Chapter Eighteen

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THE Belchambers took possession of their new town-house just in time for the opening of Parliament in the ensuing year. It was only partially furnished as yet, and most uncomfortable; but, as Lady Eccleston remarked with great originality, "the only way to get the workmen out of a house was to move in yourself." The first-floor rooms still echoed with shouts and hammerings, but the upper part of the house was more or less ready, and so were the dining-room and some back rooms on the ground-floor, which Cissy had reluctantly decided should eventually be given up to Sainty. It was astonishing how swiftly she had

     "Shaped her heart with woman's meekness
      To all duties of her rank,"

except the vulgar and obvious one which she would have shared with the humblest of wives. Having once made it quite clear that she was to receive everything and give nothing, she soon ceased to talk of returning to her mother, and Sainty was amazed at the ease with which she adapted herself to the awkwardness of the situation. In her place, he felt sure, he would not have rung a bell, or asked for a postage stamp, but it never seemed to occur to Cissy that there was anything curious in the arrangement; she annexed all her husband's possessions without scruple or hesitation as soon as she discovered that no embarrassing condition attached to doing so.

In spite of her son's entreaties that she would stay with them, Lady Charmington had retired to the dower-house immediately after the marriage, and they had barely returned from their brief and dismal honeymoon in the duke's villa before Cissy began to dispose of everything at Belchamber as if it had all been hers from earliest childhood. There had been some talk of a wedding-journey on the Continent, but Cissy had no desire to prolong the tête-à-tête with Sainty, which she did not enjoy. It was England, which she knew and understood, that was to be the scene of her triumphs; and the sight of strange lands had no charms for her compared to the fun of swooping down as mistress on the great house, where she had been an unconsidered little guest, settling which should be her own rooms, having them redecorated according to the taste of the latest fashionable upholsterer, and moving into them whatever took her fancy in other parts of the house.

She was so happily busy that she almost forgot to regret the Season, and gave up Ascot without a sigh, contenting herself with Cowes and Goodwood, which she did with great éclat from a friend's yacht, while Sainty enjoyed a fortnight of peace and seclusion.

Congenial as she found the task of establishing herself in her husband's ancestral home, it was nothing to the delirious enjoyment of selecting, decorating, and furnishing a big London house, regardless of expense; and all the time she could spare from entertaining shooting parties in the autumn was devoted to the feverish prosecution of this new delight.

Of course every one agreed that they must have a town-house. The duke and Lord Firth were not less convinced of its necessity than the large circle of acquaintances who hoped to be entertained in it. Even Lady Charmington, while she winced at the recklessness of the expenditure, was partly consoled by the sight of her son taking what she considered "his proper position in the world." She consoled herself with the thought that it was her long years of careful management that made all this profusion possible. Sainty must attend the debates in the House of Lords, and though she was rather scandalised by his Radicalism, she reflected that the limited number of peers on that side, since the Home Rule split, made some small office not improbable for him, when the Liberals came in again.

And Sainty, though he cared for none of these things, had no heart to refuse them to the girl whom he had married. The fact was that the more he thought about the matter the sorrier he felt for his wife. For his part, he told himself, he was not made for love, had never expected it to play any part in his life, and was no worse off than he was before. The disadvantage of taking a consistently humble view of one's own attractions is not without its compensations; thus the wound to his self-love, of which a vain man would almost have bled to death, was to Sainty, who had no vanity and very little self-love, only in the nature of those scratches which smart and feel sore, but rob us of no drop of heart's blood. Life was not perceptibly more unpleasant to him than it had been before, and he had still the same substitutes for a more active happiness with which he had been accustomed to fill it, his studies, his schemes of beneficence, the management of his property. But this poor child, so well fitted by nature to love and be loved, whose one chance of rising above the empty frivolity of her surroundings might have lain in the ennobling influence of a great passion, for something how much less satisfying than a mess of pottage had she bartered her birthright, a handful of tin counters, a paper crown! In spite of what he considered her generosity in taking the blame on herself, he was more and more inclined to regard her as the victim of her mother's worldliness, enmeshed like himself in the toils of that careful schemer. It was not in nature that a creature so young and fresh should be greatly influenced by considerations of wealth or rank; he could not think it. These things had been dangled before her eyes till she had been dazzled by their false lustre. She was too innocent, he reflected, to realise to what extent she had sacrificed all chances of woman's best happiness to gain them. The question was how to shield her from the consequences of her own act, to save her from the bitter repentance only too likely to follow. To do so might not be permanently in his power; but meanwhile, if she so keenly desired the undesirable as to be ready to risk the ruin of her life for it, what was simpler than to give it to her! Jewels, clothes, a house in town, the means to feed the thankless rich, the power to walk out of the room before older women---if these things could make her happy, as far as they were his to give, let her take them in full measure. They were freely hers. He had no particular use for them himself.

