The Arbiter Part 25

"Lord Stamfordham?" she said, puzzled. "When? I don't know about it."

But the doctor rea.s.sured him, and told him that all would come right: she would be herself again, even if she never regained the memory of what had happened before her fall.

"It is a common result of an accident of this kind," he said, "and need give you no special cause for anxiety. I have known two or three cases in which men who have completely recovered in other respects have never regained the memory of what immediately preceded the accident. That girl who was thrown in the Park a month ago, you remember--her horse ran away and threw her over the railings--although she got absolutely right, does not remember what she did that morning, or even the night before. And after all," he added, "it does not seem to me so very desirable that Mrs. Rendel should remember those two particular days she may have lost."

Rendel gave an inward shudder. If he could but have forgotten them too!

"They were full, as I understand, of anxiety and grief about her father's condition."

"They were," said Rendel. "It would be much better if she did not remember them."

"That's right, keep your heart up, then," said Morgan, all unconsciously; "and above all, no excitement for her, no anxiety, no irritation. Change of scene would be good for her, perhaps, and seeing one or two people. If I were you, I should take her to some German baths. On every ground I should think that would be the best thing for her."

See people? Rendel felt, with the sense of having received a blow, what sort of aspect social intercourse presented to him now. But as the days went on Doctor Morgan insisted more strongly on the necessity that Rachel should go for a definite 'cure' somewhere, and recommended a special place, Bad-Schleppenheim.

"Bad-Schleppenheim," he said, "is on the whole as good a place as you could go to."

"But isn't it thronged with English people?" said Rendel.

"Not unduly," said Morgan. "At any rate, I think it is worth trying."

"I wonder if my wife would like it," said Rendel doubtfully.

"I wouldn't tell her," said the doctor, "till it's all settled. That's the way to deal with wives, I a.s.sure you."

And with a cheery laugh, Dr. Morgan, who had no wife, went out.

