The yellow mask

HE Mirables was the finest mansion in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge Wells: and standing on the terrace this summer’s evening and gazing beyond the rose garden, beyond the sunk garden, beyond the dividing the home paddock from the park, Francis Rupert Jerningham, owner of the Mirables and the four thousand acres of land surrounding it, could see his possession as a poet would have wished to see it—in the last light of a summer’s day.

Jerningham was a young man of thirty-five, one of those delightful and dangerous people who never grow up; impressionable and ever ready to play with a new toy or break an old one; with a roving blue eye, a ready laugh, a good heart as men’s hearts go, and a fine figure and presence. He had been a companion of the Prince Regent and a haunter of St. James’s Street, and a year ago he had astonished London by marrying Molly Candlish, a girl without a penny, and settling down quietly to the life of a country gentleman.

He and she had lived together in a state of extraordinary happiness for the space of one year eleven months and three weeks; a week ago, Molly, fancying that her husband had been casting eyes at Mrs. Rose Lysaght, the wife of a neighbouring gentleman, had taxed him with it. The quarrel, mostly conducted by Molly, had been going on for a week, and to-night it was to reach its crisis; for to-night the Jerninghams were giving a bal masqué, and Mrs. Jerningham, who under constraint had issued an invitation to Mrs. Lysaght, had declared, even as she was writing the note, that she—Mrs. Jerningham—would not act as hostess nor receive a single guest.

“As your wedded wife and bound to obey you” (sniff), “I will issue the invitations to your guests—but receive that woman I will not. I shall be indisposed.”

“But, Molly—think! ’Fore Gad, you'll drive me mad! How can I insult the Lysaghts—and George Lysaght my best friend—by leaving them out?”

“It’s all the same to me,” said Molly. You can invite whom you please.”

Then she rushed off to her room in a tempest of tears, and Jerningham, quite convinced in his mind that all would be right in the end, sent off the invitation amongst the others. He was quite determined to be master in his own house; and despite his roving blue eye, his light laugh and his irresponsible nature, Jerningham possessed a will of iron where small things were concerned, and a flaming wild temper when crossed in great matters.

And this was a great matter to him—not because he was in love with Mrs. Lysaght, but because a slight put upon his guests was an insult to himself.

He was looking for Molly now, and as his eye wandered hither and thither in the, growing dusk it found her, a dim figure in the rose garden.

He came down the steps from the terrace and entered the garden.

Molly had been plucking a few flowers, and as he drew near her she reached out her hand, picked a rose and added it to her bouquet.

She was very lovely; absolutely perfect, inasmuch as no smallest thing about her detracted from her designed effect—delight.

“Molly!” said Jerningham as he drew near her. She turned her head as though she had only just perceived him.

“Are you coming in to dress?”

Molly, without a word of reply, turned again to the rose bushes and plucked another rose.

Then, speaking as though she were talking to the roses: “You know what I said.”

“I know what you said,” replied Jerningham, “but that was said a week ago, and it was said in haste, and I have been waiting for a word from you.”

“A word about what?” asked Molly.

“About to-night.”

“What about to-night?” She turned from the bushes and began arranging the flowers in her hands; a great beetle boomed towards them, passed between them, and boomed away into the silence of the scented dusk.

Jerningham stirred the gravel of the path impatiently with his foot. “I came to ask you a simple question—are you going to receive my guests to-night?”

“I am quite ready to receive your guests, but I will not receive that woman.”

“You cannot receive the others without receiving her.”

“Then I will not receive the others.”

“This is your final decision?”

“Dear heart!” murmured Molly as if to herself, “was there ever one so slow to take an answer!” Then, to Jerningham: “Can you doubt it?”

“I can doubt that my wife should be such a fool, but I am almost beginning to believe it,” blazed Jerningham. Then, suddenly, as though some recollection had checked his anger, “Molly, Molly! what way is this for us to be going on, and we so happy but a week ago! Here is my will set against yours, and yours against mine, and war and enmity in our house, and all because of a woman who is no more to me than she is to you. Are you going to let that separate us?”