Perhaps the spectacle of the ease and gusto with which she flung herself into her new rôle of the great lady was not without a certain satiric amusement for him.

One day he would find her on the pavement before the house, attended by Algy Montgomery and a grave professional gentleman who looked the ideal of a racing duke, while a pair of high-stepping bays were driven up and down for her inspection. "Haven't we more horses than we know what to do with?" Sainty would ask.

"My dear boy!" Cissy cried, "a parcel of old screws. Jane Rugby was saying only the other day that we hadn't a decent pair o' horses in the stable."

On another she would be busy comparing designs for carriages. "Those old bathing-machines at Belchamber," she remarked loftily, "are all very well for the country; but in my position it would be too grotesque for me to be seen driving about London in them. The duchess has been awfully kind about advising me. It was her idea to send for the old chariot and see if it can't be done up for drawing-rooms. She says unless it has got dry-rot or anything, that a couple of hundreds spent on it ought to make it as good as new; and of course I don't want to waste money on a tiresome thing one would never use on other occasions, if by spending a little on the old one it can be made to do. But I must have a decent brougham and open carriage at once; you must see yourself there are no two ways about it. And, come to think of it, you ought to have a brougham of your own. We are sure to clash and want it at the same time, if we try and do with one."

"Perhaps one of the bathing-machines from Belchamber might do for me," suggested Sainty, not without malice.

"Well," said Cissy quite gravely, "I don't know that it mightn't."

"Who told you of these people?" Sainty asked, examining the neatly painted pictures.

"Oh, they make all the duke's carriages, and they are always smartly turned out. Your cousin Claude told them to send me these sketches, and he has promised to go with me to Long Acre to see what they have in the shop."

Since she married, Cissy had ceased to mention Claude as "Mr. Morland," and the prefix "your cousin" was bridging the narrow chasm between that and calling him "Claude." Morland was able to be uncommonly useful to the pretty new cousin; not only at the coachbuilder's were his taste and knowledge invaluable, but at the upholsterer's, the bric-à-brac shops, the sales at Christie's, and he had even been called on to give his views (and very sound views too) in the more intimate province of the modiste and the dressmaker. Sainty was obviously of no assistance. What could be more natural, if the lady needed counsel in such matters, than to turn to a near kinsman of her husband, and one so well qualified to help? It is true that Lady Eccleston was more than ready to assist her daughter in mounting her establishment on a suitable scale, and would very willingly have accompanied her to the shops, not, perhaps, without a hope of gleaning a few scattered ears on her own account from the harvest Cecilia was reaping with so large a hook; but that unnatural young person seemed to prefer almost any advice or companionship to her mamma's. Ill as he thought of her, for the manœuvres with which she had compassed his union with her daughter, Sainty could not help a secret sympathy with the poor lady, who bore her pitiless relegation to a back place with the smiling stoicism worthy of a Red Indian. The old fiction of the perfect confidence and sisterlike relation between herself and her daughter was still gallantly maintained even to him, and when he reflected what potentialities of tearful complainings she had heroically foregone, he came near to feeling actual gratitude. But he need have been under no apprehension of plaintive confidences; anything natural or direct had long ceased to be possible to Lady Eccleston.

"I cannot have mamma dropping in to lunch whenever it suits her," Cissy remarked ruthlessly. "I have told her she must not come more than once a week, unless she's asked."

"But I thought you said you meant to let people know you were always at home for lunch?"

"So I do; it is a very convenient way of seeing my friends. That's just why I've had to speak to mamma. I should have her here every day if I didn't. And it would bore a lot of younger women, who don't know her particularly well, like Vere Deans or Ella Dalsany, to find her here perpetually---not to speak of the men."

