CHAPTER IV.

UN MENAGE A DEUX.

HAROLD JERNINGHAM lived in Park Lane. To say this, and to say in addition to this that it was his privilege to inhabit a snug little bachelor dwelling, with bay-windows from the roof to the basement, is to say that he was one of those favoured beings for whom this world must needs be a terrestrial paradise. There are mansions in Park Lane, stately and gigantic--mansions with lofty picture-galleries, and staircases of polished marble, and conservatories which roof-in small forests of tropical verdure: but the glory of this western Eden lies not in them. Are there not mansions in Belgravia and Tyburnia, in Piccadilly and Mayfair? Palaces are common enough in this western hemisphere, and the roturier may find one ready for his occupation, seek it when he will. But it is only in Park Lane that those delicious little bachelor snuggeries are to be found, those enchanting toy-houses, “too small to live in, and too big to hang at your watch-chain,” as Lord Hervey said of the Duke’s cottage at Chiswick--those irregular little edifices, with bow-windows, and balconies, and miniature conservatories breaking out in every direction, and with a perfume of the country still about them.

The house which Harold Jerningham occupied when he favoured the metropolis by his presence was one of the most enchanting of these enviable habitations. The house had been a pretty old-fashioned cottage with bow-windows, when Mr. Jerningham took it in hand, but in his possession it had undergone considerable change. He had transformed the rustic bows into deep roomy bays, and had thrown out balconies of iron scroll-work, whereon there flourished bright masses of flowers, and ferns, and mosses, amidst which no eye save that of the nurseryman’s minions ever beheld a faded leaf. He had built mysterious and spacious chambers at the back of the small dwelling, on ground that had once been a garden; and beyond these chambers you came suddenly upon a shady quadrangle roofed-in with glass, where there was a wonderful tesselated pavement, which had been transported bodily from a chamber in Pompeii, and where there were ferns and cool grasses, and a porphyry basin of water-lilies, and the perpetual plashing of a fountain.

Mr. Jerningham had furnished his house after his own fashion, without regard to the styles that were “in,” or the styles that were “out.” One rich carpet of dark crimson velvet-pile lined the house from the hall to the attics, like a jewel-casket; and the same warm and yet sombre tint pervaded the window-hangings and the walls. The ordinary visitor found very little to admire in Mr. Jerningham’s drawing-room. Thin-legged tables and chairs adorned with goats’ heads and festoons of flowers; a shabby little writing-table, considerably the worse for wear, but enlivened by patches of china, whereon rosy little Cupids frisked and tumbled against a background of deep azure; a generally untidy effect of scattered bronzes and intaglios, gold-and-enamel snuff-boxes and bonbonnières, Chelsea tea-cups, and antique miniatures; and on the walls some tapestry, just a little faded, with the eternal shepherds and shepherdesses of the Watteau school. The connoisseur only could have told that the spindle-legged chairs and tables were in the purest style of the Louis-Seize period; that the shabby little writing-table with the _plaques_ of old Sèvres had belonged to Marie Antoinette, and had been sold for something over a thousand pounds; that the bronzes and intaglios, the miniatures and bonbonnières were the representatives of a fortune; and that the somewhat faded tapestry was the choicest work of the Gobelins, after designs by Boucher.

Harold Jerningham was fifty years of age, and one of the richest men in London. The poorer members of the world in which he lived talked of him as “a lucky fellow, by Jove, and a man who ought to consider himself uncommonly fortunate never to have known what it was to be hard-up, or to have a pack of extravagant sons sucking his blood, like so many modern vampires, confound ’em!” Harold Jerningham had neither sons nor daughters, and lived in a bachelor’s snuggery. But Harold Jerningham was not a bachelor. He had married a very beautiful young first cousin some seven years before, and the union had not been a happy one. It had only endured for two years, at the end of which time the husband and wife had separated, without open scandal of any kind whatsoever. Mr. Jerningham had chosen that occasion for a long-postponed journey to the East, and Mrs. Jerningham had quietly withdrawn herself from the toy-house in Park Lane to another toy-house on the banks of the Thames, within two or three hundred yards of Wolsey’s old palace at Hampton. But let man and wife arrange their affairs never so quietly, the world will have its own ideas, and make its own theories on the subject. The world--that is to say, Mr. Jerningham’s world, which was bounded on the south by Great George Street, Westminster, and on the north by Bryanstone Square--told several different stories of Mr. Jerningham’s marriage. The beautiful young cousin had possessed the real Jerningham pride, which was the pride of the Miltonic Lucifer himself, wherefore the peaceful union of two Jerninghams was an impossibility, said one faction. But the majority were inclined to believe Mr. Jerningham in some manner guilty. Neither his youth nor his middle age had been spotless. Too proud and too refined to affect coarse vices or common dissipations, he had done more mischief and had been infinitely more dangerous than the common sinner. The master of a ruined household had cursed the name of Harold Jerningham, and innocent children had grown up to blush at the mention of that fatal name. For three-and-forty years of his life he had been a bachelor, and had laughed at the men who bartered their liberty for the sake of a wife’s monotonous companionship and the prattle of tiresome children. He had not been a deliberate sinner--indeed, the deliberate sinners seem to be a very small minority, and even the man who poisons his wife with minim doses of aconite will tell the gaol-chaplain that he was a poor, weak creature, led away from time to time by the impulse of the moment. The Tempter took him by the hand, and drew him on, foot by foot, to his destruction. There is a thick and blinding fog for ever hanging over that fatally easy slope which leads to Avernus, whereby the traveller cannot perceive what progress he has made upon the dreadful downward road.

