Ordham

“ No man could be more direct, more outspoken, than Ordham when it suited him, and this was his chief charm for people thrown much in his society,—betraying, as it did, the cool courage under his listless habit, furnishing the high lights, as it were, for that formal indubitably diplomatic nature. ”

“ To do Excellenz justice, she had not come altogether to torment Styr with this picture of Ordham’s felicity, for she was still convinced that there had been but a pleasant summer friendship between the two, whose only undercurrent was the subtle influence exercised upon Ordham in behalf of his examinations. To no other woman would she have given the benefit of the doubt for a moment, but not only had Styr let the young man go, permitted him to marry, but she looked quite the same as ever. She was an artist, nothing more. ”

“ It was his disposition to dwell on the fair and splendid surfaces, harming no man and ignoring the primal passions that crawled over their sands below. Had he, upon his majority, realized the expectations of his careless boyhood, it is doubtful if he ever would have experienced a mean, much less a criminal, impulse, for, although this may be said of many men, Ordham had true refinement of mind and a surpassing indolence. ”

“ Ordham upon this occasion felt pride as ever in their fine manly appearance, but when the youngest frankly demanded tips was mortified not to be able to respond generously, and wished that he had not come. To them he stood in the shoes of their indulgent father; moreover, Ordham was one of those unfortunate persons who, while possessing the very special gift of wearing new clothes for the first time as if they had been in his wardrobe for at least two months, yet impressed the beholder as a young man of unlimited income, and on the Continent sent the prices up in every shop he entered. ”

“ As Ordham wandered about, staring at the castles from all sides, or lying on the turf under the trees of the forest, his solitude broken only by a passing peasant in the picturesque grey and green costume of the Highlands, or the sudden appearance of a chamois at the end of a vista, he understood something of Ludwig’s contempt for mere mortals. He loitered on in the groves sacred to the unhappiest man the modern world has seen, many moods sweeping over him, but finally he lay dreaming idly ”

“ Ordham laughed heartily. “I never heard it so cleverly put!” The warmth in his voice and eyes brought the colour back to Mrs. Cutting’s face, the animation to her glance. “Indeed, you must never leave us! We should miss you too dreadfully. And you are one of us—really!—however some stupid people may regard the majority of Americans. Is not my mother devoted to you?”
“How devoted do you think Lady Bridgminster could be to any one?” ”

“ Still Ordham made no reply, but his eyes were little more than glittering lines. Bridgminster’s chest heaved, a flash leaped into his injected eyes.
“I believe you’d kill me if you got a chance—if you thought you wouldn’t be found out.”
“I would.”
“And every damned servant in the castle would swear you free,” whimpered his lordship. “Do you think I can’t see what silly asses they are about you? They hate me. I haven’t a friend in the world but my man, and he could be bought by anybody. You’d be a murderer all the same, though.” ”

“ With many this attitude begins in affectation, even though as often it develops into something like a vocation; but in the case of Ordham the subtler chords of Life’s big orchestra, forever inaudible to the swarm, had allured him since he could remember. If there was one reason more than another why Lord Bridgminster disliked and disapproved of his heir presumptive, it was because of Ordham’s candid aversion from “long tiresome meaningless days behind a gun,” “tearing across country at the tail of a frantic fox,” “wolfing food that would have stupefied the brain of a day labourer.” ”

“ Ordham was always adored by servants. With neither familiarity nor condescension, always kind (save to Hines, who sometimes got the benefit of his tempers) , with a smile of peculiar sweetness and an impenetrable reserve, a careless acceptance of devotion, yet with a tacit admission of a minion’s claim to call himself a man, generous, yet never so lavish as to suggest that perhaps his was not the divine right to be waited on hand and foot,—he fulfilled the ideal of the great lord to the most exacting class of mortals in the world. ”

