Rhea, a Woman of the World

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

 

RHEA

a woman
of the
world

By C. L. Pirkis, Author of “Lady Lovelace,” &c. &c.

“SHE is of the world—worldly, I fear,” said the Bishop of St. Cheviot's to his chaplain, with a solemn shake of the head; “however, you may as well bring the charity to her notice; I dare say she will put her name down as patroness and give you a cheque for a good round sum.”

“Hm'm,” said Lord Chenevix musingly, as from the window of his club he watched Lady Glencross drive past in her neat Victoria, “if they admitted women into the diplomatic service she'd have made a name for herself. It passes my comprehension how that woman has managed to retain the family jewels and her enormous jointure, and yet keep on good terms with every member of the Glencross family—her gouty old father-in-law included. Bless my soul! it seems only yesterday that I saw her in a brown holland pinafore, picking gooseberries in the vicarage garden, and to-day, she is a persona grata in the best sets!”

Some persons in society were wont to aver that luck, pure and simple, had been a prime factor in Lady Glencross's career from first to last. Luck, they said, had sent young Lord Glencross hunting over the glebe land; had made his horse throw him just outside the vicarage door; had broken his leg and kept him for six weeks a prisoner at the vicarage with Miss Rhea Crossley, the vicar's daughter, in sole attendance on him, an attendance that eventually was to bring about the young lady's marriage into the noble family.

Here others would occasionally take up the parable and add: that luck had still further befriended the young lady by killing her scamp of a husband, within a year of the wedding-day, in a railway accident between Neuilly and Paris. And then they would hint at some disgraceful love episode connected with the affair and break off with a smile that seemed to say: “An' if I would I could tell a tale.”

Lady Glencross had passed upon herself and her career a slightly different verdict, when some eight years previously she had put off her widow's weeds after wearing them for the conventional two years.

“I live on, the anti-climax to my own story,” she had said to herself as she donned her laces and jewellery once more. “From a poetic point of view I ought to have died when my love and my faith in man died. Yet here am I, never more alive than I am to-day; never before more ready to enjoy dress, dancing, opera, play, yachting—everything! Perhaps, after all, those are happiest who get rid of that troublesome thing called a heart at the very outset of their career, and set themselves to make sensations do duty for it in the future.”

“OF THE WORLD, WORLDLY.”

“To make sensations do duty for a heart” had sounded very well in her ears. The sentence had a touch of epigram in it. She took it for her text, so to speak, and based her daily life upon its doctrine. She swept her memory clean of all haunting images of the past, of her first early delirium of love, and of her terrible awakening from that delirium when her husband's sudden death placed in her hands, together with his private papers, the records of his dissipations before and after his marriage. She rigidly excluded from her life alike friendships and enmities that threatened to throw roots beneath a surface soil, and filled her days with an easy round—not tread-mill grind—of society pleasures. To be on good terms with all the world (including her husband's relatives) was as distinctly productive of pleasurable sensations as it was to be well dressed and generally admired. So she spared no pains to achieve both results. Also a good-natured action now and again was apt to give her soothing, pleasant thoughts when she laid her head on her pillow at night; consequently, she was ready at any moment to open her purse-strings at the call of charity, and not at all unwilling to pose as “my lady bountiful” to the large circle of impecunious relatives whom she had left behind in her upward career.

Thus it came about that when, at the close of her tenth year of widowhood, certain of these relatives wrote to her on behalf of her little cousin, Dulcie Crossley, stating that she had been left well-nigh alone in the world by the death of her parents, and would stand no chance of getting an entrée into society unless she held out her hand. Lady Glencross wrote immediately in reply: “Send her up to me at once, and I will take care that she is well launched.”

It had been all very well for Lady Glencross to congratulate herself on having got rid of “that troublesome thing called a heart.” Towards the end of that eventful tenth year of her widowhood, circumstances arose that made her a little doubtful as to whether that desirable result had been attained. Lord Carthewe, an old playfellow and early friend, returned to England after a long period of foreign diplomatic service: the old friendship was renewed, an easy intimacy was maintained, and eventually an offer of marriage was the result.

