The Red Book Magazine/Volume 20/Number 6/The Glastonbury Scandal

by E. Nesbit

The Glastonbury Scandal

by E. NESBIT

THERE were, strictly speaking, two scandals besides the other one. One of them, of course, was the marriage; but marriage is a scandal which, with patience and courage, can be lived down. Not but what it was a biggish scandal, complicated, too, by the breaking, on the part of the bridegroom, of the most, or almost the most, sacred ties.

Everyone knows that a marriage had been arranged between Miss Gertrude Vandewinckes, daughter of Mr. P. Q. Vandewinckes, of Paris and Omaha, and Lord Glastonbury. One wonders by whom such marriages are arranged. Sometimes, doubtless, by the bride. Occasionally, perhaps, by the bridegroom. Usually, one infers, by some third person. The third person in the case we are considering was old Lady Glastonbury; everyone knew that.

(You have probably had the dowager Lady Glastonbury pointed out to you at the opera. Her diamonds are enough to take your breath away as they retreat and reappear among the wrinkles of her thin neck. The complexion with which the bony structure of her face is overlaid is a marvel of art. And her chestnut curls have almost the sheen of live hair. She looks like Lord Glastonbury's grandmother, but really he is her son. She married rather late in life.)

The marriage occurred when Lord Glastonbury was on his way home from Omaha—his first visit to the home of his betrothed. Some perverse impulse prompted him to leave the ship at Plymouth. And he came to London by easy stages through the green and gold and silver of an English spring. The New Forest beckoned alluringly to eyes sated with dust and pork and the spectacle of American millionaires. He wanted to look at the New Forest, to look at it close, and to look at it alone. It was so English, so fresh, so everything that his Gertrude was not.

He got out at Winchester and went back into the Forest's green heart. And Spring, Destiny, Coincidence, suddenly took hands. At the Brockenhurst Hotel he ran across a man who had been his fag at Eton. The man took him home. The home was a park and a mansion embowered in the free forest. The mansion had a garden, and the garden had, two days after Lord Glastonbury's arrival, a garden party. “The annual thing, you know,” the friend explained. “Everybody asked. Beautiful feeling. No class distinctions. Even the grub. Cream ices—real cream. One quality for everybody.”

It was early June. Spring was late that year. The may and the laburnam were out, and the rhododendrons. The sky was blue and white, the close green turf dotted with agreeable people, English people. Lord Glastonbury looked at the crowd, loving it. And then out of the crowd one face came to him, as one face comes sometimes from among the crowded faces that move about you just as you are going to sleep; one face, so real that the surprise of its reality wakes you up, and you lose the vision.

It was a girl's face, framed in soft bright hair under a coherent shady hat. Her gloves were neat but mended; her shoes were small, but not garden party shoes. She had a white dress, shabby but fresh, with new blue ribbons, like the heroine of a romance. And to Lord Glastonbury she was just simply and inevitably that. To her it must have seemed that he descended from the Olympus of the unmistakeably Upper Classes, a condescending Jove, enveloping a confiding Semele in a cloud of flattering condescension. At first, that is. Afterwards—

The park was large, its glades well wooded. One does not quite see how he managed it. But it is certain that he was never introduced to her; that they spent the whole afternoon together; that he met her the next day, kissed her the day after that, and, a week later, married her. As for the marriage which had been “arranged,” the details of its disarrangement do not present themselves. There must, however, have been “scenes.”

Lord Glastonbury and his wife went abroad at once and stayed there. The unkindest things were said. At the end of a year they came home. The young Lady Glastonbury was presented to her Sovereign and to Society. The Sovereign admired her and Society received her very cordially, partly because it liked her husband and partly because it wanted so much to find out what he could have seen in her, and also whether she ate peas with her knife, and ate asparagus with—I forget whether it was fingers or forks that were wrong that year.

It had leaked out, as these secret horrors will, that her father was a farmer; not just a rich man who keeps a farm to spend money on, as other men keep less respectable objects, but a working farmer.

“It's quite true,” old Lady Glastonbury had to own to a sympathizing friend who was also a cousin and “companion.” “I've not the slightest doubt the girl milked cows and that the man killed pigs with his own hands.”

“Kind hearts are more than coronets,” the friend reminded her.

“It's no use quoting Shakespeare,” Lady Glastonbury affirmed; “nothing's any good. The only comfort I have is that that sort of people never have any morals. So it may be possible to get rid of her. If only it could be done while dear Gertrude's still heart-broken.”

“You think she would?” the friend asked.

“Like a shot,” said the mother-in-law, “if he could get free soon enough. Claude's got the family looks, you know.”

