The Head of the House of Coombe was not a title to be found in
Burke or Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head's own and having
been accepted by his acquaintances was not infrequently used by
them in their light moments in the same spirit. The peerage recorded
him as a Marquis and added several lesser attendant titles.
"When English society was respectable, even to stodginess at times,"
was his point of view, "to be born 'the Head of the House' was a
weighty and awe-inspiring thing. In fearful private denunciatory
interviews with one's parents and governors it was brought up against
one as a final argument against immoral conduct such as debt and
not going to church. As the Head of the House one was called upon
to be an Example. In the country one appeared in one's pew and
announced oneself a 'miserable sinner' in loud tones, one had to
invite the rector to dinner with regularity and 'the ladies' of
one's family gave tea and flannel petticoats and baby clothes to
cottagers. Men and women were known as 'ladies' and 'gentlemen'
in those halcyon days. One Represented things--Parties in
Parliament--Benevolent Societies, and British Hospitality in the
form of astounding long dinners at which one drank healths and
made speeches. In roseate youth one danced the schottische and the
polka and the round waltz which Lord Byron denounced as indecent.
To recall the vigour of his poem gives rise to a smile--when one
chances to sup at a cabaret."
He was considered very amusing when he analyzed his own mental
attitude towards his world in general.
"I was born somewhat too late and somewhat too early," he explained
in his light, rather cold and detached way. "I was born and educated
at the closing of one era and have to adjust myself to living in
another. I was as it were cradled among treasured relics of the
ethics of the Georges and Queen Charlotte, and Queen Victoria in
her bloom. _I_ was in my bloom in the days when 'ladies' were
reproved for wearing dresses cut too low at Drawing Rooms. Such
training gives curious interest to fashions in which bodices are
unconsidered trifles and Greek nymphs who dance with bare feet
and beautiful bare legs may be one's own relations. I trust I do
not seem even in the shadowiest way to comment unfavourably. I
merely look on at the rapidities of change with unalloyed interest.
As the Head of the House of Coombe I am not sure WHAT I am an
Example of--or to. Which is why I at times regard myself in that
capacity with a slightly ribald lightness."
The detachment of his question with regard to the newborn infant
of the airily irresponsible Feather was in entire harmony with his
attitude towards the singular incident of Life as illustrated by
the World, the Flesh and the Devil by none of which he was--as far
as could be observed--either impressed, disturbed or prejudiced.
His own experience had been richly varied and practically unlimited
in its opportunities for pleasure, sinful or unsinful indulgence,
mitigated or unmitigated wickedness, the gathering of strange
knowledge, and the possible ignoring of all dull boundaries. This
being the case a superhuman charity alone could have forborne to
believe that his opportunities had been neglected in the heyday
of his youth. Wealth and lady of limitations in themselves would
have been quite enough to cause the Nonconformist Victorian mind
to regard a young--or middle-aged--male as likely to represent a
fearsome moral example, but these three temptations combined with
good looks and a certain mental brilliance were so inevitably the
concomitants of elegant iniquity that the results might be taken
for granted.
That the various worlds in which he lived in various lands accepted
him joyfully as an interesting and desirable of more or less
abominably sinful personage, the Head of the House of Coombe--even
many years before he became its head--regarded with the detachment
which he had, even much earlier, begun to learn. Why should it be
in the least matter what people thought of one? Why should it in
the least matter what one thought of oneself--and therefore--why
should one think at all? He had begun at the outset a brilliantly
happy young pagan with this simple theory. After the passing of
some years he had not been quite so happy but had remained quite
as pagan and retained the theory which had lost its first fine
careless rapture and gained a secret bitterness. He had not married
and innumerable stories were related to explain the reason why.
They were most of them quite false and none of them quite true.
When he ceased to be a young man his delinquency was much discussed,
more especially when his father died and he took his place as the
head of his family. He was old enough, rich enough, important enough
for marriage to be almost imperative. But he remained unmarried.
In addition he seemed to consider his abstinence entirely an affair
of his own.
"Are you as wicked as people say you are?" a reckless young woman
once asked him. She belonged to the younger set which was that
season trying recklessness, in a tentative way, as a new fashion.
"I really don't know. It is so difficult to decide," he answered.
