A Gilded Vanity

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Contents

II. Pops IN Habnsbs 19

IV. Elizabsth 82

V. An QuATBitMB 37

Chapter I . Hilary Pricks Forth

T SUGGEST, Diana," said Hilary Warr, addressing -■■ his hostess from the opposite end of the Westwood Hall breakfast table, "that in future you do not let Pope Dollimore buy your horses for you/*

"It is a return of confidence," said Lady Baintree, as she dispensed buttered muffin to her collies, and cream to her sleek Angora cats. Outside upon the frosty lawn this February morning, her other pensioners, the starlings and thrushes, waited their accustomed benevolence of cnunbs from a lady whose love of bestowal amounted to idiosyncrasy.

"I know you choose DoUimore's wives," said Warr, daringly, "and he stocks your stables. But, good fellow as he is, he is probably the worst judge of a hunter in Europe. And this mare — ^yotu* latest acquisition — • sent down yesterday from Tattersall's — is spavined, and roars."

"You are sure?"

"Positive. Besides—"

"Spare me the ^besides*."

•• • • • lo A Gilded Vanity

"I shall have to give Pope a talking-to. Such a succession of crocks to carry you tp covert, Diana! . . . You'll be the joke of the county.*'

Lady Baintrec's handsome black eyebrows were puckered in doubt for a second, then she turned off the um decidedly.

"I shall not. Let it be known that I have given up riding to hounds, and intend only to motor to Meets in • future. Pope did not choose my car!"

"Luckily, no !'* said Warr, who was himself responsible for this purchase. Then the butler brought in the contents of the morning post-bag*. Hilary Warr was the recipient of a plump envelope with the Foreign Office seal, and another bearing a stamped flap-device of a less stately character.

"Downing Street and Savile Row," he said in answer to his cousin's glance of inquiry, for Diana still played the port of vigilant elder to the man of thirty years. "A line from Lord Folbury himself about that Persian appointment"

"About the Consulship. As if you were wanted to bury yourself alive amongst people who drink hot mutton- fat and wear Astrakhan hats, with the temperature at a hundred and ninety."

"The interment," said Warr, "is not likely to come off. There is a more promising man altogether; an abler kind of fellow, and more suited to the post, in the official eye. Dorwen — Granger Dorwen — ^whom you used to know. At Eton with me. Came home to Warr Court for the holidays, and fell in love with you, Diana, and Pope DoUimore tried to fight him — ^an awful scene of carnage. You came upon us when we

Hilary Pricks Forth ii

were pumping on the ensanguined Popy in the stableyard/'

Lady Baintree's eyebrows crumpled, and she bit her lips as if repressing some emotion. A flimsy bundle of foreign paper fluttered in her hand. Hilary knew the small, neat penmanship, and nodded to it, saying cheerfully :

"You have heard from Pope t How is he — how are he and Charlotte getting on?"

Lady Baintree handed him the letter with an upward waving motion of the chin and eyes, which signified, he knew, that if Pope DoUimore and his newly-made bride were not getting on as well as might have been expected, no two human creatures of opposing sex might ever combine in wedded harmony. Charlotte and Pope, Pope and Charlotte, had been carefully selected witfi a view to each other's happiness. Under the circumstances, they could hardly be so lost to every sense of gratitude as to disagree. But Diana was not satis* fied with Pope's letter. There was something like a wail echoing between the lines.

"Read the third sheet. All the beginning is mere balderdash — ^messages from people he has met in Paris and Rome, on dits devoid of interest, talk about the coming General Election and Bagley-Chitwell — "

"I thought, you know," said Hilary, "that Pope re-married in the interests of Bagley-Chitwell as particularly as in his own?"

"Of course. What is a Member of Parliament without a wife?"

"This Member of Parliament had already had one of your providing."

"Hilary, if you arc going to cast that viper in my teeth—"

Diana's fine ejrcs brimmed, and Warr hastened to avert the deluge. Pope's third sheet, neatly written, and numbered with official exactitude, was before him. The first had been indited by a bridegroom at Rome. This was dated from Cannes by a married man of a fortnight's standing; and notwithstanding the formality of the handwriting, there was a wildness, a distraction, apparent in the composition of the sentences which gave ground for apprehension.