“ Ordham recalled Styr’s initiation, and reflected that, although methods had changed since the primordial era, man had not. And while there was no resemblance whatever between himself and that prosaic seducer of an ignorant and beautiful child, bred in a filthy mining town, save in their common sex, still would he, impelled by that imperious call in his blood of man for his mate, have resorted to kidnapping, strategy, bribery, violence, any device old or new, to force this woman into an indissoluble bond with himself. ”

“ Ordham had imbibed the half-admitted principle that those that toiled existed merely by virtue of their usefulness to the great. It might be necessary to throw a bone occasionally to prevent snarling, or even for mere humanity’s sake; but that these underlings should presume to demand a settlement of accounts at inconvenient seasons—the liberty would hardly be greater did they solicit an invitation to dinner! That it was dishonest to buy when you had no definite prospect of paying, Ordham would have regarded as a principle of foreign growth, possibly American, wholly plebeian. ”

“ Ordham blushed at this sarcastic reference to the only excuse he had been able to think of when inviting himself to the castle of his fathers. But it must be made to serve. He answered suavely: “One gets so little of that sort of thing on the Continent. Do you go out every day?”
“Certainly. Am I really to have the pleasure of your company on the moors from morning till night?”
“Well—a good part of the day. Remember that I am a bit out of practice, and not as hard as you are.”
“I’m no longer hard, but I go out and potter about. It is a damned sight better than sitting in the house. ”

“ After all, Ordham had no real rights, no authority, save such as she tacitly granted him. Her cook was a personage of variety and attainments; her household ran on wheels oiled and invisible; society, with its trivial and levelling interruptions, was away; the ugly adder of money could never rear its head between them. If ever the opportunity was granted a woman to snatch a poem out of the vast prose heap of life, it was Margarethe’s, and she had never at any time been the woman to oppose a desire that assailed her in full strength. ”

“ Ordham had forgotten Hélène Wass. He would rather have made no reply, but when she paused, he took refuge, after his habit when excited, in commonplace:
“That is perhaps your greatest acting—that first act of Tristan. But of course there is no other in which you run the gamut of the passions—although in Götterdämmerung—but really I am not up to criticism. You are terribly real in all of your tragic rôles. I wonder how real it all is—if you are capable of sweeping a man out into eternity with you to-day? ”

“ Ordham: I have hesitated a long time—but it is better not. Friends are not for me. I shall not even go into society again for a long while. Think of me as a stage creature only. And after all, I am nothing else. ”

“ He was staring stupidly at the letters, mechanically striving to reach their significance, when a footstep on the polished floor of the drawing-room made him retreat hastily, trembling at the prospect of confronting the indignant Mabel and receiving summary dismissal. So great was his discomposure he did not notice that the footsteps were too heavy for a woman, and was astonished to confront a young man, an uncommonly good-looking young man, with a frank well-bred face and an athletic spare figure. Ordham divined at once that here was the handsome American cousin whose advent he had dreaded. ”

“ He was on the point of cutting his convalescence short and hastening to London, when he was astounded to receive the following note from Hungary:
“Dear Mr. Ordham: The most dreadful thing has happened to me! I am threatened with a goitre!! I spent a part of last summer in the Bavarian Alps—I remember certain villages where every other person had one—and the young men on Sundays with their arm round the waist of some hideous disfigured girl, as if that awful growth were a sort of heirloom! ”

“ Well, one grows older every day.”
Ordham looked at that lovely head, with its mass of shining yellow hair, the full luminous brow, the deep dark eyes, the pure polished whiteness of the skin. He could imagine no more delightful task than furnishing those clean empty little rooms. He suddenly felt that he had accumulated a vast amount in his twenty-four years, and that perhaps it was his duty to decorate the interior of that shapely skull. But her eyes wandered from him again as Mrs. Cutting asked him abruptly what he knew of Styr. ”

