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 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
spinsters had called her half-starved; but those six years had made a
transformation, and she was not the same Vera.
She had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. She had enjoyed all the
amusements and excitements that great cities can give to rich and
beautiful women. She had been flattered and followed in Rome and
Paris and London, had been written about in the New York Herald,
and had been the fashion everywhere; a person whom not to know
was to confess oneself as knowing nobody and going nowhere.
Indeed, it was a kind of confession of outsiderism not to be able to
talk of Madame Provana as "Vera."
She had accepted the position with a kind of languid acquiescence,
taking all things for granted, after the first year, when everything
amused her. In this sixth year of marriage, and wealth without limit,
she was tired of everything, except the society of authors and
painters and actors and musicians—the people who appealed to her
imagination. She had inherited from her father the yearning for
things that earth cannot give—the au delà, the light that never was
on sea or land. "The glory and the dream."
She admired and respected Father Cyprian Hammond, and she liked
him to talk to her, though she could divine that steadfast purpose at
the back of his head, the determination to bring her into the Papal
fold. She argued with him from her Anglican standpoint, and pleaded
for that via media that might reconcile old things with new; and she
felt the weakness of her struggle against that skilled dialectician; but
she refused to be converted. Half the pleasure of her intimacy with
this Eagle of Monk Street would be lost if she surrendered, and had
to exchange the struggle for the attitude of passive submission.
His arguments sometimes went near to convincing her; but the Faith
he offered did not satisfy those vague longings for the something
beyond. It was too simple, too matter-of-fact to arrest her
imagination. It offered little more than she had already in the ritual
of her own Church. The change did not seem worth while.
She looked up suddenly in the midst of the silvery treble talk about
theatres and frocks.
"Claude, do you ever keep a promise?" she asked.
"Always, I hope."
"You promised to bring Mr. Symeon to see me."
"Did I?"
"Indeed you did. Ages ago."
"Ages?"
"Well, nearly three weeks. It was at the Helstones' dinner."
"Three weeks. Mr. Symeon is not at the call of the first comer."
There was a little cry from the women, who had left off talking in
order to listen.
"He calls Madame Provana the first comer!" exclaimed the youngest
and pertest of the circle.
"I call myself the first comer where Symeon is concerned. I am not
one of his initiated. I belong to the outer herd of wretches who eat
butcher's meat and attach importance to dinner. Mr. Symeon
condescends when he gives me half an hour of a life that is spent
mostly in the clouds."
"I would give worlds to know him," said Lady Susan. "I have taken
his quarterly, The Unseen, from the beginning, His articles upon the
spiritual life are adorable, but I am not conceited enough to pretend
to understand him."
"If people understood him, he would be less admired," said
Rutherford.
"What does he do?" asked the youngest and flippantest. "I am
always hearing of Mr. Symeon and his spook magazine; but what
does he do? Is it thought-reading, slate-writing, materialisation?
Does he float up to the ceiling, as Home did? My Grannie swears she
saw him, yes, positively floating, in that large house by the Marble
Arch."
"Mr. Symeon does nothing," replied Claude. "He is the high priest of
the Transcendental. He talks."
"How disappointing!"
"Most people find that enough."
"They are bored?"
"No; they are fascinated. Mr. Symeon is more magnetic than
Gladstone was. He must have stolen those green eyes of his from a
mermaid. His disciples get nothing but his eyes and his talk; and
they believe in him as Orientals believe in Buddha. I have heard
people say he is Buddha—Gautama's latest incarnation."
"That's rather lovely!" exclaimed Miss Flippant. "I would give worlds
to see him."
"We'll excuse you the worlds, even if you owned them," said Claude
in his lazy voice. "You may see him within the next ten minutes,
unless he is a promise-breaker. I had not forgotten your commands,
Vera. I spent half a day in hunting Symeon, and did not leave him till
he promised to come to tea with you. I believe tea is the most
material refreshment he takes."
"You are ever so much better than I thought you," said Vera, with
one look up at Rutherford, before she turned to gaze at the distant
door, heedless of the talk that went on round her, until after some
minutes a servant announced "Mr. Symeon."
Claude Rutherford left his station by the mantelpiece and went to
meet the visitor.
The spacious rooms were mostly in shadow by this time, all the
lamps being so tempered by artistic shades in sea-green silk that
they gave faint patches of colour rather than light, and some people
started at the sound of Mr. Symeon's name, almost as if they had
seen a ghost.
It was a name that all cultured people knew, even when they did not
know the man. Francis Symeon was a leader in the spiritual world,
and there were no depths in the mysteries of occultism, from ancient
Egypt to modern India, that he had not sounded. He was the editor
and proprietor of The Unseen, a quarterly magazine, to which only
the most advanced thinkers were allowed to contribute—a magazine
which the subscriber opened with a thrill of anticipation, wondering
what new revelation of the "life beyond" he was to find in those
shining, hot-pressed pages, where the matter was often more
dazzling than the gloss on the paper.
Vera watched with eager interest and a faint flush of pleasure as
Rutherford and Symeon came through the shadows towards her.
"You see I have kept my promise, and here is Mr. Symeon, to answer
some of those far-reaching questions with which you often bewilder
my poor brain."
