IV

Madam, Oliver considered, was the shrewdest diplomat at Sorley's table to-night. Unlike Mrs. Beverley, she had brought no bread-and-butter miss to town, although the little Jenny was modest and blushing, as men liked 'em; as Paige was liking this one. The rogue never took his eyes off her from his place on the far side of the table, and De Joyeuse (it was clever of Madam to send Jenny in with the commander of the French battleship in the bay) was making her sparkle more quickly than an Englishman would have done. "You have intelligence," Madam was fond of saying, as though intelligence were inevitable as a handkerchief. "Bien. Use it." Gad! she used her own!

Out of the hurly-burly of uniforms, shoulders, diamond-page 189studded shirt-fronts, and enormous white ties Jenny's scared eyes at first saw only Adam languishing at her with his tie out to his ears. Great owl, she thought, and recovered sufficiently to make a face at him. But Grandma saw! Past all the welter of flowers, epergnes, lights, and the big silver elephant candelabrum presented to Major Sorley in India, Grandma saw, she who saw everything. Jenny turned hurriedly to chatter in French to De Joyeuse, who burst out into thanksgivings:

"By all the graces! So it is a fleur-de-lis and not an English rose. And I with no English of sufficient eloquence for the occasion was triste comme un chien sans la queue. May I, then, have one of those so perfect bud roses from your bouquet, mademoiselle, to remind me of the felicity of my mistake?"

"They are merely heads on wire; puppets, monsieur. Will they then serve to remind you of me."

Jenny had got her first public applause. De Joyeuse flung back his head with a great laugh that made every one turn. Madam saw Jenny crimson to that smooth candid forehead with its thin arched brows; but she was ready for De Joyeuse again, la petite cocotte adorée, Madam thought fondly…. A nymph, this Jenny, but one who has played late with Puck in the woods and caught through green twilights the flash of a satyr dancing, and rather hopes to see him soon again. Mori Dieu, thought Madam, suddenly concerned, will she perhaps be wasted on this Paige after all?

"I cannot conceive," said James Sorley, sonorously, at his table-end, "that this new company calling itself the Peninsular and Oriental can ever vie favourably with the clipper-ships. Most certainly not with those which Tasmania herself has built. There is nothing in the China tea trade much better, although the Australian Steamship Navigation Company, whose boats, I regret to say, are called boomerangs by the light-minded because they unfortunately have had so often to return to port …"

There was James at it again, like an elderly cuttlefish, thought Madam, protecting himself in a thick black soup of the dullest information.

"It is perhaps not realized by many that Hobart Town as a refitting station for whalers, from as far afield as the Japanese page 190and American grounds, has no equal. Nor has its harder timber for shipbuilding any equal. What Aloysius Carmichael wrote the last last Mercury of——"

"Fi done!" cried Madam, who did not mean to have this delicious vol-au-vent thus spoiled. "Not that shocking man with his so shocking old hat and coat?"

"Don't abuse them, ma'am," said Noll, peering at her round that detestable elephant and more than ever the good-looking vaurien. "Carmichael's hat, like its owner, was good once. As for his coat, old it may be, but it covers a multitude of sins."

"By Jove, sir," said a stout colonel. "That wit of yours must be dangerous to your enemies."

"It is more dangerous to my friends, perhaps," said Noll, lightly. "I know so much more about them, you see." He went on talking, and Julia, opposite Mab, suddenly saw by Mab's face that Noll was being dangerous still. She strained her ears. He was talking about tattooing: "Sailors tell me that the Fijians consider it a necessary preliminary to love-making; but I fear we have not that excuse, as it is, I believe, forbidden by the Bible. Yet some of us … a few of us … do other things which the Bible forbids."

So Noll knew; and how long would it be before others knew, depended entirely upon his humour. Involuntarily Julia shut her eyes, seeing in the light on the lids first Mab's set face, and behind it a score of grinning faces, and behind all cloudy clustering wild things, shapeless things peering here and there with shifting eyes. She roused herself with an effort when Mrs. Sorley made the signal; but she was scared still when, half through the evening, she walked on Mab's arm out of the ball-room at Government House and into an anteroom where he found her a seat behind a bower of tree-ferns, saying: "It is only once in a thousand times that Noll loses his sense of decency. I'll swear we hear no more from him."

