Some persons in society were wont to aver that luck, pure and simple, had been a prime factor in Lady Glencross’s career from first to last. Luck, they said, had sent young Lord Glencross hunting over the glebe land; had made his horse throw him just outside the vicarage door; had broken his leg and kept him for six weeks a prisoner at the vicarage with Miss Rhea Crossley, the vicar’s daughter, in sole attendance on him, an attendance that eventually was to bring about the young lady’s marriage into the noble family.
Here others would occasionally take up the parable and add: that luck had still further befriended the young lady by killing her scamp of a husband, within a year of the wedding-day, in a railway accident between Neuilly and Paris. And then they would hint at some disgraceful love episode connected with the affair and break off with a smile that seemed to say: “An’ if I would I could tell a tale.” Lady Glencross had passed upon herself and her career a slightly different verdict, when some eight years previously she had put off her widow’s weeds after wearing them for the conventional two years.
“I live on, the anticlimax to my own story,” she had said to herself as she donned her laces and jewellery once more. “From a poetic point of view I ought to have died when my love and my faith in man died. Yet here am I, never more alive than I am today; never before more ready to enjoy dress, dancing, opera, play, yachting—everything! Perhaps, after all, those are happiest who get rid of that troublesome thing called a heart at the very outset of their career, and set themselves to make sensations do duty for it in the future.”
“To make sensations do duty for a heart” had sounded very well in her ears. The sentence had a touch of epigram in it She took it for her text, so to speak, and based her daily life upon its doctrine. She swept her memory clean of all haunting images of the past, of her first early delirium of love, and of her terrible awakening from that delirium when her husband’s sudden death placed in her hands, together with his private papers, the records of his dissipations before and after his marriage. She rigidly excluded from her life alike friendships and enmities that threatened to throw roots beneath a surface soil, and filled her days with an easy round—not treadmill grind—of society pleasures. To be on good terms with all the world (including her husband’s relatives) was as distinctly productive of pleasurable sensations as it was to be well dressed and generally admired. So she spared no pains to achieve both results. Also a good-natured action now and again was apt to give her soothing, pleasant thoughts when she laid her head on her pillow at night; consequently, she was ready at any moment to open her purse-strings at the call of charity, and not at all unwilling to pose as “my lady bountiful” to the large circle of impecunious relatives whom she had left behind in her upward career.
Thus it came about that when, at the close of her tenth year of widowhood, certain of these relatives wrote to her on behalf of her little cousin, Dulcie Crossley, stating that she had been left well-nigh alone in the world by the death of her parents, and would stand no chance of getting an entrée into society unless she held out her hand, Lady Glencross wrote immediately in reply: “Send her up to me at once, and I will take care that she is well launched.”
It had been all very well for Lady Glencross to congratulate herself on having got rid of “that troublesome thing called a heart.” Towards the end of that eventful tenth year of her widowhood, circumstances arose that made her a little doubtful as to whether that desirable result had been attained. Lord Carthewe, an old playfellow and early friend, returned to England after a long period of foreign diplomatic service: the old friendship was renewed, an easy intimacy was maintained, and eventually an offer of marriage was the result.
Lord Carthewe was a man of about five-and-thirty, handsome, distinguished and of refined tastes; his estates were unmortgaged, his reputation without reproach. Yet all that Lady Glencross could find to say to him, in place of the “yes” he so confidently expected, was, “Let me have time to think. I cannot give you an answer now. This day week will be my yearly ball. Come to me at the close of it and I will give you an answer, but, pray—pray keep away from me till then.”
An odd request this. It was born of a vague fear lest, after all that had come and gone in her life, she had not the love to give this man that he had a right to expect from the woman he made his wife. The fear grew upon her as the week ran its round. It brought a wail in its wake.
“Ah! if he had but come to me at the first, when my heart was young and fresh and true,” she said to herself, as she stood before her mirror, wondering over the shining eyes and bright hair that had refused to endorse the record of her past experiences.
Lady Glencross’s ball—the one and only ball that she was in the habit of giving at the height of the season, always marked a red-letter day in the calendar of ball-goers. Her house in Park Lane was large, and had been altered and adapted expressly for ball-giving, and she spared neither time, thought nor money to render the evening’s entertainment a brilliant success. The ball on this occasion was to be made specially interesting by the
