Vixen, Volume III - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (microsoft ebook reader txt) 📗

made me very happy that night, for you told me I was the best-dressed woman in the room."

"I should not have been very happy myself if I had known the cost of your gown," answered the Captain grimly. "Fifteen guineas for a Honiton _fichu!_" he cried presently. "What in mercy's name is a _fichu?_ It sounds like a sneeze."

"It is a little half-handkerchief that I wear to brighten a dark silk dress when we dine alone, Conrad. You know you have always said that lace harmonises a woman's dress, and gives a softness to the complexion and contour."

"I shall be very careful what I say in future," muttered the Captain, as he went on with the bill. "French cambric _peignoir_, trimmed real Valenciennes, turquoise ribbon, nineteen guineas," he read presently. "Surely you would never give twenty pounds for a gown you wear when you are having your hair dressed?"

"That is only the name, dear. It is really a breakfast-dress. You know you always like to see me in white of a morning."

The Captain groaned and said nothing.

"Come," he said, by-and-by, "this surely must be a mistake. 'Shooting dress, superfine silk corduroy, trimmed and lined with cardinal _poult de soie_, oxydised silver buttons, engraved hunting subjects, twenty-seven guineas.' Thank Heaven you are not one of those masculine women who go out shooting, and jump over five-barred gates."

"The dress is quite right, dear, though I don't shoot. Theodore sent it to me for a walking-dress, and I have worn it often when we have walked in the Forest. You thought it very stylish and becoming, though just a little fast."

"I see," said the Captain, with a weary air, "your not shooting does not hinder your having shooting-dresses. Are there any fishing-costumes, or riding-habits, in the bill?"

"No, dear. It was Theodore's own idea to send me the corduroy dress. She thought it so new and _recherché_, and even the Duchess admired it. Mine was the first she had ever seen."

"That was a triumph worth twenty-seven guineas, no doubt," sighed the Captain. "Well, I suppose there is no more to be said. The bill to me appears iniquitous. If you were a duchess or a millionaire's wife, of course it would be different. Such women have a right to spend all they can upon dress. They encourage trade. I am no Puritan. But when a woman dresses beyond her means--above her social position--I regret the wise old sumptuary laws which regulated these things in the days when a fur coat was a sign of nobility. If you only knew, Pamela, how useless this expensive finery is, how little it adds to your social status, how little it enhances your beauty! Why, the finest gown this Madame Theodore ever made cannot hide one of your wrinkles."

"My wrinkles!" cried Pamela, sorely wounded. "That is the first time I ever heard of them. To think that my husband should be the first to tell me I am getting an old woman! But I forgot, you are younger than I, and I daresay in your eyes I seem quite old."

"My dear Pamela, be reasonable. Can a woman's forehead at forty be quite as smooth as it was at twenty? However handsome a woman is at that age--and to my mind it is almost the best age for beauty, just as the ripe rich colouring of a peach is lovelier than the poor little pale blossom that preceded it--however attractive a middle-aged woman may be there must be some traces to show that she has lived half her life; and to suppose that pain brûlé brocade, and hand-worked embroidery, can obliterate those, is extreme folly. Dress in rich and dark velvets, and old point-lace that has been twenty years in your possession, and you will be as beautiful and as interesting as a portrait by one of the old Venetian masters. Can Theodore's highest art make you better than that? Remember that excellent advice of old Polonius's,


Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy.


It is the fancy that swells your milliner's bill, the newly-invented trimmings, the complex and laborious combinations."

"I will be dreadfully economical in future, Conrad. For the last year I have dressed to please you."

"But what becomes of all these gowns?" asked the Captain, folding up the bill; "what do you do with them?"

"They go out."

"Out where? To the colonies?"

"No, dear; they go out of fashion; and I give them to Pauline."

"A sixty-guinea dress flung to your waiting-maid! The Duchess of Dovedale could not do things in better style."

"I should be very sorry not to dress better than the Duchess," said Mrs. Winstanley, "she is always hideously dowdy. But a duchess can afford to dress as badly as she likes."

"I see. Then it is we only who occupy the border-land of society who have to be careful. Well, my dear Pamela, I shall send Madame Theodore her cheque, and with your permission close her account; and, unless you receive some large accession of fortune I should recommend you not to reopen it."

His wife gave a heart-breaking sigh.

"I would sacrifice anything for your sake, Conrad," she said, "but I shall be a perfect horror, and you will hate me."

"I fell in love with you, my dear, not with your gown."

"But you fell in love with me in my gown, dear; and you don't know how different your feelings might have been if you had seen me in a gown cut by a country dressmaker."


CHAPTER III.


"With weary Days thou shalt be clothed and fed."