Vera left her table, where there had come a sudden lull in the
soprano voices as Mr. Symeon drew near—a pause in the discussion
of frocks and hats in the new comedy at the St. James's. She stood
up to talk to Mr. Symeon, telling him how she had been reading the
last number of The Unseen, and more especially his own
contribution, an essay on the other life, as understood by Tennyson
and Browning.
In that half-light which makes all beautiful things more beautiful, she
had a spirit look, and might have seemed the materialisation of Mr.
Symeon's thought, as she stood before him, fragile and slender, with
glimmering lamplight on her cloud of brown hair, and on the simple
white gown, of some transparent fabric, loosely draped over satin
that flashed through its fleecy whiteness. Her only ornament was a
necklace of aqua marina in a Tiffany setting.
"She wears that thing when she wants to look like a mermaid," Miss
Pert whispered to her pal.
"No; she wears it to remind us that she has some of the finest
jewels in London, and that she despises them," said the pal, who
had reached that critical age which is described as "getting on," and
was inclined to take a sour view of a young woman who had married
millions.
Symeon and Vera talked for some time, she with a suppressed
eagerness—earnest, almost impassioned; Symeon grave and
reserved, yet obviously interested.
"We cannot talk of these things in a crowd," he said. "If I had known
you had a party——"
"It is not a party. People come every afternoon in the winter, when
there is not much for them to do; but if you will be so kind as to
come early some day, at three o'clock, for instance, I will not be at
home to anybody, unless it were Claude, who loves to hear you
talk."
"I will come to-morrow," said Symeon; and then, with briefest adieu,
he walked slowly through the crowd, acknowledging the greetings of
a few intimates with a distant bend of his iron-grey head, and
walking amongst the pretty faces and smart frocks as he might have
done through so many sparrows pecking on a lawn.
Lady Susan came to Vera, excited and eager.
"Why didn't you keep him? I wanted you to introduce him to me. I
have been pining to know him. I read every line of his Review. He is
wonderful! I believe he has secrets that ward off age. You must ask
me to meet him—at luncheon—a party of four, with Claude. Claude
has been horrid about him."
"I value his friendship too much to introduce him to Tom, Dick, and
Harry," said Claude. "Vera and he are elective affinities."

Father Cyprian and Claude Rutherford left the house together.

"May I walk with you as far as your lodgings?" Claude asked.
"By all means, and come in with me, if you can. It is early yet, and I
have long wanted a talk with you."
"Serious?"
"Yes, even serious. When one cares as much for a young man as I
do for you, there is always room for seriousness. You look alarmed,
but there is no occasion. I don't preach long sermons, especially not
to young men."
They walked to the end of the street in silence. They were old
friends; and though Claude was the most lax among Papists, Cyprian
Hammond had never lost hope of bringing him back to the fold. He
was emotional and imaginative, and he had a heart. Sooner or later
there would come a day when he would want the utmost the Church
could do for him.
"You can't wonder if I am a little afraid," Claude said presently.
"There has been some hard hitting from your pulpit within the last
year."
"You have heard my moralities—I won't call them sermons?"
"Yes, I have heard; but I doubt if I have enjoyed your diatribes as
much as the other sinners, especially the women of your flock. They
love to be told they are a shade worse than Semiramis, if you will
only imply that they are as fascinating as Cleopatra."
"Poor worms," said the priest with a long-drawn sigh. "They are such
very poor creatures. Even their sins are petty."
"Would you prefer them if they were poisoners, like the Borgia?"
"No; but I might despise them less. And I should have more hope of
their repentance. These creatures don't know they are sinners. They
gamble, they squander their husbands' fortunes, shipwreck their
sons' inheritance; and when the domestic ship goes down they are
injured innocents, surprised to find that 'things are so expensive.' I
have talked with them—not in the confessional—and I have sounded
the shallows of their silly minds—there are no depths, unless it were
a depth of self-love. They come to Mass, and sit fanning themselves
and sniffing eau-de-Cologne, while I expostulate with them and try
to turn their thoughts into new channels. And then they get tired of
the creed in which they were brought up; tired of hearing hard
things, and of tasting wormwood instead of honey."
"Is modern London so like Babylon?"
"I doubt if the city with a hundred gates was much worse. And your
substitutes for the Church you have deserted—your Christian
Science, Pragmatism, Humanism, your letters from the dead, your
philanthropy—expressed in oranges and buns for workhouse
children, and in fashionable bazaars; charities that overlap each
other and pauperise more than they relieve; and all for want of that
one tremendous Central Power that could harmonise every effort,
bring every man and woman's work into line and rule. In the history
of God's chosen people, the one unpardonable sin was the worship
of strange gods. Their Creator knew that religion was the only basis
of conduct, and that the worshippers of evil gods must themselves
become infamous. But this is the age of strange gods. You all have
your groves and high places, your Baal and Astarte, your Kali or your
Siva, your shrines upon mountain tops and under green trees, your
Buddha, your Nietzsche, your Spinoza, your Comte. You run after
the teachers of fantastic things, the high priests of materialism. You
worship anywhere but in your church; you believe anything but the
faith of your forefathers."
