FRICTION.
From that evening forth things ran less smoothly in the hired house in Onslow Gardens. There was obviously something wrong with the works. The Duke went down oftener and oftener by night to the Die and Hazard, and, though he never said so at first to Linda, lost more and more heavily with continuous ill chance to his fellow-clubmen. Luck went against him. Baccarat or lansquenet, roulette or blind poker, it was all one: losses, losses, losses. Not that he had much cash of his own to play with; Cecil had taken care that Linda’s money should be strictly settled upon herself; and though he had allowed a large lump sum down to extricate the Duke from his current difficulties, he had firmly set his face, like a sensible business man that he was, against permitting Linda’s husband to squander away at will her future income. So the Duke had to play for the most part on imaginary hundreds; and ‘Powysland paper’ began to be as familiar an object of quotation in the smoking-room of the Die as Bertie Montgomery’s had been at an earlier stage of his existence in the same exalted chamber. The more he played, the more deeply involved the Duke became. The bad luck of the Montgomeries seemed to pursue him throughout. He floundered at last in a perfect slough of complicated embarrassments, and was at once too proud and too nervous to ask his wife’s assistance in disentangling him once for all from his intricate engagements.
The Montgomery jealousy, too, was aroused every whit as much as the Montgomery love of high play. Linda grew gradually and shamefully aware of the disgraceful fact that her husband was watching her. His first outburst of affection was cooling down now, and he was reaching the second stage of married life with men of his type — the stage in which hatred and fear of a rival begin to usurp the place of actual love for the woman they have chosen. This new cancerous growth seemed to spread apace, like some huge shapeless fungus, through the Duke’s brain. Though he spoke of it to no one, it entered into the very marrow of his bones, and filled the larger part of his waking thoughts from morning to night. He escaped from it for awhile to play — to play and lose; and then returned again to lie awake in his bed all night and think of it. Even before, this hateful feeling had begun to rise in his breast; it was characteristic of the Montgomeries that, as soon as their passion for a woman was once gratified and their point carried, a reaction set in, and jealousy alone remained of what had once been desire and worship. But since the Duke had learned the true facts about Basil Maclaine and Douglas Harrison, his fiery emotion knew no bounds. He was devoured and consumed by the eternal flame. He ate his own heart out with suspicious watchfulness.
Indeed, the situation was one which touched profoundly in different ways every leading chord in his complex nature. The man’s pride as well as his virility was deeply concerned. That his Duchess should still live and move in the same society as a man, or two men, with whom (as he conceived the matter), she had once carried on a vulgar flirtation, as a social inferior, in a London lodging-house, wounded him to the quick in his tenderest instincts. How could he, a Montgomery of Powysland, a scion of the oldest and noblest stock in the whole of wild Wales, ever have exposed himself before all the world in such a humiliating position? When he married Linda Amberley across sea in New York, he understood, of course, that she was a girl who had risen; one expects all that, naturally, when one agrees to sell one’s title and coronet to an American heiress for prompt cash; but then, she was beautiful, she was graceful, she was well educated, she was well read, she was intellectual, she was a lady, and he supposed he would never any further be troubled with her friends or acquaintances, good, bad, or indifferent, except, to be sure, her brother, Cecil, who was an American millionaire, and, as such, respectable, even if he hadn’t been, as he was, absolutely presentable and a genius also. It had never occurred to the Duke’s mind, when Linda spoke of having lived in London, that she had come into contact at all with the sort of people one would be likely to meet with in his own society. He had taken it for granted their orbits lay in different planes. And now to find that she had kept a lodging-house in Bloomsbury, where Basil Maclaine, the greatest gossip-monger in Pall Mall, and Douglas Harrison, brother of that clever and sarcastic young man who was member for South Hampstead, had actually been her inmates — oh, it was too, too horrible!
The blow to his pride was a very bitter one. If he had loved her once for six weeks, he was beginning now to be ashamed of her, and before many months were out he might easily hate her.
