Egeria

Front matter

EOEIRIÆ NEW NOVELS AT ALL LIBRARIES. AN UNSOUGHT HERITAGE. By C. G. Furley Smith, Author of ' Quixote the Weaver ' 2 vols. TOO FAIR A DAWN. By M. Bramston, Author of ' Apples of Sodom,' &c. 2 vols. TO SET HER FREE. By G. M. Robins, Author of ' A False Position,' 4 The Ides of March,' &c. 2 vols. DEB O' MALLY'S. By Mrs. George Corbett, Author of 'CasBandra,' &c. 2 vols. A MATTER OF SKILL, and other Stories. By Beatrice Whitby, Author of ' The Awakening of Mary Fenwick,' &c. 1 vol. 3s. Gd. LONDON: HURST & BLACKETT, LIMITED. EGERIA BY LILY THICKNESSE ■> IN ONE VOIUME. LONDON : HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1896. All rights reserved. EGERIA.

Chapter I

A YOUNG man with a brown, clean-shaven face and blue eyes was standing thoughtfully on the Christchurch barge at the Eights, when he heard a man's voice say behind him : ' That's Mark Bayard ; he's a Houseman, he's gone down now.' To which a woman's light tones answered : ' Introduce him to me !' Smith of Oriel touched Mark's arm ; he turned round and was presented to Egeria. His first impression was of a slender, dark eyed woman with a rather haggard face, over which her scarlet sunshade threw a faint glow of artificial colour. She must have worn a bonnet, he supposed, because at tea afterwards he heard a lady indignantly condemn her head-gear as ' a mere bow stuck somewhere at the back of B EGERIA. her head — positively indecent !' Her dark hair was parted down the middle and hung flnffily over her forehead, which had little lines across it plainly visible under the powder.

He did not observe the powder till long afterwards. She held out her hand to the young man. ' I have heard so much of you,' she said smiling, and showing the only beautiful feature of her face, her white teeth, in observing which Bayard scarcely noticed the coarse lines of the mouth. ' I am so glad to meet you now.' As he was twenty-three and she was thirty three, it need not be said that he believed her and was pleased in all simplicity of heart. ' I am afraid I haven't any claim whatever to be mentioned,' he answered, smiling down at her. ' Oh, but I saw a review of yours the other day. It slated me so heavily that I have been pining to see my destroyer ever since.' ' A review 1 Have you written a novel that I have reviewed ? Under what name?' asked Bayard, keenly interested, and taking an empty chair beside her. ' If I thought you'd feel any remorse, I'd tell you,' replied Egeria, with a rather hard little laugh. ' Guess !' EGERIA. 3 He racked his brains for a moment, watching the glittering ripples of the river till his eyes were dazzled. ' You don't mean you wrote that a tro — I mean, that one volume novel call " Hester," do you?' Egeria clapped her hands. ' Bravo for your candour !

I did. ' I beg your pardon,' said Mark, ' I did not mean to be rude but I am afraid it's no use my retracting now since you knew my opinion be forehand, is it ?' As their eyes met for an instant, some of the young man's strength went out of him. He had a strange sensation of being plunged into new unfathomable depths. Instinctive resentment edged his voice with a defiance more alluring to her than flattery. She beckoned to an elderly man who was passing by them, and rapidly introduced him to Bayard. Mark bowed, supposing him to be a relation of Egeria's. ' Mr. Sans Peur — you don't mind that, do you ? — has been cutting me to pieces in reviews. I am taking my revenge. I won't call you Sans Reproche,' she added, ' because you'd be so un- B EGERIA. interesting if you were ! Athelstan, do bring your wife here.

Ou the Queen's barge, is she ? Oh, how dull ! Of course I mean unless Mr. Jones is there.' The latter part of the sentence accompanied a rapid handshake with the passing undergraduate, who became painfully red, muttered something feebly, and hurried on, gasping for breath. ' Insufferable man !' ex claimed Egeria, glancing after him, and then turned to Mark with that smile of hers which could be sweet. She saw his entire disapproval of her written broadly across his face, for she added instantly, 'Now don't look so severely proper ! By the way, Athelstan, your wife is literally the pink of propriety to-day. What a lovely frock she has on ! I am content Avith being the very brown of respectability, you know.' Sir Athelstan with a half-sulky air conveyed them both to where his wife was standing.

