CHAPTER IX.

HOW THEY PARTED.

IN the earlier years of her loneliness, Mrs. Jerningham’s efforts in the way of little dinners were generally crowned with success. Women liked to dine at the toy-villa, because they knew the most eligible men were to be met there. Men were pleased to accept Mrs. Jerningham’s invitations, sure that at her house they would encounter none but handsome or agreeable women. She displayed a delightful tact in the selection of her society. She would invite a lovely inanity to sit at her table, as a beautiful object for the contemplation of her guests; but she would take care to balance her soulless divinity by some decent-looking woman with brains. If the Household-Brigade element threatened to preponderate, and there was reason to dread that the whole talk at dinner would be about the wonderful things “fellows” present, and other fellows absent, who were the intimate friends of those fellows, had done in the way of deer-stalking in the Trossachs, or salmon-fishing in Norway, during the last autumn, Mrs. Jerningham took care to leaven it, and would despatch an invitation to some popular littérateur or fashionable actor, some clever amateur, well up in all the art-gossip, or a gentlemanly young explorer, lately returned from Africa with the last ideas about the source of the Nile, and delightful serio-comic anecdotes about encounters with crocodiles and Abyssinian damsels.

The mistress of River Lawn made her parties pleasant at any cost of trouble to herself. Even the dragon that guarded the enchanted garden, in the shape of an elderly aunt, was a pleasant dragon, who dressed well, and could talk cleverly on occasion. And then the dinners were not those shadowy repasts which are wont to be served in mansions where a lady reigns unassisted by masculine counsel. Mrs. Colton, the elderly aunt, had entertained archbishops in her day, and knew how to compose a _menu_. The wines that sparkled into brightness under the light of beauty’s eye at Mrs. Jerningham’s table were supplied by Mr. Jerningham’s own wine-merchant, who would not have dared to impose on the lady’s possible innocence.

The house was very agreeable. That slight accident of Mr. Desmond’s perpetual presence was only an additional advantage for people who wanted to beg favours from the fashionable editor--a good word for a new book, or a new play, or a new picture. It had become an established fact, that wherever Mrs. Jerningham appeared, Laurence Desmond was to appear also. His chosen friends gathered round her, like the knightly circle about a queen in the days when there was chivalry in the land, and a queen was a sacred creature. It was he who had brought that agreeable circle to River Lawn; how could a poor lonely woman have beguiled the shining lights of the crack London clubs to illuminate her dinner-table? It was Desmond who kept a strict account of her feminine acquaintance, watchful lest the faintest shadow in the reputation of a friend should be reflected on her. The editor of the _Areopagus_ knew everything and everybody. The inner mysteries of Belgravia and Tyburnia, which outsiders discussed in solemn whispers and with awful shrugs, were stale and hackneyed facts for him. He knew that Emily Jerningham paid a certain price for his friendship--pure and chivalrous though that friendship might be--and that she must continue to pay it to the end. She had been very friendless immediately after her separation from her husband; and when the tide of public opinion was at its flood, ready to turn either way, it was Laurence’s subtle influence which had set it flowing pleasantly for her. But he knew that his friendship cost her a price, notwithstanding. There was the savour of patronage in the friendliness of the people he had won to be her intimates. Spotless dowagers visited her and received her; but they were apt to affect a sort of pitying kindness when they spoke of her to other intimates. She was “that poor Mrs. Jerningham, who is separated from her husband, you know, my dear--Harold Jerningham, a dreadful person, I believe, though very nice in society. She lives with a widowed aunt, at the sweetest place, near Hampton, and gives charming parties; highly correct and proper in every way; and, you know, I think it a kind of duty to take notice of a woman in that position, when nothing can be said to her prejudice;” and so on, and so on, with inexhaustible variations on the perpetual theme. Laurence Desmond had heard the stereotyped talk a hundred times, and the recollection of it stung him to the very quick, when he thought of it in relation to the woman whom he could remember a girl of seventeen, dressed in white, and walking by his side in a little garden at Passy.

Yes, he had known Emily Jerningham before she became the wife of her wealthy kinsman; he had known her in the days of her genteel poverty--the patient daughter of a peevish valetudinarian. He had been allied with this poorer branch of the Jerningham family by friendships and associations of many years’ standing, and had never spent a week in Paris without paying more than one visit to the shabby, little furnished-house at Passy, in which Philip Jerningham dragged out the tiresome remnant of his useless existence with Emily for his companion and nurse, his secretary, butler, and steward. He had come at first prompted by a kindly feeling for the friend of his dead father; he came afterwards for his own pleasure; and those flying visits to Paris, which had been wont to occur two or three times in the year, began to repeat themselves at very short intervals.