^'You ask mey wrote Pope, "whether I am not perfectly happy t You invite me to lay my hand upon my heart—''

"Never !" interjected Lady Baintree ; "the man must be wandering."

Hilary read on :

"To lay my hand upon my heart and declare solemnly that I have at last attained to the summit of earthly bliss. My dear Diana — my dear friend, what man lives who dare do this? When we meet you will probably tell me I am the most enviable of mortals. . . . And I shall take your word for it, Diana. Relying as I do upon the soundness of your judgment, and the correctness of your views, I shall believe you!"

The writer went on to say that Cannes as a winter resort seemed to him overrated. When there was warmth it was a clammy warmth, provocative of rheumatism. When there were bracing airs, these were of a bleakness and poignancy particularly well adapted for the aggravation of bronchial tendencies. The meteorological index, at the moment of penning, must certainly have indicated severe depression.

Hilary Pricks Forth 13

"Something is wrong," said Lady Baintree, meeting Hilary's glance. "I did not expect that Pope would be glowing, or poetic ; I did not look for a — "

"An epithalamium ?"

"That sounds as though it might be the word!" Diana added. "I need hardly remind you that when I was a girl in {nnafores — and you were an urchin in sailor collars— there was no talk of the Higher Education for women. Our governesses were not young ladies with college d^frees — they were meek impositions or benevolent frauds, and did not even speak correctly the language they professed to teach. Our French and German we got from our maids and nurses. But this is not to the point. Hilary, there is something tmsettled about Pope, and I must know the reason I"

By a special grace Hilary repressed the answer that lay at his tongue's tip. He would have liked immensely to say :

"The reason is — Charlotte!" and then bolt, if the bolting could have been continued indefinitely. Memory projected Charlotte upon his mental field of vision : a tall, somewhat angular young woman, too self-satisfied to be affectionate, too ordinary to be entertaining, with a large hand, a large foot, a large loud voice, and large widely open grey eyes with a glassy stare in them. Not the mistress whose glance should turn a cart-horse into Pegasus — not the bride whose possession should inspire a dithyramb. Nor to be sure was Pope the ideal bridegroom. But the stout little man was lovable, somehow, in his artlessly manifested desire for everybody's sympathy, and belief in everybody's goodness : and Hilary picturing him as gradually congealing, stiffening to the consistency of New Zealand mutton in Charlotte's refrigerating atmosphere, said unguardedly :

"A man might as well be married to the Jungf rau 1"

"I did not hear you," said his cousin, "you spoke so indistinctly. That is not usual with you ; perhaps the beard you have brought home from your Neilgherry expedition is accountable. That ornament, a tanned skin and a considerable amount of information concerning a mountaineering tribe of cow-worshippers, about whose country, religion, language, costume — or the want of it — nobody is in the least degree anxious to hear — would appear to be the only visible results of a very considerable outlay."

"Together with this!"

She put up her glasses to inspect the document he held up before her.

"That?"

"It is an intimation from the Honorary Secretary of the Imperial Ethnological Society, that in recognition of what the Committee are good enough to call my valuable contribution to scientific literature, they have voted me — "

"One moment. . . . You read a paper before the Society a month ago. That is the valuable contribution to which the Secretary refers?"

"Diana, don't be crushing!"

"My dear cousin, I only ask for enlightenment It is true that you lent your manuscript to me, and that I couldn't tmderstand a word of it. Do I gather that the Committee of the Ethnological Society, more alive to the value of your work than a weak and frivolous woman, have awarded you, as the author of a Mono-

Hilary Pricks Forth 15 pole or a Monocle — No ! — ^neither one nor the other."

"To be coldly correct, Diana, I have been guilty of a Monograph on the Marriage Customs of the Aboriginal Todas."

"Todas or Froggas leave me equally cold. Not so the committee, who I trust have awarded you a sufficient sum of money to recoup you for your outlay in the cause of science?"

"Not exactly. But I have their Gold Medal—"

"Ah! And that is worth— ^?"

'Some five sovereigns, I daresay, Diana."

'And your expedition cost you three hundred pounds."

"A little more, perhaps."

"A little more than half your yearly income." . . .