She and Egeria greeted each other, Lady High lake's manner suggesting coldness tempered by resignation, as Egeria kissed her in full view of everybody. Bayard was about to make his escape when Egeria looked round at him and said, EGERLi. 5 ' This is Mr. Bayard, who has been very cruel to me.' This ridiculous speech pleased Mark as much as it was meant to do, in spite of his inward conviction that everything Egeria was doing was in the worst possible taste, especially when he observed an elderly lady, a friend of his mother's, looking at him from the next barge with the greatest disfavour while she overheard Egeria. This roused his opposition at once. He knew a great deal about human nature from books and nothing whatever from ex perience. His only knowledge of. women was gathered from his sisters and their friends, for he had no leaning towards dissipation, and all he knew of it was purely theoretical.

Egeria was a delicious shock to him, after the society at the rectory. What he had seen of German women on a foreign tour had not attracted him. Some of them were too impulsively irrepressible to fascinate a mind which demanded an illusion of mystery in a woman to captivate it. He had read some French novels among others, and it seemed to him that Egeria resembled certain of their heroines but probably without their serious vices. Anyhow, there was no suggestion about her of the starched white tucker of the society EGERIA. at home, which had angered him very much of late. ' I am going to Corpus for tea at the Presi dent's,' remarked Egeria, presently. ' Are you going there?' ' Yes, I think so — by-and-by,' replied Bayard, absently. Egeria looked up at him with a searching glance. 'I don't know why six feet of height in a man should give one a distressing feeling as if he were towering above one morally as well,' she murmured, whimsically, ' but I am quite afraid of you, Mr. Bayard.' If he had told the truth he would have con fessed that he was far more afraid of her, than she could possibly be of him, so he only smiled and felt a little foolish.

A wave of people rolling up between them carried him away with a contemporary of his own. ' I didn't know you knew Egeria,' remarked the other man, smiling, as they left the barge together. ' I don't. I've only just met her. Who is shef ' Well — she is not a widow.' EGERIA. 7 ' I didn't know she was married.' The bare idea sent a shock along the line of primitive feeling. ' Oh, yes. The husband turned out a failure and is knocking about California somewhere, I believe. She makes no secret of it, or of her dishke for him.' ' Who was she V inquired Mark, after a pause. ' I really don't know, and it doesn't the least matter, but she is a remarkable woman in a small way. Haven't you read her stories ?' ' Yes, worse luck ! Is that all she is remarkable for ? — because if so, it is not very much.' ' Oh, no, my dear fellow, by no means.

She is tremendous fun, I can assure you.' This description was so far from attractive to Bayard that he went to tea in the Parks with the firm intention of avoiding Corpus, where she had told him she would be. No sooner had he got inside the room than he found himself confronted with the very person he was trying to avoid. She nodded to him laughingly. ' I came here instead of Corpus, because I met a friend and she dragged me off here instead. I can't help it if the President does die of a EGERIA. broken heart, because I did not go to tea with him. A magnetic current brought me here against my will.' She was paler without her red sunshade. Her eyes wandered restlessly round the room. ' I thought you were bound for Corpus,' she continued, without meeting Bayard's eyes. He relented towards her, as she lay back with an air of weariness in the low chair, for after all she had apparently avoided him, as carefully as he had avoided her. ' So I was, but this is less academic. 1 have been abroad and got out of the 'Varsity groove.' ' Into another, I suppose, only you happen to find it novel.

Surely one's life is made up of getting into and out of grooves.' 'Is its She nodded. ' Oh, you are so refreshingly young ; it does one good to talk to you ! What are you going to do with your life ? Oh, to think of having it all to begin ! I wish 1 had !' She clasped her hands together with a heavy sigh, and then added, smiling and shrugging her shoulders, 'However, it is no use regretting. Give me one more of those divine sandwiches, and then tell me what your plans are for the future.' EGERIA. 9 Bayard got the sandwich, and Egeria ate it with an evident pleasure, which had a certain fascination for him, for the women at home merely ate food under protest as an indecent necessity of human life, in which only man could take a coarse pleasure. ' I am going to tlie Bar because it is a respect able thing to do, and on the way there I shall learn as much as I can about life.' ' Oh, that won't be difficult !

The danger is that you may learn too much. Believe in human nature as long as you can ! I am so much older than you, that I am quite sorry for you when I think how very seamy you will find it when you know it better.' He was vaguely vexed by her assumption of elderly superiority, and drew himself up to his full height as he stood before her. The tacit movement attracted her curiously. ' You are much nicer as you are,' she con tinued, mischievously, handing him her cup, ' I prefer you innocent.' He was so enraged that he took away the cup without a word, and devoted himself to an enthusiastic sister of a particularly objectionable man on the other side of the room, and did not go near Egeria again. EGERIA. He was wondering why a girl of eighteen, with a high forehead and large teeth, should be so difficult to talk to, when he looked up and found Egeria close to him. ' I am going,' she said with a smile, leaving her hand in his for an instant. ' Come to see me some day in London.

