Men invariably termed her “a sweet woman.” Women called her other things. What was she like? Of middle height and “caressable,” with a rounded, supple figure, exquisitely groomed and got up! Her golden hair would have been merely brown, if left to Nature. It came nearly to her eyebrows in the dearest little rings, and was coaxed into the loveliest of coils and waves and undulations. Her eyes were lustrous hazel, her eyelashes and eyebrows as nearly black as perfect taste allowed. Her cheeks were of an ivory pallor, sometimes relieved with a faint sea-shell bloom. Her features were beautifully cut, inclining to the aquiline in outline. Her voice was low and tender, especially when she was saying the sort of thing that puts a young fellow out of conceit with the girl he is engaged to, and makes the married man wonder why he threw himself away. Why he was such an infuriated ass, by George! as to beg and pray Clara to marry him ten years ago, and buy a new revolver when she said it was esteem she felt for him, not love. Why Fate should ordain just at this particular juncture that he should encounter the one woman, by jingo! the only woman in the world who had ever really understood and sympathized with him! It was Mrs. Osborne’s vocation to make men of all grades, ranks, and ages ask this question. She had followed her chosen path in life with enthusiasm, let us say, collecting scalps, with here and there a little shudder of pity, and here and there a little smart of pain. Fascination, exercised almost involuntarily, 165was to her, as to the cobra, the means of life. Not in a vulgar sense, because the late Colonel Osborne had left his widow handsomely provided for. But the excitement of the sport, the keen delight of capturing new victims—bringing the quarry boldly down in the open, or setting insidious snares, pitfalls, and traps for the silly prey to blunder into—these joys the huntress knows who sharpens her arrows and weaves her webs for Man.
I have said—or hinted—that other women did not love Mrs. Osborne. Knowing, as they did, that the lovely widow frankly despised them, her own sex responded by openly declaring war. They knew her strength, and never attacked her save in bands. Yet, strange to say, the invincible Mrs. Osborne was never so nearly worsted as in a single-handed combat to which she was challenged by a mere neophyte—“a chit”—as, had she lived in the eighteenth instead of the twentieth century, the fair widow would have termed Polly Overshott.
Polly’s real name was Mariana, but, as everyone in the county said, Polly seemed more appropriate. Sir Giles Overshott had no other child, and sometimes seemed not to regret this limitation of his family circle. Lady Overshott had been dead some five years when the story opens, and Sir Giles was beginning to speak of himself as a widower, which to experienced ears means much.
The estate of Overshott Foxbrush was a fine one, unencumbered, and yielding a handsome rent-roll. It was understood that Polly would have nearly everything. She had consented in the most daughterly manner to become engaged to the eldest son of a county neighbor, a young gentleman with whom she was very much in love, Costebald Ianson Smithgill, commonly known as “Cis” Smithgill, his united initials forming the caressing little name. He was six feet high, and had a bass voice with 166treble inflections, which he was training for a parliamentary career. He had, until the demise of an elder brother removed him from the service of his country, held a lieutenancy in the Guards. As to his family, who does not know that the Smithgills are a family of extreme antiquity, descended from that British Princess and daughter of Vortigern who drank the health of Hengist, proffering the Saxon General the mead-horn of welcome when he first set his conquering foot on British soil? Who does not know this, knows nothing. The mead-horn is said to be enclosed in the masonry of the eldest portion of Hengs Hall, the family seat in the country of Mixshire, where, of course, the scene of our story is laid. And Polly and Cis had been engaged about two months when Mrs. Osborne took The Sabines, and was called on by the county, because Osborne had been the cousin of an Earl, and she herself came of a very good family. You don’t want any name much better than that of Weng. And Mrs. Osborne came of the Wengs of Hollowshire.
She took The Sabines for the sake of her health, which required country air. It was an old-fashioned, square Jacobean house of red brick faced with stone, and it boasted a yew walk, the yews whereof had been wrought by some long-moldered-away tree-clipper into arboreal representatives of the Rape of the Sabines. That avenue was one of the lions of the county, and every fresh tenant of the place had to bind him or herself, under fearful penalties, to keep the Sabine ladies and their abductors properly clipped.
