CHAPTER XXIV

________________________________________________
_ If life at Cocker's, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost

something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a

heavier blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.

 

With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with

the blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman

might well have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands.

She bore up, however, in a way that began by exciting much of her

young friend's esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the

wine of life flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the

lack of better diversion, carried on with more mystification for

the other an intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out

and drawing back. Each waited for the other to commit herself,

each profusely curtained for the other the limits of low horizons.

Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher;

nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless it was indeed

her occasional bursts of confidence. Her account of her private

affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind--sometimes the

bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes. This our young

woman took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and

another, of the famous door of the great world. She had been

struck in one of her ha'penny volumes with the translation of a

French proverb according to which such a door, any door, had to be

either open or shut; and it seemed part of the precariousness of

Mrs. Jordan's life that hers mostly managed to be neither. There

had been occasions when it appeared to gape wide--fairly to woo her

across its threshold; there had been others, of an order distinctly

disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her face. On the

whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these still

belonged to the class of things in spite of which she looked well.

She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to

float her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this,

a hundred profundities and explanations.

 

She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were

always gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest

admirers; gentlemen from the City in especial--as to whom she was

full of information about the passion and pride excited in such

breasts by the elements of her charming commerce. The City men did

in short go in for flowers. There was a certain type of awfully

smart stockbroker--Lord Rye called them Jews and bounders, but she

didn't care--whose extravagance, she more than once threw out, had

really, if one had any conscience, to be forcibly restrained. It

was not perhaps a pure love of beauty: it was a matter of vanity

and a sign of business; they wished to crush their rivals, and that

was one of their weapons. Mrs. Jordan's shrewdness was extreme;

she knew in any case her customer--she dealt, as she said, with all

sorts; and it was at the worst a race for her--a race even in the

dull months--from one set of chambers to another. And then, after

all, there were also still the ladies; the ladies of stockbroking

circles were perpetually up and down. They were not quite perhaps

Mrs. Bubb or Lady Ventnor; but you couldn't tell the difference

unless you quarrelled with them, and then you knew it only by their

making-up sooner. These ladies formed the branch of her subject on

which she most swayed in the breeze; to that degree that her

confidant had ended with an inference or two tending to banish

regret for opportunities not embraced. There were indeed tea-gowns

that Mrs. Jordan described--but tea-gowns were not the whole of

respectability, and it was odd that a clergyman's widow should

sometimes speak as if she almost thought so. She came back, it was

true, unfailingly to Lord Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight

of him even on the longest excursions. That he was kindness itself

had become in fact the very moral it all pointed--pointed in

strange flashes of the poor woman's nearsighted eyes. She launched

at her young friend portentous looks, solemn heralds of some

extraordinary communication. The communication itself, from week

to week, hung fire; but it was to the facts over which it hovered

that she owed her power of going on. "They are, in one way and

another," she often emphasised, "a tower of strength"; and as the

allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could quite wonder why, if

they were so in "one way," they should require to be so in two.

She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan counted in.

It all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If that

fate was to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not

remarkable that she shouldn't come all at once to the scratch of

overwhelming a mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to

such a person a prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye--if it

WAS Lord Rye--wouldn't be "kind" to a nonentity of that sort, even

though people quite as good had been.

 

One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to

church together; after which--on the inspiration of the moment the

arrangement had not included it--they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan's

lodging in the region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend

about her service of predilection; she was excessively "high," and

had more than once wished to introduce the girl to the same comfort

and privilege. There was a thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted

of acrid smoke; but they had been sitting among chants and incense

and wonderful music, during which, though the effect of such things

on her mind was great, our young lady had indulged in a series of

reflexions but indirectly related to them. One of these was the

result of Mrs. Jordan's having said to her on the way, and with a

certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had been for some time in

town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which little

required to be added--as if the bearing of such an item on her life

might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord

Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying

to that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also

should take place at Saint Julian's. Mr. Mudge was still an

attendant at his Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her

worries--it had never even vexed her enough for her to so much as

name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr. Mudge's form of worship was one of

several things--they made up in superiority and beauty for what

they wanted in number--that she had long ago settled he should take

from her, and she had now moreover for the first time definitely

established her own. Its principal feature was that it was to be

the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which was indeed very

much what she said to her hostess as they sat together later on.

The brown fog was in this hostess's little parlour, where it acted

as a postponement of the question of there being, besides, anything

else than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little fire

and a paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign

of a flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets.

The girl waited till they had had a cup of tea--waited for the

announcement that she fairly believed her friend had, this time,

possessed herself of her formally at last to make; but nothing

came, after the interval, save a little poke at the fire, which was

like the clearing of a throat for a speech. _

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