CHAPTER X
LIFE MUST GO ON JUST THE SAME
They met at dances and at musical At Homes, for the world wagged just as it had always done, and here—don't you think?—lies the tragedy of the commonplace. Luke and Louisa, with the whole aspect of life changed for them, with a problem to face of which hitherto they had no conception, and the solution of which meant a probing of soul and heart and mind—Luke and Louisa had to see the world pass them by the same as heretofore, with laughter and with tears, with the weariness of pleasure, and the burdens of disappointment.
The world stared at them—curious and almost interested—searching wounds that had only just begun to ache, since indifferent hands had dared to touch them. And convention said: "Thou shalt not seem to suffer; thou shalt pass by serene and unmoved; thou shalt dance and sing and parade in park or ball room; thou art my puppet and I have nought to do with thy soul."
So Luke and Louisa did as convention bade them, and people stared at them and asked them inane questions that were meant to be delicate, but were supremely tactless. People too wondered what they meant to do, when the engagement would be duly broken off, or what Colonel Harris's—Louisa's father—attitude would be in all this. Somehow after the first excitement consequent on Lord Radclyffe's open acknowledgment of the claimant things had tamed off somewhat; Luke de Mountford looked just the same as before, although awhile ago he had been heir to one of the finest peerages in England and now was a penniless son of a younger son. I don't know whether people thought that he ought to look entirely different now, or whether he should henceforth wear shabby dress clothes and gloves that betrayed the dry cleaner; certain it is that when Luke entered a reception room, a dozen lips were ready—had they dared or good-breeding allowed—to frame the question:
"Well, and what are you going to do now?"
Or,
"Do tell us how it feels to find one's self a beggar all of a sudden."
Enterprising hostesses made great attempts to gather all parties in their drawing rooms. With strategy worthy of a better cause they manœuvred to invite Philip de Mountford and Lord Radclyffe, and Luke and Louisa—all to the same dinner party—promising themselves and their other guests a subtle enjoyment at sight of these puppets dancing to rousing tunes, beside which the most moving problem play would seem but tame entertainment.
But Philip de Mountford—though as much sought after now as Luke had been in the past—declined to be made a show of for the delectation of bored society women; he declined all invitations on his own and Lord Radclyffe's behalf.
So people had to be content to watch Luke and Louisa.
They were together at the Ducies' At Home. There was a crush, a Hungarian band from Germany, a Russian singer from Bayswater, a great many diamonds, and incessant gossip.
"Luke de Mountford is here—and Miss Harris. Have you seen them?"
"Oh, yes! we met on the stairs, and had a long chat."
"How do they seem?"
"Oh! quite happy."
"They don't care."
"Do they mean to break off the engagement?"
"I have heard nothing. Have you?"
"Louisa Harris has a nice fortune of her own."
"And Lord Radclyffe will provide for Luke."
"I don't think so. He practically turned him out of the house, you know."
"Not really?"
"I know it for a positive fact. My sister has just got a new butler, who left Lord Radclyffe's service the very day Philip de Mountford first walked into the house."
"Old Parker, I remember him."
"He says Lord Radclyffe turned all the family out, bag and baggage. They were so insolent to Philip."
"Then it's quite true?"
"That this Philip is the late Arthur de Mountford's son?"
"Quite true, I believe. Lord Radclyffe openly acknowledges it. He is satisfied apparently."
"So are the lawyers, I understand."
"Oh! how do you do, Miss Harris? So glad to see you looking so well."
This, very pointedly, as Louisa, perfectly gowned, smiling serenely, ascended the broad staircase.
"I have not been ill, Lady Keogh."
"Oh, no! of course not. And how is Mr. de Mountford?"
"You can ask him yourself."
And Louisa passed on to make way for Luke. And the same remarks and the same question were repeated ad infinitum, until a popular waltz played by the Hungarian gentlemen from Germany drew the fashionable crowd round the musicians' platform.
Then Luke and Louisa contrived to make good their escape, and to reach the half-landing above the heads of numerous young couples that adorned the stairs. The hum of voices, the noise of shrill laughter, and swish of skirts and fans masked their own whisperings. The couples on the stairs were absorbed in their own little affairs; they were sitting out here so that they might pursue their own flirtations.
Luke and Louisa could talk undisturbed.
They spoke of the flat in Exhibition Road and of the furniture that Louisa had helped Edie to select.
"There are only a few odds and ends to get now," Louisa was saying, "coal scuttles and waste-paper baskets; that sort of thing. I hope you don't think that we have been extravagant. Edie, I am afraid, had rather luxurious notions——"
"Poor Edie!"
"Oh! I don't think she minds very much. Life at Grosvenor Square in the past month has not been over cheerful."
Then as Luke made no comment she continued in her own straightforward, matter-of-fact way—the commonplace woman facing the ordinary duties of life:
"Now that the flat is all in order, you can all move in whenever you like—and then, Luke, you must begin to think of yourself."