Lord Carthewe was a man of about five-and-thirty, handsome, distinguished and of refined tastes; his estates were unmortgaged, his reputation without reproach. Yet all that Lady Glencross could find to say to him, in place of the “yes” he so confidently expected, was, “Let me have time to think. I cannot give you an answer now. This day week will be my yearly ball. Come to me at the close of it and I will give you an answer, but, pray—pray keep away from me till then.”

An odd request this. It was born of a vague fear lest, after all that had come and gone in her life, she had not the love to give this man that he had a right to expect from the woman he made his wife. The fear grew upon her as the week ran its round. It brought a wail in its wake.

“Ah! if he had but come to me at the first, when my heart was young and fresh and true,” she said to herself, as she stood before her mirror, wondering over the shining eyes and bright hair that had refused to endorse the record of her past experiences.

“VIOLET EYES AND WHITE TULLE.”

Lady Glencross's ball—the one and only ball that she was in the habit of giving at the height of the season, always marked a red-letter day in the calendar of ball-goers. Her house in Park Lane was large, and had been altered and adapted expressly for ball-giving, and she spared neither time, thought nor money to render the evening's entertainment a brilliant success, The ball on this occasion was to be made specially interesting by the début of Miss Dulcie Crossley, the little country cousin.

People had been somewhat startled by Lady Glencross's good-nature towards her young relative, and were inclined to read a double motive in it—a wish to set off cultured beauty and town-bred grace by juxtaposition with simplicity and (perhaps) gaucherie.

“Muslin sets off brocade and muslin suffers proportionately,” they said. “Sweet seventeen cannot hold its own against thirty-one, backed up by Bond Street milliners and family diamonds.”

The wiseacres were to be a little out in their reckoning. If sweet seventeen had to go to the wall, it would only be after a neck and neck race; it ran the milliners and the diamonds hard on the night of the ball, at any rate.

“She is all violet eyes and white tulle,” was Lord Chenevix's first verdict upon the débutante, as he bowed his introduction to her. Ten minutes later he had something else to say. It was: “She might be a little angel who has somehow fluttered out of Paradise, and can't find her way back! There's no dancing-master in this world who could have given her that grace and elegance, I'll undertake to say. Anything more exquisite than that last round of cotillon I have never seen in any ball-room.”

Lord Carthewe was Dulcie's partner in that cotillon. He appeared bent on strictly carrying out Lady Glencross's wish to the very letter, and, after his first shake hands with her at the drawing-room door, had drifted into the ball-room, and she had only caught an occasional glimpse of him over the heads or between the shoulders of the swaying crowd of dancers.

“Can't make it out—think there must be something up between the two,” said young Hartley, of the Lancers, to a tall, slim, smooth-faced young fellow who stood beside him. “Twycross laid me a fiver the match would come off within six weeks—fancy he'll have to pay up, after all.”

“I think you and Twycross might find something better to stake your fivers on than a lady's private affairs,” answered the young man thus addressed.

He spoke with a hot vehemence, that brought all the blood to his fair, boyish face. It was no secret that Trevor Yorke, aged exactly one-and-twenty, was more than “over-shoes in love” with the fair widow of thirty-one.

Lady Glencross's brocade made a pretty spot of colour against a background of greenery, as she stood for a few minutes watching the dancers. She was a tall. fair, pale woman, with keen, deep-seated eyes, and a pleasant “society smile.” She had taken special pains with her dress that night. It was of a delicate shade of salmon-pink, looped back with brown orchids, over a petticoat richly embroidered in silver. Her hair, drawn low on her forehead, was crowned with a diamond tiara, and the Glencross diamonds and emeralds sparkled on her white neck and arms.

