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Robert Hichens - Bella Donna

R >> Robert Hichens >> Bella Donna



BELLA DONNA

FIFTH EDITION

[Illustration]




Bella Donna

A NOVEL

By ROBERT HICHENS

Author of "The Call of The Blood," "The Fruitful
Vine," "A Spirit in Prison."




A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York


Copyright, 1908
By J. B. Lippincott Company

Published October, 1908.




BELLA DONNA




I


Doctor Meyer Isaacson had got on as only a modern Jew whose home is
London can get on, with a rapidity that was alarming. He seemed to have
arrived as a bullet arrives in a body. He was not in the heart of
success, and lo! he was in the heart of success. And no one had marked
his journey. Suddenly every one was speaking of him--was talking of the
cures he had made, was advising every one else to go to him. For some
mysterious reason his name--a name not easily to be forgotten once it
had been heard--began to pervade the conversations that were held in the
smart drawing-rooms of London. Women who were well, but had not seen
him, abruptly became sufficiently unwell to need a consultation. "Where
does he live? In Harley Street, I suppose?" was a constant question.

But he did not live in Harley Street. He was not the man to lose himself
in an avenue of brass plates of fellow practitioners. "Cleveland Square,
St. James's," was the startling reply; and his house was detached, if
you please, and marvellously furnished.

The winged legend flew that he was rich, and that he had gone into
practice as a doctor merely because he was intellectually interested in
disease. His gift for diagnosis was so remarkable that he was morally
forced to exercise it. And he had a greedy passion for studying
humanity. And who has such opportunities for the study of humanity as
the doctor and the priest? Patients who had been to him spoke
enthusiastically of his observant eyes. His personality always made a
great impression. "There's no one just like him," was a frequent comment
upon Doctor Meyer Isaacson. And that phrase is a high compliment upon
the lips of London, the city of parrots and of monkeys.

His age was debated, and so was his origin. Most people thought he was
"about forty"; a very safe age, young enough to allow of almost
unlimited expectation, old enough to make results achieved not quite
unnatural, though possibly startling. Yes, he must be "about forty." And
his origin? "Meyer" suggested Germany. As to "Isaacson," it allowed the
ardent imagination free play over denationalized Israel. Someone said
that he "looked as if he came from the East," to which a cynic made
answer, "The East End." There was, perhaps, a hint of both in the Doctor
of Cleveland Square. Certain it is that in the course of a walk down
Brick Lane, or the adjacent thoroughfares, one will encounter men of his
type; men of middle height, of slight build, with thick, close-growing
hair strongly curling, boldly curving lips, large nostrils, prominent
cheek-bones, dark eyes almost fiercely shining; men who are startlingly
un-English. Doctor Meyer Isaacson was like these men. Yet he possessed
something which set him apart from them. He looked intensely
vital--almost unnaturally vital--when he was surrounded by English
people, but he did not look fierce and hungry. One could conceive of him
doing something bizarre, but one could not conceive of him doing
anything low. There was sometimes a light in his eyes which suggested a
moral distinction rarely to be found in those who dwell in and about
Brick Lane. His slight, nervous hands, dark in colour, recalled the
hands of high-bred Egyptians. Like so many of his nation, he was by
nature artistic. An instinctive love of what was best in the creations
of man ran in his veins with his blood. He cared for beautiful things,
and he knew what things were beautiful and what were not. The
second-rate never made any appeal to him. The first-rate found in him a
welcoming enthusiast. He never wearied of looking at fine pictures, at
noble statues, at bronzes, at old jewelled glass, at delicate carvings,
at perfect jewels. He was genuinely moved by great architecture. And to
music he was almost fanatically devoted, as are many Jews.

It has been said of the Jew that he is nearly always possessed of a
streak of femininity, not effeminacy. In Doctor Meyer Isaacson this
streak certainly existed. His intuitions were feminine in their
quickness, his sympathies and his antipathies almost feminine in their
ardour. He understood women instinctively, as generally only other women
understand them. Often he knew, without knowing why he knew. Such
knowledge of women is, perhaps fortunately, rare in men. Where most men
stumble in the dark, Doctor Meyer Isaacson walked in the light. He was
unmarried.

Bachelorhood is considered by many to detract from a doctor's value and
to stand in the way of his career. Doctor Meyer Isaacson did not find
this so. Although he was not a nerve specialist, his waiting-room was
always full of patients. If he had been married, it could not have been
fuller. Indeed, he often thought it would have been less full.

Suddenly he became the fashion, and he went on being the fashion.

