The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Two Faces/Chapter 3
III
It was not, doubtless, that there had been anything in their rather sharp separation at that moment to sustain or prolong the interruption; yet it definitely befell that, circumstances aiding, they practically failed to meet again before the great party at Burbeck. This occasion was to gather in some thirty persons from a certain Friday to the following Monday, and it was on the Friday that Sutton went down. He had known in advance that Mrs. Grantham was to be there, and this perhaps, during the interval of hindrance, had helped him a little to be patient. He had before him the certitude of a real full cup—two days brimming over with the sight of her. He found, however, on his arrival that she was not yet in the field, and presently learned that her place would be in a small contingent that was to join the party on the morrow. This knowledge he extracted from Miss Banker, who was always the first to present herself at any gathering that was to enjoy her, and whom, moreover—partly on that very account—the wary not less than the speculative were apt to hold themselves well-advised to engage with at as early as possible a stage of the business. She was stout, red, rich, mature, universal—a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place. She opened for Sutton instinctively at G———, which happened to be remarkably convenient. "What she's really waiting over for is to bring down Lady Gwyther."
"Ah, the Gwythers are coming?"
"Yes; caught, through Mrs. Grantham, just in time. She'll be the feature—everyone wants to see her."
Speculation and wariness met and combined at this moment in Shirley Sutton. "Do you mean—a—Mrs. Grantham?"
"Dear no! Poor little Lady Gwyther, who, but just arrived in England, appears now literally for the first time in her life in any society whatever, and whom (don't you know the extraordinary story? you ought to—you!) she, of all people, has so wonderfully taken up. It will be quite—here—as if she were 'presenting' her."
Sutton, of course, took in more things than even appeared. "I never know what I ought to know; I only know, inveterately, what I oughtn't. So what is the extraordinary story?"
"You really haven't heard———?"
"Really," he replied without winking.
"It happened, indeed, but the other day," said Miss Banker, "yet everyone is already wondering. Gwyther has thrown his wife on her mercy—but I won't believe you if you pretend to me you don't know why he shouldn't."
Sutton asked himself then what he could pretend. "Do you mean because she's merciless?"
She hesitated. "If you don't know, perhaps I oughtn't to tell you."
He liked Miss Banker, and found just the right tone to plead. "Do tell me."
"Well," she sighed, "it will be your own fault———! They had been such friends that there could have been but one name for the crudity of his original procédé. When I was a girl we used to call it throwing over. They call it in French to lâcher. But I refer not so much to the act itself as to the manner of it, though you may say indeed, of course, that there is in such cases, after all, only one manner. Least said, soonest mended."
Sutton seemed to wonder. "Oh, he said too much?"
"He said nothing. That was it."
Sutton kept it up. "But was what?"
"Why, what she must, like any woman in her shoes, have felt to be his perfidy. He simply went and did it—took to himself this child, that is, without the preliminary of a scandal or a rupture—before she could turn round."
"I follow you. But it would appear from what you say that she has turned round now."
"Well," Miss Banker laughed, "we shall see for ourselves how far. It will be what everyone will try to see."
"Oh, then we've work cut out!" And Sutton certainly felt that he himself had—an impression that lost nothing from a further talk with Miss Banker in the course of a short stroll in the grounds with her the next day. He spoke as one who had now considered many things.
"Did I understand from you yesterday that Lady Gwyther's a 'child'?"
"Nobody knows. It's prodigious the way she has managed."
"The way Lady Gwyther has———?"
"No; the way May Grantham has kept her till this hour in her pocket."
He was quick at his watch. "Do you mean by 'this hour' that they're due now?"
"Not till tea. All the others arrive together in time for that." Miss Banker had clearly, since the previous day, filled in gaps and become, as it were, revised and enlarged. "She'll have kept a cat from seeing her, so as to produce her entirely herself."
"Well," Sutton mused, "that will have been a very noble sort of return———"
"For Gwyther's behaviour? Very. Yet I feel creepy."
"Creepy?"
"Because so much depends for the girl—in the way of the right start or the wrong start—on the signs and omens of this first appearance. It's a great house and a great occasion, and we're assembled here, it strikes me, very much as the Roman mob at the circus used to be to see the next Christian maiden brought out to the tigers."
"Oh, if she is a Christian maiden———!" Sutton murmured. But he stopped at what his imagination called up.
It perhaps fed that faculty a little that Miss Banker had the effect of making out that Mrs. Grantham might individually be, in any case, something of a Roman matron. "She has kept her in the dark so that we may only take her from her hand. She will have formed her for us."
"In so few days?"
"Well, she will have prepared her—decked her for the sacrifice with ribbons and flowers."
"Ah, if you only mean that she will have taken her to her dressmaker———!" And it came to Sutton, at once as a new light and as a check, almost, to anxiety, that this was all poor Gwyther, mistrustful probably of a taste formed by Stuttgart, might have desired of their friend.
There were usually at Burbeck many things taking place at once; so that wherever else, on such occasions, tea might be served, it went forward with matchless pomp, weather permitting, on a shaded stretch of one of the terraces and in presence of one of the prospects. Shirley Sutton, moving, as the afternoon waned, more restlessly about and mingling in dispersed groups only to find they had nothing to keep him quiet, came upon it as he turned a corner of the house—saw it seated there in all its state. It might be said that at Burbeck it was, like everything else, made the most of. It constituted immediately, with multiplied tables and glittering plate, with rugs and cushions and ices and fruit and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene of splendour, almost an incident of grand opera. One of the beautiful women might quite have been expected to rise with a gold cup and a celebrated song.
