CHAPTER VI.
Countess Adrian's Sky-Parlour.
In the excitement of the preparations for "The Duchess of Malfi" Lendon had almost forgotten Countess Adrian. It was with something of a feeling of guilt that he one day read the following note:—
Queen Anne's Mansions, April. …Dear Mr. Lendon,
I have come back from Paris, and am writing to remind you of your promise to visit me in my sky-parlour. I have something that I want particularly to ask you. Can you come to me to-morrow at five?
Yours,
Agnes Adrian.
The sky-parlour proved to be a very attractive domicile, though it was at the very top of Queen Anne's Mansions and two lifts were necessary to get to it. A Chinese boy, with a pig-tail and dressed in a sort of national costume of dark blue curiously embroidered, ushered Lendon along the inner corridor. It struck him that the Oriental attendant was quite in keeping with a certain Eastern luxuriance and semi-barbaric magnificence peculiar to Countess Adrian herself, and his artistic sense was gratified by the due appearance of so judicious a touch of colour. The young Celestial retreated with all the gravity of his race to inform his mistress of her visitor, and Lendon had once again an opportunity to appreciate the harmony of effect arrived at between the lady and her surroundings. The boudoir was gorgeous, but it was a splendour in which, notwithstanding its audacity of combination, nothing jarred. Never were such vivid and bewildering pinks and greens and yellows so subtly interblended on wall and ceiling with deep crimson and burnished gold. The furniture was principally Japanese of the costliest description—inlaid work, lacquer and enamel, with here and there grotesque carvings, eccentric masks in old ivory, startling monsters in bronze and porcelain, exquisite pieces of old pottery and bits of drapery heavily wrought in silver and gold, such as might have come straight from the Mikado's palace. Everything about the room was fantastic and luxurious to the last degree. Almost everything might have fetched a price in an art collection. Lendon perceived with delight that the tea-service which stood in readiness before the fire was of rarest old Dutch, and that a casket lying open and filled with dainty French bonbons was of the most valuable cinque-cento workmanship. Amid all this congruous incongruity were different modern feminine trifles—Palais Royal knick-knacks—the latest thing in scent-bottles, photographs with the signatures of distinguished persons, lying heaped pell-mell, in a bowl of ancient Tokio ware. A soft enervating odour pervaded the place. It came, he discovered, from a curious preparation of pot-pourri that blended with the fresh perfume of forced roses and early lilac and Parma violets.
"You like my den?" said the Countess Adrian's deep musical voice beside him. He had not heard her enter. She was holding out both hands in frank welcome, and her splendid eyes, glowing with power, passion, and rich vitality, were looking into his. Again he had the sensation of being almost oppressed by that superabundance of life force which her whole presence conveyed. He could, indeed—remembering by a curious association of idea, the words of Maddox Challis in that respect—fancy it well might extinguish or absorb into itself any feebler spark. To-day she was positively beautiful, and, certainly, did not deserve her titular epithet of the "belle-Laide." There was a soft rose flush upon her smooth cheek. The turn of her neck was enchanting; so also were the curves of the ripe red lips and the gleam of white teeth between them; and so too was the shapeliness of her form, which seemed to undulate beneath the folds of an odd clinging sort of dress of some delicate Eastern fabric.
"A thousand pardons, Countess," Lendon began.
"We had the colour copied from one of the Japanese theatre-books," she went on, seating herself at the table and pouring out a cap of tea as she talked. "It was very difficult to get the British workman to understand the scheme. All sense of colour seems to have been blotted out of you in your grey, grimy, foggy little island. For myself, since I cannot have the sunshine in which I was born I must try to make up for it by colour."
"You were born in a tropical country, Countess?" asked Lendon.
"I was born in Jamaica," she answered; "and I have Spanish and French as well as English blood in my veins. The cabinets and draperies and things," she went on as if pursuing a narrative, "I brought myself from Asia."
"I did not guess that you had been such a wanderer," he said.
"Yes. I have wandered all my life. I have never had a home. Sometimes," she added sadly, "I fancy that I never shall have one. Not that I regret my wanderings," she added hastily; "they have thrown me among strange people and have taught me some strange things, though I am not quite so learned in Eastern lore as Maddox Challis. Do you know, by the way, whether he has really started for Lebanon?"
