| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: The Three Brothers Complete
Author: Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Three Brothers Complete" ***
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
THE THREE BROTHERS. Complete
THE THREE BROTHERS.
VOLUME I.
THE THREE BROTHERS.
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF
‘CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,’
‘SALEM CHAPEL,’ ‘THE MINISTER’S WIFE,’
ETC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1870.
_The Right of Translation is Reserved._
LONDON:
STRANGEWAYS AND WALDEN, PRINTERS,
28 Castle St. Leicester Sq.
CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.
PAGE
I. THEIR FATHER 1
II. THE WILL 17
III. THE NEW CAREER 32
IV. THE ELDEST SON 49
V. THE MAGICIAN’S CAVE 66
VI. THE WORKING OF THE SPELL 86
VII. PUT TO THE TOUCH 103
VIII. MRS. TRACY’S I. O. U. 120
IX. BEN’S REWARD 134
X. THE LAST INTERVIEW 152
XI. MRS. BARTON’S LITTLE BILL 161
XII. MILLICENT’S NEW START 179
XIII. REACTION 188
XIV. MARY’S OPINION 197
XV. KENSINGTON GORE 218
XVI. WELBY, R.A. 232
XVII. THE PADRONA 248
XVIII. THE TEA-TABLE 264
XIX. CHARLOTTE STREET, FITZROY SQUARE 279
XX. LAURIE’S WORK 297
XXI. WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF IT IN THE SQUARE 316
THE THREE BROTHERS.
CHAPTER I.
THEIR FATHER.
The reason why Mr. Renton’s sons were sent out into the world in the
humble manner, and with the results we are about to record, must be
first told, in order that their history may be comprehensible to the
reader. Had they been a poor man’s sons no explanation would have been
necessary; but their father was anything but a poor man. The family was
one of those exceptional families which add active exertion to
hereditary endowments. Though the Rentons had been well-known people in
Berks for two or three centuries, it had almost been a family tradition
that each successive heir, instead of resting content with the good
things Providence had given him, should add by his own efforts to the
family store. There had been pirates among them in Elizabeth’s time.
They had made money when everybody else lost money in the time of the
‘South Sea.’ Mr. Renton’s father had gone to India young, and had
returned, what was then called, a ‘Nabob.’ Mr. Renton himself was sent
off in his turn to Calcutta, as remorselessly as though he had not been
the heir to heaven knows how many thousands a-year; and he too had
increased the thousands. There was not a prettier estate nor a more
commodious house in the whole county than Renton Manor. The town-house
was in Berkeley Square. The family had everything handsome about them,
and veiled their bonnet to none. Mr. Renton was a man who esteemed
wealth as a great power; but he esteemed energy still more, and placed
it high above all other qualities. As he is just about to die, and
cannot have time to speak for himself in these pages, we may be
permitted to describe a personage so important to this history. He was a
spare, middle-sized man, with a singular watchfulness and animation in
his looks; his foot springy and light; his sight, and hearing, and all
his senses, unusually keen;--a man always on the alert, body and mind,
yet not incapable of repose. Restless was not an epithet you could apply
to him. A kind of vigilant, quiet readiness and promptitude breathed out
from him. He would have sooner died than have taken an unfair advantage
over any one; but he was ready to seize upon any and every advantage
which was fair and lawful, spying it out with the eyes of an eagle, and
coming down upon it with the spring of a giant. Twice, or rather let us
say four times in his life he had departed from the traditions of the
Rentons. Instead of the notable, capable woman whom they had been wont
to choose, and who had helped to make the family what it was, he had
married a pretty, useless wife, for no better reason than that he loved
her. And partly under her influence, partly by reason of a certain
languor and inclination towards personal ease which had crept over him,
he had been--as he sometimes felt--basely neglectful of the best
interests of his sons. The eldest, Ben, had not been sent to India at
sixteen, as his father was; nor had Laurie, the second, gone off to the
Colonies, as would have been natural; and as for Frank, his father’s
weakness had gone so far as to permit of the purchase of a commission
for him when the boy had fallen in love with a red coat. Frank was a
Guardsman, and he a Renton! Such a thing had never been heard of in the
family before.
The eldest surviving aunt, Mrs. Westbury, who was full of Renton
traditions, almost went mad of this event, so afflicted was she by such
a departure from use and wont. She had two boys of her own, whom she had
steadfastly kept in the family groove, and, accordingly, had the very
best grounds for her indignation. ‘But what was to be expected,’ she
said, ‘from such a wife?’ Mrs. Renton was as harmless a soul as ever lay
on a sofa, and had little more than a passive influence in the affairs
of her family; but her husband’s sister, endowed with that contempt for
the masculine understanding which most women entertain, put all the
blame upon her soft shoulders. Two men-about-town, and a boy in the
Guards! ‘Is Laurence mad?’ said Mrs. Westbury. It was her own son who
had gone to the house in Calcutta, which might have mollified her; but
it did not. ‘My boy has to banish himself, and wear out the best of his
life in that wilderness,’ she said, vehemently, ‘while Ben Renton makes
a fool of himself at home.’ When they brought their fine friends to the
Manor for shooting or fishing, she had always something to say of her
boy who was banished from all these pleasures; though, indeed, there had
been a great rejoicing in the Westbury household when Richard got the
appointment. It was but a very short time before her brother’s death
that Aunt Lydia’s feelings became too many for her, and she felt that
for once she must speak and deliver her soul.
‘Ben is to succeed you, I suppose?’ she said, perhaps in rather an
unsympathetic way, as she took Mr. Renton to the river-side for a walk,
under pretence of speaking to him ‘about the boys.’ He thought, poor
man, that it was her own boys she meant, and was very good-natured about
it. And then it was his favourite walk. The river ran through the Renton
woods, at the foot of a steep bank, and was visible from some of the
windows of the Manor. The road to it was a charming woodland walk,
embowered in great beeches, the special growth of Berks. Through their
vast branches, and round about their giant trunks, playing with the
spectator’s charmed vision like a child, came glimpses of the broad,
soft water, over which willows hung fondly, and the swans and
water-lilies shone. Mr. Renton was not sentimental, but he had known the
river all his life, and was fond of it;--perhaps all the more so as he
found out what mistakes he had made, and that life had not been expended
to so much purpose as it ought to have been; so that he walked down very
willingly with his sister, and inclined his ear with much patience and
good-nature to hear what she had to say about her boys.
‘Ben will succeed you, I suppose?’ she said, looking at him in a
disapproving way, as they came to the very margin of the stream where
Laurie’s boat, with its brightly painted sides and red cushions
reflected in the water, lay moored by the bank. It was a fantastic
little toy, meant for speed, and not for safety; and Mrs. Westbury would
have walked ten miles round by Oakley Bridge rather than have trusted
herself to that arrowy bark. She sighed as her eyes fell upon it. ‘Poor
Laurie! poor boy!’ she said, shaking her head. The sight seemed to fill
her with a compassion beyond words.
‘Why poor Laurie?’ said Mr. Renton; but he knew what she meant, and it
made him angry. ‘Of course Ben will succeed me. I succeeded my father.
It is his right.’
‘Ah, Laurence, but how did you succeed your father?’ said Mrs. Westbury.
‘You had the satisfaction of being the greatest comfort to dear papa.
He felt the property would be safe in your hands, and be improved, as it
has always been. People say we are such a lucky family, but you and I
know better. We know it is work that has always done it,--alas! until
now!’ she said, suddenly lifting up her eyes to heaven. Truth compels us
to add that Mr. Renton was very much disconcerted. He could not bear to
hear his own family attacked; but he felt the justice of all she said.
‘Well, Lydia, manners change,’ he said. ‘It seemed natural enough in our
time; but, when you come to consider it, I don’t see what reason I have
for sending the boys away. I can leave them very well off. We were never
so well off as we are now. You know I managed to buy that last farm my
father had set his mind upon. I don’t see why I should have broken their
mother’s heart.’
‘Ah, I knew it would come out,’ said Mrs. Westbury, with a little
bitterness. ‘Why should Mary’s heart be more tender than other people’s?
I have to send my boys away, though I love them as well as she does
hers; and people congratulate me on having such a good appointment for
Richard. It never occurs to anybody that I shall break my heart.’
‘You are a Renton,’ said her brother, with some dexterity. ‘I often
think you are the best Renton of us all. But if poor Westbury had lived,
you know, he might have contrived to spare you the parting, as I have
spared Mary; and---- The short and the long of it is the boys are doing
very well. I have no fault to find with them, and I mean to take my own
way with my own family, Lydia; no offence to you.’
‘Oh, no; no offence,’ said Mrs. Westbury, with a little toss of her
head. ‘It is all for my advantage, I am sure. When my Richard comes home
at a proper time with the fortune your Ben ought to have made, I shall
have no reason to complain for one.’
‘Ben will be very well off,’ said Mr. Renton, but with an uncomfortable
smile.
‘Oh, very well off, no doubt,’ said his sister, with a touch of
contempt; ‘a vapid squire, like the rest of them. People used to say the
Rentons were like a fresh breeze blowing in the county. Always motion
and stir where they were! And, poor Laurie!’ she added once more, with
offensive compassion, as they turned and came again face to face with
Laurie’s boat.
‘I should like to know why Laurie so particularly excites your pity,’
said Mr. Renton, much irritated. Laurie was his own namesake and
favourite, and this was the animadversion which he could least bear.
‘Poor boy! I don’t know who would not pity him,’ said Aunt Lydia; ‘it
would melt a heart of stone to see a boy with such abilities all going
to wrack and ruin. It is all very well as long as he is at home; but
when he comes to have his own money what will he do with it? Spend it
on pictures and nonsense, and encourage a set of idle people about him
to eat him up. Laurence, you mark my words--that is just the kind of boy
to be eaten up by everybody, and to come to poverty in the end. Whereas,
if he had been taught from the first that work was the natural destiny
of man----’
‘There, Lydia,--there,--I wish you would make an end of this croaking,’
cried Mr. Renton. ‘I am not quite well to-day, and can’t bear it. That’s
enough for one time.’
‘As for Frank, I give him up,’ said Mrs. Westbury,--‘a soldier, that can
never make a penny,--and, of all soldiers, a Guardsman! I am very sorry
for you, Laurence, I am sure. How a man of your sense could give in so
to Mary’s whims I can’t understand.’
‘Mary had nothing to do with it,’ said Mr. Renton angrily; and he led
the way up the bank, and changed the subject abruptly. Mrs. Westbury,
though she was not susceptible, felt that she must say no more; and they
returned in comparative silence to the house. This walk had been taken
late in a summer evening after dinner, and in the solemnity of evening
dress, over which, Aunt Lydia, who was stout and felt the heat, had
thrown a little shawl. As they reached the lawn in front of the Manor
they came upon a pretty scene. Mrs. Renton, who was feebly pretty still,
lay on a sofa, which had been brought out and placed in the shadow of
the trees. Mary Westbury, her godchild, who bore a curious softened
resemblance to her mother, sat upright on a footstool by her aunt’s
side, working and talking to her. The third figure was Laurie, lying at
full length on the soft grass. Probably since dinner he had been having
a cigar; for instead of the regular evening coat he wore a fantastic
velvet vestment, which half veiled the splendour of his white linen and
white tie. He was lying stretched out on his back,--handsome, lazy, and
contented,--a practical commentary on his aunt’s speech. There were
books lying about, which his energetic cousin had been coaxing and
boring him to read aloud; but Laurie had only shaken his head at her,
ruffling his chestnut locks against the grass: and a little sketch-book
lay by his side, where it had fallen from his indolent hand. Mrs.
Westbury looked at him and then at her brother. What words could say as
much? There lay lazy Laurence, with an unspeakable sentiment of _far
niente_, in every line of him; and he a Renton, whose very ease had
always been energetic! Mr. Renton saw it, too, and, for once in his
life, was heartily ashamed of his favourite son.
‘There you lie,’ said Aunt Lydia, ‘resting after your hard day’s work.
What a laborious young man you must be, Laurie! I never saw any one who
wanted so much rest.’
‘Thanks,’ said Laurence, with a little nod of his chin from the grass.
‘My constitution requires a great deal of rest, as you say. If you
don’t mind moving a little, Aunt Lydia, you are sitting on my note-book.
Thanks. There are some swans there I should not like to lose.’
‘And of what use are swans?’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘I wish you would tell
me, Laurie; I am such an ignorant creature, and I should like to know.’
‘Use?’ said Laurie, opening his eyes. ‘They don’t get made into patties,
as far as I know;--but they are of about as much use as the most of us,
I suppose.’
‘The most of us have a great deal to do in the world,’ said Aunt Lydia,
growing very red, for she was fond of _pâtés_; ‘if you knew how many
things have to pass through my hands from morning to night----’
‘Yes, I know,’ said lazy Laurence, raising his hand in soft deprecation.
‘Mary has been telling us;--but what is the use of that, Aunt Lydia? Why
should you worry yourself? Things would go on just as well if you let
them alone,--that’s what I always tell Ben. What’s the good of
fidgeting? If you’ll believe,’ continued Laurie, raising himself a
little on one elbow, ‘all the people who have ever made any mark in the
world have been people who knew how to keep quiet and let things work
themselves out. There’s your Queen Elizabeth,’ he said, warming to his
subject, and giving a slight kick with his polished boot to a big volume
on the grass; ‘the only quality she had was a masterly inaction. She
kept quiet, and things settled themselves.’
‘Oh, Laurie! not when she killed that poor, dear, Queen Mary!’ cried his
mother from the sofa. ‘I hate that woman’s very name.’
‘No,’ said Laurie, gracefully sinking down again among the grass,
‘that’s an instance of energy, mother,--a brutal quality, that always
comes to harm.’
‘Laurence, you are a fool!’ said Mr. Renton sharply, to his son’s
surprise; and he turned his back upon them all abruptly, and went in
across the soft grass, through the magical, evening atmosphere that
tempted all the world to rest. His sister had taken all restfulness out
of him. Though he was a sensible man, he was a Renton; and the family
traditions when thus recalled to his mind had a great power over him. He
went into the library, which looked out upon a dark corner of the
grounds full of mournful evergreens; the blank wall of the
kitchen-garden showed a little behind them, and the room at this time of
day was a very doleful room. It was a kind of penance to put upon
himself to come in from that air, all full of lingering hues of sunset
and soft suggestions of falling dew, to the grim-luxurious room, in
which he already wanted artificial light. Here he sat and pondered over
his own life, and that of his boys. Up to this moment they had been a
great deal happier than he had been. Like a gust of air from the old
plains of his youth, a remembrance came over him of loneliness and
wistfulness, and a certain impossible longing for a little pleasure now
and then, and some love to brighten the boyish days. He had not been
aware of wanting those vanities then; but he saw now that he had done
so, and that his youth had been very bare and unlovely. He had scattered
roses before his sons, while only thorns had been in his own path; but
what if he had kept from them the harder training which should make them
men? He sat till the darkness grew almost into night thinking over these
things. They were men now,--the lads. Ben was five-and-twenty; Laurie
but a year younger; and Frank, the happy boy, was only twenty, glorious
in his red coat. Mr. Renton pondered long, and when the lamp came he
made a great many notes and calculations, which he locked up carefully
in his desk. He had a headache, which was very unusual. It was his
wife’s _rôle_ in the family to have the headaches; and it did not occur
to Mr. Renton that there could be anything the matter with him. It was
the heat, no doubt, or a little worry. The ladies had come into the
drawing-room when his ponderings were over. It was a large room, full of
windows, with one large bow projecting out upon the cliff, from which
you could see the river through the cloud of intervening beeches. On the
other side the room was open to the soft darkness of the lawn. There
were two lamps in it, but both were shadowed; for Mrs. Renton’s eyes,
like her head, were weak; and the cool air of night breathed in, odorous
and soft, making a scarcely perceptible draught from window to window.
Mrs. Renton lay quite out of this current of air, which naturally she
was afraid of, on another sofa. Mary made tea in a corner, with the
light of one of the lamps falling concentrated upon her pretty hands in
twinkling motion about the brilliant little spots of china and silver.
She had a ring or two upon her pink transparent fingers, and a bracelet,
which sparkled in the light. Mrs. Westbury sat apart in a great chair,
and fanned herself. Now and then, with a dash against the delicate
_abat-jour_ of the lamp, came a mad moth, bent on self-destruction. Mr.
Renton dropped into the first chair he could find, not knowing why he
was so uncomfortable, and Mary brought him some tea. The weather had
been very warm, and everybody was languid with the heat. They all sat a
great way apart from each other, and were not energetic enough for
conversation. ‘Where is Laurie?’ Mr. Renton asked; and they told him
that Laurie, with his usual wilfulness, had gone down to the river.
‘There will be a moon to-night,’ Mrs. Renton said, with some
fretfulness; for she liked to have one of her boys by her, if only lying
on the grass, or on the deep mossy carpet, which was almost as soft as
the grass.
‘He has gone off to his moonlight, and his swans, and his water-lilies,’
said Mrs. Westbury, with disdain; but even she felt the heat too much to
proceed.
‘The water-lilies are closed at night,’ said Mary apologetically;
venturing to this extent to take her cousin’s part; lazy Laurence was a
favourite with most people, though he had no energy. Then, all at once,
a larger swoop than usual went circling through the dim upper atmosphere
of the room, and Mrs. Renton gave a scream.
‘It is a bat!’ she cried. ‘Ring, Mary, ring,--I am so superstitious
about bats; and Laurie out all by himself on that river. Mr. Renton, I
wish you would put a stop to it. I never can think it is safe. Oh, tell
them to drive out that creature, Mary! I always know something must
happen when a bat comes into one’s room.’
‘No, godmamma, never mind,’ said Mary. ‘It is only the light. How should
a bat know anything that was going to happen? They come into the Cottage
every evening, and we never mind.’
‘Then you will be found some morning dead in your beds,’ said Mrs.
Renton; ‘I know you will. Oh, it makes me so unhappy, Mary! and Laurie
all by himself in that horrid little boat!’
‘Laurie is all right,’ said Mr. Renton; ‘he knows how to manage a boat,
if he knows nothing else.’ This was muttered half to himself and half
aloud; and then he went to the bow-window and looked out upon the river.
The moon had just risen, and was shining straight down upon one gleam of
water which blazed intensely white amid all the darkling shadows. As
Mr. Renton stood looking out, a boat shot into this gleaming spot, with
long oars glistening, balancing, touching the water like wings of a
bird. ‘Laurie is all right,’ he said to himself, in a mechanical way. He
did not himself care for a thousand bats. But his wife’s alarm struck
into his own uneasiness like a key-note,--the key-note to something he
could not tell what. It was all so lovely and peaceful as he looked,
soft glooms, soft light, rustling rhythm of foliage, wistful breathing
of the night air over that pleasant landscape he knew so well. After
all, was it not better to have the boy there in his boat, than scorching
out in India or toiling like a slave in some Canadian or Australian
forest? What is the good of the father’s work but to better the
condition of the sons? But, on the other hand, if life when it came
should find the sons incapable? Mr. Renton had been a prosperous man;
but he knew that life was no holiday. When it came like an armed man
with temptations, and cares, and responsibilities upon that silken boy,
how would he meet it? These were the father’s thoughts as the bat was
hunted out with much commotion, and his wife lay sighing on her sofa. If
he had been well, probably, Mrs. Westbury’s talk would have had no such
effect upon him; but he was not well; and it had made him very ill at
ease.
Next day his lawyer came, and was closeted for a long time with him, and
there were witnesses called in,--the Rector who happened to be calling,
and the lawyer’s clerk--to witness Mr. Renton’s signature. And within a
week, though he was still in what is called the prime of life, the
father of the house was dead; and his will alone remained behind him to
govern the fate of his three sons.
CHAPTER II.
THE WILL.
There was great consternation in the family when this sudden misfortune
came upon it. All the bustling household from the Cottage overflowed
into the Manor in the excitement of the unlooked-for event; and the
eldest and the youngest son came as fast as the telegraph could summon
them to their father’s bedside. During the two or three days of his
illness the three young men wandered about the place, as young men do
when there is fatal illness in a house--useless,--not liking to go about
their usual employments, and not knowing what else to do. They took
silent walks up and down to the river, and cast wistful looks at the
boats, and dropped now and then into ordinary conversation, only to
break off and pull themselves up with contrition when they remembered.
They were very good sons, and felt their father’s danger, and would have
done anything for him; but there are no special arts or occupations made
for men in such circumstances. The only alternative the poor boys had
was to resort to their ordinary pleasures, or to do nothing; and they
did nothing, as that was the most respectful thing to do,--and were as
dispirited and miserable as heart could desire.
On the last day of all they were called up together to their father’s
death-bed. He had known from the first that he was going to die; and
Mrs. Westbury, who was his principal nurse, and a very kind and patient
one, had felt that her brother had something on his mind. More than once
she had exhorted him to speak out and relieve himself; but he had always
turned his face to the wall when she made this proposition. It was a
close, warm, silent afternoon when the boys were called up-stairs; a
brooding calm, like that which comes before a thunder-storm; a yellow
light was all over the sky, and the birds were fluttering about with a
frightened, stealthy look. Even the leaves about the open windows shook
with a terrified rustling,--clinging, as it were, to the human walls to
give them support in this crisis of nature. The light was yellow in the
sick-room, for the patient would not have the day excluded, as it is
proper to do. He looked like an old man on his bed, though he was not
old. The reflection of lurid colour tinged the ashen face with yellow.
He called them to him, and looked at them all with keen anxiety in his
eyes.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m going, boys;--it’s unexpected, but one has to give
in. I hope you’ll all do well. If you don’t do well, I’ll get no rest in
my grave.’
‘Don’t you trust us, father?’ cried Ben, who was the eldest, with a
thickness in his voice. ‘We’ll do as you have done. That will be our
guide. But don’t think of us,--think of yourself now.’
‘You can’t do as I have done,’ said the father; ‘I started different.
Perhaps it is too late now. Laurie, you will not blame me? And, Frank,
my boy, it won’t make so much difference to you. Frank’s but a boy, and
Laurie’s very soft-hearted--’ he said, as if to himself.
‘Then it is me you are afraid of, father?’ said Ben, whose face darkened
in spite of himself. ‘If I have done anything to make you distrust me,
God knows I did not mean it. Believe me now.’
‘The boy does not know,’ said Mr. Renton to himself, in a confused way;
and then he added more loudly, ‘I don’t distrust you. You’ve always been
a good lad; but it’s hard on you,--ay, it’s hard on Ben,--very hard;--I
wonder if I should have done it!’ said the dying man. They could get
very little more out of him as they stood round his bed, grave,
sorrowful, and bewildered, looking for other words, for another kind of
leave-taking. He bade them no farewell, but mused and murmured on about
something he had done; and that it would be hard on Ben. It was not the
kind of scene,--of conscious farewell and tender adieu,--the last words
of the dying father, which we are so often told of; but perhaps it was a
more usual state of mind at such a moment. His intelligence was lost in
mists, from the coming end. Energy enough to be coherent had forsaken
him. He could do nothing but go over in his enfeebled mind the last
great idea that had taken possession of him. ‘Your mother had nothing to
do with it,’ he said; ‘she knows no more than you do. And don’t think
badly of me. It has all been so sudden. How was I to know that a week
after,--is it a week?--without any time to think, I should have to die?
It’s very strange,--very strange,’ he added, in a tone of musing, as if
he were himself a spectator; ‘to go right away, you know, from one’s
business, that one understands,--to----’
Then he paused, and they all paused with him, gazing, wondering,
penetrated to the heart by that suggestion. Frank, who was the youngest,
wept aloud. Mary Westbury, behind the curtain at one side of the bed,
busied herself, noiselessly, in smoothing the bed-clothes, and arranging
the drapery, so as to shade the patient’s eyes, with trembling hands,
and trembling lips, and tears that dropped silently down her white
cheeks. These two being the youngest were the most overcome. But there
was no harshness or coldness about the bedside of the prosperous man.
They had all perfect faith in him, and no fear that he was going out of
the world leaving any thorns in their path. His words seemed to them as
dreams. Why should they think badly of him? What could they ever have to
forgive him? There had never been any mystery in the house, and it was
easier to think their father’s mind was affected by the approach of
death than to believe in any mystery now.
Mr. Renton died that night; and it was on a very sad and silent house
that the moon rose--the same moon which he had watched shining on
Laurie’s boat. Mrs. Renton, poor soul, shut herself up in her room,
taking refuge in illness, as had been her habit all her life, with Mary
nursing and weeping over her. Aunt Lydia, worn out with watching, went
to bed as soon as ‘all was over.’ The lads were left alone. They huddled
together in the library where all the shutters had been closed, and one
lamp alone burned dimly on the table. Only last night there had still
been floods of light and great windows open to the sky. They gathered
about the table together, not knowing what to do. Nothing could be done
that night. It was too soon to talk of plans, and of their altered life.
They could not read anything that would have amused their minds; that
would have been a sin against the proprieties of grief; so the poor
fellows gathered round the dim lamp, and tried to talk, with now and
then something that choked them climbing into their throats.
‘Have you any idea what he could mean by that,--about me,--about it
being hard?’ said Ben, resting his head on both his hands, and gazing
steadfastly with two dilated eyes into the light of the lamp.
‘I don’t think he could mean anything,’ said Laurie, ‘unless it was the
responsibility. What else could it be?’
‘There must always have been the responsibility,’ said Ben. ‘He spoke as
if it were something more.’
‘His mind was wandering,’ said Laurie; and then there was a long pause.
It was broken by Frank with a sudden outburst.
‘Ben, you’ll be awfully good to poor mamma,’ cried the boy; ‘she can’t
bear things as we can.’ The two elder ones held their breath tightly
when Frank’s sob disturbed the quiet;--they were too much men to sob
with him,--and yet there came that convulsive contraction of the throat.
The only thing to be done was to grasp each other’s hands silently, not
daring to look into each other’s faces, and to go to bed,--to take
refuge in darkness and solitude, and that soft oblivion of sleep,
universal asylum of humanity, to which one gains access so easily when
one is young! Stealthily, on tiptoe, each one of Mr. Renton’s sons paid
a secret visit to the dimly-lighted room, all shrouded and covered, with
faint puffs of night air stealing in like spirits through the shuttered
windows, where their father lay all quiet and at rest. True
tears,--genuine sorrow was in all their hearts; and yet----
As each went away with a heart strained and exhausted by the outburst of
grief, something of the new life beyond, something that breathed vaguely
across them in the dark, like the air from the window, filled the
impatient human souls within them. The one idea could not retain
undisturbed possession even so long as that. The world itself could no
more stand still, poising itself in its vast orbit, than the spirits of
its inhabitants. It was not that Ben thought of his new wealth, nor
Laurie of his future freedom; but only that a thrill of the future
passed through them, as they stood for this melancholy moment by the
death-bed of their past.
Five days passed thus, each of them as long as a year. Duty and
propriety kept the young men in-doors, in the languid stillness; or if
they went out at all, it was only for a disconsolate stroll through the
grounds, on which, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, they would set
out, saying little. The funeral relieved them from the painful
artificiality of this seclusion. When they met together after it, it was
with faces in which there was neither fear nor hope, that the sons of
the dead man appeared. Their father had always been just to them and
kind, and they had no reason to expect that he could have been otherwise
in the last act of his life. The persons present were Mrs. Renton, Mrs.
Westbury, her children Mary and Laurence, and the three Renton boys;
with the lawyer, Mr. Pounceby, and his clerk, and a few old friends of
the family, who had just accompanied them from the grave. They all took
their places without excitement. He might have left a few legacies, more
or less, but nobody could doubt what would be the disposal of his
principal property. The ladies sat together, a heap of mournful crape,
at one end of the room. The whole company was quiet, and languid, and
trustful. There was no anxiety in any one’s mind,--unless, indeed, it
was in that of Mr. Pounceby, who did not look to be at his ease. For the
first quarter of an hour he did nothing but clear his throat; then he
had a blind pulled up, that he might have a light to read by; then he
pulled it down, because of a gleam of the sun that stole in and worried
him. His task was such that he did not like to begin it, or to go
through it when begun. But with the obtuseness of people who have not
their attention directed to a subject, nobody noticed his confusion; he
had a cold, no doubt, which made him clear his throat;--he was always
fidgety;--they were not suspicious, and found nothing out.
‘I ought to explain first,’ said Mr. Pounceby, ‘I promised my excellent
friend and client,--my late excellent client,--to make a little
explanation before I read what must be a painful document, in some
points of view. Mr. Ben Renton, I believe your father was particularly
anxious that it should be explained to you. He sent for me suddenly last
week. It was, alas! only on Friday morning that I came here by his
desire. He wanted certain arrangements made. Boys,’ said Mr. Pounceby,
who was an old friend, turning round upon them, ‘I give you my solemn
word, had I known how little time he would have lived to think it over,
or change again, if necessary, I should never have had any hand in
it,--nor would he,--nor would he. Had he thought his time was running so
short, he would have made no change.’
Then there ensued a little movement among the boys, which showed how
correct their father’s opinion of all the three had been. Frank bent
forward with a little wonder in his face, poising in his fingers a
paper-knife he had picked up, and looked calmly on as a spectator;
Laurie only woke up as it were from another train of thought, and turned
his eyes with a certain mild regret towards the lawyer; Ben alone, moved
out of his composure, rose up and faced the man, who held, as it seemed,
their fate in his hands. ‘Whatever my father planned will no doubt be
satisfactory to us,’ he said firmly. ‘You forget that we are ignorant
what change was made.’
He began to read now, but to an audience much more interested than at
first. There was, of course, a long technical preamble, to which Ben
listened breathlessly, his lips slightly moving with impatience, and a
hot colour on his cheeks, and then the real matter in question came.
Mr. Pounceby shook his grizzled head, ‘It was a great change that was
made,’ he said; ‘but I will not waste your time with further
explanation. As you say, what your excellent father arranged, will, I
hope, be satisfactory to you all.
‘“Having been led much to think in recent days of the difference between
my sons’ education and my own, and having in addition a strong sense
that without energy no man ever made any mark in this world, I have made
up my mind, after much reflection, to postpone the distribution of my
property among my children until seven years from the date of my death.
In the meantime I appoint my executors to receive all my income and
revenue from whatsoever sources,--rents, interest on stock, mortgages,
and all other investments, as afterwards described,--and to hold them in
trust, accumulating at interest, until the seventh anniversary of my
death, when my first will and testament, which I have deposited in the
hands of Mr. Pounceby, shall be read, and my property distributed
according to the stipulations therein contained.
‘“It is also my desire, which I hereby request my said executors to
carry out, that my sons should receive respectively a yearly allowance
of two hundred pounds. I do this with the object of affording to my boys
the opportunity of working their own way, and developing their own
characters in a struggle with the world, such as every one of their
kindred from the earliest time has had to do, and has done, with a
success of which their own present position is a proof. If they shrink
from the trial I put upon them, they will be the first of their name who
have ever done so. As to the final distribution of the property, in
order that no untimely revelation may be made, I request my executors
to retain my will in their possession unopened until the day I have
mentioned,--the seventh anniversary of my decease.”’
Up to this moment all the audience had listened breathless, with a
mixture of wonder, dismay, and alarm, to this extraordinary document. It
is a mild statement of the case to say that it took them by surprise.
The boys themselves rose up one after the other to bear the shock which
came upon them so unexpectedly, and bore it like men, holding their
breath, and clenching their hands to give no outward expression. Ben was
the foremost of the three, and it was with him that the struggle was
hardest. His pride was wounded to the quick, and it was strong within
him. He was wounded, too, in his love and respect for his father, of
whose justice and goodness he had never for a moment till now
entertained a doubt. And then he was ruined,--so he thought. For the
first moment he was stunned by the blow. Seven years! Half a man’s
life,--half of the brightest part of his life,--the flower and cream of
his existence. By this time dreams had begun to steal into his heart
unawares,--dreams half inarticulate of the life which his father’s heir,
the reigning Renton of Renton, would naturally lead, tinged with all
tender regrets, and loyal to all memories, but still his own life,
master of himself and his lands and of the position his forefathers had
made for him. It was not possible that he should be unaware that few
young men in England would be better endowed, or have a better start in
the world than he. Everything was open to him,--a political career, if
he chose, the power of wealth, the thrill of independence, and all the
hopes of happiness which move a young man. Even while these visions
formed in his mind, they were struck by this sharp stroke of reality,
and faded away. He grew pale; the muscles tightened round his mouth; a
heavy damp came on his forehead. At one time the room reeled round with
him,--a mist of pale eager faces, through which that monotonous voice
rose. He was the foremost, and he did not see his brothers. He did not
even think of them, it must be confessed. The blow was hardest to him,
and he thought of himself.
When, however, the reading reached the point at which we have stopped,
Mrs. Westbury, forgetting herself, rose up, and rushed to the boys, with
a sudden burst of sobs. ‘Forgive me!’ she cried wildly. ‘Oh, boys,
forgive me! I will never, never forgive myself!’
At this interruption Mr. Pounceby stopped, and all the spectators turned
round surprised. Then nature appeared in the three young men. Ben made a
little imperative gesture with his hand, ‘Aunt Lydia, you can have
nothing to do with it,’ he said; ‘don’t interrupt us. We must not detain
our friends.’ Laurie, for his part, took her hand, and drew it through
his arm. ‘We can have nothing to forgive you,’ he said, compassionately
supporting her, having more insight than the rest. Frank, glad for his
boyish part to be relieved from this tension of interest by any
incident, went and fetched her a chair. ‘Hush!’ he said, as the sound of
her sobbing died into a half-terrified stillness. And thus they heard it
out to the end.
The interruption did them all good. It dispersed the haze of
bewilderment that had gathered round the young men. The dust of the
ruins falling round them might have blinded them but for this sudden
call back to themselves. When all was over, Ben had so far recovered
himself as to speak, though his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth.
‘We are much obliged to you all for joining us to-day,’ he said; ‘I am
sure you will excuse my mother, and indeed all of us. She is never very
strong. Mr. Pounceby, I know you are anxious to get back to town.’
‘But, Ben, my dear fellow,’ said one of the party, stepping forward and
grasping his hand, ‘stop a little. It is not any want of respect to your
excellent father,--but it must have been disease, you know. Such things
happen every day. You will not accept this extraordinary rigmarole. He
must have been out of his mind!’
‘We are quite satisfied with my father’s will; thanks,’ said Ben
proudly, though with a quiver of his lip, and he looked round for the
first time at his brothers. ‘Quite satisfied,’ said Laurie once more,
with that look of compassion which seemed uncalled for at the moment,
when he himself was one of the chief persons to be compassionated.
‘Quite satisfied,’ echoed Frank steadily, with wonder in his eyes. Then
Mr. Pounceby interposed.
‘Mr. Renton was of perfectly sound mind when he executed this document,’
he said. ‘I was with him nearly all day, and went through a great deal
of business. I never saw him more clear and business-like. On that point
nothing can be said.’
‘Nothing must be said on any point,’ said Ben quickly. ‘My brothers and
myself are satisfied. My father had a perfect right---- I would rather
not enter into the subject. We are much obliged to our friends all the
same.’
And thus all remark was peremptorily cut short. The neighbours
dispersed, carrying all over the country the news of poor Renton’s
extraordinary will; of how much he must have lost his head; and that Ben
and the other boys were Quixotic enough not to dispute it. It was
monomania, people said; and everybody knew that monomaniacs were sound
on all points but one. Before nightfall there had arisen a body of
evidence to prove that Mr. Renton had long been mad on this subject. One
man remembered something he had said on one occasion, and another man on
a second. He had been mad about his family; and the boys must be mad,
too, to bear it. These reports, however, did not break the stillness
which had fallen on the Manor,--a stillness almost more blank than that
of death. The sobs of two women, one weeping faintly over her boys’
disappointment, the other wildly in self-reproach, were the only sounds
that disturbed the calm of the house. The boys themselves were stunned,
and for that day, at least, had not the heart to say a word.
CHAPTER III.
THE NEW CAREER.
It was twenty-four hours before the brothers met to consult over their
darkened prospects. Their mother could kiss and weep over them, but she
was not the kind of woman to direct or guide her boys. Such faint idea
as she had in her mind was of a kind which would have entirely defeated
their father’s purpose. ‘Never mind, my darling boy,’ she had said
soothingly to her eldest son, though he was already a bearded man, with
the stern Renton lines of resolution about his mouth. The poor little
woman knew no better than to console him as if he had lost a toy. ‘We
can go on living at Renton all the same. I shall only have you so much
the longer. We shall only want a little more economy, my dear,’ she
said. ‘Perhaps that was what your dear papa meant. He knew how lonely I
would be. Why can’t we all live together as we have done? I have enough
for you all by my settlement, and I am to keep Renton; and when the
seven years are past, it will be quite time enough to think of marrying.
I should not be against you travelling----or anything, Ben, my dear
boy,’ the poor mother added faltering, seeing the sternness on his face.
‘No, mother dear,’ said her son. ‘No. What you have is for yourself. We
shall all come to see you; but we are not such mean creatures as to live
on you. Besides, that was not what he meant.’
‘Then what did he mean?’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Oh, boys, that I should be
driven to blame your dear papa! What could he mean if it was not to keep
you a little longer with me?’
‘He meant to put us on our mettle,’ said Laurie; ‘and he was right. We
would be a set of sad lazy fellows if we stayed on here. We’ll come and
see you, mamma, as Ben says. Don’t cry. We none of us want to marry,
thank heaven!--at least,’ said Laurie, thoughtfully, ‘I hope so; that
complication is spared at least.’
‘Dear boys, it is so much better you should not marry too soon,’ said
Mrs. Renton, drying her soft eyes. ‘He must have been thinking of that.
Oh, believe me, Ben, my own boy, it will turn out all for the best.’
‘Yes, mother,’ said Ben, with the sigh of submission perforce, and he
went away with his own thoughts; Laurie followed him after a little
interval; and Frank, upon whom the shock had fallen more lightly, stayed
with his mother to amuse and cheer her. But they all met in the library
in the afternoon to have a consultation over their fate. They were
brothers in misfortune,--a bond almost as strong as that of nature. It
hurt their pride to go over the ground with any other creature, even
their mother, who could not refrain from a hundred suggestions as to
their father’s meaning. But among themselves they were safe, and could
speak freely, with the consciousness of having the same meaning, the
same impulse, the same pride. They never discussed the will, but
accepted it proudly, owing it to themselves, as their father’s sons, to
make no question. Already their hearts had risen a little from the blank
depression of the previous night. It was Frank who was the first to
speak.
‘I tell you what I shall do,’ he said with the rapid decision of youth.
Frank had never been thought clever, though he was reasonable and
high-spirited; and, consequently, the decision to him was a less
complicated business. ‘I shall exchange into the line, and go to India
if I can. More fun,’ said the young soldier, trying hard for his old
gaiety, though there was still the gleam of a tear in his eye, ‘and
better pay.’
‘Well, that is easily settled,’ said Laurie; ‘and I think very sensible
too. Only one thing we ought to think of. Whatever the others may decide
upon, let one of us always be at hand for the sake of my poor mother. He
always took such care of her. She wants to have one of us to refer to.
We might take it in turns, you know--’
‘All right,’ said Frank, to whom, if he carried out his own plan, such a
turn would be simply impossible; but the boy did not think of that. As
for Ben, he was very hard at work considering his own problem, and
knitting his brows.
‘We are like the three princes in the fairy tales,’ said Laurie, ‘sent
out to find,--what?--a shawl that will pass through a ring, or a little
dog in a nutshell. That was to decide which should reign, though. I hope
our probation does not include so much.’
‘I have made up my mind it does,’ said Ben, with a darker contraction of
his brows; ‘it would be unmeaning else. When the seven years are over we
shall be judged according to our works. It’s rather a startling
realisation, you know.’
‘Old fellow,’ said Laurie hastily, ‘of course I stand up for my father’s
will through thick and thin; but, will or no will, you know Frank and me
too well to think either of us would ever take your place.’
‘I should hope so,’ said young Frank, leaning half over the table in his
eagerness. ‘Ben can’t think us such cads as that.’
‘I don’t think you cads,’ said Ben; ‘but I shall stand by the will,
whatever it is. I’ll fight for my birthright, of course; but since we
are placed in this position, Laurie, it’s of no use talking. He that
wins must have. I shall stand by that.’
‘Well,’ said Laurence, ‘it is easy to tell which is most like to win; so
we need not dispute about it beforehand. The thing in the meantime
is,--what to do? I wonder how the fellow set to work who had the ten
talents. As for me, I am the unlucky soul with one. You need not say
psha! so impatiently. We have got into the midst of the parables, and
may as well take example----’
‘The question is,’ said Ben, ‘not what we have got into the midst of,
but what you mean to do?’
Laurie shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is a great deal easier to talk than
to do anything else,’ he said, ‘for me at least. I suppose I must take
to art. You need not tell me I have no genius,’ he added, with a slight
flush. ‘I know that well enough. But what else can I take to? Moralising
is not a trade; or at least if it is, it’s overstocked; and I can’t
moralise on paper. I must go in for illustrations and that sort of
thing. Undignified, perhaps, but how can I help it? There is nothing
else I can do.’
‘A fellow with a university education, and as good blood in his veins as
any in England,’ said Ben, with a little impatience, ‘might surely do
better than that.’
‘What good will my blood do me?’ said Laurie. ‘Get me a few invitations,
perhaps. And as for a university education,--I might take pupils, if I
had not forgotten most of what I’ve learned; or I might take orders; or
I might go and eat my terms at the Temple. And what would any of these
three things do for me? Fellows that have meant it all their lives
would, of course, do better than a fellow who never meant it till now.
No; I have a little taste for art, if I have not much talent. I might
turn picture-dealer, perhaps. Don’t look so black, Ben. A man must make
use of what faculty he has.’
After that there was a pause, for Laurie did not care to put the same
inquiry which he had just answered, to his elder brother. And Ben did
not volunteer any information about the part he meant to take. Ben could
not evaporate in talk, as Laurie could. He could not make up his mind to
his fate, and adapt himself to circumstances. Though his pride had
forbidden him any struggle against his father’s will, yet in his heart
he was embittered against his father. There was injustice in it. Of
course, he repeated to himself, fellows who had meant it all their lives
must do better than fellows who only began to mean it in necessity.
Laurie was right so far. And under this frightful disadvantage their
father, of his own will, had placed them. Frank had a profession, and
might be not much the worse. But Ben himself had been brought up to be
heir of Renton. His heart grew hard within him as he thought it all
over. It seemed to him that if he had known it from the beginning he
would not have cared. He would have gone in for anything,--what did it
matter?--professional work, or trade, or anything, so long as he started
fair, and had the same advantages as his neighbours. Now he must thrust
himself into something which was already full of legitimate competitors.
He sat and looked into the flame of the lamp, and took no notice of his
brothers. But their fate added an aggravation to his own. Frank was not
so bad; it made less difference to Frank than to any of them. An officer
in a marching regiment was as good a gentleman as a Guardsman. But
Laurie a poor artist, and himself he could not tell what! The thought
galled him to the heart.
‘And, Ben, what shall you do?’ said Frank. ‘We have told you, and you
ought to tell us. I don’t suppose you mean to stay on with mamma. What
shall you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ben, with a sudden descent into the depths of
despondency. He had almost wept as he spoke. One had his profession, the
other at least a taste, if nothing more. Poor Ben, the first-born, had
no speciality. He might have been a political man, with a hand in the
government of his country, or he might have been a farmer, or he might
have gone to Calcutta, as Dick Westbury had done; whereas, now, at
five-and-twenty, he could not tell what to do.
‘Never mind, you’ll do the best of us all;--you were always the
cleverest of us all,’ said Frank, shocked at his brother’s dejected
looks; and then it flashed across them what their father had said, that
it would be most hard upon Ben.
‘It is you who have the ten talents,’ said Laurie, ‘and Frank has the
five; and you will go away one to your farm, and the other to your
merchandise,--isn’t that how the story runs?--while I am left with one
in my napkin. Or, if that is too serious for you, let’s take it on the
other side. But whatever you do, beware of the old woman whom we are all
sure to meet as we set out, who will ask us to help her, and give us
three gifts. I shall keep a very sharp look out for that old woman,’
said Laurie, breaking the spell of stillness, and getting up, ‘Laugh at
it? Yes, I am trying to laugh a little. Would you rather I should cry?’
he said, turning upon his brother, with tears glistening in his eyes. It
was a question which it would be. They were all at this point, standing
upon the alternative, between such poor laughter as might be possible
and bitter tears.
All this sad and wonderful overthrow had come from Mrs. Westbury’s
indiscreet taunts to her brother upon the up-bringing of his sons. If
that could have been any comfort to them, their Aunt Lydia was very
miserable. They had never allowed her to finish her confession, and her
heart was very sore over the injustice that had been done them. That
same night she stole to Ben’s door, and would have wept over him had
that been possible. She was not an unkind or hard-hearted woman. It had
been a kind of pleasure to her to contrast her nephews’ idleness with
the Renton traditions; but she was a true Renton, strong in her sense of
justice, and there was nothing she would not have done for them now.
‘Ben, let me speak to you,’ she said. ‘I did not mean it,--far from
that, heaven knows! I wish my tongue had been cut out first. I know it
would go against you to admit such a thing if any one else said it; but,
Ben, your father could not have been in his right senses. He never could
have done it, if he had known.’
‘It is a question I can’t discuss with you, Aunt Lydia,’ said Ben,
standing at the open door and barring her entrance. ‘I think you are
mistaken. I don’t think it could be anything you said.’
‘Ben, I know it!’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘I could not be mistaken. Let me
come in, and I will tell you. It was done on Friday, and that
unfortunate conversation was on Thursday night. He was very snappish to
poor Laurie when we went back to the lawn;--but, oh, if I could have
known what was to follow it! Ben, I must come in and speak to you; I
have a great deal to say. You know, there is our Dick----’
‘Yes,’ said Ben. He had to let her in, though he did it with an ill
grace. He placed his easy-chair for her, and stood leaning against the
table, to hear what she had to say. He would not countenance or
encourage her to remain by sitting down, but stood with his candle in
his hand, a most unwilling host.
‘You are angry with me,’ said Aunt Lydia, ‘and you have reason. But what
I want to say is about Dick. If your father had made this move at the
right time, it is you who should have gone to Calcutta, Ben. You have
the best right. My boy only went, as it were, to fill your place; and he
ought to give it up to you now. Of course it was to my brother he owed
the appointment. I don’t say Dick should come home; but he has made some
money and some friends; and, I think he might do something for himself
still, in another way, instead of taking your place.’
‘It is nonsense to call it my place,’ said Ben.
‘I don’t think it is nonsense; for my part, I think of justice,’ said
Mrs. Westbury. ‘It would have been yours had you been sent off six or
seven years ago, as you ought to have been. Yes, I say as you ought to
have been, Ben, like all the Rentons. None of us were ever fine
gentlemen. The men always worked before they took their ease, and the
women always managed and saved in our house; but you should not be
turned out now, when you were not brought up to it. Ben, my brother was
very cross to me that Thursday night. It was not him, poor fellow, it
was illness that was working on him. He was not in his right mind; and
the will ought to be broken.’
‘I can’t have you say this,’ said Ben. ‘I can’t let anybody say it. Aunt
Lydia, we had better not discuss the question. We have all made up our
minds to my father’s will, such as it is.’
‘Then you are very foolish boys,’ said Mrs. Westbury; ‘when I, who would
stand up for him in reason or out of reason, tell you so! Your father’s
good name is of as much consequence to me as it is to you. There never
was a Renton like that before; but still if it was to stand in the way
of justice----! And about Dick. You ought to write to him at once, to
tell him he is to look out for something else for himself, and that you
mean to take your own place.’
‘I shall never go to Calcutta,’ said Ben shortly.
‘Then what will you do?’ said his aunt. ‘You can’t live on two hundred
a-year,--at least you were never meant to live on it,--you know that.
And you can’t live on your mother. Unless you are going out to India
what are you to do?’
‘I shall find something to do,’ said Ben briefly; and then he softened a
little. ‘I know you mean to be kind,’ he said. ‘I am sure you always
meant to be kind; but I can’t do any of the things you propose. I can
neither question my father’s will, nor live on my mother, nor turn out
Dick. Let him make the best of it. I should think he had got the worst
over now. And don’t blame yourself. I don’t think you were to blame.
There must have been some foundation to work on in my father’s
thoughts; and it is done; and I will never try to undo it. We must all
make the best of it now. Will you do one thing to please me, Aunt Lydia?
Let Mary be with my mother as much as you can spare her. She will feel
it when we are all gone.’
‘I will do anything you please,’ said Mrs. Westbury, melted to tears.
‘Oh, to think I should have done you so much harm, and be so powerless
to do you any good! But, Ben, you have not told me what you are going to
do?’
‘Because I don’t know,’ said Ben abruptly. He could not come to any
decision. His aunt left him reluctantly when they had reached this
point, thinking, notwithstanding her compunction, or perhaps in
consequence of it, that if his petition about Mary meant any special
regard for her, she would not hesitate to give him her child. ‘He will
make his way,’ she said to herself; ‘he will make his way.’ It was
because he was a little hard and stern in his downfall that she thought
so well of him; and her feelings were very different as she went
prowling through the passages in her dressing-gown to knock at Laurie’s
door. Poor Laurie! nobody entertained any such confidence about him.
When Mrs. Westbury paused at Laurie’s door he was seated with his head
buried in his hands before his table, on which lay the ruins, so to
speak, of various youthful hopes. Though he had said so confidently
that none of them wanted to marry, yet there were one or two notes on
the table before him, in a woman’s hand, which he had been looking over,
poor boy, with a certain tightening of his heart. And there were hopes
too of another kind; plans for travel, plans for such study as suited
his mind, which it had been his delight to form for some time past, and
which he had so little doubt of persuading his father to let him carry
out. His little maps and calculations lay before him, all huddled
together. That chapter of his life was over. He could smile at the
change when they were all together, to help the others to bear it; but
grief, and disappointment, and downfall, all fell upon him with
additional force when he was alone. His eyes were wet when he sprang up
at Aunt Lydia’s summons, and shouted a ‘Come in,’ which was as cheerful
as he could make it, sweeping his papers away as he did so into the open
drawer of his table. He thought it was one of his brothers, perhaps Ben,
come to get some comfort from his lighter heart. When Mrs. Westbury came
in he was taken aback, poor fellow; but Laurie was too tender-hearted to
be anything but kind to his aunt. He cast down a heap of books, which
were occupying the most comfortable seat in the room, and made a place
for her, glad to turn away his face for the moment and conceal the tears
in his eyes; but those tears would not be concealed. They kept springing
up again, though he kept them from falling; and though he smiled, and
began cheerfully, ‘Well, Aunt Lydia?’ there was a sufficiently
melancholy tone in both voice and face.
‘We shall be going away to-morrow, Laurie,’ said Mrs. Westbury, ‘and I
could not go without speaking to you. Oh, what a week this has been!
When I think that it was only last Thursday night----’
‘Don’t speak of it, please,’ said Laurie; ‘one has need of all one’s
strength. It is bad enough, but we must make the best of it. I wish you
were not going away. I thought Mary would stay with my mother. How is
she to get on when we are all gone?’
‘I might leave Mary for a little,’ said Mrs. Westbury, doubtfully; ‘and
then we shall be close by at the Cottage, where your mother can send for
us when she pleases. Ah, Laurie, if you had only had a sister of your
own!’
‘If we had only had a great many things!’ said Laurie, with an attempt
at a smile; ‘but, as for that, Mary is as good as a sister. I never knew
the difference. I think she is the best creature in the world.’
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Lydia, looking at him keenly, with an inspection very
different from her manner to Ben; ‘she is a good girl; but you always
used to quarrel, Laurie. I did not think she was so much to you.’
‘She always thought me a good-for-nothing fellow,’ said Laurie, with a
little laugh, ‘like most other people. I must show you now, if I can,
that I’ve got some mettle in me. But, Aunt Lydia, you have not come to
say good-bye?’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Westbury; and then she made a pause. ‘I can’t rest,
Laurie; I can’t keep quiet and see you all in trouble,--when it is my
fault!’
‘That is nonsense,’ said Laurence decidedly. ‘You may be quite sure it
had been turning over in his mind for some time; and quite right, too,’
the young man added bravely. ‘How could we ever have known what stuff we
were made of else? If there is any good in being a Renton, as you have
so often told us, now is the time for it to show.’
‘Oh, Laurie,’ said his aunt, weeping, ‘that is what breaks my heart.
‘You have not a chance now, with the up-bringing you have had, and your
poor mother’s soft ways,--not a chance! If my brother had only thought
in time. This will could never stand if it was brought into a court of
justice. He could not be in his right mind. Ben would not listen to me
when I said so; but I must speak to you.’
‘You shall speak to me as much as you like,’ said Laurie, with his
mother’s soft ways, ‘but not on that subject. It is sacred for us,
whatever other people may think. And, after all, you know,’ he said,
with a smile, ‘it is but for seven years. I shall only be about thirty
at the end of the trial;--quite a boy!’
‘Quite a boy!’ said Aunt Lydia, very seriously; ‘but still I can’t bear
it. And, Laurie, though you are the least like a Renton of any of them,
I have always been the fondest of you!’
‘Thanks, dear aunt,’ said the young man, and he kissed her, and led her
half resisting to her own room. ‘All this excitement and want of rest
will upset you,’ he said to her tenderly; ‘and, Aunt Lydia, don’t say
anything to Frank.’
Laurie went back to his musings and his papers when she had made him
this promise;--and Mrs. Westbury had a good cry over the whole miserable
business. ‘Upset me!’ she said to herself, ‘as if I was a woman like his
mother to be upset! Oh, if I could but do anything for these poor boys!’
But at the same time she was glad in her heart that Laurie thought of
Mary only as his sister. A mother has to consider everything; and that
could never have been,--though it was a different thing with Ben.
These preliminaries, being told, and the singular and unexpected nature
of this family crisis fully explained, the historian of the Renton
family feels justified in proceeding with this narrative of the fortunes
of the three boys, and their adventures in the big changed world, upon
which they were launched so abruptly. They all left the Manor together
on a sultry September day, just the day on which, under other
circumstances, they would have been off to shoot grouse or to climb Mont
Blanc. Their mourning prevented such invitations as even in their
changed fortune they would certainly have received, and the shock was
so fresh on all of them that pleasure-making of any kind would have been
impossible. They went out as if they had been put to sea, each man in
his own bark, with no very sure compass or chart to rely on, and with
minds braced high by resolution, but altogether unprepared for the
trial, and unaccustomed to the labour. Perhaps it was as well for them
that their ideas were so utterly vague and undefined touching the rocks
and shoals and dangerous passages that lay in their way.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ELDEST SON.
The young men separated when they left the Manor,--one to his farm, and
another to his merchandise, as Laurie said. It is our business at the
present moment to follow only the eldest. Ben went back to his chambers
in the Albany, his personal head-quarters, though he did not occupy them
for more than three months in the year. Though he was called Ben, his
name was the solemn family name of Benedict. It suited him better than
the contraction. He was one of those men who are in the way of taking
things very much in earnest,--too much in earnest, some people thought.
The fashion of the period had accustomed him to the light outward
appearance and pretence of general indifference common to his kind; but
in his heart he was not indifferent to anything. He had felt his
advantages keenly, taking all the more anxious care that no one should
suspect him of doing so; and he felt his downfall now, to the bottom of
his heart. He went back to London, which seemed the only place to go to
in the emergency. He had been on a pleasant visit at a pleasant house
when the call came to his father’s death-bed. Now, in September, when he
had not a friend remaining in town, he took his solitary way there, and
went to the handsome, forlorn rooms, the very rent of which would now
have swallowed up so great a part of his income. He went in listlessly,
amid all the tokens of his former life, almost hating the signs of a
luxury so far beyond his means. Ben had taste as well as Laurie, though
in a different way. His chambers were furnished daintily, as became a
man accustomed to spend as he pleased and spare nothing. It had always
been a comfort to Mr. Renton’s practical eye, that his son’s
knick-knacks were all knick-knacks of a thoroughly saleable
kind,--things which had a real value; and the same thought, as he
entered, brought a smile upon Ben’s face. ‘I shall make some money out
of the d----d trash,’ he said to himself bitterly, thrusting away with
his foot a little graceful guéridon, on which stood a Sèvres déjeûner
service. The toy tottered, and would have fallen, but that he put out
his hand by instinct to save it. Then,--if the reader will not despise
him for it,--it must be allowed that Ben sank down into a chair, and did
something equivalent to what a woman would have done had she cried. He
muttered ill things of himself under his breath,--he called himself a
confounded fool to risk by his ill-temper anything that might bring him
the money he stood so much in need of,--and then he covered his eyes
with his hands, and felt a sudden contraction in his throat. He had
nobody to appeal to, nobody to consult. He had the problem of life to
resolve for himself as he best could, and he had lost a father whom he
loved, not a week before. All these thoughts came over him as he went
into his old rooms, where all his favourite possessions were. Of course,
neither the rooms nor their ornaments could be retained. All that Ben
could pretend to now was of a much humbler description; but he would not
hand over to another even the pain of putting things in order, and
making ready for the final sacrifice. His servant would have to be given
up too. He had not the means of hiring help to do anything that he could
do for himself. Henceforward he would have to learn to do things for
himself, and here was the first thing to do.
It is true that he would have given up these same rooms without a pang
for various other reasons;--had he been going to take possession of the
house in Berkeley Square, which now, he supposed, would either be let or
shut up;--had he been going abroad, or, indeed, for almost any other
reasonable cause;--just as the people would do who break their hearts
over the hall, or rectory, or deceased father’s house, which they would
have abandoned joyfully a dozen times in as many years, had a pleasant
chance come in their way. It was the wreck of circumstance surrounding
this change which wounded Ben; the breaking up of all his habits, and
failure of everything he had been used to. When he had recovered himself
a little, he took a disconsolate stroll through the rooms, and reckoned
up what his things had cost him;--his pictures,--some of which were
copies picked up abroad, and some chef-d’œuvres of young artists at
home, which Laurie had persuaded him to give good prices for;--the
cabinets he had attained after unexampled efforts at Lady Bertram’s
sale,--his choice little collection of old Dresden,--even his pipes and
his whips, and a hundred other trifles, which, when he counted them up,
had cost heaps of money. Some of them, alas! were not even paid for,
which was the worst sting of all. Ben had been in debt before now, and
cared little enough, perhaps too little for it. He had felt the weight
of wealth behind him, and that he could pay his arrears without much
difficulty when he chose to make the effort. But now everything was
changed. It is only when debt becomes a necessity that it is a burden.
He felt it now, dragging him down, as it were staring into his face,
hemming him in. Debt for bits of china, and pretty follies of furniture!
And now, for aught he could tell, he might not have enough for daily
bread. To be sure, a man could not starve upon two hundred a-year; but
there are such different ways of starving. And his whole first year’s
income would not be nearly enough to pay off his rent, and his man, and
the expenses of the break-up, not to speak of tradesmen. Such
reflections were so novel to him that he sat down again in despair, with
his brain going round and round. He did not even know how to set about
being ruined. There was nobody in town likely to buy his pretty things
at this time of the year, or to take his rooms off his hands. He had
come up fully resolved to be sufficient to himself, to manage everything
himself, and to give no one the opportunity of pity or remark. But it
was less easy than he supposed. As for his servant, he had been with him
at the Manor, and had heard, or found out, or divined, as servants do,
something of what had happened, and was not unprepared for dismissal.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, without hesitation, when his master spoke to him.
‘I hope it’s not that I don’t give satisfaction, sir: I’ve always done
my best.’
‘No, no,’ said Ben, with a young man’s unnecessary explanatoriness. ‘I
can’t afford now to keep anybody but myself. I am very sorry. It is not
that I have any objection to you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the man once more. ‘Of course it’s understood that
there’s board-wages, sir, if I’m sent away in a hurry before the end of
the month?’
‘Have what you like,’ said Ben, with a little indignation; ‘if that’s
all; give me a note exactly of what’s owing to you, and you can take
yourself off as soon as you like.’
‘Yes, sir; but it looks pecooliar being sent away so sudden,’ said the
fellow standing his ground. ‘Perhaps you would not mind just giving a
bit of an explanation to any gentleman as may come about my character. I
hope you consider I deserve a good character, sir. Gentlemen, and
‘specially ladies, is very apt to ask, “How was it as you was turned
away?”’
‘You may go now,’ said Ben, coldly. ‘I have nothing more to say to you.
I’ll give you your money as soon as you’re ready to go.’
‘But my character, sir?’ insisted the man. Ben, in his wrath, seized his
hat and went off, leaving Morris holding the door open with these words
on his lips. He was unreasonably angry in spite of his better judgment.
The very first man he had spoken to after his downfall was so entirely
indifferent to his concerns, so wrapped up in his own! What were
Morris’s board-wages or miserable character in comparison to Ben’s
overthrow and changed existence? He went out angry--in a passion, as
Morris said not without reason. Naturally the man had his own theory of
the whole matter, and held it for certain that his master had been going
to the bad, or why should his father disinherit him?--to which question,
indeed, it was difficult to make any answer. Ben’s next errand was to a
fashionable auctioneer and house-agent, who was very civil, and yet very
different from what he had been when the young man of fashion took his
rooms. ‘Going abroad, sir?’ Mr. Robins said, with a certain scrutiny
which made the young fellow, for the first time in his life, feel
himself a doubtful character, required to give an account of himself.
‘Perhaps. I can’t say,’ he answered; ‘but these rooms have become too
expensive for me, anyhow, and I want to sell my things.’
‘The worst possible time to do it,’ said the auctioneer, shaking his
head. ‘There is not a soul in town, sir, as you know as well as I do.
Even in our humble way, we are going to the country ourselves. They
would not fetch a third of their proper price now.’
‘But I want the money,’ said Ben; ‘and I can’t keep up the place. I must
get rid of them now.’
‘I can take your orders, of course, sir,’ said Mr. Robins,
deprecatingly; ‘but it will be at a frightful sacrifice. Nobody but
dealers will look at them now,--and we all know what dealers are. Buy in
the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,--a fine maxim, sir, for
trade; but ruinous for fancy articles, when you have to push them to a
sale, and there’s nobody to buy.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ said Ben, abruptly. He had almost said, ‘What
would you advise me to do?’ But his mind was in such a restless state,
that the pendulum had veered back again to its first throb of obstinacy
ere he could say the other words. And the orders were taken accordingly.
Then he went to his club with the listlessness of a man who does not
know what to do. What was he to do? Supposing he could make his club his
home, with a bedroom somewhere to sleep in, and the Manor and his
friends to fall back upon--would that do? Probably he could manage it,
even on his small income, by dint of economy,--that unknown quality to
which ignorance gave a certain appearance of facility. With no servant,
no expensive habits, no entertainment of friends, he might be able to
manage. This was what some one of his spiritual enemies whispered in
Ben’s ear. The next moment he jumped up and began to walk about the long
vacant room,--of which at the moment he was the sole occupant,--with
sudden agitation. His idle, pleasant life had come natural to him in the
past; but already, though so little time had elapsed, it was no longer
natural. To spend seven years of his existence planning how to save
shillings and keep up appearances,--to live, he a young man at the
height of his strength and powers, the life of a genteel old maid! That
was impossible. A day-labourer would be better, he said to himself. But
it is so easy to say that. He knew well enough that he could not be a
day-labourer; and what could he be?
He had come thus far in his uncomfortable thoughts when somebody struck
him familiarly on the shoulder, with an exclamation of surprise. ‘You
here!’ said the new-comer. ‘You in London when there is nobody in it,
Ben Renton! You are the last fellow I expected to see.’
‘What, Hillyard!’ said Ben, though his cordiality was languid in
comparison. ‘Back so soon? Have you made your fortune already?’ And as
he spoke it occurred to him that going to Australia must be the thing to
do.
‘Not much of that,’ said his friend, who was very brown and very hairy,
and in clothes that would not bear examination. ‘That is easier said
than done. I have spent all I had, which comes to about the same thing;
and now I’ve come back to try my luck at home,--my ill-luck, I should
say.’
‘Then it is no good going to Australia,’ was the thought that passed,
rapid as the light, through Ben’s mind. ‘But I thought all sorts of
people made fortunes at the diggings, or in the bush, or whatever you
call it,’ was what he said.
‘Yes, that’s how one deceives one’s self,’ said the adventurer. ‘One
throws everything together in a lump, and one thinks it’s all right;
whereas it’s all wrong, you know. If I had been brought up to be a
shepherd, I might have got on in the bush; and if I had been brought up
a bricklayer’s labourer, I might have succeeded at the diggings; but I
was not, you see. And even in these elevated branches of industry the
requirements are quite different. Let us have some dinner, Renton. It’s
great luck to find any one to hob-and-nob with, especially such a fellow
as you.’
‘Dinner!’ said Ben amazed, looking at his watch. ‘Why, it’s only three
o’clock.’
Upon which Mr. Hillyard burst into a great laugh. ‘I forgot I was back
in civilisation,’ he said; ‘but I must have something to eat, whatever
you call it. Yes, here I am, no better than when I went away. I believe
it’s all luck, after all. Some fellows get on like a house on fire. Some
are thankful for bread and cheese all their lives. Some, if they work
themselves sick, don’t get that. What’s the good of making one’s self
miserable?--it’s all fate.’
‘I suppose one must live, however, in spite of fate,’ said Ben, not
caring much what were the first words that came to his lips, nor with
any positive meaning in what he said.
‘Oh, I never was one of your tragical heroes,’ said Hillyard; ‘better
luck next time is always my motto; though, mind you, I’m not so sure
that one is bound to live in spite of everything. I don’t see the
necessity. If there’s anything better to go to, why shouldn’t one have a
try for it? And if there isn’t, what does it matter? It’s a man’s own
responsibility. If he likes to face it, let him, and don’t abuse the
poor devil as if he were a pickpocket. Why, there was a fellow the other
day,--and, by the way, I am taking his things home to his mother, which
is a nice commission,--who squared off his fate with a bullet, by my
side. I must say, I can’t blame him for one. Things could not well be
worse up there,’ said this savage philosopher, waving his hand vaguely
towards the roof, ‘than they were down below. But this is a queer sort
of talk when one has just come home, and to a favourite of fortune like
you.’
‘I am not much of a favourite of fortune just now,’ said Ben, with a
certain longing for human sympathy. ‘But I’ll tell you about that
afterwards. Now you have come home, are you going to stay in town, or
what do you mean to do?’
The question was asked not quite in good faith, for it glided vaguely
across Ben’s mind that the plans of a man who had long lived on his wits
might suggest something for his own aid; and the answer was not more
ingenuous, for it naturally occurred to Hillyard that his friend, who
had the liberal hospitality of a great country-house to fall back on,
and the probability of a shooting-box somewhere of his own, might intend
to offer him an invitation, and so bridge over some portion of those
autumn months, which were of so little use to a man who is looking for
something to do.
‘I shall get along, I suppose, in the old way,’ he said, shrugging his
shoulders. ‘I’ll serve up my Australian experiences for the papers,
perhaps; or do them philosophically, with all their chances and dangers
for intending emigrants, for the “Monthly,” if I can get hold of
Rathbone; or go in as a coach. I flatter myself I could give the
Colonial Secretary a hint or two if I could get at him. A little tall
talk hurts no one. The fact is, I don’t know what I am going to be
about,’ he added with a sigh. ‘Living on one’s wits is hard work
enough. I have kept up nothing of old days except the club, which is
always a kind of haven; though, I daresay, that sounds strange to you.’
‘Not now,’ said Ben, with a contraction in his throat. ‘I am as poor as
you, and more helpless. I rather think I am good for nothing. I suppose
I shall get used to it in time, but it’s not a pleasant feeling as yet.’
And then he told his companion all with a curious effusion, which did
not surprise Hillyard more than it did himself. He had resolved to say
nothing to anyone,--to lock up his troubles in his own breast, and seek
no advice even from his oldest friends; and here he was unbosoming
himself to the first-comer,--a man whom he had not seen for two years,
and who was by no means one of his close friends. He was not aware, poor
fellow, what necessity of nature it was that moved him. He justified
himself afterwards by the reflection that Hillyard was, so to speak, a
stranger and safe confidant,--that there was nobody in town to whom he
could repeat it,--that he was a brother in misfortune, shifty and full
of expedients, and might help him. But all these were after-thoughts.
His real impulse was the mere instinct of nature to relieve himself from
the secret pressure of a burden which was more than his unaccustomed
shoulders could bear.
Hillyard was much amazed and mystified by the strange tale, and could
with difficulty be brought to believe it. But he was very sympathetic
and consolatory when his first incredulity was got over. ‘After all,
it’s only for seven years,’ he said; ‘that is not so very much in a
life. If I knew I should come into a good estate at forty,--ay, or at
fifty,--I shouldn’t mind the struggle now; and you will be only a little
over thirty. It’s nothing,--it’s absolutely nothing. You’re down just
now, and taken by surprise, and out of spirits with what’s happened, and
all that. But things will look better presently. You think it’s hard to
struggle and work, and never know where you’re to get to-morrow’s
dinner,’ said the adventurer, with a certain light kindling in his eyes;
‘but sometimes it gives a wonderful relish to life. You enjoy the dinner
all the better. It’s more exciting than fox-hunting, or even
elephant-hunting; and what does a fellow want in life but lots of
excitement and movement and stir? As long,’ he added, after a pause, ‘as
your strength lasts, and your mind, and your spirit, it is all very
well. I don’t care for tame well-being, with no risks in it. It will be
nothing but fun for you.’
‘I don’t see the fun,’ said Ben; but certainly the dark clouds over him
were moved by the suggestion. ‘And I have not your knowledge or
resources. Absolutely, if you’ll believe me, I have not an idea what to
do.’
‘So I should think,’ said Hillyard. ‘It would be odd if you had, plunged
into it like this, without a moment’s notice. Lie on your oars, my dear
fellow, for a day or two, and come about with me. We may hit on
something, you know; and, at all events, a few days’ waiting can do you
no harm.’
By this time his meal had been served to him, and its arrival
interrupted the talk. Ben rose and walked away to a distant window,
already feeling some qualms of self-disgust at what he had done. As he
stood looking out upon the flood of human beings, each absorbed in his
own interests, he felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, how
utterly unimportant to the world was his individual comfort, or that of
any one mortal creature. He was no more to the crowd, not so much, as
one drop of perfume or of bitterness would be to the pleasant Thames as
it floated past his father’s house,--not near so much. The sea would be
a juster emblem,--that sea which swallowed up rivers and showed no
increase, which threw forth its lavish atoms to the air and knew no
diminution. He had been an important personage up to this moment, even
in his own opinion, though he had always known theoretically the
insignificance of the individual. But he knew it now with a certainty
beyond theory. When Hillyard and he were driven against the rocks, who
would know the difference or be any the wiser? He who a month ago would
have compassionately taken Hillyard home with him, to give him a little
time to consider, was now, under the adventurer’s guidance, a more
hopeless adventurer than Hillyard. Ben’s thoughts were not pleasant as
he stood and looked out, watching the stream,--deep, no doubt, with
human passion, sorrow, and perplexity, but so inexpressive on the
surface,--which kept flowing on like water, as perennial and unbroken.
His own life flitted before him like a dream as he stood looking
out,--so useless, and luxurious, and free; so care-laden and overwhelmed
by storms; so vague and doubtful in the future. Had he even known what
would await him in the end his fate would have been less hard. Perhaps
his very efforts to work out the time of his probation might secure the
loss of his birthright. He might find that he worked the wrong way, that
he had missed the end, even after his best exertions. A funeral
procession was making its way at the moment up the busy street, to which
it gave so strange a moral. And Ben turned away his head and sat down,
sickened by the sight of the slow hearse with its waving plumes. To
think he should have been defrauded even of his natural grief, even of
the softening of his heart, which should have come over his father’s
grave! Was the inmate of that other coffin leaving a wrong behind him,
casting a stone with his dead hands to crush his children? This, no
doubt, was a harsh way of taking his trouble; but there are men to whom
all crosses come harshly, and Ben Renton was one of them. Hillyard,
satisfied and comfortable, with a slight flush of bodily well-being on
his face, came up to him as he mused, with a glass of sherry in his
hand.
‘Not bad wine,’ he said, with a sigh of comfort, ‘and not a bad dinner,
I can tell you, to a man fresh from the backwoods. Ben, I’ve got a
wretched thing to do, and I want you to go with me. You’re out of
spirits, at any rate, and it will do you no harm.’
‘What is it?’ said Ben.
‘I am going to see the mother of the poor fellow I told you of. She’s a
widow living somewhere about Manchester Square. I rather think he was
the only son. He made a mull of it at some of those confounded
examinations, and rushed out to Australia in despair; and all went wrong
with him there, and he squared it off, as I told you. I have to take her
some of his things. You look more like the kind of thing, with your
black clothes and your grave face, than I do. Stand by me, Ben, and I’ll
stand by you.’
‘As you please,’ said Ben, languidly. Already the familiarity of his
new-old friend jarred on him a little. But he did not care what he did
at that moment; he did not much care even what became of him. He had
nothing to do and nobody to see. It was as easy to go to Manchester
Square as anywhere else, though the locality was not delectable. He
suffered Hillyard to take his arm and draw him along, without much
interest one way or another, not seeing how his compliance with such a
trifling request could particularly affect even the hour of time which
it occupied, much less his character or his life.
CHAPTER V.
THE MAGICIAN’S CAVE.
The address was Guildford Street, Manchester Square, a narrow, dingy,
very respectable street, with a good many public-houses in it, and
livery stables under three or four different archways, where the genteel
population round about got their ‘flys.’ The houses were tall and rather
decayed, with smoky remains of the flowers which had been kept fresh and
bright in the season lingering in their narrow little balconies, and no
small amount of cards hung up in the windows announcing lodgings to let.
It occurred to Ben as he walked listlessly through it that here was a
place which would be more suitable to his fallen fortunes than the
Albany; but the thought was inarticulate, and took no form. There was
even a similar ticket in the ground-floor window of No. 10, where Mrs.
Tracy lived, and where they were immediately admitted and conducted to
the drawing-room. Ben followed his friend mechanically into the dingy
room, with three long windows glimmering down to the faded carpet,
commanding a view of the opposite livery stable, from which one
inevitable fly was creeping slowly out under the archway. This
particular vehicle was drawn by an old white horse, and it was that spot
of white upon the dim foreground, and the white cotton gloves of the
driver, that caught Ben’s eye as he went in. He was so little interested
that he scarcely noticed anything in the room. It was a disagreeable
business. He had come listlessly because he had been asked. But though
he had heard the story of the widow’s son it had not touched him.
Perhaps he was not very tender-hearted by nature; perhaps it was because
he was absorbed in his own affairs. But certainly when he saw a tall
figure in black rise from the small room behind and make a step forward
to meet his friend, Ben woke up with a little start to realise the fact
that he was thrusting himself in, without any call, to be a spectator of
what might be a tragical scene. He stopped short and grew red with the
embarrassment of a well-bred man suddenly placed in a position where he
is one too many; and, notwithstanding Hillyard’s almost nervous glance
back at him and appeal for support, might have made his way out again
had not his course been suddenly arrested by another figure in intense
mourning, which rose from a low seat by the vacant window. It was
getting late in the afternoon, and twilight begins soon in a narrow
London street; besides which the blinds were half down, the curtains
hanging over the long narrow windows, and such light as there was
falling on the floor. For this reason the lady at the window had been
seated on a very low chair against the wall, to secure all the light she
could for the work in her hand. She rose up facing Ben as the other
faced his friend, rising slowly from the long sweep of black drapery
which had lain coiled round her on the carpet, and suddenly flashing
upon the young man, out of the shadows, with such a face as he had never
in all his life seen before. She gave him a hurried glance from head to
foot, taking in every detail of his appearance, and settling in a second
what manner of man he was; and then she pointed to a chair, with a soft
murmur of invitation to him to seat himself. He obeyed her, not knowing
why. His brain began to whirl. The long window bound with its high,
narrow, smoky rail of balcony; the faded curtains hanging over and
darkening the room; the pale light below upon the carpet, and the figure
which sank slowly down once more with its black dress in waves on the
floor; the white hands joined with some white work between them; the
face against that dusky background,--was it true that he had never seen
them all till that moment, or had they been there waiting for him,
attending this moment all his life?
Ben Renton had been a great deal in society, and had seen beautiful
women in his day; and he knew quantities of pretty girls, and had
fancied himself a little in love with some of them also in his time.
But something, perhaps, in the surrounding made this woman different
from anything he had ever seen. She was very tall, almost as tall as
himself. She was pale, with none of that adventitious charm of colour
which often stands in the place of beauty. Her hair was dark, without
any gleams in it. The only colour about her was in her eyes, which were
blue, like a winter sky,--blue of the sweetest and purest tone, shining
out under her dark hair from her pale, beautiful face, from the shadow
and the darkness, like a bit of heaven itself. Ben sat down and looked
at her, struck dumb, in a kind of stupor. What had he to do with this
wonderfully beautiful, silent creature? Who was she? How came she here?
How did it come about that he sat by her, having no right to such an
acquaintance, struck dumb, like a man in a dream? He looked on stupidly,
and saw the other lady sink down and cover her face with her hands as
Hillyard delivered his melancholy commission. Of course it was
Hillyard’s duty to do so, and even to remain with them while the
daughter rose noiselessly and went to her mother, bending over her,
turning her beautiful pale face appealingly to the strangers, with the
blue eyes full of tears. With all this strange scene his companion had a
certain connexion by right of his errand; but why was Ben Renton there,
or what could it ever be to him?
And yet she came back to the seat by the window, and Ben, looking on,
saw the tears fall upon her white hands and white work, and met in his
turn the same wistful look. ‘Were you there too?’ she said with a little
sob. He was ashamed of himself to say no; but perhaps because her heart
was full of her dead brother she gave no sign that she thought his
presence was intrusive. She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and then
she looked into his face again. ‘It is very, very hard for poor mamma,’
she said, in the softest, lowly-whispering voice. ‘Her only son! She was
so proud of him. She always hoped he would do so well; and papa died so
long ago, and we had no one else to look to. It is so hard upon mamma!’
‘She has you,’ said Ben, wildly, feeling that some reply was looked for,
and not knowing what he said.
‘Ah! yes; but I am only a girl. I can love her, but what more can I do?’
said this celestial creature with piteous looks. Ben’s brain went round
and round. He was in some enchanted place, some magician’s castle. What
had he to do there, listening to these soft plaints, receiving those
looks which would have melted a heart of stone? In his amaze he turned
half round to his friend, who alone gave him any title to be present,
and his appeal was not in vain.
‘I came home only this morning,’ said Hillyard, ‘and, of course, the
first thing I thought of was to discharge my sad commission. My friend,
Mr. Renton, came with me, as he knows better how things go on here than
I do. If we could be of any use----’
Ben had got up and bowed in his embarrassment. He was overcome, he
thought, with pity, certainly with another and stronger sentiment. ‘If
there is anything I can do--?’ he said eagerly. As he spoke the mother
raised her head and shot him through and through with a sudden glance of
her eyes,--eyes which must once have been soft like her daughter’s, but
which had grown keen, clear, and cold, instead of soft--with a hungry
look in them. But how can you criticise a woman in such circumstances?
They might be puckered up with grief; it might be the anguish of
Rachel’s weeping that looked through them. She said, ‘It is very kind,’
looking at them both, contrasting as it were the two together; and then
with a certain abruptness, ‘What was it you were saying to me about some
Rentons, Millicent?’ she asked.
‘You know, mamma,’ said the daughter, ‘Thornycroft, where I was at
school, was close to the Manor, and Mary Westbury was always talking of
her cousins. But perhaps this gentleman----’
‘Yes; I am one of Mary Westbury’s cousins,’ said Ben, with a throb of
delight; and then he paused, thinking what else he could say to
ingratiate himself. ‘I am the eldest;--Ben,’ he added, with heightened
colour;--and mother and daughter both looked at him with an interest
which they did not attempt to disguise.
‘I have heard so often of Ben,’ said Miss Tracy, with a soft, little
laugh. The sound of his own name so softly uttered completed the young
man’s bewilderment. He forgot how soon that laugh had followed on the
tears, and how entirely the mother and daughter had both thrown
themselves into the new subject. As for Hillyard, he sat between the two
with a puzzled expression on his face. Nobody took any notice of him
after the telling of his story. His friend who had the cachet of the
latest civilisation on him, who was a Renton of Renton, the eldest son,
was a very different person from an adventurer out of the bush. Mrs.
Tracy herself came forward from the little back drawing-room where she
had been sitting, and took a chair near the new object of interest. She
was a handsome woman still for her age, and showed traces of having been
like her daughter. She had the same clear, fine features; the same dark
hair, still unchanged in colour; the same height and drooping grace of
form. But her eyes, instead of being soft and dewy, were hard and keen;
her lips were thin, and the muscles all tightened about them. Her hands
were thin and long, and looked as if they could grasp and hold fast.
‘The daughter will grow like the mother, and I’d trust neither of them,’
Hillyard said to himself; but there might be a certain spite in it, for
they showed no interest in him.
‘It is very kind of you to come,’ said the widow, leaving it undecided
whom she was addressing, but looking at Ben. ‘Though it is three months
since I first heard of my dear boy’s death, this visit brings it all
back. He was my only son; and oh! what hopes are buried with him, Mr.
Renton! I thought that it was he that would have restored us to our
natural place in the world. My Millicent was not born to live in a back
street opposite livery stables. I expected everything from her brother.
Man proposes, but God disposes. I cannot tell you what heaps of money I
spent on him getting him ready for that examination; and yet it all came
to nothing:--and now he is gone!’
‘Dear mamma, we must not strive against Providence,’ said Millicent,
putting her handkerchief lightly to her eyes.
‘No, my dear,’ said her mother; ‘but if it was to be, I might have been
spared all that waste of money,--when we are so ill able to afford it.
Providence knows best, to be sure; but still, when it was to be, it
might have been so arranged that I should have saved that. You will
think it strange of me to say so; but my thought by night and by day is,
what will my child do when I die?’
‘Dear mamma, don’t say any more,’ said Millicent again. ‘I never grudged
anything that was for poor Fitzgerald’s advantage; and I am sure,
neither did you.’
‘Not if it had been for his advantage,’ said Mrs. Tracy, gloomily; ‘but
you know how he broke down in his examination, poor fellow. I don’t
want to blame Providence,--but still I might have been spared that.’
‘Perhaps, Ben, we had better go,’ said Hillyard. ‘We are only intruding
upon painful recollections. He was heartbroken, poor fellow. He never
could forget what you had spent upon him, and that he made so little
return. Ben, I think we should go.’
‘No; he never made any return,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘When one spends so
much on one child without a return, one feels that one has been unjust
to the rest. We are not very lively people; but I hope you will not
hurry away. It was so very good of you to come. Millicent, ring for some
tea. I shall be very glad to see both of you if you like to come to us
sometimes of an evening. It is a very dull time of year to be in town.
My poor boy has made it impossible for me to take Millicent to the sea
this year; and if you are going to be in town, Mr. Renton, as you and
she are almost old friends, I shall be very glad to see you; and you
too, Mr. Hillyard,’ she added, turning half round to him. Hillyard
muttered ‘By Jove!’ to himself, under his breath. But as for Ben, so
suddenly and enthusiastically received into the bosom of the family, his
eyes brightened, and his face crimsoned over with pleasure.
‘I shall be in town all the rest of the year,’ he said; ‘indeed, I am
looking for rooms in this neighbourhood. I have something to do,--that
is,--I shall want to be near Manchester Square. I shall be too glad, if
you will let me, to come now and then. I must write to Mary and tell her
what her relationship has gained me,’ said Ben, with a glow of
satisfaction; while Hillyard looked on sardonic, probably because he had
been asked, ‘too,’ as Ben’s appendage, which was a curious reversal of
affairs.
‘How is dear Mary?’ said Miss Tracy; ‘and where is she just now? I dare
say going on a round of nice visits,’ she added, with a soft sigh; ‘her
circumstances are so different from ours.’
‘She was with my mother when I left home,’ said Ben, his face clouding
over. ‘She will not have many visits this year, poor girl. My mother is
very fond of her, which is a great comfort to us all just now.’
Millicent Tracy looked at him with her blue eyes, which seemed ready to
overflow with soft tears; and Ben, who had the calm consciousness,
common to great people, that everybody must ‘know what had happened,’
felt her sympathy go to his heart. But as it chanced she had not the
least idea what had happened. The ladies had not had their ‘Times’ the
day on which Mr. Renton’s death was announced, or else they had been
interrupted by visitors, or some accident had happened to the
supplement; but, anyhow, they were in ignorance of that event. It was
sufficiently clear, however, that something had come upon the Renton
family to call for sympathy, and sympathy accordingly shone sweetly out
of Millicent’s eyes. As for Mrs. Tracy, her attention was turned to more
practical matters.
‘The ground-floor here is to let,’ she said. ‘I can’t suppose it would
be good enough for you, Mr. Renton; but still, if you had any particular
reason for being in this neighbourhood,--the people of the house are
honest sort of people. There is a parlour and a bedroom, quite quiet and
respectable. And if we could be of any use----’
‘A thousand thanks,’ said Ben. He was very reluctant to leave the
paradise on which he had thus suddenly stumbled, but Hillyard, the
neglected one, had got up and stood waiting for him. ‘I shall look at
them as I go down-stairs.’
And then Millicent gave him her soft hand. ‘I have known Mary’s cousin
for years,’ she said, smiling at him, with a little blush and half
apology. It was as if an angel had apologised for entering a mortal
household unawares. Ben went down the narrow staircase dazed and giddy,
treading, not on the poor worn carpets, but on some celestial path of
flowers. He looked at the low, melancholy room below clothed in black
haircloth, and veiled with curtains of darkling red, and thought it a
bower of bliss. Something, however, restrained him from securing this
paradise while Hillyard was still with him. He whispered to the eager
landlady that he would return and settle with her, and went out into
the street a different being. It looked a different street, transfigured
somehow. The old white horse and the rusty carriage, and the man in
white cotton gloves, with his pretence at livery, stood before a house,
a little farther down; and it seemed to Ben an equipage for the gods.
Everything was changed. The only thing that troubled him was that
Hillyard took his arm once more, as if supposing he meant to be dragged
back to that wretched club.
‘It is easy to see I am not a swell like you,’ said Hillyard. ‘I never
pretended I was; but I had no idea it was written on my face so plainly
till I read it in that old woman’s eyes.’
‘She is not exactly an old woman,’ said Ben, making an effort to get
free of his companion’s arm.
‘Oh dear, no; not at all!’ said Hillyard. ‘But if the daughter is,--say
five-and-twenty----’
‘I should say eighteen,’ said Ben.
‘Oh, by Jove! that’s going too fast,’ cried his companion; ‘though I
can’t wonder, considering the dead set they made at you. That girl is
stunning, Ben; but she thinks you’re the heir of all your father’s
property, and have the Manor at your command. Mind what you’re after if
you go there again. The old woman is as crafty as an old fox, and as for
the young one----’
‘Look here, Hillyard,’ said Ben, hotly. ‘I am introduced to this family
not by you, but by my cousin Mary. If it had been you, of course you
might say what you like of your own friends; but I consider they are
Mary Westbury’s friends, and I can’t have you speak of them in such a
tone,--for my cousin’s sake.’
‘Ah! I see,’ said Hillyard, ironically. ‘But poor Tracy was my friend,
not Miss Westbury’s, and I suppose I may talk of him if I like. It was
the mother that drove him to it, Ben. Don’t you think it’s my line to
speak ill of women. I’ve a dear little mother myself, thank God; and a
little sister as sweet as a daisy,--and about as poor,’ the adventurer
added, with a sigh; ‘but I hate that kind of woman. You may growl if you
please. I do. After he broke down in his examination she never gave him
a moment’s peace. She kept writing to him for money, and upbraiding him
for having none to send her, when the poor wretch could not earn bread
for himself. That much I know;--and you heard how she spoke of him. If
you have anything to do with these two women you will come to grief.’
‘If every woman who has a good-for-nothing son or brother was to be
judged as harshly----’ said Ben, making an effort to keep his temper.
Hillyard turned round upon him with a hoarse exclamation of anger.
‘He was not a good-for-nothing, by----!’ he cried. ‘You know nothing
about him. You call a man names in his grave, poor fellow, because a
girl has got a pair of pretty blue eyes.’
‘It appears to me that our road is no longer the same,’ said Ben, with
the superiority of temper and good manners. ‘I am going to my rooms, and
you, I suppose, are going back to the club. I daresay we shall meet
there shortly, as we are the only men in town. Good morning, just now.’
And thus they parted almost as suddenly as they met. Ben went into the
Park, and composed himself with a long walk, at first with a pretence of
making his way to his rooms, as he had said. He went across almost to
the gate, and then he turned and made a circuit back again. He wanted
cheap lodgings, that was evident,--and then!--The truth was that his
mind was swept and garnished, emptied of all the traditions, and
occupations, and hopes of his previous life. All had ended for him as by
a sudden deluge, and the chambers stood open for the first inhabitant
that had force enough to enter. Was it love that had burst in like an
armed man? A certain sweet agitation took possession of his whole being.
His agitation had been bitter enough in the morning, when he took the
account of all those dead household gods of his, from which no comfort
came; or rather it had been a kind of bitter calm,--death after a
fashion. Now life had rushed back and tingled in all his veins. The
world was no more a desert, but full of unknown beauty and wonder. Since
his first step out of the familiar ways had taught him so much, what
might not his further progress reveal? Might it not be, after all, that
his deliverance from the conventional round was the opening of a new,
and fresh, and glorious existence? Would not he be as free in Guildford
Street, Manchester Square, as in the backwoods,--as undisturbed by
impertinent observation? What were the buhl cabinets and the old Dresden
in comparison with horsehair, and mahogany, and Millicent Tracy’s blue
eyes up-stairs? He tried to consider the matter calmly without reference
to those eyes, and he thought he succeeded in doing so. He reminded
himself with elaborate, almost judicial, calm that he had but two
hundred pounds a-year; that he could not afford to live at the Albany
any longer; that cheap lodgings were necessary to him, not altogether
out of reach of the world, but beyond the inspection of curious
acquaintances. Under these circumstances the adaptation to all his wants
of the ground-floor at No. 10 was almost miraculous. It was
Providential. Ben had not been in the habit of using that word as some
people do; but yet he felt that in the present remarkable circumstances
the use of it was justifiable. Something beyond ordinary chance must
have guided him in his ignorance to exactly the place he wanted. And the
machinery employed to bring about this single result had been so
elaborate and complicated. First, a suicide far off in Australia;
second, the return of an adventurer who had been sent there expressly
to make Fitzgerald Tracy’s acquaintance, and convey his dying
message;--a friendship which had been brought about by such means surely
must count for something in a man’s life.
And so by degrees Ben found himself once more approaching the street. He
knocked at the door with a curious thrill and tremor. What if he should
see her again! What if she might be passing up and down after some of
her celestial concerns! He was admitted by a dismal maid-of-all-work,
and shown in this time to the rooms which were the object of his
ambition. They were very dingy little rooms. In their original and
normal state they made a double room with folding-doors; but as arranged
for a lodger, the folding-doors had been closed and barricaded, the
front half made into a sitting-room, and the back into a bed-room. The
windows were closed, and in the sultry September evening the four mean
walls seemed to close round the inmate and stifle him. Such a thought
had half stolen across his mind when a sudden movement above thrilled
him through and through. It seemed to vibrate through the house and
through him. No need to ask any further question--undoubtedly it must
have been her step; and immediately the musty air grew sweet as summer
to foolish Ben.
The result was that he took the wretched little rooms for thirty
shillings a-week, conveying to his future landlady as he did so the
meanest possible opinion of his intellectual powers. ‘Some fool,’ she
replied to her husband, ‘as never asked no questions.’ He thought them
very cheap, poor fellow; he thought them highly economical, retired,
respectable, and exactly what he wanted. And he was rewarded, and more
than rewarded, for his promptitude. Just as he had settled with the
landlady a little creak on the stairs and rustling of ladies’ dresses
set all his pulses beating. And when he turned sharply round there were
the mother and daughter in their crape bonnets equipped for their
evening walk. They were immensely surprised at the sight of Ben; more,
perhaps, than could have been fully accounted for in conjunction with
the fact that Miss Tracy had been seated, all this time, at the window,
seeing who came and went.
‘Is it possible that Mr. Renton has come to look at the rooms?’ the
innocent Millicent said to her mother, stopping short in the narrow
little lobby.
‘I have not only come to look at them, but I have taken them,’ Ben said,
coming forward. ‘They suit me exactly.’ And there was a charming little
flutter of pleasure and surprise.
‘I never thought you could be in earnest,’ Mrs. Tracy said; ‘the rooms
are well enough, but after what you have been accustomed to,--I was just
saying to Millicent that of course it was impossible. But now I shall be
quite comfortable in my mind, knowing you are there. Living in lodgings
is very trying for ladies,’ continued the widow, lowering her voice
confidentially as she went in with Ben to give a critical look round the
sitting-room. ‘You cannot think how anxious I have been to have some one
I know here,--on Millicent’s account, Mr. Renton. The last lodger used
positively to lie in wait for my innocent child at the door.’
‘Confounded impudence!’ said Ben. ‘I hope the fellow was kicked out.’
‘Ah, we had no such champions as you,’ said Mrs. Tracy, with a dubious
smile. ‘It was after my poor boy went away on that ill-fated voyage, so
much against my will, Mr. Renton.--Yes, he has actually taken them,
Millicent,’ she went on, speaking louder as she turned round. ‘We were
just going out for our little walk. It is cool now, and there are not so
many people about. We neither of us feel equal to fashionable
promenades, Mr. Renton. We take our little walk for health’s sake in the
cool of the evening. It is all the amusement my poor child has.’
‘Don’t say so, mamma dear,’ said Millicent. ‘I am quite happy. And oh,
Mr. Renton, couldn’t you have dear Mary up for a day or two to see you?
Cousins may visit, may not they, mamma? It would be such a pleasure to
see her again.’
‘Hush, child, you don’t think what you are saying. Young ladies can’t
visit young men, you silly girl,’ said Mrs. Tracy. And Millicent
blushed and glided round to the other side of her mother, as they all
emerged into the street. Why should that mass of crape be put between
them? Ben thought. But yet he had the happiness of walking to the Park
with them, and catching, across Mrs. Tracy’s shadow now and then, a
glance of the blue eyes. They talked and amused him the whole way,
leading him to the grateful shadows of Kensington Gardens, away from all
chance of recognition by his fashionable friends, even had there been
any fashionable friends to recognise him. They would not permit him,
however, to return with them, but dismissed him under the trees. ‘I am
sure we are keeping you from dinner,’ Mrs. Tracy said, ‘and we could
only ask you to tea. But I trust you will come to us often to tea, Mr.
Renton, when you are our fellow-lodger at No. 10.’
And he went back to the Albany, not miserable and misanthropical as he
left it, but full of loving-kindness and charity to all mankind. He went
and dressed himself in honour of ‘the ladies’ whom he had just left, and
who had already taken that name in his thoughts; and was most Christian
in his treatment of Morris, promising him the best of characters and
fullest explanations of why he was leaving; and he dined at his club,
feeling that there was still light and comfort in the world. Hillyard
was there, too, in the evening, reading all the newspapers, and yawning
horribly over them. To him ‘the ladies’ had opened no paradise. With a
temper that was half angelical, notwithstanding the adventurer’s
rudeness in the morning, Ben was pitiful and compassionate to him in his
heart.
CHAPTER VI.
THE WORKING OF THE SPELL.
For the next six months Ben Renton lived a strange life,--strange at
least for him, who up to this time had been a young man of
fashion,--répandu in the world,--with an interest in all the events, and
all the gossip almost as important as events, that circulated in that
curious, insincere, most limited sphere. He put his rooms into the hands
of Messrs. Robins to be let, and he put his buhl and his pictures into
those of the Messrs. Christie to sell,--and naturally, as it was
September, no good came of either attempt for some months; and he took
the ground-floor at No. 10, Guildford Street, Manchester Square. It
would be difficult to describe the change which thus fell upon him. He
who had gone about the Parks, about the highways and thoroughfares of
the world, as in a hamlet, knowing everybody,--dining, dancing,
chattering with every third person he met; now walked about the humdrum
streets like a creature dropped out of the sky,--a stranger to all,
seeing only strange faces around him. He whose life had been minutely
regulated and mapped out, not indeed by duty, but by that routine of
society which serves the same purpose, wandered aimlessly about all day,
or sat in his dingy parlour over a novel, with the strangest sense of
idleness and uselessness. He had not been much more industrious in the
old days, when he went from the Row to his club, from his club to the
Drive, with the weighty duties before him of dressing and dining,
strolling down, perhaps to the Lobby of the ‘House,’ or going from box
to box at an opera. These occupations were not of very profound note
among the industries of the day; but they filled up the vacant hours
with a certain system and necessity. Now he had nothing of that kind to
do. He might go and stroll about the deserted Parks; he might sit at
home and work his way through one bundle of three volumes after another,
and nobody would interfere with him. He had nothing to do. He had never
done anything all his life, and yet he had never found it out before.
One event there was still to break the monotonous existence of each dull
day. Sometimes it was that he encountered Mrs. Tracy and her daughter as
they went out, and was permitted to accompany them; sometimes that he
was admitted to the drawing-room up-stairs in the evening. They were
very cautious in those first openings of friendship; more cautious than
they had been in its earliest beginning. Sometimes it so happened that
for an entire day, or even two days, all that Ben heard of his
neighbours was the sound of their steps as they crossed the floor
overhead, sending vibrations through the house and through his foolish
heart. But yet the meeting with them was the event of the day to
him,--the only one that gave life or colour to it. It was the sole gleam
of light within his range of vision, and naturally his eye fixed on that
gleam. Sometimes it seemed to him that, instead of being the fallen man
he was, he had come there in a voluntary abandonment of luxury and
pleasantness for Millicent Tracy’s sake. Though the young men of the
nineteenth century are not given to romance, such a proceeding is still
possible among them. And there were moments in which Ben forgot that he
had any other motive for his seclusion. It was a sudden infatuation, and
yet there was nothing extraordinary in it. Everything was so new to him
in this changed and strange life, that any powerful influence suddenly
brought into being was sure to take entire possession of the vacant
space. As he sat in the gloom and quiet, with all that had hitherto
occupied him gone from his grasp, and this one subtle fascination
filling the air, it was scarcely wonderful that he should feel himself a
pilgrim of love, giving up everything for the sake of his
divinity,--keeping watch at her door, as it were, laying himself down at
her feet, separating himself from the world for her service. A certain
indescribable sense of her presence filled the house. The ceiling over
his head thrilled under her step,--the rustle of her dress on the
stair, the distant sound of her voice or her name, seemed to echo down
to him in the silence. Though he saw her at the most once a-day, and not
always so often, he felt her perpetually, and his mind was intoxicated
by this magical new sense. He lived upon it like a fool,--like a man in
love, which he was, though he knew nothing of Millicent except that her
eyes were heavenly eyes, and her voice as sweet as poetry. He had not
cared much even for poetry hitherto, nor had much time for dreaming, and
Nature now took her revenge. His youth, his extraordinary circumstances,
his unoccupied life, all conspired with this most potent of influences
against him. At first there was not even any intention in his mind
except that of seeing her, looking at her, filling his vacancy with the
new lovely creature so suddenly placed before him; the place was empty
and she had come in unawares, startling him by her smile. That was all
that Ben knew about it for the moment. To win her, and marry her, and
enter into another and fuller phase of life, had not yet dawned on his
thoughts. She had stolen in upon him like a new atmosphere,--a delicious
air in which he lived and breathed. That was all. He meant nothing by it
in the first place. He was not a free agent, voluntarily and consciously
approaching a woman whom he wanted to make his wife. On the contrary, he
was a man suddenly, without any will or purpose of his own, launched
into a new world. He might not have known that such worlds existed, so
strange and new was everything to him; but the unthought-of, unknown
influence possessed itself in a moment of the very fountains of his
life.
It is not, however, to be supposed that Ben was petted or made much of
by the ladies whose retirement he had thus hastened to share. At first
they even appeared to keep him at arm’s length with a reserve which
chilled him much after their frank reception of dear Mary Westbury’s
cousin. They retired within the enclosure of their grief when he became
their fellow-lodger, passing him with slight salutations, with crape
veils over their faces and all the adjuncts of woe, and receiving his
visits, when he screwed up his courage to the point of going up-stairs,
with the dignity of sorrow not yet able ‘to see people,’--a mode of
treatment which gave Ben a pang, not only of disappointment, but of
shame, at his own vain hopes, and the false interpretations he had put
on their first little overtures of cordiality. ‘That I should have
dreamed they would care to see me,--and their grief still so fresh,’ he
muttered to himself with self-disgust. But the ladies up-stairs, in
their retirement, were by no means without thoughts of their new
acquaintance. They discussed him fully, though he was so little aware of
it, and considered him and his ways in more detail, and with much more
understanding, than characterised his brooding over theirs. It was not
Mrs. Tracy’s fault that he was so coldly received. It was Millicent who
had barred the way against him,--Millicent herself, whose paleness and
sorrowful looks had given the last touch of tender pity and interest to
his admiration. They were mutually mistaken in each other, as it
happened; for the mother and daughter knew no more of Ben than that he
was the heir of Renton, and were so foolish in their dreams as to
believe that he had, indeed, given up all the delights of his former
life to live in dingy lodgings in order to be near Millicent. He had
been struck with ‘love at first sight,’ they thought, and despised him a
little, and were amused at the fact, though fully determined to take
advantage of it. And so strange is human nature, that the mother and
daughter would have been as much disgusted and disappointed had they
known the complication of motives which sent the young man into their
snare, as Ben would have been had he been able to conceive the aspect in
which they regarded him. He was a man of the world; and they were of the
still sharper class of adventurers living on their wits; and yet they
mutually believed in the single-mindedness, each of the other, with the
simplicity of the peasant of romance. He thought the beautiful creature
who had smiled so softly on him, and her kind mother, were interested
really about himself; and they believed that he had thrown away all the
daily brightness of existence for Millicent’s sweet sake;--so much
faith had remained at the bottom of natures so sophisticated. It was a
curious conjunction of cunning and innocence.
‘I am not going to make any pounce upon him,’ said Millicent to her
mother. ‘I won’t. You need not look so surprised. You may say what you
like, but I know it is fatal to go too fast. Men don’t like that sort of
thing. They see through it, though you don’t think they do. They are not
quite such fools. You must go softly this time, or I shall not go into
it at all.’
‘Millicent!’ said her mother severely, ‘when you talk in this wild way,
how can you expect me to know what you mean?’
‘Oh, bother!’ said Millicent. The profile turned half away as she spoke
was so perfect, and the lips that uttered the words so soft and
rose-like, that any listener less accustomed would have distrusted her
ears. Mrs. Tracy only made a little gesture of disapproval. Even to
herself the mother kept up her pretensions; but Millicent was a girl of
her century, and made believe only when the eye of the world was upon
her. ‘I mean to take this into my own hands,’ she said. ‘You are not so
clever as you were, mamma. You are getting rather old. Let me alone to
treat a man like Ben Renton. I must not throw myself at his head; he
must suppose, at least, that he has had hard work to secure me.’
‘And I trust it will be so, Millicent,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘Heaven forbid
that a child of mine should throw herself at any gentleman’s head! It
would break my heart, you know.’
‘Oh, yes; I know,’ said the daughter, with a laugh; ‘though I never can
understand what pleasure you have in pretending and keeping up your
character to me. We ought to understand each other,--if any two people
do understand each other in the world,’ the young woman added, not with
much perception of the melancholy mystery she was thus skimming over,
but yet vaguely conscious that even the mother beside her had secrets,
and would take her own way if occasion served. Each of them shocked the
other by turns, though both stood low enough in point of moral
appreciation. ‘You would sell me, as soon as look at me, if you could,’
Millicent went on. ‘Don’t deny it, for I know it; but Ben Renton is not
in your line. It is I who must manage him.’
‘You will have your own way, I suppose, Millicent,’ said her mother;
‘though what you mean by these coarse expressions I don’t understand.
What I feel is that the poor young fellow is very solitary. And I am a
mother,’ Mrs. Tracy said, with a little grandeur. ‘I feel it might be of
use to him to ask him up here. It keeps a young man respectable when
ladies notice him. It keeps him out of bad hands.’
Millicent looked at her mother, with a gleam of laughter in her eyes.
‘It is beautiful to see you, mamma,’ she said; ‘it is as good as a
sermon. But I am not so anxious about his morals. You had much better
leave it in my hands.’
This was how it came about that Ben was so much thrown back on himself,
and dismissed from the paradise of a drawing-room where his lady was, to
the close, little, dingy, black-hair-clothed purgatory on the lower
floor, to wait his promotion. A word, a look, half-an-hour’s talk now
and then, raised him into the seventh heaven; but he was always cast
back again; while, at the same time, her presence so near, the constant
possibility of a meeting, the excitement of the situation, and the utter
havoc of his own life, kept him suspended, he could not tell how, and
banished all wholesome thoughts out of his head. The mutual pursuit and
defence, the plans to see and to avoid being seen, the art of bestowing
and with-holding, the perpetual expectation and possibility, engrossed
the two completely after a time. It engrossed the witch as much as it
did the victim. When men and women have passed the age,--if the age is
ever passed,--of such contests, it is difficult to realise the way in
which the lives of those engaged in them become absorbed in one
interest. Each meeting between the two, were it only of a minute’s
duration, occupied their minds as if it had been an event. To watch him
out and in, to calculate what she should say to him next time, how soon
she might venture the next tightening of her line, filled Millicent’s
thoughts as she sat over her work by the window up-stairs; while the
sound of her foot, the faintest movement over-head, the coming or going
on the stairs, the rustle of the dress passing his door, occupied Ben
like the most exciting drama. It was madness, yet it was nature. The
mother, who was looking on with an eve merely to the result, grew
impatient, and felt disposed to throw up the matter and turn her
attention to other things. Mrs. Tracy was poor, and now that her son had
altogether failed her, even in possibility, it was essential that her
daughter should take his place. But Millicent gave no encouragement to
the vague plans that fluttered through her mother’s mind. She, too, was
engrossed, as people are engrossed only by such a strange duel and
struggle of two lives. And the six months passed with her, as with Ben,
like one long, exciting, feverish day.
‘You don’t get a step farther on,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘you are just where
you were, shilly-shallying,--no better than your brother. My poor
Fitzgerald! if he had been spared, he might have been a help to me.
Providence is very strange! He lived long enough to be a burden and take
every penny we had; and then, when he might have made me some return----
And it is just the same thing, over again, with you.’
‘Don’t speak of Fitzgerald, mamma,’ said Millicent. ‘I was fond of him,
although you may not think it. You worried him till he could not bear
it any longer; but you cannot get rid of me like that. I will never
shoot myself. I mean to live in spite of everything,--and I mean to take
my own time.’
‘You are an unnatural girl!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, with excitement. ‘Did not
I do everything for that boy? Tutors and books, and I don’t know what;
and then to break down. A young man has no business to fail when his
people have done so much for him. And now there is you,--I have spared
no expense about you, either. You have had the best masters I could give
you, and the prettiest dresses; and now you stand doing nothing. I
should like to know what this young Renton means.’
‘It would be very easy to ask him,--and drive him away for ever,’ said
Millicent, with a heightened colour. ‘Mamma, I tell you, you are not so
clever as you were.’
‘I believe you are in love with him,’ said the mother, with an accent of
scorn;--‘nothing else could account for it. That is all that is wanting
to make up the story. But I tell you this will not do,’ she added, with
an instant change of tone. ‘We shall have to run away if some
determination is not come to. I have no money to carry on with, and
there is a month’s rent owing to this horrid woman; and the tradespeople
and all---- Millicent, there must be something done. If you are going to
marry young Renton, it will be all very well; but if it is to come to
nothing, as so many other things have done----’
‘What would you have me do?’ said Millicent, in a low tone of restrained
passion. Perhaps she was angry with herself for playing so poor a
_rôle_; but, at all events, she was disgusted with the mother who had
trained her to do it, and thus kept her to the humiliating work. Mrs.
Tracy was getting, as her daughter said, rather old. Her ear was not
fine enough for the inflections of tone and shades of meaning which once
she could have caught in a moment.
‘If you will listen to me,’ she answered, in perfect good faith, ‘I will
soon tell you what to do. Tell him that we are going abroad. You know
how often I have spoken of going abroad. If we could only get a hundred
pounds, we might go to Baden, or Homburg, or somewhere. We don’t want so
many dresses, being in mourning; and, with your complexion, you look
very nice in mourning. I should like to start to-morrow, for my part.
You might tell him it was for my health,--that I was ordered to take the
baths. And I am sure it would be quite true. After all the wear and tear
I have gone through I must want baths when you come to think of it. That
ought to bring matters to a decision; and the fact is, that unless
something happens, we shall have to make a change. It will be impossible
to stay here.’
‘If it is an explanation you want,’ said Millicent, ‘it will not be
difficult to bring that about,--now;’ and the blood rushed to her face,
and her heart began to beat. Not because she loved Ben. It was a
different feeling that moved her. The object for which she had been
trained, the aim of her life, had come so near to her,--in a day, in an
hour, in a few minutes more, if it came to that, she might be a changed
creature, with all that was wretched banished from her, and all that was
good made possible. She might be, instead of a poor girl, immersed in
all the shameful shifts of dishonest poverty, a rich man’s bride,
fearing no demand, above all tricks, with honourable plenty in her hands
and about her. What a change it would be! The chance of leaping at one
step from misery to wealth, from destitution to luxury, has always a
more or less demoralising effect when held steadily before human eyes,
and this chance had always been put foremost in those of Millicent
Tracy. Nobody had ever dreamed of work for her, or honest earning. She
was to win wildly the prize of wealth out of the very depths of abject
poverty. Hers was not the extraordinary nobility of character which
could resist the influences of such training. She was demoralised by it.
Ben Renton was to her a prize in the lottery which she might win and be
rich and splendid and exalted for ever,--or which she might lose in
mortification and deepest downfall. It was this which flushed her cheek
and made her heart beat. Not because he was a man who loved her. And yet
something not mercenary, something like nature, had been in the vague
intercourse between the two,--the man’s advances, the woman’s retreat
from them and interest in them. Alas! Millicent had been wooed, and had
done her best to attract and fascinate before. It was a trade to her.
She lighted up into a gambler’s flush of excitement now when the crisis
was so near.
‘Then let it come,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘it is time after six months of
nonsense. I never knew a young man before who would be kept off and on
so long, living in such a hole, out of those lovely rooms. And,
by-the-bye, I wonder why he wants to sell those sweet cabinets. Getting
rid of his chambers one can understand. Perhaps it is for some racing
debt or something; but he must not be allowed to do it. If the family
should make themselves disagreeable, Millicent, I hope I can trust to
your good sense. Of course they must come round in the end.’
‘You may trust me, mamma,’ said Millicent, with a smile; and her mother
came round to her and kissed her, as she might have kissed her had she
been on her way to draw the fateful ticket at a lottery.
‘Now, mind you have your wits about you,’ Mrs. Tracy said.
It was the afternoon of a spring day, rather cold but bright, and a
remnant of dusty fire, half choked with ashes, was in the grate.
Millicent trembled as she sat in her favourite place by the window,
chiefly with cold,--for she was very susceptible to discomfort,--and a
little with excitement. When her mother left her, she let her work fall
on her lap, and felt, as many a woman of truer heart has felt, the very
air rustling and whispering in her ears with excess of stillness, as if
a hundred unseen spectators were pressing round to look on. He would
come, and she would listen to him and lead him on, and the step would be
taken;--the immense, unspeakable change would be made. A curious medley
of thoughts was in the young woman’s mind,--not all of them bad or
unnatural thoughts. She would be grateful to the man who changed her
life for her so completely. She would be kind to the poor,--those poor,
struggling, shifting, miserable creatures upon whom already she felt
herself entitled to look with pity. She would be very fine and grand,
and deck her beauty with every adornment, and win admiration on every
side; and yet she would be good at the same time. She would be
good,--that she determined upon. And poor Fitz, if he had but been less
impatient! if he had but lived to see this day! Thus she sat awaiting
her lover. Poor, polluted, and yet unawakened virgin soul, knowing
nothing about love!
The mother for her part put on her bonnet,--not without a keen momentary
observation that the crape was beginning to be rusty,--and drew her
shawl slowly round her shoulders. She had been a handsome woman in her
day, and with her rusty crape still looked more imposing than many a
silken fine lady. With a thrill of excitement, too, she took her way
down-stairs, with more sordid thoughts than those of her child. She was
thinking, also, which would be best for herself,--to live with them and
share their grandeur, or to secure a certainty for herself from the
bridegroom’s liberality. There are women ignoble enough to act as Mrs.
Tracy was doing, and still with so much divinity in them as to be
willing to disappear, or die, or obliterate themselves when the daughter
for whom they laboured has won her prize. But Millicent’s mother had not
even this virtue. She was drawing her ticket by her child’s hand;--which
would be most comfortable, she was thinking; and it was in the very
midst of this thought that she contrived to brush past Ben, who was
lingering at the door of his room, hoping to see something of his
neighbours.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Renton,’ she said. ‘I did not see you were
there. Not out this lovely afternoon? It is the old people who are
active now; you young ones are all alike, dreaming and building castles,
I suppose. Millicent stays up-stairs all by herself, instead of coming
out with me. But indeed she is dull, poor child. An old woman, even when
it is her mother, is poor company for a young girl.’
‘I am sure she does not think so,’ said Ben, to whom Millicent was half
divine.
‘No, I am sure she does not think so,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘she is such a
good child. But you may run up and talk to her for half-an-hour, and
cheer her up while I am gone. There are not many gentlemen I would say
as much to,’ she added playfully. Her playful speeches were not very
successful generally, but Ben was no critic at that moment. His eyes
blazed up with sudden fire. He took her hand, and would have kissed it,
so much was he touched by this mark of confidence, but Mrs. Tracy knew
there were holes in her glove, and drew it back.
‘May I?’ he said. ‘How good you are to me!’ and had rushed up-stairs
before she had time to draw breath. She turned round, looking after him,
with a certain grim satisfaction on her handsome worn face.
‘That is all safe,’ she said to herself with a little sigh of relief;
and went out philosophically to let the crisis enact itself, and buy a
little lobster for Millicent’s supper, by way of reward to her fortunate
child.
CHAPTER VII.
PUT TO THE TOUCH.
Ben rushed up the narrow stairs three steps at a time, while Millicent
sat listening with her heart beating against her breast. If he had known
the flutter it was making, how glad, how hopeful, how proud the poor
young fool would have been! And it was all for him. A sudden hush fell
upon him as he went in at the sacred door. Such a privilege had never
been accorded him before. He had sat with Millicent by her mother’s
side; he had spoken to her even while Mrs. Tracy went about from one
occupation to another, leaving them virtually alone; but to have her all
to himself for,--how long?--a year,--half an hour,--a splendid moment
detached from ordinary calculations of time! His eagerness died into the
stillness of passion as he went in. She did not get up from her seat,
but greeted him with a little touch of her lovely hand, with a subdued
gracious smile. If it could be possible that she was a little moved by
it,--a little breathless, too! He came and sat down opposite the window,
as near her as he dared;--his eyes now shining, poor fellow! and great
waves of colour passing over his face.
‘Your mother said I might come,’ he faltered, with the very imbecility
of blessedness. And Millicent nodded her beautiful head kindly at him
again.
‘Mamma thought I would be lonely,’ she said. ‘Poor dear mamma! she
thinks too much of me.’
‘That is not possible,’ said Ben. ‘And,--how could she think of anything
else? Ah, if you would but let me try to amuse you a little! You are so
young,--so----; I envy your brother,’ said the lover, growing red, ‘when
I see how you give him all your thoughts.’
‘Not all,’ said Millicent, ‘oh, indeed, not all! Poor Fitzgerald! But we
have so many things to think of. There is no more amusement for poor
mamma and me.’
‘Amusement is a poor sort of thing,’ said Ben. ‘You don’t think I meant
balls and operas? I am not such a wretched fellow as that. What I meant
was, if--if you would but try to look round you, and see that there are
others in the world----’ here he made a pause, half out of awe of the
words that were on his lips, half with a lover’s device to fix her
attention upon them, half because of the grasp of passion upon himself
which impeded his breathing and his voice,--‘who love you,’ said Ben at
last, abruptly, ‘as well,--ten thousand times better than any brother in
the world.’
He was not thinking of Hamlet,--but passion is something like genius,
and finds a similar expression now and then in very absence of all
thought.
‘Ah, Mr. Renton,’ said Millicent, ‘you must not say those sort of things
to me. Poor, dear Fitzgerald was not so very fond of me. Some women get
loved like that, but I don’t think I am one of them. Hush now! If you
are going to speak nonsense I must send you away.’
‘It is no nonsense,’ said Ben. ‘If you could but have seen my heart all
the time I have been here! It has had no thought but one. I know I am a
fool to say so,--if I were a prince instead of a disinherited knight----
’
‘Disinherited?’ said Millicent, losing in a moment the soft droop of her
hand, the soft fall of her eyelids,--all those tender indications of a
modest emotion,--sitting bolt upright and looking him straight in the
face. ‘Mr. Renton, what do you mean?’
The suddenness of the change gave him a certain thrill. He did not
understand it, nor had he time at such a moment to pause and ask himself
what it meant. He felt the jar all over him, but went on all the same.
‘Yes, I am disinherited,’ he said, leaning over her, meeting her
startled glance with eyes full of such a real and fiery glow of passion
as struck her dumb. ‘If it had not been so, could I have borne to keep
silent all this time and never say a word to you? I am a wretch to say
anything now. I have been a fool to come here. Now I think of it, I
have no right to any answer. I have nothing--nothing to offer. But,
Millicent, let me tell you,--don’t deny me that,--this once!’
‘Mr. Renton,’ said Millicent, ‘I do not know what you have to tell me.
It is so strange, all this. And I have been thinking all the time you
were---- Never mind speaking to me about myself; that does not interest
me. Tell me about this.’
‘I will tell you everything,’ said Ben, ‘and then you will give me my
sentence,--death or life,--that is what it will be. Don’t take up your
work. Oh, how can you be so calm, you women? Cannot you see what it is
to me;--death or life?’
Millicent looked up at him, dropping her work hesitatingly on her knee.
When he met that glance, the blue eyes looked so wondering, so wistful,
so innocent, that poor Ben in his madness got down on his knees and
kissed the hand that lay in her lap and the muslin that surrounded it,
and cried out, with a kind of sweet heart-break;--‘Yes, it is right you
should be calm; I love you best so. For me, the earth and the passions;
for you, heaven. I agree,--that is what God must have meant.’
With a deeper wonder still,--a real wonder,--that made her face angelic,
Millicent listened, and felt the hot lips touch her hand. What did the
madman mean? What was he agreeing to and approving? Had he found her
out? Was he mocking her? She was so bewildered that she said nothing;
and she was touched, too, at her heart. She had an impulse to lay her
other hand on his head, and smooth down the curls upon it with a touch
of natural kindness and pity. Poor boy! whose head was all running on
wild nonsense, and who could not understand the nature of her thoughts.
‘Mr. Renton,’ she said, with a little tremble in her voice, which was
not affected,--‘I am alone. Whatever you have to say to me it must not
be said in this way.’
He rose up abashed and penitent, poor fellow! feeling the serene, fair
creature worlds above him; and yet taking courage because of that little
shake in her voice. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, with broken words,--‘I did
not know any better. I thought on my knees was the most natural way. But
I see. A man goes on his knees to the woman that loves him; but I----
only love you.’
And then he stood away from her and gazed at her, looking down from his
height on her low seat, her drooping head, with such humility and
splendour of devotion, that poor Millicent was dazzled. Men had told her
this same thing before, but never in this way. Somehow it made her
shrink a little, and feel a certain shame. Not good enough to go on his
knees to her, he thought;--and yet, oh, so much more innocent, so much
purer and better than she! Such an extraordinary scene had never
occurred to her before; and in face of the unknown being standing
before her, all her experience failed, and she could not tell what to
do. ‘Don’t speak like that,’ she said, half peevishly, in her
discomfiture. ‘I am not a queen, nor Una, nor anything of the kind; and
you are not King Arthur, that I know of. Come and sit down by me as you
were before, and tell me about yourself. That is much more interesting.
I do not believe you are disinherited. Come and tell me what you mean.’
After a moment Ben obeyed. He was nearer to her so; and she sat and
gazed up at him, with heartfelt interest, which made him flush all over
with a warm thrill of happiness. She gave all her attention to his
story. He told her everything, watching the fluctuations, the shades of
surprise, of sympathy, of something else which he could not divine, on
her face. Once she put out her hand to him with a momentary
compassionate impulse. She was deeply interested; there was no fiction
in that. She was still more deeply disappointed,--sorry for herself,
sorry for him. And Ben thought it was all for him. When she took her
hand back again, away from him, and sighed, and suffered the cloud to
fall over her face, his heart began to ache for her; for her, not for
himself. He had roused her sympathy too far;--he had given her pain.
‘Don’t be so sorry for me,’ he said, with his lip quivering, ‘or you
will make me too happy. What do I mind if you care? I am young enough
to make a way for myself,--and, Millicent, for you too,--if----’ cried
the young man, drawing closer to her. What could she do with such a
passionate suitor? Perhaps she was not so sensitive to avoid the touch,
the close approach, the almost embrace of the man she could not accept,
as a more innocent girl would have been; though, indeed, there was not a
touch of the wanton in her, poor girl! She was an adventuress and
mercenary;--that was all.
‘Oh, Mr. Renton, don’t speak so!’ she said, ‘you don’t know what you are
saying. Though I am a woman I know the world better than you do. It is
very, very hard to make your way. Look at poor Fitzgerald. And when you
have tied a burden round your neck to begin with! Ah, no; you must not
talk of this any more.’
‘Burden!’ cried Ben, all glowing and brightening. ‘I like that! Divine
cordial, you mean;--elixir of life, to make a man twice as strong, twice
as able. Ah, look here, Millicent--you said round my neck!’
‘I said nonsense,’ she said, withdrawing from him; ‘and so do you.
Double nonsense,--folly! What could we two do together? I did not know
about this, or that your father was dead, or anything. Don’t look so
wondering at me. What had I to do with it? Mr. Renton, I have not been
brought up rich like you. I know what the world is, and bitter, bitter
poverty. Oh, how bitter it is! You are playing at being poor; but if you
should ever be put to such shifts as some people are;--if you should
have to fly and hide yourself for the want of a little money;--if you
had to live hard, and be shabby, and not very honest---- Oh, don’t speak
to me!’ cried Millicent, turning away from him, and bursting into
uncontrollable tears. She was angry, and her heart was sore; she had
seemed so near comfort, and prosperity, and happiness. ‘Even I could
have been fond of him!’ she said to herself, bitterly. And now he could
tell her calmly that he was disinherited! Such a disappointment after
such a delicious sense of security was more than Millicent could bear.
She could govern herself, as a man guides a horse, when she chose; but
when she did not choose, her self-abandonment was absolute. Since he was
to be good for nothing to her, she cared no longer for what Ben Renton
might think. She thrust her pretty shoulders up, and turned from him and
cried. She was sick with disappointment. And it was her way not to care
for appearances except when they were of use, which they could no longer
be here.
As for Ben, he sat looking on with a consternation and amazement not to
be described. He grew sick, too, and faint, and giddy with the great
downfall. But he was no more able to understand her now than she had
been to understand him a little while before. For some minutes he only
gazed at her, his own eyes brimming over with remorse,--for was it not
he who had driven her to tears? And he felt for her the tenderest
longing and pity. He wanted to take her into his arms to comfort her;
and would not, being too reverent to take such advantage of her
distress. But he could not sit still and look on. He got up and went
away to the other end of the room, shaking the whole house with his
agitated steps. Then he came and knelt down before her, and touched
softly the hands that covered her face.
‘Oh, Millicent,’ he cried, ‘don’t break my heart! I would rather have
died than deceived you. Tell me what is the matter. Tell me what I can
do. I will do anything in the world you please. It cannot be you who are
poor. You ought to have everything. Oh, Millicent, say one word to me if
you do not mean to break my heart!’
‘It would do no good if I were to speak,’ sobbed Millicent. ‘I have
nothing to say. Go away, and never mind,--that is the best.’
‘But I will mind; and I cannot go away,’ said Ben; and he drew one of
her hands from her flushed cheek, and held it fast. He ‘made her do it.’
That was what she said to herself years after when the remembrance would
rankle in her mind. He made her do it. He held her hand close in his,
and drew from her the story of all her woes: their debts, their
destitution; her mother’s health, which was failing, the baths in
Germany which she was ordered, but could not get to,--all the miserable
story. She poured it out to Ben as she never would have done had he been
her accepted lover,--mingling the narrative with tears, with broken
sobs, with entreaties to him not to make her say more. And all the time
her hand was in his,--soft, and warm, and trembling;--her eyes now
raised to him with pitiful looks, now sinking in shame and distress. And
there was nobody near to interfere in this humiliating scene. Even the
mother, who was lingering intentionally along the streets to give full
time for the explanation, would have shrunk with a pang of pride and
horror from such a revelation as this. But the two were alone, and had
it all their own way. Ben himself sat by Millicent’s side in a very
ecstasy of tenderness and pity. If he could but have taken her in his
arms, and carried her away,--away from the suffering, the trouble, the
shame! Yes, he felt there was shame in it,--confusedly, painfully, with
a burning red on his cheek,--and yet was intoxicated and overwhelmed by
her touch, by her look, by the love he had for her. They sat together as
in a trance,--passion, tenderness, trickery, mean hopes and great, shame
and pride and dear love, all mingling together. Such a story to be
linked on to a love-tale! such a love, veiling its face with its wings,
loving the deeper to hide the shame!
When Mrs. Tracy returned, with a very audible knock at the door, Ben
rose and tore himself away, his heart, and even his bodily frame, all
thrilling and tingling with the excitement through which he had passed.
She had no sooner ascended the stairs than he seized his hat and tore
out, jumping into the first hansom he encountered, with the instinct of
old times, and dashing down to the far-off City,--blocked up as ever in
all its thoroughfares where men in haste would pass. It was not too late
to find his father’s agent in one of the mean alleys about Cheapside,
who would pay him his allowance. It was just the time for it, by good
luck. And then he rushed off to Christie’s, and had an earnest
conversation about the buhl and the china which were not yet sold. He
took no time to consider anything;--such a state of affairs could not,
must not last a day. This was what he was saying to himself over and
over. It must not last. He had no room for more than that thought.
When Mrs. Tracy entered the drawing-room she found her daughter lying
back in her chair, with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes. Millicent
let her approach without uncovering her face, or taking any notice, and
the anxiety of the mother grew into alarm as she drew near. She had said
‘Well?’ with expectation and interest as she came in, feeling very sure
of the tale there must be to tell. But as she came nearer and saw that
Millicent did not move, Mrs. Tracy got very much frightened. ‘Good
heavens, Millicent! do you mean to say it has come to nothing?’ she
cried sharply, with keen anxiety. But Millicent was by no means prepared
to answer. She had been shaken by this totally unexpected, unlikely sort
of interview. It had gone to her heart, though she had not been very
sure whether she had a heart; and she did not know now how to explain,
or what to say.
‘Has it come to nothing?’ Mrs. Tracy repeated, coming up and shaking her
daughter by the shoulder. ‘Millicent! are not you ashamed of yourself?
What have you been doing? I know he has only just left you, for I heard
him rush down-stairs.’
‘It has come to a great deal,’ said Millicent, uncovering her flushed
and tear-stained cheeks. ‘Don’t worry me, mamma. I will tell you
everything if you will but let me alone.’
‘Everything!’ said Mrs. Tracy in an excited tone.
‘Yes, everything; but it is nothing,’ said Millicent, doggedly. ‘You
must not give yourself any hopes. It is all over. It will never come to
more; but you shall not say a word,’ she added, with indignation. ‘I
tell you I am fond of him. I will not have anything said. He is too good
for you or me.’
‘It will never come to more!’ echoed Mrs. Tracy, holding up her hands in
amaze and appeal to heaven. ‘And she dares to look me in the face and
say so! Six months lost,--and rent, and firing, and the bills!’ cried
the injured mother. Then she threw herself down in a chair, and moaned,
and rocked herself. ‘If it is to come to nothing!’ she said. ‘Oh, you
ungrateful, unkind girl! oh, my poor Fitzgerald!--perhaps you’ll tell me
what we are to do.’
A little pause ensued. The disappointment was too sharp and bitter to be
kept within the bounds of politeness, and Millicent was not prepared to
enter into full explanations. While Mrs. Tracy vented her disappointment
in reproaches, her daughter sat flushed, tearful, motionless, dreaming
over the scene that had passed, wondering within herself whether
anything could, anything would come of it after all,--neither hearing
nor listening to her mother,--half ashamed of herself, and yet not come
to an end of expectation still. ‘He will do something, whatever it is,’
she said to herself. ‘It has not ended here.’
‘I never would have stayed on in these dear lodgings,’ Mrs. Tracy went
on: ‘never, but for this; you know I wouldn’t. It was only to have been
for a week or two when we came. Oh, the money you have cost me,--you and
your nonsense! And now nothing is to come of it! Am I never to be the
better of my children,--I that have done so much for them? To waste all
my life and my means, and everything; and nothing to come of it!’ she
cried. ‘Oh, you are a beautiful manager! And six months lost for this!’
‘Mamma, you need not be so violent,’ said Millicent. ‘It is not my
fault. Do you think I am not as disappointed as you can be? And some
good may come of it, though not what we thought. He will make it up to
you somehow. For my part I have no doubt of that.’
‘What is it you have no doubt of?’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘You are more and
more a mystery to me. Good gracious, Millicent! you make me think you
have fallen in love with him,--or--some folly! But you must leave that
sort of thing to people who can afford it. We must have some prospect
for the future,--or--we must leave this.’
‘Yes, mamma; only just leave me alone,--I can’t talk,’ she said,
fretfully; but then added, with an effort, ‘It is not his fault, poor
fellow! He is disinherited. Could he help that? It was we who were the
fools to think he would come to this poky place all for me.’
Mrs. Tracy swelled to such heights of moral indignation as would have
annihilated Ben had he been present, when she heard this.
‘Disinherited!’ she cried. ‘Millicent, you may say what you like, but it
is nothing less than swindling. Good heavens, to think of such a thing!
Disinherited! Do you mean to tell me it is a man without a penny that
one has been paying such attention to? Oh, what a world this is! He
might just as well have robbed me of fifty pounds,--not that fifty
pounds would pay the expense I have been at. And I don’t believe a word
of it!’ she cried, getting up with sudden passion. If there had been
any one below to hear how her foot thrilled across the echoing floor,
she might even now have restrained herself. But she knew that nobody was
below.
‘I believe it,’ said Millicent, rousing up. ‘He was too much in earnest,
poor boy! He wanted to work for me, and all kinds of nonsense. And it
would be better to have him to work for me,’ she added, half-tenderly,
half-defiant, ‘though he has not a penny, than be worried and bullied
like this every day of one’s life.’
‘Are you mad?’ cried her mother, stopping suddenly, appalled by the
words. ‘You are in love with him, you wicked girl! You are in a plot
with this beggar against me.’
‘He shall not be called a beggar!’ cried Millicent, ‘so long as I am
here to speak for him. It is we who are beggars, not Ben Renton.’
‘You are in love with him!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, almost with a scream of
scorn. The accusation was such that Millicent shrank before it for the
moment, but she did not give way.
‘I wonder if I shall be in love with anybody again?’ she said; and then
a sigh burst from her unawares. ‘Poor fellow! poor boy! He is so good,
and he will never forget me!’
‘If he had really cared a straw for you he would never have come here!’
cried Mrs. Tracy. ‘Love!--call that love! for a man without a penny! I
call it pure selfishness. But he shall never come near you
again,--never. Oh, what am I to do?--where am I to take you? We cannot
stay here.’
‘We are going to Wiesbaden, for your health,’ said Millicent. It came
upon her all at once that she had told him so, making use,
involuntarily, of her mother’s suggestion. ‘Wait, and see what comes of
it,’ she added, with oracular meaning, which she did not herself
understand. And after a while Mrs. Tracy’s passion sank into quiet too.
When people live from day to day without any power of arranging matters
beforehand, and specially when they live upon their wits, trusting to
the scheme of the minute for such comforts as it can secure, they have
to believe in chances good and evil. Something might come of it.
Somehow, at the last moment, matters might mend. She sat down with that
power of abstracting herself from her anxiety which is given to the mind
of the adventurer, and recovered her breath, and took her cup of tea.
She had scarcely finished that refreshment when the maid knocked at the
drawing-room door with Ben’s letter. Mrs. Tracy flew at her daughter as
though she would have torn the meaning out of the paper, which Millicent
opened with the slowness of agitation; but she had to wait all the same
while it was gone over twice, every word; the very enclosures in
it,--and it was very evident that there were enclosures,--were hidden
in Millicent’s clenched hand from her mother’s eyes. She was wilfully
cruel in her self-humiliation. And yet it was Mrs. Tracy, and not
Millicent, who answered the letter which poor Ben had written, as it
were, with his heart’s blood.
CHAPTER VIII.
MRS. TRACY’S I. O. U.
Mrs. Tracy’s answer to Ben’s letter was as follows:--
‘MY DEAR MR. RENTON,--Millicent has placed your most kind and
generous letter in my hands. It is everything I have said, but it
is a very extraordinary letter as well; and it is impossible for a
young creature without any knowledge of the world to answer it. It
takes all my judgment,--and I have passed through a good deal,--to
decide how to do it. I would not for the world hurt your feelings,
dear Mr. Renton, and I am convinced that to act according to the
dictates of pride, and decline your most kind little loan, would be
to hurt your feelings. Therefore I make the sacrifice of my own. I
don’t replace your notes in this, as pride tempts me to do. I keep
them for your sake.
‘And, besides,--why should I hesitate to confess it?--we are poor.
I cannot do for Millicent,--I cannot do for myself, though that
matters less,--what I would. I don’t know how far my poor child
went in her confidences to you to-day. She was agitated,--and she
is still agitated,--though I have done all I could to soothe her.
She is much affected by your sympathy and generosity; and yet, with
the shrinking delicacy which characterises her, she cannot forgive
herself for telling you. “I could not help it, mamma,--he was so
feeling,” my poor darling says to me, with tears in her eyes. God
bless you, dear Mr. Renton! With this timely aid, which I accept as
a loan, my Millicent’s poor mother may still be spared to watch
over her child. It would have been impossible for me to go, and I
tried to hide from my pet the urging of my physicians. Now it is
all clear before us. I enclose a memorandum for the amount at five
per cent interest; but what interest can ever repay the kind
consideration, the ready thoughtfulness? I can never forget it, and
neither can Millicent. When I say that we shall leave almost
immediately, I but say that we are carrying out your intention. We
shall miss you in that strange land. How sweet if we could hope to
meet our benefactor among its gay groups! Millicent tells me
something about your circumstances, which it seems impossible to
believe. But if it should be true, dear Mr. Renton, how sweet it
will be to your mind to feel that your little savings, if diverted
from their original intention, will yet go to carry out one of the
most sacred offices of Christianity,--to save a mother, the sole
guide and protector of her innocence, to her only child!
‘Believe me, my dear Mr. Renton, with the sincerest kind regards
and good wishes,
‘Yours obliged and most truly,
‘MARIA TRACY.’
‘Will that do?’ she said, thrusting the paper across the table to
Millicent, who sat looking on. Her mother’s style of letter-writing was
very well known to her; but her heart was beating a little quicker than
usual, and it was not without excitement that she took it up.
Altogether, the day had been a strange one for her. It had brought her
in contact with genuine, real passion; and at the same time with a rare,
almost unknown thing to her,--a man, with all the instincts of power,
unconscious of those restraints which make I dare not wait upon I would.
There is something in wealth which now and then confers a certain moral
power and unthought-of force and energy. Millicent’s friends and lovers
had been hitherto of a class quite different from Ben. They had been men
to whom appearance was more than reality,--who were accustomed to look
richer than they were, and to own the restrictions of small means,--men
who could not, had they wished it, have cut a way for her through a
difficulty, as Ben did with sudden flash of purpose. In fact, he was
poorer than any of the half-bred men to whom Mrs. Tracy had all but
offered her daughter; but the habit of hesitation or considering
possibilities had not yet come upon him. Simply, he had not been able to
bear the thought of want or difficulty or pain for her, and had rushed
at the matter without a moment’s pause, or any consideration but that of
doing her service. It was quite new to Millicent. It dazzled her
imagination more a long way than it touched her heart. She was not
grateful to speak of, but she was profoundly impressed by the man to
whom a hundred pounds,--that mighty object of thought to herself and
everybody she had ever known,--was no more than a bouquet or a pair of
gloves. She was not, even at that moment, ashamed of having all but
asked, or of receiving, his help. She was only dazzled by the
magnificence, the sudden lavish zeal and service of her lover. She read
her mother’s letter slowly and critically. ‘As if he wanted to be paid
back, or have interest at five per cent!’ she said. The mother’s were
very different thoughts.