They were at Father Cyprian's door by this time, in one of those
wide streets west of Portland Place, and north of the world of
fashion. Streets that may still be described as quiet, save for the
ceaseless roar of traffic in the Marylebone Road, a sound diminished
by distance, the ebb and flow of life in an artery of the great city. It
was in a street parallel with this that the great Cardinal who defied
the law of England had lived and died half a century before.
They had been walking slowly through the thickening mist of a fine
November evening, a grey vapour, across which street lamps and
lighted windows glimmered in faint flashes of gold, an atmosphere
that Claude Rutherford loved, all the more, perhaps, because he had
never been able to satisfy himself in painting it.
"What is the good of trying, when one must always fall short of
Turner?" he had said to himself in those younger and more eager
days when he still tried to do things.
Father Cyprian had talked with a kind of suppressed passion as they
walked through solitary streets, and now he laughed lightly, as he
turned the key in his door.
"You have had the sermon after all," he said.
"It didn't touch me. I am not an extravagant, bridge-playing woman,
and I worship no strange god."
"I shall touch you presently; your withers are not unwrung."
"Suppose I say good night and give you the slip."
"You won't do that. I was your father's friend."
That was enough. Claude bent his head a little, as if at a sacred
name, and followed the priest up the uncarpeted stone staircase to a
large room on the first floor—the conventional London drawing-
room, with its three long windows and chilling white linen blinds.
But, except the shape of the room and the white blinds, there was
nothing to offend the eye that looked for beauty. The floor was
cheaply covered with sea-blue felt, which echoed the colouring of
the sea-blue walls, and the central space was occupied by a massive
knee-hole desk of ebony, inlaid with ivory, evidently of Italian
workmanship, and picturesque enough to please without being a
chef d'œuvre. There were only two objects of art in the spacious
room, but each was supreme after its kind. A carved ivory crucifix of
considerable size, mounted on black velvet, was centred on the wall
facing the windows; and over the marble mantelpiece there hung a
Holy Family by Fra Angelico. These, which were exquisite, were the
only ornaments that Father Cyprian had given himself, in his ten
years' residence in this house, where this spacious sitting-room, with
a large bedroom for himself and a small room for his servant,
comprised all his accommodation.
Six high-backed arm-chairs, covered with old stamped leather, and a
massive gate-legged table, black with age, on which he dined,
completed his furniture. To some visitors the sparsely-furnished
room might have seemed cold and cheerless; but there was an air of
repose in its simplicity that satisfied the artistic mind. It looked like a
room designed for prayer and meditation; not a room for study, for
the one bookcase, with its neat range of theological works, would
not have sufficed for the poorest student. It looked like a room
meant for solitude and thought, and for only the most serious, the
most confidential conversation.
"I have always a sense of rest when I come into this room,"
Rutherford said, while Father Cyprian was lighting the candles in a
bronze candelabrum on his desk.
"You should come here oftener, Claude. You might make a retreat
here once or twice a week. Sit on the bank for a few hours, and let
that tumultuous river of modern life go by you, while you think of
the land where there is no tumult, only a divine repose, or an agony
of regret. When did you make your last confession, Claude?"
"I have a bad memory, Father. Don't tax it too severely."
The priest was not to be satisfied by a flippant answer. He pressed
the question with authority.
"What have I to confess? An empty, dissatisfied soul, a useless life;
no positive wickedness, only negative worthlessness. I am not an
infidel," Claude added eagerly. "If I were an unbeliever, I would not
presume to claim your friendship. I should think it an insolence to
cross your threshold. I have been slack, I have fallen into a languid
acceptance of my own shortcomings."
"You have fallen in love with another man's wife," said the priest
gravely. "That is the name of your sin."
The thin face paled ever so slightly, but there was no indignant
protest; indeed, the head drooped a little, as if the sinner had
whispered mea culpa.
"I have never made love to her," he said in a low voice. "But I am
human, and can't help loving her."
"You can help going to her house. You can help hanging over her as
she sits among her friends. When it comes to making love the
Rubicon is passed, and the chances of retreat are as one in fifty. You
are on the downward slope, Claude. Every time you enter that house
you go there at the hazard of your soul."
"She has so few real friends. She is alone among a crowd. She and I
were friends as children, or at least when she was a child. I should
be a cur if I kept away from her, when she needs my friendship, just
because of the risk to myself. I am too fond of her ever to hazard a
situation that would mean danger for her. I know how much a
woman in her position has to lose. She is not the kind of woman
who could pass through the furnace of the divorce court, and hold
up her head and be happy afterwards. She is a creature of spirit, not
of flesh. Passion would never make amends to her for shame."
"Yet, knowing this, you make yourself her intimate companion!"
"I shall never betray myself. She will never know what you know. For
her I am a feather-brained amateur of life; interested in many
things, caring for nothing, a saunterer through the world, without
much heart, and without any serious purpose. She often scolds me
for my frivolity."
"I admit that she has a certain childlike innocence which might keep
her unconscious of your feelings, till the fatal moment in which you
will fling principle, prudence, honour to the winds and declare
yourself her lover——"
"That moment will never come. The day I feel myself in danger I
shall leave her for ever. In the meantime, if I am essential to her
happiness, I shall stop."
"How can you be essential? She has crowds of friends, and a
husband who adores her."