That “wind-waved tulip-bed” of swaying, many-tinted dancers, held but one form for Lady Glencross—that of Lord Carthewe.

INTO THE PLEASANTER ATMOSPHERE OF CORRIDORS AND CONSERVATORIES.

“How kind it was of him,” she said to herself, “to single out little Dulcie in this way and show her such marked attention! How loyal, too, to herself thus to carry out her wishes to the very letter and not distract her by attentions that might retard the answering of the difficult question which, although it had been before her mind all through the week, appeared as far off as ever from being set at rest. Amid all these surrounding distractions it kept its grip upon her mind.

“Shall it be 'yes,' shall it be 'no?'” she found herself whispering to herself; and to her fancy the band in the gallery overhead caught up the words as a sort of refrain and gave it out in the light valse tune which before had seemed to her wordless,

It was a variant on Marguerite's question to the flower-petals: “he loves me, he loves me not.” Lady Glencross toyed nervously with the orchids in the bosom of her dress, half wondering if she interrogated them what answer they would give.

“Lady Glencross,” said Lord Chenevix's voice at her elbow; “may I find you a seat? Now, I must compliment you on your little cousin's dancing. I have come to the conclusion that she must have learnt it in some other sphere. Anything more graceful and poetic I have never before seen. They say she has been staying with you for some little time; now tell me, how is it I have never before had the pleasure of meeting her?”

Lady Glencross looked her satisfaction. She liked to feel that little Dulcie did credit to her blood relationship; that, surrounded as she was by some of the best-bred, best-dressed women that England numbered in her aristocracy, she yet shone out as a star among them all. Dulcie, she explained, had been staying with friends in Paris for the past three weeks; had, in fact, only returned on the previous day on purpose for the ball. Yes, she was graceful; and certainly had improved in her good looks during her stay in Paris. She was glad, too, to be able to say that Dulcie had instincts in the art of dress, and the good dresser, like the poet, must be born, not made.

The cotillon came to an end; the dancers in a stream flowed past into the pleasanter atmosphere of corridors and conservatories.

“Isn't it possible to shake your resolve? Will you not give me one valse—one, only one?” said a voice over her shoulder.

Lord Chenevix drew back to make way for Trevor Yorke.

Something in the young man's voice startled her, yet she could scarcely have said what.

She answered a little coldly: “I dance only by deputy now. You will be fortunate if you can get Dulcie to give you a dance; she is very much in request to-night.” And the thought in her mind as she said this was: “Now what a good thing it would be if Dulcie were to take this foolish boy in hand, and make him fall in love with her. He was, in all respects, a good parti, except for a woman of one-and-thirty—the very match she would desire for little Dulcie.”'

The tide of dancers, influx and reflux, brought Dulcie to her side, for a brief space, without a partner in her train.

“Rhea,” said the girl suddenly and sharply, as if the words were startled out of her, “how beautiful you are! I never knew it till to-night! I do not wonder that——” She broke off as abruptly as she had begun.

“ISN'T IT POSSIBLE TO SHAKE YOUR RESOLVE?”

Rhea was a little surprised. “It is very good of you to pay me compliments,” she answered. “I think my dress should have some of the credit of my good looks.”

Those two made “a picture fair to look on,” as, for a few seconds, they stood side by side; the elder woman tall, queenly in her delicately-tinted brocades, and the younger, in her soft, floating white draperies, with her rose-leaf complexion and large up-turned eyes that seemed, to Rhea's fancy, to have suddenly caught a strangely pathetic expression.

Over their heads hung a life-size portrait of a Glencross ancestress, in early Victorian dress, with hair arranged a l'Impératrice Eugénie. The portrait was the work of a notable artist, but the living picture, standing beneath it, so to speak, took all the poetry out of it—modernised it, vulgarised it.