‘It looks better,’ she said. ‘And if we ever are able to pay him back,
Millicent,--besides, it is putting it in a business way. Every man likes
to see things put in a business way; though this is such a young
fool----’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘I never met with such a fool in my life.’
‘He is not a fool,’ said Millicent, angrily. ‘It is the way he has been
brought up. He has not been taught to consider money as we have. Oh,
me! should we all be like that if we were all rich?’ she asked herself
with a thrill of wonder. Mrs. Tracy smiled grimly as she put poor Ben’s
bank-notes,--everything the foolish youth had possessed in the
world,--into an old pocket-book, which she took out of her desk.
‘No, indeed,’ she said, ‘not such fools as to give solid good for
nonsense. Why, only fancy what he might have had for his hundred pounds!
He might have gone to Homburg himself, and got a great deal of amusement
out of it. He might have gone to Switzerland. With all his friends and
good introductions, he might have got through the season with it,’--this
was all Mrs. Tracy knew,--‘with his club and dining out, and so forth.
And because you cry a little he gives it to you! No, if I were made of
money, I never could be so foolish as that.’
‘Nobody ever minded my crying much before,’ said Millicent, with a touch
of sullenness; and then she threw the letter on the table. ‘Certainly,’
she said, ‘a hundred pounds is a high price for that.’
‘I accept it as a loan,’ said Mrs. Tracy, wrapping herself once more in
the appearances she loved. Of course I should never think of taking
money from Mr. Renton in any other way. And I wish you would see to your
packing at once. We never had such a chance before. Oh, Millicent, if
you don’t make something of it this time, how can I ever have any heart
again? There are all sorts of people at Homburg; and you look very nice
in your mourning. One does when one has a nice complexion. What will
become of us if I have to bring you back here again?’
‘I have no desire to be brought back,’ said Millicent, sharply. ‘I am
ready to do whatever I can;--you may see that. But fate seems against me
somehow,’ she added, putting up her hand to her eyes. ‘One had every
reason to think it was settled and done with without any more trouble;
and here is the treadmill just beginning again. You are pleased because
you have got your money; but it is hard upon me all the same.’
‘I believe you are in love with him, after all,’ said the mother with
profound scorn. Millicent did not make any direct answer; but she turned
away indignantly, with a frown on her face. In love with him!--no, not
so foolish as that; but still it was hard when you come to think of
it,--never to be any nearer the end,--just to have to begin again. And
when everything seemed so clear and easy! A hundred pounds was very
nice, but it was not equal to Renton Manor and a house in Berkeley
Square, and everything that heart could desire. Poor Millicent
sighed,--she could not help it. And he was so fond of her too, poor
fellow! It seemed breaking faith with him to take his money and go off
to Germany to marry somebody else on the strength of it. And it was
nice to have him always there,--ready, on the shortest notice, to come
and worship. ‘All because I am rather pretty,’ Millicent said to
herself, with that half scorn with which a woman recognises that it is
the least part of her that is loved. Her beauty was everything she had
in the world, and yet it was a little strange that that was all Ben
Renton could see in her. Her transparent scheming,--her hungry
poverty,--her readiness to marry him or any man who had money enough,
and asked her,--that all this should be glozed over and hidden by a pair
of pretty eyes! This is a weakness of which a great many women take
advantage, but which always fills them with a certain contempt.
Millicent, who might have had something better in her, and who could
have been fond of Ben had he not have been disinherited, saw his folly
with a half-disdain. No woman would have been such a fool as that! And
yet she could not bear to hear her mother call him a fool.
She got up immediately, however, to begin her packing; and then she took
into very serious consideration the question whether a new dress was not
absolutely necessary for the new campaign,--a thin dress which she could
wear over her old black silk, and which would looked ‘dressed’ at a
table-d’hôte or other public place. ‘Don’t you think grenadine would be
best?’ she asked her mother, anxiously,--‘or perhaps my white with black
ribbons?’ Whatever might be her feelings towards Ben Renton, it was
evident there was no time to be lost.
‘It must be black,’ said Mrs. Tracy, decisively, ‘when you can have so
few dresses. White is always the next step to colours, and we can’t
afford that,--not to speak of washing. Black grenadine wears very well,
and looks very nice,--on you, at least,’ Mrs. Tracy added, with a
stifled sigh. She was too old for grenadine herself. To play her part
aright, she wanted a rich black silk becoming her years. But it would
make such a hole in the hundred pounds! She was compelled to give that
up. They spent the evening with the room littered all over with
‘things,’ examining into their deficiencies,--two warriors setting out
for the battle, and looking to all the crevices of their armour. And Ben
down-stairs heard their soft, womanly footsteps thrill the floor over
his head, and strained his ears to catch every moment they made. They
seemed to have accepted his offering;--what were they going to do with
himself? He sat, sick at heart, and listened while they went to and fro
up-stairs to their sleeping-rooms, down again to the drawing-room. He
had put his door ajar, and heard everything. Sometimes her mother called
‘Millicent!’ from below; sometimes it was the sweeter voice of the
daughter that replied; and every word rang through his heart, poor
fellow! as he sat and listened. That there was a commotion of some sort
going on up-stairs was certain; and it was he who was the cause of it;
and yet they did not call him to share the excitement. Or were they,
perhaps, preparing to go away, to punish him for his presumption,--to
return him his impudent gift of money, and reject his friendship? Poor
Ben sat trembling, absorbed in a cruel fever of suspense all the
evening. Perhaps they had meant him to be so,--perhaps it was only
carelessness, their own suspense being over; but certain it is that Mrs.
Tracy’s answer to his letter was not put into Ben’s hands till the
movement up-stairs was quieted, and the ladies preparing to go to bed.
Then Mrs. Tracy rang the bell. ‘That poor boy has not got his answer
yet,--how careless, Millicent!’ she said; and Millicent half smiled as
she went and sought it on the writing-table, underneath a heap of
muslin. ‘It can’t matter much,’ she said, with a slight shrug of her
graceful shoulders, and yet gave it with her own hands to the maid.
‘Tell Mr. Renton you forgot it,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘it should have gone
to him some time ago.’ And this was how the evening ended for the
adventurers on the eve of their campaign.
It had been a trying day for Millicent. Thinking it over when she
finally retired to the little dressing-room she occupied, this was the
conclusion she came to,--a very trying day. Neither her education nor
her experience, such as it was, had at all prepared her for such trials.
She knew how to deal with the ordinary young man who was to be met with
in Guildford Street; and as she sat with her hair hanging about her
shoulders, in the thoughtfulness of the moment a whole array rose up
before her of men who had admired her, followed her about, and satisfied
her vanity to the fullest extent, but who were not to be compared to Ben
Renton in any particular. Millicent, knowing no better, would have
married young Mr. Cholmley, of the firm of Cholmley and Territ, if he
could have settled anything on her; or young Hurlstone, the solicitor,
if he had been in better practice; or the engineer, who everybody said
was likely to make so much money, had he not been so impudent about
mothers-in-law, and so determined that Mrs. Tracy should have nothing to
do in his house. She would have taken any of them, and thought it her
duty. She had been even--must it be confessed?--a quarter part engaged
to all of them before their shortcomings were apparent. And each in
succession was eager to have purchased her and her beauty, though they
all haggled about the price. But to have betrayed her poverty to them,
or her mother’s difficulties, was the last thing in the world that
Millicent would have dreamed of doing. Had she done so her lovers would
have regarded her,--she knew it,--with a certain contempt. Her beauty
was much, and that she was an officer’s daughter, and supposed to have
high connexions, was much too,--enough to cover the want of fortune
which she never attempted to conceal; but penniless, struggling with
poverty, in debt--oh, words of fear!--Millicent would have starved
rather than have breathed such damning syllables in the ears of Cholmley
or Hurlstone. But she had told Ben all, ‘as if he were a friend,’ she
said to herself in amazement. And Ben, still as if he were a friend, had
rushed forth and found what she wanted, letting no grass grow under his
feet. What a curious, bewildering, unaccountable business it was! Poor
fellow! Could he be a fool, as Mrs. Tracy thought? or was he more
infatuated, more wild about her than any of them had been? or was it a
new species she had to deal with,--a being of a different kind? She was
so puzzled that she let her hair stray all over her shoulders and get
into hopeless tangles. Poor Ben! And after all it was out of the
question that she should marry him. This hundred pounds which he had
thrust upon her,--and surely, surely, if he were not a fool he must be a
very indiscreet, prodigal sort of young man, throwing his money about in
such a wild way,--must be the end, as it was the beginning, of anything
between them. It was very hard, Millicent thought; but for that horrid
old Mr. Renton and his ridiculous will, instead of setting out on her
adventures to Homburg, in the hope of finding somebody to marry her, she
might have had Ben and the Manor and excellent settlements, and no more
trouble. Old men should not be allowed to be so wicked, she said to
herself. She would have made Ben a very good wife; she would even have
grown fond of him. A sigh trembled out of Millicent’s rose lips as these
thoughts filled her soul. What a hair’s breadth it was that divided this
shifty, tricky, sordid life, with its most miserable aim, from an
existence so different! Berkeley Square,--that was, alas! the foremost
thing in her thoughts. Her mind strayed off to caress the idea for a
moment. She saw herself in the great old-fashioned, splendid
rooms,--splendid to Mrs. Tracy’s daughter, and not old-fashioned, you
may be sure of that, from the moment Mrs. Benedict Renton had got
possession of them. She saw herself getting into her carriage at the
door, with such horses, such footmen, such a glimmer and sheen of
luxury, and sighed again very heavily. Last night it seemed so near, so
certain; and now, the old treadmill to begin again, the old game to be
played, the old risks to be run! It had not occurred to Millicent even
now how humiliating was that game. It was natural to her;--she had been
brought up to it. But she doubled the beautiful, soft, white hand which
Ben had kissed, and shook it figuratively at his horrid old father.
‘Wretched old miser!’ said Millicent, setting her pearly teeth together.
And she could have made a good wife, and even grown fond of Ben.
Mrs. Tracy, on the other side of the partition, was not half so much
disturbed. She had a hundred pounds in her pocket, as good as a gift,
she said to herself; for, of course, he would never ask either interest
or principal. What a fool the young man must be! or did he, could he,
think that she was such a fool as to throw away her beautiful daughter
upon him because of his hundred pounds? Not quite so silly as that, Mrs.
Tracy said to herself. It was the first real bit of good fortune her
beautiful daughter had brought her. For husband-hunting, adopted as a
profession in the very serious way in which Mrs. Tracy had entered into
it, is a dangerous and difficult trade. Perhaps it would be safe to say
there is no work in the world more hazardous, dreary, and
unremunerative. Millicent’s dresses had cost a great deal, and it had
been very expensive taking her ‘out,’ before poor Fitzgerald’s downfall
and death made that impossible, and on the whole she had lost a great
deal more than she had gained up to this moment. Now, here was the first
earnest of coming fortune. With her looks Millicent might marry
anybody;--a Russian prince rolling in money, most likely; or a
millionnaire with more than he could count. The world was at her feet.
Notwithstanding the small results her beauty had produced in the past,
Mrs. Tracy jumped to the highest heights of hope. And as for Ben Renton
and his hundred pounds! instead of regretting, like her daughter, she
was rather glad that the game was still all to play. The excitement had
its charm for her. She was a gambler going about the world with one
piece to stake; and, like most gamblers, could not divest herself of the
idea that if she could but wait and hold on, she must win.
CHAPTER IX.
BEN’S REWARD.
When Ben received Mrs. Tracy’s letter his mind was in a condition which
it would be very difficult to describe. He had taken, as he thought, a
step which would decide his whole life. And even in the moment of taking
it he had been put to the severest test which a man can meet;--his love
had been suddenly arrested in its high tide, and the woman he loved
placed, as it were, at the bar before his better judgment, his finer
taste. The shock had been so great that Ben’s mind for the moment had
reeled under it. He had felt equal to nothing but wild and sudden
action, it did not matter much of what kind. He had rushed out and had
done what we have already recorded, and now for two or three hours he
had been sitting with no pretence at doing anything, waiting to see what
was to come of it. Wild visions of being called to her,--of being made
to forget in the charm and intoxication of her presence all the
tinglings of shame and disquietude which against his will had come upon
him,--possessed him at first. He sat for long, expecting that every
movement he heard was towards him,--expecting to hear her voice, or her
mother’s voice, calling him. He could not go out to his club for dinner
as he generally did; he could not have eaten anything; he did not even
recollect that it was his duty to go and dine. Such a madness to have
taken possession of Ben Renton, a practised man of the world! But so it
was. He sat and listened, thinking he heard her on the stair, thinking
he heard soft taps at the door, saying sometimes, ‘Come in!’ in his
foolishness, to the ghost of his own fancy. But nobody came near him.
One would have thought that this want of any response after the great
sacrifice he had made for her, would have acted upon him like a shrill
gust of reality blowing away the mists. But, in fact, it was not so.
Instead of opening his eyes it but dimmed them more with a feverish haze
of suspense. How could he judge her when he was watching with breathless
anxiety for her call, for her answer, for some message from her? The
footsteps above him were treading lightly, cruelly on his heart; but the
very continuance of their sound rapt him so that he could think of
nothing else. What were they doing? What meaning had they towards
himself, these women who seemed to hold his life in their hands? Every
lingering moment in which the true state of affairs should have become
visible to him, in which he should have come to see, however unwilling,
something of the real character of the creature that had bewitched him,
encircled Ben with but another coil of her magic. Not now!--not now!
After he knew what she was going to do he might then be able to judge.
At present he could but listen, breathless,--watch, wait, wonder, and
catch with a quickened ear the meaning of every movement. Any rational
observer would have concluded that Ben Renton was out of his wits
before, but the climax of his madness was reached that night. He had
stripped himself of everything he had in the world,--at the moment,--for
Millicent; he would have spent his life for her if she had but made him
a sign; not in the way of self-murder, which nobody could have required
of him, but of that more total suicide which consists in the sacrifice
of all the prospects, and hopes, and possibilities of life. His love was
not a selfish, complacent impulse, but a passion which mastered him.
Thus the moments which passed so lightly overhead in that argument about
the black grenadine were ages of sickening uncertainty to Ben.
This was brought to an end by Mrs. Tracy’s letter. Such a plunge into
dead fact after the wild heat of his excitement was enough to have
brought any man to his wits. He read it over and over in his
consternation. At first there shot across him a pang of disappointment,
a sinking of heart, such as comes inevitably to those who are thrown
back upon themselves out of a roused state of expectation. And then he
re-read it till the words lost their meaning. But there was something
else which could not fail of expressiveness, and that was the silence
which had succeeded so much movement and commotion up-stairs. For
half-an-hour he refused to believe, even with the sudden stillness above
and the letter in his hand to prove it, that all possibility of further
intercourse was over for the night. He could not believe it. They were
only stiller than usual. The note should have come to him earlier. There
was still time to call him to them. He took out his watch and placed it
on the table before him. Eleven o’clock, and every thing so quiet. Then
he went out and listened in the dingy little hall, where a faint lamp
was burning; then, half mad, opened the outer door, and rushed into the
street to make sure. There, indeed, he was convinced of the fact which
had been evident to all his faculties before. The dining-room was quite
dark, evidently vacant, and above, in the higher storey, was the glimmer
of Mrs. Tracy’s candles. She was going to bed, respectable, virtuous
woman that she was, with the hundred pounds accepted as a loan under her
pillow, too virtuous to think of rewarding the giver even by a smile
from Millicent’s lips, which would have cost nothing. The poor young
fellow came in with his heart bleeding and palpitating, one knows how,
and then seized his hat and went out again for a long, agitated walk in
the dark, not caring nor knowing where he went. Yes; this was how it
was to be. They had accepted his offering, but they had not a word to
give him, nor a look, nor a smile; nothing but the formal acknowledgment
of his ‘kindness,’ and Mrs. Tracy’s I. O. U.,--which was worth so much!
Ben walked on and on through the dreary, half-lighted streets, thinking,
he supposed; but he was not in the least thinking. He was but going over
and over the fact that there was nothing for him that night, that all
hope was over, that the exquisite moment he had been expecting,--and it
was only now that he knew how he had been expecting it,--was not to be.
When some long-desired and promised meeting has failed to take place,
and the watcher, obstinately believing to the last, has to confess that
the day is over, the possibility gone, that the hour is never to be won
out of the hands of time,--then he or she knows how Ben felt. And most
of us have had some experience of such feelings. Thrills came over him,
as he walked, of wild suggestion,--how she might, after all, have stolen
down-stairs to say the fault was not hers; how she might have tapped at
his door after he was gone. Ah! no, never that! Millicent would never
have done that. And it was over for to-night, absolutely over! A hot dew
of mortification and disappointment forced itself into his eyes as he
marched along, nobody seeing him. Those dark London streets, wet
pavements, gleams of dreary lamplight, miserable creatures here and
there huddled up at corners, here and there loud in miserable gaiety,
danced before his eyes, a kind of grey phantasmagoria. What had he done?
what was he doing? What would life be with all its inconceivable chances
missed, and the golden moments gone away into darkness like this? For
the moment Ben was ready to have recognised the claim of fellowship with
the most pitiable wreck upon that stony strand. Like every real pang of
the heart, his sudden ache went beyond its momentary cause. It struck
out from that small misery,--as anybody in their senses would have
thought it,--into the wide ocean of suffering beyond. The thrill that
shook his being cast off echoes into the awful depths around him, of
which he was but vaguely conscious. Such fooling,--because a young man
had been disappointed of an hour’s talk with his love! But these
fantastic pangs are not the least sharp that humanity has to bear,
though even the sufferer may get to smile at them afterwards; and any
pain, if it is keen enough, brings the sufferer into the comprehension
of pain; just as nature, it is said, makes the whole world kin. He
walked for hours, forgetful of the poor maid-of-all-work in No. 10,
Guildford Street, who was nodding with her head against the wall, and
her arms wrapped up in her apron, waiting up for his return; and yet
during all this time not one rational thought about the real position of
Millicent Tracy and her mother, not one sensible reflection about his
lost money, presented themselves to the young man’s mind. He had not
seen her, could not see her now till the morning of another day,--most
probably was going to lose her altogether. Such were the vain things
that occupied his thoughts.
Next morning, however, Ben was desperate. The day went on till past its
height and no further notice was taken of him,--perhaps intentionally,
perhaps only because the ladies were packing, and had no time for
visitors. When he could stand it no longer he went boldly up-stairs, and
knocked at their door. To tell the truth, they had forgotten him,--even
Millicent had forgotten him, having given him but too much of her
thoughts the night before, and exhausted the subject. They were in full
discussion of the black grenadine when he went to the door, and bade him
‘Come in,’ calmly, expecting the maid, or the landlady, or some other
unimportant visitor. ‘I must have something decent for evenings,’
Millicent was saying, with quiet decision, absorbed in her subject, and
not thinking it worth while to raise her eyes; and then, suddenly
feeling a presence of some sort in the room, she started and looked up,
and gave a little scream. ‘Oh! it is Mr. Renton, mamma!’ she said, with
sudden bewilderment. She had thought he could be kept off,--kept at
arm’s-length,--and she had forgotten the important part he played in all
this preparation, and the new start which was coming. She dropped her
work, and her hands trembled a little. ‘Mr. Renton!’ There was
dissatisfaction, annoyance, surprise, in every inflection of her tone.
‘How glad I am to see you so early!’ said Mrs. Tracy, with the ‘tact’
which distinguished her, rising and coming up to him with outstretched
hands. She gave her daughter a reproving glance, which was not lost upon
poor Ben. ‘Do come in. We had hoped to see you this evening; but this is
quite an unlooked-for pleasure. You gentlemen are generally so much
engaged in the day.’
‘I have not much to engage me,’ said Ben; and then he stopped short,
with his heart aching, and gave a piteous look at Millicent, who was not
paying the least attention to him. ‘If I have come too soon,’ he said,
‘let me return in the evening. I did not mean to disturb you.’
‘You could not disturb us,’ said Mrs. Tracy, with her most gracious
smile. ‘If Millicent is too busy to talk, she shall go away and look
after her chiffons, and come back to us when her mind is at rest. As we
are going so soon, I shall be very glad of a little talk with our
kindest friend.’
‘Oh, very well, mamma,’ said Millicent; and she got up, with no
softening of her looks. She was vexed that he had come; yet vexed to go
away and leave him with her mother,--vexed to see him, with a feeling of
doing him wrong, with which Mrs. Tracy’s obtuse faculties were not
troubled. She swept out of the room without so much as looking at him,
and then stood outside with a thousand minds to go back. She was not
callous, nor cruel, nor without heart, though she had been brought up to
one debasing trade. If she had never seen him after, it would have made
the whole matter practicable; but to know all he had done, and why he
had done it; to see the love,--such love!--in his eyes; and to be
obliged to be polite and grateful, and no more! Nature rebelled to such
an extent in the young woman’s mind that it woke her to sudden alarm!
Could she be falling in love with Ben? as her mother said. When that
absurd idea entered her thoughts she turned quickly away, and ran
up-stairs to her room, and went to her packing, leaving her mother to
deal with him. No, not quite;--not so ridiculous as that!
‘Have I offended her?’ said Ben. ‘Is she angry with me for
my--presumption? What have I done to make her go away?’
‘Nothing, my dear friend,’ said Mrs. Tracy, taking his hand, and
pressing it; ‘nothing but the kindest, the noblest action. Oh, Mr.
Renton, you must not be hard upon my poor child! She feels your
generosity so much, and she feels our miserable position so much,--and,
in short, it is a conflict of pride and gratitude----’
‘Gratitude!’ said Ben, sadly. ‘Ah, how ill you judge me;--as if I wanted
gratitude! I wish I had wealth to pour at her feet. I wish I could give
her---- But that is folly. Has she not a word to say to me, after all?’
What he meant by ‘after all,’ was, after the opening of his
heart,--after the pouring forth of his love. But to Mrs. Tracy it meant
after the hundred pounds; and here was a way of making an end of him
very ready to her hands.
‘Mr. Renton,’ she said, with an assumption of dignity which sat very
well, and looked natural enough, ‘it was my doing, accepting it,--it was
not Millicent’s doing. I thought it was offered out of kindness and
friendship. Any one, almost, would pity two women left alone as we were;
and I accepted it, as I thought, in the spirit it was offered; but if I
had thought it was a price for my child’s affections----’
Ben turned away, sickening at her, as she spoke to him. ‘Bah!’ he said,
half aloud in his disgust. He would not condescend to explain. He turned
half round to the door, and gazed at it in an uncertain pause. Millicent
might come back. When he thought of it, mothers were,--or books were
liars,--all miserable, bargaining creatures like this. He would not take
the trouble to discuss it with her. If he had not been so weary and
worn-out and sick at heart he would not have been thus incivil. But he
said to himself that he could not help it, and turned impatiently away.
‘Ah, I thought it was not so,--I felt sure it was not so!’ cried Mrs.
Tracy, recovering herself as her mistake became apparent. ‘Dear Mr.
Renton, sit down, and let us talk it over. Forgive a mother’s jealous
care. But let me thank you first----’
‘I don’t want any thanks,’ said Ben, with a certain sullenness, as he
sat down at her bidding on the nearest chair.
‘For my life,’ said Mrs. Tracy, looking him calmly in the face. ‘Yes, it
was as serious as that. Not that I care much for my life, except for
Millicent’s sake. It has no more charms nor hopes for me, Mr. Renton!
But I could not die until I see her in better hands than mine. Don’t be
angry with me. You asked her,--you offered her---- What was it, in
reality, that passed between you yesterday? My darling child was too
much agitated to know.’
‘I had nothing to offer,’ said Ben, with sullen disgust. To pour out his
heart to Millicent, and to make his confession thus to her mother, were
two very different things. ‘I am penniless, and disinherited. I had to
tell her so. Nothing but what I might be able to make as a day-labourer,
perhaps,’ he went on, with angry vehemence. ‘Whatever folly said, she
has apparently no answer to give.’
‘In such a case, Mr. Renton,’ said Mrs. Tracy, facing him, ‘it is not my
daughter who has to be consulted, but me.’ He had given her an advantage
by his ill-breeding, and now he had to rouse himself, and turn round to
her and mutter some prayer for pardon. He was in the wrong. As this
flashed upon him his colour rose. Had he spoken as he now said he had it
would have been an insult. It was an insult, the way in which he was
addressing her mother now. ‘Mr. Renton,’ she said, ‘I have put myself
into a false position by taking your money; and what is life itself in
comparison with one’s true character? I cannot let you despise
Millicent’s mother. Here it is; you shall have it back.’
‘Mrs. Tracy, forgive me, for heaven’s sake! I did not know what I was
saying,’ cried Ben.
‘There it is,’ said his opponent, laying the pocket-book on the table
between them. ‘Now I can speak. Millicent is an innocent girl, Mr.
Renton. She is not one of the kind who fall in love without being asked.
Probably, now that she knows you love her, she might learn to love you
if you were thrown together. But after the honourable way in which you
have told me what your position is, I cannot permit that. I will speak
to you frankly. If things had been different I should have been on your
side; but I cannot let my child marry a man with nothing. She is too
sensitive, too finely organised, too---- I cannot suffer it, Mr. Renton.
That is the honest truth. We are going away, and you may not meet again,
perhaps.’
‘That is impossible,’ said Ben, with a firmness of resolution which made
her pause in her speech. He spoke so low that it might have been to
himself, but she heard it, and it startled her much.
‘I will not let her marry a poor man,’ cried Mrs. Tracy with the
violence of alarm, ‘whatever comes of it. She is not a girl who may
marry anybody! She must make a good marriage. She must have comfort. She
must have what she has been used to,’ the woman cried in agitation, with
a certain gloomy irony. She was afraid of him, not knowing that he might
not put his hand across the table, and clutch his money back.
‘Good; I will work for that,’ said Ben. ‘She shall have it. It is only a
question of time. What more? What do you want more?’
‘What do I want?’ cried Mrs. Tracy. ‘Is that how you speak to a lady,
Mr. Renton? I want a good deal more. I want position and respect for my
Millicent, and civility, at least, for myself.’
Ben got up and went and made a gloomy survey of the room, round and
round, after the fashion of men, and then he came back to the point he
had started from. ‘I did not mean to be rude,’ he said; ‘I beg your
pardon. I have spoken to you like an ass. I feel I have; but it is you
who have the better of me. Put away that rubbish, for heaven’s sake, if
you would not drive me mad! I don’t suppose she cares for me,--how
should she? I’ll go to work and take myself out of the way to-morrow.
Only promise me to wait,--wait till you see how I get on. You can’t
tell what progress I may make. If I do well you have nothing against me.
You said so this minute. Wait and see.’
‘And let my child sacrifice her youth,--for what?’ cried Mrs. Tracy.
‘Oh, my dear Mr. Renton, things are harder than you think! You don’t
know what you say.’
‘Perhaps I don’t,’ said Ben; ‘perhaps I do. Neither of us know. Give me
your word to this, at least,--that nothing shall be done without telling
me; nothing shall happen before I know.’
‘Oh, what am I to do?’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘How can I make such an
engagement? As if I should be sure to know even before--anything
happened! I will do what I can. You know I wish you well.’
‘You will promise to let me know before--you bind her to any other,’ Ben
repeated, bending over the little table which stood between them, to
look into her face. She thought it was to take up the famous pocket-book
upon which everything depended, and uttered a little scream.
‘I will do whatever I can,’ she said. ‘I will plead your cause all I
can. I will promise,--oh, yes! Mr. Renton, I promise,’ she cried,
eagerly. He had even, as he stooped towards her, touched the price,--as
she thought,--of the promise with his sleeve.
And then, utterly to Mrs. Tracy’s bewilderment, Ben dropped into his
chair, and covered his face with his hands, and sighed. The sigh was so
deep, and heavy, and full of care that it startled her. Had he not just
got what he had been struggling for? She had given him her promise,--a
reluctant, and perhaps not very certain bond,--and yet he gave but a
sigh over it,--the sigh of a man ruined and broken. She looked at his
bowed head, at the curious strain of the hands into which his face was
bent. What a strange, unsatisfactory, ungracious way of receiving a
favour! What a highflown, exaggerated sort of a young man! She was
thinking so, gazing across the table at him, sometimes letting her eye
stray a little anxiously to the pocket-book, with a pucker on her
forehead and a cold dread in her heart, when the unaccountable fellow as
suddenly unveiled his cloudy countenance and looked straight up into her
face. Probably he caught her glance retreating from the pocket-book, for
he laughed, and all at once, to her amaze and consternation, took that
up.
‘You must take care of your health,’ he said,--and whether he was
speaking in mockery or in kindness Mrs. Tracy could not make out,--‘and
when this is done let me know,’ he added, dropping it softly without any
warning into her lap. ‘I may be rich by that time; and when I am rich,
you know, you are to be on my side.’
‘Oh my dear, I am on your side now!’ she cried with a half-sob, and
stretched out to take his hand, and would have kissed it, in the relief
of getting what she wanted. She did not understand the glow of shame
that came over Ben’s face, the stern clasp he gave to her hand, almost
hurting her, resisting her soft attempt to draw it to her. And he held
her thus, as in a vice, and looked down upon her stormily, keenly, as if
asking himself whether he could believe her or not. ‘And I will see her,
too, before you go,’ he said, with an abruptness she had never seen in
him before; and then suddenly left her, without another word, closing
the door behind him, and audibly, with heavy, rude footsteps, descending
the stairs.
Mrs. Tracy sat motionless, with her fingers all white and crumpled
together, and the pocket-book lying in her lap, and heard the
street-door shut behind him, and his steps echo along the street. Then
only did she draw breath. It had been a tough moment, but she could
flatter herself she had won the victory. And yet she had a cry to
herself, as she sat alone awaking out of her stupefaction. What a brute
he was! Her fingers were crushed, her nerves quite shaken. But then she
had the hundred pounds in her lap, and had given only the vaguest
general promise by way of paying for it,--a promise which might be
forgotten or not as it should happen when there were a thousand miles of
land and water between the two.
‘Of course I shall see him,’ Millicent said, when she came down-stairs
and heard a kind of report of the interview,--a very partial report
given to suit the exigencies of the moment. ‘I would not be so
ungrateful,’ she said; and there was a little flutter of colour and
light about her, which looked like excitement, the anxious mother
thought. Could she be such a fool as to have fallen in love with him?
was the painful idea which flashed again across Mrs. Tracy’s mind.
Surely, surely, not anything so ridiculous as that. And the best thing
in the circumstances was to fall back upon the black grenadine, which
indeed was a matter of the first importance. It was not quite so pretty
as tulle, nor so light: but then it would be cheaper and wear better,
and at those summer dinners in daylight, which are always so trying,
would probably look even better than tulle. ‘It must be put in hand at
once,’ Mrs. Tracy said, ‘for we have no time to lose.’ And it was a
great relief to her when Millicent settled down quietly to try a new
trimming, which she thought would be pretty for the sleeve. After all,
she was a very good girl, with no nonsense about her; and her mother’s
blessing, could it have secured her the best reward a good girl can
have,--the conventional reward for all exemplary young women,--fell upon
Millicent on the spot. A good husband, a rich husband,--a very rich,
very grand, very noble mate; if that were but attained what more could
the round world give? Mrs. Tracy went and locked up her pocket-book, and
got through an endless amount of arrangements that very afternoon. She
had been in haste before, but now she was in a hurry. It occurred to
her even that it would be better to get the black grenadine in Paris,
though it might be a little dearer. Anything rather than another such
interview! On that point her mind was made up.
CHAPTER X.
THE LAST INTERVIEW.
Mothers were like that,--calculating, merchandising creatures, not
worthy to unloose the shoes of the fair and innocent angels who, by some
strange chance, were in their hands,--sordid beings whom it was just,
and even virtuous, to balk and deceive. If this were not the case, then
most books were false, and most sketches of contemporary life founded on
a mistake. Ben Renton was not more given to novels than most men, but if
there is one fact to be learned from the best studies of the best
humorists, is it not this? And there was much comfort in the thought. It
stopped him short in the course of disenchantment, which otherwise would
have wrung his heart cruelly, and perhaps convinced him. She was not to
blame. She had opened her heart to him, poor darling!--she could not
help it. And now she was separated from him by an agony of embarrassment
and shame, his money standing like a ghost between him,--who had thought
of nothing but of serving her on his knees, like a slave,--and her
delicacy, her pride, the revulsion of all her fine and tender instincts
against the burden of such a vulgar obligation! This was how he managed
to free himself from all doubts of Millicent. Her mother, it was clear,
was a mercenary, poverty-stricken, scheming, sordid ‘campaigner,’--but
then most mothers are so;--and she herself was as spotless as she was
lovely,--the soul of tender honour, the ideal and purest type of woman.
God bless her! he said in his heart. Even the cloud he had seen on her
face endeared her more to him. And if it should be his to deliver this
noble creature from her mean surroundings, to take her from the society
of the poor mercenary mother, to enrich her with everything that was
fair and honest, and of good report! Ben’s foot spurned the ground as
this anticipation came upon him. He felt himself able to conquer
everything, thrilling with the strength of a hundred men. Who said it
was hard? If it were not hard it would be too sweet, too delicious, the
day’s work of Paradise amid the yielding roses and golden apples, not
bitter sweat of the brow and mortal toil.
Two or three days passed, however, before the interview he had
determined upon, and to which Millicent assented as a matter of course,
could come to pass. Mrs. Tracy staved it off with an alarm which was
partly selfish and partly affectionate. Her own conversation with Ben
had been of a character quite unprecedented in her experience, and had
taken, as she admitted, a great deal out of her; and she was reluctant
to expose her daughter to a similar experience. And then Millicent was
still young, and there had been curious signs about her for some time
back,--signs of something unknown, which her mother was afraid of. Such
things had been heard of as that a girl, even in circumstances as
important as Millicent’s, with everything, so to speak, hanging upon her
decision, and a good marriage the one thing indispensable in the world,
should cheat all her friends and ruin her own hopes by falling in love
with an objectionable suitor. Mrs. Tracy almost blushed at the thought;
but still, as an experienced woman, she could not shut her eyes to the
possibility. And Millicent certainly was not quite like herself.
Sometimes she could not bear to hear Ben Renton’s name; but again, if he
were spoken slightly of, would flash up. And she was cross and uneasy
and restless, exacting about the grenadine and the little things she
wanted,--not easy to manage in any way. It might be dangerous to leave
them alone together. For these very different reasons Mrs. Tracy
exercised all her diplomatic skill to delay, and, if possible, put off
altogether, this unlucky interview. And in the meantime all the boxes
were packed, and such of the tradespeople as she could not help paying
were paid. A hundred pounds is not a very large sum of money after all.
She took care to point out to the landlady that she was only going for
the baths, and might be expected back again, so that people were not so
very sharp about their accounts as perhaps they might have been. And she
went so far as to leave her superfluous luggage in Guildford Street,--an
unmistakable sign of probity. If the end of all their schemes were
attained in Homburg, why then there would,--no doubt,--be money for
everything; and, if not, why it was no use burning their ships until
they saw how things would go. It was on the last evening that Ben found
his way to the drawing-room with a smouldering fire of excitement in his
heart. Not all Mrs. Tracy’s skill could balk him of that last
gratification; but she had succeeded in postponing it to the last night.
Millicent was seated where she had been the first time he saw
her,--where she had been on that memorable day when she told him their
need,--on a low, straight-backed chair in the corner, against the wall,
with the light coming in on her from under the half-lowered blind. She
was innocent of any consciousness of that perfection of effect. The
blind was down only because Mrs. Tracy felt that it looked well from the
outside, neither of them being sufficiently skilled to know how cleverly
this device concentrated the light upon the beautiful head. She had some
work in her hands, as usual, by way of relief and refuge in what was
likely to be an agitating interview. And yet Millicent did not look much
as if she should herself be agitated. Her lips were drawn in the least
in the world; her forehead had the ghost of a line on it; her foot
patted in soft impatience upon the carpet. She was anxious, very anxious
to have it over. What was the use of talk? She was ready to see him,
ready to please him so far as she could, and yet she could not but be
irritated with the man who had disappointed her,--could not but feel
that his hundred pounds was a very paltry substitute for what she had
expected of him. Millicent was not beginning her new campaign with any
very brilliant hopes. She was ready, even now, to cry with vexation and
disappointment. She never had brought a man to the point and felt that
she could put up with him, and might have a comfortable life before her,
but he went and got himself disinherited! It was all very well for the
others, who had no particular trouble in the matter; and nobody
sympathised sufficiently with Millicent to see that the very sight of
him was tantalising to her, now that he was no good! At the same time,
she was used to commanding herself, and did not betray these emotions.
Ben went into the room with the noiseless rapidity of passion. She did
not know he was coming until he was there, leaning against the window,
gazing down upon her. Mrs. Tracy was out of the room, though she had not
meant to be so. He had seized upon the moment, determined, at least for
this once, to have everything his own way.
‘Oh, Mr. Renton, how you startled me!’ said Millicent. ‘I never heard
you come up-stairs.’
‘I did not mean you should,’ said Ben. He had come up very wild in his
passion, with a hundred violent, tender words on his lips to say; but
when he came before her, and gazed down on her passionless face, somehow
the fire went out of him. A kind of wonder stole over his mind,--a
wonder not unusual to men before such a woman. Was it anything to her at
all,--anything out of the ordinary way? The meeting, the parting,--which
shook his very being,--was it merely an every-day incident with her,
saying, ‘Good-bye to poor Mr. Renton?’ He stood and gazed, with his
heart in his eyes, at the calm creature. The very marble warms a little
on its surface, at least, under the shining of the sun. When she raised
her lovely eyes to him,--undimmed, unbrightened, no haze of feeling nor
sparkle of excitement in them,--shining calmly, as they always did, a
sense of half adoration, half scorn, awoke in Ben’s mind. Was she
chillier than the marble, then? Or was not this passionless sweetness of
the woman, before the fiery love which blazed about her, a something
half divine? ‘You do not care much,’ he said. ‘I was a fool to think you
would care; and yet I have been counting the moments till this moment
should come.’
‘It is very kind of you to think so much of me,’ said Millicent; ‘and I
did want to see you, Mr. Renton. I wanted to tell you that I never for
one moment thought,--never imagined you would do anything, like what you
have done. I should not have told you, had I thought so; I should have
died sooner.’
‘Oh, Millicent! is this all you have to say to me?’ cried her lover. ‘I
wish it was at the bottom of the sea;--I wish---- Never mind. Think for
one moment, if you can, that I have never done anything--except--love
you. That does not sound much,’ the young man went on, stooping down,
almost kneeling before her, that his eyes might help his words. A smile
of half disdain at himself broke over his face as he caught her eye. ‘It
does not sound much,’ he cried. ‘You will say to yourself, small thanks
to him,--everybody does that; but it is everything in the world to me.
Have you nothing to say to me for that, Millicent?--not one word?’
‘It is very kind of you. You are very good,--you always were very good
to me,’ said Millicent, hurriedly under her breath, with a glance at the
door. Undoubtedly, Mrs. Tracy’s presence would have been a relief now.
‘Kind!’ he cried, with a sort of groan,--‘good to you! Then that is all
I am to have by way of farewell?’
‘Mr. Renton,’ said Millicent, rousing herself up, ‘I don’t know what you
think I can say. You know what you told me last time we spoke of this.
You said you were disinherited. You said you had nothing to offer me.
Well, then, what can I answer? It is very good of you to--care for me. I
shall always feel you have done me an honour. But there is nothing to
give an answer to that I know of; and, indeed, I can’t tell what else to
say.’
‘Ah, if it is only that there is nothing to answer!’ cried Ben.
‘Millicent, tell me I am to work for you,--tell me that when I have
changed all this,--when I have made my way in the world,--when I have
something to offer,--that I am to come back to you. Tell me so,--only
that I am to come!’
With a little laugh, half of natural embarrassment, half of art,
Millicent glanced at, and turned away from her lover, who was now fairly
on his knees before her, looking up with eager, pleading, impassioned
eyes into her face. ‘That would be very like making you an offer,’ she
said, shaking her head. ‘You cannot expect me to do that.’
‘But I may come?’ said Ben. He took her calm, soft hands into his, which
burned and trembled. He kissed them with his quivering, passionate lips.
Oh, what a fool he was! That was the uppermost thought in the mind of
the beautiful creature at whose feet he thus threw himself. A man of the
world, too, who ought to have seen through her,--who ought to have known
that she was not the sort of woman to wait years and years on such a
vague, nay, hopeless prospect. Yes, he might come if he liked. What did
it matter? If he was to make his own way in the world, no doubt it would
be years and years first, and by that time his feelings would have
changed, of course. It was easier to pretend to yield to him, and
satisfy him for the moment, than to set the truth plainly before him and
make a scene. Thus Millicent reasoned, not without compassion, not
without kindness, for the foolish fellow who held her hands in such a
tremulous, passionate embrace. There lay the special hardness of her
fate. She could have liked him had everything been as it ought to be.
She was sorry for him even now; but, after all, what did it matter? It
must be years and years before he could have anything to offer, and of
course his feelings would have changed a dozen times before that. It was
best to smooth over matters, and make him happy now. Thus Ben came off
victorious from both mother and daughter,--victorious,--conqueror of all
real obstacles that could stand between him and his love. So he thought.
When he went down stairs again he found the vulgarest little envelope on
his table,--dirty, crumpled, with his name scrawled on it in a style he
was quite familiar with,--his weekly bill,--and he had not anything to
pay it with,--not a shilling in the world!
CHAPTER XI.
MRS. BARTON’S LITTLE BILL.
There are different ways of being penniless, as we have said. The man
who does his work from day to day may have nothing, and yet be easy
enough; and the man who has wealth or expectations behind him may treat
a momentary impecuniosity as a good joke. And most people, too, find it
easy enough to be largely in debt. A big balance against him in some big
tradesman’s books seldom, unless he comes to the point of desperation,
is very deeply afflictive to a young man; but your little, greasy,
weekly bill,--handed in by your poor, greasy, termagant landlady, with
hungry, or wistful, or furious eyes,--and not a penny in your pocket to
pay it,--this is, indeed, to look poverty in the face.
And this is what happened to Ben Renton the day he took leave of
Millicent. If it had been a snake in his path he could not have looked
at the poor little crumpled envelope on his table with greater horror.
He had been nearly penniless, it is true, for the six months which he
had spent in Guildford Street, as has been related, but he had never
been troubled about his weekly bill; and he had nothing, nor any
prospect of anything, for three months. And he could not dig, and to beg
was ashamed. All the horrors of his position flashed upon him as he
stood and gazed at it. His occupation was gone,--his enchantress was
leaving him,--everything was over and ended. And he had no money, and
nothing to do now that the delirium was over. With his pulses all
tingling from the last meeting, and the strange intoxication of mingled
content and despair in his brain, to plunge into this cold sea of
reality, was something terrible. He caught his breath and shivered like
a man near drowning. Then he sat down and took out his purse, and
counted over the money in it. There were a few shillings left, and one
sovereign,--the last of its race; and that was all he should have for
three months,--he, Benedict Renton, the representative of an old wealthy
house,--he who imagined himself Millicent Tracy’s betrothed. He was
going to make wealth and a fortune for her, and this was the foundation
he had to start upon. And how to dig he knew not, nor to what to apply
himself.
Then Ben seized his hat and went out, leaving the thunderbolt which had
thus shaken him,--Mrs. Barton’s little bill,--lying on the table. He had
no need to look at it. Its crooked column of shillings was quite as
appalling to him as if it had been hundreds of pounds, for he had not a
penny, so to speak. He had some five-and-twenty shillings in the world;
and when a man has come to that, the mere amount of what he owes does
not much matter to him. Small or great, it involved the same
impossibility,--he had nothing wherewith to pay it. The evening had come
on,--a May evening,--with a little fresh wind blowing, and a scent of
growing grass and fresh foliage even in the dingiest of squares. London
had revolved upon its axis since he had gone to Guildford Street. Even
in that sombre neighbourhood the thrill of the new season was in
everybody’s veins; the tall dark houses round the corner, which had
slumbered all winter, had now lights gleaming all over them. The old fly
with the white horse, and the driver in white cotton gloves, which Ben
had caught a vision of through the window the first time he entered that
house and met his fate, drove past him now as he went out, with a
semblance of dash and spirit, conveying ladies in full dress to some
dinner-party. Six months,--and had he been slumbering, too, and had
dreams?--or taking the most important step of his life, laying a sweet
foundation for after happiness?--or throwing away so much time, and his
peace into the bargain? Heaven knows! He went out and made his way
through the twilight streets into the Park, where the dew was falling
and the stars shining. Even yet he had not come to ask himself seriously
the question, What was he to do? His mind was in a haze of excitement,
and uncertainty, and passion. It was like the evening landscape amidst
which he went abroad,--lights gleaming about all its edges,--vague
noises,--a haze about that blurred the distant outlines,--calm with the
compulsory quiet which comes with an ending, whatever that ending may
be,--yet agitated with fears and hopes and uncertain resolutions. There
was the faint fragrance of the spring, and the soft sadness of the
night, and the mystery of that indistinct hum and roar of the great
city, so near yet so unseen! All this was round about Ben as he walked,
and it was but a shadow of the commotion, the silence, the despair and
excitement, that were in his heart.
He walked up and down so long, having the whole soft world of space and
darkness to himself, as it seemed, that positive fatigue stole over him
at last; and then he turned instinctively, almost without knowing; it,
to the familiar ways from which he had long been a comparative exile.
When he found himself in the lighted street, pursuing the way to his
club, Ben had become languid and listless, and was scarcely conscious of
any stronger feeling than weariness. It was past eight o’clock, and in
his exhaustion he remembered that he had not dined. For some time past,
since the stream of life had begun to pour back to town, he had avoided
the club, not wishing to meet former friends; but he was weary and
stupefied, and did not seem to care for anything that night. He went in
and ordered himself a spare dinner, and sat down under cover of a
newspaper, entrenching himself behind the vast sheet of the ‘Times’ to
wait for it. Ben Renton, once amongst the most distinguished, the
wealthiest, hope-fullest, best-known of all the community,--and that
only six months ago,--now with five-and-twenty shillings in his pocket,
his life as uncertain as that of any adventurer, poorer than any
day-labourer who knew where to get work for the morrow, waiting for his
cutlet, concealed behind a newspaper! Could any imagination conceive so
vast a change?
As he rose to go to his meal, however, Ben discovered that he had not
been hid. Friends came up to greet him whom it was not easy to shake
off; and when at last he got to the door of the room in which he had
been sitting, a danger which he had not apprehended befell him. His name
was called out with a positive shout that roused everybody’s attention,
and, before he could get out of the way, he was caught, and all but
hugged, by his mother’s brother,--a hobbling, gouty old sea-captain, who
was the last man in the world he wished to see. ‘What, Ben Renton! God
bless us, come to the surface at last!’ Captain Ormerod cried loudly, as
he posted down to meet his nephew, making such a clatter with his stick
and his lame foot as roused everybody. Such an encounter at such a
moment was terrible to Ben; but he had to swallow his impatience, and
to brave it as he best could.
‘Going to get some dinner? I’ll go with ye, my boy,’ said his uncle.
‘Why, I’ve been to the Manor, and seen them all except yourself, Ben;
and there is as much lamentation over ye as if ye had gone down at sea.
Why don’t ye go and see your mother, boy? My poor fellow!’ the sailor
continued, as they sat down together at the table where poor Ben’s
dinner was served to him, ‘I don’t much wonder. If the old boy had
played me such a trick when I was your age----’
‘Remember it is my father you are speaking of,’ said Ben, hastily, his
pride and his affection all in arms. Home and its associations had been
as things before the deluge to him ten minutes ago. How they rushed back
upon him now at the very sound of this old man’s voice! His father,--ah,
yes, his father, had been very hard upon him; but, still, was not to be
breathed against by any living man save himself.
‘Well said, Ben,’ said his uncle; ‘well said, my boy! I like that. To be
sure he was your father, and my poor sister’s husband. But I may say I
wish he had made a will like other people. Why, you might have been
enjoying your own, a fine young Squire, among the best of them, if some
one had not put such devilish nonsense in his head.’
As the sailor spoke, the phantasmagoria of those six months rolled away,
as it were, from Ben’s eyes. A vision of what he might have been rose
before him. A man, important to so many people, with power and influence
in his hands, with a voice perhaps in the ruling of his country, with
all kinds of private interests at least to take charge of, dependants to
protect, friends to support and assist; and instead he had spent his
time in the little parlour at Guildford Street, madly possessed with one
woman’s image, dead and useless to every creature in the world. Was this
his father’s fault?
‘I’d rather not think on the subject,’ he said. ‘My father, no doubt,
meant well by us. He meant to teach us to depend on ourselves, to rouse
our energies----’
‘Well, my dear fellow, well,’ said Captain Ormerod, with an impatient
sigh, ‘I hope he has done so, that’s all. I should have said you looked
more as if you had been asleep and dreaming than anything else. And it
was not your poor mother’s fault, you may be sure, whoever was to blame.
You might have written home.’
‘I should,’ said Ben, with compunction. ‘I will write at once. I am very
sorry. How is my mother?’ his voice faltered in spite of himself as he
named her. He had not so much as remembered he had a mother in the
absorption of his passion. He almost thought he could see her now on her
sofa smiling at him. Poor weakly woman! Not of sufficient mark in the
world to be remembered even by her son; but yet giving the lie very
distinctly, now he came to think of it, to his bitter identification of
Mrs. Tracy as the type of mothers. It seemed strange to him to be able
to recollect so clearly, all in a moment, that he had a mother of his
own.
‘That’s right, my boy,’ said the Captain; ‘and now tell me what you have
been doing with yourself all this time.’
‘Nothing!’ said Ben. He had been hungry, and weary, and faint, and
wanted his dinner, poor fellow! but the question took away his appetite.
He pushed his plate away from him as he answered it. Nothing, and yet
how much! But he could not betray what his occupation had been to this
old man, who had outlived such folly, and, at the best, would have
laughed at the young fellow’s idiocy. He felt his colour rise, however,
in spite of himself, and in his heart called himself a fool.
‘Nothing! Well, I am not surprised,’ said his uncle. ‘They all feel, my
dear fellow, that it has been most hard upon you. Laurie has been
working, they tell me, in his way; and Frank is taking to his profession
with all his heart. Frank, you know, is my boy, Ben. But, my dear
fellow, notwithstanding your respect for your father, and all that,
which is very creditable to you, I’d rather question the will, and get
it set aside, if possible, than let myself fall into this sort of way,
you know.’
‘What sort of way?’ said Ben; and then an odd, painful curiosity came
over him. He seemed to have fallen out of acquaintance with himself in
his old character, and was not quite sure what kind of a being he was
now. ‘You don’t think that I have improved after six months’ sulking?’
he said, with a forced smile.
‘If you ask me honestly I must say, no,’ said the Captain. ‘I don’t
think you have. I don’t make you out, Ben. You haven’t taken to----
drink, or anything of that kind? That’s poor consolation. My dear
fellow, I beg your pardon. One does not know what to suppose.’
‘No; I have not taken to drink,’ said Ben, trying to laugh; but his lip
quivered in spite of himself. When he tried a second time he succeeded,
but the laugh was harsh. ‘I have been living on my income,’ he said.
Captain Ormerod shook his head. ‘I am very sorry for you, my boy,’ he
said; ‘but I hoped you would have taken it better than this. Your mother
was very much upset about your silence; but I persuaded her you were not
the fellow to sulk, as you say; and Laurie and Frank have really borne
it so well.’
‘Don’t speak to me of Laurie and Frank!’ cried Ben, stung beyond
bearing. ‘What difference does it make to them? Frank is a boy, and a
soldier, with his profession to fall back on; and Laurie is a fellow
that would always have mooned his life away; whereas I----’
‘Well, if you talk of mooning,’ said the Captain, sadly; and then he
paused. ‘Couldn’t we do something among us, Ben? We ought to have some
influence at least. If you had only been a seaman now, one might have
managed somehow; but of course there’s heaps of things. Why, there’s all
those public offices,’ said the sailor, getting up from his chair, with
a little excitement, and waving his hand in the direction of Whitehall
and Downing Street; ‘and very good berths, I believe, in some of them.
‘Why can’t we get you something there?’
‘It’s too late, uncle,’ said Ben, gradually waking into rationality as
the old life came back and grew familiar to him. He was able even to
give a softened momentary laugh at the futility of the proposition.
‘Don’t you know there’s nothing but merit and examinations now-a-days
for every office under the sun?’
‘Well,’ said Captain Ormerod, pleased to feel that he had brought the
wanderer back to a more natural tone, ‘I don’t see why that should
frighten you. I have always heard you had a fine education, Ben.’
Ben laughed again, more softened still, and with moisture creeping into
the corners of his eyes. ‘I am too old to go to school again,’ he said.
‘A man has to be shut up and crammed like a turkey before he can go in
for that sort of thing. One has to be brought up to it. I am afraid that
would not do.’
‘Then why don’t you go to India?’ cried his uncle;--‘or somewhere. You
don’t mean to tell me there are no fortunes to be made in the world,
when a young fellow has the spirit to try?’
Ben made no answer. What could he say? A sudden sickness of heart came
over him. She was going away to-morrow morning. Mrs. Barton’s bill was
lying on his table. He had five-and-twenty shillings in his pocket, and
despair in his heart. And to be called upon to answer all in a moment,
as if it was a thing that could be settled out of hand, how he would
choose to go and make his fortune! In his impatience he leaned his head
on his two hands, almost hiding his face between them, and turned half
away.
‘Or else dispute the will,’ said the trenchant old sailor. ‘Obeying your
parents is one thing, and sacrificing yourself to a piece of nonsense is
another. Your poor father’s mind must have been touched--it must have
been----’
‘My father had a right to dispose of what was his own,’ said Ben,
haughtily; and then he broke down a little. ‘Forgive me, uncle. I am
dreadfully tired to-night, and down on my luck. We could not touch my
father’s will if even I would consent to try. I’ll talk it all over with
you another day.’
The old captain gave the young man a compassionate look as he sat thus
huddled up, hiding his face in his hands, and made that curious little
sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth which is one of the
primitive signs of distress and perplexity. Then he hobbled off into a
corner and pulled out a pocket-book from his pocket and examined its
contents. ‘A little money can’t do him any harm,’ he said to himself.
And as it happened, by a lucky chance for Ben, there were two notes, a
ten-pound and a five, among the papers in that receptacle. The Captain
made a bundle of them, folding them up with his gouty, lumpy fingers,
which trembled a little, and came back and thrust it into his nephew’s
hand. ‘You’re not too old yet for a tip, though you’re wiser than your
elders,’ he said. ‘God bless you, my dear boy! Come and see me as soon
as you can.’
And thus deliverance, utterly unlocked for, came to Ben Renton in his
downfall. Such a tiny, little deliverance out of such a paltry ruin as
Mrs. Barton’s bill might have brought him to! But if the bill had been
thousands, and this treasure a million, it could not have been more
emphatically a deliverance. He would have avoided the club altogether
could he have supposed his uncle to be there; indeed, nothing but sheer
weariness could have carried him into it at such a moment. And yet the
chance had saved him. Saved him! Only a ten and a five-pound note; but
at this moment to Ben it was salvation, neither less nor more. How
curiously words differ in their meaning from one day to another in a
man’s life!
He sat there a long time after in one of those lulls which follow great
excitement, sipping his sherry, which, though he had eaten no dinner,
gave a certain soothing to his outward man, and looking as if he were in
very deep thought. But naturally, poor fellow! he was not thinking, nor
capable of thinking. Heaps of things were flitting before him in a kind
of fantastic procession. The home, which seemed so far away; the mother
whom he had almost forgotten; the life,--had it ever been, or had he but
dreamed it?--which he had lived a year ago. Was it he, Ben Renton, whom
Captain Ormerod’s fifteen pounds had just saved from bankruptcy, who
lived in the Albany once, and was the heir of Renton Manor, and one of
the most popular men in society? or was it but a tale he had read
somewhere in a book? His weariness lent another shade of confusion to
the picture. And now and then these dim thoughts were traversed by one
so sharp, so clear, so acute, that it chased all the mists away. She was
going to-morrow. He had said his farewell to her. Her hand had been in
those hands of his, on which he looked down with a sudden thrill. Her
lips had consented, or at least assented, with that passive softness of
the unimpassioned woman, which drove him wild, yet held him fast, to
wait for him. Was it to wait for him? or was it only to let him come
when his fortune was made to try his chance again? What did it matter
which? One form of folly or the other would have been much the same to
Millicent, in her strange, compassionate, worldly-minded conviction that
he would never make his fortune, or, if he did, would change his
mind;--and in the confidence of his love and passion would have been the
same to Ben.
Thus when the witch had routed once more all the softening charm of old
association, he sat till there was nobody but himself in the
dining-room. He had so much the air of a man who had no mind to be
interrupted, that several of his old friends had felt themselves
suppressed by a nod, and had gone without speaking to him. And even that
unpleasant suggestion which had occurred to the Captain about the habits
of the impoverished man came into the heads of two or three who saw him
sitting with that absorbed look over his sherry. Could he have taken in
his downfall to the meanest of all consolations? The thought troubled
some friendly souls; but perhaps it helped to keep him quite undisturbed
in the solitude he wished. It was getting quite late when some one
rushed in with his hands full of papers, disturbing the quiet of the
place--some one who demanded coffee--and threw himself down in a chair
at the other end of the room; and then got up and began to walk about,
filling the languid air with a certain commotion, a sound of rustling
papers, and vibration of busy thought. This intruder caught sight of
Ben after he had been about ten minutes in the room, and catching up his
documents, whatever they were, made a rush at his table. ‘The very man I
wanted!’ he cried. ‘Ben Renton! I thought you were dead, or mad, or at
the other end of the world.’
‘And I am neither, as you perceive,’ said Ben, not well pleased with the
encounter. There was no man in the world he less cared to see at this
particular time.
‘I have not seen you for ages,’ said Hillyard. ‘Mind, I don’t want to
intrude myself if I’m a bore. You have only to say so. But unless you’ve
had more luck than most men, I have something that may be of use to you
here.’ And he put down his rustling burden on the table, and swallowed
his coffee with a kind of impatient eagerness. ‘I’d rather have had
something more cheering,’ he said, with a laugh; ‘but a man must have
his wits clear when he has business in hand. You don’t answer my
question, Ben.’
‘If I am in luck!’ said Ben. Already he had suppressed the inclination
to impatience with which he had been disposed to answer his old
acquaintance. Surely this was not a moment to repel any offer of aid. ‘I
am just as you saw me six months ago, which does not come to much.’
‘Doing nothing?’ said Hillyard, eagerly.
‘Doing nothing,’ said Ben.
‘Then, by Jove, I’ll make your fortune, my boy!’ cried the adventurer,
striking the table with his hand in his excitement. ‘I’m going out to
America next week to make a railway. Didn’t you know I was an engineer?
That before everything;--in a secondary way, traveller, sheep-farmer,
colonial agent, litterateur,--anything you please, but engineer first of
all. And I’ve got a railway in America to make, and I want a man to help
me. Ben, don’t say another word. If you like you shall be the man.’
Then there was a pause, and Hillyard plunged into the midst of his
papers, from which he drew an unintelligible drawing, diversified with
dabs of colour and dotted lines. Ben said not a word while the search
was going on. A strange sensation, half fear, half hope, seemed to go
through his veins. It was the first offer of work that had ever been
made to him,--from Hillyard, of all men, who had taken him to Guildford
Street and actually made Millicent known to him,--whom he had kept clear
of since as a vulgar adventurer, not able to estimate such a heavenly
creature but in his own coarse way. And now it was he who offered him
the first round, perhaps, of the ladder by which he should reach her!
With this there mingled a doubt of the reality of Hillyard’s good
fortune. An adventurer himself, what solid help could he have to offer
to others? All these mingled thoughts rushed through Ben’s mind while
his companion was finding the plan. When he had spread it out on the
table, Ben gave an unsteady, nervous laugh, glancing at it without an
idea what it could mean.
‘I know nothing of railways,’ he said, ‘except travelling on them. I
don’t know even the meaning of the words on the margin there. How could
I be of any use to you,--unless as a navvy?’ he added, holding out his
arm; ‘and it would be easy to find a finer development of muscle than
mine.’
‘Pshaw!’ said Hillyard, ‘it is no joke. I mean what I say. You may trust
to me to find you what you can do. The only question is, Will you do it?
Do you want work? or is it only a makebelief about Renton and all that?
How can I tell? You bury yourself out of the world, and never throw
yourself in the way of anything, so far as one can see. You may be
contenting yourself with what you have. You may be above taking a share
of one’s good fortune. I say again, how can I tell?’
‘I am ready to work at anything. It is the height of my wishes,’ said
Ben, with a huskiness in his voice. Further explanation he could make
none; but his heart smote him all the same. What right had he to a share
of any one’s good fortune,--and of this man’s above all, for whom he had
never done anything? He had not even the gratification of thinking that
he had been kind to him in his wealthier days.
‘Then look here,’ said Hillyard, plunging into his work.
The two sat with their heads together over the inarticulate drawing till
long past midnight. By degrees it became intelligible to the novice.
Shortly it opened up before him into a possibility,--a thing
practicable, a new hope. When he went back to Guildford Street in the
early morning,--the morning which was still night,--his head was full of
the new idea. He was no longer an aimless, half-desperate man, detached
from everything but the one absorbing madness which had taken possession
of his empty life; he had linked himself on again to fact and nature,
recovered his identity, his independence, himself. The change that lay
before him,--palpable, visible, unmistakable change from one hemisphere
to another, from doing nothing to hard, open-air, undisguisable
work,--had dispersed already the mists which made a mystery and vision
of all former changes. He stretched out his hands to the past, even as
he lifted them to the future. It was but this unwholesome, unreal
interval which had made life itself look as a dream and a thing untrue.
CHAPTER XII.
MILLICENT’S NEW START.
While Ben was thus, unconsciously to himself, being drawn back across
the threshold of wholesome life, the morning was passing in a very
different way at No. 10, Guildford Street. The packing was not yet
finished, which of itself was a troublesome matter, and, to tell the
truth, Mrs. Tracy’s feeling was that she would be glad to get Millicent
safely away, and that she did not know what had come over the girl.
Notwithstanding her displeasure with her, and fears as to her state of
mind, Mrs. Tracy took care to provide a nice little supper for
Millicent, on that last night,--such as her soul loved. The two ladies
were rather fond of nice little suppers. They dined very hurriedly and
quietly in the middle of the day, eschewing hot and dainty dishes and
everything that had a good odour, lest anybody should call; and
accordingly, in the evening, when they were free, and could indulge
themselves without any scruples about gentility, they made up for their
self-denial by having something they liked, which was generally of a
savoury kind. They supped comfortably after the labour of packing, and
refreshed themselves ere they went to bed. It was at a late hour, and
they had the prospect of but a short night’s rest, for they were to
start very early in the morning; and naturally this, their last night
upon English soil, had a certain pensiveness about it, notwithstanding
the savoury fragrance and comfort of their favourite meal.
‘It seems strange to think that it is the last night,’ said Mrs. Tracy,
with not inappropriate reflectiveness. ‘How many things have happened to
us within these walls, Millicent! And perhaps we may never enter them
again.’
‘I hope not, I am sure,’ said her daughter; ‘a more dreary set of rooms
I never was in. If we cannot make out something better than this, I
should never wish to come back at all.’
‘Of course we must both wish never to come back at all,’ said Mrs.
Tracy. ‘I trust your next home, my dear, may be of a totally different
kind. If I could but live to see my child settled, and enjoy the change
a little,’ the mother added, putting her hands softly together, ‘I
should have all I want in this world.’
‘I don’t see that, mamma,’ said Millicent. ‘You are old, it is true; but
I think you want quite as much as I do in the world. You are very fond
of being comfortable;--most people are, I suppose. And then you can get
the good of things without the trouble;--I should have more pleasure,
perhaps,--if I ever come to anything,--but then I shall have all the
trouble as well.’
‘The trouble of looking nice and making yourself agreeable! I don’t
think there is much in that,’ said Mrs. Tracy, with a little contempt.
‘The serious business,--managing matters, and getting introductions, and
all that,--always falls to my share.’
‘I am sure I wish we were done with it all;--I hate it. I wish I had
been brought up to be a governess,’ said Millicent, ‘or a dressmaker, or
something. I should not have liked the work; but then one would not have
had to be thinking always what would please some man.’
‘You don’t find it so difficult to please them,’ said Mrs. Tracy, with a
little gentle maternal flattery, such as was necessary now and then to
keep the sullen shade,--which spoiled it,--off Millicent’s beautiful
face.
‘I wonder I don’t hate them,’ cried the young woman, ‘after all I have
gone through! I am sure it would not be half so hard to go in for
examinations and things like poor Fitzgerald. I don’t see how a girl can
be good if she were to try,--always brought up to think she may get to
be rich in a moment, like a gambler! I declare, mamma, I will go to the
gaming-place in Homburg and try.’
‘I hope, Millicent, you will not be such a fool!’ cried her mother,
‘after all the pains I have taken to keep respectable,--paying bills
many a time when it was like taking my heart’s blood; and you know,
among the English, it’s only disreputable people who play.’
‘It comes to just the same thing,’ said Millicent; ‘and I tell you,
mamma, a girl has no chance to be good, brought up like that to play for
a man for his money. I hate the men! Let us go and play for the money;
it will be far better; and then nobody like Ben Renton can come and look
in one’s face, and make one feel like,--like----’
‘Like what?’ cried Mrs. Tracy. ‘Millicent, I have told you again and
again that you are falling in love with that boy.’
‘Not such a fool as that,’ said Millicent, with a faint colour on her
averted face. ‘Like a swindler; that is what I meant. Why should he care
for me? It was not him I was thinking of;--and then to think it should
all come to nothing, after one felt so sure!’
‘My dear, I know it was a great disappointment,’ said the mother, with
soft sympathy. ‘I don’t wonder you felt it; but there are better than
him in the world, after all. I would not vex myself about what’s past.
You will enjoy the change, and your spirits will come back, and you’ll
find something better before long.’ Millicent did not answer; she made a
little impatient movement with her head when her mother spoke of change,
and that sullen cloud, which awoke an incipient line in her forehead
and frightened Mrs. Tracy, came over her brow. ‘You don’t know what
work is,’ resumed the mother. ‘Fancy what it would be to sit still at
your needle for hours at a time! But to be sure it is all nonsense, and
you don’t mean it. I don’t say it is not of more importance to us than
to most people: but of course it’s every young woman’s aim to be
married. It’s all nonsense what people talk of women’s work. You may
depend upon it, Millicent, it’s only ugly women and old women that talk
that stuff. No man can bear to hear it. They like you a great deal best
as you are.’
‘As if I cared!’ cried Millicent, with scorn. ‘They are such fools! Just
think of Ben Renton,--doing nothing, and losing his time, and never
seeing through us all these months, and going on with his nonsense to
me, as if I was one to understand it! And all because I’m rather
pretty!’ she said with disgust. ‘It is enough to make one sick. I wonder
I don’t hate them or despise them,--they are such fools!’
‘Millicent, you are out of temper,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘I wish you would
not talk in that way. If anybody were to hear you----’
‘I wish they could all hear me!’ said Millicent, growing fiercer. ‘Let’s
go and gamble at Homburg, mamma. I think I should like it I think I
should be lucky. Do I care for a stupid man to come and mumble over my
hands? Bah!’ cried Millicent, looking at her own white, rose-tipped
fingers, which Ben Renton, in his passion, had kissed. She looked at
them with a certain disgust; but it was not Ben who disgusted her.
Perhaps in that sudden fit of sullenness and temper she was nearer the
purer world than ever she had been before in her life. Other men would
kiss those hands,--other voices would tell that same tale in her
ear,--while she sat and smiled and considered whether the suitor was
rich enough; and, oh, heaven! why was it all? Because she was rather
pretty, and had no heart nor womanly soul in her,--and because they were
such fools!
Something like this Millicent thought as she sat with her elbows on the
table, leaning her head in her hands. It was not that any impulse in
favour of her ‘sex’ moved her altogether unintellectual, unspeculative
being. She did not care a straw for the sex. Women were not perhaps
‘such fools’ as men in this particular way. Beyond that she had never
thought on the subject. ‘How nice it would be to have money of one’s
own!’ she said; ‘how nice it would be to win it over a table with no
trouble,--and have all the excitement in the bargain! And if one lost,
one could always begin again; whereas with men,--I don’t believe I shall
ever marry well,’ she said, suddenly. ‘If I marry at all it will be some
adventurer who will take us in. Now, mamma, you’ll remember what I say;
I feel sure of it in my heart.’
‘I never saw you in such a dreadful temper,’ said her mother. ‘Is it my
fault that you go on at me? But I know what is the reason. You are in
love with this fellow that has not a penny. I knew how it would be.’
‘In love with him!’ said Millicent. ‘I wonder if I am in love with him!
If I were I could not think him such a fool. Poor fellow! he’s gone and
robbed himself to send you to the baths, and you don’t want the baths
any more than he does. He ought to marry Mary Westbury and settle down,
and get back his money. Most likely he would get back his money if he
married Mary. And yet I think I should hate her too; but that would be
for the sake of the Manor, and not for Ben. I had set my heart on the
Manor, and that lovely house in Berkeley Square. Oh, don’t speak to me!
It’s too bad! I can’t bear it!’ cried Millicent, suddenly hiding her
face in her hands.
Thus confused, not knowing what was in her own mind, Millicent Tracy ran
on, driving her mother wild. She did not know what she meant any more
than Mrs. Tracy did. Acute disappointment, a kind of reverence and
admiration of Ben, mixed strangely with a worldling’s unfeigned
astonishment and contempt at his simplicity, were in her mind. And there
were other things besides. Regrets, not only for the house in Berkeley
Square, but for the lost opportunity of perhaps catching at a different
kind of life,--longings quite undefined and inarticulate for something
better,--self-disgust, self-pity,--all of which took form somehow in
this bitter outburst of ‘temper,’ and supreme, unspeakable discontent.
Was she, after all, ‘in love’ with Ben? But how could Millicent answer
that question, not knowing what love was? Sometimes she was seized with
a sort of passionate kindness for him, gratitude for his devotion,
always mingled with half contempt, half pity. In short, she did not know
what was in her, vaguely struggling for the mastery. Principles which,
perhaps, if good influence had been possible,--if!--poor hypothesis,
that hangs about the road to ruin! And yet who knows what tears the
angels may weep over those blind strugglings of the human soul towards
something better, or of what account they may be in the eyes of One
kinder than all angels? Who knows what such agitation means, what hopes
rise with it, and in what blank sickening of soul and darkening of the
world it comes to an end?
Mrs. Tracy frankly had no idea what her daughter could mean. She
concluded she was tired, and had got worried over her packing, and
perhaps was sorry to lose her lover,--for her mother was less stoical
than the daughter, and prized a lover _quand même_. So the natural thing
to do was to get the poor child to bed, and give her some more wine and
water, and finish the work herself. ‘I will do that box for you,’ she
said; ‘and remember, Millicent, you must be up early. You want more
sleep than I do.’ She was up half the night herself, but did not mind
it. It was a new campaign, and great thoughts were in the mother’s mind.
Thus the two prepared themselves to set out to spend poor Ben Renton’s
hundred pounds. He, too, slept little that night. When they got to the
railway in the morning he was there, pale and feverish from want of
sleep, and from excess of love and misery and hope. ‘I am going to work
for you,’ he whispered, as he put Millicent into the carriage, with that
look of anguish and passion and appropriation which made her somehow
despise herself. His Millicent he called her once more, kissing her hand
in open day, in sight of all the world. Oh, how could he be such a fool!
And yet----
Thus Millicent Tracy passed away for the moment out of Ben’s life; and
he turned and walked from London Bridge all through the City in the
cordial air of the May morning,--walked all the way to be alone and
think of her in that crowd of London, before he should begin to work and
win her,--with a hundred sweet pangs and stings of hope and suffering in
his foolish heart.
CHAPTER XIII.
REACTION.
Everybody who has ever passed by that passage of life’s poignant yet
ordinary way, knows what a reaction there is when the one is gone who
has thus occupied the first place in the thoughts of a man,--or woman
either, for that matter. The moment she,--or he,--is gone, what a sudden
quickening of energy, what a rush of all the faculties at the suspended
work,--suspended for the sake of that engrossing presence. It had been
natural to delay and muse the day before, recalling what sweet moments
there might be in the past, imagining what might be in the future; but
now, when all is over, with what an impulse the man works at his
occupation, to fill the void, to hasten, if he could, the very movement
of the earth, till the time of meeting again. Ben had a double motive at
this crisis of his history. For the first time in his life he had actual
work in hand, and the positive prick of necessity to drive him to it;
and at the same time the hope of making,--of winning,--what?--his
fortune,--Millicent,--a position in the world,--all out of the chance
that had fallen into his hands, of becoming assistant to an engineer on
some little bit of American railway,--a profession of which he knew
nothing. Knowledge, or skill, did not seem to him at this moment to
count for much. It was a beginning a man wanted. Given that beginning,
and what had he to do but follow it to the ultimate success which must
come? It was in itself a foolish idea, common to the novice in every
department; but perhaps in Ben’s case it was less foolish than in that
of most men, for it was his nature to hold by anything he took up
desperately, until success of one kind or another rewarded him. He was
intense in everything, taking what happened to him not lightly, but very
seriously,--and such men are not apt to fail.
It was still early, when fresh from his long walk, and with his
faculties all cleared up and awakened by the withdrawal of the presence
which had absorbed him, he went to Hillyard’s rooms to breakfast, as his
friend had invited him to do. It was in one of those dingy parlours in
Jermyn Street, which to so many young men are radiant with that freedom
from domestic restraints, and privilege of having things their own way,
which makes the long, unlovely street into a succession of palaces.
Hillyard was sitting in his dressing-gown, over the same papers which he
had carried to the club the night before. He was not less eager, not
less excited than Ben,--or, indeed, it would be safe to say he was more
excited. It was the end only Ben was looking at; but the means, with
which he was so much better acquainted than his assistant was,--the work
itself, with its difficulties and obstacles,--had inflamed the
mind of the adventurer. Of course there would be a great many
difficulties,--there would be schemes to lead the line, one way or
another, through this man’s grounds or that man’s, by this village or
away from that; and Hillyard felt, with a little thrill of delight, that
he was the man who could solve all these difficulties. It was not a work
of the first importance, and yet he had never had such an opening
before. He was to be chief engineer, and have everything in his hands.
It was to an American, who had travelled home part of the way with him
from Australia, that he owed this preferment; and the new chance was as
precious to Hillyard as to Ben, though not perhaps of so much supposed
importance in his life.
‘I will run down and see my mother before I go,’ he said; ‘and I
suppose, so will you: but we must meet at Liverpool on the 1st, and go
out in the _Africa_. If I do not keep the ball in my hands now I have
got the thread, never trust me! Ben, you will think it strange when I
say it, but it is this I have been trying for all my life.’
‘I don’t think it the least strange,’ said Ben; ‘though, if I were to
say it was the same thing with myself----’
‘Oh, you!’ said Hillyard, ‘you have not been so many weeks on the world
as I have been years; and, besides, you don’t know what awaits you at
the end of your probation. The money must come to some one,--and, even
if it were divided among the three of you, your share would be more than
enough to make a man happy;--whereas, for me this is the only chance in
life.’
‘I wonder what made you think of me,’ said Ben, simply. ‘It was very
good of you. I was at the end of my resources and my hopes when I came
out last night.’ Hillyard looked at him keenly, and in spite of himself
a little colour rose to Ben’s face. ‘It was kind of you to think of me,’
he added hastily. ‘I do not know,--had it been me----’
‘That you would have been so forgiving?’ said his friend; ‘but I had
done you no injury, Ben,--unless in taking you there. I suppose I must
not ask what you have been doing with yourself all this time, nor what
they are to you now, these--ladies?’
‘The railway is a safer subject,’ said Ben, clearing up his countenance
with an effort; and then he added, after a little pause, ‘Mrs. Tracy and
her daughter have just gone off to one of the German baths.’
Hillyard eyed his companion with a curious look, restraining with
difficulty the whistle of wonder which rose to his lips. He,
much-experienced man, had seen through the mother and daughter at a
glance; though, to be sure, he had been pre-instructed by his
acquaintance with Fitzgerald Tracy. He could not understand how it was
that they had allowed Ben to slip through their finders. ‘If he had but
a third of the property he would still be a prize,’ he said to himself,
casting a rapid engineering glance, as it were, along the line of his
friend’s life, and jumping over the intervening seven years. ‘It was
strange they should have let him go.’ But the news of their departure
explained how it was that he found Ben so disengaged, so ready to enter
into his plans; and curious as he was, he could go no farther. A certain
preoccupation that came into the young man’s eyes, a wavering breath of
colour on his face, and, at the same time, a strain of the lines about
his mouth, his lips shutting, as it were, upon his secret, warned
Hillyard off the unprofitable inquiry. He went back to the paper on the
table, and began to describe the new life they would lead,--the
voyage,--all the novel circumstances before them. He was himself so much
of an adventurer that the sudden change of scene from St. James’s to
Ohio excited him, and gave a zest to his good fortune. But, curiously
enough, this did not tell on Ben. His interest was in the work, and
nothing else,--the work as a means to his end. The small excitement of
the journey, or the new world which he was about to enter, Ben at this
moment of exaltation contemplated almost with contempt. After all,
crossing the Atlantic, except in the mere point of duration, was little
more than crossing the Channel; and that naturally he would do without
even thinking of it. And what was America to him? There was not even
the difficulty of a new language to contend with. He was not moved by
that; at least, not now. What did excite him was the new profession he
was going to enter; the necessity of knowing it and mastering the tool
which was to carve out his fortune;--a necessity which Hillyard, to tell
the truth, had not realised.
‘I know all that is necessary for both of us,’ he said, with a laugh.
‘As for you, of course I consider it only a momentary occupation that
will fill up your time while you are waiting. I should never have
thought of offering it as more than that.’
‘I am not waiting,’ said Ben,--‘I am beginning. Do you think I am going
to build my expectations now upon my father’s will, whatever it may be?
How can I tell what it may be? Perhaps I am going about the very best
way to disinherit myself completely. That is not my concern. I mean to
work my own way. And if you can teach me enough to make me of real
use----’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Hillyard, with a cordial grasp of his hand.
But, nevertheless, the chief engineer was not quite so sure that he
liked it as well on this ground. What he wanted had been a
gentleman-assistant, whom to guide as he pleased, and of whom to boast a
little, ‘A fellow with I don’t know how many thousands a-year to fall
back upon.’ He had rather intended to dazzle his American acquaintances
with Ben; but a man who meant to learn his trade, and practise it,
might turn out rather a stumbling-block, and come in his master’s way.
However, all was settled ere they parted, and Ben supplied with lists of
books and instruments, and various unthought-of necessities which must
be provided for somehow. His face lengthened perceptibly, as Hillyard
perceived, when he heard of them, and he was for some minutes lost in
thought. ‘Considering how to raise the money,’ his friend thought, but
did not offer any help, wisely considering that Ben had friends much
more able to help him than he--Hillyard--was. Perhaps he was rather
pleased, on the whole, that the new-born professional zeal of his
companion should receive a check in the bud. Ben went away very
thoughtful with those lists in his pocket, and not very much more than
his uncle’s fifteen pounds to rely upon, but very resolute not to be
damped in his ardour. It gave him plenty to think of for the rest of
that day,--a day which was of feverish, interminable length, begun, as
it was, hours too early. And Guildford Street had a gloom upon it as of
the very grave when in the evening he went back to it.
They were to sail in the _Africa_ on the 1st of June, so that he had but
ten days for all his preparations. So close an approach to ruin had
quickened Ben’s powers, and his return to the realities of practical
life, and to reasonable hopes and prospects, made the business of
providing for his new wants less appalling than had been that first
tragical symptom of destitution, Mrs. Barton’s little bill. There was no
despair in the business now, but hope, and all the possibilities of
active life. He had never been addicted to ornament, but yet had a
little store of bijouterie which was of some value; and being no longer
ashamed of his needs, he had the heart to go back to Messrs. Christie’s,
to inquire after his buhl and china, and drive a final bargain. The
result of all these proceedings was, that Ben found enough in his pocket
to stock himself with instruments and books for the profession he had
taken up so hastily, substituting them for the pretty toys which had
been the luxuries of his youth. To be sure, his Sèvres and his cabinets
went for half, or less than half, their value; but of what value were
such dainty articles to him at this point of his career? And as the
natural spring of feeling came back, no doubt his new theodolite
awakened a little pleasure in Ben’s mind, which was still young, and
could not but respond to the pleasant thrill of novelty in the long run.
The very possession of the implements of a trade brought him nearer to
practical work. He began to think such work was worth doing, after all,
for its own sake; primitive work--making roads, building bridges--the
first necessities of man. Had it not been the hackneyed iron way--the
railroad, on which we have all heard so many big words wasted that its
wonders have become a vulgar brag--Ben might actually have been seized
with a young man’s passion for his work, and thought it superior to
every other occupation under the sun. As it was, it loosed his lips, and
restored him to the common intercourse of men. ‘I am going to make a
railway in America,’ he said to the friends whom he no longer avoided at
his club, and it was regarded as a very good joke among them. Some of
them delivered a decided opinion--by Jove, that it was a capital idea.
And the announcement of Ben Renton thus taking to work, after having
been under a cloud, was like a brisk breeze blowing through the languid,
gossiping community for one evening at least. He was able himself to see
the humour of it, and discuss the subject freely in the course of a few
days. He had touched the earth, like the giant in the story, and got new
vigour. He was even able to go home--to that house which, in his first
disgust, he had felt as if he never could enter again. He had found an
independent standing apart from the past, in which he belonged to his
family, and was now no more the embittered, disappointed, ruined heir of
Renton, but a man erect in the world by himself, and with a work and
life of his own.
CHAPTER XIV.
MARY’S OPINION.
It was on a beautiful afternoon, in one of the last days of May, that
Ben Renton went back to his father’s house. When he left it, he had not
the slightest intention of separating himself so completely from his
family; and yet, when he thought of it, he did not see what else he
could have done. To go back now, when a definite beginning had been made
in his career, and there was something decided upon--something to tell
them of--was natural; but to have gone when his whole heart was full of
Millicent Tracy, and no object beyond seeing her occupied his thoughts,
would have been simply impossible. He felt that now, though he had not
seen it at the time, and, feeling it, asked himself, with a flush of
shame, how he could have ever hoped that she could love him--a man whose
sole proof of his love was that he made himself useless for her sake! He
was but on the threshold of Armida’s garden, and already he blushed to
think that he could have lingered there so long. But it was Armida’s
garden without the Armida. It was not by her will that he had lingered.
The moment he had opened his heart to her, had she not urged him forth
to the brighter daylight and more wholesome life? Yes, or at least Ben
thought she had done so--he forgot exactly how. That it was to supply
her wants that he had been roused out of his dream, and that afterwards
downright destitution had threatened him, did not occur to him now. It
was all so recent that it was obscure to him, except that he had woke up
and found his feet standing on firm earth again, after he had told his
story into her ear; for which poor Ben’s heart poured forth litanies of
thanksgiving to his Lady of Succour. He was awakened, but he was not
undeceived.
In a county so richly wooded as Berks, it is difficult to say which is
more lovely, September or May. It was on a day of the St. Martin’s
summer that he had left Renton, when the great rich, lavish trees were
but beginning to carry here and there a faint fiery mark of Autumn’s
‘burning finger.’ Now they were all in their spring green, so new, so
fresh, so silken in this year’s garments, that it seemed impossible any
autumn could ever change the soft, glossy texture of the young leaves.
It was the last day’s leisure he might have, except on the sea, for ever
so long; and everything tempted him to enjoy it. He went as far as
Cookesley by the railway, and then got a boat and went up the stream for
the short remaining distance. The Renton woods were renowned--indeed,
uncomfortably so--parties going from far and near to visit them, and
litter the leafy corners with signs of picnics. ‘I can’t say as they’ll
let you land, sir,’ said the man from whom Ben hired his boat. ‘The old
lady’s there for ever, and shuts herself up and spoils our trade.’
Before he could take any notice of this speech, or do more than feel a
natural amazement to find himself so soon a stranger in his own country,
another boatman thrust aside the new-comer, who had not recognised the
young master. ‘I ask your pardon, sir; it’s a new man I’ve got,’ said
the owner of the boat. ‘He don’t know no better, sir; and it’s long
since we seen any o’ you gentlemen on the river. It do look a change.’
‘What! not even my brother?’ said Ben; and somehow it was a kind of
comfort to his mind that Laurie had not been there.
‘Mr. Frank do come by times,’ said the boatman; ‘but things is changed
since last summer, when you gentlemen was allays about--you and your
friends.’
‘Yes, Tom, things are changed,’ said Ben, as he pushed off from the
bank. But somehow he did not feel so cast down about that change as he
had been. Even the sight of the silvery, quiet river, which had not
altered, and the trees drooping over it, every branch of which he seemed
to know; and the bank that swelled into soft cliffs and wooded heights,
as a sudden turn brought him within sight of Renton, did not bring up,
as he had feared it would, any bitter sense of injury and misfortune to
his mind. Instead of being the heir and proprietor of all this, he was
but Ben Renton, assistant to a railway man, going engineering without
knowing how, away to the other end of the world. He said so to himself,
and still, somehow, he did not feel bitter, which was curious. On the
contrary, a soft sense of well-being stole over him. The river was as
beautiful as ever, though he had no territorial rights over it--the
woods rustled as softly in the sweet air of the spring; the sky was so
bright above him, and hope, and energy, and resolution so strong in his
breast! And Millicent! He had not known there was such a creature when
he had last been there--reason enough to take away all the bitterness
from his sensations now. Yet it was strange to see the house exactly as
it used to be--the outer blinds dropped over Mrs. Renton’s windows, her
flowers arranged in their old order, her very sofa placed beneath the
trees, as if she had been there a moment before. The only change Ben
could see was in his mother’s crape-covered dress and the dead white of
the cap which surrounded her pretty, faded face. That was an
improvement, though she did not think so; but it was the only visible
sign of all the great events that had occurred at the Manor within this
eventful year.
‘Oh, Ben, I thought I had lost you!’ cried his mother. ‘I thought you
were gone, too, like your father;’ and she clasped her arms round her
boy, and wept on his shoulder. That was all the reproach she made to
him. And Ben, as was natural, fell immediately into self-accusation. But
in his heart he felt that it would have been impossible. He could not
have kept coming and going to this familiar place while his mind was
full of Millicent Tracy, and of nothing else in the world. It could not
have been. He would have been driven to some violent step--he knew not
what--had he come home in the midst of that time of enchantment. The
contrast would have killed him, or made him desperate. It would have
dispersed the rosy mists, and brought him back to sober day. Now that
the spell was broken, he recognised, so far, its nature. And yet it was
the magic of this spell which brought him home with a clear brow and
unembittered heart, and defended him against all the suggestions of
discontent. There was nothing of the injured man in his look, no
consciousness of misfortune or downfall. Perhaps Mrs. Renton would not
have been quick enough to see this; but there were another pair of eyes
looking on--fairly bright ones, though not like Millicent’s--which took
it in at a glance, and wondered, and thought of Ben more highly than he
deserved. Mary Westbury had been with her godmother all the winter
through, giving many a thought to her cousins, to whom she had been as a
sister, and saying many a prayer in her heart for poor Ben, the most
hardly treated of all, whose wound was so deep that he had not the
fortitude to come home. Mary had been seized with a pang of fear when
she saw her cousin, without any warning of his approach, come in, as of
old times, by the window which opened on the garden. She expected to see
him with a gloomy face, ‘feeling it’ so deeply as to make everybody else
miserable. But, on the contrary, Ben’s countenance was unclouded, and
his demeanour that of a man satisfied with his own position. Mary’s
heart gave a little jump, and then settled into a pleasant glow of
friendly warmth and soft agitation. After all, what a noble fellow he
was! How fine it was of him to take to the change so kindly, and bear no
malice! She left the mother and son by themselves at first, as soon as
she could do it without ostentation, and went out, being excited, and
walked about by herself in a very pleasant flutter of spirits. She was
fond of Laurie, as everybody was, poor fellow; but Ben--Ben was
different; and how noble of him to come home with that easy look, that
unconstrained smile! Poor Mary made out a whole little romance as she
came and went--an innocent, ingenuous creature, with summer in her face
and in her heart--under the silken greenness of the lime-trees. No doubt
he must have had a hard fight to subdue himself at first--not an easy,
facile temper like Laurie--not a boy like Frank--but a man with settled
plans of his own, and strong feelings, and an almost stern character. He
had kept away until he had overcome himself. He had fought it out all
alone, struggling with his dragon, until at last he had been able to set
his foot upon him; and then the victor had come with a smile on his face
to see his mother. Such was Mary’s fancy, knowing no better; and if she
had vaguely admired, vaguely dreamed of her splendid cousin--the special
hero of this drama--before, think with what a sudden thrill of
enthusiasm, of dangerous approbation and applause, she regarded him now!
‘They must have had their first talk out, and perhaps he will want
something,’ Mary said to herself after a while, and was turning to go
in, when Ben met her,--coming to look for her, he said. It was Mrs.
Renton’s time for her sleep, and he had settled her pillows for her, and
Mary was to have a holiday for once.
‘We are to leave her alone for an hour or two,’ said Ben; ‘and, Mary,
you must tell me all about her. You have been doing our duty while we
have been,--pleasing ourselves. I have behaved like a brute to my poor
mother.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Mary; ‘we have never thought so. You are not like,--the
rest of us. I always understood how it was. You were waiting till you
could come as you ought,--as you are. I would not write to you, Ben. I
thought, perhaps, it was better you should not hear from any of us; but
I felt how it was.’
This little speech, which came out of Mary’s very heart, and was
founded upon utter conviction, struck Ben with the wildest perplexity.
Could she know how he had in reality spent his time? Could she be
mocking him? But a glance at her face made that idea impossible. Mary
believed in him somehow, though he did not even guess why. It gave him a
little uncomfortable thrill of self-consciousness; and, what was still
more strange, it gave him just a momentary amusement; but, on the whole,
perhaps its effect was encouraging, and set him at his ease with his new
companion.
‘I have behaved like a brute,’ he said again; ‘though you, with your
kind heart, make excuses for me; but, after all, it has been a little
hard. A man cannot be twisted out of his socket and set into another
without feeling it, Mary; though I do not dwell upon that now.’
‘Oh, I know,’ cried Mary, with all her heart; ‘and there has never been
a day that I have not thought of you, Ben; but you have overcome it
nobly,’ the girl cried in her enthusiasm, with tears in her eyes. Dear,
little, soft, foolish creature!--what did she mean?
‘Put on your hat and come down with me to the river,’ said Ben. ‘My
mother says you have no variety, nor even air. And she is to be left by
herself till dinner. Come, and I will row you up to the Swan’s Nest. Do
you remember?’
‘Do I remember!’ cried Mary, rushing into the house for her hat. Her
heart beat as it had never beat before in its life. Ben to recollect the
old story of the Swan’s Nest! It was natural that Laurie, her own
playfellow, should think of all those childish follies,--but Ben! She
came rushing out again, putting on her hat as she came, not to keep the
prince waiting. If poor Mary had but known the use that had been made of
her name six months before in Guildford Street, or why it was that her
lordly cousin was so gracious to her now!
But, meanwhile, they went very pleasantly together down the winding road
under the trees to the river. Both of them, in their different ways, had
that enthusiasm for the beauty of their home which is common to
well-educated young English people, not fine enough to be _blasés_.
Mary,--to whom it was a delight at any time to approach the beautiful
river near which she had been born, by this winding woodland road,
shaded by those great trees under which her mother and her mother’s
mother had watched it gliding past,--was this day wrapt in a tender
content which gave additional beauty to everything around. There was
splendour in the grass and glory in the flower wherever she set her foot
on that day of days; and when the humblest things were thus enhanced,
what was it to float forth on the blessed river, all encompassed by
summer light, and the sweetest sounds and sights of nature! Even to Ben,
pre-occupied as he was, there was a pleasure in her gentle company, in
the familiar home-look of everything, that penetrated his heart in spite
of himself. The sense of life had risen strongly in him after his
voluntary banishment. The unusual exercise, the soft gliding of the
water round the boat, the glimmer and murmur of the stream, and Mary’s
pleasant face,--not beautiful, like the other face he was thinking
of,--her soft talk and tremulous, gentle laughter, her happiness and
ingenuous confidence, all soothed and consoled him. It would have been
rapture with that other; now, it was not rapture, but a certain soft
content. She was a good girl, so kind to his mother, like a sister to
them all,--a dear, little, sweet-voiced, bright-faced creature. Ben
would have defended her against all the world; he would have pitched
into the river, without a moment’s hesitation, any man who harmed her so
much as by a thought;--he looked at her with a certain affectionate
observation and loving-kindness,--poor Mary! and yet with his heart full
of that other,--possessed by the enchantress all the time.
‘You are looking a little pale,’ he said, with that frank, affectionate
interest in her; ‘but you must not let my mother keep you too much with
her. She does not mean to be selfish, poor dear. You must run out and
see your friends, Mary, and get your roses back.’
‘He cares for my roses then,’ said mistaken Mary to herself, with a
flush of shy pleasure which restored them to her cheeks. But,--‘Indeed,
I am quite well, Ben; and I like to be with godmamma. How strange you
should tell me she is not selfish,--I who know her so well!’--was what
she said.
‘Perhaps better than I do,’ said Ben. ‘I think women know each other
best;’ and he stopped short with sudden gravity, and perhaps just a
lingering doubt of what Mary’s opinion might be of another. He meant to
ask her, but somehow he was embarrassed about it. It could wait for
another time, at least till they had finished their row. And they began
to talk of family matters, the familiar talk which is so pleasant in its
mild interest;--how old Sargent was having it all his own way with the
garden; how Willis the butler was tyrannical to the ladies; the little
_mots_ of the house, and its opinions upon things in general. And then
they reached the Swan’s Nest, which Mary had made a child’s romance
about once like little Ella in Mrs. Browning’s poem. The two knew every
water-lily and every flag, and the separate droop of every willow-branch
at that fairy nook.
‘I did not think you would have remembered,’ Mary said in her shy
delight. And they turned and floated down again with the oars laid
silent in the boat, and the sweet water plashing softly with a quiver
and ripple of sound and sunshine, so twined together that they seemed
but one, about its tiny bows. Even Ben was hushed, and charmed, and
softened by the exquisite tender stillness and brightness. Fancy what
poor Mary must have been, shut up so long in Mrs. Renton’s shaded room,
with one day of delight thus dropped unawares into her life!
They had reached the bank again, and were wandering slowly up the ascent
towards the house before the charm was broken. It was just as they
turned and stood still by mutual consent,--as everybody did who knew
that view,--to look down upon the river from between the two great
beeches, which framed it in, and made an ideal picture of the lovely
reality. There was an opening below among the trees, and a silvery nook,
with an island just appearing, a goodly bank opposite with groups of
sleek cattle, and in the distance Cookesley Church with its ivied tower.
The view was always perfect just there; a little ‘bit’ of nature’s own
composition, in which the trees, and cows, and the very swans, posed
themselves by instinct, as the most exquisite art would have posed them.
Many a time afterwards Mary Westbury looked at that scene, and felt
again the sudden twang of the bowstring and the quiver of the arrow in
her heart. That was the metaphor under which she represented it to
herself.
‘You have never been out of Berks, have you, Mary,’ said her cousin,
‘you home-keeping girl?--you were educated close by here, were you
not?’
‘What people call educated,’ said Mary, with her soft, happy laugh. ‘I
never learned anything. It was at Thornycroft, not more than ten miles
off. But it is so odd that you should remember, Ben.’
‘Do you recollect a Miss Tracy there?’ said Ben, with a slight
breathlessness,--the road was so steep; was that the cause?
‘Miss Tracy? Oh, you mean Millicent. What! do you know her?’ cried Mary,
turning round upon him. He was taken by surprise, and perhaps his face
betrayed him. At all events, she grew pale in a moment, poor child, and
leaned her arm against one of the beech-trees. That was the moment at
which she often thought the string of the bow twanged and the arrow came
home.
‘I have met her,’ said Ben;--‘that is, I have seen a good deal of her;
and she seemed to be fond of you.’
‘Millicent Tracy!’ repeated Mary, with a little tremulous movement. ‘Oh,
I don’t think she was fond of me.’
‘You do not seem, at least, to have been fond of her,’ said Ben, with a
little pique in his tone.
‘She was not in my set,’ said Mary, plucking up a little spirit. ‘We
were younger. She was so pretty,--oh, so pretty! We all thought there
never was any one like her. Is she as pretty now?’ Mary asked, with an
attempt at interest; but her tone was not so eager and hearty as her
words.
‘She is not pretty at all;--she is beautiful,’ said Ben, his passion
betraying itself in spite of him. And then they stood silent, looking
down on the river, and for some minutes not another word was said. It
was Ben who was the first to speak. The man was angry, after the fashion
of men, with the girl who up to this moment had been so sweetly ready to
adopt what tone he pleased to give the conversation. ‘I seem to have
been unfortunate in my subject,’ he said, turning abruptly to go in.
‘Miss Tracy, I see, cannot have been a favourite among the girls at
Thornycroft. She was too beautiful, I suppose.’
‘Indeed, no,’ said Mary, with a little indignation, following him. ‘We
were all very proud of her beauty. Though I don’t think we thought of
beauty. We thought she was very pretty,--oh, so pretty! No girl at
Thornycroft was ever so nice-looking; and nice too,’ she continued with
a hesitating attempt to please him. ‘I always did think that she was
nice, too.’
‘That was very good of you,’ Ben said, with a little scornful laugh; but
Mary was silent again, and grew frightened, and felt as if her heart
would break. What was Millicent Tracy to him? his cousin thought. If
this was all he had come home for, only to ask about such a girl as
that!--not for his mother at all, nor for Mary, nor for the sake of
home. The idea so disturbed her temper and patience that she had some
difficulty in keeping the ready tears from falling; and this, of course,
was going a great deal too far, for it was not for the sole purpose of
asking about Millicent that Ben had gone home.
From that moment a cloud fell over the shining day,--not in reality, for
the sun shone as bright as ever,--but upon the cousins, as they climbed
the winding path. All its exquisite greenness and intervals of sunshine
and shade,--all the play of light and colour about, the silvery gleam of
the river, the soft, full verdure behind,--were lost upon them. A jar
had struck into the magical harmony of the summer air. Mary, after the
first moment, recovering herself from that pang of mortification and
disappointment, began to struggle with herself for something to say.
What could she say? Millicent had not been popular at Thornycroft. She
had turned the heads of the young masters, and being new to the delights
of conquest, had encouraged them to make fools of themselves, and had
scandalised the entire community. She had tempted the curate, who was
the brother of Miss Thorny, the head of the establishment at
Thornycroft, into a flirtation, and broken his heart; and in consequence
of this feat had left the school abruptly. ‘Perhaps she was not so very
much to blame,’ Mary said to herself as she went painfully along by
Ben’s side, watching his averted face. ‘Men are such
fools;’--unconsciously she repeated in her innocence that sentiment
which was the fruit of Millicent’s experience;--‘they will do anything
for beauty.’ Probably it was their own doing. Could it be Millicent’s
fault if they went crazy about her lovely face? Thus the good girl
reasoned herself into tolerance. She made a great many little feints to
call Ben’s attention,--cleared her throat, dropped her gloves, tried
what she could, by every innocent artifice which occurred to her, to get
him to resume the interrupted conversation;--but Ben, with something of
the brutality of a big brother mingling, as was inevitable, with his
brotherly kindness, marched on and took no notice. She had to make a
faltering beginning herself without any aid from him.
‘Ben,’ she said, ‘you are not to think I did not like Millicent, or that
she was not very nice. I daresay it was not her fault. Everybody made a
fuss about her wherever she went;--she was so very pretty. I don’t think
it could have been her fault.’
‘Being pretty?’ said Ben, with the sneer that women hate.
‘You know I did not mean that,’ said Mary, injured. ‘I think it must
have been the gentlemen’s own doing. Mr. Thorny was very silly to think
she would ever have had him. I am sure that must have been his
foolishness. She so pretty and so clever, and he only a common curate,
you know;--just like other curates, nothing particular about him. It
must have been his own fault.’
‘I have not the advantage of knowing what you refer to,’ said Ben, with
the haughtiest assumption of indifference, though his temper had taken
fire and his pride was all in arms. A curate,--a common curate,--to have
been associated anyhow, by any means whatever, with Millicent! In his
heart he was furious, though he managed to keep some outward calm.
‘Oh, it was nothing,’ said Mary, faltering, and feeling that her attempt
at making up had not been successful,--‘only they said it was that that
threw him into a consumption. But it was not her fault,--it might have
happened to any of us,’ said Mary, with a sudden blush; for had it not
fallen to her lot, though she was no flirt and not even a beauty like
Millicent, to inflict a passing wound without knowing it on a curate of
her own?
Then Ben laughed, but it was a very unpleasant laugh. ‘When a lady
frowns a man can but die,’ he said. ‘How could he do less? I suppose
that is what you mean?’
‘Oh, Ben!’ cried Mary, with a hopeless appeal to his sense of justice.
But he only shrugged his shoulders and began to whistle, and walked the
rest of the way at such a pace that it was all she could do to keep up
with him. Not another word did he say to her on the subject, nor did he
pay any attention to her little faltering speeches. He whistled, which
was very rude of him; and, after a while, Mary, who had a spirit of her
own, grew indignant, and, if she did not whistle, did what was
equivalent,--she took up the air he was whistling, and sang it softly
with a pretty little voice. ‘I did not know you had been fond of music,
Ben,’ she said with a laugh; but it cost her a good cry when she got
into her own room. Ben, who was so superior, who had borne his trial so
nobly, who was going to work like a hero,--Ben, who had always been,
more than she knew, her own ideal of man,--to think that Millicent Tracy
with her pretty face----! ‘Why, even Laurie would have seen through
her!’ Mary said to herself, and wept with the poignant prick of
self-knowledge, which gives the chief bitterness to such a
discovery,--not self-esteem, but that indignant, sorrowful, honest
insight which, on such a provocation, reveals one’s worth to oneself in
pain and not in vanity. ‘Having known me, to decline on a range of lower
feelings and a narrower heart than mine!’ Mary did not say this, any
more than Ben had said of whose image his heart was full; but she felt
it with a sharp mingling of pride and humiliation. ‘Not that it can be
anything to me,’ she added aloud, to save her own credit, as it were,
with herself; and put on her prettiest dress, and was very cheerful and
amusing at dinner, when the mother was rather melancholy and had need of
enlivenment. Ben’s spirits had flagged, partly with the shock his pride
had received, and partly with the associations which began to creep over
him. The dinner-room, in which it was so strange to take his father’s
place; the old servants, who were connected so completely with the old
time; all the routine of the house, in which nothing was changed but one
thing,--affected the young man in spite of himself. He had been
defrauded, as it were, out of his natural grief for his father; and now
the mute eloquence of the vacant place seized upon him. So good a father
up to the last moment; so kind,--even at the last moment filled with
special compunction for Ben! Mr. Renton’s son felt, almost for the first
time, how much wisdom, and support, and guidance, how much tender
affection and watchful care, were lost to him. When his mother,
faltering, spoke, as to the boy she still felt him to be, of ‘your dear
papa,’ Ben fell back into the boy she thought him, and soft tears came
into his eyes. Perhaps the sadness did him more good than his former
mood of satisfaction; but it somewhat defeated his cousin Mary, who
meant to be gay, and prove to him that his enthusiasm for Millicent
Tracy was nothing to her. On the contrary, the soft-hearted, sympathetic
creature turned her pleasant eyes upon him, all shining with tears when
his change of mood became visible, and forgave him his Millicent, and
comforted herself that it was but a fancy; and they were all very
affectionate together, and somewhat pathetic, with that common grief
behind them and the common pang of parting before them, for the rest of
the night.
Yet when Ben went to his room, he paused on his way at the great window
on the staircase, from which all the noble gardens of the manor, and
the west wing, and the line of trees which overhung the river, were
visible, all ghostly and mysterious in the moonlight, and stood looking
out with a sudden flutter at his heart. His thoughts were not at home,
nor of the past. The question which suddenly flashed across his mind
was, Should he ever bring her here to be the mistress of it all? It was
the first time he had ever allowed himself to speculate upon the distant
future at the end of his seven years’ probation. Mrs. Renton had gone to
bed weeping, yet consoled by her son’s presence and sympathy; and Mary
was taking herself to task, in her maiden retirement, for having been
hard upon poor Ben; while Ben stood at the window looking out on the
moonlight, forgetting the very existence of these two, and asking
himself, with a thrill that ran through all his veins, Should he ever
bring her here? Mary’s hesitating story, her faint praise, her
deprecation of all intention to blame, even the curate,--contemptible
shadow!--angry as they had made him at the moment, had faded from his
thoughts. He seemed to see her in her stately beauty coming across the
lordly lawn. How lovely she was! Even the silly school-girls,
unimpassioned, feminine creatures, impervious to that influence, were
compelled to acknowledge it. What if she might stand with him here by
this very window, and look out on the moonlight some other night?
This was how Ben Renton went out upon the world,--in charity with his
own people, even with his father who had been so hard upon him; and
feeling, after all, that at five-and-twenty a man, even when
disinherited, with work in his hands to occupy him, fresh air to
breathe, and novel scenes to see, and energies to exercise in a big
spacious world where there was room to do something, had no particular
occasion to quarrel with life or fate. The thread of actual work, as
soon as he got it into his hands, had enabled him to trace his way out
of all the morbid labyrinths of solitary musing. Armida’s garden was
left behind for ever; but the witch, who had enchanted him and possessed
herself of his life, was so far from suffering by the change, that she
had developed in his imagination into a white angelic woman, worthy
reward of all labour. Poor, foolish Ben! And yet it could not have been
anything but a high nature which emerged from that six months’ mist of
self-inspection, bitterness, idleness, and insane passion, with at least
a true sense of the realities of his position, and a true love in his
heart.
And thus equipped he disappears from us for seven years into the vast
and troubled world.
CHAPTER XV.
KENSINGTON GORE.
Laurence Renton’s state of mind when he left the Manor immediately after
his father’s death was very different from that of his brother Ben. He
was a different man altogether, as will be seen. He had that unconscious
natural generosity of temper and unselfishness of disposition which is
more a woman’s quality than a man’s. By instinct, he put himself, as it
were, on the secondary level, and considered matters in general rather
as they affected other people. It was no virtue in him, and he did not
even know it. Such a disposition could scarcely have existed with a
passionate or energetic mind; and Laurie was not energetic. He could no
more have absorbed himself in a foolish passion as Ben had done, than he
could have set to work with the practical sense of his younger brother.
He was lazy Laurence under all circumstances; fond of philosophising
over his mischances, taking most things very quietly; and he had a
faculty of contenting himself with what was pleasant in whatsoever
aspect it might come, which is the very death of ambition in every
shape and form. He had occupied some rooms at Kensington, with a pretty
studio attached to them, in his father’s lifetime, when money was
plentiful. No wonder Mrs. Westbury had mourned over him, and denounced
so luxurious a mode of bringing up. He was of course a younger son, and
had no pretensions to lead an idle life. Providence seemed indeed to
have indicated a public office, or some such moderate occupation, which
would have left him time for his favourite dilettantism and required no
particular activity or exercise of intellect. But Laurence had been a
perplexing subject to deal with all his life. He had been one of those
trying boys who have no particular bent one way or another. He was a
bright, intelligent, indolent, inaccurate lad, utterly incapable of
dates or facts in general, but full of social qualities,--good-natured,
tender-hearted, ready to do anything for anybody. And then he had
travelled a little, and drifted among an artist set, and from that day
hoped and imagined himself capable of art. He had always had a certain
facility in drawing, and everybody knows how easy it is to glide into
the busy dawdling, the thousand pleasant trifles of occupation which
fill the time of an amateur. It seemed to Laurie, as it has seemed to
many another, that a life made beautiful by that faculty of discovering
beauty which the humblest artist prides himself on possessing,--and the
privilege of claiming a kind of membership with a noble craft,--was
superior to the loftiest stool and the most dignified desk even in a
Foreign Office. He was proud to call himself, as he often did, ‘a poor
painter;’ and, alas! a poor painter in the literal sense of the words
Laurie was. He had no genius, poor fellow! only a tender, amiable,
pleasant, little talent, which would have led him into verses had his
turn been literary. His friends and relations would have been more
deeply shocked still had they known what a toss-up it was whether
Laurie’s amateurship had taken the literary or artistic turn,--but
fortunately it was the latter; and as he made pretty little sketches,
and had given them away with charming liberality, and harmed nobody, it
was only the high moralists, such as his Aunt Lydia, who found any fault
with what he was fond of calling his ‘trade.’ And there was this to be
said in his favour, that he had no expensive tastes, and that, given
this mode of idleness, which he called work, Laurie’s was about as
harmless a life as a young man could lead;--‘especially as he will never
need to maintain himself,’ people had been used to say.
All this, however, had changed for him as for his brother. Even Laurie’s
modest establishment could not be kept on two hundred a-year; and he had
been used to be liberal, and manage his money matters with an easy hand,
always ready to help a comrade in distress. So that it was absolutely
necessary for him now to work. He went into his Kensington rooms with
feelings not unlike those which moved Ben when he made his melancholy
inventory of his things at the Albany. There were accumulations of all
kinds in the place. Bits of old carpet, bits of ‘drapery,’ bits of still
life, a little china, a little of everything; and a north light, perfect
of its kind, in the studio. He had fitted it all up to suit himself,
with a hundred handy devices,--stands for his portfolios, velvet-covered
shelves, all sorts of nooks for the artistic trumpery which is supposed
to be necessary in a studio; and the tiny little sitting-room into which
the studio opened had a queer, little, round bow-window, looking into
the Park, which was something like a box at the opera without the music.
All the world streamed under Laurie’s bow-window coming and going, and
many a nod and pleasant smile reached the artist.--save the mark!--in
his velvet coat, as he came now and then from behind his fresh flowers
to look out upon the fashion and beauty, sometimes with a palette in his
hand or maul-stick, on which he leaned as he looked out. It gave him a
certain pleasure to pose in this professional way. Perhaps it was as
well for the consistency of Laurie’s philosophy that it was September
when he came back to Kensington Gore. He went and sat down in his
bow-window, and nobody passed,--nobody except the unknown people who
stream about London streets all day long, and of whom no one takes any
notice. No doubt there were human figures enough; but the trees were
very shabby in the Park, and the grass, as far as he could see, was
burnt to a pale yellow, and two nursemaids and one Guardsman had all the
expanse to themselves. In these circumstances, perhaps, it was easier to
take leave of his pleasant little hermitage. He sat in his window and
looked carelessly out, and mused on the change. A pot of China asters,
showy enough, yet betokening the winter which approached, replaced all
the roses and bright geraniums which generally filled the stand. The
season was over, and this kind of thing was over, and the first part of
life.
Well! he said to himself,--and no particular harm either. Life was not
Kensington Gore. Many admirable artists had lived and died in Fitzroy
Square; and there was Turner in Queen Anne Street,--not that one would
choose to be like Turner. After all, it was but for half the year that
Kensington Gore was desirable. When people were out of town, what did it
matter? And then a smile crossed his face as it occurred to him that
henceforward he was not likely to be one of those who go out of town.
Looking down, his vacant eye caught the succession of figures passing
along the pavement; many very well-dressed, well-looking people, not
having the least appearance of being outcasts of society. And yet such
they must be, or else they would scarcely be there in such numbers in
September. Then he went on to reflect what heaps of people he himself
knew who lived in London all the year round, with the exception of a
month or two, or a week or two, somewhere for health’s sake. Most
painters were of this class. It was but identifying himself more
entirely with the art he had chosen; and in that point of view it would
be good for him. An amateur is never good for anything, thought Laurie;
but a man who has to devote himself to his work without any vain
interruptions has a chance to make something of it. Then a gleam of
pleasant and conscious vanity, for which he smiled at himself, flitted
over his meditations. He could almost see the people pausing before a
picture in the Academy,--or two or three pictures for that matter,--why
not?--when he had nothing else to do,--and telling each other how the
painter had been maltreated by fortune, and how this was the result of
it,--hard work and success, and substantial pudding and sweetest
praise;--ay, and a reputation very different from that of the dilettante
who strolled from his studio to the bow-window, and looked out in his
professional costume to receive the salutations of the ladies. ‘There is
poor Laurie Renton, who has been so foolish as to take to art and
nonsense; but, fortunately, he will never need to be dependent on it.’
That was what the ladies used to say as they passed. How different it
would be when they stood before the great picture in the Academy, and
read the name in the catalogue. He saw the expression on certain faces
as they read that name. ‘What, Laurie Renton! who would have thought he
could ever have been good for anything?’ This was what Laurie called
thinking over his changed affairs.
There was one drop of bitterness, however, in his cup which had not been
in Ben’s. We have said that when Mrs. Westbury visited Laurie in his
room on the night of his father’s funeral, there were some little notes
lying on his table, over which he was making himself miserable, with his
face hidden in his hands. It is not necessary to mention her name, as
she has, unfortunately, nothing to do with this story; but the fact was
that there had been somebody whose little notes made Laurie’s heart
beat. They had been the simplest kind of letters:--‘Dear Mr.
Renton,--Mamma bids me say that she will be very glad if you will come
to dinner on Thursday;’--nothing more: and yet he had tied them up very
carefully together and preserved them,--the foolish fellow,--as if they
were pearls and diamonds.
It was one of those might-have-beens, which are in every life. She had
very good blood, and very sweet looks, and that perfect homely training
of an English girl which people try to persuade us has vanished from the
world,--had we not eyes of our own to see otherwise. She knew no Latin
nor Greek, but she was more brightly intelligent than her brother, for
instance, who was a fellow of All Souls. And she had not a penny; and
if Laurie Renton had come in, as seemed likely, to as much money as
would have produced him 1500_l._ or even 1000_l._ a-year----!
Alas! that is how things happen in this life. Laurie was not the kind of
man, like Ben, to dare the impossible and keep his love at all hazards.
He knew well enough it would not do. Years must pass before he painted
that picture at which his friends should stare in the Academy; and in
the interval no doubt some one would come in who could give her
everything she ought to have, and for whom her sweet face would
brighten, and not for him. This had been the first thought that had
occurred to Laurie when his father’s will was read. He had seen her
standing in her bridal veil beside some one else, five minutes after the
sound of the lawyer’s voice had died on his ear. It had wrung his heart,
but he had said, ‘God bless her!’ all the same. Never word of love had
passed between them. When the returning season brought her back to the
little house in Mayfair, she would wonder, perhaps sigh, perhaps ask
what had become of Mr. Renton? But by that time Laurie knew his little
boat would have been so long gone down under the sea that there would
not be even a circle left on the smooth, treacherous water. It might
cost her a little gentle expectation or disappointment,--a wistful look
here and there for the face that was not to be seen again. Unselfish as
he was, Laurie hoped it would cost her as much as that; but it would not
cost her more. And long before the seven years were out or his great
picture exhibited in the Academy--to which, perhaps, her friends would
object as much as to his poverty--she would be some one else’s wife. And
it would be better for her. She had always been too good for Laurie.
Some one who could give her rank, wealth, whatever heart could
desire----! Poor Laurie’s heart contracted with a sudden pang, and
forced the moisture to his eyes. He was only four-and-twenty, poor
fellow! But it was to be so. Not his the force or the passion to resist
fate. It was one of the might-have-beens which gave so strange, so
shadowy a character to this existence. Strange to stand amid the
unalterable laws of nature and see what caprice moves the fate of the
chief of nature’s works. If Aunt Lydia had held her peace! If Mr. Renton
had not changed his mind! We are such stuff as dreams are made of!
Laurie said to himself as he turned from the scentless China asters in
his window and the empty Park, and this concluded phase of life.
But still things might have been worse. This overthrow might have
happened a year ago, at the moment when Laurie had pledged all his
credit, and given all his money to Geoffrey Sutton,--poor old
fellow!--after the brigands sacked his little villa up on Lake Nemi,
and took everything he had in the world. When old Geoff was going about,
wild and penniless, girt round with pistols, to revenge his loss,
without thinking that his life might go instead of Masaccio’s, and that
nobody would be left to pay his friends at home! What a business it
would have been had this happened then! But in the meantime Geoff’s old
uncle had been so obliging as to die, and all was right again. Or had it
occurred that time when Laurie took his last twenty pounds out of the
bank to send Harry Wood to Rome to nurse his lungs and pursue his
studies! Fortunately at this moment there was nothing in hand to make
matters worse than they were by nature, which Laurie reflected was the
greatest good luck,--a chance which he scarcely deserved, imprudent as
he was. So that on the whole, except for the necessity of leaving
Kensington Gore, it would not make much difference. That he should feel
a little, of course;--everything was so handy, so nice, so bright, and
Mrs. Brown understood his ways. But after all, what did it matter where
a man lived? A good light to paint by, any sort of a clean room to sleep
in, and a friendly face now and then to look in upon his work. Of that
last particular he was always certain. Indeed, Laurie was fully aware
that among his artist friends he was likely to be rather more than less
popular when he ceased to be a ‘swell’ and amateur.
Such were the young man’s thoughts when he began to feel the ground
under his feet again after his overthrow. Poor Ben! how hard it would be
upon him! but after all for himself it was no such terrible business.
Art is long; and so, for that matter, is life too, at four-and-twenty,
or at least appears so, which comes to much the same thing. Laurie for
his part would have been very glad to have stood by his brother and
given him all the succour that brotherly sympathy can give, had the
elder been so inclined; but, to tell the truth, Ben had been morose when
they parted, and had requested to be left alone, and that no attempt
should be made to condole with or help him until he himself took the
initiative. Laurie went and made a sketch of the three fairy princes
setting out on their travels, to solace himself when he had ‘thought
over’ as above for a sufficiently long period. Such little sketches were
the best things he ever did, his friends said. There was young Frank
marching in advance on a noble steed, with the sun shining on his helmet
and all his gorgeous apparel; and Laurie himself following after with
his easel on his shoulder, his portfolios, half-finished canvases,
palettes, colour-boxes, and accompanying trumpery hung about his person.
Ben came last, with his coat buttoned, and his face set against the
wind. Poor Ben! it was more difficult to make out how he would take it
than how it would affect the others. Thus Laurie, even in the first
shock, made light of his own share. There were three beautifully
distinct paths on which the three were setting out. In Frank’s case the
road was continuous, and led through sundry stormy indications of
battle, and fantastic,--supposed,--Indian towers, to where a coronet
hung in mid air,--the infallible reward, as everybody knows, of
energetic young soldiers who leave the Guards for the line. In Laurie’s
own path, the glorious cupolas of the National Gallery, with laughing
little imps fondly embracing each pepper-pot, closed the vista. These
were easy of execution; but what was to be the end of Ben’s painful way?
It lay up hill in his brother’s sketch, a perfect alp of ascent. But on
the height, though so austere, stood Renton Manor in full sunshine, at
one side; while on the other appeared a stately Tudor interior, full of
gentlemen in their hats, where some one with the features of the
pedestrian below was addressing the interested audience. ‘For of course
that is how it will end,’ Laurie said to himself; and yet his heart
melted, poor foolish fellow, over the rocks and glaciers in his
brother’s way.
‘And I wonder which of them will meet the White Cat,’ Laurie said to
himself, hanging over his drawing-block with his pencil in hand, giving
here and there a touch; ‘Frank, perhaps, as becomes a soldier; but I
wish it might be Ben.’ And then he bent over his own part of the sketch,
and did something to the imps on the National Gallery and sighed. With
that soft ache in his heart, poor fellow! enchanted primrose-paths were
not for him. So the next thing he did was to plant a lovely little ideal
figure on the rocks through which his elder brother was to make his way,
beckoning to Ben and cheering him on. That was how it should be. He
spent a great deal of time over his drawing, and took pleasure in the
comic burdens which were suspended from his own person,--brushes
dangling at his heels, a lay figure suspended over his shoulder, and a
little dog barking in amaze at the wonderful apparition. He laughed over
it just as he had sighed. Fate was good to Laurie, who could find some
way of extracting a little pleasure, a little amusement, out of
everything. It was quite late in the afternoon when he put his
drawing-block aside, placing it on the mantel-piece, where the drawing
might catch his eye whenever he returned, and took his hat and went out.
He was going to ask advice of old Welby, an old R.A. of his
acquaintance, as to what course of study he should adopt, and what would
be best for him in general, in the way of art. ‘And there’s the padrona
as well, who understands a fellow better than Welby,’ he added to
himself as he went out; and perhaps that was why he put one of Mrs.
Brown’s monthly roses,--for lack of a better,--in his button-hole as he
passed. For he was a young fellow who was fond of the society of women,
and liked to appear well in their eyes, notwithstanding that ache in his
heart.
CHAPTER XVI.
WELBY, R.A.
Old Welby, R.A., lived in No. 375 Fitzroy Square. He had lived there or
thereabouts all his life; but his immediate dwelling-place was one which
he had not occupied for above a year or two, and to which he had come
out of charitable, friendly motives which he would have denied
reluctantly had he been accused of them. It was poor Severn’s house, and
Severn’s widow never would have been able to keep it but for old Welby,
who had suddenly become dissatisfied with his rooms, and discovered that
the ground-floor of 375 was the very thing he wanted. The old gentleman
was very well off and very famous; but he was a bachelor, and had never
aspired to the honour and worry of a house of his own. He was a thorough
painter, steeped to the lips in that theory of life which is more
destructive of social follies and more wedded to liberty than any other.
Of all things in this world there was nothing he cared so much for as
art. He loved the artist and the artist hand wherever he met with them,
though he did not always display his feeling. Mere intelligence, even,
when it was bright and genuine, the uncultivated eye that perceived an
effect, though in utter ignorance of its why or wherefore, pleased him;
but he was very little interested in fine people, or about enthusiasts
who would come and rave to him of his lovely pictures. ‘And had never
found out the meaning of one of them, sir,’ he would say with a little
snort of indignation. He had had his day of society, and had been much
petted as an original as well as a great painter, but had borne his
distinction very soberly, with a head it proved impossible to turn; and
now having surmounted that ordeal, he lived as he liked living, seeing
such people as he liked, going out when he pleased, dining when he
pleased, dressing according to his own taste, with an utter disregard of
anybody’s opinions. He had taken to Laurie as he seldom took to young
men, and it was of him that our amateur went to seek counsel,--one of
the most foolish things, had Laurie but known it, that he ever did in
his life.
The ground-floor of the mansion in Fitzroy Square consisted of the
dining-room in the front, an immense dark room with sober-toned walls
and great pictures in heavy old frames, which was Welby’s sitting-room.
The room beyond, which opened into it by folding doors, was a bare,
scantily-furnished ante-chamber, where strangers, and models, and
Philistines in general, were sent to wait his pleasure: beyond that
again, with a separate passage of its own, was the studio, which was not
a part of the original building, but had been added to it by one of the
many artists who had inhabited the house. Still farther on, following
the plan of the original dwelling-place, was Mr. Welby’s bedroom, which
was not very large, and looked into the dingy, smoky London garden, with
a few trees in it which made your fingers black when you touched them,
but which, nevertheless, flourished and threw out their fresh leaves
every spring as if they had been in the depths of the country. It was
Forrester, Mr. Welby’s man, who was almost as great an authority on art
as himself, who opened the door to Laurie with frank salutation, and
showed him into the studio, where his master was. ‘Mr. Renton, sir, come
to see you,’ he said with the pleasant confidence that he was making an
agreeable announcement, and lingered a moment in the room to shake down
the contents of a portfolio which bulged inharmoniously and wounded his
sensitive eye. ‘I told you, sir, as them Albert Doorers you went and
bought was too big for any of the books,’ he said with a gentle
reproach. ‘Then go and order some bigger,’ retorted his master; and with
this little episode Laurie’s salutations were broken. Mr. Welby was not
at work. He was looking over some tiny little scraps of drawings which
were worth a great deal more than their weight in gold, carefully
examining a frayed edge here and there, mounting them with his own
hands, caressing them as if they had been his children. The studio was
a great, solemn, stately place, not like Laurie’s little shed. There was
a rich old mossy Turkish carpet on the floor, and wonderful pieces of
old art-furniture worth a fortune in themselves. Two or three easels
stood about, one bearing a picture, set there clearly for purposes of
exhibition; and another honoured by a pure white square of canvas
without a line upon it. The picture was not Welby’s own. He worked but
little now-a-days, and that little only when the inspiration was upon
him. It was by an old Italian master little known, who was the R.A.’s
special pet and protégé. He had been pointing out its beauties to some
bewildered visitors only that morning, who would much rather have seen a
Welby, even in the most fragmentary condition, than the curious, quaint
Angelichino which required a very profound artistic taste to understand.
Nobody knew whether old Welby’s admiration for his pet master was
genuine, or was his way of jeering at a partially educated amateur
public. That and his pure white canvas were his favourite show-pieces,
and these accordingly were the most prominent objects in the studio when
Laurie went in. The painter himself was a little man with refined
features, but many wrinkles; his eyes were very keen and bright under
the shaggy mobile eyebrows with which he almost talked, and the colour
on his cheek was as fresh as a winter apple. His hair was almost white,
and so was his beard, but yet he was not old. He had a black velvet
bonnet on his white locks,--not a skull-cap, but a round bonnet such as
the Dutch painters wear in their pictures,--and a velvet coat; and was
not above adding,--it was apparent,--a skilful touch to the
picturesqueness of his appearance by means of dress. Such was the man
who held out both his hands to Laurie, with a half foreign warmth
mingled with his English calm. ‘Ah, Renton, I am glad to see you,’ he
said; ‘a young fellow like you in September is a rarity: and I wanted
some one to look at my little Titians. I picked them up in Venice for an
old song. There is where you boys should go. Such lights, such
reflexions! Look here, my dear fellow,--what do you say to that?’
Laurie gazed and applauded as was expected of him; but somehow, though
he had been moderately cheerful before, the sight of this life which was
no life filled him suddenly with an uncalled-for depression. To go wild
about a scrap of paper with some pencilled lines made how many hundred
years ago, and never to think of the lives getting wrecked, the hearts
getting broken round you! This was what Laurie suddenly thought,--with
great injustice, as was natural,--and felt disposed to walk away again
on the spot without betraying the troubles of which the other was
unconscious. ‘The padrona would have known before I had said a word,’ he
said to himself in his heart.
Whether Mr. Welby, whose eye was keen enough, whatever his sympathy
might be, read his young friend’s thoughts at once it would be
impossible to tell. If he did he showed no feeling for them. He went on
calmly to the end of his new acquisitions, pointing out their beauties;
and then when Laurie was sick and faint, and felt that he hated Titian,
put them all together in a most leisurely way and locked them up in a
drawer of a beautiful ebony cabinet all inlaid with silver. Then he
returned to his visitor and drew a chair to a table and pointed to one
near him. ‘Come and tell me all about it,’ he said with the most sudden
change in his tone.
‘Ah, you have heard!’ cried Laurie, half indignant, half mollified.
‘I have heard nothing,’ said the painter; ‘but I see you have brought a
heap of troubles to cast down at your neighbour’s door. Come, let us
have them out.’ Whereupon poor Laurie told his story, brightening as he
told it. Curiously enough, when he brought himself face to face with his
misfortunes, the burden of them always was lightened for him,--a case so
much unlike what it is with ordinary men. When he stood at a distance
from them, so to speak, they swelled into great mystic, devouring
giants; but they were only manageable human difficulties, and no more,
when he faced them near. ‘I must take to work in earnest,’ said Laurie,
‘that’s all, so far as I am concerned. It is worse for Ben; but
fortunately, as I have a profession----’
‘Have you a profession?’ Mr. Welby broke in abruptly, looking Laurie,
without a shadow of a smile, in the face, as if moved by genuine
curiosity; and the young man gave a little nervous smile.
‘You thought I was amateur all over,’ he said, ‘and I daresay I deserved
it. But don’t tear me to pieces altogether; that stage of existence is
past.’
‘I asked for simple information,’ said the R.A. ‘If you have a
profession now is the time to stick to it. I thought you were only a
virtuoso; but if you have really been brought up to anything----’
‘You make me feel very small,’ said poor Laurie, blushing like a girl up
to his hair. ‘I have not been brought up to it, I know. I have been a
virtuoso merely, but I am not too old to begin to work in earnest. And
there is nothing I love like art.’
‘Art!’ said Mr. Welby, with great strain and commotion of his eyebrows.
He gave his shoulders a little shrug, and he talked volumes with those
shaggy brows. Laurie felt himself scolded, pushed aside as a puny
pretender.
‘I did not mean to say anything so very presumptuous,’ he said with
momentary youthful petulance, in answer to this silent lecture; and then
added, with equally sudden youthful compunction, ‘I beg your pardon. I
do want your advice.’
‘Art!’ repeated the R.A. with a little snort. ‘You had much better take
to a crossing at once. I went at it, sir, when I was twelve years old. I
never had a thought in my noddle but pictures. I’ve gone here and there
and everywhere to study my trade; and after fifty years of it, sir,’
cried the Academician, springing suddenly to his feet, seizing a canvas
which stood against the wall and thrusting it upon one of the vacant
easels up to Laurie,--‘look at that!’
It was the beginning of a sketch half smeared over. One exquisite pair
of eyes, looking out as from a mist of vague colour, seemed to look
reproachfully upon their creator; but there certainly was an arm and leg
also visible, of which Laurie felt like poor Andrea in Mr. Browning’s
wonderful poem, that if he had a piece of chalk----. Welby, R.A. was
growing old. He knew it perfectly, and perhaps in his soul was not
sorry; but when he saw the signs of it on his canvas it went to his
heart.
‘Look at that!’ he said, with a sort of savage triumph; ‘drawing any lad
in the Academy would be ashamed of!--after fifty years as hard work as
ever man had. I might have been Lord Chancellor in those fifty years. I
might have sat on the wool-sack or been Governor of India; and here I
stand, a British painter, not able to draw the tibia! By Jove, sir, a
man would need to be trained to bear mortification before he could stand
that!’
‘I should think you might laugh at it if any man could,’ said Laurie,
feeling half disposed to laugh himself; but he had too true an eye to
attempt to contradict his master.
‘I can’t laugh at failure,’ said Mr. Welby, snatching the sketch he had
just exhibited off the easel and thrusting it back into its place
against the wall. ‘I had some people here to-day who would have given me
a heap of money for that piece of idiocy. What do they care? It would
have been a Welby, no matter what else it was. Welby in his drivelling
stage, the critics would have called it, and just as good for a specimen
of the master as any other. And that is what a man comes to, my dear
fellow, after fifty years--of art!’
‘Yes,’ said Laurie, with the confidence which he had as a young man of
the world, and not as an art student; ‘I don’t say anything about the
tibia, for you know best; but to put a soul into a smeared bit of canvas
is what no Lord Chancellor in the world could do; and you know quite
well it would have made any young fellow’s fortune to have painted that
pair of eyes.’
‘Eyes! Stuff!’ said the R.A., but he took back the canvas again and
looked at it with a softened expression. ‘The short and long of it is,
my dear boy,’ he said, ‘that Art is a hard mistress even to those who
serve her all their lives; and you have done no more than flirt with her
yet. Is there anything else open to you? You were quite right to come to
me for advice. Nobody knows better the shipwrecks that have been made by
art. Why, you cannot come into this house, sir, without feeling what an
uncertain syren she is. There was poor Severn, as good a fellow as ever
breathed. I don’t say he could ever have been Lord Chancellor; but he
might have made a very respectable attorney, perhaps, or merchant, or
shoemaker, or something; and here he’s gone and died, the fool, at
forty, leaving all those children, and not a penny, all along of art.’
‘But what do you say of the padrona?’ said Laurie, kindling into a
little subdued enthusiasm. ‘What else could she have done? What would
have become of the children?’
‘They would have gone to the workhouse, sir, and there would have been
an end,’ said the Academician, sternly. ‘The padrona, as you call
her--and, by Jove! had I been Severn, I’d have shut her up sooner than
let a parcel of young fellows talk of her like that. Well, then, Mrs.
Severn--as we’ll call her, if you please--the young woman has a pretty
talent, and her husband taught her after a fashion how to use it. And
her pictures sell--at present. But how long do you think it will be
before everybody is stocked with those pretty groups of children?
They’re very pretty, I don’t deny; and sometimes there’s just a touch
that shows, if she had time, if she had not to work for daily bread, if
she wasn’t a woman, and could be properly educated, why that she might
do something with it which----. But everything is against her, poor
soul! and she’s not wise enough to make hay while the sun shines; and
when the sun has done shining, I wish you would tell me what the poor
thing is to do?’
‘I hope the sun will shine as long as she needs it,’ said Laurie,
warmly.
‘Ah! hope, I dare say; so do I. But that’s as much as wishing she may
die early, like him,’ said Mr. Welby, rubbing his eyelid. ‘It can’t
last, my dear fellow; and that’s why I say the workhouse at once, and
have done with it. But anyhow. Mrs. Severn is no example for you. She
was made for work, that woman. As long as she has her baby to carry
about at nights, and her boys to make a row, and that child Alice, with
her curls--why the woman is a tiger for work, I tell you. But you are
made of different matter. And besides,’ said the R.A., with the faintest
twist of a smile about his lip, ‘a woman may content herself with the
homely sort of work she can do; but a young fellow aims at high art--or
he’s a muff if he don’t.’ The old man concluded with a little
half-affectionate fierceness, softening towards Laurie, who was
everybody’s favourite, and who was thus affronted, stimulated, and
solaced in a breath.
‘Perhaps I am a muff,’ said Laurie, laughing. ‘I am inclined to think
so, sometimes. I am not sure that I want to go in for high art. I want
to master my profession as a profession, as I might go and eat in the
Temple. I am not too old for that,’ he said, wistfully, giving his
adviser one of those half-feminine, appealing glances which never come
amiss from young eyes.
Once more the R.A. became pantomimically eloquent. He shrugged his
shoulders, he shook his head, he delivered whole volumes of remonstrance
from his eyebrows. Then, after a few minutes of this mute animadversion,
suddenly put his head between his hands, and stared right into Laurie’s
eyes across the table. ‘Let us hear what chances you have otherwise,’ he
said. ‘I beg your pardon for insinuating such a thing, but hasn’t your
family some sort of connexion with--trade?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Laurie. ‘You need not beg my pardon. It is too big a
connexion to be ashamed of--Renton, Westbury, and Co., at Calcutta, and
there’s a house in Liverpool, I believe. Ben ought to have been sent
out, had we stuck to the traditions of the family. It has been in
existence for a hundred and fifty years.’
‘Well, then, suppose you go out in place of Ben,’ said Mr. Welby,
musingly, as he might have asked him to take physic; upon which Laurie
laughed, and grew rather red.
‘My cousin, Dick Westbury, went in Ben’s place,’ he said;--‘the very
sort of fellow to make a merchant of. You might as well tell me to go
and stand on my head.’
‘If I could make all the money by it that those fellows do, I should not
mind standing on my head,’ said Laurie’s counsellor, reprovingly. ‘Why
shouldn’t you be “the very sort” as well? I don’t see that any
particular talent is required. A good head, sir, and close attention,
and a knowledge of the multiplication-table. But perhaps they did not
teach you that at Eton?’ Mr. Welby added, with a gentle sneer, such as
he loved.
‘If they did, I have forgotten it years ago,’ said Laurie. ‘Indeed it
would not do. You know it would not do. A fellow has to be brought up to
it; and besides, I shouldn’t go if I were asked,’ he added, with a
sudden cloud on his face.
‘That settles the question,’ said his adviser. ‘You are a fool, my dear
fellow; but I thought as much. Well, then, there are all the Government
offices;--couldn’t your friends get you into one of them? The very thing
for you, sir. Not too much to do, and plenty of time to do it in. You
could keep up your studio still.’
