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

in Arlington Street. The dining-room looked a picture of comfort. The oval table, the low lamps, the clusters of candles under coloured shades, the great Oriental bowl of wild flowers--eglantine, honeysuckle, foxglove, all the sweet hedge flowers of midsummer, made a central mass of colour and brightness against the subdued and even sombre tones of walls and curtains. The room was old, the furniture old. Nothing had been altered since the time of Sir George's great grandfather; and the whirligig of time had just now made the old things precious. Yes, those chairs and tables and sideboards and bookcases and wine-coolers against which Georgie's soul had revolted in the early years of her wedded life were now things of beauty, and Georgie's friends envied her the possession of indisputable Chippendale furniture.

Mr. Mostyn, a distinguished owner of race-horses, with his pretty wife, made up the party. The gentleman was full of his entries for Liverpool and Chester, and discoursed mysteriously with Sir George and the horsey bachelors all supper time. The lady had lately taken up science as a new form of excitement, not incompatible with frocks, bonnets, Hurlingham, the Ranelagh, and Sandown. She raved about Huxley and Tyndall, and was perpetually coming down upon her friends with awful facts about the sun, and startling propositions about latent heat, or spontaneous generation. She knew all about gases, and would hardly accept a glass of water without explaining what it was made of. Drawn by Mr. Smithson for Lesbia's amusement, the scientific matron was undoubtedly 'good fun.' The racing men were full of talk. Lesbia and Lady Kirkbank raved about the play they had just been seeing, and praised Delaunay with an enthusiasm which was calculated to make the rest of mankind burst with envy.

'Do you know you are making me positively wretched by your talk about that man?' said Colonel Delville, one of Sir George's racing friends, and an ancient adorer of the fair Georgie's. 'No, I tell you there was never anything offered higher than five to four on the mare,' interjectionally, to Sir George. 'There was a day when I thought I was your idea of an attractive man. Yes, George, a clear case of roping,' again interjectionally. 'And to hear you raving about this play-acting fellow--it is too humiliating.'

Lady Kirkbank simpered, and then sighed.

'We are getting old together,' she murmured. 'I have come to an age when one can only admire the charm of manner in the abstract--the Beautiful for the sake of the Beautiful. I think if I were lying in my grave, the music of Delaunay's voice would thrill me, under six feet of London clay. Will no one take any more wine? No. Then we may as well go into the next room and begin our little Nap.'

The adjoining room was Sir George's snuggery; and it was here that the cosy little round games after supper were always played. Sir George was not a studious person. He never read, and he never wrote, except an occasional cheque on account, for an importunate tradesman. His correspondence was conducted by the telegraph or telephone; and the room, therefore, was absorbed neither by books nor writing desks. It was furnished solely with a view to comfort. There was a round table in the centre, under a large moderator lamp which gave an exceptionally brilliant light. A divan covered with dark brown velvet occupied three sides of the room. A few choice pieces of old blue Oriental ware in the corners enlivened the dark brown walls. Three or four easy chairs stood about near the broad, old-fashioned fireplace, which had been improved with a modern-antique brass grate and a blue and white tiled hearth.

'There isn't a room in my house that looks half as comfortable as this den of yours, George,' said Mr. Smithson, as he seated himself by Lesbia's side at the card table.

They had agreed to be partners. 'Partners at cards, even if we are not to be partners for life,' Smithson had whispered, tenderly; and Lesbia's only reply had been a modest lowering of lovely eyelids, and a faint, faint blush. Lesbia's blushes were growing fainter every day.

'That is because everything in your house is so confoundedly handsome and expensive,' retorted Sir George, who did not very much care about being called George, _tout court_, by a person of Mr. Smithson's obscure antecedents, but who had to endure the familiarity for reasons known only to himself and Mr. Smithson. 'No man can expect to be comfortable in a house in which every room has cost a small fortune. My wife re-arranged this den half-a-dozen years ago when we took to sittin' here of an evenin'. She picked up the chairs and the blue pots at Bonham's, had everythin' covered with brown velvet--nice subdued tone, suit old people--hung up that yaller curtain, just for a bit of colour, and here we are.'

'It's the cosiest room in town,' said Colonel Delville, whereupon Mrs. Mostyn, while counters were being distributed, explained to the company on scientific principles _why_ the room was comfortable, expatiating upon the effect of yellow and brown upon the retina, and some curious facts relating to the optic machinery of water-fleas, as lately discovered by a great naturalist.

Unfortunately for science, the game had now begun, and the players were curiously indifferent as to the visual organs of water-fleas.

The game went on merrily till the pearly lights of dawn began to creep through the chinks of Lady Kirkbank's yellow curtain. Everybody seemed gay, yet everybody could not be winning. Fortune had not smiled upon Lesbia's cards, or on those of her partner. The Smithson and Haselden firm had come to grief. Lesbia's little ivory purse had been emptied of its three or four half-sovereigns, and Mr. Smithson had been capitalising a losing concern for the last two hours. And the play had been fast and furious, although nominally for small stakes.