Sainty did not retort that Lady Deans and Lady Dalsany were not so very much younger than Lady Eccleston. It was no affair of his; and it soon became evident that Cissy's mother was not the only relation whom it bored her friends to meet at her luncheon-table. Sainty had been brought up in a certain old-fashioned code of manners. His mother, seeing that he was shy and awkward in company, and being not less so herself, had insisted rather unduly on the ceremonial side of social life. He had been taught that hospitality demanded that he should receive and take leave of guests with some form, accompanying them to their carriages, and putting on their cloaks, which the groom of the chambers, who was much taller and unencumbered with a stick, would have done much better. But he was not long in discovering that these attentions were by no means demanded by the ladies of the set into which the duchess and Claude had made haste to introduce his wife.

If Cissy's friends found Sainty tiresome, it must be admitted that he found them no less so. The repulsion was certainly mutual. He wondered sometimes what had become of all the people she had known and liked, and from whom she had received kindness, during the three or four seasons that had preceded her marriage; they seemed to have vanished like smoke. She was absorbed in a little knot of married women, for the most part considerably her seniors, much in the world's eye, and none of them exactly qualified for the rôle of Cæsar's wife. Their conversation was extremely esoteric, and the minute fragments of it which were intelligible to him shocked him profoundly. Occasional paragraphs in the papers assured him that "young Lady Belchamber," or "pretty little Lady Belchamber, who was among the most attractive of last season's brides," was "very smart" or "quite in the innermost set"; from which he was fain to derive such comfort as he might. He once ventured to ask Cissy why she never saw anything of the de Lissacs; he had hoped something for her from Alice's influence. "I thought you and the girls were very intimate," he said.

"Oh! girls bore me," she answered; "and besides, they are not the least in it; they wouldn't have anything in common with the people they'd meet here. Of course with their money they might have done anything, but poor dear Mrs. de Lissac has no flair, don't you know; she simply doesn't take any trouble. I'll ask them, if you like, some day when I'm having a duty dinner." And she did.

"Why do we never see anything of you?" Sainty asked of his old friend on that occasion. "I had hoped that when we came to town we should be much together."

"Well---here we are!" said Alice, with rather frosty playfulness. "And you know," she added more gently, "how welcome you always are in Grosvenor Square."

"Cissy is always at home to lunch, you know," Sainty persisted. "Why don't you come in sometimes?"

"Lady Belchamber has never told either the girls or me that she was at home to lunch," said Alice, freezing again, and went on hurriedly to praise the beauty of the house and the taste of its mistress. Sainty looked round him. "Cissy has a genius for spending money," he said gloomily. "Wait till you see the drawing-rooms; these rooms are nothing to the plunges she is making upstairs." Before Mrs. de Lissac could answer, they were swooped upon by Lady Eccleston bringing Lady Deans with  her.

"Dear Alice," she cried, "Lady Deans fears you don't remember her; you met at Belchamber. She is going to have a stall at the World's Bazaar, and this is such an opportunity to have a little quiet talk about it. I have been telling Lady Deans that you are one of our very kindest helpers, and that you have given the most superb things; a few really good things that can be raffled for are such a help, and one can always raffle the same things two or three times over---no one ever knows."

"Why shouldn't we have a lottery?" asked Lady Deans. "I mean a real lottery, not for sofa-cushions and things, but for money prizes like they have abroad. I'm sure it'ld catch on."

"But I thought lotteries were illegal," Sainty objected.

"Oh! not at bazaars, or for a charity," cried Lady Eccleston. "I know dear Father Stephen of St. Radegund's, Houndsditch, told me they had a most successful one for their parish room and made heaps of money. I think Lady Deans's is a lovely idea."

"Well---it's gambling you know," said Sainty. "I suppose you wouldn't allow a roulette table----"

"Why don't you have a Derby sweep while you're about it?" suggested Algy Montgomery. "You could sell the tickets at the bazaar, and as the Derby won't be for a good couple o' months later you could forget to draw it at all. People would only suppose some other fellow had won, don't yer know."

Lady Eccleston was enchanted with the notion. "Dear Lord Algy! Could you work it for us?" But Mrs. de Lissac, inured as she was to bazaar morality, was, as a clergyman's daughter, a little alarmed at any connection with the turf. "How are you getting on with the people for the Café Chantant?" she asked, to change the subject.