‘But you forget the competitive examination,’ cried Laurie, just as his
brother Ben had replied to a similar suggestion. ‘I don’t know Julius
Cæsar from Adam,’ he said, laughing. ‘I have not an idea which Göthe it
was that discovered printing. I can’t tell whereabouts are the Indian
Isles. They’d pluck me as fast as look at me. You forget that we’re
high-minded, and that influence is no good now.’
‘Confound it!’ said Mr. Welby, with energy, pausing to find something
else more feasible. Then he bent confidentially across the table,
coaxing, almost appealing, to his intractable neophyte. ‘My dear fellow,
what do you say to literature?’ said the R.A. in his softest tone. Upon
which Laurie burst into uncontrollable laughter.
‘I see no occasion for laughter,’ the Academician continued, half
offended. ‘Why shouldn’t you write as well as another? I assure you,
sir, I know half-a-dozen men who write, and they have not an ounce of
brains among them. All you require is the knack of it. They tell me they
make heaps of money; and it does not matter what lies you tell, or how
much idiocy you give vent to,--especially about art,’ he said, with
sudden fierceness. ‘And, to be sure, in this beautiful age of ours
everybody reads. I don’t see why you should not go in for the newspapers
or the magazines, or something. There is no study wanted for that;
there’s the beauty of it. The more nonsense you talk the more people
like it. And so far as I can see, it’s as easy to talk nonsense on paper
as in company; easier, indeed, for there’s nobody to contradict you. All
you want is the knack. I know the editor of the “Sword,” my dear fellow.
I’ll get you an engagement on that.’
‘But I never wrote two sentences in my life,’ said Laurie; ‘and, as for
literature, it cannot be less uncertain than art.’
‘Quite a different thing, my dear fellow,’ said the R.A., eagerly; ‘not
one in fifty, let us say, knows a picture when he sees it. I might say
one in a hundred. Whereas everybody, I suppose, understands the rubbish
in the papers; everyone reads it, at least, which comes to the same
thing. I know men who are making their thousands a-year. It is only
getting the knack of it.’
Laurie gave a faint laugh; but the fun had by this palled upon him. For
a moment he covered his face with his hands. It was part of his
temperament to have these moments of impatience and disgust with
everything. Then Mr. Welby got up and began to walk about the room in
some excitement. ‘Confound the fellow, he will do nothing one tells
him!’ he said. But after a while the old painter came back to his seat,
and was very kind. He entered into the question, more gravely, even with
a certain melancholy. He pointed out to him, again, how many wrecks
there were on all the coasts, of men who had mistaken their profession,
and gave him an impressive sketch of all the toils he ought to go
through ere he could worthily bear the name of painter. ‘And, after all,
find yourself like me, baffled by the tibia!’ he cried, with a kind of
passion. But in this talk Laurie recovered his spirits. His friend, in
his compunction, gave him practical advice which would have been of the
highest importance to any beginner. ‘I warn you against it all the
same,’ he said, working his eyebrows like the old-fashioned telegraph.
But Laurie took the information and the advice without the warning, and
went away, once more seeing in a vision that picture on the line in the
Academy with Laurence Renton’s name to it, and a crowd of his fine
friends wondering around.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE PADRONA.
When Laurie left Mr. Welby’s studio he had not, however, satisfied
himself either with No. 375, Fitzroy Square, or with the advice on art
subjects which he had come to seek. Old Forrester replied to his inquiry
if Mrs. Severn was at home with a benevolent smile:--‘It ain’t often as
she’s anywhere else, sir,’ said that authority. ‘I never see such a lady
to work,--and a-singing at it, as if it was pleasure. Them’s the sort,
Mr. Renton, for my money,’ the old man added with enthusiasm. ‘Master,
he’s ready to swear at it sometimes, which ain’t consistent with art.’
‘Don’t you think so?’ said Laurie. ‘But when art becomes a passion, you
know----’
‘I don’t hold with passion,’ said Forrester. ‘It stands to reason, Mr.
Renton, that a thing as is to hang for ages and ages on a wall, didn’t
ought to have no violence about it. I hate to see them poor things
a-hurting of themselves for centuries. You look at ’em, sir,’ he added,
pointing to an old picture, in which the action was somewhat violent,
which hung in the hall; ‘they couldn’t do that nohow, not if they were
paid millions for it. Me and Shaw was talking it over the last time he
was here. I don’t hold with that sort of passion, not in a picture. And
I don’t always hold with master himself, Mr. Renton, between you and me.
He’s been swearing hawful, sir, over that poor tibbie there. And what
business has any man, sir, to have his tibbie in such a hattitude? It’s
hoisted right round, nigh out of its socket. I wouldn’t do it, not for
no money, if it was me.’
‘But you have no such fault to find with Mrs. Severn,’ said Laurie, who,
in the impatience of youthful criticism, had made a similar observation
to himself.
‘Bless you, sir, there’s never nothing out of harmony in them groups,’
said Forrester; ‘and easy, too, to tell why. Not as I’m a-making light
of her heye; she’s got a fine heye for a lady, sir,--in
composition;--but, seeing it’s her own little things as is the models,
would she put ’em in hattitudes to hurt ’em, Mr. Renton? You may take
your oath as a lady wouldn’t. Master, he pays his models, and he don’t
care. Will you walk up, or will I go and say you’re here?’
‘I think I may go without being announced,’ said Laurie, who was a
little proud of the _petites entrées_, though it was only to a humble
house. As he went up the great, dingy staircase he put his fingers
lightly through his hair, and looked with some dismay at the limp
pinkness of the rose in his button-hole. It was hanging its head, as
roses will when they feel the approach of frost in the air. There is a
curious dinginess, which is not displeasing, in those old-fashioned
houses. The walls were painted in a faint grey-green; the big stairs had
a narrow Turkey carpet, very much worn, upon them, and went winding up
the whole height of the house to a pale skylight in the roof. A certain
size, and subdued sense, of airiness, and quiet, and space was in the
house, though London raged all around, like a great battle. The
arrangement of the first floor was much like that of Mr. Welby’s
apartments. There was a great shadowy, dingy drawing-room, with three
vast windows, always filled with a kind of pale twilight,--for it was
the shady side of the Square,--and opening from that, by folding-doors,
a second room, which did duty as Mrs. Severn’s dining-room; and behind
that, again, the studio. The door of the dining-room was open, and
Laurie paused, and went half in as he passed. The children were there
with their daily governess, who was, poor soul! almost at the end of her
labours. She was struggling hard to keep their attention to the last
half of the last hour when the intruder’s head thrust in at the door
made further control impossible. There were two small boys, under ten,
and one little creature with golden locks, seated at the feet of the
eldest of the family, who was working at the window. ‘Alice, with her
curls,’ was almost too big for Miss Hadley’s teaching. She was seated in
that demure, soft dignity of the child-woman, with all the importance of
an elder sister, working at little Edith’s frock; a girl who rarely said
anything, but thought the more; not beautiful, for her features were not
regular, but with lovely, thoughtful brown eyes, and a complexion so
sweet in its varying colour that it felt like a quality of the heart,
and one loved her for it. Her curls were what most people of the outside
world knew her by. In these days of _crée_ locks and elaborate
hair-dressing, Alice’s soft, silken, perfect curls, nestling about her
pretty neck, softly shed behind her ears, were distinction enough for
any girl. They were chestnut,--that chestnut, with the gold in it, which
comes next to everybody’s favourite colour in everybody’s
estimation;--and there was a silken gloss upon them which was
old-fashioned, but very sweet to see, once in a way. She sat,--in the
perfectly unobtrusive dress of modern girlhood; simple frock up to the
throat, little white frill, tiny gold locket, without even a ribbon on
her hair,--against the afternoon light in the window, just raising her
eyes with a smile in them to Laurie, and lifting up one slender finger
by way of warning. ‘Mamma is in the studio,’ said Alice, under her
breath. He thought he had never seen a prettier picture than that little
interior he had peeped into. Miss Hadley was not bad-looking, Laurie
decided. She had keen black eyes under those deep brows, and not a bad
little figure. And little Frank, with such a despairing languor over his
soft, round, baby face; and Edith, all crumpled up like a dropped rose
by Alice’s feet; and the light slanting in through the big window,
trying and failing to penetrate the dimness of the grey-green walls, all
covered with pictures. Everything was in the shade, even little Edith,
all overshadowed by her sister’s dress and figure;--an afternoon
picture, with every tone subdued, and a touch of that weariness upon all
things which comes with the waning light;--a weariness which would
vanish as soon as it was dark enough to have lights, and when the hour
came for the family tea.
When Laurie knocked at the studio door, he could hear, even before he
was told to come in, the painter singing softly over her work, as
Forrester had said. She was no musician, which, we suppose, may be
understood from the fact of this singing at her work. Her voice was not
good enough to be saved up for the pleasure of others, and accordingly
was left free to hum a little accompaniment to her own not unmelodious
life. Mrs. Severn was not a partisan of work for women, carrying out her
theory, but a widow, with little children, working with the tools that
came handiest to her for daily bread; and she had been accordingly
adopted respectfully into a kind of comradeship by all the artists
about, who had known her husband, and were ready to stand by her as
much as men of the same profession might. Nobody ever dreamt of thinking
she was going out of her proper place, or taking illegitimate work upon
her, when she took up poor Severn’s palette. There are ways of doing a
thing which people do not always consider when they are actuated by
strong theoretical principles. The padrona took to her work quite
quietly, as if she had been born to it; did not think it any hardship;
worked her regular hours like any man, and asked little advice from any
one. In short, if she had a fault, it was generally believed that it was
her indifference to advice. She rarely asked it, and still more rarely
took it. Since the time when poor Severn died, and when she passionately
explained to her friends that it was less pain to manage her own affairs
than to talk them over with others, she had gone on doing everything for
herself. Whether that was a wise way of proceeding it would be hard to
tell; but at least it was her way. Poor Severn had not been a great
painter, poor fellow; he had done very well up to a certain point, but
there he had stopped; and then he had travelled about a great deal with
his family, and studied all the great pictures in the world, and made
sketches of a great many novel customs and practices, with the view of
making a new start,--‘as Phillip did.’ John Phillip, as every one knows,
being an ordinary painter, went to Spain, and came home a great one; but
poor Severn found no inspiration awaiting him at any wayside. One of
the children had been born in Florence, and one in Dresden; they were
almost the only evidences that remained of those piteous wanderings and
labours.
But wherever the poor fellow went, a pair of bright, observant eyes were
always by his side, taking note of things which he only tried to make
use of, and by degrees his wife had got possession of the pencil as it
dropped out of his failing hands. Of course, her drawing would not bear
examination as his would have done. He did the best he could to give her
a more masculine touch, but failed. She was feeble in her anatomy, very
irregular in respect to everything that was classical; but, somehow,
bits of life stole upon the forlorn canvases in Fitzroy Square under her
hand. ‘You may trust her for the sentiment,’ he said, poor fellow!
almost with his last breath, ‘and her eye for colour; but, Welby, I’d
like to see her drawing a little firmer before I leave her.’ This he was
never fated to see; and Mrs. Severn’s drawing was not likely to get
firmer when her teacher was gone. It was never very firm, we are bound
to admit; and we are also obliged to confess, against our will, that the
padrona catered a great deal for the British public in the way of pretty
babies, and tender little nursery scenes. Her pictures were domestic, in
the fullest sense of the word. In her best there would be the little
child saying its prayers at its mother’s knee, which never fails to
touch the Cockney soul; and in her worse there would be baby at table
breaking his mug and thrusting his spoon everywhere but where he ought.
They were very pretty, and sometimes, as if by chance, they stumbled
into higher ground, and caught a look, a gleam of heaven; an unconscious
essay, as it were, at the English Mary and her Blessed Child, which has
never yet been produced by an insular painter--only an essay--and it
never had time or hope to come to more. But the British public, bless
it! liked the pictures, and bought them--not for their gleams of loftier
meaning, but for the exquisite painting of baby’s mug, and because the
carpet under the mother’s feet was so real that you could count the
threads. The painter did not ask herself particularly why her pictures
became popular; she was very thankful, very glad, and took the money as
a personal favour for some time, feeling that it was too good a joke.
But all the freshness of the beginning was over long before the day on
which Laurie knocked at the studio door. She painted now with a more
swift and practised hand, but still very unequally; sometimes mere mugs
and carpets, with little human dolls; and sometimes women with children,
more and more like the divine ideal; and out of her sorrow had grown
softly happy again without knowing how--happy in her work, and her
freedom, and her independence, and her children. Alas! yes; in her
independence and freedom. She liked that, though many a reader will
think the worse of her for liking it. But it is not as a perfect
creature she is here introduced, but as a woman with faults like others.
Everybody knew that she had been very fond of poor Severn, and had stood
by him faithful and tender till his last breath; and that she was very
desolate when he was gone, and cried out even against God and His
providence a little in her anguish and solitude--but pondered and was
silent, and pondered and was cheerful--and, at last, things being as
they were, got to be glad that she was free and could work for herself.
And she was comparatively young, and had plenty to do, and there were
her children. A woman cannot go on being heart-broken with such props as
these. And it pleased her, we avow, since she could not help it, to have
her own way.
It was her husband who had called her padrona caressingly to everybody
when they came back from Italy--the ‘missis,’ as he would explain--and
what had been a joke at first had become the tenderest of titles now.
Those only who had been Severn’s friends dared continue to address her
by that name, and Laurie was one of them, young though he was. When she
said ‘Come in,’ he opened the door softly. She was standing by her
easel, hastily finishing something with the little light that remained.
‘Don’t disturb me, please, for five minutes,’ she said, without looking
round, ‘whoever you are. I must not lose this last little bit of light.’
‘Don’t hurry,’ said Laurie, sitting down behind her in a Louis Quinze
fauteuil, which had figured in many pictures.
‘Ah, it is you!’ said the padrona; but she did not turn round for the
moment, or take any further notice of him. This third studio was not
like any of the others. It was much barer, and, indeed, poorer. There
was in it none of the classic wealth of casts and friezes which adorned
Laurie’s sanctuary. There were no pictures in it, as in Mr. Welby’s
stately studio. Had the padrona possessed ebony cabinets inlaid with
silver, or a rare Angelichino, no doubt she would have sold them for
some mean-spirited consideration of Alice’s music-lessons, or a month at
the seaside for the bundle of children whose pleasure was more to her,
alas! though she was a painter, than all the pictures in the world.
There were some prints only on the walls, grey-green here as elsewhere
throughout the house--prints of Raphael’s Madonnas--she of San Sisto
within reach of the painter’s eye as she worked, and she of Fogligno, in
her maturer splendour, on the mantel-piece; but there was a great dearth
of the usual ‘materials’ with which an artist’s studio abounds. The
padrona’s work was of a kind which did not require much consultation of
examples; her draperies were chiefly modern, her subject the
ever-varying child-life, which she had under her eye. A little
lay-figure, which little Edith called her wooden sister, was in a
corner, dressed--alas! for art--in one of Edith’s frocks, considerably
torn and ragged, which was about the highest touch of effect Mrs.
Severn permitted herself. There was something curious altogether in the
commonplace, untechnical air of the room. It is the defect of women in
general when they adopt a profession to be rather too technical; but the
padrona took her own way. She had given in so far, however, to the use
and wont of the craft as to wear a grey garment over her gown, which
fitted very nicely, and looked as well as if it had been the gown
itself. She was a middle-sized woman, fully developed, and not girlish
in any way, though her face had the youthfulness of a gay temperament
and elastic disposition. Her eyes were hazel, with a great deal of light
in them; her mouth full of laughter and merriment, except when she was
thinking, and then it might perhaps be a trifle too firm; her hair
brown, and soft, and abundant. Laurie sat in the fauteuil and watched
her taking the good of the last remnant of the light with a curious
mixture of kindness and admiration, and a kind of envy. ‘If I could but
go at it like that!’ he said to himself, knowing that had he been in her
place he would so gladly have thrown down his brush on the pleasant
excuse of a visitor. There was a certain professional ease in the way he
seated himself to wait her leisure, such as perhaps could have been bred
in none other but this atmosphere, softly touched with the odour of
pigments, and with the lay figure in the corner. Literature has less of
this brotherhood of mutual comprehension--at least, in England--being a
morose art which demands to a certain extent seclusion and silence; but
art is friendly, gregarious, talkative. The padrona began to talk to him
immediately, though she did not turn her head.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ she said; ‘at least I shall be glad to see
you whenever I have finished this arm. It has worried me all day, and if
I don’t do it at once it will slip out of my mind again. I wish one
could paint without drawing; it is hard upon an uneducated person; and I
am sure if it was not for those horrid critics, the British public does
not care if one’s arm is out of drawing or not.’
‘Welby does not think so,’ said Laurie. ‘Have you seen his tibia that he
is raving about?’
‘Ah, but then that wounds his own eye,’ said Mrs. Severn, half turning
round; ‘just as a false note in music wounds my child, though it does
not disturb me much. The dreadful thing is not to know when you’re out
of drawing or out of tune. One feels something is wrong, but one is not
clever enough to see what it is.’
‘I don’t think you are often out of tune, padrona nostra, or out of
drawing either,’ said poor Laurie, with a sigh.
‘Dear, dear!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘what does this mean I wonder--that our
friend is out of tune himself?’
‘Dreadfully out of tune,’ said Laurie, ‘all ajar and not knowing what
to do with myself, and come to you to set me right.’
Then there was a pause of a minute or two, and the painter turned from
her easel and put down her palette with a sigh of relief. ‘That’s over
for to-day at least,’ she said, and came and held out her hand to her
visitor. ‘I saw it in the papers,’ she said, ‘but I would not say
anything till I could give you my hand and look you in the face. Was it
sudden? We have all to bear it one way or other; but it’s very hard all
the same, and especially the first blow.’
It was the first time since the reading of the will that anybody had
sympathised honestly with one of Mr. Renton’s sons for their father’s
death; and, near as that event was, the voice of natural pity startled
Laurie back to natural feeling. The twilight, too, which hid the tears
that rushed to his eyes, and the soft, kind clasp of the hand which had
come into his, and the voice full of all sympathies, united to move him.
A sudden ache for his loss, for the father who had been so good to him,
struck, with all its first freshness, into the mind where dwelt so many
harder thoughts. When Mrs. Severn sat down, and bade him tell her about
it, the young man went back to the sudden death-bed, and was softened,
touched, and mollified in spite of himself; his voice trembled when he
told her those wanderings of the dying man,--as everybody thought
them,--and of his affectionate confidence that ‘Laurie would not mind.’
‘I see there is something more coming,’ said the padrona, with that
insight in which he had trusted; ‘but whatever it is I am sure he was
right, and Laurie will not be the one to mind.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Laurie, with a sob that did no discredit to his
manhood; and if there had been a shadow of resentment in his heart for
the injury done him, in these words it passed away; and instead of
asking the padrona’s advice as he had intended, as he had asked old
Welby’s, he told her, on the contrary, about his father, and his
anxieties touching Ben, and all the sinkings of heart, of which he did
not himself seem to have been conscious till sympathy called them forth.
I do not know whether the softness of the domestic quiet, and the
padrona’s face shining upon him across the table, with all the light in
the room concentrated in her hazel eyes, and the soft monosyllables of
sympathy--the ‘poor Laurie’--that dropped from her lips now and
then,--one cannot tell what effect these might have had in making the
character of this interview so different from that he had held with Mr.
Welby. Had it been her daughter to whom he was talking there could of
course have been no doubt about it. But anyhow this was how it happened.
Laurie made it apparent to her and to himself that it was the tender
anguish of bereavement which had brought him here to be comforted, and
was perfectly real and true in thus representing himself; and Mrs.
Severn was very sorry for him, and thought more highly of him than
ever. It had grown almost dark before she rose from her chair and
brought the conversation to an end.
‘You are too young to dwell always on one subject,’ she said, ‘Come in
now and have tea with the children. They are all very fond of you, and
it will do you good. Of course you have not dined: you can go and dine
later at eight or nine: it does not matter to you young men. And, if the
talk is too much, Alice will play to you.’
‘The talk will not be too much,’ said Laurie; but as he followed the
padrona out of the room he plucked the rose out of his button-hole and
crushed it up in his hand and let it drop on the floor. A rose in a
man’s coat is perhaps not quite consistent with the deepest phase of
recent grief. But he was no deceiver in spite of this little bit of
involuntary humbug. Other thoughts had driven his grief away, and
diminished its force perhaps; but those were true and natural tears he
had been shedding, and he felt ashamed of himself for having been able
to think of the rose, and did not want the padrona’s quick eye to light
upon that gentlest inconsistency; but on the whole it did not appear to
him that he was unequal to their talk. So he went and played with the
children while Mrs. Severn withdrew to change her dress for the evening,
seating himself in the inner room where the lamp was burning and the
table arrayed for tea, while Alice in the dim grey drawing-room, with
the folding-doors open, played softest Lieder, such as her soul loved,
in the dusk; and Miss Hadley sat and knitted, casting now and then a
keen look from under her deep brows at Laurie in his mourning; and the
urn bubbled and steamed, and little Edith climbed up into her high seat
by the table, waiting till the padrona in her lace collar should come
down to tea.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE TEA-TABLE.
Mrs. Severn’s society was of a peculiar kind,--it had something of the
ease of French society, with the homeliness of the true Briton. Very
rarely, indeed, did she make calls. She never gave parties of any
description whatever; and yet there was always a little flow and current
of human minds and faces about her. The class which in London is perhaps
more at liberty to please itself than any other class,--at least in
England,--was that to which she belonged, both in right of her husband
and of herself, and which circulated about her, very independent of
rule, and very full of life. I do not know if I should call it the
artist-class, for that is a wide world, and has many divisions, and fine
people abound in that as in every other division of society. The
padrona’s friends were painters, authors, journalists, people with
crotchets, public reformers, persons of every kind to whom intellect, as
they called it, clearness and brightness, and talk, and the absence of
ceremony, were sweeter than any other conditions of society. They came
to her studio, some of them, with only a knock at the door,--but these
were intimates,--and chatted while she went on with her work. They
dropped in in the evening, and chatted again sometimes till midnight;
they filled the rooms with discussion of everything in earth and
heaven,--art news, political news, society news, a little of everything;
they held hot discussions on social questions with the zeal of people
immediately concerned, not with the languor of good society. The padrona
‘received’ almost every evening in this way after her work was done; and
it was people whose work was done also who came to see her,--with fresh
air in their faces, and all the eagerness and commotion of fresh life in
their minds. I do not mean to say that the intelligence of these
visitors was of the highest class, or that anything like the tone of a
French salon,--the salon which has now become almost as much a tradition
as Mrs. Montague’s drawing-room with its feather hangings,--pervaded the
grey-green drawing-room in Fitzroy Square; but only that the people
there came together to talk, and kept up an unfailing stream of
comments, not merely on the people of their acquaintance, but on
everything that was going on. It was easier work for a stranger to get
on with them than it was in society where conversation is so personal,
and the doings of that small class which calls itself the world, are so
uppermost in everybody’s thoughts. Nobody asked, ‘Did you hear what
Lady Drum said to Lady Fife last night at the Clarionett’s ball?’ or
went into raptures over the dear Duchess, or discussed the causes which
led to that unfortunate separation between Sir Edward and his wife. To
be sure, you might get just as tired, perhaps more so, listening to
discussions about the ‘sweet feeling’ of this or that picture, or its
bad drawing, or the uncertainty of its meaning, or about whether this
exhibition was better than the last, or what Horton had said about it in
the ‘Sword,’ or about spiritualism,--of which there were many
distinguished professors in the padrona’s circle, or about social
science, or women’s work, or the Archæological Society; but still it was
a different sort of thing from the common languor and the common wit.
When Laurie had played with the children, and taken his cup of tea, and
the lamp was carried into the large drawing-room, he did not care to
leave the easy-chair in which he had placed himself and undertake that
long walk to Kensington Gore. A certain sensation of ease had stolen
over him. He had thrown down his pack of troubles at his neighbour’s
door, as old Welby had said, and, with a certain soft exhaustion,
stretched himself at full length in the low chair, with his feet at the
other end of the hearth-rug. There was no fire, and it was dark at that
end of the room; and the lamp had been placed on a table near the
opposite wall, where the ladies sat working. The padrona herself was
making something up with lace and ribbons, and Miss Hadley, not yet gone
home, but with her bonnet on ready to start, had returned to her
knitting. Alice had gone up with the children to see them put to bed. It
would be difficult to tell why Laurie lingered at the other end of the
room in comparative darkness. Perhaps because he meant still to ask
closer counsel from the padrona,--perhaps because his artist eye was
pleased with the effect of that spark of light, with her head fully
revealed in it. They let him alone, that being the fashion of the house.
‘He is tired and sad, poor boy!’ Mrs. Severn said to her friend; and
they went on with their talk, and left him to come to himself when he
pleased. Laurie was in no hurry to come to himself. He lay back lazily
resting from thought, and let the picture, as it were, steal into him
and take possession of him. The room was so large that it was quite dim
everywhere but round that one table, and the furniture looked a little
ghostly in the obscurity, the chairs placing themselves, as chairs have
such a way of doing, in every sort of weird combination, as though
unseen beings sat and chattered around the vacant tables. And in the
distance the white, bright light of the lamp came out with double force.
There was, perhaps, a touch of carelessness in the padrona’s coiffure,
or else it was that she could not help it, her hair being less
manageable than those silken, lovely curls of her child’s; but she was
different in black silk gown and her lace collar from what she was in
her blouse. Laurie sat dreamily with his eyes turned towards the light,
and listened to the hum of the voices, and sometimes caught a word or
two of what they said. No doubt some one would come in presently to
break up this quiet, but in the meantime there was a charm in the
stillness, in the dimness, in the presence of the women, and motion of
their hands as they worked; such soft sounds, scarcely to be called
sounds at all, and yet they gave Laurie a certain languid pleasure as he
sat exhausted in his easy chair.
‘Work does not suit everybody,’ he heard Mrs. Severn say. ‘We think so
just as we think people who are always ill must be enjoying bad
health;--because we are fond of work, and never have headaches. It is
unjust.’
‘I thought we were born to labour in the sweat of our brow!’ said Miss
Hadley, who was a little strong-minded, and had her doubts about
Genesis.
‘Not born,’ said the padrona, with a soft laugh; ‘only after Eden, you
know; and there are some people who have never come out of Eden; for
instance, my child.’
‘Ah, Alice!’ Miss Hadley answered, with a little wave of her head, as if
Alice was understood to be exceptional, and exempted from ordinary rule.
‘Fancy the child having to work as I do!’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘Fancy her
being trained to my profession, as some people tell me I should do. I
think it would be nothing less than profane.’
‘My dear, you know I think all girls should know how to work at
something,’ said the governess, ‘when they have no fortunes; and you
will never save money. You couldn’t, if your pictures were to sell twice
as well; and though you are young and strong, still----’
‘I might die,’ said the padrona. ‘I often think of it. It is a frightful
thought when one looks at these little things; but I have made up my
mind for a long time that it is best never to think. One can’t live more
than a day at a time, were one to try ever so much; and there is always
God at hand to take care or the rest.’
‘But generally, so far as I know,’ said Miss Hadley, ‘God gives the
harvest only when the farmer has sown the seed.’
‘Which means I am to bring up my child to do something,’ said Mrs.
Severn. ‘And so she does,--a hundred things,--now, doesn’t she?--and
makes the whole house go to music. I can’t train Alice to a trade. If
necessity comes upon her, some work or other will drop into her hands. I
was never trained to it myself,’ the padrona added, with a
half-conscious smile about the corners of her mouth, and perhaps just a
touch of innocent complacency in her own success, ‘and yet I get on,--as
well as most.’
‘Better than most, my dear; better than most,’ the governess said, with
a little enthusiasm. ‘But you know how much you have been worried about
your drawing, and how sensitive you are to what those wretched men say
in the “Sword.” Do you think I don’t notice? You take it quite sweetly
when they talk about the colour, or texture, or the rest of their
jargon; but you flush up the moment they mention your drawing. Now, if
you had been trained to it, don’t you see, as a girl----’
The padrona grew very red as her friend spoke. It was clear that the
criticism touched even when thus put, and Laurie, in the background,
felt an overwhelming inclination to wring the neck of the strong-minded
woman. But then she laughed very softly, with a certain sound of emotion
that might have brought tears just as well.
‘When I was a girl,’ she said, ‘how every one would have stared to think
I should ever be a painter, making my living!--how they would have
laughed! “What, our Mary!” they would all have said. It came so natural
to do one’s worsted work, and read one’s books, and go to one’s parties!
And I suppose, as you say, I should have been working from the round,
and studying anatomy,--faugh!--my child to do that! I would rather work
my fingers to the bone!’
‘I think you are wrong, my dear,’ the governess said; and Laurie hated
her, listening to the talk.
As for the padrona, she shook something like a tear from her eyelash.
Laurie thought it was pretty to see her hands moving among the lace and
the ribbon, with that look of power in them, knowing exactly how to
twist it, how to make the lace droop as it ought. Not a very monstrous
piece of work, to be sure. ‘Hush!’ she said, ‘here are some people
coming up-stairs. Most likely Bessie Howard, who will tell us what the
spirits are doing; or the Suffolks from over the way, who are great
friends of hers. They have just come home from Dresden, and I want to
hear what they have been about there.’
‘I hate travel-talk,’ said Miss Hadley, ‘and I detest the spirits, so
I’ll go; and though it is not the first time, nor the second, we have
spoken on this subject, I do hope, my dear, you’ll think of what I’ve
said.’
The padrona shook her head; but the two women kissed each other with
true friendliness just as the other visitors came into the dim room.
Laurie had risen reluctantly from his seat in the darkness to bid the
governess, who was one of the family, good-night. ‘I am sorry to hear of
your trouble, Mr. Renton,’ she said, as she gave him her hand. She was
not bad-looking, though she was strong-minded; and though he had wanted
to wring her neck a moment before, the brightness of her eyes,--though
she was half as old again as Laurie,--and the kindness of her tone
mollified the woman-loving young man in spite of himself.
‘Thanks,’ he said; ‘you must have thought me a brute; but I don’t feel
up to talk,--yet.’
‘It is not to be expected,’ said Miss Hadley; ‘but it is a blessing to
be young and have all your forces unimpaired. You must do as much as you
can, and not think any more than you can help. Good-night!’
‘Good-night!’ Laurie said, opening the door for her; and then he stood
about in the room helplessly, as men stand when they object to join the
other visitors; and finally went back to his chair by the vacant fire.
‘He is waiting for the child,’ Miss Hadley said to herself as she went
down-stairs; and the thought was in her mind all the way home to her
little rooms in one of the streets adjoining Fitzroy Square, where she
lived with her old sister, who was an invalid. They had a parlour and
two bed-rooms, and bought their own ‘things,’ and were attended and
otherwise ‘done for’ by their landlady; and, on the whole, were very
comfortable, though all the noises of the little street, and echoes from
the bigger streets at hand, went on under their windows, and the
geraniums in their little balcony were coated with ‘blacks,’ and the
dinginess of the surroundings, out and in, were unspeakable. People live
so in the environs of Fitzroy Square, and are very lively, pleasant sort
of people; and think very well of themselves all the same.
Laurie was not waiting for the child; he was waiting to catch the
padrona’s eye and say good-night to her; but that inconsistent woman was
now all brightness and eager attention to the travel-talk which Miss
Hadley hated. The people who had just come from Dresden were a young
painter and his wife, and there were so many things and places and
people to be talked of between them. ‘You saw old Hermann,’ the padrona
said, with a smile and a tear. ‘Ah, he used to be so kind to,--us;--and
the big Baron with all his orders, and Madame Kurznacht? Did they ever
speak of us?--and hasn’t old Hermann a lovely old head? Did you paint
him? Ah! it is so strange.--it is like a dream to think of the old
times!’
Could any man, though jealous, and sulky, and neglected, interrupt this
to say a gruff good-night? Not Laurie, at least. He thought to himself
that letting alone sometimes went too far, and that he, too, might have
had a word addressed to him now and then; but still it went to his heart
to hear her recollections and the tone in her voice. She was thinking,
not of these new people and their travels, but of poor Severn, and the
days when he and she had wandered over the world together. She was
better off now. Laurie believed that there was no doubt she was better
off, and less harassed with care and bowed down with anxiety; but
yet,--poor Severn! And two painter-folk straying about the world, free
to go anywhere, the man emancipating the woman by his society,--is not
that better than one alone? And how could her friend, with a heart in
him, stop her in her tender thoughts by thrusting himself into the midst
of them? While Laurie, sulky but Christian, was thus cogitating, Alice
came into the room, and came softly up to him. ‘Are you here all by
yourself, Mr. Renton?’ she said.
‘Yes, Alice, all alone. Sit down and talk to me,’ said Laurie.
‘I wish I could go and play to you,’ said Alice; ‘but that would disturb
the people. It is so strange to see you sad.’
‘I am not so very sad,’ Laurie said, ‘not to trouble my friends with it,
Alice; and I am only waiting now to say good-night. I am going to work
so hard I shall have no time to be sad.’
‘At that pretty window with the flowers in it,’ said Alice, ‘away at
Kensington? It must be nice to be so near the Park.’
‘I don’t care much for the Park now,’ said Laurie. ‘I must go without
disturbing the padrona. You will tell her I said good-night.’
‘Mamma is coming,’ said Alice; ‘she always hears what people say if they
were miles off; and I want to ask about dear old Dresden and old
Hermann, too.’
Then the padrona came up to him still with her lace in one hand, and sat
down by him in the shade. ‘Did you think I had forgotten you were
there?’ she said. ‘I know you want to go now, and I have come to tell
you what you are to do,--that is, what I think you should do;--you don’t
mind my interfering, and giving my advice?’
‘I want it,’ said Laurie. ‘I have been waiting all this time to see what
you would have to say to me before I went away.’
The padrona smiled and nodded her head. ‘You must not stay at Kensington
Gore,’ she said. ‘It is too dear and too fine if you are going to work.
You must come to this district, and content yourself with two rooms.
There are plenty of lodgings to be had with the window made on purpose,
and a good light. I will look out for you, if you please; and then you
must go in for it,--the life-school, and all that sort of thing. It is
odious,’ said the woman-painter, with a little impatient movement of her
head, ‘but you men must go through everything. And you can come here,
you know, as much as you like; and I am sure Mr. Welby will give you
what help he can; and you will do very well,’ said Mrs. Severn, smiling
at him. ‘When I can get on with no training at all, what should not you
do? And we shall all be proud of you,’ she added, patting his arm softly
with her disengaged hand. She was his comrade, and still she was a
woman, which made it different; and he went away with a little
reflection of the kind glow in the padrona’s eyes warming his heart. No
doubt that was the thing to do. He saw her seat herself at the table
again where by this time other people had made their appearance, and
begin to smile and talk to everybody without a moment’s interval: but
she lifted her eyes as he went out at the door with a little sign of
amity. How pleasant it is to have friends! Love is sweet, but upon love
he had turned his back, poor fellow! giving up all the vague delight of
its hopes. Alice, with her curls, had no power to move him. That ground
was occupied. But friendship, too, was sweet. And to have a friend who
understood him at the first word--who saw what he meant almost before it
was spoken; who could give him bright, rapid, decisive advice, the very
sound of which had encouragement in it,--not hesitating, prudential,
disheartening, like old Welby’s;--a friend besides who had bright,
lambent-glowing eyes, which consoled what they looked at, and a soft
voice----. In this, at least, Laurie was in luck. He met two or three
people that night at the club, which was not of such lofty pretensions
as White’s or Boodle’s, and called itself the Hiboux or the
Hydrographic, I am not sure which,--a place where men were to be met
with all the year through, and which was not deserted even in September.
Laurie belonged to a grander club as well, but his dilettante tastes had
made him proud of the Hiboux. And his friends collected round him to
hear the news, and were very sympathetic, and approved of his intention
to face his difficulties. ‘It may be the making of you, my dear fellow,
as it was the making of Frank Pratt,’ said the man who wrote those
papers in the ‘Sword’ which threw half the artists in England into
convulsions. ‘Thanks,’ said Laurie; ‘you think you will have one more
innocent to massacre.’ And he looked so fierce at the representative of
literature that the audience was moved to a shout of laughter. It was
not himself Laurie was thinking of, but the padrona, whose drawing this
ruffian had reviled. He had disturbed a woman whose shoes he was not
worthy to brush, Laurie said to himself, and avoided the reptile, with a
bitterness worthy of his misdeeds. He could not eat his partridge in
comfort under that fellow’s eye; who was not a brute by any means, and
had a certain kindness for a young man in misfortune, even though he did
write for the ‘Sword.’
When Laurie got home to Kensington Gore the first thing he saw was the
drawing on the mantel-piece of the Three Princes, or the Three Paths. He
took it down and examined it, not without a certain complacency. No
doubt it was a clever drawing. Then he took his pencil with a sudden
suggestion in his mind. Somehow since he drew it his own figure seemed
to him scarcely dignified enough for the subject:--it was too comic,
with all those traps festooned about it. He took his pencil, as I have
said, and put lightly in, half-way between himself and the National
Gallery, a shadow of a figure with one arm stretched out towards him.
Not a sylph like that fairy form which he had pictured on the rocks Ben
was climbing. This was a full, mature, matron figure, Friendship,
steadfast and sweet, not beckoning the hero on to the delights of life,
but holding out a helping hand. A hand may be very strong and helpful
and sustaining, though it is soft and fair and delicate. This thought
passed through Laurie’s mind as he indicated by a line or two the
gracious, open, extended palm. Alas! no sylph,--not her of the little
letters who might have been all the world to Laurie,--but Friendship,
the only feminine presence that could ever enter his existence. He
sighed as he put in this new personage in the drama, yet hung over it
all the same, feeling that even this lent an interest to his own path.
Not glory and a coronet which Frank, no doubt, as a soldier had his
chance of winning; not wealth and honour which more naturally and
certainly would come to Ben;--but the National Gallery finally, and
Friendship on the way to give him a hand. Such were to be the special
characteristics of Laurie’s way through the world.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHARLOTTE STREET, FITZROY SQUARE.
Laurie’s removal was not accomplished with the passionate haste which
distinguished that of his brother Ben. There was no particular hurry
about it. The padrona, with the natural impatience of a woman, found a
lodging almost immediately, which he saw and approved; but Laurie took
his time, and consoled poor Mrs. Brown at Kensington Gore, and found her
a lodger in the shape of a ‘real hartis-gentleman,’ as she herself
perspicuously expressed it, having felt in her soul from the beginning
that Laurie was something of a sham. Her new tenant was a young painter
who had made a successful _debút_ at the last Academy, and was for the
moment a man whom the picture-dealers delighted to honour. He was ready
to take Laurie’s pretty fittings, his contrivances, everything he had
done for himself; but Laurie’s good sense deserted him on that point.
The money would have been convenient no doubt; but he could not part
with the rubbish of his own collecting and contriving, which represented
to him not so much money, but so many moments of amusement and pleasant
thoughts. There was not room for half of them in Charlotte Street, where
he was going; so he carried his shelves, and stands, and quaint little
cupboards, to No. 375, Fitzroy Square, and put them up in every corner
he could find, the children hanging on him as he did so in an admiring
crowd. So that he got a great deal more good of his belongings than Ben
did of the marqueterie and buhl; and his successor furnished the rooms
at Kensington Gore with conveniences of a much more expensive kind, and
was altogether more splendid, and lavish, and prodigal than Laurie,
whose tastes were very unobtrusive. His new lodging in Charlotte Street
was on the first floor; the front room,--called the drawing-room,--had
three windows in it, one of which was cut up into the wall a few feet
higher than the others, giving that direct sky-light which is necessary
to a painter; and there was a sleeping-room behind. This was all
Laurie’s domain now-a-days, and the rooms were not large. There was a
table in the corner near the fireplace, as much out of the way as
possible of the great easel and the professional part of the room, where
he ate his breakfast, and anything else he might find it necessary to
regale himself with at home, in a meek kind of humble way,--under
protest, as it were, that he could not help himself. His new landlady’s
ideas on the subject of cooking were of the most limited character. She
gave him weak tea and bacon for breakfast without any apparent
consciousness of the fact that such luxuries pall upon the taste by
constant repetition, and that a diet of _toujours perdrix_ wearies the
meekest soul. Laurie thought it most expedient, on the whole, not to
inquire into her sentiments in respect to dinner, but swallowed his
morning rasher with a grimace, and was, on the whole, ‘a comfortable
sort of gentleman,’ the woman reported;--‘not like some as thinks they
can’t give too much trouble.’ But he missed the mistress of Kensington
Gore. He missed the neat maid, and his boy, who exasperated him in the
studio, and kept all his friends in amusement; and it was a different
thing looking out from the dreary windows in Charlotte Street upon the
dreary houses opposite,--upon the milkman and the potboy wending their
rounds, and the public-house at the corner, and the awful blank of
gentility in the windows on the other side, to what it used to be when
he could glance forth upon the sunny Park from among his flowers, with,
even at this time of the year, the old ladies taking their airing, and
the nurserymaids under the leafless trees. Nurserymaids and old ladies
are not entrancing objects of contemplation except to their respective
life-guards and medical men; but still it was better than in Charlotte
Street. Miss Hadley lived opposite to him, and was by no means of his
opinion; and when she was at home watched with a little amusement for
such glimpses of her neighbour as were to be had. In the morning,--when
there was not a fog,--Laurie, to start with, barricaded his windows,
leaving only the upper part of the middle one unshuttered, and then set
himself to work before his easel with Spartan heroism. Old Miss Hadley,
who knew all his story, had her chair near her window, entering into the
little drama with zest, and kept her eye upon him. For the first day or
two he would remain in this sheltered condition until the afternoon
light began to fail, when all at once he would sally forth with an
alacrity and air of relief which much amused the watcher. But by-and-by
this power of activity began to wane. ‘My dear, he’s getting a little
tired,’ the old lady said, with a chuckle, to her sister, a week after
Laurie’s arrival. ‘I heard the bolts go about one o’clock, and the
window opened; and there he was in his velvet coat, with his palette and
all the rest of it. I am sure Mr. Welby never looked so professional;
and he has a nice brown beard coming, and I like the looks of the lad,’
said Miss Hadley, who was a soft-hearted old soul.
‘He is not such a lad,’ said Miss Jane, ‘and his beard has been come
this twelvemonth at least; but I never thought it would last very long.
I hate amateurs.’ For all that, however, she would look up and nod at
Laurie, when she came home early and the young man appeared at his
window. As the days went on old Miss Hadley found her life quite
brightened up by the new neighbour, whose proceedings she watched with
so good-humoured an interest.
‘He had Shaw the Guardsman to sit to him to-day,’ was her next report;
‘and dreadfully bored the poor boy did look to be sure. I saw the
warrior go away, and then our friend stepped out on his balcony and
yawned as if his head would have come off.’ Next time the report was of
a different character. ‘The boy is getting used to us,’ the old lady
said; ‘he has been buying some plants for his window. He stood a long
time to-day and watched the Jenkinses getting into their dog-cart. He
took off his hat, my dear, when he was going out, when he saw me come to
the window. He knows I am your sister, I suppose.’
‘I do not admire his taste watching the Jenkinses,’ said Miss Jane, with
a momentary frown of jealousy. She would have been very indignant had
any one called her a match-maker, and yet almost without knowing it
there had come into her head a little plan about Laurie and ‘the child.’
‘Bless you, he was only amusing himself,’ said the elder sister. ‘I have
no doubt it looked very funny to him,--and the fuss and the cloaks, and
the bottles sticking out of the basket. They were going to see their
married sister at Battersea, my dear. Her husband is a coal-merchant,
and I believe they are very well to do. But I am very glad, I must say,
that Mr. Renton went opposite to live, and not at the Jenkinses. So
many girls in a house when people let lodgings is not nice; a young man
may be inveigled before he knows; and Mrs. Robinson is a very
respectable sort of a person; I am very glad he has gone there.’
‘I daresay he thinks it miserable enough,’ said the governess. These
little talks occurred every evening; and though Miss Hadley did not
confide all the vicissitudes of Laurie’s life to Mrs. Severn, yet the
main incidents became generally known ‘in the Square.’ They knew that
Shaw had been sitting to him, and that he had been bored, and the
incident afforded no small amusement to a circle of admiring friends.
‘It must be Miss Hadley who has betrayed me,’ said Laurie; ‘the fellow
has such heaps of talk. I declare I know everything about his family,
from the first of his name down to his sister’s little Polly. Little
Polly it was. And if a man may not be permitted to yawn after two hours
of that----’
‘A man might be permitted to yawn in the midst of it,’ said the padrona,
‘which I am sure you didn’t. But it was droll to rush out into your
balcony, and relieve yourself as soon as he was gone.’
‘There is no air in that little hole of a place,’ said Laurie; and then
he bethought himself that the other people about him were all of them
inmates of similar holes. ‘I mean it’s very nice, you know,’ he added,
‘and close to everything,--schools, and British Museum, and everything
a man can desire. But I am very fond of as much air as I can get.’
‘I always thought this was a very airy neighbourhood,’ said little Mrs.
Suffolk, who lived in another of the streets near Fitzroy Square, ‘and
so handy for the children, in five minutes they can be in the Park.’
‘One gets never to listen to those fellows,’ said her husband; ‘if you
take an interest in them they go and make money of you. Their wives are
always ill, and their children dying, and that sort of thing. Glossop’s
got your old rooms over at Kensington, do you know, Renton? And come out
no end of a swell. I don’t know why, I am sure, unless that he has a
friend on the “Sword.”’
‘Not so bad as that,’ said Laurie. ‘Those were two very pretty pictures
of his this year.’
‘Oh, ah, pretty enough,’ said the other; ‘if that is all you want in a
picture. British taste! But I’d like to know what sort of people they
must be who like to hang these eternal simperings on their walls. I
believe there are heaps of men who don’t care twopence for art. But to
choose bad art where good is to be had, out of mere perverseness!--I
don’t believe in that. They pin their faith on the “Sword,” and the
“Sword” lies and cheats right and left, and looks after its own friends;
and the British public pays the piper. When one thinks of Glossop, that
one has known all over the world, in Laurie Renton’s pretty rooms at
Kensington Gore!’
‘And Laurie here!’ said the padrona, ‘which is great luck for us. But,
my friend, you are mistaken. There are heaps of people, as you say, who
prefer bad art to good. It is of no use pretending to deny it;--and,’
Mrs. Severn added with a little sigh, ‘we all trade upon it, I fear, if
the truth were told.’
‘No, indeed, I am sure not that,’ said the painter’s wife. ‘There stands
one who never does, I say to him a hundred times, “Reginald dear, do
think of a popular subject; do paint something for common sort of
folks!”--but he never will. They say it is only the _nouveaux riches_
that buy now-a-days,’ Mrs. Suffolk continued in injured tones, ‘or
dealers; and we know nobody who writes on the “Sword.” You do, of
course, Mr. Renton,--you have been so much in the world.’
‘I met Slasher the other day at the club,’ said Laurie, with a laugh
which he could only half restrain. ‘He is not such a bad fellow. If you
will let Suffolk bring you to my little place some time, I will show him
to you. He does not bite in private life.’
‘Oh, I don’t know that I should like to meet such a man,’ the little
woman said, with an anxious glance at her husband; and then she took
Laurie a step aside, and became confidential. ‘If you would but make
Reginald and him friends, Mr. Renton! I don’t mind speaking to you.
Nobody knows what talent Reginald has; and I am so afraid he will get
soured with never finding an opening; and he can’t afford to keep up a
club like you young men, and we have been so much out of the world. What
does it matter studying nature and studying the great masters, and
staying out of London till everybody forgets you?’ the poor young woman
continued, with tears in her eyes. She was young, and it was hard upon
her to keep from crying when she met Laurie’s sympathetic look. ‘It is
not so much the money I am thinking of,’ she said; ‘but if Reginald were
to get soured----’
‘I’ll get Slasher to meet him directly,’ said Laurie, with eager
promptitude; ‘and you may be sure everything I can do----’
‘Oh, thanks!’ said the painter’s wife. ‘It is not that he wants any
favour, Mr. Renton, but only an opening; and we have been so much out of
the world.’
‘I wonder you don’t get up a Trades-Union, and make a stand,’ said Mrs.
Thurston, who was literary. ‘How anything can keep alive that is so
badly written as the “Sword,” I don’t know. It is because you are all so
eager to see what it says about you, even though you hate it. Just like
the articles in all the papers about women! If women were not so curious
to see “what’s next,” do you think any one would take the trouble to
write all that? Don’t mind it, and you take away its power.’
‘Ah, it is so easy for you,’ cried Mrs. Suffolk;--‘you have nothing to
do but to go to your publisher; but what with the Hanging Committee
putting all their friends on the line, and those wicked papers that
never think of merit, but only of some one the writers know----’
‘That’s enough, Helen,’ said her husband, with an attempt at a smile;
‘you talk as if we minded. But what is the criticism of an ignorant
fellow, who does not know a picture when he sees it, to me,--or any
one?’ he added, with the slightest half-perceptible quiver of his lip.
‘Constable has just come back from Italy, Renton;--one of our old set;’
and so the talk ran on.
This little party was assembled as before in the great drawing-room.
There was a fire now which made it brighter and took away something of
its quaintness, and the padrona and her guests had drawn near it,
carrying the light and the circle of faces into the centre of the room.
Now and then somebody would sing, or play,--but talk was what they all
loved best, and music as an interruption of the latter was not greatly
cultivated. The padrona herself was always working at something with her
swift, dextrous fingers; and the ladies who formed her court had
generally brought her work in their pockets, to add to their comfort
while they talked. Laurie spent the next half-hour standing with Suffolk
before the fire, talking of Italy, where they had met, and of the old
set, with all that curious mingling of laughter and sadness which
accompanies such recollections. Of ‘the old set’ so many had already
dropped by the way, as the passengers dropped through the trapdoors in
Mirza’s Vision, while yet the fun of their jokes and their adventures
lasted vividly in their comrades’ minds. ‘You remember poor old
So-and-so,’ the young men said to each other, looking down with their
brown faces on the soft glow of the fire; ‘what fun he was! what scrapes
he was always getting into! There was not a painter in Rome who did not
turn out the day of his funeral!--and poor Untell, with his bad Italian.
What nights those were in the Condotti! There never was a better fellow.
Did you hear what an end his was?’ This was how the talk went
on,--without any moral in it as of the vanity of human joys; nothing but
pure fact, the laughter and the tragedy interlaced and woven together;
while the ladies round the lamp with the light on their faces, talked
too, but not with such historical calm, of the injustices of the
‘Sword,’ and of the Academy, and of the public; of the advantages of
other professions,--literature, for example,--at which its
representative shook her head; of the children’s education and their
health, and, perhaps, a little of the ills of housekeeping,--subject
sacred to feminine discussion. Women do not meet, I suppose, nor do
women die, as men do. They had no such melancholy, jovial records behind
them to go over,--their talk was of the present and the future,--a
curious distinction,--and the padrona’s society numbered always more
women than men.
Next day, perhaps, it would be at Suffolk’s house that Laurie spent his
evening, which was a house not unlike the one in which he himself
lived,--a thin, tall strip of building in which two rooms were piled
upward upon two rooms to the fourth storey. The two parlours on the
ground-floor were domestic, and there Mrs. Suffolk sat, very glad to see
her husband’s friends when they came in, but not so entirely one of the
party as when the padrona was the hostess. Her little room, though it
was as prettily furnished as humble means would allow, was not
calculated for the reception of a crowd, and after they had paid her
their _devoirs_, the men streamed up-stairs to the corresponding but
larger room above, which was the studio,--a place in which there were no
hangings to be poisoned with their tobacco, nor much furniture to impede
their movements. Perhaps the wife of one would come with him and take
off her bonnet and stay with Mrs. Suffolk, bringing her work with her,
and resuming those endless, unfailing talks about the children, and the
housekeeping, and the injustice of the world. For it must be understood
that the artist-life I am attempting to describe is not that of the
highly-placed, successful painter, against whom the Academy has no
power,--who is perhaps himself on the Hanging Committee, and has the
‘Sword’ at his feet in abject adoration;--but of the younger
brotherhood, in a chronic state of resistance to the powers that be, and
profoundly conscious of all the opposing forces that beset their path.
Little Mrs. Suffolk had care on her brow, as she sat with her sister in
art and war, in the little drawing-room down-stairs, discussing the
inexpediency of those wanderings to and fro over the earth, which
probably both had gone through and enjoyed, but which ofttimes made the
public and the picture-dealers oblivious of a young painter’s name.
Up-stairs, however, there would probably be five or six young fellows,
of a Bohemian race, bearded, and bronzed, and full of talk, who had not
yet taken the responsibilities of life on their shoulders, and laughed
at the wolf when he approached their door. Two or three of them would
collect round Suffolk’s picture, which he had been working at all day,
to give him the benefit of their counsel, in the midst of the wreath of
smoke which filled the room. Most of them were picturesque young fellows
enough,--thanks to the relaxed laws of costume and hair-dressing
prevalent among them. And to see Suffolk with the lamp, raising it in
one hand to show his work, shading it with the other that the light
might fall just where it ought to fall, tenderly gazing at the canvas on
which hung so many hopes, with the eager heads round him studying it
judicially, would have made such a picture as Rembrandt loved to paint.
‘I don’t quite like that perspective,’ said one. ‘Look here, Suffolk,
your light is coming round a corner,--the sun is there, isn’t he?--or
ought to be at that time of the day.’
‘What time of the day do you call it?’ said a second.
‘Why, afternoon, to be sure,’ cried the first critic; ‘don’t you see the
shadows fall to the left hand, and the look in that woman’s eyes? It’s
afternoon, or I’m an ass! Did you ever see a woman look like that except
in the afternoon?--sleepiest time, I tell you, of the whole day.’
‘She’s weary of watching, don’t you see?’ said his neighbour.
‘Matter-of-fact soul! But I’d get that light straight if I were you,
Suffolk. He’s wrong about the sentiment, but he’s right about the
light.’
‘Give us the chalk here,’ said Constable, who had just come back from
Italy; ‘there’s just a touch wanted about the arm, if you don’t mind.’
‘The colour’s good, my dear fellow,’ said Spyer, who was older than any
of them, and a kind of authority in his way, ‘and the sentiment is good.
I like that wistful look in her eye. She’s turned off her lover, but she
can’t help that gaze after him. Poor thing!--just like women. And I like
that saffron robe; but I think you might mend the drawing. I don’t quite
see how she’s got her shoulder. It’s not out of joint, is it? You had
better send for the surgeon before it goes down to Trafalgar Square.’
All these blasts of criticism poor Suffolk received, _tant bien que
mal_, doing his best to seem unmoved. He even suffered the chalk which
‘that beggar, Constable--a tree-painter, by Jove!--a landscape man,’ he
said afterwards, with the fervour of indignation, permitted himself to
mark the dimpled elbow of his Saxon maiden. The mists of smoke and the
laughter that came out of the room from cheery companions who were lost
in these mists, and the system of give and take, which made him
prescient of the moment when Spyer and Constable too would be at his
mercy, as he was now at theirs, made their comments quite bearable, when
one word from the ‘Sword’ would have driven the painter frantic. And to
do them justice, it was only the pictures which were in the course of
painting on which they were critical. Groups now and then would collect
before that picture of the English captive boys in the Forum, which the
Academy had hung at the roof, and which had come home accordingly
unapplauded and unsold, though later;--but I need not anticipate the
course of events. Suffolk’s visitors gathered before it, and looked at
it with their heads on one side, and pointed out its special qualities
to each other, not with the finger, as do the ignorant, but with that
peculiar caressing movement of the hand which is common to the craft.
‘What colour! by Jove, that’s a bit of Italian air brought bodily into
our fogs;--and the cross light is perfect, sir!’ Spyer said, who had
just been so hard on his friend’s drawing. If they found out faults
which the uninstructed eye was slow to see, they discovered beauties
too; and then gathered round the fire, and fell into twos and threes,
and went back to that same talk of the past and the ‘old set,’ in which
Laurie had indulged on the previous night. The ‘old set’ varied
according to the speakers; with some it was only the fellows at
Clipstone Street; but with all the moral was the same; the cheery days
and nights, the wild sallies of youthful freedom, the great hopes
dwindled into nothing, the many, many fallen by the way, not one-half of
the crowd seeming to have come safely through the struggles of the
beginning. ‘Poor So-and-so! If ever there was a man who had a real
feeling for art, it was he; and as good a fellow’--they added, puffing
forth meditative clouds; and there would be a laugh the next moment over
some remembered pranks. Laurie had formed one of many such parties ere
now. He, too, had been of the ‘old set:’ he had his stories to
contribute, his momentary sigh to breathe forth along with the fumes of
his cigar. But, perhaps, he had never in his amateur days felt so
completely belonging to the society in which he found himself.
Sometimes, perhaps, he had laughed a little, and given himself a little
shake of half-conscious superiority when he left them, and set out to
Kensington Gore as to another world; but Charlotte Street was
emphatically the same world, and the _esprit de corps_ was strong in
Laurie’s heart. ‘Anch’io pittore,’ he said to himself as he stood
indignant before Suffolk’s beautiful picture which had been hung up at
the roof. It was a beautiful picture; and one of these days the Hanging
Committee might treat himself in the same way; and if by chance
criticism should really be so effectual as everybody said, why should
not something be done for Suffolk--using the devil’s tools, as it were,
to do a good action--by means of Slasher and the ‘Sword?’
The majority of the young men went away after an hour’s talk and smoke
unlimited; but Laurie was one of those who remained and went down to
supper, along with Spyer and Constable, to the back room down-stairs,
which was the little dining-room. Mrs. Suffolk was very careful to keep
the folding-doors shut, and to make two rooms, though it certainly would
have been larger and might have been more comfortable had they been
thrown into one. It was Mrs. Spyer who was her companion that evening,
who was older than she, and commented a little sharply on this poor
little bit of pretension, as Laurie walked part of the way home with the
pair. ‘I like nice dining and drawing-rooms as well as any one,’ Mrs.
Spyer said, ‘but if I were Helen, I would be comfortable, and never
mind.’ ‘All the same she is a good little woman,’ her husband had said,
irrelevantly;--for, to be sure, nobody doubted that she was a good
little woman. They had cold beef and celery and cheese on the table, and
refreshed themselves with copious draughts of beer. I do not say it was
a very refined conclusion to the evening, but I think Laurie was better
amused and more interested than after many a fine party. He walked home
with Spyer, talking of Suffolk’s picture, and the injustice that had
been done him, _jettant feu et flamme_, as they mentioned the Academy,
yet hoping that band of tyrants could not be so foolish two years
running. ‘The thing is, to have him written up in the papers,’ Spyer
said; ‘a fellow of his talent cannot be long kept in the background; but
if the papers were to take him up, it would shorten his probation.’ ‘I
hate the papers,’ said Mrs. Spyer. ‘Why don’t we have private patrons,
as we used to have, and never mind the public? To think of a wretched
newspaper deciding a man’s fate! I would not give in to it for a day.’
‘But we must give in to it, or else be left behind in the race,’ said
her husband. And Laurie thought more and more, as he listened to all
this talk, of the influence he himself might exercise at the club and
elsewhere upon Slasher and the ‘Sword.’
CHAPTER XX.
LAURIE’S WORK.
The first grand question to be decided, when Laurie settled in Charlotte
Street, was what his first picture was to be. It is true that Mr. Welby,
and even the padrona, who was so much more hopeful, were all for mere
study and life-schools, and the lectures at the Academy, and anatomical
demonstrations, and other disagreeable things, which Laurie, always
amiable, gave in to, to please them, not doubting of the advantage of
the studies in question. But still his anatomy, and his notes, and
studies from the life, however careful, were only means to an end; and
there was no reason why the end itself should not be pursued at the same
time,--or at least so he thought. He had painted pictures before now as
a mere amateur, and in that capacity had even,--once,--obtained a nook
in the Academy’s exhibition; and why he should now suspend his chief
work, and, having become a professional painter, paint no longer, was
what Laurie could not perceive. He was not the man to exhibit his study
of the Norman fisherwoman or Italian peasant who might chance to be
posing at the school, as some of the Clipstone Street fellows did. His
work there, of course, would help him in his real work at home; but to
spend his entire time in preparation for work, and do nothing, seemed to
Laurie plain idiocy. ‘I painted nothing for three years on end when I
was like you,’ old Welby said. ‘You require to be a painter, sir, before
you can paint a picture; and it is hard enough work to make yourself a
painter. If I were in your place I’d never look at a canvas bigger than
that for at least a year.’
‘That’ was the study of a head which Laurie had taken down with him to
Mr. Welby’s studio. It was one of the padrona’s, and the old painter had
praised the sketch. As for Laurie, he turned it hastily with its face to
the easel, and laughed the uneasy laugh of embarrassment and offence.
‘I rather flattered myself I was a painter,’ he said, and then paused
and recovered his temper. ‘The fact is, I must keep myself up,’ he
exclaimed; ‘I must feel as if I were doing something. So long as I paint
merely scraps I feel myself demoralised. And then you forget I am not a
novice,’ Laurie said, with some pride. He had been all over Italy, and
had studied in Rome, and was very learned in many artistic matters. To
be told that he had first to make himself a painter was rather hard.
‘Of course you are a novice,’ said the R.A., ‘and quite natural too. I
don’t want to be disagreeable, my dear fellow, but an amateur is really
worse,--you may take my word for it,--than an absolute beginner. The
very traditions of amateur art are different. If you were making a fair
start I should know exactly what to tell you; but how can I tell how
much you may have to unlearn?’
This, it will be allowed, was not encouraging. Laurie went up-stairs
afterwards three steps at a time, with his blood boiling in his veins.
He gave the padrona an animated little address about old fogies in
general, and R.A.’s in particular, to her extreme amazement, as she
stood at her work. It was a crisp, sunny, wintry morning, and Mrs.
Severn was very busy. She opened her brown eyes and laughed, as Laurie,
breathless, came to an end.
‘They will be giving advice,’ she said, ‘I know; and advice, unless when
it is just what one wants, is a terrible nuisance. I see exactly what
you mean.’
‘I have no objection to advice,’ said Laurie, half angry, half laughing,
‘when it is kept within due limits; but there is such a thing as going
too far.’ And then he told her the extent of Mr. Welby’s sin, not
without a momentary thought gleaming through his mind as he spoke, that
it was the fresh, new life which the old painter objected to see coming
within the exclusive boundaries of the profession. ‘Art is like any
other trade,’ he said, as he concluded his tale; ‘the workmen are bent
on pursuing their mystery, and would like to stone away any interloper
who inclines to come in.’
Mrs. Severn said nothing for a minute or two, but went on working at her
easel with her back to him; and when one is eager and excited to start
with, there is nothing more exasperating than to have one’s warm and
one-sided statement received thus with chilling silence. It is the
surest way to fill up what is wanting of the cup of indignation. ‘You
say nothing,’ Laurie continued, with impatience, ‘and yet, of course,
you must have suffered from it yourself.’
‘You will think I am helping to bar the door of my trade,’ said the
padrona, ‘and I know I deserve that you should fly through the window or
through the ceiling in wrath; but I can’t help it. He was quite right.
You have all your amateur habits to break yourself of, and to get to
work like,--like,--one of us. Don’t be vexed. I have wanted to say it
before, and, of course, with the generosity of my kind, I say it now
when you are down.’
‘You too!’ Laurie said with a pang. He took two or three turns up and
down the painting-room before he could speak. And but for pride, which
would not permit him to show how deep was his mortification, I fear he
would have blazed and exploded out of the house; but as soon as he had
come to himself, pride, more potent than any better feeling, cleared the
cloud from his brow.
‘I thought you had a better opinion of me,’ he said, reproachfully,
standing behind the easel and casting pathetic glances at her. ‘I came
to you to be,--consoled, I suppose,--like an ass. I thought I was
already something of a painter,--at least to you,--or why should I be
encouraged to attempt anything? Why didn’t you say to me, “Go and be a
shoemaker?”--as, indeed, Welby was honest enough to do.’
‘Now, Laurie, don’t be unjust,’ said the padrona. ‘Don’t you see it is
because I expect you to do something worth while that I want you to
study hard and learn everything? What is a year’s work to you at your
age? When one gets old one would give everything for the chance of such
a preparation. What am I but an amateur myself, not half instructed as I
ought to be? And that is why I am so anxious that it should be different
with you,--at your age.’
‘I cannot see what my age has to do with it,’ said Laurie, ‘nor why you
should always want to set me down as a boy;’ and then he paused and
compunction overtook him. He went up to his adviser, in the coaxing way
which Laurie had been master of all his life. He could not take her
hand, for she had her brush in it and was working all the time; but he
took the wide sleeve of her painting-dress between his fingers and
caressed it, which came to much the same thing. ‘You are so good to me,’
he said,--‘always so kind and so good. I never thought you would be
against me too.’
Thus it will be seen that to be advised, and even ill-used and trodden
upon by a friend who is a woman, and not uncomely to look at, is on the
whole less disagreeable than to be snubbed by an ancient R.A.
The padrona laughed, but her eye melted into loving-kindness as well as
laughter. ‘You are a boy,’ she said, ‘and a very insinuating one into
the bargain. But I am not going to be coaxed out of my opinion. You
ought to go home this very minute and lock up all your canvases and take
to chalk and paper and pencils for a whole year; and then you can come
back to me and I will tell you what I think you should do.’
‘If I am not to come back for a whole year I may as well go and hang
myself at once,’ said Laurie; and so the talk fell into lighter
channels. The truth was that he spent a great deal more time than he had
any call to do in the padrona’s studio, and hindered, or did his best to
hinder, her work; and perhaps liked better to examine her sketches and
criticise them, and make suggestions thereupon, than to labour steadily,
as he ought to have been doing, at sketches of his own. But this had not
yet lasted long enough to attract anybody’s attention,--even hers or his
own; for, of course, after such a shock as his life had sustained, this
was still an unsettled moment. He had not shaken himself down yet, nor
found his standing-ground after the convulsion; and it was natural he
should seek the counsel of his friends.
But the result was, after these conversations,--the one more
discouraging than the other,--that Laurie went direct to his colourman’s
and chose himself a lovely milk-white canvas six feet by ten, and had it
sent home immediately, and went on his knees before it in silent
adoration. His imagination set to work upon it immediately, though he
was self-denying enough not to touch it for days; but undeniably that
very night there were various sketches made of a heroic character before
he went to bed. It was difficult to choose a subject,--much more
difficult than he supposed. Several great historical events which struck
his fancy had to be rejected as demanding an amount of labour which in
the meantime was impracticable. He wandered in a range of contending
fancies all night long in his sleep, with Suffolk’s Saxon maiden in the
doorway of her father’s grange, dismissing the Norman squire who had
become her lover, floating through his brain in conjunction with various
Shakspearian scenes, and some of the padrona’s baby groups, with the
padrona herself in the midst; and when he woke the dream continued.
Sometimes he thought he would abandon history and paint a Mary with that
face,--not a girl Mary in the simplicity of youth, but one with
thoughts matured, and the wider, greater heart of experience and ripe
womanhood. Foolish boy! For, to be sure, he was a boy after all.
It took Laurie a long time to decide this matter in a satisfactory way.
One day his inclinations were scriptural, and another historical; and on
the third he would have made up his mind to a modern _genre_ picture,
but for the size of his canvas, which was clearly intended for something
heroic. He settled at last,--which indeed was almost a matter of
course,--upon a very hackneyed and trite subject, being somehow driven
to it as he felt by the influence of Suffolk’s pictures, which he
admired with all a young man’s indignant warmth. The subject which he
chose was Edith seeking the body of Harold. ‘In the lost battle, borne
down by the flying.’ Nothing could well have been more inconsistent with
his state of mind, or tastes, or general inclinations. He was not given
to melancholy thoughts, neither,--though Laurie was sufficiently
fanciful,--had any analogy struck him between his own first beginning of
the fight and that end, always so linked with the beginning, of utter
loss and overthrow and darkness. It was not any chance gleam of a
forecasting, profound imagination, or passionate sense of the fatal
chances of the battle, that suggested it to him. Such an idea might have
occurred to Suffolk, but it was inconsistent with the very constitution
of Laurie’s mind. He chose his subject in pure caprice, probably
because it was the most unlike of anything he could imagine, to his own
tender, friendly, unimpassioned nature. There are moments of youthful
ease and hope in which tragedy comes most natural to the cheerful,
unforeboding soul; I cannot tell why,--perhaps, as Wordsworth says, out
of the very ‘prodigal excess’ of its personal content. Laurie was so
absorbed in his subject,--in sketching it out, and putting it on the
canvas, and bringing his figures into harmonious composition,--that his
Clipstone Street studies suffered immensely, and he even failed in the
usual frequency of his visits to ‘the Square.’ Had he gone there as
usual, he would, of course, have betrayed himself, and he was determined
that not a word should be said until he could,--with a certain
triumph,--the triumph of individual conviction and profound
consciousness of what was best for himself over all advice,--invite his
counsellors to come and look at what was about to be. So long as this
fit of fervour lasted Miss Hadley had nothing to report, except the
barricading of his windows from morning till afternoon, as long as the
light lasted,--unless, indeed, on foggy days, when the painter would
glance out at the sky from his balcony, palette in hand, a dozen times a
day, with despair in his face. The padrona thought she had gone too far,
and affronted him, and was sorry, and sent him friendly messages,
recalling the truant; but Laurie, notwithstanding the yearning of his
heart, was true to his grand object. As he stood before the big canvas,
putting in those vast, vague outlines of the future picture, it seemed
to him that he already saw it ‘on the line’ in the Academy, with the
little scene he had already imagined going on below. But by this time he
had half forgotten the fine people whose astonishment he had once amused
himself by imagining. Kensington Gore had been swept away by the
current, and looked like some haunt of his boyhood. What he thought now
was chiefly, ‘They will have changed their opinion by that time.’
‘They,’ no doubt, included old Welby, who had been so hard on the young
painter; but I fear that the special spite of this anticipation was
directed against the padrona. What did it matter after all, except,
indeed, in the strictest professional point of view, what old Welby
thought?
Edith had not got beyond the first chalk outline, when Forrester, Mr.
Welby’s man, came one morning to Charlotte Street, with a message from
his master. Forrester was understood to know nearly as much about art as
his master did, and resembled him, as old servants often do,--and I
rather think Laurie was secretly glad, now matters had progressed so
far, of this means of conveying, in an indirect way, the first news of
his rebellion to ‘the Square.’ At all events he sent for him to come
up-stairs, awaiting his appearance with a little trepidation. Forrester,
however, was not arrogant, as some critics are. He came in with the most
bland and patronising looks, ready, it was evident, to be indulgent to
everything. When he had delivered his message, he cast an amiable glance
around him. The room was lighted only by the upper light of the middle
window, all the rest being carefully closed, and even that amount of
daylight was obscured by the shadow of the great canvas which was placed
on the easel, where all the rays that were to be had out of a November
sky might be concentrated upon it. Forrester was too thoroughly
acquainted with the profession of which he was a retainer not to
understand at once the meaning of this big shadow, and Laurie in his
anxiety thought or imagined that the critic’s lips formed themselves
into an involuntary whistle of astonishment, though no sound was
audible. But the old servitor of art felt the claims of politeness.
Instead of displaying at once his curiosity about the work in hand, he
paid his tribute of applause with a grace which his master could
scarcely have emulated. ‘That’s a nice sketch, sir,’ Forrester said,
indicating one of the Clipstone Street studies. ‘I hope you ain’t
working too hard now, we see you so little in the Square. I like that
effect, Mr. Renton; master would be pleased with that effect.’
‘I am very glad you think so, Forrester,’ said artful Laurie, leading
his visitor on.
‘Master’s a little severe, Mr. Renton,’ said Forrester, ‘but you young
gentlemen take him a deal too much at his word. Bless you, he don’t mean
half he says. I know he’d be pleased. I call that a very nice drawin’,
Mr. Renton; better nor many a dealer buys for a picture. I always said,
sir, as you was one as would come on.’
‘I am much obliged to you for your good opinion, Forrester,’ said
Laurie; ‘it is very kind of you to take so much interest in me.’
‘I’ve been among painters all my days,’ said Forrester. ‘I sat to Opie,
sir, though you wouldn’t think it, when I was a lad. I don’t know as
there is a man living as understands ’em better nor I do. I knows their
ways; and if I don’t know a picture when I sees one, who should, Mr.
Renton? I’ve been about ’em since I was a lad o’ fifteen, and awful fond
o’ them, like as they was living creatures,--and a man ain’t worth much
if he don’t form no opinion of his own in five-and-forty years. Me and
master goes on the same principle. It’s the first sketch as he’s always
mad about. “Take the big picture and hang it in your big galleries,” he
says, “and give me the sketch with the first fire into it, and the
invention.” I’ve heard him a saying of that scores of times; and them’s
my sentiments to a tee. But master, he’s all for the hantique, and me, I
go in for the modern school. There’s more natur’ in it, to my way of
thinking. You’ve got something on your easel, sir, as looks important,’
Forrester continued, edging his way with curious looks towards the
central object in the room.
‘I don’t know if I should let you see it.’ said Laurie; ‘I have only
just begun to put it on the canvas; and you are an alarming critic,
Forrester,--as awful as Mr. Welby himself.’
‘No, sir; no, no,’ said Forrester, affably; ‘don’t you be frightened; I
know how to make allowances for a beginner. We must all make a
beginning, bless you, one time or other. Master ’ud grieve if he see a
big canvas like that. He’d say, “It’s just like them boys;” but I ain’t
one to set a young gentleman down. Encourage the young, and tell your
mind to the hold, that’s my motto, sir,’ the old man said, as he placed
himself in front of the easel. As for poor Laurie, the fact is that he
grew cold with fright and expectation as he watched the face of the
critic. Forrester gave vent to a prolonged Ah! accompanied by a slight
expressive shrug when he took his first look of the canvas, and for
several moments he made no further observation. To Laurie, standing
behind him in suspense, the white chalk shadows seemed to twist and
distort themselves, and put all their limbs out of joint, in pure
perversity, under this first awful critical gaze.
‘If I might make so bold, sir,’ said Forrester, mildly, ‘what is the
subject of the picture, Mr. Renton?’ which was not an encouraging
remark.
‘Of course I ought to have told you,’ cried Laurie, very red and hot.
‘It is an incident after the Battle of Hastings,--Edith looking for the
body of Harold. Edith, you know, was----’
‘I’ve seen a many Hediths,’ said Forrester. ‘I ought to know. I’m an old
stupid, sir, not to have seen what it was; but being as it’s in the
chalk, and me not having the time to study it as I could wish----. I
don’t doubt, Mr. Renton, as it’s a fine subject. It did ought to be,
seeing the many times as it’s been took.’
‘I don’t think I have seen it many times,’ said Laurie, profoundly
startled; ‘I only remember one picture, and that very bad,’ the young
man added hastily. Forrester shook his head.
‘Not in the exhibitions, I daresay, sir,’ said the critic, solemnly;
‘but there’s a many pictures, Mr. Renton, as never get as far as the
Academy. Mr. Suffolk, he did it, sir, for one; and young Mr. Warleigh,
as has give up art, and gone off a engineering; and Robinson, as has
fallen into the portrait line,’ Forrester continued, counting on his
fingers; ‘and poor Mr. Tinto, as died in Italy; and there’s the same
subject,’ the old man added, solemnly, after a pause, ‘turned with its
face again the wall in our hattic, as Mr. Severn hisself, sir, did when
he was young.’
Laurie was overwhelmed. He gazed at the ruthless destroyer of his dreams
with a certain terror. ‘Good heavens, I had no idea!’ said the young
man, growing green with sudden despair. Then, however, his pride came
to his aid. ‘It’s a dreadful list,’ he said; ‘but, you perceive, as they
never came under the public eye, and nobody was the wiser----’
‘To be sure, sir--to be sure,’ said Forrester, with pitying complacency.
‘A many failures ain’t what you may call a reason for your failing as is
a new hand. I hope it’ll be just the contrary; but if you hadn’t a begun
of it, Mr. Renton,--and being as it’s but in the chalk, it ain’t to call
begun;----couldn’t Hedith be a looking out for her lover, sir, of an
evening, as young women has a way? I don’t suppose there was no
difference in them old times. And a bit o’ nice sunset, and him a-coming
out of it with his shadow in front of him, like. I don’t say as the
subject’s as grand, but it’s a deal cheerfuller. And when you come to
think of it, Mr. Renton, to hang up all them dead corpses and a skeered
woman, say, in your dining-room, sir, when it’s cheerful as you want to
be----’
‘Thanks,’ said Laurie, with a little offence. ‘I have no doubt you are
very judicious, but I am sorry I can’t see the matter in the same light.
You will give Mr. Welby my compliments, please. I’ll be glad to dine
with him on Saturday, as he asks me. Perhaps you will be so good as to
say nothing--. But no, that’s of no consequence,’ Laurie added, hastily.
Of course he was not going to give in. Of course they must know sooner
or later what he was doing, and better sooner than later. They might
laugh, or sneer, or consider him childish if they pleased; but the
moment his picture was hung on the line in the Academy, all that would
be changed. So Laurie mounted his high horse. But he did it in a
splendid, magnanimous sort of way. He smoothed down Forrester’s wounded
feelings by a ‘tip,’ which, indeed, was more than he could afford, and
which the old man took with reluctance,--and opened the door for him
with his own hands. ‘Offended! because you tell me how popular my
subject has been? Most certainly not! Much obliged to you, on the
contrary, Forrester, and very proud of your good opinion,’ he said, with
a most gracious smile and nod, as his critic went away, which Forrester
did with a certain satisfaction mingling with his regret.
‘It’s for his good,’ the old man said to himself; ‘and there ain’t no
way of doing them young fellows good without hurting of their feelings.’
Laurie for his part went back to his painting-room, and sat down moodily
before his big canvas. It was too ridiculous to care for such a piece of
criticism. Forrester;--Mr. Welby’s servant!--to think of minding
anything that a stupid old fellow in his dotage might venture to say!
Laurie laughed what he meant for a mocking laugh, and then bit his lip
and called himself a fool. Of course the old rascal had been crammed
beforehand and taught what to say; or if not, at least it was no wonder
if the servant repeated what the master thought. It was not this
picture or that, but every picture that Welby had set his face against.
And what a piece of idiocy to show his man, his echo,--the very first
beginning,--the most chaotic indication,--such as none but an eye at
once keen and indulgent could have made out,--of the great work that was
to be! Laurie concluded proudly that nobody was to blame but himself, as
he sat down in his first quiver of mortification, half inclined to tear
his canvas across, and pitch his chalks to the other end of the room.
Then he looked at it, and found his Edith looking down upon him with her
tragic eyes,--eyes which to her creator looked tragic and full of awful
meaning, though they were but put in in chalk. Perhaps, indeed, it was
the chalk that made her divine in her despair, whitely shadowing out of
the white canvas, owing everything to the imagination,--a suggestion of
horror and frantic grief and misery. What if it was a common subject!
The more common a thing is, the more universal and all-influencing must
it be. A tender woman, made sublime by her despair, seeking on a field
of battle the body of the man she loved most,--a thing of primitive
passion such as must move all humanity. What if it were hackneyed! All
the more distinctly would it be apparent which was the touch of the real
power which could embody the scene, and which the mere painter of
costumed figures. Such were Laurie’s thoughts as he sat, discouraged
and cast down, before his picture,--poor fellow!--after Forrester’s
visit. If the man’s criticisms had so much effect upon him, what would
the master’s have had? What could he have said to the padrona had it
been she who had come to look at his picture? Then the long array of
names which Forrester had quoted came back upon him. In short, poor
Laurie had received a downright unexpected blow, and ached and smarted
under it, as was natural to a sensitive being loving applause and
approbation. He turned his back on Edith for the rest of the day,
throwing open his windows, to Miss Hadley’s astonishment, the first time
for a week, and affording her a dim vision of a figure thrown into an
arm-chair by the fire, with a novel. It was the first time since he came
to Charlotte Street that he had in broad daylight and cold blood given
himself over to such an indulgence. He was disgusted with his work and
himself. He had not the heart to go out. He could not go to the Square,
where probably by this time they were all laughing over his folly. He
read his novel doggedly all the afternoon, in sight of Miss Hadley, who
could not tell what to make of it. The light was gone and the day lost
before he roused himself, and pitched his book into the farthest corner.
His kindly spy could not tell what the perverse young fellow would do
next. Probably go and have his dinner, she said to herself; which,
indeed, Laurie did; and came home much better, beginning to be able to
laugh at Forrester, and snap his fingers at his predecessors. ‘The more
reason it should be done now,’ he said to himself, ‘if Suffolk, and
Severn, and all those fellows broke down over it.’ And he suffered a
little gleam of self-complacency to steal over his face, and went to
work all night at his sketch, to improve and perfect the composition. So
that, on the whole, Laurie, though no genius, had that nobler quality of
genius which overcomes all criticism and surmounts every discouragement.
He had been shut up long enough in silence with his conception. That
day, he made up his mind, instead of permitting himself to be
ignominiously snubbed by old Forrester, that he would face the world,
and carry the sketch which he was completing to the padrona herself.
CHAPTER XXI.
WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF IT IN THE SQUARE.
Forrester went back very full of his discovery, and there was a certain
solemnity in his manner which made it evident to his master that he had
something to tell. When he had delivered Laurie’s message about the
dinner on Saturday, he paused with a look of meaning. ‘And glad he’ll be
of a good dinner, too, sir,’ the old man said, solemnly, ‘before all is
done.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Forrester,’ said Mr. Welby. ‘He must have been
extravagant: for, after all, though it’s a change to him, a man need not
starve on two hundred a-year.’
‘It’s not now as I’m meaning, sir,’ said Forrester, with a sigh. ‘He’s
been and started in a bad way. For aught I can tell he’s as well off as
you and me now; but I know what it all comes to, Mr. Welby, when a young
man sets hisself agoing, and won’t hear no advice,--in that way.’
‘God bless me! you don’t mean to say the young fellow has got married?’
said Mr. Welby, with agitation; for his interest in Laurie was great.
‘No, sir,’ said Forrester, ‘worse nor that. Marrying’s a lottery, but
sometimes a wife’s a help. You may shake your head, sir; but sometimes
she’s a help. It’s more nor that; but I won’t keep you no longer in
misery. That young gentleman, sir, as you take an interest in, and I
take an interest in, and the good lady up-stairs, though he’s been
well-instructed and had all our advice, and ain’t an idiot, not to speak
of, in other things, he’s been and took up the Saxon line. I see, with
my own eyes, a sketch of that ere blessed Hedith as is always a seeking
somebody’s body. He’s got it stuck up on a big canvas six by ten, sir;
you take my word; and you know what that comes to as well as me.’
‘Bless my soul!’ said Mr. Welby; and though his emotion took a different
form, it was quite as genuine as Forrester’s outspoken despair. He took
a few turns through his studio, repeating this disclosure to himself.
‘The Saxon line!’ he said with horror. ‘Infatuated boy! When a young man
is thus bent on destroying himself, what can any one do?’ ‘You are sure
you are making no mistake?’ said the R.A.; ‘it was not some other
fellow’s canvas that had been left in his place? And what did you say to
him? After all the trouble we’ve taken! I will never interest myself in
any young man again,’ said Mr. Welby, with effusion, ‘not if I should
live a hundred years!’
‘What did I say, sir?’ said Forrester. ‘I told him plain where he was
going to; to destruction. I gave him a piece of my mind, sir. I spoke to
him that clear as he couldn’t make no mistake. I told him the times and
times I’ve seen it done, and what followed. I counted ’em over to
him,--Mr. Suffolk, and young Mr. Warleigh, and----’
‘Then you behaved like an ass,’ cried the R.A., with indignation.
‘Suffolk! the cleverest painter he knows. Why, there’s not a man among
us can hold the candle to Suffolk for some things! Why didn’t you tell
him of Baxter, and Robinson, and Simpson, and half-a-dozen other young
fools like himself? Suffolk! A man of genius! I thought you had more
sense.’
‘He may be a bit of a genius,’ said Forrester, standing his ground; ‘but
he don’t sell his pictures, and Mr. Renton knows it. He was struck all
of a heap, sir, when he’d heard all I’d got to say. I don’t approve of
the subject, nor I don’t approve of the size; but as far as I could
judge of the chalk, it wasn’t badly put on. I wouldn’t say he’s a
genius, but he’s got a way, has Mr. Renton; and always a nice-spoken,
civil gentleman, even when he’s put out a bit, as he might have been
to-day.’
‘Pshaw!’ said the master; ‘that means, I suppose, that he did not kick
you down-stairs. Foolish boy! after all I said to him. I daresay some of
the women have put it into his head to go and distinguish himself. Go up
and give my compliments to Mrs. Severn, and I’d like to speak to her if
she is not busy; and mind you don’t say a word of this. Don’t speak of
it anywhere. I hope what you’ve said to him, and what I shall say to
him, will bring him to his senses. Don’t say a word about it to any
soul.’
‘I’ve been trusted with greater secrets,’ said Forrester, with dignity.
‘He’ll tell her, sir, as fast as look at her; and he’ll build more on
her advice, though she don’t know half nor a quarter. I’m a going, sir.
He thinks a deal more of what she says than of either you or me.’
‘Insufferable old bore!’ Mr. Welby said to himself. ‘Outrageous young
ass! It must be those silly women that have bidden him go and
distinguish himself. And what have I got to do with it, I’d like to
know?’ The truth was the Academician had begun to take a greater
interest in Laurie than was consistent with his principles; and he
wanted to blame somebody for his favourite’s rebellion. He put down his
palette, for he was at work at the moment, and washed his hands, and
prepared for the interview he had asked. Perhaps Mr. Welby was doubly
ceremonious as a kind of protest against the ease with which other
members of the profession penetrated into the padrona’s studio.
‘A lady is a lady, however she may be occupied,’ the old man said. And,
in accordance with this principle, Forrester’s mien and voice were very
solemn when he made his appearance up-stairs. ‘Master’s compliments,
ma’am, and if you’re not busy he’d like to speak to you,’ he said,
standing ceremoniously at the door.
‘Mr. Welby, Forrester?’ said the padrona. ‘Oh, surely; I shall be glad
to see him. I hope there’s nothing the matter. Come in and tell me what
you think of this. I hope there’s nothing wrong.’
‘No, ma’am; not as I knows of,’ said Forrester, with profound gravity.
‘I don’t know what else could be thought of it, but that it’s a sweet
little bit of colour, ma’am. You never done nothing finer nor that
flesh. It’s breathing, that is. Miss Alice called me in to have a look
at it before you came down.’
‘Miss Alice is always an early bird,’ said the padrona, pleased. ‘I’m
glad you like it, Forrester; but I don’t think I’ve got the light quite
right here. Tell Mr. Welby I shall be glad to see him; but you look
horribly grave, all the same, as if something had gone wrong.’
‘No, ma’am, nothing,’ said Forrester, with a glance over his
shoulder;--‘only about Mr. Renton, as we’re afraid is in a bad way.’
‘Good heavens! Laurie! What is the matter with him?’ cried Mrs. Severn.
The old man shook his head in the most tragical and desponding way.
‘Master will tell you himself, ma’am,’ Forrester said, withdrawing
suddenly out of temptation and closing the door behind him. The padrona
did not know what to think. Laurie had not been visible for a week at
least in the Square; but even a young man, with all the proclivities
towards mischief common to that animal, cannot go very far wrong in a
week. She too prepared for the impending interview, as Mr. Welby was
doing. She put away all her working materials, and set the big Louis
Quinze fauteuil near the fire for her visitor. She even went so far as
to put a sketching-block on the table, and sat down before it with a
pencil in her hand, posing half consciously, as an amateur might have
posed. The padrona, though she was not timid in general, was a little
afraid of her tenant. If she left her picture on the easel it was
because there was no time to get it comfortably smuggled away, and some
inarticulate beginning placed in its stead. She turned the Louis Quinze,
however, with its back to the easel by way of security. A word of
approbation from old Welby was worth gold; but yet the risk of obtaining
it was one Mrs. Severn did not care to run.
A few minutes after he tapped at the door, and came in, taking off the
velvet cap which,--as he knew very well,--had such a picturesque effect
on his white hair. The moment he entered the room the padrona saw how
vain had been her precaution in turning the Louis Quinze chair. He
glanced round him with the quick artist-eye which sees everything, and
went up to the easel of course as politeness required, and delivered
his little speech of courteous applause, under which Mrs. Severn
discovered not a word of criticism, such as her usual visitors threw
about so lightly. ‘I don’t think I have got the light quite here,’ she
said, as she had said to Forrester,--but with alarm in her face.
‘Indeed, I don’t see what there is to find fault with,’ Mr. Welby
answered, with his old-fashioned bow. Nothing could be more sweet or
more unsatisfactory. The padrona almost forgot poor Laurie, as with a
flush of vexation on her face she indicated to her visitor the Louis
Quinze chair.
‘I hope you are not over-exerting yourself, my dear madam,’ the old
painter said. ‘I am struck dumb by your energy. Where I produce one
little picture you exhibit half-a-dozen. I admire, but I fear; and, if
you will let an old man say so, you must take care not to overwork your
brain.’
Tears sprang to the padrona’s eyes; but she kept them fixed steadily on
her block, so that the old cynic, who, no doubt, knew all the
commonplaces about women’s tears, should not see them. She said, with
all the composure she was mistress of, ‘You and I are very different,
Mr. Welby. Your one picture, of course, is more than worth my
half-dozen; but one must do what one can.’
‘No one knows better than I what Mrs. Severn can do,’ said the R. A.,
with one of those smiles for which the padrona could have strangled him.
‘I was but taking the privilege of my age to warn you against
overwork,--which is the grand disease of these times, and kills more
people than cholera does. Pardon me. I want to speak to you about young
Renton, in whom I know you take an interest. I advised him,’ Mr. Welby
said, slowly, ‘to give up all idea of producing anything for the moment,
and to devote himself to preparatory work,--hard work.’
‘So he told me,’ said the padrona, with a little spirit; for there was
no mistaking the implied blame in old Welby’s tone. ‘And so I told him,
too.’
‘Then somebody has been undermining us, my dear madam,’ said the R. A.
‘Somebody has been egging up the foolish boy to make a name for himself,
and win fame, and so forth. Forrester brings me word that he has begun a
great picture. High art, life-size, Edith finding the body of Harold.
The young fellow must be mad.’
‘Edith finding the body of Harold!’ repeated Mrs. Severn,
bewildered;--and then, what with her personal agitation, what with the
curious anti-climax of this announcement after her fears about Laurie,
the padrona, we are obliged to confess, burst into a sudden fit of
nervous laughter. She laughed till the tears came into her eyes; and, to
be sure, old Welby had no way of knowing how near to the surface were
those tears before.
‘I confess I do not see the joke,’ he said, slowly. ‘Of course I have
nothing to do with the boy. If he goes and makes a fool of himself, like
so many others, it is nothing to me. Indeed, I don’t know who advised
him to come here, where one can’t help seeing what he’s about. He would
have been a great deal better, and out of one’s way, had he stayed at
Kensington Gore.’
‘He was paying four guineas a-week for his rooms at Kensington Gore,’
said the padrona, meekly. ‘It was I who advised him to come to Charlotte
Street. A man cannot live on nothing. If he had given all his income for
rent----’
‘When I was like him I lived on nothing,’ said the R.A.; ‘but young men
now-a-days must have their clubs and their luxuries. Why, what education
has he had that he should begin to paint pictures? A few lines scratched
on a bit of paper, or dabs of paint on a canvas do well enough for an
amateur; but, good heavens, a painter! You don’t see it, ma’am; you
don’t see it! Women never do. You think it’s all genius, and nonsense.
You will tell me it’s genius that makes a Michael Angelo, I suppose;
but, I tell you, it’s hard work.’
‘I do see it,’ said the padrona. ‘Sit down, please, and don’t be angry
with me. I see it very well; but I can’t help laughing all the same. It
is Laurie’s way. He will never be a Michael Angelo. It is so like him to
go and set up a great picture to surprise us. One of these days, if you
take no notice, he will come like Innocence itself, and invite us to go
and look at it. I was afraid something was wrong with him; but this
quite explains why he stayed away.’
‘And that is all a woman cares for!’ said Mr. Welby. ‘The boy’s quite
well, and his absence accounted for; and what does it matter if he makes
an ass of himself?’ Here the painter rose, and made a little _giro_
round the room, pausing at the easel with a certain vindictiveness. ‘I
wouldn’t give much for that baby’s chances of life,’ he said. ‘The
creature will be a cripple if it grows up. It has no joints to its legs;
and that little girl’s got her shoulder out. There’s where the elbow
should come,’ he went on, making an imaginary line in the air. It was
the same picture he had made a pretty speech about when he came into the
room, from which it may be perceived that Mrs. Severn’s terror of her
lodger’s visit was not without cause.
‘I shall be so glad if you tell me what you see wrong,’ the padrona
said, with, I fear, more submission than she felt.
‘Wrong, ma’am,--it’s all wrong!’ cried the R.A.; ‘there’s not a line
that could not be mended, nor a limb that is quite in its right
place;--but I couldn’t paint such a picture for my life,’ Mr. Welby
continued, with a sudden melting in his voice; ‘nor anybody else but
yourself. The body’s out of drawing, but the soul’s divine.
Light!--nonsense,--the light’s all as it ought to be; the light’s in
that woman’s face. I don’t know how to better it. But this is not what
we were talking of,’ he continued, suddenly turning his back on the
picture. ‘We were talking of Laurie Renton. What is to be done about
this ridiculous boy?’
The padrona was a little disturbed. She was overwhelmed by the praise,
feeling all the sweetness of it; and she was pricked, and stung to
smarting by the blame. It cost her a considerable effort to master
herself, and to bring back her thoughts even to Laurie Renton. ‘You must
not be too hard upon him,’ she said, with her voice a little tremulous.
‘A mind that has any energy in it must work in its own way.’ This was
said half on Laurie’s account, no doubt, but also half on her own, after
the assault she had sustained. ‘I think it would be best not to say too
much about his big picture. He will read your disapproval in your eye.’
Mr. Welby shrugged his shoulders. ‘I doubt if a young fellow would take
much interest in reading my eye. But he may read yours, perhaps,’ said
the cynic, with a questioning glance, which Mrs. Severn was too much
occupied to perceive, much less understand. And this was about the end
of the consultation. They might admire and warn, and hold up beacons
before the unwary youth, but there is no Act of Parliament forbidding a
young painter to purchase for himself canvases six feet by ten, and to
paint, or attempt to paint, heroic pictures thereupon. His advisers
might regret and might do their best to turn him to wiser ways, but that
was all; and the question was not urgent enough to demand the sacrifice
of the very best hours of a November day,--which, heaven knows! are
short enough for a painter’s requirements, in a district so rapidly
reached by the rising fog from the city as Fitzroy Square.
It was the evening of the next day before Laurie carried out his
resolution. With a little impatience he waited till it was dark, or
nearly so, and then, with his sketch under his arm, went round the
corner to the Square. To carry a portfolio or a picture under your arm
is nothing wonderful in these regions; and I think it was something of a
foppery on Laurie’s part to wait till the twilight; but, on the whole,
it was rather Mr. Welby and old Forrester he was afraid of than the
general public. The padrona was,--as he knew she would be,--in her
dining room, sitting in the fire-light, with a heap of little scorched,
shining faces about her, when he went in. One good thing of these short
winter days was, that the woman-painter had a special hour in which it
was impossible to do anything, and a perfectly legitimate indulgence to
play with the little ones to her heart’s content. They were all upon
her,--little Edie seated upon her mother’s lap, with her arms closely
clasped round her neck, and the boys on either side embracing her
shoulders. ‘She is my mamma,’ said little Edie; ‘go away, you boys.’
‘She is my mamma as well,’ said Frank and Harry, with one voice. They
could not see Laurie as he came in softly into the ruddy, warm, homelike
darkness, nor hear the voice of the maid who opened the door for him;
and Laurie, soft-hearted as he was, lingered over this little glimpse of
those most intimate delights with which neither he nor any other
stranger could intermeddle. When he saw the mother with her
children,--who were all hers, and in whom no one else had any
share,--the helpless, hopeful, joyous creatures, encircled by the
woman’s soft, strong arms, which were all the protection, all the
shelter they had in this world,--his heart melted within him, the
foolish fellow! Alice sat at her piano in the drawing-room, playing the
soft dream-music which was natural to the hour; and to her, had he been
like other young men, Laurie’s thoughts and steps would naturally have
turned; instead of which he stood gazing at her mother, who at that
moment no more remembered him than if there had been no such being in
existence. Laurie’s heart melted so that he could have gone and sat down
on the hearth-rug at her feet, as one of the boys did, had he dared, and
asked her to let him help her and stand by her. Help her in what? Laurie
gave no answer to his own question; and, to be sure, he could not stand
in the dark for more than a minute spying upon the fireside hour. He put
down his sketch on a side-table with a little noise, which made the
padrona start.
‘I am not a ghost,’ said Laurie, coming into the warmer circle of the
firelight.
‘Then you should not behave as such,’ Mrs. Severn said, holding out her
hand to him with a smile: and then the mere accident of the moment
brought him beside little Frank on the hearth-rug, as he had thought,
with a little sentimental impulse, of placing himself. He sat down on
the child’s stool, and held out his hands to the fire, and looked up at
the padrona’s face, which shone out in glimpses by the cheerful
firelight. Sometimes little Edith, with her wreath of hair, would come
between him and her mother like a little golden, rose-tinted, cloud;
sometimes the fitful blaze would decline for a moment, and throw the
whole scene into darkness. But Mrs. Severn did not change her attitude,
or put down the child from her lap, or ring for the lamp, on Laurie’s
arrival. He came in without breaking the spell,--without disturbing the
calm of the moment. And after an absence of more than a week, and some
days’ work and seclusion, it is not wonderful if he felt as if he had
suddenly come home.
‘This would not be a bad time to lecture you, as I am going to do,’ said
the padrona. ‘He has been very naughty, children; he ought to be put in
the corner. Let us make up our minds what we will do to him, now we have
him here.’
‘Give him some bad sums to do, mamma,’ said little Harry, whose life was
made a burden to him in that way; ‘or make him write out fifty lines;
and don’t tell him any stories. What have you done, Mr. Renton? I want
to know.’
‘Give him a bad mark in the pantomime book,’ said Frank. Now, the
pantomime-book was a ledger of the severest penalties; the bad marks
disabled a sinner altogether from the enjoyment of the highest of
pleasures, and was as good as a pantomime lost. The savage suggestion
awoke the sympathy of little Edie on her mother’s knee.
‘What has he done?’ said Edie. ‘Poor Laurie! But mamma won’t listen to
these cruel boys. Mamma listens to me. I am the little princess in the
new picture. Mamma, I love Laurie. Make him go down on his knees and beg
pardon, and I know he will never do it any more.’
‘I will never do it any more,’ said Laurie, with one knee upon the
hearth-rug. There was something in the soft, genial warmth, and kindly,
flickering light, the touches of the children, and their sweet, ringing
tones,--the face of their mother now and then shining upon him, and her
voice coming out of the shadow,--which captivated him in some
unintelligible way. There was no romance in the matter, certainly. She
was years older than he was, and thought of him as a grandmother might
have thought. But Laurie Renton was that kind of man. His heart was full
of tenderness and sympathy, and a certain sense of the pathos of the
situation which did not strike the chief actors in it. Mrs. Severn
thought herself a happy woman,--notwithstanding all that had befallen
her,--when she sat down by her fire, and felt the soft pressure of those
soft, baby arms; but to Laurie there was a pathos in it which brought
the tears to his eyes. ‘I will never do it any more,’ he said; ‘I will
do whatever mamma tells me. I will be her servant if she will let me.’
Perhaps it was well for Laurie that the children immediately burst into
a chorus of laughter and jubilation over his proposal. ‘He will be our
Forrester, and do everything we tell him,’ cried the boys; and the
padrona, carried away by their delight, thought nothing of the bended
knee nor the unnecessary fervour of submission. I doubt even if she
heard very clearly what he said, or was the least aware of his attitude;
but probably instinct warned her that there was enough of this. She rang
the bell, which was close to her hand, without saying anything. After
all, the firelight and the hearth-rug was only for the children and
herself. And I think Laurie even was a little ashamed of his temporary
intoxication when the lamp came in, carried by the maid, bringing back
the light of common evening,--the clear outlines of prose and
matter-of-fact.
It was not till after tea that he brought his sketch to exhibit it. The
children had gone up-stairs, and Miss Hadley had returned home, and no
evening visitor had as yet arrived. When Laurie was left alone with the
padrona, she laid down her needlework and lifted up her eyes to him,
beaming with a kindly light. ‘I have something serious to say to you
now,’ she said. ‘I have been hearing dreadful things about you. You have
not taken our advice.’
‘Our advice! I don’t know what that means,’ said Laurie. ‘There is but
one padrona in the world, and her advice I always take.’
‘Do not be hypocritical,’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘You promised to paint no
pictures, but to be busy and study and do your work; and here you have
set up an Edith as big as Reginald Suffolk’s, and you call that taking
my advice.’
‘Here she is,’ said Laurie, producing his sketch. He placed it on the
table, propped up against the open workbox, and took the lamp in his
hand that the light might fall on it as it ought. He did not defend
himself. ‘I kept away as long as I could, meaning not to tell you yet;
but that did not answer,’ said Laurie; ‘and here she is.’
The padrona put away her work out of her hands, and gave all her
attention to the new object thus placed before her; and whatever might
be the qualities of Edith, the group thus formed was pictorial
enough;--the room all brightness and warmth, centering in the pure light
of the lamp which Laurie held up in his hand; the fair, ample, seated
figure gazing earnestly at the little picture, with her own face
partially in the shade,--behind her the open doors of the larger room,
dark, but warm, with a redness in it of the fire, and a pale gleam from
the curtained windows. But the actors in this still interior were
unconscious of its effect. She was looking intently at the sketch, and
he, pausing to hear what she should say of it, holding his breath.
‘Put down the lamp,’ said the padrona after a pause, ‘it is too heavy to
hold, and I can see. And sit down here till I speak to you. You have not
taken our advice.’
‘I understand,’ said Laurie, and his lip quivered a little, poor fellow!
‘That means I may take away the rubbish. You need not say any more, for
it will pain you. I understand.’
‘You don’t understand anything about it,’ said Mrs. Severn, putting out
her hand to retain the sketch where it was. ‘Let me say out my say. I
don’t want to like it. I wish I could say it was very bad. If it had
been atrocious it would have been better for you, you rash boy! But I
must not tell any fibs. I like the sketch; there is something in it. I
can’t tell how you should know about that woman, expecting every moment
to see---- Yes, put her away, Laurie, for a little; her eyes have gone
to my heart.’
Laurie put down his creation upon the table with a face all glowing with
pride and delight. ‘I hoped you would like it,’ he said; ‘but that it
should move you,----’ and in his gratitude he would have kissed the
hand of the friend to whose counsel he owed so much. As for the padrona,
she withdrew her hand quickly, with a momentary look of surprise.
‘But I have more to say,’ she went on. ‘You must wait till you have
heard me out. Don’t be vexed or disappointed. I doubt if you will ever
make any more of her. Now don’t speak. I will say to you what I have
never said to any one. How many sketches like that have I seen in my
life, full of talent, full of meaning! It is not a sketch;--it is all
the picture you will paint of that subject. I know what I am saying. She
who is so real in that, with her awful expectations, will be staring
like a woman on the stage in the big picture. I know it, Laurie. I have
seen such things, over and over again.’
Laurie said nothing. He saw her eyes, which were still fixed on his
sketch, suddenly brim over, quite silently, in two big drops, which fell
at Edith’s feet. Mortification, disappointment, and, at the same time, a
kind of consolatory feeling, took possession of him. The downfall was
great from the first flush of joy in her approbation; but yet----
Clearly it was of poor Severn she was thinking. Poor Severn, of whom it
was certainly the fact that he never did anything good except in
sketches. Laurie’s heart rose magnanimous at this thought. If that was
all, how soon he could prove to her that he was a different man from
poor Severn! ‘It is not worth a tear,’ he said; ‘never mind it. I ought
to have known that it would bring things to your mind----’
‘It is not that,’ said the padrona, recovering herself; ‘it is because I
am anxious you should not waste your strength. Put it up again where it
can be seen, or, rather, bring it into the other room, where there is a
better place. Take the lamp, and I will take the picture. I like it,’
she said, as she followed him into the larger drawing-room. ‘Let it
stand here, where it can be seen. And I will send for Mr. Welby if he is
at home. I like it very much;--but I don’t want you to paint the big
picture all the same.’
‘If you like it, that is reason enough why I should paint the big
picture,’ said Laurie. If the padrona discerned the touch of tender
enthusiasm in his tone, she took no notice whatever of it, but busied
herself placing the sketch in the most favourable light.
‘Mr. Welby came up-stairs, and insulted me, all on your account,’ she
said with a laugh. ‘Oh, don’t look furious. I don’t want any one to
fight my battles. But it is cruel of him, all the same. He congratulated
me on my energy, and on sending six pictures to the Exhibitions where he
sent one. It was very ill-natured of him,--a man who has had a whole
long life to perfect himself, and nothing to hurry him on. Does not he
think, I wonder, that even I would like to take time and spare no
labour, and paint something that would last and live?’ Mrs. Severn said,
with a flush coming over her face.
‘And so you do, and so they will,’ said Laurie, carried away by his
feelings. The padrona shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t deceive myself. I get money for my pictures,
and that is about what they are worth. But don’t you think, Laurie,--you
who understand things that are not spoken,--don’t you think it sometimes
makes my heart sick, to feel that, if I could but wait, if I could but
take time, I might do work that would be worth doing,--real work,--one
picture, say, that would have a whole soul in it? But I can’t take time:
there are the children, and daily bread; and--he taunts me that I paint
six pictures for his one!’
‘Padrona mia, nothing that could be painted would be half so good as you
are,’ cried Laurie, not knowing in the thrill and pain of sympathy what
he said.
‘I should like to paint something that would be better than me,’ said
the padrona, ‘but I cannot. I have to work for their bread,--and you
feel for me when I tell you this. And don’t you see,--don’t you see why
I bid you work?’ cried the artful woman, suddenly turning upon him,
standing on her own heart, as it were, to reach him. ‘There is nothing
to urge you into execution, to compel you to exhibit and sell and get
money. Why don’t you take the good of your blessed leisure, you foolish
boy? Never think of the Academy, nor of what you will paint, nor of
what people think. Make yourself a painter, Laurie, now that you have
your life in your hands, and heaps of time, and nothing to urge you on.
But, good heavens! here are people coming,’ cried Mrs. Severn,--‘to find
me flushed and half crying over all this, I declare. Talk to them till I
come back, and I will send down the child to help you; and don’t forget
what I’ve been saying,’ she said, as she rushed out of the room.
This assault had been so sudden, so trenchant, so effective;--he had
been led so artfully to the softness of real feeling, in order to have
the thrust made at his most unguarded moment, that Laurie stood confused
when his Mentor left him, not quite sure where he was, or what had
happened. Had it been any stranger who had appeared, Mrs. Severn’s young
friend would have made a poor impression upon her visitor; but, happily,
it was Alice who came in,--Alice with her curls,--harmonious spirit,
setting the house to music, as her mother said. This was all poor Laurie
made by his honesty in carrying his Edith, in her earliest conception,
for the approval of the Square.
THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
LONDON:
STRANGEWAYS AND WALDEN, PRINTERS,
28 Castle St. Leicester Sq.
* * * * *
THE THREE BROTHERS.
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF
‘CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,’
‘SALEM CHAPEL,’ ‘THE MINISTER’S WIFE,’
ETC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1870.
_The Right of Translation is Reserved._
LONDON:
STRANGEWAYS AND WALDEN, PRINTERS,
Castle St., Leicester Sq.
CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
PAGE
I. PLAY 1
II. WHAT CAME OF IT 20
III. A PATRON OF ART 42
IV. SUCCESS 64
V. A DISCOVERY 79
VI. LAURIE’S FATE 96
VII. A FULL STOP 113
VIII. YOUNG FRANK 133
IX. NELLY RICH 152
X. BROTHERLY ADVICE 174
XI. THE MUSIC-ROOM 186
XII. A PRISONER 198
XIII. SUNDAY 210
XIV. FRANK’S PERPLEXITIES 234
XV. PROGRESS 256
XVI. MRS. RENTON’S CALL 271
XVII. A STEP THE WRONG WAY 286
XVIII. WAVERING 306
THE THREE BROTHERS.
CHAPTER I.
PLAY.
It must be admitted that the counsel thus bestowed upon Laurie in
respect to his work had rather a discouraging than a stimulating effect
upon him. It disgusted him, no doubt, with Edith and his big canvas, but
it did not fill him, as it was intended to do, with enthusiasm for
Clipstone Street, and his other opportunities of legitimate work. He
made it an excuse for doing nothing, which was unfortunate, after so
much trouble had been taken about him. Perhaps, on the whole, it would
have been better to have let him have his way. The padrona herself
thought so, though she had not been able to refrain from interfering
when she had the opportunity. The Square, and the adjacent regions, had
pronounced almost unanimously that the sketch was a very clever sketch;
but, notwithstanding, deprecated with one voice the big canvas, and the
ambitious work. ‘I did it, and you see I have not made much of it,’ said
Suffolk. ‘If I thought I could make as much of it as you have done, I
should go in for it to-morrow,’ cried Laurie, with an enthusiasm for
which the painter’s wife could have hugged him. ‘But, dear Mr. Renton,
if you would but advise him to take simpler subjects!’ Mrs. Suffolk
said, with her pathetic voice. Suffolk was a man of genius, as even old
Welby admitted, and slowly, by degrees, the profession itself was
beginning to be awake to his merits; but as for the British public, it
knew nothing of the painter, except that up to this moment he had been
hung down on the floor, or up at the roof, in the Academy’s exhibition,
and sneered at in the ‘Sword.’ This was what came of high art.
Mr. Welby paid Laurie a visit in his rooms, to enforce the lesson upon
him. ‘If we had room and space for that sort of thing, it would be all
very well, sir,’ said the R.A., ‘but in a private collection what can
you do with it? The best thing Suffolk could hope for would be to have
his picture hung in some Manchester man’s dining-room;--best patrons we
have now-a-days. But it would fill up the whole wall, and naturally the
Manchester man would rather have two or three Maclises, and a Mulready,
and a Webster, and even a Welby, my dear fellow,--not to speak of
Millais, and the young ones. There’s how it is. A dozen pictures are
better than one in our patrons’ eyes,--more use, and more variety, and
by far more valuable if anything should happen to the mills. Though it’s
a work of genius, Renton,--I don’t deny it’s a work of genius,--whereas
this----’
‘Is nothing but a beginner’s attempt, I know,’ said poor Laurie. ‘That
is all settled and understood. Let us talk of something else.’
Mr. Welby, without heeding the young man, got up, and gazed upon the
white canvas, which still stood on the easel like a ghost, with the
white outlines growing fainter. Laurie had not had the heart to touch it
since that evening in the Square. ‘I don’t understand how you young men
can be so rash,’ he said; ‘for my part, I think there is no picture that
ever was painted equal to the sublimity of that blank canvas. Why, sir,
it might be anything! Buonarotti or Leonardo never equalled what it
might be. It is a thing that strikes me with awe; I feel like a wretch
when I put the first daub of vulgar colour on it. Colour brings it down
to reality,--to our feeble efforts after expression,--but in itself it
is the inexpressible. I don’t mind your chalk so much. It’s a
desecration, but not sacrilege,--a white shadow on the white blank,--and
it might turn out anything, sir! Whereas, if you put another touch on
it, you would bring it down to your own level. The wonder to me always
is how a man who is a true painter ever paints a line!’
‘It is well for the world that you have not always been of that
opinion,’ said Laurie, forcing out a little compliment in spite of
himself.
‘But I have always been of that opinion,’ said Mr. Welby.
‘Unfortunately, man is a complex being, my dear fellow, and whatever
your convictions and higher sentiments may be, the other part of you
will force itself into expression. But the thing is to keep it down as
long as possible, and subdue and train it like any other slave. That is
always my advice to you young men. Never draw two lines when you can do
with one. Don’t spoil an inch more of that lovely white canvas than your
idea will fill. Keep within your idea, my dear Laurie. You should no
more tell it all out than a woman should tell out how fond she is of
you. Art is coy, and loves a secret,’ said the old man, warming into a
kind of enthusiasm.
These were the kind of addresses which were made to Laurie in this his
first attempt to stumble out of his pleasant amateur ways into
professional work and its habits. He could not but ask himself, with a
tragi-comic wonder, whether it was anxiety for his good alone which
wound up his friends into eloquence, or whether there had ever been a
novice so overwhelmed by good advice before. He had done what he liked
in the old days, when what he liked was of little consequence; but it
was clear that he was not to be permitted to do what he liked now. He
was affronted, disgusted, amused, and discouraged, all in a breath. Work
in cold blood for work’s sake, to lead to no immediate end, was
something of which Laurie was incapable. It seemed to him that the way
to become a painter was by painting pictures, and he did not give the
weight they deserved to his friends’ counsels when they adjured him to
work at smaller matters, and to postpone the great. ‘I shall never
satisfy them,’ he said to himself; and accordingly the spur being thus
removed, his natural habit of mind returned upon him. He had no tendency
to extravagance, being simple in all his tastes, and it seemed to him
that he could get on very well on his two hundred a-year. ‘I shall never
marry,’ Laurie said to himself, with a sigh, ‘nor think of marrying.
That sort of thing is all over; and there is enough to keep me alive, I
suppose. And why should I go worrying everybody about pictures which I
don’t suppose I am fit to paint? But I may be of use to my friends,’ he
added in his self-communion. So he took to play instead of work, which
he found to be more congenial to his ancient habits, and he fell back
into it as naturally as possible. It would have been better for him, so
far as his profession was concerned, had they let him have his own way.
But if he could not be a great painter himself, it was possible enough
that he might be of use to those who were so. Though he had been
momentarily absorbed by his abortive project, and momentarily thrown off
his balance by all the opposition it met, yet he had not forgotten his
promise to Mrs. Suffolk. If there was anything he could do to open the
eyes of the British public, and show it what a blunder it was making,
that would always be so much rescued from the blank of existence.
Laurie’s Edith, even had she come to the first development which he once
hoped for her, could never be,--or at least it was not probable that she
would ever be,--equal to that scene in the Forum, which hung neglected
on the wall of Suffolk’s studio. To bring the one into the light of day
was perhaps a better work than to paint the other. It was the first
thought that roused Laurie out of his own mortification. He bore no
malice. He was too sweet-hearted, too easy and forgiving, for that.
Indeed, on the contrary, he was very grateful to one at least of his
hardest critics. The padrona had uncovered her heart to him by way of
pointing her objection. He had seen into her mind and spirit as perhaps
no one else had ever done. He was sorry for the pain it must have given
her to speak to him,--even more sorry than for himself; but Laurie could
not, though Mrs. Severn would have wondered, speak what people call ‘a
good word’ on her behalf when he got Slasher in his power. The words
would have choked him. Ask any man in ordinary Art-jargon and common
print to applaud the woman to whom his own heart began to give a kind of
wordless, half-unconscious worship! Ask for praise, public praise, for
his padrona. He would as soon have thought of leading her upon the stage
to have garlands thrown at her feet like a prima donna. Here was a
disability of woman which nobody had ever thought of before. It did not
matter much, from Laurie’s point of view, whether they blamed her or
praised her. To name her at all was a presumption unpardonable, the mere
thought of which made his cheek burn. And yet it would have done Mrs.
Severn a great deal of good had the ‘Sword’ taken an enthusiasm for her.
And Laurie had no objection to her work. He knew that he could not have
done it for her had he tried his hardest. Her independence, and her
labours, and her artist life, were all part of herself. He could not
realise her otherwise. But to have her talked of in the papers! Laurie’s
private feeling was, that instead of influencing Slasher in her favour,
he would like to knock down the fellow who should dare to have the
presumption to think that she could be the better for his praise!
But Suffolk was a totally different matter. And Laurie, having turned
his back upon the studio, and turned himself loose, so to speak, upon
the world again, set to work at the club and elsewhere, to cultivate
Slasher with devotion. Slasher was understood to be the special
art-critic of the ‘Sword;’ and he had qualified himself for such a
post, as most men do, by an unsuccessful beginning as a painter, which
had, however, happened so long ago that some people had forgotten, and
some even were not aware of the fact. Though he was not ill-natured, it
must be admitted that Laurie commended himself to the critic by the want
of success which the young fellow did not attempt to disguise. ‘My
friends are a great deal too good to me,’ Laurie said, with comic
simpleness; ‘they have all fallen upon my picture so, that I have given
it up. What is the use of trying to paint with every man’s opinion
against you? I have not stuff enough in me for that!’
‘Poor Laurie!’ Slasher said, with a laugh which was not unkind. ‘If you
had persevered, probably I, too, should have been compelled, in the
interests of art, to let loose my opinion. So it is as well for me you
stopped in time.’
‘But I want you to let loose your opinion, and do a service to the
nation,’ said Laurie. ‘I want you to come to my place and meet a friend
of mine,--the cleverest fellow I know. All he wants is, that you should
speak a good word for him in the “Sword.”’
‘Ah!’ said the critic, with a groan of disgust; ‘I am tired of speaking
good words. I don’t mind walking into anybody to do you a favour, my
dear fellow. There’s always some justice in anything you like to say
against a picture,--or a man either. But if you knew the sickening stuff
one has to pour forth for one’s own friends, or one’s editor’s friends!
I am never asked to give a good notice in the ‘Sword’ but I feel that
it’s for an ass. Instinct, Laurie! I dare say your friend is everything
that’s delightful, but if his pictures were worth twopence you would
never come to me for a good word.’
‘I should not ask you to praise him, certainly, if I did not think he
deserved it,’ said Laurie, with a little offence.
‘Ah! if you were as well used to that sort of thing as I am,’ said
Slasher, with a sigh. ‘I don’t mind cutting ’em all up in little pieces
to please the public. A slashing article is the easiest writing going.
You have only to seize upon a man’s weak point,--and every man has a
weak point,--and go at it without fear or favour; but when Crowther
comes and lays his hand on my shoulder in his confounded condescending
way, “My dear fellow,” he says, “here’s a poor devil who is always
pestering me. He is a cousin of my wife’s;” or, “He’s a friend of my
brother-in-law’s;” or, “He was at school with my boy,” as the case may
be. “I suppose his picture’s as weak as water; but, hang it! say a good
word for him. It may do him good, and it can’t do us any harm.” That’s
what I’ve got to do, till it makes me sick, I tell you. I’ll pitch into
your aversions, my dear Laurie, and welcome; but don’t ask me to say
good words for your friends.’
‘But my friend is a man of genius,’ said Laurie. ‘I don’t want you to
speak up for him because he is my friend; but because his pictures are
as fine as anything you ever saw.’
Slasher shook his head mournfully. ‘I don’t know anything about his
pictures,’ he said; ‘but that’s how criticism gets done now-a-days. A
man speaks well of his friend, and ill of the fellows he don’t like.
And, as for justice, you know, and appreciation of merit, and so
forth,--except, perhaps, once in a way, in the case of a new name, that
nobody knows,--you might as well look for snow in July. And it’s just
the same in literature. I said to Crowther the other day: “That’s a nice
book, I suppose, as you praised it so.” “No,” he says, “it’s not a very
nice book; but the man that wrote it is a nice fellow, which comes to
the same thing.” No, Laurie, my boy, I’m sick of praising people that
don’t deserve it. That’s why I go in for cynicism and abuse, and all
that. It may be hard upon a poor fellow now and then, but at all events,
it isn’t d----d lies.’
‘I don’t want you to tell lies,’ said Laurie, half-affronted, half
laughing. ‘Come with me on Thursday to the Hydrographic. It’s Suffolk’s
night for exhibition, and you shall see him, and see his work----’
‘Suffolk!’ said Slasher. ‘That fellow! By Jove! I like your modesty,
Laurie Renton, to come here calmly and ask me to praise a man’s pictures
whom I have cut up a score of times at least.’
‘But I don’t suppose you ever saw them’, said Laurie, standing his
ground.
‘I’ve seen them as well as anybody could see them’, said Slasher. ‘I
remember there was one in the North Room down on the floor one year, and
one over the doorway. My dear fellow, I’ve seen the kind of
thing,--that’s enough. Heroic figures, with big bones, and queer
garments--red hair, that never was combed in its life--and big blue
saucer eyes, glaring out of the canvas. I know;--there are two or three
fellows that do that sort of thing. But it will never take, you may be
sure. The British public likes respectable young women with their
clothes put properly on them; in nice velvet and satin, that they can
guess at how much it cost a yard.’
‘The British public ought to be ashamed of itself,’ said Laurie; ‘but
you may come with me on Thursday all the same.’
‘I don’t mind if I do for once,’ said the critic. And so the matter was
settled. Laurie was a very busy man until Thursday came. He was as busy
as he had been when his mind was full of Edith, but, on the whole, in a
more agreeable way. After all, to shut yourself up all day long in a
first floor in Charlotte Street, with a terrible litter about you,--for
when there is nobody to keep you neat but a maid-of-all-work, and you
have no time for ‘tidying’ yourself, litter is the inevitable
consequence,--your windows shut up, and the light coming in over your
head, as in a prison, is not a seductive occupation. Now that Edith was
pushed aside out of the way and the windows were open, the room was more
bearable. And why a man should make himself wretched by pursuing high
art in direct opposition to all his friends? But Laurie betook himself,
without entering into any explanations, to Suffolk’s house, and devoted
himself to the task of collecting together his friend’s loose drawings.
They had grown intimate by their frequent meetings in the Square. And
Suffolk, who was in danger, as his wife feared, of getting ‘soured,’ and
who was busy, and did not care to exhibit himself at the Hydrographic,
gave in to Laurie with a half-sullen acquiescence. ‘What’s the good?’ he
said. ‘But, Reginald dear, it may be a great deal of good,’ his wife
said, turning wistful eyes upon him. And Laurie went and came, bringing
his spick-and-span new portfolios to receive the drawings, which were
huddled up in all sorts of dusty, battered, travel-worn receptacles. In
such matters amateurs are safe to have the advantage over the brethren
in the profession. He mounted, and trimmed, and arranged all day long,
with his mouth full of dust, and his heart full of hope; and confided
his anticipations to the padrona in the evening, having established a
right to the _entrée_ at that moment of moments which she spent with her
children over the fire. It came to look natural that Laurie should take
his place on the hearth, in the firelight, along with little Frank and
Harry. ‘A curious taste,’ the padrona said, and laughed; but not without
a little wonder rising in her mind as to how this fancy was to be
accounted for. ‘The boy likes to feel as if he were one of the family, I
suppose,’ she said to Miss Hadley, who looked on sometimes, with her
knitting, and did not approve;--‘for he is only a boy.’
‘He is boy enough to be fond of women a dozen years older than himself,’
said Miss Hadley, with a significant nod. To which Mrs. Severn, with her
eyes fixed on the fire, made no immediate reply.
‘After all, it is quite natural,’ the padrona continued, after a pause;
‘he is separated from his own family by this strange business;--and such
an affectionate, soft-hearted fellow!’
‘Well, I think it is chiefly affectionateness,’ Miss Hadley admitted:
and she added after a moment: ‘It cannot be for Alice, as I thought!’
‘The child!’ cried Mrs. Severn, in alarm. ‘She is but a child. Don’t
talk as if it were possible any one should dream of stealing her from
me. What should we do without Alice?’ cried the mother, with a sudden
pang. ‘Jane, I hope you will not do anything to put such ideas in any
one’s mind.’
‘Such ideas come of themselves,’ said Miss Hadley. ‘She will be sixteen
in summer. She is of more use than many a woman of six-and-twenty. She
must marry some time or other. Why, what else could you look for when
you refused to bring her up to do anything? A girl who has no fortune in
this world must either marry, or work, or starve; and I don’t know,’
said the strong-minded woman, with energy, ‘which is the worst.’
‘Hush,’ said the padrona, with a smile, ‘infidel! and here is the child
going to her music. Alice, come and look me in the face.’
‘Have I been naughty, mamma?’ said Alice, bending over her mother. For a
moment the two looked into each other’s eyes, with the perfect love, and
trust, and understanding which belongs to that dearest of relationships.
If it gave a pang to the heart of the woman looking on, who had no
child, I cannot tell. The mother lifted her face, still warm with all
the vigour, and softness, and beauty of life, and kissed the lovely,
soft cheek, in its perfection of youth. ‘It would be no wonder if any
one loved her,’ she said softly, when the child had disappeared into the
soft darkness in the next room, her heart wrung with a premonitory pang
of tender anguish. That was the night on which Laurie brought his
brother Frank,--splendid young Guardsman, who had run up to town to
endeavour to arrange the exchange he wanted into a regiment going to
India,--to introduce him to his friends in the Square.
But on the Thursday he rushed in breathless for five minutes only in
the gloaming, to keep the padrona _au courant_ of affairs. ‘We have
placed the picture, and it shows splendidly!’ he cried. ‘The only thing
I fear is that Suffolk will be sulky, and not show as well as the
picture. Could not you send for him before he goes, and put him in a
good humour? If he were out of temper it might spoil all.’
‘I will send for them,’ said the padrona, ‘and keep his wife with me
till you come back. It is very good of you to take all this trouble. I
wish you had a picture to show splendidly too.’
‘How inconsistent some people are,’ said Laurie. ‘After making an end of
my poor picture! No, padrona, that is all over. Let us now be of some
use to our friends.’
‘But it is not all over,’ said Mrs. Severn. And then she paused, seeing,
perhaps, some signs of impatience in him. ‘Heaps of people can paint
pictures,’ she said; ‘but it is not everybody who can serve their
friends,--like this.’
‘If it but succeed it will be something gained,’ said Laurie, with a
sigh of anxiety; ‘and you will think me, after all, not useless in the
world?’ he went on, holding out his hand. Miss Hadley was looking on,
with very sharp eyes; and she saw that the young man stood holding the
padrona’s hand much longer than was necessary for the formality of
leave-taking. ‘Slasher is to dine with me at the club,’ he continued.
‘He will be in good humour at least. And you will think of us, and wish
us good speed.’
‘Surely,’ the padrona said, withdrawing her hand; and Miss Hadley sat
glancing out of the darkness with her keen eyes; knitting for ever, and
looking on. When the young man was gone a certain embarrassment stole
over Mrs. Severn,--she could not tell why. ‘He is as eager and excited
as if his own fate were to be decided to-night,’ she said. ‘What a good
fellow he is!’ Miss Hadley made no reply. No sound but that of the
knitting-needles clicking against each other with a certain fierceness
came out of the twilight in the corner. In this silence there was a
certain disapproval, which made the padrona uncomfortable in spite of
herself. ‘I am afraid you have changed your opinion of poor Laurie,’ she
said, after a pause. ‘I thought you used to like him?’ The children had
not yet come down from their game of romps in the nursery up-stairs, and
the two were alone.
‘I like him very well,’ said Miss Hadley. ‘I like him so well that I
can’t bear to see him making a fool of himself.’
‘How is he making a fool of himself?’ said Mrs. Severn, quickly.
‘Or to see other people making a fool of him,’ said Miss Hadley. ‘There,
I have said my say! I don’t know if it be his fault or yours; but the
young fellow is losing his head, my dear, and you must see it as well
as I do.’
‘I see nothing of the kind,’ said the padrona, with dignity. ‘I am
surely old enough to be safe from such nonsense; and you are too old to
talk like a school-girl. You are as jealous as a man,’ she added, after
a pause, relapsing into easier tones. ‘Would you like me to forbid the
poor boy the house?’
‘It might be best,’ said Miss Hadley, stiffly;--‘certainly for him. I
don’t know about you.’
‘What folly!’ cried the padrona, with momentary anger; but the children
rushed in at the moment, sweeping away all other thoughts. Mrs. Severn,
however, was more silent than usual as she sat in the firelight with
Edie’s soft arms clasped round her neck. She told but one story all the
evening, and that an old one. Her mind was pre-occupied. The governess
sitting in the corner grew bitter as she gazed at her. ‘A woman with
every blessing of life,--a woman with all those children,’ Miss Hadley
said to herself; ‘yet a young man’s silly love is enough to draw her
mind away from them,--at her age! What fools we are!’ Thus another
little drama sprang into life in a corner, with actors, and accessories,
and spectators, all complete. There was Alice in the great dim
drawing-room, as usual, playing softly, till the very air seemed to
dream and murmur with the wistfulness of her music. ‘This romance should
have come to the child,’ Miss Hadley mused, with anger; ‘with the child
it would have been natural. With the mother----’ She could not trust
herself to realise what she thought about the mother. She had held so
different an opinion of her at all former times; the padrona had shown
herself so entirely unmoved by such vanities! And now, good heavens, at
her age! Such were Miss Hadley’s thoughts as she sat in the twilight,
while her friend played with her children. She forgot her sister, who
was waiting for her, and all the comforts of the little parlour in
Charlotte Street. She would have liked to stay there all night, to keep
at her post without intermission, to save the padrona from herself. ‘She
cannot realise what she is doing,’ Miss Hadley said in her
self-communion. And probably Mrs. Severn was aware of her friend’s
inquisition. She had a little flush on her cheeks when she received the
Suffolks, for whom she had sent. She went into all the arrangements of
the Hydrographic for that evening with an interest which was a little
nervous and overstrained. ‘I trust some illustrious stranger may be
there to be of use to you,’ she said, with a smile; and took no notice
of Miss Hadley, who kept immovably in the background. And when Suffolk,
in his best humour and his evening coat, went out to the Hydrographic,
where his pictures were being exhibited, the two women, whom he left
behind, talked a great deal about Laurie. Poor Laurie! He was very
happy, and excited, and in earnest at that moment, believing himself in
the fair way of serving his friend. And they both liked him with
tenderness, such as women feel for such men. But yet they said ‘Poor
Laurie!’ even in their commendation and gratitude; and did not well know
why.
CHAPTER II.
WHAT CAME OF IT.
When Laurie left the Hydrographic in company with his friend Slasher, he
had still a hope of being able to present himself for a few moments in
the Square to report how he had sped. But his companion, as it turned
out, had no such idea. The Hydrographic held its meetings in the
artists’ quarter,--in that region which, but for art, no man of fashion
would think of visiting. But being in it, for once in a way, Slasher,
who considered himself a man of fashion, had made up his mind to make
the best of it. He went with Laurie to his rooms, talking all the way of
Suffolk’s pictures. That the critic had been shaken by the sight of
them, there could be no doubt. He had been moved by the admiration of so
many men who knew better than he did. The mere fact that the painter had
been invited to make such an exhibition showed that he was becoming
known to his own profession, and had been owned by it. There was light,
and space, and leisure to look at the pictures. There was the
comfortable sensation,--in Slasher’s case,--of a good dinner and
pleasant company, and just such an amount of deference to himself as
soothed and glorified his self-esteem. He insisted on going with Laurie
to finish the evening, letting his tongue loose as they walked along.
‘There is something in it, I don’t deny,’ he said. ‘The contrast between
that fair group of children and the dark Romans is very well done, and
the monk’s figure is full of expression. Let us see what you have
yourself, Laurie. I, for one, am more interested in that. Welby is such
a friend of yours, he might have found a place for something of your own
to-night. It is not a bad room for showing a picture,--and all sorts of
men go to the Hydrographic. It would be as good a thing as you could do
to make Welby exhibit you there next time he has a chance. Yes, I don’t
deny there’s a good deal that’s fine about that picture. The light is
very well managed. It sets one thinking of Rome, you know, and how the
air all smiles and glows about you on a spring morning. It’s not a bad
picture. Is this where you live? It is not so nice as Kensington Gore.’
‘No,’ said Laurie, ‘it’s not so nice; but it’s better for work;’ and he
ushered his companion into his room, where the contents of his
portfolios, which he had carried off for Suffolk’s sketches, lay about,
all mingled with books and studies in oil and a great deal of litter.
The big canvas, thrust back into a corner, a pale shadow of what might
have been, presided over the confusion. It was not so nice as Kensington
Gore; but to Slasher, who liked to feel himself a man of fashion and
superior to professional persons, the disorder of the place was not
disagreeable. Laurie Renton had once been ‘a cut above him,’ and it was
not unpleasant to feel that Laurie Renton was now in circumstances to
appeal to his patronage. They sat down together over the fire, and
lighted their cigars; and what with the smoke, and what with the liquids
that accompanied it, and the witching hour of night which makes men
confidential, and the old associations, Slasher’s lips were opened, and
he unfolded to Laurie many particulars of his life. ‘You would not think
it, but I began the world in much such a place as this,’ said the
critic. Laurie, of course, knew all about the manner in which his
companion had begun the world; for everybody does know all about
everybody else, especially in respect to those circumstances of which
everybody else is the least proud. The listener in this case had the
embarrassing privilege of contrasting autobiography with history, which
is always a curious process. But, notwithstanding this difficulty,
Laurie was, as always, a good listener,--not from policy, which seldom
deceives any one, but because he preserved that tender politeness of the
heart and regard for other people’s feelings which make it impossible
for a man to contradict, or doubt, or sneer at his neighbour. ‘I suppose
he thinks it all happened so,’ Laurie said to himself; and Slasher was
grateful to him for the good faith,--a little puzzled certainly, but
genuine,--with which he listened. In the breaks of his story he would
get up and saunter about the room, turning over Laurie’s sketches, and
now and then he would interject some remark upon the special subject of
the evening.
‘Some of those studies of your friend’s were fine,’ he said, suddenly.
‘I hope they’ll do him justice next year at the Academy. I’ll speak to
Sir Peter, if you like; and if the picture he is doing now is as good as
the one we saw to-night----’
‘One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,’ said Laurie,
oracularly. ‘And half a loaf is better than no bread.’
‘Hang it, what can a fellow do?’ cried Slasher. ‘You are the most
pertinacious little beggar I ever came across. Do you think a man can go
and eat his own words and stultify himself? Look here, I’ll tell you
what I’ll do. You shall write a notice of the Hydrographic for the
“Sword.” Blow the fellow’s trumpet up to the skies, if you like; say
there’s never been anything like him since Titian. And I’ll take it to
Crowther. Now I don’t see what more a man can do.’
‘I write the notice for the “Sword!”’ cried Laurie, laughing,--‘that is
a little too strong. I never put a sentence together in my life.’
‘As if that had anything to do with it!’ said the critic. ‘Why that’s
the only good thing I can see in this blessed trade of literature. You
can go at it off-hand. Put a sentence together! Why I’ve heard you put
twenty. It’s nothing but talking, my dear fellow. A practical writer
like myself, you know, goes off at the nail, and talks of fifty other
subjects before he touches the right one; but I can fancy that the
public, by way of a change, might prefer to hear what you wanted to say
at once. Of course you can do it; and I’ll take it to Crowther. A man
cannot make a fairer offer than that.’
‘It is awfully good of you,’ said Laurie, in a ferment. The proposal
went tingling through his veins like wine. It had seemed supremely
ridiculous to him when old Welby had suggested that he should take to
writing, just as he might have suggested shoe-making or carpentry. But
from Slasher, to whom the doors of the ‘Sword’ were open,--and in
Suffolk’s interest,--the idea changed its aspect. Though there are no
labourers of any description who so systematically underrate their trade
as do professors of literature, yet it is astonishing how pleased every
outsider is who is invited to enter that magic circle. Laurie felt that
Slasher in his turn had paid him the most delicate compliment. Though he
might have laughed at the ‘Sword’ and the critic, and at newspapers and
critics in general, at another moment, no sooner was he asked to strike
in, in the _mêlée_, than the craft and all its adjuncts became splendid
to Laurie. What a power it was! How a word in the ‘Sword’ thrilled
through and through those regions where artists congregated, filling
some with boundless satisfaction and others with despair! When he cried
out, in modest delight and surprise, ‘I write a notice for the “Sword!”’
thinking it too grand to be true, he already felt himself ever so much
more important, so much cleverer and greater a person than he had been
five minutes before. Perhaps, it is true, the smoke and the beverage
that accompanied it, and the fact that it was two o’clock in the
morning, had something to do with Laurie’s pleasure in the proposal, as
it had with Mr. Slasher’s liberality in making it;--but still there it
was. Laurie Renton, whom everybody had snubbed, down to Forrester,--whom
everybody had interfered with and advised and ordered about ‘for his
good,’--might now become, all at once, an authority before whom they
would tremble in their turn,--who would dispense justice, or favour, or
vengeance, from his high-placed seat. It was when he looked at it from
this point of view, and not out of any disinterested love of literature,
that he jumped at the idea. Laurie leaned over the fire with his eyes
glowing, and revelled in the wonderful thought. He was a little
particular about his drawings in most cases, preferring to show them
himself, and give what elucidation he saw necessary; but this time he
permitted Slasher to make his own investigations undisturbed. All he had
hoped for in his most sanguine moments had been to extract from the
critic some grudging word of praise which should rouse public curiosity
about Suffolk’s picture. But to have the organ in his own hands, to say
what he would,--to secure in his own person that art should be spoken of
with understanding, commended without fear or favour, condemned with
impartiality,--this was something beyond his highest hopes. Such a
critic as he himself would be was the thing of all others wanted in the
world of art. How often had the painters round him,--how often had he
himself,--asked each other if such a thing were possible? And here was
the possibility placed within his reach,--thrust, as it were, into his
own hands!