Hillary stiffened a little. She saw that she had gone too far. Upon certain points of independence the Warrs were touchy.

"The point is, that it is my income, and not begged or borrowed from anybody else."

"Obstinate!" She sighed, and rose, and came and kissed him on the forehead, where the crisp light brown hairs began to crinkle, above the level of the sun-tan. "When you might have as much of mine as you wanted."

"But I don't want it. Spend your spare thousands on the folk who do."

"Quixote. You compel me to waste it on unprofitable objects."

"Do you call marriageable young ladies tmprofitable objects? Are you not the Bona Dea of dowerless virgins? a Matrimonial Missionary to Society at large?"

A light he knew well began to gleam in her eye. There were moments when, inspired by her masterpassion, she was ahnost fateful.

"Hilary," — ^there was a note of entreaty in her voice — "when are you going to let me marry you?— <I mean — let me find you a nice wife?"

He said, with an inward chuckle : "You know I'm a petrified bachelor. Continue to respect me, can't you, as the only male creature who has been able to maintain celibacy in spite of your urgings towards conjugality? And, you have found Pope a nice wife. Can't that content you ?"

She shot a rapid glance of thanksgiving towards the panelled ceiling.

"It should. After that first unforttmate venture. You were in India, when those events transpired. You had no personal experience of Jane."

"Jane was your discovery. You wrote me an eightpage letter, categorically setting forth her perfections, you dwelt with insistence on your conviction that in her Pope was destined to find the ideal mate."

"I did say I thought she would do for Pope."

"She certainly got within an s^preciable distance of that result. He had eyes like green railway lamps when he met me at Southampton, after the decree nisi was made absolute — and his waistcoat hung in folds piteous to see."

"We need not speak of that dreadful time," said Lady Baintree, controlling a tendency to shudder. She added : "I believe I suffered more than Pope. And he is now hai^ily settled, thank Heaven! Charlotte is no giddy creature of torrid temperament — "

"But a creature of Alpine remoteness and inaccessi-

Hilary Pricks Forth 17

bility. Monte Rosa in petticoats — as described in your letters to me. What should you say," Warr queried, "if, the monograph upon the Aboriginal Todas being off my mind, I were to run South for a few weeks, and look up your latest pair of honeymooners ?"

"It would relieve me beyond expression," said Lady Baintree incautiously, "to receive the very latest news of Pope and Charlotte from so reliable a source. Ring at once, and tell one of the men to put your things together."

"I'll see to the packing myself," said Hilary Warr. He got up and moved with his long, light stride towards the door, mechanically feeling for his cigar-case as he went. "One can get to the bachelors' wing by the garden way," he went on, "unless I am thinking of somebody else's house?"

"Your memory," said Lady Baintree, "has not deceived you. A wrought-iron staircase, Italian design, with gilded scroll-work — ^leads down, balcony by balcony, to the azalea shrubbery on our sunny side. A fad of my poor dear's." (She alluded to Sir Charles Baintree, who had resigned existence and the role of husband to Diana while yet the coat in which he had led her to the altar was of fashionable cut.) " 'Expensive! oh! undoubtedly. But so convenient for the bachelors,* he used to say. You have your old room at the end ? Yes ! I forgot how empty the house was, and that it might strike you as unsociable."

Warr admitted that, even after the cantons of the Neilgherries, the civilised desolation of a series of corridors of which he was the sole inhabitant did strike rather chilly. But he went away to stuff a well-worn Gladstone bag with a few necessaries, whistling, and i8 in excellent spirits. Before the dog-cart came round, he paid a second visit to Pope DoUimore's purchase. The mare, as Bayliss bitterly observed, had made the most of her time in kicking herself dead lame. She sawed her head-rope up and down till the rings rattled, and looked upon all comers with a malevolent eye. It occurred to Hilary Warr for the twentieth time that if his cousin would choose her own hacks and automobiles she would have less time to employ in the forcible adjustment of other folks' careers. And his mental eye turned towards Cannes, and picturing Pope in process of refrigeration, with lips frost-bitten in the desperate effort to snatch a conjugal kiss, he laughed aloud at the humour of his own thought, as children and maniacs, and men and women who are much inured to solitude, often do.

