A Great Success Part 2

"_Games?_" said Doris. "Do you mean cards--for money?"

"Oh, dear no! Intellectual games. _Bouts-rimes;_ translations--Lady Dunstable looks out the bits and some people think the words--beforehand; paragraphs on a subject--in a particular style--Pater's, or Ruskin's, or Carlyle's. Each person throws two slips into a hat. On one you write the subject, on another the name of the author whose style is to be imitated. Then you draw. Of course Lady Dunstable carries off all the honours. But then everybody believes she spends all the mornings preparing these things. She never comes down till nearly lunch."

"This is really appalling!" said Doris, with round eyes. "I have forgotten everything I ever knew."

As for her own impressions of the great lady, she had only seen her once in the semi-darkness of the lecture-room, and could only remember a long, sallow face, with striking black eyes and a pointed chin, a general look of distinction and an air of one accustomed to the "chief seat" at any board--whether the feasts of reason or those of a more ordinary kind.

As the days went on, Doris, for all her st.u.r.dy self-reliance, began to feel a little nervous inwardly. She had been quite well-educated, first at a good High School, and then in the cla.s.s-rooms of a provincial University; and, as the clever daughter of a clever doctor in large practice, she had always been in touch with the intellectual world, especially on its scientific side. And for nearly two years before her marriage she had been a student at the Slade School. But since her imprudent love-match with a literary man had plunged her into the practical work of a small household, run on a scanty and precarious income, she had been obliged, one after another, to let the old interests go. Except the drawing. That was good enough to bring her a little money, as an ill.u.s.trator, designer of Christmas cards, etc.; and she filled most of her spare time with it.

But now she feverishly looked out some of her old books--Pater's "Studies," a volume of Huxley's Essays, "Sh.e.l.ley" and "Keats" in the "Men of Letters" series. She borrowed two or three of the political biographies with which Arthur's shelves were crowded, having all the while, however, the dispiriting conviction that Lady Dunstable had been dandled on the knees of every English Prime Minister since her birth, and had been the blood relation of all of them, except perhaps Mr. G., whose blood no doubt had not been blue enough to ent.i.tle him to the privilege.

However, she must do her best. She kept these feelings and preparations entirely secret from Arthur, and she saw the day of the visit dawn in a mood of mingled expectation and revolt.

CHAPTER II

It was a perfect June evening: Doris was seated on one of the spreading lawns of Crosby Ledgers,--a low Georgian house, much added to at various times, and now a pleasant medley of pillared verandahs, tiled roofs, cupolas, and dormer windows, apparently unpretending, but, as many people knew, one of the most luxurious of English country houses.

Lady Dunstable, in a flowing dress of lilac crepe and a large black hat, had just given Mrs. Meadows a second cup of tea, and was clearly doing her duty--and showing it--to a guest whose entertainment could not be trusted to go of itself. The only other persons at the tea-table--the Meadowses having arrived late--were an elderly man with long Dundreary whiskers, in a Panama hat and a white waistcoat, and a lady of uncertain age, plump, kind-eyed, and merry-mouthed, in whom Doris had at once divined a possible harbour of refuge from the terrors of the situation.

Arthur was strolling up and down the lawn with the Home Secretary, smoking and chatting--talking indeed nineteen to the dozen, and entirely at his ease. A few other groups were scattered over the gra.s.s; while girls in white dresses and young men in flannels were playing tennis in the distance. A lake at the bottom of the sloping garden made light and s.p.a.ce in a landscape otherwise too heavily walled in by thick woodland.

White swans floated on the lake, and the June trees beyond were in their freshest and proudest leaf. A church tower rose appropriately in a corner of the park, and on the other side of the deer-fence beyond the lake a herd of red deer were feeding. Doris could not help feeling as though the whole scene had been lately painted for a new "high life"

play at the St. James's Theatre, and she half expected to see Sir George Alexander walk out of the bushes.

"I suppose, Mrs. Meadows, you have been helping your husband with his lectures?" said Lady Dunstable, a little languidly, as though the heat oppressed her. She was making play with a cigarette and her half-shut eyes were fixed on the "lion's" wife. The eyes fascinated Doris. Surely they were artificially blackened, above and below? And the lips--had art been delicately invoked, or was Nature alone responsible?

"I copy things for Arthur," said Doris. "Unfortunately, I can't type."

At the sound of the young and musical voice, the gentleman with the Dundreary whiskers--Sir Luke Malford--who had seemed half asleep, turned sharply to look at the speaker. Doris too was in a white dress, of the simplest stuff and make; but it became her. So did the straw hat, with its wreath of wild roses, which she had trimmed herself that morning.

There was not the slightest visible sign of tremor in the young woman; and Sir Luke's inner mind applauded her.

"No fool!--and a lady," he thought. "Let's see what Rachel will make of her."