She will separate us soon enough without my letting,” replied Molly. “But she will not separate us with my consent. Rupert, I am not angry now. When one is driven to a last pass, one leaves anger behind one. Nor do I doubt that you have not wronged me even in thought, but I see in that woman the destruction of all my happiness—I know it most surely, and by some means that God He only knows; and were I to stand in your hall to-night and receive her as a guest I would be putting the seal to my own undoing, and that I will not do.”

There was something in her manner and in her words that held Jerningham at check for a moment. It was conviction. Molly, who inherited from her Irish mother an Irish temper, had also a touch of the Celtic far-sight which is first cousin to second-sight; besides, simply as a woman, she knew that even though her husband might not have cast eyes at Mrs. Lysaght, Mrs. Lysaght had cast eyes at him. The combination of intuition and ascertained fact had raised her soul in arms against this woman who she felt would prove to be the destruction of her happiness. Many a woman has seen the destruction of her peace of mind foreshadowed in the form of another woman, but few women have had the courage and decision in action displayed by Mrs. Molly Jerningham.

Jerningham recovered himself. “'Fore Gad, said he, “I have feared many things, but I have never feared to be made ridiculous by a jealous wife.”

“And how, pray, am I casting ridicule upon you?”

“Oh, p-tt! don’t ask me to waste my breath explaining that the sun shines. To the point. Are you still fixed in your resolve?”

“Yes, unless by some miracle this woman sends a messenger to say that she will not be with us to-night.”

“That she will not do, for she is well and hearty. I saw her only to-day.”

“Then that ends it,” said Molly.

She turned from him and walked towards the house. A great full moon had thrust a silver shoulder over the woods to the east and the light of it came straight across the garden, touching the roses, touching the statues on the wall, touching the figure of the girl and casting her shadow far before her.

Jerningham, standing rigid in the moonlight, watched her as she ascended the steps. He let her pass right into the house; and then he came tearing after her. The devil had broken loose in him; he was in a condition that might have led him to kill a man or strike a woman. She was not in the hall when he reached it, nor in any of the lower rooms; then he tore upstairs to her bedroom. She had locked the door. He struck on it, and she answered him, and her cool, calm voice only served to make his anger worse.

Now, Jerningham’s temper was of that subtle sort which, becoming heated beyond a certain point, becomes ice—the ice in which is conserved all cold and bitter words and all hard deeds.

“Very well,” said he, “you have shut the door in my face, and that door shall never be opened between us again. Nor will I say good-bye to you, for you have passed out of my life.”

Then he turned on his heel and came down the corridor to his room, where Pym, his valet, was waiting to help him to dress.

So completely had he mastered himself that the man did not notice anything out of the way.

It was a fancy-dress affair and masque combined—a poor attempt at the gaiety of other nations, inasmuch as the abandon and secrecy of your true bal masqué must necessarily be attenuated in a countryside affair where most of the guests were known one to the other and where the names of the masqueraders were announced and shouted from door to door by the lackeys. However, there was a sufficiency of strangers, visitors to the Wells who were bare acquaintances, and so forth, to lend a tinge of intrigue to the business.

At nine o'clock Rupert Jerningham, alone and in all the glory of a Knight Templar’s dress, stood to receive his guests at the top of the broad flight of stairs leading to the ball-room. He had reckoned on his aunt, Lady Dawlish of Templetown, to help him out, and he had not reckoned in vain, for she was one of the first to arrive.

“Indisposed! And what’s her indisposition?” asked the good lady.

“Temper,” replied Jerningham.

“Shall I go up and talk to her?”

“Perfectly useless. Rose Cowslip, her maid, tells me she went to her door and knocked, and she wouldn’t answer. Not that I sent Rose.”

“The music will bring her down quicker than her maid,” said Lady Dawlish. Then she forgot Molly and her temper and everything else in the business of receiving the first guests, among whom were George Lysaght and his wife.

Mrs. Lysaght was not wearing her mask; she carried it loose with her fan. Jerningham claimed her for the first dance, and before it was over he found himself wondering what had come to the woman to make her so fascinating, and why he had never thought of her before.

