Phantom Fortune, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [free e novels .txt] 📗

in her nature to break her heart for anybody; but she wanted to make a great marriage, to be renowned and admired. She had been reared and trained for that; and she was not going to belie her training.

A visitor from the great London world was so rare an event that there was naturally a little excitement in the idea of Lady Kirkbank's arrival. The handsomest and most spacious of the spare bedrooms was prepared for the occasion. The housekeeper was told that the dinner must be perfect. There must be nothing old-fashioned or ponderous; there must be mind as well as matter in everything. Rarely did Lady Maulevrier look at a bill of fare; but on this particular morning she went carefully through the menu, and corrected it with her own hand.

A pair of post-horses brought Lady Kirkbank and her maid from Windermere station, in time for afternoon tea, and the friends who had only met twice within the last forty years, embraced each other on the threshold of Lady Maulevrier's morning-room.

'My dearest Di,' cried Lady Kirkbank, 'what a delight to see you again after such ages; and what a too lovely spot you have chosen for your retreat from the world, the flesh, and the devil. If I could be a recluse anywhere, it would be amongst just such delicious surroundings.'

Without, twilight shades were gathering; within, there was only the light of a fire and a shaded lamp upon the tea table; there was just light enough for the two women to see each other's faces, and the change which time had wrought there.

Never did womanhood in advanced years offer a more striking contrast than that presented by the woman of fashion and the recluse. Lady Maulevrier was almost as handsome in the winter of her days as she had been when life was in its spring. The tall, slim figure, erect as a dart, the delicately chiselled features and alabaster complexion, the soft silvery hair, the perfect hand, whiter and more transparent than the hand of girlhood, the stately movements and bearing, all combined to make Lady Maulevrier a queen among woman. Her brocade gown of a deep shade of red, with a border of dark sable on cuffs and collar, suggested a portrait by Velasquez. She wore no ornaments except the fine old Brazilian diamonds which flashed and sparkled upon her slender fingers.

If Lady Maulevrier looked like a picture in the Escurial, Lady Kirkbank resembled a caricature in _La Vie Parisienne_. Everything she wore was in the very latest fashion of the Parisian _demi-monde_, that exaggerated elegance of a fashion plate which only the most exquisite of women could redeem from vulgarity. Plush, brocade, peacock's feathers, golden bangles, mousquetaire gloves, a bonnet of purple plumage set off by ornaments of filagree gold, an infantine little muff of lace and wild flowers, buttercups and daisies; and hair, eyebrows and complexion as artificial as the flowers on the muff.

All that art could do to obliterate the traces of age had been done for Georgina Kirkbank. But seventy years are not to be obliterated easily, and the crow's feet showed through the bloom de Ninon, and the eyes under the painted arches were glassy and haggard, the carnation lips had a withered look. Age was made all the more palpable by the artifice which would have disguised it.

Lady Maulevrier suffered an absolute shock at beholding the friend of her youth. She had not accustomed herself to the idea that women in society could raddle their cheeks, stain their lips, and play tricks before high heaven with their eyebrows and eyelashes. In her own youth painted faces had been the ghastly privilege of a class of womankind of which the women of society were supposed to know nothing. Persons who showed their ankles and rouged their cheeks were to be seen of an afternoon in Bond Street; but Lady Diana Angersthorpe had been taught to pass them by as if she saw them not, to behold without seeing these creatures outside the pale. And now she saw her own dearest friend, a person distinctly within the pale, plastered with bismuth and stained with carmine, and wearing hair of a colour so obviously false and inharmonious, that child-like faith could hardly accept it as reality. Forty years ago Lady Kirkbank's long ringlets had been darkest glossiest brown, to-day she wore a tousled fringe of bright yellow, piquantly contrasting with Vandyke brown eyebrows.

It took Lady Maulevrier some moments to get over the shock. She drew a chair to the fire and established her friend in it, and then, with a little gasp, she said:

'I am charmed to see you again, Georgie!'

'You darling, I was sure you would be glad. But you must find me awfully changed--awfully.'

For worlds Lady Maulevrier could not have denied this truth. Happily Lady Kirkbank did not wait for an answer.

'Society is so wearing, and George and I never seem to get an interval of quiet. Kirkbank is to be full of men next week. Your granddaughter will have a good time.'

'There will be a few women, of course?'

'Oh, yes, there's no avoiding that; only one doesn't reckon them. Sir George only counts his guns. We expect a splendid season. I shall send you some birds of my own shooting.'

'You shoot!' exclaimed Lady Maulevrier, amazed.

'Shoot! I should think I do. What else is there to amuse one in Scotland, after the salmon fishing is over? I have never missed a season for the last thirty years, unless we have been abroad.'

'Please, don't innoculate Lesbia with your love of sport.'