He had no special peculiarity of manner. He did not attract the world of
women by elaborate brutalities, or charm it by silly suavities. He
seemed always very natural, intelligent, alive, and thoroughly
interested in the person with whom he was. That he was a man of the
world was certain. He was seen often at concerts, at the opera, at
dinners, at receptions, occasionally even at a great ball.

Early in the morning he rode in the Park. Once a week he gave a dinner
in Cleveland Square. And people liked to go to his house. They knew they
would not be bored and not be poisoned there. Men appreciated him as
well as women, despite the reminiscence of Brick Lane discoverable in
him. His directness, his cleverness, and his apparent good-will soon
overcame any dawning instinct summoned up in John Bull by his exotic
appearance.

Only the unyielding Jew-hater hated him. And so the lines of the life
of Doctor Meyer Isaacson seemed laid in pleasant places. And not a few
thought him one of the fortunate of this world.

One morning of June the doctor was returning to Cleveland Square from
his early ride in the Park. He was alone. The lively bay horse he
rode--an animal that seemed almost as full of nervous vitality as he
was--had had a good gallop by the Serpentine, and now trotted gently
towards Buckingham Palace, snuffing in the languid air through its
sensitive nostrils. The day was going to be hot. This fact inclined the
Doctor to idleness, made him suddenly realise the bondage of work. In a
few minutes he would be in Cleveland Square; and then, after a bath, a
cup of coffee, a swift glance through the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_,
there would start the procession that until evening would be passing
steadily through his consulting-room.

He sighed, and pulled in his horse to a walk. To-day he was reluctant to
encounter that procession.

And yet each day it brought interest into his life, this procession of
his patients.

Generally he was a keen man. He had no need to feign an ardour that he
really felt. He had a passion for investigation, and his profession
enabled him to gratify it. Very modern, as a rule, were those who came
to him, one by one, admitted each in turn by his Jewish man-servant;
complex, caught fast in the net of civilized life. He liked to sit alone
with them in his quiet chamber, to seek out the hidden links which
united the physical to the mental man in each, to watch the pull of soul
on body, of body on soul. But to-day he recoiled from work. Deep down in
his nature, hidden generally beneath his strong activity, there was
something that longed to sit in the sunshine and dream away the hours,
leaving all fates serenely, or perhaps indifferently, between the hands
of God.

"I will take a holiday some day," he said to himself, "a long holiday. I
will go far away from here, to the land where I am really at home, where
I am in my own place."

As he thought this, he looked up, and his eyes rested upon the brown
facade of the King's Palace, upon the gilded railings that separated it
from the public way, upon the sentries who were on guard, fresh-faced,
alert, staring upon London with their calmly British eyes.

"In my own place," he repeated to himself.

And now his lips and his eyes were smiling. And he saw the great drama
of London as something that a schoolboy could understand at a glance.

Was it really idleness he longed for? He did not know why, but abruptly
his desire had changed. And he found himself wishing for events, tragic,
tremendous, horrible even--anything, if they were unusual, were such as
to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows. The
foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the
unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city
where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the
languor, or all the energy, that was within him. And he imagined, as
sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances
unwind their shining coils, where he would find the incentive which he
needed to call all his secret powers--the powers whose exercise would
make his life complete--into supreme activity.

He gripped his horse with his knees. It understood his desire. It broke
into a canter. He passed in front of the garden of Stafford House,
turned to the left past St. James's Palace and Marlborough House, and
was soon at his own door.

"Please bring up the book with my coffee in twenty minutes, Henry," he
said to his servant, as he went in.

In half an hour he was seated in an arm-chair in an upstairs
sitting-room, sipping his coffee. The papers lay folded at his elbow.
Upon his knee, open, lay the book in which were written down the names
of the patients with whom he had made appointments that day.

He looked at them, seeking for one that promised interest. The first
patient was a man who would come in on his way to the city. Then
followed the names of three women, then the name of a boy. He was coming
with his mother, a lady of an anxious mind. The Doctor had a sheaf of
letters from her. And so the morning's task was over. He turned a page
and came to the afternoon.

"Two o'clock, Mrs. Lesueur; two-thirty, Miss Mendish; three, the Dean of
Greystone; three-thirty, Lady Carle; four, Madame de Lys; four-thirty,
Mrs. Harringby; five, Sir Henry Grebe; five-thirty, Mrs. Chepstow."

The last name was that of the last patient. Doctor Meyer Isaacson's
day's work was over at six, or was supposed to be over. Often, however,
he gave a patient more than the fixed half-hour, and so prolonged his
labours. But no one was admitted to his house for consultation after the
patient whose name was against the time of five-thirty.