Then, as they sat together in a corner and watched the next dance, he lost interest in her. A lady who had just arrived in the company of Mrs. Todmorden of the Wells fascinated his eye. She was tall, dressed entirely in black, and wearing a yellow mask. Her figure was divine, and her hair dressed in a foreign style he had never seen before. Then he noticed that she was absolutely unadorned, she wore nothing in the form of jewellery; and this fact alone was enough to mark her apart in a company suffering from a profusion of glitter.

Making an excuse to his companion, he sought out Mrs. Todmorden, found her in the card-room, tore her away from the table where she had taken a seat, and questioned her in a corner.

“Who is she? How strange she should have attracted you! And have you not seen her before?”

“I, never!”

“Think. In Paris last year, at the ball at the Embassy. Search your mind—stay, I will help you. Search for an Italian lady, dressed in blue, who lost her fan and who found it on the seat where you were sitting with your wife.”

“I can remember no such person. I have only a vague remembrance of that ball; but even so, I could never have forgotten that figure had I seen it once.”

“Ah, she has a better memory than you,” replied the good lady.

“She remembers me?”

“So I should fancy. You are not a person easily to be forgotten.”

“Tell me at least her name.”

“She is the Countess Giuliano.”

“Introduce me to her.”

“It is a pity we came so late that you were not able to receive us,” said Mrs. Todmorden. “You were dancing with that lady in grey over there when we arrived.”

“Mrs. Lysaght.”

“Yes, and you were so preoccupied with her that you forgot to see me. Let us leave it so; admire the Countess with your eyes and it will be all the better for your peace of mind—she carries danger with her.”

“In what way?”

“Well, I do not wish to speak ill of a guest of mine, and one whom I have brought to your house, but she is a woman who carries a fatality with her and—well, there, I’m old enough to be your aunt, and I don’t want to see you like a bluebottle fly in this spider’s web.”

“You won’t introduce me to her?”

“I won’t—that’s flat. Go and introduce yourself. You are host, and have a free hand; and so my hands will be washed of the matter.”

She spoke with the irritability of a sensible woman who has unwittingly or against her will assisted in some foolish business. She doubtless regretted having brought the stranger with her, and it seemed to Jerningham that there was some occult reason for this regret personal to himself.

“You fear”

“Nothing. You are too sensible a man to come to mischief.”

“Confound the woman!” muttered Jerningham as she turned away from him. He went back to the ball-room, where a quadrille was just ending, caught the mysterious one off the arm of her partner and introduced himself.

Ah, that voice, touched with the slightest foreign accent! Those eyes that seemed to smile at him behind the disguise of the yellow mask! That patch, just placed in the very position near the corner of her mouth! These and the mystery that lay in Mrs. Todmorden’s words, what a charm they made for the catching of a fool or even a wise man!

Jerningham, with the boldness of his age, began the attack as they passed down the stairs for a breath of air on the terrace. “Have you forgotten the Ambassador’s ball?” said he.

“No,” she replied. “Have you?”

“I am not dead yet, and till I die the remembrance will not leave me. Have you forgotten the fan?”

She did not reply. They had reached the terrace, which was deserted. Behind them lay the great house, humming with voices and the strings of the violins now leading a new dance; before them lay the garden, the park, the woods and all the wonder-world of a summer’s night.

A little shiver ran through her. It was as if in answer to his question about the fan; and as if the spirit of it had seized him and whispered into his ear, Jerningham guessed the secret of this woman whom he had met in Paris and forgotten.

She loved him.

To be loved in secret by a beautiful woman and to have the fact half revealed to him in the glamour of a summer’s night would be a test for the sanctity of any man. Jerningham, no saint, but a simple though honourable enough sinner, forgot honour, forgot his wife, forgot even his anger against her, and fell into the net spread by passion just as the bluebottle falls into the net spread by the spider.