"Then you don't help him in the writing?" said Lady Dunstable, still with the same detached air. Doris laughed.

"I don't know what Arthur would say if I proposed it. He never lets anybody go near him when he's writing."

"I see; like all geniuses, he's dangerous on the loose." Was Lady Dunstable's smile just touched with sarcasm? "Well!--has the success of the lectures surprised you?"

Doris pondered.

"No," she said at last, "not really. I always thought Arthur had it in him."

"But you hardly expected such a run--such an excitement!"

"I don't know," said Doris, coolly. "I think I did--sometimes. The question is how long it will last."

She looked, smiling, at her interrogator.

The gentleman with the whiskers stooped across the table.

"Oh, nothing lasts in this world. But that of course is what makes a good time so good."

Doris turned towards him--demurring--for the sake of conversation. "I never could understand how Cinderella enjoyed the ball."

"For thinking of the clock?" laughed Sir Luke. "No, no!--you can't mean that. It's the expectation of the clock that doubles the pleasure. Of course you agree, Rachel!"--he turned to her--"else why did you read me that very doleful poem yesterday, on this very theme?--that it's only the certainty of death that makes life agreeable? By the way, George Eliot had said it before!"

"The poem was by a friend of mine," said Lady Dunstable, coldly. "I read it to you to see how it sounded. But I thought it poor stuff."

"How unkind of you! The man who wrote it says he lives upon your friends.h.i.+p."

"That, perhaps, is why he's so thin."

Sir Luke laughed again.

"To be sure, I saw the poor man--after you had talked to him the other night--going to Dunstable to be consoled. Poor George! he's always healing the wounds you make."

"Of course. That's why I married him. George says all the civil things.

That sets me free to do the rude ones."

"Rachel!" The exclamation came from the plump lady opposite, who was smiling broadly, and showing some very white teeth. A signal pa.s.sed from her eyes to those of Doris, as though to say "Don't be alarmed!"

But Doris was not at all alarmed. She was eagerly watching Lady Dunstable, as one watches for the mannerisms of some well-known performer. Sir Luke perceived it, and immediately began to show off his hostess by one of the sparring matches that were apparently frequent between them. They fell to discussing a party of guests--landowners from a neighbouring estate--who seemed to have paid a visit to Crosby Ledgers the day before. Lady Dunstable had not enjoyed them, and her tongue on the subject was sharpness itself, restrained by none of the ordinary compunctions. "Is this how she talks about all her guests--on Monday morning?" thought Doris, with quickened pulse as the biting sentences flew about.

... "Mr. Worthing? Why did he marry her? Oh, because he wanted a stuffed goose to sit by the fire while he went out and amused himself.... Why did she marry him? Ah, that's more difficult to answer. Is one obliged to credit Mrs. Worthing with any reasons--on any subject? However, I like Mr. Worthing--he's what men ought to be."

"And that is--?" Doris ventured to put in.

"Just--men," said Lady Dunstable, shortly.

Sir Luke laughed over his cigarette.

"That you may fool them? Well, Rachel, all the same, you would die of Worthing's company in a month."

"I shouldn't die," said Lady Dunstable, quietly. "I should murder."

"Hullo, what's my wife talking about?" said a bluff and friendly voice.

Doris looked up to see a handsome man with grizzled hair approaching.

"Mrs. Meadows? How do you do? What a beautiful evening you've brought!

Your husband and I have been having a jolly talk. My word!--he's a clever chap. Let me congratulate you on the lectures. Biggest success known in recent days!"

Doris beamed upon her host, well pleased, and he settled down beside her, doing his kind best to entertain her. In him, all those protective feelings towards a stranger, in which his wife appeared to be conspicuously lacking, were to be discerned on first acquaintance. Doris was practically sure that his inner mind was thinking--"Poor little thing!--knows n.o.body here. Rachel's been scaring her. Must look after her!"

And look after her he did. He was by no means an amusing companion.

Lazy, gentle, and ineffective, Doris quickly perceived that he was entirely eclipsed by his wife, who, now that she was relieved of Mrs.

Meadows, was soon surrounded by a congenial company--the Home Secretary, one or two other politicians, the old General, a literary Dean, Lord Staines, a great racing man, Arthur Meadows, and one or two more. The talk became almost entirely political--with a dash of literature. Doris saw at once that Lady Dunstable was the centre of it, and she was not long in guessing that it was for this kind of talk that people came to Crosby Ledgers. Lady Dunstable, it seemed, was capable of talking like a man with men, and like a man of affairs with the men of affairs. Her political knowledge was astonis.h.i.+ng; so, evidently, was her background of family and tradition, interwoven throughout with English political history. English statesmen had not only dandled her, they had taught her, walked with her, written to her, and--no doubt--flirted with her.