“ As his imagination, morbidly active, pictured him hopelessly involved, without a plank to grasp at, he suddenly swore an oath that he would never go under, no, not if he sacrificed all belonging to him, and every canon that society had invented for her own defence and deluded man into believing was handed down from on high. Ordham, fastidiously bred, and reared above the temptations that men of lower degree must reckon with in their daily struggle, was one of the most finished results of those same immemorial laws ”

“ Ordham set his teeth and turned away, grimly reflecting that the one mental trait his wife possessed which compelled his admiration was the neatness with which she could deliver a lie. She broke off the heads of several geraniums and then cried out, as if suddenly inspired with a bright idea: “Let us go to the country to-day. It is too utterly heavenly to stay in town. ”

“ Princess Nachmeister, very magnificent in pale blue brocade embroidered with silver (which, Ordham reflected, became her hideously) , stood by the window and watched the young man with sharp interest as he advanced down the long apartment between the rows of gorgeous lackeys that seemed to await a concourse of kings. She despised the Anglo-Saxon race with all her German soul, believing them to be moderns without subtlety, and never forgetting that they were savages when the Italy of her ancestors was the crown of civilization ”

“ In the second act of Tristan und Isolde she expressed every soft enchantment of womanhood, and Ordham for the first time fully realized what a great artist she was, for he could see no indication that any traces remained of those impulses that drive the race blindfolded, in this sullen almost angry shell. She looked like a fallen goddess, whom mortal passions had consumed, leaving but a vast regret for her lost godhead. No wonder she could play Brynhildr! ”

“ Ordham felt a little angry; he was, in truth, too much of a Briton and a born diplomatist to relish such plain speech.
“Perhaps. But, to be quite honest, not entirely that. It is rather a relief to fling the bare facts into somebody’s teeth. When you have been shut up within yourself for many years, it suddenly becomes necessary to lift the lid and let the steam escape. ”

“ Certainly he had shared her delusion for a moment to-night. But he was a modern of the moderns. There was nothing of the old gods in him. It was only when Styr sang that the dead men in his soul awoke and surrendered. Contact with herself did not stir his senses in the least, although it agitated his mind.
If there be such a thing as the diplomatic temperament, John Ordham may be said to have possessed it. Side by side with the recklessness of youth and a sensitive nature, marched already a tendency to regard life as a sort of musical instrument whose keys were to be touched delicately, warily ”

“ As Ordham did not like this particular tenor, he remained in the foyer until Tristan had finished his bleating and ranting in the last act—that vicious test of a tenor’s histrionic powers, as of his vocal endurance—and bribed the doorkeeper to let him enter later and stand while Styr sang the Liebestod. Sometimes she rose to her feet as if impelled upward by the intensity of her vision; but to-night she chose to exhibit the physical weakness of delirium as the soul struggled free of the relaxing flesh, the ecstasy of death. ”

“ But Ordham had seen women cry easily before, and was not as moved as a husband of four short weeks should be while his lovely bride wept and sobbed over the arm of her chair. He was ice-cold with anger; Mabel’s betrayal of the secret that his mother also was indifferent to his career was the final indignity; and he reflected cynically that the sooner a man discovered just how much a woman’s tears were worth the better. ”

“ Then I should fly to the very centres of distraction. This peace is not for the outsider. It is not sold in the shops with the crucifixes. It takes generations to make. Even if one brought here a peaceful, even a religious, mind, one would never feel quite the real thing. And yet I do not believe there is a self-righteous person in Oberammergau. Alas! Our tête-à-tête is over. Here comes your grenadier.”
Ordham hastily lit a cigarette as his Lutz strode up, exclaiming: “Did you think to escape your lesson? We shall have it here. It shall be conversation and dictation.” ”

“ He always spends the season in London, and now that Styr is becoming famous, it gives him great satisfaction to add his little quota of scandal.”
“It is quite possible that he mistook her for some one else. She looks like one woman off the stage, and another on.” Ordham felt an uncontrollable nervousness in his knees and moved about the room, staring at the soft pastels. ”