"Of you, Lou," he said simply.
"Oh! there's nothing," she said, "to think about me."
"There you are wrong, Lou, and you must not talk like that. Our engagement must be officially broken off. Colonel Harris has been too patient as it is."
"Father," she rejoined, "does not wish the engagement broken off."
"All these people," he said, nodding in the direction of the crowd below, "will expect some sort of announcement."
"Let them."
"Lou, you must take back your word."
"How does one take back one's word, Luke? Have you ever done it? I shouldn't know how to."
She looked at him straight, her eyes brilliant in the glare of the electric lamps, not a tear in them or in his, her face immovable, lest indifferent eyes happened to be turned up to where these two interesting people sat. Only a quiver round the lips, a sign that passion palpitated deep down within her heart, below the Bond Street gown and the diamond collar, the soul within the puppet.
She held his glance, forcing him into mute acknowledgment that his philosophy, his worldliness, was only veneer, and that he had not really envisaged the hard possibility of actually losing her.
Oh, these men of this awful conventional world! How cruel they can be in that proud desire to do what is right!—what their code tells them is right!—no law of God or nature that!—only convention, the dictates of other men! Hard on themselves, selfless in abnegation, but not understanding that the dearest gift they can bestow on a woman is the right for her to efface herself, the right for her to be the giver of love, of consolation, of sacrifice.
Commonplace, plain, sensible Louisa understood everything that Luke felt; those great luminous eyes of hers, tearless yet brilliant, read every line on that face drilled into impassiveness.
No one else could have guessed the precise moment at which softness crept into the hard determination of jaw and lips; no ear but hers could ever have perceived the subtle change in the quivering breath, from hard obstinacy that drew the nostrils together, and set every line of the face, to that in-drawing of the heavy air around caused by passionate longing which hammered at the super-excited brain, and made the sinews crack in the mighty physical effort at self-repression.
But to all outward appearance perfect calm, correct demeanour, the attitude and tone of voice prescribed by the usages of this so-called society.
"Lou," he said, "it is not fair to tempt me. I should be a miserable cur if I held you to your word. I am a penniless beggar—a wastrel now, without a profession, without prospects, soon to be without friends."
He seemed to take pleasure in recalling his defects, and she let him ramble on; women who are neither psychological puzzles nor interesting personalities have a way of listening patiently whilst a tortured soul eases its burden by contemplating its own martyrdom.
"I am a penniless beggar," he reiterated. "I have no right to ask any woman to share my future dull and humdrum existence. A few thousands is all I have. I think that Edie will marry soon and then I can go abroad—I must go abroad—I must do something——"
"We'll do it together, Luke."
"I feel," he continued, rebellious now and wrathful, all the primary instincts alive in him of self-preservation and the desire to destroy an enemy, "I feel that if I stayed in England I should contrive to be even with that blackguard. His rights? By God! I would never question those. The moment I knew that he was Uncle Arthur's son I should have been ready to shake him by the hand, to respect him, to stand aside as was his due. But his attitude!—the influence he exercises over Uncle Rad!—his rancour against us all! Jim and Edie! what had they done to be all turned out of the house like a pack of poor relations—and poor Uncle Rad——"
He checked himself, for she had put a hand on his coat sleeve.
"Luke, it is no use," she said.
"You are right, Lou! and I am a miserable wretch. If you only knew how I hate that man——"
"Don't," she said, "let us think of him."
"How can I help it? He robs me of you."
"No," she rejoined, "not that."
Her hand still rested on his arm, and he took it between both his. The couples in front of them all down the length of stairs paid no heed to them, and through the hum of voices, from a distant room beyond, came softly wafted on the hot, still air the strains of the exquisite barcarolle from the "Contes d' Hoffmann."
Louisa smiled confidently, proudly. He held her hand and she felt that his—hot and dry—quivered in every muscle at her touch. The commonplace woman had opened the magic book of Love. She had turned its first pages, the opening chapters had been simple, unruffled, uncrumpled by the hand of men or of Fate. But now at last she read the chapter which all along she knew was bound to reach her ken. The leaves of the book were crumpled; Fate with cruel hand had tried to blur the writing; the psychological problem of to-day—the one that goes by the name of "modern woman"—would no doubt ponder ere she tried to read further; she would analyze her feelings, her thoughts, her sensations; she would revel over her own heartache and delight in her own soul agony. But simple-minded, conventional Louisa did none of these things. She neither ruffled her hair, nor dressed in ill-made serge clothes; her dress was perfect and her hand exquisitely gloved. She did nothing out of the way; she only loved one man altogether beyond herself, and she understood his passionate love for her, and all that troubled him in this world in which they both lived.
"I love that barcarolle, don't you?" she said after awhile.
"I did not hear it," he replied.