The band recommenced; Dulcie was carried off by an eager partner, and Rhea found her attention claimed now by this person, now by that. The music had changed from the smooth, gliding valse to a sprightly gavotte. All the same, however, to Rhea's fancy, it held the old refrain—there was no silencing it, no getting rid of it. It was in vain that she left the ball-room and went back to the drawing-rooms, the music seemed to follow and haunt her there, with its perpetual iteration of “Shall it be 'yes'—shall it be 'no'?” Beneath the wearisome round of society platitudes, to which she was forced to listen and to reply, she found herself saying to herself vaguely, dreamily: “What is love? What is love? In the old, foolish, girlish days I knew, or thought I knew. But now——” she broke off, mentally shrugging her shoulders at herself.

After a time, the society platitudes began to give place to society adieux—a touch of the finger-tips, or a nod, a smile. The rooms began to get empty; the hall below to become thronged; the roll of departing carriages became prolonged and ceaseless. The music seemed to float into the room in louder, fuller tones now that the hum of intervening voices had ceased; the band had had orders to play so long as there were half-a-dozen couples to stand up on the perfect floor; so Rhea conjectured that the ball-room was not as yet deserted. Here, however, in the empty drawing-room, her presence no longer seemed a necessity. In another quarter of an hour, at farthest, she knew that the last of her guests would have departed; and that Lord Carthewe, sure of finding her alone, would be making his way to her side to receive his final answer. Now, what was that answer to be? Five minutes alone in perfect quietude, to face her heart, to face herself, she felt was an absolute necessity to her.

Outside, over the green park, she knew day was dawning. The cool air of the morning came flowing in through an open window. That window led into a covered verandah which ran round the side of the house and ended in the ball-room. It was lighted with Chinese lanterns and prettily furnished with lounge seats and big, flowering shrubs. It seemed to suggest to Rhea a cool retreat, where a few minutes of quiet thought could be indulged in.

She took up the thread of her thinking where she had let it go half-an-hour previously. “In the old days,” she said to herself, moving slowly, dreamily, amid the big flower-jars and heavily-scented shrubs, “I knew what love was. It was to me, then, just a blind stretching forth of the hands to grasp, and then to hold and to keep against all heaven and all earth. But is it in me now thus to grasp, to hold, to keep——” She broke off abruptly, coming to a standstill alike in thought and movement.

Was that not someone or something moving among the shadows at the farther end of the verandah, where, by a small flight of steps, it led into the ball-room.

A second glance showed that that someone was Trevor Yorke.

“I have been waiting here for the past two hours, to see and speak to you,” he said, in a low, nervous tone, as he advanced rapidly towards her. “No, no, not in there!” he added, as Rhea made a step forward as if to pass on to the ball-room. “I must, must see you alone to-night. I am going away to-morrow to Africa, for years, and perhaps for ever, and I must—I will say my good-bye to you before I go.”

“Going away to Africa!” repeated Rhea blankly. “Do your people know—do they like the idea?”

“What does it matter to me what they like or don't like,” he answered, almost fiercely. Then he suddenly caught both her hands in his, crying out passionately, “Rhea, Rhea, look at me—don't turn your face away! Do you not see that I am broken-hearted?”

He stood beside her, a tall, slim figure, the figure that gives one the impression of having been only just emancipated from an Eton jacket—the swinging Chinese lantern throwing a curious glare of colour on his haggard boyish face.

Rhea made no effort to release her hands, feeling it was, indeed, a good-bye clasp.

“My poor, poor boy!” was all she said, in a pitying tone.

“Yes, always that,” he said bitterly. “Always your poor boy—never anything else. You won't give me credit for a man's passion, a man's heart! And when I am gone, you and everyone else will say 'the best thing he could have done! He'll come back cured in a year or so!' But I'm not going away to get cured! No! And I'm not going away because you mean to marry Carthewe, and I can't bear the sight of your happiness. I'm going away because——” He broke off abruptly, then added, in a quieter tone, “Rhea, do you care enough about me to want to know the real reason why I am leaving home, friends, father, mother—perhaps for ever?”