Suffolk had gone home hours before, calling at the Square for his wife.
He gave the ladies the very scantiest account of what had happened, but
suffered the particulars to be drawn out of him, bit by bit, as he
walked home through the dimly-lighted streets. Though he was too proud
to make any demonstration of satisfaction before Mrs. Severn, yet his
wife read in the eyes, whose expression she knew so well, that for once
in his life the sense of general approbation had warmed him. ‘It is all
Laurie Renton’s doing,’ she said, in the candour of delight, with a
generosity which was not so easy to her husband. Suffolk himself had
never made any appeal to Laurie, and did not see it in the same light.
‘I don’t think Laurie Renton has so much in his power,’ he said, ‘though
he has taken a great deal of trouble. It was Welby’s affair chiefly, of
course; and then, after all, a man who has been labouring a dozen years
surely does not need to be grateful to anybody if he gets a bit of
recognition on his own merits at last.’
‘Of course it is on your own merits, Reginald,’ said his wife; but the
woman was more grateful than the man. She knew very well that it was not
her husband’s merits,--which, indeed, had met with but little
recognition hitherto,--but that wistful word she had once spoken to
Laurie, and his soft heart which had not forgotten it. Suffolk went on,
quite unconscious of her thoughts and of her interference, to set down
poor Laurie at his just value.
‘Renton was there with a friend of his,’ he continued;--‘Slasher,
Helen,--that confounded snob who has the impudence to give us all our
deserts in the “Sword,”--as shallow an ape as you ever saw. Laurie’s a
very good fellow, but he’s too general in his friendships. After feeling
really obliged to him for his handiness, to see him arm in arm with a
conceited ass like that----’
‘Did you speak to him?’ cried Mrs. Suffolk. ‘What did he look like?
Reginald, of course it is natural that you should be affronted; but if
you consider how much influence the “Sword” has----’
‘Oh, I was civil; don’t be frightened,’ said Suffolk. ‘Deadly civil we
both were; and he had something complimentary to say, like the rest.
Trust those fellows to see which way the wind’s blowing. But what
disgusts one is to find Laurie Renton,--a fellow one likes,--hand in
glove with a snob like that.’
‘He does not mean it, Reginald, I am sure,’ said Mrs. Suffolk, driven to
her wits’ end, and feeling at once disposed to assault her husband for
his stupidity, and to cry over poor Laurie, thus cruelly belied.
‘Oh, no, he doesn’t mean it,’ said the painter; ‘it’s only that
confounded friendliness of his that likes to please everybody. If he had
more stamina and less good nature----’ said his critic, severely.
But he never knew how near his wife was to shaking him as she clung to
his arm. And Mrs. Suffolk said no more on the subject,--reflecting,
first, that when a man takes a ridiculous idea into his head, it is of
no use reasoning with him; and, secondly, that Laurie should never know
how little gratitude had attended his efforts. That at least she would
take into her own hands. If Reginald did not know what his friend had
done for him, she at least did. And so did the padrona; and the chances
were that their thanks would be more congenial to Laurie than any gruff
acknowledgments that might be made from another quarter. Thus the pair
walked on, excited by the faint prospect of better days, through the
glimmering, silent streets, when most people were in bed--the husband
making his report in snatches, the wife drawing it forth bit after bit,
and piecing the fragments together with an art familiar to women. She
knew about as well what had passed as he did by the time they reached
their own narrow, dingy door. And after one peep at the children,
sleeping up on the fourth floor at the top of the house, Mrs. Suffolk
joined her husband in his studio,--where he had gone to smoke his final
pipe,--and drew forth further his bits from him, and added her words of
assent or advice to the deliberations he fell into, standing with a
candle in his hand before his half-finished picture. ‘Please God, you
shall have your comforts like the rest, if this comes to anything, my
good little wife,’ he said at last. ‘Oh, Reginald, it is for you I wish
it most,’ she cried, with tears in her pretty eyes. That gleam of a
possible brightening in their lot went to their hearts. Ah, hard, happy,
chequered life!--so hard to bear while it is present, so sweet to look
back upon when it is past!
But everything was hushed and asleep in the house of the Suffolks when
Laurie shook hands with the critic, and stood at his door in the raw,
chilly air of the winter morning to see him go. Laurie had not been
keeping late hours for some time past, and the excitement had roused him
out of all inclination for sleep. He went back to his fire and pushed
away the _impedimenta_ from his table, and with his nerves all
thrilling, and his brain in a feverish commotion, began to write.
Perhaps the soda-water had affected him slightly too--and the hours of
talk, and the novelty of what he had in hand, had undoubtedly affected
him. He sat till his fire burned out and his lamp ran down, making his
first essay at composition. It seemed to him very easy in his
excitement. ‘If this is all they make so much fuss about!’ he said,
feeling himself not only capable of the ‘Sword,’ but of greater things.
The street was beginning to wake to the first sounds of the morning when
he threw himself on his bed, chilled and exhausted, yet full of content.
Surely, after all, this rapid art, which could be caught up without any
study, and the effect of which was immediate, was more to the purpose
than the labour of months upon one piece of canvas, which might affect
nobody, not even the Hanging Committee. New prospects seemed opening
before him also,--prospects more vast and boundless than those which
flickered before the eyes of Suffolk and his wife. What if this were now
that tide in the affairs of men, which it behoved him to take in its
flow! He left his sketches lying about,--paper, and chalk, and canvas,
all muddled together,--to be dealt with, in the absence of the
portfolios, by the maid-of-all work; but he took his little
writing-desk, with his new production in it, to his bedroom with him,
where it might be in safety; and fell asleep when the milkman was going
his rounds, feeling himself, as it were, on the edge of an altogether
new career.
His composition, however, did not look so hopeful when he got up a few
hours later, and read it over in the calm of noon as he ate his
breakfast. Miss Hadley over the way had seen that his room was vacant
all this time, the windows open, and papers fluttering about in the
chilly air. She could not understand why he lost so many hours on such a
bright morning, or what had become of him. It was nearly one o’clock
before he had done dawdling over his tea, reading and re-reading his
criticism. After all, it was not quite so easy. He made a great many
emendations, and then took to doubting whether they were emendations;
and grew querulous over it, and sadly disturbed in his confidence. Then
he folded it up and put it in his pocket, and, snatching up his hat,
rushed down-stairs. ‘He is going to the Square,’ Miss Hadley said, as
she saw him dart round the corner; and she stood for a long time at her
window pondering whether Jane could be right about that matter. ‘She
will never be so silly, and he will never be such a fool,’ said the old
lady; and sat down again, with her mind quite excited, to watch when he
should come back.
The padrona, for her part, was standing at her easel, troubled with many
uncomfortable thoughts. She had looked at herself in the glass that
morning longer than usual, and had decided that there were a great many
lines in her face which she had not thought of noticing. ‘I am getting
old,’ the padrona said to herself, and laughed; and then, perhaps,
sighed a little. She laughed because she felt as young as ever, and age
seemed a joke as it entered her thoughts; and she sighed because----
who can follow those subtle shades of fancy? And then she began to
think. Laurie Renton was but a boy,--not more than four-and-twenty at
the outside, she calculated, reckoning as mothers do. ‘Harry was
beginning to walk when I saw him first, and Harry will be eight in
March,’ said the padrona; ‘and Laurie was but a schoolboy then, not more
than seventeen.’ Four-and-twenty! He could not be more,--nothing but a
boy. And Jane Hadley is an old fool;--that was the easiest solution of
the difficulty. Mrs. Severn liked Laurie, she said frankly to herself.
It was pleasant to have him running in and out, with all his
difficulties and all his wants. He was such a good fellow,--so frank, so
natural, so willing to help everybody, so transparent about his own
affairs, so----affectionate. Yes, that was the word;--he was
affectionate. Half banished as it were from his own family, he had
linked himself on to hers, and she was pleased it should be so. And as
for any folly that might enter any one’s head! ‘These old maids!’ Mrs.
Severn said to herself,--though it was not like her to say it; and thus
she tried to dismiss the subject. If he came too often, she might
perhaps suggest to him that it would do him a great deal of good to go
and study in Italy for the winter. ‘And I should miss the boy,’ the
padrona said to herself with candour. But in the meantime there was
nothing she could say or do. It was simply ridiculous to think of
taking any other step. At her age! and such a boy!
She was still working at the picture which Mr. Welby had commended. It
was a commission from her patrons, the Riches of Richmont, and was to be
hung in a spot chosen by herself in the bright country-house, full of
light, and air, and flowers, and everything sweet, to which they
sometimes invited her. Edith’s little ‘wooden sister’ was standing to
her at the moment, draped in great folds of white. She was working hard
at the folds of the dress, and studying with puzzled anxiety the
position of the limbs, which, Mr. Welby had declared, had no joints in
them. And she was anything but grateful to Jane Hadley for throwing,
just at this moment, an additional embarrassment into her mind. It was
while she was thus occupied that Laurie rushed in breathless with his
tale of last night’s proceedings and his paper to read to her. Any
prudential thoughts that might have entered her mind as to the propriety
of keeping him at a distance vanished at the sight of him. It was all so
perfectly natural. Whom else should he go to, poor fellow, to tell his
doings, to communicate all his difficulties and his hopes? Mrs. Severn
blushed to think that she could have allowed herself for one moment to
be swayed from her natural course by such absurdity. Jane Hadley must
have lost her senses. Should the boy go to old Welby and tell him?
Should he confide in his landlady? Who was there that he could come to
in his difficulties but herself?
‘I have brought it to read to you,’ said Laurie, ‘if you can take the
trouble to listen. I am afraid it is dreadful trash. The truth is, I was
a little excited about it last night; and now, this morning----’ He was
abashed, poor fellow, and explanatory, and very anxious to impress upon
her all the excuses there were for its imperfection. Somehow, everything
had a different aspect in the morning! He went on, playing with the
paper; and then, making a dash at it, began to read. It was not very
good, to tell the truth. There was an attempt to be funny in it, which
was not very successful, and there was an effort after that airy style
which so many young writers attempt unsuccessfully; and then there was a
rather grand conclusion, full of big words, which Laurie had risen into
just as he heard the first cry of the milkman, and felt that it was
necessary to come to an effective close. The padrona went on painting
very steadily at her easel. She had the notion, which women so often
entertain, that a young man, with all those advantages which a man has
over her own sex, could do anything he chose to do,--and especially
Laurie, her own _protégé_; and yet here, it was evident, was something
he could not do. The writing in the ‘Sword,’ though it was said to be
nothing remarkable, was not like Laurie’s writing. Poor Laurie’s
narrative, instead of the sober little history it ought to have been,
read like a bad joke. He might have been sneering at Suffolk for
anything the reader could have made out, and patronising him
oppressively at the same moment. Never woman was in a more uncomfortable
position than was Mrs. Severn standing at her easel. Laurie himself was
so conscious of its weakness and flatness that he attempted, by dramatic
tricks with his voice, to give it effect. ‘Good heavens! Suffolk will go
mad,’ the padrona said to herself; and then there was a word or two
about Mr. Welby. And the author sat breathless, trembling, yet with a
smile of complacency on his face, to hear her opinion. Poor Laurie! whom
she had already driven to the utmost bounds of patience in respect to
his picture! She shivered as she stopped to arrange the drapery on the
little lay figure. Certainly, to be Laurie’s adviser-in-chief was a post
which had its difficulties as well as its pleasures.
‘Is that all?’ she said, when an awful pause of a minute in duration
warned her that the moment to deliver her judgment had come.
‘All!’ said Laurie, flattered by the question, and beginning to take
courage. ‘I should have thought you had found it quite long enough.’
‘Well, perhaps it is long enough,’ said the trembling critic; ‘but still
I think there might be another paragraph. You have not said anything
about the German sketches, for instance, which were so clever; and you
know, if I am to be a critic, you must let me find fault. There are one
or two turns of expression. What is that you say about Mr. Suffolk
having lived out of the world?’
‘“This young artist has little acquaintance with the ways of the
world,”’ read Laurie. ‘“He loves nature, which is open to high and low.
Instead of conciliating the critics and picture-dealers, he has
satisfied himself with the models on the steps at the Trinita di Monte.
Perhaps we ought to warn him that this is not the best way to please the
British public.”’
‘Mr. Suffolk will not like that,’ said the padrona. ‘It looks as if you
meant something against his character. It looks like a sort of
accusation----’
‘Why, it is a joke!’ cried Laurie; ‘every one must see that at a
glance.’
‘But people are stupid,’ said his critic, taking courage. ‘I think you
should change it. And then about Mr. Welby. Don’t you say he has almost
given up painting? There is nothing he hates to hear said like that.’
‘“Our veteran master in the art,”’ read Laurie, ‘“feeling his own
strength decay, has called upon a younger brother to fill his place,--a
substitution at which artists will rejoice.” I mean, of course, that
everybody will be pleased to find he is spared the trouble.’
‘But he will not like it,’ said the padrona. ‘I think I would say,
instead of that about the Trinita di Monte, that he has spent a great
deal of his time in Rome, and has caught the warmth of the atmosphere
and brilliancy of the colour, and so on; and Mr. Welby,--I would say how
graceful it was on his part to lend his aid to a younger man, and how
ready he is to appreciate excellence. You told me to say what I think.
And don’t you think if you were to begin just plainly by saying Mr.
Suffolk’s works were exhibited at the Hydrographic, instead of that
about the gem that is born to blush unseen----?’
‘In short,’ said Laurie, with a flush on his face, ‘you don’t like any
part of it,--beginning, or middle, or end.’
‘Yes, indeed I do,’ said the treacherous woman. ‘I think it is very
nice; but I am sure you could improve it. Don’t be offended. You could
not expect to turn out a Thackeray all at once.’
‘Nor a Michael Angelo,’ said Laurie, desponding; ‘nor anything. I shall
always be a poor pretender, good for little;--and this attempt is more
ridiculous than all the rest. Well, never mind. If it were not for poor
Suffolk’s sake----’
‘For Suffolk’s sake you are bound to do it,--and do it well,’ said Mrs.
Severn; ‘and for mine,--I mean for everybody’s who cares for you. To
begin at three o’clock in the morning, after a night of talk and smoke,
and then to be melancholy because you are not pleased with your work!
There are pens and paper on that table, Laurie, and I will not so much
as look at you. Go and try again.’
‘Do you mean to say you care?’ said Laurie; and he went and stood by
her, while she continued to work.
He thought it was a little hard that she never turned, never looked at
him, but went on painting faster than usual, making false lines in her
haste. He had no thought that she was afraid of him, and of any foolish
word or look which might change their position to each other. He stood
wistfully with his heart full of unspeakable things, yearning for he
knew not what, longing for a little more of her, if it were but a glance
from her eye, a touch of her hand. She had wounded and mortified him,
and then she had bidden him try again; but would not spare him a glance
to show that she cared,--would not stop painting, and going wrong. He
stood and looked on, watching her in a kind of fascination. She had been
hard upon him, and he had felt the sting, and forgiven her; and now he
might make reprisals if he would. He put out his hand suddenly and took
the brush from her hand. ‘I am not going to be trodden on for ever,’ he
said; ‘I am the worm that turns at last. I am going to put in that
elbow; you are doing it all wrong.’
The padrona never said a word. She gave the brush up to him, and stood
looking on while he carried out his threat,--looking at the canvas, not
at him. He did it, and then his heart failed him. He had not an idea how
much alarmed she was, and terrified for the next word. He had not made
any investigations like Miss Hadley’s into the state of his own
feelings. He did not want anything,--except to be near her, to have her
attention, her sympathy, and do whatever she wanted. Now he became
alarmed, in his turn, at his own boldness, and humbly laid the brush out
of his rash hand.
‘Padrona mia, I am a wretch, and you are angry with me!’ he said. Then
Mrs. Severn laughed, and broke the spell.
‘We are quits,’ she cried, with a nervousness in her voice which Laurie
could not account for. ‘You have given me the upper hand of you, Laurie.
Now go and sit down yonder, and write your paper all over again from the
beginning. I accept your elbow. You are bound to do what I tell you
now.’
‘As if I did not always do what you tell me!’ said Laurie, and he went
and sat down at the writing-table, eager to please her. As for the
padrona, she took up her brush with a little shudder, feeling she had
escaped for this time, but that it might not be safe to trust to chance
again. The foolish boy! And yet with all his folly there was so much to
like in him! Perhaps even the folly itself was not so despicable in
Mrs. Severn’s eyes as it was in those of Jane Hadley, who had never been
fluttered by alarms of this description, the good soul! But this sort of
thing, it was clear, must not be allowed to happen again.
The paper, however, was written, and much improved, and at last, toned
down by repeated corrections, was declared ready for the ‘Sword,’ and
worthy of that illustrious journal. By that time it was dusk, and there
was no choice but to let him stay to tea. The padrona sent her attendant
from her to listen to something new Alice was playing, with a genuine
horror of Jane Hadley’s comments, and annoyed consciousness of which she
could not divest herself. But the young man stayed only ten minutes by
Alice, fair though the child was, and sweet as was her music in the soft
wintry gloaming, and came straying back again to the little group on the
hearth-rug, to share Frank’s foot-stool. ‘He says he is to go to the
pantomime, mamma,’ said Frank, whose whole being was pervaded by the
sense that Christmas was coming. ‘And I say he is to go to the
pantomime. Mamma, I love Laurie,’ said little Edith. ‘But my pet, I am
not Laurie’s mamma to take him to the pantomime,’ cried the padrona
loud, so that Miss Hadley could hear. Alas! Miss Hadley did not take the
trouble to listen. She looked, and saw Laurie half on the stool,
half-kneeling, with the fire-light shining on his face, and that turned
upwards to Mrs. Severn who sat back in the shadow, with an expression,
as the governess thought, which nobody could mistake. Was it the
padrona’s fault?
CHAPTER III.
A PATRON OF ART.
Nothing could be more satisfactory in every way than the notice in the
‘Sword.’ It was not eloquent, nor too long, and Slasher was pleased. ‘By
Jove, Laurie, I was afraid you’d go in for fine writing, or for chaff,
which is as bad,’ he said, with an air of relief. And it was very clear
and distinct as to Suffolk’s merits. It made such a commotion through
the whole district round Fitzroy Square as has seldom been equalled,
except just at the opening of the Academy. The paper was lent about
almost from house to house. ‘Have you seen what the “Sword” says of
Suffolk’s picture?’ one would say to another. ‘I hear it was all through
Laurie Renton.’ It almost seemed to Laurie as if people looked at him
more respectfully in the streets. At all events, the fellows at
Clipstone Street showed a difference in their manner; and yet there were
some even there who shook their heads. ‘He would never have made much by
art,’ said Spyer, who went now and then, and drew for an hour or two, by
way of keeping himself up, ‘or I should have been sorry; the pen and
the pencil don’t agree. But it’s a good thing for Suffolk. The dealers
are beginning to look after him. It’s enough to make a man sick, by
Jove! years of work go for nothing, when a paltry half-dozen words in a
newspaper----! If I was a young fellow like the most of you, I’d do
something to put a stop to that.’
‘What can any one do put a stop to it?’ said one of the young men. ‘We
have no private patrons now-a-days. We have only got the public and the
press, to do our best with them. Laurie Renton draws very well for an
amateur; I hope he will not end in the “Sword.”’
‘Laurie Renton was born an amateur,’ said Spyer; ‘he never was anything
better, and couldn’t be. Let him take to writing. That’s what heaps of
people do after coquetting with art. He may make something of that; but
he never will paint a picture that has any chance to live.’
‘He draws very well, all the same,’ said Laurie’s defender. But on the
whole, though it gained him an amount of respect and importance among
them, his little attempt at literature did not raise Laurie’s
reputation. It looked like a defection to the painters round him. Though
it was but for once, and took up but two columns in the ‘Sword,’ he was
given up as having gone over to literature, which, in the opinion of the
Clipstone Street fellows, was a very easy and well-rewarded trade.
Suffolk himself did not quite know what to think. He lost not a moment
in going to see his critic, and thanking him for the good word he had
said for him. But yet he was a little unwilling to acknowledge that it
was Laurie’s paper which brought that picture-dealer to see him. The
very next week after, the ‘Looker-on’ had a notice of the Hydrographic,
and followed Laurie’s lead, praising the picture with still greater
effusion than he had allowed himself; and even Mrs. Suffolk, when she
saw this, was moved in her heart by a momentary feeling that Laurie had
been very measured and even cold, in his approbation. She was grateful,
and so was her husband,--but----. There was a degree of pleasure in
their satisfaction with the ‘Looker-on,’ which was wanting in their
gratitude to Laurie. Gratitude is a cumbrous thing to move about with.
And Laurie felt that even the padrona expected him, now he had begun, to
go on writing articles. One morsel of print implied to all these
innocent people an engagement on the ‘Sword’ at least, and ready entry
into literature in general. If he had gone on writing, and stood up like
a man for his friends, the society which surrounded him would have felt
that he had done his duty. But there seemed to all his comrades a
certain cowardice in contenting himself with one effort. That he should
have exerted himself on Suffolk’s account was quite comprehensible; but
to stop there, and do nothing further, and say no good word for anybody
else! It was that he did not choose to take the trouble, people
thought,--not even for the padrona;--for nobody suspected that Laurie
would have been torn by wild horses rather than have put her sacred name
into profane print. This was a refinement of sentiment which no man
could be expected to enter into. Mrs. Severn herself was perhaps a
little disappointed too. It would have been but natural that she, his
closest friend, to whom he came with all his troubles, should reap the
benefit of the pains she had taken in getting him to write; but never a
word in celebration of the padrona’s pictures came into the ‘Sword.’ ‘He
does not care for them, I suppose,’ she said to herself with a little
sigh, not taking it unkindly, but with a doubt which clouded her sunny
sky sometimes,--a secret suggestion in her mind that her pictures did
not deserve admiration. She sighed, poor soul, because she could not
make them better, not because it was not in her heart to conceive of
higher things. But then she could not afford to wait and think, and
collect her full strength, and do her very best. Sometimes she pulled at
the tether that bound her, with that impulse towards excellence which is
in every sensitive nature. But she could not stop long enough in her
ordinary work to achieve anything beyond it. She thought Laurie did not
consider her pictures worth talking about, and contented herself without
any bitterness. He was not doing what in the merest commonplace way he
might have done for her; but the padrona, who was fond of Laurie, did
for him what few painters are disposed to do for one another,--she
offered him a share in the one special piece of goods which no artist
likes to share;--she had the magnanimity to send him a note to Charlotte
Street, in the end of March, on one of those coldest of spring mornings,
to come and meet her patrons, the Riches of Richmont, at lunch.
The padrona was not given to the writing of notes, nor indeed had she
much occasion so far as Laurie was concerned, who seldom was absent from
the Square for an entire day. But he had felt, without knowing how, a
certain difference in his reception since the day on which he wrote his
paper at Mrs. Severn’s writing-table. Not that she was less kind or less
interested in him;--perhaps it was, though the young man did not think
of that, that there was always somebody there, and that the third
person, instead of keeping in the background, was brought into the
conversation, and spoiled it. Perhaps Mrs. Severn, too, thought the
interloper spoiled it. Talk is pleasant, a _quattr’ occhi_; but then the
interloper was needful. This depressed Laurie’s spirits in spite of
himself. There was not much that was exhilarating in his prospects
generally. Nothing more had come of his literary ambition after that one
paper, and his work as an artist went on by fits and starts, with no
particular aim in it to spur him on; and his friends, who were all in
the heat and fervour of their work for the exhibition, naturally felt
that a man who was not preparing for the Academy, who had no share in
their white heat of excitement as to the decision of the Hanging
Committee, was still something of an outsider. And a cloud had risen on
his intercourse with the Square. Laurie was low, and felt despondent
about affairs in general. And the chilly spring and the east winds
affected his--temper, he said. Probably it was something else besides
his temper that was affected. He had begun to say to himself that he was
a useless wretch, and not good for much, and that it was ridiculous to
hope that he could ever make any mark in the world; and would come home
from seeing his friends of nights, who were all so busy, with a certain
sensation of misery. The padrona’s pictures had been put into their
frames, though she was still working at that one for Mr. Rich, and her
studio was beginning to get freshened up and decorated in preparation
for the private view, which every painter affords to his or her friends
and patrons. Even old Welby had taken down the white canvas and the
Angelichino, and placed two of his own pictures to have the final
touches given to them and to be exhibited before they went to the
Academy. As for Suffolk, he was working with a kind of passion at the
big picture which had been so unsparingly criticised; the canvas was as
big as that one of Laurie’s, on which the chalk outlines still
lingered,--and there were but two figures in it. The maid in the low
arched doorway, in her white kirtle, was dismissing her lover with an
inexorable sweetness and sadness; the young man was resisting, and
refusing to be dismissed, his dark face glowing with love, and trouble,
and angry protest against fate. They were the representatives of two
races, hostile, yet fated to mingle; and there was in the picture,
moreover, a deeper issue,--that struggle of love and duty which it is
sometimes best for the world should not be decided on duty’s side.
Laurie would stand and look at it, and wonder why he could not have done
it as well. Sometimes a vision of the Edith of his imagination, with a
still deeper force of expression in her face, would flit across this
canvas; but he had discrimination enough to know that Suffolk, in his
place, would have painted that Edith had all the world been against him.
After all, it was his own fault, but that was no particular consolation;
and he felt himself left outside, out of their calculations, almost out
of their sympathy, at this particular crisis of fate, when everybody was
too much excited about his own luck, and his neighbour’s, to have
leisure to think of the rest of the world. The moment for sending in to
the Academy was like the eve of a great battle in Fitzroy Square and its
environs; and Laurie, who was not even a volunteer to come in the
_mêlée_, could not but find himself sometimes out of place among those
excited groups, with their one subject. He was interested in their
fate; but he was not himself putting his own to the touch--and he was a
little low in consequence, and heartily wished the crisis over, and
things going on again in their usual way. Let who would object, Laurie
said to himself, with a kind of desperate resolution, he would have
something to send next year.
It was while he was full of these melancholy thoughts that the padrona’s
little note came to him. He had been there the night before, and Miss
Hadley had been present,--even in the studio, to which, in former times,
she never dreamt of penetrating. To be sure, there was a kind of a
reason for that now in the renovation that everything was undergoing;
but still it was rather hard never to be able to say a word to one’s
friend, never to receive an expression of her opinion or of her
kindness, without Miss Hadley’s keen eyes upon one’s face. And Laurie
had grown almost angry at this perpetual intrusion. He was idling over
one of his school studies when Mrs. Severn’s note was brought to him. It
was the briefest little note,--but at least Miss Hadley had not
interfered with that.
‘Come,’ it said, ‘and lunch with us at two, and meet the Riches.
They have just sent me word they are coming to see my pictures.
They are my great patrons, and they may be of use to you. I will
tell them who you are,--a Grand Seigneur turned painter,--and they
will be immensely interested. Don’t laugh at them; they are such
good souls.
‘You were a little cross, do you know, the other day? and I cannot
have you cross. We are all so busy there is no time for talk.
‘M. S.’
This was the note, and there was not much in it. It was the padrona’s
soft heart which had made her add that last little coaxing,
half-apologetic sentence, and perhaps it was foolish of her. But then,
though it was certainly necessary that Laurie should be cured,--and that
without mercy,--of any foolish notions that might have stolen into his
foolish young head, still for one moment, once in a way, it was a
comfort to be free of Miss Hadley; and she had said nothing that his
mother might not have said. But perhaps Mrs. Severn would not have been
so sure of the perfect judiciousness of her words had she seen how
Laurie lighted up under them, and expanded into content. It was eleven
then, and his invitation was for two; but yet he decided it was best to
send a note in return. It is a species of communication which is very
attractive sometimes. Laurie jumped at it with an exhilaration for which
he did not attempt to account. It was a different thing altogether from
those other little notes conveying mamma’s messages, which he still
preserved somewhere; but not, it must be confessed, with such lively
feeling as he once did. Quite a different matter! It was his friend who
had written to him now,--only a dozen words, and yet herself was in
them,--herself, always full of kind thought, of that gracious interest
in him, wanting to help him on though he was so unsatisfactory, finding
fault with him in that soft, caressing way, which was sweeter than
praise. Laurie,--foolish fellow,--put away his work, and spent
half-an-hour of the short time that was to elapse before he should see
her in writing the following note. It could have been written in five
minutes; but there was, it cannot be denied, a certain pleasure in
lingering over it, and a certain skill was required to put a great deal
of meaning into few words. He did not think he had succeeded, after all,
when it was written. But here it is:--
‘I will never be cross any more, padrona mia. I have been thinking
you meant to cast me off. But you don’t? I will go and meet the
Riches or the Poors, or anybody else you like, and thank them for
the chance. You I never could thank,--not half or quarter enough.
So silence shall speak for me.
‘Yr---- ‘L. R.’
It is not to be supposed that Laurie wrote ‘your’ in plain letters. He
made a hieroglyphic of it. It might have been only ‘&c.;’ in short, it
was as like that as anything else. He was beguiled into the use of the
pronoun, he did not quite know how, as he hung over it with his pen in
his hand like a pencil, anxious to add just a touch somewhere, as might
have been done in the line of the lip or the droop of an eyelid, to
express what he was feeling. It was of purpose and intention that he
made it undecipherable. Perhaps she would find it out; and if not, still
at least he had expressed himself, which was always something. He was
not thinking of any result, or anything that might come of it, as Miss
Hadley did. At the present stage such an idea would have been simple
profanity. He did not think of it at all. He was her disciple, her
servant, her subject. That she should reverse the position and be his,
and subject to him, was an idea which had never entered Laurie’s mind.
It would indeed, as we have said, have appeared sheer profanity to him.
Such delicacies of feeling do not come within the range of the Miss
Hadleys of life. And so Laurie made his hieroglyphic, expressive of the
deepest devotion, and felt his heart and his face expand with a
delicious softness, and put on his hat, and himself gave the note to the
maid-servant in the Square. It was but a few steps round the corner; and
when he was out, he went a few steps farther and got himself a lily of
the valley to put in his coat. It was still early, and the flower cost
him as much as a meal; but when a young man’s heart gives a sudden jump
in his bosom, reasonably or unreasonably, it would be hard if he could
not give utterance to his satisfaction with himself and the universe in
general by so simple an expedient as a flower in his coat. And at the
same time he ordered some pots of the same lilies to be sent to the
Square, not for that day, but for to-morrow, on which Mrs. Severn was to
exhibit her pictures to her friends before sending them to the Academy.
This little matter occupied the morning until it was time to present
himself at the Square. A very fine carriage stood before No. 375 when he
reached the door, with a gorgeous coat-of-arms on the panel, and
liveries and hammer-cloth, which looked like a duke’s at least. The big
footman stared superciliously at Laurie as he went up the steps. He was
but ‘a poor hartis’ it was evident to that splendid apparition. The
patron had arrived with all the pomp which ought to attend such a
celestial visitor, and naturally the house from top to bottom bore
evidence of a certain excitement. Forrester, in his best coat, opened
the door to Laurie, his face beaming with cordiality and smiles. ‘I
can’t say as he knows much, Mr. Renton,’ said Forrester, ‘but he’s a
stunning one to buy; and I wouldn’t take no notice, sir, if I was you,
of his little ways,--nor the lady’s neither, sir,’ said the old man.
Laurie laughed and nodded in answer to this advice, without any distinct
idea what Mr. Rich’s little ways might be; and so walked into the great
drawing-room, which it was strange to see by daylight, full of the grey
spring atmosphere, out of which an east wind had taken all the colour.
The white curtains hung over the long windows; the fire burned with a
little cheerful noise; and the padrona, in her black dress, sat on a
sofa beside a rich, rustling, luxurious woman, fifteen or twenty years
older than herself. Mrs. Severn’s figure had filled out into the
gracious fulness of matronhood. She was not a sylph, like her child; but
she looked something like a sylph beside the vast form on the sofa. And
in front of her stood a little man, very plump and rosy, with a
double-eyeglass in his hand. The padrona looked a little flushed and a
little excited. Perhaps it is not in human nature to receive unmoved a
visit from a patron.
‘This is Mr. Renton,’ she said, as Laurie came in. ‘Mr. Laurence Renton,
Mrs. Rich;’ and, to Laurie’s great surprise, the large lady got up from
the sofa to shake hands with him, which was a great deal more than the
padrona did. Mrs. Rich was very large and very wealthy, and looked as if
she might be rather oppressive; but, nevertheless, she had been smiling
very benignly on the padrona, and Laurie consequently saw some good in
her face.
‘Mr. Renton, I ought to know you, for we are almost neighbours in the
country,’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘Don’t you know Richmont? Ah, I daresay you
have been a great deal from home, like so many young men. Mr. Rich, Mr.
Renton has not seen Richmont. It is only six months since we took
possession. Mr. Rich bought it for the situation, and gave I am ashamed
to say how much money for it; and then the house wanted everything done
to it,--new rooms built, and I can’t tell you all what. I believe your
mamma does not visit anywhere, Mr. Renton. She is a great invalid, I
hear; and of course, unless she was so kind as to signify a wish, I
could not call first. But I am sure if you are at Renton when we are
there, it will give us the greatest pleasure to see you at Richmont.’
‘Thanks,’ said Laurie, feeling rather aghast. He did not know what more
to say till a half-comic, appealing glance reached him from the
padrona’s eyes. Then he bestirred himself. ‘I have been a long time from
home,’ he said, ‘and at present my mother goes nowhere; but I don’t
know,--pardon me,--where Richmont is. I am so stupid about
localities,--I never know anything that is not close to my eye.’
‘It was called Beecham once,’ said the rich woman; ‘but we are not the
old family;--we are the new family, Mr. Renton; and Mr. Rich thinks it
only right, when he has bought it, to give it his own name. We are not
ashamed of being new people. I have just been talking to our friend here
about painting one of the rooms for us,--in panels, you know. She is so
clever. I never knew a woman so clever; but that is between you and me,’
said the patroness, patting the painter patronisingly on the arm. ‘She
does not hear a word we are saying. I never would tell her she was
anything out of the ordinary to her face.’ Such were the astounding
manners and customs of the new species of humanity to which Laurie had
been unexpectedly presented. It took him half-an-hour at least to
realise the unfamiliar being. No doubt there are patrons in England of
the type known in old days, when one monarch leaned on his painter’s
shoulder, and another picked up his painting-brush. But these are
chiefly patrons of the old masters, not of the new; and Mr. Rich and his
wife were the specimens best known in Fitzroy Square. When they went in
to luncheon the padrona looked more and more flushed, though Forrester
was present to wait, looking as solemn as any family butler, and
listening with a sore heart,--but no outward token,--to Mr. Rich’s views
about art. He had his views, too, as well as his wife, though he was not
so immediately audible. It was when he had swallowed some wine that he
found his tongue, and then Mrs. Rich was silenced by the more
influential stream.
‘Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Renton,’ he said. ‘We’d have been
very glad if your mother had come to see us. It would have done her no
harm, and it might have done Mrs. Rich a little good. We don’t pretend
to be above that sort of thing. But of course all this fuss about the
will must have been hard upon you. I’m told you’re one of the rising
young men of the time. Stick to that. You may buy houses and lands, but
you can’t buy talent. I’ll be very glad to go and see anything you may
have to show. If our friend Mrs. Severn is to be trusted,--and I’ve
always found her to be trusted, sir,--her eye is so true,--you’ve got
something that will suit me very well; and I hope we shall know each
other better before we part.’
‘I did not mean that Mr. Renton had anything to show this year,’ said
the padrona. Laurie had never seen her so embarrassed. Was it that the
people were overpowering?--or was it----? But there was no time to
cogitate possibilities in the midst of this stream of talk.
‘Mr. Renton must come and see us at Richmont?’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘He must
come with you, some day, Mrs. Severn. I have got some of her sweet
pictures hung in my morning room; and she has been so kind in her
suggestions about the furniture. It is such a thing to have an artist’s
eye; and such pretty eyes too,’ added the stout lady, in an audible
aside to Laurie, who was seated next to her. ‘Don’t you think so? To me
she is prettier than ever she was. She is like Alice’s sister. She looks
young,--and she is young,--and to think of all she has done!’
Laurie sat by her, and never said a word. He could not pay compliments
to the padrona as a mere indifferent spectator might have done,
entering into the fun of the situation. And Mrs. Severn sat at the head
of the table, with a flush of embarrassment on her cheek. But perhaps
even she was not so sensitive as Laurie; and they were patrons, and
brought her commissions,--and they were bread! These are mean
recommendations, no doubt, but they have a wonderful effect.
‘What I like is a picture I can understand,’ said Mr. Rich. ‘What I say
to a painter is;--“Tell your story. Choose what subject you like, old,
or new, or middle-aged; but, whatever your incident is, stick to it, and
tell it, without need of any description in a book.” That’s my
principle, sir. And I like a good, warm wholesome colour; none of your
cadaverous-looking things. There are plenty of sad things and nasty
things in life without putting them in pictures. Like as I prefer a good
ending in a story. I have some pretty pictures to show you, sir, when
you come to see me. Crowquill painted that last series out of the “Vicar
of Wakefield” for me. I could have got twice the price I gave for them
from a gentleman I know in Manchester; but nothing but necessity would
make me part with these pictures. When a thing’s painted for you, it has
a value it would not have had otherwise. And I have as fine a little
Millais as you ever saw. I hope to have a picture from you in my
collection before all is done.’
‘You have not a Welby, I think,’ said the padrona, who worked rather
hard at her part of the conversation. ‘You should make haste to secure
that; for he paints very little now.’
‘I don’t care very much for Welby,’ said Mr. Rich, indifferent to the
awful countenance of Forrester behind his chair. ‘He’s a deal too
classical for me. I had not a classical education myself; and I am not
ashamed to say I don’t appreciate that sort of thing. Nature is what I
like. I don’t pretend to go in for the old masters. They’re very fine, I
daresay; but give me a nice modern picture with colours, sir, like what
you see in life. I hope you are of the real school, Mr. Renton,--not to
carry it to excess, you know. The thing for modern collections,--and I
know a great many collectors of my way of thinking,--is modern life; the
sort of thing one understands. How am I to know about your Greeks and
your Romans? I like pretty English girls, and nice young fellows making
love to them. Why shouldn’t they make love to ’em, Mrs. Severn? I did it
in my day. And as for your pictures, could anything be sweeter? It’s the
next step in life. We’ve all gone through that phase,’ said Mr. Rich,
waving his hands; ‘and that’s the sort of thing we want in our
collections. I say this to you, Mr. Renton, as a young man beginning
life.’
‘Mr. Renton will prefer the pretty girls, of course,’ said the patron’s
wife, with a good-humoured laugh. And Laurie sat by, not knowing what
reply to make, while the padrona, with that flush on her face, sat at
the head of the table, and let them talk. What was the use of arguing
the question? The finest reasoning in the world does not convince people
whose minds are incapable of receiving it. And they bought the pictures
they commended, which is what better critics seldom do.
‘There must be a variety of tastes,’ Mrs. Severn said, with a meekness
that was not natural to her. ‘I am not so pleased with my tame little
groups that you are so good-natured about. There are many things I would
rather do if I could.’
Then Mr. Rich laughed, and told the story of Listen, whose dream it was
that tragedy was his forte,--not a novel story certainly, but not
inappropriate at the moment. ‘I should like to see Welby’s pictures all
the same,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘We could not come to-morrow, so I
should like to make a round to-day. I’m going to Crowquill, and Baxter,
and some more,--as long as the light holds out;--and if you can tell me
of any others----’
‘There is Suffolk,’ said Laurie, looking at the head of the table; and
then he paused surprised. The padrona was but human. To let her own live
patron go out of her hands to the studios of celebrated painters whom
everybody knew was a thing inevitable, against which she could never
dream of struggling; but to send him, in cold blood,--her own precious
property,--to Suffolk,--a new name, a rising painter,--one of the men
whom it would be a credit to patronise! Mrs. Severn had a struggle with
herself. Generosity was easy where Laurie Renton was concerned; and she
would have shared her purse with the Suffolks, with all the unthinking
open-heartedness of her kind. But send him her patron! That was a trial.
Laurie looked at her surprised. He knew her face so well that he saw the
struggle in it, though without knowing what it meant; and he was
startled by the pause she made before she answered him. A flood of
thoughts rushed through the padrona’s mind at that moment. She thought
of herself and the children, and the need she had of patronage; and
then, on the other hand, she thought of Suffolk’s wife, with an
unmanageable man, who would not paint popular subjects, with no power to
help herself, with children too,--babies always coming,--and all sorts
of troubles. It was not of the artist she thought, and his long
unrewarded labours. She was only a woman, after all; and it was the
woman who came to her mind, anxious and powerless, and overwhelmed with
anxiety. All at once the face, obscured by some cloud which Laurie could
not penetrate,--to his supreme annoyance,--cleared up with a sudden
light, which he did not understand. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I should like Mr.
Rich to see that picture. It is not quite the kind of subject he likes;
but we all think it one of the finest things; Mr. Renton will tell you
about it. It was spoken very highly of the other day in the “Sword.”’
‘Ah; then it must be fine,’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘Perhaps Mr. Renton will
take a seat in the carriage with us, and introduce us. I like to see
everything I can see; and we have not much time for the light. And you
will not forget, dear, that you are engaged to us for Easter week. It
will be so nice to have you; and you shall plan out your pictures for
the east room. She is going to do the fairy tales for us, Mr.
Renton,--it will be charming. If the carriage is up, Mr. Rich, I am
afraid we ought to go.’
The padrona called Laurie to her as he was about to follow them
down-stairs. ‘They have given me a beautiful commission,’ she said, with
a little excitement,--‘a year’s work! And I was so mean that I hesitated
to send them to Suffolk after that. Try and make them buy the picture,
Laurie. They will, if you are clever, and talk to them a little of
Renton, and draw them on. I trust you to do it.’ It was only for a
moment at the drawing-room door. Was it the year’s work, and the contest
with herself about Suffolk’s picture, which gave her that look of
agitation and excitement? Or was it the time of year, the eve of the
Academy, and all the crowd that would come to-morrow? Laurie could not
give himself any answer as he rushed down-stairs to guide the Riches on
their beneficent course; but his eyes shone, too, and his heart beat
loud. As if he could have had anything to do with it,--a mere boy!
CHAPTER IV.
SUCCESS.
When Laurie Renton drove from the padrona’s door in Mr. Rich’s carriage,
opposite to that patron of art, it was his sense of the comicality of
the situation which came uppermost. Art student, art critic, artist, he
had been with a certain satisfaction in each office. But to be showman
and salesman too was a new branch. These are the vicissitudes to which a
man is subject who puts himself under the dominion of a woman, in the
absolute and unconditional way which Laurie had done. But that was not
how he regarded the matter. He was pleased to do it even for Suffolk’s
sake; though he could not but laugh within himself when he took his seat
on the luxurious cushions, with the couple opposite to him who breathed
wealth, and filled the very atmosphere with its exhalations. One of the
exhalations was not so pleasant as could be wished; for Mrs. Rich’s
favourite perfume was of a character too distinct and decided for the
narrow enclosure of a carriage; but the rustle of her silk, and the soft
warmth of her velvet and her furs, and the wealthy look about her
altogether,--wealthy and liberal and self-important and kindly,--was not
without a certain human interest. She had been a pretty woman. Laurie,
whose eyes were open to such particulars, was at once aware of that; and
she was a good-looking woman of her age still. Her husband had less
apparent character about him; but there was in both a consciousness of
being able to give pleasure and scatter benefit around them, which was
not unprepossessing. No doubt they were vulgar, perhaps
purse-proud,--horribly ostentatiously rich. But they meant to benefit
other people with their wealth, which was always something in their
favour. Laurie glided with natural skill into the part allotted to him.
He talked of Renton; of his mother’s invalid condition, which made it
impossible for her to call; and of his young brother Frank the
Guardsman,--for he had not yet negotiated his exchange,--whose battalion
was stationed at Royalborough, and who, he was sure, would be glad to
make their acquaintance. And then he went on to Suffolk’s story with the
most natural sequence;--a man so full of talent, so laborious, so
devoted to art, with such a pretty little wife!
‘Ah, there we have you, Mr. Renton!’ said jolly Mrs. Rich; ‘but it is
naughty to talk so of a married lady. You ought to have eyes only for
the pretty girls.’
‘A pretty young woman is a pretty young woman, whether she’s married or
single,’ said her husband; ‘but I don’t like a man who goes on painting
pictures that don’t sell. What is the good of it? No man in business
would think of such a thing. It’s a sinful waste of capital as well as a
waste of time. He ought to have changed his style. I’ll tell him so. You
do a many foolish things, Mr. Renton, you artists, for want of a plain
common-sense man of business to give you a little advice.’
‘That is very possible,’ said Laurie, with candour; ‘but even in
business a man may go on with a speculation for a long time, though it
is not immediately successful, if he is sure it will succeed in the
end;--so long as he can afford to wait.’
‘Ah, yes, that is the whole question,’ said Mr. Rich,--‘as long as he
can afford to wait; but a man should think of his wife and children. If
I had a little family dependent on me, and had to paint for a living,
I’d make them comfortable, Mr. Renton, if I had to change my style every
other day.’
‘But that is not so easy as you think,’ said Laurie; ‘and the wife and
children do not complain. Mrs. Suffolk is as proud of those boys in the
Forum as she is of her own babies.’
‘Are there boys in the picture?’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘Then I shall like it
for one. And she must be a nice little woman; but you young men, you
should not go paying attention to a married lady. It is not because it
is wrong,--for I never was so strait-laced as some, and never objected
to a bit of fun,--but it keeps you from marrying and settling, which is
dreadful. You are all so selfish, you gentlemen. As long as you have a
woman to go and tell your little tales to, and get her sympathy and so
forth, and no danger of going any further, you are quite satisfied;--and
the girls are left, and nobody pays any attention to them. That is what
I don’t approve of. We matrons have had our day, Mr. Renton, and we
should be content with it. When I see married women dancing and going
on, and young girls sitting without partners, I could beat them, though,
perhaps, it is vulgar of me to say so. I like a young man when he falls
in love honestly, as people did in my days, with a nice young girl.’
‘We can’t all afford to fall in love,’ said Laurie, laughing, yet with a
faint, distant recollection of the possibility he had himself given up.
Curious it was how far off that looked now! But, like most sinners, he
was utterly unconscious that there was any moral which he could apply to
his own case in this little sermon. His mind glanced off to somebody
else whom, perhaps, it might have touched. ‘And as for Mrs. Suffolk,’ he
added, ‘she does not think there is a man in the world who comes within
a hundred miles of her Reginald; and, as I said, she is as proud of
those boys in the Forum----’
‘What’s the Forum? Tell me the story; I like to know the story of every
picture,’ said Mr. Rich. And Laurie told, to ears which received it
with all the interest of ignorance, that well-known tale. Mr. Rich
thought he had read something about it in a book; and shook his head
over an incident so remote in antiquity. ‘I like English subjects,’ said
the patron. ‘I don’t care for your Italian things. I never was in Italy
myself, and how should I know if they are true or not? English pictures
are the things for me.’
Then Mrs. Rich reminded the millionnaire that he had promised to take
her to Italy next winter, and that it would be well in the meantime to
make a little acquaintance with that country. And Laurie fell back on
the ‘Sword,’ giving his companions the benefit of his own article,
which, being a solitary effort, he had kept in his memory. It was a
scene of genteel comedy, in which he was at once actor and
audience,--and perhaps no other description of audience had such an
exquisite sense of the points of the drama. He went through his part
with a fluency which amazed himself, and chuckled and clapped his hands
in secret with an infinite sense of his own humour. Mr. Rich’s grand
coachman was too fine to know the locality, and made a great many turns
and rounds before he reached Suffolk’s door, which left time for the
little play to play itself out. It was curious to see the vast woman of
wealth in her vast seal-skin cloak, in her rustling silken train, with
plumes nodding on her bonnet, and lace streaming, get in at the narrow
door. The house looked as if it could not possibly contain her. Laurie
gave a comical glance to the upper window, with a momentary idea that he
must see her head looking out there while still her train was on the
steps at the door. And when she shook hands with the painter’s little
wife, who got up from her work to receive them in a nervous flutter of
agitation, not knowing what to expect, it seemed to Laurie as if he had
brought a good-humoured ogress into this little fairy palace.
‘And a very pretty little woman she is,’ the patroness said in a
whisper, nodding to him aside. ‘I like your taste, Mr. Renton.’ Thus it
will be seen that Laurie’s hands were full.
‘We did not expect anybody till to-morrow; and I don’t know if Reginald
is ready. If you would but go up and tell him, Mr. Renton?’ Mrs. Suffolk
said, appealing to him also in an aside.
Suffolk was not the least ready to receive visitors. It was an east
wind, which had impaired his light and affected his temper. ‘I’ve no
time to go and change my coat,’ he said, like a savage. ‘What’s the
good? Laurie, you’re the best fellow in the world; but Thursday is the
last day, and you know what I’ve got to do. Look at that sky! By Jove!
stop a man in the middle of a sky like that, and ask him to be civil to
strangers! You might as well tell me to put this confounded east wind
out of my eyes!’
‘Only for ten minutes,’ said Laurie, ‘there’s a good fellow! You are
doing too much to that sky. Leave it for an hour, and you’ll see what’s
wanting twice as well as you do now. And I do believe there’s a chance
of selling the Angles! Think of Mrs. Suffolk and the children. Surely
they’re worth half-an-hour and the trouble of changing your coat.’
Suffolk paused in his painting, and grew pale, and stared at his friend.
‘Selling the Angles!’ he said; and then he put down his brush, and
turned away with an impatient exclamation. While Laurie stood looking
anxiously on, the painter went to the nearest window and began to open
the shutters, but stopped in the midst and turned back upon him. ‘It’s
all rubbish,’ he said; ‘I don’t believe in selling the Angles. Why do
you come here and mock a fellow even in the midst of his work? I say,
Laurie, tell me one thing,--who is it?--quick!’
‘It’s old Rich, the City man,--the padrona’s friend. It was she who sent
him,’ said Laurie, breathless with suspense.
Then the painter broke down; he gave a sudden sob all at once. ‘God
bless that woman!’ he said, and rushed at his shutters. As for Laurie,
he made himself housemaid, studio-boy, with his usual facility. It was
he who dragged out the spare easel to the best light, and took down the
picture from the wall where it hung somewhat in the shade. He took the
dust off it lovingly with his handkerchief, while Suffolk changed his
coat. His hands were rather black, and there was a cobweb on his breast
close to the lily in his button-hole when he went down-stairs; and it
would be hard to say which was the fairer ornament. Then he turned
himself into a groom of the chambers, and ushered the patron and
patroness up-stairs, Mrs. Suffolk following. The little woman trembled
all over, though she did her best to hide it; and Laurie’s heart went
jumping like a thing independent of him, in his breast. Suffolk was the
most self-possessed of the three, but he purchased his composure by
putting on a morose and forbidding aspect. Not that he meant to be
morose; on the contrary, his brain was in a greater whirl than that of
either of the others. If it might indeed come to pass,--if he too should
really possess a patron, giving commissions, making life secure
beforehand for his wife and the children! And then it occurred to him
that this was the padrona’s patron. The thought nearly overcame the
painter. If she had taken her children’s bread from her table and sent
it to his, he would not have felt it so much. ‘God bless that woman!’ he
said again in his heart. If the attempt failed or succeeded he was
equally bound to her for his life. But he did not think of Laurie’s good
offices with the same effusion, though Laurie by this time had come
forward equal to the emergency, and resumed the showman’s part.
‘When you are in Italy, Mrs. Rich,’ said Laurie, ‘I know what you will
say to yourself some spring morning. You will say, “Now I feel Mr.
Suffolk’s picture!” Look at that golden air; you can see the motes
dancing in it; and I can smell the orange-blossom out of the convent
gardens. I have seen English children look like that,--like little
roses,--with the dark Romans all round, admiring them.’
‘Have you now, Mr. Renton?’ cried Mrs. Rich; ‘I should like to see that.
Dear little angels! Though my own are all grown up, I adore little
children. And you never saw such a skin and such hair as my Nelly had
when she was a little thing. They are lovely, Mrs. Suffolk--I think they
are quite lovely. Mr. Rich, don’t you think that group is just like our
Charlie and Alf? I mean what they used to look. And that woman with the
white thing on her head,--that is a beauty! I am sure your husband must
have painted you scores of times,’ she went on, graciously laying her
hand upon little Mrs. Suffolk’s shoulders. ‘Now come and show me this
other one, and let the gentlemen talk. I hope Mr. Rich will buy that
picture. I think he will buy it. And they tell me there was something
very nice about it in the “Sword.”’
‘Yes,’ said the painter’s wife, all confused and breathless with
anxiety, straining her ears to hear what the gentlemen were saying; ‘and
the “Looker-on” had an article too. They were all very complimentary;
they said it was quite a work of genius----’
‘But it has not begun to pay just yet,’ said Mrs. Rich, with a little
wave of her hand. There was a melting, liberal grandeur about her
patroness. She looked like a conferrer of favours,--a rich, mellow,
embodied Fortune. ‘I think Mr. Rich will buy it,’ she repeated, looking
round upon her husband.
This was not a speech calculated to still Mrs. Suffolk’s agitation.
Could it be possible? Oh, if Reginald would only be civil! If he would
but condescend to talk and show it off to the best advantage! But it was
Laurie who was talking. It was he who was pointing out all its great
qualities. And then there was a pause, awful as the pause,--not before a
thunderstorm,--that is nothing,--a mere accident of nature,--awful
almost as the pause you make when you have opened the letter which is to
bring you news of life or death!
And then, once more, it was Laurie Renton’s voice that broke the
silence. If he had been pleading with a woman whom he loved, his tones
could scarcely have been more insinuating. ‘If I remember Beecham
rightly,’ he said, ‘there was a space left for a picture just opposite
the little organ in what used to be the music-room. Have you changed
that? or perhaps you have placed some picture there?’
‘That is just the thing,’ said Mr. Rich; ‘I knew there was a place. You
have got an eye, Mr. Renton, and a memory too. Fancy, my dear,’ he said,
calling to his wife, ‘he remembers the rooms at Richmont better than I
do myself,--calls it Beecham though; but of course that is quite
natural. Yes. And he is quite right too. I should not wonder if it was
the exact size. The music-room is Nelly’s particular room, Mr.
Renton;--my daughter Nelly, the only one I have at home. I think that is
just the sort of thing she would like. Girls are full of fancies. She
would not have my last Crowquill, though it is a lovely specimen, and
that one of Mrs. Severn’s that she fancied was not big enough. I should
think this was just about the size. Mr. Suffolk, a word with you, sir,’
said the patron, with all the confidence of a man whose cheque-book was
in his pocket. Laurie stood with his back to them, measuring the picture
with his handkerchief, and Mrs. Suffolk, before the new picture on the
easel, stood trembling, trying to show it to the patron’s wife. What a
moment it was! Mr. Rich was very audible; but Suffolk, in his agitation,
spoke low, and looked more nervous than ever. His wife thought, oh, if
Reginald should be disagreeable!--oh, if the rich man should be
affronted, driven away by his bad manners! And it was only manner all
the time. She stood in a fever of suspense, not knowing what Mrs. Rich
said, who chattered on, drowning even her husband’s voice. She gave
Laurie one look of appeal. Oh, if it were only ordained in Parliament,
or by nature, that artists’ wives and friends should do their business
for them;--at least when they were men like Suffolk! If it had lasted
long, Mrs. Suffolk must have fallen fainting at her patroness’s feet.
But just when the strain had reached its highest point, Mrs. Rich fell
silent by some chance, and took to examining one particular corner of
the picture, and the voice of the millionnaire became distinctly
audible. ‘If that’s all, I’ll give you a cheque at once,’ he said. ‘I’d
like to have the picture as soon as you can send it; for you see Nelly
is from home, and I’d like to give her a surprise. Perhaps Mr. Renton
and you would run down and see it hung? A day in the country would do
you good after all your hard work. Have you pen and ink? What, not pen
and ink in your place!--every man of business should be supplied with
that. I couldn’t put in my signature in paint, you know,’ the man of
wealth said, with his large laugh of ease and careless liberality. He
joked over it as if it were sixpence! as if it was a thing that happened
every day! while to two of the people who listened to him it was
something like coming back from the dead.
Suffolk, with his voice choked, made some feeble response. He tried to
laugh too; he tried to say it did not matter,--there was no hurry,--any
time would do. A poor little piece of hypocrisy, at which his wife
quailed, trembling lest he should be taken at his word.
‘No, no; I like to settle such matters off-hand,’ said the
patron;--‘there’s Renton, like a sensible fellow, off for the ink. I
like that young man; never saw him in my life till this morning; but he
feels like an old friend, and his people are our neighbours in the
country. You and he must make a run down by the one o’clock train,--I
don’t know a better train,--brings you down twenty-five miles in thirty
minutes,--not bad, that. And I’ll send over a trap for you. What day
will you come? Thank you, Renton; that’s practical; that’s the sort of
thing I like. I want you both to come down and have some luncheon, and
see the picture hung. Let it be a day in the end of the week; a day in
the country never harms any man. Settle it with my wife. My dear, come
here and look at the picture. It’s ours; or rather, it’s Nelly’s. Don’t
you think she’ll like it? And I want to have them down to see it hung.’
Thus was this extraordinary piece of business accomplished, in a
moment,--as it were in the twinkling of an eye. Neither Suffolk nor his
wife knew what their visitors said and did, or where they were, or what
had happened to them, till Mr. Rich suddenly recollected that there was
no time to lose, and so many other studios to visit in daylight. It was
all settled about that visit to Richmont, which Laurie, disagreeable
though it was to him, had not the heart to refuse. And I suppose Suffolk
talked and assented and behaved himself like any ordinary mortal, though
he knew no more of what had passed than a man in a dream. Laurie put
these blessed rich people into their carriage afterwards, and took as
much care of the vast woman as if she had been the queen. ‘I will ask
your brother over to meet you, Mr. Renton,’ she said, as she took leave
of him; and Mr. Rich followed her, rubbing his hands. ‘I have done a
good morning’s work,’ said that happy man. ‘Two hundred and fifty! I
don’t doubt I could sell it for six to-morrow,--that’s what it is to go
to the fountain-head.’ Laurie himself felt a little giddy as the
carriage drove away. And when he returned to the studio, he found that
Mrs. Suffolk was crying, and her husband not much more steady. The
painter had forgotten all about his sky. He had his cheque in his hand,
and was looking, first at that, and then at his Angles. ‘By Jove,
Laurie, you have done it at last!’ he said, bursting into a loud laugh,
and crushing Laurie’s hand as in a vice,--and then he went to the inner
room, and put on his old painting-coat, which was a good excuse.
But whether it was Laurie who was to be commended this time, or the
padrona, who,--let it be confessed,--with a moment’s hesitation and
reluctance, had sent the patron to her friend, was a doubtful matter.
They had both a hand in it. It was ‘our little business,’ as Laurie
said, pleasing himself, in his foolishness, with the thought of this
partnership. And he went, of course, to the Square, not by roundabout
ways, like the fine coachman, but as fast as his feet could carry him,
to report how everything had happened. Duty and courtesy both demanded
that not a moment should be lost till the report was made.
CHAPTER V.
A DISCOVERY.
When Laurie reached No. 375 with his budget of news, the padrona was
out! It was nothing very dreadful to be sure. She did go out sometimes,
like everybody else; and in all likelihood no very long time would
elapse before she returned. But, all the same, Laurie was intensely
_contrarié_, and felt as if this were a special spite of fortune. She
must have known he would come to make his report of what had happened at
Suffolk’s, and to inquire into the news she had given him as he left the
house. A beautiful commission,--work for a year! That was what she had
said. And then, without any regard for his curiosity, his interest in
everything that concerned her, she had gone out! He went up to the
studio to wait for her, passing the door of the dining-room very quietly
that Miss Hadley might not hear him, and rush in with her usual
officiousness to make one of the party. At this moment, after all his
excitement, he did not feel equal to general talk with three or four
people. It was the intimate conversation _à deux_ for which Laurie
longed. Never had he seen the studio in such preternatural good order
before. The pictures that were going to the Academy were placed all
ready for exhibition, each on its separate easel; a few touches were
still wanting to one of them, but that it was evident the padrona had
calculated upon doing with the morning light, before her visitors began
to arrive. The Louis Quinze fauteuil was placed in front of the
principal picture; a great Turkish curtain of many colours, one of poor
Severn’s acquisitions in the days when he was rich enough to buy things
that pleased his eye, had been put up across the farther window, to be
drawn as might be needful for the light. A great many sketches were
placed about the room,--poor Severn’s last drawing, unfinished, but
always holding the chief place among his wife’s treasures, hanging in
the best light. And everything was cleared away that impaired the
appearance of the studio, a proceeding which gave positive delight to
the housemaid, and even filled the padrona’s soul with a sense of
comfort. ‘If I could only keep it tidy like this!’ Mrs. Severn had said,
with a sigh. Whereas Laurie, with the untidiness natural to man, was
disgusted with it, and hated the place in its unusual decorum. He walked
about with his hands in his pockets, and stared blankly at everything.
What did she mean by going away? What did she mean by putting herself,
as it were, out of her studio, and filling it up with knickknacks that
did not belong to it? As for poor Severn’s last sketch, it was not a
drawing for a woman to be proud of. She might have known that at least
by this time. It might be valuable to her for the sake of association,
of course,--anything, a table, or a chair, might be dear for
association’s sake,--but she must have known better than to prize it as
a drawing. And then Laurie went and looked at the picture, which smiled
sweetly at him out of its frame, full of sweet nature and expression,
but undeniably wanting a few finishing touches still. How could she go
out roaming about in that strange way, and leave the picture unfinished?
Laurie in his heart was angry with his padrona. It was not like her to
go out and stay out like this,--doing shopping perhaps!--which any woman
without an ounce of brains could have done just as well;--which Miss
Hadley might have been sent to do: getting her out of the way at the
same time! Laurie in his impatience hunted up his friend’s brushes, and
mixed her colours, and went at the unfinished picture himself to fill up
those tedious moments. There was a pleasure, too, in thinking he would
have a hand in it; not that there was anything of the least importance
to do;--a touch of light upon the floor, a bit of perspective which was
not quite complete. When he had put in a few lines caressingly, with a
half sense that it was her hand, or her dress, or something belonging to
her that he was touching, another fit of impatience came upon him.
Where could she have gone? What could she be doing? It was of no use
waiting here, making himself angry in her absence. He might as well go
and see old Welby, and leave her to the surprise of finding that some
one had been doing her work while she was out. Of course if she came in,
Miss Hadley would be with her, or Alice, or somebody. Laurie accordingly
put down the brushes again, restoring the room to something of its
ordinary aspect, and took up his hat and went down-stairs. ‘She will
think of the lubber-fiend,’ said Laurie to himself; ‘and I wonder if she
will put me a bowl of cream for my hire.’ Would the bowl of cream answer
the purpose? or was there any other hire of which Laurie thought? There
came a little gleam over his face, and the shadow of a smile; but I do
not think it was in anticipation of anything in particular, only a
certain pleasant sentiment, half tenderness, half amusement. Laurie was
the kind of man whose eye softens and whose lip smiles under any
circumstances at the thought of a reward from a woman. It was as he went
down-stairs that he noticed for the first time the film of cobweb on his
coat beside the flower,--and he left it there, though he was very dainty
in point of personal appearance. Perhaps he thought it was a mark of the
work he had been doing, which the padrona would smile to see; or,
perhaps, that her hand was the hand which should brush it off.
With these ideas in his mind he went down-stairs, possessed by a kind of
sweet love-in-idleness; not the passion of a young man for a girl; a
tenderness made up of many things,--of that soft reverence just touched
with pity, which a man of generous temper has for a woman in such a
position; and yet pity is not the word,--or else it was a kind of pity
in which there was all the softness and none of the superiority which
usually mingles with that sentiment; and of admiration for the brave
creature who had gradually grown the central figure in his landscape;
and of a longing to help her; and of pride in the regard she gave him
and the sympathy between them. There was perfect sympathy between them,
though he had never, Laurie thought, seen any woman worthy to stand by
her side. This was part of his delusion, for there were women as good,
and with far greater gifts than the padrona, to be met with in the
world. But still it was not wonderful if the young man was proud of her
friendship. Friendship,--that was the word; with no result to come, no
thickening of the plot towards a climax; but only a delicious
accompaniment to life, an interchange of every thought and sentiment, a
soft but strong support in every chance that might befall a man. This
was all that was in Laurie’s mind. It was something more akin to
worship than the passion which appropriates can ever be. It had not
occurred to him to seize, to take possession of, to secure her as his
own; the idea itself would have been a profanity; only to be nearer to
her than any one else, to be her subject and yet her counsellor; an
indescribable perfect relationship such as exists only in imagination.
Laurie himself had never gone any deeper. The padrona’s life and
condition were to him as settled and everlasting as the skies, the
ordinary constitution of the world. And all would go on as it was going
on. And at the present moment he would not have exchanged that visionary
tie for anything actual in life.
Mr. Welby was standing before his picture when Laurie went in, looking
at it with that intense inspection of the cultivated eye, which no
uneducated critic can give. He held out his hand to his visitor, but did
not change his attitude. Welby, R.A., had his anxieties about the
Academy’s Exhibition as well as another. True, his picture was sure of a
place on ‘the line,’ and every advantage a benign Hanging Committee
could give it; but there were other dangers before the face of the
Academician from which the younger men were safe. Mr. Welby knew that if
there was a faltering line in his canvas, or one neglected detail, even
the critics who were his friends would say he was growing old. ‘It
would ill become us, who are indebted to Mr. Welby for so many noble
pictures, to be eager to mark the indications of approaching decadence;
but, alas! no man can remain of primitive strength for ever,’ would be
the philosophical comment of the ‘Looker-on.’ And the ‘Sword’ would be
still sharper in its judgment. Such words as these were echoing in the
old painter’s ear as he looked at his picture. He was aware he was old,
and life had no such charm to him that he should cling to it
unduly,--but such criticisms were hard to bear. He was going over the
picture himself, criticising its every detail, and he held up his hand
with an unspoken warning to Laurie, who understood, as he had a faculty
of doing, and waited behind till the inspection was over.
‘I think that will do,’ said Mr. Welby at last, with a long and
deeply-drawn sigh. ‘Come here, Renton, and give me your opinion.’ Laurie
was full of the natural instinct of admiring and believing in the work
of the old man,--who was leader and patriarch, as it were, of his own
special party;--and, besides, it was a fine picture, and he thought it
so, though very different no doubt from Suffolk’s ‘Saxon Maiden,’ or
from the lovely children in the padrona’s pictures upstairs. Art, to be
the everlasting thing it is, is as yet as much bound by fashion as any
silly woman. The fashion of the day had changed; but yet old Welby’s
picture was a fine picture still.
‘I don’t want those fellows to be picking holes in my coat,’ said the
R.A., ‘though of course they will do it all the same.’
‘I don’t see what holes there are to pick,’ said Laurie, strong in his
_esprit de corps_, and ready to swear to the excellence of his master in
contradiction of all the critics in the world. ‘We have just sold
Suffolk’s picture,’ he added suddenly, glad to deliver himself of the
wonderful news, which had been burning holes, as it were, for want of
utterance, in his heart.
‘Sold Suffolk’s picture!’ the Academician said with a start. It was the
most wonderful piece of news that had been heard in the artists’ quarter
for many a year. For no man had gone so consistently in the face of
popular opinion as Suffolk, or held so obstinately by his own style.
Laurie, nothing loth, told the whole story, with excitement and a
natural satisfaction; and how it was old Rich, the City man, who was
well known to be the padrona’s special property. And as he told it he
looked down upon the bit of cobweb, by this time gone to the merest
speck,--the sign in that particular matter, of his close partnership
with the padrona,--which was still on his coat.
‘So she sent him her own patron?’ said Mr. Welby; ‘that was good of her,
Renton,--that was very good of her. To be sure, he had just given her a
commission. I suppose you heard of that. A private patron is a great
institution, my dear fellow,--there is more satisfaction in it than in
dealers. He has given her a commission to fill one room with pictures.
There are to be twelve of them I think, and the subjects from the fairy
tales. She’ll do it very well. She has wonderful invention, you know, in
her way, and Cinderella and little Red Riding Hood, and all the rest
will just suit her; and there is a year’s living secured at once. I am
sorry for that woman, Renton. I am more sorry for her than I can tell,’
cried the R.A., with unquestionable emotion in his voice.
‘Sorry for--the padrona?’ cried Laurie, half laughing, half angry. He
would have liked to have knocked down the man who presumed,--and yet to
be sorry for that hopeful, dauntless woman, so full of life, and
strength, and energy, seemed too good a joke.
‘Yes, sorry for her,’ said Mr. Welby, severely, ‘though you don’t know
what I mean, of course. She is at her best now, and I suppose she is
making a good deal of money; but look at her principles, sir. Her
principles are,--you need not contradict me, I know her better than you
do,--never to shut her heart nor her purse against anybody she can help.
What kind of an idea is that, I ask you, for this world? Of course, she
can’t lay by a penny; and when the fellows in the newspapers begin to
say of her as they say already of me----’
‘But you!’ cried Laurie, ‘you----’ and then he stopped, not knowing how
to end his sentence.
‘I am old, that is what you were going to say,’ said Mr. Welby. ‘I am
two-and-twenty years older than she is,--just two-and-twenty years. It’s
almost as long as you have been in the world, my dear fellow, and you
think it’s centuries; but two-and-twenty years pass very quickly after
thirty-five. And she’ll age sooner than I did,--never having been, you
know, so thoroughly trained a painter. Her quick eye will fail her, and
her fine touch, and she will not have knowledge and experience to fall
back upon; and the public will tire of those pretty pictures. Her genius
will pall, and then her courage will fail, though she has pluck at
present for anything. Do you think I’ve never seen such things happen?
If she has ten years more of success it will be all she can hope for;
and the boys will scarcely be doing for themselves by that time; and she
will have to reduce her living, which will go sadly against the grain,
and struggle with all sorts of anxieties. When I look at that woman,
sir, my heart bleeds. It’s all very pleasant just now,--plenty of work
and plenty of strength, and a light heart, and her friends round her,
and her children; and she feels she is up to her work,--knows she is up
to her work. But when they come to say of her what they are beginning to
say of me----’
Laurie raised his hand with a speechless protest and denial of the
possibility, but the words he would have spoken died in his throat. What
could he say against this prophet of evil?--only that every pulse in him
and every nerve thrilled fiercely at the suggestion;--and that was no
answer, heaven knows.
‘Even if she did keep on long enough to get the boys launched in the
world,’ said Mr. Welby, who seemed, Laurie thought, to take a certain
pleasure in the torture he was inflicting,--‘what is to become of her
afterwards, unless she were to die off-hand, which is not likely? People
don’t die at the convenient moment. Most likely she’ll linger for years,
poor, and old, and unable to work, on some pittance or other,--lucky if
she has that. It’s hard upon such a woman, Renton. I tell you, when I
look at that fine creature and think what’s before her, it makes my
heart bleed.’
‘But, good heavens! why should you imagine such things?’ cried Laurie,
when he could speak. ‘Of course we may all go mad, or get ruined, or
perish miserably,--one as well as another;--but to forebode such a fate
for her----’
‘I said nothing about getting ruined or going mad,’ said Mr. Welby,
pettishly. ‘I said Mrs. Severn would outlive her market,--ay, and
outlive her powers,--and that my heart ached for her, poor thing! I
declare to you, Laurie, my heart so aches for her, that if I thought she
could make up her mind to it, I would marry her to-morrow,--though it
would break in upon all my habits,’ said the R.A., sinking his voice,
‘in a most annoying way.’
‘Marry--her--to-morrow!’ cried Laurie, and he made a step towards the
old painter with a savage impulse which he could scarcely restrain. He
was wild with sudden passion. ‘Marry her!’ It was hard to tell what kept
him from raising the hand which he had clenched in spite of himself. But
he did not, though it was a courageous thing of old Welby to keep facing
the young fellow with that sudden transport of fury in his eye.
‘Yes,’ he said, calmly. ‘I am getting old, and I have saved a little
money, and I have no near relations. If I thought she could make up her
mind to it, I would ask her to marry me to-morrow. I have thought of it
often. For her sake, that is what I would do.’
Laurie made no answer; he walked away from the old man to the very end
of the studio, and stood there staring at the Angelichino which stood
against the wall. His blood seemed to be boiling in all his veins, and
his heart throbbing as if it would burst. Why should he be angry? Why
should he object to old Welby for his desire to shield the padrona from
even a possible evil? But Laurie’s mind was in too great a ferment to
permit him to think articulately. He did not understand what was the
meaning of the sudden tumult within him,--the sharp shock which his
nature seemed to have sustained. To get away and be alone was the
immediate necessity upon him. If he could have gone through the wall, or
leaped out of the window, probably he would have done it. But that being
impossible, he composed himself as well as he could, and returned to
where old Welby stood calmly, taking no notice of him, looking once more
at his picture. At the sight of the old man’s tranquillity Laurie felt
ashamed of himself.
‘I suppose my nerves are more easily affected than most people’s,’ he
said, with an attempt at a laugh. ‘I can’t think of all those dreadful
things happening,--to--the padrona,--and take it calmly. Good-night! I
must go now.’
‘If such a thing as I said should ever happen,’ said Welby, shaking
hands with him,--‘I may as well warn you,--I’d have no more padronas.
How poor Severn put up with it is more than I can say.’
This parting speech sent Laurie forth in a renewed tempest of rage and
indignation. He had meant to return up-stairs after his visit to old
Welby, but that was now impossible. He had let himself out, and closed
the door sharply behind him, before old Forrester could make his
appearance. Daylight by this time was beginning to fail, and the lamps
were being lit along the street, twinkling across the Square through the
smoky trees, which were swelling with the fulness of spring. The look of
the outside world as he came thus suddenly into it,--the tall,
glimmering houses,--the lamps like candies in the pale, waning
daylight,--the trees all bristling with half-opened leaves, and the sky,
leaden yet light, with its remoteness, and colourless serenity, looking
down upon all, never went out of Laurie’s mind. He forgot all his
displeasure at her absence, all his wondering where she was. He did not
even look if she might be coming, or remember that he might meet her
suddenly face to face so near her own door. His mind was too full of her
idea to remember herself, if we may say so. He went round and round the
Square without any particular sense of where he was going, and then took
the first street, any street,--what did it matter?--and got out into a
crowded thoroughfare, where lights were gleaming, and men hurrying, and
every sound and stir of life. It was a long time before he could even
make out his own thoughts, what they were. All was dimness and chaos and
commotion, like the scene around at first; lights gleaming, cries coming
out of the obscurity,--a tumult he could not comprehend. Then by degrees
the clouds rolled off, each to its own corner; the foreground cleared,
the central figure reappeared. What was it? Laurie stood still for a
moment, and looked himself, as it were, in the face, aghast. He had not
so much as suspected it till now. She had been his friend; nothing so
tender, nothing so near, had ever been in his life; yet he had not
dreamed what the truth was until old Welby, with his detestable
suggestion, had thrust it thus unveiled in his face.
And Laurie stood aghast. It may injure him in some people’s eyes, yet I
cannot but avow that when the young man found that he loved a woman much
older than himself,--a woman with children, and a separate, independent
past, with twice his experience, and,--metaphorically at least,--twice
his age,--he was appalled by the discovery. He had known her another
man’s wife; he had himself been as a child beside her in the first days
of their acquaintance. There was less difference in point of age between
himself and her daughter than between himself and her; and yet he loved
her. No, it was not friendship. Friendship would not have resented hotly
and wildly, with a half-murderous passion, old Welby’s suggestion.
Friendship would not have moved any man’s heart into such a mad
commotion. He loved her. That it never had occurred to himself to change
the relationship between them, or seek a closer one, was nothing.
Another man had but to talk of marrying her, and lo! the whole world was
lit into conflagration. There was a sweetness in the discovery too. His
heart warmed and glowed in that fire; words which he but half understood
went whispering through the air about him,--‘There is none like her;
none.’ No girl, no young heroine of romance, could be such a creature as
was this woman, tried, and proved, and developed, with all the
sweetness in her still, and yet all the strength of life. If he had been
proud of her regard, proud of her sympathy, how much more proud would he
be of her love! If that were possible! Could it be possible? Going on in
this distracted range of thoughts, the fact gleamed upon Laurie that no
girl could make such sacrifice of pride and natural position in loving
him as this woman should,--if she would; and was it likely? It would be
as vain to attempt to follow him in the maze of passion that possessed
him, as in the streets he wound his way through, while the night
darkened round him, and the lights shone brighter. A storm of thunder
and lightning might have been going on, and he would never have known
it. Such a thing had befallen as he had never dreamt of. The soft love
which he had put aside with a pang of tender regret as a thing
impossible,--too sweet for him and too costly,--had come back at
unawares, and come in and taken possession, no longer soft and easy to
be vanquished, but twined in with every thread of life. It was so easy
to come away from Kensington Gore,--from the world he had lived in for
years,--from the pensive-pleasant hopes of his youth; but to leave this
place, which had not an attraction but one, would be tearing up his life
by the roots. This was the fact, though he had not known it. Wonder, and
terror, and delight, and a vague overwhelming dismay, filled Laurie’s
mind as he found himself standing thus after the earthquake, with the
solid ground rent under his very feet. There were flowers growing still,
so sweet that he was intoxicated with their breath; but yet there had
been an earthquake, and the sober soil was torn with that convulsion. He
walked and walked, charged with those thoughts, till he got to the very
skirts of far-reaching London, and came to himself in a gloomy, suburban
road. It was the rain falling in his face out of the almost invisible
skies that roused him first, and then he had to grope his way back to a
thoroughfare and get a cab, and go home. When he reached his room and
looked at himself in the little glass over the mantel-piece he saw a
pale apparition, with gleaming eyes and a visionary smile; appalled,
shaken to the very depths of his being, and yet with a subtle happiness
at his heart. He was happier, and more bewildered and utterly astray in
all his reckonings, than he had ever been in his life.
CHAPTER VI.
LAURIE’S FATE.
Next day was the day of the private exhibition made in the artists’
houses of their pictures before they were sent off to the Academy; not a
day in which a man could make his appearance with any passionate or
sentimental errand in the studio of a painter. All day long a stream of
carriages were flocking about Fitzroy Square, and driving into the
adjacent street, where carriages were not frequent visitors. There was a
suppressed excitement about the district generally. It was, as we have
said, like the eve of a battle, and every new spectator who appeared to
judge of the pretensions of the combatants increased the commotion.
Perhaps at another moment Laurie would have felt a certain oppression in
a day which was so exciting for all his friends and so indifferent to
himself; but now he had a shield against any such sentiment. He got up
that morning with something of the lassitude of a man exhausted by great
exertions. The sun was shining, which had been a rarity of late, and the
consternation of the previous night had somehow died out of his mind.
To-day he should see her, that was certain. To-day the sweetness of the
presence of the woman whom he loved would smooth away all perversity of
circumstances, and make rough places seem straight. He had a longing to
see her, to make sure that she at least was the same, notwithstanding
the wonderful change that had taken place in himself, or rather the
wonderful unsuspected revelation he had had of his own sentiments.
Somehow, with such a sympathy as there was between them, she must have
divined, must have been affected by the extraordinary convulsion he had
passed through. The daily impulse to seek her, and lay bare his thoughts
to her, which had become a second nature to him, was mingled now with
the curiosity a young man might have felt to see the person to whom he
had been betrothed in his cradle, but had never seen. In a manner,
Laurie had never seen this lady of his affections. When he parted with
her yesterday she had been his friend; now she was his love,--the first
and only woman in the world to him. It was impossible that she could be
the same, look the same, in the face of this amazing change. He hurried
to get one glimpse of her while the morning lasted,--to make
acquaintance with her,--to familiarise himself with her looks and her
ways.
But when Laurie reached the Square he found, alas! that he was not the
only one who had been moved to visit the padrona in the early sunshine.
Miss Hadley was there putting the finishing touches to the room; and so
was Mrs. Suffolk, leaning back in the Louis Quinze chair, laughing and
crying and chattering to the children in the picture as if they had been
real babies. ‘Oh, you darlings!’ the little woman was saying, ‘I wonder
how many people will go on their knees to you when you are out in the
world. But though you are little angels, you are not so nice as your
mother. You are sweet, but not so sweet as our padrona.’ This was the
chatter Laurie heard as he went in. And it gave him a shock which it
would be impossible to describe, when the padrona herself turned round
upon him, palette in hand, smiling and placid and gracious, the very
same woman from whom he had parted yesterday. All the heat and agitation
of suppressed passion might be in his eyes, but in hers there was only
the brightness of every day,--the composure of her usual, ordinary
looks. Nay, as if to emphasize more and more the perfect unity, so far
as she was concerned, of to-day and yesterday, she turned to him with
the very words which, when he left that room last, before heaven and
earth had changed for him, he had fancied her using. ‘Here comes the lob
of spirits,’ said the padrona, ‘and his bowl of cream has not been
placed for him as it ought to have been. Here is Robin Goodfellow, who
does his friends’ work, and never asks even to be praised for it. Where
were you that you never came near us all the night?’
‘Where was I?’ said Laurie. He was too much agitated to tune himself
immediately to the key of his present companions. Fortunately Miss
Hadley was busy arranging his lilies of the valley, and Mrs. Suffolk,
who had sprung up to take him by both his hands, was not sharp-sighted.
He looked over the little woman’s shoulder with dilated eyes, which
looked to the padrona as if he had been up all night, or in some
trouble. ‘I will tell you another time where I was,’ Laurie said, with a
voice full of tender meaning. The padrona gazed at him with wonder
unfeigned. ‘The boy has got into some scrape,’ she said to herself. And
then both the women plunged without drawing breath into the story of the
Angles and Mr. Rich, and Suffolk’s sudden and unhopedfor success.
‘We had given up thinking of it even,’ Mrs. Suffolk cried. ‘I did hope
if the Saxon Maiden got a good place at the Academy----but I never even
hoped for the Angles. Call him the lubber-fiend! when he rushed up to
poor Reginald yesterday, and made him put on his good coat, and did
everything for him, he was more like our guardian angel.’
What was it all about? Laurie had to stop and ask himself, glancing at
them in a kind of consternation. Suffolk’s picture! why that was months
and months ago! What did they mean by bringing that up again? And
before he had recovered himself, the visitors began to arrive. He stood
by her a little, watching, as in a dream, while the padrona shook hands
with her friends, and explained her pictures to them, and received their
plaudits. Yesterday he would have been proud of their universal
admiration; but to-day it made him sick to see her receive such vulgar
homage. He would have liked to take her hand publicly before them all,
and draw it within his arm, and lead her away from such a scene. ‘Do you
think your praise is anything to her?’ he felt himself saying; and then
he took his hat abruptly and disappeared. So far, at least, the
revelation to himself of the nature of his own feelings had not
increased his happiness. And I cannot tell what old Welby meant by
lifting the curtain so rudely from the poor young fellow’s dream;
whether it was done in spite or kindness, or whether it was entirely
unintentional,--a simple expression of his sentiments without any
reference to Laurie,--is what I cannot tell.
The next day was again a day of exhibition, and the day after that was
the one on which Laurie had engaged to go down with Suffolk to Richmont.
He had been very reluctant to go at the time, and it may be supposed how
much more reluctant he was now. It was his own country,--the very
journey in the railway would bring a hundred recollections before him.
His mother and his home would be within reach; but how could he go near
that peaceful place with this agitation in his heart? Two days before he
could have done it, and spoken of the padrona with that tender fervour
which knew no need of concealing itself. Now,--his mother would find him
out in a moment, and so would Mary Westbury. Indeed, it was wonderful to
him that Suffolk did not find him out. So that it would be Saturday
before he could actually see her with any chance of knowing her mind.
I will not enter into the visit to Richmont, which belongs to another
portion of this history and had nothing to do, so to speak, with
Laurie’s life. He got it over, and he got over those three days, but
from Wednesday to Saturday he never entered the house at which he had
hitherto been a daily visitor. He could not go now while she was
surrounded with people, and talk ordinary talk to her as if she was
anybody else. When he saw her, he must see her alone; and accordingly
Laurie denied himself, and passed by her door, and saw others admitted,
and watched the light come into the windows of the great drawing-room,
and shadows appear on the blinds. This curious experience he went
through as well as the rest, and gradually came to forget what was
unusual in the story of his love; though not even now, after three days’
brooding over it, could he see how it was to be, or how she was to
answer what he would have to say.
It was on Saturday morning that at last he made his way to the Square.
It was a holiday, thank heaven, and the children were out in the Park
with their maid, and Alice was at her music when he went in. To-day, at
least, there could be no Miss Hadley. To-day there was no excuse for the
presence of strangers. Somehow the sound of Alice’s piano struck him
with an unpleasant sensation as he went up the stairs almost stealthily,
fearing that a third person might start out from behind some door at the
sound of his step, to mar the interview he sought. Alice was no common
musician, even at her early age; and yet was her daughter. It may be
understood how this consciousness, and the sound of the music the girl
was playing, came in like one of the discords in his strange story. Had
Alice been a child like her little sister, the effect would have been
much lessened; but to love a woman whose daughter sat playing Mozart and
Beethoven! The thought which passed through Laurie’s mind was not
articulate, but yet the sound jarred upon him. Softly he went past the
door. If his love-tale had been for Alice there would have been no
incongruity in it. He went past the room where the young girl in her
meditations sat alone, and knocked softly at the door of the other, in
which her mother was pursuing her occupation. The padrona was not
painting on that particular afternoon. She was standing by the table,
with a portfolio of drawings open before her, searching for something.
She called him to come in, and looked up with a bright look of pleasure
when she saw who it was.
‘You have come at last,’ she said, holding out her hand to him. ‘What
has been wrong? I thought you had forsaken us;’ and looked at him full
in the face with candid, unembarrassed eyes.
‘Nothing has been wrong,’ said Laurie, holding her hand fast. His heart
began to beat, but what could a man say in cold blood with a pair of
frank, steady eyes looking at him, restraining him with their
friendliness? The padrona withdrew her hand without even any appearance
of wonder at his clinging clasp. She was glad to see him. She had wanted
to see him; and new events had come in, effacing from her mind for the
moment her temporary alarm on his account; and she could understand that
he was glad to come back, though his absence had lasted only three days.
‘I was looking over some old sketches,’ she said. ‘I told you of the
commission Mr. Rich had given me; I was looking for a drawing my dear
Harry made some years ago,--you may have seen it,--for Cinderella. It
would be a pleasure to me to go upon that; but I can’t find it in all
those great portfolios,’ she said, with a sigh. Why she should have
brought poor Severn in at that special moment it would have been hard to
say; perhaps it was chance alone; perhaps there was in her some
unconscious warning of nature as to what was coming. Laurie withdrew a
step or two with sudden discomfiture. He hated poor Severn for the
moment as he had never hated any man before.
‘You will do it much better yourself,’ he said, and his tone was such
that the padrona turned and looked at him with wonder in her eyes.
‘How strangely you speak!’ she said; ‘and now I look at you, how
strangely you look, Laurie! What is the matter? I have scarcely seen you
since you were so good to the Suffolks. Something has happened. I heard
from them last night that you had been in the country. Is it anything
about home?’
‘No,’ said Laurie, in a kind of despair, ‘it is nothing about home.’
‘Perhaps it is something you cannot tell me,’ said the padrona, ‘and in
that case never mind my questions; you may be sure of my sympathy
anyhow, even without explanation. If you are vexed, I am sorry; you know
that.’
‘How should I know it?’ said Laurie. ‘Yes, perhaps if I did not tell
you,--if I left it to your imagination,--you are so kind to
everybody,--you would be kind to me. If I did not tell you,--that might
be my safeguard!’ For by this time it had begun to appear to him that
madness itself could not be more mad than his dream.
‘It is strange to hear you speak so to me,’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘I never
thought of being kind to you, as I am kind to everybody. What is it,
Laurie,--tell me?’ And she laid her hand softly on his arm.
Then the young man’s composure and his boldness both abandoned him. He
took her hand and kissed it wildly. ‘Perhaps it would be best to go and
leave you,’ he cried, ‘never to come near you more!’ And then he left
her, and paced up and down the room, trying to master the strange tumult
of his thoughts. Nothing in the world could have disarmed him as her
kindness did, and sympathy. But as he turned away, the padrona came to
herself, or rather came to a recollection of the warning she had
received. In a moment she saw how it was; and, as was natural, in a
moment her anxiety to know what ailed him suddenly came to an end. Mr.
Rich’s commission, which was a great event to Mrs. Severn, had startled
her out of thought of Laurie. His little hieroglyph at the end of his
note had gone almost unnoticed in the excitement of the moment, and
every hour had been occupied since then. But now it all rushed back upon
her, and the error she had been guilty of in asking any questions. If
she had not made this discovery, most likely her sympathetic, kind
unconsciousness would have staved off what was coming. But the moment
she found it out, a thrill of tremulous knowledge came into her voice.
‘Well, never mind,’ she said, hastily; ‘you must not think that I want
to pry into your secrets. Come, I am not working now; let us go to Alice
and hear what she is about. You are pre-occupied,’ said the padrona,
closing her portfolio and talking against time, ‘and I am _désœuvrée_.
Let us go and listen to the child. Come, I will lead the way.’
‘Not yet,’ said Laurie. As soon as she knew the truth she lost her
power, and he recovered a portion at least of his courage. He came and
took her hand and brought her back. ‘Perhaps I may never ask it again,’
he said, ‘but you must listen to me now.’
‘Of course I will listen,’ said Mrs. Severn, much alarmed; ‘but just as
well beside the child as anywhere else. If you have anything to tell me,
she will be too much engaged with her music to hear. Come,--I was going
to her when you came in.’
‘But now you will stay with me,’ said Laurie, leading her back. She was
so much afraid of betraying any signs of trouble, that this time she did
not even withdraw her hand. She sat down in the great chair, growing
pale, but preserving with a great effort her composure, at least in
appearance.
‘This looks very solemn,’ she said, with an attempt at a laugh. ‘What
dreadful tale of misdemeanours has your mother-confessor to hear? Have
you been robbing an orchard, or running away with a lady? I will put the
Suffolks’ story against it, whatever it may be, and grant you
absolution. You never did an hour’s work that will give you more
pleasure than that. I suspect they had been badly off, much more than
they permitted any one to know.’
‘Do you think I care for Suffolk,’ said Laurie, ‘or anybody else?
Padrona! you know what I am going to say before I speak. You have found
it out as well as I. Don’t you know for months back,--since ever I came
here,--there has been but one person in the world for me,--but one!
Whatever I have done, it has been to please you;--whatever I have given
up, it has been for your sake. Night and day I have been thinking of
you,--contriving to get a word from you or a smile. And I tried to make
myself believe I could be content with what you give to your
friends;--but that delusion is over. Padrona mia, what will you do with
me?’ he cried, kneeling down by the arm of her chair.
It never occurred to him that he was kneeling, nor did he intend to
kneel. It was but the most practicable way of getting close to her, and
seeing into her face. There was something of the pleading look of a
child in Laurie’s eyes. He did not make any passionate claim on her, nor
appeal; he only put his fate into her hands, with a humility more like
the diffidence of age than the equality of love.
Then there was a pause. The padrona was too much overwhelmed, too
agitated, to speak. She said--‘For heaven’s sake, Laurie, rise, and do
not break my heart!’ and took away her hand which he was still holding;
but that was no answer,--rather the reverse.
‘Break your heart!’ he said. ‘I would heal every wound it ever had, if I
had the power. I don’t seem to care for anything else in the world. Give
me a right to stand by you, to take care of you. Padrona mia, you cannot
always do all things, as you are doing, for yourself. Let me be the man
to guard you, to labour for you. I don’t know what I am saying, and you
don’t answer me one word,--not one word!’
‘To labour for her, to take care of her!’ Such words to her who was far
better able to protect and care for another than he was. But that was
not the thought that entered her mind. Her eyes filled with tears. To
see this young man at her feet pleading with such passionate folly, woke
all the tenderness in her heart. She was fond of him at all times. She
put her hand caressingly on his head; her voice softened and broke as
she spoke to him.
‘Laurie, I am old enough to be your mother,’ she said.
‘It is not true!’ he cried, with sudden fierceness; ‘and if it were,
what matter? All the happiness I desire in life is in your hands.’
And then the woman, quite melted and overcome, was so weak as to cry,
leaving him to think for the moment that he had won his wild suit. This
love was so strange to her, so new, so old, such a sudden dash of the
sweetness of youth into her sober cup! She was roused by the words that
he began to pour into her ears, and with a little cry of pain drew back
from her lover,--her lover! What a word for such as she to speak! She
put him back with her outstretched hands.
‘Laurie,’ she said, ‘are we mad, both you and I? Do you know what you
are doing? For some moments you have made me as foolish as yourself. But
I am ashamed. Do you know who I am? Harry Severn’s wife,--Alice Severn’s
mother! Yes,--that, and nothing else, so long as this life lasts! Can a
woman make herself into two people? Laurie, let all this be as if it had
never been.’
‘It can never be as if it had not been!’ he cried. ‘For a punctilio, for
a form, for your pride,--you would cast aside a man’s love and life for
that! Padrona! that is no answer. The past has nothing to do between us.
To-day is to-day.’
Mrs. Severn turned upon him, and took his hand in hers. ‘Laurie,’ she
said, ‘let me speak.’ Her eyes were full of tears; her face lighted up
with a tremulous smile. ‘To-day is to-day, as you say. I am very fond of
you. I will say I love you, if you like. Patience, and hear me to an
end. If you go away, I shall miss you every hour; but if my child’s
finger were to ache I should forget your existence, Laurie. A single
hair on their heads is more to me than all the world beside. Do you
understand? My poor Harry is past, if you will. God forgive me for
saying so!--but to-day is so full there is no room in it for any other.
Laurie, I want my friend. I want nothing else;--nothing else that any
man can give.’
The young man stumbled up to his feet with the strongest passion he had
ever known in his life maddening him, as it seemed. His heart was
wounded, and so was his pride, bitterly,--beyond reach of healing. It
was he who drew away from her the hand she had retained in hers, with
kindness which felt to him like an insult.
‘Mrs. Severn, I have made an ass of myself!’ he said. ‘Don’t think of me
any more,--it is not worth your while. As for your friend----’
He went to the table and took up his hat, and made as though he would go
away. He was half blind, and did not see where he was going,--the room
and the house swimming round him in his agitation. His last word had
been said in a tone of contempt,--contempt to her, after all this
passion! The padrona had not moved; she sat looking after him with her
eyes full of tears and her hands clasped. Was it all to end and be over
like this,--like a bad dream? But poor Laurie had not hardness enough in
him to make such a conclusion. He faltered on his way to the door; he
turned round, only half conscious of what he was doing, to look once
more at the woman who had become the life of his life. And she, on her
part, made a half-conscious movement of her hands towards him. He went
back to her, and threw himself again at her feet. I don’t suppose
anything was said,--at least, anything that either recollected. They
kissed each other with that strange refinement of anguish which belongs
to those movements of human affection which are beyond the simplicity of
nature. The two beings met and clung together for a moment, and parted.
He was speeding along the streets, half wild, wrapt in a mist of
excitement and misery, not caring,--as he thought,--what became of him,
before the steady hand of the clock had moved two minutes farther on.
And she, in the great chair where her visitors used to sit and criticise
her work, lay back, trembling, with her face hidden in her hands.
Alice, meanwhile, had played through Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the
pure, young soul carried away by it into a celestial dream; nothing
articulate in her mind,--soft breathings of blessedness present, of joy
to come, making an atmosphere around her,--a sacred creature, without a
single discord in her, or jar of pain or trouble. And old Welby in his
studio in the leisure of the moment,--his pictures gone to the Academy,
and his year’s work completed,--mounted, classified, and made a
catalogue of his Titians, with the truest satisfaction and content,
thinking no more of what he had said three days before to Laurie Renton
than of last year’s snow. The old painter and the young girl pursued
their serene occupations under the same roof while this scene was going
on, and knew no more than that the door had opened and closed abruptly,
when poor Laurie, with all his wounds fresh and bleeding, rushed out
into the outer world.
CHAPTER VII.
A FULL STOP.
The padrona was not a woman given to little ailments,--headaches, or the
other visionary sufferings which are conventional names for those aches
of the heart or temper to which we are all liable; but yet on the
evening of this day she found herself unable for once to face her little
world. It was not so much that her eyes were red, for eyes that have had
to weep the bitterest of tears, and which have watched and toiled
through most of life’s serious experiences, soon recover their outward
serenity; but her heart was sore. It has been said so often, that most
people by this time must be sick of hearing it, that love is the grand
occupation of a woman’s life; and that, while in man it is subordinate
to a hundred other matters, in her existence it is the chief interest.
Whether this is or is not the case with the great majority of women, is
a question which must be decided according to the experience of the
observer; but we doubt much whether in any case it applies to women over
thirty,--and it certainly did not apply to the padrona. There were many
interests in her life; and love, as ordinarily so called, had no more to
do with it than if she had been a stockbroker. Nothing more annoying,
more out of place and harmony with her existence, could have happened
than this curious interpolation of misplaced passion. Being a woman, her
heart had melted over the foolish boy. She was fond of him, as she had
avowed. His soft, devoted, tender ways,--the deference and subdued
enthusiasm which women love,--had made his society a very pleasant
feature in her life, and perhaps she had not seen as she ought to have
done the dangers that might attend it. And now this sudden awakening all
at once,--the force and reality of his feelings,--the doubt lest she had
been to blame,--the compunctions over his pain, and even her sorrow at
the loss of him, which was not the least poignant part of it
all,--overwhelmed her. She went to her room as soon as the little ones
had gone to bed. These little ones should of themselves have been a
safeguard to her. A certain shame came over her when she looked at her
own daughter, who was almost old enough to be herself the chief figure
in some episode of the universal drama, and remembered what words had
been said, what wild ovations made to Alice’s mother. The padrona’s
friends were aghast when they were told that she was not well enough to
receive them. Miss Hadley, who had come round to the Square with a
mixture of jealousy and alarm on finding out that no sign of life had
that day been seen at Laurie’s windows, was driven almost out of her
senses with curiosity to know what it could have been that had given the
padrona a headache. ‘Gone to bed with a headache!’ Miss Hadley did not
believe it. She was angry not to be admitted,--not to judge with her own
eyes what it was. But Alice, who suspected nothing, watched her mother’s
rest like a young lioness. ‘I cannot let you go up; she will be better
to-morrow,’ said Alice; and Miss Hadley could not for shame ask the
child, as she longed to do it, if this mysterious headache had come on
after a visit from Laurie. ‘She has been working too hard,’ people who
were more charitable concluded without question, and congratulated
themselves that the pictures had been sent in, and that now, if ever, a
painter might draw breath for a moment. But the padrona had not gone to
bed. She heard them come and go away as she sat up in her room; and she
heard Jane Hadley’s voice, and trembled lest that enterprising woman
should seek her out even in her retirement. She could not have borne any
keen eye upon her that night. Alice was different, to whom her mother
was as far lifted above such vanities or such suspicions as if she had
been a saint in heaven. ‘I think it would kill Alice!’ the mother said
to herself with a shudder. And I believe she would rather have died
herself than betray to her woman-child what had happened;--although
nothing had happened, except that a foolish young man had mistaken
himself and her, and put love in the place of friendship. But her
thoughts were very soft towards poor Laurie,--poor, foolish fellow!--to
throw away all his love and fresh heart and feelings upon a woman old
enough to be his mother! Anybody else might have laughed at him for it,
or despised him; but Mrs. Severn did not despise him. It went to her
heart to think of that gift being thrown at her feet. And she was fond
of the boy,--poor Laurie!--and if all the world scorned him for his mad,
boyish fancy, at all events it was not her place to scorn.
At the same time, after the edge of her compunction and regret and soft
yearning over the poor boy that loved her had become a little blunted,
the padrona had reason enough to be put out and vexed by the disturbing
influence of this unlucky event. Love,--vulgarly so called,--was, as we
have said, as much out of her way as if she had been an elderly
stockbroker. Love,--of another kind,--was, it is true, her whole life
and strength; but yet no man, however steeled by the world, could have
been less disposed to any sentimental play of emotion than was this
woman. Before Laurie came that morning her mind had been full of a
hundred fancies, all pleasant of their kind. They were not thoughts of
the highest elevation, perhaps. One of them was the rude, material
reflection that she had her work secured and clear before her for a year
certain; her living secured; no doubt about the sale of a picture; no
sharp reminder of the precariousness of her profession to keep her
uneasy;--but her work safe and sure for twelve months. And then it was
pleasant work, and such as her soul loved. She had been commended by her
visitors,--some of whom were people whose praise was worth having,--as
she had never been before. Things were going well with her. The children
were well, and developing their characteristics every day. She could
look the world in the face and know that she was doing her best for
them. When all at once,--in a moment,--the bitter-sweet of this boy’s
love was thrown into the crystal fountain, and the surface that had been
so clear, reflecting the heavens, was in a moment troubled and turbid.
With a certain impatient pang she said to herself, as so many have said,
that there was always something to lessen one’s satisfaction, always
some twist in the web of life to obscure its colours at its best. And
poor foolish Laurie, who had thrown away the best he had for nothing!
Poor boy! how her heart ached for him! how it hurt her to think of his
pain! and there was little, very little comfort in the thought that he
was lost to her. His friendly talk, his ready heart-service, his
difficulties and errors, and even his weakness, which it had been so
pleasant to minister to, to reprove, and exhort, and accept,--that was
all over now. A gap and dreary void was suddenly made in her closest
surroundings,--a gap which was hard on him and hard on her, and yet
inevitable,--to be made at all hazards. The padrona was very much
downcast about the business altogether, and shed a few tears over it in
her solitude. Nothing could have prevented, nothing could mend
it,--except, perhaps, Time; and Time is a slow healer, whom it is hard
to trust when one’s wound is of to-day.
If such was the effect this incident had on the padrona, it may be
imagined what sort of a tempest it was which swept through Laurie’s mind
and spirit when he left her. He disappeared under the bitter waves. Not
only was there no sign of life in his windows, but, so far as he was
himself conscious, there was no sign left in life to represent what he
had done with that distracted, incoherent day. The chances are that he
did most of the ordinary things he was in the habit of doing,--was seen
at his club, and talked to his friends somewhat in his usual strain.
Indeed, I have heard a _mot_ attributed to Laurie, which could have been
spoken but on that special evening, if it was spoken at all. I do not
suppose he made any exhibition of himself to the outer world; but I can
only take up the tale at the moment when, worn out and weary, he got
back to his room in Charlotte Street, and came to the surface, as it
were, and looked himself in the face once more. The agitation of the
past three days had told upon him. He had been shaken by the strange
sweet shock of his discovery that he loved her; and now upon that came
the other discovery, involved in the first, that he had spent his
strength for naught, and wasted all his wealth of emotion on a dream. Of
course he had known all along it must be a dream; so he said to himself.
He had poured out his heart as a libation in her honour. What more had
he ever hoped it could be? And now he was empty and drained of both
strength and joy. His pain was even mingled with shame,--that shame of
the sensitive mind when it discovers that its hopes have been beyond
what ought to be hoped for. His cheeks burned when he remembered that he
had dreamed it was possible for this woman, so much higher placed than
himself in the dignity of life, so far before him in the road, to turn
and stoop from her natural position, and love him in her turn. He would
have dragged her down, taken her from her secure eminence, placed her in
a false position, exposed her to the jeers and laughter of the
world,--all for the satisfaction of his selfish craving! He would have
gone in the face of nature, ignored all the sobering and maturing
processes which had made her what she was, and drawn her back to that
rudimentary place in the world which her own daughter was ready to fill.
Was not this what he would have done had he had his will? A hot flush of
shame came over Laurie’s face in his solitude. He felt humiliated at
the thought of his own vanity, his own folly. When she had held out her
hands to him, when she had given him that kiss of everlasting dismissal,
nature had asserted itself. Youth is sweet; it has the best of
everything; it is the cream of existence; but yet when the grave soul of
maturity drops back to youth, and gives up its own place, and ignores
all its painful advantages, is there not a certain shame in it? Had the
padrona been able to make that sudden descent,--could she have done what
on his knees he would have prayed her to do,--then she would no longer
have been herself. This consciousness, unexpressed, flashed across his
mind in heat and shame, aggravating all his sufferings. That it could
not be was bad enough; but to be compelled to allow that it was best
that it should not be,--to feel that success for him would have been
humiliation and downfall for her,--was not that the hardest of all?
It would be vain to follow Laurie through that long, distracted
monologue, confused ‘In memoriam’ of the past, with jars and broken
tones of the future stealing into it, through which every soul
struggles, after one of those shocks and convulsions which are the
landmarks of life. To be stopped every moment while forming forlorn
plans of practicable life by mocking gleams of what might have been, by
bitter-sweet recollections of what has been,--does not everybody know
how it feels? Laurie’s life was snapped in two, or so, at least, it
seemed to him. What was he to do with it? Where was he to fasten the
torn end of the thread? Could he stay here and turn his back upon the
past, and work, and see her at intervals with eyes calmed out of all his
old passion? But when he came to think of it, it had been for her he had
come here. At the first, perhaps, when he had dreamed of that gigantic
Edith and of fame, had he been permitted to go on, he might have found
for himself a certain existence belonging to this place which could have
been carried on in it after the other ties were broken. But he had not
been allowed to go on; and Charlotte Street had become to him only a
kind of lodge to the Square, a place where he could retire to sleep and
muse in the intervals of the real life which was passed in her service
or presence. He exaggerated, poor fellow! as was natural. It seemed to
him at this moment as if in all his exertions, even for Suffolk, who was
his friend, it had been her work he was doing. One thing at least was
certain,--it would never have been done without her. She was mixed up
with every action, every thought, even fancy, that had ever come into
his mind. He had done nothing but at her bidding, or by her means, or
with her co-operation. His work had languished for months past. If he
had pretended to study, it was to please her. And how could life go on
here, when it had but one motive, and that motive was taken away from
it? There are moments in a man’s life when everything that is painful
surges up around him at once, rising, one billow after another, over his
devoted head. That very morning, moved by some premonition of fate, he
had been collecting his papers together, and putting his affairs in
order; and though so vulgar a fact had made little impression on him in
his state of excitement, still Laurie had been aware that his accounts
were not in his favour, and that it might be necessary one day to look
them full in the face, and put order in his life. He had gone on all the
same, without pausing to think, in his mad love. That was perfectly
true, though he was the same Laurie Renton who, six months ago, had put
away the girl’s little notes whom he had begun to think might have been
his wife. He had given up that hope then without a moment’s doubt or
thought of resistance; and yet now, in a still worse position, he had
rushed on blindly to make confession of his love and throw himself at
another woman’s feet. I cannot account for the inconsistency.
But now,--whatever shock he may sustain, howsoever his hopes may perish,
a man must go on living all the same. His life may be torn up by the
roots; he may be thrown, like a transplanted seedling, into any corner;
but yet the quivering tendrils must catch at the earth again, and
existence go on, however broken. Laurie was a man easily turned from his
ambitions, as has been seen; a man not too much given to thought,
easily satisfied, of a facile temper,--and with more power to work for
others than for himself; but still he had to live. Something had to be
done to reconcile natural difficulties, something decided upon for the
future tenor of existence. Nor was he even the sort of man who could
come to an abrupt stop, and stand upon it. His thoughts were discursive,
and rushed forward. Even in the bitterest chords of that knell of the
past there was the impatient whisper of the future. I think there can be
no doubt, on the whole, that what would have been best for him would
have been that government office, to which he would have been tied by
the blind hand of routine, and which would still have left him leisure
for his amateur tendencies. Had he been so fortunate as to possess such
a prop of actual occupation, Laurie would probably have removed from
Charlotte Street,--to which, indeed, he never need have come,--and gone
on steadily with his work, composing his quivering nerves and healing
his wounds. He would have gone on doing kindnesses to his neighbours,
pleasing himself with little pensive sketches, reading more than usual
perhaps; subdued, like a man who had gone through a bad illness; and by
degrees he would have come back, calmed and healed, and able to take up
his old friendship. But that was impossible now. A change of some kind
or other he must have been compelled to make, even had there been no
personal cause for change. He must work; he must spare; he must recall
himself to a sense of the probation on which he had entered six months
before with a light heart. And the natural thing to do was at the same
time the wisest thing. Rightly or wrongly, the artist, whoever he may
be, trusts in Italy as the country of renovation, the fountain of
strength. Laurie scarcely hesitated as to his alternative. He could stay
no longer where he was; his experiment had failed, his position had
become untenable. The readiest suggestion of all was that one in which
there still lay a certain consolation,--he would go to Rome.
He resolved upon this step before he went to bed, and on the next
morning he began to pack up. Miss Hadley, from the other side, watched
his open windows with a curiosity much quickened by her sister’s
surmises and doubts, and saw, to her amazement, the great canvas moved
from its position in the corner,--a step which she found it difficult to
understand. ‘I suppose he is going to take to his painting again,’ she
said to Jane, when she came home. Jane shook her head, with dubious
looks. The truth was she did not understand it. The most strange of all
possible orders had proceeded that morning from Mrs. Severn’s studio. It
was that she was extremely busy, and that no one was to be admitted. No
one! Miss Jane Hadley had her doubts that, though this was the audible
command, an exception had been made in Laurie’s favour, and that so
unusual a step was taken by the padrona in order to secure to herself,
without interruption, the society of her lover. Though Miss Hadley loved
her friend truly in her way, and had a respect for her, and even
believed in her, this was the evil thought which had crossed her mind;
and consequently she was disposed to scoff at her sister’s suggestions.
But there were soon other facts to report of a still more bewildering
character. A van came to Laurie’s door, and carried off the big canvas;
and a workman in a paper cap became visible to the elder sister’s
curious eyes in the centre of Laurie’s room, packing in a vast
packing-case the young man’s belongings. ‘He is going away!’ Miss Hadley
said, with dismay, when her sister came home. She could have cried as
she said it. He was as good as a play to the invalid who never stirred
out of her parlour. Laurie, with his kindly ways, had made himself a
place in her heart. He had taken off his hat as he came out every day to
the shadow of her cap between the curtains; he had waved his hand to her
from his balcony; he had never found fault with her investigations; and
when he bought the flowers for his window he had sent her some pots of
the earliest spring blossoms to cheer her. She, too, had grown fond of
Laurie. ‘He is going away!’ she said, with the corners of her mouth
drooping. ‘And the very best thing he could do,’ said Miss Jane
decidedly; upon which, though she was a very model of decorum, old Miss
Hadley felt for the minute as if she would have liked to fling her
tea-cup at her sister’s head.
It did not take long to make Laurie’s preparations for this sudden
change. He pushed them on with a certain feverish haste, glad to occupy
himself, and eager to put himself at a distance from the house he could
no longer go to as a privileged and perpetual guest. Somehow Charlotte
Street, though it had two ends like other streets, seemed to converge
from both upon the Square. It suggested the Square every time he looked
out upon it; indeed, all roads led to that door which was shut upon him,
which he knew must be shut. But he had not gone back to hear of the
extraordinary barricade raised by the padrona against the world in
general. Laurie had nobody to consult,--nothing to detain him now. He
did not even see one of the ‘set’ for more than a week, during which all
his preparations were made. The day on which by chance he met Suffolk in
the street was ten days later, when everything was settled. Suffolk
stopped eagerly, and turned with him, and took his arm.
‘What has become of you?’ he said; ‘and what did you mean by sending me
that canvas? After all, I wish you had gone on with it. We waited,
thinking you were coming to explain; and I have called twice, but you
were always out; and you look like a ghost,--what does it mean?’
‘It don’t mean anything,’ said Laurie, with as gay a look as he could
muster, ‘but that I’m off to Rome to-morrow; where, you’ll allow, a man
cannot carry canvases with him measuring ten feet by six. I meant to
have come to bid you good-bye to-night.’
‘Off to Rome!’ cried Suffolk, amazed, ‘without a word of warning? Why,
nobody knows of it, eh? not the padrona, nor any of us? What do you
mean, stealing a march upon your friends like this?’
‘My friends won’t mind it much,’ said Laurie. ‘No; I didn’t mean that. I
should like you to miss me. I rather grudge going, indeed, till I know
how they’ve hung the Saxon Maiden----’
‘Oh, confound the Saxon Maiden!’ said Suffolk; ‘it is you I want to know
about, running off like this without a word. It is not anything that has
happened, Laurie?’
‘What could happen?’ said Laurie, with a forced smile. ‘The fact is I am
doing nothing here. You all set upon me, you know, about that picture;
and I must do something. It is no use ignoring the fact. I am going in
for our old work in the Via Felice. And I shall be in time for the Holy
Week,--it is so late this year;’ he said, with a half laugh, at his own
vain attempt at deception,--quite vain, as he could see, in Suffolk’s
eyes.
‘But you don’t care for the Holy Week,’ said the painter. ‘I don’t
understand you, Laurie. What does the padrona say?’
‘The padrona approves,’ said Laurie. He got out the words without
faltering, but he could not bear any more allusion to her. ‘Paint
something on my poor canvas. I have got fond of it,’ he said. ‘I’d like
to see something on it worth looking at.’
‘I won’t touch it!’ cried Suffolk. ‘By George, I won’t! I’ll beat Helen
if she rubs out a line, whisking out and in. Laurie, think better of it.
I don’t know the set at the Felice now; they are not equal to our old
set. Stay, there’s a good fellow, and paint at home.’
‘I can’t,’ said Laurie; ‘I must not. I will not. And the worst is, you
must take me at my word, and not ask why.’
‘I will never say another syllable on the subject,’ said Suffolk,
humbly, and they walked half a mile, arm in arm, without uttering a
word. This was the first notice Laurie’s friends had of his new
resolution. When he had parted from Suffolk, he went straight, without
pause or hesitation, to Mrs. Severn’s door. It was Forrester who opened
it to him; and Forrester, being a privileged person, paused to look at
Laurie as soon as he had closed the door.
‘You’ve been ill, sir,’ said Forrester; ‘the whites is all green, and
the flesh tints yellow in your face, Mr. Renton. Master was asking about
you just yesterday. Don’t you say a word, sir. I can see as you’ve been
ill.’
‘I can’t answer for my complexion,’ said Laurie; ‘but I’m not ill now,
Forrester. I am going away, and I’ve been awfully busy. I want to see
Mrs. Severn. I won’t disturb your master to-day.’
‘Master’s out, sir,’ said the man, ‘unfortunately; he’s at that blessed
gallery, a hanging or a deciding on the poor gentlemen’s pictures. And a
nice temper he do come home in, to be sure! And Mrs. Severn’s----
engaged, sir,’ said Forrester, making a stand in front of the stair.
‘Engaged!’ said Laurie, aghast.
‘Them’s the words, Mr. Renton,’ said the old man. ‘She’s a designing
them twelve pictures, as far as I can hear. She’s busy, and can’t see
nobody. It’s more than a week since them orders was give. And folks is
astonished. It ain’t her way. But I can’t say but what I approve, Mr.
Renton,’ said Forrester, stoutly; ‘designing of a series is hard work.
They’ve all to hang together, and there’s harmony to be studied as well
as composition. And she ain’t going to repeat herself if she can help it
and, on the whole, I approve----’
‘That will do,’ said Laurie, putting him aside; ‘I will make my own way;
and I will tell Mrs. Severn you did your duty, and stopped me. This
could not include me.’
‘But, Mr. Renton!’ cried Forrester, making a step after him.
‘That is enough,--quite enough,’--said Laurie. ‘It could not include
me.’
But his heart beat heavily as he went up the familiar stair. She had
shut out all the world that she might make sure of shutting him
out,--‘Though she might have known I would not molest her!’ poor Laurie
said to himself, with a swelling heart. It was unkind of the padrona.
Had he not been going away it would have wounded him deeply. He went up
heavily, not with the half-stealthy eagerness of his last visit. It
would not have troubled him had he encountered a dozen Miss Hadleys. ‘I
must see Mrs. Severn alone;’ was what he would have said without
flinching had he met her; but, as it happened, there was no one at all
apprehensive or curious now. The order had been given, and the stream of
callers had stopped, and there was an end of it. He went up without any
haste, his foot sounding dully,--he thought,--through all the silent
house. She would hear him coming, and she would know.
‘Come in,’ said the padrona.
She was standing at her easel, drawing, with a little sketch before her,
putting in the outlines of her future picture. Somehow she looked
lonely, deserted, melancholy; as if the stream of life that had flowed
so warmly about her had met with some interruption. In fact, she had
felt the withdrawal of that daily current more than she could have told;
and she had missed Laurie; and her mind had been full of wondering.
Where was the poor boy? What was he doing? How was he bearing it? This
was the thought that was uppermost in her mind as she put in the
Sleeping Beauty. Somehow the picture was appropriate. Life seemed to
have ebbed from her too, though it was her own doing. She did not feel
quite sure sometimes that it was not a dream; and lo, all in a moment,
without any warning, he appeared standing at the door!
The chalk dropped out of the padrona’s fingers. She trembled in spite of
herself. It took her such an effort to master herself, and receive him
with the tranquillity which was indispensable, that for some moments she
did not say a word. Then she recovered herself, and let the chalk lie
where she had dropped it, and made a step or two forward to meet him. ‘I
am glad you have come,’ she said, holding out her hand. And it was quite
true, notwithstanding that she had given orders to exclude the world for
the sole purpose of excluding him, if he should come.
And thus they met, shaking hands with each other in the same room, under
circumstances quite unchanged, except----
‘I am going away,’ said Laurie. ‘I would not have come,--you know I
would not have annoyed you. You need not have told the servants to keep
everybody out. You might have trusted me.’
‘You know I do trust you, with all my heart,’ she said, ‘and that is why
I tell you I am glad you are come; I am very glad;’ and then she sat
down feeling somewhat breathless and giddy, and pointed him to a chair.
He sat down, too, not knowing very well what he was about; and again
there was a pause.
‘I am going away,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Looking over everything, I found
it would be better on the whole to go away----’
The padrona bowed her head, feeling her guilt;--it was her fault;--how
could she say she was sorry, or appeal against his decision as any other
friend would have done? It was she who was the cause.
CHAPTER VIII.
YOUNG FRANK.
I have already mentioned that Frank Renton, being up in town on the
business of negotiating the change he desired into a regiment of the
line, was taken one evening by his brother Laurie to No. 375, Fitzroy
Square.
It was a thing very lightly done, as so many things are that affect our
lives. ‘Come with me and see the padrona,’ Laurie had said, as the
evening darkened, before they went out to dinner. ‘You’ve heard me talk
of her. She has such charming children.’ This was the first thing it
came into his head to say; for being foolish he could not launch into
praise of herself. And Frank had gone very carelessly, looking with open
eyes of amused wonder at all the artists’ houses, and at the dinginess
of the Square. Alice was playing when they went in, and Frank, sitting
down in the shade before the lamp was lighted, and observing, still with
a half-amused surprise, how familiar his brother was in the house, was
softly penetrated by those unknown strains coming from he could not
tell where, and made by he knew not whom. The door of the great
drawing-room was open, and there came from it the usual gleam of red
firelight, the usual ghostly appearance behind of the curtained windows.
When he had listened for a long time in silence, not feeling himself
quite able to join in the conversation which was going on, Frank at last
took heart to ask who was the musician. The lamp was brought into the
room at this moment, and the padrona turned to him, with a smile as soft
and tender as the music, just dawning about her lips. ‘It is my child,’
she answered, in that full tone of love and pride which comes only out
of the heart of a woman who has a daughter. There was such softness in
the tone, such love and profound complacency and content, that it
touched the young soldier. Somehow it occurred to him for the moment
that there must be some painful defect about the creature whose name
came thus from her mother’s lips--blind, perhaps, or sick, or somehow
not just an ordinary child. Then with a curious impulse, which she could
not have explained, the padrona lifted her voice and called ‘Alice!’
Frank turned to the open door as the music stopped, with unusual
curiosity, expecting some pale vision, with signs of decay in its
countenance, or sightless eyes at the least; when all at once there
looked out upon him, ‘Alice with her curls,’ like a rose between the
falling folds of the vague, dim-coloured curtains, with eyes like stars,
half dazzled, confused with the sudden light, and those sweet tints for
which, as I have said, the beholder was grateful to her. He looked and
looked, and the young man’s eyes were touched as by Ithuriel’s spear. No
man had yet seen in her what, all at once, Frank Renton saw. She was to
him no child, but a woman. He got up off his chair stumbling, confused.
And Laurie was sitting calmly there talking to the mother with this
fairy princess coming to them! It seemed incredible. And, in fact,
Laurie scarcely looked at Alice even as he shook hands with her. He gave
her a kind, half-paternal smile, and went on talking, which was to Frank
such a mystery as no explanation could clear away. Then she sat down and
took her work with the quiet of a child, totally unaware of young
Frank’s reverential admiration. Fortunately he knew a little about
music. ‘Was that so-and-so that you were playing?’ he said, when he had
sat for some minutes looking at her work and listening to Laurie’s
interminable talk with the padrona. The young soldier had a certain
contempt for them as they sat and chattered--talking nonsense about any
stupid subject that came into their heads, when they might have been
talking to Alice, or listening to her music. ‘You must practise a great
deal,’ then said the young man, in the safe obscurity into which his
silence had thrown him--for, though the padrona had received him very
graciously as Laurie’s brother, what was she to find that could be said
to a speechless young Guardsman who probably had not an idea in his
head? Frank, however, had several ideas; but he was discomposed, as most
people are when brought suddenly into the company of familiar friends
who know all each other’s ways of thinking and habits of mind. He could
not strike into the full stream of their conversation, and it was
natural that he should draw towards Alice, who was also left out of it.
‘You must practise a great deal or you could not play so well,’ he
repeated, taking a little courage. And nobody paid any great heed to the
two sitting apart, as it were, in the shade.
‘I am very fond of music,’ said Alice; ‘I like it better than anything;’
and then there was a long pause, and the conversation on the other side
of the table thrust itself into prominence again, and became offensively
audible. There was talk chiefly about pictures of which Frank did not
know very much, and about people of whom he knew nothing--not the kind
of people talked of in society whom he would have known. Laurie had
always had strange friends; but how odd it was to find him in the midst
of a new world like this, and a world so entirely apart and separate
from the known hemisphere! But yet Frank did not find it disagreeable to
sit silent against the wall now that Alice was at the table with her
work. After ten minutes more he made another attempt at conversation.
‘Have you heard Madame Schumann play that?’ he said; and Alice glanced
up at him and softly shook her curls.
‘I have not heard much music,’ she said. ‘We never go out. It bores
mamma going out in the evening. I shall when I am older, perhaps; but
not now.’
‘But if you never go out in the evening, what do you do with yourself?’
said Frank, with some consternation. Upon which Alice startled him
completely by answering, in the softest matter-of-course voice, ‘We have
mostly people with us at home.’
Here Frank came to a dead standstill. He glanced round upon the room,
which, though pleasant, and cheerful, and homelike, bore no appearance
of being adapted for such perpetual hospitality. ‘We have mostly people
with us at home.’ Did they give dinners or dances, or what did they give
in this curious, grey-green, picture-hung, half-lighted place? As if in
answer to this question Mary at that moment came in with the tea,
carrying a vast tray before her, with heaps of cups and saucers,
substantial bread and butter, steaming urn, and all the paraphernalia of
that modern meal. The young Guardsman looked on bewildered to see Alice
rise, in the same calm, matter-of-course way, and rinse the teapot and
make the tea. Was it the tea-party of humble life which he was in for?
Would the guests come in presently and take their seats round the table
and munch their bread and butter? And what if there might be muffins,
perhaps, or buttered toast? Frank would have been amused had not Alice
been there in the midst of it. He would have concluded that his brother
had brought him to make acquaintance with the habits of the aborigines
in these dingy regions out of the world. But then how came this creature
there? He was relieved when he saw little Edith clamber up to her high
chair, and became aware that it was only to be a family party after all.
Frank was not sufficiently philanthropical, being a Guardsman, to
interest himself much in the children and the bread and butter; but by
degrees Alice surmounted all the obstacles of her surroundings, and
began to cast a lovely haze upon the whole scene. He did not say much;
he sat, if the truth must be told, in rather an embarrassed, sheepish
way in his chair against the wall, with very little of the assurance
natural to his profession. But then it must be taken into account that
this was an undiscovered country,--such an America, as Columbus
discovered, full of strange new beings, new customs,--a foreign world to
Frank. He was out of his depth. When the padrona now and then turned to
address him, with a vain attempt to make him comfortable, he felt
himself drawl and yaw-haw as does the ordinary young swell of romance.
And it was evident to him that his brother’s friend gave him up as quite
impracticable. Little Edith, however, was less fastidious. She got down
out of her high chair and placed it close to the stranger, and took him
under her little wing.
‘Sit next to me,’ said Edith, ‘and you shall have some cake. Are you
Laurie’s little brother? You are bigger than he is. Didn’t he say it was
his little brother, Alice? But I always say Harry is my little brother,
and he is a great deal,--such a great deal,--about six feet taller than
me.’
‘And older too,’ said Harry. ‘I am eight and you are six. You’re not six
till your birthday, and Alice is sixteen, and me and Frank----’
‘Nurse says girls are quite different,’ said little Edie. ‘You are only
boys, you two. Are you Mr. Renton, as well as Laurie, Mr. Laurie’s
brother?--how funny it would be to call you that!--or have you another
name all to yourself?’
‘I am Frank,’ said the Guardsman, laughing; and then the boys drew near
him, and Alice looked up smiling from her tea-making, and a certain
acquaintance sprang up. To know that Alice was sixteen on the one
side,--and to know that this young fellow, who gazed and addressed her
in a tone so different from Laurie’s tone, for instance, was Frank,
seemed somehow to give each of them a certain hold on the other. Frank
put down his hat, and drew his chair to the table; and by-and-by they
were all sitting round it, drinking tea and talking.
‘Laurie’s brother is not so stupid as I thought he was,’ the padrona
said afterwards, as she made her _resumé_ of the whole proceedings; and
with that slight remark Mrs. Severn dismissed the matter from her
thoughts. Laurie himself was trouble enough, the foolish fellow; but
that any further complication should arise through Laurie’s brother was
a thing which never entered into her mind.
When the two brothers left the house there was silence between them for
some time. Indeed, little was said till they had got as far as Harley
Street. Then, all at once, Laurie spoke.
‘You were out of your element in the Square,’ he said, with a little
forced laugh. ‘You don’t understand the kind of thing; but I can tell
you it is no small matter to me to have such a house to go to.’ This was
uttered abruptly, and was not at all what he meant to say. To seem to
apologise for the padrona and her house was as far as possible from his
intention, and yet it sounded like an apology in his brother’s ears.
‘I daresay,’ said Frank; and then he too added hastily, with a shade of
embarrassment,--‘She is quite lovely, I think.’
‘No;--do you though?’ cried Laurie, with a mixture of amaze, and
delight, and indignation. ‘I never saw you look at her even, all the
time we were there.’
‘And she plays wonderfully,’ said Frank. ‘Music goes to one’s heart, you
know, coming like that, out of the dark, one can’t tell how. I thought
she must be blind, or consumptive, or something; and then to see a face
like a little rose!’
‘Oh, you mean Alice,’ said Laurie, drawing a long breath of relief, and
amusement, and kindly contempt. Alice was a very nice little thing; but
how it should occur to any one to put her in the first place! To be
sure, the boy was only twenty. Laurie, who was twenty-four, felt the
difference strongly.
‘Who else could I mean?’ said Frank, calmly;--‘there was no other girl
there. But, Laurie, really you ought to mind what you are about. We may
have come down in the world, you know, and seen better days, and all
that; but we need not fall quite out of the habits of gentlemen all the
same.’
‘Am I falling out of the habits, &c.?’ said Laurie, laughing. ‘I am only
a poor painter, my dear fellow. I am not a swell and a Guardsman like
you.’
‘I shan’t be a Guardsman a minute longer than I can help it, and you
know that,’ said Frank, with a little indignation; ‘but I hope I shall
never see a girl like that come into a room without treating her with
proper respect.’
‘Proper respect!’ cried Laurie, much mystified; and then he laughed.
‘Alice is only a child,’ he said. ‘I have known her since she was that
height. She thinks me a kind of old uncle, or godfather, or something.
Yes, of course, she plays charmingly,--but she is only a child all the
same.’
‘A child! she is sixteen,’ said Frank; ‘and lovely, I think. I don’t
know the family, of course; they are your friends; but a young lady
like Miss Severn is generally considered entitled to a little ceremony.
I don’t want to be didactic,’ said the Guardsman, ‘but----’
This remonstrance furnished Laurie with laughter for the rest of the
evening; but Frank did not see the joke. Of course the young lady was
nothing to him. This he explained fully. But it vexed him to think that
his brother was falling into the free and easy habits which, he
supposed, were current among the people who lived in those dingy
streets, where every house boasted a long, central window, and the very
atmosphere was redolent of paint;--beings who lived all their lives in
shooting-coats and wide-awakes,--wild, untrimmed, hairy men, not fit to
come into a lady’s society at any time. People on that level might be
utterly indifferent and irreverent, and treat a woman as they treated
their comrades; but that Laurie should fall into such ways vexed Frank.
This was the chief subject of his thoughts as he bowled down through the
darkness in the twelve o’clock train to Royalborough, where his
battalion was quartered. It was another of the results of his father’s
unfortunate will. Frank had been, as Mr. Renton foresaw, the one who
felt it least. His nominal allowance had always been just what it now
was, and his mother was as ready now as ever to supply him with those
odd five-pound notes which drop in so pleasantly to a youthful pocket.
It made no more difference than his father’s death must have made under
any circumstances. There was no longer a bright and pleasant house to
take his friends to, but that had nothing to do with the will, and was
at the present moment a necessity of nature. And then he had his
profession, and liked it, and might hope for advancement in it. And in
the meantime he had made up his mind to go to India, a proceeding which
had its pleasant as well as unpleasant aspects. He had sold his pet
horse, to be sure, which cost him a pang; but still a man may get over
that. And he was noway banished from the society he had been used to, or
from the kind of life. Nothing was changed with him to speak of, but
everything was changed with Laurie; and as for Ben, he had disappeared
under the waters altogether,--disgusted, or indignant, or furious with
fate. Frank’s heart was heavy as he went back in the dreary ‘last
train,’ dropping people at all the stations,--coming every now and then
to a jarring, tedious stoppage in the blackness of the night. It is not
a cheerful mode of locomotion when a man is alone, and has thoughts
which are the reverse of agreeable. Laurie’s intimacy in the painter’s
house, the accustomed, familiar way in which he sat down amongst all
those children and took his tea, the homely table, the talk in which his
brother was so absorbed as to forget everything,--even common
politeness,--how fatal was all this! Had he gone there, indeed, kindly
as a chance visitor,--as any potentate from Belgravia might look in now
and then, it might have been well; but to become an _habitué_ of such a
house, to give up for it,--as he seemed to be doing,--all the charms of
society, could that be well? ‘Why should it be so?’ Frank asked himself.
No doubt Lady Grandmaison would have invited Laurie all the same,--as,
indeed, she had invited himself, Frank,--notwithstanding the temporary
cloud under which they all were living. No doubt the Barnards and the
Courtenays would have been just as kind as ever. He might have kept up
all his friends, Frank concluded to himself, with the premature prudence
of a young man of society; why shouldn’t he? Nothing but the absence of
a coat or a pair of gloves could have absolutely shut out Laurie Renton
from society; and his coat, Frank felt, was quite presentable, and had
even a flower in it, the extravagant wretch; and yet his world had
become Fitzroy Square!
Frank Renton dwelt so much on this thought that the apparition of Alice
Severn went out of his head,--and yet not, perhaps, quite out of his
head. He had not been such a fool, he would have said, as to fall in
love with a girl whom he had only seen once,--a girl belonging to the
objectionable locality in which Laurie had lost himself; yet the little
picture she made as she stood for a moment answering her mother’s call
in the doorway, with the dim curtains falling round her like a frame,
and herself so bright in colouring, so sweet in all her rose-tints,
lasted in his mind as such impressions seldom did. Perhaps it was the
quite unexpected character of the appearance that made him dwell upon
it. In a ball-room, or at a picnic, or, in short, at any party, or in a
country-house where there are a number of people assembled, a man knows
he is likely to meet some pretty girl or other, and is prepared for the
vision; but when you are making a humdrum call, in a house quite out of
the world, on people quite unacquainted with anybody you know,--in
short, very respectable people, but moving in a different sphere,--and
are, all at once, confronted by a creature like a rose, playing
Beethoven in the dark, standing looking at you from the doorway with
dazzling, lovely, half-seeing eyes,--of course you had not been looking
for anything of the kind, and it makes a certain impression on you.
Frank was not in any way addicted to art. He did not understand it much,
nor care for it. Now and then something struck him as being ‘a pretty
picture;’ but it might be one of Laurie’s drawings, or it might be a
Raffael, and the difference was not very evident to the Guardsman.
Perhaps it was the first time that he had of his own accord, or rather
involuntarily, in spite of himself, by impulsion of nature, hung up as
it were a picture of his own making on the walls of his mind. ‘By Jove,
if Laurie were to paint something like that,’ he said to himself,
altogether unaware in his simplicity that neither Laurie nor any of his
fellows could have done justice to the evening darkness, and the soft
lamplight, and the dark, undefined curtains draping themselves about the
bright young face. Frank made it for himself, which was much more
satisfactory, and left it there, hanging in his private closet of
recollections, though, so far as he was aware, he thought but little of
Alice Severn, and was much too sensible a fellow to fall in love at
first sight.
Besides, he was busy, and had no time just then for nonsense of any
kind. It was not quite so easy to manage the exchange he wanted as he
had believed it would be; and Mrs. Renton, though she interfered so
little in her son’s proceedings, did what she could to put a stop to
this movement on his part. ‘I never even hear from Ben,’ she said,
pathetically. ‘I do not know where he has gone or what has become of
him; and Laurie, though he writes punctually, has not been to see me for
ever so long; what shall I do if you go too?’
‘But, mother, I must go,’ Frank would say; ‘I can’t get on where I am
now. No, mamma,--thanks; I ought not to take it. What my father meant
was that we should go and seek our fortune. And beside, if Ben and
Laurie don’t have money from you, I ought not to have it. That is as
clear as daylight.’
‘If Ben and Laurie were here they would have everything I could give
them,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘they ought to know that; but you are the only
one of my boys that stands by me, Frank. Put it in your pocket, dear,
and never mind. Ah! if your poor dear papa could but have seen the harm
it has done!’ and she cried, poor soul, longing for her other children,
though she had not energy enough to seek them out; ‘but we must not
blame your dear papa,’ she added, hastily, drying her eyes.
‘No,’ said Frank. ‘But it has done harm. Laurie was not like himself
last time I saw him. He has got among a queer sort of people,--artists
and that sort of thing. I don’t feel quite easy about him, to tell the
truth.’
‘Among low people, do you mean?’ cried his mother, with the tears ready
to flow from her eyes.
‘N--no; not exactly low people,’ said Frank; and somehow a hot flush of
colour covered his own face. All at once that picture rose up before
him, and Alice out of the doorway looked at him with reproachful eyes.
‘I heard that favourite thing of yours so beautifully played the other
day,’ he added, hastily; and then he hummed a few bars to identify the
melody; ‘charmingly played. I don’t think any one could have done it
better.’
‘Mary plays it very nicely,’ said his mother, who was easily led away
from one subject to another.
‘Oh, Mary!’ said Frank. ‘Yes, she does very well, of course; but this
was almost genius, you know. She played it as if she were making it up
herself. Quite a young girl, fifteen or so,’ Frank went on; ‘and sitting
in a dark room, so she must have played from memory. I wish you could
have heard her.’
‘Was it any one I know?’ said Mrs. Renton.
