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Title: A call
The tale of two passions
Language: English
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1910
CONTENTS
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV
PART V
EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE
PART I
A CALL
II
THAT was not, however, to be the final colloquy between Robert
Grimshaw and Ellida Langham, for he was again upon her doorstep
just before her time to pour out tea.
“What is the matter?” she asked; “you know you aren’t looking
well, Toto.”
Robert Grimshaw was a man of thirty-five, who, by reason that
he allowed himself the single eccentricity of a very black, short
beard, might have passed for fifty. His black hair grew so far back
upon his brow that he had an air of incipient baldness; his nose was
very aquiline and very sharply modelled at the tip, and when, at a
Christmas party, to amuse his little niece, he had put on a red
stocking-cap, many of the children had been frightened of him, so
much did he resemble a Levantine pirate. His manners, however,
were singularly unnoticeable; he spoke in habitually low tones; no
one exactly knew the extent of his resources, but he was reputed
rather “close,” because he severely limited his expenditure. He
commanded a cook, a parlourmaid, a knife-boy, and a man called
Jervis, who was the husband of his cook, and he kept them upon
board wages. His habits were of an extreme regularity, and he had
never been known to raise his voice. He was rather an adept with
the fencing-sword, and save for his engagement to Katya Lascarides
and its rupture he had had no appreciable history. And, indeed,
Katya Lascarides was by now so nearly forgotten in Mayfair that he
was beginning to pass for a confirmed bachelor. His conduct with
regard to Pauline Lucas, whom everybody had expected him to
marry, was taken by most of his friends to indicate that he had
achieved that habit of mind that causes a man to shrink from the
disturbance that a woman would cause to his course of life. Himself
the son of an English banker and of a lady called Lascarides, he had
lost both his parents before he was three years old, and he had been
brought up by his uncle and aunt, the Peter Lascarides, and in the
daily society of his cousins, Katya and Ellida. Comparatively late—
perhaps because as Ellida said, he had always regarded his cousins
as his sisters—he had become engaged to his cousin Katya, very
much to the satisfaction of his uncle and his aunt. But Mrs.
Lascarides having died shortly before the marriage was to have
taken place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring
four months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was
broken off, for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr.
Lascarides had, it was known, died intestate, and apparently,
according to Greek law, Robert Grimshaw had become his uncle’s
sole heir. But he was understood to have acted exceedingly
handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact Mr. Hartley Jenx
had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of Ellida to Paul
Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit settlements
of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his uncle’s
great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to her mother
with a devotion that her English friends considered to be positively
hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become exceedingly
strange in her manner after her mother’s death. The reason for her
rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood, but it
was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs.
Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox
Church, whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for
the sake of convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been
received into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the
rupture, there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great
bitterness. Katya Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of
nervous breakdown, and passed some months in a hydropathic
establishment on the Continent; and it was afterwards known by
those who took the trouble to be at all accurate in their gossip that
she had passed over to Philadelphia in order to study the more
obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this study she was
understood to have gained a very great proficiency, for Mrs. Clement
P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were such a feature of
at least one London season, and who herself had been one of Miss
Lascarides’ patients, was accustomed to say with all the enthusiastic
emphasis of her country and race—she had been before marriage a
Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.—that not only had Katya
Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the
Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to
diagnose obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American
continent. It was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in
London said, a little out of the picture—at any rate, of the picture of
the slim, dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and
the dark eyes that they remembered her to have had.
But there was no knowing what religion might not have done for
this southern nature if, indeed, religion was the motive of the rupture
with Robert Grimshaw; and she was known to have refused to
receive from her cousin any of her father’s money, so that that, too,
had some of the aspect of her having become a nun, or, at any rate,
of her having adopted a cloisteral frame of mind, devoting herself, as
her sister Ellida said, “to good works.” But whatever the cause of the
quarrel, there had been no doubt that Robert Grimshaw had felt the
blow very severely—as severely as it was possible for such things to
be felt in the restrained atmosphere of the more southerly and
western portions of London. He had disappeared, indeed, for a time,
though it was understood that he had been spending several months
in Athens arranging his uncle’s affairs and attending to those of the
firm of Peter Lascarides and Company, of which firm he had become
a director. And even when he returned to London it was to be
observed that he was still very “hipped.” What was at all times most
noticeable about him, to those who observed these things, was the
pallor of his complexion. When he was in health, this extreme and
delicate whiteness had a subcutaneous flush like the intangible
colouring of a China rose. But upon his return from Athens it had,
and it retained for some time, the peculiar and chalky opacity. Shortly
after his return he engrossed himself in the affairs of his friend
Dudley Leicester, who had lately come into very large but very
involved estates. Dudley Leicester, who, whatever he had, had no
head for business, had been Robert Grimshaw’s fag at school, and
had been his almost daily companion at Oxford and ever since. But
little by little the normal flush had returned to Robert Grimshaw’s
face; only whilst lounging through life he appeared to become more
occupied in his mind, more reserved, more benevolent and more
gentle.
III
IV