“He's exactly like you,” said the friend. “Claude is his mother's glass, and she in him brings back the lovely April of her prime.”

“Not with his nose,” said Claude's mother, blinking at a silver-framed mirror on the table by her side.

“Well,” said the friend, “I'm sure I hope it will all turn out for the best. I'm sure if anyone could manage it—”

“What's that?” said Lady Glastonbury sharply.

“I only said if ever anyone deserved anything less, it's you,” the friend stumbled in her haste.

“Well,” said Lady Glastonbury, “we shall see. They come home to-night.”

They came. “Foxy,” was the dowager's verdict on the pale, pointed little face, the hazel eyes, the full-gold hair. “And a lanky May-pole,” she added, smiling amiably at her five foot eight of graceful daughter-in-law.

“Of course,” sho was saying, “dear Claude's choice is welcome to me. He ought to have known that. So long as he is happy.”

“Thank you,” said the new daughter-in-law. “I think he is.”

The elder lady kissed the younger again. In such few and simple words are wars declared.

“You are happy, Claude, aren't you?” the bride of a year asked her husband that night when they were alone. And he answered in a lover's cliché, which was also a statement of fact: “I never knew what happiness meant before—hadn't the slightest idea.”

“No more had I,” said Lavender, and the two melted into a group that would have charmed a sculptor.

Next day there was a little talk about the family jewels. It ended in old Lady Glastonbury's sending them to Lavender with a sugared note.

“Old Susie don't hardly look her own bright little self without the diamonds, does she?” one of her footmen murmured to another. “The Pig-sticker's girl wouldn't have wanted them—plastered all over with them already. Poor old Susie! We'll see how the young 'un looks in them.”

But the young 'un, who was Lavender, was not the girl to flaunt jewels in a house whose mistress had once worn them. She wore no ornaments but a string of pink pearls, “the gift of the bridegroom,” when they dined with his mother.

“She's pretending to despise the Glastonbury diamonds now,” said old Susie to the cousin.

Lavender herself was feeling a little breathless. The honeymoon was over, and she was plunged suddenly into a restless, resistless tide of social obligations, with no experience to guide her, and no ambitions to inspire; her only guide and incentive, a passionate wish to please Aim. Her husband helped; her mother-in-law helped. Old Susie might rot have grieved to see her daughter-in-law divorced, but she had no desire to see her ridiculous. Lavender was a quick learner. Before she had been married two years she could have passed an examination in “the way the Rich live.” She had learned to control her housekeeper, and no longer felt those earlier tremors of the soul in her butler's presence. She learned to do everything that is “done,” and to eschew all such things as are “not done.” She played her part perfectly.

“Really,” said old Susie to Amelia, the cousin, “to look at her no one would guess. And most providentially her father died—neck broken, you remember—fancy a person in that position hunting!—and there are no other relations. If it wasn't for Gertrude.”

“Gertrude's married by now, I suppose?”

“The odd thing is that she isn't. She was over last spring. They met. It was like a play. So sweet to each other—the women, I mean—Lavender a little too sticky, perhaps. Oh! very pretty. It made me sick! And Gertrude with her four million dollars! And she's not so very plain, is she, now she does her hair the new way?”

“Some people think your daughter-in-law a beauty, don't they?”

“Oh, you mean all those men who hang about her. I don't know. She's a little bit different from our sort of girls. I expect they think... Anyway they do hang about. But so they do with barmaids. Claude doesn't seem to mind. I spoke to him about it the other day. 'She's too cordial,' I said. 'There'll be a scandal presently.' Well, he can't say I haven't warned him.”

“But if she's cordial to everyone?”

“That's just her craftiness,” said old Susie. “You mark my words, Amelia, shall find her out yet. She's growing paler and thinner. She's got something on her mind. Oh, I don't despair of seeing him free yet.”

“But surely,”—even Amelia had to say it—“you don't want the girl to do anything wrong?”

“Heaven forbid!” said the dowager Countess of Glastonbury, “but if she does do anything—not quite—I don't want it to be for nothing.”

That same evening Lord Glastonbury, in his turn, remarked the pallor of his wife's little pointed face.

“What have you been doing to yourself?”? he said. “You look like a little white rose. Tired?”

“Not very,” said she.

“Take a day off,” he said.

“A day—would you come? Into the country? To-morrow?” She spoke eagerly.

“Can't be done, my child,” he said. “I've more engagements than I can get through, as it is. But you might take a day's rest-cure. Lie in bed all day, you know. You'd be as fresh as paint for the Widcroft-Lawson's dinner, and there's a dance somewhere afterwards, isn't there? I do like you in white.” And he touched her soft, shining dress.

