Reprise (4 page)

“Step in and sit down. She’ll come in a flash when she hears you’re here,” Clarence told him.

The servant brought word quite simply that Miss Mallow did not wish to see Lord Dammler. “I’ll wait,” he said, pretending to misunderstand the reply.

“I’ll hustle her along,” Clarence told him, but when she told him she was through with Dammler for good, he suddenly didn’t feel like facing Nevvie again that morning, and went to his studio to paint. He had no model on hand, so painted in the brown edges and did another picture of himself, wearing his nightcap. This solved very nicely the habit his own brown hair had of disappearing into the brown background. It was chiaroscuro of the best sort in his eyes, a nice sharp contrast of white and brown. Dandy. Rembrandt didn’t manage it quite so well. Had a way of blurring it all together.

For forty-five minutes Dammler sat alone in the saloon, getting more worried and more angry as he sat. He went into the hall and asked the butler if he might please see
Mrs.
Mallow. She came, disturbed, embarrassed, but firm in her declaration that Prudence would not see him.

“By God she will, if I have to rip down her door,” he said. “Would you please tell her so, ma am."

The message was relayed. “Maybe you’d better just
see
him,” Mrs. Mallow suggested.

“I wouldn’t see him if my life depended on it. The
impertinence
of giving such a message to you, my mother! Upon my word, he has been unconventional in the past, but this is the first time I have seen an outright display of bad breeding. Tell him to go away, and not come back.”

Poor Mrs. Mallow returned below with this unhappy news. She was glad Prudence was firm in her resolve, but when she saw the lost look that came over Dammler’s face, she had second thoughts. Even as she stood watching, wavering in her own resolve, she saw a change come over his expression. The hurt look gave way to anger, and soon to resolution.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, then arose quickly and strode into the hallway, dashed up the stairs two at a time. He didn’t hesitate a second. He had never been abovestairs before, but a flashing tail of skirt told him not only her room, but that she had been listening over the bannister as well. Entering not a minute before him, Prudence slammed the door; it was still rattling when he reached it. He pulled it open and entered without knocking.

The long wait and the disappointment had worn his nerves thin. His voice was loud when he spoke. “If you have something of importance to say to me, Prudence, have the gumption to say it yourself, and don’t send your mother to do your dirty work.”

She rounded on him, furious. “I said what I had to say to you yesterday. I thought my meaning must be perfectly clear. When a lady returns her engagement ring and tells a man she doesn’t want to marry him, anyone but an
idiot
must get the message. As I am clearly dealing with the exception, I will spell it out so that even you cannot misunderstand me. I don’t ever want to see you at this house again. We are through, completely, utterly done with each other forever.”

“Not quite done! It has apparently slipped your mind that
I
was involved in the engagement as well, and I deserve a better excuse for dismissal than that I offered shelter for a night to a friend in trouble.”

“Then I’ll give you nine or ten or a hundred other reasons! You are immoral, conceited, a liar, a libertine and damned impertinent, sir, to send me threats by my mother.”

“I am not a libertine!” he jumped in at once, lighting instinctively on her real objection. “It is a reflection of your mind that you impute lechery to me when I was doing no more than housing the afflicted.”

“You ought to have clothed the naked while you were about it.”

“She wasn’t naked!”

“Next to it. If I had arrived five minutes sooner..."

“If you had arrived five minutes sooner, you would have discovered me on the sofa in the drawing room. I had to go into my bedroom to get my jacket.”

“Odd you found it necessary to warn Hettie to
get rid of me,
if picking up a jacket was your only business in Cybele’s room. Odd, too, you were having a cup of coffee with her, now I come to think of it, with a breakfast tray for two by the bedside.”

“That wasn’t my idea--the tray! I was in a hurry, and carried my coffee in with me. I only told Hettie to take you away for a minute because I
knew
what you’d think. I know the way your mind works.”

“If you had the least conception how my mind works, you wouldn’t be wasting my time and your own with this scene.
I
am of the opinion that the position in which I found you allows me no other course than to be finished with you. Any woman in Christendom would say the same.”

