Delphi collected works o.., p.391
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 391
Hubert took an English weekly paper up to his bedroom. He read himself to sleep over the review of a novel. “It seems alike unnatural and incredible,” said the reviewer, “that a woman of the high character of Iris should have consented to live in any relation but absolutely legal wedlock with any man.” Hubert did not know who Iris was, or what he might have thought of her conduct if he had read the story. But the remark cast a flood of light on the psychology of the reviewer. What on earth had Iris’s high character to do with the question? If he had said, “a woman so prudent as Iris,”
“so self-seeking as Iris,”
“so cautious as Iris,” Hubert would have understood it. But “a woman of the high character of Iris!” — it was really too absurd. He went to sleep smiling at it.
CHAPTER VII.
MATRIMONIAL BUSINESS.
AT breakfast next morning, Fede wore the white rose Hubert had pinned the night before into her evening bodice. It had somehow unaccountably got crushed meanwhile — behind the rhododendrons; but it revived in water, and looked almost as well as ever in the pretty pink blouse she wore down to breakfast. Only Mrs. Egremont (being a woman) noticed its tumbled condition, and mentally accounted for it with a motherly smile; for Mrs. Egremont had been young, and was young enough still to sympathize with lovers.
Fede certainly was charming. The mixture of the hot Italian woman and the bright English girl in her made a delicious compound. “A co-inheritor on one side with Dante and Giotto,” Hubert said; “a co-inheritor on the other with Shakespeare and Darwin.” As she smiled across the table, with a flush of timidity on her dark olive cheek, at her future mother-in-law, Julia Egremont felt she had never yet seen any girl so attractive. It is seldom one’s children choose the wives one thinks fit for them; but if Mrs. Egremont had been asked to select for Hubert, she could not have picked out anyone more to her taste than Fede.
“And then just look at her antecedents,” Hubert said to her with pride, when they met in their salon three minutes before breakfast. “Could any one have a better or finer record? Her father is a Tornabuoni; and you’ve only to look at him to see at a glance he is straight, and well-built, and noble, and honorable — an Italian gentleman to the core, every inch of him! And her mother, an English lady — a Warwickshire Hampden, indirectly descended from the great John Hampden, and belonging therefore to one of the soundest and ablest families in England. I don’t care twopence myself about family from any other point of view; of course, I don’t want to marry the last girl of a decadent stock, not if she were the daughter of a hundred silly or drunken earls; but surely, noblesse oblige, and a physiologist at least ought to take care he’s marrying into a good sound stock that will do credit to his children.”
“Besides which,” Uncle Emilius added maliciously,” you’re in love with Fede.”
It’s the same thing,” Hubert answered sturdily not yielding one jot or tittle of his argument. “If people fall in love, that shows they’re eternally meant for one another.
They’re the pair whom Nature designs to unite. Its your loveless marriages that do all the harm. Considerations of money, convenience, rank, birth and religion — those lead to unions with no final reality in them. But I’m in love with Fede — because Fede is good and beautiful and sound and strong and attractive; which means, she is the girl I ought to marry.”
“Q. E. D.,” Uncle Emilius responded, with his hand on the door. “After which, I propose to go down to breakfast.”
The Marchese, however, took a more mediaeval and commercial view of married relations than Hubert. As soon as breakfast was over, he drew Uncle Emilius aside into the salon of number twenty, and requested the honor of a few minutes’ conversation alone with him. Being a man of business, he saw at once that Uncle Emilius was more likely to give dispassionate consideration to practical details than Hubert himself in his present condition.
The interview was satisfactory. “Then I quite understand.” the Marchese observed at the end of it. “Mrs. Egremont’s estate, being worth what you say, is absolutely entailed on the children of the marriage. The Property is not at her own disposal. It follows the name. And she has no other child but Mr. Hubert.”
“Precisely,” the doctor answered, stroking his chin after his wont. “And I believe — I do not know — but I believe — and will ascertain — that my sister desires to make a proper and ample provision, meanwhile, for the Marchesa Fede.”