"I could tell better if I knew exactly what wickedness is. When
I find out I will let you know. So good of you to take an interest."
Thirty years earlier he knew that a young lady who had heard he was
wicked would have perished in flames before immodestly mentioning
the fact to him, but might have delicately attempted to offer "first
aid" to reformation, by approaching with sweetness the subject of
going to church.
The reckless young woman looked at him with an attention which
he was far from being blind enough not to see was increased by his
answer.
"I never know what you mean," she said almost wistfully.
"Neither do I," was his amiable response. "And I am sure it would
not be worth while going into. Really, we neither of us know what
we mean. Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may
have painful limitations--or I may not."
After his father's death he spent rather more time in London and
rather less in wandering over the face of the globe. But by the
time he was forty he knew familiarly far countries and near and
was intimate with most of the peoples thereof. He could have found
his way about blind-folded in the most distinctive parts of most
of the great cities. He had seen and learned many things. The
most absorbing to his mind had been the ambitions and changes of
nations, statesmen, rulers and those they ruled or were ruled by.
Courts and capitals knew him, and his opportunities were such as
gave him all ease as an onlooker. He was outwardly of the type
which does not arouse caution in talkers and he heard much which
was suggestive even to illumination, from those to whom he remained
unsuspected of being a man who remembered things long and was
astute in drawing conclusions. The fact remained however that
he possessed a remarkable memory and one which was not a rag-bag
filled with unassorted and parti-coloured remnants, but a large and
orderly space whose contents were catalogued and filed and well
enclosed from observation. He was also given to the mental argument
which follows a point to its conclusion as a mere habit of mind.
He saw and knew well those who sat and pondered with knit brows and
cautiously hovering hand at the great chess-board which is formed
by the Map of Europe. He found an enormous interest in watching
their play. It was his fortune as a result of his position to know
persons who wore crowns and a natural incident in whose lives it
was to receive the homage expressed by the uncovering of the head
and the bending of the knee. At forty he looked back at the time
when the incongruousness, the abnormality and the unsteadiness of
the foundations on which such personages stood first struck him.
The realization had been in its almost sacrilegious novelty and
daring, a sort of thunderbolt passing through his mind. He had
at the time spoken of it only to one person.
"I have no moral or ethical views to offer," he had said. "I only
SEE. The thing--as it is--will disintegrate. I am so at sea as
to what will take its place that I feel as if the prospect were
rather horrible. One has had the old landmarks and been impressed
by the old pomp and picturesqueness so many centuries, that one
cannot see the earth without them. There have been kings even in
the Cannibal Islands."
As a statesman or a diplomat he would have seen far but he had been
too much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent
for work of any order. He freely admitted to himself that he was
a worthless person but the fact did not disturb him. Having been
born with a certain order of brain it observed and worked in spite
of him, thereby adding flavour and interest to existence. But that
was all.
It cannot be said that as the years passed he quite enjoyed the
fact that he knew he was rarely spoken of to a stranger without
its being mentioned that he was the most perfectly dressed man in
London. He rather detested the idea though he was aware that the
truth was unimpeachable. The perfection of his accompaniments had
arisen in his youth from a secret feeling for fitness and harmony.
Texture and colour gave him almost abnormal pleasure. His expression
of this as a masculine creature had its limits which resulted in
a concentration on perfection. Even at five-and-twenty however he
had never been called a dandy and even at five-and-forty no one
had as yet hinted at Beau Brummel though by that time men as well
as women frequently described to each other the cut and colour
of the garments he wore, and tailors besought him to honour them
with crumbs of his patronage in the ambitious hope that they might
mention him as a client. And the simple fact that he appeared in
a certain colour or cut set it at once on its way to become a
fashion to be seized upon, worn and exaggerated until it was
dropped suddenly by its originator and lost in the oblivion of
cheap imitations and cheap tailor shops. The first exaggeration
of the harmony he had created and the original was seen no more.
Feather herself had a marvellous trick in the collecting of her
garments. It was a trick which at times barely escaped assuming the
proportions of absolute creation. Her passion for self-adornment
expressed itself in ingenious combination and quite startling
uniqueness of line now and then. Her slim fairness and ash-gold
gossamer hair carried airily strange tilts and curves of little
or large hats or daring tints other women could not sustain
but invariably strove to imitate however disastrous the results.