CHAPTER XIX

Rachel, however, even after the move abroad so strongly recommended by her doctor had been made, did not all at once regain her normal condition. She appeared to be better in health; she was calmer, her nerves seemed quieter; but a strange dull veil still hung between her mind and the days immediately preceding the great catastrophe. To what had happened the day before her father's death she never referred; she had not asked Rendel anything more about the accusation brought against him. Once or twice she had spoken of her father as if he were still there, then caught herself up, realising that he was gone. Was this how it was always going to be? Rendel asked himself. Would he not again be able to share with her, as far as one human being can share with another, his hopes and his fears, or rather his renunciations? Would she never be able to take part in his life with the sweet, smiling sympathy which had always been so ineffably precious to him? Those days that she had lost were just those that had branded themselves indelibly into his consciousness: the afternoon that Stamfordham had come with the map, the morning following when it had appeared in the newspaper, the scenes with Gore, with Stamfordham,--all those days he lived over and over again, and lived them alone. There was some solace in the thought that if that time were to be to Rachel for ever blurred, she would never be able to recall what had pa.s.sed between herself and her husband after Rendel had brought on Gore's illness by taxing him with what he had done. And while he struggled with his memories--would he always have to live in the past now instead of in the future?--Rachel, who had been told to be a great deal in the fresh air, pa.s.sed her time quietly, peacefully, languidly, lying out of doors. They had deemed themselves fortunate in securing in the overcrowded town a somewhat primitive little pavilion belonging to one of the big hotels, of which the charm to Rachel was that it had a shady garden. Rendel, whose time even during the period in which he had had no regular occupation had always been fully occupied, reading several hours a day, making notes on certain subjects about which he meant to write later, became conscious for the first time in his life that the hours hung heavy on his hands. It was with a blank surprise that he realised that such a misfortune, which he had always thought vaguely could befall only the idlers and desultory of this world, should attack himself. Life is always laying these snares for us, putting in our way suddenly and unexpectedly some form of unpleasantness by which we may have seen others attacked, but from which unconsciously we have felt that we ourselves should be preserved by our own merits,--just as when we are in good health we hear of sciatica, lumbago, or gout, and accept them without concern as part of the composition of the universe, until one day one of these disagreeables attacks ourselves, and stands out quite disproportionately as something that after all is of more consequence than we thought. It unfortunately nearly always happens that we have to face the mental crises of life inadequately prepared. We think we have pictured them beforehand, and according to that picture we are ready, in imagination, with a sufficient equipment of fort.i.tude and decision to enable us to encounter them. In reality we mostly do no better than a traveller who going to an unknown land and climate, guesses for himself beforehand what his outfit had better be, and then finds it deplorably inadequate when he gets there. Rendel, during those days of lonely agony in London that followed the revelations sprung on the public by the _Arbiter_, had endeavoured to school himself to face what the future might have in store for him; but he had thought that while he was abroad, at any rate, the horror that pursued him now would be in abeyance. He had never been to German baths, he had never been to a fas.h.i.+onable resort of the kind; he had no idea what it meant. All that he had vaguely pictured was that it would be some sort of respite from the thing that dogged him now, the fear--for there was no doubt that as the days went on it grew into a fear--of coming suddenly upon some one he knew, who would look him in the face and then turn away. And now that they were at the term of their journey, installed in their little foreign pavilion, he had become aware that at a stone's throw from him was a numerous cosmopolitan society, among whom was probably a large contingent from London. He did not try to learn their names; he would jealously keep aloof from them. Rachel had been advised to stay here for four weeks at least. Four weeks, no doubt, is not very long under ordinary circ.u.mstances: he had not imagined that it might seem almost unendurably long to a man who had been married less than a year to a wife that he loved. And yet, before he had been there three days, he was conscious that each separate hour had to be encountered, wrestled with, conquered, before going on to the next. He had meant to write: there was a point of administration upon which he had intended to say his say in one of the Reviews. But somehow in that sitting-room, with the windows opening down to the garden, the steady work, which in his own study would have been a matter of course, seemed almost impossible. Then he thought he would read. He read aloud to Rachel for part of the day; but he did not dare to choose anything that was much good to himself, as he had been told that the more inactive her mind was the better. Something he would have to do; he would have to organise his daily life in some way that would make the burden of it endurable. He made up his mind to take long walks--the hotel and pavilion lay on the outskirts of the town--to go into the outlying country and explore it on foot. But in the evenings when Rachel was gone to bed, and when, alone at last, he would try to concentrate his mind on the study or the writing to which he had been used so eagerly to turn, another thought that he had been keeping at bay by a conscious effort would rush at him again and overwhelm him.

In the meantime, at the other side of Bad-Schleppenheim, the hours were flying fast and gaily. From the moment when the visitors met together at an early hour in the morning to drink their gla.s.ses of Schleppenheim water, and onwards through the luncheon parties, excursions, walking up and down, listening to the band, seeing theatricals, or playing Bridge in the evening, there was never a moment in which they were not industriously engaged in the pursuit of something. It was mostly pleasure, though many of them imagined it was health. Many of the people who in London const.i.tuted Society were here, in an inner and hallowed circle, in the centre of which were many minor and a few major royalties out of every country in Europe; and revolving round them in wider circles outside, many other people who, at home just on the verge of being in Society, revelled in the thought that here, under altered conditions, and in the enforced juxtapositions of life in a watering-place, a special talent for tennis, a gift for Bridge, better clothes than other people, or a talent for private theatricals, would help them to be on the right side of the line they were so anxious to cross. Add to these, numbers of pretty girls anxious only to enjoy themselves, and swarms of young men who had come for the same reason, and it will be imagined that the atmosphere reigning in the brilliantly lighted Casino, in and around which the joyous spent their evenings singing, dancing, wandering in the grounds, was singularly different from that of the little isolated pavilion where Rendel sat trying to fas.h.i.+on the picture of his life into something that he could look upon without a shudder.

