Chapter II: Tottering Life and Fortune

... Loathsome sight,
How from the rosy lips of life and love
Flashed the bare grinning skeleton of death!
White was her cheek; sharp breaths of anger puff’d
Her nostrils....
—TENNYSON (_Merlin and Vivien_).

With head erect, Lady Lochore walked on between the borders of lilies. The path was so narrow and the lilies had grown to such height and luxuriance that they struck heavily against her; and each time, like swinging censers, sent gushes of perfume up towards the hot blue sky.

Colonel Harcourt went perforce a step behind her, just avoiding to tread on her garments as they trailed, dragging the little pebbles on the hot grey soil. Now and again he mopped his brow. He liked neither the sun on his back nor the strong breath of the flowers, nor this aimless promenade. But, in his dealings with women, he had kept an invariable rule of almost exaggerated deference in little things, and he had found that he could go further in great ones than most men who disdained such nicety.

Suddenly Lady Lochore stopped and began to cough. Then she wheeled round and looked at Harcourt with irate eyes over the folds of her handkerchief she was pressing to her lips.

Anthony Harcourt possessed a breast as hard as granite, withal an easy superficial gentlemanly benevolence which did very well for the world in lieu of deeper feeling; and a great deal better for himself. He was quite shocked at the sound of that cough; still more so when Lady Lochore flung out the handkerchief towards him with the inimitable gesture of the living tragedy and showed it to him stained with blood.

“Look at that, Tony,” said she, “and tell me how long do you think it will be before I bark myself to death?”

Her cheek was scarlet and her eyes shone with unnatural brilliance in their wasted sockets. She swayed a little as she stood, like the lilies about her; and indeed she herself looked like some passionate southern flower wasting life and essence even as one looked at her.

“Come out of this heat,” said Harcourt. He took her left arm and placed it within his; led her to a stone bench in the shade. She sat down with an impatient sigh, passed the back of the hand he had held impatiently over her wet forehead and closed her eyes. In her right hand, crushed upon her lap, the stained cambric lay hidden.

“Is not this better,” said her companion, as if he were speaking to a child, “out of that sunshine and the sickly smell of those flowers? Here we get the breeze from the woods and the scent of the hay. A sort of little heaven after a successful imitation of the infernal regions.”

“If you mean Hell, why don’t you say Hell?” said Lady Lochore. She laughed in that bitterness of soul that can find no expression but in irony. “Bah!” she went on, half to herself. “It’s no use trying not to believe in Hell, my friend; you have to, when you’ve got it in you! Look here,” she suddenly blazed her unhappy eyes upon him. “Look here, Tony—honour, now! How long do you give me?”

All the man’s superficial benevolence looked sadly at her from his handsome face.

“I am no doctor.”

“Faugh! Subterfuge!”

“Why, then, at the rate going, not three months,” said he. “But, with rational care, I’ve no doubt, as long as most.”

“Not three months!” She clenched her right hand convulsively and glanced down at the white folds escaping from her fingers as if they contained her death warrant. “Thank, you, Tony. You’re a beast at heart, like the rest of us, but you’re a gentleman. I am going at a rapid rate, am I not? Oh, God! I shouldn’t care—what’s beyond can’t be worse than what’s here. But it’s the child!”

The man made no answer. He had the tact of all situations. Here silence spoke the sympathy that was deeper than words. There was a pause, Lady Lochore drew her breath in gasps.

“It’s a pretty state of affairs here,” she said, at last, with her hard laugh.

“You mean——?”

“I mean my sanctimonious brother and his prudish lady!”

“Surely——?” He raised his eyebrows in expressive query.

“Not she!” cried Lady Lochore in passionate disgust. “I would think the better of her if she did. No, she’s none of those who deem the world well lost for love. Oh, she’ll calculate! She’ll give nothing for nothing! She’s laid her plans.” Lady Lochore began reckoning on three angry fingers uplifted. “There’s the equivocal position—one; my brother’s diseased notions of honour—two; her own bread-and-butter comeliness—three. She’ll hook him, Tony. She’ll hook him, and my boy will go a beggar! Lochore has pretty well ruined us as it is.”

“I should not regard Sir David as a marrying man, myself,” said the colonel soothingly.

“No,” said she, “the last man in the world to marry, but the first to be married on some preposterous claim! Look here, Tony, we are old friends. I have not walked you off here to waste your time. You know that my fortunes are in even more rapid decline than myself. There’s the child; he is the heir to this place. Before God, what is it to me, but the child and his rights! I’ll fight for them till I die. Not much of a boast, you say, but when a woman’s pushed to it, as I am”—her voice failed her. There was something awful in the contrast between the energy of her passion and the frailness of her body and in the way they reacted one upon another.

“Poor soul!” said Colonel Harcourt to himself—and his kind eyes were almost suffused.