“After her death — your sister’s, I mean — Mr. Hubert must necessarily inherit everything?”
“Yes, absolutely everything.”
“Her husband was a military man, I understand?” the Marchese continued tentatively.
“Colonel Egremont? — he was. He had served in India.”
“A colonel? So! I must telegraph full details of the arrangement, you see, to Florence.” And he made a little note of it.
Sir Emilius looked doubtful. “Well, between you and me,” he remarked after a pause, stroking his chin with one dubitative hand, “I don’t know that I would make a great point of the Colonel. He was — well — a bit of a scamp, I’m bound to admit. There are black sheep, you see, in every family. He gave my sister a good deal of trouble.”
The Marchese was a man of the world; and besides, he knew the exacting morality of these extraordinary English. With them, a married man — but there. No Tuscan gentleman could ever endure it. “Oh, of course,” he answered diplomatically, “we understand these things. Military men have a code of their own. And in India, too, you say! Those very hot climates!”
“But Hubert,” Sir Emilius went on, with avuncular pride, “Hubert’s a young fellow to be proud of. He carried everything before him in science at Oxford. He’s a rising physiologist, sure of election to the Royal Society. And — he’s also a poet.”
“A poet! That’s bad,” the Marchese cried, drawing back. “These poets play ducks and drakes with their money.”
Sir Emilius assumed at once his blandest air — the air with which he assured the nervous lady-patient there was nothing on earth the matter with her digestive economy. “But my dear sir,” he put in, “the man of science in Hubert outbalances the poet. It’s a capital mixture. Enough imagination to save him from being dry; enough steady ballast to keep him from being wild and mad and reckless. He’s my favorite nephew — like one of my own boys to me!”
This was an opening for the Marchese to explore the question of contingent remainders. “Then you have children of your own?” he interposed dubiously.
Sir Emilius drew one weary hand across his ample brow. “Children?” he cried. “Oh, dear, yes! My quiver full of them! In fact, I may say, twelve go to the quiverful.”
The Marchese made a mental note of the fact. No windfalls from that quarter! “Well, you’ll excuse my being businesslike,” he said, with his expansive smile, stroking the black mustache pensively. “We Italians treat these affairs from a strictly legal standpoint. And in the present depressed condition of the wine-market” — the Marchese delivered those well-worn words in his most impressive style — he had had much practice—” before I allowed matters to go a step further between Fede and your nephew, I felt I must understand his financial position.”
He paused a moment, expecting Sir Emilius to inquire in turn what provision he meant to make, Per contra, for his daughter’s future. But, to say the truth, Sir Emilius, like a true-born Briton, had never even conceived that a “foreign” nobleman could make any provision of any sort for his family. The moment he heard Hubert was going to marry the daughter of an Italian marquis, he made up his mind it must be a pure love-match, and put considerations of money out of court entirely. For it is the fixed belief of Uncle Emilius’s kind that all foreign noblemen are penniless adventurers, perpetually on the lookout for a British heiress or an American millionairess, to keep the pot boiling. So he merely observed in an acquiescent tone, “We may gather, then, Marchese, that you offer no obstacle?”
The Marchese jumped at this view of the question. “I offer no obstacle,” he answered, with an air of the greatest magnanimity; though, as a matter of fact, he would have been prepared to make a settlement upon Fede if Sir Emilius had asked for it. “You see, if my daughter were an only child we could afford to do more for her; but as she has two brothers—”
The idea struck Sir Emilius as novel — nay, almost brilliant. An Italian nobleman portion his daughter who was marrying an Englishman! Original, really!— “Oh, we’re perfectly satisfied as to that,” he said, smiling. “The provision my sister means to make for the Marchesa will be ample — ample. The fact of it is, my nephew is in love with your daughter; and all we require is your consent to the marriage. That being given, I think nothing else need detain us.”
“Certainly not,” the Marchese replied. He rose from his chair and began to move round Mrs. Egremont’s salon, in which they had been sitting. A photograph in a frame on the mantelpiece caught his eye. “Ha, an old friend!” he cried, taking it up and looking at it.
