Читать книгу Patriotic Lady - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 5

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When beauty passes nature it becomes art. —Leonardo da Vinci

It has been said that Cupid writes his epistles on the leaves of a ledger; at any rate this quarrel was about money.

The great difference between the lovers was that, whereas Sir Harry could pay for at least some of his pleasures, Amy was penniless. So, when the final quarrel came, the girl, who had only her personal charms, was utterly defeated by the young man who had birth, a title, relations, friends and property.

The easy-going rake, who knew the ways of his world, certainly expected to have to pay in cash for five months of amorous felicity with the pretty creature who had such a lively tongue and such gay romping ways. But the bills were too high and came in far too frequently. Five guineas for coach hire! This was a piece of insolence not to be endured; and there were the milliners, dressmakers, haberdashers, all clamorous for their dues, and the house-keeping had reached those crazy figures which are only possible when a fashionable young bachelor entertains boon companions and ladies of the town.

Sir Harry protested sharply that he was ruined and that the fault lay with his wild, giddy mistress. She retorted insolently with t he assurance of the petted toy whose impertinent follies had always been applauded.

But Sir Harry was in no mood to laugh at her flounces and grimaces; with the revulsion following infatuation he felt that the girl was not worth what she was costing him; even if he could afford so extravagant a companion, would it be worth while to empty his purse to pay the expenses of a creature whose favours he must share with all his friends?

In his opinion Amy had behaved exactly like the flower of the gutter she was, and to the gutter she might return.

He was, besides, tired of her, sick of the long debauch of which Up Park had been the scene during the autumn and winter, jaded with the drink, the gambling, the din of the disorderly women, the tipsy men, the confusion arising from bad service, the nagging visits from duns, the insolence of unpaid servants.

Amy played into his hands by losing her temper, by tossing her head and answering him in the rustic Welsh accent of which he was tired; he replied brutally, and they shouted, one at the other, amid the litter of the fashionable room in the smart mansion which occupied a hollow of the South Downs.

Bottles, decanters and glasses cumbered the sideboards, packs of fingered cards piled the small tables, wheezing lap-dogs sat on soiled lace caps and kerchiefs, flung over satin chairs; dirty clay pipes, tobacco-pouches, snuff-boxes, crowded the coquettish ornaments on the mantel shelf; there were fowling-pieces in one corner, whips in another, a basket of pups under the desk, a gross dog, smelling of the stable, before the log fire—and everywhere a confusion of unpaid bills—un odor di femina.

Amy, in stiff silks overtrimmed and gaudy, with stale powder dotted in her heavy hair, holes in her stockings and kicked-out shoes, with unpaid-for lace across her bosom, and a black velvet patch to show off a complexion not well cared for, held her own with coarse words, with violent gestures, maintaining her right as a young, seductive female, to spend what she pleased, to do as she pleased.

"Not at my expense," was the burden of Sir Harry's reply, as he lounged sulkily beneath pictures discreetly curtained even in that establishment, against the case of books the indecencies of which had long been staled by thumbings over.

The baronet's polished exterior had once seemed very attractive to Amy; he had all the easy airs of his class and could be elegant when with ladies, but he took a gentleman's privilege and was crude enough with females who lived—as the term went—under his protection. When Amy, in a passion at his refusal to submit to her tantrums, screamed out that she would fling out of his house—he said that she not only might, but must, go.

She could be packed off more easily than could a maidservant as she was without the written law. The right of appeal to the unwritten law she had, in her lover's opinion, forfeited, when, in return for her keep and her amusements, she had not given even a brief fidelity.

With such a mood on either side the scene could have but one ending; the pretty young girl tossed out of the dishevelled mansion which had been, for nearly half a year, a slut's paradise, and her whilom lover warned her not to return. In the brutal phrase of the time, she was turned out of keeping.

Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh saw her departure with relief. She was noisy, she was common, she was expensive, she was losing her figure and he was weary of her bright, pretty face, her cheerful ignorance, and the quick insolence with which she picked up the vices and the airs that belonged properly to gentlefolk.