Lady Eccleston rattled off a list that seemed to contain every one of any celebrity in the theatrical or musical world.

"And have you got them all?" asked Lady Deans.

"Well, I've written to a good many of them, and one or two have answered," said Lady Eccleston; "but I shall pop them all down---their names will look splendid on the programme."

"But will they come?" asked Sainty.

"Oh dear no, they won't come; very few of them will come. But some will; I shall make sure of one or two, and we can get some really good amateurs; and every now and then some one can get up and say that Ellen Terry regrets she couldn't manage it at the last moment, or something. We shall let people in for ten minutes at a time in batches; they'll think they just missed some of the best people----"

"Seems to me you will 'let 'em in,'" chuckled Lord Algy.

"Do you think," asked Lady Deans, "there would be any chance of getting Lady Arthur to sing or dance, or anything? I suppose, Lord Belchamber, you couldn't ask her for us?"

"But she never could sing or dance, or do anything," interposed Lord Algernon.

"Oh! that wouldn't matter, as long as she would appear. You see, all the story of her marriage and everything made her a celebrity."

"But it was two years ago," Lady Eccleston interrupted. "People have forgotten all about it," and she deftly piloted the discussion to other projects, so that Sainty was spared the necessity of making any answer to this astounding proposition.

The bazaar in connection with which so many happy suggestions had been offered was one of Society's periodic sacrifices to philanthropy. Certain fair ones, to whom no form of self-advertisement came amiss, were ready to dress up in the cause of charity and display themselves to a wider public than that which usually had the opportunity of admiring them, on the understanding that none of the trouble of organisation should fall upon them, and that the date should be fixed for before Easter, when there wasn't much else going on. On these conditions, Lady Eccleston and a little band of zealous fellow-workers had secured a most imposing list of stall-holders. It was calculated that the suburbs and the Stock Exchange would come in their thousands to see and converse with the ladies whose names and doings Lady Eva Morland made weekly familiar to them in the pages of "Maidie's Tea Table" in the Looking-glass. The proceeds were to be handed to a charity in which a very great personage was interested, and the bazaar was to be opened on at least two of its three days by different members of the royal family. Lady Eccleston was in her element, and running the whole concern. If it was not she who had the brilliant inspiration of making the various stalls represent the countries of the earth and dressing the fair vendors in national costume, at least she took the credit for it. In spite of his mother-in-law's repeated injunctions to him to attend the opening, Sainty had not the slightest intention of doing so. Indeed, he had hoped, by liberal contributions, to get off altogether, but Alice de Lissac had reinforced Lady Eccleston with gentle persistence.

"I think you should put in an appearance," she said, "just to support your wife, you know; it will look queer if you don't, when she and her mother are so much interested. I should have thought you would have come to the opening"; and finally Sainty was fain to buy immunity from being present at this ceremony with a promise to visit his wife's stall in the course of one afternoon. It was not till somewhat late on the last day of the three that he brought himself to redeem his given word.

By the time he arrived, the whole show, though brilliantly lighted and to his perception still disagreeably crowded, had become a little worse for wear. The stalls were denuded of half their contents, the air had a vitiated second-hand taste, and a fine impalpable dust, raised by the passing of so many feet, hung like a light haze over everything. Tired, dishevelled girls, looking curiously sham in their fancy dresses by the side of people in everyday garb, and flushed under the rouge that had been thought a necessary part of their costume, moved among the crowd making a last effort to dispose of the remainder of their wares, excited by competition to perilous lengths of flirtation with unknown and rather common young men, with whom on no other occasion they would have thought of exchanging a word.

Sainty was patiently elbowing his way like Parsifal among the flower-maidens, and meditating on the mystery of what was and was not permitted to the London girl, when he was suddenly confronted by Mr. Austin Pryor. Every buttonhole of the young stockbroker's neat frock-coat was decorated with faded vegetation and his arms loaded with a number of quite useless purchases.

"Well, Belchamber," he began, "I've got a bone to pick with your wife; too bad of her, I call it. I'd an awful good time here yesterday with her, and she made me promise to come again to-day and bring a lot of our fellows from the city. I told 'em all how ripping she looked in her Polish get-up, and now they've all come and she isn't here; she's gone and given us all the slip. Most unprincipled of her, I call it."