“It is a sad reflection on Christendom to take this high-handed tone with me. I found you in a very similar position with Mr. Seville at an inn in Reading not so very long ago, and didn’t feel it necessary to raise a fuss about it.”

“You found me having a cup of tea with Mr. Seville, who was kind enough to help me when Mama took ill. She was lying in the next room, and you
did
make a considerable fuss. You threatened to shoot him.”

“I should have! To be in your bedroom at midnight.”

“We were both fully dressed, at least. The circumstances were entirely different.”

“No, they were very much the same. Seville helped you when you were in trouble, and it chanced he ended up in your room at an unseemly hour.
I
helped Cybele when she was in trouble, with the same result. Also with the same result in both cases of
my
ending up in the wrong, being kicked out as though I were a mutt.”

“You are no better than a mutt!”

His body tensed, and a cold anger shook him. “You were happy enough to make use of the
mutt,
however. To use my connections and influence to ingratiate yourself with society, and get your books reviewed in
Blackwood’s Review.
To make an advantageous marriage. What changed your mind, as you apparently recognized me for a cur from the beginning?”

“I thought you had changed, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, after all.”

“You taught me a few, Prudence. I thought you were different from other girls, immeasurably better. I thought we had a relationship of mutual trust and respect and understanding.”

“I can’t respect a man who doesn’t respect himself. To invite that trollop into your house, and us on the very edge of being married.”

“She’s gone. I took her away.”

“Back to the love nest, Dammler? Swallow Street, was it not, where all the ladybirds roost?”

“No, she’s gone to stay with some friend on the corner of Conduit and Bond.”

“That would be handy for you, with your own new house in Berkeley Square within whistling distance. Chosen with that convenience in mind, no doubt.”

“I didn’t choose the apartment. Wills arranged it. She’s got a job with him in the play.”

“Better and better! An unexceptionable excuse to see her every day. That will give society a good laugh, to see your mistress starring in your new play, while the bride sits home, ignorant of the fact.”

“She isn’t starring, and you are not ignorant of the fact that she has a small part, as I just told you.”

“I am not going to be the bride, either, so it’s no matter.”

“I won’t be back, Prudence,” he said, studying her with a carefully controlled expression. “If you send me away now, I won’t
ever
be back. Even a mutt will grovel only so far.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Pray don’t slam the door when you go out.”

“This is the end then.”

“The end, finis, curtain. Make a nice bow.”

He made no bow, but turned and walked briskly out the door, giving it a good slam behind him.

She was half glad it was irrevocably over and done with, and wholly sorry that it had ended this way. Her next step was to reconsider their argument, and find an insult in every word he had uttered. To imply she had
used
him to advance herself was unforgivable. He
had
arranged the interview that got her books reviewed in
Blackwood’s Review,
but she had not egged him on to it, had been ignorant of his part in it until it was all over. The rest of it was pure fabrication. She had not wanted to travel in his set, he had dragged her into it. As to dredging up the Seville business again! A wealthy gentleman who had asked her to marry him, and later, after she had refused him, had accidentally been staying at the same inn in Reading, and got her a doctor when Mama was poisoned by shellfish. He had been in her room late, and it was unfortunate in the extreme Dammler had come bursting in to insult the poor man, but to suggest there was any impropriety in it was absurd. Talk about a reflection of one’s own mind! He was only trying to excuse his own behavior, but it was inexcusable, and he must know it.

Chapter Four

The summer in London was hot and tiresome. With company thin, Dammler went out only seldom, and when he did so, there was no sign of Prudence. What she was doing he could only guess. He remained in town himself only because of his play in rehearsal. Prudence was not accustomed to the luxury of spending her summers anywhere else than in the city, so that was no added burden. She tried to work on her book, but it went poorly. She had lost interest in virtuous Patience. She wanted a new character, a girl involved in more lively pursuits than going to the greengrocer for her mother. With the past weeks reeling in her head, she wanted a heroine who was involved with the high and mighty. Her sharp eye had been busy to note the foibles of the
ton,
and she longed to give them a trimming down. A girl who came to society with a fresh eye would do the thing as she wished to do it. Someone like herself, who had not grown up amongst them, and thus saw their behavior for what it was.