He took her hand and she let him hold it: he raised it to his lips, and then suddenly, and like a curling spring, his arm was around her waist. She slipped from him like a mist. Then he followed her to the balustrade, where she had taken her stand, and, holding her hands, implored her to remove her mask that he might feast his eyes on her face.

His language was enough to have made the moon blush for a mortal’s stupidity.

“But how can I unmask if you hold my hands?”

“There, then; you are free!”

She was raising her hands as if to remove the mask, when voices from the hall door caused Jerningham to turn. Mr. Shawbury and several other gentlemen, tired of dancing and flushed with wine, had come for a breath of air. Jerningham cursed them beneath his breath, and turned with his companion towards the house. She led the way up the steps past the gentlemen and into the great hall, where a number of people were congregated gossiping and making merry. Here she was seized upon by her partner for the next dance, and Jerningham was left to bite his nails and to conceal his feelings as best he might under the amiability of a host.

It was now a quarter to twelve. At twelve o’clock supper was served and Spicer, his major-domo, had arranged the guests at his direction so that Mrs. Todmorden should sit upon his left and the Countess Giuliano on his right; and as the dancers trooped from the ball to the supper-room, Jerningham stood at the door, waiting to pounce on his prey. He was standing like this when Spicer coming behind him touched his elbow.

“Mrs. Todmorden has gone, sir; she felt suddenly indisposed and asked me to make her excuses. The other lady with her gave me this note for you, which was to be delivered private.”

Jerningham took the scrap of folded paper, opened it and read:

No signature.

Jerningham folded the paper and placed it in his pocket. It was a scrap of his own note-paper which she had taken from the writing-stand in the hall; the scrawl was in pencil and betrayed the agitation of the writer.

Then he returned to the supper-room and took his place at table.

Next morning at eleven o’clock, as Jerningham took his place at the breakfast-table, he found a letter by his plate. It was a letter from his wife, and it was short but not at all sweet.

He stood with this letter in his hand for a moment, feeling as though some viewless person had struck him a blow in the face.

Then he rang the bell and sent for his wife’s maid. The maid, always a lachrymose person, seemed on the verge of tears.

She knew nothing except that her mistress had sat up all night, refusing to go to bed, and had departed that morning with nothing but a small bag containing a few necessaries of apparel.

But how did she go?”

“She drove to the Crown, sir, and there took the coach for London.”

“Thanks,” said Jerningham. “That will do.”

He sat down to the table and breakfasted. He had no fear at all as to Molly’s safety. She was far too sane and sensible a person—on all subjects but Mrs. Lysaght—to do anything rash. No visions of her being found drowned in a pond occurred to trouble him. She would go to her mother, who lived in retirement at Hampstead; he could picture their meeting, Molly in tears casting herself on the breast of her mother. Old Mrs. Candlish always wore a shawl pinned across her ample breast by a cameo brooch. The marriage had been somewhat of a mésalliance, for the Candlishes were not on the same branch of the social tree as the Jerninghams. These thoughts straying across his mind did not soften him towards Molly. The ice which had succeeded the blazing anger of the evening before had melted, disclosing something worse than itself—distaste.

The woman he had loved so passionately had become distasteful to him. He contrasted her with the unknown of last night. The Italian whose voice, whose person, whose every movement spoke of birth and breeding. The woman he was to meet to-night and say good-bye to.

He finished breakfast and came out on the terrace. The weather to-day was grey and cloudy, and for the first time, as he stood on the terrace and viewed his beautiful estate, he felt not in love with it. It, like Molly, had become distasteful to him.

The vision of Italy as he had seen it last year rose up before him.

He turned to the house, went to the library and began to arrange his papers and make preparations such as a man makes who has in view a long and indefinite journey. He made out a draft for five thousand pounds, payable to himself on Coutts; he wrote a letter to his agent at the Wells, giving directions about the management of his estate and a host of other things. Then he wrote out a draft for five thousand pounds payable to Molly, put it in an envelope without a written word, and directed it to her, care of his agent.

He was mobilising, but for what campaign he would have found it hard to say definitely.

These preparations took him till five o'clock, at which hour—such was the atrocious custom of the day—he dined, consuming a bottle and a half of old port, a proceeding not in the least fortifying to his wisdom.