Mr. Jerningham had not been a deliberate sinner. He was not altogether vile and wicked. He was too selfish a man not to wish for the approbation of his fellow-man; he was too much of a poet and an artist not to perceive the loveliness of virtue. He was not an honourable man, but he knew that honour was a very beautiful thing in the abstract, and he had a vague sense of discomfort when he acted dishonourably--just such an unpleasant sensation as he would have felt if he had worn an ill-fitting coat or an ill-made boot. He was not without benevolence, and could even be generous on occasion; but in all his useless life he had never sacrificed his own enjoyment for the good of another. He had taken his pleasure--all was told in those few words--and if pleasure was only to be had at the cost of evil-doing, he had shrugged his shoulders regretfully, and paid the price. He had gathered his roses, and other people had been inconvenienced by the thorns. The roses were still blooming about his pathway, but Mr. Jerningham no longer cared to pluck them. A man may grow tired even of roses. His marriage had been the result of one of those generous impulses which redeemed his character from utter worthlessness. A kinsman had died in Paris, in the extreme depths of patrician poverty, leaving behind him a very lovely daughter, and a letter addressed to Harold Jerningham. The lovely daughter came to London, unattended, to deliver the letter, which she presented with her own hands to the elegant bachelor of three-and-forty. If she had not been a Jerningham, there is no knowing what story of sin and folly this interview might have inaugurated. But she was the daughter of Philip Jerningham, and the direct descendant of a Plantagenet prince; so, after a brief acquaintance, she became the wife of the eldest representative of her family, and the mistress of that delicious little house in Park Lane, to say nothing of parks and mansions, farms and forests, in three of the fairest counties in England.

She ought to have considered herself the most fortunate of women, said the western world. Whether she did so consider herself or not, it speedily transpired that she was not a happy woman. For a few months the world had the pleasure of beholding Mr. Jerningham in frequent attendance on his wife. He handed her in and out of carriages, he went out to dinner with her, he stood behind her chair at the Opera, he was even seen occasionally to drive her in his unapproachable mail-phaeton; and this seemed the perfection of domestic felicity. Then there came an interregnum, during which the Jerninghams were rarely seen together. They led an erratic existence, the rule of which seemed to be that Mr. Jerningham should be at Spa when his wife was in London, and that Mrs. Jerningham should be on her way to one of the country houses whenever her lord came to town. Then all at once arose the awful rumour that the Jerninghams had parted from each other for ever. Elegant gossips discussed the subject at feminine assemblies, and men talked about it in the clubs. Why had the Jerninghams separated? Was he to blame? Was she? Had Jerningham, the irresistible, dropped in for it at last? Or had he been playing his old trick, and had the little woman plucked up a spirit, and cut him? It is to be observed that Mrs. Jerningham was amongst the tallest of her sex; but your genuine club-lounger would call Juno herself a little woman.

It became generally understood before long that Harold Jerningham had himself alone to thank for the failure of his matrimonial venture. He made his name somewhat notorious just at this time in conjunction with that of a French opera-dancer; so Mrs. Grundy shrugged her shoulders deprecatingly, and pitied Mrs. Jerningham. “A superb creature, my dear; the very model of propriety; and a thousand times too good for that dissipated wretch, Harold Jerningham,” exclaimed the sagacious Mrs. Grundy.

While the world made itself busy with the story of her brief married life, Emily Jerningham endured her wrongs and sorrows very quietly in the toy-villa at Hampton. She had an ample income settled on her by her husband; and as she had been steeped in poverty to the very lips before her marriage, it is scarcely strange, perhaps, if she forbore to complain of Mr. Jerningham’s conduct, and elected to talk about him--whenever intrusive people compelled her to mention his name--as her friend and benefactor. The world lauded her generosity, but considered itself injured by her reticence.