Chapter II

THE hotel which the honeymooners had selected as their temporary abode was the kind of place where everybody else goes under the same circumstances. It possessed a vast white facade, to which many green Venetian blinds, Majolica window-boxes, and striped awnings, lent a frivolous air. There were orange-trees in tubs, and hedges of flowering syringa; one caught ultramarine and violet peeps of sea between clumps of grey-green foliage; cacti, palms, and aloes inspiring reminiscences of the East; roses reminding one of nothing but the Riviera ; the polyglot composite population that may be found there and everywhere else.

The sun shone gallantly for one who had left an English February behind him, though the breeze had a bite of frost. The fancy came to Hilary that Qiarlotte had iced the atmosphere. He saw her approaching, clad in bridal dove-colour, edged with fur of chinchilla. She looked handsomer than he could have believed possible. She wore an astonishing hat of Maria Jackson's (Diana had given it and the gown, Hilary was sure; she never scrupled to pour forth gold when the decking of a victim for the altar was in question) — though she had not paid Pope's tailor for the immaculately-cut garments in which he was paraded. The rotund, dapper, once fussy little man was sadly altered. Even in the reign of Jane, now vanished into space with the sum for which her jointure had been compounded — even when he groaned beneath that yoke, he had not presented so crushed an appearance, nor exhibited such an absolute eclipse of individuality. He was now the mere tail to Charlotte's kite; the tassel of bank-notes that should steady her in many an aerial flight — prevised in the heady twitch of her nostrils, the cold ambition of her grey eyes, the obstinate jut of her underjaw. And this was the woman who had had views as to the amelioration of this, that, and the other, who had decried extravagance in dress, who had spelt Society with a little *'s/' whom Diana had chosen out of a host of aspirants as the ideal helpmeet. Heaven and earth! her very voice was changed as she greeted Hilary.

"You! of all people," Charlotte cried in a high-toned nasal key, and offered Warr the latest handshake in grey suede. Once, doubtless urged on by Diana, she had set her cap at him, deplored the restraints of civilisation, hinted that her ideal of earthly bliss lay in a nomadic existence, spent by the side of some beloved wanderer amidst scenes as wildly sylvan as those which surrounded the first pair of wedded lovers; quoting Mrs. Livingstone and Lady Burton and other authorities to demonstrate the practicability of the role of explorer's bride. And Hilary, while seeing the hook as clearly as the often-angled- for trout, had nibbled a little at the end of the lure without the slightest intention of being caught. Charlotte's tone and expression gave him now to understand that these piscatory passages were buried in oblivion.

"You will breakfast with us?" she said, forestalling the invitation that was upon her husband's tongue. "A mid-day breakfast after the foreign fashion, with hors d'(£uvres and fruit and claret." Hilary wished she would not talk of things being f oreign- fashioned f "We got into the way of it in Paris and Rome."

Then she hailed a passing head-waiter in the French language, or what would have been the French language in the opinion of Charlotte's family, by whom her powers as a linguist were held in traditional repute. I do not think I mentioned that Charlotte was the daughter of the Vicar of Westwood-Witton, a living in the gift of the lady of Westwood Hall, and had first attracted the attention of Lady Baintree by the spirited manner in which she rode upon the whirlwind and directed the storm of parish affairs. And, indeed, it is only natural to conjecture that such a young woman, who can quell a mothers' meeting at a glance, and settle single-handed the disputes of infuriated coal and blanket claimants, should be the wife of wives for a public man. Here now was Charlotte bullying the waiter — who spoke English admirably — in imperfect tenses, with regard to the comer table in the salle h manger J which had already been appropriated by another party of three, a gentleman and two ladies, both of whom were young ; one so immature as to merit the designation of a child. These bowed distantly to Charlotte and smilingly to Pope, who spoke of them as "the Colquhotms," but volunteered no further information. It must be understood that Charlotte had been profuse of inquiries as to the health of dear Lady Baintree — dearest Lady Baintree ! Pope had said in rather a hollow tone, "I trust Diana is well ?"

"As full of health, spirits, and energy as usual,"

returned Warr. It seemed to him that Pope's jaw dropped a little as though he felt himself a living testimony to that superabundant energy.

"Dear thing. We shall see her in town in the spring," effused Charlotte.