Sir Emilius nodded. “Yes, the great American poet,” he said. “You knew him?”
The Marchese expanded visibly to the naked eye. “When he lived at Florence — yes; I knew him intimately. Who that loved Italy did not know the poet? Who was not proud of his love for our country?”
“But I thought you had a feeble opinion of poets?” Sir Emilius put in maliciously.
The Marchese snapped his fingers. “As sons-in-law, yes, I grant you. But, him! ah, there, he was a Man, your poet!”
“He was,” Sir Emilius admitted with caution.
“We count him our own,” the Italian continued enthusiastically. “Look what he did for Italian unity!” He put his hand on his heart. “We are businesslike, we Italians,” he went on, “but we are not ungrateful. Your poet forged a golden chain which linked together Florence, London, America. After Mazzini and Garibaldi, what man of our time so deeply stirred the soul of Italy?”
Sir Emilius was unprepared for such a burst of emotion. The Englishman keeps all his sentiment for the family: the Italian bestows it rather on his country. “He was an intimate friend of my sister’s,” he said drily, distrusting these transports. “She admired his work. She carries his portrait about with her everywhere.”
“In a silver frame,” the Italian added, looking hard at it.
“Eh? Quite so,” Sir Emilius answered, not grasping his meaning.
The Marchese mused aloud. “This world’s an enigma,” he said. “Yet sometimes one gets a clue that leads one through it. — Well, well, Sir Emilius, I think we perfectly understand each other. Suppose we adjourn for a while to the writing-room, where we can get pen and paper, and reduce the terms of our agreement to writing? For this being a marriage, you see — an affair of importance — we must of course leave nothing to feeling, but treat it in every way as a matter of business.”
CHAPTER VIII.
AN UNEXPECTED INTERVIEW.
WHILE the two men of business were engaged on these practical details in the salon, Mrs. Egremont, Fede, and Hubert had slipped out into the garden. For a while they kept together; but after twenty minutes or so, the mother dropped quietly and naturally into the background — she knew her place, she said to herself with some tinge of a mother’s irrepressible feeling when she first finds herself relegated to a secondary rank in her son’s estimation — and allowed the young people to wander off by themselves among the roses and rhododendrons. She would write a letter home, she thought, under the shade of the trees; and she beckoned to Rosa, the round-faced chambermaid, from the window to come to her.
“Bring me the writing-case from number twenty,” she said, “and a postage-stamp for England. The concierge will give you one.”
“Yes, madame,” Rosa answered, in her most insinuating voice. “And madame’s shawl, n’est-ce pas? Madame may catch a chill if she sits under the trees here.”
“Oh, thank you,” Mrs. Egremont answered, with her soft, subdued smile. “How thoughtful of you, Rosa!”
The girl tripped away, with the affected mincing step of the Bernese chambermaid when tricked out in her finery; and was back again in a minute with the writing materials and shawl, as well as a footstool. She arranged it carefully under Mrs. Egremont’s feet, with obtrusive politeness.
“Oh, thanks, Rosa,” the lady said, with another gentle smile. “How very kind and good you always are to me!”
“Oh, madame,” Rosa answered, in her insinuating voice; “it is always a pleasure to do anything for madame. Madame is so gracious!”
She moved up the steps again. As she passed, the concierge muttered, “You do make up to her!”
Rosa smiled and tossed her head. “Last chance for the season!” she answered flippantly, in quite a different voice, and in her own broad dialect. “She’s good for twenty francs. If I carney her enough, she may make it forty. Besides, I’d like to get a good place in England!”
It is the modern Eldorado of Bernese chambermaids. It may lead to apotheosis — marrying the butler!
Mrs. Egremont sat writing some minutes in silence. Her letter was full of Hubert and Fede. The girl was a dear girl — a very dear girl — and yet, of course, it was hard for a mother to lose the chief place in her boy’s affection. But she was more than satisfied: it was wrong of her even to hint her personal feelings. She was ashamed to think she could be so selfish.