"So … you've told him."

"You know I have not. I'm tired of being accused of all kinds of absurd things, Julia."

She pushed her hair back nervously. Ever since she saw Jenny's luminous youth she had been conscious that she was not looking page 191her best, and Mab's eyes were confirming it. Perhaps her white cashmere wrap embroidered with gold and cherry-colour was too hard, and even her maid had hinted that the elaborate head-dress of gauze and lace and big cherry bows was set too far back on her fair puffed hair. She thought of Jenny's wreath of roses and a wild tide of jealousy and despair rushed up and out.

"It's your fault. It's all your fault if I do look time-worn and shop-soiled. You did it. Why didn't you let me alone? I was so young, and you … Oh, men are brutes … animals!"

He did not move his eyes from her. She railed on hysterically:

"You know how hard it is for me. You know what life with Berry means … and all the public position to keep up. And you never letting me go. It is you, not Berry, who's destroying me. You! You!" She flung the words at him like stones. "And now when I look old and tired you compare me with Jenny. I used to be like Jenny before you …"

She went on and on, unable to stop. And he stood looking as though in a minute he'd smile; looking in the fullness of his manhood a hundred times more splendid than he had been as a boy. Age had ripened him, but already she … Suddenly she began to sob. "Mab, Mab! I'm not thirty yet. I am very young to be so unhappy."

"Why should you be unhappy? I have told you I will call him out when you choose."

"And do you imagine that would end it?" She believed that he did. Men always thought that you could settle any matter by violence. It would not be ended so easily as that. The laws of the universe, always falling more heavily upon women, would see to that. "Mab, I'm too frightened." No, men were not like women. He put being frightened—and what is worse?—aside as trifling.

"The question is, Julia, what do you want me to do?"

As though it were as simple as that! How did she know what she wanted him to do?

In the dim light behind the tree-ferns Mab stood quite still. Julia was always making scenes. Some women—and unluckily Julia was one—luxuriated in scenes. They loved to drag out to the light instincts, delicacies which he felt should be veiled, page 192cherished. He was never very clever with words, but he knew dimly that there were some things to be silently and sacredly held within the mysterious ego of the soul. And Julia was always trying to turn them into melodrama. Quite suddenly he was sick of it. Sick of it. Sick of her.

She lifted her blue eyes that still were lovely; put out her gloved hands to him, saying piteously, "How I wish I could forget you … let you go."

"But you can't. I understand." It startled him to know how intensely he understood, how intensely he could say, "Nor can I let you go."

"It isn't as though I were not a good wife to him now," said Julia, recovering. "There's surely no harm in our seeing each other sometimes."

His smile was bitter. No harm for her who would have her cake and eat it. But what about him? Beyond the screen people were streaming past: ribbons, laces, and ringlets of laughing girls streaming past. The loud rollicking of music through opened doors. Mab gave Julia his arm, and they went out into the stream.

Jenny was comparing programmes with Maria when Mab came presently asking for a dance. Jenny, lively as a cricket, glowing as the dawn, laughed at him. "Not one left, Uncle Mab. We both haven't, and Grandmamma won't let me dance more than once with anyone, either."

"But I was granted the supreme favour of 'The Blue Danube'," remarked Mr. Paige from behind Madam. He had propped the wall there ever since, with crush-hat elegant on his hip, as though requesting the world to understand that after consorting with angels one did not descend to the common herd. There he remained, drinking Jenny like wine as she floated by and becoming so much stimulated that he actually called a toast at the buffet later while the ladies were cloaking: "Gentlemen! I give you … aw … the brightest eyes here to-night."

"They're toasting Jenny," said Oliver, arriving to give Madam his arm; and Jenny, with wide eyes, stricken into terror by the power of her own womanhood, heard them cheering. Then she page 193turned and dived into the carriage, and Madam followed to find her sobbing.

"There, there," said Madam, patting her and thinking of Julia as she had seen her a moment before, standing in the doorway listening to the cheers. "La reine est morte. Vive la reine. Such things will go to arrive, ma petite."