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Page 110
It was nearly midnight. Outside, the dull rumble of London
seemed a sound, continuous, unvarying, as though it were the
distant roar of a world turning in some stellar space.
It was a great old house in Park Lane, heavy and of that gloomy
architecture with which the feeling of the English people, at an
earlier time, had been so strangely in accord. It stood before
St. James's Park oppressive and monumental, and now in the midst
of yellow fog its heavy front was like a mausoleum.
But within, the house had been treated to a modern re-casting,
not entirely independent of the vanity of wealth.
After the dinner at the Ritz, the girl felt that she could not go
on; and Lady Mary's party, on its way to the dancing, put her
down at the door. She gave the excuse of a crippling headache.
But it was a deeper, more profound aching that disturbed her.
She was before the tragic hour, appearing in the lives of many
women, when suddenly, as by the opening of a door, one realizes
the irrevocable aspect of a marriage of which the details are
beginning to be arranged. That hour in which a woman must
consider, finally, the clipping of all threads, except the single
one that shall cord her to a mate for life.
Until to-night, in spite of preparations on the way, the girl had
not felt this marriage as inevitable. Her aunt had pressed for
it, subtly, invisibly, as an older woman is able to do.
Her situation was always, clearly before her. She was alone in
the world; with very little, almost nothing. The estate her
father inherited he had finally spent in making great
explorations. There was no unknown taste of the world that he
had not undertaken to enter. The final driblets of his fortune
had gone into his last adventure in the Great Gobi Desert from
which he had never returned.
The girl had been taken by this aunt in London, incredibly rich,
but on the fringes of the fashionable society of England, which
she longed to enter. Even to the young girl, her aunt's plan was
visible. With a great settlement, such as this ambitious woman
could manage, the girl could be a duchess.
The marriage to Lord Eckhart in the diplomatic service, who would
one day be a peer of England, had been a lure dangled
unavailingly before her, until that night, when, on his return
from India, he had carried her off her feet with his amazing
incredible sacrifice. It was the immense idealism, the immense
romance of it that had swept her into this irrevocable thing.
She got up now, swiftly, as though she would again realize how
the thing had happened and stooped over the table above the heap
of jewels. They were great pigeon-blood rubies, twenty-seven of
them, fastened together with ancient crude gold work. She lifted
the long necklace until it hung with the last jewel on the table.
The thing was a treasure, an immense, incredible treasure. And
it was for this - for the privilege of putting this into her
hands, that the man had sold everything he had in England - and
endured what the gossips said - endured it during the five years
in India - kept silent and was now silent. She remembered every
detail the rumor of a wild life, a dissolute reckless life, the
gradual, piece by piece sale of everything that could be turned
into money. London could not think of a ne'er-do-well to equal
him in the memory of its oldest gossips - and all the time with
every penny, he was putting together this immense treasure - for
her. A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing like
this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?
She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of
prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower. They were
symbols, each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of
sacrifice that lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic
figures illumined with the halos of romance.
Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that
the girl considered in this marriage. And to-night, suddenly,
the actual physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had
drawn back. Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him - a
grandmother of a German house. And, yet, who could say, perhaps
this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct
Germany of Beethoven.
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