One of them did rise, as it happened, while Sutton drew near, and he found himself a moment later seeing nothing and nobody but Mrs. Grantham. They met on the terrace, just away from the others, and the movement in which he had the effect of arresting her might have been that of withdrawal. He quickly saw, however, that if she had been about to pass into the house it was only on some errand—to get something or to call someone—that would immediately have restored her to the public. It somehow struck him on the spot—and more than ever yet, though the impression was not wholly new to him—that she felt herself a figure for the forefront of the stage and indeed would have been recognised by anyone at a glance as the prima donna assoluta. She caused, in fact, during the few minutes he stood talking to her, an extraordinary series of waves to roll extraordinarily fast over his sense, not the least mark of the matter being that the appearance with which it ended was again the one with which it had begun. "The face—the face," as he kept dumbly repeating; that was at last, as at first, all he could clearly see. She had a perfection resplendent, but what in the world had it done, this perfection, to her beauty? It was her beauty, doubtless, that looked out at him, but it was into something else that, as their eyes met, he strangely found himself looking.
It was as if something had happened in consequence of which she had changed, and there was that in this swift perception that made him glance eagerly about for Lady Gwyther. But as he took in the recruited group—identities of the hour added to those of the previous twenty-four—he saw, among his recognitions, one of which was the husband of the person missing, that Lady Gwyther was not there. Nothing in the whole business was more singular than his consciousness that, as he came back to his interlocutress after the nods and smiles and handwaves he had launched, she knew what had been his thought. She knew for whom he had looked without success; but why should this knowledge visibly have hardened and sharpened her, and precisely at a moment when she was unprecedentedly magnificent? The indefinable apprehension that had somewhat sunk after his second talk with Miss Banker and then had perversely risen again—this nameless anxiety now produced on him, with a sudden sharper pinch, the effect of a great suspense. The action of that, in turn, was to show him that he had not yet fully known how much he had at stake on a final view. It was revealed to him for the first time that he "really cared" whether Mrs. Grantham were a safe nature. It was too ridiculous by what a thread it hung, but something was certainly in the air that would definitely tell him.
What was in the air descended the next moment to earth. He turned round as he caught the expression with which her eyes attached themselves to something that approached. A little person, very young and very much dressed, had come out of the house, and the expression in Mrs. Grantham's eyes was that of the artist confronted with her work and interested, even to impatience, in the judgment of others. The little person drew nearer, and though Sutton's companion, without looking at him now, gave it a name and met it, he had jumped for himself at certitude. He saw many things—too many, and they appeared to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace—massed together and conflicting, and after a moment also saw struggling out of them a small face that struck him as either scared or sick. Then, with his eyes again returning to Mrs. Grantham, he saw another.
He had no more talk with Miss Banker till late that evening—an evening during which he had felt himself too noticeably silent; but something had passed between this pair, across dinner-table and drawing-room, without speech, and when they at last found words it was in the needed ease of a quiet end of the long, lighted gallery, where she opened again at the very paragraph.
"You were right—that was it. She did the only thing that, at such short notice, she could do. She took her to her dressmaker."
Sutton, with his back to the reach of the gallery, had, as if to banish a vision, buried his eyes for a minute in his hands. "And oh, the face—the face!"
"Which?" Miss Banker asked.
"Whichever one looks at."
"But May Grantham's glorious. She has turned herself out———"
"With a splendour of taste and a sense of effect, eh? "Yes." Sutton showed he saw far.
"She has the sense of effect. The sense of effect as exhibited in Lady Gwyther's clothes———!" was something Miss Banker failed of words to express. "Every body's overwhelmed. Here, you know, that sort of thing's grave. The poor creature's lost."
"Lost?"
"Since on the first impression, as we said, so much depends. The first impression's made—oh, made! I defy her now ever to unmake it. Her husband, who's proud, won't like her the better for it. And I don't see," Miss Banker went on, "that her prettiness was enough—a mere little feverish, frightened freshness; what did he see in her?—to be so blasted. It has been done with an atrocity of art———"
"That supposes the dressmaker then also a devil?"
"Oh, your London women and their dressmakers!" Miss Banker laughed.
"But the face—the face!" Sutton woefully repeated.
"May's?"
"The little girl's. It's exquisite."
"Exquisite?"
"For unimaginable pathos."
"Oh!" Miss Banker dropped.
"She has at last begun to see." Sutton showed again how far he saw. "It glimmers upon her innocence, she makes it dimly out what has been done with her. She's even worse this evening—the way, my eye, she looked at dinner!—than when she came. Yes"—he was confident—"it has dawned (how couldn't it, out of all of you?) and she knows."
"She ought to have known before!" Miss Banker intelligently sighed.
"No; she wouldn't in that case have been so beautiful."
"Beautiful?" cried Miss Banker; "overloaded like a monkey in a show!"
"The face, yes; which goes to the heart. It's that that makes it," said Shirley Sutton. "And it's that"—he thought it out—"that makes the other."
"I see. Conscious?"
"Horrible!"
"You take it hard," said Miss Banker.
Lord Gwyther, just before she spoke, had come in sight and now was near them. Sutton on this, appearing to wish to avoid him, reached, before answering his companion's observation, a door that opened close at hand. "So hard," he replied from that point, "that I shall be off to-morrow morning."
"And not see the rest?" she called after him.
But he had already gone, and Lord Gwyther, arriving, amiably took up her question. "The rest of what?"
Miss Banker looked him well in the eyes. "Of Mrs. Grantham's clothes."