Mrs. Vansittart had passed the age of blind love. She had not the incentive of a healthy competition. She had not that more dangerous incentive of middle-aged vanity, which draws the finger of derision so often in the direction of widows. And yet she took a certain pleasure in playing a half-careless and wholly cynical Juliet to Percy Roden's gauche Romeo. She had no intention of marrying him, and yet she continued to encourage him even now that open war was declared between Cornish and the malgamite makers. Cornish had indeed thanked Mrs. Vansittart for her assistance in the past in such a manner as to convey to her that she could hardly be of use to him in the future. He had magnified her good offices, and had warned her to beware of arousing Von Holzen's anger. Indeed, her use of Percy Roden was at an end, and yet she would not let him go. Cornish was puzzled, and so was Dorothy. Percy Roden was gratified, and read the riddle by the light of his own vanity. Mrs. Vansittart was not, perhaps, the first woman to puzzle her neighbours by refusing to relinquish that which she did not want. She was not the first, perhaps, to nurse a subtle desire to play some part in the world rather than be left idle in the wings. So she played the part that came first and easiest to her hand—a woman's natural part, of stirring up strife between men.
She was, therefore, gratified when Von Holzen made his way slowly towards her through the crowd on the Kursaal terrace one afternoon on the occasion of a Thursday concert. She was sitting alone in a far corner of the terrace, protected by a glass screen from the wind which ever blows at Scheveningen. She never mingled with the summer visitors at this popular Dutch resort—indeed, knew none of them. Von Holzen seemed to be similarly situated; but Mrs. Vansittart knew that he did not seek her out on that account. He was not a man to do anything—much less be sociable—out of idleness. He only dealt with his fellow-beings when he had a use for them.
She returned his grave bow with an almost imperceptible movement of the head, and for a moment they looked hard at each other.
“Madame still lingers at The Hague,” he said.
“As you see.”
“And is the game worth the candle?”
He laid his hand tentatively on a chair, and looked towards her with an interrogative glance. He would not, it appeared, sit down without her permission. And, womanlike, she gave it, with a shrug of one shoulder. A woman rarely refuses a challenge. “And is the game worth the candle?” he repeated.
“One can only tell when it is played out,” was the reply; and Herr von Holzen glanced quickly at the lady who made it.
He turned away and listened to the music. An occasional concert was the one diversion he allowed himself at this time from his most absorbing occupation of making a fortune. He had probably a real love of music, which is not by any means given to the good only, or the virtuous. Indeed, it is the art most commonly allied to vice.
“By the way,” said Von Holzen, after a pause, “that paper which it pleased madame's fantasy to possess at one time—is destroyed. Its teaching exists only in my unworthy brain.”
He turned and looked at her with his slow smile, his measuring eyes.
“Ah!”
“Yes; so madame need give the question no more thought, and may turn her full attention to her new—fancy.”
Mrs. Vansittart was studying her programme, and did not look up or display the slightest interest in what he was saying.
“Every event seems but to serve to strengthen our position,” went on Von Holzen, still half listening to the music. “Even the untimely death of Lord Ferriby—which might at first have appeared a contretemps. Cornish takes home the coffin by tonight's mail, I understand. Men may come, madame, and men may go—but we go on for ever. We are still prosperous—despite our friends. And Cornish is nonplussed. He does not know what to do next, and fate seems to be against him. He has no luck. We are manufacturing—day and night.”
“You are interested in Mr. Cornish,” observed Mrs. Vansittart, coolly; and she saw a sudden gleam in Von Holzen's eyes.
After all, the man had a passion over which his control was insecure—the last, the longest of the passions—hatred. He shrugged his shoulders.
“He has forced himself upon our notice—unnecessarily as the result has proved—only to find out that there is no stopping us.”
He could scarcely control his voice as he spoke of Cornish, and looked away as if fearing to show the expression of his eyes.
Mrs. Vansittart watched him with a cool little smile. Von Holzen had not come here to talk of Cornish. He had come on purpose to say something which he had not succeeded in saying yet, and she was not ignorant of this. She was going to make it as difficult as possible for him, so that when he at last said what he had come to say, she should know it, and perhaps divine his motives.
“Even now,” he continued, “we have succeeded beyond our expectations. We are rich men, so that madame—need delay no longer.” He turned and looked her straight in the eyes.
“I?” she inquired, with raised eyebrows. “Need delay no longer—in what?”
“In consummating the happiness of my partner, Percy Roden,” he was clever enough to say without being impertinent. “He—and his banking account—are really worth the attention of any lady.”
Mrs. Vansittart laughed, and, before answering, acknowledged stiffly the stiff salutation of a passer.
“Then it is suggested that I am waiting for Mr. Roden to be rich enough in order to marry him?”
“It is the talk of gossips and servants.”
Mrs. Vansittart looked at him with an amused smile. Did he really know so little of the world as to take his information from gossips and servants?