“Sure to be. Do you? I'm glad. Claude,” she went on, fingering the pink pearls nervously, “I suppose we can't leave London till July? I—the country must be lovely now.”

“Of course we can't,” he told her. “You'll have all August and September at Glastonbury. We can't possibly run away in the middle of the season. People would think we were mad.”

“I suppose they would,” she said with a sigh, and he kissed her and told her not to be a dear little duffer.

It was after this that the change came into their lives. Hitherto, her every moment had been at his service, and at the service of that new life which was to him the only natural life for intelligent human beings. Now, very quietly, and very persistently, Lavender began to withdraw, to evade invitations, to stay at home with “headaches,” to make her calls very short and her visits to her dressmaker very long. More than once she was away for a whole day, without either carriage or motor—“very plainly dressed, milady,” her maid reported to old Susie, who flushed with triumph under her rouge and gave the maid a five-pound note for good news.

Be sure that after this old Susie missed nothing. She watched and she paid others to watch, and she found out quite a number of things. And when she thought she had collected enough material for a really irresistible bomb-shell she wrote to her son. The note read:

Dear Claude: Please come at three to-morrow without your wife. I have something very important to say to you.

Your affectionate mother,
SUZANNE GLASTONBURY.

Of course he went. He found his mother in that confusion of silks and stuffs and woods and metals, carpets and cabinets, statuettes and flowers, which she called her drawing room. Valuable and beautiful objects in an aimless, elaborate muddle. He was used to drawing rooms of that sort. His wife's was very like it. He kissed his mother with careful lightness, sat down on a chintz-covered Chesterfield between a rose the size of a soup-plate and a peony the size of a tea-tray, and said:

“Well, Mother?”

“It's a very delicate matter,” she said, looking at the sparkle of her rings.

“If it's money,” he said, with a generous pause.

“It's not money,” she answered; “far from it. It's dear Lavender.”

Then she told him, in the kindest and must delicate way, all about the short calls and the long dressmaking interviews and the days away, so plainly dressed. He interrupted with a stern:

“What are you driving at?”

“Nothing,” said old Susie sweetly; “you didn't suppose I meant for a moment anything—anything of that sort? But dear Lavender's very young. She's certainly looking much brighter. Haven't you noticed it?”

He had. There was a new rose in his wife's cheeks, a new light in her hazel eyes.

“She's so young,” his mother repeated; “perhaps she's formed some undesirable acquaintances. Or some one out of her old life. Don't pull those carnations to pieces, Claude. I only thought you ought to know.”

“Thank you,” said Claude; “I suppose you haven't said anything of this sort to anyone else?”

“My dearest boy! Now should I?” said Lady Glastonbury.

 

“I gave him something to think about, anyhow,” she told Amelia when she had described to her cousin the interview in its every detail; “but I'm afraid it's not much good yet. She's told him some story. He sent me a telegram last night. Like to see it?”

The telegram was short:

Have spoken to Lavender on the subject of our conversation to-day. Everything is quite all right.

C.

“So that's all right,” said Amelia.

“Let us hope so,” said old Susie darkly. “But mark my words, we've not heard the last of this business yet.”

It was a fortnight later that old Lady Glastonbury made her great discovery. She and Amelia were on their way to a matinée. There was a block in the traffic in one of those low streets where Italians live, Soho, you know. Amelia was secretly furious. She had the middle-aged spinster's passion for the stage, and she knew that they were late already. This delay would make them late beyond the rising of the curtain. Suddenly Lady Glastonbury's thin hand gripped hers.

“Look!” she hissed rather than whispered. “Did you see that?”

“No. Where? What?”

“That girl,' said Lady Glastonbury. “At last I've run her to earth. I'll get out. I'll join you at the theatre. No, don't stop me. I saw her go into a house. Yes, Lavender, of course. Not a word, Amelia. My mind's made up.”

She got out of the carriage then and there and picked her way between the motors and horses to the dusty pavement. Amelia saw her enter a tall, open door; then the block broke and the carriage moved on.

“Well!” said Amelia. “I never should have believed it. Never in this world.”

 

“I was perfectly right, my dear,” said old Susie, rustling disturbingly into her stall in the middle of the second act. “I've made exhaustive inquiries. That wicked girl has a flat there, calls herself Mrs. Lovell—her maiden name, you know, and what's more there's a Mr. Lovell. They only go there occasionally. I got it all out of the housekeeper. That house is flats.”

“Shish!” said the people in the stalls behind, in front and on both sides.

“I can't sit this out,” said Lady Glastonbury, the moment the curtain went down. “I must go straight to Cadogan Square and see Hortense.”