As she wrote, a figure glided silently across the lawn. It was clad in a shabby old tourist tweed suit and it walked with some difficulty, lifting each foot with care, as is the habit of men in the middle stages of locomotor ataxy. The hoary old reprobate had breakfasted in his room, and had stolen out at last in search of an opportunity for carrying a scheme he had planned into execution.
He stole up to her so quietly, with catlike tread, that he was close by her side before Julia Egremont saw him. His shadow on her paper first called her attention. She looked up, and gave a start of mingled surprise and terror.
“What! Walter?” she cried. “You here! Oh, for God’s sake, what do you mean by it?”
The Colonel drew himself up jauntily.
“Yes, my dear,” he answered, fixing his eyeglass in his eye, “it’s me; or, to be more strictly grammatical, it’s I, at your service. ‘An unexpected pleasure,’ you say. Well, an unexpected pleasure.” He drew back a pace and gazed at her. “You hardly supposed you’d see me in this out-of-the-way place, did you?” he went on, with hateful banter. “Oh, no, of course not. In point of fact, that’s exactly why you came here. You avoided Florence, for fear of meeting me. How did I find out your plan? I see you asking yourself that mental question. Well, it’s as simple as getting drunk, and much less costly. I was over at Lugano, boring myself to death in a bad hotel, and baking myself to blazes, when I happened to see your respected name in the Swiss Times on the visitors’ list at the Black Eagle. ‘A rare chance,’ thought I to myself, ‘of seeing dear Julia!’ When a man’s been separated so long from his wife, the sight of her name naturally produces in his mind an immediate access of deferred affection. He takes the arrears out, so to speak. So into the train I jumped, took the Gotthard to Goeschenen, walked over the pass, didn’t kill myself on the glacier, descended on the valley, and — here I am at last, my dear girl, to adore you!” He held out both hands, palm outward, in an imploring attitude. But his face was all mockery. Mrs. Egremont rose from her seat in an agony of terror.
“Oh, go, go, go!” she cried. “How could you be so imprudent? What should I do if Hubert were to come up and see you? He’s here at the hotel with me.”
“So I saw in the newspaper. And, to tell you the truth, that seemed to me an additional reason for paying my respects to you. It’s high time the boy knew his own father.”
Mrs. Egremont wrung her hands.
“Walter,” she moaned, “you are merciless.” She cast her eyes about her hastily, as if looking for shelter. “You have broken your compact,” she went on. “Didn’t you promise me faithfully you’d never come north of the Alps without leave? Don’t I pay you five hundred a year to live away from England? Haven’t I got your own name to the agreement on paper?” Colonel Egremont eyed her through his eyeglass with a complacent smile. “Well, I’m not north of the Alps, am I?” he answered, gazing about him at the mountains with unruffled geniality. “I’m here in the midst of ’em. Jolly fine Alps, too; as large as they make ’em. Besides, if it comes to that, didn’t you promise once to love, honor and obey me?” He held out his arms once more with mock pathos — that loathsome, bloated man. “Do you love me now?” he asked.— “Do you honor me? Do you obey me?”
Mrs. Egremont shuddered.
“God help me, no!” she cried, with a wild gesture of repugnance. “How could any one love or honor or obey such a creature as you are?”
The Colonel was cool as indifference could make him. “Very well, then,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “There you are, my good woman. You see how you keep your own promises, Julia.”
His wife recoiled from him. His very look repelled her. “It was a wicked and a foolish one,” she said. “I ought never to have made it. Promise to do or not to do, if you will; but promise to feel or not to feel — what a transparent absurdity!”
Colonel Egremont surveyed her satirically through his pince-nez. “And this, I suppose,” he said at last, “is the New Morality.”
The unhappy woman sank into a seat and half-covered her face. “I don’t know whether it’s new or old,” she answered, shrinking from him. “But this I do know, that I cannot possibly have any feeling now but disgust and loathing for you.”
Colonel Egremont dropped into a rustic seat and unbuttoned his coat. “Oh, pray go on,” he observed, in a sarcastic voice. “Don’t trouble about me. Forgive my intrusion. Excuse me for existing!”
