The Custom of the Country (55 page)
Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them. And there had been moments lately when she had had to confess to herself that Moffatt did not fit into the picture. At first she had been dazzled by his success and subdued by his authority. He had given her all she had ever wished for, and more than she had ever dreamed of having: he had made up to her for all her failures and blunders, and there were hours when she still felt his dominion and exulted in it. But there were others when she saw his defects and was irritated by them: when his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends, jarred on perceptions that had developed in her unawares. Now and then she caught herself thinking that his two predecessors – who were gradually becoming merged in her memory – would have said this or that differently, behaved otherwise in such and such a case. And the comparison was almost always to Moffatt’s disadvantage.
This evening, however, she thought of him indulgently. She was pleased with his clever stroke in capturing the Saint Désert tapestries, which General Arlington’s sudden bankruptcy, and a fresh gambling scandal of Hubert’s, had compelled their owner to part with. She knew that Raymond de Chelles had told the dealers he would sell his tapestries to anyone but Mr Elmer Moffatt, or a buyer acting for him; and it amused her to think that, thanks to Elmer’s
astuteness, they were under her roof after all, and that Raymond and all his clan were by this time aware of it. These facts disposed her favourably toward her husband, and deepened the sense of well-being with which – according to her invariable habit – she walked up to the mirror above the mantelpiece and studied the image it reflected.
She was still lost in this pleasing contemplation when her husband entered, looking stouter and redder than ever, in evening clothes that were a little too tight. His shirt front was as glossy as his baldness, and in his buttonhole he wore the red ribbon bestowed on him for waiving his claim to a Velasquez that was wanted for the Louvre. He carried a newspaper in his hand, and stood looking about the room with a complacent eye.
‘Well, I guess this is all right,’ he said, and she answered briefly: ‘Don’t forget you’re to take down Madame de Follerive; and for goodness’ sake don’t call her “Countess”.’
‘Why, she is one, ain’t she?’ he returned good-humouredly.
‘I wish you’d put that newspaper away,’ she continued; his habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing-room annoyed her.
‘Oh, that reminds me –’ instead of obeying her he unfolded the paper. ‘I brought it in to show you something. Jim Driscoll’s been appointed Ambassador to England.’
‘Jim Driscoll –!’ She caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll – that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to – all the banquets and ceremonies and precedences …
‘I shouldn’t say she’d want to, with so few jewels –’ She dropped the paper and turned to her husband. ‘If you had a spark of ambition, that’s the kind of thing you’d try for. You could have got it just as easily as not!’
He laughed and thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes
with the gesture she disliked. ‘As it happens, it’s about the one thing I couldn’t.’
‘You couldn’t? Why not?’
‘Because you’re divorced. They won’t have divorced Ambassadresses.’
‘They won’t? Why not, I’d like to know?’
‘Well, I guess the court ladies are afraid there’d be too many pretty women in the Embassies,’ he answered jocularly.
She burst into an angry laugh, and the blood flamed up into her face. ‘I never heard of anything so insulting!’ she cried, as if the rule had been invented to humiliate her.
There was a noise of motors backing and advancing in the court, and she heard the first voices on the stairs. She turned to give herself a last look in the glass, saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on her list.
But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.
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