He had fallen in love with Emily Jerningham, and he had sufficient reason for believing that his love was returned. Those evenings in the little flower-garden at Passy were the happiest hours of his busy life. The paradise was very prim and dusty and arid, and all the roar and clamour of Paris thundered a hoarse chorus in the distance; but it was Eden, nevertheless; and when, a few years afterwards, he wasted an idle hour by going to look at the old place, he was surprised to discover what a shabby scene it was, now that the glamour had departed from it.

He was a proud man, and it was his misfortune to live in a world in which the splendour and luxuries of the million were accounted the necessities of existence. The women he met were women who would have been panic-stricken if they had found themselves on foot and alone in a crowded London street. They were women who, if suddenly reduced to the depths of poverty, would have thought the delf-plates and mugs of destitution a greater hardship than its bread and water. They were delicate creatures--“not too bright or good for human nature’s daily food,” but quite unable to cope with human nature’s pecuniary embarrassments. They were creatures who thought that a cheque-book went on for ever, like the Laureate’s brook: and that so long as there were any of those nice oblong slips of paper left in the world, papas and husbands and brothers had nothing to do but to sign their names at the bottom of them.

Laurence Desmond intended to ask Miss Jerningham to be his wife, but he was determined not to marry until he was secure of something like fifteen hundred a year. He reckoned his future expenditure sometimes as he meditated by his bachelor hearth, with a cigar between his lips. Two hundred a year for a house somewhere within reasonable distance of the Park; a hundred for his wife’s dress, fifty for his own; a miniature brougham would be rather a tight squeeze at a hundred and fifty; his own expenses, cigars, diplomatic dinners given at his club, cab-hire, books and newspapers, say two hundred more; and the remaining eight hundred for the vulgar necessities of every-day existence. Mr. Desmond mapped out his future very pleasantly for himself and the woman he loved; but in those days he was yet very far from the possession of the indispensable fifteen hundred. So he held his peace in the little flower-garden at Passy, and was content to talk agreeable nonsense to Emily Jerningham, while the poor little fountain trickled and dripped in the sunshine, and the gaudy red geraniums in the plaster vases on the wall made patches of vivid colour against the hot blue sky, and that hoarse chorus of Paris sounded its perpetual accompaniment--the roar of wheels and the rattle of vehicles, the tinkling of bells, the jingling of spoons and glasses on the pavement outside the coffee-houses, and the voices of the excited million, all blended into one indistinguishable clamour, rising and falling like the waves of a distant sea.

Mr. Desmond waited, satisfied with his prospects, content to abide the ripening of his fortunes, and convinced that good feeling and policy alike were involved in patience. Unhappily, the man who plans his own life is like a chess-player in London matched against a chess-player in Paris, and with _no_ telegraphic communications of his adversary’s moves. His theory of the game is perfect. His plan of action is decided upon with the cool deliberation of an accomplished strategist. He sees his way to the very end of the encounter: his castle there, his bishop here, his queen in the centre of the board, and--lo, his enemy is checkmated! But that hidden player in Paris adopts unimaginable tactics; and suddenly, after one never-to-be-expected move, the player in London finds himself ignominiously beaten.

While Laurence Desmond was dreaming lazily of the future, lingering over his midnight cigar in Temple chambers--nearer the chimney pots than the handsome rooms he afterwards occupied--Philip Jerningham took it into his head to die suddenly, and Emily came to London with a letter to her cousin ever-so-many-times-removed, the irresistible Harold. By one of those insignificant accidents which make the links in the great chain of destiny, it happened that the announcement of Philip Jerningham’s death escaped the eye of Emily’s undeclared admirer. It was not to be expected that a bereaved daughter, who was left very desolate and helpless, could write ceremonious notes to all her late father’s masculine acquaintance; and Emily had the Jerningham pride, and, for some unknown reason, was peculiarly inclined to be resentful of small offences where Laurence Desmond was concerned. So the editor went on smoking his midnight cigars, and pushing on steadily towards the achievement of the indispensable income; deferring week after week and month after month the Parisian holiday which he was always promising himself.

The time drifted by him with that imperceptible progress which is so peculiar to time when a man is always wrestling with the arrears of his labour, and trying to get seventy minutes out of an hour. Time puts on a special pair of wings for the slave who fills a waste-paper basket and uses half-a-crown’s worth of postage-stamps every day of his life except Sunday, and who sits under a popular preacher on that day, weighed down by the consciousness of a hundred unanswered letters, and the knowledge that a hundred offended correspondents are swelling with indignation because of his neglect.