Mrs. Osborne was destitute of the faculty of reverence, Lady Smithgill of Hengs said afterwards. Because early in June, when she drove over to call—it would not become even a Smithgill to ignore a Weng of Hollowshire—upon turning a curve in the avenue so as to command the house, the lawn, and the celebrated Yew Tree Walk, 167the new tenant of The Sabines, exquisitely attired in a Paris gown and carrying a marvelous guipure sunshade, appeared to view; Sir Giles Overshott was with her, and the lady and the baronet were laughing heartily.
“Mrs. Osborne simply shrieked,” Lady Smithgill said afterwards, in confidence to a few dozen dear friends; “and Sir Giles was quite purple—that unpleasant shade, don’t you know?
“It turned out that they were amusing themselves at the expense of The Sabines. I looked at her, and I fancy I showed my surprise at her want of taste.
“‘We think a great deal of them in the county,’ I said, ‘and Sir Giles can tell you how severe a censure would be pronounced by persons of taste upon the tenant who was so audacious as to deface or so careless as to neglect them, or even, ignorantly, to make sport of them.’
“At that Sir Charles became a deeper shade, almost violet, and she uncovered her eyes and smiled. I think somebody has told her she resembled Bernhardt in her youth.
“‘Dear Lady Smithgill,’ she said, or rather cooed (and those cooing voices are so irritating!), ‘depend on it, I shall make a point of keeping them in the most perfect condition. To be obliged to pay a forfeit to my landlord would be a nuisance, but to be censured by persons of taste residing in the county, that would be quite insupportable.’ Then she rang for tea, and there were eight varieties of little cakes, which must have been sent down from Buszard’s, and a cut-glass liqueur bottle of rum upon the tray. ‘Do you take rum?’ she had the audacity to ask me. I did not stoop to decline verbally, but shook my head slightly, and she gave me another of those smiles and passed on the rum. Sir Charles brought it me, and I waved it away, speechless, absolutely speechless, at the monstrosity of the idea.
“She overwhelmed me with apologies, of course.
168“And both Sir Giles—who, I regret to see, is constantly there—and Sir Costebald, who has once called—consider her a sweet woman. But—think me foreboding if you will—I cannot feel that county Society has an acquisition in Mrs. Osborne.”
“Papa goes to The Sabines rather often,” said Polly Overshott, when it came to her turn to be the recipient of Lady Smithgill’s confidence. “He does say that Mrs. Osborne is a sweet woman, and he is helping her to choose some brougham horses. He says the pair she brought down are totally unfit for country roads. And as for the rum, she offered it to me. Colonel Osborne held a post in the Diplomatic Service at Berlin, and Germans drink it in tea, and I rather like it, though a second cup gives you a headache afterwards.”
“Mary!” screamed Miss Overshott’s mamma-in-law elect, who had effected this compromise between Polly and Mariana.
“As regards The Sabines,” Polly went on, “we have bowed down before them for years and years, and we shall go on doing it, but they are absurd all the same. So are our lead groups and garden temples at Overshott—awfully absurd——”
“I suppose you include our Saxon buttress and Roman pavement at Hengs in the catalogue of absurdities,” said Lady Smithgill icily. “Fortunately, Sir Costebald is not a widower, or they might stand in some danger of being swept away. At the present moment, let me tell you, Mary, your lead figures and garden temples are far from secure. That woman leads your father by the nose—twines him round her little finger. Cis tells me——”
“What does Cis know about it?” said Polly, flushing to the temples.
“Cis is a man of the world,” said Lady Smithgill. “But at the same time he is a dutiful son. He tells 169everything to his mother. It seems—Cis personally vouches for the truth of this—that Sir Giles is constantly at The Sabines—in fact, every day.... He is dressed for conquest, it would appear.”
“Cis or Papa?” asked Polly, with feigned innocence.
“Sir Giles wears coats and neckties that would be condemned as showy if worn by a bridegroom,” said Lady Smithgill rapidly. “He is perfumed with expensive extracts, and his boots must be torture, Cis says, knowing all one does know of the Overshott tendency to gout. He never removes his eyes from Mrs. Osborne, laughs to idiocy at everything she says, and simply lives in the corner of the sofa next her. He monopolizes the conversation. Nobody else can get in a word, Cis tells me.”