And so Mrs. Chepstow would be the last patient he would see that day.

He sat for a moment with the book open on his knee, looking at her name.

It was a name very well known to him, very well known to the
English-speaking world in general.

Mrs. Chepstow was a great beauty in decline. Her day of glory had been
fairly long, but now it seemed to be over. She was past forty. She said
she was thirty-eight, but she was over forty. Goodness, some say, keeps
women fresh. Mrs. Chepstow had tried a great many means of keeping
fresh, but she had omitted that. The step between aestheticism and
asceticism was one which she had never taken, though she had taken many
steps, some of them, unfortunately, false ones. She had been a well-born
girl, the daughter of aristocratic but impecunious and extravagant
parents. Her father, Everard Page, a son of Lord Cheam, had been very
much at home in the Bankruptcy Court. Her mother, too, was reckless
about money, saying, whenever it was mentioned, "Money is given us to
spend, not to hoard." So little did she hoard it, that eventually her
husband published a notice in the principal papers, stating that he
would not be responsible for her debts. It was a very long time since
he had been responsible for his own. Still, there was a certain dignity
in the announcement, as of an honest man frankly declaring his position.

Mrs. Chepstow's life was very possibly influenced by her parents'
pecuniary troubles. When she was young she learnt to be frightened of
poverty. She had known what it was to be "sold up" twice before she was
twenty; and this probably led her to prefer the alternative of being
sold. At any rate, when she was in her twenty-first year, sold she was
to Mr. Wodehouse Chepstow, a rich brewer, to whom she had not even taken
a fancy; and as Mrs. Chepstow she made a great fame in London society as
a beauty. She was christened Bella Donna. She was photographed, written
about, worshipped by important people, until her celebrity spread far
over the world, as the celebrity even of a woman who is only beautiful
and who does nothing can spread in the era of the paragraph.

And then presently she was the heroine of a great divorce case.

Mr. Chepstow, forgetting that among the duties required of the modern
husband is the faculty of turning a blind eye upon the passing fancies
of a lovely and a generally admired wife, suddenly proclaimed some ugly
truths, and completely ruined Mrs. Chepstow's reputation. He won his
case. He got heavy damages out of a well-known, married man. The married
man's wife was forced to divorce him. And Mrs. Chepstow was socially
"done for." Then began the new period of her life, a period utterly
different from all that had preceded it.

She was at this time only twenty-six, and in the zenith of her beauty.
Every one supposed that the man to whom she owed her ruin would marry
her as soon as it was possible. Unfortunately, he died before the decree
_nisi_ was made absolute. Mrs. Chepstow's future had been committed to
the Fates, and they had turned down their thumbs.

Notorious, lovely, now badly off, still young, she was left to shift for
herself in the world.

It was then that there came to the surface of her character a trait that
was not beautiful. She developed a love of money, a passion for material
things. This definite greediness declared itself in her only now that
she was poor and solitary. Probably it had always existed in her, but
had been hidden. She hid it no longer. She tacitly proclaimed it, and
she ordered her life so that it might be satisfied.

And it was satisfied, or at the least for many years appeased. She
became the famous, or the infamous, Mrs. Chepstow. She had no child to
be good for. Her father was dead. Her mother lived in Brussels with some
foreign relations. For her English relations she took no thought. The
divorce case had set them all against her. She put on the panoply of
steel so often assumed by the woman who has got into trouble. She defied
those who were "down upon her." She had made a failure of one life. She
resolved that she would make a success of another. And for a long time
she was very successful. Men were at her feet, and ministered to her
desires. She lived as she seemed to desire to live, magnificently. She
was given more than most good women are given, and she seemed to revel
in its possession. But though she loved money, her parents' traits were
repeated in her. She was a spendthrift, as they had been spendthrifts.
She loved money because she loved spending, not hoarding it. And for
years she scattered it with both hands.

Then, as she approached forty, the freshness of her beauty began to
fade. She had been too well known, and had to endure the fate of those
who have long been talked about. Men said of her, "Mrs. Chepstow--oh,
she's been going a deuce of a time. She must be well over fifty."
Women--good women especially--pronounced her nearer sixty. Almost
suddenly, as often happens in such cases as hers, the roseate hue faded
from her life and a greyness began to fall over it.

She was seen about with very young men, almost boys. People sneered when
they spoke of her. It was said that she was not so well off as she had
been. Some shoddy millionaire had put her into a speculation. It had
gone wrong, and he had not thought it necessary to pay up her losses.
She moved from her house in Park Lane to a flat in Victoria Street, then
to a little house in Kensington. Then she gave that up, and took a small
place in the country, and motored up and down, to and from town. Then
she got sick of that, and went to live in a London hotel. She sold her
yacht. She sold a quantity of diamonds.