"A husband of fifty years of age, grave, silent, with his mind
concentrated upon international finance; a man who is thinking of
another Turkish loan while he sits opposite her, with his stony eyes
fixed upon space—a man whose brain is a calculating machine and
his heart a handful of ashes."
"Has she complained of him?"
"Never; but things have leaked out. She was not eighteen—little
more than a child—when she married him. She gave herself to him
in a romantic impulse, admiring his force of character, her heart
touched by his affection for a dying daughter. To be so loved by that
strong nature seemed to her enough for happiness. But that was six
years ago, and she has lived six years in the world. The romance has
gone out of her love. What can she have in common with such a
man?"
"The bond of marriage—his love, and her sense of duty," answered
the priest.
"She has a keen sense of a wife's duty: she preaches sermons upon
her husband's goodness of heart, his fine character; and she ends
with a sigh, and regrets that for some mysterious reason she has not
been able to make him happy."
"She is too rich and too much indulged, and she is without a saving
creed. Poor child, I would give much to save her from herself and
from you."
"Don't be afraid of me, Father. Men of my stamp may be trusted. We
are too feather-brained to be intense, even in sin. Good night. I hear
the jingle of glass and silver, and I think it must be near your dinner-
time. Good night!"
The priest gave him his hand, but not his blessing. That was
withheld for a better moment.
 CHAPTER V
When a woman's imagination, still young and ardent, begins to find
the things of earth as Hamlet found them, "weary, flat, stale, and
unprofitable," it is only natural that she should turn with a longing
mind to the life that earth cannot give, the something unseen and
mysterious that certain gifted individuals have attributed to
themselves the power of seeing. Vera, after six years of marriage,
six years of unlimited wealth and unconscious self-indulgence, had
begun to discover that most things were stale, and some things
weary, and all things unprofitable; and then, to a mind steeped in
modern poetry and modern romance, and the modern music that
always means something more than mere combinations of
harmonious sounds, there had come a yearning for the higher life,
the transcendental life that only the elect can realise, and only the
earth-weary can ardently desire.
Francis Symeon was the philosopher to whom she turned with
unquestioning faith; for even those who had spoken lightly of his
creed and of his reasoning faculty had admitted that the man was
essentially sincere, and that the faith he offered his followers was for
him as impregnable as the rock of Holy Scripture.
He was announced on the following day as the clock in Vera's
morning-room struck three, a punctuality so exceptional as to seem
almost uncanny, when compared with the vague sense of time in the
rest of her acquaintance. She received him in a room where there
was no fear of interruption—her sanctuary, more library than
boudoir, where the books she loved, her poets and novelists and
philosophers, in the bindings she had herself invented, filled her
book-cases, alternating with black-and-white portraits of the gods of
her idolatry—Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Scott, de Musset, Heine,
Henry Irving, Gounod. Only the dead had place there—the dead
musician, the dead poet, the dead actor. It was death that made
them beloved and longed for. They had gone from her reach for
ever; and it was this sense of something for ever lost that made
them adorable.
Mr. Symeon looked round the walls with evident admiration.
"I see you prefer the faces of the noble dead to water-colour
sketches and majolica plates," he said. "Divine books, divine faces,
those are the best companions a woman can have."
"I spend a good deal of my life in this room," Vera answered. "I have
no children. I suppose if I had I should spend most of my time with
them. I should not have to choose my companions among the
dead."
"You have chosen them among the living," Mr. Symeon answered in
a voice that thrilled her. "Do you think that Tennyson is dead? He
who knew that the whole question of religion hinges upon the after
life: immortality or a godless universe. Or Browning, who has gone
to the very core of religion, whose magnificent mind grasped the
highest and deepest in Divine love and Divine power? Such spirits
are unquenchable. This rag of mortality upon which they hang must
lie in the dust, but for the elect death is only the release of the
immaterial from the material, the escape of the butterfly from the
worm. You have the assurance from the lips of Christ: God is the
God of the living; and for those whose existence on earth is only the
apprenticeship to immortality, there is no such thing as death."
This was the chief article in Mr. Symeon's creed; hinted at, but not
formally stated in his contributions to the magazine which he edited.
He claimed immortality only for the elect—for those in whom the
spirit predominated over the flesh. To Vera there was no new idea in
his exposition of faith. She had a feeling that she had always known
this, from the time she stood beside Shelley's grave in the shadow of
the Roman Cenotaph, and that other grave under the hill, the
resting-place of Shelley's Adonais. The thought of corruption had
been far from her mind, albeit she knew that the heart of one poet
and the wasted form of the other were lying in the darkness below
those spring flowers on which her tears were falling, and it was no
surprise to her to hear a serious man of sixty years of age declare
his faith in the unbroken chain of life.
"I saw that you were not one of those who scoff at transcendental
truths," Mr. Symeon said, after a few moments' silence. "I read in
your eyes last night that you are one of us in spirit, though you may
know nothing of our creed. You must join our society."
"Your society?"
"Yes, Madame Provana. We are a company of friends in the world of
sense and in the world of spirit. The majority of us have crossed the
river. As corporal substance they have ceased to be; their dwelling is
in the starlit spaces beyond Acheron. For the common herd they are
dead; but for us they are as vividly alive as they were when they
walked among the vulgar living, and wore life's vesture of clay. They
are nearer to us since they have passed the gulf, and we understand
them as we never could while they wore the livery of earth. They are
our close companions. The veil that parted us is rent, and we see
them face to face."