Lendon answered in the negative.
"That man fascinates me," said the Countess. "He is the only person I have ever met who gives me the feeling that he could make me do what he pleased. I met him first at Pekin. I spent a whole year in India, China and Japan; it was the year after my marriage with Count Adrian."
The idea crossed Lendon's mind that it was strange she should thus composedly allude to a ceremony which the law-courts had pronounced null and void. Clearly, also, as she retained the title to which it had been decreed she had no right, there was wisdom in the bold part of assuming her history to be above reproach or question.
He did not answer directly, but accepted the tea and sugar which she handed to him, with some commonplace complimentary remark upon the excellence and peculiarity of the brew.
"It's Asiatic too," she said. "I know what you are thinking of," she added abruptly. "You are wondering that I should speak of my husband with so little embarrassment—after all that you have heard and read in the newspapers. Now confess—isn't it so?"
"I have heard—of course," he said, not denying the inference. "As for the newspapers, I am more in the dark than you think, for I was out of England at the time of the trial to which, I suppose, you refer."
"At any rate you know the circumstances. I have no doubt they were in a hundred mouths at Mrs. Walcot Valbry's the other night. I have no doubt, too, that not a few of the great ladies were indignant at meeting me, though they were glad enough to accept the hospitality of my hotel in Paris, in the old days. I dare say, too, that people in general think I am trying to brazen it out, and take my appearance in society as a proof of my utter heartlessness. That is of very little consequence, but you will know that after a great storm, when the waters have been lashed to foam and the billows torn to their very depths, by-and-by the tumult subsides as though it had never been, and the surface of the sea is scarcely stirred by so much as a ripple."
"There was a great storm?" said Lendon questioningly. "I am speaking of the storm in your own nature—not of the outside world—the newspapers and the gossip of scandal-mongers. That is all only a cyclone of straws."
She paused an instant with her eyes on his face. "I like to hear you say that," she replied. "It gives me a kind of key to your character. I like a man to look upon the society-sensation part of the affair—the notoriety and all that kind of thing, you know—as a cyclone of straws. Here is where the real tempest rages." And she laid her hand lightly upon her breast. "A storm? Yes; a hurricane, a tornado, a cataclysm! Great Heavens! How I suffered!"
"Ah, I can understand the suffering you may have gone through—the pain of a trust betrayed—of a noble love hurt to the death by the discovery that it had spent itself upon an unworthy object."
"Yes—you know. That I suppose was how you felt about Jessie Harford. You did love that woman, Mr. Lendon. If some one had only loved me like that!"
"Surely there must be many"—he began.
"Oh many!" she interrupted. "You think I am a woman to inspire love. Well, I suppose I can count my lovers by the score—perhaps I can't count them at all—it would be a bore to try. But that's not the kind of love I mean—love that loves on through ingratitude and baseness, and reverences itself too much to make a mere plaything of what, after all, was only in its very nature created for the lower uses. I wonder"—she added slowly—"that you were not tempted to revenge yourself in that way, after you had found out how she deceived you, and when you loved the woman still."
"I was tempted—for a little while," he answered. "I thank Heaven for the strength which enabled me to overcome the temptation. Don't let us talk of that, Countess."
"Why, since it is all dead? It is dead, isn't it?"
"My love for Jessie Harford is dead," he said, quietly.
He rose as he spoke and stood by the fire-place, absently fingering a quaint little porcelain figure which stood upon it.
"And that is what comes even of such love!" she said, looking at him intently.
"Of such love!" he repeated. "No! the love never dies, it lives again in another form. But, talk to me about yourself—if you will."
"Oh, yes, I am an egotist; I always talk about myself. But haven't you noticed that nobody ever finds fault with a judicious egotism in the case of a man or woman who is in the nature of things interesting? I suppose, without bad taste, I may assume that I am interesting; at any rate some misguided people have found me so. You were wrong, Mr. Lendon," she went on, without waiting for his reply. It was a peculiarity of Countess Adrian that she never allowed time for a reply that must necessarily be a compliment. "Wrong, in your interpretation of what I said about my husband. There was no trust betrayed, in one sense. There was no discovery of the kind you mean. I always knew that he was ignoble. There was no love hurt to the death."
"You mean that you did not love him?"