"She contemplates Chesterfield Gardens in April."

"And we Cadogan Square."

"Till then—"

"We shall be busy at Bagley. People expect so much from the lords of the manor," Charlotte said.

"I thought the house was let."

"I made Pope buy back the lease. He has got over his dislike to the house now." Charlotte darted her lord and master a glance which was meant to be arch, if not tender, across the coffee-tray, and Hilary remembered that Jane had burnt her boats, and fought her last battle at Bagley before the county rose in its strength and said, "This woman must be cut!" He glanced at Pope, whose smile was sicklied over with a pale cast of something not quite comprehensible, and at the same time the Moorish curtains that depended beneath the double entrance arch of the salle being pulled aside, the florid countenance of the little bridegroom immediately offered to observation a curious combination of colour. A green complexion in conjunction with a yellow top-knot may be becoming and appropriate to a macaw, but a human being presenting these peculiarities provokes comment. Charlotte, however, did not remark Pope's manifestation of perturbation; she was looking at the lady who had just entered.

"What a stylish woman! Quite the best-dressed I have seen for ages." She appealed to Hilary, who was conscious of a laxity of the muscles of the jaw which rendered speech difficult. Pope's mouth was open, his arms hung helplessly at his sides ; he leaned back in his chair and blinked a little, feebly, between dying-goldfish gasps. For the new-comer was Jane. Jane in the highest possible spirits, Jane at the zenith of her showy beauty, Jane dyed, waved, dressed, jewelled— too jewelled — and accompanied by the last man upon earth of whom her late husband might wish to be reminded. A more awful contretemps could hardly have been devised by the Enemy.

"Parisienne, I am sure," Charlotte babbled on, complacently, "or the best type of American who can boast old family and high breeding, and who gets her gowns from Worth. Now she is speaking to the people who so rudely took our comer table. I wonder who she is?"

Neither of the men replied. Both of them were looking at Jane — it may be mentioned that Charlotte had never seen her predecessor, — as she rustled across the polished parquet, followed by her ostentatiously beaming possessor, to bestow a morning salutation upon her acquaintances. Half-way to the table her eye lighted upon Pope, coolly scanned his perturbed features, took a comprehensive if swift survey of Charlotte's large countenance, then reverted to Warr. She bowed to Warr, flaunting for the moment a small corner of her flag of defiance, while her Lothario, behind her, blackened and scowled. Then she turned to the two English sisters, who with a middle-aged military father, a slightly decayed specimen of the beau sabreur, were breakfasting at Charlotte's coveted comer table.

"Why, she knows you !" Charlotte exclaimed, with eager, slightly offended curiosity; then as Pope remained dumb and Warr's sunburned cheeks were conscious of a tingling sensation of warmth, she tittered and tossed her large head, and said with a laborious loftiness and reserve :

"I see! I beg your pardon ! But indeed she did not appear to belong to that class of — "

At which Pope bounded in his chair and collapsed with a gurgle, and Warr, stepping to the rescue, proposed liqueur and cigarettes in the garden.

Thither the two men repaired alone, — Charlotte, with a happy inspiration, possibly snatched from Jane's coiffure — ^finding it necessary that her hair should be again dressed.

They had a little table under the shade of a pinkishstemmed eucalyptus, and as the sunshine danced upon the gilt-green decanter and the tiny glasses the quick attendant set before them. Pope — who had interchanged no signal of intelligence with Warr up to the moment, broke out with :

*T)eplorably unfortunate ! Awful — most awful !"

"Luckily Charlotte was quite ignorant," Warr began.

"I trust,'' Pope returned, "I trust in Providence that she may remain so! But both, my dear Warr! My first and my second together under one roof. My second admires my first's toilette. My first — " he broke off. "It sounds like one of the acrostics newspapers offer to be guessed correctly for a prize." He rolled his round china-blue eyes over the rim of his little glass of Benedictine. "You cannot imagine," he went on, "the kind of sensation that came over me. I felt like — I do not know what I felt like, my dear Warr."

"Men are more sensitive than women," Warr remarked. "Our skins are tougher, but our feelings are less pachydermatous."