“Tony, Tony!” she panted in a whisper of frantic intensity, “you can help. Oh, don’t look like that! I know I’m boring you, but I’ll not bore anyone for long. Think what it means to me! Fool! As if any man could understand! Don’t be afraid, I won’t ask anything hard of you. Only to make love to the rosy dairymaid, to the prim housekeeper, to the pretty widow. Why, man, you can’t keep your wicked eyes off her as it is!”

He leaned back against the bench, crossed one shapely leg over the other, closed his eyes and laughed gently to himself. Lady Lochore, bending forward, measured him with a swift glance, and her lips parted in a sneer.

“You’re but a lazy fellow. You like your peach growing at your elbow. You’ve been afraid of hurting my feelings ... you have been so long regarded as my possession! Oh, Tony, that’s all over now. Listen—if you don’t know the ways of woman, who does? The case is very plain: that creature is planning to compromise David. I know how you can make love when you choose, and I know my fool of a brother. I’ll have her compromised first! And then——”

She pressed her hands to her heart, then to her throat; for a moment or two the poor body had struck work. Only her eyes pleaded, threatened.

“And then? Before the Lord, you ladies!”

For all his _bonhommie de viveur_, Colonel Harcourt, of the First Guards, was known about Town to be a good deal of “a tiger,” as the cant of the day had it; and he held a justified reputation as an expert with the “saw-handle and hair-trigger.” Conscious of this, he went on:

“Truly, Maud, it may well be said there’s never a man sent below but a woman showed the way! But is there not something a little crude in your plan?”

“Crude! Have I time to be mealy-mouthed? I’m not asking you anything very hard, God knows! Merely to follow your own bent, Tony Harcourt; you have had your way with me, but that is over now, and you know it. I want you to devote yourself to that piece of country bloom instead. In three months you know what I shall be!...”

“My dear Maud.... And then?” He was amused no longer: Lady Lochore was undeniably crude. “A regular conspiracy!” he went on. But, after a moment’s musing, a gleam came into his eye. “What of it!” he cried, “all’s fair in love and war—a soldier’s motto, and it has been mine! And as for you, why, your spirits would keep twenty alive!”

She laughed scornfully.

“It sounds better to say so, anyhow,” she retorted. “I don’t want any mewing over me. So it’s a bargain, Tony? For old sake’s sake you’ll go against all your principles and make love to a pretty woman? And we’ll have this new Pamela out of the citadel. We’ll have this scheming dairy-wench shown up in her true colours! My precious brother, as you know, or you don’t know, has got some rather freakish notions about women. He’s had a slap in the face once already, and it turned him silly. Disgust him of this second love affair, he’ll never have a third and I shall die in peace. You have marked the affectionate, fraternal way in which he treats me! I had to force my way back into this house. He’ll never forgive me for marrying Lochore—and as for Lochore himself, to the trump of doom David will never forgive him for.... Bah! for doing him the best turn one man ever did another!”

“And what was that?” asked the colonel, with a slight yawn.

“What you and I are going to do now,” said my Lady. She smoothed her ruffled hair, folded her stained kerchief and slipped it into her bag; rose, and looked down smiling once more at the man, her fine nostrils fluttering with her quick breath in a way that gave a singular expression of mocking cruelty to her face. “Lochore saved Sir David from marrying beneath him.”

“And how did he accomplish that?” asked the colonel, rising too.

There was now a faint flutter of curiosity in his breast The reasons for Sir David’s eccentricity had once been much discussed. Lady Lochore took two steps down the path, then looked back over her shoulder.

“In the simplest way in the world,” she answered. “He gave a greedy child an apple, while my simpleton of a brother was solemnly forging a wedding ring.”

“Why”—the colonel stared, then laughed—“my Lady,” said he “these are strange counsels! Why—absurd! How could I think the plump, pretty Phyllis would as much as blink at an old fogey like me. And, as for me——”

Again Lady Lochore turned her head and looked long and fully at the speaker.

“Oh, Tony!” she said slowly at last. “Tony, Tony!”

Colonel Harcourt tried in vain to present a set face of innocence; the self-conscious smile of the gratified _roué_ quivered on his lips. He broke into a sudden loud laugh and wagged his head at her. She dropped her eyelids for a second to shut out the sight.

“And she bit into the apple?” asked the colonel, presently.

“With all her teeth, my dear friend. Heavens! isn’t the world’s history but one long monotonous repetition? With us Eves, everything depends upon the way the fruit is offered. And that is why, I suppose, it is seldom Adam and his legitimate orchard that tempts us. Reflect on that, Tony.”

With this fleer, and a careless forbidding motion of her hand, she left him standing and looking after her.

There was a mixture of admiration and distrust in his eyes.

“By George, what a woman!” said he. “Gad, I’m glad I am not her Adam, anyhow!”

Then his glance grew veiled, as it fixed itself upon an inward thought, and a slow complacent smile crept upon his face.