LEANED BACK IN HER CHAIR DAZED AND STUPEFIED

Rhea released her hands; her rings seemed almost crushed into her fingers with the tightness of his clasp. She was strangely agitated. She sank into a chair that was half-hidden by two big, branching myrtles.

“You have taken me so by surprise, I can scarcely get my thoughts together,” she said. “I had no idea that such a thing was in your mind!”

He stood in front of her, with his arms folded on his breast, looking down on her.

“Did you think I should come to you day after day and say 'going, going,' till someone else said: 'gone at last, thank Heaven!'” he asked bitterly.

“But, must it be?” asked Rhea, of set purpose, making her tone as unemotional and matter-of-fact as possible. “You could keep out of my way without leaving England. You were not compelled to follow me about from house to house as you have been in the habit of doing of late. You need never have crossed my threshold again if to do so gave you pain.”

“Gave me pain! Do you think I am going away in order to save myself pain?” he cried contemptuously. “Why, I would stand torture—infinite torture in every part of my body just for a five minute's glimpse of you! Rhea, Rhea! don't you see—can't you understand that I am going away, not for my own sake, but for yours, because I won't have you talked about in an intolerable fashion. I have never asked you to marry me. I never would ask you to marry me; I love you too well to ask you to put yourself in what the world would consider a ridiculous position. Two nights ago my mother came to me and told me certain remarks that had been made about you in consequence of my attentions to you; how that people said No! I won't repeat the idiotic speeches. When I heard them I said to myself, it is time this was put a stop to; I love her so, I must leave her; I will quit at once and for ever take myself out of her life.”

His words had come in a torrent; ended, they left him almost breathless.

Rhea gazed up at him wonderingly. So, then, love might mean something other than a grasping, a holding and a keeping against all heaven and all earth! Sometimes it might mean a leaving and a letting go.

Her hands clasped together nervously. “My poor, poor boy,” she began once more.

He gave her no time to finish. He flung himself on the ground at her feet, kissing the hem of her dress, his hot tears falling here and there on its silver embroideries.

“Rhea, Rhea,” he cried brokenly, “kiss me once, just once, on my forehead, and let me go!”

Rhea bent forward, parted his fair curly hair, and lightly touched his forehead with her lips.

The chair on which she sat stood immediately beneath a window of one of the smaller drawing-rooms. From that room, at that moment, there came a sound of movement and of voices, as if some persons had just entered it.

Trevor sprang to his feet. “God bless you!” he said, in low, tremulous tones. “Forget me; it is all I have to ask of you now!”

Then, with feet that stumbled as they went, he made his way along the verandah, back to the ball-room once more.

Rhea leaned back in her chair, feeling dazed and stupefied. Here was her question—“What is love?”—answered with a vengeance. She felt as one might feel who, having questioned the oracle, expecting to hear the voice of the priest in reply, hears instead the voice of the god himself.

The heavy, odourous air seemed to stifle her. The clanging of the band had ceased now; the roll of carriages in the street below was getting fainter. The golden-grey of the morning, that filtered in through the interstices of the Venetian shutter, fought with and died hard in the glare of the Chinese lantern over her head. Lord Carthewe, no doubt, was seeking her now in the deserted rooms, in order to claim her promise of an interview. She felt utterly unfit to face him and the momentous question whose answer might contain in itself the making or marring of two lives.

Again the sound of voices came to her through the window beneath which she was seated. In a vague sort of way, she found herself listening to them, without knowing who they were, nor feeling much interest in what was being said, until suddenly three little words, “our last valse,” fell upon her ear, in tones that were unmistakably her cousin Dulcie's.

Yet how strangely unlike Dulcie's usual tones they were! The words seemed to be sighed rather than spoken.

Was it possible, Rhea asked herself, that the foolish little maiden had let her heart be taken captive at her very first ball by some possibly ineligible suitor? Now, who could be the person whom she was addressing in such a pathetic voice—a landless younger son, an impecunious German princelet?