CHAPTER XX

The walls of the little town were placarded with the announcement of a great bazaar to be held for the benefit of the English Church in Bad-Schleppenheim. The economics of a fas.h.i.+onable bazaar are evidently governed by certain obscure laws, of which the knowledge is yet in infancy; for the ordinary laws of commerce are on these occasions completely suspended. That of supply and demand becomes inverted, since the vendors are seemingly eager to sell all that the buyers least want: the cost of production, of which statistics are not obtainable, the expenditure of money, time, and energy required to furnish the stalls is not taken into account at all. Loss and profit appear to be inextricably mingled; however much unsold merchandise remains on the stall at the end of the bazaar the seller is expected to hand over a substantial sum to the good object for which she is supposed to have been working. And yet there must be some advantage in this method of raising money, or even the female mind would presumably not at once turn to it as the simplest and most obvious way of obtaining funds for a given purpose.

These problems, however, did not exist for Lady Chaloner, one of the leaders of English Society in Schleppenheim. She took bazaars for granted, as she did everything else. She was one of the very pillars of the social fabric of her country. She was of n.o.ble blood, she was portly, she was decidedly middle-aged. She had been recommended to diet herself and to drink the waters of Schleppenheim, and as she did so in company with half the distinguished people in Europe, she was quite content to follow the course prescribed. In these days when everything is called into question, when social codes alter, and an undesirable fusion of human beings takes place in so many directions, it was positively refres.h.i.+ng to turn to Lady Chaloner, who not only did not know, but could not conceive that it mattered, what other people did in any layer of existence beneath her own. She had not at any time a keen eye to discrimination of character. Her judgment of those fellow-creatures whom she naturally frequented was based in the first instance on their degree of blood relations.h.i.+p with herself, then on their social standing: but she was but vaguely aware of the difference between the men and women, especially the women, who did not belong to that inner circle, and knew as little about them as a looker-on leaning from a window in a foreign town knows about the people who pa.s.s beneath him in the street. But there were times when she entirely recognised the usefulness in the scheme of creation of those motley crowds of well-dressed persons, even though they bore names she had never heard before. During her preparation for the bazaar, for instance, which she was getting up in the single-minded conviction that nothing better could be done for the inst.i.tution she was trying to befriend, she had been more than willing to co-operate with Mrs. Birkett, the wife of the chaplain, and even to ask some of Mrs. Birkett's friends for their help.

Mrs. Birkett, who approached the bazaar from the point of view from which she had artlessly imagined it was being undertaken, that of ensuring some sort of provision for the expenses of the chaplain who undertook the summer duty of Schleppenheim, received a series of shocks as she came face to face with the different points of view of the various stall-holders with whom she was successively brought into contact. Lady Chaloner--she looked on this as a great achievement--had succeeded in enrolling among the bazaar-workers the young Princess Hohenschreien, on the ground of her being a staunch Protestant. The Princess was half-English, half-German. Her mother had been a distant connection of Lady Chaloner. This relations.h.i.+p in some strange way entirely condoned in Lady Chaloner's eyes the fact that the Princess Hohenschreien had a good deal of paint on her face, and a good deal of paint in her manner, and that the loudness of her laugh and the boldness of her bearing were more p.r.o.nounced than would have been permitted of the well-behaved ladies brought up within the walls of Castle Chaloner.

However, Lady Chaloner's daughters were married to husbands of an excellent and irreproachable kind, and were out in the world; and Lady Chaloner felt no kind of responsibility about Madeline Hohenschreien, "Maddy," as she was called by her intimates. She expressed distinct approval of her, in fact, in the words, "Maddy has such a lot of go about her, hasn't she? It does one good to hear her laughin'." So when "Maddy" instantly and light-heartedly undertook to help the bazaar by performing at the Cafe Chantant, that was to go on at stated times all through the evening, Lady Chaloner felt that she was doing a distinctly good work. It was no small undertaking, however, marshalling her forces and trying to arrange that every one of the stallholders should not be selling exactly the same thing--namely, the small carved wooden objects, the staple commodity of Schleppenheim, made by the surrounding peasantry.

The bazaar was drawing near, and Lady Chaloner was very busy indeed.

Indefatigably did she send for Mrs. Birkett several times every day, begging her to bring a pencil and paper that they might make lists. Mrs.