“Ah,” she said, and that was all. She rose and made a little signal with her parasol to her coachman, who was waiting in the shadow of the Kursaal. As she drove home, she wondered why Von Holzen was afraid that she should marry Percy Roden, who, as it happened, was coming to tea in Park Straat that evening. Mrs. Vansittart had not exactly invited him—not, at all events, that he was aware of. He was under the impression that he had himself proposed the visit.
She remembered that he was coming, but gave no further thought to him. All her mind was, indeed, absorbed with thoughts of Von Holzen, whom she hated with the dull and deadly hatred of the helpless. The sight of him, the sound of his voice, stirred something within her that vibrated for hours, so that she could think of nothing else—could not even give her attention to the little incidents of daily life. She pretended to herself that she sought retribution—that she wished on principle to check a scoundrel in his successful career. The heart, however, knows no principles; for these are created by and belong to the mind. Which explains why many women seem to have no principles and many virtuous persons no heart.
Mrs. Vansittart went home to make a careful toilet pending the arrival of Percy Roden. She came down to the drawing-room, and stood idly at the window.
“The talk of gossips and servants,” she repeated bitterly to herself. One of Von Holzen's shafts had, at all events, gone home. And Percy Roden came into the room a few minutes afterwards. His manner had more assurance than when he had first made Mrs. Vansittart's acquaintance. He had, perhaps, a trifle less respect for the room and its occupant. Mrs. Vansittart had allowed him to come nearer to her; and when a woman allows a man of whom she has a low opinion to come near to her, she trifles with her own self-respect, and does harm which, perhaps, may never be repaired.
“I was too busy to go to the concert this afternoon,” he said, sitting down in his loose-limbed way.
His assumption that his absence had been noticed rather nettled his hearer.
“Ah! Were you not there?” she inquired.
He turned and looked at her with his curt laugh. “If I had been there you would have known it,” he said.
It was just one of those remarks—delivered in the half-mocking voice assumed in self-protection—which Mrs. Vansittart had hitherto allowed to pass unchallenged. And now, quite suddenly, she resented the manner and the speech.
“Indeed,” she said, with a subtle inflection of tone which should have warned him.
But he was engaged in drawing down his cuffs. Many young men would know more of the world if they had no cuffs or collars to distract them.
“Yes,” answered Roden; “if I had gone to the concert it would not have been for the music.”
Percy Roden's method of making love was essentially modern. He threw to Mrs. Vansittart certain scraps of patronage and admiration, which she could pick up seriously and keep if she cared to. But he was not going to risk a wound to his vanity by taking the initiative too earnestly. Mrs. Vansittart, who was busy at the tea-table, set down a cup which she had in her hand and crossed the room towards him.
“What do you mean, Mr. Roden?” she asked slowly.
He looked up with wavering eyes, and visibly lost colour under her gaze.
“What do I mean?”
“Yes. What do you mean when you say that, if you had gone to the concert, it would not have been for the music; that if you had been there, I should have known of your presence, and a hundred other—impertinences?”
At first Roden thought that the way was being made easy for him as it is in books, as, indeed, it sometimes is in life, when it happens to be a way that is not worth the treading; but the last word stung him like a lash—as it was meant to sting. It was, perhaps, that one word that made him rise from his chair.
“If you meant to object to anything that I may say, you should have done so long ago,” he said. “Who was the first to speak at the hotel when I came to The Hague? Which of us was it that kept the friendship up and cultivated it? I am not blind. I could hardly be anything else, if I had failed to see what you have meant all along.”
“What have I meant all along?” she asked, with a strange little smile.
“Why, you have meant me to say such things as I have said, and perhaps more.”
“More—what can you mean?”
She looked at him still with a smile, which he did not understand. And, like many men, he allowed his vanity to explain things which his comprehension failed to elucidate.
“Well,” he said, after a moment's hesitation, “will you marry me? There!”
“No, Mr. Roden, I will not,” she answered promptly; and then suddenly her eyes flashed, at some recollection, perhaps—at some thought connected with her happy past contrasted with this sordid, ignoble present.
“You!” she cried. “Marry you!”
“Why,” he asked, with a bitter little laugh, “what is there wrong with me?”
“I do not know what there is wrong with you. And I am not interested to inquire. But, so far as I am concerned, there is nothing right.”
A woman's answer after all, and one of those reasons which are no reasons, and yet rule the world.
Roden looked at her, completely puzzled. In a flash of thought he recalled Dorothy's warning, and her incomprehensible foresight.
“Then,” he said, lapsing in his self-forgetfulness into the terse language of his everyday life and thought, “what on earth have you been driving at all along?”
“I have been driving at Herr von Holzen and the Malgamite scheme. I have been helping Tony Cornish,” she answered.
So Percy Roden quitted the house at the corner of Park Straat a wiser man, and perhaps he left a wiser woman in it.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Vansittart to Marguerite Wade, long afterwards, when a sort of friendship had sprung up and ripened between them—“my dear, never let a man ask you to marry him unless you mean to say yes. It will do neither of you any good.”
And Marguerite, who never allowed another the last word, gave a shrewd little nod before she answered—“I always say no—before they ask me.”