Beneath soft drooping or oddly flopping brims hopelessly unbecoming
to most faces hers looked out quaintly lovely as a pictured child's
wearing its grandmother's bonnet. Everything draped itself about
or clung to her in entrancing folds which however whimsical were
never grotesque.
"Things are always becoming to me," she said quite simply. "But
often I stick a few pins into a dress to tuck it up here and there,
or if I give a hat a poke somewhere to make it crooked, they are
much more becoming. People are always asking me how I do it but
I don't know how. I bought a hat from Cerise last week and I gave
it two little thumps with my fist--one in the crown and one in
the brim and they made it wonderful. The maid of the most grand
kind of person tried to find out from my maid where I bought it.
I wouldn't let her tell of course."
She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House
of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power
of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was
concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements
for her world.
Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the
mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that
she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of
time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She
chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed,
extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as
if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two
hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid
to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate
puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids
and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed
himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and
would not have understood him if she had.
"If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he
said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and
a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks
and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather."
"I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed
quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them."
"It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it."
"If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things
floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response.
"That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours
might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things
you call paillettes."
The fancy attracted her.
"If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would
look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my
hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened
with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers."
With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place
in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than
before.
"You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am
having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress
with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must
look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a
dress and hat like that. You must only smile."
Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe
that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he
realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of
his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might
become a bore was that she had none whatever.
It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey
dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe
first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who
lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It
had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate
dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white
or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out
exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or
flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait
of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting
than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the
spreading trees.
When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group
of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him
said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost
as if he saw something which frightened him.
"Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?"
he inquired.
Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids
down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little
poke bonnet.
"It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was
answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling
little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as
quickly."
"One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger
of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is
fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale
bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It
won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please."
The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he
drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when
Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature
that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are
eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen
minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should
ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at
first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her
sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the
fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to
his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon
of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own
inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair
by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers.
She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a
rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person
and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed.
"Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without
it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?"
"Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and
blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or
paillettes."
"Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh
laugh having ended.
"One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have
to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like
the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all."
For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into
a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of
angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much
her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and
Feather laughed also.
Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other
hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing
for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of
trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again
and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker
and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed
be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to
their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place
in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be
an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing
up at the agency had been as follows:
"They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew.
They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to
their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three
years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who
remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work
above the usual."
The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who
came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners
of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather
was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich
he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain
men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One
was obliged to have money.
This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much
argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even
in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument
regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always
curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially
and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow
observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible
to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it
was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction
Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and
that he alone could explain it--and he would not.
Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of
her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and
more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him
on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with
an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound
intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There
was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her.
He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself,
her successes and her clothes which were more successful than
anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners
the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be
fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls.
Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure
that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion
was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness
and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a
result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her
had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments.
Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she
talked to her husband was at once light and friendly.
"Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you
know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me
to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me
to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose
six more."
"Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob.
"It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily.
"Doesn't it?"
"Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You
look quite red and cross."
"I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel
hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather."
"Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things
you say--and do, too, for the matter of that."
Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room
grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead.
"There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little
before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS."
"That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used
to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of
the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING
things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know,"
she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect
how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used
to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering
him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about
his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off
without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the
aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore
his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine."
She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the
grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his
fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the
eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility
of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his
mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her
clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully.
"I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political
parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things
he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He
isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him.
He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked
as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating
streamers was a relief to him."
The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about
uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her
existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly
fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to
the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an
earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall
had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable
agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the
two top-floor nurseries.
The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's
drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing
hard.
"Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe
I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think."
He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather
sprang at him.
"Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe
is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to
wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head.
"Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T
give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor
make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing
stertorously and quite insensible.
It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced
at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the
sofa.
He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless.
"Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired.
"He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can
bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera
and--"
"Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly.
"I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went
so far as to interrupt her.
"You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested.
"Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed.
"Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack
of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs.
In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely
penniless widow with a child.