“Since when did Cis begin to be jealous?” said Polly under her breath.
“I did not quite catch your remark,” returned Lady Smithgill. “By the way, Mary, I hope you will wear those pearls as often as you can. They require air, sunshine, and exercise.... I contracted my chronic rheumatic tendency thirty years ago through sitting in the garden with them on. For days together Sir Costebald’s mother used to skip in them upon the terrace, but I never went as far as that.”
“The pearls—what pearls?” asked Polly vaguely.
“Dear Mary, when a fiancé makes a gift of such beauty—to say nothing of its value—and the strings were originally purchased for two thousand pounds—it is customary for the recipient to exhibit a little appreciation,” Lady Smithgill returned.
“Appreciation!”
“Of course you thanked Cis, my dear. I never doubted that. But there, we will say no more....”
Polly’s blue eyes flashed. She rose up; she had ridden over to the Hall alone, and her slight upright figure looked its best in a habit.
170“I should like to say a little more.” She put up her hand and unpinned her hat from her close braids of yellow-gold, and tossed the headgear into a neighboring chair. “Dear Lady Smithgill, Cis has not given me any pearls. Perhaps he has sent them to Bond Street to be cleaned——”
“Cleaned! They are in perfect condition.”
“Or—or perhaps he has given them to some one else. I have seen very little of Cis lately,” Polly ended. “But Papa tells me that he is a good deal at The Sabines. Papa seemed to find him as much in the way as ... as Cis found Papa. And—her new kitchenmaid is the sister of our laundrywoman, and a report reached me that she had lately been wearing some magnificent pearls.... I thought nothing of it at the time, but now....”
There was a snorting gasp from Lady Smithgill. All had been made clear. Her double chin trembled, and her eyes went wild.
“Mary!” she cried.... “I have been blind! My boy—my infatuated boy! That woman has a positively fiendish power over men.... She will enslave—ensnare Cis as she has done your father and dozens of others. Oh! my dear, there are stories.... She is relentless. The Sowersea’s second son, De la Zouch Sowersea, is now driving a cab in Melbourne, and the Countess attributes everything to her. At Berlin—where her husband had a diplomatic appointment, and she learned to offer refined English-women rum in their tea—there were worse scandals—agitations, duels! Now my son is in peril. Save him, Mary! Do something before it is too late!”
“I can hardly drop in at The Sabines—say I have called for my property, and take Cis and Papa away,” said Polly, her short upper lip quivering with pain and anger. “But I will think over what is best to be done. In the meantime do not worry Cis. Leave him to go his 171way. We need not be too nervous. He and Papa will keep an eye upon each other,” she ended.
“You know more of this than you have told me,” poor Lady Smithgill gasped. “There are scandals in the air—people are talking—about my boy and that woman! Why did she ever come here?” the unhappy lady murmured. “I said from the first that she would be no acquisition to the county!”
Polly’s cob, Kiss-me-Quick, came round, and Polly took leave. She had warm young blood in her veins, and an imperious temper of her own, and to be asked to “do something” to add a fresh access of caloric to the obviously cooling temperature of one’s betrothed is not flattering. Yes, she had suspected before; yes, she had known more than she had told the proprietress of the agitated double chin and the agitated maternal feelings. Sir Giles had betrayed Cis as unconsciously as he had betrayed himself. “Really, Poll, I think you ought to keep the young man better to heel,” he had said. “He means no harm, but Mrs. Osborne is a dangerously fascinating woman, and a woman of that type possesses advantages over a girl. And, of course, I don’t suggest anything in the nature of disloyalty to yourself—Cis is the soul of honor and all that. But to see an engaged young fellow sitting on footstools, and lying on the grass at the feet of a pretty woman—who doesn’t happen to be the right one—turning up his eyes at her like a dying duck in a thunderstorm—by George!—irritates me. He is always in Mrs. Osborne’s pocket, and one never can get a word with her alone—I mean, nobody is allowed to usurp her ............