Vera listened in silence, and the grave, slow speech went on without
a break.
"We have our meetings. We discuss the great problems, the
everlasting mysteries; we press forward to the higher life. We are
not afraid of being foolish, romantic, illogical. We are prepared for
contempt and incredulity from the outside world; but for us, whose
minds have received the light from those other minds, who have
been consoled in our sorrows, strengthened in our faith by those
influencing souls, there is nothing more difficult in our creed than in
that of Newman, who saw behind each form of material beauty the
light, the flower, the living presence of an angel. The spirits of the
illustrious dead are our angels; and our communion with them is the
joy of our lives. We call ourselves simply Us. Our chosen poets,
philosophers, painters, musicians, even the great actors of the past,
those ardent spirits in whom genius was unquenchable by death,
men and women whose minds were fire, and their corporal existence
of no account in the forces of their being: those who have lived by
the spirit and not by the flesh—all these are of our company. These
are the influencing souls who are our companions in the silence and
seclusion of our lives. Not by the trumpery expedient of an alphabet
rapped out upon a table, or by the writing of an unguided pencil; but
by the communion of spirit with spirit, we feel those other minds in
converse with our own. They teach, they exhort, they uplift us to
their spirit world, sometimes in hours of meditation, and sometimes
in the closer communion of dreams."
"Are their voices heard—do they speak to you?" Vera asked, deeply
moved, her own voice trembling a little.
"Only in dreams. Speech is material, and belongs to the earthly
machine. It is not from lip to ear, but from mind to mind that the
message comes."
"And do they appear to you? Do you see them as they were on
earth?" Vera asked.
The November twilight had filled the room with shadow, and the
face of the spiritualist, the sharply-cut features, and hollow cheeks,
and luminous grey-green eyes, looked like the face of a ghost.
"Only in dreams is it given to us to look upon the disembodied great.
We feel, and we know! That is enough. But in some rare cases—
where the earthly vesture has worn to its thinnest tissue—where
death has set its seal upon the living, to one so divested of mortal
attributes, so marked for the spirit world, the vision may be granted.
Such an one may see."
"You have known ...?" faltered Vera.
"Yes, I knew such a case. In the final hour of an ebbing life the
chain of wedded love that death had broken was reunited, and the
wife died with her last long gaze turned to the vision of her
husband. Her last word was 'reunited!'"
Vera was strangely impressed. It was not easy for the unbelieving to
make a mock of Mr. Symeon's creed. The force of his convictions,
the ideas that he had cultivated and brooded upon for the larger
part of his life, had so possessed the man, that even scoffers were
sometimes moved by his absolute sincerity, and found themselves,
as it were unawares, treating his theories almost seriously. For Vera,
in whom imagination was the greater part of mind, there was no
inclination to scoff, but rather a most earnest desire that the
spiritualist's creed might be justified by her own experience, that it
might be granted to her to sit in the melancholy solitude of that
room, with a volume of Browning on her lap, and to feel that the
poet was near her, that an invisible spirit was breathing
enlightenment into her mind, as she read the dying words of the
beloved apostle in "A Death in the Desert," which had been to her as
a new gospel—and to know that when she raised her eyes to the
portrait on the wall, it was not the dead, but the living upon whom
she looked.
This was involved in the creed of her Church—the Communion of
Saints.
Were not the gifted, who had lived free from all the grossness of
clay, from the taint of earthly sin, worthy to be numbered among the
saints, and like them gifted with perpetual life, perpetual fellowship
with the faithful who adored them?
When he left the great, silent house Mr. Symeon knew that he had
made a proselyte. Though Vera had said little, it was impossible to
mistake the fervour with which she had welcomed his revelation of
the spirit world. Here was a mind in want of new interests, a heart
yearning for something that the world could not give.
She sat by the dying fire, in the gathering darkness, long after her
visitor had left her. Yes, this had been her need of late—something
to think of, something to wish for. Her life—so over full of the things
that women desire, pomp and luxury, troops of friends, jewels and
fine clothes, the "too much" that money always brings with it—had
vacant spaces, and hours of vague depression, in which the sense of
loneliness became an aching pain.
 CHAPTER VI
Mario Provana's wife was the fashion. The prestige for which some
women strive and labour for years, spending themselves and their
husband's fortunes in the strenuous endeavour, and having to
confess themselves failures at last, had been won by Vera without
an effort. Her husband's wealth had done much; her youth, and the
something rare and exceptional in her beauty, had done more; but
the Disbrowes had done the most of all. With such material—a triple
millionaire's wife in the first bloom of her loveliness—the work had
been easy; but no one could deny that the Disbrowes had worked,
and might fairly congratulate themselves, as well as their fair young
cousin, (first, second, or third, as the case might be) upon the result
of their tactful efforts. All Disbrowes were supposed to have tact,
just as they had arched insteps, and long, lean hands. It was as
much a mark of their race.
From the day of Vera's return from her long Italian honeymoon she
found herself walled round and protected by her mother's kindred.