Captain Winstanley never again alluded to the dressmaker's bill. He was too wise a man to reopen old wounds or to dwell upon small vexations. He had invested every penny that he could spare, leaving the smallest balance at his banker's compatible with respectability. He had to sell some railway shares in order to pay Madame Theodore. Happily the shares had gone up since his purchase of them, and he lost nothing by the transaction; but it galled him sorely to part with the money. It was as if an edifice that he had been toilfully raising, stone by stone, had begun to crumble under his hands. He knew not when or whence the next call might come. The time in which he had to save money was so short. Only six years, and the heiress would claim her estate, and Mrs. Winstanley would be left with the empty shell of her present position--the privilege of occupying a fine old Tudor mansion, with enormous stables, and fifteen acres of garden and shrubberies, and an annuity that would barely suffice to maintain existence in a third-rate London square.

Mrs. Winstanley was slow to recover from the shock of her husband's strong language about Theodore's bill. She was sensitive about all things that touched her own personality, and she was peculiarly sensitive about the difference between her husband's age and her own. She had married a man who was her junior; but she had married him with the conviction that, in his eyes at least, she had all the bloom and beauty of youth, and that he admired and loved her above all other women. That chance allusion to her wrinkles had pierced her heart. She was deeply afflicted by the idea that her husband had perceived the signs of advancing years in her face. And now she fell to perusing her looking-glass more critically than she had ever done before. She saw herself in the searching north light; and the north light was more cruel and more candid than Captain Winstanley. There were lines on her forehead--unmistakable, ineffaceable lines. She could wear her hair in no way that would hide them, unless she had hidden her forehead altogether under a bush of frizzy fluffy curls. There was a faded look about her complexion, too, which she had never before discovered--a wanness, a yellowness. Yes, these things meant age! In such a spirit, perchance, did Elizabeth of England survey the reflection in her mirror, until all the glories of her reign seemed as nothing to her when weighed against this dread horror of fast-coming age. And luckless Mary, cooped up in the narrow rooms at Fotheringay, may have deemed captivity, and the shadow of doom, as but trifling ills compared with the loss of youth and beauty. Once to have been exquisitely beautiful, the inspiration of poets, the chosen model of painters, and to see the glory fading--that, for a weak woman, must be sorrow's crown of sorrow.

Anon dim feelings of jealousy began to gnaw Pamela's heart. She grew watchful of her husband's attentions to other women, suspicious of looks and words that meant no more than a man's desire to please. Society no longer made her happy. Her Tuesday afternoons lost their charm. There was poison in everything. Lady Ellangowan's flirting ways, which had once only amused her, now tortured her. Captain Winstanley's devotion to this lively matron, which had heretofore seemed only the commoner's tribute of respect to the peeress, now struck his wife as a too obvious infatuation for the woman. She began to feel wretched in the society of certain women--nay, of all women who were younger, or possibly more attractive, than herself. She felt that the only security for her peace would be to live on a desert island with the husband she had chosen. She was of too weak a mind to hide these growing doubts and ever-augmenting suspicions. The miserable truth oozed out of her in foolish little speeches; those continual droppings that wear the hardest stone, and which wore even the adamantine surface of the Captain's tranquil temper. There was a homoeopathic admixture of this jealous poison in all the food he ate. He could rarely get through a _tête-à-tête_ breakfast or dinner undisturbed by some invidious remark.

One day the Captain rose up in his strength, and grappled with this jealous demon. He had let the little speeches, the random shots, pass unheeded until now; but on one particularly dismal morning, a bleak March morning, when the rain beat against the windows, and the deodoras and cypresses were lashed and tormented by the blusterous wind, and the low sky was darkly gray, the captain's temper suddenly broke out.

"My dear Pamela, is it possible that these whimpering little speeches of yours mean jealousy?" he asked, looking at her severely from under bent brows.

"I'm sure I never said that I was jealous," faltered Pamela, stirring her tea with a nervous movement of her thin white band.

"Of course not; no woman cares to describe herself in plain words as an idiot; but of late you have favoured me with a good many imbecile remarks, which all seem to tend one way. You are hurt and wounded when I am decently civil to the women I meet in society. Is that sensible or reasonable, in a woman of your age and experience?"

"You used not to taunt me with my age before we were married, Conrad."

"Do I taunt you with it now? I only say that a woman of forty,"--Mrs. Winstanley shuddered--"ought to have more sense than a girl of eighteen; and that a woman who had had twenty years' experience of well-bred society ought not to put on the silly jealousies of a school-girl trying to provoke a quarrel with her first lover."

"It is all very well to pretend to think me weak and foolish, Conrad. Yes, I know I am weak, ridiculously weak, in loving you as intensely as I do. But I cannot help