Mr. Desmond was roughly awakened from his pleasant day-dreams one morning on reading the announcement of Harold Jerningham’s marriage. The blow was a severe one, and for some days the writer’s arguments were rather weak and inconsequential, and the editor’s eye unusually careless of flaws and blemishes in the work of his contributors. Only now that Emily was lost to him did he know how very dear she had been; but even more bitter to Laurence Desmond than the thought of his loss was the idea of his folly.

“I fancy myself a man of the world,” he said to himself, “and yet I am the dupe of masculine fatuity which would be contemptible in a stripling newly escaped from the university. I thought she loved me; I thought her love was as entirely my own as if I had received the assurance of it in the plainest words that were ever spoken.”

The idea that he had been duped by his own vanity stung him to the quick. He studiously avoided the places in which he was likely to encounter Emily Jerningham, and it was not until a year after her marriage that he met her. He came upon her suddenly one bright autumn day in an obscure foreign picture-gallery. For years after that day he was able to recall the scene of their unexpected meeting--the quaint old chamber in the courtyard of an hospital, the grim pre-Raphaelite pictures of unpleasant martyrdoms, the dusty motes dancing in the sunlight, and the listless grace of a woman who stood with her back towards him, leaning on the top rail of a chair, with an open catalogue held loosely in her hand. There was no one but this woman in the gallery. The door banged behind Mr. Desmond as he went in, and startled by the noise, she turned and looked at him.

This is how he met Emily Jerningham. The white change in her face told him that he had not been the dupe of a delusion when he fancied himself beloved. He felt that he must be something more than a common acquaintance to the woman who looked at him with that pale, terror-stricken face. For a moment he feared that Mrs. Jerningham would faint; but the fear was groundless. She belonged to a class in which the women have some touch of the Roman’s grandeur mingled with the sensuous softness of the Greek. The colour came back to her cheeks and lips in a few moments, and she held out her hand to her dead father’s friend.

“How do you do, Mr. Desmond?” she said. “I did not know that you were in Germany.”

“No. I am taking a brief holiday. Is Mr. Jerningham with you?”

“Yes; he had letters to write this morning, and sent me to explore this curious old hospital by myself. Do you stay long here?”

“I go on to Vienna this evening.”

The beautiful face grew pale again. Mrs. Jerningham looked at her catalogue.

“I think I have seen all the pictures,” she said. “My guide has gone to look for the key of some mysterious chamber; I must go in search of him. Good-morning, Mr. Desmond. Oh, here is my husband!”

Mr. Jerningham sauntered into the gallery.

“I couldn’t stand any more letter-writing, so I came to see your pictures, Emily,” he said. “Ah, Desmond, how do you do? What brings you to this queer old place, so completely out of the beaten track--almost beyond the ken of _Murray_? You know my wife? Ah, I remember; your father and her father were great cronies. How is it you never told me you knew Desmond, Emily?”

Mrs. Jerningham’s reply was only a vague murmur; but her husband was not one of those men who hang upon the utterances or watch the looks of their wives. He allowed the woman he had chosen ample liberty, only requiring that her toilette should be perfect, her voice harmonious, her movements graceful, and her reputation spotless. For it is an understood thing, that whatever character Cæsar himself may bear, there must be no possibility of suspicion with regard to Cæsar’s wife.

Harold Jerningham and Laurence Desmond had met very often before to-day. It happened that the Jerninghams were also on their way to Vienna, and had made their arrangements for travelling by the same train as that chosen by Laurence. They met at the station, and travelled together, Mr. Jerningham being very well pleased to find the tedium of the journey beguiled by masculine companionship. Mrs. Jerningham sat in a corner of the carriage, very silent and impenetrable, but beautiful to look upon in the fitful glare of the railway lamp, or in occasional glimpses of moonlight.

That night-journey was the beginning of a closer acquaintanceship between Harold Jerningham and Laurence Desmond. During the ensuing London season the younger man was a frequent visitor at the house of the elder. The Jerninghams met Mr. Desmond at parties. They met him in the following winter at a country house; sat round the same fire at Christmas time, and shuddered at the same ghost-stories; danced in the same condescending quadrille at a ball of servants and tenantry, and plucked costly trinkets from the same Christmas-tree--Harold always more or less distinguished by the tone of a being who had endured a previous existence in every star in the planetary system, and was wearily “doing” his last world before final extinction.