They came from all the points of the compass. Lord Okehampton
from his park in North Devon, Lady Balgowrie from her castle in
Aberdeenshire, Lady Helstone from the Land's End. They came
unbidden, and overflowing with affection, but much too tactful to be
vulgarly demonstrative.
"Poor Lady Felicia's foolish pride kept us all at a distance," they told
Vera; "but now that you are emancipated, and your own mistress, I
hope you will let us be useful."
From countesses down to hard-up spinsters, they all said the same
thing, and no one could accuse them of "gush." They all announced
themselves as worldlings, pure and simple, and they made no
professions.
"You have made a great match, my dear," said Lady Helstone, "and
you have a great career before you, if you are careful in the choice
of your friends. That is the essential point. One black sheep among
your flock might spoil all your chances. There are men about town
that my husband calls 'oilers'—they were called tigers when my
mother was young—and one of those in a new woman's visiting list
can wreck her. The creatures are intolerably pushing, and don't rest
till they can pose as cavaliere servente or at least as l'ami de la
maison."
Vera welcomed this army of blood relations with amiability, but
without enthusiasm. She was ready to love that one kind lady who
had given her the only happy holiday of her childhood, under whose
hospitable roof she had known Claude Rutherford; but the
countesses who had been unaware of her existence while she was a
dependant upon "poor Lady Felicia," could have no claim upon her
affection. Yet they and their belongings were all pleasant people;
and in that large and splendid house which was to be her home in
London, she found that people were wanted.
The emptiness of those spacious rooms, during the long hours when
her husband was at his offices in the City, soon became appalling;
and she was glad of the lively aunts and cousins, and their following,
who transformed her drawing-rooms into a parrot house, both for
noise and brilliant colour, to say nothing of the aquiline beaks that
prevailed among the dowagers and elderly bachelors. Once
established as her relations—the distance of some of the cousinship
being ignored—they came as often as Vera cared to ask them, and
they brought all the people whom Vera ought to know, the poets,
and novelists, and playwrights, who were all dying to know the
daughter of Lancelot Davis, that delightful poet whom everybody
loved and nobody envied. His fame had increased since he had gone
into the ground; and his shade was now crowned with that belated
fame which is the aureole of the dead. They brought the newest
painting people, and the fashionable actors and actresses, English or
American, as well as that useful following of "nice boys," who are as
necessary in every drawing-room as occasional chairs, or tables to
hold tea-cups.
Instigated by the Disbrowes, and with Mario Provana's approval,
Vera soon began that grand business of entertaining, to which a
triple millionaire's wife should indubitably devote the greater part of
her time, talent, and energy. Countesses and countess-dowagers
gave their mornings to her, advising whom she should invite, and
how she should entertain. They instructed her in the table of
precedence as solemnly as if it had been the Church Catechism,
showed her how, in some rare concatenation, a rule might be
broken, as a past master of harmony might, on occasion, allow
himself the use of consecutive fifths.
They were never tired of extending Madame Provana's knowledge of
life as it is lived in the London that is bounded on the south by
Queen Anne's Gate and by Portland Place on the north. They called
it opening her mind—and praised her for the intelligence with which
she mastered the social problems.
Her husband was pleased to see her admired and cherished, above
all to see her happy; yet he could not but feel some touch of
disappointment when he looked back upon those quiet afternoons in
the olive woods at San Marco, and the tea-parties of three in Lady
Felicia's sitting-room, and remembered how he had thought he was
marrying a friendless and unappreciated girl, who would be all the
world to him, and for whom he must be all the world, in a long
future of wedded love.
He thought he was marrying a friendless orphan, whose divine
inheritance was poetry and beauty; and he found that he had
married the Disbrowes.
They were all terribly friendly. They never hinted at his inferior social
status, his vulgar level as a tradesman, only trading in money
instead of goods. They behaved as if, by marrying their cousin, he
had become a Disbrowe. Lady Helstone, Lady Balgowrie, Lord and
Lady Okehampton treated him with affection without arrière pensée.
The most that Okehampton, as a man of the world, wanted from the
great financier was his advice about the investment of his paltry
surplus, so trifling an amount that he blushed to allude to the desire
in such exalted company.
But now a time had come when Vera needed no counsel from the
Disbrowes, and when she was beginning to treat those social
obligations about which she, as a tyro, had laboured diligently, with
a royal carelessness. Her aunts complained that she had grown
casual, and that she had even gone very near offending some of
their particular friends, people whom to have on her visiting list
ought to have been the crown of her life.
Vera apologised.
"I know far too many people," she said; "my house is becoming a
caravanserai."
She said "my house" unconsciously—with the deep-seated
knowledge that all those splendid rooms and the splendid crowds
that filled them meant very little in her husband's life.
Six years of the "too much" had changed Lady Felicia's
granddaughter. The things that money can buy had ceased to
charm; the people whom in her first season she had thought it a
privilege to know had sunk into the dismal category of bores. Almost
everybody was a bore; except a few men of letters, who had known
her father, or who loved his verses. For those she had always a
welcome; and she was proud when they told her that she was her
father's daughter. Her eyes, her voice were his, these enthusiasts
told her. She was a creature of fire and light, as he was.