Birkett's experience, however, was limited to sales of work under somewhat different conditions in England, and she was not of very much use, except as a moral support and outward material embodiment of the cause for which the bazaar was being undertaken. She sought comfort in her inmost soul in the thought of all the money that must surely flow into the coffers of the Church after this magnificent undertaking; but she was secretly out of her element and ill at ease, when Lady Chaloner pounced upon her to talk of the bazaar, at an hour when the most fas.h.i.+onable people in Europe, with their best clothes on, were walking up and down while the band was playing, or established at little tables exchanging intimate pleasantries with one another and greetings with the people that pa.s.sed.

She was sitting by Lady Chaloner, in compulsory attendance upon that benefactress of the Church, a few days before the bazaar was to come off.

"Now, let me see," said Lady Chaloner, "what are you goin' to have on your stall?"

"On mine?" said Mrs. Birkett, rather taken aback.

"Yes," said Lady Chaloner, "aren't you goin' to have a stall?"

"You see," said Mrs. Birkett, "I have not any of the things here that--er--I generally use for the purpose," and she thought regretfully of a big box at home which contained a sort of rolling stock of hideous articles that travelled, so to speak, between herself and her friends from one bazaar to another, and reappeared, a sort of symbolical merchandise, a currency in a nightmare, at all the fancy sales held in the neighbourhood of Leighton Ham.

"The only thing is," said Lady Chaloner, "it is rather a pity, because, bein' for the Church, people will expect you to sell, you know. Perhaps you could sell at somebody else's stall. Mine's full, I think," she added prudently. "Let me see," and her ladys.h.i.+p ran quickly over the names of the half a dozen young women who, in the most beguiling of costumes, were going to trip about and sell b.u.t.tonholes to their partners of the evening before. Lady Chaloner's solid good sense and long habit of the world kept things that should be separate perfectly distinct; she did not for a moment contemplate Mrs. Birkett tripping about and selling b.u.t.tonholes. "Perhaps Mrs. Samuels hasn't got her number complete," she said, not realising this time, the thing being a little more out of her field of vision, that Mrs. Samuels, who had been spending her time, energy, and even money, in trying to be friends with Lady Chaloner, might quite possibly be in the same att.i.tude towards Mrs.

Birkett, if thrust upon her, as Lady Chaloner was to herself.

"I daresay, yes," said Mrs. Birkett, with some misgiving, as she saw Mrs. Samuels further down the alley, standing with a London manager in the centre of a group who were laughing and talking round them.

"Let me see, Mrs. Samuels is goin' to have the tea, isn't she?"

"Yes, the refreshment stall," said Mrs. Birkett, referring to her list.

"And Lady Adela Prestige the fortune tellin'--and Princess Hohenschreien, what did she say she would do? Oh! I remember, the Cafe Chantant. What has she done about it, I wonder? Do you know anything about that?"

"I am afraid I don't," said Mrs. Birkett. This, indeed, was quite beyond her competence.

"I wonder if she has got people enough. Ah! here she is. Madeline!

Maddy!" she called out, as Princess Hohenschreien appeared at the end of the walk, a parasol lined with pink behind her, and her head thrown back as she laughed loud and heartily at something her companion had said.

"Yes, dear Lady Chaloner? Were you calling me?"

"I wanted to speak to you about the bazaar," said Lady Chaloner. "How do you do, M. de Moricourt," to the Princess's companion.

"The bazaar," said the young man in French, as he bowed, "what is that?"

"What is that?" said the Princess, with another burst of laughter. "But, _mon cher_, you are impossible! We have been talking of nothing else all the way down the alley."

"How?" said the young man. "I really beg your pardon, Princess, but I thought we were talking of the comedy we were going to act at the Casino."

"And what do you suppose that comedy is for," said the Princess, "if not for the bazaar?"

"How can I tell?" said Moricourt. "It might have been to please the public, or even to please the Princess Hohenschreien," with a little bow.

"Of course we shall please both," said the Princess. "And a bazaar gives us a reason. A charity bazaar, isn't it?"

"Ah! a charity bazaar," said Moricourt, "that is another thing. It doesn't matter how badly I shall act, then."

"Perhaps that is as well," said the Princess.