‘It was somebody Laurie knows,’ said Frank shortly. ‘I suppose he’ll
stick there for ever and ever, and never do anything. I wish he were not
such a lazy beggar. In one way he is the cleverest of us all.’
‘My poor Laurie! so you all say,’ said the mother; ‘but this I
know,--Laurie is never lazy when he can serve other people, Frank; and
he is not so clever as Ben is,’ she added. ‘Your dear papa always said
so. Ben was the clever one, he always said. I would not mind about
cleverness if I but knew where he was and what he was doing. That breaks
my heart.’
‘Oh, he will turn up,’ said Frank, whose heart was not in any danger of
breaking. And he put his mother’s gift in his pocket, though not
without compunction. ‘It seems like stealing a march upon them,’ he said
to himself as he went away. This was just about a month before the time
when Ben suddenly appeared at Renton Manor to bid them all good-bye, and
when Laurie was near the climax of his little drama. Frank, whom no
necessity had urged on, was but beginning to make his arrangements for
setting out in the world, when they voluntarily or involuntarily had
completed theirs, and were about to take their plunge. As he went down
the walk to the river, under the budded trees, his own idea was that he
was the only one of the three who would really go off, as his father
wished, to seek his fortune. Ben had hidden himself somewhere in a fit
of disgust, but would repent and become reasonable, and return to Renton
to manage his mother’s affairs, which needed some one to look after
them. After all, Renton was his mother’s for the time being, and it was
the natural home of her eldest son; and as for Laurie, he would stick
fast where he was, and would not have pluck enough to make any change.
So that it was utterly out of the question that he, Frank, should
relinquish his plans and prospects in order that one of his mother’s
children might be near her. Mrs. Renton, indeed, was not a woman to
exercise such an influence on her sons. They were fond of her; but
either they were not fond enough to make a sacrifice for her, or she
was not the kind of woman to require it. She kept in the background,
wailing softly, but was not energetic enough to demand a response from
any one. Frank marched down to his boat, which lay waiting for him, with
a feeling that if he was not the clever one, he was at least the
energetic one, of the family, and probably would be the only one to make
his fortune. The first step, to be sure, was a little slow and
troublesome, but, once in India, everything became possible. He resolved
within himself that he would scorn delight and live laborious days, as
soon as he had got himself made into a real soldier instead of an
ornamental Guardsman. He would go in for his profession with all his
heart. No doubt it was a resolve which might call for a good deal of
self-denial, but for that young Frank was prepared. Parties, and
pleasure, and music, and even love affairs, were things he meant to be
out of his way. As for falling into a lower sphere contentedly, as
Laurie seemed to have done, Frank hoped that such a descent was
impossible to him. He pulled down the stream to Cookesley, though it was
cold; for the river was at once the best and most expeditious way of
passing between the manor and Royalborough. Frank pulled down the
stream, and felt his heart glow and tingle as he thought of all he was
going to do. He had some ‘pluck’ he admitted to himself, if not so much
cleverness as Laurie or Ben. So it will be seen he had quite forgotten
that momentary peep at Alice Severn, and the equally temporary
impression which her young beauty had made upon his imagination or his
heart.
CHAPTER IX.
NELLY RICH.
It was not very long after this that Frank Renton was accosted by one of
his friends in the regiment with what seemed to him a very odd sort of
request. ‘Look here, Frank,’ said young Edgbaston, who was a son,--it is
unnecessary to add,--of Lord Brummagem, and a very popular, good-natured
young fellow, ‘I’ve promised to produce you at the Riches’, where I am
going to lunch. Don’t struggle, my boy. They are going to have your
brother Laurie, and you must come.’
‘My brother Laurie!’ cried Frank in amazement. ‘And who are the Riches;
and what do they want me for? I never heard of the people that I know
of. I suppose it is one of your jokes?’
‘It’s very witty to be sure,’ said Edgbaston, ‘but it is not one of my
jokes. Papa Rich is something in the City. He was a cheesemonger once
upon a time, I believe; but that’s all left behind long ago. Alf Rich,
of the Buffs, is one of his sons. You know Alf. He gives capital dinners
and eke luncheons. And they’re all intensely jolly, from the pater down
to little Nelly. Come along. I promised to bring you. And you’ll meet
your brother, if that’s any inducement. Old Rich told me he was to be
there.’
‘Laurie to be there! I don’t understand it,’ said Frank.
‘Old Rich buys pictures to no end,’ said Edgbaston; ‘perhaps that’s why
your brother’s going; or perhaps he’s after little Nelly. And not a bad
speculation either, I can tell you. She’s a nice little girl;--and
heaps, cartloads, mountains of tin. If Laurie don’t go in for that style
of thing, I’d recommend it to your own consideration.’
‘If it’s so desirable, why do you let it go among your friends in this
liberal way?’ said Frank. ‘It’s not in Laurie’s line, I fear,’ he added
with a sigh. To tell the truth, the conditions and prospects of his
elder brothers lay much on Frank’s mind. He felt easy about himself; but
he disapproved of the others, especially Laurie, whom everybody had
disapproved of from his cradle,--and felt that he was in a bad way.
‘Then come along, and try your luck, my boy,’ said his friend. And the
consequence was that by noon Frank and half-a-dozen more were flying
over the green, balmy, awakening country on Edgbaston’s drag. They were
all in high spirits, with that delightful sense of fulfilling every duty
that can be looked for from a Guardsman which is the soul of pleasure.
And Frank Renton, puritanical as he had been in respect to his brother
Laurie and Alice Severn, was soon chatting about ‘little Nell,’ whom he
had never seen, as familiarly as any of them. So that it is evident
stern principle alone was not involved in his displeasure with his
brother. The young men were not at all contemptuous of the good things
to be had at Richmont; but the family who were to receive them there did
not count for much. Old Rich spent his money freely to give them
pleasure, and got laughed at for his pains; Mamma Rich, or Rich _mère_,
as they call her, was not much more respectfully treated; and as for
Nelly Rich, her name was bandied about from mouth to mouth with the most
unscrupulous ease. ‘If I were you, So-and-so, I’d certainly go in for
little Nell,’ one and another of those lively youths would say from time
to time. She had ‘heaps of tin’--that was her grand characteristic,--and
was evidently ready to drop into anybody’s arms who should do her the
honour to hold them out to her. But the talk was a matter of course, not
meaning half that it seemed to mean. And half at least of her critics
were dumb before Nelly, and had an unfeigned dread of her keen little
bright eyes and sharp speeches. Richmont itself was a big house in a big
park, conveying to the ordinary spectator no sense of present
incongruity with its past. The old part of the mansion was in the east
wing, and not visible from the front, and all that could be seen by the
party in the drag was the vast white modern façade, very fresh and clean
as yet, with great plate-glass windows, and a wide hospitable door,
opening into a hall with scagliola pillars. At this door old Rich stood,
waving his hand in sign of welcome. The flower-beds on the lawn were
already full of every bright thing which could be had at the season, and
the whole place was alit and alive with wealth, and warmth, and
movement. ‘To think that a fine old place like this should drop into the
greasy hands of an old cheesemonger!’ said one of the men as they drove
through the leafy avenue. But they were all quite willing to be the
cheesemonger’s guests, and to drink his wine, and enjoy the good things
his greasy gold had provided.
‘Glad to see you all,’ shouted Mr. Rich; ‘delighted we’ve got such a
fine day; almost good enough for croquet, it appears to me. Good
morning, my lord. Oh, any friend of yours! Ah-ha, Mr. Frank Renton,’
stretching forth his hand with a cordiality which took Frank by
surprise, ‘now I call this kind. Had everything been as it ought to be,
of course we’d have met before now,--country neighbours, you know. Your
brother has just come by the last train with a friend of his, a
wonderful clever fellow from town. He’s too much of a swell himself ever
to paint much, eh? but he’s hand and glove with all of them. Come along
up-stairs, and I’ll take you to him. Lord Edgbaston, you know your way
to the drawing-room. Mrs. Rich will be delighted to see you; and I trust
to you not to let my Nelly leave the room till I send for her. I mean to
give the child a little surprise,’ added the millionnaire, rubbing his
fat hands. ‘Come along, Mr. Renton.’ Frank followed in a state of
partial stupefaction. What reason there could be for this old fellow’s
cordiality; why he should leave a live lord to find his own way
up-stairs and conduct him, Frank Renton, instead; why Laurie should be
here; what he had to do with the surprise Mr. Rich was going to give his
child;--all these were mysteries to Frank. He seemed to have gone into
an enchanted house. Had Mr. Rich taken him aside and offered him his
daughter’s hand and fortune on the spot, his surprise would scarcely
have been increased. Was this what it meant? Or if it was not this, what
did it mean?
The Rentons and the Beauchamps had been friends in the old days, and
Frank knew the house through which he was being guided almost as well,
perhaps, as the owner of it did, who walked before him, looking not half
so imposing as his own butler. Frank, who had a good deal of prudence
for so young a man, thought it would be better on the whole to say
nothing about this; but when his host preceded him through passage after
passage, and up one short flight of stairs after another, surprise got
the better of him.
‘We must be going to the music-room, I suppose,’ he said; ‘this is the
way;’ for the new master paused uncertain between two turns.
‘That’s about it,’ said Mr. Rich; ‘droll though, to see a stranger know
one’s house better than one does oneself. I suppose you were a deal here
in the time of the old people? Very nice people according to all I hear.
But, you know, I didn’t turn them out. Bought the place at a fair price,
as anybody else might have done. It was their doing, not mine. Ah! it’s
a sad thing to outrun the constable, Mr. Frank. It should be a lesson to
you as a young man.’
‘I am just going off to India,’ said Frank, determined, at least, to let
his new acquaintance know that little was to be made of him in the way
of society, ‘and I shall not have much chance.’
‘To India, eh?’ said Mr. Rich, with an unchanged tone. Clearly after
all, he did not mean to offer the young Guardsman on the spot his
daughter and her fortune. ‘India’s a fine thing at your age. My eldest
boy went off a dozen years ago, when we were not quite so well off as we
are now; and he’s coming home this summer, please God. If you had been
at home we might have had no end of jolly meetings; but your mother goes
out nowhere, I hear.’
‘Not now,’ said Frank; ‘my mother is a great invalid.’ And there was
something in his tone which betrayed a certain offence,--What right had
this man to speak of his mother? And this tone conveyed itself at once
to the other’s lively ear.
‘Ah, well! she has a right to please herself,’ said Mr. Rich. ‘Here we
are at last. Halloo, gentlemen, I hope it fits. I wouldn’t have it too
large or too small for a hundred pounds.’
‘Never fear, it will fit beautifully,--I knew it would,’ cried Laurie’s
voice from behind a great picture, which was being hoisted into its
place. After having been rather splendid and haughty about his mother to
this commonplace individual, who had no right to hope for her
acquaintance, it must be admitted that it gave Frank a pang to find his
brother as busy as a workman, and quite at his ease in his occupation,
putting up Mr. Rich’s pictures. Here was something worse even than
Laurie’s slovenly ways and contented relapse into lower life. When a man
has a brother in the Guards he owes it, if not to himself, at least to
his relations, to remember that he is a gentleman. And to play the fool
in such a house as this was worse than anything, with all those fellows
below to tell each other how sadly Frank Renton’s brother, ‘the artist
fellow,’ had fallen back in the world.
‘I did not know my brother was in the habit of carrying home his work,’
he said, with a certain savage irony. But Laurie did not hear this
speech, and Mr. Rich, who did hear it, took no notice. There was nothing
for it but to stand and stare at the daub as it was raised to its place.
In the middle of the floor, in front of it, stood a bearded stranger,
whom Frank did not know, nor care to know. He was watching the progress
of the picture with anxious interest. Was it Laurie’s picture? Whether
it were or not, Laurie condescending to make a carpenter of himself for
the moment was a sight which shocked his brother much. He strode away to
the end window, and gazed out to show his indifference, with a soft
whistle of impatience, which would have made itself into words anything
but soft had circumstances permitted. But nobody remarked either his
impatience or his anger. The room was long and not very broad, and the
panel in which the picture was being placed was immediately opposite the
gilded pipes of a chamber organ, which was let into the wall. To be
sure, if it had been a picture of chorister boys instead of little
barbarians it would have been more harmonious with the place; but
Suffolk’s Angles shone out of the dark wall like positive sunshine.
There were three broad mullioned windows in one end of the room, and at
the other a great east window full of heraldic designs in painted
glass,--the arms of the Beauchamps and their connexions. Under this
blaze of colour, on either side, the panels were carved, running into
little pinnacles and canopy work of a semi-ecclesiastical kind. It had
been, indeed, a chapel in the early ages, when the Beauchamps were
Catholic. A few high-backed, heavy, oak chairs were all the furniture in
it now, except quite at the west end of the room, near where the
picture was being placed, where a grand piano stood under one window,
and a small easel in the other. This picturesque place, in which priests
in glittering vestments, and knights in steel, and ladies in flowing
robes, would have been the natural actors, was now the music-room in
Richmont, occupied chiefly by the ex-cheesemonger’s daughter,--an
out-of-the-way place in which she could pursue her occupations as she
pleased. Reflections, not exactly to this effect, but of a somewhat
similar meaning, were in Frank’s mind as he turned with disgust from his
unconscious brother. The poor Beauchamps!--who had the best blood in
England in their veins, and were now vegetating at all sorts of wretched
Continental baths and watering-places. To be sure, old Beauchamp was a
blackleg, and his wife no better than she should be,--and the
music-room, when Frank knew it, had been a lumber-room and play-room,
dear to the children, though nobody thought anything about its
picturesqueness. Still, those were the Beauchamps, and these
Riches,--and what a falling off was there! Frank was full of these
thoughts, and in a very discontented mind generally, not condescending
to look at the picture with which all the rest were absorbed, when
Laurie emerged from behind the frame, and, to his amazement, saw that it
was his brother who interrupted the light in the middle window. It was a
kind of bay window, projecting just a little out beyond the line of the
others, and in it there stood a low chair covered with old brocade, and
a small table with a vase of fresh spring flowers. Frank had not noticed
these little accessories, but Laurie, having the eye of an artist, took
them in at a glance. Somehow Frank’s attitude, standing between the low
chair and the little table, suggested ideas to Laurie’s mind of a
different kind from those which moved his brother. This was the
favourite haunt of the millionnaire’s daughter. The chair was hers, and
the flowers, and the book which lay on the ledge of the window; and
Royalborough was close at hand, not too far for a young soldier to ride
over any day. Could Frank be Nelly Rich’s property too?
‘Frank!’ cried Laurie, ‘you here! Who could have dreamt of seeing you?’
‘I have more reason to say so,’ said Frank. ‘We are quartered close by;
but what can you be doing carpentering in a house like this? Perhaps
that’s the branch of art you have taken to at last,’ the Guardsman
continued with a sneer. As for Laurie, he had been good-natured from his
cradle, and laughed at this little ebullition.
‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Come and look at the picture. Of course, I know
you don’t know anything about it; but so long as you have eyes you may
look, at least. What games we used to have up here! Is the goddess
worthy of the shrine now?’ he added, glancing up with a little curiosity
into the young soldier’s face.
‘I don’t know what you mean by shrines and goddesses,’ said Frank, still
angry; ‘but I do think, for the sake of your friends, if not for your
own, you ought to mind what you’re about, and not be so very complaisant
in the house of a cad like this.’
‘Hush!’ said Laurie, ‘don’t call names, my big brother. What have I been
doing, I wonder, to come under your great displeasure? Dust on my coat,
is it?’ and Laurie suddenly bethought himself of the cobwebs which he
had hoped the padrona might have brushed off for him; and stopped short,
the foolish fellow, and smiled and sighed.
‘Dust!’ cried Frank, indignantly. ‘I wonder you did not take it off to
do your work the better. It would have been the right thing to do.’
‘And so it would,’ said Laurie; ‘I will recollect another time. But come
along, old fellow, and look at the picture, and don’t make yourself so
disagreeable. Old Rich has sent for his daughter, and we can’t go on
squaring before a lady. Stand here, and look at it well.’
‘Is it yours?’ said the reluctant Frank. And Laurie laughed and shook
his head.
‘He asks if it is mine,’ he said; ‘there’s a Guardsman’s idea of the
possibilities, Suffolk! You might as well have asked if that Madonna was
mine.’
‘Well, and what if I had?’ said Frank, stoutly, in his ignorance--and
went and stared with a determination to see nothing. The three figures
were standing thus grouped,--Frank looking at the picture, and Suffolk,
who had taken no part in the conversation, looking with mild surprise at
the natural curiosity called a Guardsman of which he knew little more
than the other did about the Angles,--when Mr. Rich came back triumphant
with his daughter. They made a curious centre to the room, from which,
by this time, the workmen who had been placing the picture had
disappeared, leaving them alone. Frank, the very impersonation of
scepticism and critical ignorance, stood with his face turned upward to
the Angles, and defiance and disdain in the very attitude of his feet
resentfully planted on the polished oaken floor. Suffolk, turning round
and round in his fingers the rule which one of the workmen had left
behind him, stood half a step behind, looking at Frank, with the
faintest of smiles on his face, and that curious faculty of seeing,
which never deserts a true painter, somehow making itself visible in his
eyes. He was not studying the figure which thus defiantly posed before
him, and yet there was an amusing consciousness of the pose, and of all
expressed by it, in his look. Frank was so unaware of this, and Laurie,
as he recognised it, became so divided between sympathy with his brother
and amusement with his friend, that the three faces made a very curious
group; and so Nelly Rich thought as she came into the room, not knowing
why it was that her father had brought her here. She was followed by
the entire party, Mrs. Rich leading the way, and leaning her substantial
weight on Edgbaston’s arm. She had but a minute to notice the group, but
it made an impression on her; and curiously enough,--or, perhaps not
curiously,--Nelly’s sympathies fixed upon Frank in the moment she had to
identify him. The others were laughing at him, and he was young and
single-handed, and,--so handsome. Nelly Rich piqued herself upon being
intellectual and fond of art; and yet it was neither the painter nor the
amateur that caught her eyes; it was the ignorant, unintellectual,
handsome young Guardsman, which no doubt was quite natural in a way.
She gave a cry of wonder and delight when she saw the picture; but the
kind father, to whom that cry was music, had made a mistake by bringing
the party with him. After the first outburst Nelly retreated and was
silent. She was not the kind of Nelly Rich whom either Frank or Laurie
Renton had expected to see. Anything more unlike the portly, comely
mother who came in after her, sweeping her gorgeous skirts all over the
brown oak floor, could not be conceived. Nelly was very small; she had
the figure and the foot of a fairy; and how her dark, clear, olive
complexion,--her hair so dark as to be almost black,--her brilliant
dark-brown eyes,--could have been derived from the two ruddy, roundabout
people beside her, was a puzzle to everybody. She might have been a
fairy changeling, but that her small figure was perfect in form, and
instinct with life, health, and activity. She was as plainly dressed as
her mother was gorgeous, with a black gown and knots of crimson ribbons,
like a Spaniard, which, indeed, was the most becoming dress she could
have chosen. And she was not a timid maiden generally, taking shelter
from the crowd; but a creature quite able to express herself and defend
herself. Nevertheless she stepped aside as her mother entered on
Edgbaston’s arm, and said not a word more about the picture. The party
invaded the music-room, filling it with noise and movement. The scene
was changed. It was no longer a retired, half-solemn place, full of
associations of the past, and one soft, pleasant suggestion of the
present conveyed by the fresh flowers, the instruments, the little
easel, and the book, which harmonised everything; but a show place, with
vulgar sightseers and a vulgar showman,--vulgar, though the visitors
came of blood to which no objection could be taken. They gazed at the
painted window, and at the carved oak, and at the pictures, alike with
suppressed yawns, and referred stealthily to their watches, wondering
when luncheon would be announced. Suffolk, who was the only stranger
whom no one knew, stood aside, and looked on with a certain indignation.
His picture, newly placed, newly arrived,--a picture which Academicians
had condescended to praise, and the ‘Sword’ had noticed
favourably,--should have been, no one could doubt, the chief thing to be
noticed; but what the newcomers did was to cast a careless glance at it,
and say, ‘Ah! oh! pretty thing, to be sure,’ and turn their backs with
that unspeakable calm of indifference which galls the artist mind beyond
endurance. ‘Like old Woodland’s style, ain’t it?’ said Edgbaston, with
his glass in his eye. If there was one man or painter whom Suffolk
regarded with especial contempt it was old Woodland! The painter turned
to the window stung and smarting all over, and tried to look out; and
then one of the young men found a sketch upon Nelly’s little easel, and
went into ecstasies over it. They all crowded, a mass of tall heads, to
look at it with an interest which no one had dreamt of showing in the
Angles. ‘Parcel of empty-headed coxcombs!’ Suffolk said to himself; and
then certain reflections overtook him as to the kind of people who were
likely to see his work where it was now placed. Was not the Guardsman
the very highest possible class of visitor who could come to Richmont;
and was this all for which he had spent his brains and his strength? He
had turned, and was looking with the most curious wonder and contempt
upon the group round Nelly’s easel. Could he help being contemptuous?
The sketch was an unobtrusive little performance, pretending nothing,
and not meaning much. And it was for such eyes as these that he had
painted his picture! He was thinking so with a certain bitterness, when
Nelly herself, with a little rush, penetrated the group, and, seizing
upon the harmless drawing they were gazing at, thrust it before their
eyes into a portfolio.
‘It is not worth a glance,’ she cried; ‘it’s a bit of waste paper. Oh,
for heaven’s sake, don’t stare, and make me ashamed of myself before Mr.
Suffolk! It was the picture you came to see.’
‘I came because you were coming,’ said one of the young men.
‘Oh, never mind the picture. Come and show us what you have here,’ said
another, laying his hand on the portfolio. This was how they talked,
with Suffolk looking on. As for Nelly, her cheeks grew crimson. She was
not, as we have said, a timid maiden; and she was given to speaking her
mind, as even these gentlemen knew.
‘Yes,’ she said, with her eyes sparkling; ‘to be sure, you know best.
You shall have the portfolio to look at--art brought down to the meanest
capacity. I might have known that would be the most suitable for you;
and, Mr. Suffolk, come and tell me about it,’ she said softly, turning
to the painter. She held out her hand, that he might offer her his arm,
and led him, in spite of himself, opposite to the poor picture which had
been so scorned. ‘I want to clear them all away, those stupid men,’ said
Nelly, confidentially. ‘I hate young men; they are all so idiotic. Mr.
Suffolk, when I look at this I could cry, out of envy and spite. How is
it you can do it?--And I work and work and can’t do anything. I would
give my head if I could paint only that little bit of a tree; and I
suppose you never gave it a thought?’ she said, turning the brilliant
brown eyes upon him. ‘Tell me about it, please; for it will be my chief
friend, and live with me all day long.’
‘What am I to tell you, Miss Rich?’ said the painter, taken by surprise,
and yet standing on his dignity still.
And then Nelly gazed at the Angles for at least a minute in silence,
holding his arm. ‘It does not matter,’ she said, at last, with a
long-drawn breath of satisfaction,--‘I shall learn it all from their
faces. You must know, I live in this room, and they will never ask me
what they are to tell me. I shall find out all their story in little
bits. That one is quite happy to have so much change and variety, and to
feel himself in Rome,--you painted him when you were happy, Mr. Suffolk;
and that one is thinking of home,--something had happened to you then. I
shall find it all out by degrees. Those men don’t find themselves so
happy as they thought they would be over the portfolio,’ she broke off
suddenly, with a little laugh; ‘but please to remember I have got eyes,
and there are other people besides Guardsmen who come here sometimes.
Mamma, I hear the bell for luncheon; please take all those men away.’
‘You must not be shocked with Nelly, Mr. Suffolk,’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘I
have told her all about your charming little wife, so she knows she need
not be afraid to speak to you; and that’s her way, making up all that
nonsense about the pictures she likes. I think it looks perfectly
charming, now that it is in its place. Nelly, this is Mr. Renton, whom I
told you of. He is such a friend of Mrs. Severn’s; and this is Mr. Frank
Renton; neighbours of ours, you know, when they are at home, and cousins
to that nice Miss Westbury you made acquaintance with the other
day,--such a nice, lady-like girl. But I hear the bell. I am sure you
must all be quite hungry after your long drive.’
‘Yes, come along,’ said Mr. Rich; ‘come along, and let us have something
to eat. Nothing like art for giving one an appetite. I am as hungry as a
hunter. All with getting up Suffolk’s lovely picture! Gem of my
collection, I call it, though I have half-a-dozen Crowquills
down-stairs, which I’ll show you after lunch. Come along, gentlemen. As
for Nelly, you know, and the painter, they’ll follow. Ladies and men of
genius don’t want to eat like us common mortals. Come along, come
along,’ said the millionnaire, his voice dying off in the passage. The
two Rentons, who had just been presented to Nelly, stood by her, waiting
till she led the way; and Nelly, for her part, had no inclination to
lead the way. She had got rid of ‘those stupid men,’ and she was rather
in the humour for a little talk.
‘Now they’re gone one can breathe,’ she said, with complimentary
confidentialness. ‘We need not go down just yet. Please, Mr. Renton,
tell me about the Severns. You are grand people, and I don’t suppose
Miss Westbury would like it if I quoted her as an acquaintance; but I
may ask about the Severns. Do you know them too?’
‘I have only seen them once,’ said Frank; ‘but I don’t think you do Mary
Westbury justice. I am sure she would be charmed----’
‘Tell me about the Severns, please,’ said Nelly, with a little wave of
her hand.
Then there was a pause, which nobody could have explained. Laurie, it is
true, knew very well why it was that he, excited and confused as he was,
should feel himself unable to speak of the padrona; but why could not
Frank answer so simple a question? In the meanwhile Frank, on his side,
saw suddenly before him, as in a vision, that picture of Alice standing
in the doorway, with all the shadows round her, and felt his lips
sealed, and could not speak.
‘If these gentlemen will not tell me anything,’ said Nelly, ‘Mr.
Suffolk, speak. I’m sure you know them too.’
‘I have only seen them once,’ repeated Frank, hastily. ‘Miss Severn
plays like--St. Cecilia. I have not heard anything like her playing for
a hundred years.’
‘Well,’ said Nelly, shrugging her shoulders, ‘here is one fact elicited
by dint of inquiry. Miss Severn--that is, I suppose, Alice, who was a
little darling when I saw her last--plays. I don’t care so much for
playing as I ought to do. And I wanted to hear of the padrona and all
the little ones. Couldn’t you tell me anything more, Mr. Renton? Yes, I
call her the padrona too. Mr. Severn used to give me a lesson
sometimes--not for money, but for love. It may seem strange to you,’
said Nelly, demurely, ‘but he was fond of me. And I am fond of her, and
all of them. And Alice plays! I suppose that is all one could ever get
out of a man. If any one asks you about me, Mr. Frank Renton, I know
exactly what you will say: “Miss Rich--draws.” It is nice to be so
concise, but oh, tell me about my pretty padrona, please!’ cried Nelly,
clasping her hands together, and turning appealing eyes to Laurie. It
was almost more than Laurie’s composure could bear, for it was just at
the moment after he had made his discovery, and was waiting to know what
was to be done with him; and his heart was, so to speak, in his mouth.
‘She is as pretty as ever,’ said Laurie, in that strange tone of
suppressed emotion which makes itself almost more distinctly apparent
than the plainest confession of feeling; ‘and I don’t think I could tell
you how good she is. Suffolk knows her. We cannot trust ourselves to
speak of the padrona,’ said Laurie, nervously, ‘we people who live
about the Square.’
And then Suffolk said something to the same purport in words, but in so
different a tone as to throw the thrill in Laurie’s voice into fuller
relief. And Nelly looked at him full in the face, not disguising the
little gleams of discernment, half surprise, half mischief, in her eyes.
This was the only sign about her of inferior breeding. She had not
sufficient delicacy to conceal the enlightenment his tone had given her.
She looked at him so that he felt he was discovered, and his face flamed
with the sudden consciousness; and then she turned to Frank, who was the
particular mouse with which at the moment Nelly felt disposed to play.
‘This room must have been made on purpose for Miss Severn, who plays,’
she said. ‘I should think anybody who was musical would be in paradise
here. There is the organ and the piano, and in that closet there are
harps, and sackbuts, and dulcimers, and all kinds of music. I shall ask
Alice Severn to come to see me, and Mr. Frank Renton shall come too, and
hear her--play.’
‘I ask no better,’ said Frank, responding to the challenge as became a
Guardsman. And Nelly took them down-stairs, leaving the two graver,
pre-occupied men to follow, and making Frank her partner by some subtle
sleight of hand. He was very much at home at Richmont before the day was
over. Even Laurie remarked the rising flirtation, and laughed to
himself in the midst of his own excitement at the possibility of his
brother’s fortune coming in so easy a way. And his friends congratulated
him on his success, and pledged him in bumpers when they got home. ‘I
tell you, my boy, she has cartloads of tin,’ said Edgbaston. ‘Better
that than going out to India.’ And as for Frank, he did not deny to
himself that on the whole, notwithstanding Laurie’s undignified aspect,
and Mr. Rich’s soap-boiling, or cheesemongering--which was it?--he had
spent a very pleasant day.
CHAPTER X.
BROTHERLY ADVICE.
Next day, however, Frank Renton was full of many thoughts.
I doubt whether it is in my power to give any clear impression of the
reflections naturally produced in a young man’s mind by the first
suggestion of marrying money. In ordinary cases, marriage is not the
object set before the youth--the purpose contemplated from the beginning
of an acquaintance. He is attracted by some stranger, whose name he
never heard before, perhaps, and of whose existence, previous to the
eventful hour which brought them together, he had no knowledge. Chance
or inclination brings them together. Then the germ warms, quickens,
bursts into flower. Love comes spontaneous, unsought, perhaps almost
unwelcome, and marriage becomes but a necessary accident in its course.
But to approach that idea of marriage in cold blood, and without any
soft compulsion of feeling, is a very different matter. It is a thing
which women are called upon to do every day; but it is not so
inevitable among men. It had been brought before Frank in what seemed a
very distinct way. True, Nelly Rich was a little flirt, almost
confessedly avenging herself on the world for her father’s uncomfortable
position, and the spurns her family endured, by doing as much harm as
she could among the men who ate Mr. Rich’s dinners and laughed at him.
She had no mercy upon them, and more than one, within the knowledge even
of the battalion at Royalborough, who had supposed themselves sure of
Nelly and her fortune, had been ignominiously turned off when the crisis
came. This very fact naturally made Frank think the more of the
impression, which all his comrades informed him he had produced. Fifty
thousand pounds down, and some further share in all probability when the
father and mother died, not to speak of Nelly herself--pretty, and
bright, and amusing, and clever as she was! The idea, as was natural,
awoke many reflections in the young soldier’s mind. I have said that he
had not suffered by his father’s death; but yet had he meant to remain
in his present position at home, no doubt Frank would have shared in the
disadvantages which his brothers had felt so keenly; and to have it in
his power at twenty to secure his own comfort for life without any
particular trouble was a dazzling prospect. It is not to be supposed by
this that Frank had developed at so early an age the mercenary instincts
of a fortune-hunter. On the contrary, the good things which the gods
seemed thus to have placed within his reach, gave him a shock rather
than a thrill of satisfaction. He had no wish to marry,--to plunge into
serious life at his age, and give up the wayward ways of youth. The idea
would never have entered his mind had he been left to himself. But when
a young man sees such a golden apple nodding at him from an accessible
bough, and thinks he has but to put forth his hand and secure to himself
at one stroke all the advantages of wealth, the sensation is a startling
one. He went about thoughtful for two days, turning it over and over in
his mind. It is true he did not think very much about Nelly. She was
very nice, very jolly, and a man need not fear to have a dull companion
for life whom duty called upon to marry Mr. Rich’s daughter; but the
truth was that she did not count for very much in the matter. Frank was
honest with himself, and affected no delusion on that subject; but then
he had heard of people marrying money all his life without any
particular reprobation. Many men had done it, as he knew, who got on
very well with their wives, and made admirable husbands. Indeed, as
Frank reflected to himself, with the mild cynicism which was inseparable
from the kind of education he had gone through, marriage was one of the
things in which there must be many mixed motives. Love, of course, was
all very well to romance about; but love could not be, never was, the
only thing taken into account, except indeed by fools. If it was mere
love you married for, of course you did it in the style of King
Cophetua, and scorned the consequences. But few men went so far as that.
There were questions of income and settlements, and how people were to
live, which came in along with the purest affection, and brought
marriage,--necessarily,--into the same category with all other human
affairs. Edgbaston, for instance, as everybody knew, had been
desperately in love with Fanny Trent, who married old Oatley, the
brewer, after all. Edgbaston himself, in a melting moment, had told the
story to Frank. ‘I’ve got nothing but mortgages to look forward to,’ the
young lord said, ‘and of course I knew that was how it must end. I had
only a shabby old coronet to offer her, and Oatley was a bag of money.
Poor Fanny! I don’t think she liked it any more than I did; but what can
a fellow do when circumstances are dead against him?’ That was how it
happened in ordinary life. Even when a man was as fond of a woman as he
could be, still he must take other matters into account,--how they were
to live, what provision was to be made for the future, and a hundred
other details about connexions and position and the like. Therefore,
whatever your feelings might be, Frank argued with himself, marriage was
always a matter of mixed motives; and to reject a rich alliance which
had nothing particularly disagreeable in it, or indeed to put aside the
thought of it, as if marriage was not one of the things to be calculated
about and carefully considered in all its bearings, was simple folly. He
had never thought so deeply on any subject, his profession and general
circumstances being rather against any very lively exercise of his
mental faculties. This question of Nelly Rich cost him two days’ painful
deliberation. To have her and to suspend his negotiations about India
and the marching regiment, and to strike out a shorter path instead to
wealth, and ease, and comfort--or not to have her! It even interfered
with his sleep, though he was so young and healthy. It was not a matter
on which he could consult any one, and this increased the difficulty
tenfold. Even as to Edgbaston, though he was so good a fellow, Frank had
sufficient delicacy to feel that if he should hereafter marry a woman
about whom he had thus consulted his friend, he could never allow that
friend to enter the house in which his wife should be supreme. If she
ever became his wife it would be indispensable that no living creature
should know how he had once questioned and doubted. Frank might be
susceptible to worldly motives, as most people are; but he was full of
honourable feeling all the same. He might marry money, but no one should
ever be able so much as to hint to the woman who brought it that it was
not her he loved best. He would do all a man could to love her if he did
marry her; and he would breathe his secret to no one. And thus he
turned his difficulty over and over in his mind, and denied himself the
comfort of friendly counsel on the subject, which indeed was as high an
evidence of the young man’s honourable feeling as could well be desired.
But his reasonings with himself were far from being successful. His
arguments, like those of philosophy, were irrefutable, but produced no
conviction. The more clearly he saw that it was expedient for him to
seize so unusual an opportunity, and secure his own prospects for life,
the more unwilling did he feel to take the first necessary steps. India
suddenly acquired an attraction for Frank which it never had before.
Tiger-hunts, warlike expeditions,--all the pomp and circumstance of
Eastern life,--suddenly gleamed up in his imagination as contrasted with
the tame amusements and monotonous life at home. Yes, home had been very
pleasant before any other visions came. Hunting, and fishing, and
boating, and going to balls, are very agreeable modes of filling up a
young man’s time, and leave him little leisure to think what is the good
of it all. But if by any chance that question should penetrate through
the maze of pleasures, it either has to be answered or it leaves an
unpleasant echo among sounds otherwise most agreeable. Frank had made a
virtue of necessity after his father’s death, and had compelled himself
to ask and to find an answer to this demand. After all there was no
good except amusement in it. He was a lovely spectacle,--he was modestly
aware,--on state occasions in his grand uniform; but these occasions
were but few, and there would still be heaps of men left to hunt the
foxes and fish the rivers of England after he was gone. A man who
remained and grew old and yet was never anything more than a beautiful
Guardsman, was not an imposing being. And the money he might marry was
not enough to give him occupation and a solemn status in the country.
Had it been fifty thousand a-year indeed, that would have been as good
as a profession; for of course it would have involved estates to manage,
and a hundred things to do; but fifty thousand down, though it would
make him extremely comfortable, would leave him as ornamental and
useless as ever. And India was all novel, and fresh, and full of
excitement;--troops to lead, mutinies to quell for anything he knew,
principalities to conquer perhaps,--shawls, diamonds, tigers, everything
new. Frank had a hard time of it with all these thoughts. And once or
twice there did actually spring up before him, quite uncalled-for, among
his serious reflections, the shadowy apparition of that doorway with its
curtains, and the young face looking through. That had nothing to do
with it, you may well say,--less than nothing; but yet it had a sort of
confusing effect on the young man’s intellect, and added a perplexity
the more. The way in which he finally extricated himself from the maze,
and saw daylight at last, is one which, I suppose, few people would
divine, and which could have occurred only to a younger brother in
conscious possession of many qualities, both intuitive and the result of
experience, which Providence had denied to the rest of his family. He
wrote a letter to his brother Laurie; and this is what the young
Machiavel said;--
‘MY DEAR LAURIE,--
‘You will be surprised I don’t doubt when you see what I am writing
to you about. Perhaps you will think it is not the part of the
younger to advise the elder; but if we don’t hang together, and do
the best we can for each other, what are we, under our present
circumstances, to do? I am not quite as old as you are, but perhaps
I have been thrown more into the world. You have always taken to
artists, and those kind of people, you know, who are out of the
tide, and have queer notions; beside being,--no offence
intended,--of a diffeent sphere from us. You think, on the other
hand, that we are an empty-headed set, and perhaps you are not far
wrong; but a fellow picks up a great many wrinkles even among men
that are stupid enough to look at,--don’t you see?--when they’ve
got some knowledge of the world.
‘The fact is I am beating about the bush a little, because I don’t
very well know how to begin what I’ve got to say. It is just this.
You must have noticed the other day when you were at Richmont how
favourable everybody was to you and to me. Of course, one does not
care for the opinion of an old beggar like Rich. But his wife isn’t
at all so bad, and the girl, on the whole, is very nice. I assure
you frankly I do think so. She’s a clever little thing, and
decidedly pretty and amusing too, and fond of pictures, and that
sort of thing, so that there would be a sympathy between you. To
say it out plump, my opinion is that she is the very sort of girl
you ought to marry. It is not everybody that would suit you. You
want some one that has money, and yet doesn’t stand upon her money;
and that would not be conventional or stuck-up, but take your
friends along with yourself, and make up her mind to it. Now Nelly
Rich has no right to be stuck-up; and yet she’s nice, and looks
nice, and we Rentons are well enough known to marry anybody we
please. As for the father, I don’t think you need mind about him.
He is very liberal and hospitable, and ready to throw his money
about in buckets-full, and that always tells. People may snigger at
him, but they’ll go to his house all the same. And you may marry a
girl, you know, without marrying her father too. The mother is not
at all so bad. She’s motherly, and that sort of thing. And Nelly
has fifty thousand pounds. I can’t tell you how much I have been
thinking of it since that day. The fellows here have all advised me
to go in for it myself, but I’m rather too young to marry; and
besides I think it would suit you far better than me. I have my
profession, and I can do very well for a few years on my allowance,
especially in India, where there is double pay. But you,--forgive
me, my dear Laurie,--have always been a fellow to talk, you know,
and to do things for other people. I don’t think you’re the man to
make your way in the world, and I can’t help feeling that to have a
nice wife who would take an interest in your pursuits, and a nice
steady income that would keep you out of anxiety, would be the very
thing for you. I have made every inquiry, and as far as I can make
out, Nelly Rich is not what you would call a flirt. She is fond of
a little fun, and I like her for that; and when a man is cheeky,
they say she leads him on till he makes a fool of himself; but no
sensible fellow would object to a girl for having a little spirit.
She is very good-tempered, and no end of fun; and very clever at
drawing, and everything of that kind. She doesn’t go in for music,
but neither do you; and she’s the sort of girl that would travel
with you, and work with you, and make an ass of herself about
pictures, and old churches, and rubbish, just as much as you would.
I think, on my word, Laurie, it’s the very thing for you.
‘Anyhow, old fellow, you won’t take it amiss my having put it into
your head? It would be a most sensible thing to do; and I feel sure
a man might get quite fond of Nelly Rich, were he to try. I suppose
it is because the Manor is so near that they are so friendly to us.
As soon as mamma is well enough I’ll make her call. She’ll do it at
once when she knows what depends on it. And if you play your cards
at all well, you are as sure of success as anything can be. And
then you would not need to give up any of your friends. She was as
pleased with that painter-fellow the other day as if he had been a
prince. And you remember how she talked about the people in Fitzroy
Square. The more I think of it, the more it seems providential for
you. My dear fellow, go in and win. I should have recommended her
to Ben, had Ben been within knowledge. But she will suit you much
better than she would have suited him. And it will be a real
comfort to think that one of us is saved from the wreck, whether
the others sink or swim.
‘Yrs. affec.,
‘F. RENTON.’
This was Frank’s grand device for utilising Nelly’s fortune, and yet
preserving his own freedom. Laurie only received the letter when he was
in the midst of his preparations for going to Italy, and he threw it
aside with a painful smile. But our Guardsman knew nothing about his
brother’s preoccupied mind, and, satisfied that he had done the best
for everybody, laid aside the subject, and went upon his way as usual.
He was rather anxious for Laurie’s answer, it is true; but then there
are often irregularities in family correspondence, and Laurie might
think it best to leave it until they met. As it happened Frank did not
even visit his mother for the next ten days; and Mary Westbury, who was
his home correspondent, was so full of the news of an unexpected visit
from Ben, that she quite omitted to mention Laurie’s intimation, which
came immediately after, of his intended departure. So that Frank had
actually no information about his brother when he went on the following
Saturday to dine at Richmont.
CHAPTER XI.
THE MUSIC-ROOM.
Frank was alone on his second expedition to Richmont, which was a
satisfaction to him. He was full of his scheme, and anxious to see how
the land lay, and what Laurie’s prospects might be should he make up his
mind to ‘go in’ for the fifty thousand pounds. And he was quite willing
to divert himself in the society of his future sister-in-law. The
invitation had a family aspect altogether, he thought; and, instead of
returning to his quarters, he had made his arrangements to go home for
the Sunday, and rouse his mother to such steps as were practicable for
securing Laurie’s advantage. Frank left Royalborough with all the lively
zest of a matchmaker, pleased with himself and his own generosity, and
rather elated on his brother’s account. Fifty thousand pounds!--two
thousand five hundred a-year, and always the prospect of something
coming at the end of the seven years’ probation! For a man who had no
expensive tastes, and whose whole soul was wrapped up in pictures, it
was a fortune! He could dabble in paint as much as he liked, and his
wife could help him; and they could travel about as much as they liked,
and go to all the pretty places that took their fancy. There was no one
to whom he could have said as much in actual words; but the feeling in
his mind was, that if anybody had ever originated a better plan he’d
like to hear of it. Ben had turned up, as Mary Westbury’s letter told
him; and no doubt Ben would make his way in the world. And as for
himself, Frank thought that there was no particular fear; but Laurie was
the feeble one of the family, the one most likely to do little, to spend
his strength for naught, or waste his own life for the advantage of
others. And nothing could be so good for him as to be thus put on a
comfortable shelf out of harm’s way at the very beginning of his career.
He was fond of Laurie, as most people were; and it pleased him as much
in his brotherliness as in his vanity to take Laurie thus in hand and be
the one to provide for him. This time it was to dinner he was going at
Richmont, and he had written to the Manor to beg his mother to send over
the dog-cart for him and his portmanteau. The millionnaire’s house was
beginning to be lit up in all its windows when he drove along the
avenue: the lights in it sparkled like fairy lamps in the blue, spring
twilight; and when he entered the great hall he was informed that nobody
had come down-stairs yet, and that the dinner had been made an hour
later in consequence of some one else who was to arrive by the train.
‘The young ladies is in the music-room, sir,’ the butler said
respectfully, being himself a native of Berks, and feeling that the
advent of a Renton was an honour to the house; ‘and I was to tell you as
tea is served in the drawing-room.’
‘Oh, I’ll join the young ladies,’ said Frank, lightly, thinking of Nelly
only, his sister-in-law that was to be. No doubt some one must be with
her, but that did not matter. Indeed, on the whole, it was so much the
better, for it would not be becoming to flirt, except in the very
mildest way, with a girl who was going to be your brother’s wife. He ran
up-stairs, telling the man he knew the way, and thus making a daring
leap into intimacy such as he would never have dreamed of had he taken
time to think. But his own plan had taken possession of him. Of course
she was going to be his sister-in-law, and it would be absurd to stand
upon ceremony. Thus Frank, being unused to the excitement of so much
thinking, was carried away by it, and took his own imaginations for
granted. As he ran up-stairs, however, his ear was caught by the sound
of the organ, a sound which had not been heard in Beecham so long as he
had known the house, and to which Richmont, according to Nelly’s
description, was as little accustomed. The music seemed to fill the
place, swelling through the stairs and passages, which were full of the
darkness and stillness of the approaching night. Frank stood still to
listen, and then went on with a surprised face, and with a new thrill in
his heart. It was surely the same sonata he had heard softly breathing
out of the dark drawing-room that night he visited Fitzroy Square. Who
could be playing? Could there be two girls in the world who had the same
power, the same feeling for music, the same subtle sentiment, and
expressive strength? But then how did he know at all that it was a girl
who was playing? It might be some old music-master, one of the sort of
people whom Nelly loved. All the same, it had the effect of subduing his
steps, and making his approach much less confident and unembarrassed. He
lingered,--he thought of going back,--he felt himself a coxcomb and
presumptuous animal. And yet he went on, led partly by the force of the
impulse which was still upon him, and partly allured by the dulcet and
harmonious sound to which he was so susceptible. He knocked at the door,
but his summons was unheard in the midst of the music. Then he opened it
softly, and went in. There was no light in the room except the pale
twilight, which marked out every line of the windows, and the glimmering
of the painted glass at the end by which he entered. He seemed to step
out of the real world altogether into an enchanted place when he crossed
that darkling threshold. The gilded organ-pipes caught a certain faint
reflection, and under that dim shimmer sat a shadow, which was playing;
while in the centre window, in the bay, looking out, as it seemed, into
the night, another shadow, light and small as a fairy, stood listening
or musing. The opposite wall of the room, and the picture which was so
bright in the daylight, had retreated altogether into the gloom; and the
painted window hung as if suspended in the air; and all the solid wall
in which it was set, and the dark oak carving under it, had receded into
obscurity. Frank stood with his hand on the door, and held his breath.
He felt at once like a fool and like an intruder, not knowing who they
were whose privacy he was invading, and having no right whatever to be
there even had he been sure it was Nelly who stood in the window. He had
burst into her particular privacy unannounced the second time he had
been in the house! But Frank was bewitched, and stood still, blotting
himself out as small as possible against the door.
But either the door had creaked or her quick ear had caught some sound
of movement, for Nelly Rich turned round suddenly. She was not so
absorbed in the music as the player was, or as Frank would have been had
he been listening in a legitimate and proper way. Her mind was divided
between that and a great many other thoughts, and gave but a partial
attention to the sounds which filled the room. When she saw that another
shadow had intruded into her retirement, Nelly gave a little cry, and
flitted like a ghost towards the door.
‘Who is there?’ she cried with a sharpness which struck in just at a
pianissimo passage, and startled the player as well as the intruder. The
music ceased with a kind of long-drawn wail, and the musician too gave a
little scream. Frank would have been thankful if the old oak floor had
suddenly opened and swallowed him up.
‘A thousand pardons,’ he cried; ‘it is I, Miss Rich; Frank Renton. I
don’t know how to explain my intrusion. Pray forgive me. I was told I
should find you here,--and then the music; I have not a word to say for
myself. Pardon?--that is all.’
‘Was it papa who told you you would find me here?’ said Nelly. ‘It is
just like him. But, Mr. Renton, I am not papa, and I admit nobody but my
friends to this room,--especially in the dark,’ she added, with a quiver
of coming laughter, which reassured Frank. He sank down upon his knee,
as she stood with her arms extended, metaphorically thrusting him away.
‘What can I say for myself?’ said Frank. ‘I am a wretched sinner, not
worthy to be admitted as a friend. Let me come in as a captive, like one
of your Angles; or as a beggar, or---- Don’t be too hard upon me. The
evil is done. The mortal has crossed the threshold of fairyland. Let him
stay.’
‘Alice, advise me,’ cried Nelly, turning to the silent figure at the
piano. ‘Shall we let him stay?’
So it was Alice! Something had told him so the instant he recognised
that sonata. Now he turned his head towards her in the gloom,
breathless, awaiting her answer. Alice, however, made no reply. She only
returned to her organ, and took up her pianissimo passage. I cannot tell
how she intimated her pleasure to the slave on the other side of the
wall who ‘blew;’ but, anyhow, she took it up where she had left off, and
the soft, delicious sounds, the very voice of the darkness and
stillness, whispered over the two darkling, undiscernible figures,--one
standing, one kneeling, in the gloom. A certain soft thrill of
consciousness, half comic, half sentimental, moved Nelly. No doubt it
had been partly in jest that Frank had put himself on his knees; but
might it not be partly in earnest, too? Frank, for his part, had
forgotten Nelly’s very existence. It seemed natural to him to listen
thus to such a strain. He was not intellectual, and could have heard the
finest poetry in the world unmoved. All his pretty sentiments about
fairyland, etcetera, were also the most superficial words; but the music
seized upon, mastered him, put a soul into the young soldier. He turned
half towards the instrument, kneeling, and unconscious that he was
kneeling. To him it was poetry, art, passion, imagination, all in one.
And Alice went on playing softly as in a dream; and the remaining rays
of half light gradually extinguished themselves, till even the two
shadows at the door became scarcely discernible, and the organ-pipes
faded into obscurity. It was a curious situation altogether, but only
Nelly was aware of it. To her the fact was very evident that a handsome
young Guardsman, still kneeling on one knee, as to his sovereign, was
before her; that twilight was settling down into night; that Mr. Frank
Renton was a stranger: and that it was time to dress. Something
prevented her from speaking, and cutting short the music; but her
impatient mind having got over the first charm, began to grow weary, and
long for a change. She could not make out how it was that the musician
went on, unfatigued with all those lingering notes. ‘That’s the same
thing over again,’ Nelly said to herself, not being so fond of music as
she ought to have been, as may easily be perceived. She glided back to
the window, at last; and Frank, roused by her motion, rose from his
reverential attitude. He knew that Alice could not stop till the
movement had come to an end; and was not impatient, but absorbed in the
lovely harmony. But after a while the thought stole into even his mind
that it would be best to get as much into the light as possible, and he
followed Nelly to the window. There was a glimmering of the park visible
outside, and, what was more to the purpose, a great expanse of blue sky
and stars. And in the room there was the painted window, hanging in the
air like a picture worked in jewels, suspended without visible support;
and the music--and the two girls;--even a poet could not have objected
to all the accessories of the scene.
‘Thanks, Alice, it is lovely,’ cried Nelly; ‘but all the same for the
moment, my dear, I am glad it is done; for this is growing very ghostly.
Mr. Renton, I think I can see that you have come in, though you never
got permission. Go before us, please, and let us know if there are
lights in the passages: and if you are good, and do everything you are
told, we will forgive you for coming in. Alice, give me your hand. They
are both intoxicated with the music, these two, cried Nelly, as if to
herself; ‘and I don’t believe they have any eyes to see that window
hanging there all by itself. Come along, you people, who can hear and
can’t see:--let us get into the light.’
‘But I can see, too,’ said Alice, softly, coming to Nelly’s side.
‘Ah, you are a painter’s daughter,’ said Nelly: ‘but you would need to
be a cat to see anything now. Thanks, Mr. Renton. Now wait a moment till
our eyes are used to the light.’
‘Coming down to the common world again,’ said Frank, ‘is hard. No one
can feel it more than I do. Take care of that step,--even painters
themselves cannot always see.’
‘I wish the common world were not down so many stairs,’ said Nelly; and
then they emerged into the light. They were still in their morning
dresses; and Frank’s eyes, once more out of the darkness fell upon the
fresh, girlish face, the mass of shining hair,--all those tints of rose
and lily which belonged to Alice Severn and her sixteen years. There was
a great deal more expression in Nelly’s little brown, sparkling
countenance. She had lived a year or two longer in reality, a hundred
years or so longer in experience. Alice’s face lay like an inland lake
moved from above, from without, by soft, kissing breezes, by beams of
sunshine, but not by any movements from within. There were no volcanoes
underneath, nor quicksands, nor sunken rocks. She was very young, and
ignorant as a child. That want of definite expression which was a
trouble to some of her friends, to Frank was a beauty. She looked like a
saint, or an angel, to his eyes. In his worldly-mindedness and curious
calculations of what he called practical matters, this face disturbed
him, experienced man of the world as he was. What would she think of his
scheme for Laurie? The first effect of her presence had been to drive
Laurie and all his schemes out of his mind. And now the very contrast of
her innocence brought them all back with a rush. It was not this
visionary creature concerning whom the plot was laid;--but Nelly, little
sprite, who stood by her, a being manifestly of this world.
‘I wish Laurie had been here,’ cried Frank, abruptly, remembering his
_rôle_. ‘He is the only one of our family who has an eye. He would have
raved about your window, Miss Rich.’
‘That would have been kind of him,’ said Nelly, with a slight touch of
disdain. ‘It was Mr. Laurence Renton you were speaking of, Alice. Did
you say he had gone away?’
‘Gone away!’ cried Frank, with a start, which endangered his footing on
the stair.
‘To Italy,’ said Alice. ‘We were all so sorry. He went yesterday
morning, and the night before he came to bid mamma good-bye. They say it
was quite suddenly that he had made up his mind.’
‘To Italy!’ repeated Frank, in tones of absolute consternation. He
stopped on the stair as he went down, to apostrophise mentally both
heaven and earth. Gone! notwithstanding all the plans that were making
for him. Frank stopped short, so much affected by the news that he
forgot even the odd appearance that he made, standing on the stair.
‘Then how is it to be done,--and who is to do it?’ was the question that
immediately suggested itself to his mind. Nelly Rich stood and looked up
at him through the rails of the stair with bright eyes, full of
mischief, contemplating his puzzled countenance. Who was to do it? By
this time it seemed a matter of conscience to Frank that some Renton
should appropriate Nelly and her fifty thousand pounds. And Ben was
going to America, and Laurie had disappeared into the South. His face
expressed the liveliest perplexity and self-interrogation. Who was to do
it? Laurie being gone, and Nelly’s fortune still unsecured, was it not
necessary that he himself, casting all weaker ideas aside, should go in
himself for the fifty thousand pounds!
CHAPTER XII.
A PRISONER.
Frank found it very difficult to make out, both at that and a subsequent
period, how it was that no dog-cart came for him from the Manor on that
Saturday night. To be sure, the circumstance was easily enough explained
as a matter of fact, and meant simply this, neither more nor less,--that
his letter, intimating his intention to spend the Sunday with his
mother, and giving instructions when he was to be sent for, reached Mrs.
Renton only on Sunday at noon. But what Providence meant by permitting
such a thing to happen, was of course a totally different matter. The
mistake fitted in wonderfully, as mistakes so often do, with the course
of events. Richmont might not be so refined as the Manor, but it
certainly was, at the present moment, much more amusing. And though of
course Frank, like a good son, had been quite willing to give up the
Sunday to his mother, yet he was aware of the fact beforehand that the
Sunday would be dull. Mrs. Renton had lived a semi-invalid life so long
that it was rather a pleasure to her, now she was alone, to relapse
into full and unmitigated invalidism. She had so many draughts to take,
and precautions to bear in mind, that her whole time was filled up, and
that not so unpleasantly as might have been supposed. She had her
favourite maid, who never permitted her to forget anything; and when
there was no draught to be taken, was always hovering in the background
with cups of tea or arrowroot to sustain her mistress’s strength. Mrs.
Renton was very fond of her boys, but still, her own circumstances being
of such a character, she was not entirely dependent upon them for her
happiness. To be sure, if any one had so much as mentioned happiness to
her, she would have wept, poor soul, and declared positively that no
such thing was possible to her, thus left alone in the vacant house, her
husband dead, and her sons absent. But, nevertheless, the draughts, and
the care, and the tea, and the arrowroot, occupied her time, and gave
that gentle support of routine which is so invaluable to a languid life.
But it may be supposed that her room was not the most lively place in
the world to a young man; and Frank, in the drawing-room at Richmont,
with Mrs. Rich making all sorts of comical speeches, and Nelly quite
disposed to flirt, and Alice ready to play, did not feel any sensation
of despair when he was informed that no dog-cart had come, and that it
was now too late to expect it. ‘All the better luck for us,’ said Mr.
Rich. ‘Nothing for making acquaintance like a Sunday in the country.
There is your room ready, and we’re delighted to have you. By Monday you
will know how you like us, and we shall have found out how much we like
you.’
‘We know that already,’ said Mrs. Rich, who was fond of little inuendos;
‘and I am sure I don’t know how far it is safe to keep a handsome young
Guardsman in the house along with two girls. For my part, I don’t answer
for the consequences. I can’t be sure how I shall stand it myself,’ she
added, with a laugh, which was a little vulgar, no doubt, but mellow,
and not unpleasant to hear. Nelly looked up at her mother as if she
could have pinched her; but as for papa Rich, this kind of humour was in
his way, and he laughed too.
‘I’ll risk it,’ he said, ‘especially as the Guardsman has other fish to
fry, my dear, and isn’t likely to interfere with you. What’s the matter,
little Nell? You need not knit your brows at me. I hope I may express
myself as I like in my own house, and no offence to any one. Mr. Frank,
here, understands what I mean; and I am very glad he is going to stop
with us, whatever you may be, you little flirt. And where has Alice
Severn gone to? I want to speak to her. Don’t you think you could play
us some nice, old-fashioned tunes, my dear? I don’t understand your
grand music. That’s why I like your mamma’s pictures, you know. ’Igh art
goes a step beyond me; but give me a pretty woman and a bunch of nice
children, and I know what that means. And it is just the same in
music;--“Sally in our Alley,” and two or three more,--I like them better
than your sonatas; but I suppose you think me an ignorant old wretch for
that?’
‘No, indeed,’ said Alice; ‘I will play whatever you please.’
‘Then come with me,’ said the patron of art, giving Alice his fat arm.
Alf of the Buffs, who had arrived by the train, and on whose account
dinner had been postponed, was the only other member of the party, and
he had stretched himself at full length on the sofa with all the
appearance of being asleep. The other people had gone away early; and
Frank had Mrs. Rich and Nelly, in the intimacy of the domestic circle,
all to himself. Old Rich took Alice quite to the other end of the great
drawing-room, to the piano, which stood there, and the conversation went
on with a distracting accompaniment of tunes and the clapping of hands,
with which Alice’s audience hailed each air in succession. Frank’s
attention in particular was sadly distracted,--he could neither listen
nor stop listening; and yet the talk had taken a turn which, on the
whole, was rather interesting.
‘How will your mamma bear your going away?’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘Her
youngest;--I can feel for her. My eldest are married, and out in the
world; and I know it’s best for themselves, and I don’t mind. But Alf
and Nelly are my babies, just as you are your mother’s, Mr. Frank. What
should I do, if any one came to carry my little girl off to the end of
the world? And it will be harder still on your poor, dear mamma.’
‘But I can’t help it,’ said Frank. ‘You know,--I suppose everybody
knows,--the peculiarity in our circumstances. I can’t go on as I am
doing. India’s the place when a man has no money. I don’t know what
would become of me if I were to stay at home.’
‘Well,--you might marry an heiress, you know,’ said Mrs. Rich.
‘Mamma,’ said Alf, from the sofa,--not asleep, though he looked like
it,--‘if you have any heiresses in your pocket remember your own flesh
and blood first of all; don’t turn them over to Renton;--he can manage
for himself.’
‘Oh, yes; I don’t doubt he can manage beautifully for himself,’ said
Mrs. Rich, nodding her head; ‘but still he may be the better for a
little advice. An heiress is the very thing for you, Mr, Frank. As for
Alf, of course,--though I say it that shouldn’t,--he’ll be very well
off, and a catch for any one; as you would have been, but for that fancy
of your poor papa’s; Mr. Rich’s opinion has always been that his brain
must have been touched. But that is the thing for you,--as clear as
daylight. Marry a girl with money, and settle down at home; and don’t
go and break your mother’s heart. You take my advice, and tell her it
was I who gave it, and she’ll order her carriage directly, and come over
to Richmont and hug me,--though she would not so much as call, you know,
only for me.’
‘Indeed you do her an injustice,’ said Frank; ‘she is a great
invalid,--she never goes anywhere now.’
‘Then her carriage goes to the Rectory, which is not half a mile off;
but never mind,’ said Mrs. Rich. ‘I am sure I don’t mind. Give us a
little time, and well make our way. Yes; that’s what you’ve got to do.
Marry a girl with money. I’m sure you’d make her a good husband all the
same.’
I hope, if I were a husband at all, I should be a good one,’ said Frank,
laughing; ‘but I don’t think I should like to marry money. A little
could do no harm, of course,--just enough to keep her comfortable, and
as she had been used to be.’ As he said this, Frank, without knowing it,
looked direct at Nelly; and, to his consternation, caught her eye, and
saw her grow suddenly crimson; an example which, man of the world as he
was, he immediately followed. Then, to make things worse, he came to an
alarmed, embarrassed pause. ‘The man who ought to marry money is my
brother Laurie,’ he said hastily, and then stopped. What had he done?
Was it the fifty thousand pounds he was thinking of?--or what was it?
This was only the second time he had been in her company, and yet he
had committed both himself and Nelly,--or, at least, in the
consternation of the moment, so he thought.
‘It must be pleasant for the heiress to be discussed so calmly,’ said
Nelly all at once. ‘Of course, any woman is ready to marry any man who
presents himself. That’s the conclusion, isn’t it? But some girls are of
a different way of thinking. Why should Mr. Laurence Renton marry money,
I should like to know? I think he is very nice,--a great deal nicer
than----most men,’ said Nelly, with emphasis. Her cheek was more
crimson than ever, and the defiance was an exquisite compliment which
went to Frank’s heart. Yes,--it was droll, but it did really seem to him
that if he was disposed he might have that fifty thousand pounds. With
that he could have his horse and a great many luxuries besides; and
Nelly was very pretty, sitting there, opposite to him, with that blush
on her cheek, and soft indignation in her eyes.
‘Laurie is the best fellow that ever lived,’ he cried, recovering
himself with an effort; ‘but he does things for other people with a much
better grace than for himself. He has always been like that. Lazy
Laurence everybody calls him. He will never make his own way. I don’t
know what he has gone to do in Italy. But, all the same, there never was
such a good fellow. He is the kind of fellow,’ said Frank, with a
little effusion, ‘that something out of the way should happen to. He
ought to find a beautiful princess in a wood, and fall in love with her,
and save her from the giant; and then find out after all that she was
the daughter of the king of the gold-mines, and had her pockets full of
diamonds. That is the fate I should like for Laurie. Somehow he seems to
deserve it; and it never would occur to him to plan anything for
himself.’
‘Now I like that,’ cried Mrs. Rich; ‘I like you for being so proud of
your brother. There are heaps of heiresses, you know, in Italy--at least
so one reads in books; ladies travelling alone, that a young man could
make himself very useful to, and then in common gratitude---- Why it is
quite like a fairy tale. And when will your brother go? and what will he
do in Italy? Mr. Rich has promised to take us there next winter. I have
wanted to go all my life, Mr. Frank. It has been my dream. How strange
it would be if we should meet him! But, alas! we have no heiresses,’
said Mrs. Rich, casting a glance at Nelly, who, for her part, gave her
mother a quick, indignant look.
‘We shall go like a caravanserai,’ said Nelly, ‘with servants, and
companions, and all sorts of dead-weights. Papa says he means to take
that Count with him who is sick, and heaps of people. What I should like
to do would be to go all by myself, and live out of the English
quarter, and see all the pictures, and never say a word to anybody.
Fancy going to Rome and somebody saying to you, “ Isn’t it lovely?” as
if it were a scene in a pantomime! I do so hate all that. I hate the
books about parties to the Colosseum and rides in the Campagna. I want
to go to Rome, and live and work. I wish I were your brother. I wish I
could go wherever I pleased, and run about everywhere alone.’
‘I wish you could go with Laurie,’ said Frank, and for the moment it was
said with absolute simplicity, without a thought of his scheme; ‘that is
precisely what he will do; and he knows everything,--where to go, and
what to see.’ Then he caught the odd, inquiring glance Nelly shot at
him, and grew confused, he could scarcely tell why. ‘Of course, that is
nonsense,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘But it must be the pleasantest of all
when two people, just two, can ramble all about the world alone.’
Then there was another pause. What did he mean? He asked himself the
question, and could not answer it. Was it that he himself would like to
be one of the two, with a bright, little, vivacious, enthusiastic
creature by his side to make everything interesting? Or was it Laurie
who should take that place? Frank was so bewildered that he did not
know; and Nelly, sitting opposite to him, was so softened by this
curious talk, and looked so much a sweeter version of herself, as with
her face crimsoned and her eyes lit up, she sent a glance at him now and
then, half stealthy, half candid, that the heart began to beat in the
Guardsman’s bosom. Not that he cared much for Rome, or for rambling
about the world in general. The pictures would bore him. The rides in
the Campagna and the parties to the Colosseum would be best for Frank;
and as for running about among all the old holes and corners as Laurie
did, would not India be a thousand times better, with promotion, and
fighting, and tigers, and general novelty? Clearly Providence had made a
mistake about that dog-cart. It was Laurie who should have been stranded
at Richmont, and left to concert an Italian tour with Nelly Rich. How
perfectly they would have suited each other! But all the time Frank’s
heart felt soft to the bright, sparkling creature, who was actually
waiting, expecting the next words which he should speak.
‘It is very stupid on my part to talk like this,’ he said, with a little
forced laugh. ‘I shall be crossing the Desert most likely when you are
on your way, or creeping about Bombay or Calcutta, or some other
wretched place. But I must tell Laurie to look out for you, Mrs, Rich.
He is sure to be of use,’ he added, hastily. And then Frank’s temples
throbbed and grew crimson, and his heart gave a jump. Was it that Nelly
sighed, and gave her head a little, scarcely perceptible shake, like one
who has relinquished some pleasant thought? It was intensely flattering,
and Frank could not but feel the compliment. What a dear little thing
she was! How warm-hearted and how discriminating in her judgment! Frank
felt disposed to kiss her hand, or even her cheek, out of pure
gratitude. But still he was not disposed to give up India and his own
way, and wander over the world with her, even had she possessed twice
fifty thousand pounds.
And there was still the music going on at the other end of the room, and
Mr. Rich clapping his hands at the conclusion of each melody. It was
very different certainly from the programme up-stairs in the dark in the
music-room; but yet there was a charm in the quaint old airs which Alice
went on playing one after another, over and over again, without a sign
of weariness. A distant, visionary, unconscious creature, still
unawakened to any sense of personal life, rapt in the strains of her own
music--half child, half angel--as calmly indifferent to him and every
man as though they had all been like old Rich! Somehow this was the
image which most captivated the young man’s perverse fancy. He turned
his chair round and listened when the talk had come to this point. And
Nelly did not wonder. It seemed as if all had been said that could be
said thus. And Mrs. Rich began to applaud loudly. And then the Saturday
came to an end. It was only the second time he had been in this house.
That was the extraordinarily ludicrous part of it! In such a house men
grow quickly intimate.
CHAPTER XIII.
SUNDAY.
People are apt to talk of Sunday in the country as a pleasant thing, and
yet there are few things which require a more delicate combination of
circumstances to make it bearable. Far be it from me to say a word
against the English Sunday which is good for man and beast, and only a
little heavy upon the idle portion of the world, who have no particular
occasion for rest. Sunday at home, with one’s own occupations and
pleasures about one, is precisely what one chooses to make it,--an oasis
in the desert, a peaceful break upon the frets of life, or a weariness
and a nuisance, according to the inclinations of the individual. But
your Sunday is taken out of your hands when you visit your friends.
Frank Renton was nothing more than an ordinary young man, neither less
nor more devout than the average; and felt the weekly holiday often
enough lie heavy on his hands. But he, like everybody else, floated upon
the surface of the Sunday at Richmont,--a waif and stray, without any
will of his own, to be made what his entertainers pleased. Sunday
usually comprises morning church, which is one’s duty, and a blessed
relief from one’s friends; and then lunch, which is a happy interlude of
life; and then a dreadful afternoon to be got through somehow; enforced
aimless walks, if it is fine; aimless compulsory talk, in any case; if
it rains, confusion and despair till dinner comes,--a heavenly interval
of occupation! After that, if there is anything at all genial in the
nature of your interlocutors, the evening may be got through, with the
assistance of sacred music; but, oh, the joy, the relief, the
satisfaction, when ten o’clock comes, and one is justified in lighting
one’s candle and going to bed! Two girls in the house to walk with, and
talk to, naturally modified this frightful programme to the young man.
They all walked to church in the morning,--for Mr. Rich was
old-fashioned,--and after luncheon looked at each other to know what was
to be done. There was the flower-garden to visit, and the stables, and
Mr. Rich’s favourite walk round the grounds. Frank, being a stranger,
went through the whole of these varied operations. He visited the
flower-garden with Mrs. Rich, and the stables with Alf, and made the
round of the little park with the father and son together, and had all
the views pointed out to him. ‘But you know all this ground as well as
we do,’ the millionnaire said, though not until after he had cheerfully
pointed out everything that was to be seen, and all the points of
vision. ‘Ten thousand times better,’ Frank groaned to himself; but he
was too civil to speak out. It was a lovely day, in the end of April;
heaps of primroses were clustering in the woods, and the flower-beds
were gay with the first flush of spring; the lilacs and laburnums were
beginning to bloom; the orchards were all white, and the air full of
perfume. On such a day, as Mr. Rich justly said, it was a pleasure
merely to be out-of-doors. But Frank, who had abundant opportunity of
being out-of-doors, was indifferent to the pleasure. He had not anything
particular to say to Alf, and Alf had nothing particular to say to him.
So that Mr. Rich had it all his own way, and did the chief part of the
talking, and enjoyed himself. He went through the walks, a little in
advance of the two young men, with his hands folded under the tails of
his coat. His step was brisk, though theirs was sufficiently languid.
‘This was a sad desert when I came here,’ he would say, turning round,
and bringing them to a stop for a moment, ‘I had cartloads of rubbish
cleared away from this bank,--scrubby bushes, all choked and miserable,
without air to breathe or space to grow in. I had ’em all cleared away,
sir. And over there, there had been a little landslip, as you see, which
I stopped just in time. The whole slope would have fallen with those
pretty birches, but for what we had done. You can see how it’s all bound
and shored up. They told me I never could manage it; that a City man
knew nothing about such things. But just look at it now, and tell me if
anything could be more steady. It would defy an avalanche, that bank
would.’ And Mr. Rich stopped and patted the slope with his fat hands.
‘It seems beautifully done,’ said Frank, and Alf gave a little grunt, as
who should say, The old fellow knows what he is about.
‘I flatter myself you won’t see better work anywhere,’ said the
millionnaire. ‘We City men know a thing or two, Mr. Frank. We may not be
so fine as you soldiers, but we have an eye for practical matters. I was
not much to brag of in the way of prosperity when I first came to this
neighbourhood. We took a little house down here, my wife and I, for
change in the summer; and I set my eye on this place. I said to myself,
‘If I thrive I’ll settle there, if money will buy it.’ And there’s
nothing money will not buy. Here I am, you see, and my children after
me. What would the Beauchamps have thought if they had known that the
very name of their place was to be changed, and it was to be called
after the Riches, people nobody ever heard of? But a great many people
have heard of me now.’
‘Immense numbers, I am sure, sir,’ said Frank, throwing away his cigar.
He had the natural civility of his family, and could not turn an
absolutely deaf ear, sick as he was of the monologue. Even Alf took his
cigar out of his mouth, and looked at it curiously, as if it perhaps
could clear up the situation. ‘All the same; I don’t see that we are
anything remarkable,’ said Alf; which was almost as great a puzzle to
his father as a similar accident was to Balaam.
‘Oh dear, no, not all remarkable,’ said Mr. Rich, after he had stared
wildly at his son; and he gave a glance at Frank, and a little nod, to
signify his appreciation of his boy. ‘I don’t suppose you soldiers have
much need for brains,’ he added, with benevolent jocularity. ‘But to
return to the subject. I don’t know if you have observed how much I have
done to the house, Mr. Frank. That music-room Nelly is so fond of was
the merest wreck and ruin. Lumber in it,--actually lumber!--old pictures
turned against the wall that were not worth sixpence, and trunks full of
old papers, and everything that is most dreary. I had Runnymede, the
architect, down, who knows all about that style of thing. I said, “Name
your own price, and take your time, and come and dine with me whenever
you are in the county.” These were all the conditions I made, and in six
months, sir, I had everything restored; and as pretty a little domestic
chapel,--the best judges tell me,--as exists in England. All money,
sir,--money and a little taste. You may think I have too high an opinion
of what money can do; but I don’t think one can have too high an idea.
It can do anything. It’s the greatest power known. You may have the best
intentions in the world, but you can’t carry them out without money. You
can’t serve your friends without money; for influence means money, you
know, however incorruptible we are now-a-days. When I stand and look
round me, and see all the changes that have been made, I feel that
nothing but money could have done it. We did not have all this by birth,
as the Beauchamps had. You should see my cattle at the farm. The
Beauchamps never could afford to keep up that home-farm. I feel sorry
for them; but it was clearly the best thing they could do to go away.
They were keeping the sunshine off the land, and preventing it from
thriving. You must have money, Mr. Renton, before you can do anything.
It would be a great deal better for you young men if you recognised that
at the first start.’
‘I don’t see what good it would do us,’ said Frank. ‘We can’t invent
money. Of course I know it would be very nice to have it,--but wishing
is not having;’ and with that he turned his eye towards the music-room,
the windows of which were open. He was wishing to be there, there could
be no doubt; but I don’t think there was any calculation in his head, or
at that moment the smallest recollection of the fifty thousand pounds.
‘That is true,’ said Mr. Rich; ‘but when it comes in your way you should
know better than to put it aside, as I have known some foolish young
fellows do. There is your brother, for instance. Knowing who he was, and
being neighbours, and so forth, why I’d have bought anything of his own
as fast as look at it,--anything! As for merit, I should never have
asked if it was good or bad. But, no! Instead of taking me to his own
studio, where he must have had something to show,--must have had, don’t
you see, or what is the good of a studio at all?--he took me to
Suffolk’s and I bought that picture instead. That is what I call running
in the face of Providence. Serve your friends next to yourself, if you
like,--I don’t object to that; but to serve them before yourself is
going counter to every right feeling. Friendship is all very well, but
you can command even friendship if you have money enough. You prefer to
think of disinterestedness and all that sort of thing, you young
fellows; but the only man that can really be disinterested is a rich
man. Therefore be as rich as you can,--that has been my motto all my
life.’
Frank laughed, though he did not much like the lecture. ‘That is all
very well,’ he said; ‘but how are we to grow rich, except on the turf,
or at cards, or something? And you are just as likely, for that matter,
to grow poorer than richer. They are having some music up there,’ he
said, turning decidedly in the direction of the music-room. Mr. Rich
shook his head.
‘You won’t make much by music,’ he said,--‘at least, you amateurs don’t.
If I were Mrs. Severn I’d train that girl for the stage, or something.
Why not? She must work for her living, poor thing! And do you take my
advice, Mr. Frank,--don’t waste your chances, or refuse a good thing
when you may have it. Friends are all very well, but serve yourself
first. You know the proverb,--“He who will not when he may, when he
would he shall have nay.”’
‘If I should ever have any good things in my power I will recollect,’
said Frank, laughing. But he was disturbed by this strange persistency.
They had come at last, he thanked heaven, to the end of the walk; and it
was on Mr. Rich’s lips to propose another round. ‘I think I’ll go
up-stairs and see what the young ladies are doing,’ said Frank, hastily.
Then Alf uttered a haw-haw under his moustache, and his father chorused
loudly,--a liberty which the subject of this mirth somewhat resented.
‘Ay, do,’ said Mr. Rich; ‘more natural than listening to an old fogey
chattering, isn’t it? Go to the young ladies,--I don’t doubt you’ll be
very welcome; but nevertheless, Mr. Frank, don’t forget that I have been
giving you good advice,--and very good advice, too, you’ll find it. Come
along, Alf.’
Frank turned back to the house with a wonderful sense of relief, while
the father and son resumed their walk. What could old Rich mean? What
were the good things that might be coming his way that he was to be
careful not to refuse? The question sent the blood to his face, and a
thrill, for which it was difficult to account, through his whole frame.
Was it Nelly’s fortune that was thus waiting his acceptance? Was it----
He quickened his pace, and felt his temples throb, and something buzz in
his ears. He had put aside the idea. He had resolved in his own mind
that it was Laurie who was to face this question; but Laurie was gone,
and, so far as he could see, everybody was agreed in thrusting it on his
own notice. Was it necessary that he should go over all the arguments
once more? ‘Serve yourself first and then your friends,’ old Rich had
said, as if he had divined the intention of the young soldier to
transfer this possible piece of good fortune to his brother,--as if he
had any right to transfer Nelly Rich to any one! All this time she might
be, and probably was, quite unconscious of the whole business. A girl
might flirt a little with a man without ever thinking of him after. He
was the only fellow at present with whom she could flirt. His face grew
hotter and hotter as he went up-stairs. ‘Don’t waste your chances, or
refuse a good thing when you may have it,’ old Rich had said. After all,
Frank himself was but a younger son. However matters turned out, he
could not come in to a great fortune; and here was competence, comfort,
security, before him. Frank had never been brought up to be anything but
a young man of the world, and he did not know indeed how far it was
right for him to put aside this chance. It was not a temptation he had
to set his face against,--it was a reasonable, sensible prospect which
probably he would be a fool not to seize upon. His freedom, after all,
was but a poor thing to set against all that he would gain by such a
marriage,--freedom for the mess, and the club, and the monotonies of a
young man’s life! For gaiety is as monotonous in its way as dulness; and
Frank was man enough to feel that the kind of existence he was leading
was not so good or so delightful as to be held fast at all costs. He
would not be rendered miserable by being withdrawn from the mess. It
would be no unendurable bondage to have a bright little companion to go
everywhere with him! His mind dwelt for a moment on that thought with a
softening sense of tenderness and gratified vanity. Then he pulled
himself up, as it were, with a start. Was that Nelly, that sudden vision
that had flitted before him? or was it--some one else? Breathless, not
stopping to make any further investigation, he rushed up-stairs.
They were both there as usual;--Nelly in the low chair, with a book in
her hand, talking to Alice, who stood leaning against the window, which
was open. The sounds Frank had heard had been imaginary sounds. ‘Come
and talk,’ Nelly had said, not caring at that moment for music. The soft
air breathing through the window,--the sight of the budding trees and
green of the park,--the sweetness of the flowers, were all music to
Alice. How different it was from Fitzroy Square! The world, with which
the child had as yet made so little acquaintance, breathed melodies to
her from every corner. She was glad to play for anybody who asked her;
but for herself, music was not so much a necessity there as at home. And
she was very content to stand by the open casement with that sweetness
which was sweeter even than the Lieder breathing about her, and the air
rustling softly through her curls. Nelly was asking her all sorts of
questions about home, and about Laurie Renton, who had at that moment an
interest for her. Why had he gone away so suddenly? Had anything
happened? ‘You did not refuse him, did you?’ she had asked, just as
Frank entered the house.
‘I,--refuse him? What do you mean?’ cried Alice, opening her brown eyes.
‘I mean what everybody means,’ cried Nelly. ‘Alice, my dear, you are a
perfect baby. Did you never hear of a girl refusing a man before? Then
you must have been very badly brought up. Perhaps you think we are to
give in to them whenever they ask us; but that would never suit me.’
‘I have not thought anything about it,’ said Alice, with a sudden blush
on her innocent cheeks.
‘And yet you are sixteen,’ said Nelly. ‘I had not only thought about it,
but done it, before I was your age. But then I have money. In this house
we think a great deal of money. It seems quite right and natural to them
all that men should ask me, and pretend to be in love with me, because
papa is rich. Did you hear Frank Renton say last night he would never
marry for that? Young men are all so frightfully prudent now-a-days;
they laugh, and smirk, and say, ‘Oh yes, of course,’ and look at me as
if I was something into the bargain that had to be taken with my
fortune. I wish I had been an artist’s daughter, like you. Then I could
have taken up my father’s profession, and nobody would have thought it
strange. If I married that Laurie Renton now----’ said Nelly, with
meditative calm. Alice’s blush grew deeper and deeper, and she turned
away her face. She was a fanciful child, full of ideas which most people
would think overstrained; and it made her cheeks flame, though she had
nothing to do with it, to hear Nelly’s philosophical peradventures. And
then she remembered how suddenly Mr. Frank Renton had come in upon them
last night. If he should by chance hear anything of a conversation like
this!
‘I don’t know what you mean. I--can’t--understand how you can--speak
so,’ said Alice.
‘That is because you have been kept in the nursery, and never heard
anything,’ said Nelly; ‘and much the best thing too. But it is long
enough since I have been in the nursery, and there are always heaps of
people about the house who do not care a straw for us. Why shouldn’t I
have married Laurie Renton? It would have been a very good thing for
him, and he is living just as I should like to live. Ah! you have heard
a great deal about love, and all that nonsense,’ said Nelly, with a
sigh.
‘I have never heard anything about it. Why should people talk of such
things?’ cried the indignant Alice.
‘Why shouldn’t you talk of anything you think about?’ said her
companion; ‘for of course you have thought about it, and read about it,
and believe in it. But one comes not to believe. I don’t care a straw
for Laurie Renton. I don’t know him. I have seen him once, and most
likely I shall never see him again. But he and I might have made what
you may call a reasonable match. He would have been a great deal the
better of my money; and I should have been much the better of having him
to go about with me, and take care of me, and tell me what to do. It
would have been the very thing for us both.’ And Nelly sighed again,
having thus oddly brought herself just to the same point to which
Frank’s deliberations had brought him. But the sigh was not for Laurie;
indeed, as she admitted, she did not know Laurie. If Frank had been like
his brother, perhaps---- But he was not like his brother, nor was he
like herself. He was Frank, a young Guardsman and butterfly, like the
rest; one of the men who had seized upon her own faulty sketch, and
taken no notice of Suffolk’s beautiful picture; a young fellow,--she
said to herself,--without two ideas in his head; and yet----; ‘I suppose
you don’t know much about his brother?’ she said to Alice, leaning her
arm upon the broad ledge of the window, and her head on that. The two
girls were in this attitude, the one looking up to the other, when Frank
himself arrived at the door.
This time he was very modest and discreet. He knocked, which startled
them much, and then he asked, ‘May I come in?’ and entered softly after
a pause. ‘I was told I might come,’ said Frank, folding his hands. ‘I
hope I have not done anything wrong.’
And Nelly looked up at him with a sudden blush. He was handsome, and
young, and full of that splendid freedom and independence of movement
which girls, being excluded from it, admire so intensely. Why should he
insist on coming, and stand thus suppliant, with his hands folded,
unless---- And last night he had knelt,--he had gone down on his knees
as men are not in the habit of doing out of novels; and he was not like
the other men. He was not exactly like them, at least, as they were like
each other. And---- Nelly extended her hand, which was unnecessary.
‘When a man has made up his mind in this determined way to effect an
entrance, of course he must do it,’ said Nelly. ‘Come in, since you will
come. Come and talk: we were talking of you, and you can give us all
the information we want.’
‘Talking of me?--that is too much happiness,’ said Frank.
‘That is, of your brother, which comes to about the same thing,’ said
Nelly, carelessly. ‘Please give us a full account of all you have ever
done, and your motives for doing it. I am full of curiosity to-day. It
is Sunday, and one has nothing else to do. You had better begin at Eton,
and tell us all about it,’ cried the girl, laying back her head upon her
high-backed chair, and looking full at him, with that calm observation
in her face which is so exasperating to ordinary mortals. Frank was not
exasperated, however, for there was a certain trace of nervousness in
Nelly’s audacity. As for Alice, she was horror-stricken.
‘Oh, Nelly! how can you speak so?’ she cried. To Alice, Frank Renton was
a paladin,--too fine a being to approach with freedom at all, much less
with candid questioning. Tell them everything he ever did! He would be
angry, Alice thought. ‘Oh, Nelly! how dare you?’ she cried. And Frank
was as much touched by the sound of that soft little exclamation as if
her utterances had been those of the highest wisdom.
‘Begin with Eton?’ he said. ‘It is so long ago I forget; and besides, I
have always been so good, and gentle, and well behaved, that there is
nothing to tell about me. I will tell you about Laurie, if you like. He
was always an unlucky fellow,--too late for everything, and never quite
sure whether he was right or wrong;--but the best fellow that ever was
born. You would have liked Laurie if you had known him. And I wanted you
to know him,’ continued Frank. ‘You would have suited each other so
well.’
‘Should we?’ said Nelly, still looking up, and leaning back her head
against the high back of her chair. ‘Alice, please go and play us
something. If you cannot manage the organ, there is the piano. Mr.
Renton, tell me why you wanted me to know your brother, and why you
thought he would have particularly suited me.’ The question brought the
guilty blood to Frank’s face. What a little inquisitor she was! What
strange, outspoken people were the entire family! ‘Why did you think he
would have suited me?--tell me,’ she asked, looking fixedly into his
face.
‘Oh, I only thought,--I don’t know that I had any motive;--I suppose
because you are both fond of pictures, and both.’--here Frank paused to
take breath,--‘both,--why both artists, you know, in a way,’ he said,
with confusion; and during this broken utterance Nelly never once
removed from him her brilliant eyes.
‘I see,’ she said quietly, while Frank looked out at the window, and saw
Mr. Rich and Alf leisurely turning down towards the woods, and wished
he were with them after all. Being advised for his good was bad enough,
but to have his secrets thus demanded of him, and himself looked through
and through, was worse. Confound it! what did she see? that he had been
thinking of handing her over to Laurie? that he had been ready to
traffic with her, presuming on the notice she had taken of him, and
coolly planning to get her money for his brother? Was this what she saw,
the little sorceress? Just then Alice, who had been sent away not to
disturb the investigation, began to strike some plaintive chords on the
piano. Ah, there was a creature who would never gaze at a man with such
disdainful, suspicious scrutiny--a consolatory being, that would sweeten
and smooth life, and make its sorrows bearable, instead of adding
distraction to distraction! Frank felt sure that she had heard what was
passing, and struck in at the most difficult moment to relieve his
embarrassment and tranquillise his mind. Bless her! and of the other he
had said, in his perplexity, Confound her! While he stood silent,
looking out, the music stole about his heart and caressed and soothed
him. He felt as if it had not been the music but the musician who did
so; but of course that was nonsense. It freed him from the necessity of
making Nelly any further answer, or asking what it was she saw, as a man
strong in conscious right might have done. But all Frank’s consciousness
was of wrong.
It was Nelly who was the first to speak. She changed her position
rapidly, and with it her manner and all that was objectionable in her
looks. She leaned forward to him with her arm on the ledge of the
window. ‘I am impertinent,’ she said; ‘yes, I know you think so; but you
must not be angry, Mr. Renton, as Alice says.’
‘Angry!’ cried Frank.
‘Yes, angry; you might be, for I have been very disagreeable. I can’t
help being disagreeable now and then. You are very fond of your brother,
and you wanted me to know him. It was a great compliment; and before you
came I was saying to Alice how I wished I could have gone with him, and
lived just as he did. But I can’t, you know. A girl never can do
anything she wants to do. That is what makes us envy you so, and admire
your independence and your freedom,’ said Nelly, looking up with
different eyes,--with eyes as plaintive and insinuating as the
music,--into Frank’s face.
What could he do? He was mollified in spite of himself. ‘Not so very
independent, after all,’ he said. ‘A subaltern cannot boast of much in
that way. I have to come and go as I am told, and ask leave before I can
get away to see my friends.’
‘And have a hard life altogether,’ said Nelly. ‘That is very sad; but if
I were to ask leave ever so they would not let me go to Rome as your
brother has done. I wish he had been my brother, and then I might have
gone with him; but our poor boys don’t understand that sort of thing.
George knows about the money market and all that. And when Harry comes
home he will probably be able to talk of indigo. Isn’t it indigo? And
Alf,--what should you say Alf knows most about, Mr. Renton?’ said Nelly,
with fun dancing in her eyes.
Poor Alf! Frank could not but laugh, though he was conscious of not
being particularly clever himself. And it was impossible not to look
down upon the sparkling face that gazed up at him. The music plucked at
his heart and called him to attention; but he could not be so rude as to
turn from Nelly. And then something might still be done in Laurie’s
interest. ‘If you go to Italy next winter you will meet my brother,’ he
said; ‘at least I hope so. I should like to be able to tell him to look
out for you, if I knew when you were going;--I am sure he could be of
use.’
‘Next winter!’ said Nelly, ‘that is a long time off yet. No one can tell
what may have happened before next winter. Do you expect to be gone from
here that you speak in that uncertain way about where we are going?’
‘I expect to be in India by that time,’ said Frank.
‘In India? Oh, yes, I remember; so you said,’ said Nelly, and made a
pause; then she asked suddenly, with a hurried glance at him, ‘And you
think there is nothing that could happen that would make you change
your mind?’
‘I don’t know what could happen that would change my mind,’ said Frank.
He faltered as he spoke, knowing that there was one thing,--and that her
very self,--which might alter all his plans; and yet feeling no desire
to have his plans altered; but a more energetic determination, on the
contrary, to carry them out. But what could a girl possibly mean by such
a question? Not that, surely, of all things in the world! The pause that
ensued was full of embarrassment. And the music swept in again suddenly
and filled the whole place, and the rustling, palpitating silence
between them. Nelly spoke no more. She let her head drop upon one hand,
and with the fingers of her other beat time softly on the little table.
The subject of the conversation was nothing to her; that was the
inference in her change of attitude. ‘Listen; how lovely that is!’ were
the first words she spoke; and yet she admitted that she did not care
for music. Frank stood and leaned upon the open casement, with his eyes
vacantly fixed upon the green world without; and though there was still
the vibration in the air caused by the strange, secret, unacknowledged
duel which had been going on between Nelly and himself, the sweet sounds
once more entered into and possessed him. The strain took him upon its
growing current like a toy, and flooded him, as it were, with changed
sensations and a curious quietness. It soothed, and cheered, and stilled
him all in a moment. And strangely enough, though he was a young man who
should have known better, all these results seemed to him to have been
produced not by the music but by the musician. It was to Frank as if
Alice herself had whispered a soft ‘Never mind’ into his ear, and had
charmed him instantly into such dreams as put away from him all
recollection of the former embarrassment. He stood thus till long after
Nelly had ceased to beat with her fingers on the table, and till she had
almost grown tired of wondering at his absorbed countenance. She had
suffered the music to end that particular conversation, feeling that it
could go no further; but she had naturally expected that another
conversation should begin after a proper interval. But such an idea did
not occur to Frank. He was really absorbed in the music,--a thing which
bewildered Nelly. She sat and beat time for five minutes, and then she
stopped and looked at the Guardsman and at Alice with a look of wonder
in her face. But Frank did not even observe her look. When she could no
longer refrain herself, she burst into sudden speech.
‘I do not understand music,’ she said. ‘Do you know what that means, you
two? You are both so absorbed you have lost sight of everything else.
Does it mean anything? Pray tell me what it is?’
‘What it means?’ said Frank; and Alice, though she had but half heard
the question, paused as by instinct, the chords still vibrating under
her fingers. She had been perfectly passive, taking no part in the talk,
not even knowing what was said; yet suddenly she too felt as Frank did,
that they were engaged in opposite armies, two against one. Nelly
affronted, a little hurt, angry without meaning to be angry, stood on
one side--and on the other, the performer and the listener stood
together, having forgotten everything. Alice felt this by instinct, with
a quick pang of sorrow, yet of satisfaction. He and she were on the same
side. It was pleasant not to stand alone.
‘You look moon-struck,’ said Nelly, more and more indignant, ‘and it is
still broad daylight. Yes; tell me what it means. What wailing spirit is
in the keys? I cannot make it out. I have been listening and wondering
for ten minutes. I know what books mean, and pictures; but I can’t
understand music. Tell me, you two, who are fond of it, what it is all
about?’
Then Frank turned round upon Alice, and a look of mutual appeal passed
between them. Mean? It was part of a mass; but Frank, for his part at
least, did not know the solemn words to which the music was wedded; and
he wanted no meaning that could be put into words. He felt what it was,
instinctively. It was the only poetry of which his mind was susceptible.
Alice was more fanciful, more imaginative, perhaps more intellectual
than the young Guardsman; but yet the question was to her much what the
question, What did ‘In Memoriam’ mean? would have been to a mind of
different inclinations. The two looked at each other in a momentary
wondering consultation. They were the two against one, connected by a
secret bond. In a moment the colour flamed from one young face to the
other. A sensation of happiness, tenderness, exquisite satisfaction and
contentment, came over them both. Neither could explain, and yet both
knew, felt, and felt together. And were ashamed!--Surely a more innocent
bond could not have been. As for Nelly, with her quick eyes she saw the
glance, and understood, and flamed up also, all over, with resentment
and indignation, and a mortified sense of being superseded.
‘Yes.’ she said, with a hard little laugh, ‘consult each other! I have
asked heaps of musical people the same question; but they never could
tell me. What is it about? Is there a story in it, or any meaning? Have
a consultation; two heads are better than one. And please, when you make
it out, tell me,’ she cried, rising from her seat. ‘I will go and get a
book that I can understand.’
And before they could either of them say a word she was gone out of the
room. The movement was so sudden, that they were both taken by surprise.
‘What is the matter? Is she affronted?’ said Frank, with a secret sense
that he himself was the sinner. As for Alice, she was struck with
consternation. ‘What have we done?’ she said, faltering, and then
recollected herself, and blushed more deeply than ever. And there was a
pause of dismay, during which the two strangers listened and waited for
the return of the daughter of the house. Then Alice rose with tears in
her eyes.
‘Mr. Renton, I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘Miss Hadley always tells me
musical people are so selfish, thinking everybody must like it. I will
go and beg Nelly’s pardon. I did not mean any harm.’
‘Harm?’ said Frank with indignation; but before he could add another
word he found himself alone.
CHAPTER XIV.
FRANK’S PERPLEXITIES.
It will be perceived, from all that has been said, that Nelly Rich used
more freedom in the expression of her sentiments than is generally
expected from girls of her age. A well brought-up young woman is not
supposed to go off affronted when her admirer, real or supposed, shows a
sudden interest in music, or anything else, independent of herself. The
modern code of manners exacts that she should, if not grin, at least
smile and bear it, with as much courage and as little of the air either
of offence or resignation, as possible. Nelly betrayed her less exalted
origin in this, that she allowed her real sentiments to escape her.
There can be no doubt that she had given Frank intimations of her
readiness to look favourably upon him which a more reticent girl would
have blushed to give, and on which was built much that would else have
seemed coxcombical in his behaviour. When a young woman asks if there is
no possible chance that would induce a young man to change his mind
about going to India or elsewhere, she is either beguiling and deluding
that young man, or she is exhibiting, as far as she can, ‘intentions’
which are generally supposed to originate on the other side. And then
her abrupt exit was a startling thing. When he was left alone in the
music-room with the open piano, and Nelly’s book lying on the table,
Frank did not feel comfortable. He was left, as it were, master of the
field. But it cannot be said that it is a pleasant thing to rout your
friends so completely in their own house, and find yourself in solitary
possession of their usual haunts. The evening passed, however, less
unpleasantly than this scene would have led a looker-on to suppose.
Alice, learning wisdom from experience, excused herself on the plea of
being tired from playing; and Frank made his peace with Nelly, saying no
more about his brother, and talking of the Beauchamps, and Mary
Westbury, and his own home. The Renton woods were an unfailing
subject,--as were also his own boyish adventures, into the history of
which he was drawn by Mrs. Rich, whose inquiries were manifold. A man,
especially if he is still a boy, has always a certain pleasure in
uttering such reminiscences to sympathetic ears. The ladies laughed at
his Eton scrapes, and were edified by his adventures on the river, and
listened with ready interest, and smiles, and wanderings, to all his
schoolboy tales. He felt himself of importance as he turned from one to
another, and it pleased him to see Nelly seriously inclined to listen.
She was interested,--it was no make-believe,--interested in Frank in
the first place, and after that, like a true woman, interested in every
detail about him. She liked to know how he had distinguished, and how he
had committed, himself. It seemed to give her something to do with him;
and Frank, too, felt the charm of confidence. She had put aside her
waywardness, and listened with bright eyes of interest, with an eager
ear, with smiles and exclamations. She made him describe Renton to her
over and over again, and those points of view which people went to see.
‘I could row you over,’ he said, ‘any day. From Cookesley to Renton is
an easy pull. Let us make up a party and do it. The river is lovely, and
if you have not seen it before----’
‘I have never been higher up than Cookesley,’ said Nelly; and thus it
was arranged, though Mrs. Rich shook her head.
‘We shall see when the time comes,’ that wise mother said; and Frank
perceived that it was only in case his mother should make up her mind to
be civil that this little expedition would be permitted.
He made himself very agreeable to Nelly that evening, undismayed by the
events of the afternoon. Alice was out of the way. She was at the other
end of the room, looking over engravings, and resisting Alf’s entreaties
that she should play something. ‘Nelly would not like it,’ she said to
herself; ‘she is talking, and she likes that better.’ And Alice felt
herself somewhat silent and wistful, and wished herself back in Fitzroy
Square. That evening it appeared to her that she was not enjoying her
visit as she had expected to do. She missed her mother, and she missed
the children, and Miss Hadley, and her usual duties, and perhaps
something else too, though she did not know what was in her own
thoughts. Sometimes she cast a wistful glance across the room at Nelly
smiling and softened, with that look of absorbed attention in her
brilliant eyes. Alice had been shocked by her friend’s freedom of
speech, but, as was so natural, impressed by it also. Unconsciously she
herself began to speculate about Nelly. Could there be--as girls
say--anything between her and Frank Renton? Was that why she was cross,
and was it not the music? Alice felt herself to be pushed aside, and it
was not a cheerful feeling; but fortunately the only form it took was a
longing for home. She had home to fall back upon whatever might befall
her here. If any vague discontent came down upon her heart, happiness
and peace, as of old, dwelt and waited for her in the Square. This was
her feeling, as she sat in the distant corner looking over the
photographs. Alf had settled down sulkily when she refused to play to
him, on a sofa near, and Mr. Rich slept the sleep of the just, the
Sunday evening crown of the week’s exertion, in an easy chair midway
between her and the table, with a lamp burning brilliantly upon it,
round which were grouped Mrs. Rich and Nelly and the young visitor.
When Alice saw them laughing and talking, she felt that she would have
liked to be there too, and have a part in the fun. But they did not call
her, and she was too shy to go unasked, and she found the evening a
little long.
When Frank Renton left Richmont the next morning it was with a mind by
no means settled or at rest. He had received the warmest invitations to
return from the parent pair, and Nelly was not slow to intimate that she
looked for him soon. ‘Come over here when Lord Edgbaston’s refined
society palls upon you,’ Nelly said. ‘Indeed, Edgbaston is a very good
fellow,’ Frank answered, apologetically. ‘I know he is a lord,’ was
Nelly’s reply. She did not care for a lord, nor had she given so much of
her society or conversation to any one of her followers, though many of
them were much more eligible in every way than Frank. This compliment
went to the bottom of his heart. No doubt she was full of intelligence
and discrimination, and could see the difference between one man and
another; and she was, when she liked, the brightest little sympathetic
creature, and awfully clever,--clever enough to make up a man’s
deficiencies in that way; but yet----! These were the young man’s
thoughts as he walked down to Cookesley to get his boat. He was going to
the Manor, after all, to see his mother; and on the way he turned
everything over again in his mind. Nelly was very nice, when she
pleased; and though her connexions were nothing to brag of, still that
was not a thing which people took into severe consideration when a man
married money, especially when the money was young and pretty. And
yet----! Frank could not but ask himself how it was that the girl who
took a fellow’s fancy--the one he would really have gone after had he
been able to choose for himself--should never be the one who had the
fifty thousand pounds. It was a curious spite of fortune. When he
directed his mind to the serious consideration of this grand
question--the first great social problem he had ever tackled on his own
account--a singular dissipating influence always arrested him. Stray
notes of music would float across his mind,--a bit of a melody which
compelled him to hum it,--a perplexing bar which would separate from
everything else, and echo in his ear. And when he returned to the
consideration of Nelly Rich, another little agile figure stepped in
before her, the one shadow jostling the other out of the way with a
curious reality. It was not he who did it, nor had his will any share in
the matter. They did it themselves, independent of any influence of his.
So that the more he thought it over the more perplexed he became; and
yet it was not a matter which could be suffered to run on and be decided
any time. It must be settled, and that at once.
With his head full of these thoughts, he walked down across the
cheerful, blooming country to Cookesley. The day was quite bright enough
for the expedition he had proposed to Nelly; and when the recollection
of this proposed expedition came back to his mind, Frank fell into
pondering whether his mother would call. Why should she not call? It was
quite true that she was an invalid; and also true that she was in the
deepest of mourning; but still, the carriage, with Mary in it, and a
card, would do. Mere civility! he said to himself. And if it should be
for Laurie’s interest,--or even for his own! Instead of going to India.
Frank knew that his mother would have visited anybody in the country on
that inducement. And it might come to that. He stepped into his boat
with so serious a countenance that the men at the wharf took note of it.
‘Them Rentons, they ain’t up to no good,’ one said to another. ‘The
eldest gentleman, as was here the other day, was awful changed, and this
one, as is the swellest of all, looks as black as if he was a-carrying
of the world on his shoulders.’ This chance observation Frank overheard
as he glided his boat through the maze of skiffs into clear water. It
made him smile when he was fairly afloat and out of reach of
observation. He had more than the world on his shoulders. What would the
mere world have been, or any superficial weight, compared to the task of
deciding what his whole life was to be? According as he made up his mind
now would be the direction and colour of his existence. No wonder he
looked black. But how was it that the eldest gentleman had so changed?
And Laurie was gone without giving any reason. It was hard to think that
it was their father’s fault,--the father who had been so good to them.
Seven months before they had all looked up to him with the undoubting,
affectionate confidence of sons who had never known anything but
kindness; and now they were all scattered to the different corners of
the world, separated from each other, broken up, and set adrift. Frank
was more a man of the world than either of his brothers, though he was
so young. He could not but ask himself,--Was not old Rich right? Mr.
Renton’s mind must have been touched. He could not have been guilty of
such an injury to them all had he been in full possession of his reason.
Thus, if he did not look black, he looked at least very grave, as he
pulled up the river, unlike the light-hearted young Guardsman who had so
often made the banks ring with his laughter and boyish nonsense. He was
approaching his twenty-first birthday, and he was having the grand
problem submitted to his decision. It was not pleasure and virtue,
certainly, which stood before him offering; him the irrevocable choice.
There was no particular sin in adopting either course, and no
unspeakable delight; nothing infinitely seductive to move his senses, or
loftily excellent to restrain them. If he were to marry Nelly and stay
at home, he would be to all intents and purposes as good and as honest
as if he went to India. And if he went to India he would be sufficiently
well off, and quite as happy,--perhaps happier than if he stayed at
home. The question was a fine modern one between two neutral shades of
well-doing, and not a primitive alternative between black and white,
salvation and ruin. You will say that to marry a girl he did not love
would have been a sin; but Frank did not see it in that light. If he did
marry her, no doubt they would get on very well together. Nelly was not,
as we have already said, a temptation to be resisted, but, most
probably, a sober duty which he ought not to neglect. He was not
passionate, like Ben, nor was he meditative, like his brother Laurie. He
was the practical man of the family. If it had been decided to be right,
no doubt he would have done it like a man, and been quite comfortable
ever after. The difficulty was that there was too much neutral tint
about the whole question. It was possible that he might do quite as well
for himself in India as by marrying money. The chances were too equal,
the gain too uncertain, to make the decision easy.
Mrs. Renton received him as usual in her dim room with the blinds down,
a bottle of medicine on the table, and her arrowroot in the background.
It was a different atmosphere, certainly, from that of Richmont. His
mother wept a few tears as Frank kissed her. She was apt to do so
now-a-days when one of her sons appeared. And Ben’s farewell visit had
been but a few days before, and had shaken her more than anything that
had happened since her husband’s death. She could do nothing but talk of
him. ‘He was looking quite well, Frank, quite well,’ she said, over and
over again, ‘though I am sure living shut up in London all winter would
have killed any one else. And he is to sail on Friday,’ Mrs. Renton
added with a sigh. As for Mary Westbury, she, too, bore traces of having
been moved by Ben’s visit. ‘Oh, he is quite in good spirits about
going,’ she interposed. ‘I think he likes the idea.’ Frank, with his
new-born experience, felt at once that something must have happened, and
that all was not merely simple, straightforward, cousinly friendship
between Mary and Ben.
‘I suppose that was why you did not send for me,’ he said; ‘but, mamma,
you must take the consequences. Instead of only dining at Richmont, I
have passed the Sunday there, and I hope you will be so polite as to
call. They are very good sort of people, and they have been very kind to
me.’
‘Those new people!’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘What a house for you to spend
Sunday in! Your note never came till yesterday, when the servants came
back from church; and I thought of course you must have gone back to
Royalborough. Mary will tell you all about it, and how we consulted what
to do.’
‘But, mother, I want you to call on Mrs. Rich,’ repeated Frank.
‘My dear!’ said Mrs. Renton, sitting up on her sofa.
But Frank was aware that she must not be allowed to stand up for
herself, and confirm her own resolution by talk. ‘They are friends of
Laurie’s,’ he said, making a little gulp at the fib; ‘they are fond of
him, and they may have it in their power to be kind to him, too. They
are going to Italy next year.’
‘My poor Laurie!’ cried Mrs. Renton. ‘He has written me such a nice
letter. He says he could not come to say good-bye; that it would have
been too much for him. So he says; but I am sure he was afraid to come
to let me see how pale he was looking. You don’t think it is anything
about his lungs which has taken him to Italy? He might confide in you.’
‘Why it is for his pictures, not his lungs,’ said Frank, with the
cheerful confidence of ignorance. ‘Those Riches are friends of his. I am
sure it would be good for him if you could make up your mind to call.
Don’t you think he is the sort of man who ought to marry money?’ Frank
added, with a little embarrassment, after a pause.
‘To marry money! Is he thinking of marrying?--and he has nothing!’ cried
Mrs. Renton, with consternation.
‘But if she had a good deal?’ said Frank. ‘He will never make any way
for himself. Don’t you see, he is too good-natured and kind for that. So
I think a nice little fortune that would keep him comfortable would be
the very finest thing for Laurie. And I wish you would call at
Richmont.’
‘Is it Miss Rich that is to supply the little fortune?’ asked Mary, with
a smile.
‘Miss Rich is very nice,’ said Frank, with some indignation. Though he
spoke thus of Laurie, it was not with any particular hope in respect to
him. But if he himself should marry Nelly,--which seemed much more
likely,--he would not drop any word which could be brought up against
her. ‘She is very accomplished, and draws beautifully; but unless you
can get my mother to attend to ordinary civility, they can’t be expected
to like it. And it may be the worse for both Laurie and me.’
‘Neither Laurie nor you should have anything to do with such people,’
said Mrs. Renton; and then she stopped short, and a new current of
thinking rose up in her mind. ‘I do not like such things to be spoken
of, Frank,’ she said. ‘It is disgusting to hear some people talk of
marrying money. Has the young lady a great fortune? Did you say she was
nice? Sometimes the children of those vulgar people are wonderfully well
brought up. They get all that money can buy, of course. And did you say
they were fond of Laurie? He has never mentioned them in any of his
letters. Poor Laurie! Will his pictures ever bring him in any money, I
wonder? And he never can go travelling about on his allowance,--that is
impossible. Did you say Miss Rich had a very large fortune, Frank?’
‘Enough to be comfortable upon,’ said the Guardsman. ‘They would be
immensely pleased if you would call.’
‘Oh, my dear, I am not strong enough, nor in spirits to call anywhere,’
said Mrs. Renton, sinking back on her pillows. But the seed had been
dropped in the soil. Mary Westbury’s opinion, when she and Frank were
alone, was that she would go. Frank, for his part, found himself a great
deal more anxious about it than he had the least idea he was. Perhaps
because of Nelly; perhaps only because of the difficulty,--he could
scarcely say.
‘I shall feel very small if she does not go,’ he confided to Mary; ‘and
really, you know, I had not the least claim upon them, and they were
very kind to me.’
‘I thought you said they were friends of Laurie’s,’ said Mary. ‘He never
mentioned them in any way; but people have begun to gossip about you,
Frank. I nearly laughed when you were talking so wisely of Laurie. It
never occurred to you that other people might be behind the scenes and
know better. Everybody says it is you.’
‘What is me?’ said Frank, with some heat. ‘I did not think you were the
sort of girl to repeat such folly. Because Nelly Rich is a nice bright
little thing, and would be the very thing for Laurie----’
‘Laurie again!’ cried Mary, laughing. ‘You are the strangest figure for
a match-maker! They say, Frank, that these good people have quite made
up their mind to have a gentleman of Berks for their daughter: and that
is why they have always been so interested about us. And then they came
to know you,--the very thing they want. I don’t know if it is true, but
that is what they say.’
‘They say a great deal of nonsense,’ said Frank. ‘But, Mary, I have
never had an opportunity to ask you anything. How about Ben?’
And now it was Mary’s turn to change countenance. ‘I don’t think there
is much to tell about Ben,’ she said, with unusual curtness of
expression. ‘He is going to America, you know.’
‘But there is something more than that,’ said Frank. ‘I can read it in
your face.’
‘Then you know more than I do,’ said Mary Westbury, cooling down into
that dogmatic obduracy and calmness which is a gift of woman. ‘I am sure
Ben did not confide in me.’
No--and wild horses would not have drawn anything further from her, that
was evident. Mary, who was always so open, and candid, and
straightforward, closed up in a moment, put shutters to all her windows,
sealed her lips as if hermetically. If there had been nothing this
would not have been necessary; but Frank had not time to go fully into
the question. He gave her a keen, scrutinising glance, and then was
silent. No doubt Ben had got into some scrape or other; but that his
brother was not to know anything about it was equally clear.
‘It is dreadful that you should all be going off at once,’ said Mary.
‘Ben did come to bid us good-bye, but Laurie has disappeared without
even so much as that. I wish you would tell me something about Laurie,
Frank. He must have known somebody better than the Riches surely;--some
of those artist people. When you went to see him in town did you never
see any of his friends?’
‘Laurie’s friends?’ said the Guardsman, and it is undeniable that
certain confusion stole over him. It was a kind of duel that was taking
place between his cousin and himself. They were both of clearer sight
than usual, enlightened by experience,--both anxious to find out
something they did not know, and conceal something they did. ‘Oh, yes,’
Frank went on carelessly, ‘I have seen several of his friends;--Suffolk,
the painter,--though I don’t suppose you ever heard of him; and there is
a Mrs. Severn, in Fitzroy Square,--I think he was most intimate there.’
‘Tell me about her,’ cried Mary. ‘It is so odd of Laurie to go away
without coming home; something must have happened to him. It might not
be anything of that kind, of course; but tell me,--were there
daughters? or any one?’
Frank cleared his throat, nor could he keep a certain glow of colour
from mounting to his temples,--most foolish and uncalled for, it was no
doubt,--for Mrs. Severn’s household was not, and never could be,
anything to him. Either it was Mary’s eyes looking at him so keenly, or
simply a little excitement hanging about himself. Or he must have taken
cold somehow on the river.
‘Daughters?’ he said. ‘Oh,--well,--children, that’s all; there is one
little girl that plays charmingly,’ Frank added, with easy candour; ‘but
Laurie never cared for music. I don’t think there’s anything in that.’
‘And it could not be Miss Rich?’ said Mary, fixing her eyes more keenly
than ever on the young fellow’s face.
Then his countenance cleared. He was himself unaware of the change of
expression, but Mary saw it, and perceived at once that Nelly, though he
talked of her so much, was not dangerous ground to Frank. ‘No; frankly,
I don’t think it could be Miss Rich,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘I think it
would be a capital thing for both; but I cannot say that I believe
either of them have thought of it for themselves.’
‘But this Mrs. Severn----?’ insisted Mary, and she was aware of an
immediate gleam of intelligence and embarrassment in his eyes.
‘She is a painter’ said Frank, ‘and a widow, and a very nice woman,--at
least I suppose so. To hear Laurie chattering to her you would think he
found her so. I cannot say I remarked it particularly myself.’
‘And young?’ said Mary, breathless with her discovery.
‘Oh dear, no,’ said Frank, ‘not at all young;--not old either, I
suppose. A certain age, you know; that sort of thing. But really, if you
are interested about her, you must apply to Miss Rich. I did not observe
her much. Her little girl,’ Frank continued, with again that soft drop
of the eyelids, and gleam of sudden light from beneath them,--‘she I
told you of, who plays so charmingly,--is at Richmont now.’
‘Oh!’ said Mary. And Frank turned away to the window as if the
conversation had come to a natural end. And as for his cousin, she
seemed suddenly to have made a discovery; and yet, when she thought it
over, could not make out what the discovery was. The little girl who
played could not surely have anything to do with Laurie; or was it Frank
himself who was moved by her music,--or,--. Mary was left as much in the
dark as at the beginning. ‘The boys’ had all gone off on their separate
courses; they had escaped out of the hands of their old confidante and
unfailing sympathiser; and the idea grieved her. She would have given a
great deal to have been able to read the meaning of that look in her
young cousin’s eyes. She would have liked in all sisterly tenderness and
faithfulness to fathom Laurie’s secret,--for a secret Mary felt there
must be. As for Ben, that was different. She felt that the secret in his
case was somehow her own.
‘Old Sargent ought to be looked after, really,’ said Frank. ‘It is all
very well to have a gardener who is a character; but those flower-beds
are disgraceful, Mary. You should see the garden at Richmont. I suppose
my mother does not mind; but, at least, you might look after it. I shall
give the old beggar a piece of my mind if he comes across me to-day.’
‘Are the gardens really so wonderful at Richmont?’ said Mary;
‘altogether it must be an extraordinary place. I have met Miss Rich
once, and I thought her pretty; of course, I should like to know her,
if---- But, Frank, you might tell me---- If that is really what you are
thinking of----’
‘If what is really what I am thinking of?’ said Frank, with a laugh.
Mary had laid her hand on his shoulder, and was looking at him
anxiously. His face had changed once more,--the gleam under the eyelash,
the softened droop of the lid, had disappeared: but the colour rose
again to his face, though with a difference. ‘Don’t inquire too much,’
he said, turning away from her. ‘I can’t tell you myself. No one can
say what may happen. Don’t ask me any more questions, there’s a dear.’
‘But Frank, only one thing;--is she really so very nice?’ said Mary,
with another effort to catch his eye.
‘Oh, yes; she’s very nice?’ answered Frank, with a little impatience in
his tone.
‘And if,--that were to happen--you would not require to go to India?’
said Mary, dropping her voice.
‘No.’
‘And,--only one word;--are you really, really fond of her, Frank?’
The young soldier shook her hand off his shoulder, and turned away with
an impatient exclamation. ‘Good heavens! what an inquisitor you are!
Can’t you let a fellow alone? As if a man can go and make a talk about
everything like a set of girls!’ he cried, and stepped out of the open
window on to the lawn, where old Sargent was visible in the distance.
Frank went straight to the old gardener, and began to give him that
piece of his mind he had promised, using considerable action, and
pointing indignantly to the flower-beds, while Mary stood and watched,
feeling that old Sargent was suffering the penalty of her own curiosity.
Her cousins had always been as brothers to Mary,--at least the two
younger ones had been brothers; and it vexed her beyond description to
find how they had both glided out of her knowledge upon their different
paths. She was a good girl, and very sensible, everybody allowed; but
still she was young, not in reality any older than Frank, and the first
idea of love was sacred to her mind. The almost admission he had made
struck her dumb. To think of a girl,--in that way,--and yet not be fond
of her! Mary shrank from the idea as if she had received a blow. Of
course, she had heard of marrying money, as everybody else has, and,
like everybody else, had seen people who were said to have married
money, and got on together as well as the rest of the world. It was a
thing acknowledged in the society she was acquainted with to be a duty
incumbent upon some people, and creditable to all. But yet,--one of the
boys! Instinct carried the day over principle as inculcated everywhere
around her. “With other people it might be well enough,--but one of us!
Mary stood in great consternation, looking on while Frank delivered his
lecture to the gardener. She wanted to say something more to him, and
did not know how. Had not he better, far better, go to India, after all?
It would be sad to have none of the boys at home, but not so sad as
this. And then Mary cast a half-angry, half-pitying thought at Nelly
Rich, poor wealthy girl, the ‘money’ whom Frank was trying to bring
himself to marry. She was angry, like a woman, at this creature for so
much as existing, and yet,--‘Oh!’ said Mary to herself, ‘what a fate for
a girl,--to be married as money! And how frightful, for Frank! and how
base of him! and yet, oh, what a fate! poor, poor fellow!’ This is how
her thoughts went on as she stood gazing after him, with consternation,
and sympathy, and horror, and indignation. Everybody would say it was
quite right; even Mrs. Renton would go and call, for this reason, though
for no other, and smile upon them for their wealth. Mary grew sick as
she thought of it. Ben was infatuated, and blind, and foolish. He was
going to be miserable in a different way, for the creature he loved was
not good enough for him. But it was not so bad as this.
In the meantime Frank was very bitter upon old Sargent about those
flower-beds. He upbraided the gardener with taking advantage of his
mother’s illness and her indifference to external things. He was so
solemn about such a breach of trust that the old man was struck dumb,
and had not a word to say for himself. It was a satisfaction to the mind
of the young master, who had been stung by Mary’s injudicious question,
more than he could have avowed. Frank had to take a long walk, and do an
immense deal of thinking, before he could bring himself back to his
former easy sense of duty. Fond of her! Of course, if he married her he
should grow fond of Nelly. He liked her very well now, or he never would
think of it. Girls were such foolish creatures, and could not understand
all the breadth of a man’s motives. A pretty thing the world would be
if it were built only upon what they called love. Love! It was very well
in its way, but society wanted a firmer, more practical basis; but yet,
notwithstanding all these reasonings, Frank was more shaken than he had
yet been by the surprise and the pain that had come into Mary Westbury’s
face.
CHAPTER XV.
PROGRESS.
Before Frank returned to his quarters, he had received his mother’s
promise that she would call at Richmont. ‘I have given up all that sort
of thing on my own account,’ Mrs. Renton had said. ‘I will never go into
society again. All that is over for me; and I hope your friends
understand so. I can’t entertain people, you know; but anything that is
for my boy’s interests,’ the mother said, magnanimously, sitting up
among her pillows,--that was quite a different matter. Fifty thousand
pounds going a-begging, so to speak, when such a small affair as her own
card, or, at the worst, ten minutes’ talk, might determine the house to
which it should come! There could be no doubt about a mother’s duty in
such circumstances. Laurie, it was true, was out of the way; but there
was no reason why Frank should not take advantage of such a windfall.
Mrs. Renton’s mind was not troubled by any of the scruples that moved
Mary Westbury. Perhaps,--it was so long since it had come in her
way,--love had lost its importance in her eyes. Perhaps she had never
felt its necessity in any very urgent way. Mr. Renton had been the best
of husbands, but yet it could not be said that there had been much
sentiment, not to say passion, in their union. But Mrs. Renton, like
every other sensible woman, understood the value of fifty thousand
pounds. She had already made a calculation in her own mind as to the
income it would produce. ‘It can’t possibly be at less interest than
five per cent,--with a father to manage it who knows all about money,’
she said. ‘Five per cent on fifty thousand makes twenty-five hundred.
They might take Cookesley Lodge and live very comfortably on that; and I
should have them always near me.’ This reflection made Mrs. Renton not
only willing, but anxious, to pay the promised visit. She questioned her
son a great deal about Nelly before he left her. What she was like, and
the colour of her hair, and her height, and a hundred other details. ‘If
she is pretty it is so much the better,’ she said, with maternal
indulgence for a young man’s weakness. ‘I do not say anything, Frank,’
she told him, as she bade him good-bye, ‘for I see you are turning it
over in your mind. And you know I am not mercenary, nor given to think
about money. Alas! there are many things that money cannot do! It can’t
buy health when one has lost it. But it has always been my opinion that
to marry young was the very best thing for a man. And, my dear boy, if
it is in your power to secure your own happiness, and other things as
well, I hope you will be guided for the best.’ She meant that she hoped
he would be guided to the fifty thousand pounds. And Frank understood
what she meant as well as if she had said it. Mrs. Renton had never been
poor in her life, and yet she appreciated money; whereas Mary Westbury,
who had been brought up in a very limited household, and by a very
prudent mother, felt in this present instance a scorn for it which no
words could express. When she went out to the door in the starlight to
see her cousin off, her mind was full of thoughts half contemptuous,
half bitter. There was no moon, but a soft visionary light in the skies,
partly of the stars, partly that lingering reflection of light which
makes a summer evening so beautiful. Mary stood in the dark shadow of
the doorway and watched Frank getting into the dog-cart. She said her
good-night with a certain plaintive tone. ‘Good-night! but you don’t say
good luck, Mary,’ cried Frank, as he lighted his cigar. She came out
upon the steps, and looked up wistfully at him as he spoke. The shadows
of the trees hung dark all round, swallowing up in gloom the road by
which he was going; and in the opening, out of the shadow, Mary looked
at him, and thought he looked half-defiant, half-deprecating, as he
struck a light, which made his form visible for a moment. The horse was
fresh, and stood with impatience waiting the signal to start.
‘Good-night,’ Mary repeated; ‘I don’t know about the good luck:’ and
then he was suddenly whirled away into the darkness. The dog-cart was
audible going down the long line of avenue to the gate which opened on
the highroad, and now and then appeared for a moment out of the shadow
where the trees separated. She felt melancholy to see the boy thus
dashing forth, doubting and unguided, into the world. She was very
little older than he was, and yet Mary kindly felt the insufficiency of
Frank’s youth to keep him in the straight way, much more keenly than he
felt it himself. He was going, and nobody could tell what he was going
to. And there was nobody to stand in his way and advise him. Thus Frank
went out of sight, and the two ladies stopped behind with their
different thoughts. Mary was not alone in her knowledge of his
intentions; the entire household was soon pervaded by a sense of the
coming event. Mrs. Renton, as she took her arrowroot, could not but give
a hint of what she supposed to be going on to her confidential maid, and
that trusted creature was not reticent. ‘Mr. Frank’s going to marry a
lady as has made a terrible fuss about him,’ the butler said, ‘as
rich,--as rich----! I hope, when he comes into his fortune, he’ll have
something done to keep us a-going here. It’s hawful is this quiet,--and
us as always had so much visiting.’ ‘He’ll beat the old ones all to
sticks,’ said the cook; ‘but I always said Mr. Frank was the one.’ Thus
it will be seen that he left a universal excitement behind him, and
that of a favourable character. A wedding in prospect is always pleasant
to everybody, and the servants’ hall was as much impressed by the duty
of marrying money as was their mistress. Only Mary in her heart, and one
small housemaid, were sensible of the other side of the question. From
Mrs. Renton, down to the boy who blacked the shoes, the feeling, with
these two exceptions, was general. To have married for any other reason
might have produced as many criticisms as congratulations. Frank would
have been set down as too young,--a foolish boy; but to marry money was
a thing so reasonable, that nobody could but applaud.
And Frank himself felt all its reasonableness as he returned to his
quarters. He took the train at Cookesley Station for Royalborough; and
when he had to change carriages at Slowley junction, stood and kicked
his heels on the platform, so absorbed in his thoughts that he had not
leisure to be impatient. In every way it was the most reasonable, the
most natural, the most feasible thing. He cast his eye round the county,
as it were, as he stood waiting for the down-train. For a man who was
going to settle down, no county could be better than Berks. It was his
own county, in the first place, where his family were known and
considered,----and then it had a hundred advantages. It was so near
town that a man could run up for a day as often as it pleased him; a
good hunting county, with pleasant society, and the garrison at
Royalborough, in which there are always sure to be some of his regiment,
within reach. He cast his eye metaphorically over the district, and
recollected that Cookesley Lodge was to let, and also that pretty house
near St. Leonard’s. Either of them, he thought, would do very well for a
small establishment. So far as this his thoughts had advanced. He
settled a great many things as he stood on the platform at the Slowley
junction, and paced up and down with echoing feet, neither fuming nor
fretting, absorbed in his own thoughts. The station-master kept out of
Frank’s way, in fear of being called to account for the lateness of the
train; but he was too much occupied even to think of the train. To be
sure, he could afford a good hunter or two without interfering with the
other needs of the _ménage_ in respect of horses. He thought of
everything,--from the little brougham and the pony-carriage, and the
cart for his private use, down even to the dogs which should bark about
the place, and hail him when he came home. He thought of everything,
except of the central figure who would bring all these luxuries in her
hand. Certainly, he did not think of her. A chorus of barking terriers,
pointers, mastiffs,--I know not how many kinds of dogs,--seemed already
in his thoughts to bid him welcome as he drew near the imaginary house.
But there was no representation in his mind of any sweeter welcome. He
imagined the terriers, but not the wife running to the door to meet
him. That he left out, and he was not even aware of the omission. On the
whole, it grew pleasant to the eye,--this imaginary house. A Renton was
sure of a good reception in the county which had known the family for
hundreds of years; and if he wanted occupation, there was the Manor
estate, left in the lawyer’s hands only during the seven years’
interregnum, which he could always keep an eye on; and his mother’s
interests, and her own property, which she would be so glad to have him
at hand to see after. Cookesley, on the whole, would be the best. It was
near the Manor, and not quite so near Richmont; and then there would be
the river for the amusement of idle hours. It was a pleasant prospect
enough. Youth, health, a good hunter, a pretty house, a
pleasantly-assured position, and,--say at the least,--two thousand five
hundred pounds a-year! A man should have no call to mope who had all
these good things. Something, it is true, he left out from the
calculation, but there was enough to fill any man with very comfortable
sensations in what remained.
Thus it happened that he had almost made up his mind when he got back to
Royalborough. He had weighed all the arguments in favour of such a step,
and had found them unanswerable. The arguments against,--what were they?
It is, indeed, impossible to formalise them or set such weak pleas
against the solid, sturdy weight of reason which lay on the other side.
Indeed, there was nothing that could be called an argument,--certain
wandering notes of music that now and then stole with a bewildering
effect upon his ear,--faint, momentary visions of a face which was not
Nelly’s. But what then? To be fond of music is no reproach to a man,
even if the future partner of his bosom does not play; and as for the
face, why any face may spring up in your memory, and glance at you now
and then by times without any blame of yours. Some people, as is well
known, are haunted for days by a face in a picture; and what did it
matter to anybody if Frank’s imagination, too, were momentarily haunted
by the picture which he had made of a certain sweet countenance?
He felt that he had quite made up his mind when he went to bed; but the
morning brought back a certain uncertainty. What a pity that Laurie
could not have been got to do it,--Laurie, for whom it would have been
so completely suitable! leaving Frank free to go to India! He could not
but feel that this was indeed a spite of fortune. Laurie, poor fellow!
could not go to India,--he never would make his own way anywhere,--he
would only moon about the world and make himself of use to other people;
and, so far as his own interests were concerned, would end just where he
began. Whereas Frank felt confident that he himself could have made his
way. And Laurie wanted somebody to take care of him, to give a practical
turn to his dreamings, to keep him comfortable in his wanderings to and
fro. If he could only be sent for from Italy even yet! What could have
tempted him to go to Italy at this time of the year, which everybody
knew was the very worst time,--bad for health, and impossible for work?
Frank shook his head in his youthful prudence at the vagaries of those
artist-folk. They never could be relied upon one way or another. They
were continually doing things which nobody else did,--going away when
they were wanted at home,--staying when they should go away. It must
have been some demon which had put it into Laurie’s head to take himself
off at this particular moment, leaving to his conscientious brother the
task of dealing with that fifty thousand pounds. Indeed, the morning
light brought home to Frank more and more clearly the sense that this
step he was contemplating was duty. The evening had had certain
softening effects. The pretty little house, and the hunters, and the
terriers, and all the pleasant country-gentleman occupations to which
the young man had been born, came clearly before him at that pleasant
hour. But, by daylight, it was the duty involved which was most apparent
to Frank. He had no right to allow such an opportunity to slip through
his fingers. If he did so, he might never have such a chance again. To
neglect it was foolish,--wrong,--even sinful. He gave a little
half-suppressed sigh as he sat down to breakfast, feeling strongly that
high principle involved some inevitable pangs. But should he be the man
to turn his back upon an evident duty because it cost him something? No!
Ben might take the bit in his teeth and go out to America to make his
fortune, like the head-strong fellow he was; and Laurie might prefer his
own foolish devices to every substantial advantage under heaven; but
Frank was not the man to run away. He could see what the exigencies of
his position demanded, and he was not one to shirk his duty. And then,
poor boy! he rounded his deliberations by humming very dolefully a bar
or two of a certain plaintive melody, and ended all by a sigh.
‘Sighing like a furnace,’ said Edgbaston, who came in unceremoniously,
followed by Frank’s servant with the kidneys,--for his thoughts did not
much affect his appetite,--and his letters. ‘My dear fellow, that’s
serious. Ah, I see you have a card for the grand fête. We are all
invited, I think.’
‘What grand fête?’ said Frank.
‘There it is,’ said his friend, turning over the letters, and producing
an enormous square envelope ornamented with a prodigious coat-of-arms in
crimson and gold. ‘These are something like armorial bearings, you know.
By Jove! people ought to pay double who go in for heraldry to that
extent. Mine is not as big as a threepenny bit. It’s a case of swindling
the Exchequer. The arms of the great house of Rich, my boy. Don’t you
know?’
‘There are Riches who are as good gentlefolks as we are,’ said Frank,
already feeling that this scoff affected his own credit.
‘Oh, better,’ cried Edgbaston. ‘We are only Brummagem,--I confess
it,--with a pinchbeck coronet. But I doubt if our friends are of the old
stock. Open and read, Frank; this day fortnight. Archery
fête,--everything that is most alluring,--croquet, good luncheon, dance
to wind up with. We’re all going. Hallo! there’s a note enclosed for
you!’
‘And why shouldn’t there be a note enclosed?’ said Frank, colouring
high, and thrusting the small epistle under his other letters. ‘I
suppose all of you had the same?’
‘The card was thought enough for me,’ said Edgbaston. ‘Well, well, I
don’t repine. But I say, Frank, if you are going in for that in earnest,
I see no use in carrying on about India. And I came to tell you of a
fellow in the 200th who wants to get off going. Montague,--he’s to be
heard of at Cox’s. You can do what you like about it of course, but you
can’t go in for both.’
‘For both?’ said Frank; ‘what do you mean? I don’t know anything else I
am going in for. Did you say Montague of the 200th? Going to Calcutta,
are they? Thanks, Edgbaston. I’ll think it over. Of course one can’t
make one’s mind up all at once.’
‘I advise you to think it well over,’ said his friend; ‘and the other
thing, too. You may look as unconscious as you please, but you can’t
conceal that you are the favourite, Frank. And, by Jove, it shows her
sense. She’s as jolly a little thing as ever I saw, and there’s no end
to the tin. If I were in your place, I’d see India scuttled first. I
don’t know a fellow who might be more comfortable; and I can tell you,
you’ll be an awful fool, my dear boy, if you let her slip through your
hands.’
‘Stuff!’ cried Frank. ‘I wish you’d let a man eat his breakfast in
peace, without all this rubbish. Archery fête, is it? I didn’t know
anybody went in for archery now-a-days; and, as for croquet, I am sick
of it. I don’t think I shall go. What sort of a fellow is Montague? The
best thing would be to run up to town, and have a talk with him at
once.’
‘If that is what you have determined on,’ said Edgbaston; ‘but, Frank,
if I were you, with such a chance----’
‘Oh, confound the chance!’ said Frank; and the rest of the conversation
was based on the idea that his heart was set on the proposed exchange,
on the prospects of the 200th, and his own immediate banishment. He
thought he had done it very cleverly, when at last he got rid of his
comrade. But Edgbaston was not the man to be so easily deceived. He
explained the whole matter confidentially to the first group of men he
encountered. ‘Look here, you fellows,’ he said; ‘mind how you talk of
little Rich to Frank Renton. He has made up his mind to go in for Nelly,
and he’s awfully thin-skinned about it, and sets up all sorts of
pretences. Frank’s the favourite, I always told you; I’ll give you five
to one they are married in six months.’
Thus Frank’s affairs were discussed, though he flattered himself he had
so skilfully blinded his critic. When Edgbaston was gone, he drew the
little note from beneath the other papers. It was from Nelly, as he
thought, and there was not much in it,--but yet,--
‘DEAR MR. RENTON,--Mamma bids me say that she forgot, when you were
here, to tell you of the little party to which the enclosed card is
an invitation. They were all put up on Saturday, before you came,
and we forgot them. And I open your envelope only lest you should
think it strange that we never said anything about it. I hope you
had a pleasant walk to Cookesley. The river must have been lovely.
‘The fête is in my poor little honour, so I hope you will come. It
happens to be my birthday;--not that anybody except my own people
can be supposed to care for that; but you, who are so fond of your
family, will excuse poor papa and mamma for making a fuss. You
know I am the only girl they have; though I am only
‘NELLY.’
‘_Richmont,_
‘_Monday morning._’
Only,--Nelly! It was a tantalising, seductive little note, which tempted
a young fellow to answer, even when he had nothing to say. She must have
written it as soon as he was gone. She must have been thinking of him
quite as much, at least, as he had been thinking of her. Something of
the natural complacency and agreeable excitement which, even when there
is nothing more serious in hand, moves a young man in his correspondence
with a girl, breathed about Frank as he wrote his reply. He told her he
could perfectly understand the fuss that would be made, and that it was
astonishing how many follies other people, who could not claim such a
tender right of relationship, might be tempted to do for the sake of a
little personage who was only,--Nelly. And then he begged pardon on his
knees for the familiarity. Thus it will be seen that things were making
considerable progress in every way. This snatch of letter-writing did
more for the sentimental side of the question than half-a-dozen
interviews. The pretty little note with Nelly’s little cipher on it, the
suggestions of the conclusion, the humility which asserted a subtle
claim on his discrimination as a man fond of his own family,--all this
moved Frank, who was not used to such clever little suggestive
correspondences. For the first time it occurred to him that Nelly was a
sweet little name, and that it would be pleasant to have its little
owner rush to meet him when he went home. For one moment the hunters and
the terriers fell into the background. Thus it will be seen that the
affair made admirable progress in every possible way.
CHAPTER XVI.
MRS. RENTON’S CALL.
And it was not later than the Wednesday after when Mrs. Renton, moved to
the pitch of heroism by the possible advantages to her boy, and
fortified by a large cupful of arrowroot, with some sherry in it, got
into her carriage and called at Richmont. Mary accompanied her, full of
curiosity and opposition. Mary herself had thought Nelly Rich ‘nice’
when she met her and had no particular call to be interested in her; but
now her feelings were much less amiable. A little sprite of evil
tempting Frank to do what he ought not to do,--this was the idea which
now entered Mary’s mind as to her little neighbour. But, nevertheless,
of course she accompanied her aunt merely to smile and say polite things
to everybody. She could not help it; it was the duty which life exacted
of a well-bred maiden. It was a very fine day, and both the ladies
sallied forth with the hope, common to people who pay morning visits, of
finding that the Riches were out, and that a card would serve all
purposes of civility. ‘They are sure to be out such a beautiful day,’
said Mrs. Renton. ‘I hope you put some cards in my case, Mary; and write
your name on one, my dear, that they may see we have both called, should
like to pay every attention, in case of anything----’ Mary made a
little wry face, but scribbled her name all the same, without any
remark. But when they drew up before the door at Richmont their
delusions were all scattered to the winds. Everybody was in,--Mr. Rich,
Mrs. Rich, Miss Rich; and Mrs. Renton, not without an effort, got out of
her carriage. She was much impressed by the beautiful footmen who stood
about the hall. ‘Poor old Beecham!’ she said in her niece’s ear; ‘it
never was kept up as it ought to be in their time,--poor things!’ and
her heart melted towards the people who had everything in such order.