Basil Maclaine, of all men! That wriggling snake, that society ferret, who wormed his way up in the world by getting in the thin edge of the wedge here, and using it as a lever to raise himself further there; who knew all the small talk of all the tea-tables in Belgravia; who retailed slanderous gossip of the clubs in ladies’ boudoirs, and carried candid tittle-tattle of the boudoirs to the smoking-rooms of the clubs. It was hateful, hateful! Basil Maclaine, beloved of dowagers and welcomed of old maids, who knew every spiteful story in town, and who studied the society papers with diligent care, as expositors study a Scripture text, to get out of their words every hint or innuendo! And to think that this man had it in his power now to go round all London with a sneer in his sleeve, and tell the whole world that laughable story how he had jilted the Duchess of Powysland himself, when she waited at table on him in a common lodging-house! The bare idea of such a possibility ahead was gall and wormwood to the last of the Montgomeries.
If only Linda had told him when he first met her in New York! She ought to have told him; but she had kept it back from him. And the worst of it was, he felt in his own heart she had kept it back, not of malice prepense, nor from any mean and deceitful desire to conceal it, but simply and solely because it meant so little to her that it never occurred to her at all to explain it in full. The whole thing seemed so simple and ordinary to her mind that she hardly thought it worth wasting a second word upon. How little she could enter, with her bourgeois ideas, into the exalted feelings of a Montgomery of Powysland!
Whoever a Montgomery marries he ennobles and raises at once to his own rank. The Duke wouldn’t have been ashamed had he married a flower-girl. It wasn’t that he minded. It was this hateful Maclaine man. That the fellow should be able to go about town whispering how he had refused as beneath him the very girl whom a Montgomery married — there was the sting of it. That was the point that the Duke could never get over.
As a matter of fact, of course, Basil Maclaine was far too wise to say anything to anybody about Linda’s former occupation in life. Linda herself was much more likely to commit that simple indiscretion. Basil saw at a glance, in his worldly-wise way, how greatly it would redound to his own glory and credit to have it generally believed that he had stood on terms of family intimacy with the Duchess of Powysland before her marriage; and he certainly wasn’t going to throw away the kudos of such an immediate connection with a ducal house for the mere gratification of retailing a petty piece of boarding-house gossip. On the contrary, his cue was now to magnify the Amberleys to the very best of his ability; to explain how he had known that distinguished engineer well when he was engaged in perfecting his great inventions in his laboratory in London; and how, owing to an unsuspected change of name (connected presumably with inheritance of property and the Heralds’ Office), he had failed to recognise them at first as the dear old friends of his youth when the announcement of the Duke’s marriage was made in England.
Indeed, in a week or two after the meeting at the Simpsons’, Basil Maclaine, by sheer hard talking, had succeeded in revolutionizing opinion at all the clubs about the American heiress, who, it was now generally understood, was really a lady of gentle English birth, well known to Maclaine, and Hubert Harrison, and lots of other people in London society, whose brother had merely gone over to America in order the better to float his valuable patents, which had originally been designed, perfected, and worked out in the dignified repose of his English study. The general impression society carried away at last from Basil’s vague talk amounted to an indefinite notion that Linda was probably the outcome of some snug country rectory, in a midland shire, and that Cecil, her brother, the inventor of the famous Amberley motor, and the owner of endless mines or ranches in Bret-Harteland or elsewhere, had in all likelihood come out as senior wrangler and Smith’s prizeman at Cambridge in some forgotten decade. So much may be done without violation of the strict truth, by deft suggestion.
The only thing that bothered Basil in this matter was the obvious difficulty of making the best of his acquaintance with Linda. He could hardly find many opportunities of meeting the Duchess now; and without them, his proud boast of previous acquaintance would be worth to him but little in the eyes of society. However, all things come to him who knows how to wait — even an answer to his letters to the present writer; and Basil Maclaine’s opportunity came at last at Sabine Venables’ wedding.