For the first twelve months after the separation, Mrs. Jerningham secluded herself from all society except that of a few chosen friends, and devoted herself to the cultivation of orchids at the toy-villa. She started with the intention of passing the remainder of her days amongst the chosen friends and the orchids; but she was young and handsome, rich and accomplished, and society had chosen to exalt her into a social martyr. So people penetrated the depths of her suburban retreat, and beguiled her to return to the world, of which she had seen so little. She went into society, tolerably secured from the hazard of meeting her husband, who had his own particular circle, and that a very narrow one. Emily Jerningham was liked and admired. She was a beauty of the Juno type, and the Jerningham pride became her. It was not by any means an intolerable pride, never parading itself on unnecessary occasions--pride defensive, and not pride aggressive; the pride of a prince who will be hand-and-glove with his dear Brummell, but who will order Mr. Brummell’s carriage when the beau is insolent. Mrs. Jerningham was very popular. She had all the charm of widowhood without its danger. There was even the faintest flavour of Bohemianism about her position, spotless though her reputation might be. She was a saint and martyr who gave nice little dinners, and drove the most perfectly appointed of pony-phaetons. It was only by an indescribable something--a tranquil grace of bearing, a subdued ease of manner, a pervading harmony in every detail of her surroundings, from the unobtrusive colouring of her costume to the irreproachable livery of her servants--that strangers could distinguish her from other unprotected women of a very different class.

Young men were ready to worship and adore her. “If the gurls a fellah meets were like Mrs. Jerningham, a fellah might make up his mind to go in for the domestic,” said young Tyburnia to young Belgravia. “S’pose the odds are against Jerningham going off the hooks between this and the first spring-meeting, so as to give a party a chance with Mrs. J. herself,” speculates young Belgravia, dreamily.

Mrs. Jerningham had enjoyed her quasi-widowhood some two years, when Mrs. Grundy’s attention was called to a new phenomenon in connection with that lady.

It was observed that whoever was bidden to the nice little dinner-parties at the toy villa, there was one gentleman whose presence was a certainty. It was observed that whenever Mrs. Jerningham dropped in for an hour or two at any fashionable assembly, this gentleman was sure to drop in at the same hour, and to depart, listless and weary, as soon as he had handed that lady to her carriage. He was not one of the butterflies, but had been admitted amongst those gorgeous creatures on account of certain gifts and qualities which the butterflies were able to appreciate. He was a powerful satirist, something of a poet, and the editor of a fashionable semi-political, semi-literary periodical, entitled “The Areopagus.” He was five-and-thirty years of age, as handsome as an intellectual man can venture to be, and as elegant as a Lauzun or a Hervey. He had chambers in the Temple, a hunting-box in Berkshire, the _entrée_ to all the best houses in London, and a hundred country houses always open to him. The Bohemians of the press watched his career with envious eyes, and would have rejoiced infinitely to catch him tripping on the difficult editorial pathway, so that they might band themselves together to rend him in pieces. The first time these watchful enemies obtained any advantage over him was when the western world began to whisper that he had fallen in love with Mrs. Jerningham. Then the literary Bohemians, the “Cherokees” and “Night-birds,” and all the little clubs and cliques in London, set up their malicious chatter; and men who had never beheld Emily Jerningham’s face speculated upon her conduct and gloated over the anticipation of some tremendous scandal which should terminate in Laurence Desmond’s expulsion from the Eden of fashion.

The clubs and cliques were doomed to disappointment. No tremendous scandal ever arose. After a little discussion, the world agreed to accept this Platonic attachment between the lady and the editor as the most delightful of social romances. Mrs. Jerningham had taken care to provide herself with a perfect dragon in the way of an elderly widowed aunt, whose husband had been in the Church--and, sheltered thus, she was free to bestow her friendship on whom she pleased. Time, which sanctifies all things, gave a kind of legality to the Platonic attachment; and in due course it became an understood thing that Mr. Desmond would never marry until Harold Jerningham’s death should set Emily free.

If any rumour of this romantic friendship reached Mr. Jerningham’s ears, he received the tidings very quietly. No _preux chevalier_ ever spoke of his liege lady in a more reverential spirit than that in which Harold Jerningham spoke of his wife. It seemed as if these two people had agreed to sound each other’s praises. Emily declared her husband to be the most noble and generous of men; Harold lauded his wife as the purest and most honourable of women. Malicious people shrugged their shoulders and hinted at hypocrisy.

“Jerningham was always a Jesuit,” said one; “he is the Talleyrand of social life. And if you want to arrive at what he means, you must take the reverse of what he says.”

“If they are both such delightful creatures, what a pity it is they couldn’t live peaceably together!” said another.