“Wont you—think it over?” even Amelia was moved to urge. “You can't undo that sort of thing once you've done it.”

“Who wants to undo anything?” asked old Susie. “Not another word.” And she told her story at length. She rustled out just as the third act began.

At Cadogan Square she learned that her son and his wife were both out. Would not dine at home. She made her way to Lavender's boudoir and found in the little vellum-covered book no engagement noted for that evening.

Her heart beat high with triumph. Now—at last—

“What did your mistress wear?” she asked Hortense.

“A little sprigged delaine, my lady—straw hat—with roses—very simple—but more chic than my lady usually wears on these occasions.”

“These occasions?”

“I mean when my lady goes out without the carriage and without milord.”

“That will do,” said old Lady Glastonbury, very dignified all of a sudden. “Tell them to call a taxi.”

Her taxi set her down in Siena Street a little way from those flats. The street was dusty and dirty; men in shirt sleeves and women without hats were standing about in groups. A barrow loaded with flowers went by, and there were flowers in some of the windows of the flats.

She went in and up the stairs. There was no hall porter in the dingy cemented passage. And no lift boy and no lift. Old Susie had to climb the stairs, for Mrs. Lovell's flat was on the top floor. Many, many stairs. She reached the top landing breathless. The door of Mrs. Lovell's flat was open, and as Lady Glastonbury stood panting on the top stair she saw through the crack of that door a kitchen, very bright and neat, with dressers piled with gay cheap crockery, a white scrubbed table and the back of some one in a “little sprigged delaine,” some one who was, quite plainly, “washing up.” In that part of the kitchen which was hidden from old Susie's gaze certain movements indicated the presence of another person, even before the person who was washing up called out with what struck old Lady Glastonbury as incredible levity: “Look out, darling; the kettle's boiling over.”

It was then that old Susie pushed the door open and walked in. It was a man, that other person—old Susie saw it, a man without a coat, his blue shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. At the sound of the newcomer's entrance the girl who was washing up turned. It was Lavender, of course, and the man who was bending over a gas stove made one leap and disappeared through a further door.

Lavender crossed the room and shut the inner door. She turned off the gas, whose expiring plop broke the silence like a sardonic exclamation. Then she passed behind her visitor and closed the outer door. Then she turned to her mother-in-law and stood, silent, grave, awaiting the attack.

Lady Glastonbury for once found herself at a loss for words.

“I've found you out, you see,” was the best she could do after half a minute of a silence which she felt as intolerable.

“I see you have,” said Lavender politely. “It must have given you a great deal of trouble. I hope you find the result worth it?”

“How dare you?” said old Susie. “You ought to go down on your knees and beg me to spare you.”

“Ought I?” said Lavender. “And would you?”

“I feel that I am being contaminated by being in this place at all.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Lavender; “of course you're not used to kitchens. Shall we go into the sitting-room? Shall I show you the way?”

She opened the door through which that degrading crouching figure in shirt-sleeves had passed, and the other woman followed her. There was nothing else to do. The sitting room, like the kitchen, was of a shining neatness. All the furniture was old and bees-waxed to a mirror surface. An oak settle, a Welsh dresser, displaying a Spode tea service of pink and gold, ladder-backed chairs, a spiral-legged gate-table. On the window-ledges were jars of red roses. On the table a pot of honeysuckle.

“Wont you sit down,” said Lavender, wheeling forward a low armchair, “since you are here?”

“Why don't you say you are glad to see me?” Lady Glastonbury asked savagely. “You might as well, while you are about it. Why don't you?”

“Because, of course, I'm not. I'm sorry to see you. I never meant you to find out.”

“Really! You surprise me. No, you shameless girl, I will not sit down in this abode of....misconduct. I came here to expose you, and I mean to do it. I am going, at once—at once. But before I go—”

“You look,” said Lavender, interrupting definitely, “as though you were very glad you had found me out. Why?”

“Such conduct as yours,” said the other, rather at a loss, “deserves to be found out.”

“I don't want to be disrespectful,” said Lavender, “but I don't think you deserve anything at all. Not anything nice, that is. You certainly don't deserve to be told anything. But I will tell you, if you like. I couldn't have gone on with it all, if I hadn't had—his.”

“Gone on with what?”

“With all that empty scurry and worry that you call life,” said Lavender, facing the other woman across the polished oak and the honeysuckle. “I had to have a place to breathe in—so I took this—and this is some of the furniture from home.”

“That I'll swear it isn't,” was old Susie's rejoinder.