She shook her head. "It is my misfortune perhaps—perhaps my good fortune, that I have never loved anyone, except myself. Tell me, what do you say to that?"
"I can hardly venture, Countess. Anything I might say would be either impertinent or ridiculous."
"Oh! I'm a woman who has got past conventionalities. That is part of my wretched position; one of the cruellest of the wrongs he has done me. He has given the world permission to insult me."
"No!" exclaimed Lendon, eagerly. "You do injustice to yourself, as well as to the world."
"You are not likely to insult me, you mean. If you were, I should not be talking to you now, in this fashion. I have a fine scent for possibilities of disrespect. No, Mr. Lendon, I value your consideration and I value your opinion also. I should like you to understand me."
She rose too, and stood beside him, one elbow resting on the mantel-piece, her face turned towards him as she leaned slightly backward. Her eyes looked at him with a wistful expression. Her whole attitude—the tilt of her small head, the exquisite modelling of her chin and throat, the droop of her eye-lids—were indescribably alluring. She affected him as some strong perfume or heady wine might do. It occurred to him, in a whimsical manner, that were he not in love with Beatrice Brett, he should certainly fall in love with Countess Adrian.
"Come and sit down," she said; "you look so unsociable standing there." She motioned him to a chair, and sank herself upon a low cushioned sort of lounge, beside the fireplace.
"I want you to understand that I was never in love with my husband," she went on. "I was a wild ignorant Creole girl, hungering to see the world, and I married him because he was rich and had a title, and would open my oyster for me. I did really marry him, or at least I believe so. You don't suppose that at sixteen I was so worldly wise as they tried to make out."
"Sixteen!" he repeated pitifully—"only sixteen!"
"Yes, I am younger than you fancied perhaps; I am twenty-five—twenty-five," she said again—"no great age; and what have I not gone through! I lived with him for nearly seven years, then he got tired of me and cast me off, but I did not choose to be flung aside like a—shall I say a Jessie Harford!"
"No!" he exclaimed savagely; "you must not speak of her in that way."
"Ah, I can hurt you. I wanted to. I said that on purpose. When I can make a man look as you did at that moment, I know that he is not quite indifferent to me. Forgive me. I don't want you to be indifferent to me." She put out her hand to him and let it fall again, as her tones fell also in a caressing cadence.
"You know that would be impossible," he said.
"Would it? Well, we shall see. I took my claim into the law courts, and they decided against me—as law courts have a way of deciding against an unfriended woman. In spite of them he is my husband in deed and in fact, and I am his wife, yet we are both at liberty to marry again whenever we please."
"Report says, doesn't it, that Count Adrian is about to avail himself of that liberty?"
"He is going to marry the daughter of one of your English peers. You see there are mothers even in your pious England who don't hesitate to give their young daughters to a man of known profligacy, and who has a wife already living. There will be a grand wedding and columns in the Morning Post, which you may be sure will not be so ill-bred as to mention the fact of my existence. I have no doubt that if Count Adrian had been an Englishman and a politician, a great deal of political capital would have been made out of that—misadventure, shall we call it? I should have had champions by the thousand. They might even, had I the misfortune now to be poor, have got up a public subscription for me. But as it is, he is not an Englishman, he has nothing to do with politics, and so the papers ignore his past, and Society opens its doors to him, and mothers welcome him as a suitor to their daughters. In my case everything would be different; there is not a mother in England who would not think her son polluted by a marriage with me. Isn't it so? Tell me!"
Lendon felt at a loss to reply; all he could say was, "You are very hard."
She laughed. "I knew you would make some banal remark. I hoped you would be more original. Of course I am hard; and of course, too, it is as I say: even Sir Donald Urquhart is obliged to confess it."
"Sir Donald, at any rate, proudly announced the probability of your bearing his name."
"He is too devoted. He thinks it advisable I should change one which is a subject of disagreeable notoriety. He is willing to sacrifice himself on the altar of his infatuation: I may say that without vanity. His love isn't the kind of love I spoke of to you."
"You don't love him, then?" Lendon blurted.
"Love him! My friend—I may call you my friend, may I not?—it doesn't imply anything compromising—do you think I have lived twenty-five years in the world, and during nine of them have been in familiar acquaintance with some of the wittiest and best-bred and altogether most fascinating men in the world, to succumb now to the attractions of Sir Donald Urquhart?"