‘It would be a lesson to Sargent to see that garden,’ she said; ‘only to
see it. Oh, my dear, what money can do!’ So went in, with her mind
prepared to be friendly. Mrs. Rich received her in a considerable
flutter. She was the first county lady of any importance who had done
her so much honour. Finer people than Mrs. Renton, indeed, had come down
from town to the Riches’ parties, and taken the good of all that was
going, and laughed at the hosts for their pains; but no leader of the
county had yet presented herself. Mrs. Renton was, as the maids say,
_passée_, but, nevertheless, her countenance was as good as any one’s
for a beginning. She might have withdrawn from the world, but so much
the mere was the world likely to be impressed by her example. It was the
first ray of the sunshine of local grandeur in which it was the desire
of Mrs. Rich’s heart to bask.
‘This is so kind,--so very kind,’ she said in her flutter. ‘You must let
me send for my daughter. She is in her favourite room, with her pictures
and her books; but she would not miss you for the world. This is the
most comfortable corner, with no draughts. Some tea, Baker; let Miss
Rich know Mrs. Renton is here.’
‘Pray, don’t disturb yourself,’ Mrs. Renton said. ‘I scarcely ever go
out; but it is such a lovely day.’
‘And so kind of you!’ repeated the lady of the house. ‘I had heard so
much of your family,--such nice young men, and everything so charming,
that I confess I have been longing for you to call. And I have the
pleasure of knowing two of your sons, Mrs. Renton,--Mr. Frank, and the
one next to him,--Mr. Laurence, I think,--delightful young men. I hope
Mr. Frank does not really mean to go to India. It would be such a loss
to the neighbourhood. I was telling him he ought to marry an heiress,
and settle down in the county, and make himself comfortable. I told him
I should have you on my side. And such a good son as he seems to
be,--so fond of you. He surely cannot mean to go away.’
‘I am sure,’ said Mrs. Renton, ‘I should be very thankful if any strong
inducement fell in his way to keep him at home.’ And just at this moment
Nelly came in, in a white gown, with her favourite scarlet ribbons. The
dress was not of flimsy materials, but dead, solid white, relieved by
the red; and there was a flush upon her dark, clear cheek, and unusual
brilliancy in her eyes. Frank’s mother stopped short with these words on
her lips, and looked at Nelly. Was she the strong inducement? She was a
little agitated, and the nervousness and excitement made her almost
beautiful. Mary Westbury stared at her too, open-mouthed, thinking,
after all, Frank might have other motives. Nelly came in with a touch of
shyness, very unusual to her. The nearest female relations of one who,
perhaps----. If she had been even more agitated than she was, it would
have been natural enough.
‘This is my daughter Nelly,’ said Mrs. Rich; ‘my only daughter. She can
tell you more about it than I can. We are to have a little fête for her
on Monday week,--archery and croquet, and that sort of thing, and a
dance in the evening. It would give us all the greatest pleasure if Miss
Westbury would come. Nelly, you must try and persuade Miss Westbury.
Indeed, I assure you, I spoke to Mr. Frank quite seriously,’ Mrs. Rich
added, sinking into a confidential tone, as she changed her seat to one
close to her much-prized visitor. ‘And he is so fond of you. I am sure
he will not go if he can help it. How nice he is! and how popular among
the gentlemen! We were delighted with the chance which kept him here all
Sunday. Sunday in the country is such a nice domestic sort of day. There
is nothing like it for making people acquainted with each other. I was
so glad when I heard the hours pass and no sound of wheels. I think
before he left us that he got really to feel that we were his friends.’
‘He was very grateful to you for your kindness, I am sure,’ said Mrs.
Renton, who, though she could talk herself upon occasions, was fairly
overflooded and carried away by this flowing current of speech.
‘Oh, grateful,--no!; said Mrs. Rich; ‘that word would be quite
misapplied. It is we who should be grateful to him,--a young man
accustomed to the best society,--for putting up with a family party. And
your other son, Mrs. Renton, is delightful too. We met him in town. He
took us to a friend of his, Mr. Suffolk, the painter, where Mr. Rich
bought a most lovely picture. I should ask you to go up to the
music-room and look at it but for the stairs. It is a trial going up so
many stairs. Yes, we have done a great deal to the house. It must be
strange to you, coming to call at a house you once knew so well. But, as
Mr. Rich says, it is not our fault. We gave a very good price for it;
and, if we had not bought it, some one else would. My husband has laid
out a great deal of money upon it. He has excellent taste, everybody
says; and, of course, being well off, he does not need to consider every
penny, as, unfortunately, so many excellent people have to do. You would
be pleased if you saw the music-room,--quite a fine domestic chapel they
tell us. We have hung Mr. Suffolk’s picture there. If you are fond of
pictures----’
‘Oh, thanks! but I am not able to move about and look at things as I
used to be,’ cried Mrs. Renton, in alarm.
‘To be sure,’ said her anxious hostess; ‘I ought to have thought of
that. You will take a cup of tea? It is so refreshing after a long
drive. Your son is quite a painter, I know, and so is my daughter. I
tell her I cannot tell where she has got it, for we neither of us could
draw a line to save our lives, neither her father nor me.’
Thus Mrs. Rich fluttered on, more fluent than ever, probably in
consequence of her agitation. She was anxious to show herself at her
best to her visitor, and the consequence was that Mrs. Renton went away
sadly fatigued, and with a sensation of pity for Frank. ‘I never could
get a word in,’ she said, indignantly, when she found herself safely
ensconced once more in the corner of the carriage. ‘Mary, have you some
eau-de-Cologne? I feel as if I were good for nothing but to go to
sleep.’
‘Then go to sleep, dear godmamma,’ said Mary, soothingly; ‘don’t mind
me; I have plenty to think about, and I am sure you are tired. But Miss
Rich is not so heavy as her mother,’ she added, conscientiously. Her
heart compelled her to do justice to Nelly, but it was against the
grain.
‘I don’t know much about Miss Rich,’ said Mrs. Renton, sighing in her
fatigue. And she closed her eyes, lying back in her corner, and dozed,
or appeared to doze. As for Mary, she had, as she said, a great deal to
think about, and indulged herself accordingly, having perfect leisure.
But Mary’s thoughts had more of a sting in them than her aunt’s. She was
thinking somewhat bitterly of the difference between hope and reality.
How hopeful, how promising had been all those young men, her cousins!
She herself, feeling herself as a woman as old as the eldest, though she
was in fact the same age as the youngest, had thought of them in the
exalted way common to young women. Something better than usual, she had
felt, must fall to their fate. And yet so soon, so suddenly, what a
miserable end had come to her dreams! Ben, for whose express benefit
some unimaginable creature had always been invented in Mary’s thoughts,
had allowed himself to be taken captive by the first beautiful face,
unaccompanied by anything better. He had set a creature on the
supremest pedestal who was not worthy to be his servant, Mary thought.
He had been beguiled and taken in by mere beauty,--not beauty even in
which there was any soul. And Frank was going to marry money! She did
not know about Laurie. Perhaps had she been aware how far he had erred
on the other side, and how his admiration for the soul and heart had led
him away, she might have been still more horror-stricken. The difference
between fact and expectation made her heart sink. Was this all that hope
was good for? was this all that men were good for? to be deceived or to
deceive; to fall victims to a little art and a pair of bright eyes; or
to affect a love which they did not feel? Mary’s heart sank within her,
as she thought it all over. But her thoughts were interrupted by Mrs.
Renton, who stirred uneasily every five minutes and said something to
her.
‘I never saw Beecham look the least like what it does now,’ Mrs. Renton
murmured, and then closed her eyes again. ‘I wonder what they are really
worth,’ she would say next, drowsily, with her eyes shut, ‘when they can
afford to spend so much on setting the house to rights. But the woman is
insupportable,’ Mrs. Renton added, with much energy.
Thus they went home again over Cookesley bridge and across the smiling
country.
‘I am sorry you did not speak to Miss Rich, godmamma,’ said Mary, as
they approached the gate of the Manor; ‘she is very nice, and just as
well bred as other people. I never could have told the difference.’ A
sentiment which, forced as it was from her by pure conscientiousness,
made Mrs. Renton shake her head,--
‘Ah, my dear, I never could have been deceived,’ she said. ‘When I saw
her sitting by you, I said to myself in a moment, How easy it is to see
which is the gentlewoman! But she is not so bad as her mother,--I can
understand that.’
‘She is not bad at all,’ said Mary; ‘and if that is really what is going
to happen,--though I hope not with all my heart----’
‘Why should you hope not? ‘Mrs. Renton cried, sitting bolt upright, and
opening her eyes wide. ‘How unkind of you, Mary! Don’t you see the poor
boy may never have such a chance again? If we had her entirely in our
own hands we might make a difference. I must speak to Frank to begin
from the beginning, keeping her as much as possible away from her own
family. I wonder what the father looks like? The family are so
objectionable,’ said Mrs. Renton, seriously, ‘that such an arrangement
would be indispensable,--at least if he ever hoped to make his way in
society. I don’t think I ever was so tired of any call in my life.’
‘But her family may be fond of her,’ said Mary, ‘all the same.’
‘Fond of her, my dear!’ cried Mrs. Renton, with energy; ‘what does that
matter? You would not have a young man like Frank give up the society of
his equals on account of his wife’s family. It would be absurd. Besides,
it will be the very best thing he could do for her to bring her away
from such an influence; nobody would ever visit her there.’
‘But, dear godmamma,’ said Mary, persisting with the unreasonableness of
youth, ‘if that is the case, would it not be better for Frank to
withdraw from it altogether? For nothing seems to be settled yet, and I
think he might still withdraw.’
Mrs. Renton gave a cry of horror and alarm. ‘I can’t think where you
have got such foolish notions,’ she said. ‘Why should he withdraw? I
tell you I think it is very doubtful if he ever has such a chance again.
Weak as I am, you see what an effort I have made to-day on his behalf. I
am frightened by that woman, but I would do it again rather than
anything should come in his way. I would actually do it again!’ said the
devoted mother; and after such an heroic decision what could any one
say?
As for Mrs. Rich and her daughter, they were quite unconscious of the
feelings which moved Mrs. Renton. When the carriage disappeared down the
avenue Mrs. Rich drew Nelly to her, and gave her a soft, maternal kiss.
‘If you ever have anything to do with that old lady,’ she said, ‘you
will not find her difficult to manage, my dear. I was thinking of that
all the time she was here. “My Nelly will turn you round her little
finger,” I said to myself. She is not one of your hard, fine ladies,
that are as easy to be moved as the living rock.’
‘I don’t see that it matters to me,’ Nelly said, impatiently. ‘Mamma, I
wish you would not go on thinking that every new person we meet----. It
is quite ridiculous. Why should I have anything to do with her? And I
don’t think she would be easy to manage. She gave me a look as I came
in, and lifted her eyebrows while you were speaking,----’
‘She was as sweet as sugar to me,’ said Mrs. Rich, ‘and I hope I can see
through people as fast as any one; and it is you who are ridiculous, my
dear. As if you did not know as well as I do that Frank Renton does not
come here without a reason. He is a young man who knows quite well what
he is about; and, of course, it is he that has sent his mother. That
Miss Westbury did not look half pleased, Nelly. I should not wonder if
she wanted to keep her cousin for herself.’
‘Mamma, you are too bad; you are always saying things about people,’
said Nelly. ‘She may have all the Rentons in the world for me. What do I
care for her cousin? And why cannot you let me alone as I am? I am much
happier here than I should be anywhere else. I hate all those silly
young men.’
‘Ah! my dear, I know what nonsense girls talk,’ said Mrs. Rich; ‘but I
hope I know better than to pay any attention. I should be glad to keep
you always at home, Nelly; but I am not a fool, and that can’t be. And
isn’t it better to fix upon somebody that is nice, and will be fond of
you, and will not take you away from us? That has always been my idea
for you. I made up my mind from your cradle, Nelly, that I would choose
some one for you. Many people in our position, as well off as your papa
is, would want a title for their only daughter; but I want somebody to
make you happy, my pet, and that will not be too grand, and take you
away from your father and me.’
‘That you may be sure no man shall ever do,’ said Nelly, returning her
mother’s kiss.
If Mrs. Rich had but heard what the other mother was saying as she drove
home,--‘I will speak to Frank to keep her as much away from her own
family as possible!’ Or if she had been aware of the calculation in
Frank’s mind about the houses which were to be had in the county, and
his decision in favour of Cookesley Lodge as being farther off from
Richmont! Thus the two sets of people went on in their parallel lines,
never coming within sight of each other. After all, it was poor Nelly
for whom the question was most important. She went away across the park
in her white gown, with her pretty waving ribbons, and a sketch-book
under her arm, after this talk with her mother. Nelly had not attained
the highest type of maidenly refinement. She had adopted something of
that exalted code of manners which entitles a young princess to signify
her preference. She was rich and petted, and set upon a pedestal, a kind
of little princess in her way; and she had perhaps permitted Frank to
see that his attentions would be acceptable to her in a more distinct
manner than is quite usual. She was even conscious that she had done so,
but the consciousness did not disturb her much. Communing with herself
vaguely as she sat down under a tree, and arranged her materials for
sketching, Nelly came to some very sensible conclusions about the
matter. Yes; she liked Frank; he was nice, and he was very suitable. Her
eye had singled him out instinctively from the little crowd of Guardsmen
the first time she had seen him. Perhaps he was not clever,--not so
clever as could have been wished; but he was very good-looking, and he
was nice. And then, perhaps, he was younger than she quite liked him to
be; but Nelly told herself philosophically that you could not expect to
have everything. Her own ideal had been different. He had been thirty at
least, a man of experience, with a story and unknown depths in his life;
and he had been a man of splendid intellect, and looked up to by
everybody; and he had been dark, with wonderful eyes, and a face full of
expression. Whereas Frank Renton was fair, with eyes just like other
people’s, very young, and not intellectual at all. But he was
nice,--that was the point to which Nelly’s reflections always came back.
And he was a gentleman of a family very well known in Berks, and would
please papa and mamma by settling near them. And Nelly in her heart
secretly believed, though even in her thoughts she did not express it,
that Frank, though he might please papa and mamma by settling down,
would in the meantime please herself by taking her all over the world.
His ideal of the hunters and the terriers was very different from her
ideal, though the latter was quite as distinct in its way. No doubt a
young couple moving about wherever they pleased, dancing through the
world here and there, over mountains and valleys, stopping where they
liked, rushing about wherever the spirit moved them,--would be a very
different thing from the caravanserai progress through Italy
contemplated by papa and mamma and all their dependants. This was
Nelly’s ideal, very clearly drawn, and most seductive to her mind. Two
people can go anywhere;--a young woman need not mind where she goes, nor
how she travels, so long as her husband is with her. Even Mrs. Severn
had told her stories of the early wanderings of the poor, joyous young
painter-pair, which had filled Nelly’s heart with longing. To be sure
he was no artist; but still his presence would throw everything open to
his young wife, and make every kind of pleasant adventure possible. No
longer would there be necessity for pausing to reflect,--Was this
proper? was it correct to do so and so? ‘You may go anywhere with your
husband,’ was a sentiment that Nelly had been in the way of hearing all
her life.
Thus it will be seen that Nelly Rich was not so much to be pitied as
Mary Westbury thought. This marriage,--if it came to a marriage,--was an
affair involving mingled motives on her part as well as Frank’s. Yet, as
she sat under the tree with her bright face shadowed by the leaves, and
her white dress blazing in the sunshine, she might have been a little
lady of romance, with the flowers all breathing fragrance around her,
and above the tenderest blue of summer skies.
CHAPTER XVII.
A STEP THE WRONG WAY.
When Frank Renton had sent off his note to Nelly, accepting the
invitation for the birthday fête, and adding such little compliments as
have been recorded, a kind of sensation of having gone too far came over
him. He had not yet by any means made up his mind finally, and he had no
desire to commit himself. It seemed necessary, by way of holding the
balance even, to take a step in the other direction. So he set about
making very vigorous inquiries concerning the 200th, their destination,
and the character of the officers, and all the other points of
information most likely to be interesting. And the result of his
inquiries was a resolution to go up to town and see Montague, who did
not want to go to India. Edgbaston and the rest might laugh, but Frank
said to himself that he was far from having made up his mind, and that
it was very important for him to acquaint himself with all the
circumstances. It was on a June day when he went up to town in pursuance
of this resolution, hot enough to dissuade any man from business, and
especially from business connected with India. ‘If it is like this in
Pall Mall, what will it be in Calcutta?’ Frank asked himself; but,
nevertheless, he was not to be dissuaded. Montague, however, though
certified on all sides to be at home, was not to be found. Frank sought
him at his rooms, at one club after another, at the agent’s,--everywhere
he could think of,--but was unsuccessful. To be sure he got all the
necessary information, which answered his purpose almost as well; but
the ineffectual search tired him out. He was so thoroughly sick of it,
and the day was so hot, that none of his usual haunts or occupations
attracted him as it happened. After he had fortified himself with sherry
and biscuits, he went rambling forth to spend his time in some
misanthropical way till it should be time to return to Royalborough; but
the best way that occurred to him for doing that was to take a walk. The
Row was deserted; so, of course, it would have been foolish to go there;
and he did not feel disposed to make calls; and lounging about the
club,--or, indeed, anywhere where he should meet men and be questioned
on all hands about himself and his brothers,--was a trial he was not
equal to in his present frame of mind. So he went out to walk, which was
a curious expedient. And of all places in the world to go to, turned his
steps in the direction of the Regent’s Park, which, as everybody knows,
is close to Fitzroy Square.
I have never been able to understand what was Frank’s motive in setting
out upon this walk. He knew very well,--none better,--that it was
entirely out of the world. What a Guardsman could have to do in such a
neighbourhood, except, indeed, to visit a wayward brother, nobody could
have imagined; and now the wayward brother was gone. He said to himself
that he did not mind where he went, so long as it was quite out of the
way of meeting anybody; and yet on ordinary occasions Frank had no
objection to meeting people. He went up Harley Street, scowling at those
scowling houses, and then he went into the smiling, plebeian park, among
all the nursery-maids. How funny it was, he said to himself, to notice
the difference between this and the other parks, and persuaded himself
that he was studying life on its humdrum side. He looked into the steady
little broughams meandering round and round the dull terraces. Was it
any pleasure to the old ladies to drive about thus, each in her box? And
then he walked down the centre walk, where all the children were
playing. The children were just as pretty as if they had been in
Kensington Gardens. Mrs. Suffolk’s babies trotted past, with signs of
old Rich’s two hundred and fifty pounds in their little summer garments,
though Frank knew nothing of them,--and he kept stumbling over two
pretty boys, who recalled to him some face he knew, and to whom he
seemed an object of lively curiosity. They held close conversations,
whispering with their heads together, and discussing him, as he could
see, and turned up wherever he went, hanging about his path. ‘I tell you
it ain’t Laurie’s ghost,’ one of them said audibly, at length. ‘He’s
twice as tall, and he’s Laurie’s brother.’ ‘Hallo!’ Frank said, turning
round upon them; ‘you are the little Severns, to be sure.’ No doubt it
was the first time the idea had occurred to him. He must be close to
Fitzroy Square, and being so, and Mrs. Severn having been such a friend
of Laurie’s, it was his duty to call. Clearly it was his duty to call.
She was a friend of the Riches, too. There was thus a kind of connexion
on two sides; and to be near and not to call would be very uncivil.
Frank made friends with the boys without any difficulty, and took the
opportunity of making them perfectly happy by a purchase of canes and
whips from a passing merchant of such commodities, and set off for the
Square under their guidance. It would not have mattered if Mrs. Severn
had not known that he was in the neighbourhood; but of course the boys
would hasten home and tell. And to be uncivil to so great a friend of
Laurie’s was a sin Frank would not have been guilty of for the world.
Thus it will be seen that it was in the simplest, most unpremeditated
way that he was led to call at the Square.
The scene he saw when he went in was a scene of which Laurie had once
made a little drawing. Though it was so hot and blazing out of doors,
the great window of Mrs. Severn’s dining-room, which looked into her
garden, was by this time of the afternoon, overshadowed by the
projecting ends of her neighbours’ houses, and admitted only a softened
light. Alice sat full in the midst of this colourless day with her curls
hanging about her shoulders, and her delicate face, with all its soft
bright tints, like a flower a little bent upon its stem. The door of the
dining-room was ajar; and this was how Frank managed to catch a passing
glimpse as he was being ushered into the decorum of the great vacant
drawing-room; for to be sure he was a stranger, and had no right to go
as familiar visitors did, and tap at the padrona’s studio-door. He saw
as he passed Alice sitting by the window, her hands full of work, and
her face full of contentment and sweet peace. And at her feet, like a
rose-bud, sat little Edith, in all a child’s carelessness of attitude,
her little white frock tucked about her shapely, rosy limbs, her little
feet crossed. Miss Hadley was in the shadow, and Frank did not see her.
He thought Alice and her little sister were alone, and that he was in
luck. He paused at the open door, though the maid led the way to the
other. ‘May I come in?’ he said. Perhaps the tone was too much like that
in which he had asked permission to enter the music-room at Richmont.
Alice gave a great start at the sound of his voice, and dropped her work
on the floor. ‘Oh, Mr. Laurie’s brother!’ cried Edith, who was quite
unembarrassed. And Frank felt himself charmed out of all reason by the
little start and the flutter of the white work as it fell. ‘I feared you
were still at Richmont,’ he said, ‘and that I should not see you.’ And
so he went lightly in and found himself in Miss Hadley’s presence, with
her sternest countenance on, a face enough to have driven out of his
wits the most enterprising cavalier in the world.
‘It is Mr. Frank Renton,’ said Alice. ‘Miss Hadley, Mr. Renton’s
brother;’ and Miss Hadley made him a curtsey, and looked him through and
through with her sharp eyes, for which Frank was so entirely unprepared.
The thought of finding Alice all by herself had been so charming to him,
and he had brightened into such genuine exultation, that the way in
which his face fell was amusing to see.
‘Your mamma will be very glad to see Mr. Renton’s brother, I am sure,’
said Miss Hadley. ‘Run, my dear, and tell her; and ask if he shall go to
the studio, or if she will come here.’
‘Don’t disturb Mrs. Severn, pray, for me,’ said the discomfited Frank.
‘I was in the neighbourhood, and by accident met the boys in the park. I
could not be so near without calling; but pray don’t disturb her for
me.’
‘She is sure to want to see you,’ said Miss Hadley. ‘Have you heard from
your brother? It was so very unexpected to us all his going away. I
hope it was not his health. But you young men think so little of
travelling now-a-days. Is it you who are going to India, Mr. Renton?
Your brother used to talk a great deal of you.’
‘Yes, I think I am going to India,’ said Frank. Alice was standing
putting her work aside before she went to tell her mother of Frank’s
presence; but at these words she turned half round with an involuntary
movement,--he could see it was involuntary, almost unconscious,--and
gave him a soft look of inquiry and grief. ‘Must you go away,--shall we
never see you again?’ said the eyes of Alice. The tears were ready to
spring and the lips to quiver, and then she returned to the folding of
her work, and blushed all over her pretty throat. And Frank saw it, and
his heart swelled within him. To think she should care! Nelly
disappeared out of his thoughts like the merest shadow,--indeed, Nelly
had not been in his thoughts since he left Royalborough. ‘I have not
quite made up my mind yet; but I fear I must go,’ he continued,
answering her look. And Miss Hadley, always sharp, noticed at once the
changed direction of his eyes.
‘Run, my dear, and tell your mother,’ she said. ‘I will put your work
away for you, and Edie may go and play with the boys. Run out into the
garden, children. We cannot have you all making a noise when people are
here.’
‘But I want to stay and talk to Mr. Laurie’s brother,’ cried Edith. ‘I
love Laurie; there is nobody so nice ever comes now. And Alice loves him
too,’ said the little traitor, ‘and tells me such stories when she is
putting me to bed, about Richmont.’
‘But, you silly child, it was Mr. Frank Renton who was at Richmont,’
said Miss Hadley. Upon which the child nodded her head a great many
times, and repeated, ‘I know, I know.’
‘Your brother was such a favourite with them all,’ said Miss Hadley,
apologetically, ‘they get confused to know which Mr. Renton it is. He is
very nice. Is he just wandering about on the face of the earth, or has
he settled down anywhere? I don’t think Mrs. Severn has heard; and that
is strange too.’
‘We don’t know exactly what route he has taken,’ said Frank, ‘He is not
much of a letter-writer. Of course my mother hears. And I don’t think it
is anything about his health. There is such pleasure to a fellow like
Laurie, who never thinks of anything, in the mere fact of travelling
about.’
‘I always thought he considered everybody before himself,’ said Miss
Hadley.
‘He never pays the slightest attention to his own affairs,’ said Frank,
‘which comes to very nearly the same thing; and yet he is the best
fellow that ever was born.’
Having thus exhausted the only subject which they had in common, he and
Miss Hadley sat and gazed at each other for some time in silence. The
governess was very well aware that Laurie had not gone away for his
health,--indeed, she had a shrewd suspicion what it was that had driven
him away,--and she could not but look at Frank with watchful, suspicious
eyes, feeling that there was something in his uncalled-for visit, in his
embarrassment, and Alice’s start and look of interest, more than met the
eye. There might have been no harm in that, had he been staying at home.
But a young man on the eve of starting for India! It would break her
mother’s heart, Miss Hadley said to herself; and though she was
sometimes troublesome, and almost intrusive in her vigilance, the
governess loved her friend with that intense affection of one woman to
another,--generally of a lonely woman to one more fortunate than
herself,--which is so seldom appreciated and so little understood, but
which sometimes rises to the height of passion. Jane Hadley made herself
disagreeable by times to the padrona, but would have been cut in pieces
for her,--would have lain down to be trampled over,--could she have done
any good by such an act to the being she held highest in the world.
Therefore it immediately occurred to her that her first duty was to
discourage and snub this new visitor. Going away to India, and yet
trying to make himself agreeable in the eyes of Alice, was a sin of the
deepest dye.
‘You were going to change into another regiment, your brother said,’
remarked Miss Hadley. ‘When do you leave? I should think, on the whole,
it would be pleasanter to change the monotony of your leisure for a more
active life.’
‘It is not settled yet,’ said Frank. ‘But I suppose I’ll go. Yes; it is
rather monotonous doing garrison work at home.’
‘And what part of India are you going to?’ Miss Hadley continued. Frank
began to get irritated by the questions. Confound India! he did not want
to think of it,--or, indeed, to trouble his mind with anything at that
moment. He wanted Alice to come back again, to look at him, to speak to
him, to play for him. He kept his eyes on the door, and felt that the
place was empty till she came. Here it was he had seen her first. There,
under the curtains in the doorway, she had stood lighting up the
darkness with her face; there she had sat making the tea;--how clearly
every little incident dwelt on his mind! As for Nelly Rich, he had not
the slightest recollection where he saw her first, nor what the
circumstances were. He was never restless for her return when she was
out of the room; but at that moment he did not even pay Nelly Rich the
compliment of contrasting his feelings in respect to her with his
feelings to Alice Severn. He simply forgot her existence, and watched
the door, and stammered what reply he could to the inquisitor who sat
opposite to him,--like an old cat he said,--watching him with her keen
eyes.
And when the door opened at last it was only Mrs. Severn who came in.
Frank absolutely changed colour, and grew pale and green with
disappointment. Laurie had thought her a type of everything most perfect
in woman; but to Frank she was a sober personage, comely and
middle-aged, and Alice’s mother, which indeed was her real appearance in
the world. She came in with a gleam of interest in her eyes, and a
little eagerness in her manner. She had not taken off her
painting-dress, but she had put aside her brushes and her palette, and
sat down by him without any fuss about abandoning her work. With her
intimates she worked on without intermission, but to strangers the
padrona ignored the constant labour which filled her life.
‘Have you brought us some news of your brother, Mr. Renton?’ she said.
‘I shall be so glad to hear he is safe in Rome. He should not have gone
so late in the year.’
‘No, I have no particular news,’ said Frank. ‘His going took us all by
surprise. My mother has had two or three little notes, I believe. I was
in the neighbourhood,’ he added in an explanatory, apologetic way, ‘and
thought I would call.’
‘I am very glad to see you,’ said the padrona; ‘Laurie Renton’s brother
can never be but welcome here. I have known him so long,--since he was a
boy,’ she added, with a little colour rising on her cheek, seeking in
her turn to excuse the warmth with which she spoke; but the blush was
for Jane Hadley quietly seated in the background seeing everything, and
not for the unconscious Frank.
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Frank. ‘Laurie was always speaking of you. I met Miss
Severn the other day at Richmont. She might tell you, perhaps. How she
plays! I don’t think I ever heard anything like it. It draws the heart
out of one’s breast.’
‘Ah, yes, Alice plays very well,’ said Mrs. Severn, with placid
complacency. ‘She is doing something for me in the studio. She is as
clever with her needle as she is with her music,’ she added, calmly.
Clever! and to compare her needlework with her music! This speech went a
long way to prove that the padrona was a very ordinary, commonplace
personage in Frank’s eyes. That, however, did not matter so much. What
was a great deal more important was that Alice did not return.
‘I hope she liked Richmont,’ he said; ‘they are kind people, and the
country is lovely just now. You don’t know Renton, Mrs. Severn? My
mother, I am sure, would be charmed to see you, and Laurie must have
told you of our woods. My mother is a great invalid. She has always been
so as long as I can recollect, but she would be delighted to see you. I
wish I could persuade you and Miss Severn to come down for a day; I
could row you up from Cookesley,’ said Frank, eagerly. Alice came in
just in time to hear these last words, and gazed at her mother with a
longing look. She had not heard the previous part of the proposal, but
to be rowed up the river from Cookesley! The words flushed her young
imagination with every kind of delight.
‘It is very tempting,’ Mrs. Severn said, ‘but I fear we must not think
of it. Alice, you must go and make some music for Mr. Renton; he likes
your playing. Are you in town only for the day?’
‘Only for the day,’ said Frank; and then he paused and put on his
suppliant look. ‘When I was here with Laurie I was allowed to stay to
tea.’
‘And so you shall stay to tea if you like it,’ said the padrona,
laughing. And Alice gave him a momentary glance and a soft little smile
of content. A paradisiacal sense of well-being and happiness glided over
Frank he could not tell how. It was something quite new and strange to
him. He had been happy most part of his life,--not being yet quite
one-and-twenty, poor fellow!--happy for no particular reason,--because
he was alive, because he was Frank Renton, because he had got something
he wanted; but this was a totally different sort of happiness. It seemed
to float him away from all mean and indifferent things; he was mounted
up on a pinnacle from the heights of which he contemplated the rest of
the world with a tender pity; he was enveloped in an atmosphere of
blessedness. This intoxicating yet subduing delight seemed to him the
natural air of the place in which he was. They must breathe it all day
long these happy people; even the governess who sat grim over her
knitting and watched him with keen eyes. It was the air of the place,
though the place was Fitzroy Square, in the heart of London, on the way
to the City; for never in the summer woods, never at home in his
hereditary house, never amid the luxuries and delights of society, had
he breathed anything like it. He did his best to make himself agreeable
to Mrs. Severn, but it cannot be asserted that he was sorry when she
left the room, which she did after a while. True, Miss Hadley was there,
more watchful than a dozen padronas; but the watchfulness seemed
appropriate somehow and was harmonised by the atmosphere, just as summer
air harmonises all out-door noises. The children rushed to the garden,
getting tired of the quiet, and Alice went into the other room and began
to play. I have said it was the only poetry of which Frank was
susceptible. All the poets in one could not have moved him as these
sweet, inarticulate floods of sound did, making the atmosphere more
heavenly still, breathing a heart into it full of soft longings and a
tender languor. The house, as we have said, was on the shady side of the
Square--the great drawing-room felt like some cool, still, excluded
place, in the midst of the hot and lingering afternoon. Frank threw
himself into a chair at the other end of the room, from whence he could
watch the musician without disconcerting her. There were the three great
windows draped in white like tall ghosts ranged against the wall; and
the chairs and tables all grouped in a mysterious way as if there were
whispering spectators who marked all; and the cool grey-green walls with
here and there the frame of a picture catching the light; and Alice in
her fresh muslin gown, white, with lines and specks of blue, with blue
ribbons tied among her curls, and her bright eyes intent and her white
hands rippling among the ivory keys. The only thing that had ever made a
painter of Frank was his meeting with Alice. His mind was becoming a
kind of picture-gallery hung with sketches of her. He remembered every
look, almost every dress she had ever worn,--the dark neutral-tinted one
that night, the white at Richmont, and now the glimmer of blue ribbons
among the curls,----
After a time Miss Hadley, who sat there patient with her knitting, like
a cat watching a mouse, was called away for something and had to leave
them reluctantly. And then it is undeniable that Frank took advantage of
her absence and stole a little closer to the piano. He even interrupted
Alice ruthlessly in the midst of her sonata.
‘Play me this,’ he said, humming the bars that haunted him. He was even
so bold as to approach his hand to the piano and run over the notes. ‘It
was the first thing I had ever heard you play,’ the young man added; ‘I
have done nothing but sing it ever since. Ah, forgive me for stopping
you! Let me hear it again.’
‘It is very lovely,’ faltered Alice, stooping her head over the keys;
and then by chance their eyes met and they knew---- What? Neither said
another word. Alice’s fingers flew at the keys with the precipitancy of
haste and fear. She spoiled the air, her heart beating so loud as to
drown both tune and time. As the notes rushed out headlong after each
other, an indifferent looker-on would have concluded poor Alice to be a
school-girl in the fullest musical sense of the word. But Frank, though
he was a connoisseur, never found it out. He sat down behind her
listening with a perfect imbecility of admiration. It might have been
St. Cecilia, it might have been the angels playing in heaven whom
Cecilia heard. To him it was a strain divine. To think that he had not
known of Alice’s existence when he heard these notes first! He began to
babble in the midst of the music, quite unconscious of doing anything
amiss.
‘When I heard you play that first I had never seen you,’ he said, and
though Alice was at the crisis of the melody her hand slackened and
lightened to listen. ‘I could not think who it could be. I thought you
must be the sick one of the family or something. And then, when your
mother called you and you came and stood in the door----’
Alice now stopped altogether and did her best to laugh. ‘What a very
good memory you must have,’ she said. ‘I am sure I could not have
remembered all that.’
‘Yes; I have a good memory,--for some things,’ said Frank, while she
half unconsciously kept running on with one hand among the treble keys,
half drowning his voice, half making an accompaniment to it. ‘Your
mother spoke of you in such a tone--I understand it now, but it
bewildered me at the time, I thought you must be ill--or--sickly--or
something. And then she called Alice, and you appeared under the
curtains; I can see it all as plain as if it had happened yesterday.
Laurie chattering enough for six with his back turned, and you standing
in the doorway like----’
Alice made a great crash on the piano and burst at once into a grand
symphony. Instinct told her to play, and it was just as well she had
done so, for one minute after Miss Hadley appeared with her perpetual
knitting in her hand. She gave Frank a look when she perceived his
change of position and herself approached the piano. A young fellow who
was going to India! That was his sole and unique description to Miss
Hadley,--and she was deeply indignant at his presumption. The symphony
was a long one, but Alice was restored to herself. Safety had come in
place of danger. She had not wanted Miss Hadley to return, and yet under
shelter of Miss Hadley her faculties came back to her. There was a good
deal of crash and execution in what she was now playing, and it suited
her feelings. It was a kind of music which Frank would have scorned at
from any other player, but oddly enough it chimed in with his feelings
now. They were both tingling all over with soft emotion and that first
excitement of early love, in which it is the man’s object to say as much
as he may under covert of commonplace observations, and the woman’s to
receive it as if it meant nothing and to escape from all appearance of
comprehension. And yet if by chance they looked at each other both knew,
not what they were aiming at certainly, but in some darkened, vague
degree that there was a meaning, and a very decided one underneath.
Then Mrs. Severn appeared again in her black silk gown, and the tea was
set upon the table, and Alice made it as she had done before. It was
like the same scene repeated, and yet it was not the same. Alice who had
been to him but a fairy vision was now---- What was she now? Frank made
a sudden jump from that side of the question, and felt his cheeks flush
and a delicious glow come over his heart. But, not to speak of Alice,
he himself was no longer an accidental guest received for his brother’s
sake; but if not a friend, at least an acquaintance received for his
own. To Alice at least he was more than an acquaintance. ‘I have lived
in the same house with Miss Severn, and I feel as if we were old
friends,’ he said, and Alice, with a soft blush and smile, did not
reject the claim. ‘How pretty it was at Richmont!’ she said, with a
soft, little sigh. And if it had not been for that dreadful old
governess, who broke in, in the most abrupt way, with something about
India! What was India to her? What had she to do with it? If a man
wanted for the moment to forget everything that was disagreeable, what
business had Miss Hadley to interfere? Frank as nearly turned his back
upon her when she made her second interpellation on the subject as
good-breeding would allow. Was it her business? He was very wroth with
the meddler, but very soft and benignant with every one else, talking to
Edith--to the child’s immense delight--as if she were grown up, and
discussing games with the boys, and making himself very generally
agreeable. He stayed long enough to watch the people beginning to arrive
on their evening calls, and accepted all the circumstances of the house
with the profoundest satisfaction and sense of fitness. But he could not
find any more private opportunities of making known his recollections or
his fancies to Alice, and went away at last when he had but time for
his train, with a sense of intoxication and absorption in he knew not
what golden dreams. India!--but soft--India, when a man came to think of
it, might for anything he knew, involve brighter possibilities than he
had yet contemplated. Speak low; whisper low. When this thought occurred
to Frank he ran and took his leave with a sensation as if a whole hive
of bees had set to buzzing in his head. As I have said it intoxicated
him. He had need to go away, to get himself into the morose solitude of
the train to think it over. The sudden light that had burst upon his
path took all power of vision from his dazzled eyes.
CHAPTER XVIII.
WAVERING.
It has been seen that Frank Renton was not, in any sense of the words, a
model young man. He was not offensive nor disagreeable, but as a pure
matter of fact, the centre of his own world, as, indeed, we all are more
or less. When it had been placed so very clearly before him that it was
to his advantage to marry money, he had acquiesced, with a little
struggle, feeling that the advantage was so great as to create a duty;
but now, after this bewildering day, another prospect altogether opened
before his eyes. He had forgotten Nelly. For the moment she passed from
his mind, as if she had never been, and Alice had risen upon him like
the sun. He could perceive now that from the first moment his heart had
claimed her. Happiness, companionship, the very light of life, seemed to
be concentrated for him in that simple youthful creature, ignorant of
the world, innocent as a child, sweet with the earliest freshness of
existence. He had no need to reason about it, to say to himself that it
was she whom he wanted, she whom he had unconsciously been groping for;
he knew it; it was clear as daylight; he seemed to himself to have been
aware of it all along, from the earliest moment. A voice from heaven had
spoken to him, as to Adam, crying, ‘This is she.’ Such was the thought
that filled his mind as he went down to Royalborough in the dark and
damp loneliness of the railway carriage. He had so much thinking to do
that he had warned the guard that he must have a compartment to himself;
and there he lay back in his corner with a very black shadow thrown on
him from the dim lamp, and floated forth upon this Elysian sea of
thought. But it was only for the first two minutes that it was Elysian.
All at once he sat bolt upright, and remembered that he had forgotten
something. Nelly! This recollection rushed at him like another railway
train in the darkness, so that there was a sharp and violent collision.
After the first shock Frank began to consider anxiously how far he had
gone on that other side, what words he might have spoken, what
inferences had been made. Only yesterday, it must be allowed, he was
making very decided way towards Nelly. He had been softened, and brought
nearer to her personally, and the house and the hunters had held a very
high place in his thoughts. He had persuaded his mother to call, and
written a note which was not at all unlike the first beginning of
love-making. And yet, to-day, he had forgotten Nelly’s existence. When
he recollected all this, he grew suddenly very hot, and very
uncomfortable. Love, even when it is unfortunate, has something sweet in
it; but the thought of Nelly’s little indignant face was not sweet. He
had never loved her; he had never, even to himself, pretended to be fond
of her. He had represented to himself that if they were married, no
doubt the time would come when he should be fond of his wife. But while
he was thus deciding in cold blood, the other had but to give a glance,
and all was over with Nelly. When this terrible complication became
apparent, Frank no longer found that there was anything Elysian in his
circumstances; for this discovery suddenly revealed to him the entire
circumstances of the case. Nelly was marriageable, for she was very
rich; but Alice was poor. If the wealth of the one out-balanced the
objections against her in respect to birth and breeding, there was no
such saving clause in respect to the other. Even Mr. Rich patronised
Mrs. Severn. The artist’s family was of no rank, and had no such social
standing whatever, not even that conferred by money. As for the
distinction of art,--Frank was too much a man of the world not to know
for how little that counted. Penniless, without connexions or prospects,
or blood, or anything,--a creature who was only herself, and possessed
only the qualities of her own mind and heart! To make such a marriage,
Frank was aware, would be sheer madness. Nelly was different. Nelly
meant Cookesley Lodge, with all its accompaniments and a certain sum
a-year. Alice meant nothing but her simple self. No wonder the moisture
stood heavy on his forehead. He had been a fool, in suffering himself to
be thus moved out of all sense and prudence. And yet when he tried to
turn to other thoughts his heart grew sick. He--almost--made a vow never
to think of anybody, never to look at any one more. Why was fate always
so spiteful? Why was it that Alice had not Nelly’s fortune, or Nelly
Alice’s charms? It was not that he was mercenary. Money, except for what
it brought, was not important to Frank; but there is a difference
between being mercenary and being an idiot. And he knew so well what the
world would say if, instead of marrying money, he married a girl who had
nothing,--neither money nor any other substantial recommendation. He
would be laughed at, and she would be snubbed,--and who could wonder at
it? Thus Frank reasoned with himself, and groaned in his heart. And then
he thought of India, and the world stood still for a moment that he
might look that possibility in the face.
India! In the first place, it was out of the world, and the ridicule
attending his fiasco would not, in India, be so overwhelming; but at the
same time, the world is a very small place, and news would travel
faster than by telegraph to everybody who was anybody. In India the pay
was double, which was a very great matter; but then, on the other hand,
would not the expenses be greater too? Not, of course, in proportion to
Cookesley Lodge and the hunters, which, alas! it was no use thinking any
more about, but in proportion to the tiny _ménage_ which a young soldier
with two hundred a-year, besides his pay, might venture on at home. And
here, once more, Frank drew himself up, with a sensation of misery. Two
hundred a-year and his pay barely sufficed for himself. To marry upon it
would be simple madness, neither more nor less. And to wait seven
years---- No! India was the only chance. It was the most usual thing in
the world for a young fellow going out there to marry before he
went;--therefore it must be practicable. There would be no society nor
expensive habits,--as he supposed, in his ignorance,--and there was the
chance of appointments, which was always worth taking into account.
Frank contemplated the question all round, but it was a very dreary
horizon which encircled him on every side. Poverty, the renunciation of
most things which had made life agreeable--a struggle with care and the
burdens of serious life,--instead of Cookesley and the hunters and
terriers, and the country gentleman’s existence, for which he had
evidently been created! There was so much good in the young man
however, that though he could not but contrast the two existences which
thus seemed to be set before him, he could not and did not contrast the
two through whose hands their different threads must run. He made no
comparison there. Nelly had been swept out of his sky the moment Alice
appeared.
One thing was quite clear to him at this crisis of excitement and
emotion, while the image of Alice still danced before his eyes with all
her soft looks and words;--Cookesley and its delights,--meaning Nelly
and her fortune,--were impossible,--quite impossible; altogether out of
the question. He had been capable in the abstract of doing a duty to
himself and the world, and securing,--in default of Laurie, for whom he
always acknowledged the position would have been so much more
suitable,--all those advantages which seemed to be held out to him in
Nelly Rich’s hand. He liked her very well, and no doubt would have grown
fond of her in time. That he could have done. His own interests, and the
unanimous voice of his friends, and the appeal of the world in general,
had all but decided the question. But Frank, notwithstanding the prudent
and practical character of his understanding, was true and honest at
bottom. And as soon as he discovered beyond question that he was in love
with one woman, it became impossible for him to marry another, whatever
the advantages might be which she brought with her. He was not capable
of that. It was indispensable to him to be true, if not to Alice, who
knew nothing about his sentiments, at least to Nelly. She had a right to
it. He could have married her yesterday, but he could not deceive her
to-day. What could he do? The clouds closed in upon him, swallowed him
up, the more he thought it over. Do! Nothing but trudge forth to India,
leaving his hopes of every description behind him,--a saddened and a
solitary man. Neither one thing nor another, neither love nor wealth
were practicable.
‘I must never see her again,’ Frank said to himself, as he got out of
the train; ‘I must never see her again!’ Perhaps it was because of the
very practicality and matter-of-fact character of his mind that he felt
it dangerous to permit himself such an indulgence. He could not go and
gaze and moon about her, as other men might, without anything coming of
it. The only safeguard would be to keep away altogether. But it was not
a cheerful thought; and, consequently, when he emerged from the station
with his hat down over his brows, a certain air of tragedy and misery
was about the poor fellow. And if the reader of this sober history
should at any time encounter on the railway between London and
Royalborough an unfortunate and melancholy Guardsman, well thrown back
into the shadow of the lamp, gnawing his moustache as he chews the cud
of fancy, let him remember the miserable perplexities of poor Frank
Renton, and pity the man. The impulse of the mature spectator’s mind is
so invariably to vituperate the military butterfly, that it is the duty
of the benevolent moralist to turn the tide of sympathy towards that
beautiful, frivolous, yet sometimes suffering creature, when he has the
opportunity. After all, Guardsmen are men.
Frank kept his resolution for a week. He gave himself a fair trial. To
describe the cogitations which passed through his mind during that time,
would only weary the reader without bringing him any nearer to the issue
of the conflict; for, to be sure, it does not matter so very much what
conclusion a young man may arrive at in such a contest, after even weeks
of thought. Five minutes may destroy the entire fabric at any time;--a
sudden meeting,--three words,--all unpremeditated on either side,--a
chance look,--even a few notes of music played unawares by strange
hands,--will suffice to undo the finest piece of reasoning ever put
together. Nor is it at all unusual in Frank’s circumstances for a young
man to make an absolute determination against marriage one day, and go
and lay himself at the feet of the lady of his affections on the next.
Many times, it must be allowed, Cookesley Lodge would burst like a
sudden revelation upon the young man’s soul. He could hear the hunters
rattling up the avenue, and the dogs yelping a chorus of welcome; and
then this charming home-scene would give place to a misty conception of
an Indian bungalow,--whatever that might be,--and the fierce delights of
a jungle-hunt. The question was not Alice or Nelly,--that would have
horrified him;--but Cookesley with all possible comforts and
indulgences, and India with none;--question enough to make a man ponder.
Four or five days after his visit to London, though it seemed four or
five years from the multiplicity of his thoughts, he rode over to
Richmont, on an unacknowledged mission to prove to himself whether that
image of Alice, which he had been trying hard to banish, would disappear
before the close realisation of all the good things on the other side.
He had tried to forget her, or rather he had tried to shut her out from
his thoughts; to divert his mind to anything else in the world rather
than allow it to dwell upon her. And he was now going to test what
success he had had. Nelly Rich was sketching under the trees, as we have
before seen her, when he rode up to the door; and instead of going in to
pay his respects to her mother, Frank,--with a strong sense of
duty,--crossed the lawn to where the white figure, with sketching-block
on her lap, and bright ribbons fluttering about her, sat in the shadow
of the soft limes. A prettier picture could not have been desired. The
dead white of the dress blazed out in the sunshine, lying in crisp folds
upon the soft grass. The silken lime-leaves made a flutter and chequer
of light and shade upon the pretty drooping head. Nelly was older, more
piquant, more expressive, indeed, to any unprejudiced eye more
beautiful, than Alice Severn; not, as Frank said to himself hotly, that
he ever had made such a profane comparison. But yet it was impossible
thus to approach the one without thinking of the other. There was a
technicality and a pretension, he thought, about all this paraphernalia
of the artist. When Alice went softly to her piano, you never could have
told, until you heard her, that she was anything but a school-girl. And
no one seemed to give her any particular glory for her music. She was a
little girl to all of them. Whereas Nelly was the mistress of
everything, more mistress in the house than was her mother, and getting
credit for all sorts of talent and cleverness. In his heart Frank took
up a position of defence for the absent, whom, indeed, no one dreamt of
attacking. No doubt he would have to talk of the sketch, and admire it
as if it had been something very fine. At Fitzroy Square the mother had
smiled and had just admitted that Alice played well;--and that she was
as clever at her needle as at her music. How strange was the difference!
‘Is it you, Mr. Renton?’ said Nelly; and she put down her
sketching-block hastily as he approached. ‘I could not make you out till
you came quite close. Did you not find mamma?’
‘I confess I did not ask,’ said Frank; and the consciousness that he was
paying a compliment which he did not mean embarrassed him in his
peculiar circumstances; ‘I saw you here----’ and then he stopped, the
unfortunate youth giving double meaning to his words.
Nelly blushed. It was very natural she should after such an address; and
her change of colour told upon Frank as the most terrible reproach. ‘I
thought Mrs. Rich would be with you,’ he added, hurriedly; ‘it is so
pleasant out-of-doors on such a day. You were sketching, I am sure, and
I have stopped your work.’
‘Oh, it does not matter,’ said Nelly. ‘I want to draw the house, and I
cannot get it just as I want it. I must have in the window of the
music-room. You know I live there. I don’t care for all the rest of the
house in comparison with that one room.’
‘Yes,’ said Frank, with a sudden relapse, ‘with such music as we had
there the other day, the place was like paradise.’
‘You liked little Alice Severn’s playing,’ said Nelly. ‘Ah! yes, I
remember. She plays very well. For myself I am not fanatical about
music. I don’t understand it. I want to know what it says, and it says
nothing. And these musical people are so exclusively musical, they never
seem to have brains for anything else.’
‘But that could not be the case with--Miss Severn, I should think,’ said
Frank, taking a foolish pleasure in speaking of her, and making a little
pause before her name like a worshipper. Nelly gave him a quick glance,
and answered carelessly.
‘Oh, Alice! She is a good little thing enough; but I don’t think she has
much brains,--few girls have,--or men either for that matter. I don’t
expect anything of the kind from people who come to this house.’
‘You are not complimentary to your visitors,’ said Frank, feeling
mortified, and with a secret sense that something at least of this
condemnation was intended for himself.
‘Well, Mr. Renton, few of our visitors are complimentary to us,’ said
Nelly, with a flush on her face, which even Frank perceived was quite
different from the soft blush which had greeted his first appearance.
Probably her quick ear had caught some difference in his tone, though he
was not himself aware of it. ‘We are rich, and you come to us when we
ask you, and are very civil; but I know you laugh at us behind our
backs, and make very free with our names, and do not show us the respect
you would to the most miserable creature who was of good family. And
then you think we are taken in by it, and don’t know----’
‘Miss Rich, you must allow me to say that personally you are doing me a
great injustice,’ said Frank, colouring high. ‘I cannot undertake to be
responsible for everybody who comes here; but so far as myself and my
friends are concerned----’
‘Oh, I beg your pardon!’ cried Nelly, turning her face towards him with
sudden shame and penitence which made it beautiful. Her large brilliant
eyes were full of tears, and the eloquent blood had rushed to her
cheeks. She held out her hands to him in the fervour of her compunction.
‘Oh, forgive me!--do forgive me! I was cross. I did not know what I was
saying. I did not mean you.’
There was nothing that Frank could do but take the pretty, soft,
appealing hands, and hold them in his own for a moment. He did not kiss
them, as no doubt he would have done had he never paid that visit to the
Square. ‘There is nothing for me to forgive,’ he said in softened tones.
And then Nelly recovered herself, and took her hands away.
‘But you must forgive me,’ she said, ‘for being cross to you, who, I am
sure, did not deserve it. Your mother called on Wednesday, and mamma was
so pleased. You know we are new people,--very new people--and it is a
great thing for us to have Mrs. Renton calling. But because we are such
spick-and-span new people we have always something happening to vex us.
One hears bits of gossip about you officers,--how you laugh and discuss
one, and take things in your head,’ said Nelly, breaking off suddenly,
and looking full in Frank’s face. What did she mean? Whatever it was, it
covered him with embarrassment and shame. This conversation at least was
true. He had been taking things in his head, and he did not know how to
meet her look, or give her any reply.
‘I don’t know to what you refer,’ he faltered. ‘I am sure, Miss Rich----’
and then he broke off altogether, so great was his confusion under the
steady light of her keen eyes. ‘There is no doubt,’ he went on, as soon
as he recovered himself, ‘that everything possible and impossible is
talked about. It is the fashion everywhere now-a-days. You know it as
well as I. But had anything that was less than respectful ever been
breathed in my presence----’
‘I was quite sure of that,’ said Nelly, leaning towards him with glowing
eyes and expressive face. The eyes were full of soft gratitude, and
something that looked like a tender pride. ‘I know that,’ she repeated;
‘you have always been so different!’ The voice had fallen quite low, so
that Frank had to lean forward to hear it. And there was encouragement
in her look for anything he might have had to say, for anything he
might have been moved to do, in the excitement of the moment. And
Frank’s heart was softened by compunction and the sense that he was not
so blameless as he had claimed to be. The crisis of his fate had come.
THE END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
LONDON:
Printed by STRANGEWAYS & WALDEN, Castle St. Leicester Sq.
* * * * *
THE THREE BROTHERS.
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT,
AUTHOR OF
‘CHRONICLES OF CARLINGFORD,’
‘SALEM CHAPEL,’ ‘THE MINISTER’S WIFE,’
ETC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1870.
_The Right of Translation is Reserved_
LONDON
STRANGEWAYS AND WALDEN, PRINTERS.,
28 Castle St. Leicester Sq.
CONTENTS
OF
THE THIRD VOLUME.
PAGE
I. ALICE’S FATE 1
II. A STRUGGLE 16
III. EXCHANGED INTO THE 200TH 36
IV. WHAT IT COSTS TO HAVE ONE’S WAY 56
V. THE FALLING OF THE WATERS 73
VI. THE RAVEN 93
VII. THE DOVE 113
VIII. BEN 133
IX. THE NEXT MORNING 154
X. AUNT LYDIA 174
XI. ALL HOME 184
XII. SUSPENSE 199
XIII. THE WILL 220
XIV. THE END OF A DREAM 241
XV. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR 262
XVI. WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO LAURIE 283
XVII. CONCLUSION 304
THE THREE BROTHERS.
CHAPTER I.
ALICE’S FATE.
Alice Severn was very innocent and very young,--just over sixteen,--a
child to all intents and purposes,--as everybody thought around her. Old
Welby, who had taken to meddling in the padrona’s affairs, with that
regard which the friends of a woman who is alone feel themselves
entitled to display for her interests, had been pressing very earnestly
upon Mrs. Severn’s attention the necessity of preparing her child, who
had an evident and remarkable talent, to exercise it in public.
‘Few people, indeed, have their way so clear before them,’ he had said
repeatedly. ‘It is the finest thing in the world to have a girl or boy
with a decided turn. If you could but see the parents who come to me
with sons who don’t know what they would be at; and the idiots think
they may be made painters because they care for nothing in earth or
heaven. But here is this child with a talent. Of course, if it were a
talent for our own art, we might know better how to manage it; but such
as it is, it is a gift. Never undervalue a gift, my dear madam.
Providence itself points out the way for you. You have only got to train
her for her work.’
‘But, Mr. Welby,’ pleaded the padrona, ‘she is such a child. How could I
send my little maid out into the world to appear in public! I could not
do it! It would drive me out of my senses. My child! You forget what
kind of a creature she is.’
‘I don’t in the least forget,’ said the R.A. ‘She is very pretty, too,
which is a pity; but you should be above foolish notions in that
respect,--you who are so well known to the public yourself.’
‘Not so very well known,’ said the padrona, with a half smile; ‘and then
it is only my name, not me. And even if it were my very self, why it
would only be me still, not her. I am old, and what does it matter? But
my lily, my darling! Mr. Welby, you are very kind, but you do not take
the circumstances into consideration;--you do not realise to the full
extent what the consequences would be.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by the full extent,’ said Mr. Welby; ‘but
this I see as clear as daylight, that some time or other the child will
probably have her bread to earn. I say probably. She may marry, of
course, but the papers tell us people have given up marrying now-a-days.
You can’t live for ever, ma’am; and still more certainly you can’t work
for ever. And the child has actually something in her fingers by which
she could earn money, and provide for herself with the greatest ease.
Besides, a musician is not like a singer, or a dancer, or anything of
that sort. She comes on and sits down before her piano, and never pays
any attention to her audience. She need not even look at them unless she
likes. She has only a little curtsey to make, and so is off again. It is
positively nothing. She may marry, of course, but that would be no
protection against poverty. And what’s the alternative? A lingering,
idle sort of life at home; saving scraps, and making her own gowns and
bonnets; or, perhaps, giving music-lessons to tiresome children whom she
would hate. You should not, my dear Mrs. Severn, do such injustice to
your child.’
‘Indeed, I am the last person to do her injustice,’ said the padrona,
half angered, half saddened, with tears in her eyes. It was a very
trenchant style of argument. ‘If I were to die, or if I were to fail in
my work!’ Mrs. Severn said to herself, with one of those awful throbs of
dread which come upon a woman who is the sole protector and
bread-winner of her children. Such a thought was not unfamiliar to her
mind. It came sometimes at chance hours, stealing upon her suddenly like
an evil spirit, and wringing her heart. It set her now, for the
hundredth time, to count up the little scraps of resource they would
have in such a terrible contingency, the friends who would or might be
kind to them. ‘If I might but live till Edie is twenty!’ was the silent
prayer that followed. It did not seem possible that so long as she did
live she would be unable to work. This frenzy of dread was but
momentary. Had it lasted, so sharp and poignant was it, the life which
was so important might have been put in jeopardy; but fortunately Mrs.
Severn’s mind was as elastic as mind could be, and rose again like a
flower after the heavy foot had pressed it down. Yet, Alice,--could she
be doing injustice to Alice? These arguments had without doubt made a
certain impression upon her. Let but this summer be over, she said to
herself. It would be time enough certainly when the child was
seventeen,--one more year of sweet childhood and leisure, and
undisturbed girlish peace. And then the grateful thought came back upon
the mother of Mr. Rich’s commission which she was working at, and her
year’s work which was secure. Could there be comfort greater than that
thought? And the morrow would care for the things of itself.
While such discussions went on,--for they were frequent,--Alice moved
about the house, a soft, domestic spirit, with light steps and a face
like a flower. Every day it became more like a flower. The sweetness
expanded, the husks of the lovely blossom opened, the woman came gliding
noiselessly, so that nobody around perceived it, out of the silken bud
of the girl. She was clever at her needle, as her mother had boasted,
and made and mended with the homely natural satisfaction of a worker who
is conscious of working well; and she was housekeeper, and managed the
accounts, and ordered the dinners, proud of her importance and the
duties of her office; and she saw the children put to bed, and heard
them say their prayers. The homeliest, most limited life,--and yet what
could the world give that was better? Not Nelly Rich’s leisure, and
gaiety, and luxury; not Mary Westbury’s tedious comforts and
occupations. Alice for her part had everything,--and the piano, and the
talk of nights added to all. And yet her mind was not undisturbed, as
her mother fondly thought. A little secret, no bigger than a pin’s
point, had sprung into being in the virgin heart;--not worth calling a
secret,--not a thing at all, in short,--only a murmur of soft, musing
recollections,--dreams that were not half tangible enough to be called
hopes. As, for instance, what was it he meant when their eyes met that
afternoon as she played to him? how was it that he remembered so well
every time he had seen her,--even her dress?--questions which she asked
and then retreated from, and eluded, and played with, and returned to
them again. And would he go to India? Would he come back to Fitzroy
Square? So misty was the sphere in which all this passed that the one
question seemed to Alice as important as the other. What if he might
come again some afternoon, flushing all the fading sky with new tints?
What if he should go away and never be heard of more? All this was in
the child’s mind when her mother resolved that this summer at least
Alice should be left in undisturbed peace. The old story repeated
itself, as everything does in this world,--the everlasting tale of
individual identity, of isolation and separation of nature between those
who are dearest and nearest to each other. The mother would have given
her life cheerfully for her child, but could no more see into that
child’s soul than if she had been entirely indifferent to her. And
Alice, the most loving and dutiful of children, went sweetly on her way,
shaping out her own individual life, and never suspecting in that any
treason to her earliest loves, or any possible break in her existence.
It all turned on the point whether a young Guardsman, who,--with all
kindness towards Frank Renton be it said,--was not equal to either Alice
or her mother, should call, or should not call, next time he might be in
town. Certainly a very trifling matter, and almost concluded against
Alice beforehand, as may have been perceived.
I cannot take it upon me to say if he had never come that Alice would
have broken her heart. Her heart was too young, too fresh, too
visionary, to be tragically moved. She could have gone on looking for
him, wondering if he would come, quite as capable of expecting that he
would suddenly appear out of the depths of India as that he would come
from Royalborough. She had so much time to spare yet before beginning
life for herself that the fanciful delight of wondering what he meant by
a look or a word, was actually more sweet to her than anything tangible
could have been; but yet if he had never come again, a pathetic chord
would have sounded among the fresh harmonies of her being,--perhaps a
deeper note than any which had yet been awakened in her, at least a
sadder one. She would have looked for him and grown weary, and a certain
languor and melancholy would have come into her life. Already she had
more pleasure in thinking than she had ever been known to have,--or at
least she called it thinking,--and would sit silent for hours wrapped in
soft dreams, forgetting to talk, to the great disgust of little Edith,
and wonder of Miss Hadley, who was the sharpest observer in the
household, and guessed what it all meant. But still Alice could have no
reason to complain had Frank Renton never more made his appearance in
the Square. She would never have dreamt of complaining, poor child; she
would have sighed, and a ray of light would have gone out of her life,
and that would have been all;--and she had so many rays of light that
there might well be one to spare!
It was not thus, however, that things turned out. Not much more than a
week had elapsed when Frank again made his appearance in the Square. He
had not said much to himself about it. He pretended to himself, indeed,
that it was a sudden thought, as he had some time to spare. ‘One might
as well go and bid them good-bye,’ he said aloud, the better to persuade
himself that it was purely accidental. He had seen Montague, and had all
but concluded with him about the exchange, though he had still been
quite doubtful on the subject when he came up to town. Yet the sight of
the other side, and the reality given to the matter by the actual
discussion of it as a thing to be done, had an effect upon him which
nothing else had yet had. It was made at once into a matter of fact by
the first half-dozen words he exchanged with Montague of the 200th. And
now it was all but settled, whatever other conclusions might follow. The
suddenness with which this very serious piece of business had been
concluded, or all but concluded, had filled Frank with a certain
excitement. He did not know how he should announce it at home,--how he
should tell it to his friends. But he had done it. No doubt his mother
would weep, and other eyes would look on him reproachfully. Not that any
eyes had a right,--an absolute right,--to reproach him; but still----!
Frank’s mind had been very much agitated and beaten about for some days
past. That interview with Nelly had been hard upon him. He had not said
all, nor nearly all, that he had been expected to say; but still he had
said something which had drawn the indefinite bond between them a little
closer. He would owe to her, he felt, after what had passed, some sort
of embarrassing explanation of the reasons which had induced him all at
once to make up his mind and choose India and work, instead of what was
vaguely called his good prospects at home. These good prospects he knew,
and everybody knew, herself included, were,--Nelly and her fifty
thousand pounds; and it would be as much as saying, ‘I have given up all
thoughts of you,’ when he told her of his sudden determination. He had
said nothing about going to India in that last interview. On the
contrary, he had been rather eloquent on the subject of staying at home.
And now he would have to explain to her that India and freedom had more
charms for him than she had, even when backed by all her advantages. It
was not a pleasant intimation to make; neither was the thought pleasant
of telling his mother, who would have still more occasion to reproach
him. ‘Go to India, when you might have fifty thousand for the asking,
and heaven knows how much more!’ Mrs. Renton would say; and would feel
herself deeply aggrieved by her son’s backsliding. He had been beguiled
into all this by the talk of Montague of the 200th, and his own errant,
foolish inclinations. It had seemed to him like an escape from himself,
and he had taken advantage of the chance;--but it was terrible to
contemplate the immediate results. And he had an hour or two to spare,
and a little music had always so good an effect upon him! Besides, it
would not be civil to go away without taking farewell of Laurie’s
friends. The 200th were to go in three months. There would be little
further time for anything but the business of his outfit. Frank turned
his steps towards the Square with the resolution, declared,--to
himself,--that this should be the last time. He would see them once
more, as civility required, and then all would be over. He would put all
such nonsense from his mind, the folly of thinking of either;--for was
it not folly to entertain such an idea at his age?--and go away and
enjoy his freedom. He would be twenty-one before the regiment set sail,
which was no doubt a serious age, and the beginning of mature manhood;
but still few men without money married so early. And Frank did not want
a wife, though he had thus got himself into such difficulties with two
girls at once. The clear course was evidently to set himself free from
such premature entanglements, and take refuge in distance and novelty,
and rejoice in his escape.
By what strange chance it was that the padrona should have gone out that
special afternoon, taking Miss Hadley with her, is what I never could
explain. Things do occur so sometimes in this curious world, where
everything happens that ought not to happen. Alice was alone, all by
herself in that shadowy, silent drawing-room. It was a thing which did
not occur thrice in a year. And lo! Frank Renton’s visit to say good-bye
must happen on one of these rare occasions! Alice was not playing when
he was ushered in. She was sitting at work close to the piano, though
that too was not usual to her. She had gone in with the intention of
practising, but the charm of thinking had been too strong for her. Even
her work had fallen on her knee in the soft, profound stillness and
loneliness which of late had come to be so sweet to her. She was
thinking of him, asking herself once more those sweet, vague, fanciful
questions. It was so pleasant, in her new mood, to feel herself all
alone, free to think as she pleased, and lose herself in dreams for a
whole, long, enchanted afternoon. And just at that moment, as good or
evil fortune decided, Frank Renton was shown into the room. He himself
was struck dumb by the chance, as well as Alice. She looked up at him,
poor child, with absolute consternation. ‘Oh, I am so sorry mamma is
out!’ she said; and notwithstanding the stir and flutter of her heart at
the sight of him, she was quite in earnest when she said so. Mamma being
out, however, made all the difference between conscious safety and calm
and the uneasy dread which she could not explain. What was she afraid
of? Alice could not answer the question. Not of him, certainly, of whom
she believed every good under heaven. Of herself, then? But she only
repeated her little outcry of regret, and could give no reason for her
shy shrinking and fears.
‘Is she?’ said Frank; ‘but I must not go away, must I?--though your tone
seems somehow to imply it. Let me stay and wait for her. I have come to
say good-bye.’
‘Good-bye?’ said Alice, faltering. The child grew cold all over in a
moment, as if a chill had blown upon her. ‘Are you really, really going
to India, after all?’
‘After all? after what?’ said Frank, turning upon her so quickly that
she had no time to think.
‘Oh, I meant after----. I thought----. People said----. But, no, indeed;
I am sure I never believed it, Mr. Renton; it is such stupid talk; only
I was a little surprised,’ said Alice, recovering herself. ‘I mean, are
you really going to India,--after all?’
Frank laughed. He was at no loss now as he had been with Nelly Rich. ‘I
see that is what you mean,’ he said, looking at her with softened,
shining eyes, and that delicious indulgence for her youth and simplicity
which made him feel himself twice a man; ‘and you may say after all.
There are some things I shall be glad to escape from, and there are
other things,’ said Frank, rising and going close to her, ‘there are
other things----’
He did not mean it,--certainly he did not mean it,--any more than he had
meant going to India, when he came up that morning to town to talk the
matter over in a vague, general way; but, somehow, as he stood in front
of her, leaning over the high-backed chair on which she had placed her
work, gazing into the sweet face lifted to him, which changed colour
every moment, and was as full of light and shade as any summer sky, a
sudden sense of necessity came over him. Leave her?--Was there anybody
in the world but the two of them looking thus at each other? Did
anything else matter in comparison? ‘What is the use of making any
pretences?’ cried Frank; ‘if you will but come with me, Alice, going to
India will be like going to heaven!’
She sat and gazed at him with consternation and wonder and dismay;
growing pale to the very lips; straining her wistful eyes to make out
what he meant. Was he mad? What was he thinking of? ‘Go with, you?’ she
faltered, under her breath, incapable of any expression but that of
amaze. Her wondering eye sank under his look, and her heart began to
beat, and her brow to throb. The suggestion shook her whole being,
though she had not quite fathomed what it meant. And then the crimson
colour rose like a sudden flame, and flew over all her face. The change,
the trouble, the surprise, were like so many variations in the sky, and
they combined to take from the young lover what little wits he had left.
‘Would it be so dreadful?’ he said, bending down over her. ‘Alice, just
you and I. What would it matter where we were so long as we were
together? I know it would matter nothing to me. I would take such care
of you. I should be as happy as the day was long. I want nothing but to
have you by me, to look at you, and listen to you. I do not care if
there were not another creature in the world’, cried the youth; ‘just
you and I!’
‘Oh, don’t speak so!’ cried Alice, trembling in her agitation and
astonishment. ‘Don’t, oh, don’t! You must not! How could I ever, ever
leave mamma?’
‘Then it is not me you object to?’ cried the lover, in triumph, taking
her hands, taking herself to him in a tender delirium.
This was how it came about. With no more preparation on either side,
with everything against it,--friends, prudence, fortune, Nelly,--every
influence you could conceive. And yet they did it without any intention
of doing it,--on the mere argument of being left for half-an-hour alone
together. True, it took more than half-an-hour to calm down the
bewilderment of the girl’s mind, thus launched suddenly at a stroke into
the wide waters of life. She looked back trembling upon her little
haven, the harbour where she had lain so quietly a few minutes before.
But we can never go back those few minutes. The thing was done, and
nobody in the world could be more surprised at it than the two young,
rash, happy creatures themselves, holding each other’s hands, and
looking into each other’s faces, and asking themselves,--Could it be
true?
CHAPTER II.
A STRUGGLE.
There are moments in life which are so sweet as to light up whole weeks
of gloom; and there are moments so dreadful as to make the unfortunate
actors in them tremble at the recollection to the end of their lives.
Such a moment in the life of Frank Renton was that in which he suddenly
heard the padrona’s knock at her own door. He had been as happy as a
young man could be. He had felt himself willing, and over again willing,
to give up everything without a regret, for the sake of the love he had
won, and which was, he said to himself, of everything in earth and
heaven the most sweet. This he had said to himself a hundred times over
as he hung over Alice in the first ecstasy of their betrothal. He could
not imagine how he ever could have doubted. Going to India would, as he
had said, be going to heaven. Where he went, she would be with him. He
should have her all to himself, free from any interference. They would
be free to go forth together, hand in hand, like Adam and Eve. What was
any advantage the world could give in comparison to such blessedness? He
was in the full flush of his delight when that awful knock was heard at
the door.
At the sound of it Alice started too. She clung to him first, and then
she shrank from him. ‘Oh, it is mamma!’ she cried, with sudden dismay.
Then there was a pause. Frank let go the hand he had been holding.
Nature and the world stood still in deference to the extraordinary
crisis. He turned his face, which had suddenly grown pale, to the door.
And they heard her talking as she came up the stairs, unconcerned,
laughing as if nothing had happened! ‘It will be a surprise to Alice,’
she said audibly, pausing in the passage, at the dining-room door. And
Alice shuddered as she listened. A surprise! If the padrona could but
know what a terrible surprise had been prepared for herself!
And then she came in upon them, smiling and blooming, her soft colour
heightened by a little fresh breeze that was blowing, bright from the
pleasant unusual intercourse with the outside world. ‘I am sorry you did
not come with us, Alice,’ she said. ‘It is not so hot as we thought it
was. Ah, Mr. Renton!’ and she held out her hand to him. Upon what tiny
issues does life hang. If Alice had not thought it too hot to go out,
all this might never have happened. And the mother to speak of it so
lightly, thinking of nothing more important than the walk, ignorant
what advantage had been taken of her absence! To the two guilty
creatures who knew, every word was an additional stab.
‘I came up again to-day about the same business,’ said Frank, faltering.
Alice bent trembling over her work, and said nothing. She did not go, as
was her wont, with soft, tender hands, to untie the bonnet and take off
the shawl, taking pride in her office as ‘mamma’s maid.’ She put on an
aspect of double diligence over her work, though her hands trembled so
that she could scarcely hold her needle.
Even Mrs. Severn’s unsuspicious nature was startled. She turned to Miss
Hadley, who had come in behind her, and said, half in dumb-show, with a
certain impatience, ‘What does he mean by coming so often?’
‘No good,’ answered Miss Hadley, solemnly, under her breath; which
laconic utterance amused the padrona so much, that her momentary
uneasiness flew away. She sat down smiling, turning her kind face upon
the trembling pair. ‘Poor Laurie’s brother!’ she said to herself. That
was argument enough for tolerating him and showing him all kindness.
‘Alice, how is it you are so busy?’ she said. ‘I think you might order
some tea. Though it is not so very hot, it is pleasant to get into the
shade. I hope your business has made progress, Mr. Renton,’ she added,
politely. As the padrona looked at them it became slowly apparent to
her that something was wrong. Alice had not liked the task of
entertaining a stranger all by herself; or----! But of course it must be
that. It was ill-bred of him, even though he was Laurie’s brother, to
insist on coming in when there was nobody but the child to receive him.
Mrs. Severn began to feel uncharitably towards the young man. Alice
flushed one moment, and the next was quite pale. She was reluctant to
raise her eyes, and neglected all her usual _petits soins_. When she had
to get up to obey her mother, it was with a shy avoidance of her look,
which went to the padrona’s heart. What could be the matter? Was she
ill? Had he been rude to her? But that was impossible. ‘Is there
anything wrong, my darling?’ she said, half rising from her seat.
‘Oh, no, mamma!’ said Alice, breathlessly, in a fainting voice.
The padrona gave Miss Hadley a look which meant,--Go and see what is the
matter; and then with a very pre-occupied mind turned towards Frank to
play politeness and do her social duties. ‘I hope your business has made
progress,’ she repeated, vaguely; and then it became apparent that he
was agitated too.
‘Yes,’ he said; and then he came forward to her quite pale and with an
air of mingled supplication and alarm which filled her with the
profoundest bewilderment. ‘Oh, Mrs. Severn, forgive us!’ he cried. He
would have gone down on his knees had he thought that would have been
effectual; but he did not dare to go down on his knees. He stood before
her like a culprit about to be sentenced; and she looked at him with
eyes in which alarm and suspicion began to glow. There was something
wrong; but even now the mother to whom her child was indeed a child did
not guess what it was.
‘Us!’ she said; and somehow a thought of Laurie struck into the maze of
her thoughts. He could not have done anything, poor fellow, in his
exile, to call for forgiveness in this passionate way. ‘I cannot tell
what you mean,’ she cried. ‘What have I to forgive? And who are the
sinners?’ and she tried to laugh, though it was difficult enough.
‘Mrs. Severn,’ he said, ‘I would not, believe me, have taken advantage
of your absence, not willingly. She is so young. I know I ought to have
spoken to you first. I did not mean it when I came----’
‘She?’ cried the padrona, with a little cry. Not yet did she see what it
was; but instinct told her what kind of a trenchant blow was coming, and
all the blood seemed to rush back upon her heart.
‘Yes,’ said Frank, rising into the calm of passion, ‘I found her all by
herself. And I loved her so! From that first moment I saw her,--when you
called her, and she came and stood there,’ he cried, pointing vaguely at
the door; ‘and I had come to tell you I was going away. And she was
sorry. It all came upon us in a moment. How could I help telling her? I
loved her so! Forgive me for Alice’s sake.’
The padrona sat gazing at him for some moments with dilated eyes; then
suddenly she hid her face in her hands, and uttered a low, moaning cry
as of a creature in pain. All at once it had come upon her what it
meant. Frank standing there, full of anxiety, yet full of confidence,
was bewildered, not knowing what this meant in reference to himself. But
the truth was that Mrs. Severn was not thinking of him, had no room in
her mind for him at that terrible moment. It was her child she was
thinking of,--Alice, who was here half an hour ago, and now was not
here, and could never again be, for ever. It all burst upon her in an
instant, not anything remediable, as a thing might be which was
independent of the child’s own will, but voluntary, her own doing, her
choice! Something sung and buzzed in her ears; her eyes felt hot and
scorched up; sharp pulsations of pain came into her temples. ‘My
child!--my baby!--my first-born!’ she said to herself. It was as if the
earth had shaken beneath her feet, and the house had crumbled down about
her. Her whole fabric of happiness seemed to shrink up; and yet it was
not so much--not so much that she asked; not anything for herself, not
the ease, the comfort, the leisure, the pleasures, so many had. Was she
not content, more than content to work late and early, to spare herself
in nothing, to labour with both hands, as it were, never grudging? Only
her children, that was all she asked to have! And here was the first of
her children, the sweetest of all, her excellency and the beginning of
her strength, her companion, and tender consoler, and sweet
helper--gone! She gave a cry, a half-smothered moan, such as could not
be put into words. And all this time Frank stood before her, pale,
somewhat desperate, but courageous, knowing that however the mother
might be against him, the daughter was for him,--and trusting in his
fate.
When the padrona at last withdrew her hands from her face it struck her
as with a sense of offence that he should still be standing there. Why
did he, a stranger, stand and gaze at her misery? What right had he? And
then she remembered that it was this boy whom her child had chosen out
of the world, to give up her home for him. In her heart, at that moment,
the padrona hated Frank. She raised her head, and even he, though he had
no love in his eyes to enlighten him respecting the changes in her face,
saw that the lines were drawn and haggard, the colour gone, and that a
look of age and suffering had fallen upon her. But she commanded
herself. She spoke after a minute with an effort. ‘Mr. Renton, this is
a very serious matter you tell me.’ she said; ‘my daughter is a child,’
and then she had to stop and take breath, and moisten her dry lips. ‘She
is too young,--to judge what is best,--for her life. And so are you,’
she added, looking at him with a certain pity for the boy who was so
young too, and Laurie’s brother to boot; ‘you are both too young to know
what you are doing. You should not have disturbed my Alice!’ she cried,
suddenly, unable to keep in the reproach. ‘Such thoughts would never
have come into my darling’s mind. You had no right to disturb my child!’
She got up as she spoke in a blaze of momentary excitement,--anger,
grief’s twin brother, rising sudden into the place of grief. She made a
step or two away from him, and began to collect Alice’s work and fold it
up with her trembling hands, turning her back upon him, as if this
sudden piece of business she had found was the most important matter in
the world. Then she turned round, raising her hand, with an outburst of
natural eloquence. ‘She was only a child,’ she cried; ‘as much a child
as when she sat on my lap. She had not a thought that was not open to
me. I have worked for her almost all her life, watched over her, nursed
her, smiled for her when my heart was breaking,--and all in a moment,
for a young man’s vanity, my child is to be mine no longer. Why did you
not come to me fairly, like an honest enemy, and warn me what you meant
to do?’
As she spoke, standing before him with her arm lifted in unconscious
action, almost towering over him in the greatness of her suffering and
indignation, Frank stood lost in astonishment. Mothers, so far as he
knew, were glad to get their daughters off their hands. Such was the
tradition in all regions he had ever frequented. He had expected
difficulties, no doubt, but not of this kind. It was with a certain
consternation that he gazed at her, asking himself what it meant. It was
all real, there could be no doubt of that. But yet,--he was in Fitzroy
Square. It was not a duke’s daughter he had ventured on engaging to
himself, but a humble artist’s, who everybody would have thought would
have been glad enough to have her child provided for. This Frank knew,
or, at least, he believed he knew, was the light in which the matter
would have been regarded by sensible people. And he, though Belgravia no
doubt might have scorned him, was no such contemptible match for the
daughter of the painter. He stood surprised and discomfited, not knowing
how to reply to a woman who addressed him so strangely. Perhaps it would
be best to let her have it all her own way, and exhaust her indignation
without contradicting or opposing her; but then the passion in her face
moved the young man.
‘I never thought of coming as an enemy,’ he said, with some heat. ‘I
have loved her ever since I saw her. I am not to blame for that.’ How
could he be to blame? He had done naught in hate, but all in honour. And
thus the mother and the lover stood confronting each other, rivals; but
in a conflict which for one of them was without hope.
Then there was an interval of silence,--a truce between the foes. Frank
mechanically turned over and over the books which lay on a little table
against which he was leaning, and the padrona threw herself into her
chair trembling in her agitation. Again and again her lips forced
themselves to speak, but the effort was a vain one. She had not the
heart to speak. What was there to say? If Alice’s heart was gone from
her, then everything was gone. It was not as in old days, when she could
have forbidden an unsuitable indulgence with the certainty that after
the pain of the first few minutes the smiles would come back, the little
heart melt, and the child be herself again. Here was a serious trial
now, and the padrona’s heart was sick. She sat, not even looking at him,
with her head turned to one side, and her mind full of bitter thoughts.
This silence was worse than anything for Frank. He bore it as long as he
could, standing with his eyes fixed upon her, expecting the verdict
which was to come. Then, as she did not speak, he summoned up all his
courage. He made a few steps forward, so as to bring himself before her
eyes, and thus addressed her, with as much steadiness and calm as he
could command;--‘Mrs. Severn,’ he said, ‘could you not put yourself in
my position? I did not mean to betray myself. I meant to say good-bye,
and go away, and never trouble you more. But she was sorry, God bless
her! She looked at me, and pitied me, and I did not know what I was
saying. I will not tell you a lie, and say I regret,’ cried Frank, with
excitement; ‘but I will say I am sorry I had not the chance of speaking
to you first. Surely, surely, you will not refuse her to me for that!’
‘Refuse her to you!’ said the padrona, with an unconscious contempt;
‘refuse her to you! You cannot think it is you I am thinking of. Oh,
young man, how little you know! There is the sting of it! I would give
everything I have in the world she had never seen you; but you make me
work out my own sorrow. Can you believe I would hesitate a moment if it
were only refusing you?’ she cried, with a gesture unconsciously full of
scorn, throwing, as it were, something from her. Frank had never been
spoken to in such a tone before. He had been an important personage at
Richmont. Not so would his prayer have been received there. The wounded
_amour propre_ of his youth made itself felt in his displeasure. He went
to the nearest window, and stood staring out into the street, disgusted
with himself, and half disgusted, if the truth must be told, with all
the circumstances. He had been a fool in thus committing himself. He had
behaved like a fool in every way, and this was his reward;--not
rejection even, but scorn!
‘But I can’t refuse her anything!’ the padrona said with a sigh, that
came out of the very bottom of her heart. There was the sting of it. She
could not turn away, as impulse would have made her, the lover whom she
felt to be her enemy. There was the child to be considered. It was no
plain and easy matter to be decided upon in an arbitrary way. Fathers
and mothers have refused their children’s wishes before now for their
good. Daughters have been even shut up in their rooms, starved,
imprisoned, bullied into giving up the undesirable suitor, as everybody
knows. But these courses were not open to the padrona. She could no more
have stood by and seen her child suffer than she could have flown. The
one was as much an impossibility of nature as the other. She could not
refuse Alice the desire of her heart. Oh, gentle heavens! to think it
could be the desire of that tender creature’s heart to go away from her
home where she had been cherished since ever she was born,--from her
mother, who had loved and shielded her for all her sixteen years,--away
to the end of the world with a young man, whom six months before she had
never seen! And she not a woman with any weariness in her heart, nor a
girl of adventurous instincts, curious and longing for the unknown, but,
on the contrary, the purest womanly domestic child, caring little about
all the noises of the great world without,--only sixteen, a soft,
contented creature, happy in all the little business of her limited
life! There was the wonder,--a thing not new, familiar every day;--and
yet ever miraculous, a wonder and a portent to the padrona, as if it had
never happened before.
It was just then that Alice came faltering into the room. She had cried
and leaned her head on Miss Hadley’s breast when she was questioned what
was the matter; but she would not tell even that faithful friend until
mamma knew. Her faithful friend, indeed, was at no great loss. Her eyes
were sharp enough to make up the lack of all suspicion in the innocent
household. She divined the truth, and she also divined the scene that
must be going on in the drawing-room. ‘I knew this was what would come
of it,’ she allowed herself to say,--which was but natural; and she led
Alice back to the door, though it was against her will. ‘My love, these
two will never agree without you.’ she said, and stayed outside with
that purest self-denial of the secondary spectator, burning with
curiosity and interest, yet giving way to the chief personages
concerned, which is so often seen among women. She would not even go
into the dining-room, where she might have seen or heard something, but
stayed outside in the passage, having carefully closed all the doors. So
far as she herself was concerned, Miss Hadley was not Frank’s enemy.
When a man spoke out she respected him, as she always said. It was only
when he shilly-shallied that she had a contempt for him;--and to have
one of them provided for would no doubt be a great matter. Such, taking
Frank’s theory of what was proper and natural, was Miss Hadley’s way of
thinking; but she knew only too well how impracticable Mrs. Severn could
be.
Alice went in faltering, changing colour, ready to sink to the ground
with innocent shame-facedness, but as much unaware of the struggle going
on in her mother’s mind as if she had been a creature of a different
species. When she had made a few steps into the room, she paused, and
gave a quick timid glance at the two, who were both stirred by her
approach. The padrona rose, and gazed at her child, who had thus left
her side, while Frank started forward to place himself by her. This was
the last touch, which the mother could not bear. She darted to Alice’s
side, put him away with her hand, took the girl into her arms, and
holding her fast, gazed into her face. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘is it true?
Never mind any one but me. Look at me,--at your mother, Alice. Tell me
the truth,--the truth, my darling! Can it be? Do you want to go with
him, and leave us all,--the boys, and Edith, and all that love you? Is
it true? Do you want to leave me, my child?’ cried the mother, in a
voice of anguish. And she stood holding her fast, reading the answer
before it came in her eyes, in the modulations of her lips,--elevated to
such a height of passionate feeling as she had never known before in all
her life.
Nor was it a less trial for the young inexperienced creature, knowing
nothing of passion, who was held thus in the grip of despair.
Fortunately, Alice could not understand the full force of the tempest in
her mother’s heart. ‘Oh, mamma, how can you think I want to leave you?’
she cried, with tears; and Frank, listening, felt with a pang that he
was cast aside. Then she paused. ‘But, oh, mamma, dear!’ said Alice,
with a soft, pleading, breathless tone, melodious like the cooing of a
dove,--‘oh, mamma, dear!’--and she slid her tender arm round her
mother’s neck, changing her attitude to one of utter supplication,--‘you
have Edie and the boys, and my dearest love for ever and ever. And he
has nobody; and he says,---- Will you only hear what he says? It is not
fancy. He wants me most.’
It was not more than a minute that they stood thus clinging together,
but Frank thought it an hour. He was left out of the matter. It was they
who had to decide a question so momentous to them. And then he became
aware that the padrona had cast her arms round her child to support
herself, and was weeping wildly upon Alice’s shoulder. No need for any
further questions. They had changed characters for the moment. The
girl’s slight figure tottered, swayed, steadied itself, supporting with
a supreme effort the weight of the mother’s yielding and anguish; and
Alice gave him a look over that burthen,--a look of such pain and
sweetness and confidence, that Frank’s heart was altogether melted.
‘Look what I have to bear,--what I have to give up for you!’ it seemed
to say;--a pathetic glance; and yet there was in it the triumph of the
new love rooting and establishing itself upon the ruins of the old.
When the padrona came to herself she called Frank Renton to her. It was
not that she had fainted or become unconscious; but that, when a
woman,--or a man either for that matter,--is suddenly called upon to
sound the profoundest depths of suffering within her,--or his,--own
being, a mist comes upon external matters, confusing place and fact, and
above all, time, which goes fast or slow according to our consciousness.
It might have been years, so far as she could tell, since she came in
cheerfully from her walk, fearing no evil. She had been engaged in some
awful struggle against her spiritual enemies, principalities and powers,
such as she had never yet encountered; and all unprepared, unarmed for
the conflict! She came to herself, lying back in her chair exhausted as
if with an illness, without strength enough left to feel the full force
of any calamity. She called Frank Renton to her, holding out her hand.
‘Sit down here and let me speak to you,’ she said. ‘I am to listen to
what you have to say. And I will listen,--but not now. Such a thing had
never entered into my mind. I thought the child was safe for years. I
thought she was all mine,--my consolation. I have had so much to do, it
seemed but fair I should have a consolation. But there is nothing fair
in this world. And now it is you who have her heart, and not me,--and I
don’t know you even. To be sure you are Laurie’s brother. Mr. Renton, if
you will come back to me another time, when I have got a little used to
it, I will hear everything you have to say.’
‘Thanks!’ said Frank, not knowing what answer to make, being utterly
confused in his own mind, and as much out of his depth in every way as a
young man could be. And he would have taken the hand she held out to him
in token of amity,--but Mrs. Severn was not equal to any such signs of
friendship.
‘It will be for another time,’ she said, sitting upright in her chair,
and drawing back a little. ‘If I had received any warning;--but you
have only met two,--three times;--is that all?’ she said, with a sudden
spasm in her voice.
‘And at Richmont,’ said Frank, divided between offence and humility.
Alice had left the room again, and the two were alone.
‘And at Richmont,’ the padrona repeated with a heavy sigh. ‘I might have
known. But you don’t know my child,’ she added, with sudden energy. ‘You
have seen her pretty face and heard her music, and it is those you care
for,--that is all. And there are others as pretty, and who play as well.
You cannot know my child.’
‘Look here, Mrs. Severn,’ cried Frank, driven wild in his turn; ‘I have
loved her since the first moment I saw her under those curtains. Was it
my doing? I was listening to the music, not thinking of any one; and you
called Alice, and she came. And I have been struggling against it ever
since. I will tell you the truth. I was to marry money,--everybody had
made up their minds to it. I was to have a rich wife and give up India,
and live a life that would suit me much better at home. That is the
truth. And I tried,--tried hard to carry it out. But I had seen Alice,
and I could not. To-day when I came I meant to try to say good-bye. I
meant it honestly, upon my life. And that other girl is prettier, if you
will speak so,’ cried the young man, with a kind of brutality, ‘than
Alice. Judge if it is only for that----’
‘Then you will repent,’ said the padrona, blazing up into an
inconsistent jealousy and resentment. ‘Believe me, Mr. Renton, it is far
better to carry out your intention, and leave my penniless girl alone.’
The young man started up with a muttered oath. The moment of passion was
over, but that of mutual exasperation had come. The light of battle
kindled in the padrona’s eyes. She would have been glad to be rid of him
at any price; and yet,--inconsistent woman,--though she hated him for
loving Alice, the thought that he had struggled against that love, the
thought that her child had been put in competition with another, set her
all a-flame. ‘By heaven, you do me injustice!’ cried Frank. ‘Why will
you misunderstand what I say? Let me tell you everything from the
beginning. Is it just to judge me unheard? I am Laurie’s brother, whom
you are fond of; and Alice is mine as well as yours. She has no doubt of
me. Why cannot we be friends, we two? I should be your son----’
‘It must be for another time,’ said the padrona, letting her voice
relapse into languor.
The sense of exhaustion had been thoroughly real when she expressed it
before; but now, it must be allowed, it was exasperating. The elastic
soul had touched the ground, and rebounded ever so little. But she had
rebounded in a perverse, and not an amiable way. It was not the calm of
despair, but an active wretchedness in which there was hope. And Frank,
too, got set on edge, as she was, and left the house with but one soft
word from Alice to console him as he went, flaming with opposition and
resentment. He could turn the tables on her yet, if he were to try. He
could make her regret her interference, if he would. And then a
visionary Alice glided into the young man’s imagination, holding out her
soft arms. Vex her because her mother was vexatious to him? Ah, no! not
for the world!
CHAPTER III.
EXCHANGED INTO THE 200TH.
Frank was not in spirits to go to his club, or anywhere else, after the
events of the afternoon. He made a rush for the train instead, thirsting
for the quiet of his quarters, in which, at least, he could lock himself
in, and be free from intruders. With the same desire for solitude, he
ensconced himself as usual in a corner of a railway-carriage, hoping
there, at least, to be able to indulge his thoughts in peace. But it was
a summer’s day, not yet dark, so that he could not hide himself; and his
consternation may be imagined when, in two or three minutes, he heard
the voice of Mrs. Rich asking for the Royalborough carriage. ‘Bless us,
there is Mr. Renton, Nelly!’ she said, a minute after, for Frank had
given a start at the sound of her, and probably caught her eye by the
movement, though he had sunk the next minute into the profoundest shade.
But, after this, there was nothing to be done but to jump out, and make
himself useful to the ladies, and give up his hoped-for solitude.
Nelly, of all people in the world, to face him at such a moment! To
Frank it seemed as if fate were against him. He had to go through the
usual round of salutations, and express his satisfaction at meeting
them, while all the time he fretted and fumed. It was not even as if
they had been three, which is a safe party. Mrs. Rich had a companion, a
lady of about her own age, who was going to Richmont with them, so that
Nelly was left to Frank. Neither her mother nor she thought it a bad
arrangement. She made her way to the farther window, and seated herself,
leaving Frank no alternative but the seat beside her. And she was very
lively and full of animation,--a bright, smiling creature, pleasant to
look upon. It would be impossible to describe Frank’s feelings as he
seated himself beside her, with a gap of two vacant seats between him
and the elder ladies at the other side, and the noise of the train to
favour a _tête-à-tête_. ‘Come and tell me what you have been about,’
said Nelly. ‘Are you always running up and down to town, you idle
Guardsmen? I never go but I see heaps of you. Tell me what you have been
about.’
‘You had better tell me what you have been about,’ said Frank; ‘that
would be more interesting. Shopping? or picture-seeing? or,--oh, I
perceive, the flower-show. I had forgotten that.’
‘You were not there,’ said Nelly, quickly,--‘for I looked. There was
Lord Edgbaston, and I don’t know how many more, who are always to be
seen everywhere,--but not you.’
‘I was engaged on much less pleasant business,’ said Frank, to whom it
suddenly occurred that here was an opportunity to tell some portion of
his news. It could not be told too soon, especially considering all that
had happened since.
‘Less pleasant!’ repeated Nelly. ‘They are very slow and stupid, I
think, unless one has some one to talk to one likes. As for the flowers,
one can see them anywhere. I had Lord Edgbaston, your charming friend,
Mr. Renton; and he was not lively. I don’t suppose his talents lie in
the way of talk.’
‘He is a very good fellow,’ said Frank, with a certain tenderness,
thinking how soon he should have left all these pleasant companions. His
heart melted to them, and his voice took a lugubrious tone.
‘How doleful you are!’ cried Nelly, laughing; ‘one would think you were
going to cry. What has been going on? Tell me; has some one been unkind?
And I declare you are quite pale. I am getting very, much
interested;--do let me know.’
‘I don’t know that you will be at all interested when you hear,’ said
Frank, with a certain desperation. ‘I have just been settling matters
about my exchange into the 200th. They are to sail for India in three
months, and it is not cheerful work.’
‘To sail for India in three months!’ said Nelly. The change that came
over her face was indescribable. A half-amused incredulity, then the
startled pause, with which she might have said, This is too serious a
matter to joke about; and then consternation, anger, mortification. She
grew pale, and then brilliantly crimson, till the colour dyed as much as
could be seen of her clear, dark skin. She had a right to look at him
with eyes of keen inquiry;--not a right to interfere or find fault,--but
yet a right to ask the question. He had gone so far that she had, at
least, that claim.
‘Yes,’ he said, with an exquisite discomfort, such as would have been
punishment enough for worse treachery than he had perpetrated, ‘I have
been putting it off and wasting my time, beguiled by pleasanter things.
But to-day matters became urgent, and I settled it. I could delay no
longer,’ he said, with apology in his tone; ‘it is not a cheerful piece
of work, as I say.’
Nelly did not answer a word. She was struck dumb. That other day, under
the lime-trees, he had certainly said not a word about India. He had
not, indeed, said all which the opportunity might have justified him in
saying. He had been unsatisfactory, and had made a very poor use of the
opportunity. But still he had not so much as hinted at anything which
could explain this. She sat in her corner, bending towards him a little,
as she had been before he made this startling intimation. What could it
mean? Could he intend to ask her to go there with him? Nelly’s heart
gave a sudden bound at the thought. She was so adventurous and eager for
change that India itself would not have frightened her. Could that be
what he meant? She did not change her position, but sat still, turning
towards him in a listening attitude, with her eyes cast down, and a
certain sharpness of expectation in her face. The idea was quite new and
startling, but it was not unpleasant. She waited, with a tingling in her
ears, a sudden sense of quickened pulsation and tightened breath, for
the next words he should say.
But at that moment dumbness, too, fell upon Frank. His lips grew dry;
his tongue clave to his mouth. He turned a little away, and began to
play unconsciously with the little cane in his hand, flicking his boot
with it. It seemed to him as if all his powers of speech were exhausted
and not a word would come. If only there might be a stoppage at some
station, or an accident, or anything! He would have welcomed any
incident that would have interrupted this horrible pause. And not a word
would come to his lips. He tried to make up some ordinary question
about the flower-show, but it would not do. He sat in a frightful
consciousness,--afraid to look at her, wondering what she was thinking
of it, how she would receive it. And the train was one of those nice,
quick express trains, which stop only at Slowley junction. The poor
young fellow thought he would have gone mad with that awful pause and
stoppage of talk, and the everlasting iron murmur and clank of the
wheels.
It was full five minutes before any one spoke, and that at such a time,
of course, seemed as a year. Then it was Nelly who resumed the
conversation, in a tone clear and distinct, with a modulation of
contempt in it which set Frank’s nerves on edge. ‘I do not see why it
should not be cheerful work,’ she said; ‘no doubt you like it or you
would not have done it; but it is sudden surely, Mr. Renton?’ And Frank,
who did not look at her, who was busy still with his cane and his boot,
felt that she was looking steadily at him.
And he was aggravated at the tone. It was the second time that afternoon
in which he had been contemptuously spoken to;--by Mrs. Severn, first of
all, who had certainly no right to do it, and who had taken pains to
make him understand how little importance he was to her, what small
hesitation she would have had in cutting him off from all good offices.
And now Nelly, who might have an excuse, adopted the same tone.
Naturally, it was the one who had some justification for her scorn who
bore the brunt of both offences. He looked up at her, and met full, as
she had not expected him to meet, the look of restrained resentment,
indignation, and wounded feeling, with which she regarded him. Though he
was in the wrong, he met her eyes with more fortitude than she could
exercise in meeting his. He it was who had been the traitor, and
therefore he took the upper hand. ‘I am surprised you think it sudden,’
he said, fixing his eyes upon her so resolutely that Nelly’s could not
bear the gaze. ‘I have been in negotiation about it more or less since
ever I knew you. The opportunity has been sudden, but not the
intention.’ Thus the man, being unmoved by anything but a passing
compunction which he had overcome, got the better of the woman whose
heart had been touched ever so little. He looked full at her, and he
looked her down.
‘But I thought you had changed your mind,’ said Nelly softly, with an
effort to preserve her calm.
‘Oh no, never!’ answered Frank, in his majestic way. And then she turned
her face round to the window, and gazed steadily out. It was not that
she was in love with him,--not much. But she was a girl who had had
every toy she ever longed for in all her life, and now for the first
time she was denied. She turned to the window, and sudden tears sprang
into her eyes. Her own impression was that she was struck to the heart.
Her lip quivered; there was a painful feeling in her throat. She had
been so bright, so lively, so full of enjoyment,--and now the revulsion
came! But she was proud enough not to make any very distinct
self-betrayal. She did not mind showing him that she was offended. Even
had it come to a little outbreak of passion and tears, she would not,
perhaps, have very much minded. But all she did now was to turn away her
face. Turning round and gazing very fixedly out of a window after a
short interval of very lively and friendly conversation, is a
sufficiently marked sign that something is wrong. But Nelly did not
utter any reproach. He had faced her, and intimated to her, almost in so
many words, that it was a matter she had nothing to do with; and she
accepted the intimation. But she did not think it necessary to put an
amiable face upon it, as so many girls would have done. She had turned
almost her back upon him before they got to Slowley, where the gorgeous
carriage of the Riches,--much the most splendid in the county, with a
coat-of-arms as big as a soup-plate upon the panel,--was waiting for
them. And when Frank got out and gave her his hand to alight, Nelly
sprang past him without taking any notice. ‘Good-bye, Mr. Renton; I
suppose we shall see you before you go,’ she said, without looking at
him. Mrs. Rich thought her daughter must be out of her senses when she
heard the news, which it cost Nelly an effort to tell with composure.
She had lost all her colour, and looked black, and pale, and gleaming,
and dangerous, when the Royalborough train glided on; and Mrs. Rich
after an affectionate farewell to Frank, leisurely ascended into her
carriage. ‘Have you quarrelled with Frank Renton, my dear?’ she said,
with a little alarm.
‘Oh, dear no!’ said Nelly. ‘I told him to come and see us before he went
away.’
‘Before he went away!’ said Mrs. Rich, surprised.
‘Yes. He has exchanged into the 200th, and they are going to India,’
said Nelly, following the train, as it swept along the curves, with an
eye which was far from friendly. And Mrs. Rich’s conclusion was that the
young man must be mad.
Nor must it be supposed that Frank Renton’s thoughts were particularly
comfortable as he pursued his way. He was not vain enough to be
gratified by Nelly’s mortification, and he could not conceal from
himself the fact that he had not behaved quite as he ought to have done.
He had not gone any great length, but still he had said and done enough
to justify these kind people in thinking badly of him. He had made them
an ungracious return for their hospitality and kindness. And when they
should come to know that he was going to be married before he left, and
that it was Alice Severn who was to be his bride, what would they
think? Would it not look as if lie had gone to Richmont and pretended
to pay court to Nelly for the sake of their visitor? Would it not be
supposed that both he and his innocent Alice had been traitors;--his
innocent Alice, to whom the very thought of evil was unknown? And then
there was Alice’s mother,--though she did not like him,--who might be
injured by this misconception. Mr. Rich was her patron, he had heard.
All this maze of humiliating contingencies made Frank half frantic. He
was angry with Mrs. Severn for being a painter,--angry with the Riches
for buying her pictures,--angry that there should be any connexion, and
that, above all, a connexion as of patron and dependant between the
family of the girl he might have married and that of the girl he loved.
Thinking it over, his very soul grew sick of the imbroglio. If he could
but rush up to town and take his Alice to church, and be off to India
the very same day,--seeing nobody, making explanations to nobody,--that
was the only way of managing matters which could be in the least degree
satisfactory; and that was impossible. Mothers of far higher pretensions
than Mrs. Severn would, he knew, have received his suit much less
cavalierly. He would have her susceptibilities to _ménager_ as well as
those of everybody else. There was not a point in the whole business,
except Alice herself, upon which he could look with the least
satisfaction; and indeed it said a great deal for Frank’s love that
Alice herself retained his allegiance unbroken through it all.
Next morning Frank hurried over to Renton at an hour so early as to
startle himself and everybody concerned. He met his cousin Mary as she
made her habitual round of the flower-beds before breakfast. It had
always been hard work to get him to be ready for breakfast at all, not
to speak of sauntering in the garden. And yet he had come all the way
from Royalborough. Mary held out her hand to him with a little cry of
surprise.
‘Is it you, Frank, or your double?’ she asked in her amaze. ‘It does not
seem possible it can be you.’
‘I wish I had a double who would be so obliging as to do half my work
for me,’ said Frank, dolefully. ‘It is me, worse luck! and if you don’t
stand my friend, Mary, I don’t know what I shall do.’
‘Of course I will stand your friend. But, Frank, what is it?’ cried
Mary, gliding her arm within his with sisterly confidence. And he took
breath for a few minutes without saying a word, leading her from the
front of the house out of sight under the shadow of the trees.
‘I may as well tell you at once,’ he said, after this pause. ‘I could
not stand it any longer. I have settled all about my exchange, and I am
going to India in three months.’
‘To India!’ said Mary. But she had a brother in India, and perhaps it
was not quite so appalling to her as Frank expected it to be. She made a
little pause, however, and then she said, ‘Poor godmamma!’ with as much
feeling as he could desire.
‘Well,’ said Frank; ‘could I help it? It is my father you must blame.
How was it to be expected that I could get on in the most expensive
regiment in the service after what has happened? It was my duty to do
something, and this was the only thing I could do.’
‘I am not blaming you, Frank; I only said, “Poor godmamma!” she will
feel it so,’ said Mary; ‘especially after what you gave us to understand
last time, that--that there might be another way----’
‘That was folly,’ said Frank hotly; and then he added with humility,
‘But I have not told you half all. You must do more for me yet. Mary, I
am going to get married before I go.’
‘To get married!’ Mary repeated with a start; and then she clasped his
arm tight with both her hands, and looked up joyfully in his face. ‘Then
you must have been fond of her after all,’ she cried. ‘It was not her
money you were thinking of. Oh, Frank! don’t be angry. It made me so
unhappy to think you were going to marry her for her money.’
‘Good heavens! this girl will drive me mad!’ cried Frank. ‘What
nonsense are you thinking of now? Money! She has not a penny, and you
never heard of her in your life.’
‘It is not Nelly Rich then?’ said Mary, faltering and withdrawing the
clasping hands from his arm.
‘Nelly Rich! that was all your own invention, and my mother’s,’ said
Frank,--‘not mine. I said she would have suited Laurie. If you chose to
make up a story, that was not my fault.’
There was a pause after this, for Mary remembered but too distinctly the
conversation about Nelly, and could not acknowledge that the story was
of her invention. But she could hold her tongue, and did so steadily,
making no remark, which Frank felt was as great an injury to him as if
she had enlarged on the subject. He went along under the trees,
quickening his pace in his agitation, without much thought of Mary, who
had to change her steps two or three times to keep up with him.
‘I suppose you have no further curiosity?’ he said at length; ‘you don’t
want to know who it really is.’
‘Yes, Frank,--when you will tell me,’ said Mary, holding her ground.
‘You are very provoking,’ said her cousin;--‘if it were not that I had
such need of you! You should not aggravate a poor fellow that throws
himself as it were on your assistance;--I will tell you who it is
whether you care to hear or no. It is Alice Severn,--Mrs. Severn’s
daughter, who was Laurie’s great friend.’
‘Laurie again!’ said Mary, amazed,--‘Mrs. Severn! Are we never to have
an end of Laurie’s friends? You told me she had no daughters. You said
something about a little girl. Ah, Frank! I am afraid it is some widow
coquette that first made a victim of Laurie and now has done the same to
you. I knew there was something mysterious about his going away.’
‘I wish you would talk of things you understand,’ said Frank,
indignantly. ‘Alice is only sixteen. She is, I believe, the purest,
simplest creature that ever lived. As for Laurie, she was a child to
him;--he treated her like a child.’
‘Sixteen! Of course she is only a child,’ said Mary; ‘and the daughter
of Mrs. Severn the painter! Frank, you must be mad.’
‘I think I shall be, unless you help me,’ said the young soldier. ‘Her
mother is furious against me, Mary; and so will my own mother be, I
suppose. But what does it matter when we are going to India? We shall be
able to live on what we have. She has no expensive tastes, nor have I.’
‘You,--no expensive tastes?’ cried Mary. ‘Oh, Frank! do pause and think.
I did not care for Nelly Rich, but this is far worse. Nelly Rich was of
no family, but she had money; whereas this girl is----’
‘The creature I love best in the world,’ said Frank, interrupting her
hastily, with a sudden glow upon his face. ‘It is of no use speaking. If
I have to give up mother, and home, and friends, and all I have in the
world, I shall still have Alice,--and Alice means everything. It is
because you don’t know her. But I tell you there never was any one like
her. And, Mary, if you don’t stand by us, I will throw up everything
else I care for in the world.’
‘But not her?’ asked his cousin, raising her eyes to his face.
‘Never her!’ cried the young man. ‘Give up my Alice! Not for twenty
mothers! I don’t mind what people choose to say. We are going to India,
and it will not matter to us,--nor your objections, nor mamma’s
objections, nor anything in the world. She shall go with me if I run
away with her. You understand me now?’
‘Is she the kind of girl to run away with you?’ said Mary, still looking
earnestly in his face.
‘No,’ said Frank, with a little outburst of impatience, ‘I wish she
were. You may think how unpleasant it is to me to put myself at that
woman’s feet, and plead as if I were a beggar. And she hates me; but
Alice stands fast, bless her! And her mother can refuse her nothing,’
he added, with a sudden breath of satisfaction. He was flushed and
excited with his story. Mary had never seen him look so manful, so
bright, and full of energy. He had made up his mind;--that was something
gained, at least.
And then there was another pause. Mary did not know how to reply. Frank
was in love, and that was a great, the greatest recommendation in his
favour. But this Alice, this creature of sixteen, a girl altogether out
of his sphere! It was impossible for his cousin, brought up in the
prejudices of her class, not to feel that there must have been some
‘artfulness,’ some design upon the innocent young Guardsman, some
triumphant scheme, to lead away so guileless a member of society; and
what if it were the same scheme which had wounded Laurie too, and sent
him away with, perhaps, a broken heart! Such were Mary’s thoughts as she
listened. And what could she do? Make herself a party to this artful
plan? Countenance the girl, and help Frank to ruin himself? How could
she do it? And there were all the speculations about Nelly Rich which
had thus fallen to the ground,--and all her godmother’s hopes of the
money Frank was to marry! Her mind was full of perplexity. ‘I do not see
what I can do,’ she said, faltering. ‘I don’t understand it at all.
There was first Miss Rich, and we had made up our minds to that; and
now, all at once, it turns out not to be Miss Rich, but a girl no one
ever heard of. I don’t know what to make of it, Frank. How can I stand
your friend? You are scarcely one-and-twenty. You don’t want a wife at
all, that I can see; and going to India too! And a girl of sixteen! I
think you are quite unreasonable. As for poor godmamma, I don’t know how
she is to bear it. I see nothing but folly in it myself, and what can I
say?’
Frank made no answer. He turned with her towards the house, from which,
some time before, they had heard the sound of the breakfast-bell. The
old butler stood at the window with his napkin in his hand, looking
anxiously about the flower-garden for Miss Mary, and much puzzled to
divine whose was the figure which he saw in the distance by her side.
Mary had dropped her cousin’s arm, and the two walked onward, side by
side, like people who have quarrelled, or between whom, at least, some
difficulty has arisen. ‘My mother does not get up to breakfast?’ Frank
had said, and Mary had answered ‘No,’ and they had gone on again without
further communication. But yet Frank was not so cast down as he might
have been supposed to be. He was sure of Mary, though Mary was so
doubtful of him. When they sat down together to breakfast in the
sunshiny quiet of the great brown dining-room, they went over and over
the subject again, and yet again. Frank was not aware that he had any
skill in description, but, all unawares, he placed before his cousin
such a picture of Alice and her curls as touched Mary Westbury’s heart.
‘If my mother once heard her play, she would never ask another
question,’ Frank said, in his simplicity; and he confided to Mary more
of his troubles in respect to Nelly Rich than he had ever thought to
tell. ‘It is a sneaking sort of thing for a man to say,’ Frank admitted,
with a flush on his face, ‘but it wasn’t all my doing. I declare I
thought old Rich meant to offer her to me the first hour I was in the
house. I should never have thought of it myself. And I met her to-day,
Mary, and told her plainly I was going to India. She is sharp enough.
You may be sure a fellow would never need to make long explanations to
her.’
‘And did she understand this too?’ said Mary, from her judicial seat.
‘No, by Jove, I could not tell her that,’ said Frank. ‘That is the worst
of it. They will think it was all made up then, and that Alice and I
were laughing at them. They are sure to think that, but it is not true.
Such an idea had never come into her innocent head; and as for me, I
tried never to look at her, never to speak to her, to think of Nelly
only,--like a cur,--for her money,’ said Frank, with a novel fervour of
self-disgust. ‘And she’s not a bad sort of girl, I can tell you, Mary.
I’d like her to know there was no treachery meant.’
‘I am glad you have so much feeling, at least,’ said Mary, the Mentor,
looking at him with more charitable eyes.
‘Oh, feeling!’ cried Frank, ‘I wish you would not speak of feeling. And
then there is her mother. She will consent for Alice’s sake; but she
hates me. And mamma will go out of her senses, I suppose,’ said the
young man, disconsolately. He looked so discouraged, so anxious, so
boyish, amid all the serious complications he had gathered round him,
that it was all Mary Westbury could do to restrain a momentary laugh.
And yet there were few cases less laughable when you come to think of
it. To be sure, there always remained the question,--a question which
every sensible person might ask,--Why was it needful that a young man of
one-and-twenty and a girl of sixteen should marry at all? Seven years
later would be quite time enough. They had set their hearts upon it; but
why should they more than other people have the desire of their hearts?
Mary, for her own part, had set her heart repeatedly on things that had
not come, and were very unlikely to come to her. And why Frank and his
Alice should have their will at once out of hand she could not see. But,
after all, it might be the best way of cutting the knot. It was better
in her opinion that he should marry any how for love, than in the most
favourable way for wealth. And before Frank quitted Renton, Mary had
undertaken this all but impossible task.
CHAPTER IV.
WHAT IT COSTS TO HAVE ONE’S WAY.
Space forbids the historian to attempt any description of the
difficulties which Mary had to encounter in her benevolent undertaking.
By Frank’s urgent desire,--for his courage had altogether failed
him,--nothing was said on the subject till he was gone; and the
consequence was a very uncomfortable day, in which even Mrs. Renton
perceived that there was something more going on than was revealed to
her. ‘What are you always talking to Frank about?’ she said, pettishly.
‘I never turn my head but I find you whispering, or telegraphing, or
something. If there is anything I ought to know, let me know it.’
‘Wait a little,--only wait a little, dear godmamma,’ Mary answered,
pleading; and then, when the hero was gone, the tale was told.
‘Going to India,--going to be married!’ said Mrs. Renton, in her
bewilderment; ‘but why should he go to India if he marries? Of course he
will be provided for if he makes up his mind to that. Or why should he
marry if he goes to India?--one thing is bad enough. Is he out of his
senses? Fifty thousand pounds will give them, at least, two thousand
a-year.’
‘But, godmamma, you are making a mistake,’ said Mary. ‘It is not Miss
Rich Frank is going to marry. It is a young lady,--whom he met at
Richmont.’
‘Not Miss Rich!’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Another girl! The boy must be mad to
go on making acquaintance with such people. And how much has she?’ the
mother added, with plaintive submission to a hard fate, folding her
patient hands.
Mary, thus driven to the last admission of all, grew quite pale, but
made a brave stand for her client. ‘Oh, godmamma,’ she cried, ‘you must
not be hard upon him. He is so young; and isn’t it better he should
marry her because he loves her than because she is rich? She has not a
penny, he says.’
When this awful revelation was made, Mrs. Renton was excited to the
length of positive passion. Words failed her at first. Her eyes, though
they were worn-out eyes, retaining little lustre, flashed fire. Her
faded cheeks grew red. She was inarticulate in her rage and indignation.
It was Mary who received the first brunt of the onslaught, for
encouraging a foolish boy in such nonsense, and for taking it upon her
to defend him against all who wished him well. You would have thought
it was Mary who had inspired him with this mad fancy, put it in his
head, encouraged him in it, urged him to commit it, and compromise
himself in the face of the strenuous, steady, invariable opposition of
‘all who wished him well.’ The poor lady made herself quite ill with
indignation, and had to be taken to bed, and comforted with more tonics
and arrowroot than ever. She lay there moaning all the evening, refusing
to allow poor Mary to read to her, or to perform any of her usual
ministrations. If it had not been that Frank had left his boat, having
himself returned to Royalborough by the railroad, and thus afforded Mary
the opportunity of getting easily across the river, and running all the
way to the Cottage to be comforted by her mother for half-an-hour before
returning to her charge, I don’t know what would have become of her.
Mrs. Westbury did not look the sort of woman to seek comfort from, but
she was Mary’s mother, which makes all the difference, and she had never
got over her compunction about her nephews. This trial they were all
going through was her doing, and though she sympathised much more with
her sister-in-law than with Frank in the present case, she was not
without a certain pity for the boy. ‘He must be mad,’ she said; ‘but if
it can’t be put a stop to, it must be put up with; and your aunt will
have got a little used to it by to-morrow.’ Thus comforted Mary went
back, not without a little wondering comparison in her own mind between
the people who could do rash things and have their will, and those who
had ‘to put up with’ everything that might chance to come in their way,
and never had it in their power to please themselves. She was a very
good girl, full of womanly kindness and charity; but it is not to be
supposed that close attendance upon a weariful invalid like her aunt,
not ill enough to move any depth of sympathy, but requiring perpetual
_pettis soins_, and endless consideration in every detail of life, was a
kind of existence to be chosen by a lively girl of twenty. Poor Mary was
the scapegoat and ransom for the sins of her family. The three ‘Renton
boys’ were all going away on their own courses, comforting themselves
about their mother,--when they thought of her at all,--by the reflection
that Mary was with her. They could go away, but Mary could not budge. It
was rather hard, when you came to think of it. And that Frank, not three
months older than herself, should marry and set out in life, and go
blithely off to all the novelty and all the brightness, and no one have
any power to stop him; while she stayed at home, making excuses for him,
and doing duty for all three! Mary was a comfortable kind of young
woman, and went into no hysterics over her fate; neither did she rave to
herself about the awful blank of routine and the want of excitement in
her life. But she did feel a little envy of Frank, and pity for herself,
as she glided across the silvery river in the summer twilight. Doing
must be a pleasanter thing than ‘putting up with,’ even to a
philosophical mind.
The next day Mrs. Renton had got a little used to it. She exerted
herself to the unusual extent of writing Frank a letter, conjuring him
by all his gods to repent ere it was too late, and to return to the
paths of common sense and discretion; and when she had done this, she
called Mary to her, and asked a hundred questions about ‘the girl.’ ‘Her
mother was one of Laurie’s great friends,’ Mary said, trying to make the
best of it.
‘All the doubtful people one knows of seem to be Laurie’s friends,’ said
his mother, pathetically. And thus the crisis was over at Renton, for
the moment at least.
At Richmont, however, affairs took a much more serious turn when the
whole truth was known. Nelly’s intimation that Frank was going to India
had not very much affected that sanguine household. ‘It will bring
things to a point,’ Mrs. Rich had said to her husband. ‘He has done it
in some little spirit of independence, not to be obliged to his wife,
you know; but if he comes to an understanding with Nelly, we’ll make him
exchange again.’
‘Ah! if he comes to an understanding with Nelly. But she shall never go
to India with him,’ said the father. ‘No young fellow shall blow hot
and cold with my daughter. I’d have done with him at once.’
‘Nonsense! It has been some little tiff between them,’ said the more
genial woman. And even Nelly got by degrees to believe that it was not
yet finally over. But when the whole truth was whispered at
Richmont,--as it soon was by one of the officers who had learned the
fact, no one knew how,--the family in general became frantic. Nelly kept
her temper outwardly at least, and held her tongue, having some regard
for her own dignity; but the father and mother were wild with rage.
People whom they had patronised so liberally!--a woman to whom they had
just given such a commission! When this thought occurred to them, they
exchanged glances. Next day, without saying a word to any one, Mr. and
Mrs. Rich went up to town. They bore no external signs of passion to the
ordinary eye, but in their hearts they were breathing fire and flame
against every Renton, every Severn, every creature even distantly
connected with either. There was very little conversation between the
two indignant parents as they made their way solemnly to Fitzroy Square.
A certain judicial silence, and stern restraint of all the lighter
manifestations of feeling, alone marked the importance of their mission.
They were shown up to Mrs. Severn’s studio by their own request,--having
peremptorily refused any such half-way ground as the drawing-room, as
if they had come to treat with their equals. The workshop of the woman
who was, as it were, in their employment, working to their order, was
the more appropriate place.
They found the padrona standing at her work with looks very different
from her usual aspect. Something spiritless and worn was in the very
attitude of her arm, in the fall of her gown, and dressing of her hair.
It was not that she was less neat, less carefully dressed, less busy.
But the woman was in such unity with herself, that her unusual
despondency communicated itself to every detail about her. She had no
heart for Cinderella,--the little loving figure triumphing in its new
life,--the sour, elder women standing by who were grudging,--what were
they grudging? The child’s happiness, or her triumph, or the loss of
her? She had not even heart enough to rouse her to the heights of
artist-passion, and to work in her own heart into the picture, as
doubtless she would yet do, some time when all was over. She stood with
her sketches hung round the walls, and the whole room full of this
commission of her rich patron,--the commission which made her living
quite secure and above the reach of chance, and her mind easy for the
year,--but listless, spiritless, mechanical, her heart gone out of her
life.
Mrs. Severn was so much pre-occupied that she did not even notice, what
at another time she would have been so ready to notice,--the changed
tone of the Riches as they came in. Luckily for her own comfort, she had
never heard that there was ‘anything between’ Nelly Rich and Frank
Renton. Such a reason for having nothing to say to him would have been
very welcome to the padrona. But she could not refuse to have anything
to say to him without breaking her child’s heart; and, accordingly what
did it matter? It was to Alice, not to him, that she had yielded.
Therefore, she received very much as a matter of course Mrs. Rich’s
pretended congratulations. ‘We hear that great things have been
happening with you,’ she said. ‘I am sure I had no idea, when Alice was
at Richmont, that she was such an advanced young lady. I suppose it was
going on then, though we knew nothing about it.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the padrona. ‘I cannot give you any information. It
is not a pleasant subject to me; but I don’t suppose it was going on
then.’
‘Not a pleasant subject!’ cried Mrs. Rich, with not unjustifiable
virulence. ‘Oh, my dear Mrs. Severn, you must not tell me that. We all
know what a mother feels when she has succeeded in securing a charming
_parti_ like Mr. Frank Renton for her favourite child.’
‘Is he so?’ said the padrona. ‘Indeed, I should not have thought it. But
I am not in charity with Mr. Frank Renton. I wish we had never seen
him. I am like Cinderella’s sisters,’ she said, with an attempt at a
smile;--‘I am spiteful;’ and there was a something in the droop and
languor of her aspect which began to melt the hearts of the avengers.
She looked so unlike herself.
‘Nay, nay,’ said Mrs. Severn’s patron. ‘Of course it is a fine thing for
you to have your daughter settled so soon. And a fine thing for her
too,--a girl without any fortune. Not many men, I can tell you, would
have been so rash.’
‘Then I wish Mr. Frank Renton had not been so rash,’ cried the padrona,
with rising spirit. ‘I would have thanked him on my knees had he kept
away from this house. I cannot see any good in it. Forgive me! I have no
right to trouble you with my vexations. I will show you my sketches,
which are more to the purpose.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Rich, with hesitation. ‘It was principally about
them,--we came to speak.’
The padrona, in her unsuspiciousness, became half apologetic. ‘I should
have written to ask you to come and see them,’ she said; ‘but this
business has put everything else out of my mind;’ and she began to
collect her drawings in their different stages, and to rouse herself up,
and show her work, as became her. The avengers, meanwhile, looked at
each other, recruiting their failing courage from each other’s eyes.
‘Pray don’t give yourself any trouble,’ said Mr. Rich. ‘The fact is,
Mrs. Severn,--I am very sorry,--my wife and I have been talking things
over, and she,--I,--I mean we,--are not quite sure----. What I would say
is, that if you could make a better bargain with any one,--a dealer,
perhaps, or any of your private friends,--for these pictures,--why, you
know I would not stand in your way.’
‘A better bargain!’ said the padrona in amaze, not perceiving in the
least what he meant; ‘but I never should dream of a better bargain. I am
painting the pictures for you.’
‘Yes; I know there was some understanding of that kind,’ said the uneasy
millionnaire. ‘Some sort of arrangement was proposed,--but, you know,
circumstances alter cases. I,--I don’t see,--and neither does my
wife,--that we can go on with that arrangement now.’
The padrona had been standing by her great portfolio, taking some
drawings out of it. She stood there still, motionless, as if she were
paralysed. Every tinge of colour left her face; her eyes gazed out at
them for one moment blankly, with a sudden pang which made itself
somehow dimly apparent, though she did not say a word. It was a cruel
blow to her. For a moment she could not speak, or even move, in the
extremity of her astonishment. Before the echo of these extraordinary
words had died in her ear, Mrs. Severn’s rapid mind had run over in a
moment all there would be to do in the dreadful year which was
coming,--Alice’s outfit, and the marriage which was such pain to think
of, but which, nevertheless, must be planned and provided for, so that
her child should have all due honour. As she stood and gazed at the two
faces which were looking at her, it was all she could do to keep down
two bitter tears that came to her eyes.
‘I thought it was more than an arrangement,’ she said; ‘perhaps because
it was of more importance to me than it was to you. I thought it was a
bargain. The price was settled, you know, and everything.’
‘Yes, oh yes,’ said both together. ‘I know there was a great deal said.’
‘Mr. Rich was in a buying humour that day,’ said the wife. ‘But
circumstances alter cases,’ said the husband. They had done their work
more completely than they meant to do it; but yet they were not going to
give in.
Mrs. Severn bowed her head. She could not speak. It was the cruellest
aggravation of all her other troubles! ‘If that is the case,’ she said,
after a long pause, ‘of course I must arrange otherwise;’ and then she
came to a dead stop, turning over the drawings unconsciously with her
agitated hands.
‘Oh, you will find no difficulty about it,’ said Mr. Rich, rubbing his
hands; ‘you are so well known. There is Lambert will take as many of
your pictures as you can give him, and there is that man in
Manchester----’
‘Thanks,’ said the padrona. ‘I shall find a purchaser, I hope.’ And then
there was a dead silence; and the two avengers felt inclined to drop
through the floor and hide themselves. They were not cruel. They had
taken no thought of what they were doing, and when they perceived the
reality of it, could have bitten out their tongues for saying such
words. And yet what were they to do? They could not unsay what they had
that moment said.
As for Mrs. Severn, she was too much occupied with her own thoughts to
exert herself to set at their ease the dealers of so cruel a blow. But
yet, after a while, the instinct of courtesy, which is so strong in some
natures, came to the surface. Those two tears which had wanted to come
had been reabsorbed somehow, and she gave herself a little shake; and,
with a curious smile about her mouth, went forward to the two
embarrassed, uncomfortable people. ‘Perhaps you will look at the picture
all the same, and tell me if you like it,’ she said. And then the
startled pair, feeling very small and very angry with her for her
magnanimity, made a few steps forward, huddled together for mutual
support, and gazed in grave silence at Cinderella. She set it in the
best light for them, and showed them how much was complete, and how much
was still to do. The arrow they had sent at her was still sticking,
quivering, in her heart. And she had not time to pluck it out, but she
had time to be very civil, and smile upon the discomfited pair. Perhaps
she overdid it just a little; but to such a brave spirit, confronting
all the world, as it were, and standing alone in the fight, it is
difficult to keep a certain glimmer of contempt out of the lofty
forgiveness which it awards to its enemies. There was a touch of scorn
in the padrona’s smile. But when Mr. and Mrs. Rich had crept down-stairs
to their carriage, it is impossible to describe the state of downfall in
which they found themselves. ‘She did not feel it a bit,’ said Mrs.
Rich, trying to console herself. ‘And she has many friends among the
dealers,’ said the millionnaire, a little ruefully. ‘I shouldn’t wonder
if some fool gave a hundred or two more for the series,--and my idea!’
he added, with a certain indignation. And they went home very
uncomfortable. He might be free to withdraw from his bargain, according
to the letter of the law, but he could not charge his fee-rent for the
idea, having rejected the pictures in which it was to be carried out.
When she had seen them safely out, the padrona dropped softly into her
big chair, and hid her face in her hands. Alice’s outfit, and the
wedding, and all the year’s expenses, which she had thought safely
provided for, and her little triumph in being free of the dealers for
once,--they were all gone! It was not such a moving spectacle, perhaps,
as if she had been a young girl weeping for her lover. But those two
tears that forced themselves out, womanish, against her clasped hands,
what concentrated pain was in them! They were more bitter than many a
summer torrent out of younger eyes. And then she sprang to her feet, and
snatched at her palette, and went to work with flaming cheeks and a
headache, and all her old fire in her eyes. She had been listless enough
before, but she was not listless now.
When Nelly Rich, however, heard of this wonderful proceeding, their
grand house became too hot to hold the unhappy pair. ‘Withdraw your
commission! for what reason, in heaven’s name?’ cried Nelly, blazing at
them in thunder and lightning. The girl was half crazy with shame and
disgust. She brought her father almost to his knees before the day was
over, and flew to London, post haste, by herself, in spite of
everybody’s remonstrances, to make up the matter. ‘Papa had gone out of
his senses, I suppose,’ she said, dissembling her fury, to Mrs. Severn.
‘Padrona mia, for the sake of old times, you will not mind? He is so
sorry. They were both mad, I suppose.’ If Mrs. Severn had followed her
first impulse, she would have held by the dealers, who were not liable
to such madness; but she was her children’s mother, and had the bread
and butter to think of, and was not able to afford such luxuries as
revenge or pride. So that nobody was the worse for the patron’s
ill-temper except himself; and two people were the better,--to wit,
Nelly and Cinderella, the latter of whom had been undoubtedly
languishing under the weight of Mrs. Severn’s heavy heart, until this
violent pinch of apparent evil fortune came to sting her into life.
As for Nelly, setting her foot into the studio did her good. The smell
of the pigments, and the sight of the rubbish about,--all the sketches,
and unused bits of canvas, and bursting portfolios, were balm to the
impetuous but not ungenerous girl. ‘I don’t want to see Alice,’ she
said; ‘it was sly of her not to tell me. No, I don’t want to see her;
but she is very happy, I suppose;’ and it was not possible that this
could be said without a certain bitterness, considering all that had
come and gone.
‘Nelly dear, don’t speak of it,’ said the padrona, who was ignorant of
all the complications; and she went and gave the little messenger of
consolation a kiss, and suffered herself to shed a tear or two out of
her full heart. ‘I thought it would have killed me at first,’ she said,
going back to her work with trembling hands. And the hand that shook so
made a dreadful business of Cinderella’s white dress, and then the
mother put away her tools, and sat down and cried. Nelly had been poor
Severn’s pupil in the old, old days, and the sight of her brought
nothing but softening thoughts to the padrona’s mind; and the fountain
was opened that she kept so bravely shut. As for Nelly herself, every
moment in that room was good for her. She cried too, and washed all her
bitterness away in those tears, and turned Frank Renton and all his
misdoings courageously out of her imagination. I doubt whether he had
ever got so far as her heart.
‘I only want you to tell me one thing,’ she said, somewhat fiercely, to
Alice, who came in, all unconscious, after the tears were dried, glad
and wondering. ‘Was it going on when you were at Richmont?’
‘It?--what?’ said simple Alice, and then the child’s ready blush covered
her face. ‘Oh, no, no! It never came on at all; it came into our minds
in a moment, when we knew he was going away.’
And Nelly Rich was so magnanimous as to kiss Alice too.
‘Tell him I did it,--and that I bear no malice,’ she said, with a laugh;
and then went away with Miss Hadley, who saw her safely to the railway
station, and made the story still more plain to her. The governess
thought it strange of Mrs. Rich to permit her daughter to run about
alone in this way, but reflected that it might be one of the strange
customs of ‘those sort of people,’ and did her duty by the young lady,
putting her under the care of the guard, and keeping an eye on the
carriage till the train started. The journey might be slightly
indecorous, but it did more good than any tonic in the world.
And so it came about that in September Frank Renton sailed from
Southampton to join his regiment, with his young wife,--the only one of
the brothers who made anything like a practical conclusion to the little
romance of their beginning. Though he had hesitated for some time as to
whether he should follow interest or inclination, Frank was not the sort
of man, when his choice was made, to care very much what he might tread
upon in his way. He would have given no one pain willingly, but to have
his way was the most important matter, and he had it accordingly. They
were a couple of babies to set forth thus together, to face the
world,--one-and-twenty and sixteen! but their very youth kept them from
any consciousness of the gravity of the undertaking. They went forth
with the daring ignorance of two children, hand in hand. There were
several hearts that ached over the parting, and one had almost broke in
the effort. And the bride shed a few soft tears, and the bridegroom
kissed his hand to the people who stayed behind; and thus the last of
the three Rentons carried out his father’s will, and launched himself
upon the world.
CHAPTER V.
THE FALLING OF THE WATERS.
The readers of this history must be prepared to pass over an interval of
something less than seven years from the end of the last chapter. I
allow that it is a most undesirable break, but yet it has been involved
from the beginning as a necessity of the narrative.
Nearly seven years had elapsed since Mr. Renton’s death at the moment
when we again approach Renton Manor. He died in September, and it was
the beginning of August when Mrs. Renton received a note from Mr.
Ponsonby, the lawyer, announcing his intention of arriving at the Manor
the next day. Mrs. Renton had not improved much in health, but she had
laid aside her mourning, and wore grey and violet, and pretty caps, once
more. Her existence had known very little change during all these years.
Now and then the tonics had been changed, and she had substituted for a
whole year the Revalenta Arabica for the arrowroot; but the difference
was scarcely perceptible except to the maid and the cook, and I
believe, on the whole, the arrowroot was found to agree with her best.
She had taken her drive almost every day with a feeling that she was
doing her duty. ‘My dear husband always made such a point of my drive,’
she said, plaintively, though for her own part she would have preferred
her sofa; and so had lived on, very punctual in taking her medicine, a
woman humbly conscious of fulfilling all the duties of her life. Mary
Westbury had been generally her companion in these drives; and as she
was younger and not so settled in mind, had sometimes, it must be
allowed, felt as if life was no better than a leisurely promenade
between two rows of hedgerows, sometimes green and sometimes brown. The
carriage was very comfortable and the horses were very fat, and there
were a great many charming points of view within a radius of fifteen
miles round Renton; but still there were moments in which Mary was such
an infidel as to wish herself jogging to market in the passing cart, or
carrying a basket along the road, or anywhere rather than in that
luxurious corner. If anything had happened to make Mrs. Renton ‘put
down,’ as people say, her carriage, she would have regarded it as a
calamity altogether immeasurable; but I think that both she and her
niece would have felt a burden taken off their minds. She would have
been left at peace on her sofa, and Mary could have taken needful
exercise in her own way. But such a blessing in disguise was beyond
praying for. Mr. Renton, though he had been so hard upon his sons, had
provided very tenderly for his wife’s comfort.
Renton had been hers for these seven years, and had been kept precisely
as it was when it was the home of the whole family,--not a servant
dismissed nor a change made; and thus the height of comfort had been
secured. Mary, too, was very comfortable,--no young woman could be more
so. She had a maid of her own, which would have been an impossible
luxury at home, and a liberal allowance for her dress, and a fire in her
room, if she chose, from October to May, or indeed all the year through,
if such was her pleasure; and the freedom of various libraries, and an
excellent piano, and any amount of worsted work she chose. And then the
drive every afternoon, wet and dry, ‘so that she has the air and the
change, when we poor people, who have no carriage, must stay indoors,’
Mrs. Westbury said when she described her daughter’s happiness. And this
felicity had gone on for nearly seven years.
‘I wonder what Mr. Ponsonby wants,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘He might have
come without any intimation. I am sure he generally does. Why he should
send word like this, as if he had some news to bring, I cannot conceive.
I do hope it is nothing about the boys.’
‘It cannot be anything about them,’ said Mary. ‘Consider, godmamma, you
had a letter from Ben just the other day, and Frank and Alice wrote by
the last mail.’
‘That is all very true,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘but how can I tell that they
may not have telegraphed or something? And then there is Laurie always
wandering all over the world. He may have gone off, as he did the first
time, without letting any one know.’
‘But he would never have dreamed of sending Mr. Ponsonby to tell you,’
said Mary; ‘he would have written direct. Laurie is the best
correspondent of them all.’
‘Or he may be going to be married,’ said Mrs. Renton,--‘he or Ben. By
the way, he says something about Ben; but all those business people
write such bad hands. Perhaps you can make it out. I am sure it is too
much for me.’
After this little introduction, Mary took the lawyer’s letter with some
slight tremulousness. She was nearly seven-and-twenty by this time, and
ought, she said to herself, to have been quite steady about such
matters. Of course some day Ben would marry, and so long as it was any
one who would make him happy she could only be glad. Many a wandering
thought about Millicent Tracy had come into her mind. Had she been
faithful to him? Had there been any intercourse between them? Had he
kept steadfast to his imagination of her for all these years? For it
was only an imagination, as Mary felt sure. Every letter that came from
Ben had caused her a certain tremor,--not, as she said to herself, that
it would make any difference to her; but if he were to bind himself to a
woman unworthy of him! And now that he was coming back so soon, it was
with a thrill of more intense expectation than usual that she took Mr.