"Luke."
"It's no use, Lou," he said under his breath. "You must despise me for being a drivelling fool, but I have neither eyes nor ears now. I would give all I have in the world to lie down there on the floor now before you and to kiss the soles of your feet."
"How could I despise you, Luke, for that?"
"Put your hand on my knee, just for a moment, Lou. I think I shall go mad if I don't feel your touch."
She did as he asked her, and he was silent until the last note of the barcarolle died away in a softly murmured breath.
"What a cowardly wretch I am," he said under cover of the wave of enthusiastic applause which effectually covered the sound of his voice to all ears save hers. "I think I would sell my soul for a touch of your hand, and all the while I know that with every word I am playing the part of a coward. If Colonel Harris heard me he would give me a sound thrashing. A dog whip is what I deserve."
"I have told you," she rejoined simply, "that father does not wish our engagement to be broken off. He sticks to your cause and will do so through thick and thin. He still believes that this Philip is an impostor, and thinks that Lord Radclyffe has taken leave of his senses."
She spoke quite quietly, matter-of-factly now, pulling, by her serene calm, Luke's soul back from the realms of turbulent sensations to the prosy facts of to-day. And he—in answer to her mute dictate and with a movement wholly instinctive and mechanical—drew himself upright, and passed his hand over his ruffled hair, and the jeopardized immaculateness of shirt front and cuffs.
"Philip de Mountford," he said simply, "is no impostor, Lou. He has been perfectly straightforward; and Mr. Dobson for one, who has seen all his papers, thinks that there is no doubt whatever that he is Uncle Arthur's son. His clerk—Mr. Downing—went out to Martinique, you know, and his first letters came a day or two ago. All inquiries give the same result, and Downing says that it is quite easy to trace the man's life, step by step, from his birth in St. Pierre, past the dark days of the earthquake and the lonely life at Marie-Galante. Mrs. de Mountford was a half-caste native, as we all suspected, but the marriage was unquestionably legal. Downing has spoken to people in Martinique and also in Marie-Galante, who knew her and her son, or at any rate, of them. I cannot tell you everything clearly, but there are a great many links in a long chain of evidence, and so far Mr. Dobson and his clerk have not come across a broken one. That the Mrs. de Mountford who died at Marie-Galante was Uncle Arthur's wife, and that Philip is his son, I am afraid no one can question. He has quite a number of letters in his possession which Uncle Arthur wrote after he had practically abandoned wife and child. I think it was the letters that convinced Uncle Rad."
"Lord Radclyffe," she remarked dryly, "has taken everything far too much for granted."
"He is convinced, Lou—and that's all about it."
"He is," she retorted more hotly than was her wont, "acting in a cruel and heartless manner. Even if this Philip is your uncle Arthur's son, even if he is heir to the peerage and the future head of the family, there was no reason for installing him in your home, Luke, and turning you and the others out of it."
"I suppose," rejoined Luke philosophically, "the house was never really our home. What Uncle Rad gave freely, he has taken away again from us. I don't suppose that we have the right to complain."
"But what will become of you all?"
"We must scrape along. Frank must have his promised allowance or he'll never get along in the service, and five hundred pounds a year is a big slice out of a thousand. Jim, too, spends a great deal. Uncle Rad never stinted him with money, for it was he who wanted Jim to be in the Blues. Now he may have to exchange into a less expensive regiment. I think Edie will marry soon—Reggie Duggan has been in love with her for the past two years—she may make up her mind now."
"But you, Luke?"
He did not know if he ought to tell her of his plans. The ostrich farm out in Africa—the partnership offered to him by a cousin of his mother's who was doing remarkably well, but who was getting old and wanted the companionship of one of his kind. It was a living anyway—but a giving up of everything that had constituted life in the past—and the giving up of his exquisite Lou. How could he ask her to share that life with him?—the primitive conditions, the total absence of luxuries, the rough, every-day existence?
And Lou, so perfectly dressed, so absolutely modern and dainty, waited on hand and foot——
But she insisted, seeing that he was hesitating and was trying to keep something from her.
"What about you, Luke?"
He had not time to reply, for from the hall below a shrill voice called to them both by name.
"Mr. de Mountford, Miss Harris, the young people want to dance. You'll join in, won't you?"
Already he was on his feet, every trace of emotion swept away from his face, together with every crease from his immaculate dress clothes, and every stray wisp of hair from his well-groomed head. Not a man, torn with passion, fighting the battle of life against overwhelming odds, casting away from him the hand which he would have given his last drop of blood to possess—only the man of the world, smiling while his very soul was being wrung—only the puppet dancing to the conventional world's tune.
"Dancing?" he said lightly: "Rather—Lady Ducies may I have this first waltz? No?—Oh! I say that's too bad. The first Lancers then? Good! Lou, may I have this dance?"
And the world went on just the same.