Almost she felt it a duty to point out the immorality that ran rampant amongst those she had lately been associating with. Adultery was a way of life with them, with gambling, debts and dissipation all a part of it. Yes, it would make an excellent, instructive book. When she sat down, the words seemed to come of their own accord. Hettie was there, leading her young relative astray, but she was careful to give no similar physical characteristic to her book people when she wrote from life. The relationships were changed. She made herself the daughter of a minister to give the girl a little extra whitening, and to insure the character’s not being taken for herself. She eliminated her mother  but revived her own father for the minister. Dammler she elevated to a duke (so he couldn’t say, if he ever found out, she had lowered him). She also gave him blond hair, while his world travels were limited to a stint in France. Never having been there, she knew only its reputation and didn’t feel the rest of the world could possibly outdo it in infamy. Not a mention of his being a poet. Mr. Seville became her real hero, for of course her heroine must have a happy ending, and the duke be delivered of a suitably bad fate. She equivocated between the gallows and Bedlam, settling in the end for his sheering off to America, for even in fiction she couldn’t quite bear to kill him. As she wrote, she had uphill work making Seville interesting. He became a shadow figure, with the villain taking over as the central character. Too close to her work, she was blinded to this flaw in the story, the playing down of the supposed hero. To increase the difference between the villain and heroine, the lady was endowed with every imaginable virtue.

It was a wonderful diversion for her. She could think of Dammler all day long, twisting him into a form that was easy to hate, but the real Dammler had no such diversion. He was frustrated, bored, and still ferociously angry. To call him a
mutt!
It was infamous. Yet as he reviewed his past life, it didn’t seem so far fetched. What had he, born to wealth and position, accomplished? A thin volume of inferior verse, and a play that was presentable only because he had put some of Prudence’s wisdom into his heroine. His life had been as hapless and promiscuous as a dog’s. She was right, as usual. The play progressed satisfactorily, the rewriting all done by early August. He thought of going to Longbourne Abbey, but to go alone where he had thought to go with Prudence--he couldn’t face it. When Hettie invited him to her place in Surrey, he accepted.

Hettie, a confirmed socialite, had no thought of going alone or only with her nephew. She had a host of friends joining her at intervals for varying lengths of time. She took pains to invite several eligible young ladies to amuse Dammler, and with a mischievous chuckle, she also invited the Malverns. Lady Malvern was reputed to have been Dammler’s mistress. She didn’t know whether it was true, but it was certainly possible, as he had spent sundry holidays at Finefields with the lady and her husband. Had finished off his second batch of cantos there, in fact. The alacrity with which the invitation was accepted tended her to think there was more than friendship between the two.

Her plans bore little fruit. Dammler soon fell into the routine of walking off into the park or woods with his notebook right after breakfast and staying there for the greater part of the day. What he was writing she didn’t know, but it seemed to keep him in good humor, so that he helped her entertain the company in the evenings. He discussed his work with no one. Occasional notices appeared in the London papers of the departure and arrival of guests at Lady Melvine’s place. Such celebrities as Lord Dammler and the Malverns did not go unannounced.

“I see Lady Melvine has got the Malverns to go to her for the last half of August,” Clarence said, sipping his tea one fine morning. “And the Swazies. I expect you know all these folk, eh, Prudence?”

“I know of them,” she replied, clenching her jaw to control her anger. Lady Malvern! He had gone running back to her! “A pity she didn’t ask us. I would like to get away from the sweltering heat of the city for a week or two. But they will all be back in September. All our friends will be turning up one of these days. I confess I miss them.”

To call these people “friends” was another of Clarence's delusions. To hear he expected to continue association with them filled Prudence with forebodings of despair. Clarence would not like having all his vicarious glory snatched from him. He had remained civil to her all summer long, but if September did not return him to his recent pinnacle of fame, he would soon turn on her. Uncle was capable of wretched behavior under the strains of deprivation. She tried to give him a hint that things would be different. He wouldn’t hear of it.