And people continued to say, "Mrs. Chepstow--oh, she must be well over
fifty."

Undoubtedly she was face to face with a very bad period. With every
month that passed, loneliness stared at her more fixedly, looked at her
in the eyes till she began to feel almost dazed, almost hypnotized. A
dulness crept over her.

Forty struck--forty-one--forty-two.

And then, one morning of June, Doctor Meyer Isaacson sat sipping his
coffee and looking at her name, written against the time, five-thirty,
in his book of consultations.




II


Doctor Meyer Isaacson did not know Mrs. Chepstow personally, but he had
seen her occasionally, at supper in smart restaurants, at first nights,
riding in the Park. Now, as he looked at her name, he realized that he
had not even seen her for a long time, perhaps for a couple of years. He
had heard the rumours of her decadence, and taken little heed of them,
not being specially interested in her. Nevertheless, this morning, as he
shut up his book and got up to go downstairs to his work, he was aware
of a desire to hear the clock strike the half-hour after five, and to
see Henry opening the door to show Mrs. Chepstow into his
consulting-room. A woman who had lived her life and won her renown--or
infamy--could scarcely be uninteresting.

As the day wore on, he was several times conscious of a wish to quicken
the passing of its moments, and when Sir Henry Grebe, the penultimate
patient, proved to be an elderly _malade imaginaire_ of dilatory habit,
involved speech, and determined misery, he was obliged firmly to check a
rising desire to write a hasty bread-pill prescription and fling him in
the direction of Marlborough House. The half-hour chimed, and still Sir
Henry explained the strange symptoms by which he was beset--the buzzings
in the head, the twitchings in the extremities, the creepings, as of
insects with iced legs, about the roots of the hair. His eyes shone with
the ardour of the determined valetudinarian closeted with one paid to
attend to his complaints.

And Mrs. Chepstow? Had she come? Was she sitting in the next room,
looking inattentively at the newest books?

"The most extraordinary matter in my case," continued Sir Henry, with
uplifted finger, "is the cold sweat that--"

The doctor interrupted him.

"My advice to you is this--"

"But I haven't explained to you about the cold sweat that--"

"My advice to you is this, Sir Henry. Don't think about yourself; walk
for an hour every day before breakfast, eat only two meals a day,
morning and evening, take at least eight hours' rest every night, give
up lounging about in your club, occupy yourself--with work for others,
if possible. I believe that to be the most tonic work there is--and I
see no reason why you should not be a centenarian."

"I--a centenarian?"

"Why not! There is nothing the matter with you, unless you think there
is."

"Nothing--you say there is nothing the matter with me!"

"I have examined you, and that is my opinion."

The face of the patient flushed with indignation at this insult.

"I came to you to be told what was the matter."

"And I am glad to inform you nothing is the matter--with your body."

"Do you mean to imply that my mind is diseased?"

"No. But you don't give it enough to think about. You only give it
yourself. And that isn't nearly enough."

Sir Henry rose, and put a trembling finger into his waistcoat-pocket.

"I believe I owe you--?"

"Nothing. But if you care to put something into the box on my hall
table, you will help some poor man to get away to the seaside after an
operation, and find out what is the best medicine in the world."

"And now for Mrs. Chepstow!" the Doctor murmured to himself, as the door
closed behind the outraged back of an enemy.

He sat still for a minute or two, expecting to see the door open again,
the form of a woman framed in the doorway. But no one came. He began to
feel restless. He was not accustomed to be kept waiting by his patients,
although he often kept them waiting. There was a bell close to his
elbow. He touched it, and his man-servant instantly appeared.

"Mrs. Chepstow is down for five-thirty. It is now"--he pulled out his
watch--"nearly ten minutes to six. Hasn't she come?"

"No, sir. Two or three people have been, without appointments."

"And you have sent them away, of course? Quite right. Well, I shan't
stay in any longer."

He got up from his chair.

"And if Mrs. Chepstow should come, sir?"

"Explain to her that I waited till ten minutes to six and then--" He
paused. The hall door-bell was ringing sharply.

"If it is Mrs. Chepstow, shall I admit her now, sir?"

The doctor hesitated, but only for a second.

"Yes," he said.

And he sat down again by his table.