"Yet you have consented to marry him."
"Not quite. It was agreed between us that he should announce the fact of our engagement it doesn't follow that the engagement is a binding reality. He believed that the announcement would improve my position. Of course he was right, a future Lady Urquhart may be no very great personage, but at least people are less eager to be unpleasant to her than to notorious, by courtesy Countess Adrian. Do you see? And when any one offers me something good I never hesitate to take it, always provided that the extent of the obligation is clearly defined."
"And is that the case with Sir Donald? I should hardly have thought so."
"I think it is. At any rate, if he is under any rosy delusion, that is not from any want of candour on my part. I have no doubt he would tell you so if you pressed him."
"I! What right have I to question his or your arrangements?"
"None, I suppose; but it is the right of a friend to be interested in one's welfare. You never answered my question. May I count on your friendship?"
"Most certainly, Countess. On my warm admiration and my humble services, if they can be of any use to you."
"I shall fasten you to your word presently. Mr. Lendon, does it seem strange to you that I, being what I am, don't jump at the prospect of marrying Sir Donald Urquhart?"
"It seems to me that perhaps you hardly appreciate his devotion at its true value."
"You mean that, on the face of things, there is a sort of heroism in his willingness to give his name to a woman whose own has been so smirched and bespattered. I don't know, though that it is such a very ancient and honourable name. His grandfather was a nobody, who made money and voted steadfastly with the Government; but let that pass. No, I don't think it is altogether heroism. You see, Sir Donald is not a very young man, and so has less to lose. He has no one to please but himself, and so can't hurt anybody's feelings of consequence to him. Then he is an art-collector and dilettante, and has a reputation for eccentricity, so can do with impunity many things that in anybody else would set Mrs. Grundy rampant. Added to all this, he is a man about town of no very exalted moral standard. He has never in his life denied himself a thing he wanted; and he is rich enough to pay a long price for the article he fancies. He is going to pay a long price for me. He wouldn't do it if he were not infatuated. Now, is that heroism?"
"As you put it, no."
"I put it after the way of a woman of the world. Now for my side of the question."
"Ah! your side of the question, about which I confess to feeling the deepest interest."
"Well, why do I hold back? Why have I stipulated for a year in which to make up my mind—a year in which, though we are bound before the world, I am free as air to give myself to any one I like better? For the simple reason I have already told you I have never been in love."
"Forgive me for saying that this seems to me the most curious and interesting fact in your most remarkable and interesting personality."
"You wouldn't take me for a woman of ice? I'm not. I'm a pent volcano. I could love with all my heart and soul and strength, if—if the right man came along. But he has never come. My Prince Charming has never stepped within the enchanted palace to awake the sleeping princess by his kiss."
An odd little exclamation broke involuntarily from Lendon. It was half of pity, half of amusement. There did indeed seem something almost bordering on comedy in this picture Countess Adrian drew of herself as the innocent slumbering beauty who had never thrilled to passion. Countess Adrian, of whom the world said—he was too chivalrous to finish the sentence, even in thought. She seemed to have read what was passing in his mind: a deep blush overspread her face.
"You judge me like the typical man of the world," she said, with a sadness which touched him infinitely; "and no man of the world can ever conceive it possible that a woman may be dragged in the mire and yet through all keep the heart of a girl. Well, no matter."
"Countess," said Lendon hastily, fearing he had wounded her, "I want to think of you only as you would have me think. You puzzle me; you interest me. Teach me to understand you."
"Then," she said, "we must agree, once for all, to drop conventional standards. Think of me—of this outer husk of me"—and again she laid her two hands upon her bosom—"as what the conditions of my life have made me. Think of the inner woman as still untouched with cynicism, still with the capacity for enthusiasm—for devotion. The outer experiences are only as garments to be worn or thrown aside. I am twenty-five, and I have had a rich wardrobe. Everything has happened to me except—Death and Love."
"Why do you put death first?" he said.
"Because it might come to me at any moment. My mother died suddenly of heart-disease. I, too, have disease of the heart. Don't speak of that: it is a subject I can't bear to dwell upon."