“My home, not his. And I come here and do my own marketing, and cook a little and wash up and keep things clean myself, and pretend I've got a real home, not just a houseful of servants. And I know some of the French women, the ones who keep the shops, and they come in and have coffee with me sometimes. And it's a real little life of my own. And I love it,” she said defiantly. “I don't suppose you'll understand, but I've told you because I thought I ought. And now will you please go.”

“Upon my word,” said old Lady Glastonbury, and she leaned on the table for support, “—you expect me to believe this—this silly tale?”

Lavender shrugged her shoulders delicately.

“No, no, my girl,”—old Susie's face was purple under its casing,—“young women don't set up secret flats just to do their own housework in and entertain French shopkeeper's wives.”

“I did,” said Lavender.

“It takes two birds to build a nest.” The flowers in old Susie's hat trembled sympathetically as her hand trembled on the table.

“I made this, alone,' said Lavender, very pale and very scornful.

“You wicked little viper!” the other woman almost screamed. “But you're lying for nothing, young woman. I've seen the man. Through the crack of the door. And I'm going to see him face to face before I leave this room.”

“You saw—” Lavender hesitated, incredulous.

“I saw the other dicky-bird that you made this nest for the sake of; the man you've betrayed my poor boy for.”

Lavender made a quick movement.

“Oh, it's no use your denying it. He's in there now. And I don't stir till he comes out. Now, my lady!”

Lavender stood irresolute, and old Susie thought in her wicked old heart, “Now I've got you in a corner, my beauty,” and she pictured the guilty creature in shirt sleeves skulking in the room, the door of which lay behind her between the oak settle and the tall mahogany clock.

Once more Lavender shrugged her shoulders.

“There is there,” some one in there,” she owned, and old Susie crowed with pleasure, “but I have promised not to tell anyone that anyone but me comes here.”

“I dare say you have,” said Lady Glastonbury. “Well, whoever he is, out he comes. Call him out.”

“No,” said Lavender. Just that.

“Then I shall.” The old woman's voice rose to a shriek and turned quickly and beat with her fists on the door.

“Here, come out,” she said,

She drew back as the door opened, and, still in shirt sleeves because his coat was hanging on the door in the kitchen, the man came out. It was Lord Glastonbury, her son and Lavender's husband.

“Well, Mother,” he said, and his face was set like a flint.

“I—I just looked in,” she said. “I saw dear Lavender come in here this afternoon. And I thought I'd surprise you.”

“You have,” said Lord Glastonbury.

“I think I must be moving on,” said old Susie, groping for her bag and purse on the table.

Lavender stood trembling from head to foot.

“I didn't tell, Claude,” she said.

“I know you didn't. Mother, I asked my wife to keep the little secret We didn't want paragraphs in the paper: 'Peer Pursues Plainness—Society Lady Loves the Simple Life,' and all that rot. Lavender invented the game, and when I found it out she let me play, too. I adore washing up. And I can cook a chop better than your cook can. You'll keep our secret, wont you?” His tone was light, but eyes and mouth were hard.

“I think I'll have a taxi,” said old Susie weakly.

“Do you mind if I fetch one?” Glastonbury asked his wife.

“Go, of course,” she said, and he went.

“Now,” said Lavender with resolution, “I'm going to forgive you. You can't help my doing that. And— You always hated me, and I always hated you. Can't we stop it? I only hate you because you hate me. If you can stop, I can.”

“I can't,” said old Lady Glastonbury. “You've got Claude and you've got the family jewels, and you didn't bring him a penny, and—”

“You shall have the jewels back, for as long as you like,” said Lavender. “I've never worn them—though what you want with them— Oh! don't let's be hateful. Claude doesn't know all you said—they're double doors. I'll never tell him. No one shall ever know. Let's be friends. Quick, before Claude comes back.”

She almost pushed the old lady into a chair.

“Don't cry,” she said. “I suppose you couldn't help thinking things like that, if that's how you're made. I'll make Claude send away the cab, and you'll have dinner with us. No one will ever know.”

 

But everybody had to know about the nest. To counteract what everybody thought they knew from the incoherent confidences of cousin Amelia, adrift at the matinée's end, to the acquaintances she met, coming out. Fortunately the thing didn't get into the papers, but everybody who was anybody knew and chattered till Lord Glastonbury and his young wife went to live at one of his country houses, where they raise cattle and have a model dairy. There are the strangest stories about the domesticity of their life there, but nothing that is positively scandalous. When people told each other the story they always added: “So that's the second Glastonbury scandal in the last forty years.”

“What was the other?” some one would be sure to ask, and the answer would be:

“Oh, have you forgotten? About old Susie. She was a barmaid, you know, and thirty-five if she was a day, when Lord Glastonbury's father married her.”