HIS ATTITUDE WAS NOT THAT OF A HOPEFUL OR EXPECTANT LOVER.

Rhea did not have long to wait for an answer to her question. Slow, distinct and charged with passion, came a masculine voice in reply. “Our last valse! Yes. Life comes to an end for me to-night. Oh! my darling, my darling, why did we ever meet thus, only to part?”

“My darling! my darling!” And the voice in which these words were said was that of Reginald, Lord Carthewe!

Rhea put her hand to her forehead. Was she dreaming—what did it all mean? There fell a silence; then Dulcie's voice was heard again.

“It has been all Rhea's doing from first to last,” she said, speaking falteringly and with the sound of tears in her voice. “She made me go to Paris, and——”

“Yes,” interrupted Lord Carthewe, “and she forbade me her house for a week, and thus virtually sent me over there to pass the time! Oh, my love, my love! Fate has indeed been cruel to us! I curse these chains of honour, curse the folly that made me forge them for myself, but it is utterly, utterly beyond my power to break them!”

Rhea's hand fell limply to her side. Her brain was on fire, yet she felt frozen, benumbed, half-paralyzed.

“Utterly out of his power to break his chains,” did he say? Oh, then it lay in her power to keep him true to his spoken word; to “grasp, to hold, to keep him against all heaven and all earth.” The Chinese lantern over her head went out with a splutter. The golden grey of the morning poured in now through the half-turned Venetian shutter. One long, narrow ray slanted to Rhea's feet and setting her jewelled shoe-buckles glittering, found out an ugly tarnished spot on the silver embroideries of her dress.

Rhea looked down on it curiously. Left there by a man's tears, was it? And once more there seemed to sound in her ears the passionate, boyish voice saying, “I love her so I must leave her. I will quit at once, and for ever take myself out of her life.”

She rose slowly, unsteadily to her feet, feeling less like a living, breathing woman than a walking marble statue.

As she entered the principal drawing-room, Dulcie, with averted face, fluttered across it at the further end and went out by another door.

The rooms showed disordered and desolate now, with their faded flowers and drooping greenery and candles here and there flickering in their sockets as Rhea passed on to the room where she felt sure Lord Carthewe still lingered. Yes, there he was, leaning back on a large settee, in a listless, dreamy attitude, with one hand covering his eyes.

He started to his feet as she entered and began a somewhat disjointed series of apologies.

“It is so late—I fancied you must have retired—I was thinking that, perhaps, after all, you would rather see me in the morning,” he said, then broke off abruptly, for the man was too innately true and honest to be a ready fabricator of glib society lies.

Rhea was very white, but her grace of manner had come back to her, together with her sweet, measured-out “society smile.”

“I FEAR IT MUST BE A PLAIN, UNQUALIFIED 'NO.'”

“Pray don't apologise,” she said. “I am glad to be able to save you the trouble of calling to-morrow. I told you, don't you know, that I would give you your answer to-night.”

Lord Carthewe drew a step nearer. His attitude was not that of a hopeful or expectant lover. His head was bowed; his fingers were clenched into the palms of his hands with the restraint he put upon himself.

“And that answer is——?” he queried nervously.

“I hope you'll forgive me, I fear it must be a plain, unqualified 'No,'” she answered, her pleasant smile still playing about her lips.

“I have thought the matter well over; I feel sure you will not press me for a reason. I am very grateful for the compliment you have paid me—I hope we shall always be friends. Now, if you do not mind, I will say 'good-night,' or rather, 'good-morning.' I am very tired—almost tired to death.”

It was after this, within six months of Dulcie's marriage to Lord Carthewe that the Bishop of St. Cheviot's passed judgment upon Lady Glencross as a woman of the world, and Lord Chenevix sighed his regrets that a diplomatic career had been denied her.