After three or four years of pleasure in trivial things, she had grown
disdainful of all delights, except those of the mind and the
imagination. The opera, or the theatre when Shakespeare was
acted, always charmed her, but for the olla podrida of music and
nonsense that most people cared for she had nothing but scorn. She
never missed a fine concert or a picture show, but she broke half her
engagements to evening parties, or appeared for a quarter of an
hour and vanished before her hostess had time to introduce the new
arrivals, American or continental, who were dying to know her.
The general impression was that she gave herself airs: but they
were airs that harmonised with her fragile beauty, the something
ethereal that distinguished her from other women.
"If any stout, florid creature were to behave like Madame Provana,
she would be cut dead," people told Vera's familiar friend, Lady
Susan Amphlett.
Lady Susan pleaded her friend's frail constitution as an excuse for
casual behaviour.
"She is all nerves, and suffers agonies from ennui. Her father was
consumptive, and her mother was a fragile creature who faded away
after three years of a happy married life. It was a marriage of
romance and beauty. Davis and his wife were both lovely; but they
had no stamina. Vera has no stamina."
Lady Felicia had been lying more than a year in the family vault in
Warwickshire. Her last years had been the most prosperous and
comfortable years of her life, and the vision of the future that had
smiled upon her in the golden light above the jutting cliff of
Bordighera had been amply realised by the unmeasured liberality of
her granddaughter's husband. Before Vera's honeymoon was over,
the shabby lodgings in the dull, unlovely street had been exchanged
for a spacious flat in a red brick sky-scraper overlooking Regent's
Park. Large windows, lofty ceilings, a southern aspect, and the very
newest note in decoration and upholstery had replaced the sunless
drawing-room and the Philistine walnut furniture, and for those last
years the Disbrowe clan ceased to talk of Captain Cunningham's
widow as poor Lady Felicia. What more could any woman want of
wealth, than to be able to draw upon the purse of a triple
millionaire? As everything in Lady Felicia's former surroundings, her
shifting camp of nearly twenty years, had been marked with the
broad arrow of poverty, every detail of this richly feathered nest of
her old age bore the stamp of riches; and the Disbrowes, who knew
the price of things, could see that Mario Provana had treated his
wife's relation with princely generosity.
Once more Lady Felicia's diamonds, those last relics of her youth, to
which she had held through all her necessitous years, were to be
met in the houses of the fashionable and the great; and Lady Felicia
herself, in a sumptuous velvet gown, silvery hair dressed by a
fashionable artist, emerged from retirement in a perfect state of
preservation, having the advantage by a decade of giddy dowagers
who had never missed a season.
The giddy dowagers looked at her through their face à main, and
laughed about Lady Felicia's "resurrection."
"She looks as if she had been kept in cotton-wool and put to bed at
ten o'clock every night," they said.
Grannie enjoyed that Indian summer of her life, and was grateful.
"You have married a prince," she told Vera, "and if you ever slight
him or behave badly, you will deserve to come to a bad end."
Vera protested that she knew her husband's value, and was not
ungrateful.
"I want to make him happy," she said.
"That is easy enough," retorted Grannie. "You have only to love him
as he deserves to be loved."
"Was that so easy?" Vera wondered sadly.
It seemed to her that, by no fault of hers, there had come a
difference in her relations with her husband. He was always kind to
her, but he was farther from her than in the first year—the Italian
year—which, to look back upon, was still the happiest of her married
life. He was absorbed in a business that needed strenuous labour
and unflagging care. He had told her that it was not his own
interests alone that he had to guard; but the interests of other
people. There were thousands of helpless people who would suffer
by his loss of fortune, or his loss of prestige. The pinnacle upon
which the house of Provana stood was the strong rock of a
multitude. A certain anxiety was therefore inevitable throughout his
business life. He could never be the holiday husband, sharing all a
wife's trivial pleasures, interested in all the nothings that make the
sum of an idle woman's existence.
Vera accepted the inevitable, and it was only when she began to
think the best people rather boring, that she discovered how the
distance had widened between herself and her husband. Without a
dissentient word, without a single angry look, they had come to be
one of those essentially modern couples whose loveless unions
Father Cyprian deplored.
She thought the blame was with Mario Provana. He had ceased to
care for her. Just as she had grown weary of her troops of friends,
her husband had wearied of the wife he had chosen after a week's
courtship.
"He thought he was in love, but he could not really have cared for
me," she told herself. "His heart was empty and desolate after the
loss of his daughter, and he took me because I was young and had
been Giulia's friend."
This was how Vera reasoned, sitting in her lonely sanctuary, while on
the other side of the wall there was a man of mature age, a man
with a proud temper and a passionate heart, a man who had
endured slights in his youth, whose first marriage had ended in
disappointment, the crushing discovery that the beautiful girl who
had been given to him by a noble and needy father had sacrificed
her inclinations for the sake of her family, and had never loved him.
She had been faithful, and she had endured his love. That was all.
And in those last years, when disease had laid a withering hand
upon her beauty, and when the world seemed far off, and when only
her husband's love stood between her and death, she had learnt the
value of a good man's devotion, and had loved him a little in return.