Mrs. Jerningham had learned by this time to meet her old friend without sudden pallor or sudden blushes. If she met him very often, she met him by favour of that chain of accidents which links together the lives of some men and women. She happened to be buying hyacinths in the Pantheon during the hour which the hard-working editor snatched from the cares of journalism in the sweet cause of friendship, bringing to bear all the forces of his mighty intellect on the selection of a squirrel, intended for a birthday-gift to a fellow-worker’s little girl. If the purchase of the hyacinths and the squirrel occupied a longer time than is usually devoted to such small transactions, it must be remembered that there is great room for the exercise of taste and discretion in the choice of flowers which are to fill a jardinière of the real old _bleu de roi_ Sèvres, and an animal which is to twirl perpetually for the delight of one’s friend. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the fact that Mr. Jerningham and his wife encountered Laurence Desmond ever and anon at the Opera, at the Botanical and Zoological Gardens, and at other places of public resort. The circle in which decent people revolve is such a narrow one that there must needs be these accidental encounters at every turn in the crowded ring.

“I fancy we meet Mr. Desmond a little more frequently than other people,” Harold Jerningham said one day to his wife; and this was the only occasion on which he made any special mention of the editor’s name.

It was about a week after Mr. Jerningham made this remark, that Emily found a letter awaiting her on the table of her morning-room. The letter was addressed in her husband’s hand, sealed with her husband’s arms and cipher. It was his habit to write her little notes informing her of his movements when the pressing business of their useless existence separated them for a day or so; but he did not usually seal his letters. This letter was sealed: and there must have been something in the appearance of the document which startled Mrs. Jerningham, for she grew very pale, and her hand trembled as it tore open the envelope.

The length of the letter was not calculated to alarm a woman who expected a marital lecture.

“MY DEAR EMILY,--The tulip-wood cabinet in which I keep coins is exactly the same as that which you use for your letters. The keys are duplicates. I opened yours instead of my own this morning, in a fit of absence of mind, and saw some letters. I did not read them. The fact of their existence, their number, and the address they bear--which is not to any house of mine, is sufficiently suggestive. Be good enough to remain at home to-morrow. Mr. Halfont will call upon you in the course of the morning.--Truly yours,

“H. J.”

This was all. Mr. Halfont was the family lawyer, a person whose name was generally heard in connection with leases. Mrs. Jerningham looked at the two cabinets, one on each side of the fireplace. Yes, they were exactly alike. She had known that always, and might have guessed that the locks and keys were the same. But she had never thought on the subject; the apartment was so entirely her own sanctum; and Harold Jerningham possessed so many cabinets filled with coins and medallions, cameos and intaglios, which he never looked at, and which, after the feverish delight of bidding for them at Christie’s, were supremely indifferent to him. How, then, should she have foreseen the possibility of the accident that had happened?

Was it altogether an accident?

Emily took a key from a little casket on the table, and went to one of the cabinets--her own. She opened it, and seated herself in the chair before it--the chair in which Harold Jerningham had sat an hour ago, no doubt. The piece of furniture was half-cabinet, half-secrétaire; and it was here that Mrs. Jerningham was wont to fill in the blanks in those lithographed protestations of rapture or expressions of regret wherewith she accepted or declined the invitations of her acquaintance. It was here she wrote her letters, and it was here she kept the MSS. of those correspondents whose letters were worthy of preservation. They were in a row of pigeon-holes; and amongst those in the pigeon-hole marked D there was a packet tied with ribbon. That tendency to render a bundle of dangerous letters conspicuous by a circle of bright-hued ribbon is one of womanhood’s fatal weaknesses.

Mrs. Jerningham took out the packet and contemplated it thoughtfully.

“I wish he had read the letters,” she said to herself; “it would have been much better for both of us if he had read them.”

She looked at the address upon the topmost envelope:

“E. J., _Post Office_, _Vigo Street_.”

“It was very wrong to have them directed to a post-office,” she thought to herself.

She packed the letters in a sheet of paper, and directed the packet to her husband, with a brief note, the composition of which cost her much trouble. She shed some few tears while she was writing this note; but she took care that they should not fall on the paper. There was a certain firmness and decision in her manner which was scarcely compatible with the feelings of an utterly guilty woman.

Mrs. Jerningham had a long interview with her husband’s lawyer on the following day, an interview which had in it none of the unpleasant elements of a “scene.” After this the house in Park Lane was abandoned by both master and mistress. Mr. Jerningham was abroad; Mrs. Jerningham at one of the country houses. It was not till the following season that the world in which the Jerninghams lived became aware that the Jerninghams had parted. So small an amount of union is necessary to constitute marriage in this upper world that the fact of the separation only became patent on the establishment of the toy-villa at Hampton.