He had been almost looking forward to the arrival of his last patient of
that day, but now he felt irritated at being detained. For a moment he
had believed his day's work to be over, and in that moment the humour
for work had left him. Why had she not been up to time? He tapped his
delicate fingers impatiently on the table, and drew down his thick brows
over his sparkling eyes. But directly the door moved, his expression of
serenity returned, and when a tall woman came in, he was standing up and
gravely smiling.

"I'm afraid I am late."

The door shut on Henry.

"You are twenty minutes late."

"I'm so sorry."

The rather dawdling tones of the voice denied the truth of the words,
and the busy Doctor was conscious of a slight sensation of hostility.

"Please sit down here," he said, "and tell me why you come to consult
me."

Mrs. Chepstow sat down in the chair he showed her. Her movements were
rather slow and careless, like the movements of a person who is quite
alone and has nothing to do. They suggested to the watching man vistas
of empty hours--how different from his own! She settled herself in her
chair, leaning back. One of her hands rested on the handle of a parasol
she carried. The other held lightly an arm of the chair. Her height was
remarkable, and was made the more apparent by her small waist, and by
the small size of her beautifully shaped head, which was poised on a
long but exquisite neck. Her whole outline announced her gentle
breeding. The most lovely woman of the people could never be shaped
quite like that. As Doctor Isaacson realised this, he felt a sudden
difficulty in connecting with the woman before him her notorious career.
Surely pride must be a dweller in a body so expressive of race!

He thought of the very young men, almost boys, with whom Mrs. Chepstow
was seen about. Was it possible?

Her eyes met his, and in her face he saw a subtle contradiction of the
meaning her form seemed eloquently to indicate.

It was possible.

Almost before he had time to say this to himself, Mrs. Chepstow's face
had changed, suddenly accorded more definitely with her body.

"What a clever woman!" the Doctor thought.

With an almost sharp movement he sat forward in his chair, braced up,
alert, vital. His irritation was gone with the fatigue engendered by the
day's work. Interest in life tingled through his veins. His day was not
to be wholly dull. His thought of the morning, when he had looked at the
patients' book, was not an error of the mind.

"You came to consult me because--?"

"I don't know that I am ill," Mrs. Chepstow said, very composedly.

"Let us hope not."

"Do you think I look ill?"

"Would you mind turning a little more towards the light?"

She sat still for a minute, then she laughed.

"I have always said that so long as one is with a doctor, _qua_ doctor,
one must never think of him as a man," she said; "but--"

"Don't think of me as a man."

"Unfortunately, there is something about you which absolutely prevents
me from regarding you as a machine. But--never mind!"

She turned to the light, lifted her thin veil, and leaned towards him.

"Do you think I look ill?"

He gazed at her steadily, with a scrutiny that was almost cruel. The
face presented to him in the bold light that flowed in through the large
window near which their chairs were placed still preserved elements of
the beauty of which the world had heard too much. Its shape, like the
shape of Mrs. Chepstow's head, was exquisite. The line of the features
was not purely Greek, but it recalled things Greek, profiles in marble
seen in calm museums. The outline of a thing can set a sensitive heart
beating with the strange, the almost painful longing for an ideal life,
with ideal surroundings, ideal loves, ideal realizations. It can call to
the imagination that lies drowsing, yet full of life, far down in the
secret recesses of the soul. The curve of Mrs. Chepstow's face, the
modelling of her low brow, and the undulations of the hair that flowed
away from it--although, alas! that hair was obviously, though very
perfectly, dyed--had this peculiar power of summons, sent forth silently
this subtle call. The curve of a Dryad's face, seen dimly in the green
wonder of a magic wood, might well have been like this, or of a nymph's
bathing by moonlight in some very secret pool. But a Dryad would not
have touched her lips with this vermilion, a nymph have painted beneath
her laughing eyes these cloudy shadows, or drawn above them these
artfully delicate lines. And the weariness that lay about these cheeks,
and at the corners of this mouth, suggested no early world, no goddesses
in the springtime of creation, but an existence to distress a moralist,
and a lack of pleasure in it to dishearten an honest pagan. The ideality
in Mrs. Chepstow's face was contradicted, was set almost at defiance, by
something--it was difficult to say exactly what; perhaps by the faint
wrinkles about the corners of her large and still luminous blue eyes, by
a certain not yet harsh prominence of the cheek-bones, by a slight droop
of the lips that hinted at passion linked with cynicism. There was a
suggestion of hardness somewhere. Freshness had left this face, but not
because of age. There are elderly, even old women who look almost
girlish, fragrant with a charm that has its root in innocence of life.
Mrs. Chepstow did not certainly look old. Yet there was no youth in her,
no sweetness of the girl she once had been. She was not young, nor old,
nor definitely middle-aged.

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