Ponsonby’s letter in her hand. But there was nothing about marrying or
giving in marriage in that sober epistle. It intimated to Mrs. Renton,
in the first place, that the time specified in her husband’s will had
nearly expired; that he had received a letter from her son Ben,
informing him that he intended to meet him at the Manor, along with the
other members of the family, on the 15th of September; and that,
accordingly, Mr. Ponsonby was coming to Renton next day to go over the
property with the bailiff, and see with his own eyes the condition in
which everything was, that there might be no delay, when the time came,
in making everything over to the heir. All that Mrs. Renton had made of
this very distinct letter was the fact that the lawyer was to pay her a
visit, and that there was something about Ben. But indeed Mr. Ponsonby
did not write a legible hand.
‘Then it is just what Ben told us about coming home,’ said Mrs. Renton,
‘though he was not so particular to me in naming the day. He said the
beginning of September, if you recollect, Mary; and Frank and his wife
are coming by the next mail. I am afraid the children will make a
dreadful commotion in the house, and altogether it will be so odd to see
Renton full of people again. Of course, Laurie is coming, too. I don’t
know what I shall do with them all. They can’t expect me to have parties
and that sort of thing for them, Mary, in my state of health?’
‘No, dear godmamma,’ said Mary, soothingly, ‘they will not expect
anything of the kind; and you will never think of the trouble when you
have all the boys at home. Fancy Frank having boys of his own!’ she
cried, with a little laugh. The choice lay between laughing and crying,
and the first was certainly the best.
‘I hope his wife has kept up her practice,’ said Mrs. Renton, still with
a cloud on her brow, ‘since that was what he married her for.’
‘Godmamma!’ cried Mary, with consternation.
‘Well, my dear, I don’t know what else she had to recommend her. No
family, nor connexions; not a penny,--not even expectations! If it was
not for her music, what was it for? And so many women give up practice
when they marry. I always forget,--is it three or four children they
have?’
‘Two, godmamma,’ said Mary, gently; ‘don’t you remember the poor, dear,
little baby died?’
‘Well, it is quite enough,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘with nothing but their
pay to depend upon. And there will be a black nurse, you may be sure,
driving the servants out of their senses. But if she has kept up her
practice, it will be an amusement for the boys. And things might have
been worse. There might have been three families instead of one, you
know, Mary; and then I think I should certainly have run away.’
‘Yes,--perhaps it is selfish,’ said Mary; ‘but I am glad, too, that they
are not all married. It will be more like old times.’
‘Selfish!’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I can’t see how it can be selfish. Of
course Ben will have to marry some time or other, for the sake of the
property. But I never can make out why young men marry, for my part.
Haven’t they everything that heart can desire? and no care, and much
more petted and taken notice of in society than if they were dragging a
wife about with them everywhere? A girl is quite different. She has
everything to gain, you see. I often wondered whether I have been doing
my duty by you, Mary, keeping you out of the way of a good establishment
in life.’
‘Pray don’t speak so, godmamma,’ said Mary, with a blush of indignation;
‘not to me at least.’
‘But I do, my dear. And I am sure no one ever deserved to be comfortably
settled better than you do. However, I have always found, in my
experience,’ said Mrs. Renton, with a profound look of wisdom, ‘that
when these things are coming they come, however quietly you may be
living; and, if they are not to come, they don’t, however much you may
go into society. Look at Jane Sutton, who never was seen out of her
father’s house, and now she’s Lady Egmont! I suppose we must expect Mr.
Ponsonby to lunch.’
‘I should think he would come early,’ said Mary, with a smile; and, as
it was Mrs. Renton’s hour for taking something, she went away to tell
the housekeeper of the guest. And then she made a little tour of the
house; peeping into the rooms, in some of which preparations had already
begun. The west wing, in which the ‘boys’ rooms’ were, was all in
commotion,--carpets taken up, women with pails and brooms in every
corner. The only one as yet untouched was the little sitting-room, or
dressing-room, attached to Ben’s chamber, where his old treasures were
still hanging about,--his books and his pictures, and all his
knicknacks. Into this oasis Mary strayed, with a strange thrill of
expectation creeping over her. Seven years! what a slice it was out of a
life; and how much had happened to the others and how little to herself!
Mary felt as if she had done nothing but drive all these years in that
most comfortable of family coaches, with her aunt by her side, and a
bottle of medicine in the pocket of the carriage. And now they were all
coming back! To what? What change should she find in them? and ah! what
changes would they find in her? Ben must be thirty-two by this time; and
Mary was seven-and-twenty, which, for a woman, is about twenty years
older, as all the world knows!
As for ‘the Frank Rentons,’ they were not to be placed in the west wing
at all, but in a suite of rooms over the great doorway, the
guest-chambers of the house, as became their dignity as married people
with children and nurses to be accommodated. How funny that was! Frank,
who had always been the youngest in every way, whom they all,--even Mary
herself in a manner,--had bullied and domineered over,--and here had he
attained a point of social dignity to which none of the others had yet
approached! Mary laughed to herself, and then she dried her eyes. It was
an agitating crisis altogether, to which she looked forward with the
strangest mixture of feelings. Laurie, it was true, had come home long
since; and came to the Manor now and then, and had not drifted out of
knowledge. But, then, one always knew exactly how Laurie would be, and
it did not matter if he were in London or at the end of the world, so
far as that went; but Ben---- And to think everything was going to be
settled, and they were all coming home!
Mr. Ponsonby arrived next day; not, as they expected, to luncheon, but
in the evening. He was an old friend of the family, and Mr. Renton, as
people say, had no secrets from him. But that was a figure of speech,
for the Ponsonbys had managed the Rentons’ affairs for generations, and
there were no secrets to keep. ‘I shall want the whole day for what I
have to do,’ he told Mary when he arrived; ‘so I thought it best to come
overnight.’ And he dined with the two ladies, and did his best to make
himself agreeable. His coming and his talk were the most tangible sign
that they had yet had that their long vigil was over, and that the tide
of life was about to flow back to them. He spoke in a very guarded way,
betraying nothing of the secret he had kept those seven years; but when
Mrs. Renton spoke of one thing and another which she wanted to have
done, Mr. Ponsonby made answers which infinitely piqued Mary’s
curiosity. ‘We must see what the will says about it,’ said the lawyer.
‘It is not worth while doing anything now till he is here to decide for
himself. All that is the heir’s business, not mine.’
‘Do you mean Ben?’ said Mrs. Renton; for even she was moved to a little
surprise.
‘I cannot tell whom I mean until the will is read,’ he said; ‘but, of
course, whoever is the heir will be but too happy to do what you wish,
my dear Mrs. Renton. It must be a great pleasure to you to have all your
boys at home.’
‘Ye-es,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘but when one does not know whether they are
coming to disappointment or to satisfaction! If they should have had to
travel all this way for nothing, what a thing it would be,--if it were
only for the expense!’
‘But I trust it will be satisfaction this time, and not disappointment,’
said the lawyer. ‘I am heartily glad, for my part, that the seven years
are over. I hear the boys have all done so well, which is immensely to
their credit, and, of course, is just what their excellent father
meant.’
‘I never could think what he meant,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Lydia always
says it was her fault; but he was not a man to follow anybody’s opinion
but his own. As for doing well, I am not so sure about that. Ben has
become a railway man;--think of that, Mr. Ponsonby! I never even
approved of the railroad myself. I don’t see what use there is for so
much hurry. I am sure I went a great deal oftener to town when we used
to drive our own horses than now that there is a railway close to the
gates. But he has pleased himself, which is always something. And Laurie
has pleased himself, too. He paints very pretty pictures sometimes; but
I don’t believe he will ever earn enough to keep him in gloves. And as
for Frank,--a poor soldier with nothing but his pay and a family of
little children! It is very different from what I had once hoped.’
‘But probably this is all over now,’ said Mr. Ponsonby,--‘or at least,
we have every reason to believe so; and in the meantime they have had
their struggles, and know what they are capable of. Let us hope, my dear
madam, that everything will prove to have been for the best.’
‘I don’t doubt that everything is for the best,’ Mrs. Renton answered in
plaintive tones. And then Mr. Ponsonby was left to his wine in the great
old dining-room, which he had not been in since that dismal day when he
read the will,--or rather the preface of the will,--to the startled
family. It was a bright room enough in the morning when the sunshine
came in, or on winter nights when the fire sparkled and glimmered in the
wainscot; but it was very sombre in the dimness of a summer night, with
one lamp on the table and the windows open, admitting the night with all
its ghosts of sound and profound soft glooms. The family solicitor was
not an imaginative man, and yet he could not help feeling that his old
friend might come in any moment through the curtains, which hung half
over the open window, and dictate to him some new condition in the will
which had already wrought so much mischief. ‘Not a word more,’ Mr.
Ponsonby caught himself saying; and then he roused up and went to Mary
in the drawing-room, where she was seated alone in much the same magical
half-darkness as that he had left.
‘I suppose it is the instinct of a Londoner,’ he said; ‘but I declare I
don’t think this is safe. Sitting with windows open to the lawn, all
alone at this hour! Suppose some one should walk in upon you before you
had time to give an alarm?’
‘Who could walk in upon me?’ said Mary, laughing. ‘We are at Renton, you
know, and not in Harley Street.’
‘Sure enough,’ said the townsman. ‘No, thanks; I prefer to face that
window. Let me not be approached from behind; let me see what is coming,
at least.’
‘How odd to think of such a thing!’ said Mary. ‘I sit here every evening
after godmamma has gone to bed, and one cannot live unless all the
windows are open. But oh, Mr. Ponsonby, do talk to me a little! Do you
think,--do you really think,--that now, at last, things will be
comfortable for the boys?’
‘Let us hope so,’ said the man of law, arranging himself comfortably in
an easy-chair. ‘I suppose Mrs. Renton has gone to bed. Let us hope so,
at least.’
‘Hope!’ cried eager Mary,--‘of course we all hope; but what do you
think?’
‘My dear, I can’t tell you what I don’t know, and I must not tell you
what I do know,’ said Mr. Ponsonby. ‘Do you never have any change from
Renton? It is very fine air; but I don’t think it is exhilarating for
young people. Do you ever go out?’
‘We drive every day,’ said Mary, with the faintest little grimace; and
then she looked at her old friend, and permitted herself the relief of a
laugh. ‘It is dismal sometimes,’ she said; ‘but when the boys are back I
shall be free again, and go home.’
Mr. Ponsonby looked at her in silence as she spoke. ‘Home’ was a
cottage, instead of a great house; but otherwise, in the eyes of the man
accustomed to the world, there was not much difference between the one
widow’s house and the other. ‘How do these women live?’ he said to
himself. When the boys came home there might be a little movement,
perhaps, and feeling of life about the old place,--and then she would go
home! ‘That is just the time you ought to stay, I think, and see if they
cannot make it a little more amusing for you,’ he said. ‘Do you never
ride now?’
‘I have no one to ride with me. I could not go out alone, you know,’
Mary answered, without raising her eyes.
‘Well, I am not much of a man to ride with a young lady, but you shall
come out with me to-morrow and go over the estate,--if there is anything
you can ride in the stables. It will do you good. I must see that
everything is in order for the heir. And you will not mind giving up the
drive,--not for one day,--for the sake of an old friend?’ said the
lawyer. ‘Good Lord! there’s a fellow coming in at the window, as I
said. Ring the bell, my dear! Quick, and leave the rest to me!’
‘Why, it is Laurie!’ cried Mary, springing up, as Mr. Ponsonby seized
the gilded stick which supported a little screen, and brandished it in
the face of the new-comer. ‘That is just his way, frightening people out
of their wits. Come in quickly, Laurie, if it is you, and not your
ghost.’
‘It is not my ghost,’ said the figure at the window, advancing to shake
hands with Mr. Ponsonby, who was still a little excited. ‘A ghost was
never so dusty nor so thirsty. I have walked down from town all the way,
to get a breath of air, and very much mystified I was to see a man in
the dining-room from the end of the avenue as I came along. I thought at
first it must be Ben.’
‘So there was some one about!’ said Mr. Ponsonby; ‘that explains my
sensation. I had just been giving your cousin a lecture upon sitting
alone with the windows open. Yes, Laurie, my boy, here I am, come to
look over the ground for the last time, before it is given up to the
heir.’
‘Ben will not be hard upon you,’ said Laurie, with a laugh; but as he
spoke he looked fixedly at the solicitor, hoping,--which was like
Laurie,--to beguile that astute practitioner into self-betrayal.
‘I don’t know any thing about Ben,’ he answered, smiling at the simple
artifice; ‘but I know I must set my affairs in order, and be prepared
to give up my trust. I want Mary to go with me over the estate. She is
moping and pale, and a brisk canter will do her good. Will you see if
there is anything she can ride?’
And then there ensued a little consultation as to whether Fairy was up
to it. Fairy was a pet pony, as old as the hills, who had been eating
herself into a plethoric condition for years; but Mary, who was not a
very bold horsewoman, believed in the venerable animal, as did every
soul about Renton. ‘She’s hold in years, but she’s young at ‘art, Miss;
she’ll carry you like a bird,’ was the coachman’s opinion when he was
called into the consultation. And then Laurie had a vast tankard brought
to him, and refreshed himself after his long walk. When Mr. Ponsonby
retired, the cousins stepped out again on to the lawn, and Mary looked
on and talked while Laurie had his cigar. The moon, which was half over
and late of rising, began to lighten slowly upwards, shining upon the
river far below, while they were still left in darkness on the higher
bank. ‘It is so strange to think we are all on the brink of a new life,’
Mary said, as she gazed down through an opening in the trees upon that
silvery gleam, which was framed in by the dark, rustling branches. ‘Are
we?’ said Laurie, with a kind of echo in his voice. Somehow he had taken
his life awry, by the wrong corner, and there did not seem vigour
enough left in him to care for a new beginning,--at least for himself.
‘Laurie,’ she said, encouraged by the darkness. He had thrown himself
down in a garden-chair, and was visible only as a shadow, with a red
point of cigar indicating his face; while she stood leaning on one of
the lower branches of the lime-tree which framed in that glimpse of the
light below. Their voices had the softened, mysterious sound which such
a moment gives, and as neither of them was happy enough to draw new
delight out of the influence of the night, both of them, by natural
necessity, grew a little sad. ‘Laurie,’ Mary said, and faltered.
‘Sometimes I think I should like to know a little about you. I do know
something about the others,--even Ben,--but you have always been a
mystery to me since you first went away.’
‘I don’t think I am much of a mystery,’ said Laurie, not moving from his
chair.
‘But you are a mystery,’ Mary repeated, with a little eagerness. ‘I
don’t know what has come to you,--whether it is love, or whether it is
loss,--don’t be angry, Laurie.’
‘It might be love and loss too,’ he said, with a little laugh, which was
not cheerful, and then he rose and tossed away his cigar. ‘What if I
were to say you were a mystery, too?’ he continued, not knowing how
Mary’s cheeks burned in the darkness. ‘We all are, I suppose; and my
poor old father that meant to do so well for us, and tossed us all
abroad to scramble anyhow for life,--what do you say to that for a
mystery, Mary? and here is the moment coming to prove which of us is
preferred and which condemned. I am the poor fellow with one talent, who
laid it up in the napkin. If he had not been so mean as to abuse his
master, I think I should have sympathised with that poor wretch.’
‘I cannot say I sympathise with him,’ cried Mary, woman-like. ‘To be
able to do, and not to do, that is what I cannot understand. But you
have not hid your talent in a napkin, Laurie. I wish you had a better
opinion of yourself.’
Upon which Laurie laughed, and drew her hand through his arm, and the
two strayed together, silent, down under the shadow of the trees towards
the opening which looked on the river. The moon creeping higher every
moment, began to thread through the bewildering maze of branches with
lines and links of silver; and there was always that one brilliant spot
in the midst of the river, far below them, shining like burnished
silver, scarcely dimpling under the moonbeams, which seemed to swell as
well as glorify the rather scanty water. Their hearts were full of
wistfulness and dreams. The world lay all as dark before them as those
rustling, breathing woods, with, for one, a brightness in the future
which might or might not,--most probably should not,--ever be attained;
and for the other, only some fanciful, silvery thread twining through
the sombre life. They paused, arm-in-arm, by that beech-tree at the
corner where Ben and Mary had paused when he was last at home, and where
he had shot that arrow at her,--as she said to herself,--of which she
could still feel the point. But Laurie was very different from Ben. No
spark of emotion went from one soul to the other as they stood so close
and so kindly together. They were the parallel lines that never
meet,--each thinking their own thoughts, each with a sigh that was not
all pain, contemplating the well-known road behind them, the invisible
path before;--and all the world around lying dark and light, stirring
softly, breathing softly, in the long speechless vigil which we call
night.
Next day Mr. Ponsonby went over the home-farm, and all the neighbouring
land, inspecting everything, looking to farms, farm-buildings, drainage,
timber,--all the necessities of the estate. Mary rode by his side on
Fairy, who verified the coachman’s verdict, and carried her mistress
like a bird,--at least as nearly like a bird as Mary wished. Laurie had
gone back to town that morning by the train. When his cousin returned to
luncheon, freshed and roused by her ride, it seemed to her almost as if
the new life had already begun. The work-people who had been sent for
from town had arrived with a van full of upholstery,--bales of fresh,
pretty chintz for ‘the boys’ rooms,’ and new furniture for the extempore
nursery. An air of movement was diffused about the whole house. The
flood which had swept over Renton, almost engulfing the peace of the
family, was almost over,--the waters were going down,--the household ark
standing fast, and the saved ones beginning to appear at the long-closed
windows. Such were Mary’s feelings as she went with her aunt for that
inevitable drive. To-day the hedgerows were not so monotonous, the dust
less stifling; and when they met Mr. Ponsonby on his cob, with the
bailiff in attendance, the returning life rose into a sparkle and glow
in Mary’s face. ‘Her ride has done her no end of good,’ Mr. Ponsonby
cried, waving his hand as he rode past. ‘Good?’ said Mrs. Renton: ‘was
there anything the matter with you, Mary? I am sure, if there is any
good in riding, I wonder Dr. Mixton has never recommended it to me.’ And
then the two drove on, as they had been driving, Mary thought, all these
seven long years.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RAVEN.
Some days after Mr. Ponsonby’s visit, Mary Westbury saw from her room,
where she happened to be sitting, a carriage drive up the avenue. It was
only about twelve o’clock, an unusual hour for visitors; and the
carriage was of the order known as a fly, with just such a white horse,
and coachman in white cotton gloves, as had made an important feature in
the landscape to Ben Renton seven years before in Guildford Street,
Manchester Square; but there was not, of course, any connexion in Mary’s
mind between such a vehicle and her cousin’s brief romance. She watched
it, with a little surprise, as it came up. Who could it be? There was
somehow, a greater than ordinary attempt to look like a private carriage
about this particular vehicle, with, as might have been expected, a
failure still more marked. And flys of any description were not well
known at Renton. The lodge-keeper had looked at it disdainfully when she
opened the gate; and the butler, who was standing at the door, received
the card of the visitors with a certain mixture of condescension and
contempt. ‘For Miss Westbury,’ he said, giving it to a passing maid to
carry up-stairs, and only deigning, after an interval, to show the
visitors into the drawing-room. The card which was brought to Mary had a
very deep black border, and the name of Mrs. Henry Rich printed in the
little square of white. Who was Mrs. Henry Rich? There had been very
little intercourse between the Riches and the Rentons since Frank’s
marriage; but Mary recollected with an effort, when she turned her mind
that way, that one of the sons had died some time before, and that he
turned out to have been married, and to have left an unknown widow to be
provided for after he died. These facts came quite dimly to her mind as
she pondered the name. But she had never heard who the widow was, and
could not think what a stranger in such circumstances could want with
her. ‘I don’t know them well enough to do her any good,’ Mary said to
herself. The border was so black, and the fly had impressed her with
such a feeling of poverty,--wrongly, to be sure, for of course had Mrs.
Henry Rich possessed a dozen carriages she could scarcely have brought
them with her to Cookesley,--that the idea of a weeping widow seeking
something very like charity, was suggested to Mary by the name, and the
deep mourning, and the hour of the visit. Civility demanded of her that
she should see this unexpected visitor. ‘But I must tell her we see
very little of them, and that I can do nothing,’ Mary said to herself as
she went down-stairs. She was dressed in one of her fresh, pretty
muslins, pink and white, with all the pretty, crisp bits of lace and
bows of ribbon that makes up that toilette _fraîche et simple_, which is
one of the greatest triumphs of millinery, and next to impossible to any
but the rich. And a pleasant figure to behold was Mary amid the
sunshine, in the calm of the stately, silent house which was so familiar
to her, and in which her movements were never without a certain grace.
The most awkward being in the world has an advantage in her own house
over any new-comer. And Mary was never awkward. The worst that could be
said of her was that she was in no way remarkable. You could not
specially distinguish her among a crowd as ‘that girl with the bright
eyes,’ or ‘with that lovely complexion,’ or ‘with the fine figure.’ Her
eyes were very nice, and so was her colour, and so was her form; but, as
she herself said, her hair was the same colour as everybody else’s; she
was just the same height as other people; her hands and feet the same
size; her waist the same measure round. ‘I have never any difficulty
about my things,’ Mary would say, half laughing, half annoyed;
‘everybody’s things fit me;’ and though she had preserved a great deal
of the first fresh bloom of youth, still it was a fact quite known and
acknowledged by her that the early morning and the dews were over with
her. Such was the pleasant household figure, full of everything that
makes a woman sweet to her own people, and yet not beautiful, which went
softly into the great Renton drawing-room, in the morning sunshine, to
see her visitor, not having the least fear of the stranger, or anything
but pity, and a regretful certainty that her own ministrations, which
she supposed were going to be appealed to, could be of no use.
Mary went in so softly that she surprised the ladies,--for there were
two of them,--in an investigation into some handsome cabinets which were
in the room, and which, indeed, were perfectly legitimate objects of
curiosity. But to be discovered in the midst of their researches
discomposed the strangers. They stood still for a moment between her and
the window,--two tall, sombre, black figures,--draped from head to foot
in the heaviest mourning. They had their backs to the light, and Mary
could not for the moment distinguish their faces. She went forward with
her soft smile and bow; and then she made a bewildered, involuntary
pause. It was many, many years since she had seen that face, and she
could not remember whose it was; but yet it struck her, even in her
ignorance, a curious paralysing blow. It was the kind of blow said to be
given by that mysterious monster of the seas, which the great French
novelist has introduced into literature. It jarred her all over, and
yet seemed to numb and take all power from her. ‘Mrs. Rich?’ she
faltered, with a wonderful mingling of recollection and ignorance; and
then stood still, too much startled to say more.
‘Dearest Mary, have you forgotten me altogether?’ said the youngest of
the two ladies, coming up to her with both hands outstretched. Still
Mary did not remember whose face it was, and yet she grew faint and
sick. The tall figure towered over her middle-sized head; the lovely
blue eyes looked appealing into her heart. ‘Don’t you remember
Millicent?’ said the sweet voice; and then her reluctant hand was taken,
and those softest rose-lips touched her cheek. Mary was glad to point to
a chair, and shelter her own weakness upon one beside it. ‘It is so
unexpected,’ she said, making a feeble apology for her consternation;
and then Mrs. Tracy came and shook hands with her, and they all sat down
in a little circle, poor Mary feeling the room go round and round with
her, and all her courage fail.
‘You did not know me under my changed name,’ said Millicent; ‘and I am
so changed, dear Mary, and you are exactly as you were,--you are not a
day older;--that is the difference between living such a quiet life and
being out in the world.’
‘I should have known you anywhere, my dear,’ said Mrs. Tracy, coming a
little closer to Mary’s chair.
‘That is very strange,’ said Mary, recovering herself, ‘for I think I
only saw you once. But I am very much surprised. Millicent, was it you
that married Mr. Henry Rich?’
‘Who else could it be?’ said Millicent, slowly shaking her head with a
soft pity for herself, and then she pressed her handkerchief lightly to
her eyes. She was dressed in profound black, in what it is common to
call the most hideous of garbs--a widow’s mourning dress. Her bonnet was
of crape, with a veil attached to it, which was thrown back, showing the
lovely face, just surrounded by a single rim of white. Though it goes
against all ordinary canons of taste to say so, I am obliged to add that
her melancholy robes were very becoming to Millicent, as indeed they are
to most women. Her dazzling whiteness of complexion, the soft rose-flush
that went and came, the heavenly blue of her eyes, came forth with
double force from the sombre background. Poor Mary was overwhelmed by
her beauty, her quiet consciousness of it, her patronage, and tone of
kindness. And to come here now, at such a moment, when the world was
about to begin again! It was so much her natural instinct to be
courteous, that she could not make any demonstration to the contrary,
but her manner, in spite of herself, grew colder and colder. The only
comfort in the whole matter was that Mrs. Renton had not yet come
down-stairs.
‘Her happiness lasted but a very short time,’ said Mrs. Tracy, taking
up her parable; ‘such a young man, too! But my poor dear child has been
very badly used. It was not only that; he died just when he ought to
have been making some provision for her.’
‘Oh, mamma dear, that was not poor Harry’s fault!’
‘But we found out afterwards,’ continued Mrs. Tracy, ‘that he had not
anything like what he had given himself out to have. He had squandered
his money in speculation,--that was the truth; and now his family,
instead of appreciating the position of a poor young creature thus
deprived of her natural protector----’
‘Oh, please,’ said Mary, interrupting her; ‘I know the Riches a little,
and I’d rather not hear anything about their affairs.’
‘I am speaking of our affairs, my dear,’ said Mrs. Tracy, solemnly; ‘of
Millicent’s affairs; for, alas! I can scarcely say I have any of my own.
Since my poor boy died, seven years ago, I have not cared much what
happened,--to myself.’
‘Poor mamma worries about me more than she ought,’ said Millicent. ‘But
we do not come to trouble you about that, dear Mary. How nice you look
in your pretty muslin! I wonder if I shall ever wear anything pretty
again. I feel such an old woman in those hideous caps. Don’t I look like
a perfect ghost?’
‘I think you look more beautiful than usual,’ said Mary, with a certain
spitefulness. She intended no compliment. It was rather a reproach she
meant, as if she had said, ‘You have no right to be beautiful. Why
shouldn’t you look a perfect ghost like other people?’ It was sharply
said, not without a touch of bitterness, though it sounded pleasantly
enough; and Millicent shook back her veil a little further, and laid her
fingers caressingly upon Mary’s hand.
‘Ah, it is you who are partial!’ she said, while Mary boiled with secret
wrath. ‘But tell me about Thornycroft, and if it is still kept up; and
our old Gorgon, you know, and all the people. There was that poor Mr.
Thorny, too,’ said Millicent, with a little laugh; ‘tell me about them
all.’
‘Mr. Thorny died,--as you must have heard,’ said Mary; ‘and it was your
doing, everybody said; and then poor Miss Thorny gave up. I wonder you
like to think of it. It might have been going on like old times but for
you----’
‘Could I help it?’ said Millicent, with a little shrug of her shoulders.
‘If a man is a fool, is it my fault? You must know by this time, Mary,
as well as I do, what fools they will make of themselves; but it is too
bad to call it our fault.’
‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Mary, fiercely, and then there
was a pause.
‘This is such a lovely place,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘we have heard so much
about it. We used to know your cousin, Mr. Benedict Renton, Miss
Westbury,--at one time. I suppose he is still abroad?’
‘Yes, he is still abroad.’
‘What a sad thing for him, with his prospects! It must have upset all
your calculations. But the time is up now, is it not?’ Mrs. Tracy said,
with her most ingratiating smile.
Mary perceived in a moment what was their object, and hoping it might be
but a voyage of inquiry, shut up all avenues of intelligence in her, and
faced the inquisitor with a countenance blank of all meaning--or so at
least she thought. ‘What time is up?’ she said.
‘Oh, the time,’ cried Millicent, breaking in impatiently,--‘the time,
you know, for the will. As if you did not know all about it! Oh, you
need not be afraid to trust us. Ben Renton was not so careful; he told
me everything about it. I must tell you that we saw a great deal of Ben
at one time,’ Millicent added, with one of her vain looks. Mary says it
might have been called an arch look by a more favourable critic. ‘He
was, in short, you know, a little mad--but you will say that was my
fault.’
‘I have no more to do with my cousin’s private affairs than I have with
Mr. Rich’s,’ said Mary; ‘indeed, I wish you would not tell me. My
cousin is not a man to like to have his affairs talked about. I would
rather not hear any more.’
‘Miss Westbury is quite right, Millicent,’ said Mrs. Tracy, ‘and shows a
great deal of delicacy. She is always such a thoughtless child, my dear.
She never stops to think what she is going to say. The harm it has done
her, too, if she could only see it! Millicent, my darling, if you would
but learn some of Miss Westbury’s discretion! But it will be pleasant
for you to have your cousins home again, I am sure.’
To this artful question Mary gave no answer at all. Indignation began to
strengthen her. She sat still, with an air which any well-bred woman
knows how to assume when necessary,--an air of polite submission to
whatever an unwelcome visitor may choose to say. It neither implies
assent nor approbation, but,--it is not worth while to contradict you.
Such was the expression on Mary’s face.
‘Ah, mamma, Mary has not such a warm heart for old friends as I have,’
said Millicent at last. ‘I have been raving about coming to see her for
weeks back, but she does not care to see me. She is indifferent to her
old friends.’
‘Were we ever old friends?’ said Mary. ‘I don’t remember. You were older
than I was. I thought you were very pretty, as everybody did, but----’
‘But you did not like me. Oh, I am used to that from women,’ said
Millicent, with a mocking laugh; and she actually rose to her feet to go
away.
And the colour rushed into Mary’s face. Used to that from women! because
of her beauty, which transcended theirs! The ordinary reader will think
it was a self-evident proposition, but Mary was of a different opinion,
being thus directly and personally accused.
‘I don’t know about women,’ she said, indignantly; ‘but I have never had
any occasion,--to be jealous of you.’ This was said with a fierceness
which Mary never could have attained to had it been simply true. ‘I
admire you very much,’ she added, with a little vehemence. ‘I did so at
school; but that does not alter the truth. We were never great friends.’
‘Well, it is kind of you to put me in mind of that,’ said Millicent.
‘Mamma, come. You see it is as I told you. We shall find no nice
neighbours at Renton. It is best to go away.’
The word ‘neighbours’ made Mary start, and she had not time to realise
that she was about to get rid of them, when the door was suddenly pushed
open, and Mrs. Renton’s maid appeared with her shawls, and her cushions,
and her knitting. ‘Mrs. Renton is coming down immediately,’ said the
woman; and on this, to Mary’s bewilderment, her visitors sat down again.
She was driven to her wits’ end. To leave them to encounter poor Mrs.
Renton was like bringing the lamb to an interview with the wolf.
‘May I ask you to come to the library?’ she said, hurriedly. ‘My aunt is
a great invalid, and sees no visitors. Pray forgive me for asking
you;--this way,’ and rushed to the door before them. But the fates were
against poor Mary on that unfortunate day.
‘We have made quite a visitation already,’ said Mrs. Tracy, and got up
again to shake hands. As for Millicent, though she had been so angry,
she took Mary’s two hands again; and, stooping over her, gave her
another kiss. And all these operations took time, and, before they had
made any progress towards their departure, Mrs. Renton came in, and
received with some astonishment the curtsies and salutations of the
unknown guests.
‘Pray don’t hurry away because I have come. I am always so glad when
Mary has her friends to see her,’ Mrs. Renton said, with the sweetest
amiability; ‘do sit down, pray.’ The mother and daughter waited for no
second invitation. They put themselves on either side of Mrs. Renton, as
they had done off Mary; and thus a kind of introduction had to be
performed most unwillingly by the victim, who felt that her cause was
lost.
‘Mrs. Rich!’ said the lady of the house, gathering up her wools,--‘that
must be a relation of the Riches of Richmont. Oh, yes; we know them
very well,--that is, they are very good sort of people, I am sure. When
my son Frank was at Royalborough, he used to go to see them. All the
officers do, I believe; and he made me call. Oh, yes, of course, I
understand,--the son who died. Poor thing! your daughter is a very young
widow.’ This was aside to Mrs. Tracy, who had already volunteered to
arrange the cushions in Mrs. Renton’s chair.
‘Not much more than a child,’ said that astute mother; ‘and left so
poorly off, after all! You may suppose, Mrs. Renton, if I had not
thought it would be a very good marriage in point of money, I should
never have sacrificed my child to the son of a man in the City. I would
rather have starved. And then it turned out he had not half what he was
supposed to have. People that do those sort of things should be
punished,’ Mrs. Tracy said, with fire in her eye.
‘Indeed, that is my opinion,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘but I always thought
the Riches were rolling in money.’ And then she made a little internal
reflection that, perhaps, on the whole, Frank had not done so very much
amiss.
‘So we thought,’ said Mrs. Tracy, confidentially; ‘or rather, so I
thought, for my poor child is as innocent as a baby. But poor Harry had
speculated, I believe, or done something with his money; and his father
is as hard,--oh, as hard---- If I could but see justice done to my
Millicent, I care for nothing more.’
‘And, dear me, we had thought they were such liberal kind of people!’
said Mrs. Renton, thinking more and more that Frank, on the whole----
‘And your daughter is so very prepossessing,’ she added, in a lower
tone. ‘Of course they knew all about it,--before----’
‘That is just it,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘the marriage took place abroad, and
we were both so ignorant of business, and I fear the settlements were
not quite _en règle_; I am so foolish about business; all I trust to is
the heart.’
‘Dear, dear, what a sad thing! But I should always have looked over the
settlements,’ said Mrs. Renton, who knew as much about it as her
lap-dog, shaking her head and looking very wise. Millicent had pretended
to talk to Mary while this was going on, but principally had employed
herself in gazing round the room, noting all its special features.
Furnished all anew, in amber satin, it would look very well, she
thought; and, oh, what a comfort to have such a home, after all the
wanderings of her life! And then she wondered what the house was like in
Berkeley Square. Poor, dear Ben! what a surprise it would be to him to
find that she was established at the Willows! She wondered whether he
would be very angry about her marriage, or whether he would think, as a
great many men did, that a young widow was very interesting; and how
long a time it would be before they had made up their quarrels and he
was at her feet again! These questions were so full of interest that
Mary’s taciturn manner did not trouble her. ‘I daresay she would like to
have him herself,’ Millicent said; and the desire seemed so natural that
her respect for Mary rather increased than otherwise. If she had let
such a prize slip through her hands without so much as an attempt to
secure it, then Millicent would have thought her contemptible indeed.
At length there came a moment when it seemed expedient that she too
should strike in to the conversation with Mrs. Renton. There was an
audible pause. Millicent was not so clever as her mother; but in such a
crisis as the present she was put upon her mettle. So long as there were
only men to deal with there was no need for much exertion. Nature had
provided her with the necessary weapons to use against such
simpletons,--her eyes, the turn of her head, her smile, a soft
modulation of her voice; but with a feminine audience it was a different
matter. There, wit was more needful to her than beauty,--mother
wit,--adroitness,--the faculty of adapting herself to her part and her
listeners. Mrs. Tracy looked at her with an anxiety which she could not
disguise. A statesman looking on while his son made his first speech in
Parliament, could scarcely have experienced a graver solicitude. As it
was, Millicent addressed herself to her mother with the softest of
voices. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘does it not seem strange to find yourself
here, after all Mr. Ben Renton used to tell us? How fond he was of his
beautiful home!’
And then came the expected question from his mother,--‘Ben? my son Ben?
Did you meet him abroad? Is it long since you saw him? Dear, dear, why I
am looking for my boy home every day. They are all coming home
about,--about----’ Here Mrs. Renton caught Mary’s warning eye, and
paused, but immediately resumed again. ‘Why, of course, everybody knows!
Why should not I say what it is about? It was an arrangement of my poor
dear husband’s. They are coming to read the will. We don’t know how we
are left, none of us, for it was a very odd arrangement; but I am sure
he meant it for the best. We shall be together next month, and I am sure
Ben will be charmed to resume his acquaintance with you. What a nice
thing you should be in the neighbourhood! The only thing is, that I am
afraid you will find The Willows damp.’
‘But what a pleasure for you to have all your family with you!’ said
Millicent; ‘and oh! what a delight to your sons to return to you!’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Of course I shall be very glad to see them.
And then, to be sure, shooting will have begun, and they will be able
to amuse themselves. I am such an invalid, I tremble at the thought of
any exertion.’
And when Mrs. Renton said this, Millicent rose, and declared she knew
that she could put one of those cushions more comfortably in the chair.
It was quite late in the afternoon when they left the Manor at last, for
Mrs. Renton insisted that they should stay to luncheon. She was
distressed beyond measure when she heard of the fly which had been
waiting for so long. ‘It will cost you a fortune,’ she cried; ‘and we
could have set you down when we went for our drive.’
‘We are not very rich,’ Mrs. Tracy said in reply; ‘but to have made
acquaintance with you is such a pleasure. And it is not often we indulge
ourselves.’
Mrs. Renton declared, when they were gone, that it was years since she
had seen any one who pleased her so much. ‘As for the daughter, she is
perfectly beautiful!’ she cried, in rapture; ‘and to think that such a
lovely creature should have married Harry Rich!’
‘But we don’t know anything about Harry Rich,’ said Mary, who was
disposed to be misanthropical; ‘perhaps he was a lovely creature too.’
‘I don’t understand what has come to you, Mary,’ said her aunt. ‘Why
should you be so disagreeable? Such a nice, pretty creature; one would
have thought she was just the very companion you want. And your own old
schoolfellow, too! I never like to give in to what people say of girls
being jealous of each other, but it really looks more like that than
anything else.’
‘Yes; I suppose I must be jealous of her,’ said Mary; and Mrs. Renton
took the admission for irony, and read her a long lecture when they went
for their drive. It is hard upon a young woman to be lectured when she
is out driving, and can neither run away nor occupy herself with
anything that may make a diversion. Poor Mary had to listen to a great
many remarks about the evils of envy and self-estimation, and the
curious want of sympathy she showed.
‘Poor thing!--a widow at such an early age, and badly left, and with
such very sweet manners. And the mother such a very judicious person,’
said Mrs. Renton. ‘I am so glad they are at The Willows. It will be
quite a resource to the boys.’
Then indeed something very like bitterness rankled in Mary Westbury’s
heart. Envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. Yes, very
likely it would be a resource for the boys. In all her own long and
tedious fulfilment of their duties, Mary had never once proposed to
herself any reward ‘when the boys came home,’ and yet, perhaps, there
had been in her heart some hope of appreciation,--some idea that they
would understand what abnegation of herself it had been. They would
know that this long, monotonous stretch of duty,--which was not, after
all, her first natural duty,--was not less, but perhaps more hard, than
their own wanderings and labour. And now all at once a cloud had fallen
over this prospect. One soweth and another reapeth. Mary had laboured
and denied herself for their sakes; but it was this stranger who would
be the great resource for the boys. And Ben! Mary’s heart contracted
with a secret, silent pang as she thought of Ben coming defenceless,
unprepared, to find the syren who had,--she did not doubt,--bewitched
and betrayed him, seated at his very gates. Her last conversation with
him rose up before her as clear as if it had but just occurred. Ben,
too, had ventured to suggest that she,--that all women,--would be
envious of Millicent. Her heart rose with an indignant swell and throb.
Was there nothing then in the world better than blue eyes and lips like
rose-leaves, and the syren’s voice and smile? If that was all a man
cared for, was he worth thinking of? She had gone and married Henry Rich
when Ben was poor. And now that the man whose name she bore had
opportunely vanished from her path, she had returned now Ben was about
to regain his fortune, to lie in wait for him, with a miserable pretence
of old friendship and tender regard for his cousin, who was to be the
victim, and scapegoat, and sacrifice for all! Perhaps it was not much
wonder that Mary was bitter. And she had all a woman’s natural distrust
in the man’s powers of resistance. It never occurred to her that the
syren of his youth might now have no attraction for him. ‘They are like
that,’ she said to herself, with a true woman’s feeling of
half-impatient tolerance, and pity, and something like contempt,--not
blame, as if he were a free agent. It was not he, but she, upon whom it
was natural to lay the blame.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DOVE.
About a week after the arrival of the visitors from The Willows, an
arrival of a very different kind happened at Renton;--and yet it could
not be called an arrival. There had been no further news, and the Manor
was still in the same state of pleasant confusion and preparation,--the
maids sitting and chatting over their work in the west wing, and a
roomful of seamstresses working at the new carpets and curtains for ‘the
boys’ rooms,’--when one morning Mary was mysteriously called out from
Mrs. Renton’s room, where she was reading the newspaper, her usual
morning occupation. ‘It was a lady who wanted to see her,’ the maid
said; and was stolid, and refused all further particulars. ‘A lady,--any
one who has been here lately?’ Mary asked, stiffening into sudden
offence. It could be nobody but Millicent, she thought, though Millicent
had been at the house repeatedly since her first visit, and was already
known. ‘I never saw her before, miss,--not at Renton,’ was the reply;
and Mary, annoyed, went to see for herself who the unknown visitor was.
She had been set on edge by the events of the last few days.
‘Wheresoever the carrion is, there will the eagles be gathered
together,’ she said to herself, with a kind of spiteful misery. So long
as nothing was going to happen in the family, no mysterious visitors,
neither men nor women, came near Renton; and now here was the second in
a week! Perhaps some other syren to put herself in Ben’s way; perhaps
somebody who possessed Laurie’s secret, whatever that might be. As for
Frank, he was a married man, and had his wife to take care of him, and,
heaven be praised! could have no secrets,--at least, none in which Mary
could be compelled to interfere.
She went to the drawing-room door discontented, with no comfortable
expectation. But when she had opened it, the most unexpected scene burst
upon her eyes. The first thing she saw was a Hindoo ayah holding in her
arms one of those milk-white, blue-veined children whose delicacy of
tint contrasts so strangely with the dusky arms that carry them,--the
kind of child of which one says involuntarily that it is an Indian
child. Her first glance was at that pearly, blue-eyed creature, and then
she turned round with a start and cry of joy upon a lady who stood by
smiling.
‘Is it Alice?’ she cried. The comfort it was to her, the relief and
satisfaction and sense of strength it gave her, would be difficult to
describe. Mary was not given to enthusiasm, but she clasped her arms
about the new-comer with a warmth which brought tears to her eyes. ‘I
thought it was some one disagreeable, and it is you!’ she cried in her
delight. She had been looking for an enemy, and here was a natural
assistant and ally.
And then ensued a flutter of explanation and welcome, as was natural. It
was Alice who had thus come unaccompanied and unexpected,--or, rather,
it was Mrs. Frank Renton, a young matron of six years’ standing, with
one wistful, bright-eyed, wondering little girl by her side, and the
child on the nurse’s knee.
‘We came to give mamma a surprise,’ said Alice; ‘not to keep her anxious
till the last moment, thinking everything impossible must have happened
to us. I know how she watches every day and thinks. And this was such a
good opportunity for coming! We came when she had not the least
expectation of us, and saved her all that. It was Frank’s idea,’ said
the young wife, with a happy smile.
‘And where is Frank?’
‘Coming next mail. Yes, that is the worst of it; but, as he said, we
could not have everything; and I came with Lady Sinclair, the
Governor-General’s wife, you know. Think what an honour it is! And she
was so kind to us. She has quite taken a fancy to us, which is odd. I
don’t mean it is odd that they should all be fond of Frank, for
everybody is. Don’t you think baby is like him? Come and look at baby. I
am sure you have not had a good look at him yet. Mamma has done nothing
but carry him about in her arms. It is so funny to see my baby in
mamma’s arms,’ cried Alice, with a sudden gush of bright tears; ‘and,
oh! so nice! I love him the more for it. She thinks he is rather pale.
Well, perhaps he is a little pale. I suppose Indian babies generally
are,--and then the journey, you know. Renton is not a bit changed. I
stood just now, when you came in, on the very same pattern of the carpet
that I stood on when Frank brought me here first; and I was so
dreadfully frightened; and then you came and put your arms round my
neck----’
‘You were such a child,’ said Mary; and the two kissed each other once
more.
‘It was so good of you to put your arms round my neck. Not just a
regulation kiss, as Frank says. I put myself on the very same square
this time to see what you would do.’
‘Why you are a child still!’ said Mary, looking at her with that curious
mixture of amusement and wonder and respect with which an unmarried
woman looks upon the matron who is younger than herself. How many
experiences Alice had gone through of which the home-dwelling girl knew
nothing! And yet she was a child still!
‘So mamma says,’ said Alice. ‘But, oh! how nice and fresh and bright you
look! Is that how dresses are made now? Am I a dreadful fright in my old
things? For money does not go so far in India as one thinks; and what
with the children and everything, I have had to be very economical.
Mamma says I am about fifty years behind other people; and they all
laugh so at poor baby’s things. But he has got on his new pelisse
to-day, and I think he looks very nice. Is grandmamma up yet? Do you
think she would like the children to go and see her in her room?’
‘I must let her know first,’ said Mary.
But she lingered, and this babble ran on, which was so pleasant; and the
children’s hats were taken off, and Alice exhibited little Mary’s hair,
which was pale gold, of the softest, silkiest kind; but would not
_crêper_, nor stand out, as ‘the fashion’ was, to her despair.
‘You would not think she had half so much as she has,’ the mother said;
‘it is so soft. Look here, how thick it is! but it will not hang as it
ought. Should I take her to Truefitt, or somebody? Frank thinks it is
pretty as it is, but then he did not know what was the fashion; and he
is silly,--he likes curls.’
‘And, by-the-bye, where are your curls?’ said Mary.
Alice laughed and shook her head with the pretty movement that these
same curls had made habitual to her.
‘I put them up to come out,’ she said. ‘Fancy coming out with the
children, and without Frank, with those things bobbing about my
shoulders like a baby! I wish you would speak to him about it, Mary.
Mamma agrees with me that I ought to put them up when I go out; but he
is such an old goose. Don’t you think we ought to go to grandmamma? She
may think that it is unnatural of us not to go to her at once.’
‘It will do by-and-by,’ said Mary. ‘You know what an invalid she is. How
good the children are, Alice! I am sure she will be delighted with them,
after all.’
‘After all?’ cried Alice, amazed. ‘But you must not think they are
always good; you should see mamma with them. Mamma looks as if it was
natural to her to have a baby in her arms. Wasn’t it good of Frank to
make up the plan for me to come over and save her all the anxiety? I did
not want to come till he was ready myself. It was all his consideration.
And then Lady Sinclair wanted me so much to travel with her. Of course
it was more comfortable. And as I am not a great lady myself, nor
anybody particular, it was nice to have Lady Sinclair to take me up, you
know, for Frank’s sake.’
‘Why, you are quite a little woman of the world!’
‘That is what mamma says; but so would you, if you were asked about your
people, and all sorts of questions put to you. I always used to feel so
ashamed, when the colonel’s wife began to talk to me, that I had not an
uncle an earl, or even a baronet. That would have been better than
nothing, for Frank’s sake. I do think he felt it sometimes, and was
angry that his wife was a nobody; but then when Lady Sinclair took me
up,’ Alice said, with a sparkle in her eyes,--‘and the Governor-General
is baby’s godfather,--that made all the difference. It was quite absurd
the difference it made.’
‘And I hope you have kept up your music,’ said Mary, thinking of Mrs.
Renton. But to Alice the question had another meaning, and covered her
soft face with a sudden blush.
‘I am so glad! Lady Sinclair does not care for music,’ she cried; ‘not
one bit! She does not know Beethoven from Verdi. It was me she liked,
and not my playing. Oh, if you knew how impertinent they used to be!
saying I must have been professional, and such cruel things;--not that
there would have been any harm in being professional,--but only you know
men have such prejudices, and it made Frank furious. But it was me Lady
Sinclair liked, though I dare say you are surprised,’ Alice added, with
a laugh of pleasant girlish vanity. Her heart was thrown wide open by
the excitement of the home-coming; all its envelopes of shyness and
strangeness having been forgotten for the moment. Except with ‘mamma,’
she had never chattered so freely to any one in her life.
‘Very much surprised,’ Mary said, kissing the bright face which had come
upon her like a revelation. They had jumped all at once into the
tenderest intimacy. Frank’s bride had been a timid little stranger the
last time she was at Renton, afraid to speak, carrying herself very
gingerly among her unknown relations; but she was flushed by the delight
of being among her own people this time, and confident of everybody’s
regard.
‘I think really I ought to go to grandmamma now,’ she added, after that
pleasant laugh. And Mary hastened to her godmother to prepare the way.
Mrs. Renton had just finished dressing, and was lying on her sofa, to
recover from the exertion, sipping her cup of arrowroot. She was in a
pale grey dress, which, she flattered herself, was slightly mourning,
but had some pretty pink ribbons in her cap, to which that description
could scarcely be applied. They were not perhaps very suitable to her
widowhood, but then they were very becoming; and when the sun is shining
brightly, even an invalid lady upon a sofa is apt to feel an inclination
towards such innocent vanities.
‘My mistress has taken a biscuit with her arrowroot this morning,’ said
the maid, in a tone of exultation. ‘I always said as a little bit of
company was the thing that would do her most good.’
Mrs. Renton gave a soft smile in acknowledgment of this commendation.
She was aware that it was good of her to eat that biscuit, and a gentle
self-approval filled her heart. ‘I quite enjoyed it,’ she said; and Mary
had to pause and hear an account of what kind of biscuit it was, and to
express her delight at the feat. ‘And I have something else to tell you,
dear godmamma,’ she said; ‘if you are quite sure you will not be upset
by the surprise. Some one has just arrived,--Alice and the children! She
had an opportunity to come by this last mail, with Lady Sinclair, the
Governor-General’s wife, who has taken a great fancy to her. Frank would
not let her miss the opportunity. She arrived the day before yesterday,
and she is with the children, looking so nice! I am sure you will be
delighted to see them. Shall I bring them up here?’
Mary’s nervousness betrayed itself in the haste with which she delivered
this long explanation, never pausing to take breath. And Mrs. Renton put
down her arrowroot and sat upright on the sofa. ‘Bring them here!--Alice
and the children! Good heavens, Mary! are you out of your senses?’ said
the invalid, ‘when I have just this moment got out of bed!’
‘But she will wait as long as you please,’ said Mary, anxiously.
‘And you know I hate surprises,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘It may be all very
well for you robust people who are never ill; but such a thing upsets my
nerves altogether; and nothing is ready, you know; and why did Frank not
come with her? But it just shows how dreadful it is to have to do with
people who are out of society!’ cried Mrs. Renton, putting one foot to
the ground. ‘I suppose I must go and see to things myself.’
‘Missis will make herself quite ill!’ cried the maid, in alarm. ‘Oh,
please, ma’am,--if you would be so good, ma’am,--Dr. Mixton would never
forgive me if you went and walked about after you’ve took your
arrowroot.’
‘Don’t worry me, Davison!’ cried Mrs. Renton, ready to cry; ‘as if I had
not enough to worry me! Couldn’t she write? or keep to her proper time?
I don’t understand how you can countenance such a thing, Mary! As for
walking about, I can’t do it. If all the house goes to sixes and
sevens,--and there is no place for anybody to sleep in,--I can’t help
it; I cannot do it. I have my duty to my children to think of, and I am
not going to kill myself.’
At this moment Alice, who had become impatient, knocked at the door.
Nobody conceived that such an invasion was possible, and therefore
Davison opened the door, cautious, but unsuspecting, while Mrs. Renton
put up her foot again, and lay back, the image of exhaustion, on the
sofa. Davison gave a little cry of mingled horror and delight, if such a
mixture may be. Alice stood in the doorway with a child in each hand.
They were all lightly clad in white summer dresses, the young mother and
the two children. Little Laurence tottered forward a step or two,
holding by his mother’s hand, and Mary held back, gazing, with wistful
blue eyes, at the strange scene. Mrs. Renton, as long as she was by
herself, was an invalid given up to all sorts of indulgences; but when
she was brought face to face with the outside world she was a lady, and
knew how to adopt that gracious _rôle_. Before Mary Westbury could
recover from her astonishment and consternation, the mistress of the
house held out her hands to her daughter-in-law. ‘Ah, Alice, come in,’
she said; ‘bring them to me. I am not able, my dear, to go to you.’
And in five minutes more, the chatter and the laughter, the tumult of
pleasant explanations and questions, and all the talk that belongs to an
arrival, was in full course by the side of Mrs. Renton’s sofa. As for
Alice, it had never occurred to her to be afraid of her mother-in-law.
She was afraid of nobody in the present felicitous state of her affairs.
She had forgotten altogether how little she had been at Renton, how
small her personal knowledge was of the household there. Somehow,
through those six years of correspondence, the Manor and the Square had
got jumbled together in the mind of Mrs. Frank Renton. Had she come with
any doubt of her reception, the chances were that things would not have
gone so pleasantly. But she had not the least doubt of her reception.
She could not be kept away even so long as was necessary to get
grandmamma’s reply. She took it for granted that her husband’s mother
belonged to her almost as much as her own. Who should go and ask
admission for Frank’s children into the room their father was born in,
but she? And this fearlessness vanquished the invalid, who felt all her
tremors of anticipation quieted in a moment. The children did not
scream, but only gazed at her in silence, with big, wide-open eyes,--and
baby was like his father. And Mrs. Renton, though she had been so long
accustomed to think of herself first, and watch over her own peace and
comfort, was still Frank’s mother. After awhile old recollections came
over her, and she cried a little over Frank’s boy. ‘I remember when his
father was just like him,’ she began to tell Alice, and ran into a
hundred little nursery stories, which roused her heart within her. ‘I
might have talked to her for a hundred years before she would have
thought of telling them to me,’ said Mary, with again an unmarried young
woman’s admiration, and soft half-envy of the young mother’s
privileges. Alice drew a low chair to the side of the sofa, and put the
baby--most daring proceeding of all--on the very couch itself, that
grandmamma might give her opinion of his little dimpled arms and legs,
and say if she did not think he was stout enough, though perhaps not so
fat as an English baby ought to be. ‘But mamma says she does not care
for those very fat babies,’ Alice said, with eyes intent upon the face
of the critic. ‘And neither do I,’ Mrs. Renton said with solemnity,
holding her grandson’s little pink foot in her hand. ‘If I had done it,
poor godmamma would have been quite ill all day,’ Mary said afterwards,
describing the meeting to her mother. And for an hour or two there was
nothing to be heard but that soft feminine talk, all full of bits of
private history, and interspersed with every kind of digression, which
women love. Alice gave them no narrative of her six years’ absence; but
_apropos_ of everything and nothing, there would come a little chapter
out of the heart of it. ‘It was that time when I was rather ill--that
Frank wrote to you about. He took me up to the hills, and we had to
leave little Mary at the station. We went along with the General and his
wife, and they were so friendly; and it was he, you remember, who
recommended Frank for that appointment he has held ever since. To tell
the truth, we had got into debt,’ said Alice, with a blush; ‘it was that
that made me ill, as much as anything. We were determined not to tell
you, but struggle out of it as best we could, and you can’t think how
glad we were of that appointment. I thought you would all think me such
a wretched little creature to have brought Frank nothing, and yet have
let him get into debt. It was there I first saw a lady with a chignon. I
could not tell what to make of it at first, and Frank thought it
hideous; but then it was too big--it was as big as her head.’
‘Depend upon it, my dear, it was false hair; they say everybody wears
false hair now-a-days,’ said Mrs. Renton, who was still holding in her
hand the baby’s little dimpled foot.
‘But I don’t believe that,’ said Alice. ‘I like you in the chignon,
Mary; it suits you much better than the other fashion; and what a
comfort it must be not to have any curls to do when you are sleepy!
Grandmamma dear, I wish you would tell me what to do with little Mary’s
hair. It is so soft it will not _crêper_, nor anything. Lady Sinclair’s
niece’s little girl looks to have a perfect bush of hair, and Mary has
just as much, but it will not stand out.’
‘It must be plaited every night before she goes to bed,’ said Mrs.
Renton, ‘and just damped a little before it is plaited. Have you an
English nurse? Of course your ayah must be sent back. And, Alice, I hope
you are quite sure about that debt.’
‘It was all paid, every penny! Don’t be afraid. I could never have come
home and looked you in the face if it had not been paid. And I have
taken such care ever since! Frank is,--too generous, you know. He asks
people, and does not think. And then everybody that pleases comes and
stays with you. India is such a funny place for that. When we were at
Goine Ghurla, the Fentons lived with us for six weeks; they could not
get a house to suit them, and we had a larger one than we wanted, and of
course they came to us as if it were the most natural thing in the
world. It is very nice, but it is rather expensive. Of course we could
have gone to them in return had we wanted to go, but we never did. How
nice it is to see you in your pink ribbons, grandmamma, after that
dreadful widow’s cap!’
‘My dear, I am only in my own room; it is only something Davison made up
for me,’ said Mrs. Renton, confused. ‘I never wear colours down-stairs.
Indeed, my spirits will never be equal to it again.’
‘But they are so becoming to you,’ said Alice. And thus the talk ran on.
And the children, awed by the novelty of everything, behaved themselves
like little angels, not uttering a cry, nor shedding a tear. When the
time of the afternoon drive came, little Mary, inspired by her good
genius, made a petition to go in the carriage with grandmamma. And that
day the marvellous sight might have been seen of Mrs. Renton with the
ayah and the baby seated opposite her, and little Mary, in great state,
by her side, perambulating the lanes. Mrs. Renton made the coachman stop
when they passed the rector’s pony carriage, and explained, ‘My son
Frank’s children, just come from India,’ with such pride as she had
scarcely felt since Frank had been the baby. Already these sweet
_avant-couriers_ of return and restoration had loosened the prison bonds
for the invalid in her unconscious selfishness. She forgot all about her
medicine, and even her cup of tea, when she went in, and demanded to
know instead if her favourite biscuits had been provided for the
children. On the whole, it was pleasanter thus taking thought for others
than thinking only of herself.
When they were left alone, Mary and Alice went out together to stray
about the lawn and down the favourite haunt of the Rentons,--the path to
the river. And they had a great deal of talk and consultation,
confidential and serious, which was comforting to both. ‘Don’t you know
in the very least how things are to be?’ Alice asked, with a certain
wistfulness. ‘I don’t care about money, indeed; but, oh, it would be so
nice to stay at home!’
‘Nobody knows,’ said Mary; ‘not even Mr. Ponsonby, I believe. It makes
one very anxious when one thinks of it. If poor, dear uncle’s mind was
touched, as some people think, he may have made some other stipulation.
I don’t know,--but Renton ought to come to Ben.’
‘I have heard Frank say often that if the will did not do that, Laurie
and he had both agreed to settle it so,’ said Alice. ‘Of course they
could not take it. But if it is not wrong to say so,--and as poor Mr.
Renton is dead I don’t think it can be wrong,--I should like if there
was some money for us.’
‘There must be some money for you,’ said Mary; and thus speaking they
moved down the bank, and, coming to the beech-tree at the corner, which
was associated in Mary’s mind with so many tangles of the tale, stopped
short to contemplate the view. A little to one side from that famous
point of vision a peep could be obtained, through some branches, of a
house close by the water’s edge,--a little house, with its trees dipping
into the stream, lying under the shadow of a high, wooded bank. Mary’s
mind was full of her special griefs and apprehensions, and she could not
keep her eyes from that peaceful little place, which lay full in the
afternoon sunshine. ‘That is The Willows,’ she said, pointing it out.
‘It looks very nice, but what is The Willows?’ said Alice. ‘I never
heard Frank speak of it,’ which was her standard of interest for
everything within her vision.
‘I dare say Frank never remembered it,’ said Mary; ‘it is not a place of
any consequence; at least, it never was before. But two ladies have come
to it now. They are a mother and a daughter, and they are both widows.’
‘Poor things! but that does not sound very important still. Are they
nice?’ said Alice, in her ignorance. And Mary began to regret the
suddenness of her confidence.
‘The daughter is very beautiful. She was a schoolfellow of mine once,’
said Mary; ‘and I’m afraid they are not very nice. If I tell you
something, will you never, never say a word to any one,--not even Frank?
Oh, it is nothing wrong. I think Ben met her once, and was fond of her.
Beauty goes so far, you know, with men. I think he was very fond of her,
and she must have deceived him. And think what it will be to him, poor
fellow, if he finds her there when he comes home!’
‘But how did she deceive him?’ cried Alice. ‘Oh, tell me! It must be
quite a romance.’
‘I don’t care for such romances,’ said Mary. ‘He loved her, I am sure,
and she went away abroad, and must have married somebody else, for she
is a widow I told you; and fancy what he will feel when he finds her
here!’
‘Well, perhaps he might like it,’ said Alice. ‘Men are so queer. They
are not the least like us. I know by Frank; when something happens that
I think he will be in a dreadful way about, he takes it quite calmly;
and then for the least little thing, that nobody in their senses would
pay the least attention to, he will blaze up! Is Ben nice? Perhaps he
will be quite pleased to find her here, to show her he does not care.’
‘I don’t know if you would think him very nice; but to us, you know,’
said Mary, turning away her head, ‘he is Ben: and, of course, there is
no more to be said.’
‘Yes, of course, you are all fond of him,’ said simple Alice; and they
went on, relapsing into other channels of talk. But though she
understood so little the full meaning of what she had heard, Alice was
such a relief and comfort to Mary as she had not had for years. Even to
have said so much as this relieved her; and to nobody else could she
have ventured to say even so much. Not to her own mother, who was too
energetic, and might have thought it her duty to come into the field,
and break a lance with Mrs. Tracy in defence of her nephew; not to
Laurie, who might have seen deeper still, and detected certain secrets
of Mary’s heart which she would not whisper even to herself. But Alice,
who was ready to listen, and give her ignorant, shrewd opinion, was a
comfort to speak to. Mary was exhilarated and consoled by her walk, as
much as her aunt was by the drive, in which the soft pride and sense of
property in Frank’s babies had warmed her dried-up soul. When the mother
and her babies went back to town by the evening train, Mrs. Renton felt
herself able to walk almost to the end of the avenue to see them off, a
thing she had not been known to do for years; and Mary drove with them
to the station, anticipating joyfully the time when ‘Frank’s family’
should come back to take possession of the apartments prepared for them.
The family ark was settling upon the top of the mount. But a few days
more, and the doors would open, and the wanderings be over, and the
family fate be known.
CHAPTER VIII.
BEN.
The first who arrived of the family party was the eldest son.
It was on the 15th of September that Ben came home. The day appointed
for reading the will was a week later, and none of the others had
arrived when Ben’s letter came announcing his return for the next
morning. Fortunately, the ‘boys’’ rooms were quite ready, and the house
was so wound up to the height of excitement, that the first actual
arrival was a godsend. The flutter and commotion of that day was
indescribable. As for poor Mary she did not know what she was about. It
was cruel on her that he should come alone,--that there should be nobody
to break their inevitable _tête-à-tête_ at breakfast and during the
hours when Mrs. Renton would certainly be invisible. Busy as she was,
looking after everything, she found time for a hurried note to Laurie,
telling him of his brother’s coming. ‘He has been so long away that I
feel as if it were a stranger who was coming,’ Mary wrote, in a panic
quite unlike her usual character;--‘do come at once and help me to
entertain him.’ ‘Help you to entertain Ben!’ was Laurie’s reply, with
ever so many notes of interrogation. Perhaps the helplessness and fright
which were visible in this demand threw some light to Laurie upon the
state of affairs, but he either could not or would not help her in her
trouble; and with a heart which beat very loudly in her breast, but with
an outward aspect of the most elaborate quietness and composure, Mary
stood on the lawn in the September sunset watching for the dog-cart to
come from the station. The ladies from The Willows had been calling that
very morning, and of course had heard what was going to happen, and a
glance had passed between the mother and daughter when Mrs. Renton had
hoped she would see a great deal of them while the ‘boys’ were at home.
‘I should think Mr. Renton must have forgotten us,’ Millicent had said,
with a little pathos. Mary took very little part in all this, but noted
everything, the most vigilant and clear-sighted of critics. It made her
heart ache to look at that beautiful face. Was it possible that those
blue eyes which looked so lustrous, and the smiling lips that were so
sweet, could obliterate in Ben’s mind all sense of falsehood and
treachery? And, indeed, Mary only took the treachery for granted.
Perhaps there had been nothing of the kind; perhaps he was coming
without any grievance against her to fall into this syren’s snares. How
cunning it was of her to post herself there, on the edge of the river,
where ‘the boys’’ boats would be passing continually, and where they
could not escape her! And how deep-rooted the plan must have been which
preserved the date for seven years, and made Millicent aware exactly
when her victim was coming home! Mary’s thoughts were severe and
uncompromising. She could not think of any possible tie between
Millicent and her cousin but that of enchantress and victim. She did not
know how good the adventuress had resolved to be if at last this last
scheme of all should be successful; nor what a weary life of failure,
and disappointment, and self-disgust, poor Millicent had gone through.
Mary could not have believed in any extenuating circumstances. There
could be no trace of womanly or natural feeling in the creature who thus
came, visibly without the shadow of a pretext, to lie in wait for Ben.
She thought her heart would have stopped beating when the dog-cart
dashed in at the gates. But her outward aspect was one of such fixed
composure that Ben, as he made a spring out of it, almost without
leaving the horse time to stop, and caught his cousin precipitately in
his arms, felt as if he had committed a social sin in his sudden kiss.
‘I am sure I beg your pardon, Mary,’ he cried, half laughing, half
horrified. ‘I forgot I had been away so long, and you had grown out of
acquaintance with me; but still you need not look so shocked.’
‘I am not shocked,’ said Mary, who had scarcely voice enough to speak;
‘it was only the surprise; and, good heavens, what a beard!’
‘Well, yes, it is an alarming article, I suppose,’ said Ben, looking
down with complacency upon one of those natural ornaments which men
prize so much. It was an altogether new decoration. And it seemed to
Mary that he had grown even taller while he had been away, so changed
was the development of the mature man,--brown, bearded, and
powerful,--from that of Ben, the young man of fashion, who had been as
dainty in all his ways as herself. His frame had broadened, expanded,
and acquired that air of activity and force which only occupation gives.
His eye had no languor in it, but was full of active observation and
thought. The change was so great that it took away her breath, and after
the second glance Mary was not quite sure that it was so very
satisfactory. He was more like the Rentons than he had been,--his lip
curled a little at the corner, as if it might sneer on occasion. His
manner had grown a little peremptory. ‘Where is my mother?’ he said
immediately, without giving even a spare moment to look again at the
companion of his childhood;--‘in her own room?’
‘Yes, she is waiting for you,’ said Mary. And he went off from her
without another word. Of course it was very right he should do so, after
an absence of six years and a half, and very nice of him to be so
anxious to see his mother. But yet---- Mary went in after him, in two or
three minutes, feeling somehow as if she had fallen from an unspeakable
height of expectation; though she had not expected anything in
reality,--and Ben had been very kind, very frank, and cordial, and
cousinly. What a fool she was! And while she could hear the unusual roll
of the man’s voice in Mrs. Renton’s room, running on in perpetual
volleys of sound, Mary, in the silence of her own, sat down and
cried,--folly for which she could have killed herself. Of course his
first hour belonged to his mother. And what did she, Mary, want of him
but his kindly regard, and,--esteem,--and,--respect! Respect was what a
man would naturally give,--if she did not betray herself, and show how
little she was deserving of it,--to a woman of her years.
Seven-and-twenty! To be sure Ben was nearly five years older; but that
does not count in a man. Moved by these thoughts, Mary went to the
extreme of voluntary humility, and dressed herself in one of her
soberest dresses for dinner. ‘I laid out the pink, ma’am, as Mr. Ben
has come home,’ said her maid. ‘No, the grey,’ said Mary, obstinately.
He should see at least that there was no affectation of juvenility about
her,--that she fully acknowledged and understood her position
as,--almost,--middle-aged. Poor Mary was considered a very sensible girl
by all her friends, and she thought to herself, while committing this
piece of folly, that she would justify their opinion. Sense as her grand
quality,--and esteem and respect as the mild emotions which she might
hope to inspire,--such were the reflections that passed through Mary
Westbury’s mind as she put on her grey gown.
‘It don’t look so bad, Miss Mary, after all,’ said her maid
encouragingly, as she gave the last twitch to the skirt. And certainly
it did not look bad. The sensible young woman who wished her cousin Ben
to respect her, had a little rose-flush going and coming on her cheeks,
and a lucid gleam of emotion in her eyes, which might have justified a
more marked sentiment. Her hand was a little tremulous, her voice
apt,--if the expression is permissible,--to go into chords, the keys of
half-a-dozen different feelings being struck at the same moment, and
producing, if a little incoherence, at the same time a curious
multiplicity of tone. The dining-room had more lights than usual, but
still was not bright; and when Ben came in with his mother on his arm,
he protested instantly against the great desert of a table, which, in
deference to old custom, was always spread in the long-deserted place.
‘I can’t have you half-a-mile off,’ he said. ‘You must sit by me here,
mamma, and you here, Mary. That is better. We are not supposed to be on
our best behaviour, I hope, the very day I come home.’
‘Why, this is very nice,’ said Mrs. Renton, as she sipped her soup at
her son’s right hand, and stopped from time to time to look at him. ‘And
one does not feel as if one had any responsibility. I think I shall keep
this seat, my dear; it will be like dining out without any of the
trouble. And then, Ben, I shall not feel the change when you bring home
a wife.’
Mary, who had been looking on, suddenly turned her eyes away; but all
the same, she perceived that Ben’s obstinate Renton upper lip settled
down a little, and that he grew stern to behold.
‘I don’t think that is a very likely event,’ he said.
‘But it must be,’ said Mrs. Renton; ‘it must be some time. I don’t say
directly, because this is very pleasant. And after being left seven
years all alone, I think I might have my boy to myself to cheer me up a
little. But it must be some time,--in a year or two,--when you have had
time to look about you and make up your mind.’
‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ said Ben, with a short
laugh; ‘if I am to judge of my effect upon English ladies by the
impression I made on Mary,--it is not encouraging, I can tell you. I was
afraid she would faint.’
‘Oh, Ben!’ Mary exclaimed, looking up at him with her lucid, emotional
eyes; and the rose-flush went over all her face. It was a very pleasant
face to look at. And, perhaps, even beauty herself is not more
attractive than a countenance which changes when you look at it, and a
voice full of chords. Yes; no doubt he had some respect for her, and
even esteem, if you went so far as that.
‘Mary and I have been living so much out of the world,’ said Mrs.
Renton. ‘We have been quite alone, you know, my dear. My poor health was
never equal to the exertion. It is always best for such an invalid as I
am to give up everything, I believe. And except just our drives,--your
poor dear papa always made such a point of my drives.’
‘But Mary was not an invalid,’ said Ben, and he looked full at her for a
moment, lighting up once more the glow in her face. ‘I don’t know what
you have been doing to yourself,’ he said. ‘Is it the way she has her
hair, mother? It cannot be her dress, because I remember that gown. I
suppose she has been asleep all these seven years, like the beauty in
the wood.’
‘I think I have,’ said Mary; but her voice was scarcely audible. After
all, the pink gown had not been necessary, and virtue had its reward.
‘Asleep for seven years? Indeed, you are unkind to Mary,’ said Mrs.
Renton. ‘You can’t think what a comfort she has been to me, Ben. She has
always read to me, and driven with me, and talked when I could bear it,
and got my worsted work straight, and given the housekeeper her orders.
If she had been my own child she could not have been nicer. And never
cared for going out or anything. I am sure it is not necessary for me to
say it; but if anything should happen to me, I hope you will all be very
kind to Mary. You can’t think what a good child she has been.’
‘Kind to Mary!’ said Ben, holding out his hand to her. Well,
perhaps there might be something more than even respect and
esteem,--affection,--that was the word:--family affection and
brotherly-kindness. And what could a woman of seven-and-twenty desire or
dream of more?
And when they retired to the drawing-room Mrs. Renton was very eloquent
about the change of affairs. ‘Not to say that it is Ben, my dear,--whom
of course it is a great happiness to see again,--there is always a
pleasure in knowing that there is a man in the house,’ she said. ‘It
rouses one up. I am sure there were many days that it was a great bore
to go down to dinner. I should have liked a cup of tea in my own room so
much better; but a man must always have his dinner. And then they have
been about all day, and they have something to tell you, if it is only
what is in the evening paper;--and there is always most news in the
evening paper, Mary. I have remarked that all my life. And even now, you
know, one feels that he will come in by-and-bye,--and that is something
to look forward to. It is a great advantage, my dear, to have a man in
the house.’
‘It is very pleasant, at least, to have Ben in the house,’ said Mary;
but she quaked a little while she spoke; for what was she to do with him
for the rest of the evening after Mrs. Renton went to bed? And if the
world was coming to an end, it would not prevent Davison’s appearance at
half-past nine to take her mistress up-stairs. And there was not much
chance that Ben would be inclined for bed at that early hour. Mary tried
hard to brace herself up for the evening’s work, as she made the tea,
pondering whether she might retire in her turn about half-past ten or
so, that being a proper young ladies’ hour,--though with Laurie she
would not have minded how long she sat talking, or letting him talk; and
yet Ben had been seeing more, doing more, and had more to tell than
Laurie. Thus it sometimes happens that the greater the love the less is
the kindness,--though such a word as love had not been breathed in the
inmost recesses of Mary Westbury’s mind.
But when Ben joined them he was very talkative, and full of his own
concerns, and was so interesting that his mother put Davison off, and it
was ten o’clock before she actually left the drawing-room. After a
little conflict with herself Mary prepared to follow. She would have
liked to stay, but felt herself awkward, and uncomfortable, and full of
a thousand hesitations.
‘Are you going too?’ Ben said, as he saw her gathering up her work; and
there was a tone of disappointment in his voice that went to her heart.
‘I thought you might be tired,’ she said, faltering.
‘Tired! the first night at home! I suppose the poor dear mother has
stayed as long as is good for her; but you are not an invalid, Mary,’
said Ben; ‘you don’t mean to say ten o’clock is the end of the evening
for you? And I have a hundred things to tell you, and to ask you. Put on
your shawl, and come out for a breath of fresh air. The moon always
shines at Renton. I’ll ring for somebody to bring you a shawl.’
‘I’ll run and get one,’ said Mary; and she stayed up-stairs for a few
moments to take breath and compose herself. It was very silly of her, of
course, to be excited; but she reflected that it was not simply the
innocent stroll with her cousin in the moonlight for which she was
afraid, but the possibility of a return to the subject of Millicent, of
which he had spoken to her last time he was at Renton. He was standing
outside the window waiting for her when she came down, and they wandered
away together, instinctively taking that path towards the river. So many
moonlight walks on that same path glanced over Mary’s memory as they
walked,--childish ones, when the cousins played hide-and-seek behind the
great, smooth, shining boles of the beeches,--merry comings-home from
water-parties when they were all boys and girls together. And then that
walk, which was the last she had taken with Ben.
He did not say much for some minutes. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of
all those old recollections. ‘When I went away the moon was shining,’ he
said at last abruptly, ‘and I suppose it has been shining and the river
running and the branches rustling all this time. How strange it seems! I
wonder if I have been dreaming all these seven years?’
‘I daresay you have for a great part of the time,’ Mary said, with an
effort to be playful. ‘I am sure I have at least----’
‘I hope so, considering my mother’s account of what you have been
doing,’ said Ben. And then he made a pause, and said, as if he did it on
purpose to stir up every possibility of discomfort in her, ‘Do you
remember our last talk here?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, and then they went on, stumbling in the dark places,
and now and then coming out like ghosts,--two weird figures,--into the
silver light. Though he had brought her out on the pretence of having so
much to say, in reality he scarcely talked at all. And she kept by his
side, with her heart giving irregular thumps against her breast. She had
not breath enough to bid him not to go any farther, and the sound of her
own foot-steps and his in the utter stillness seemed to wake all kinds
of curious echoes in the dark wood. Mary was half frightened, and yet
rapt into a curious mysterious exaltation of feeling. What was he
thinking of? Were they two the same creatures who had come down that
same path together,--was it six years or six hours ago? The darkness
among the trees around was not more profound than was the darkness in
which Ben’s life had been enveloped during his absence. He had written
home, it is true, and they had known where he went, and what, as people
say, he was doing all the time; but of his real existence Mary knew as
little,--just as little and as much, as he of hers. Thus they went on,
until they came to the opening, and the green bank upon the river-side,
which lay in a flood of moonlight all shut and bounded round by the
blackness of the woods.
‘What a pity there is no boat!’ said Ben. ‘I might have taken you up the
reach as far as the moonlight goes. We must have a boat. I did not
think it was so sweet. And there is Cookesley Church across the fields.
I remember so well looking at it the last time through the branches of
the big beech. How high the river is! Whose boat is that, I wonder, on
the other side?’
‘Oh, it is from The Willows, I suppose,’ said Mary, with a kind of
desperation.
‘The Willows? that is something new. Is it old Peters and his sister?
But you told me he was dead. What sort of people are at The Willows
now?’
‘Two ladies,’ said Mary, succinctly. Was not this like the very hand of
fate? Why The Willows should thus thrust itself quite arbitrarily into
the conversation without any word or warning she could not tell. It was
like the work of a malicious spirit.
‘Two ladies!’ said Ben. ‘You are very terse,--terser than I ever knew
you. And who may the two ladies be who venture on the river in the
moonlight?’
‘Oh, I do not think they are in the boat.’
‘But whether they are in the boat or not, who are they?’ said Ben, and
there was a sound as of laughter in his voice.
Then there followed a dead pause. The boat lay in the fullest moonlight,
and already they could hear the soft plash of the oars and distant sound
of voices. It was not coming down the stream, but floating softly on
the silvered water, just kept in its place against the current by the
oars. Some one was out enjoying the beauty of the night in that magical
fashion; and opposite was visible the little margin of lawn which
belonged to The Willows, the trees dripping into the water, and the
lights in the open windows. A subtle suggestion of happiness, and love,
and rest, was in the scene. Was it a pair of lovers, or a young husband
with his wife, or----
‘Tell me,--this becomes mysterious,--who are they?’ said Ben.
‘Oh, only some people,’ Mary said, with some breathlessness, ‘whom I
think you once knew. Do you remember speaking to me, the last time we
came down here together, about,--some one,--a school-fellow of mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘It is a very strange coincidence,’ Mary said, with a miserable attempt
at a laugh. ‘It is Millicent, who has gone there with her mother for the
summer. We are neighbours now.’
And then silence came again,--silence deeper than before. He started a
little, that it was easy to see; but his face was quite in the shade.
And after a while he said, with a steady and decided voice, ‘You mean
Mrs. Henry Rich?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary; and then they both stood on the rustling grass and
watched the boat, which lay caught, as it were, and suspended in the
blaze of white radiance. No doubt she was there, enjoying that beautiful
moment, not thinking what silent spectators were looking on so near. As
for Mary, she stood spell-bound, and gazed full of a thousand thoughts.
Since her cousins had been gone, Mary had had no one to row her about
the shining river, every turn of which she knew so well; but Millicent
had her boatman at once. And who was he? And what could Ben be thinking
of that he stood thus on the brink of the full stream, filled more than
full by the overflowing of the moonlight? All at once he turned on his
heel, as if rousing himself, and drew Mary’s hand within his arm.
‘Let me help you up the bank,’ said Ben. ‘After all, the night grows
cold. Have you ever walked as far before, so late as this?’
‘Never, I think,’ said Mary, going with him up the hill at a pace very
unusual to her. Though he carried on some pretence at conversation, she
was too breathless with the rapid ascent to answer otherwise than by an
occasional monosyllable. But when they reached the great beech he
permitted her to breathe. Perhaps he paused there only from habit, or
perhaps he was curious to look back upon that picture on the river, and
gain another glimpse in this strange, unlooked-for, unsuspected way into
the life of the woman he had once loved. The boat had disappeared while
they were mounting the bank, and on the lawn, before The Willows, stood
a white figure, dwarfed by distance into the size of a fairy, but
blazing white in the intense moonlight. No doubt Ben saw her, for his
face was turned that way; but he went on again without a word. It was
only when they had reached the lawn, and were approaching the lights and
the open window by which they had come forth, that he alluded to what he
had seen. Then he asked sharply, all at once, in the very middle of some
other subject which had nothing to do with it, ‘How long have these
people been here?’
‘Three weeks,’ said Mary. Not another word was said; but a certain
constraint and embarrassment,--at least so she thought,--had come over
him. When she lit her candle this time he made no attempt to detain her.
She thought even that he gave a sigh of relief as he opened the door for
her, and said good-night; and it was hard for Mary to think with any
charity of the woman who had thus waylaid him,--waylaid his very
imagination,--on the night even of his return. Possibly she was quite
wrong in her estimate of Ben’s feelings. When she was gone he threw
himself heavily into a chair, and sat for an hour or more, doing
nothing, chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. But no doubt he had
enough to think about without that. It would have been strange had the
coming home,--the approach of certainty after his long suspense,--the
familiar life that seemed to have taken him up again after casting him
out of its bosom,--produced no excitement in his mind. And then there
was that curious sense of unreality which comes upon a man when, after
an active life of his own, he returns to his father’s house, and finds
everything, down to the minutest particular, just as it used to be. Is
not this life such stuff as dreams are made of? To Ben, who was not a
man of thought, this sentiment was bewildering; and the quiet of the
house weighed upon him with an irritating heaviness. Talk of noise!
There is no such babel as that of silence when it surges round you, when
no living thing stirs, and the mysterious air rustles its wings in your
ears, and the earth vibrates under your feet. The flutter of moths and
invisible insects attracted by the light, the rustle of the leaves
outside, the curtains waving in the night air, the mysterious thrills
which ran through the furniture, the wavering of the flame of the
lamp,--all affected Ben when he was left alone. His life had been so
busy and full of action,--and now he had left that existence which was
his own, and come back into the midst of those shadows to await the last
sentence of a dead man’s voice, and have his whole destiny, perhaps,
thrown once more into mistiness and darkness. Had there been any need
for that boat softly rocking on the curve of the silvered water,--for
that white solitary figure in the moonlight,--to complicate matters
further? But whether that last incident did count for anything in the
multiplicity of his thoughts, or whether it affected him as Mary
supposed,--and as Millicent meant it to affect him,--who can tell? He
sat a long time thinking, but he uttered none of his thoughts in the
shape of soliloquy, which is unfortunate for this narrative; and I am
obliged to wait, as most people are compelled to do, for the slow
elucidation of events, to show the turn taken by Ben Renton’s thoughts.
Mary’s mind went more rapidly to a conclusion, as may be supposed. She
could no more tell than I can what Ben was really turning over in his
thoughts; but one thing was clear to her, that he had not heard of the
neighbourhood of Millicent with indifference. It might be indignation,
it might be disgust, it might be concealed and suppressed delight; but,
at all events, the information had moved him. And at the same time, he
had been very nice to herself,--very friendly, almost more than
friendly--affectionate; not forgetting to help her even when she had
just thrown that bombshell into the quiet. To be sure, he had hurried
her up the hill, unconscious of the rapidity of his pace; but that was
little in comparison with his kindness in remembering her at all when he
had just heard such news. So Mary said to herself, thinking, like a
romantic young woman, that Ben must have straightway forgotten
everything but Millicent. Well! She was like a sister to him: he was
ready to trust her, ready to rely upon her, ready even to admire and
praise her in that frank, affectionate way as a brother might. Why
should there be any heaviness or sense of disappointment in her heart?
Mary said to herself that it was only because of its being Millicent,
who was not worthy of him. If it had been almost anybody else,--if it
had been half-a-dozen girls she could name to herself, who were good
girls, and would have made him happy--but Millicent was no mate for Ben!
That was the only reason of the blank, sense of pain and vacancy in her
heart. For herself, she was more than content.
And thus the old house closed its protecting doors upon the first
instalment of the restored family; and with that received agitation,
disquiet, unrest, into the bosom of the stillness. Renton had been lying
high and dry, like a stranded vessel, for all those years, and peace had
dwelt in it; but now that the tide was creeping up, and life stealing
back, the natural accompaniment returned. Sighs of impatience,
disappointment, pain,--eager desires for the future, which came so
slowly, counting the minutes,--a sense, overmastering everything, of the
hardness and strangeness of life. Nobody had thought of life as hard, as
troublous, or full of fatal mistakes, during all those years when Mrs.
Renton had driven about the lanes, and taken care of her health. The
blessed bonds of routine had kept things going, and nobody was either
glad or miserable. But as soon as the bigger life came back with chances
of happiness in it, then the balancing chances of pain also returned. As
soon as it becomes possible that you may be blessed, it also becomes
possible that you may fall into the lowest depths of anguish. This was
the strange paradox which Mary Westbury contemplated as she heard Ben
Renton’s unaccustomed step going to his room after midnight, through the
profound stillness of the sleeping house.
CHAPTER IX.
THE NEXT MORNING.
Rising full of anxious thoughts of the excitement which must have taken
possession of Ben from the revelations of the night, Mary was much taken
aback to meet her cousin, in, to all appearance, an extremely cheerful
state of mind, next morning. He had been up early, and had taken a long
walk, and renewed,--he told her,--his acquaintance with the country. ‘If
one had it in one’s own hands one could do a great deal more with it
than has been done yet,’ he said, looking more like the portraits of the
old Rentons than Mary liked to see.
‘I am sure I hope nobody will ever try to improve it as long as I am
here,’ she said, with a little heat,--for Renton as a parish, and Berks
as a county, were to Mary the perfection of the earth.
‘You don’t like stagnant ponds, I hope,’ said Ben, laughing at her
vehemence,--‘nor cottages falling to pieces,--nor fields that are
flooded with every heavy rain.’
‘But I like the broad turf on the roadsides, and the old hedges, and
the old trees,’ said Mary, ‘and everything one has been used to all
one’s life. Ah, Ben, whatever you do, don’t spoil Renton! I should break
my heart----’
‘Probably I shall never have it in my power to spoil Renton,’ he said,
with a short sigh of impatience. ‘I wish I had not come home until the
very day fixed for this reading of the will. It is hard work hanging
about here and kicking one’s heels and waiting. My father was very hard
upon us, Mary. It was too much to ask from any set of men.’
‘I don’t think it has done you much harm,’ said Mary, whose natural
impulse was to defend the ancient authorities, however much she might
sympathise with the sufferers in her heart.
‘Don’t you?’ said Ben, walking away from the breakfast-table to the
window, where he stood drawing up and down the blind with preoccupied
looks. After a few minutes she, too, moved and went up to him. Her mind
was full of anxiety to say something,--to give him to understand that
she could enter into his feelings; but it was so difficult to enter upon
such a subject with a man, and especially with such a man as Ben.
‘Ben, I think I know,--a little,--what you mean,’ she said, faltering;
‘and I can see how, in some things, it must have been very
hard,--preventing you from,--often,--doing what you wished; but now
that is over. You need not wait now----’
He turned round and looked at her with some surprise in his eyes. ‘You
don’t know what you are saying, Mary,’ he said. ‘I am like most men,
very glad now to have been prevented doing things which at one time I
would fain have done. And you are right, too,--I am my own master
now,--not because the will is to be read this day week, but because I
have found a trade and can work at it;--but that was not what I meant.’
Mary sat down patiently and raised her eyes to him that he might tell
her what he did mean. She was in the way of listening to a great many
explanations, and thought them natural. Ben, for his part, stood and
looked at her for a minute, and then turned away with a laugh.
‘Poor Mary!’ he said. ‘What wearisome talk you must have listened to all
these years,--going into everything! You must have a special faculty for
that sort of thing, you women; how have you managed to live through it
all and keep your youth and your bloom?’
‘There has been nothing dreadful to live through,’ said Mary; ‘but as
for the youth, I don’t pretend to that any longer. It is gone, like so
many other pretty things; and I am not thinking of myself.’
‘Not now, nor ever,’ said her cousin; ‘but I don’t feel disposed to give
up the matter as you do. I don’t feel very aged----’
‘But you are a man,’ said Mary, interrupting him, ‘which makes all the
difference; and, besides, this sort of talk is quite nonsense. I must go
and read the paper with godmamma. Have you done with it?’ And she took
the “Times” from the table, and was about to leave the room.
‘I have not done with it,’ said Ben, ‘I have not begun it even. I am
going to read it to my mother, and you shall come and listen, if you
like. You have done our duty long enough. It is but fair I should take
my spell now.’
Mary made a little protestation, but Ben was not disposed to give in. He
was _ennuyé_ for one thing, and did not want to be alone and give
himself up to troublesome thoughts. There are times when it is better to
do even the most humble of domestic duties than to be left to yourself.
Mary thought, as she took her work and sat down near the window of her
godmother’s room, at some distance from the reader and listener, that
affairs were wonderfully changed indeed, and that Ben’s dutifulness was
beyond all the traditions of good behaviour she had ever known. Mrs.
Renton herself was a little overpowered by so sublime an act. Ben did
not read steadily through as Mary did. He read not the bits of news
which were her favourite study, but leading articles and speeches, which
were not in her way. And then he would pause and talk in the middle of
them, often turning his chair round towards Mary, and defrauding his
mother both of the paper and his attention. It was pleasant, no doubt,
to have a man in the house, and still more pleasant to have Ben at home;
but the great and unexpected condescension of his morning visit to read
the papers was not by any means so great a pleasure as it looked. But
for the name of the thing she would really have preferred Davison; and
Mary’s reading was infinitely more satisfactory. When Ben wound up by
saying, as it is the proper formula to say, that there was nothing in
it, Mrs. Renton could not but echo the words with a little querulousness
in her tone. He threw the paper carelessly on to the bed, and the poor
lady drew it towards her, and made a feeble search after her spectacles.
‘Indeed there seems very little,’ she said, ‘much less than on most
days; but it was very kind of you to think of coming and reading to me,
Ben.’
‘I mean to come ever morning, mother,’ he replied,--at which Mrs. Renton
shivered,--‘and relieve Mary a little. By-the-bye, I want to know
whether you will mind if I have Hillyard here. I told him he was to come
on Saturday, if he did not hear from me to the contrary. He is not quite
in your way, but he is a very good fellow. I thought you would not mind
if I had him here.’
‘My dear boy, the house is yours,--or at least it will soon be yours,’
said Mrs. Renton. ‘It is very nice of you to consult me, and you know I
am not very able to receive strangers; but still Mary is there to do
all that is necessary, and of course you must have your friends.’
‘Mother, I should like you to understand that it is not at all of
course,’ said Ben. ‘The house is not mine,--I am not calculating that it
will ever be mine. I want Hillyard, not so much because he is my friend,
as because he is with me in business. He is my right-hand man----’
‘It was Mr. Hillyard you went to America with at first?’ said Mary, from
her distant seat.
And Ben, relieved, walked across the room, finding she was easier to
talk to than his mother. ‘Eh? Yes, it is the same Hillyard,’ he said,
with a laugh which had some pleasure in it. ‘I was his right-hand man
then, and now he is mine. That is all the difference; but we have always
hung together all the same.’
‘Then you have done better than he has,’ said Mary, looking up at him
with a smile.
And Ben came and stood by the side of the table she was working at, and
looked down upon her as he spoke. ‘He’s a very good fellow,’ he said,
‘but he does not stick to his work. There are some people who do best to
be masters, and some who do best to be subordinate. And when he is not
master, poor fellow, he is worth a dozen ordinary men.’
‘When some one else is master?’ said Mary, with natural female
gratification.
‘No compliments,’ said Ben. ‘A man needs to be as hard as iron, and as
bold as brass;--though why brass should be the emblem of unpleasant
boldness, by the way, I don’t know.’
When there had been as much of it as this, Mrs. Renton began to stir
uneasily. ‘I cannot hear what you two are saying,’ she said. ‘You have
light enough for your work generally at this window, Mary. Why should
you go away so far to-day? And, Ben, I can see there are two or three
things here you did not read to me. There is a dreadful burglary
somewhere, in a country-house like this. It is dreadful to think we
might be killed in our beds any nights,--and gives it such an
interest;--and there is a great deal out of “Galignani” in the French
article. “Galignani” is always amusing. But Mary will read it to me when
you go out.’
‘I was not thinking of going out,--at present, mother. When is Laurie
coming? He ought to be here,’ said Ben. ‘I don’t understand how a man
can choose to shut himself up in London at this time of the year.’
‘But he is working at something,’ said Mary.
‘He is always working at something, and I don’t know what it is ever to
come to. Laurie ought to be the eldest son,--if there is to be an eldest
son among us,’ said Ben. ‘I think that would be the best solution. He
could muse about his fields, and paint the trees, and make a very good
country gentleman,--don’t you think so, Mary?--and marry and make
everybody comfortable;--that is how it ought to be.’
‘Ben,’ said his mother, solemnly, ‘I hope you have not been led astray
into Radical principles since you have been away. How could Laurie be
the eldest son? Your poor dear papa did everything for the best. He
thought it was good for you to wait, and no doubt it must have been good
for you. But to speak as if he did not care for your rights! Why, you
were called Benedict because you were the eldest son. I said to Mr.
Renton, “I hate the name,--it is the ugliest name I know.” But he always
said, “My dear, we can’t help ourselves; the Rentons have been Laurence
and Benedict for hundreds of years,--and Laurence and Benedict they must
continue to be; but you can call him Ben, you know,--or Dick, for that
matter.” I had a good cry over it,’ Mrs. Renton said, dropping back
fatigued upon her pillows; ‘for, if there is anything I hate, it is
those short names like Ben and Dick; but he had his way. And now to
think you should talk as if it had been all in vain!’
‘Miss Mary,’ said Davison with decision, ‘my missis has talked a deal
more than she ought, and I don’t hold with excitement. If you and Mr.
Ben was to go out for a walk now,--or something as would take him off
his poor dear mamma,’ said the careful nurse, lowering her voice. Ben
was too much for his mother. After seven years of soft, feminine
glidings about her room, softened voices, perpetual consideration of her
ailments, this ‘man in the house,’ thought pleasant at first, was too
much for her powers. ‘And I don’t know how we’ll ever do when they’re
all here,’ the faithful Davison murmured to herself, as she sprinkled
eau-de-Cologne about the pillows, and mixed some port with the
arrowroot. And Ben was banished forthwith from the room. ‘He is very
nice at dinner, my dear,’ Mrs. Renton herself said, ‘but men never
understand. And they should always have something to do, Mary. They are
never happy without something to do.’
‘But poor Ben, this is his first day at home!’ said Mary, when she had
read all about the burglary, and calmed the patient down.
‘But, my dear, they are always wretched themselves,’ said Mrs. Renton,
‘when they are quite unoccupied. You must find him something to do.’
Thus it will be seen that Mary’s labours were not much lightened by the
arrival of the eldest son. When she went down-stairs after her
newspaper-reading, she found him in the library yawning somewhat over a
book. ‘Come and talk,’ he said, setting a chair for her; and then
laughed a little over his unsuitableness in the hushed and soft-toned
house.
‘It is because you have been so long away,’ said Mary. ‘You have gone
off on one current, and we on another. I suppose it is always so when
people are long parted. Is it not sad?’
‘I don’t think that it ought to be so,’ said Ben.
‘And Laurie has his current, too,--quite different. I should like to
find out about Laurie. It is he I know least about,’ said Mary, with a
little sigh.
And then Ben smiled. ‘I should like to hear,’ he said, ‘what you know
about me?’
What did she know about him? Nothing,--and yet everything, Mary thought.
‘Sometimes one divines,’ she said.
‘And sometimes one divines all wrong,’ said Ben.
Then there followed a pause. It was a very exciting game of fence so far
as she was concerned. But she felt instinctively it was not safe to keep
it up.
‘Godmamma will not come down to luncheon,’ she said, ‘but in the evening
I hope she will be all right again. And when Alice is here and the
children they will be a great help. Alice is not clever, you know, but
she harmonises things somehow. I wonder if it is because she is
musical.’
‘You harmonise things, too, and you are not particularly musical,’ said
Ben.
‘Oh, me!’ Mary turned away, not caring to discuss that subject. He was
always so nice to her,--so frank and affectionate. ‘If he were to marry
Ruth Escott now, or Helen Cookesley, how nice it would be to be a sister
to her!’ Mary thought! but Millicent! Could he be thinking of Millicent
now? He had got up from his chair, and was looking out with a certain
wistfulness--or at least what would have been wistfulness in a woman,
who has always to wait for any one she particularly wishes to see. A man
can go forth and seek, and has no call to be wistful; but then it was
only according to feminine rules that Mary, so long unaccustomed to
anything else, could form her thoughts.
‘I have ordered up a boat from Cookesley,’ he said; ‘and remember, I
mean to row you to the Swan’s Nest this afternoon. It is clearing up----
’ for it had become cloudy, and rain had fallen during that period of
newspaper-reading in Mrs. Renton’s room. And then Ben went out abruptly
and left her. He stood upon no sort of ceremony, as if she were anything
but his natural sister, but went away without any explanation. Going to
the Swan’s Nest it would be necessary to pass The Willows; and at this
moment he was taking the path to the river. Could he be going the very
first morning to lay himself again at the syren’s feet? Could it be the
mere pleasure of passing her house, being in the neighbourhood, that
moved him? Mary, without pausing to think, flew up-stairs,--up beyond
the servants’ floor to a little turret-room which commanded a view of
the river. And when she had waited long enough to recover her breath,
there, sure enough, was a boat shooting out from the green bank at
Renton with one figure in it, which must be Ben. And the course he took
was up the river. She covered her face for a moment when she saw it, and
a hot, sudden tear brimmed just over, wetting her eyelashes. Mo more.
Was it her business that she should weep over Ben’s folly? No man can
redeem his brother, much less any woman, alas! However dreadful it might
be, the man must go his own way.
Mrs. Renton rallied sufficiently that afternoon to go for her drive, and
Mary’s services were wanted accordingly. But when she had got through
that duty, there was still time for the Swan’s Nest, to which she had
been looking forward with an excitement which was almost feverish. Ben
was waiting for them at the door. He took his mother up to her room,
subduing his big pace as best he could to quietness, and put her into
Davison’s hands for her rest before dinner. It was an arrangement very
grateful to all parties. While Mrs. Renton was taking her favourite
refreshment and being comfortably tucked up on her sofa, the young
people were making their way down to the bank with something of the
gaiety of former days. ‘I once beat you, Ben, running down,’ Mary said,
for a moment forgetting The Willows and all that was involved in it. ‘I
defy you to beat me now,’ her cousin said, and Mary’s heart for one
moment felt so light that she made a woman’s wild dash down one wind of
the path, and stopped short breathless, catching at the great beech to
support her. But between the branches of the beech Mary saw a sight
which quickly sobered her. Could it be by previous arrangement, or was
it by chance? A boat lay at the little steps before The Willows, and
some one,--there could be no difficulty in guessing whom,--was getting
into it. Mary’s heart sank away down to the lowest depths,--a sudden
sickness of the light, and the brightness, and the river, and the day,
came over her. She turned even from Ben, feeling sick of him too. A
certain contempt of him rose up in her tender soul. Yes; there are many
pangs in the sensation with which a woman recognises that another less
worthy is preferred to herself; but not the least penetrating is that
instinctive, involuntary contempt. He had gone and arranged with
Millicent no doubt, and then he thought to please all parties by taking
her, Mary, to meet the woman he loved. Ben, for his part, with the
stupidity of a male creature, saw that some shadow had come over her,
and thought she had struck her foot in her rapid descent against the
roots of the beech. ‘Ah, you should not have gone in for it,’ he said in
not triumph, but sympathy;--‘take my arm. I hope you have not twisted
your foot.’ I twisted her foot!--when it was he who wrung her heart!
But to be sure, Mary did not wish him to divine what was her real
ailment; and it was so like a man! But the laughter and the fun were
over. The two descended soberly to the river-side and got into the boat.
And Mary gathered the cords of the little rudder into her hands, and Ben
took up the sculls. They were face to face, and it was difficult for one
to hide from the other what emotions might rise or what change come over
them. ‘I am afraid you have hurt your foot badly,--you look quite pale,’
Ben said, bending forward to her with absolute anxiety. ‘Oh, no, I am
all right,’ Mary replied, saying in her heart, What fools men are! How
stupid they must be!--a threadbare sentiment which does not bear
expression. And then she cried, ‘Remember I am strong,’ with a certain
gleam of wicked glee. She could run him into the weeds if he showed too
much interest in that other boat. She could keep him out of speaking
distance to baulk Millicent’s wiles, or she could run into them to give
her a fright. Mary began to feel herself when she pulled that cord which
put some power into her hands, and saw the little skiff turn and dart
about at her will from one side to another. ‘Take care what you are
doing,’ cried Ben in dismay, thinking his coxswain had lost her wits;
but she was only getting possession of them, and beginning to remember
that there was no need to be passive, and that she, too, had arms in her
hands.
And for a little they shot silently, vigorously, each attending to his
work, up the shining river. Mary could not speak, and Ben did not, being
moved by a thousand associations. The first break in the silence was
made by voices not their own, coming from the boat which Mary kept her
eye on with the fixedness of enmity. Distant sounds of conversation and
laughter came first, at which Ben pricked up his ears. ‘Don’t run into
any one,’ he said. ‘I hear voices;--there is somebody coming, and I hope
you are keeping a look-out ahead----’
‘You need not fear for me,--I see them,’ said Mary, with emphasis, and
he made no sign as if he knew what she meant, but kept on rowing so
quietly that he either did not know who was coming, or thought she was a
most accomplished hypocrite. On the contrary, he too began to talk
softly like a man absorbed in thoughts and preoccupations of his own.
‘The last time you and I were here together was one of my last days in
England,’ he said;--do you remember? I was full of my own affairs, and
indifferent to everything; and, good life, what a fool I was!’ he added
to himself,--and then paused and sighed. Mary, for her part, saw all,
noted all, and in her rashness felt anxious to test his meaning.
‘You made me very curious,’ she said; ‘I was so anxious to know what
you meant----’ And there was no telling how much further she might have
gone had not the other boat suddenly glanced alongside, and some one
called her by her name. Some one! Millicent, looking more lovely than
she had ever seen her, she thought, with a scarlet cloak lightly thrown
over her black dress, lying back upon the cushions, holding gingerly in
her hands the steering cords.
‘Mary!’ Millicent called, softly,--‘is it you? Oh, I am sure one of your
cousins must have come home! Stop and tell me! What a happy thing for
Mrs. Renton! And are not you all in the seventh heaven?’
The picture was one which neither of the cousins ever forgot. She was in
the full bloom of her beauty, increased rather than diminished, by the
severity of her mourning dress. The river sparkled like a mirror all
round the gay little painted boat in which she reclined. An unusual
flush of colour was on her cheek, and the young Guardsman who was rowing
her gazed with eyes of worship on the lovely creature. No doubt she was
excited. It seemed to Mary that even the boy who was with her was part
of a plan, the _mise en scène_ which she had perfected for Ben’s sake;
and that her cheek was flushed with the excitement of the meeting and
with her unusual anxiety that success might follow. For the first time
for seven years Ben and she looked each other in the face. The
Guardsman had run the other boat so close that she was almost as near to
him as Mary was, confronting him, in a position in which she could watch
his face and all its changes. When he looked up her eye was upon him. It
was the most curious meeting for those two, who had parted so
differently. Was it possible she had forgotten how they parted? She
looked at him with an unabashed, smiling, gracious countenance, while
Ben, with some agitation, took off his hat.
‘Is it Mr. Ben Renton?’ Millicent said, softly. And Mary, looking on,
saw the colour flash all over Ben’s face at the sound of her voice.
Then, in her heart, his cousin acquitted him of having arranged this
interruption. On the contrary, he was so moved by it that he did not
seem capable of finding his voice.
‘Mr. Renton, Mrs. Henry Rich,’ Mary said, mechanically, attempting an
introduction, though she knew how unnecessary that was.
‘Ah, we have met before!’ said Millicent. ‘Did I not tell you, Mary? We
used to know each other, though your cousin seems to have forgotten me;
but, to be sure, I had then a different name.’
‘No, I have not forgotten,’ said Ben; ‘that would be difficult under any
name.’
And then there was a dead pause. Millicent put her arm over the edge of
the boat and dipped her pretty hand into the water. She had a certain
air of embarrassment, either real or assumed; and Ben looked at her with
a curious openness and fixedness of gaze. ‘You have just come?’ she said
at last, not raising her eyes.
‘Just come,’ said Ben; ‘and only for a few days.’
Then Millicent’s eyes rose, and turned to him curiously; and Mary, too,
bewildered, gave him a frightened, anxious look. There was a whole drama
in their glances, and yet the words were very constrained and very few
which passed between them. ‘So soon?’ Millicent said, with a surprised,
half-sorrowful tone.
‘So soon!’ he repeated, with a kind of decision, always looking at her,
till Mary, hard-hearted as she thought herself, felt that he was
uncivil, and was moved to interfere; but Millicent bore it bravely
enough. Her colour grew higher, her composure was a little shaken, but
yet she did not betray any symptoms of mortification or fear.
‘My mother would be glad to see you before you go,’ she said, faltering
slightly. ‘We cannot forget our obligations to you,--though perhaps you
have forgotten;’ and then she tried another half-supplicating, anxious
look.
‘I have forgotten nothing,’ said Ben. ‘We Rentons have extraordinary
memories. I will call on Mrs. Tracy if I can before we go.’
‘Then I will not detain you longer,’ Millicent said, with a look of
relief. ‘What a pleasure it must be to you, Mary, to have your cousin to
row you about! I am quite grateful to Mr. Horsman, who is so good as to
bring me out. How delicious the river is, to be sure! Mr. Renton, it was
you who used to tell me of it--first.’
‘Then I am glad to have added something to your pleasures,’ said Ben. He
had adjusted his sculls, and did not manifest the least inclination to
stay longer. On the contrary, Mary felt that he was anxious to go on, to
get clear of this interruption. And not less anxious was the young
Guardsman,--almost a boy,--who had taken his hat off sulkily, and waited
his orders with eagerness. Millicent was the only one of the four who
had any desire to linger. She gave Ben another long, searching look, to
which he made no response, being busy, or appearing to be busy, with his
sculls; and then she gave a little nod to her waterman.
‘I dare say we shall meet again,’ she said, gaily, ‘unless you are going
a very long way;--_au revoir_.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Mary. And in another moment, with one pull of the
steerage and one sweep of the oars, the Renton boat had shot wide of the
other, darting off to one side with a nervous motion, for which Mary
alone was responsible. Ben made no remark, which was symptom enough of
his agitation too. Had he been as calm as he affected to be, Mary knew
well that her illegitimate energy would not have passed without remark.
And they went up the river for some time at a tremendous pace, devoting
themselves to their work with the energy of professional people. Mary
steered beautifully all the way to the Swan’s Nest. She steered as if
her life depended on it, keeping the due course in every turn, avoiding,
as she ought, the side where the current was strongest, which a
steerswoman seldom remembers to do, and in every way justifying the old
training which had been disused so long. And scarcely a word was spoken
between them until they reached the end of their expedition. It was a
sheltered little elbow of the river, a very bed of water-lilies in the
season. And the green leaves still spread all round like a thick carpet
upon the water. Then Ben took breath for the first time. He lay upon his
oars and wiped his forehead, and drew a long breath. ‘That was hard
work,’ he said, with a sigh. But which it was that was hard
work,--whether the encounter with Millicent, or their long, breathless
sweep against the current, Mary could not tell.
CHAPTER X.
AUNT LYDIA.
‘Let us run to the Cottage for five minutes, and see mamma,’ said Mary,
as they made their way back. ‘Fancy, Ben, she does not know you have
come home!’
‘Shall we have time?’ Ben asked, making for the bank as he spoke. The
path that led to the Cottage struck off from the river-side above The
Willows. And it was always gaining time to make this little diversion.
He had been so silent, saying nothing,--and a sense of disappointment
had crept over Mary after the intense sympathy with which she felt she
had been entering into all his thoughts.
But when he thrust the boat into the flowery bank, and helped her to
jump out, Ben replied to her, though she had said nothing. ‘You are
quite right,’ he said. ‘It is best in every way not to meet them again.’
‘Ben! I did not say a word----’
‘No,’ he answered, ‘you did not, and it was very, very kind of you,
Mary. I am more obliged to you than I can say. There are some things
which it is impossible to talk about. I thank you with all my heart.’
What did this mean? Mary was accustomed to a great deal of talk about
everything,--more talk than meaning, indeed. And she was a little
bewildered by this absence of all explanation. She would have been
comforted had he opened up a little and told her how it all was. But she
submitted, of course, concluding it was his mannish, unsatisfactory way.
And as they went hurriedly up the lane, in the kindness of her heart she
slid her hand through Ben’s arm. It was the softest, kindly touch, such
as his sister’s hand might have given. Was not she his sister, nearer to
him than any one else, and, little as she did understand, yet knowing
more of what was in his heart,--she thought,--than any other creature in
the world?
And Ben was not indifferent to that mute token of sympathy. He drew the
timid hand closely through his arm. ‘My good little Mary!’ he said; but
even then he said no more. No explanation came, whatever she might do or
say, which was hard, but had to be borne.
And this is how it was that Mrs. Westbury, to her very great amazement,
saw her daughter and Ben Renton approaching the Cottage
arm-in-arm,--‘like an engaged couple,’ she said afterwards,--which gave
her a curious thrill of admiration and satisfaction at the first
glance. When her nephew came up to her, however, nature prevailed, and
the recollection of her own agency, which nobody but herself believed
in, in sending all the boys away.
‘Ben!’ she cried, and then kissed him, and held both his hands, and shed
some tears of surprise and joy, ‘I am so glad to see you! I cannot tell
how glad I am to see you! Have you all come home?’
‘Only I,’ said Ben; ‘but the others are coming, and Mary and I have come
to fetch you, Aunt Lydia, to dine with my mother. She does not
understand my noise and uncouthness, after the long spell of quiet she
has had. After dinner Mary and I will bring you back.’
‘Mary and you seem to be--full of business,’ said Mrs. Westbury, more
and more astonished. She had intended to end her sentence differently,
but had met Mary’s eye, and paused, not quite knowing what to make of
it. But she went up-stairs for her best cap, calling her daughter with
her. ‘What is the meaning of all this, Mary?’ she said. ‘What does Ben
mean by it? For my part, I cannot tell what to think.’
‘About what, mamma?’ said Mary; but there was a little flutter in her
heart which belied her composure. ‘Ben has come home, as you see, and he
came to see you, as he ought to do, and he wants you to go to dinner. I
think it is all very visible what he means.’
‘It does not seem to me at all plain,’ said Mrs. Westbury; but then she
put her hand into her wardrobe to get out her cap, and decided that it
was best not to spoil sport by any premature remarks. It was startling
to see Mary leaning so confidentially on her cousin’s arm. And Ben’s
talk of ‘Mary and I’ was very peculiar; and if the will was all right,
such an arrangement would be a most sensible, most admirable one. But if
things were going on so well of their own accord, it might be best to
let them alone, and suffer the affair to take its own course. When she
found herself walking down to the river a quarter of an hour afterwards,
with a maid behind carrying her cap, and Ben and Mary on each side of
her, Mrs. Westbury freely expressed her surprise at the whole business.
‘I was just going to have tea,’ she cried. ‘One can’t dine late when one
is alone, and Laurence has gone over to Cookesley to see some of his
friends. I never thought of seeing any of you, nor of Ben at all, though
I knew he was expected. And now to find myself on my way to Renton!
Laurence will be struck dumb when he comes home.’
‘So Laurence is a parson now,’ said Ben. ‘How droll it will be to see
him so! but pleasant for you. You can keep hold of a parson and keep
him at home.’
‘Yes. I expect you to give him Renton, you know, Ben, when old Mr.
Palliser dies.’
‘Well, I suppose one of us is sure to have Renton to give,’ said Ben;
‘so that Laurence will be safe anyhow. But I have no confidence that it
will be me.’
‘It must be you,’ said Mrs. Westbury, indignantly. And then there came a
pause, and she was helped into the boat. ‘Who are those new people at
The Willows?’ she said, as she settled herself. ‘That is their boat;
they are always on the water. They say she is a young widow; but I don’t
think that is much like a widow. Somebody told me you knew them, Mary.
Was it yourself?’
‘She was at Thorny croft at school for a little,’ said Mary, giving her
mother a look. The look put a stop to the conversation; but it had to be
explained afterwards, which was done somewhat at the expense of truth.
The Willows’ boat had been drawn close to the bank before they passed,
and Mary was less particular in steering wide of it. Millicent stood on
the lawn, having just landed, with her scarlet cloak dropping off her
shoulders, and waved her hand to them. ‘Good-night! How pleasant it has
been!’ she cried, her voice falling softly through the summer air, still
full of the slanting sunshine. ‘Good-night!’ Mary cried across the
water. Ben never said a word; he did not even pause in the slow,
vigorous, regular stroke which made the boat fly down the shining
current. They were yards below The Willows before Millicent had finished
speaking her two or three words. “Was he afraid?--was he indifferent?
And while Mary’s mind was busy about this question, Aunt Lydia was
forming her little theories of a very different kind. When a young man
passes by a very pretty woman without so much as raising his head, it
means,--what does it mean?--that some one else has secured his
attention, and taken up all his thoughts. Mrs. Westbury felt as if
Providence itself was heaping coals of fire on her head. She it was who
had brought about the banishment of the boys, and yet no sooner had the
first of them come home than he set about fulfilling her dearest wish.
But no doubt it was for Mary’s sake. Mary, who had never harmed any one,
who had helped and served everybody from her cradle. How bright she had
become all at once!--how she had learned to chatter like the rest! It
seemed curious to Mrs. Westbury that an important event should be coming
about in her child’s life in which she herself had not been the chief
actor,--especially that Mary should have had the sense to acquire for
herself an eligible lover without any assistance. Ben did not look very
much like a lover it is true, but Aunt Lydia was aware that a man in
such a position is not always possessed with an insane delight, but
often has a great deal to think of. She, too, was silent with the stress
of her own thoughts. It was Mary who entertained them,--talking as she
had never been heard to talk before,--full of wild spirits and fun. Her
mother, who knew nothing of the story, did not perceive that Mary’s
gaiety came on suddenly after they passed The Willows, nor that her eyes
had the humid and dilated look which signifies emotion. One finds things
out so much more readily when one has an inkling of the _fin mot_ of the
enigma. Mrs. Westbury did not even know there was an enigma to solve,
and set down her daughter’s high spirits to what seemed to her the most
natural and the most likely cause.
‘I congratulate you, my dear, upon having Ben back again,’ she said to
Mrs. Renton as she kissed her. They were not very fond of each other,
the two ladies; but yet, by dint of connexion and contiguity, had come
to a certain habit of mutual dependence, though the support was chiefly
on one side.
‘Yes,’ Mrs. Renton said, with an under-tone which was slightly
querulous. ‘He is a very good boy; but a stranger in the house makes
such a difference in one’s life.’
‘You don’t call Ben a stranger, poor fellow! And he is so nice. It is
quite a pleasure to see him back,’ said Mrs. Westbury. ‘I thought you
would have been out of your wits with joy.’
‘And so I am,’ said Ben’s mother, with a little indignation; ‘but there
is nobody that has any real consideration for my weakness except Mary.
She knows just how much I am able to bear. I suppose it is difficult for
people in health to realise how weak I am.’
‘Well, my dear, you know I always said that if you would but make an
effort to exert yourself it would do all the good in the world,’ said
Mrs. Westbury; and then she went up-stairs to put on her cap. ‘I have no
patience with your aunt,’ she said to Mary,--‘thinking of her own little
bits of ailments, half of which are mere indulgence, when her poor boy
has just come home.’
‘Poor godmamma! I don’t think she can help it,’ said Mary.
‘Nonsense, child! I have said to her from the first that she ought to
make an effort. How do you think I should ever have managed had I given
in? And now tell me, please, what you meant by looking at me so, twice
over, when I was speaking to Ben.’
‘I did not want you to talk about Mrs. Rich,’ said Mary, turning away as
the exigencies of her own toilette required. ‘He used to know her, and
I was afraid you might say something----’
‘You might have left that to my own discretion,’ said Mrs. Westbury,
with some offence.
‘But, dear mamma, how could your discretion serve when you did not
know?’ said Mary. ‘And, poor fellow! he is so,--so----’
‘So very devoted to some one else that he could not even take the
trouble to look at Mrs. Rich,--such a pretty woman, too!’ said Mrs.
Westbury. ‘It seems to me, my dear, that you have made the very most of
your time.’
‘Oh, mamma, how dreadful that you should say so!’ cried Mary, turning
round again with flaming, crimson cheeks. ‘Surely, surely, you know me
better! And Ben, poor fellow! has so much to think of. Nothing could be
further from his mind. I have been their sister all their lives; it
would be hard if I could not try to be a little comfort to him now.’
‘My dear, if he needs comfort, I am sure I have no objection,’ said Mrs.
Westbury, with a smile; and just then Mary’s maid came into the room,
and the conversation came to an end. It was this dreadful practical
turn, which was in the old Renton blood, which bewildered the less
energetic members of the family. But it was wonderful to see how Ben and
Aunt Lydia got on at dinner. He told her more about his work, and what
he had been doing, in half-an-hour than the others had extracted from
him in twenty-four. And the Renton spirit sparkled in Mrs. Westbury’s
eyes as she listened. ‘Even if you had not made a penny, Ben,’ she said,
in her energetic way, ‘I should be so much more pleased that you had
been making some use of your talents than just hanging on in the old way
at home.’
‘But I have made a penny,’ Ben said, with a kindred glance;--he was
pleased with the thought, which gave Mary a momentary disgust;--‘though
it has cost more than it is worth in the making,’ he added, in a lower
tone. And then his cousin forgave, and was sorry for poor Ben. It was
dangerous work for Mary, especially as there was still the excitement of
the return expedition across the river, to convey Mrs. Westbury home to
look forward to. But, fortunately, there was no one visible about The
Willows when that moment came;--nothing but serene moonlight, white and
peaceable, unbroken by any shadow or voice but their own, was on the
gleaming river. And the Rev. Laurence Westbury standing on the bank in
his clerical coat,--who had been at school when Ben left Renton,--to
take his mother home, and bid the new-comer welcome; and then the silent
progress back down the stream in the moonlight. It surprised Mary
afterwards to think how little Ben and she had said to each other, and
yet what perfectly good company he had been. And thus they went on,
those curious, rapid days.
CHAPTER XI.
ALL HOME.
Laurie arrived on the Friday, coming in, in his usual unexpected way,
through the window, when they were all in the drawing-room after dinner.
The brothers had met in town, where Ben had paused for a day on his way
to Renton, so that their greeting was not mingled with any of those
remarks on changed appearance and unexpected signs of age which are
general after a long absence. But when they stood thus together for the
first time for seven years, the difference between old things and new
became more perceptible to the bystanders. The surroundings were so
completely the same as of old that any variation from the past became
more clear to them. The same lamps, shaded for their mother’s sake; the
same brilliant spot of light upon the tea-table, where the china and
silver glittered; Mrs. Renton lying on the same sofa, in the same
attitude, covered with the same Indian shawl; the same soft odour of
mignonette and heliotrope, and earth and dew, stealing in at the great
open window; even the same moths, or reproductions of the same, making
wild circles about the lamp. ‘And Mary, I think, is the very same,’
Laurie said, looking at her with true brotherly kindness. But ‘the boys’
were not the same. Of the two it was Laurie who looked the elder. He was
just thirty, but the hair was getting thin on the top of his head, and
his face was more worn than it had any right to be. Ben had broadened,
almost imperceptibly, but still enough to indicate to the bystander that
the first slim outline of youth was over. But Laurie, though he had not
expanded, had aged even in the lines of his face; and then he had grown
a little careless, like the society into which he had cast himself. He
was dusty with his walk, and his velvet morning-coat looked strange and
wild beside Ben’s correct evening costume. Lazy Laurence still; but with
all the difference between sanguine youth and meditative manhood. Mary,
however, was the only one of the party who was troubled by the mystery
of Laurie’s subdued tone. Mrs. Renton was not given to speculation, and
Ben was occupied by his own affairs to the exclusion of all inquiry into
those of others. Both mother and brother took it for granted that Laurie
was just as it was natural he should be. Only Mary,--sisterly, womanly,
anxious always to know how it was,--watched him with a sympathetic eye.
‘Well! here we are at home once more, old fellow,’ said Laurie,
throwing himself into an easy chair near the window, when the mother had
been safely conveyed up-stairs.
‘Yes, a home that always looks the same,’ said Ben. ‘I am not so sure as
I used to be of the good of that. It makes one feel doubly the change in
one’s self.’
‘These are his Yankee notions,’ said Laurie. ‘I suppose he has given up
primogeniture, and Church and State, and everything. But Mary is an
orthodox person who will set us all right.’
‘As if women might not think about primogeniture and all the rest as
well as you others!’ said Mary. ‘We are the only people who take any
time to think now-a-days. Ben has done nothing but make railways,--and
money,--and he likes it;--he is a real Renton,’ she cried, pleased to
let him know her mind on that subject.
‘And very right, too,’ said Laurie. ‘If there were not Rentons to be had
somewhere how should the world get on?’
‘But I don’t care for the world,’ said Mary; ‘and I would much rather
you were not fond of money, like everybody else, you boys.’
‘I am very fond of money, but I never can get any,’ said Laurie. ‘I say
to myself, if I should happen to come into reputation next century, what
a collection of Rentons there will be for somebody to make a fortune
of,--Ben’s heirs, most probably; or that little Mary of Frank’s, who is
a darling. Now that I think of it, as she is a painter’s descendant, it
is she who shall be my heir.’
‘I think much the best thing would be for you to have Renton, Laurie,
and heirs of your own.’
‘Thanks,’ said Laurie; ‘my brothers are very kind. Frank took the
trouble to write me a long letter ever so many years ago, adjuring me by
all I held dear to marry a certain Nelly Rich.’
‘It was very impertinent of him,’ cried Mary, ‘and very conceited. Nelly
Rich would no more have looked at you----’
‘Showed her sense,’ said Laurie, quietly. ‘I am only telling you what
actions have been set on foot for my benefit. But I never saw Nelly Rich
except once, so I am not conceited; and as for Renton, no such iniquity
could ever be, as that it should go past you, Ben.’
‘You speak strongly,’ said the elder brother.
‘That is one result of time, you know. One can see now, without
irreverence, how wrong my poor father was. Of course we would have been
wretches had we been capable of anything but obedience at the time,’
said Laurie; ‘but, looking back, one can see more clearly. He was
wrong,--I don’t bear him any malice, poor dear old father! but he did us
as much harm almost as was possible. And if Renton is left out of the
natural succession, I shall say it is iniquity, and oppose it with all
my power.’
‘It would be iniquity,’ Ben said, gravely. And then there was a pause.
The three sat, going back into their individual memories, unaware what
devious paths the others were treading. But for that Laurie might never
have fallen into the temptation which had stolen what energy he had out
of him, and strengthened all his dreamy, unpractical ways. But for that
Ben might have given the Renton force and strength of work to his
country, and served her,--as is the citizen’s first duty,--instead of
making American railroads, which another man might have been found to
do. As for Mary, the paths in which she went wandering were not her own.
It did not occur to her to think of the seven years, which for her had
been simple loss. Had she been living at home, no doubt, long before
this she would have married some one, and been like Alice, the mother of
children. But such were not Mary’s reflections. She was thinking if this
had not happened Ben would have married Millicent seven years ago, and
that, on the whole, everything was for the best.
They had but one other day to themselves; but during that day the house
felt, with a bewildered sense of confusion and uncertainty, that old
times had come back. Mr. Ben and Mr. Laurie had gone back to their old
rooms; and their steps and voices, the peremptory orders of the eldest,
the ‘chaff’ of Mr. Laurie, ‘who was a gentleman as you never could
understand whether he was in earnest or in joke,’--turned the heads of
the old servants. They, like their mistress, were upset by the new
_régime_; the dulness of the house had been a trouble to them when her
reign of utter seclusion commenced; but if it was dull, there was little
to do, and the house had habituated itself to the monotonous round. And
now they felt it a hardship when the noise and the work recommenced, and
dinner ran the risk of having to wait ten minutes, and breakfast was on
the table from half-past eight to half-past ten. ‘All along o’ that lazy
Laurie, as they calls him, and a very good name, too,’ said the
affronted cook. Mary had much ado to keep them in working order. ‘There
may be further changes after a while,’ she said to the old butler, who
had carried them all in his arms, and knew about everything, and who
would as soon have cut his throat as leave Renton;--‘you must have
patience for a little, and see how things turn out.’ Thus it will be
seen that if the return of her cousins brought any happiness to Mary it
brought a great increase of anxiety as well. And there was always the
sense of Millicent’s vicinity to weigh upon her mind. She had been
looking forward for years to the family reunion as the end of
tribulation and beginning of a better life; but up to this time her
anticipations had not been fulfilled. Anxieties had increased upon
her,--one growing out of another. Instead of comfort, and certainty, and
the support which she had always been taught to believe were involved in
the possession of ‘men in the house,’ Mary found that these tenants had
rather an agitating than a calming effect upon herself and the community
in general. That she should have more trouble about the dinners was
natural; but that even their mother should require to be let softly down
into the enjoyment of their society, and that circumstances in general
required double consideration on account of their presence, was a new
idea to Mary. And then it turned out that Mrs. Renton had spoken very
truly when she said a man must have something to do. Both ‘the boys’
were in a state of restlessness and excitement, not disposed to settle
to anything. There was capital shooting to be had, and the partridges
were everything a sportsman could desire; but somehow even Ben felt that
partridges were not congenial to the occasion. And as for Laurie, he was
too indolent to make any such exertion. ‘Wait till Frank comes,’ he
said. ‘Frank has energy for two. If we were on a Scotch moor, indeed,
where you want to move about to keep yourself warm; but it’s too hot, my
dear fellow, for stumping about through the stubble. I’ll take Mary out
after a bit for a row.’ And Ben’s activities, too, culminated in the
same idea. Laurie lay in the bottom of the boat, sometimes puffing
gently at his cigar, doing simply nothing, while Ben pulled against
stream, and Mary steered him dexterously through the weeds; and then the
three floated slowly down again, saying little to each other, lingering
along the mid current with scarcely any movement of the languid oars.
They were not very sociable in this strange amusement; but still its
starts of momentary violent exercise, its dreamy charm of movement, the
warm autumnal sun overhead, the delicious gliding water that gurgled on
the sides of the boat, and all the familiarity and all the novelty of
the scene, chimed in with their feelings. Ben was pondering the future,
which was still so dark,--his unfinished work at the other end of the
world,--what he would do with Renton if it came to him,--what he would
do if it did not come to him,--all the range of possibilities which
overhung his way as the trees overhung the river. Laurie, for his part,
wandered in a field of much wider fancy, and did not take Renton at all
into account, nor the chances which a few days might bring to him. What
did it matter? he could live, and he had no more to think of,--no future
which interested him particularly,--no hope that would be affected by
the tenor of his father’s will. Sometimes his eye would be caught by a
combination of foliage, or a sudden light on the water, or the turn of
Mary’s arm as she plied her cords. ‘How did Mary keep her steering up
while we were all away?’ he would say between the puffs of his cigar,
and made up his mind that she should sit to him next day in that
particular pose. Mary, for her own part, during these expeditions, was
too much occupied in watching her cousins to have any thoughts of her
own. What was Ben thinking of? Was it The Willows his mind was fixed on
as he opened his full chest and sent the boat up against the stream with
the force of an arrow out of a bow? Was it the image of Millicent that
made his eyes glow as he folded his arms, and let the skiff idle on the
current? And what were Laurie’s thoughts occupied about as he lay, lazy,
in the bottom? Mary gazed at them, and wondered, not knowing what to
think, and said to herself how much more difficult it was now to
prognosticate what would become of them than it would have been seven
years ago, at their first entering upon life. And thus the long day
glided to its end.
On the Saturday Frank and his belongings arrived, and all was altered.
Frank, so far as personal appearance went, was the least changed of all.
His moustache had grown from the silky shadow it used to be into a very
decided martial ornament, and he was brown with the Indian sun. Laurie
had the presumption to insinuate that he had grown, which touched the
soldier to the quick; but though he was the father of a family, the
seven years had affected him less than either of his brothers. To be
sure, he was but seven-and-twenty, and had lived a comparatively happy
life. But it must be allowed that the Sunday was hard to get through.
The three brothers, who were all very different men to begin with, had
each got into his groove, and each undervalued,--let us not say had a
contempt for,--the occupation of the other. What with India, and what
with youth, and what with the training of his profession, Frank had all
the unreasoning conservatism which was natural to a well-born,
unintellectual soldier. And then he had a wife to back him, which
strengthens a man’s self-opinion. ‘Depend upon it,’ he would say, ‘these
Radicals will land us all in perdition if they get their way.’ ‘Why
should I depend upon it, when my own opinion goes directly contrary?’
Ben, who had been in America, and all over the world, drawing in
revolutionary ideas, would answer him. As for Laurie he would ask them
both, ‘What does it matter? one man is as good as another, if not
better,’ and smile in his pococurante way. The children were a godsend
to them all, and so was Alice with her youthful wisdom. For Mary by this
time, with three men to keep in order, as it were, and Mrs. Renton to
hold safely in hand all the time, and all unsuitable visitors to keep at
a distance, and the dinner to order, was about as much overwhelmed with
cares, and as little capable of the graces of society, as a woman could
be. She had to spend with her aunt the hour of that inevitable Sunday
afternoon walk, and saw her flock pair off and disappear among the trees
with the sensations of an anxious mother, who feels her nursery for the
moment in comparative safety. Ben with Alice and little Mary went one
way, and Laurie and Frank took another. When she had seen them off Mary
turned with a satisfied mind to read to her godmother the Sunday
periodical which took the place of the newspaper on this day. It was
very mild reading, though it satisfied Mrs. Renton. It was her principle
not to drive on Sunday, and the morning was occupied by the Morning
Service, which Davison and she read together before she got up, and that
duty being over the Sunday periodical came in naturally to take the
place of the drive. It was very rarely that she felt able to go to
church; and of all days this day, which followed so closely the arrival
of her sons, was the one on which she could least be supposed capable of
such an exertion. So Mary read a story, and a sermon, and a missionary
narrative, and was very tired of it, while the slow afternoon lingered
on and the others had their walk.
Ben and Alice, though they were in the position of brother and sister,
and called each other by their Christian names, had met for the first
time on the day before, and naturally were not very much acquainted with
each other’s way of thinking. The woods were their great subject of
discourse. ‘Frank has talked of them wherever we were,’ said Alice. ‘I
am so glad to bring the children here. If we should have to go to India
again it will be nice for them to remember. But I need not speak like
that,’ she added, after a moment’s pause, with a sudden rush of tears to
her blue eyes; ‘for if we have to go to India we must leave little Mary
behind,--she is too old to go back. And I suppose if I were prudent,
baby too--but I could not bear that.’
‘Why should you go back to India?’
‘Ah, we must, unless there is some money coming to us,’ said Alice: ‘you
know I had no fortune. I did not think that mattered then; but when one
has children one learns. Do you think there will be some money for Frank
in the will?’
‘I am certain of it,’ said Ben.
‘Enough to make us able to stay at home,’ said Alice, clasping her
hands. ‘It is not that I care for money, nor Frank either.’
‘But it is quite natural you should care. And I promise you,’ said Ben,
‘if there is anything I can set right, that you shall not go back to
India. Whichever of us is preferred, you may be sure of that. I can
answer for Laurie as for myself.’
‘Oh, I know Laurie,’ cried Alice; ‘but I did not know you,--and then
perhaps Frank would not be willing;--but anyhow, since you say you are
sure, I will keep up my heart.’
And in the meantime Frank and Laurie by the river-side were having their
confidences too. ‘If it should come to me,’ Frank was saying, ‘I hope I
shall do what is right by Ben in any case--but it will be a struggle for
that little beggar’s sake.’
‘I would let the little beggar take his chance,’ said Laurie; ‘there is
time enough. I don’t think you need begin to consider him yet.’
‘I should do my duty, of course,’ said Frank, ‘by Ben, who has been
badly used; but I don’t deny it will cost me something, Laurie. A man
does not get ties about him for nothing. If I had the chance of a home
for Alice and the little ones,--even if it were not a home like this, by
Jove! it would be an awful temptation,--a temptation one would scarcely
know how to resist.’
‘Then it is to be hoped it will never come,’ said Laurie. ‘I don’t see
how we could stand in doubt for an instant. I don’t speak of natural
justice. But Ben was brought up to be the heir. There was never a doubt
of his being the heir till my poor father’s will had to be read.
Therefore he must be the heir now. I don’t care whether it falls to you
or me. It’s as clear as daylight, and I can’t believe you would find the
least difficulty in doing what was right.’
‘I should do it,’ said Frank, but he made no further protestation. In
his heart he could not but say to himself that it was easy for Laurie, a
man with nobody dependent on him, with no question before him such as
that of returning or not returning to India, and with,--so far as any
one knew,--no prospects of future happiness which depended on this
decision. And Ben, too, was unmarried, and likely to be unmarried.
‘Unless he marries Mary,’ Frank said to himself. Of course if Renton
fell to him he would marry, and they had all pledged themselves that
Renton must fall to him, and Ben accordingly would sit down in his
father’s seat, and bring in some stranger to rule over the place, and
Alice and the children would have to go away. Back to India! If that
were the only alternative Frank felt as if it would be impossible to do
his duty by Ben. The excitement of the moment, and the fundamental
simplicity of his mind, thus brought him to the strange notion that all
secondary justice must have been set aside, and that it would be a
question of everything or nothing to the victor. Thus the Rentons
awaited, with thoughts often too deep for words, with a restrained
excitement wonderful to behold, with hopes and sinkings of heart, the
revelation of their father’s will; and that was to take place next day.
CHAPTER XII.
SUSPENSE.
When the Rentons were all seated together in the drawing-room after
dinner, doing their best to get through the Sunday evening, a note was
brought to Mrs. Renton, to the amazement of all the family assembly.
Mrs. Westbury and her son Laurence, who was curate of Cookesley, had
joined them at dinner; and they were all seated in a circle round the
room drinking their tea and trying to talk, and suppressing an
occasional yawn with the true decorum of a family party. Sometimes there
would get up a little lively talk between Mary and her mother and
brother touching the gossip of the district, or Alice and Laurie would
brighten into a familiar discussion of something belonging to Fitzroy
Square; but then they would suddenly remark that the others were
uninterested and taking no part, and the talk would come to a stop, and
Mrs. Westbury would make a commonplace remark to one of her nephews, and
Alice would ask the curate if he went often to the Opera, and a
uniformity of dulness would fall upon the party. The Rentons were all
well-bred people, and it was certainly not well-bred to enjoy one’s self
in an animated way in a corner with two or three, while the rest of the
company sat blank and did not know what one was making merry about. To
be sure, there was Alice’s music to fall back upon; but, except to two
or three of the company, that would not much mend matters; so that when
the note was brought to Mrs. Renton there was immediately a little
movement of interest. Ben brought one of the shaded lamps to his mother
that she might read it, and Mary drew near in case her services should
be wanted to write the answer, for which the butler stood solemnly
waiting erect in the midst of the fatigued group.
‘It must be something very urgent indeed to write about to-day,’ Mrs.
Westbury said. ‘I am old-fashioned, and I don’t think the family quiet
should be disturbed on Sunday unless it is something of importance.’
‘My dear, I can’t read these dreadful hands that people write
now-a-days,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I can’t get the light on it, and I am
too tired to sit up. If you would read it aloud, Ben----’
Ben took the little note in his hand, and put the lamp down on the
nearest table. His face was in shade, and it was impossible to tell what
his feelings were. He glanced over the note for a second, and then read
it aloud as his mother bade. It was a prayer to be allowed to visit the
woods next morning with a friend who was going away, and it was signed
‘Millicent Rich.’ ‘I would not have dreamt of asking, knowing that you
have all your people about you, and do not want to be troubled with
strangers,’ she wrote; ‘but our friend is going off by the three o’clock
train. We shall keep strictly to the woods, and not come near the house
to worry you, when your attention must be so occupied with other things;
but please let me come.’ This was what Ben read out with a perfectly
expressionless voice, not even faltering over the name.
‘Of course she must come,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘Mary, you must write a
note for me. Say that the boys being here makes no difference, and that
if she will come to luncheon and bring her friend----’
‘But, godmamma, Mr. Ponsonby is coming,’ said Mary, while Ben took up
the lamp, and stood like a monument, holding it in his hand.
‘Mr. Ponsonby will not eat her, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Renton; and then
there was a pause.