I live in Duchess Mansions, Kensington. Will you remember ?' ' Thank you very much. You are very kind.' Mark was quite resolved to forget it as he turned back to his companion. But, as it turned out, the gods saw otherwise.

Chapter II

One Saturday afternoon, early in the November ofthe same year, Bayard went to Kensington to call on some people who had been kind to him since he had settled in town. He found they were not at home, and turned away disappointed. They were not a specially interesting or clever family, but there was a cosy, homely air about the house ; the old people were hospitable, unaffected, and well-bred, and — greater attraction to a young man — there were daughters who were pretty and well dressed. Though they were far from being women of the world, there was a certain charm about their girlish chatter which Bayard had not found among his sisters' friends at home, and he was still unspoilt enough to find it attractive. The young women of the society at home, if they were not given up entirely to ' good works,' were horsey and slangy.

This London com- EGERIA. 12 promise between the two extremes had all the charm of novelty. He walked away from the gloomy stucco portico with a sudden sense of loneliness. He was disinclined to visit any of his men ac quaintances, because they were to be seen at any time, and, moreover, they offered nothing to his imagination. He was not the very least in love with any of the girls whom he had hoped to see, but there was an absolute sting of pain in the fact that he could not see one of them this particular afternoon, an effect out of all proportion to the cause, for he had not even formulated to himself which of the three he really wanted to see. Woman in general beckoned to an ardent unspoilt fancy as an irresistible necessity. He walked aimlessly in the premature dark ness and fog through one street after another, till suddenly his eye fell on a name illuminated by a gas-lamp on the brick wall of a house in front of him. ' Duchess Mansions' He could not remember where he had seen it before, or what it recalled.

He paused, and looked round him. Then a bolt slid back in his brain and revealed the connection : Egeria EGERIA. 13 had told him she lived there. After a moment's hesitation almost of foreboding, which he regarded as sentimental, he went to the door and inquired for her. He was taken up in a lift with an absurd resemblance to a gilt cage, and finally deposited on a landing opposite a small front door. On ringing, he was admitted by a. servant whose accent immediately showed her to be French. She knocked at and then opened a door leading out of a tiny hall, and Bayard found himself face to face with a screen. After groping his way round this obstruction, he was in Egeria's presence. In the last remains of the murky light she was sitting at a desk with her head resting upon her arms. Her attitude suggested such profound despair that the young man hastily stepped back behind the screen and waited till the servant had repeated his name.

Hearing it, Egeria looked up and came for ward, holding out her hand. Her face was wet with tears, and her hair was wild. She pushed it back from her forehead with one hand, as she said, ' How good of you to come ! Sit down !' She then seated herself on the sofa which EGERIA. was concealed from the door by the screen, and Mark took the chair she pointed out. ' You are a sort of rescuing angel,' she said, laughing, with an hysterical catch in her breath. ' I was feeling so utterly alone. I was praying at a shrine that can't answer prayers,' she con tinued, pointing to the desk. Puzzled, he saw that there was a photograph standing on the top of the desk in a wooden Swiss frame of which the doors were standing open wide at this moment. There was a small green bowl of white flowers under it, and as Bayard looked at them he realised the origin of the heavy scent of stephanotis which flooded the room and oppressed him.

This, with the dim light and the extraordinary way he had been received, astonished and rather embarrass ed him. He half suspected his companion of acting a part for a moment, and sat twisting his hat round in his hands, uncertain what to do. ' You will think me perfectly mad,' she said, wiping her eyes, ' but the fact is, I am very unhappy ; and this afternoon I was almost meditating suicide when your name was announced. Tell me ! How did you get here at all? Was it a fluke V EGERIA. 15 The last word released Mark from his un certainty and set him at his ease at once. He was extremely relieved that he was not expect ed to make one in a dramatic scene, and the entrance of the servant with a lamp restored him to a comfortable sense of paying an after noon call in a reasonably conventional manner. ' To tell the truth,' he answered, smiling, 'it was a fluke, because I did not know where these flats were, and found them quite by accident.' ' A lucky one for me !' returned Egeria, lightly, pulling down the blind.