It was a splendid function, of course. That goes without saying. Old Affability, having once adopted Hubert Harrison as his second best choice for Sabine’s husband, was determined nobody else in the world should ever suspect he was less than amply satisfied with his daughter’s selection. So he made the most of Hubert’s Parliamentary position, and his own big friends, and succeeded in producing ‘a very smart affair, indeed,’ as all society said of it at their tea-tables that evening. Everybody was there, the Powyslands included. Foreign ambassadors congratulated the bride; literature, science, and art smiled responsive on the bridegroom; and high finance stood in a solid phalanx to see the member for South Hampstead properly tied to one-half of the famous Venables inheritance. And when all was over, and people lounged about in the rooms after the breakfast, while the bride was putting on her going-away dress, Basil Maclaine found a chance at last to stroll up, as if by accident, and engage in conversation with Linda, Duchess of Powysland.
From the far corner of the room, where he stood talking lightly to a bejewelled old dowager, the Duke kept his keen eye fixed firmly on Linda. He had been silently vigilant and suspicious of late; and what was worse, Linda knew it. She saw for herself that her husband was watching her. Now, though she loved him still as much as she had ever done, Linda was the very last woman in the world to endure being spied upon. She must be free, she must be individual, she must be herself and spontaneous, come what might of it. And, besides, her womanly pride was at stake here. Not for worlds would she have let Basil Maclaine see that she shunned him or was afraid to meet him. So she held out her hand with all the old frankness and cordiality, in spite of her husband’s uneasy glances; and she kept Basil talking there for half an hour, to his immense delight, without one sign of the wound he had so cruelly inflicted upon her. Basil himself was in the seventh heaven. The Duchess had talked to him familiarly about Cecil and his plans like an intimate friend, and all the world around, straining its eager ears, had overheard with interest many significant scraps of their intimate conversation. Nay, they had even learned that he could venture to chaff a Duchess.
Ah, how altered their positions were from those good old times when he had felt hurt at the bare idea of Linda Figgins being considered good enough for him! And now he was proud she should single him out at Sabine’s wedding for half an hour’s small-talk. Nay, more; as he looked at her in her magnificent dress and her queenly beauty, he felt again, as he had felt that night after the Simpsons’ party, that he was really in love with her.
As he looked and talked, looked and laughed, looked and admired, looked and listened, the feeling deepened on him. Ever deepened and deepened. He was over head and ears in love with Linda now. Oh, what a mistake he had made in not marrying Linda! To think she might once have been his — that queenly woman; willingly his; gladly his; and he had been fool enough, mad enough, insane enough, to reject her! What could he ever have been made of? Flesh and blood, or adamant? Why, as a woman alone, she was matchless, matchless. Such eyes, such lips, such a bust, such a figure! And when she warmed up with the conversation, and answered him back quickly with her ready wit, held her stately head erect, and smiled at him proudly, he cursed himself in his heart for his foolish blindness. So potent are diamonds and coronets in opening one’s eyes to the real inner worth of unsullied womanhood!
And this was the Linda who had folded the tablecloth, queenly even then, with himself to hold the other end, in the lodgings at Clandon Street!
Douglas Harrison, relieved at last from his duties as his brother’s best man, and wandering away for awhile from those attentive bridesmaids, looked into Basil’s face as he passed once or twice with a bitter smile. It was impossible not to see, from the light in Basil’s eyes and the open show of Basil’s pearly teeth, that now, at last, too late, he was really in love with Linda.
And somebody else saw it too. The Duke of Powysland, away over in his corner, tied helplessly to his Dowager, and smiling his stereotyped society smile, interposed a mechanical ‘Yes’ or an automatic ‘No, really,’ at random every now and again; but he was fretting and fuming inwardly. He could see Basil Maclaine was talking with unusual animation for many minutes together to the beautiful Duchess. He could see the Duchess was talking with unusual frankness to that unmitigated cur, Basil Maclaine. All the passionate jealousy of the Montgomery nature kindled fiercely within him at the hateful sight. ‘If this happens again,’ he said to himself through his clenched teeth — smiling cat-wise all the while at his Dowager as he said it— ‘I shall make them both pay for it, and pay for it dear. She shall never disgrace the Montgomeries for nothing.’