At quarter to ten he took his stand on the London Road, within a stone’s throw of his gate. The clouds that had been gathering all day were banked now, so that the night had the blackness of the pit. The wind was rising for rain, and Jerningham, as he waited and watched, could hear the foliage of the trees and the far-off woods murmurous as the waves of the sea.

A post-chaise passed, going towards the Wells, and a couple of fuddled rustics presently followed the chaise, giving him good-night and then breaking into song far down the road till their voices were lost in the immense sounds and silences of the night.

Then came the London coach with horn blowing and lamps blazing, and vanished with all its sounds blotted out by the murmur of the trees.

Five minutes later a travelling carriage drew near, coming from the direction of the Wells and travelling at full speed. It passed, slackened its speed, and drew up a hundred yards away.

Jerningham came towards it at a run and nearly fell into the arms of the woman who had stepped from the carriage and who was standing waiting for him on the road.

As he seized her hands and knew by the very touch that it was she, ail the indecisiveness of his half-formed plans vanished. Seizing her in his arms and kissing her through the veil she was wearing, he held her so tightly to him that she could neither speak nor move. Then in the whirlwind of his passion, without a word, half-leading, half-carrying her, he had her at the coach-door; lifted her in, jumped in himself, closed the door and shouted through the window, “London.”

The postilions cracked their whips and the carriage started.

Seated beside her, breathless and holding her hand, he still scarcely recognised what he had done, or the fact that he had flung wife and honour behind him and had started off on a new road in life leading who knows where.

The woman, half paralysed and shaking as though with the palsy, was cowering against him, her head on his shoulder, her hand in his.

Then her voice came to him in the darkness, broken and shaking like her body. “You have compromised me for ever.”

“You are mine for ever.”

“And your wife?”

“She is gone from me, body and spirit.”

“But you—how can you love me? Though I love you—body and soul and have loved you ever since the first moment I saw you—ay—that I should say such a thing even in the darkness!”

“Love you! Why, from the very first moment my eyes rested on your form I have loved you.”

“Am I then so fascinating? But you have never seen my face!”

“I have seen your soul.”

“Ah, you have seen my soul, but you have not seen my face fully, and that is what I fear.”

A cold chill came to him. “Why should you fear?”

“For my disfigurement.”

“Your disfigurement!”

“Could you love me if—if”

“Yes?”

“If that which happened to my face this year shocked you” A sob broke her voice.

“Nothing could shock me in you,” said Jerningham. Yet as he said the words he felt as though ice were touching his midriff and his lips were dry.

She sighed contentedly. “I knew it. Your heart is as noble as your face, and I love you.”

He was silent. “Tell me,” he said at last. “What is it? What happened to you? Were you hurt, dear one?”

“You will see when you see my poor face—” She broke off and began to cry softly, and Jerningham, trying to comfort her, felt tragedy for the first time in his careless life.

He had bound himself to this with his own hand, and there was no undoing the bond.

“That was why you refused to unmask last night?” said he.

“Yes. Did not my friend tell you?”

“Mrs. Todmorden told me nothing.”

“Gave you no hint?”

“No.”

“Have you not really guessed who I truly am?”

“I—I What do you mean? Your voice! Why—damnation! Molly!”

Her arms were around his neck, she was laughing and crying at the same time, and he, astounded, stunned, and in some extraordinary way delighted, was trying to accommodate his stupid mind to the fact that he had run away with his own wife.

“I couldn’t help it,” she gasped between paroxysms of laughter and weeping. “I arranged it all with Mrs. Todmorden, went out by the back way and joined her at the door.—And, Rupert”

“Well?”

“You may ask Mrs. Lysaght now every day in the week, for she’ll never get over the fact that you gave her the cold shoulder for me.”

“But this morning, when you went away to London,” he blazed out, “where did you go to?”

“To Mrs. Todmorden’s. Where shall we go now?”

“I’ faith,” said he, “we’d better go to London; as I’ve begun running away with you I may as well finish the business.” .