One lamp gave an extremely tempered light through a red shade which tortured Mark's eyes as he looked curiously round the room. It was too full of flowers, and the arrangement of it lacked repose. There were too many knick-knacks, low chairs, and ottomans placed in inconvenient positions. A hanging brass lantern, which Egeria told Bayard Sir Athel stan had brought her from Venice, was a kind of magnet for the unfortunate head of any man as tall as Mark, whenever he wanted to move across the room. Photographs of friends, prin cipally men, stood about in frames on little tables, in a way which jarred on Bayard's taste, EGERL-i. educated in a school of severe refinement and simplicity. Superfluous antimacassars would slip off chairs, and unnecessary little cushions would slide on to the floor at odd moments dur ing his visit.

Afterwards, they all formed part of this woman's personality, and became inex tricably associated with the image of her in his mind. She seated herself on the sofa once more, leaning her elbow on the raised end so that her face was left in shadow. ' Well, I will forgive you for not wanting to come and see me,' said Egeria, in a far less co quettish manner, which set the young man more at his ease. 'How are you getting on? What are you doing V ' Still writing reviews and trying to get experience.' She nodded brightly. ' Do you like living in London after all? Do you know many people V ' Yes, a good many. 1 find it rather difficult to work regularly, and there are constant in terruptions.' Egeria smiled. She had been looking at the strong, brown hands resting on his knee while he spoke ; the subtle influence they exerted over EGERIA. 17 her vibrated in the tone of her voice as she said, ' You didn't expect to lead a life of monastic solitude in such a maddening whirlpool as this, did you?' 'No, but I am afraid of frittering away all my time.' ' Oh,' said Egeria, ' I fritter as a matter of business.

If you write novels, you see, you must fritter to some purpose.' Mark looked at her curiously. Her manner for the moment was almost harsh and repellent. A sort of bitterness edged her voice. At this point the servant, who invariably knocked be fore she entered, brought in the tea-tray and set it down on the table. ' I don't see why frittering is the least necessary for the purpose of writing novels,' said Bayard, as his hostess rose and poured out a cup of tea, while he watched the outline of her figure against the light. ' Can't you think out things better in solitude ? I can.' ' Solitude !' she ejaculated, looking round with the cup of tea in her hand. ' Oh, if I were you with your life, your past and your future, I might think so too ! But if you were me ' She paused and came to him. He rose and took the cup from her, his hand touching hers C EGERLi. 18 as he did so.

Conscious of an electric shock at the contact, he blamed his own clumsiness, while, as he towered above her, her rough dark hair hid her eyes from him, and he could not see the expression of her face. She sank back once more into her corner of the sofa. ' The fact of it is, I envy you,' she said. ' I wish I were a man, at your age, with your chances of success, your brains, your muscles.' Bayard was silent, so absorbed in the mystery of his own sensations that he scarcely heard her. 'Did you hear?' she asked, impatiently, leaning forward. He roused himself. ' Yes ; but I don't quite see why you should wish to be a man.' ' Oh, heavens ! Why, for one thing, if I were, you would think it worth while to come and talk to me sometimes. You wouldn't have thought me a hysterical fool of a woman when you came in just now.

Ah, don't deny it ! Of course I knew what you thought at once. Some day I will tell you why I was crying, if you turn out any better than the rest of men.' ' You are very bitter,' said Mark, ' I did not EGERIA. 19 judge you quite so harshly as you seem to imagine.' The two looked each other straight in the eyes for an instant. Then Egeria leaned her head back against the wall, and clasped her hands behind her neck. 'I wonder,' she murmured, 'if you are a fraud like all the others ? I wish I could believe in you really ; I am so entirely alone.' There was a knock at the door and the maid announced a lady. Egeria's manner changed completely. She kissed the new-comer with enthusiasm. Mark stayed only a few minutes longer, marvelling at the rapid alternation of her moods, for when he left her she was chatting as lightly and merrily to the other woman as if she had not a care in the world. ' I will send you a little story of mine,' she said to him as he went out, • for you to criticize.

May I ?' Her tone of appeal effaced the remembrance of her bitter one as he recalled it when he walked away. All the rest of the day he was vaguely miserable, and when the story came he put it away without looking at it. C -'0

Chapter III

Bayard had two furnished rooms in Piccadilly besides his chambers at the Inn. One evening, at the beginning of December, he was sitting at home with a pipe and a table piled with books, uncertain what to do and yet feeling that he ought to work. Picking np a volume, he turned listlessly over the pages. It was one he had got from Mudie's that morning, and had not opened since. Suddenly something fell out and fluttered in to the fender close to his feet. He picked it up, and mechanically glanced at the lines of writing upon it : ' Only a month to-day since we were engaged, and I am so full of doubt and despair that I do not know what to say to you, but I must write. We cannot go on like this! I am not good enough to be your Egeria — your guardian-angel, EGERIA. 21 as you once said I should be.