He could not help a shudder. "It is inconceivable!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, I look splendidly well: I feel life thrilling in every pulse of me. But never mind. I am going to tell you something which will partly explain my conduct in regard to Sir Donald. It is this: I am intensely superstitious. No, that is not the right expression. It would be more correct to say that I believe in occult forces."
"You, too!" he exclaimed.
"Why do you say 'you, too?' Have you been meeting anyone lately who goes in seriously for that sort of thing?"
"It seems to me that everyone goes in for that sort of thing more or less seriously," he answered evasively; "and 'occult' is the fashionable adjective."
"Perhaps so. At any rate this superstition of mine is the reason of Maddox Challis's influence over me," she went on. "I have learnt enough to know that he is an Initiate of the lower grade. He doesn't choose to exert his powers—indeed, I believe it is a rule of the Brotherhood that they are not to be lightly displayed—but he could teach you and me some strange secrets of Nature, if he would. He won't talk to me; he doesn't like me; but he knows that I know."
"And where did you get your knowledge, Countess?" Lendon asked.
"Oh, mine is only a smattering. I knew a man in the East—he was a Parsee—an astrologer—a sort of Mr. Isaacs and Ram-Lal combined. It was he who told me that this year would be the most fateful in my life. Now you know why I don't choose to bind myself. I stake my all on this year—Death or Love."
She got up from her chair and held out her hand as if she would have dismissed him. He took her hand, and some impulse for which he could not account prompted him to raise it to his lips.
"You play a strange game, Countess," he said; "and one in which it is you yourself who incur the least danger. To a man who accepted your challenge—Death or Love—the game might well prove fatal."
"Why?"
"Surely, to know you is to love you—but the Prince Charming fortunate enough to touch your heart must be a rare and exceptionally endowed person."
"You think so?" she said.
"Isn't it proved, since, as you say, you have never loved? And yet, how many there must be who have loved you."
"There is a fatality in that sort of thing. It is destiny—not temperament. Or, as the poets tell us, a wandering soul finding its twin."
"Oh, the twin soul theory is a hackneyed solution of the problem why some two people love each other, and some other two do not. My theory is that certain forces in oneself reach their climax, and at the same given time certain outside currents converge and bring about a convulsion, and then it is, when one's nature and one's surroundings are ripe, that love comes. It is the 'psychological moment,' in short. And given the psychological moment, there is bound to be a Prince Charming hanging round. Where, then, is the question of hazard?"
Countess Adrian looked at him steadily for a moment or two before she replied. "Suppose," she said, "that the man I loved, the man whom I knew would satisfy all the requirements of my being, for whom I had poured forth all that I have to give—what could never be taken back and given to another—suppose that he had no love to give me in return?"
"Impossible, Countess," said Lendon, "unless"
"Unless?" she repeated.
"Unless he were devoted heart and soul to another woman."
"There is the hazard of the game," she said calmly. "He might be—married—or he might be, as you say, devoted heart and soul to another woman."
"Heaven grant, Countess, that it may be happy love which awaits you!"
"Good-bye," she said abruptly. "Our talk this afternoon has interested me. You must come again. But I have said nothing that I intended to say, and I have said everything that I meant not to say. I don't mean to flatter you; but I am naturally a reserved person, and I dislike the after taste of indiscreet confidences."
"Oh, I beg you not to regret having given me a glimpse of your true self," he exclaimed warmly. "Surely what you have said could only heighten my admiration—my esteem."
"That will be for you to show me," she answered, smiling.
"At least," he said, "you will allow me to hear what it is that you intended to say?"
"My object, in short, for asking you to call to-day. I had been thinking of sending for you for several days. I have really been back from Paris for some time, but I had a notion that you were otherwise engaged, and I felt a most unaccountable and unusual timidity. However, as you see, I took my courage in both hands and sent for you."
"Well? Is it anything I can do? If so, command me."
"Yes, it is something I want you to do. Oh, it's not a thing that you will dislike—at least, I hope not. But let that stand over for to-day. I don't feel in the mood to ask favours."
"I assure you, Countess, whatever the favour may be, it is granted. For you to ask a favour from me is to confer one."
"We shall see. I will write. And now that you know your way to my sky parlour, I am always at home after five o'clock."
He took his leave, and made his journey down; and it was not till he had reached the dark little court outside the Mansions, that he remembered the fact that Beatrice Brett's name had never once been mentioned during the long afternoon talk.