Part 23 (1/2)

'May I take you home?' Margaret asked.

'Oh, please do!' answered the beauty with alacrity. 'It's awfully good of you!'

It was raining as the two handsome women got into the singer's comfortable brougham.

'Isn't there room for me too?' asked Logotheti, putting his head in before the footman could shut the door.

'Don't be such a baby,' answered Lady Maud in a displeased tone.

The Greek drew back with a laugh and put up his umbrella; Lady Maud told the footman where to go, and the carriage drove away.

'You must have had a dull evening,' she said.

'I was sound asleep most of the time,' Margaret answered. 'I'm afraid the Amba.s.sador thought me very rude.'

'Because you went to sleep? I don't believe he even noticed it. And if he did, why should you mind? n.o.body cares what anybody does nowadays.

We've simplified life since the days of our fathers. We think more of the big things than they did, and much less of the little ones.'

'All the same, I wish I had kept awake!'

'Nonsense!' retorted Lady Maud. 'What is the use of being famous if you cannot go to sleep when you are sleepy? This is a bad world as it is, but it would be intolerable if one had to keep up one's school-room manners all one's life, and sit up straight and spell properly, as if Society, with a big S, were a governess that could send us to bed without our supper if we didn't!'

Margaret laughed a little, but there was no ripple in Lady Maud's delicious voice as she made these singular statements. She was profoundly in earnest.

'The public is my schoolmistress,' said Margaret. 'I'm so used to being looked at and listened to on the stage that I feel as if people were always watching me and criticising me, even when I go out to dinner.'

'I've no right at all to give you my opinion, because I'm n.o.body in particular,' answered Lady Maud, 'and you are tremendously famous and all that! But you'll make yourself miserable for nothing if you get into the way of caring about anybody's opinion of you, except on the stage. And you'll end by making the other people uncomfortable too, because you'll make them think that you mean to teach them manners!'

'Heaven forbid!' Margaret laughed again.

The carriage stopped, and Lady Maud thanked her, bade her good-night, and got out.

'No,' she said, as the footman was going to ring the bell, 'I have a latch-key, thank you.'

It was a small house in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, and the windows were quite dark. There was not even a light in the hall when Margaret saw Lady Maud open the front door and disappear within.

Margaret went over the little incidents of the evening as she drove home alone, and felt better satisfied with herself than she had been since Lus.h.i.+ngton's visit, in spite of having deliberately gone to sleep in Mustapha Pasha's drawing-room. No one had made her feel that she was changed except for the better, and Lady Maud, who was most undoubtedly a smart woman of the world, had taken a sudden fancy to her. Margaret told herself that this would be impossible if she were ever so little vulgarised by her stage life, and in this reflection she consoled herself for what Lus.h.i.+ngton had said, and nursed her resentment against him.

The small weaknesses of celebrities are sometimes amazing. There was a moment that evening, as she stood before her huge looking-gla.s.s before undressing and scrutinised her face in it, when she would have given her fame and her fortune to be Lady Maud, who trusted to a pa.s.sing hansom or an acquaintance's carriage for getting home from an Emba.s.sy, who let herself into a dark and cheerless little house with a latch-key, who was said to be married to a slippery foreigner, and about whom the gossips invented unedifying tales.

Margaret wondered whether Lady Maud would ever think of changing places with her, to be a G.o.ddess for a few hours every week, to have more money than she could spend on herself, and to be pursued with requests for autographs and grand pianos, not to mention invitations to supper from those supernal personages whose uneasy heads wear crowns or itch for them; and Senorita da Cordova told herself rather petulantly that Lady Maud would rather starve than be the most successful soprano that ever trilled on the high A till the house yelled with delight, and the royalties held up their stalking-gla.s.ses to watch the fluttering of her throat, if perchance they might see how the pretty noise was made.

But at this point Margaret Donne was a little ashamed of herself, and went to bed; and she dreamt that Edmund Lus.h.i.+ngton had suddenly taken to wearing a little moustache, very much turned up and flattened on his cheeks, and a single emerald for a stud, which cast a greenish refulgence round it upon a s.h.i.+rt-front that was hideously s.h.i.+ny; and the effect of these changes in his appearance was to make him perfectly odious.

CHAPTER VIII

Lord Creedmore had begun life as a poor barrister, with no particular prospects, had entered the House of Commons early, and had been a hard-working member of Parliament till he had inherited a t.i.tle and a relatively exiguous fortune when he was over fifty by the unexpected death of his uncle and both the latter's sons within a year. He had married young; his wife was the daughter of a Yorks.h.i.+re country gentleman, and had blessed him with ten children, who were all alive, and of whom Lady Maud was not the youngest. He was always obliged to make a little calculation to remember how old she was, and whether she was the eighth or the ninth. There were three sons and seven daughters. The sons were all in the army, and all stood between six and seven feet in their stockings; the daughters were all good-looking, but none was as handsome as Maud; they were all married, and all but she had children. Lady Creedmore had been a beauty too, but at the present time she was stout and gouty, had a bad temper, and alternately soothed and irritated her complaint and her disposition by following cures or committing imprudences. Her husband, who was now over sixty, had never been ill a day in his life; he was as lean and tough as a greyhound and as active as a schoolboy, a good rider, and a crack shot.

His connection with this tale, apart from the friends.h.i.+p which grew up between Margaret and Lady Maud, lies in the fact that his land in Derbys.h.i.+re adjoined the estate which Mr. Van Torp had bought and re-named after himself. It was here that Lady Maud and the American magnate had first met, two years after her marriage, when she had come home on a long visit, very much disillusionised as to the supposed advantages of the marriage bond as compared with the freedom of a handsome English girl of three-and-twenty, who is liked in her set and has the run of a score of big country houses without any chaperonial enc.u.mbrance. For the chaperon is going down to the shadowy kingdom of the extinct, and is already reckoned with dodos, stagecoaches, muzzle loaders, crinolines, Southey's poems, the Thirty-nine Articles, Benjamin Franklin's reputation, the British workman, and the late Herbert Spencer's philosophy.