Robert Elsmere

But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had never seen her so womanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate social skill. As she talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of literature, or politics, or famous folk, flas.h.i.+ng her beautiful eyes from one to the other, Sir John Headlam would, every now and then, turn his odd puckered face observantly towards the farther end of the table.

'By Jove!' he said afterwards to Wharncliffe as they walked away from the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more _roles_ than Desforets!' Sir John and his hostess were very old friends.

Upstairs smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining in.

M. de Querouelle, having talked the best of his _repertoire_ at dinner, was now inclined for amus.e.m.e.nt, and had discovered that Lady Aubrey could amuse him, and was, moreover, _une belle personne_. Madame de Netteville was obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men stood chatting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious of a complete failure of social energy, began to look at his watch. Instantly Madame de Netteville glided up to him.

'Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know how my affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come into my little writing-room.' And she led him into a tiny panelled room at the far end of the drawing-room and shut off from it by a heavy curtain, which she now left half-drawn.

'The latest?' said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising his eyebrows with the slightest motion of the head towards the writing-room.

'I suppose so,' she said indifferently; 'she is East-Ending for a change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy's young man who "liked bad wine, he was so bored with good."'

Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the open window of the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her.

'You look as if you had had a strain,' she said to him abruptly, after they had talked business for a few minutes. 'What has been the matter?'

He told her Richards's story, very shortly. It would have been impossible to him to give more than the driest outline of it in that room. His companion listened gravely. She was an epicure in all things, especially in moral sensation, and she liked his moments of reserve and strong self-control. They made his general expansiveness more distinguished.

Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying--

'I was at your lecture last Sunday--you didn't see me!'

'Were you? Ah! I remember a person in black, and veiled, who puzzled me.

I don't think we want you there, Madame de Netteville.'

His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it.

'Why not? Is it only the artisans who have souls? A reformer should refuse no one.'

'You have your own opportunities,' he said quietly; 'I think the men prefer to have it to themselves for the present. Some of them are dreadfully in earnest.'

'Oh, I don't pretend to be in earnest,' she said with a little wave of her hand; 'or, at any rate, I know better than to talk of earnestness to _you_.'

'Why to me?' he asked, smiling.

'Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the upper cla.s.s and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not interested in any other, and, indeed, you know nothing of any other.'

She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night was splendid and regal--her dress of black and white brocade, the diamonds at her throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the marks of experience and living on the dark subtle face.

'Perhaps not,' he replied: 'it is enough for one life to try and make out where the English working cla.s.s is tending to.'

'You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps his eye only on the lower cla.s.s will achieve nothing. What can the idealist do without the men of action--the men who can take his beliefs and make them enter by violence into existing inst.i.tutions? And the men of action are to be found with _us_.'

'It hardly looks just now as if the upper cla.s.s was to go on enjoying a monopoly of them,' he said, smiling.

'Then appearances are deceptive. The populace supplies ma.s.s

'My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de Netteville.

Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper cla.s.s can produce a Brook Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future will want a vast effusion of feeling and pa.s.sion to carry it into action, and feeling and pa.s.sion are only to be generated in sufficient volume among the ma.s.ses, where the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous.

You upper-cla.s.s folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if you s.h.i.+rk it--but----'

'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. 'I know you would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We are to starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses and everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him--which might be worth doing--but that he may rule us. It is too much!'

'Very well,' he said drily, his colour rising. 'Very well, let it be too much.'

And, dropping his lounging att.i.tude, he stood erect, and she saw that he meant to be going. Her look swept over him from head to foot--over the worn face with its look of sensitive refinement and spiritual force, the active frame, the delicate but most characteristic hand. Never had any man so attracted her for years; never had she found it so difficult to gain a hold. Eugenie de Netteville, _poseuse_, schemer, woman of the world that she was, was losing command of herself.

'What did you really mean by "worldliness" and the "world" in your lecture last Sunday?' she asked him suddenly, with a little accent of scorn. 'I thought your diatribes absurd. What you religious people call the "world" is really only the average opinion of sensible people which neither you nor your kind could do without for a day.'

He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and defended himself not very seriously. But she threw all her strength into the argument, and he forgot that he had meant to go at once. When she chose she could talk admirably, and she chose now. She had the most aggressive ways of attacking, and then, in the same breath, the most subtle and softening ways of yielding and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly her antagonist turned upon her he found himself disarmed he knew not how.

The disputant disappeared, and he felt the woman, restless, melancholy, sympathetic, hungry for friends.h.i.+p and esteem, yet too proud to make any direct bid for either. It was impossible not to be interested and touched.

Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. Whether in his hours of intimacy with her, twelve months before, young Alfred Evershed had received the same impression may be doubted. In all things Eugenie de Netteville was an artist.

Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing-room was drawn back, and Sir John Headlam stood in the doorway. He had the glittering amused eyes of a malicious child as he looked at them.

'Very sorry, madame,' he began in his high cracked voice, 'but Wharncliffe and I are off to the New Club to see Desforets. They have got her there to-night.'

'Go,' she said, waving her hand to him, 'I don't envy you. She is not what she was.'

'No, there is only one person,' he said, bowing with grotesque little airs of gallantry, 'for whom time stands still.'

Madame de Netteville looked at him with smiling half-contemptuous serenity. He bowed again, this time with ironical emphasis, and disappeared.

'Perhaps I had better go back and send them off,' she said, rising. 'But you and I have not had our talk out yet.'

She led the way into the drawing-room. Lady Aubrey was lying back on the velvet sofa, a little green paroquet that was accustomed to wander tamely about the room perching on her hand. She was holding the field against Lord Rupert and Mr. Addlestone in a three-cornered duel of wits, while M. de Querouelle sat by, his plump hands on his knees, applauding.

They all rose as their hostess came in.

'My dear' said Lady Aubrey, 'it is disgracefully early, but my country before pleasure. It is the Foreign Office to-night, and since James took office I can't with decency absent myself. I had rather be a scullerymaid than a minister's wife. Lord Rupert, I will take you on if you want a lift.'

She touched Madame de Netteville's cheek with her lips, nodding to the other men present, and went out, her fair stag-like head well in the air, 'chaffing' Lord Rupert, who obediently followed her, performing marvellous feats of agility in his desire to keep out of the way of the superb train sweeping behind her. It always seemed as if Lady Aubrey could have had no childhood, as if she must always have had just that voice and those eyes. Tears she could never have shed, not even as a baby over a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could she have looked upon a lost possession as anything else than the opportunity for a new one.

The other men took their departure for one reason or another. It was not late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Querouelle talked with gusto of four 'At homes' still to be grappled with.

As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his hand.

'No,' she said, with a quick impetuousness, 'no: I want my talk out. It is barely half-past ten, and neither of us wants to be racing about London to-night.'

Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he lingered rather reluctantly--for another ten minutes, as he supposed.

She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open to the back of the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane Street came borne in upon the warm night air. Her superb dark head stood out against a stand of yellow lilies close behind her, and the little paroquet, bright with all the colours of the tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back of her chair, touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers.

Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his dying day with shame and humiliation.

In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a woman who was five years his senior had made him what was practically a confession of love--had given him to understand that she knew what were the relations between himself and his wife--and had implored him with the quick breath of an indescribable excitement to see what a woman's sympathy and a woman's unique devotion could do for the causes he had at heart.