'What! you wouldn't like her to shoot? Well, perhaps you are right. It is hardly the thing for a pretty girl with her fortune to make. It spoils the delicacy of the skin. But I'm afraid she'll find Kirkbank dull if she doesn't go out with the guns. She can meet us with the rest of the women at luncheon. We have some capital picnic luncheons on the moor, I can assure you.'

'I know she will enjoy herself with you. She has been accustomed to a very quiet life here.'

'It is a lovely spot; but I own I cannot understand how you can have lived here exclusively during all these years--you who used to be all life and fire, loving change, action, political and diplomatic society, to dance upon the crest of the wave, as it were. Your whole nature must have suffered some curious change.'

Their close intimacy of the past warranted freedom of speech in the present.

'My nature did undergo a change, and a severe one,' answered Lady Maulevrier, gloomily.

'It was that horrid--and I daresay unfortunate scandal about his lordship; and then the sad shock of his death,' murmured Lady Kirkbank, sympathetically. 'Most women, with your youth and beauty, would have forgotten the scandal and the husband in a twelvemonth, and would have made a second marriage more brilliant than the first. But no Indian widow who ever performed suttee was more worthy of praise than you, or even that person of Ephesus, whose story I have heard somewhere. Indeed, I have always spoken of your life as a long suttee. But you mean to re-appear in society next season, I hope, when you present your granddaughter?'

'I shall certainly go up to London to present her, and possibly I may spend the season in town; but I shall feel like Rip Van Winkle.'

'No, no, you won't, my dear Di. You have kept yourself _au courant_, I know. Even my silly gossiping letters may have been of _some_ use.'

'They have been most valuable. Let me give you another cup of tea,' said Lady Maulevrier, who had been officiating at her own exquisite tea-table, an arrangement of inlaid woods, antique silver, and modern china, which her friend pronounced a perfect poem.

Indeed, the whole room was poetic, Lady Kirkbank declared, and there are many highly praised scenes which less deserve the epithet. The dark red walls and cedar dado, the stamped velvet curtains, of an indescribable shade between silver-grey and olive, the Sheraton furniture, the parqueterie floor and Persian prayer-rugs, the deep yet brilliant hues of crackle porcelain and Chinese cloisonné enamel, the artistic fireplace, with dog-stove, low brass fender, and ingle-nook recessed under the high mantelpiece, all combined to form a luxurious and harmonious whole.

Lady Kirkbank admired the _tout ensemble_ in the fitful light of the fire, the dim grey of deepening twilight.

'There never was a more delicious cell!' she exclaimed, 'but still I should feel it a prison, if I had to spend six weeks in the year in it. I never stay more than six weeks anywhere out of London; and I always find six weeks more than enough. The first fortnight is rapture, the third and fourth weeks are calm content, the fifth is weariness, the sixth a fever to be gone. I once tried a seventh week at Pontresina, and I hated the place so intensely that I dared not go back there for the next three years. But now tell me. Diana, have you really performed suttee, have you buried yourself alive in this sweet spot deliberately, or has the love of retirement grown upon you, and have you become a kind of lotus-eater?'

'I believe I have become a kind of lotus-eater. My retirement here has been no sentimental sacrifice to Lord Maulevrier's memory.'

'I am glad to hear that; for I really think the worst possible use a woman can make of her life is in wasting it on lamentation for a dead and gone husband. Life is odiously short at the best, and it is mere imbecility to fritter away any of our scanty portion upon the dead, who can never be any the better for our tears.'

'My motive in living at Fellside was not reverence for the dead. And now let us talk of the gay world, of which you know all the secrets. Have you heard anything more about Lord Hartfield?'

'Ah, there is a subject in which you have reason to be interested. I have not forgotten the romance of your youth--that first season in which Ronald Hollister used to haunt every place at which you appeared. Do you remember that wet afternoon at the Chiswick flower-show, when you and he and I took shelter in the orange house, and you two made love to each other most audaciously in an atmosphere of orange-blossoms that almost stifled me? Yes, those were glorious days!'

'A short summer of gladness, a brief dream,' sighed Lady Maulevrier. 'Is young Lord Hartfield like his father?'

'No, he takes after the Ilmingtons; but still there is a look of your old sweetheart--yes, I think there is an expression. I have not seen him for nearly a year. He is still abroad, roaming about somewhere in search of adventures. These young men who belong to the Geographical and the Alpine Club are hardly ever at home.'

'But though they may be sometimes lost to society, they are all the more worthy of society's esteem when they do appear,' said Lady Maulevrier. 'I think there must be an ennobling influence in Alpine travel, or in the vast solitudes of the Dark Continent. A man finds himself face to face with unsophisticated nature, and with the grandest forces of the universe. Professor Tyndall writes delightfully of his Alpine experiences; his mind seems to have ripened in the solitude and untainted air of the Alps. And I believe Lord Hartfield is a young man of very high character and of considerable cultivation, is he not?'

'He is a splendid young fellow.