He had suffered the disillusions of that first union. Yet again, after
many years, he had staked his happiness upon a single chance, and
had taken a girl of eighteen to his heart, in a state of exaltation that
was more like a dream than sober reality. He had lavished upon this
unsophisticated girl all the force of strong feelings long held in
check. At last, at last, in the maturity of manhood, the love that had
been denied to his youth was being given to him in full measure. He
could not doubt that she loved him. That innocent, unconscious love,
trusting as the love of children, revealed itself in tones and looks
that he could not mistake. Before he asked her to be his wife he was
sure that she loved him; but after six years of marriage he was no
longer sure of anything, except that his wife was the fashion, and
that her Disbrowe relations were innumerable. He was sure of
nothing about this girl whom he had clasped to his breast in a
rapture of triumphant love, on the hill above the Mediterranean. Year
after year of their married life had carried her farther away from
him. Who could say precisely what made the separation? He only
knew that the years which should have tightened the bond had
loosened it; and that he could no longer recognise his child-wife of
their Roman honeymoon in the fragile ennuyée whom Society had
chosen to adore.
 CHAPTER VII
"Well, now your whim has been gratified, I should like to know what
you think of Francis Symeon?" Claude Rutherford asked, as he put
down his hat in Vera's sanctum, the day after her conference with
the high priest of occultism.
The question was his only greeting. He slipped into the low and
spacious chair by the hearth, and seemed to lose himself in it, while
he waited for a reply. He had the air of being perfectly at home in
the room, with no idea that he could possibly be unwelcome. He
came and went in Madame Provana's house with a lazy insouciance
that many people would have taken for indifference. Only the skilled
reader of men would have detected the hidden fire under that
outward serenity of the attractive man, who flirts with any attractive
woman of his acquaintance, and cares for none.
"I think he is wonderful."
"And you believe in him?"
"Yes, I believe in him, because his ideas only give form and
substance to the thoughts that have haunted me ever since I began
to think."
"Grisly thoughts?"
"No, Claude; happy thoughts. When I first read my father's poetry
and began to think about him—in my dull grey room in Grannie's
lodgings—I had a feeling that he was near me. He was there; but
behind the veil. When I read 'In Memoriam' the feeling grew
stronger, and I knew that death is not the end of love. There was
nothing that shocked or startled me in what Mr. Symeon told me
yesterday."
"About 'Us,' the spiritual club, in which the dead and the living are
members on the same footing? The club that elects, or selects,
Confucius or Browning one day, and Lady Fanny Ransom—mad Lady
Fanny as they call her—the next?"
"I saw nothing to ridicule in a companionship of lofty minds. But you
know more about the society than I do. Perhaps you are a
member?"
Claude answered first with a light gay laugh, and then in his most
languid voice.
"Not I! I am of the earth earthy, sensual, sinful. If I went to one of
their meetings I should have to go disguised as a poodle. Lady
Fanny owns a fine Russian, that has a look of Mephisto, though I
believe he is purely canine."
"Tell me all you know about their meetings."
"Imagine a Quakers' meeting, with the female members in Parisian
frocks and hats—a large room at the back of Symeon's chambers in
the 'Albany.' It was once a fashionable editor's library, smelling of
Russia leather, and gay with Zansdorf's bindings—but it is now the
abode of shadow, 'where glowing embers through the room, teach
light to counterfeit a gloom.' And there the congregation sits in
melancholy silence, till somebody, Lady Fanny or another, begins to
say things that have been borne in upon her from Shakespeare or
Browning, or Marlowe or Schopenhauer; or her favourite bishop, if
she is pious. They wait for inspiration as the Quakers do. I am told
Lady F. is tremendous. She is strong upon politics, and is frankly
socialistic; she has communications from Karl Marx and Fourier,
George Eliot and Comte. Her inspiration takes the widest range, and
moves her to the wildest speech; but she is greatly admired. They
never have a blank day when she is there."
"I should like to hear her. I know she is eccentric; but she is
immensely clever, and she seems to have read everything worth
reading, in half a dozen languages."
"She crams her expansive brain with the best books; but I am told
she occasionally puts them in upside down, and the author's views
came out topsy-turvy. You are of imagination all compact, Vera; but I
should be sorry to see you lapsing into Fannytude."
"You scoff at everything. There is nothing serious for you in this
world or the next."
"Which next world? There are so many. Symeon's for instance, and
Father Hammond's. What could be more diverse than those? I have
thought very little about the undiscovered country. But you must not
say I am not serious about something in this world."
"I cannot imagine what that something is."
"I hope you will never know. If fact, you are never to know."
His earnestness startled her. When a man's dominant note is
persiflage any touch of grave feeling is impressive. Vera was silent—
and they sat opposite each other for a few moments, she watching
the rise and fall of a blue flame in the heap of logs, he watching her
face as the blue light flashed upon it for an instant and then left it
dark.
It was a face worth watching. She had her mermaid look this
evening, and her eyes—ordinarily dark grey—looked as green as her
sea-water necklace.
"How is Provana?" he asked at last; an automatic question,
indicating faintest interest in the answer.
"Oh, he is very well; but I am afraid he is worried. He stays longer in
the City than he used to stay, and he is very grave and silent when
we dine alone."
"What would you do if the great house of Provana were to go down
like a scuttled ship? Would you stick to a bankrupt husband—
renounce London and all its pomps and vanities—give up this
wilderness of a house and all the splendid things in it?"
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