'I am afraid to think of how much I must owe you,' said Lesbia, when Mr. Smithson bade her good night.

'Oh, nothing worth speaking of--sixteen or seventeen pounds, at most.'

Lesbia felt cold and creepy, and hardly knew whether it was the chill of new-born day, or the sense of owing money to Horace Smithson. Those three or four half-sovereigns to-night were the end of her last remittance from Lady Maulevrier. She had had a great many remittances from that generous grandmother; and the money had all gone, somehow. It was gone, and yet she had paid for hardly anything. She had accounts with all Lady Kirkbank's tradesmen. The money had melted away--it had oozed out of her pockets--at cards, on the race-course, in reckless gifts to servants and people, at fancy fairs, for trifles bought here and there by the way-side, as it were, for the sake of buying. If she had been suddenly asked for an account of her stewardship she could not have told what she had done with half of the money. And now she must ask for twenty pounds more, and immediately, to pay Mr. Smithson.

She went up to her room in the clear early light, and stood like a statue, with fixed thoughtful eyes, while Kibble took off her finery, the pretty pale yellow gown which set off her dark brown hair, her violet eyes. For the first time in her life she felt the keen pang of anxiety about money matters--the necessity to think of ways and means. She had no idea how much money she had received from her grandmother since she had begun her career in Scotland last autumn. The cheques had been sent her as she asked for them; sometimes even before she asked for them; and she had kept no account. She thought her grandmother was so rich that expenditure could not matter. She supposed that she was drawing upon an inexhaustible supply. And now Lady Kirkbank had told her that Lady Maulevrier was not rich, as the world reckons nowadays. The savings of a dowager countess even in forty years of seclusion could be but a small fund to draw upon for the expenses of life at high pressure.

'The sums people spend nowadays are positively appalling,' said Lady Kirkbank. 'A man with five or six thousand a year is an absolute pauper. I'm sure our existence is only genteel beggary, and yet we spend over ten thousand.'

Enlightened thus by the lips of the worldly-wise, Lesbia thought ruefully of the bills which her grandmother would have to pay for her at the end of the season, bills of the amount whereof she could not even make an approximate guess. Seraphine's charges had never been discussed in her hearing--but Lady Kirkbank had admitted that the creature was dear.


CHAPTER XXIX.


'SWIFT SUBTLE POST, CARRIER OF GRISLY CARE.'

Maulevrier called in Arlington Street before twelve o'clock next day, and found Lesbia just returning from her early ride, looking as fresh and fair as if there had been no such thing as Nap or late hours in the story of her life. She was reposing in a large easy chair by the open window, in habit and hat, just as she had come from the Row, where she had been laughing and chatting with Mr. Smithson, who jogged demurely by her side on his short-legged hunter, dropping out envenomed little jokes about the passers by. People who saw him riding by her side upon this particular morning fancied there was something more than usual in the gentleman's manner, and made up their minds that Lady Lesbia Haselden was to be mistress of the fine house in Park Lane. Mr. Smithson had fluttered and fluttered for the last five seasons; but this time the flutterer was caught.

In her newly-awakened anxiety about money matters, Lesbia had forgotten Mary's engagement: but the sight of Maulevrier recalled the fact.

'Come over here and sit down,' she said, 'and tell me this nonsense about Mary. I am expiring with curiosity. The thing is too absurd.'

'Why absurd?' asked Maulevrier, sitting where she bade him, and studiously perusing the name in his hat, as if it were a revelation.

'Oh, for a thousand reasons,' answered Lesbia, switching the flowers in the balcony with her light little whip. 'First and foremost it is absurd to think of any one so buried alive as poor Mary is finding an admirer; and secondly--well--I don't want to be rude to my own sister--but Mary is not particularly attractive.'

'Mary is the dearest girl in the world.'

'Very likely. I only said that she is not particularly attractive.'

'And do you think there is no attraction in goodness, in freshness and innocence, candour, generosity--?'

'I don't know. But I think that if Mary's nose had been a thought longer, and if she had kept her skin free from freckles she would have been almost pretty.'

'Do you really? Luckily for Mary the man who is going to marry her thinks her lovely.'

'I suppose he likes freckles. I once heard a man say he did. He said they were so original--so much character about them. And, pray, who is the man?'

'Your old adorer, and my dear friend, John Hammond.'

Lesbia turned as pale as death--pale with rage and mortification. It was not jealousy, this pang which rent her shallow soul. She had ceased to care for John Hammond. The whirlpool of society had spun that first fancy out of her giddy brain. But that a man who had loved the highest, who had worshipped her, the peerless, the beautiful, should calmly transfer his affections to her younger sister, was to the last degree exasperating.

'Your friend Mr. Hammond must be a fickle fool,' she exclaimed, 'who