Sainty, while expressing suitable distress at the faithless behaviour of his spouse, was secretly not sorry to be spared her encounter with the gallant Lotharios of Throgmorton Street, when he thought of the fragments of conversation he had already overheard in passing.

"I don't know what has happened to her, I'm sure," he said politely; "I expected to find her here myself."

When at last he arrived at the lath and canvas pavilion, much bedraped with Liberty muslin and flags, across the front of which a scroll displayed the legend, "Poland---Marchioness of Belchamber," he found only the de Lissac girls and another maiden, clad in little hussar caps and dolmans hung coquettishly on one shoulder, resentfully eyeing the ebbing tide of custom, while Alice and Lady Eccleston, aided by her obedient son Thomas, were feverishly tying parcels in the background.

"Have you written on that one, Tommy," Lady Eccleston was saying, "Mrs. Brown, Elm Lodge, Streatham? Oh dear, which parcel is the big yellow cushion? I am sure that was the one she bought. Well, never mind, this is a cushion anyway, it feels soft; that'll do. Ah, Sainty, you've come a little late, dear. Everything is over."

"What's become of Cissy?" Sainty inquired.

The young ladies were evidently not in the best of tempers, and this innocent question served to open the floodgates of their wrath.

"Cissy's gone," Norah de Lissac said crossly, "and left us in the lurch. She said she was tired, but I think she was only bored. When it got dull and shabby and all the nice people had gone it didn't amuse her any more."

"It puts us in such a foolish position," Gemma chimed in. "People naturally come here to see her, and when they don't find her they are not best pleased. One man asked me if I was Lady Belchamber, and when I said I wasn't, he said, 'Then which of you is?' Of course I had to say we none of us were, and then he was quite rude and said 'Then you've no business to put her name up over the stall.' It wasn't at all pleasant."

Norah took up her parable again. "She didn't even take the trouble to put on her costume to-day, just came in her ordinary clothes, and of course we looked like dressed-up fools beside her. If she had just sent us word she wasn't going to we wouldn't have put ours on either."

"Oh, dears, it would have been a great pity," said Lady Eccleston, emerging from a pile of brown paper with her mouth full of pins. "You look charming in your dresses; they really suit you better than Cissy; and it would have been so flat if none of you had been in costume, for there really isn't much in the stall itself to suggest Poland, I must admit. I think Cissy really was tired, you know; she has had a hard two days of it."

"Well, we were tired too," said the implacable Norah. "She's not the only person who has had a hard two days. Can't we go home now, at least, and get off these ridiculous clothes?" she asked, turning to her step-mother. Alice looked distressed and murmured something about "not deserting Lady Eccleston."

"Oh, don't think of me," cried that lady. "You and the dear girls go. Tommy and I can soon finish what's left to do. The people are thinning fast, and we've done very well. I can't thank you enough for all your splendid help"; and she embraced the whole party with a last galvanic effort at cheerful enthusiasm.

Sainty saw the de Lissac party to their gorgeous equipage, and was just turning away from the door when a small voice at his elbow demanded, "Shall I please to call the kerridge, m'lord?" and looking down he had a vision of two large appealing eyes and a white kid forefinger pressed tightly to a curly hatbrim. He recognised the diminutive boy who decorated Cissy's coach-box when she rode abroad.

"Yes," he said; "if the brougham is here, I may as well take it. Lady Belchamber has gone home."

In the course of the drive he wondered why he had taken the trouble to come to the bazaar, and who had been benefited or pleased by his visit.

He had hardly got to his room and sat down to his book by the fire, with a sigh of relief, when a servant came to him.

"If you please, my lord, Gibson wants to know if there are any more orders for the carriage."

"Not for me," Sainty answered, his mind on what he was reading. "Ask her ladyship."

The man looked surprised and still lingered doubtfully.

"Well," said Sainty, "what is it?"

"If you please, my lord, my lady hasn't come in yet."

"Oh, I think she must have----" Sainty was beginning but stopped himself. He saw no reason for discussing Cissy's movements with the servants. "Then you must wait for orders till she does," he said.

He wondered a little why, if she left the bazaar because she was tired, she had not come home. But after all, Norah's explanation was probably the correct one. She was bored with the whole thing and took the shortest cut for freedom; it was not Cissy's way to allow herself to be bored. "In any case it is no affair of mine," he thought, as he turned again to his book.