You mean that Jane took it coolly," Pope said. Coolness has always been her weapon, under all circumstances and in every conceivable situation. As for Bigg-Warsley — "

"He looked uncommonly sick," said Warr, recalling the visage that Lothario had been tmable to wring into a grin.

Do you think," Pope hesitated, and swallowed, that it is incumbent on me — the encounter having taken place on foreign soil — ^to send him a friend ?"

"With a challenge ? Absolutely no ! Your present position puts such a course out of the question."

"I will not assume, my dear Warr," Pope said, "that your assurance does not give me some amount of satisfaction. You knew me at Eton, where I was very far from being a fighting boy — "

"I remember your hitting Dorwen in the eye because he stole Diana's photograph," said Warr, with the old warming towards the old, kindly, boyish days.

"At Warr Court in the holidays," Pope Dollimore returned. "You should remember too, my dear Warr, that he thrashed me dreadfully."

Hilary recalled the pumping episode, and Diana's appearance on the scene.

"Diana! She — she had said only the evening before that she hated and scorned a boy who could not use his fists on provocation. And so — I took the first that occurred," Pope exclaimed.

"Diana has been the axis on which your whole life has spun."

"She has such strength of purpose," the little man said. "Such astonishing vitality. Energy that positively dizzies one. I declare to you," he put his hand plaintively to his head, "that sometimes she makes everything go round."

"That is through trying so incessantly to make everything go square," said Warr.

"It pleases her," said Pope stoutly, "and it does not — ^" he could not candidly say Lady Baintree's amiable weakness was invariably productive of unalloyed good to others, "it does not always do harm. You said that she was well, and busy?"

"Planning married happiness," said Warr wickedly, "for another of her protegies; Euphemia BuUerby, I believe ; I mean, I know,"

"Miss BuUerby is engaged ?"

"To the Westwood-Witton doctor, that Scotchman, Lockaby."

"I should have said, had you asked me, that two people more tmsuited to each other did not exist."

"Perhaps Diana holds the opinion that it is better to begin with a little disparity."

Pope winced, and Warr blamed his own faculty for unconsidered speech. But Diana's victim said, after a pause :

"To revert to the unpleasant encounter of this morning — I may say, Warr, that I consider your accidental arrival — in connection with that — as Providential."

Wart's eyes, well-opened, handsome, and of darker hue than his light brown hair, and short, crisp beard, opened in surprise. What did old Popy want him to it do ? Explain the situation to Charlotte the bride — act as ambassador conveying suggestions of departure to Jane the Hardy? But Pope was already launched upon the explanation.

"You observed the three people who were breakfasting at an adjoining table?"

"The comer table. A grizzled ex-officer— of British Cavalry, I should say, with two daughters."

"Precisely. Jane — she spoke to them." . . .

"Well?"

"They are known to me."

1 saw that you were acquainted." 'A Scottish family. Their name is Colquhoun. They are very far from rich, but are highly connected, and the eldest girl, Elizabeth, a charming young creature, is just upon the point of making her dibut in Society. I have enlisted, I trust, Diana's good offices in her behalf. The letter in which I mentioned her was written from Nice, the place, in fact, where I came across the family, reviving an agreeable acquaintance after a lapse of years."

Warr wondered to what this preamble was going to lead.

"Cannes is full of fashionable people — people to whom Elizabeth Colquhoun will be presented by and by — ^people whose good gtaces it is imperative that she should gain," Pope went on, his round florid cheeks growing pinker, and his round china-blue eyes more saucer-shaped as his excitement increased. "And I need hardly say to a man of the world, like yourself, it is necessary that Miss Colquhoun should not place herself, at the outset of her social career, in an invidious position. Now, I do not suppose that, all things considered, and putting personal prejudice aside, that Jane — that the lady who arrived at the hotel last night in company with Mr. Bigg-Warsley can be considered a fitting companion for a young girl."

Warr began to see a glimmer.

"It is plain therefore that Captain Colquhoun or Miss Elizabeth herself must be given a hint upon the subject," Pope went on, "and it is equally clear that the warning must not emanate from me. And I think, my dear Warr, that if you would convey to father and daughter together, or father and daughter singly, the necessary caution — "

"They will, singly or together, think me uncommonly impertinent," said Warr.