I feel that you will be disappointed in me if we marry. I can't be quite different from myself. I must tell you the truth. I entreat you to release me from my promise ; I will never bear you any malice, for you deserve someone much more perfect than I. It is all my fault Dear, forgive me all the pain I have caused you! ' Jocelyn.' It was only a half sheet, and when Mark be gan to read it he was under the impression it was an extract from the book. He finished it with a shame faced sense that it was part of a letter instead. Writing and signature were both such as might be common to either sex. But the phrases were obviously a woman's. He was touched by them, and very curious to see the writer. The words in the bold, clear, hand that modern women use appealed pathetic ally to him who had never seen the writer's face, and he instinctively sided with her against the man with the ready jealousy ofthe less fortunate outsider.

Hearing a knock at his door, Bayard thrust EGERIA. 22 the paper into his pocket. If one man had desecrated her letter by losing it, no other man should see it while it was in his hands. The visitor turned out to be St. Hilary, an ac quaintance whom he liked in spite of a want of sympathy on many points. He was older than Bayard, and lived in rooms in St. James's, where the latter often dropped in at spare moments when his own quarters became somewhat lonely to him. St. Hilary explained that he had just been dining with another man and a certain burlesque actress whose photographs were in all the shop windows just then. He described the party at which he had been making a third. ' I left them,' he added, yawning, ' because I saw I was de trop and, in fact, had only been asked lest her husband should turn up to get his dinner at the same place.' Mark offered him a pipe.

He took it with a bored air, and looked round as he filled it, hum ming a song from the latest burlesque at the ' Gaiety.5 Presently he suggested that Mark and he should go to a theatre. Bayard was still fresh enough to London to be filled with pleasant excitement as he entered the auditorium and took his seat. EGERIA. 23 He was absorbed in the scene on the stage, when he heard St. Hilary suddenly exclaim, 'Why, there's Otto Meyrick and the very woman !' Following the direction of his eyes, Mark looked up at the couple in a box above him. ' He is the only surviving son of Lord Wynd cliff,' explained St. Hilary ; ' he is trying to get in for East Mockington.' The Honourable Otto happening to look down at that moment caught St. Hilary's eye and nodded. He was the very pattern of the young poli tician, politics being one of those callings where a man is a comparative stripling with a career before him at forty.

Looking at his expression less face, with the eye-glasses poised on the thin, aquiline nose, the slight whiskers, and the compressed, straight mouth, Bayard felt at once that no one was more fitted to throw up a losing cause or hoodwink an opponent with more irreproachable appearance of respect ability. The thin hand hanging over the edge of the box looked bloodless and cold against the crimson velvet. The high, bald forehead seemed as if no contraction of pain or emotion had ever come to wrinkle its polished surface. EGERIA. 24 Mark conceived an instinctive violent dislike to him. St. Hilary began to laugh. ' He is a most extraordinary chap. He looks now, for all the world, as if he were following a dull debate in the House or listening to one of his parson brother's sermons, doesn't he?' Perhaps there was just a dash of envy in Bayard's antipathy at that moment, though he was not conscious of wishing himself in Mey rick's place.

The contempt he felt was min gled with an excited curiosity to probe Otto's sensations as he sat there. The garish spectacle on the stage ended by being distasteful, and the spectators were even more depressing. Bayard felt himself out of place among them. If he had been guilty for a moment of a wish to imitate Otto Meyrick's example, the wish died out when he overheard the girl's coarse laugh. He thought vaguely that Egeria would have attributed his attitude to his innocence, but he knew that æsthetic fastidiousness had as great a share as any moral revolt in his increasing sense of sadness as the minutes wore wearily on. EGERIA. 25 He sat back with a rather bitter laugh, and folded his arms. ' You take it all far too much to the great serious, as Florae says,' replied St. Hilary, good naturedly : ' you'll get over it.' Mark made a movement of impatience. ' Let's come away !

I am tired of all this. A forest of legs in tights becomes as monotonous as a row of pollard willows after a time.' ' Come up and let's ask Otto Meyrick if he thinks so too,' said St. Hilary, rising. ' I am sorry you are bored at your age. You won't have anything left to bore you at sixty, if you go on at this rate while you are a youngster. ' I assure you,' returned Bayard, laughing, as they made their way into the corridor, ' on the contrary, I have imbibed quite a taste for puritanism during the last few minutes.' ' My dear fellow, you will certainly marry an heiress. Keep it up !' said St. Hilary, approv ingly. 'That is what Meyrick did some years ago, but she died. She left him her money, however, and one little boy. He is far too canny to marry again, 1 fancy, a fact which his women friends put down to his devotion to his wife.