V

ETTA STACKPOLE—now Lady Hudson—had been Dudley Leicester’s first and very ardent passion. She was very much his age, and, commencing in a boy-and-girl affair, the engagement had lasted many years. She was the only daughter of the Stackpoles of Cove Place, and she had all the wilfulness of an only daughter, and all the desperate acquisitiveness of the Elizabethan freebooters from whom she was descended. Robert Grimshaw said once that her life was a series of cutting-out expeditions; her maids used to declare that they certainly could not trust their young men in the hall if Miss Etta was likely to come down the stairs. It was perhaps her utter disrespect for the dictates of class that made Dudley Leicester finally and quite suddenly break off from her.

It was not exactly the case that he had caught her flirting with a boot-black. The man was the son of the farrier at Cove, and he had the merit of riding uncommonly straight to hounds. Dudley Leicester—one of those men who are essentially monogamous—had suffered unheard-of agonies at hunt balls, in grand stands; he had known the landscape near the Park to look like hell; he had supported somehow innumerable Greshams, Hewards, Traceys, Stackpole cousins, and Boveys. But the name of Bugle stuck in his gorge. “Bugle: Farrier,” was printed in tarnished gold capitals over the signboard of the vet’s front-door! It had made him have a little sick feeling that he had never had before. And that same afternoon Etta’s maid Agnes had come to him, her cheeks distorted with pitiful rage, to ask him for mercy’s sake to marry Miss Etta soon, or she herself would never get married. She said that her young man—her third young man that it had happened to—had got ideas above his place because of the way Miss Etta spoke to him whilst he waited at table. So that it wasn’t even only the farrier; it was the third footman too. His name was Moddle....

That very afternoon—it had been six years before—Dudley Leicester had announced his departure. He had, indeed, announced it to the maid Agnes first of all. It broke out of him, such a hot rage overcoming him that he, too, very tall and quivering, forgot the limits of class.

“I’m sorry for you, Agnes,” he had blurted out; “I’m sorry for myself; but I shall never marry Miss Stackpole.” The girl had taken her apron down from her eyes to jump for joy.

And very gradually—the process had taken years—hot rage had given way to slow dislike, and that to sullen indifference. He sat at her side at the dinner-table, and she talked to him—about concerts! She had a deep, a moving, a tragic voice, and when she talked to her neighbour it was with so much abandonment always that she appeared to be about to lay her head upon his black shoulder and to rest her white breasts upon the tablecloth. She perfumed herself always with a peculiar, musky scent that her father, years ago, had discovered in Java.

“Bodya,” she would say, “has the tone of heaven itself; it’s better than being at the best after-theatre supper in the world with the best man in the world. But he uses his bow like a cobbler stitching. If I shut my eyes La Jeuiva makes me use all the handkerchiefs I can get hold of. Real tears! ... But to look at, she’s like a bad kodak—over-exposed and under-developed. She shouldn’t be so décolletée, and she ought to sing in a wood at night. We’ve had her do it down at Well-lands....

“But,” she added, “I dare say you never go to concerts now.”

“I haven’t been to one since the ones I went to with you,” Dudley said grimly.

“Ah!” she said. “Don’t you remember our last? It was a Monday Pop. We were passing through town, all the lot of us, from the East Kent to Melton. What a lot of frost there was that year! Don’t you remember? It was so hard on the Monday that we didn’t go down to the Shires, but stayed up instead. And there was the quartette with Joachim and Strauss and Ries and Piatti! I wonder what they played? I’ve got the programme still. Those quaint old green programmes! I’ll look it up and let you know. But oh, it’s all gone! They’re all dead; there are no Pops now and St. James’s Hall.... And yet it only seems yesterday.... Don’t you remember how dear old Piatti’s head looked exactly like the top of his ’cello in shape?”

Dudley Leicester, gazing rigidly at the tablecloth, was at that moment wondering how Etta Hudson got on with her footman. For as a matter of fact, Dudley Leicester’s thoughts, if they were few and if they rose very slowly in his rather vacant mind, were yet almost invariably of a singular justnesss. He had broken off the habit of Etta Stackpole, who, like many troublesome but delightful things, had become a habit to be broken off. And Dudley Leicester had, as it were, chopped her off in the very middle because of a train of thought. She could carry on with the Traceys, the Greshams, the Stackpole cousins and the rest. If it pained him he could yet just bear it, for he imagined that he would be able to defend his hearth against them. But when it had come to Bugle, the farrier’s son, and to Moddle, the third footman, it had suddenly come into his head that you couldn’t keep these creatures off your hearth. He knew it had been as impossible as it would be sickening....

So whilst Etta Stackpole talked he had been wondering, not only how Lady Hudson got on with her footman, but how Sir William liked it. Sir William Hudson was the Managing Director of the Great Southern Railway Company. As far as Dudley Leicester knew, he passed his time in travelling from one end of the world to the other, whilst Etta carried on her cutting-out expeditions from a very snug harbour in Curzon Street, or from the very noble property known as Well-lands in Surrey. But, indeed, although the Leicesters and the Hudsons lived in the same street, their points of contact were almost non-existent, and since their rupture Dudley Leicester and Etta Stackpole had never met. His mother, indeed, who had managed his estate a little too economically till her death three years ago, had let Hangham, the Leicesters’ place, which was just next door to Cove Park, and Etta, perhaps because she thought it was full time, or perhaps because she had stipulated for some agreeable arrangement with Sir William, had almost immediately “made a match” with the director of railways. And although it would be hard to say what was Dudley Leicester’s “line,” we may put it down in his own words that railway directors were not in it. But vaguely and without much interest, at odd moments Dudley Leicester had gathered—it is impossible to know how one does gather these things, or perhaps Robert Grimshaw had really formulated the idea for his simple brain—that the Hudsons were one of several predatory and semi-detached couples. They didn’t interfere apparently with each other. They hit where they liked, like what used to be called “chain shot,” dangerous missiles consisting of two cannon-balls chained one to the other and whirling through Society. Robert Grimshaw had certainly gained this impression from his two friends, the Senhora de Bogota and Madame de Mauvesine, the wives of two of the diplomatic body in London, two ladies who, though they were upon the most intimate of terms with Etta Hudson, were yet in a perpetual state of shocked and admiring envy. It was as if, witnessing Etta’s freedom, these ladies of Latin origin and comparatively circumscribed liberties, rubbed their eyes and imagined that they had been allowed to witness scenes from a fairyland—from a veritable Island of the Blessed. They couldn’t imagine how it was possible to be married and yet to be so absolutely free. They couldn’t, indeed, imagine how it was possible to be so absolutely free in any state, whether married, single, or any of the intermediary stages. And, indeed, Senhora de Bogota, at that moment opposite them at the table, was leaning across the little blonde man who was always known as Mr. “Phyllis” Trevor, for much the same reason that Dudley Leicester came afterwards to be known as Mr. “Pauline” Leicester—Senhora de Bogota was leaning, a splendid mass of dark and opulent flesh, across her diminutive neighbour’s form to whisper with a strong Brazilian accent to Madame de Mauvesine:

“Regardez donc cette Etta! Ces Anglaises, a-t-on jamais vu rien de pareilles!”

And Madame de Mauvesine, blonde with coppery hair and a peaked, almost eel-like face, raised her eyes to heaven, or rather to the ceiling that was painted to resemble a limpid blue sky filled with chains of roses and gambolling cherubs.