‘But, godmamma,’ Mary resumed after that interval, ‘don’t you think so
important a day as to-morrow is,--and so much as there will be going
on----’
‘Any stranger would be a bore,’ said Frank. ‘How are we to go and talk
and be civil, when an hour more may see us set up or ruined----’
Here Alice plucked at his sleeve, indicating with a look of warning the
stolid countenance of old Willis, who stood listening to everything. ‘If
it would be any pleasure to grandmamma, I would attend to them,’ she
said.
‘And I think it would be a very good thing for you all,’ said Mrs.
Westbury, ‘and take your minds off yourselves a little. It is a blessing
to have a stranger for that,--you are obliged to exert yourselves, and
kept from brooding over one subject. I think your mother is quite
right.’
‘Let us have them,’ said Laurie. ‘What does it matter? Old Ponsonby is
always late.’
‘He will surely never be late on an occasion of such importance,’ said
Laurence Westbury.
Mrs. Renton looked from one to another with an anxious countenance, and
they came round the sofa, glad of the little interruption to that family
quiet which was almost too much blessedness. Ben, who said nothing,
lighted up the circle in a curious Rembrandtish way, holding his lamp so
as to screen his mother; and outside stood old Willis, erect as a
soldier, with unmoved countenance, waiting for the answer.
‘Ben, what do you say?’ said Mrs. Renton, with all the earnestness of a
last appeal.
‘That you must do just what you like, mother,’ said Ben.
Upon which she wrung her hands in despair. ‘How can I tell what I shall
like if none of you will advise me?’ she said.
‘I will attend to them, if grandmamma would like it,’ said Alice, coming
to the head of the sofa. ‘And I am sure you would like it, dear
grandmamma; it would give you something else to think of.’
‘So it would, my dear,’ said Mrs. Renton, ready to cry; ‘and how I am to
get through to-morrow without some assistance is more than I can tell.’
‘It will take all your minds off the one subject,’ added Mrs. Westbury;
‘and of course there must always be luncheon. Mary, go and do what your
aunt tells you. It will be good, my dears, for you all.’
And Ben gave a little gesture with his hand, Mary caught his eye over
the glowing darkness of the shaded lamp, and went and wrote her note
without a word. Ben’s face had said, or seemed to say, ‘Let them
come,--what does it matter?’ And if it did not matter to him, certainly
it mattered nothing to any one else. When the note was despatched, Alice
sat down at the piano and played to the entire satisfaction of her
husband, his mother, and Laurence Westbury. Ben settled down in a
corner and took a book, till his aunt Lydia went and sat beside him,
when an earnest conversation ensued; and Laurie stood idling by the
window, beating back the moths that came in tribes to seek their
destruction in the light, and sometimes saying a word to Mary, who, half
occupied by the music and more than half by her own thoughts, sat near
him within the shadow of the curtains.
‘What sort of people are those that are coming to-morrow, and why don’t
you like them?’ said Laurie, under cover of a fortissimo.
‘I never said I did not like them,’ said Mary.
‘No; but I know you don’t. Who are they?’
And then the music fell low into tremulous, dying murmurs, and all was
silent in the room except for a shrill ‘s’ now and then of Mrs.
Westbury’s half-whispered energetic conversation with Ben. When the
strain rose and swelled into passion, the talk at the window was
resumed.
‘It is not they,--it is she I don’t like;--one of my old school-fellows,
and the most beautiful woman you ever saw.’
‘Hallo!’ said Laurie, ‘is that the reason why?’
‘Yes, of course. We should all like to strangle her because she is so
pretty,’ said Mary, with a certain rancour in her voice.
Laurie sent a great night-moth out with a rush, and then he stooped
towards his cousin’s hiding-place. ‘Granted in the general,’ he said,
‘but there is something particular about this.’
What could Mary say? Her heart was quivering with that poignant sense of
weakness and inability to resist fate which sometimes overcomes a woman
in those secret machinations for somebody else’s good, which are so
seldom successful. ‘I have done,’ she said; ‘I will try no more.’ And
that was all the answer that was given to Laurie’s curiosity.
Alice had not fallen off in her playing. The piano, under her fingers,
gave forth such sounds as wiled the very hearts out of the bosoms of the
three who were listening. Mrs. Renton lay back on her sofa, with the
tears coming to her eyes and a world of inarticulate, inexpressible
feeling in her heart. Had it been poetry, the poor lady would have
yawned and wished herself in bed; but now she had floated into a serene
Eden,--a Paradise full of all vague loveliness, and sweetness, and
unspeakable, indistinct emotions. As for Laurence Westbury, he dared
scarcely draw breath, so entirely did the witchery seize him. The music
to him stormed and struggled like a soul in pain, and paused and sank to
give forth the cry of despair, and swelled into a gathering hope, into a
final conflict, into delicious murmurs of sweetness and gratefulness and
repose; there was a whole drama in it, moving the real listener with
such a rapid succession of feeling as the highest tragic efforts of
poetry call forth in others. While in the meanwhile Ben and Aunt Lydia
talked quite undisturbed in their corner of railways and investments,
and of how much Renton might be improved, and how fast Dick Westbury was
making his fortune out in India; and Laurie was driving out the moths,
and moralising over their eagerness to enter, and thinking of anything
in the world rather than the music. Such were the strange differences of
sensibility and feeling among half-a-dozen people, all of one race.
A forlorn hope that it might rain next morning, and so prevent the
threatened invasion, was in Mary’s mind up to the last moment. She felt
as if, having thus failed in her own person, Providence must aid her to
save her cousin, the head of the house, who was of so much importance to
the family, from such a snare. But Providence refused, as Providence so
often does in what seems the most heart-breaking emergency, to aid the
plans of the schemer. As lovely a September morning as ever shone
brightened all the park and the trees under her windows as she gazed
out, unable to believe that she was thus abandoned of Heaven. But there
could be no mistake about it. It was a lovely day, enough to tempt any
one to the woods had there been no purpose of the kind beforehand; and
as if to aggravate her sense of the danger of the situation, Ben
himself was visible from her window, coming up the river-path in boating
costume, though it was only half-past seven in the morning. Had he been
on the river already at this ridiculous hour? Passing The Willows no
doubt, gazing at the closed windows, pleased with the mere fact of being
near her, though at such an hour no one, Mary assured herself with a
little scorn, had ever seen Millicent out of bed; and on such a day as
this, when all his prospects for life hung in the balance! But,
strangely enough, it never occurred to Mary in her womanish
pre-occupation to think that it might be the feverish excitement of the
crisis, and not any thought of Millicent, which had roused Ben and
driven him to try the tranquillising effects of bodily exertion.
Notwithstanding the atmosphere of family anxiety by which she was
surrounded, the fact was that Millicent’s visit was ten times more
important in Mary’s eyes than that of Mr. Ponsonby. The one did not cost
her a tenth part of the anxious cogitation called forth by the other. No
doubt the will would be read and everything settled, ill or well. Ben
would have Renton, as he ought; or Frank would have it, or it would be
settled somehow; but the effect of Millicent’s appearance would be to
unsettle everything. It would rouse up those embers of old love which
she felt were smouldering in Ben’s mind. Smouldering! How could she tell
that they were not blazing with all the warmth of present passion?
Else, why had he sallied out in the dawn of the morning only to pass by
the sleeping, shut-up house which contained the lady of his dreams? For
that he had gone out for this purpose, and no other, Mary felt as
certain as if she had watched him every step of the way. But there was
nothing now to be done but to submit, and to put the best face that was
possible upon it. Perhaps, indeed, if anything should occur so as that
Ben should not have Renton, it would no longer be an unmixed misfortune,
for it would take him out of Millicent’s way.
It was hard to tell whether it was a relief or an annoyance to find a
stranger at the breakfast-table when they all met down-stairs. ‘What a
nuisance!’ Frank said to his wife, feeling that Ben’s right-hand man was
not the sort of person to be admitted to familiar intercourse with the
family at such a moment. But Mary felt, on the whole, that Hillyard’s
unexpected appearance was a good thing for Ben. The stranger, who ought
to have arrived some days before, had been detained, and got down to
Cookesley on Sunday night, from whence it appeared Ben had gone down
early to fetch him, thus explaining, to the great consolation of his
guardian and watcher, his early expedition. Hillyard was very carefully
dressed, too carefully for the morning, and a little impressed by the
house and the circumstances. His beard had been trimmed and his
wardrobe renewed before he would follow his once _protégé_, and now
patron, to the Manor, and he was very anxious to make himself agreeable,
and justify his presence.
‘I know I should not have come at such a time,’ he explained to Mary; ‘I
told Renton so. Of course we have been so much together that I could not
but know why he was coming home.’
‘I do not think it makes any difference,’ said Mary. ‘I am sure my aunt
will always be glad to have any of Ben’s friends.’
‘It is very good of you to say so,’ Hillyard answered gratefully. And
then he began to tell her what a fine fellow her cousin was, and what a
head he had, and how he had mastered his profession while other men
would have been gaping at it. ‘He is master and I am man now,’ he said,
unconsciously using Ben’s words, ‘though I was brought up to it; and I
should just like you to see the beautiful work he puts out of his
hands.’
‘I daresay I should not understand it if I saw it,’ said Mary, smiling
behind the urn; but she lent a very willing ear, and thought Hillyard a
very nice person. Unquestionably he was a relief to the high strain of
suppressed feeling which appeared in every face at the table, except,
perhaps, Laurie’s, who, late as usual, came in, carrying the baby in his
arms, and did not mind.
‘Here is a little waif and stray I found wandering about the passages,’
he said. ‘Little Laurie, your mamma does not care about you to-day; you
had better stay with me.’
‘Doesn’t mamma care for him, the darling!’ cried Alice. And then the
child was picked up, having made a rush to her arms, and set up beside
her at table.
‘The heir-presumptive, I suppose?’ Hillyard said behind the urn; and
Mary began to think he was not quite so nice as she had thought him
before.
Then the members of the family dispersed, to kill this lingering, weary
forenoon as they best could. Ben and Hillyard went out together in
earnest conversation, and Laurie established himself in a shady corner
of the lawn, and made a group of Alice and her children, and began to
draw them; while Frank started off, as he said, for a long walk. Mr.
Ponsonby had announced that he was to come by the one o’clock train; but
there was another three-quarters of an hour later, and nobody who knew
him expected him to arrive by the first. And at half-past one Millicent
and her friend would come to luncheon. Such a conjunction of events was
very terrible to think of; though, perhaps, not so alarming to any one
as to Mary, who alone knew of the motives of the latter visit. She had
to go about her usual occupations all the same. She could not cheat the
sick expectations of her heart by joining the group on the lawn and
chatting with the children, nor could she rush forth to still her
anxieties by bodily exertion, like the boys. A woman, she thought to
herself, is always tied to the stake. She had to fulfil all her little
peaceful household occupations as if her heart was quite at ease, and
had not even any sympathy to support her, for what was it to her any one
could have said? They were all three her cousins, and it could not
matter very deeply to her which of them got Renton; and as for
Millicent, that was mere feminine jealousy, and nothing else,--so Mary
had to lock up her troubles carefully in her own breast.
It was only about a quarter past one when Millicent arrived at Renton,
and with her came her mother and her ‘friend,’ who was the young soldier
they had seen rowing her on the river. Mrs. Renton had just come
down-stairs, with Davison carrying her shawls and her worsted work, and
it was to her the visitors made their way. ‘Mr. Horsman is a connexion
of my poor husband’s,’ Millicent said with a decent sigh. ‘He is a
brother of Sir George Horsman, whom Nelly married. Nelly is my
sister-in-law, Mrs. Renton; but I suppose you know?’
‘Indeed I know very well,’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘It was she who we once
thought would have married Frank. Not that I am not perfectly satisfied
with Frank’s wife. She is certainly nice, and suits him admirably, which
of course is the great thing. But she had no money. And there was once a
time when he saw a great deal of Miss Rich.’
‘She was quite a catch,’ said Mrs. Tracy,--a word which wounded Mrs.
Renton’s ear.
‘I cannot say I looked upon it in that point of view; but the young
people were thrown in each other’s way a great deal,’ Mrs. Renton said
with some stateliness; and Millicent immediately rushed into the field.
‘I thought the Mr. Rentons had all arrived,’ she said, ‘and yet you are
alone;’ and cast an angry glance at Mary, as if demanding of her where
they were.
‘What has become of the boys?’ said Mrs. Renton, looking round her. ‘I
have only just come down. The fact is, it is a very exciting day for
them; we expect Mr. Ponsonby down immediately to read the will.’
Millicent and her mother exchanged glances. ‘Then the time is up?’ Mrs.
Tracy said meditatively, and bent with increasing solicitude over the
invalid on her sofa. ‘What a trial for you!’ she said, clasping her hand
in sympathy. And Mrs. Renton raised to her eyes that said unspeakable
things.
‘Ah! yes,’ she murmured; ‘but nobody thinks of me;’ and this balm of
consolation was sweet to her heart.
They all came dropping in a few minutes later to luncheon, and Ben and
Hillyard were among the first. ‘Ponsonby has not come by this train,’
said Ben, ‘but Frank is waiting at the station for the next.’ It was
hard not to feel as if Frank was doing the rest an injury by waiting to
have the first word with the lawyer; such, at least, was Mary’s
instinctive feeling. But her heart was weighted now with a more painful
anxiety still. She saw Ben give a brief, contemptuous glance at young
Horsman, whose position was not a comfortable one, and her heart sunk.
But then he turned away from Millicent,--avoided seeing her, indeed, in
a curious, visible way, and that was a consolation. Mrs. Tracy, however,
got up with effusion to shake hands with dear Mr. Renton, begging that
she might have a good look at him, to see if he was changed. ‘Not at all
changed,’ was her verdict. ‘Just the same generous face that once came
to our help in our troubles. Mr. Renton, do you know I may say you saved
my life?’
Then Millicent, too, rose, and, with a whole drama in her eyes, held out
her hand to him. There was regret, remorse, and a tender appeal for
pardon, and a sweet self-pity in those blue, shining eyes. They seemed
to say, ‘Be kind to me! Be sorry for me! I am so sorry for myself!’ But
it was hard to make out whether there was any answer in Ben’s looks.
She stood so turned towards him, holding out her hand, that he had no
choice but to draw near, and then she turned meaningly towards a vacant
chair at her side. He could not have gone away without rudeness, and Ben
was not disposed to be rude to anybody at such a moment of fate. He took
the seat accordingly, though with grave looks, and then there came a
gleam of triumph into Millicent’s eyes.
‘How curious we should have chanced to come here on this day of all
others,’ she said, her voice sinking to its softest tones. ‘You told me
of it the very last time we met; but, perhaps, Mr. Renton, you forget?’
‘Did I tell you of this?’ said Ben. ‘What a good memory you must have!
but there are some things I do not forget.’
‘Ah! something unkind about poor me, Mr. Renton! but if you knew what I
have had to go through since, you would not think anything unkind.’
‘I suppose we have all had a great deal to go through since,’ said Ben.
‘Seven years! it is a large slice out of one’s life; one’s ideas about
most things change immensely in seven years.’
‘Do they?’ said Millicent, looking at him with soft, appealing eyes.
‘Very much,’ said Ben, with a smile; ‘so much that one looks back with
amazement upon the follies one has been guilty of. A man says to
himself, “Is it possible I could have been such an ass?” Are ladies not
subject to the same effect of time?’
‘No;--ladies are more constant,’ said Millicent. ‘When our thoughts have
turned one way, it does not matter what happens, they always keep the
same. We may be obliged to change in outward appearance. We are not so
free as you gentlemen are. One’s friends or one’s circumstances sway one
sometimes, but in the heart we never change,--not half, oh! not a
quarter so much as you.’
‘That may be. I have no experience,’ said Ben.
‘But I have,’ said Millicent, ‘and I do so want to tell you. You know I
never was very happy in my circumstances, Mr. Renton. Mamma is very
kind, but she does not understand one’s feelings; and when she got me
abroad, she had me all in her own hands. Yes, you are quite right about
the change time makes. When I look back I cannot think how I could have
done it. But I was so young, and so used to obey mamma.’
‘And a very laudable principle, I am sure,’ said Ben, with a polite
little bow. ‘I beg your pardon--I thought I saw my brother and Mr.
Ponsonby coming up the avenue. You were saying,--something about
obedience,--I think?’
‘You do not think it worth while to listen to me,’ said Millicent.
‘Oh, yes, surely,--pray go on. I am full of interest,’ said Ben.
And then the poor creature looked at him with eyes which were pitiful in
the eagerness of their appeal. She was a mercenary, wretched woman,
ready to barter her beauty for comfort and wealth, and a fine house and
a good position; and yet there was still in Mrs. Henry Rich the same
redeeming possibility that there had been in Millicent Tracy. If he
would have taken her out of that slough of despond, she would have been
good, have made him a true wife, have grown a gentle lady, so far as it
was in her. To the bottom of her soul Millicent felt this,--just as many
a poor criminal feels that in other circumstances he would have been a
model of all virtue. And for her the matter was not one without
hope;--marriage to a woman may always be a new life,--and the seven
years had not dimmed her eyes, nor taken the roses from her cheeks. And
by those roses and bright eyes and lovely looks are not a woman’s fate
determined continually? Again, it was her last hope. For though
admiration was always sweet, yet to be troubled with a boy like this
young Guardsman, was irksome to Millicent in her maturity. And to go
through a round of such boys,--flattering, wooing them, being
wooed,--good heavens! was this all that fortune had in store for a
woman? Therefore she made one more effort before she yielded to fate.
‘You were more interested, Mr. Renton,’ she said, with soft reproach,
‘when we talked together last,--oh, so much more interested! If I did
not know you so well, I could scarcely think it was the same.’
‘That is true,’ said Ben; ‘but you taught me some things, Mrs. Rich, and
I profited by the lesson. I doubt whether but for your assistance I
could ever have been the man I am.’
‘Ah! then I have at least something to do with you?’ said Millicent.
‘Come and tell me, will you? It is not like London, where one was always
being interrupted. In the country there is so much time for talk.’
‘But I have no time,’ said Ben. ‘After to-morrow I shall probably go
away again; and when I tell you I have profited by your instructions, I
think that is all I have to say.’
‘You are angry with me because of,--because of,--poor Henry,’ said
Millicent, with tears coming to her eyes. ‘But ah, Mr. Renton!--ah, Ben,
if you only knew!’
Ben sprang impatiently to his feet. To him, as to any other generous
man, it felt like a personal pang and shame to see a woman thus
humiliate herself. He made a long step towards the window, with a flush
on his face. ‘Here they come!’ he said, though at the moment he was not
thinking much of their coming. And then there ensued a sudden
inevitable flutter in the family which affected the guests. Alice, who
had been charitably talking to the Guardsman, jumped up with a little
cry of excitement, and sat down again, ashamed of herself, but with all
possibilities of conversation quenched out of her; and Mrs. Renton, whom
Mrs. Tracy had been occupying to the best of her ability to leave
Millicent free for her important interview with Ben, was suddenly
overcome, and cried a little, lying back on her pillows. ‘Oh Ben, my
dear! I don’t know how I am to bear it,’ she said, holding fast by her
son’s hand. Laurie was the only one who was perfectly steady. He came
forward immediately from the background, and raised his mother up,
supporting her on his arm. ‘You will bear it beautifully, mamma, as you
always do,’ said Laurie. ‘Come and give us our luncheon. You forget we
are not alone.’
And he supported her into the dining-room, holding her hand caressingly
in his. As for Ben, he turned and gave his arm to Millicent, ‘As if I
had been a cabbage,’ she said afterwards, indignantly. None of her
pathetic glances, not the soft little pressure of her hand upon his arm,
gained the slightest response. His face was set and stern, full of
thoughts with which she had nothing to do. Mrs. Tracy ventured to
whisper as she followed, ‘Ah, how sweet it is to me to see you two
together again!’ But Ben did not even hear what she said. He waved his
hand to Mr. Ponsonby in the distance as he went across the hall. The
beautiful face at his side had no more effect upon him than if it had
been a hideous mask. He was absorbed in his own business, and careless
of her very existence. Millicent, in her fury, could have struck him as
he took her into the dining-room. Was this to be the end?
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WILL.
It was Hillyard’s behaviour at this meal which gained him the regard of
the various members of the Renton family. He took such pains to attend
to the strangers, and give to the agitated group the air of an ordinary
party, that all of them who were sufficiently disengaged to observe his
exertions felt grateful to him. Millicent sat next to Ben on one side,
but Hillyard had placed himself between her and Mary Westbury on the
other, and in all the intervals of his general services to the company
Mrs. Rich had his attention, for which Mary blessed him. She herself,
overcome by many emotions, was but a pale spectator, able to take little
part in what was going on, saying now and then a languid word to the
unfortunate Guardsman, but capable of nothing more except watching,
which she did with a sick excitement beyond all description. Mary was so
pale, indeed, and watchful and excited, that her mother was alarmed, and
made signs to her across the table which she did not feel capable of
understanding. ‘She will cry if she does not mind, and make a scene,’
Mrs. Westbury said to herself; and set it all down to the score of Ben,
which was true enough, but not as she thought. As for Ben, he inclined
his ear specially to Mrs. Tracy, who was at his other hand, and hoped
she liked The Willows, and that her rheumatism was better, and a hundred
other nothings. There was, it is true, nothing very remarkable about
this party, looking at it from the outside. They were well-dressed
people, gathered round a well-appointed table, getting through an
average amount of talk, smiling upon each other like ordinary mortals;
but yet underneath how different it was; Mrs. Renton was consoled, and
ate her luncheon, sustained by her son Laurie’s attentions; but Mrs.
Frank Renton trembled so that she could scarcely keep up the fiction of
eating, and grew pale and flushed again six times in a minute, and
nervously consulted the countenance of her husband, who, very silent and
self-absorbed, drank his sherry, and more of it than he wanted at that
hour, taking little notice of any one; then, at the other end of the
table, there was Mrs. Tracy, hanging with ostentatious, artificial
interest on every word uttered by Ben; and Millicent, very pale, with an
excited gleam in her eyes, casting tender, wistful looks at him, which
he never saw; and Hillyard talking enough for six, helping everybody,
introducing a hundred indifferent subjects of conversation, which ran a
feeble course half-way round the table and then died a natural death.
Mrs. Westbury, one of the few people who was calm enough to remark upon
the appearance of the others, concluded within herself that, after all,
the strangers were a mistake. If the family party had been alone, their
excitement would have been nothing beyond what was natural; but her own
child, Mary, who ought at least to have been one of the calmest of the
party, sat by that unhappy Guardsman pale as a ghost, once in ten
minutes saying something to him, and looking as if she were about to
faint; and all the others were equally under the sway of agitation and
self-restraint. When this uncomfortable meal came to an end, everybody
rose with an alacrity which showed how glad they were that it was over.
And then there ensued another moment of supreme embarrassment. If the
strangers had any sense of the position they would go away instantly,
the family felt; but instead of that, Millicent moved at once to the
upper end of the room, where there stood upon a crimson pedestal a bust
of the last Benedict Renton, and humbly begged of Ben to explain to her
who it was; and while the others stood about waiting, he had to follow
and describe his grandfather, and fulfil the duties of showman, Mrs.
Tracy rushing to join the group.
‘Benedict Renton--your name!’ Millicent said, with again another attempt
upon his feelings, while Ben stood angrily conscious of the effort and
contemptuous of the fooling, scarcely concealing his eagerness to be at
liberty. ‘And this portrait, Mr. Renton? I can trace the family
resemblance,’ said Mrs. Tracy. And all this while Mr. Ponsonby’s blue
bag waited outside, and the family murmured, standing round in agonies
of suspense to know their fate. Then once more Hillyard stood forth,
vindicating his claim to be called Ben’s right-hand man.
‘Let me be cicerone,’ he said, ‘Renton, I know you are anxious to see to
your business. Mrs. Rich will take me for her guide to the pictures for
the moment. You know Mr. Ponsonby cannot wait, and you are losing time.’
‘If Mrs. Rich will excuse me,’ said Ben.
‘Oh, please don’t think of excuses; we can wait,’ said Millicent.
‘Mayn’t we wait to learn the news?’ and she clasped her hands softly,
unseen of the bystanders, and gazed into his face. ‘Nobody,’ she
murmured, lowering her voice, ‘can be more interested than I.’
‘So long as you can find anything to amuse you,’ said Ben, half frantic.
‘Hillyard, I confide it to you;’ and he had turned away, before any
further dart could be thrown at him. Then there was a hurried
consultation between Mrs. Renton and her sister-in-law. ‘I shall stay
with them; never mind. Of course I am anxious too; but half-an-hour more
or less don’t matter,’ Mrs. Westbury said, with the voice of a martyr;
and when Millicent looked round she found herself standing alone with
her own special party, Hillyard at her right hand, and Mrs. Westbury,
with a smile of fixed politeness, behind. Ben was gone. He had made no
answer to her appeal,--he had shown no inclination to linger by her
side. She had put forth all her strength for this grand final _coup_,
and it had failed.
‘I don’t think Mr. Renton has improved in politeness in his travels,’
she said to Hillyard, unable altogether to restrain the expression of
her despite.
‘He has not been in polite regions,’ said Hillyard; ‘and everything, you
know, must give place to business, now-a-days, even the service of
ladies. You must forgive him, when you consider what it is----’
‘I have nothing to do with him,’ said Millicent, angrily. ‘I hope I
never shall have anything to do with so rude a man;’ and then she
paused, thinking she had gone too far. ‘You know it is not a way to
treat an old friend----’
‘Poor Renton!’ said Hillyard. ‘He is so unlikely to be any the better
for this anxiety, you know,--that is the worst of it; and I don’t think
he has any hopes to speak of. He has made all his arrangements for going
back to his work----’
‘You don’t say so!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, with a look at her daughter. ‘And
I can’t believe it!’ cried Millicent.
‘But I assure you it is true. No one can know better than I, for I go
with him,’ said Hillyard; ‘all our arrangements are made. But let me
show you the pictures. This was Sir Anthony Renton, who was a--Master in
Chancery in Queen Elizabeth’s time,’ pointing to a respectable merchant
in snuff-coloured garments of the days of Queen Anne. But the visitors
cared nothing for the family portraits, and Hillyard’s last shaft had
told. If Ben was unlikely to have Renton, it was of no use spending more
trouble upon him. They consulted together hastily for a moment, and then
they turned their backs upon the pictures. ‘I have the pleasure to wish
you good morning, Mrs. Westbury,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘Since our friends
are so much occupied we will take our leave. Pray give Mrs. Renton my
best sympathies.’
‘It is to be hoped some one will get the money at the end,’ said
Millicent, with less civility, sweeping towards the door. And thus the
strangers were got rid of at last.
‘I flatter myself I did that,’ said Hillyard, with a chuckle of
satisfaction. And then he, too, took his departure, and left Aunt Lydia
free to join the party in the library, where the great revelation of the
future fate of the family was about to take place.
The air of restrained excitement in this room was such that it would
have communicated itself to the merest stranger who had entered. It was
a dark room by nature; and a cloud had just passed, as if in sympathy,
over the brightness of the day. The window was open, and the blind beat
and flapped against it in the wind, which was a sound that startled
everybody, and yet that nobody had nerve enough to stop. Mrs. Renton had
been placed in an easy chair near the vacant fireplace. Alice and Mary
sat formally on two chairs against the wall; and the three brothers
stood up together in a lump, though they neither spoke nor looked at
each other. Mr. Ponsonby was seated at the writing-table, arranging his
papers and holding in his hand a large blue envelope, sealed. There was
complete silence, except now and then the rustle of papers, as the
lawyer turned them over. The members of the family scarcely ventured to
breathe. When Aunt Lydia entered they all turned round with a look of
reproach; their nerves were so highly strung that the least motion
startled them. In the midst of this silence, all at once Mrs. Renton
began to sob and cry, ‘I feel as if you had just come home from the
funeral!’ she said, with a wail of feeble grief. There was a little
momentary stir at the suggestion, so true was it; and Alice, being at
the end of her strength, cried too, silently, out of excitement. As for
the brothers, they were beyond taking much notice of the interruption.
They were now so much wiser, so much more experienced, since the day of
the funeral, the last time they had all met together in this solemn way.
Now they did not know what they were to expect: their confidence in
their father and the world and things in general was destroyed. By this
time it had become apparent to them that things the most longed for were
about the last things to be attained. Had they been all sent away again
for another seven years, or had the property been alienated for ever and
ever, the brothers would not have been surprised. Whether they would
have submitted, was a different question. Their opinions about many
things had changed. Their unhesitating resolution to obey their father’s
will seven years ago, without a word of blame, appeared to them now
simple Quixotism. They were scarcely moved by their mother’s tears. He
had done them harm, though they had been dutiful to him. He might now be
about to do them more harm for anything they could tell. The
uncriticising anxiety and expectation which filled the women of the
party was a very different sentiment from the uneasy, angry
anticipations of ‘the boys.’ Few dead men have ever managed to secure
for themselves such a vigorous posthumous opposition. In short, he was
not to them a dead man at all, but a living power, against which they
might yet have to struggle for their lives.
Mr. Ponsonby looked round upon this strange company, with the big
envelope in his hand and an excitement equal to their own. He looked at
them all, after Mrs. Renton’s crying had been quieted, and cleared his
throat. ‘Boys,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘I don’t know what’s in this any more
than you do. He did it without consulting me. If it is the will of ‘54
that is here, it is all just and right; but if it is any new-fangled
nonsense, like what I read to you here seven years ago, by the Lord I
will fight it for you, die or win!’
This extraordinary speech, it may be supposed, did not lessen the
excitement of the listeners. Alice crossed over suddenly to her husband,
and clung to him, taking it for granted that disappointment and downfall
were involved in these words. ‘Dear, if there is nothing for us, I shall
not mind!’ she cried, gazing at Mr. Ponsonby with a kind of terror.
‘Quickly, please; let us wait no longer than is necessary,’ said Ben,
with a certain peremptoriness of tone. Mr. Ponsonby had settled down in
a moment, after this outburst, to his usual look and tone.
‘I need not trouble you with many preliminaries,’ he said; ‘you all
remember how everything happened. He sent for me a week before his
death, and gave me this,’ holding up the envelope, ‘and this letter,
which I have also here. When I remonstrated his answer was, “If the one
harms, the other will set right.” My own impression now is, I tell you
frankly, that his mind was affected. Have patience one moment. Nothing
in the shape of a will, even in draft, was found among his papers, so
that there is nothing whatever to set against this, or explain his
intention. If it is that of ‘54 it is all right----’
‘No more!’ cried Ben; ‘let us know what it is at once.’
Then the lawyer tore open the envelope. Not a sound but the tearing of
the paper and crackling sound of the document within was to be heard in
the room, except one sob from Mrs. Renton, which seemed to express in
one sound the universal thirst of all their hearts. Mr. Ponsonby rose up
as he unfolded the paper; he stopped and gazed round upon them blankly,
with consternation in his eyes. Then he opened the sheet in his hand,
turned it over and over, shook out the very folds to make sure that
nothing lurked within,--then caught up the torn envelope and did the
same. And then he uttered an oath. The man was moved out of himself,--he
stamped his foot unconsciously, and clenched his fist, and swore at his
dead antagonist. ‘D---- him!’ he cried fiercely. This pantomime drove
the spectators wild. When he held up the paper to them they all crowded
on each other to see, but understood nothing. It was a great sheet of
blue paper, spotless--without a word upon it. Mr. Ponsonby in his rage
tossed it down on the floor at their feet across the table. ‘Take it for
what it is worth!’ he shouted, almost foaming with rage. Frank, at whose
feet it fell, picked it up, and held it in his hands, turning it over,
stupid with wonder. ‘What does it mean?’ cried Ben, hoarsely. Surprise
and excitement had taken away their wits.
‘Give it to me!’ said Mrs. Renton, from behind; and her son, upon whom
the truth was beginning to dawn, threw it into her lap. It flashed upon
them all at once, and a kind of delirium, fell on the party,--flouted,
laughed at, turned into derision, as it seemed, by the implacable dead.
‘It means that there is no will. I have been keeping a blank sheet of
paper for you,’ said Mr. Ponsonby bitterly, ‘for seven years.’
And then there was another pause, and they all looked at each other, too
much bewildered to understand the position, as if the earth had been
rent asunder at their very feet.
‘We never did anything to him to deserve this!’ said Laurie suddenly,
with a voice of pain. ‘Is there no mistake?’
As for Ben, he said nothing. His eyes followed the gleam of the paper,
which his mother was turning over and over in her helpless hands, as if
the secret of it might still be found out. But by degrees his eyes
lighted up. Almost unconsciously he made a step apart, separating
himself, as it were, from the audience, placing himself by Mr.
Ponsonby’s side as a speaker. There was a certain triumph in his eye.
After all, he was but a man, like other men, and the heir; and his
rights had been debated and questioned by everybody, himself included.
There was a flush and movement of satisfaction about him,--a sudden warm
blaze out of the absorbing disappointment, baffled hopes, and bitter
resentment which were rising round him.
‘If there is no will,’ he said, with a deep flush on his face, and
nervous gesture of his hand, ‘Renton is mine, as it ought to be. I am in
my father’s place; and what has been done amiss, it is my place to undo.
I cannot believe that there is any one here who doubts me.’
While he was speaking, Alice uttered a little cry. She had turned to him
her white face, but without seeing him or any one. ‘Must we go back to
India?’ she said, with a voice of anguish. That was the shape it took to
the young pair. She was pale as marble, but Frank’s face was blazing
red.
‘Hush, Alice!’ he said, fiercely; ‘that is our own affair.’
Ben made a movement towards them in his impatience. ‘I have told you you
should not go back!’ he cried. ‘I am here in my father’s place to set
all right.’
‘Stop a little,’ said Mr. Ponsonby, suddenly coming forward with a chair
in his hand, which he placed in the midst of them, sitting down upon it,
amid the agitated group. ‘You have not done with me yet. We have not
come to such simple means yet. Mrs. Frank, my dear, don’t be angry, and
don’t give way to your feelings. Things are not so bad as you suppose. I
lost my head, which is inexcusable in a man of my profession. It was a
dirty trick of him, after a friendship of thirty years. My dear young
people, sit down, all of you, and listen to me.’
No one made any change of position, but they all turned their eyes upon
him with looks differing in intensity, but full of a hundred questions.
Frank was defiant; Alice wild with despairing anxiety; Mrs. Renton
crying; Laurie soothing her; Ben very watchful, eager, and attentive.
Mr. Ponsonby, however, had entirely recovered his composure, which
unconsciously had a calming effect upon them all.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I lost my head, which I had no right to do; but I am
coming to myself. Now, listen to me. There is no will; and Ben from this
moment is master of Renton, as he says. But stop a little. The personal
property remains, which is worth as much as Renton. I don’t know what I
could have been thinking of to forget that. After all, there is really
nothing to find fault with but the look of the thing. The money has been
accumulating these seven years;--it has been as good as a long
minority;--and some of the investments have done very well. The land, of
course, goes to the eldest son; but the personality, as some of you
ought to have known, is divided. It comes to just about the same thing.
God forgive me if I said anything I ought not to have said in the
excitement of the moment. It is shabby to me, but it won’t harm you,
thank God! I lost my head, that was all, and more shame to me. The will
of ‘54 would have come to much about the same thing.’
‘Oh, Mr. Ponsonby,’ cried Alice, with streaming eyes, thrusting herself,
unconscious of what she was about, in front of them all; ‘tell me, will
there be enough to keep us from going to India again?’
‘There will be twenty thousand pounds, or more,’ said Mr. Ponsonby, ‘if
you can live on that; and I could, for my part.’
Alice, like the lawyer, had lost her head. She was too young to bear
this wonderful strain of emotion. She threw her arms about his neck in
her joy, and wept aloud, while they all stood by looking on, with such
feelings as may be supposed.
She was the only one who spoke. Her husband drew her back at this point,
half angry, half sullen, with his disappointment still dark in his face.
‘You had better go,’ he said to her, almost harshly; ‘you have heard all
that there is to be heard. It is best we should discuss the real
business by ourselves.’
‘Yes, come along,’ said Laurie, ‘all you ladies. You have heard it is
all right. You don’t want to hear the accounts, and all that legal
stuff. We will manage the business. I will take you back to your sofa,
mother, now you know all’s right.’
‘But is it all right?’ said Mrs. Renton. ‘I don’t seem to understand
anything. Ben, will you come and tell me? Have they all got their
money,--all the boys? And what is Frank to have for his children? Till
you have children of your own, it is his boy who is the heir. Laurie is
always telling me it will come right. I would rather hear it from the
rest. Oh, boys! your poor father meant it for the best.’
‘It is all right, mother,’ said Ben; ‘better than we thought.’
‘Ah, but Frank says nothing,’ said the mother. ‘I will not go away till
I am satisfied about Frank.’
‘You heard Alice, I suppose,’ said Frank, somewhat sulky still. ‘I do
think it is a shame there is no will; but if we are to have our shares,
as Mr. Ponsonby says, I suppose, mother, it is all right.’
‘Of course it is,’ said Laurie. ‘Come, and I’ll see if the carriage is
round for your drive. You know how important it is you should have your
drive.’
‘Your dear papa always made such a point of it, Laurie,’ Mrs. Renton
said, holding her handkerchief to her eyes, ‘or else I am sure I never
could have the heart to go out on such a day.’
And thus the ladies were dismissed, and the brothers held their meeting,
and settled their business by themselves. It would be vain to say that
they were satisfied. Frank, whose mind had been vaguely excited,--he
could not tell why,--and to whom it had begun to seem inevitable that
some special provision should have been made for the only one of the
three who had ‘ties’ and a family to provide for, had experienced a most
sharp and painful downfall. And it took him a long time to accustom
himself to the idea that after all he was not wronged. It was a personal
offence to him, as it had been to his wife, that Ben should look
satisfied. ‘When he has Renton, I do not see the justice of Ben having
his share of the money too,’ he said, with a little bitterness in his
unreasonable disappointment. And Ben was half displeased to feel that it
was not to be his magnanimous part to provide for his brothers, but that
their own right and share remained to them as indisputably as Renton was
his. His proposal was that they should return to the will of ‘54, of
which Mr. Ponsonby still possessed the draft, and a great deal of
discussion took place between them. It was half-past six o’clock before
any of the party emerged out of the dark library, where they had spent
between three and four hours. Mr. Ponsonby came out, declaring that he
was tired and thirsty and half dead, and demanding sherry from the
butler, who was preparing the table for dinner. They all went in and
stood by the sideboard, and swallowed something to refresh themselves.
‘And, my dear boys, give me the satisfaction of hearing you say you are
contented,’ said Mr. Ponsonby, ‘before dinner comes on; for I should
like to be jolly, if I may.’
‘I am perfectly satisfied,’ said Laurie; ‘and Ben is happy for the first
time for some years. As for Frank, he must speak for himself; he has
been dreaming, and it is sometimes unpleasant to wake up.’
‘If I have been dreaming, it was not for myself,’ said Frank; ‘a man
with a family is so different from you fellows; but if it will be any
satisfaction to you, I think I may say I am content, since better can’t
be.’
And then he went up-stairs abruptly to dress. Alice had been waiting for
him long, trembling a little, and not daring to believe anything till
her authorised expositor of external events came to deliver the judgment
to her. It did not seem right to Alice that Frank should not be the
first in any distribution of prizes or honours. And yet she was not
insensible to the claims of natural justice. ‘We should never have been
able to give it up if it had come to us,’ she said to herself; ‘and it
would have been contrary to all traditions of the family to disinherit
Ben.’
‘You always told me he was to have it,’ she said, when Frank came in,
with the remnants of his sulkiness still hanging about him. ‘You used to
say if it came to you, you would give it up to Ben.’
‘And so I should, of course,’ said Frank; ‘the thing is, the fellow was
so self-satisfied,--with a kind of look of pleasure that we were all cut
out. That was what I could not stand.’
‘But don’t you think he meant to be good to us?’ Alice said, trying hard
to smoothe her savage down.
‘Good to us, by Jove! but fortunately that’s all over,’ said Frank. ‘We
are safe enough. No need to worry yourself over those blessed children
any more. Poor little beggar! he won’t have much to look forward to; but
still you may bring him up at home, and that is all you care for, you
little goose,’ the young husband said, softening over the happiness in
Alice’s eyes.
‘How much shall we have, Frank?’ she asked, with a sudden relapse into
prudence.
‘Let me dress now,--and go and make yourself pretty,’ he said. ‘We shall
not be so badly off; there will be something like a thousand a-year.’
And thus Frank Renton too acknowledged to himself that things might have
been worse, and that he was content.
But perhaps the strangest thing of all was that Mrs. Westbury withdrew
into her daughter’s room, and locked the door, and had a cry, in which
Mary, over-worn and over-excited, was quite disposed to share, though
for a different reason. ‘I cannot understand your uncle Laurence,’ said
Mrs. Westbury. ‘I am sure I am not mercenary. I have given you up to
your aunt, and never grumbled, much though I wanted you; and you have
given up seven years of your life to her, and he has not left you so
much as a gown. I do feel it, my dear, for you.’
‘I am sure, mamma, I don’t feel it for myself,’ said Mary, with a smile.
‘One does not mind so long as all is right with the boys.’
‘The boys are all very well,’ said Mrs. Westbury, ‘but he might have
left something, my dear, to you.’
‘I did not want anything, mamma,’ said Mary. ‘But godmamma will not want
me so much when she has Ben, and oh, I do so long to get home!’ Poor
Mary was over-done, over-worn, excited by so many diverse feelings that
her power of self-command failed her at last. She put her arms round her
mother’s neck, and threw, as it were, all her weight of unexpressed
cares and griefs upon her. ‘Take me home, mamma!’ she said, and wept in
the abandonment of weariness and disappointment, and that overwhelming
despondency for which one can give no reason, on her mother’s neck.
Mrs. Westbury was a woman fond of explanations from other people, but
she understood her child by instinct, ‘Yes, yes, you shall go home, my
darling!’ she said, soothing her, but without any intention of carrying
out her promise. It was early days, as she said to herself. Before any
change was made, it must be made plainly apparent what the rest of the
family meant to do.
On the whole, the dinner-table was more cheerful that night. They were
all worn out with excitement, it is true, and signs of tears were about
the women’s eyes; but still there was the sense that, after all, justice
was once more in force, and natural law ruling their affairs. One man’s
will, fantastic and unaccountable, was no longer supreme over them. Ben
took his place at the head of the table with a certain glow of
satisfaction. ‘I know none of you would have seen me wronged,’ he said
when they were sipping over their wine. It was the first time that he
had taken any notice of the often-repeated declaration of his younger
brothers.
‘Not if the prize had been Great Britain, instead of Renton,’ said
Laurie; ‘though, to tell the truth, the one would have been as great a
bore as the other, had it come to me.’
‘Of course I should have given it up to Ben,’ said Frank; ‘but it would
have been a struggle; therefore I’m very glad things have been settled
as they are without my help.’
‘Bravo!’ cried Mr. Ponsonby, ‘that is the best sentiment I have heard
to-night.’
‘Shake hands, old fellow,’ said Ben, holding out his hand. Laurie
somehow did not count. The world would indeed have been coming to an end
had he been out of temper about his rights. It was the younger and the
elder who exchanged the grasp of peace and mutual amity. ‘And, remember,
Renton is home to us all,’ Ben said, with moisture in his eyes. ‘Of
course my mother remains here; as it has always been, with room for
all.’
‘Bravo, bravo!’ said Mr. Ponsonby, ‘now is the time for generous
feelings! My dear fellows, prosperity is the thing that opens men’s
hearts. Don’t talk to me of the benefits of misfortune! Let a man feel
he has his thousand a-year, or his five thousand a-year, safe in his
pocket, and then is the time his heart warms. But I’d have Mrs. Frank
come to an understanding with Mrs. Ben before I would take the
invitation in too literal a sense,’ said the old lawyer, with a chuckle
over his own wit.
‘I do not expect there will ever be a Mrs. Ben,’ said the heir, with an
impatient movement of his head.
‘Tell me that this time twelvemonths,’ said Mr. Ponsonby; and then they
all went out to the lawn to smoke their evening cigar.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE END OF A DREAM.
If I do not enter very particularly into the family arrangements which
were made after this settlement, it is because, in the circumstances, so
much detail is unnecessary. Had Ben been in Frank’s position, a married
man with a family, it would of course have been needful that some
arrangements should have been made about Mrs. Renton’s future
habitation. She herself was provided for by her marriage settlements,
and had a little fortune of her own, settled on herself, which was
something for the babies to look forward to; and there was a
jointure-house on the estate, known by the name of the Dovecote, a
pretty, small house, with a view on the river, and only a mile’s drive
from Cookesley, where there can be no doubt Mrs. Renton, had there been
any need for it, would have been very comfortable. But as Ben was not
married, what did it matter? It was better his mother should keep house
for him, as she said in her innocence, than leave him to servants. There
was a consultation held in her room next morning, to the interruption
of the newspaper-reading; but as this was a crisis, full of events, for
once in a way she did not mind.
‘I would go to the Dovecote, my dear boy, if you thought I should be in
your way,’ she said; ‘but I think I had much better stay and keep house
for you, till you have a wife of your own to keep your house.’
‘I don’t think that is a very likely event,’ said Ben. ‘Of course you
will keep house for me. And I think you should give the Dovecote to
Frank,--that is one thing I wanted to speak to you about. I will have it
fitted up, and do what I can to make it comfortable, and then you can
have the children always at hand to amuse you while I am away.’
‘But you are not going away?’
Mary was quite at the other end of the room, working by the window. It
was only her aunt’s worsted-work she was doing--not a very serious
occupation--but it always wanted a remarkable amount of light when Ben
was in the room. She was sitting there by herself, listening eagerly,
with a sore feeling in her heart, as of being excluded,--she who had
sacrificed so much to the comfort of the family. After all, though she
was so nearly related, and had spent her life with them, she was not a
Renton. Not like a daughter of the house, whose opinion would have
weight and whose comfort had to be consulted. Talk of Mrs. Renton
keeping the house! The meaning of that of course was that Mary was to
keep house. But of Ben’s house she never would be the honorary
housekeeper,--of that she was sure. When she heard her aunt’s frightened
exclamation, she too looked up a little,--of course it must be only a
figure of speech about his going away. Or he meant going to London
perhaps, or to the moors, or something temporary. Ben came to the
window, with his hands in his pockets, before he answered. Not as if he
were coming to Mary. It was only the restless habit men have of
wandering about a room. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking out, and addressing
nobody, ‘I am going away. Of course I must go back to my work. You
forget that when I came home I had not the least idea of what was to
become of me. And to throw away the work I had been making my bread by
for six years, would have been a great piece of folly. Indeed, the fact
is,--and I hope you won’t be vexed, mother, I assure you it is quite
necessary,--I am going to-morrow. I must finish what I’ve got to do.’
‘Going to-morrow!’ said Mrs. Renton, with a little shriek. Mary did not
even lift up her head from her work. She kept on bending over the
worsted roses as if they were the most important things in the world;
but her heart suddenly had taken to flutter in the wildest way against
her quiet breast.
‘Yes, Mary,’ said Ben, suddenly, ‘don’t you see that it is necessary? I
must finish my work.’
Mary made him no answer, being intent on the shade of a pink, and he
took a few turns about the room in his impatience; for his mother had
begun to cry softly in her bed.
‘That is always the worst of talking to you women,’ he said. ‘Mother,
can’t you understand? You can’t go breaking off threads in life, as you
do it in your sewing. I must wind up my affairs. There are some things I
must see after for myself.’
‘Oh, Ben, after I had made up my mind to something so different!’ said
his mother. ‘I did not sleep a bit last night for making up how it was
to be. I had quite settled in my mind what parties it would be necessary
to give. We have not entertained since your poor dear father died, not
once,--but now I had been thinking there ought to be a series of
dinners, and perhaps a ball, to give Renton its proper place again in
the county, and prove that everything is settled. And now you come and
break my heart, and tell me you are going away!’
‘But, dear godmamma, he will soon come back,’ said Mary, coming to the
rescue. ‘He does not mean he is to go on making railways all his life.
He is going to finish his work,--that is what he said; though it is
disappointing of course.’
‘Because of the ball?’ said Ben, looking at her across his mother; but
Mary was not able at that moment to take her part in any encounter of
wit.
‘No,’ she said, almost angrily, ‘not because of the ball. I am not young
enough now to care very much for balls; but because I thought it was
your turn now to take care of godmamma, and----’ Mary could trust
herself no further. She went back abruptly to her work, leaving both
mother and son in a state of the utmost surprise and consternation.
‘I think you are all bent on driving me wild,’ said poor Mrs. Renton.
‘It seemed as if everything was over yesterday; but now here is Ben
going away, and Mary is disagreeable. And who have I to fall back upon?
Laurie is very kind, but he will be going too; and Alice is nice, but I
am not used to her. If Mary is to be sharp with me like this, what am I
to do?’
‘I will never be sharp with you, godmamma,’ said Mary, who for the first
time in her gentle life felt herself driven further than she could bear.
‘But you must remember sometimes that I have a home and people of my
own. You have wanted me very much for these seven years, and you know I
have never said a word,--but now that the boys have all come home, I did
hope----’
She would not break down and cry,--not for the world, while Ben kept
gazing at her from his mother’s bedside. But she stopped short abruptly,
in the middle of her sentence, which was the only alternative, and
applied herself with a kind of fury, with trembling fingers, and eyes
blind with unshed tears, to the worsted work. Calculating upon her
services as if she were a piece of furniture! Making all these
arrangements without any reference to her! It was more than Mary could
bear.
‘Ben, speak to her,’ said Mrs. Renton, faintly. ‘Oh, my dear, the boys!
Of course I am fond of the boys; but what can boys do for a poor woman
like me? Oh, Ben, speak to her! You would not go and forsake me, Mary,
when I want you most?’
Ben did not speak, however. He was startled, and out of his reckoning.
He went to the window again, and stood opposite to his cousin, and gazed
down upon her, with his hands in his pockets and a look of profound
concern and uncertainty on his face.
‘I won’t forsake you, godmamma,’ said Mary, with a trembling voice; ‘but
surely you might think,--plan out something,--make some arrangement.’
How hard it is for a woman to assert herself, to speak out of a heart
sore with the consciousness of being made no account of, and not to cry!
It would have been easier for Mary to put herself down under their feet
and allow them to walk over her,--as, indeed, it seemed to her she had
been doing. And they did not know it! They had endured their seven
years’ bondage, and it had come to an end, and all was right again; but
for her the same round was to go on for ever, and nobody even was aware
for what poor hire she had sacrificed her life and her youth.
‘Davison, Miss Mary says she is going to leave us,’ said Mrs. Renton, as
the maid came in. ‘No, no; take it away. I could not swallow it. I am
sure if I thought there was anything in the world she wanted, I would
have got it for her, Davison. And I always thought she was so happy with
me. No, it would choke me, I tell you. And if she was not happy with me,
there are years and years that I might have got used to it; but to go
and tell me now, just when I want her most----’
‘You’ll take your arrowroot, ma’am,’ said Davison, soothingly. ‘It’s
just as you like it, neither too hot nor too cold. Miss Mary agoing
away! That’s a fine joke. Miss Mary couldn’t stay away, ma’am, not if
you was to send her. She’s a deal too fond of you. It’s just nice now,
just as you like it. It’s all her fun, that’s what it is!’
‘I don’t see any fun in it,’ said Mrs. Renton, feebly. But she was
consoled by the fuss, and the re-arrangement of her pillows, and the
arrowroot. ‘You’ll speak to her, Davison, won’t you?--and tell her I
couldn’t bear it. I am sure it would cost me my life.’
‘To be sure, ma’am, I’ll tell her,’ said the maid.
While this little scene was going on, Ben stood by the window, always
with his hands in his pockets, gazing at his cousin, who worked with
fury, with hands that trembled, and eyes blind with tears. She kept them
from falling with a superhuman effort, but she could not see anything
but great blurs of mixed colour on the piece of embroidery before her,
harmless bits of worsted all dilated and magnified through the tears.
‘Do you really mean it, Mary?’ he said, looking down upon her with a
look of grief, which she did not see, and yet knew of, and was stung by
to the bottom of her heart.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘Ben. I can’t tell. I don’t want to give you
more trouble. I don’t know what I am saying. It has all been too
much,--too much!’
‘Come out into the air,’ said Ben. ‘I see it has been too much. We are
all such selfish wretches, thinking only of our own concerns. Come out
into the air.’
‘I think I am more fit to go to bed,’ said Mary, and the tears fell in
spite of her. ‘Never mind me. I have got such a headache,--and,--a bad
temper. Never mind! I think I shall go to bed.’
‘Come out to the woods instead,’ said Ben, with a brother’s tender
sympathy. ‘Never mind, mother,--she will come round. It is only that she
is worn out and over-done. I am going to take her out into the air.’
And so he did, though there was nothing she less desired. He took her
out, giving her his arm, and suiting his steps to hers as if she had
been ill. She was moved to a weary laugh, half of exasperation, when she
had been thus led forth. ‘There is nothing the matter with me, Ben.
Don’t make all this fuss. You make me ashamed of myself,’ she said.
‘There is something the matter with you,’ said Ben. ‘Come and sit down
here, where we can have a good talk. I see now, though I was such a
selfish ass as not to think of it before. You see, Mary, you have always
been so much one of ourselves, that it never occurred to me to think of
the sacrifice you were making in living here.’
‘It was no sacrifice!’ cried Mary. ‘Don’t make me wretched, Ben. I lost
my temper, that was all. I thought you were making all your plans, as if
it were to go on for ever and ever; and that I was only a piece of
furniture that nobody thought of. Don’t pay any attention to me.’
‘My poor little Mary!’ said Ben, taking her hand into his. He made her
sit down on the root of the beech, and bent his eyes wistfully on her,
holding her hand in one of his, and with the other stroking his
moustache, as is the wont of men in trouble. He saw there was something
in it, more than met the eye; and he looked at her with a certain blank
wistfulness. What did Mary want? If it had been anything he could fetch
for her from the ends of the earth, he would have done it. If he had
only known what it was!--or what would please her,--or how to soothe the
nerves, which were evidently all ajar. Mary could not bear that gaze.
Shame, and a sense of humiliation, and all the sensitive pride of a
woman, overwhelmed her. Was there something in her heart which she would
not have him discover? She put up her other hand and covered her face
with it, turning away from him; and whether any sort of enlightenment
might by degrees have penetrated the blank anxiety of his gaze, I cannot
tell; for at that moment they were interrupted in such a way as Mary
remembered to the end of her life.
All at once a rustle was audible as of some one coming,--indeed, of some
one quite near; and then there was a little, light laugh. “Oh, good
gracious! we have come at an unlucky moment,’ said Millicent’s voice,
close at their side. Mary sprang to her feet, drawing her hand away from
Ben’s, raising her flushed face in a kind of desperation. Mrs. Tracy and
her daughter had just turned the corner round the beech-tree, from which
Ben rose, too, with more surprise than delight. Millicent had put on a
white dress, with no sign, except in the black ribbons, of her mourning.
She was in the full splendour of her beauty, excited into more
brilliancy than usual. ‘I am sure I am very sorry if I have interrupted
anything,’ she said, with the colour rising into her cheek, and a
laughing devil of malice in her eyes.
‘Yes, you interrupted a serious discussion,’ said Ben. ‘Mary is worn
out, and I have been questioning her about her health. She has been
shutting herself up a great deal too much, and she denies it, as all
women do.’
‘How sorry I am! and you were feeling her pulse, I suppose?’ said
Millicent. ‘It looked the prettiest scene imaginable, seen through the
trees. You did not hear us coming, you were so pleasantly,--I mean
seriously,--occupied. And have you found out what is the matter with
her, Mr. Ben?’ This was said with the air half-malicious, half-friendly
of the discoverer of a secret. And on the score of this pretended
confidence, Millicent approached him closely, and used all her weapons
against the man who had once knelt at her feet. She looked him in the
face with eyes as much brighter than Mary Westbury’s as they had been in
the earlier days,--with the sweet tints of her complexion increased by
exercise, and by, perhaps a little excitement over this supposed
discovery,--with the morning air puffing out the white frills and
trimmings of her dress, and ruffling a curl which, after the fashion of
the day, fell over her shoulder. The mother had immediately appropriated
Mary, who, wild with shame and confusion and anger, stood at bay, and
was now with difficulty restraining her inclination to burst away from
the intruder, and go home and bury herself in her room, where nobody
could see her hot blushes and angry tears. Ben was moved by a certain
confusion, too, against his will. It was an awkward attitude, certainly,
in which to be seen by any stranger eye.
‘I am not much of a physician,’ he said; ‘but we have all had a great
deal of excitement lately, and Mary is worn out. I trust it is nothing
more.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Millicent. ‘I know that; indeed, I had thought I might
come and inquire this morning as an old friend. You forget that you told
me all about it,--once. I thought I might ask, for the sake of old
times, if all was right at last.’
‘You do me a great deal of honour to remember anything about my
affairs,’ said Ben. ‘Are you going to the river?’ and he turned with her
to go down in the direction she had been taking. ‘Have you a boat?’
‘Yes; the old gardener put us across,’ said Millicent. ‘You do not give
me credit for any friendly feeling, and you always try to get rid of me,
Mr. Renton. Oh, indeed, I can see it very well. I do not feel angry, for
perhaps you have had provocation; though I can see it very well. But it
would not do you any harm, nor me much good--except for old friendship’s
sake,--if you were to answer my question. Is it all right?’
‘It is perfectly right,’ said Ben, with a little bow. ‘I don’t know that
there was ever any doubt on that subject. I must thank you for taking
so much interest in us and our affairs.’
‘That is all you say now,’ cried Millicent, with ready tears springing
to her eyes; and tears come as readily from mortification and the
passion of anger as from any other cause. ‘You would not have answered
me like that once. Ah, Ben Renton, how much you are changed!’
‘I think it is very natural I should be,’ said Ben. ‘You are changed,
too, Mrs. Rich; though not in anything external,--unless it may be for
the better, if that were possible,’ he added, with a certain grudge in
his words. The man was but a man, and they were extorted from him by the
beauty which could neither be mistaken nor overlooked.
‘If I am not changed in externals, you may be sure I am changed in
nothing else,’ said Millicent, turning upon him with a smile of such
eager sweetness and hope, that it almost reached his heart. She, poor
creature! believed she was winning him back. The thought quickened all
her powers, quickened the very springs of being in her. She forgot Mary,
and the attitude which for a moment had driven her to despair. So much
the better if he had been Mary’s lover,--a touch of triumph the more! ‘I
have had a great deal to endure since we parted,’ she went on. ‘Oh, you
cannot tell all I have had to bear! And I thought time had worn me and
aged me, and that you would scarcely have known me again. But nothing
has ever changed me at heart.’
‘Mrs. Rich, you forget that this conveys very little information to me,’
said Ben, moved with sudden vindictiveness. ‘In those days of which you
speak,--and I don’t know why you should speak of them, the recollection
cannot be a pleasant one,--I remember clearly enough what a fool I made
of myself. My heart was open enough,--ass as I was,--but I don’t know
now, and I did not then, what were the sentiments of yours,--if
indeed----’
‘I had one!’ cried Millicent. ‘Oh, that you should say this to me! And
yet I feel that I deserve it. I acted as if I had none. What can I say
or do to make you know how sorry I am? Sorry is too poor a word. Oh,
Ben, I know I ought not to say it; but if either then or now you could
have seen into my heart----’
Her eyes were shining through her tears; her cheeks glowed with soft
blushes; her look besought, implored, entreated him. Poor soul! she said
true. If he could have seen into her heart, then or now, this is what he
would have seen there:--If Ben Renton will lift me out of all the
necessities of my scheming, wretched life,--if he will give me plenty,
money, luxury, comfort, what my soul sighs for,--then I will do my best
to love him. I will be a good wife to him,--I will be good in my way,--I
will,--I will,--I will! She had said all this to God many a time saying
her prayers, and this is what her heart would have said to Ben, with a
kind of desperate ingenuousness,--innocence in the midst of guile. And
he looked at her, and the man’s soul was shaken within him. Something of
the truth became visible to him;--not the ineffable charm of love. If it
had been very love that shone in her eyes,--however his finer sense had
been revolted by its over-frankness,--no doubt he would have fallen a
victim. For he had loved her once, and she had never been more
beautiful, perhaps never so beautiful in her life. He was touched by her
loveliness, by her eagerness, by the pitiful intensity of expression in
her eyes. Take me,--save me!--she seemed to be crying to him: and, good
heavens! to think what one gleam of this fire, one such look, would have
been to him once! Ben grew confused in himself, half with recollections,
half with pity; and the softness of success and restoration was in his
mind,--even of triumph,--for had not he won a victory, and silenced all
opposers? His voice faltered as he answered her, if answer it could be
called.
‘It is a long time ago,’ he said; ‘one’s very body and being alter you
know, they say, completely in seven years.’
‘But one’s heart never changes,’ murmured Millicent. And that was the
moment when Mrs. Tracy, feeling that the conflict was not progressing,
chose to come in like a watchful goddess, who sees that her champion’s
arms do not prevail.
‘My dear, we are taking Mr. Renton away from his cousin,’ she said, ‘and
from talking over family matters; but since we have done so, could you
not persuade him, Millicent, to come over to us to luncheon? You might
go on the water a little; you are so fond of it; and then lunch would be
ready. Mr. Renton, you must not think it strange that we are anxious to
see a little of such a kind friend as you are. I always say your ready
kindness saved my life.’
Millicent turned sharp round, and involuntarily clenched her hand, as if
she would have struck her mother. ‘It is all over now!’ she said to
herself; and never had the battle been so nearly won. As for Ben, the
sound of the new voice woke him up in a moment. He gave himself a little
shake, and recovered his self-command. Good heavens! to think how near a
step it had been to falling helpless into the syren’s snare!
‘Thanks; but we must turn back when we have seen you to your boat,’ he
said; and lingered to let Mrs. Tracy join them. ‘I have no time for any
such pleasures. My mother thinks it hard enough already, and I must give
her what little time remains. I am going away to-morrow.’
‘To-morrow!’ said Mrs. Tracy, with a half-sneer and a look at her
daughter, to which Millicent, flushed, and pouting, and angry, made no
reply. ‘Then is it a mistake, after all? I thought I heard you say all
was right. I beg your pardon, I am sure----’
‘About the property it is all right,’ said Ben; ‘but I am not the idle
fellow you once knew me. Those were the only six months I ever
absolutely threw away in my life. And I can’t give up my work in a
moment because I have got back my rights.’
‘It was a pity you threw away those six months you speak of,’ said
Millicent. ‘Come, mamma; why should we trouble Mr. Renton to go with us
to the boat? Of course he must have a great deal to talk of,--to his
mother,--and to Mary,--his own people. We are strangers, and have no
claim upon him.’
‘There are some things which one gives all the more freely because there
is no claim,’ said Ben, with good-nature. ‘The path is rather rough
here. Mrs. Tracy, give me your hand.’
‘Thank you, I want no help!’ Millicent cried, when he turned to her, and
she sprang over the gnarled mass of roots, and ran down the path to the
green river-bank. She stood there, framed in by the thick foliage, her
white figure standing out against the light of the river,--a picture not
to be easily forgotten. Emerald green below,--green, just touched with
points of autumnal colour, here and there a yellow leaf above;--gleams
of blue sky looking through;--one long line of light reflecting all the
darker objects, the river, with one boat lying close to the grassy
margin; and in the midst the beautiful, flushed, brilliant creature,
full of passion, and mortification, and an angry despair. She did not
think it worth while now to hide the strong emotions in her mind, but
stood with her face turned to them as they followed, humiliated, yet
defiant,--the crown of all the scene, and the only discord in it. Poor
Millicent! her eyebrows lowered, her eyes shone; her colour was high
with the shame of her defeat; and yet, beyond the angry glance in her
eye, there was a tear, and the corners of her mouth drooped; and,
scarcely concealed by the hard, little laugh of artificial gaiety, a sob
was sounding in her throat.
‘Good-bye,’ she said, almost roughly, ‘Ben,--I will never call you so
again! I wish you luck of your good fortune. It makes a great difference
to most people in this world.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Ben, taking her hand almost against her will. ‘It makes
little difference to me. What has been done has been done by nature and
years. If you should ever want help or counsel that I can give---- Well,
let us say nothing about that. Good-bye----’
‘For a time,’ Mrs. Tracy added, with her bland smile, taking his hand in
both hers,--‘till our meeting again.’
And Mary, whose feelings all this time had been more overwhelming than
can be described, and who had followed mechanically, with an instinct
of being there to the last to see what direful harm might happen, stood
passive by his side, not knowing if she were in a trance or a dream; and
saw the boat push off into the shining river. Mrs. Tracy turned and
waved her hand to them, bland to the last. But Millicent never turned
her head. Once only, just as the boat shot past the long drooping
branches of the willow which closed in the view, she looked round
sharply and saw them; and the rowlocks sounded hollow and loud, and with
another stroke the boat was gone. Neither of them have ever seen that
beautiful face again.
Ben stood for some time after they had disappeared on the same spot,
forgetting everything, gazing out upon the vacant stream and vacant
sunshine, in a curious vacant way. If it had been put to him, he would
never have confessed how much moved he had been. Perhaps he was himself
unconscious of it. But nature made a pause in him, manifesting the
convulsion, in her own way, when this woman, who had influenced it so
strangely, passed for ever out of his life.
‘Are you fond of Coleridge, Mary?’ he said to her without any preface,
quite suddenly, as they went up the steep bank.
‘Of Coleridge, Ben? What an odd question! Why do you ask?’
‘Do you remember what he says? And what a curious sense he had of the
things that are inexpressible,--
‘How there looked him in the face
An angel beautiful and bright,
And how he knew--‘
‘No, I don’t mean that,--not so bad as that!’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Mary, with a little shiver; and she
took hold of his arm with an instinctive desire to show him her
sympathy. Very well did she know what he meant; or at least thought,
hoped she did; but denied it with characteristic readiness. He pressed
the soft, sisterly hand to him when he felt it on his arm. Certainly,
there was a great sympathy between them, though nothing more. And he did
not say another word to her of the subject of the conversation which
this last meeting had blotted out as if it had never been. They did not
talk of anything, indeed, but went home together, with a silent
understanding of each other in which there was certainly some balm.
Understanding each other! which meant that the
woman,--partly,--understood the man, and had it in her heart to be a
little sorry for him in respect to the conflict through which he had
come; and a little, a very little,--which was more remarkable,--sorry
for the other woman thus finally foiled and done with; but that the man
had no comprehension at all of the woman, and gave no particular thought
to her, except so far as was conveyed in a tender, kindly sympathy for
poor little Mary. Her life must not be made a burden to her any longer
by his mother’s drives and her worsted work. That was all the progress
Ben had made in the comprehension of his cousin’s heart.
CHAPTER XV.
AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.
On the next morning Ben went away without a word, no repentance of his
intention or lingering desire to postpone it having apparently crossed
his mind. He took leave of his mother the night before, for he was going
away early. ‘It will not be for seven years this time,’ he said, as he
kissed her, and was going to kiss Mary, too,--a formula which his
cousin, with a pang of mortification in her heart, felt might be better
dispensed with. ‘Nay; I shall see you in the morning,’ she said, half
terrified lest the blood which she felt to be scorching her cheek might
‘make him think anything.’ What should it make him think? She puzzled
him a little, it must be allowed; but he was not the kind of man who can
think of many different things at one time. His mind had been absorbed
with the business which brought him to Renton. It was absorbed now with
thoughts of what he had to do in the winding-up of his own affairs. Now
and then it flitted vaguely across his perception that Mary had
something on her mind which, one time or other, it would be his
business to see into. Dear little Mary! Ben was very fond of his cousin.
If she had wanted a hair from the beard of the Cham of Tartary, or a
golden apple from the Tree of Bliss in the gardens of the Enchanted
Isles, he would have done all a man could do to get it for her. But he
did not know now what she wanted, or if she wanted anything,--and that
was one of the matters which could wait till he came home.
Laurie, too, was going away with Ben, though only to town; and the night
before they left was a night of talk and recollections more than the
separated family had yet permitted themselves. It was true that Hillyard
put himself singularly in their way. Perhaps he had not had all the
advantages of the Rentons; but still he was a gentleman, though much
knocking about the world had taken some of the outside polish off him,
and he had never shown any inclination to intrude upon their private
talk, or make himself a sharer in the family communings,--never till
now. Perhaps it was because they were just setting off again, and Ben’s
family came in for the _attendrissement_, which might have been more
justly bestowed upon his own. But it was ridiculous that he should plant
himself by Mary, occupying her attention, and pouring forth his
confidences upon her, as it seemed to him good to do. They were all
gathered together in the drawing-room as they had been so many times
before, after Mrs. Renton went to bed, with the windows open as usual,
the lights shaded, the languor of the night and its wistfulness and soft
content and melancholy stealing in; the half-darkness and the soft
breathing of the night air, and the fluttering moths about the lamp,
were all accessories of the picture which nobody could forget. And there
was a mysterious gloom about the walls and the roof, owing to the shades
on the lamps, which gave a more distinct character to the half-visible
faces, each in its corner, and to the brilliant circles of illumination
round every light. They had begun to talk of their father, and this last
event in the story of his will, which was so strange, and so unlike all
his previous life.
‘One would like to know what he meant by it,’ said Laurie. ‘Poor, dear
old father! If there had been something dependent on the issue of our
probation; if there had been a reward for the man that had used his
talent best, like you, Ben; or for the man who had given him an heir,
like Frank; but all to end in this aimless way! We have always thought
ourselves very sound in the brain, we Rentons, or I know what one might
be tempted to think.’
‘That is what I have thought all along,’ said Frank.
‘It is not for us to say so, at least,’ said the elder brother. ‘I
believe illness coming on had confused his mind. They say it does. I
don’t think he can have been quite clear what he was doing. And then he
remembered at last, and was sorry,--don’t you recollect?’
‘My poor father!’ said Laurie. And then there was a pause; and in this
pause, through the dimness and the stillness, came the sound of
Hillyard’s voice, too low to be distinguishable, coming from Mary’s
corner, addressed to her with a volubility and eagerness which struck
them all with amazement. He had not meant to be so audible; and when,
after the first silence, a little laugh burst from Alice at the one
voice thus brought into prominence, he faltered and stopped too, as
people do under such circumstances. What could he be finding to say to
Mary? and what could Mary be thinking of to listen to him? were the
half-angry thoughts that flashed over Ben’s mind. Of course he was a
guest here, and everybody’s equal. Yet still, it seemed to Ben as if, on
the whole, this was bad taste, to say the least, on Hillyard’s part.
But Alice, though she had laughed at the sound of the solitary voice
which continued when they all dropped, was eager to let loose her
opinions, too, on the other subject. ‘I cannot see what other will could
have been just, now,’ she said. ‘If he had told you something to do, it
would have been different. But he gave you nothing to do; and how were
you to know what he wanted? It was not Laurie’s three princes, after
all.’
‘And, now I come to think of it, I don’t believe in my three princes,’
said Laurie. ‘I have not a doubt they fought it out when papa was out
of the way. Fancy two elder brothers giving in to a fellow because he
had the marvellousest little dog that ever was seen! It came to natural
justice, you may be sure, at the end, and the strongest had it. And it
has come to a kind of natural justice with us, so far as law allows.
Poor old father! One used to feel as if he must be so much wiser than we
were. And it proves he was as confused as the rest, and saw just as
short a way before him, and stultified himself, half-knowingly, like one
of his own sons.’
‘Don’t!’ said Ben, with a voice of pain. He was more angry with his
father than soft-hearted Laurie ever could have been, and consequently
was less able to talk of it. ‘Thank heaven!’ he cried, suddenly, ‘I
don’t suppose it has done any of us any lasting harm.’
‘No,’ said Laurie, out of the silence, after a pause, ‘no more harm than
we should have done ourselves, anyhow, for our own hand.’
And somehow, in the room, there was the sound of a sigh; whom it
proceeded from it would be hard to tell--six people all gathered
together of a soft autumn evening, and not too much light to betray
them, it would be strange if there was not more than one who sighed. But
Alice, in the shade, slid her hand through her husband’s arm, and said
joyously, ‘It has done us no harm, Frank!’ ‘Because we would not let
it,’ he whispered back again, brushing her soft cheek with his
moustache. Yes, that was the secret. Have your will, anyhow, whether
fortune permits or no; and in the long run the chances are you will come
out just as well as your neighbour, who allowed fortune to constrain
him, and will have had your will and your happiness into the bargain;
bad social morality, perhaps, but just as good fact as any other. The
young soldier and his wife had their little triumph unsuspected by the
others, who heard but a momentary whisper in that corner, which was
drowned by Hillyard’s more forcible whisper, always conversing with
Mary. What did the fellow mean by it? Ben was so disgusted by this ‘bad
taste’ of his friend, that he got up and stepped out on the lawn, with
some murmur about a cigar. And the other men all rose and joined him,
though not with any enthusiasm. When they had all trooped out, he
stepped back for a moment, and held out his hand to his cousin.
‘Is it really the case, Mary, that I am not to bid you good-bye
to-night?’
‘No,’ Mary said, drawing back, with a shy hesitation which he did not
understand; ‘do you think I would let you go away,--so far,--and not
make your breakfast for you the last morning? This is only good-night.’
‘Good-night, then,’ he said, but held her hand still. ‘What was that
fellow, Hillyard, so voluble about?’
‘That fellow!’ said Mary. ‘I thought he was your great friend. Indeed,
it was mostly you he was talking about.’
‘A poor subject,’ Ben said, only half satisfied; and then she drew her
hand away from him, and he went off with a half-suspicious glance at
her, and a certain sense of uneasiness, to join the men outside.
A parting in the morning is of all things in the world the most
detestable. He who would have a tender farewell, and leave a soft
recollection behind him, let him depart by the night train,--the later
the better,--when there is no inquisitive light to spy out, not only the
tear, but even that humidity of eye which tells when tears are coming.
Mary’s eyes were in this condition when Ben rose from his hurried
breakfast, and came up to her in the full light of day, and of Mr.
Hillyard, who lingered, though nobody wanted him. She had kept behind
the urn, feeling that, after all, had she stayed up-stairs and watched
him going away from her window, it would have been less unsatisfactory.
‘You’ll write and let me know how things are going on,’ Ben had said,
not feeling particularly cheerful himself, but yet approaching the best
part of the wing of a partridge to his mouth. ‘Oh, yes, of course I will
write, as usual,’ Mary said, and he gave a nod of satisfaction as he
ate. To be sure, he had to eat before he started. And then she added,
‘You’ll let us know as soon as you arrive.’ And he nodded again over
his coffee-cup. It was to give him his breakfast she had got up,--and
what else was there to be expected? And when the dog-cart was at the
door, Ben wiped the crumbs carefully from his moustache, and went up to
his cousin, and took her hand, and bent over her. ‘Good-bye, Mary,’ he
said, kissing her cheek, ‘take care of yourself. I’ll write a line from
town before we start. I’m very sorry, now it has come to the last.
Good-bye!’
‘Good-bye, Ben!’ she said, unable to articulate another word. The blood
seemed all to stagnate about her heart. Up to this moment there had
always been a possibility of something happening,--something being done
or said. But now it was all over. A certain haze came over her eyes, and
yet she could see him looking back at her as he went to the door, with
an indefinable expression. She stood and held by the back of the chair,
looking out of the window before which the dog-cart was standing,
forgetting for the moment that there was any one else in the world.
‘Good-bye, Miss Westbury,’ said a voice at her ear.
Mary turned round with an impatience it was scarcely possible to
disguise. ‘Oh, Mr. Hillyard, I beg your pardon! I thought you were gone.
Good-bye!’ she said. He was standing holding out his hand with his eyes
bent on her, and a glow in them such as even a woman agitated with
feelings of her own could scarcely mistake.
‘Good-bye, Miss Westbury. I shall never forget the days I have spent
here,’ he said, and stooped over her hand, as if----
‘Hillyard! do you mean to stay all day?’ cried Ben from the dog-cart, in
a tone which was not sweet.
‘Indeed, you will be late for the train; you have not a moment to lose,’
cried Mary, withdrawing her hand.
He muttered something, she could not tell what,--nor, indeed, did she
care. ‘Not farewell yet,’ was it he said? But what did it matter? The
interruption had so far roused her that she felt able to go to the
window and smile and wave her hand to Ben. Hillyard was still holding
his hat in his hand, trying to attract her attention, when the dog-cart
disappeared down the avenue. Then Mary sat down and gazed straight
before her, with that poignant sense of unreality which such a moment
gives. Five minutes ago he was there; and now here was vacancy,
silence,--a blank in which life lost itself. Five minutes, and all the
world changed! Her brow was burning and heavy with tears unshed,--an
ache which seemed physical, so hard the strain and pain it produced in
her, went through her heart. And a whole long day to go through, and the
birds singing merrily, and the sun shining, and old Willis on his way to
remove the remains of Ben’s breakfast, and to spread the table for the
family that remained! ‘It don’t seem no good, do it, Miss Mary, to have
master home so short, and he been so long away?’ Mary started to her
feet at the words. No good indeed?--perhaps harm, if one dared say
so!--deeper blank and silence after the momentary movement and the
light!
And now to think it was all over, and that there remained nothing but
the old life to be taken up again and gone on with just as before! If it
had been night, when one could have shrouded one’s-self in one’s own
room, and cried or slept, and forgotten one’s-self! But it was
day,--early morning,--with a whole heap of duties to be performed, and
people to look on while she was performing them. And Mary felt sick of
it all,--the duties, and the daylight, and the life. Laurie, who thought
early rising idiotic, went by a much later train, at what he called a
rational hour. And then the house was left in its old quiet, but for the
presence of Frank and Alice and the children, which no doubt made a
great difference. When Mary went to her godmother with the newspaper she
was questioned minutely about Ben’s departure and his looks. ‘Did he eat
any breakfast, Mary?’ Mrs. Renton said, putting her handkerchief to her
eyes.
‘He ate a very good breakfast,’ said Mary, with a slight sense of
humour, but on the whole, a greater sense of something like displeasure.
Yes, he had been quite able to eat breakfast, though he was going away!
‘And enjoyed it, poor fellow?’ said his mother. ‘Ah, if one only knew
when he would eat his next meal at Renton? And was he cheerful, my dear,
or did he feel it very much? Poor Ben! None of you think how hard it is
upon me!’
‘You have Frank, godmamma,’ said Mary, ‘and if he settles in the
Dovecote it will be very nice for us all. And there is Laurie close at
hand whenever you want him, and no one could be more kind than
Laurie----’
‘But neither Laurie nor Frank is Ben,’ said Mrs. Renton with decision,
drying her eyes--which, alas! as her niece felt to the bottom of her
heart, was most true. And then Mary read the papers, all the bits of
news, as she had done any day these seven years. Had there been any
break in the endless round, or had she only dreamed it? It seemed so
hard to know: for the interruption, with all its agitations and
pleasures, had vanished, and everything was as it had been before.
Except, indeed, that Frank and Alice made the dinner-table cheerful, and
took the heavy duty of the drive off Mary’s hands, which was a relief
for which she should have been more grateful. But even that showed the
difference between her own life and that of Frank’s wife, though Mary,
had she not been driven to it, was not given to such comparisons. For
her there was but the usual monotonous promenade over the well-known,
too well-known country; but Alice was taken to the Dovecote, and even
the invalid grew interested about the changes necessary, and the
furnishing and decorations of that abode. ‘The Frank Rentons’ had all
the pleasant excitement of settling down before them. And Mary felt that
it was very wicked and unwomanly of her to desire any excitement, or to
feel so wearily conscious of the want of interest in her own existence.
Would it be much better in the cottage with her mother, who in all these
years had learnt to do without her, and whose whole mind was absorbed in
her curate-boy? Perhaps that would not be any better. And, anyhow, it
was evident that there was nothing to do in the meantime but to submit.
There was, however, an excitement awaiting Mary much nearer than she had
any expectation of. It came to her just two days after Ben’s departure,
in the afternoon, when once more Alice and the children had gone to
accompany Mrs. Renton in her drive, and she was alone in the
drawing-room, with the window open as usual,--that window by which
everybody went and came,--everybody, that is to say, belonging to the
family. Mary was reading, seated in her favourite chair, half buried in
the curtains, when it seemed to her that a shadow fell on her book,--a
very familiar accident. It must be Frank, she thought, looking up; but
to her great amazement she saw it was Hillyard standing with a
deprecating, anxious look before the window. She made a spring from her
seat with that one thought which fills the mind of a preoccupied woman
to the exclusion of all personal courtesy and consideration. Something
must have happened to Ben! ‘What is it? for God’s sake, tell me! tell
me!’ she said, rushing out upon him, dropping her book, and holding up
her clasped hands.
‘Nothing, Miss Westbury,’ he said, putting out his hand to take hers,
with the humblest, softest tone,--a tone amazing in its gentleness from
such a big-bearded, unpolished man. ‘I was only waiting to ask you
whether I might come in.’
‘But you are sure there is nothing wrong with--my cousin?’ Mary cried;
and then recollected herself, and was covered with confusion. ‘I beg
your pardon; but seeing you so suddenly it was natural to think of Ben.
I felt as if you must have brought bad news, Mr. Hillyard; don’t think
me very silly--but godmamma may come in any moment from her drive--you
are sure there is nothing the matter with Ben?’
‘Nothing at all. I left him a few hours ago, very well and very busy,’
said Hillyard; and then once more he added in the same soft, subdued,
disquieting tones, ‘Will you let me come in?’
‘Yes, surely,’ said Mary, though she was trembling with the sudden
fright. ‘But it is so strange to see you. Is there any change in your
plans? I thought you were to go to-day.’ And then a wavering of light
and colour came over her face suddenly in spite of herself. This man,
who had no possible business at Renton, surely could not have come
alone!
‘I begged for another day,’ said Hillyard, following her into the room.
‘I daresay I was a fool for my pains. It may be years before I return
again. I asked for another day.’
‘I am sure godmamma will be very glad,’ said Mary, courteously; ‘but
somehow it was very startling to see you, and not Ben.’
And she gave a momentary glance out, as if still she expected the other
to appear. Such a reception to a man who had come on Hillyard’s errand
was like frost to a brook. It bound him, shrank him up within himself.
He stood looking at her with a half-stupefied, wistful gaze, saying
nothing. Ben; always Ben! Was that the only thought in her mind? Was it
possible she could see him thus, and meet his eye, and not see his
errand was altogether apart from Ben?
Mary, however, was so much occupied with her tremor and start, and
curious little flutter of expectation, that it did not occur to her as
strange for some minutes that her present companion said no more. She
took his silence with the composure of perfect indifference. She was not
even curious about him, further than concerned her cousin. Why should
she be curious about Mr. Hillyard? But at last it did strike her that
politeness required that she should speak to him. And, looking up, she
caught the expression of his face and of his attitude all in a moment,
and the ardent light in his eyes. Such a look is not to be mistaken.
With a sudden rallying of all her blood to her heart, and steadying of
her nerves for an utterly unforeseen but unmistakable emergency, Mary
faltered and stopped in her intended speech, waiting for what was to
come.
‘Miss Westbury,’ he said, ‘I might as well tell you at once that I see
what a fool I am. I have my answer before I have spoken. You think no
more of me than if I were Ben Renton’s horse, or his dog, or anything
that belonged to him. I see it quite plain, and I might have seen it
before I went away on Wednesday; but there are things in which a man
cannot be anything but a fool.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Hillyard?’ said Mary. ‘I hope I have
not been rude. You are a stranger to us all. It is only through Ben we
have known you; and it was natural when I saw you that I should think of
my cousin. If I have hurt your feelings I am sure I beg your pardon.’
In all this she was talking against time, hoping that Frank or somebody
would come in.
‘No,’ he said; ‘I know I had no right to think of anything else. Of
course I am a stranger. Ben’s dog,--that is about it! I am not sneering,
Miss Westbury. I should not have minded your calling me so when I
came.’
And there he stood, turning his eyes away from her, a big strong man of
the woods as he looked, abashed and disconcerted, like a chidden child.
He gazed out blankly, pulling his beard, with a flush of such quick
mortification and downfall as a boy might feel when he sees his hasty
projects fall to nought, and yet a deeper pang underneath than any boy
could bear. Altogether the man looked so humbled and sore and sad,
silenced in the very moment of effusion, that Mary’s heart was moved.
She was sorry for him, and remorseful for her own indifference. It
seemed almost needful to let him say out his say by way of consolation.
‘We all called you Ben’s friend,’ she said; ‘his best friend, whom we
have heard of for years. Nobody else could have come among us at such a
time. You must not think I mean anything disrespectful or unkind.’
Then there came a great burst of words from him. ‘That was what I
thought,’ he said; ‘that you had been used to hearing of me; that I
might have been to you as an old friend. I too have heard of you for
years. And look here, Miss Westbury; you may scorn me, but I must say
it, I have been in love with you for years. I used to see your letters,
and think there was a woman, if one could ever hope to get within speech
of her! And then I came here. I ought never to have come. My heart was
full of you before, and you may think what it was when I saw you. Don’t
stop me, please; it is better now that it should all come out. You were
kind to me, as you would have been to any stranger; but you did not know
what was in my mind, and I did, and went on fire like a fool. There now,
I see how it is. I won’t grieve you by asking anything. Only give me
your hand and say you forgive a rough fellow for taking it upon him to
love you, before he ever saw you; and behaving himself like an ass when
he did.’
‘Mr. Hillyard, I am so sorry,’ said Mary, with tears in her eyes. ‘I did
not mean,--I never thought,--It is me whom you must forgive,--if you
can.’
‘You!’ said the strange man. ‘God bless you! that’s what I say. You and
forgiving have nothing to do with each other.’ And then he took her hand
between both his, and gazed down upon her with a fond, lingering,
sorrowful look, as if he were getting her face by heart. ‘I don’t know
why I came,’ he said, muttering to himself; ‘I knew it would be exactly
so,--just so. And yet I wanted you to know----’
And then the man seemed suddenly to forget her presence altogether.
Standing there, holding her hand, he might have fallen into a dream so
perfectly still was he. But her hand was lost, buried between both his,
held fast, while she stood perforce by him. And yet there was no force
in it, no rudeness, but only a profound melancholy silence,--a sacrifice
of the hidden sweetness he had been cherishing in his life.
‘Mr. Hillyard,’ she said, softly, ‘you must say good-bye to me and let
me go.’ And then he woke up and came to life.
‘The other hand too,’ he said, ‘for this once. Good-bye, and God bless
you! It’s all I’ll ever have for my love. God bless you! Good-bye!’
He did not even kiss her hands, but held them fast; and then let them
drop, and turned, stooping his tall head through the white curtains, and
went out as he came in. Mary stood looking after him with an
indescribable sensation. Was he really gone, this man who had been
nothing to her barely an hour since, and now was part of her life? or
was it a dream altogether, an invention of her fancy? His heavy foot
ground upon the gravel for two or three steps while she stood in her
amazement looking after him; and then he stopped, and turned round, and
came back. But he did not attempt to come in. She on the one side of the
white curtains, and he on the other; stood for another moment and looked
at each other, and then he cleared his throat, which was husky. ‘I am
not coming back,’ he said, ‘I have just one word to say. If there should
ever be a time when you might think,--not of me, I don’t mean of me,
for I’m a stranger as you say,--but that a man’s love and support might
be of use to you,--they say women feel that sometimes, if things don’t
go altogether as they wish,--then let me but know, hold up only your
little finger, Mary,--there! I’ve said it for once,--and I’ll come if it
were from the ends of the earth!’
And then, without another word or look, he went away.
Was this the excitement she had been wishing for, and blaming herself
for wishing? Mary ran up to her room in terror of meeting any one, with
her heart beating wildly in her breast. Here was an incident indeed, to
diversify a dull afternoon, a dull life with! She was so touched and
excited, and moved by compassion and surprise and regret, that the
effort upon her was not much less than if Hillyard’s extraordinary suit
had been that of a man to whom her heart could have responded. She sat
down and hid her face in her hands, and got rid of some of her
excitement in tears, and went over the strange scene. How strange a
scene! For all these seven years,--her best and brightest,--Mary had
never heard the voice of love. Now and then a tone of that admiration
and interest which might have come to love had just caught her ear from
the outside world, but she had been drawn back into her retirement and
the deeper tone had never followed. And now, all at once, here was
passion of such a kind as seldom startles a woman’s ears in these days.
An utter stranger an hour ago, and now,--happen what might, should she
never see the man again,--a bit of her life! Mary’s head swam, and the
world went round with her. ‘They say women feel that sometimes, if
things don’t go altogether as they wish.’ What did he mean? Had he read
in her heart more than others could? Was she one to fall into a longing
for some love and support, some awakening and current of activity in her
life, after all youthful dreams were gone? The suggestion moved Mary
with a humbling sense of her own weariness and languor, and senseless
disappointment, and longing for she knew not what. She was not one of
those women to whom somebody’s love is indispensable,--if not one, then
another. With a cheek burning with shame, and eyes hot with tears, she
rose up and went down again to her duties, such as they were.
Henceforward she was determined she should suffice to herself. This,
after the first shock of emotion, was all the effect poor Hillyard’s
sacrifice upon her altar had on Mary. That he should have seen that all
was not going altogether as she wished! After all, what better had most
women to do with their lives, than to tend a real or imaginary invalid,
to order dinners, to read newspapers, to go out every afternoon for a
drive? And she had perfect health, and a beautiful country, and plenty
of books, and all the poor people in Renton parish, to occupy her. To
think with all that, there might come a time when she would want a
man’s,--any man’s,--love and comfort! The counter-proposition, that a
man should some time in his life long to have a woman by him, does in no
way shock the delicacy of the stronger creature. But what woman is there
who would not rather die than acknowledge personally for herself that a
man is necessary to the comfort of her existence? In the abstract, it is
a different matter. Poor Hillyard! the immediate result of his
pilgrimage of love, and hopeless declaration, was to move Mary Westbury,
in a wild flame of indignation at her own unwomanliness, to the task of
contenting herself, energetically and of set purposes, with all the
monotonies of her life.
CHAPTER XVI.
WHAT IT ALL MEANT TO LAURIE.
When Laurie Renton arrived in town, he went with the story of his
family’s fortune and his own, as was natural, to the padrona, who had
now a double interest in the tale. She had already heard of it in a
letter from Alice; but such a narrative is naturally more full and
satisfactory by word of mouth.
It was in the same house, up the same stairs, in the same studio, that
Laurie sought his friend. Everything was seven years older, and the hair
growing thin on the top of Laurie’s head, and Alice the mother of
children; but neither Mrs. Severn nor her studio was much changed. She
had attained, when we saw her first, to that table-land which lies in
the centre of an innocent and healthful life, and on which Time, if he
does not stand still, moves with such equal and steady steps, that it is
difficult to trace his progress; and as many more years were probably
before her ere there would appear in the padrona any such marked signs
of the passage of years as those which had already left their stamp on
Laurie in his youth. There might be a few white threads among her hair,
at least she said there were; but for all that any one could have told,
she might have been wrapped in some enchanted sleep for all those years,
instead of working, and thinking, and sorrowing, and taking such simple
pleasures as came to her. The pleasures had been less and the sorrows
greater since Alice left her; but now Edie had grown, as everybody said,
a great girl, and the mother’s heart was stirring into life in her
development, to prepare for herself another crisis and sacrifice. It was
years now since Laurie had returned from his first self-banishment to
Italy. He had come back and he had been away again from time to time,
but he had always returned here,--‘home’ as he liked to call it,--and
for a long period there had been nothing in the character of his
feelings which made it painful to him to come. How this was he could not
tell. When he went away on that forlorn journey to Rome he had felt as
if he never could look again upon the woman whom he loved with all his
heart, but who, as nature herself indicated, could never be more to him
than a friend. She could not be his,--never,--though everything in
heaven and earth were to plead for him,--and the only thing for him to
do was to rush away from her, and bury himself and his unhappy love out
of sight for ever. These had been his feelings when he went away;--but,
somehow, they did not last. Slowly, by degrees, he and his heart came
back to her without any anguish or despair in them. When he returned,
and went half-tremblingly to see if he could bear the sight of her,
Laurie found, somewhat to his astonishment, that the sight, instead of
driving him wild with disappointed affection, soothed and consoled and
softened him as nothing else could do. Perhaps, had it been possible
that she should become any other man’s wife the sensation would have
been different; but there had long ago ceased to be any strong wish on
the matter in Laurie’s mind. The old custom of hanging about her house
came back upon him. He would come and talk to her of all his own
concerns, and of a great many of hers, by the hour together; and not of
realities only, but of fancies,--everything that came into his head.
There was the strangest transposition of ordinary rules in their
intercourse. While he lounged about, and talked and poured out all his
mind, she would be working on steadily, pausing to note her
effects,--now and then calling him into counsel on some knotty point,
responding to his thoughts, understanding him even when he but
half-uttered his meaning, giving him a certain proof of perfect sympathy
and friendship, more soft and tender than ordinary friendship,--and yet
never stopping in her work. Had they been of the same age, such a thing
of course could not have been possible; but on the vantage-ground of a
dozen additional years the woman stood calm and steadfast, and the man
too, his boyish fit of passion over, was calm. No doubt there was a
whisper at one time in the artists’ quarter that Mrs. Severn was going
to make a fool of herself and marry a man young enough to be her son.
But as time disproved that matter, the world, which after all is not
such a stupid world, but acknowledges, after due probation, the
privileges that can be safely accorded to the blameless, held its
tongue,--or only jeered innocently by times at the friendship. ‘Such
things are impracticable generally, and dangerous, you know, and all
that. It is all very well to talk of friendship; but one knows it always
falls into love on one side or the other. I really do believe an
exception ought to be made for the padrona and Laurie Renton,’ was what
was said in Fitzroy Square. And as the two took matters with perfect
composure, and never looked as if they supposed either the world or the
Square to have anything to do with it, the unusual bond between them
soon came to be considered a matter of course. It was not such a bond
that the man was always at the woman’s apron-strings. He went away,
sometimes for months together, and travelled about in that
half-professional, half-dilettante way that suited Laurie; and then he
wrote to her, and next after Alice’s, Laurie’s letters were looked for
in Mrs. Severn’s house. And I will not say that there was not now and
then just a word in them which the padrona passed over when she read
these epistles to the boys, and which made her half smile, half sigh
with a curious mingled sense of regret, and amusement, and pleasure. He
would say, when he was describing something to her, ‘If you were but
here, padrona mia, I should want no more.’ Foolish fellow! as if she
ever could be with him, as if it would not be the height of folly and
weakness, and overturn of the whole rational world and all the modesties
of nature. But yet, so long as it evaporated in a harmless sigh like
this, it hurt no one,--not Laurie, who perhaps loved his wanderings all
the better for that soft want in them; and not her, as she doubled down
the page at that point with a half-laugh. And when he came home the
first place he went to was the Square. To be sure, such a friendship put
all thoughts of marrying out of Laurie’s head, as Mrs. Suffolk, who
thought everybody should marry, sometimes deplored. ‘Unless you send him
away, padrona, he will always be just as he is. He will never think of
any other kind of life,’ she would say to her friend. ‘My dear, he has
no money to marry on,’ the padrona would say,--and so Laurie’s heart had
always found a home and every kind of support and consolation and
sympathy in Fitzroy Square.
And, to tell the truth, the money had been rather a difficult point with
him now and then. To live upon two hundred a-year when you have been
brought up a Renton of Renton, is a matter which requires a great deal
of consideration. But Laurie, fortunately for himself, had no expensive
tastes, and he painted some pictures, and, what was more remarkable,
sold some; and even found himself on the line at the Academy, thus
carrying out his highest dreams. But it did not give him the
gratification, nor cause the stir he had once anticipated. It was a
small picture, a little bit of Italian air and sunshine, and Slasher
gave it a little paragraph all to itself in the ‘Sword;’ but the people
whom he had once pictured to himself finding out his name in the
catalogue, and calling heaven and earth to witness that Laurie Renton
had done something at last, had by this time forgotten all about Laurie
Renton, or he had forgotten them, which came to the same thing. And
candidly in his soul, Laurie allowed, that had not old Welby been on the
hanging committee, probably it never would have reached ‘the line;’ and
had not Slasher been a friend of his, would never have been noticed in
the ‘Sword.’ But it sold for a hundred pounds, which was always an
advantage. The picture was called ‘Feliciello, on Tiberio,’ and was the
picture of a dark-faced Capriote guide, on one of the highest points of
his island, pointing out to a fair English girl the points in the
wonderful landscape round. It was Edie Severn, who had never been there,
with her golden hair streaming round her, who was the English girl. But
handsome Feliciello had been studied on the spot. And Mr. Rich of
Richmont,--always a great patron of the fine arts,--gave Laurie a
hundred pounds for it, and thought it one of his greatest bargains.
‘This picture has a story,’ he would say to his guests; ‘it was painted
by a gentleman, the son of one of my neighbours in the country, a man
who had never been brought up to make his living by art. It is quite a
romance; but I hear matters are settled, and that he has come into his
share of the money, and will paint no more, and I think I was very lucky
to secure this. My daughter, Lady Horsman, will tell you all about it.’
‘About the picture painted by a gentleman?’ Nelly would say, on being
questioned. ‘Most painters that I know are gentlemen. Papa means to
infer that he is not much of a painter, I suppose.’ For Lady Horsman was
not fond of the Rentons, and had never cared to cultivate their society.
‘If you get my lady on painters she’ll talk till midnight,’ Sir George
said out of his moustache. He did not know the difference between a
sign-post and a Titian, and thought the one quite as pretty as the
other; but he was the head of one of the oldest families in Christendom,
and Master of the Hounds in his county, and a great many other
grandeurs; and, so far as I know, Nelly had the full value for her fifty
thousand pounds.
This, however, is a digression a long way out of Fitzroy Square. Laurie
went to the padrona with his story, and found her still in a state of
excitement over Alice’s letter,--the second since the event,--with
something in it about Dovecote, which was the last new possibility. She
had just been taken to see it, and her letter was full of an
enthusiastic description of its beauties. ‘Think, mamma, of a lovely
little house close to Renton, with a lawn sloping to the river, and a
cow, and a pony-carriage, and I don’t know what,’ the young wife wrote
in her delight. ‘And Frank thinks he may afford himself a hunter, and
there is the sweetest honeysuckle room for Edie and you!’ The padrona,
being mother to the being upon whom this glorious prospect was opening,
was more interested at first in the Dovecote than in anything Laurie had
to say.
‘To think one has only to take the train and be with her in an
hour,--after being so far away for,--a lifetime!’ the padrona said, with
tears in her eyes.
‘Only six years,’ said Laurie; ‘but never mind; after Alice has had her
turn perhaps you will think of me.’
‘When you know I always think of you!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘it becomes you
to be _exigeant_, Laurie! and you are not going to have a cow, and a
pony-carriage, and everything that is most delightful on the face of the
earth. Think of Alice having a cow! You are so terribly _blasé_, it does
not seem to strike you. And Edie is out, the child, so that there is no
one to be glad but me.’
‘It does not strike me at all,’ said Laurie. ‘If she had a dozen cows, I
think I could bear it. But some day I must take you to see Dovecote,
padrona, since you like it so much.’
‘I wish they had had Feliciello,’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘if one had known
you were all to be so well off,--it would have pleased Frank.’
‘Frank will like some of those vile chromos just as well,’ said Laurie.
‘I’ll buy him a few, I think. And I mean to bring Ben to see you
to-night; then you will know us all. Not that there will be any intense
gratification in that; but you’ll like Ben. He is made of different
stuff from the rest of us. There is more in him. He is not so cheeky as
Frank; and he is another sort of fellow, to be sure, from a
good-for-nothing like me.’
‘Laurie, there is something the matter,’ said the padrona, turning upon
him with her palette in her hand. She knew all his tones like the notes
in music, and heard the far-off quiver of one of his fits of despondency
already vibrating in the quiet. ‘Is not this as good for you as for the
rest?’
‘Oh, yes, quite as good,’ he said abruptly, with his eyes on her work.
‘You are putting too much yellow in that light.’
‘Am I? but that is not the question. Laurie, never mind the light, but
tell me what is wrong.’
‘I must mind the light,’ he said. ‘If I can’t put you right when you get
into a mess, what is the good of me? It’s all wrong and it’s all right,
padrona mia, and I don’t know that it matters much one way or another;
but I don’t quite like your shadows. With that tone of light they should
have more blue in them,’ he went on, gazing at the picture and shading
his eyes with his hand.
‘But it will make a great difference in your life,’ said Mrs. Severn,
putting down her tools and drawing a chair near to where he sat.
‘That is just it,’ he said; ‘it will make no difference to speak of. It
is a great thing for Ben; and for Frank, too, it will be everything. You
can see that clearly. But what difference will it make to me? More money
to spend, perhaps, and better rooms to live in; but no sort of expansion
or widening-out of life. That’s not possible, you know. It was put a
stop to once, and no change that I know of can effect it now.’
‘You cannot mean to reproach me, Laurie?’ said the padrona.
‘No,’ he said, still fixedly gazing at the picture; ‘I don’t reproach
you. Being you, perhaps you could have done nothing else. I am not
complaining of anybody; but this is how it is,--you see it for
yourself.’
‘Laurie, listen to me,’ she said, with eagerness, laying her hand on his
arm. ‘I have wanted to speak to you for long, and never liked to begin
the subject. You must make an effort to break this spell. I did not say
a word as long as you were poor,--for what could you do?--and I thought
I was always some consolation to you; but now that you have money
enough, and can make a new beginning,--Laurie, do you know, I think it
would be better for you to go away from me.’
‘What, go away again?’ he said, with a half-smile, ‘as I did when I went
to Rome? No, there is no such occasion now.’
‘Of course there is no such occasion now,--that dream has passed away,
as all dreams do,--but, Laurie, for that very reason I speak. Even what
you were so foolish as to wish then you don’t wish now.’
She made a momentary pause, but he gave no answer. It was quite true. He
was not in love with her any longer,--though she was the creature
dearest to him in the world. Nor did he any longer want to appropriate
or bind her closer to himself. He would not have admitted this change in
words, but it was true.
‘I don’t think in the least that you have ceased to care for me,’ she
continued; ‘but it is different,--it is not in that way. And you are
getting not to care much what happens. We talk over it, and come to our
conclusions; and after that, good and evil are much the same to you.
That is why I think you should go away,--not to Italy, as you did
before, but out of this neighbourhood, to some place like the one you
used to live in, and go back into the world.’
‘Why, I wonder?’ said Laurie. ‘The world and I had never much to say to
each other. And at least I have some comfort in my life here.’
‘Too much, a great deal,’ said the padrona, with a smile. ‘You know you
can always come to me, whether it is a pin that pricks, or a storm that
overtakes you. I am fond of you; and you can always reckon on my
sympathy.’
‘Always!’ said Laurie, stooping to kiss the hand she had laid on his
arm.
‘Yes; but that is not good for you,’ said Mrs. Severn, hastily
withdrawing her hand. ‘Now is the moment to preach you Helen Suffolk’s
little sermon. She says you will never marry so long as you are
constantly here.’
‘Marry!’ said Laurie, looking at her, and then turning his head away
with a half-contemptuous impatience.
‘Well, marry. Why should not I say so? If I have stood in your way,
unwillingly, unfortunately, once, why should that shut up all your life?
Laurie, if I were to ask you to reconsider all this, and make a
difference,--for my sake?’
‘I could not marry even for your sake,’ he said, turning to her with a
sudden laugh; ‘though there is no other inducement I would do so much
for. Tell me something else to do to show my devotion, and let
everything go on as it was before.’
‘Not as it was before,’ said Mrs. Severn. ‘This atmosphere might be good
enough for you when you were poor. At least, it did you no harm; but now
I want you to go back into the world.’
‘You want me to be wretched, I think,’ said Laurie. ‘I have got used to
this atmosphere, as you call it; and it suits me. But I have forgotten
all about the world. What have I done that I should be sent back among
people who have forgotten me, to mix myself up with things in which I
take no interest? Padrona, in this you do not show your usual wisdom.
Let us return to the question of the light.’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘It is because I am anxious about you that I speak.
This is such a point in your life; a new beginning,--anything you please
to make it,--and you feel yourself how hard it is to think that it will
make no difference. Laurie, what I want you to do is to break this
thread of association, and turn your back upon the past.’
He turned and looked at her as she spoke, and their eyes met;--hers
earnest and steady; his with a smile, which was full of tenderness, and
a kind of playful melancholy dawning in them. ‘But that is not what I
want you to do,’ he said, the smile growing as he met her gaze. She
turned away with a little impatient exclamation. It was not the kind of
reply she had looked for.
‘You are provoking, Laurie,’ she said. ‘You have regained the ground you
stood on seven years ago, and why should you refuse to recall the
circumstances too?’
‘And make the seven years as if they had never been?’
‘I think you might, in a great measure,’ said the padrona, with a little
flush on her cheek, ‘though you laugh. Nothing has happened in those
seven years. Yes, I grant you, you have felt some things as you never
did before, and learned a great many things. But nothing has happened,
Laurie. Nothing has occurred either to tie up your freedom in any way,
or to leave rankling recollections in your mind. There has been no fact
which could fetter you. Indeed,--for all that has come and gone,--your
life might be safer to begin anew than that of any man I know.’
‘Well, that is hard!’ said Laurie, with more energy than he had yet
shown; ‘the present is not much, the future I take no particular
interest in, and you ask me to agree that there is nothing in the past!
What has been the good of me altogether, then? Nobody will say that it
has been worth a man’s while to live in order to produce ‘Feliciello.’
Padrona, this is very poor consolation,--the poorest I ever knew you to
give.’
‘I did not mean it so, Laurie.’
‘No, you did not mean it,’ he said; ‘you did not think that the
past,--such as it is,--is all I have. Of course I might now go back to
Kensington Gore, as you tell me, or somewhere else; and go to a few
parties next season, perhaps. Fine fate! Didn’t I tell you how I used
to anticipate people finding my name in the Academy catalogue, and
standing and staring at Laurie Renton’s picture? and now I can’t, for
the life of me, remember who the people were I so thought of! That’s
encouraging for a return to old ways. Let’s say no more about it,’ said
Laurie, getting up and following his friend to her easel. ‘After all,
the boys and Edie shall have some pleasure out of the money, and then it
will not be quite lost.’
‘The boys and Edie must not get into the way of looking to you for
pleasure,’ said the padrona, quickly; ‘neither for you nor them would
that be good.’
‘There it is now!’ cried Laurie, ‘proof upon proof how little I am the
better for what has happened. You cannot work for ever, padrona; but if
I had all the gold-mines that ever were dreamt of you would not take
anything from me; and what is the good of my having it, I should like to
know?’
‘No, I would not take anything from you,’ she said, with a momentary
smile; but it was a suggestion that made her tremble in her fortitude
whenever it was made. ‘Laurie,’ she said, with a little gasp, turning to
him for sympathy, ‘when I cannot work I hope I shall die.’
‘But one cannot die when one pleases, that is the worst of it,’ said
Laurie. ‘I hope you will, padrona mia,--and I too,--and then, perhaps,
one might have a better chance for a new life.’
This was not cheerful talk for a new beginning; but the amusing thing
about Laurie, and, indeed, about the pair thus strangely united, was,
that after all this had been uttered and done with they both became
quite cheerful; and, a quarter of an hour afterwards, were planning an
expedition to Dovecote, taking Renton by the way, with all that
enjoyment of the idea of a country excursion which is so strong in the
laborious dweller in towns. The vision of gliding rivers and autumnal
trees swept over Mrs. Severn’s mind like a refreshing wind, carrying
away all the vapours. For a time, she thought no more either of that
twilight life which Laurie had chosen for himself, and of which she felt
herself partly the cause, nor of her own anxieties, but went on
painting, reducing the yellow tone in her light, and modifying her
shadows, and full of cheerful discussion of the day and the way of
going. To the moment its work or its thought; and to the next, why,
another thought, another piece of work; and so forth, as pleases God.
This blessing of temperament,--special gift of heaven to its
beloved,--belonged more or less to both. The artist-woman had it in its
perfection, which was the reason why she had got through so much hard
labour and so many struggles with eye undimmed and spirit unbroken; and
Laurie had it in a degree which had done much to lead to the
unsatisfactoriness and imperfection of his life, which is a strange
enough paradox, and yet true. For in the padrona, this power of
dismissing care and living in the hour was accompanied, as it often is,
by the strongest vitality and energy of constitution, by a natural
delight and pleasure in exertion, and by the perpetual, never absent
spur of necessity. Whereas in Laurie’s case it was associated with the
meditative, contemplative soul; the mind that is more prone to thinking
than to doing; a slower amount of life in the veins, and an existence
disengaged from necessities and responsibilities. Temperament had more
to do with the matter than had that early blunder in his life for which
the padrona never forgave herself. ‘If I had not stood in his way he
would have made a life for himself, like other men,’ she would say to
herself, with an ache in her heart, yet with that touch of tender
gratitude to the man who had it in him to pour himself out like a
libation on her path, which a woman cannot but feel, however undesired
the sacrifice may be. I am afraid to acknowledge it, but the truth is
that such a libation is very grateful to a woman. There is in it the
most exquisite, tragical, heart-rending pleasure. Not that one would not
regret it with all one’s heart and soul, and do everything that one
could, like Lancelot, to turn aside the rising passion. But even to
Lancelot was not that self-offering of the lily-maid, though he would
have given his life to prevent it, an exquisite sweetness and
sorrowfulness, a combination of the deepest pain and gratification of
which the soul is capable? Such an act raises the doer of it,--be it man
or woman,--out of the level of ordinary humanity, and envelopes the
receiver of the offering in the same maze of tenderest, most melancholy
glory. Something of this feeling the padrona had for her Laurie, who had
given her his life like a flower, without price or hope of price in this
world. And yet, I think, temperament was at the bottom of it, and the
sacrifice, and the sweetness of it, and all the subdued tones of his
existence which had followed, were more to him than the brighter
daylight colours of ordinary existence, even though he might feel the
absence of those fuller tones now and then, once in a way.
But to some extent Laurie acted upon Mrs. Severn’s advice. As luck would
have it, his old rooms at Kensington Gore, having passed through many
hands in the interval, proved to be vacant about this time. And Laurie
secured them, and fitted up all his old fittings, his carved brackets
and velvet hangings, and all the contrivances that had been so pleasant
to him; and had his bow-window once more full of flowers, and looked out
once more upon the gay park and the stream of carriages as from an
opera-box. But the ladies who looked up at his window once had passed
away and given place to others, who knew not Laurie, or had forgotten
him, and asked each other who was the man who stared so from that
window? And from Kensington Gore to Fitzroy Square is a very long walk
to be taken every day. And though, to be sure, there are plenty of
studios about Kensington, into which an amateur may drop, yet these are
grand studios, flanked by drawing-rooms, with ladies to be called upon,
and the flavour of society about. It is true that Suffolk lives in that
refined neighbourhood now, having made very rapid progress since the
days when Mr. Rich bought ‘The Angles,’ and Laurie put the studio in
order for the reception of the patron, and got cobwebs on his coat.
‘They were very nice, those old days, after all!’ Mrs. Suffolk says,
when they talk it over; but they have now a spruce man-servant,--more
spruce, though not so well instructed as old Forrester, Mr. Welby’s
man,--to move a picture that has to be moved, and open the door to the
patrons and patronesses. And Laurie for one, to whom a man-servant is
not the badge of grandeur and success which it is to Mr. Suffolk, rather
preferred, I fear, the state of things in the old days, when they all
clustered about Fitzroy Square.
But the padrona has not removed from No. 375, though she has been
tempted and plagued to do so on all sides. Frank, who would prefer to
have a mother-in-law (since such a thing he must have) in a habitable
part of the town, is very energetic as to the advantage it will be to
Edie when she grows up. And Alice recommends it with wistful eyes, as so
much nicer for the air, not liking to say a word against the home of her
youth. Mrs. Severn thinks it would be unkind to Mr. Welby to withdraw
from him; and it would cost a great deal of money; and then there would
be new carpets wanted for new rooms, and quantities of things; and, last
of all, would not it be a still greater clog upon Laurie and hindrance
to him, in the possibility of his heart disengaging itself from all the
pleasant bonds of the past? I think, however, that the thing which will
finally resolve the point will be Frank’s success in the competition for
a Foreign Office clerkship, for which he is going in. None of his people
have any doubt of his success; and, in that case, the boy may be trusted
to make his mother’s life a burden to her so long as she remains in
Fitzroy Square. But what is to be done with Mr. Welby, and Forrester, to
whom it would now be impossible to live out of sight of Edie and the
boys, and withdraw themselves from the gradually increasing authority of
the padrona, I don’t know.
Laurie’s sketch of the ‘Three Fairy Princes’ turned up out of a
packing-box when he took back his belongings to Kensington Gore; and he
hung it in the placer of honour over his mantelpiece. There anybody may
see young Frank pushing forth towards the Indian towers and minarets,
with a coronet hanging in a haze over the distant prospect; and Laurie
himself, with his goods and chattels hung about him, and his lay-figure
gazing blank over his shoulders, trudging towards the pepper-boxes of
the National Gallery; and Ben scaling the rocks, like Mr. Longfellow’s
Alpine hero, with the nymph on the summit beckoning him,--not to eternal
snows and supernatural excellence, but to Renton and the House of
Commons. Frank has not got the coronet; nor Laurie, except in the very
mildest accidental way, the glories of the Academy. But who is to tell
what is waiting for Ben? At least, there is only another chapter to do
it in, and the story is all but told.
CHAPTER XVII.
CONCLUSION.
The day of Hillyard’s visit was full of trial and excitement to Mary. To
live in a household where everything is talked of freely, with the
consciousness of having various matters of the deepest interest entirely
to yourself, is not an agreeable position in any case; and to feel
yourself thrilling through every vein with the concussion of a recent
shock, while yet you are compelled to put on the most commonplace
composure, is more trying still. Mary, however, had been used to it for
some time back, if that was any alleviation. She only had known, or
rather suspected, the ancient connexion between Ben Renton and the
beautiful Millicent. She alone had had the excitement of watching their
meeting after so long an interval. She only had understood the passage
of arms between the two; and she had witnessed their parting, which to
her was of ten-fold more interest than even the great interest which the
family had in common. And now, her spectatorship in Ben’s romance being
over, here had suddenly sprung up a romance of her own, so completely
beyond all expectation that even now she could scarcely believe it had
been real. Mary could not have betrayed Ben’s secret to any one; but had
her mother been at hand, or even had her godmother been less
pre-occupied, I doubt whether she could have kept poor Hillyard’s to
herself. For it was her own, and in the excitement of the moment she
might not have remembered that it was the man’s also, and a humiliation
to him. But, as it was, poor Mary had not the opportunity of relieving
her mind. Mrs. Westbury was away, and Alice took her share in nursing
Mrs. Renton, entering into it with a certain enjoyment of the task.
There were even moments when she thought Mary unsympathetic, and was
sorry for ‘poor grandmamma,’ bringing with her a fresh interest in the
ailments and the alleviations, such as was scarcely possible to the
nurse who had been going through it all for seven years. Mary
consequently at this extraordinary moment of her existence had lost all
her habitual quiet, and all those possibilities of communication which
had ever been open to her. She herself and her personal being was
floated away, as it were, on the current of ‘the Frank Rentons.’ They
had come into the house like an inundation, and left no room for
anything but their own cheerful beginning of life,--their arrangements,
their new house, their children, what they were going to do. The two
women who had lived there so long in the silence were carried away by
the vigorous young tide; and Mary, hiding her individual concerns in her
own mind, lived for the rest of that evening a strange, abstracted,
feverish sort of existence, like a creature in a dream, hearing the
cheerful voices round her, and the lights shining, and figures flitting
about, but only awaking to take any part in it when she was called upon
energetically to come out of her abstraction. The position altogether
was so strange that she kept asking herself which scene was real and
which was a dream;--either this was the reality,--this evening picture,
with Frank talking to his mother on the sofa, and Alice working in the
golden circle of the lamplight, and the urn bubbling, and gleams of
reflexion shining from the tea-table in the corner; or else the other
scene, with Hillyard standing sunburnt, and bearded, and impassioned,
telling her he had loved before he even saw her,--saying, if some time,
any time she should want a man’s love and support---- One thing was
certain, they could not both be real; she had been dreaming them,--or
else she was dreaming now.
Nor yet was Mary’s excitement over for the night. When the evening post
came in, a letter was brought to her, which at the first glance she saw
was in Ben’s handwriting. Well! there was nothing surprising in that. Of
course Ben would write, though she had not expected it so soon. But the
contents of the note were such as to raise to a climax her sense of
being in some feverish dream. This is what Ben said:--
‘DEAR MARY,--I want to speak half-a-dozen words to you before I go.
I have heard something to-day which has taken me very much by
surprise, and I cannot leave England without seeing you. But I
don’t want to disturb my mother with a hurried visit and another
parting. If you will be at the beech-tree on the river-walk
to-morrow morning at eight, I will come down by the first train and
meet you there. Don’t refuse me. It is of great importance. In
haste,
‘Yours, B. R.’
Mary’s head went round and round as she sat,--hearing Frank’s voice
talking all the while, and Alice pouring out the tea,--and read this
note. The question changed now, and seemed to be,--they or Ben; which
was the phantom? But the paper and the writing were very real,--so real
that she could see it had been written in excitement, and was blurred,
and betokened a scratching and uncomfortable pen, which is a thing that
no imagination would be likely to invent. When she had put the
extraordinary note away in her pocket,--fortunately she had not said out
loud, ‘Here is a letter from Ben,’ as on any other day she would have
done,--Mary’s mind went hopelessly into abstraction. She gave up the
tea-making to Alice gratefully and without an effort, though in general
she did not like her prerogatives invaded. She never uttered a word to
help on the conversation. She had to be recalled as from a distance,
when anybody spoke to her. Things had come to such a pitch that she
seemed to lose her individual consciousness altogether. To have violent
love made her one day by a man whom she scarcely knew, and to meet her
cousin Ben clandestinely the next morning by the great beech, to talk
over something of importance, which concerned only her and him, and
nobody else in the family,--the earth seemed to be going off its pivot
altogether to Mary. She felt that now nothing would surprise her. If
Mrs. Renton had suddenly proposed to her to walk to town, or Frank that
she should swim across the river, it would have seemed to her perfectly
natural. But to meet Ben by stealth at the great beech at eight o’clock!
Could she have mistaken the words? For one moment a sort of gleam of
eldritch fear came across her, and a reminiscence of the amazing manner
in which the familiar forms of the nursery arranged themselves in the
mind of little Alice in Wonderland in the story. Could it be that Ben
was to start on his long journey to-morrow by the first train, and could
the great beech be the name of the ship? Mary was so completely thrown
off her balance, that this idea actually occurred to her. And then she
felt that they must all have remarked that she had got a letter, and had
thrust it stealthily into her pocket. Altogether, the evening swam over
her somehow, she could not tell how. And then there was the stir of
Davison’s entrance, and Mrs. Renton’s going to bed. And then Frank
disappeared to smoke his cigar, and Alice, finding her companion
uncommunicative, sat down at the piano, and began to play softly to
herself, as she had been wont in the old days at home; and silence,
broken only by sounds which helped to increase all the mists, and made
her feel a safety and comfort in the retirement of her thoughts, fell
upon the quiet house.
Next morning Mary was awake and up before any one was stirring. She did
not herself think that she had slept all the night; but she was still
young enough to consider an hour or two’s wakefulness a great matter.
And she was as much afraid of Ben’s visit being found out, as if he had
been the most illegitimate of visitors. She was out soon after six,
while the grass was still quite wet with dew, and went wandering up and
down the river-walk like a ghost, under the cloistered shade of those
great trees which, as yet, let no sunshine through. There was something
in the air at that early hour which told that summer was waning, and
Mary was chilly with nervousness, which had all the effect of cold. She
went all the way down to the river-side, and basked in the sunshine
which lay full on the open bit of green bank, by way of overcoming the
shivering which had seized her. The world was so still, the birds so
noisy,--which rather heightens than impairs the stillness,--the paths so
utterly vacant and suggestive, that fancy continually caught glimpses of
something disappearing behind the trees. Now it would seem a gliding
dream-figure, now the last sweep of a robe just getting out of sight.
The ghostliness of the early morning is different, but not less
profound, than that of the night; and at six o’clock the Renton woods
were as mysterious, as dim under the great shadows of the trees, as any
enchanted wood. The sunshine went all round them, drying up the dew on
the open bank, and chasing the mists and chills of night; but the
river-walk was all brown and grey, and full of clear, mystical distances
and windings, broken by upright shafts of trees. Any one might have
appeared suddenly at such an hour in such a place. People out of books,
people out of one’s own straining fancy, people from the other world.
And though it was Ben, and no other, for whom Mary Westbury was waiting,
yet her imagination, over-excited, was ready to see anything. And she
was alarmed by every waving leaf or bough that swayed in the morning
air. If anybody should discover this tryst! If it should be known that
Ben had come in this sweet inconceivable sort of way to see her! Had he
been a tabooed lover, whose discovery would have involved all sorts of
perils, Mary could not have been more afraid.
It was half-past seven before he came,--as indeed she might have
known,--since that was the earliest moment at which any one could come
by the first train. She could see him coming for a long way, making his
way among the trees. He had not come in by any gate, but through some
illegitimate byway known to the Renton boys and the poachers, so lawless
were all the accessories of this extraordinary stealthy meeting. He came
along rapidly, making himself audible by, now and then, the sound of the
gravel sent flying by his foot, or the crackle of a fallen branch on the
path. And then he came in sight, walking very quickly, with a look of
abstraction, wrapped in his own thoughts. He was close upon the bank
before he caught sight of Mary, whose grey gown was easily lost sight of
among the branches,--then he quickened his pace, and came forward
eagerly.
‘You here,’ he said, ‘Mary? I thought I should be too early for you,’
and held out both his hands for her.
‘I was so much surprised,--so anxious to know what it was. I have been
out for nearly an hour, I think,’ said Mary. ‘I could not sleep.’
‘Did I startle you?’ said Ben. ‘Not half so much, I am sure, as I was
startled myself. But if I have made you uneasy I will never forgive
myself,’ he went on, looking closely into her face.
What could have made that difference in his look? He had always been
kind,--certainly he had always been kind,--but he had never looked at
her before in that wistful, anxious way. He had been protecting,
superior, affectionate; but such was not his expression now.
‘Oh, it does not matter!’ said Mary; ‘but, of course, since it is
something important enough to bring you from town like this,--and at
this hour---- Tell me, please, and put me out of pain.’
What he did was to draw her arm closely through his own. ‘Come this
way,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to be seen or interrupted. There is a
corner down here where we shall be quite safe. It was very good of you,
Mary, to come.’
‘Oh, Ben,’ she cried, ‘don’t talk so, you frighten me! You never were so
gentle, so soft to me before. Tell me what it is. It must be something
terrible to make you look like this. What is wrong?’
‘I don’t know if there is anything wrong,’ he said. ‘It depends upon
your feelings altogether, Mary; only I never had thought of,--anything
of the kind,--never! It came upon me like a thunder-clap. To be sure. I
might have known. You could not but be as sweet and as pleasant in the
eyes of others as you were in mine----’
‘Ben, don’t talk riddles, I entreat of you,’ said Mary. ‘I cannot make
this out to-day. A shadow would frighten me to-day. I have had too much
to bear,--too much,--‘
‘Sit down here,’ he said, tenderly; ‘you must not be frightened. There
is nothing to hurt you. It is only me that it can hurt. Mary, Hillyard
came to me yesterday, and said,--I suppose by this time you must know
what he said?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, first with a violent blush, and then growing
suddenly hot.
‘Of course, I ought to have known it,’ said Ben. ‘I used to read him
your letters, like an ass, never thinking. I was furious yesterday; I
thought it presumption and insolence. But, of course, that was nonsense.
The man is as good as I am. The fact is, I suppose I thought that no
other man but myself had any right to think of you.’
‘Ben!’ Mary cried, trembling with a sudden passion, ‘you never thought
of me! How can you say so? or what is it you would have me understand? I
feel as if you were mocking me,--and yet you would not come all this
way, surely, to mock me!’
‘Then, I did not think at all,’ he went on, without any direct answer.
‘I felt that no man had any right,--and I was a fool for thinking so.
Mary, the fact is, it ought to be you and I.’
‘What ought to be you and I?’ she faltered, lost in confusion and
amazement.
He was standing before her, not lover-like, but absorbed, pressing his
subject, and paying no special regard to her. ‘It ought to be you and I
to build up the old house. No. I cannot think any man has a right to
come in and interfere. But only just there is this one thing to be said.
Whatever is for your happiness, Mary, I will carry out with all my
might. If you should set your heart on one thing or another, it shall be
done; but still that does not affect the question,--it ought to be you
and me.’
‘For what?’ she asked again.
‘For what? Oh, for more than I can tell,’ said Ben; ‘to build up this
old house, as I told you,--to get through life. I must always have felt
it, though I did not know. And here is this fellow come in with his wild
backwoods way, and thinks he can win you off-hand. I don’t say a word if
it is for your happiness; but I know it should be you and me.’
And then there was a pause, and Ben walked up and down the little vacant
space in front of the seat he had placed her in, with his eyes bent on
the ground, and his face moody and full of trouble. As for Mary, she sat
and gazed at him, half-conscious only, worn out by excitement and
wonder, and the succession of shocks of one kind and another which she
had been receiving, but with a soft sense of infinite ease and
consolation stealing over her confused heart. It was that relief from
pain which feels to the sufferer like positive blindness. She had not
even known how deep the pain in her was until she felt it stealing in
upon her,--this ineffable ease and freedom from it, which is more sweet
than actual joy.
‘Ben,’ she said at last, when she could get breath. ‘It is very
difficult for me to follow you, and you confuse me so that I don’t know.
But, about Mr. Hillyard you are all wrong. I never saw him till Monday.
I never thought about him at all. I was very sorry. But it is not as if
I could blame myself. I was not to blame.’
‘To blame! How could you be to blame?’ said Ben, and he came and stood
before her again, gazing at her with that strange look which Mary did
not recognise in him, and could not meet.
‘I should never have mentioned it to any one,’ she said. ‘I would not
now, though you question me so. But only it is best you should not have
anything on your mind. Is,--that,--all?’
It was not coquetry which suggested the question; it was her reason that
began utterly to fail her. She did not seem to know what it was he had
said besides,--though he had said something.
‘Ah!’ he cried vehemently, and then paused and subdued himself, ‘all
except my answer, Mary,’ he said, softly stooping over her.
‘Your answer? You have not asked me anything. Oh, Ben,’ she cried,
suddenly getting up from her seat, with her cheeks burning and her eyes
wet, ‘let there be no more of this. It was all the feeling of the
moment. You thought something had happened which never, never could
happen, and you felt a momentary grudge. Don’t tell me it was anything
else. Do you think I forget what you told me once up at the beech about
her?’ Mary cried, waving her hand towards The Willows. ‘You did not mean
to tell me; but I knew. And the other day---- When you say this sort of
thing to me it is unkind of you; it is disrespectful to me. I have my
pride like other women. Let us speak no more of it, but say good-bye,
and I shall go home.’
‘Then you do not even think me worthy of an answer?’ said Ben; and the
two stood confronting each other in that supreme duel and conflict of
the two existences about to become one, which never loses its interest;
she flushed, excited, suspicious; he steadily keeping to his point,
refusing to be led away from it. And why Mary should have resisted,
standing thus wildly at bay,--and why, when she could stand no longer,
she should have sunk down on the seat from which she had risen, in a
passion of tears, is more than I can tell. But that finally Ben did get
his answer, and that it was, as anybody must have foreseen, eminently
satisfactory to him at last, is a matter about which there can be no
doubt. I do not know even whether he offered any explanations, or
justified himself in the matter of Millicent. I am inclined to think,
indeed, that at that moment he took no notice of it whatever; but only
insisted on that reply, which, when nature was worn out and could stand
against it no longer, came. But the victor did go into certain
particulars, as with Mary’s arm drawn closely through his he led her
again up that bank which, in so much excitement and uncertainty,
half-an-hour before he had led her down.
‘I can’t tell you the fright I was in yesterday,’ he said. ‘It suddenly
flashed upon me in a moment how mad I had been. To leave you here so
long, open to any assault, and to be such an ass as to bring a man down
who had eyes in his head, and was not an idiot?’
‘I wish you would not swear,’ said Mary. ‘The strange thing is that you
should like me, and yet think me of so small account that any man,--a
man I had only known for three days----’
‘Hush!’ he said, drawing her to him. ‘When a man’s eyes are opened first
to the thought that another man has gone off express to rob him of his
jewel, do you think he pauses to be reasonable?’ and then they looked at
each other and were silent, there being more expression in that than in
speech.
‘But the jewel was no jewel till yesterday,’ said Mary, making the kind
of objection which women love to make, ‘and who knows but it may be
paste to-morrow?’
‘My dear,’ said Ben, ‘my only woman in the world! might not a man have
been beguiled to follow a Will-o’-the-wisp till he cursed and hated
such lights, and chose darkness instead,--and then all at once wake up
to see that his moon had risen, and that the night was safe and sweet as
day?’
I suppose it was the only bit of poetry which Ben Renton was ever guilty
of in his life; and it was perfectly successful. And they went on and
continued their walk to the beech-tree. Mary’s eyes were blind with
sweet tears; but then, what did it matter? was not he there to be eyes
to her, through the winding of the tender morning path? And as they
reached the trees, the sunshine burst into the wood all at once with
something like a shout of triumph. If it was not a shout, it came to
precisely the same thing, and caught a branch here and a twig there, and
made it into burnished gold, and lit up the far distance and cloistered
shade into all the joyous animation and moving stir of life.
‘Must you go now?’ Mary said, clinging to him a little closer, ‘must it
still be secret? is no one to see you now?’
‘I must still go away,’ he said, ‘no help for that, Mary; but in the
meantime I am going home with you to tell them all about it. I shall
still catch my ship if I go by the next train.’
He was received with subdued consternation by the household, which
jumped instantly to the conclusion that something had happened; but
there is an instinct in the domestic mind which is almost infallible in
such matters; and before Mrs. Renton had even been told of the
unexpected arrival of her son, Davison had said to the housekeeper,
‘He’s come down at the last to settle it all with Miss Mary. Now didn’t
I tell you?’ and Willis had recorded his opinion that, on the whole,
there wasn’t nothing to say again it. ‘A little bit of money never comes
amiss,’ he said; ‘but she was used bad in the will, never to have no
compensation. And, on the whole, I agrees with Ben.’
Such was the decision of the house, conveyed in language, kind, if
familiar, just five minutes after the entry by the window into the
dining-room, where the breakfast-table was prepared for the family, of
the betrothed pair. Mary’s gown was wet with the dew, and she ran
up-stairs to change it, leaving Ben alone to receive the greetings of
his brothers, who appeared at the same moment. ‘I thought you couldn’t
resist coming down again, old fellow, before you left for good,’ Frank
said in her hearing, as she rushed to the covert and sanctuary of her
own room. He was not so discriminating as the intelligent community
below stairs.
And then, in that strange golden forenoon, which seemed at the same time
one hasty moment and a long day, full of events, Mrs. Renton, amazed,
found her son again stooping over her, and received the astonishing
news. It was some time before she could take it in. ‘What,’ she said,
‘Mary? I will never believe it is Mary. You are making fun of me, Ben.’
‘It is a great deal better than fun, mother,’ he said. ‘I could not go
till it was settled; and now there is only ten minutes or so to kiss us
and bless us, and thank me for giving you such a daughter. She has been
a daughter to you already for so long.’
‘Of course she has,’ said the bewildered woman. ‘Mary! it’s like your
sister. I can’t think it’s quite right, do you know, Ben. I should as
soon have thought of you marrying Alice, or----’
‘Frank might object to that, my dear mother,’ said Ben.
‘But, Mary--you are sure you are not making one of your jokes? And after
all, I can’t think what you see in her, Ben,’ Mrs. Renton said, with a
little eagerness. ‘She was never very pretty,--not like that beautiful
Mrs. Rich, you know, or those sort of women,--and not even very young.
She must be seven-and-twenty, if she is a day. Let me see, Frank was
born in July, and she in the December after. She will be
seven-and-twenty on her next birthday. And nothing to make up for it----
’
‘Except that there is nobody else in the world,’ said Ben, smiling at
Mary, who had just come into the room.
‘Nobody else in the world! I don’t know what you mean. Not to say a word
against Mary, but you might have done a great deal better, Ben.’
‘And so he might, godmamma,’ said Mary, with the gravity of happiness,
though Ben had her hand in his.
‘Yes, my dear,’ said Mrs. Renton, in perfect good faith, ‘a great deal
better. You always have the sense to see things. If I were you, I would
reflect a little longer before I announced it, or did anything more in
the matter, Ben.’
The answer Ben made to this proposal was to draw his betrothed close to
his mother’s bedside within his own supporting arms. ‘Give her a kiss,
mamma, and say God bless you,’ he said, bending down his own face close
to Mary’s. And the mother, quite confused and bewildered, did as she was
told, crying a little, and not knowing what to think. And before any one
knew, Ben was gone again, off by express to join the steamer which
sailed from Liverpool that night. He had just time; everything belonging
to him having gone on before with poor Hillyard, who knew nothing about
this morning’s expedition. And before noon the episode was all over, and
the Frank Rentons once more in the foreground, and Mary reading the
newspaper as if such a wild inroad of romance into the midst of reality
had never been.
‘My dear, it is not that I am not as fond of you,--fonder of you than of
anybody,’ Mrs. Renton said, when poor Mary, for one moment, owing to a
paragraph about a shipwreck, fairly broke down; ‘but it does not seem
somehow as if it were quite proper. And we can’t shut our eyes to it
that he might have done better. It feels as if there was never to be
any satisfaction in the boys’ marriages. I had a fortune of my own, and
so had your grandmother; but everything now is going to sixes and
sevens----’
‘Don’t say anything more about it, godmamma,’ said Mary, with an
outburst of pent-up agitation, and the nervous panic that seizes a
weakened mind. ‘Oh, how can we tell what may happen in the meantime? Let
us say nothing more till he comes home.’
‘Well, to be sure, he might change his mind,’ said Mrs. Renton, as
Davison came in with her arrowroot. And for half-an-hour or so that
satisfactory conclusion, and the adding of another teaspoonful of port,
on account of the excitement she had been going through, put a stop to
the conversation, and gave Mary time to draw breath in peace.
But if the reader of this history hopes to be humoured by a shipwreck at
this late period of the narrative, it is a vain expectation. The winds
blew, and the sea rose, but Ben Renton got safely out to Canada, and
came safely home. I am sorry to have to say that his last great piece of
work did not pay nearly so well as he had expected it to do; and the
business, which he made over to Hillyard, was, owing to the state of the
colony at that moment, of less value than had been anticipated; but at
the same time patience alone was wanted to realise all possible hopes. I
have been obliged to ask the reader to take Ben’s success for granted
all along, as it would have been simply impossible to introduce details
of engineering enterprise into a work of this description; and, indeed,
to tell the truth, I fear I should not have sufficiently understood them
to set them forth with any distinctness. But whether Hillyard will have
patience, and keep up the energy which Ben put into the business, is a
very doubtful matter; and it is just as likely as not that he may turn
up again at the old club, which is the only luxury he keeps up, as
rough, as _insouciant_, as careless what becomes of him, as on the first
day Ben met him, after the weird of the Rentons had begun. Mary might
have made another man of him perhaps; but who knows? Temperament is
stronger than circumstance,--stronger than fortune,--stronger even than
love.
Ben Renton came home, as I have said, as safely as most men come home
from Canada. And everything occurred as it ought to have occurred. I
would add that they lived happy ever after, if there had been time to
make such a record. But the fact is, that it is too early yet to be
historical on that point; and for anything anybody can tell, the Rentons
may yet come to be very wretched, and give occasion for other chapters
of history; though, in common with all their friends, I sincerely hope
not. Benedict Renton of Renton stood for the county of Berks, in the
late election, with politics perhaps slightly tinged by his life in the
other world, but failed by a few votes, notwithstanding the interest
attaching to him,--Berks, like many other counties, being of the opinion
that a good, steady, reliable bumpkin, who will do whatever he is told,
is a more satisfactory legislator than a man who has spent his youth in
objectionable exercises, such as writing, and thinking, and moving about
the world. Frank Renton, true soldier and constitutional Tory, is one of
those who hold this opinion. But I do not despair of seeing Ben in
Parliament yet.
And thus the story ends; being like all stories, no history of life, but
only of a bit out of life,--the most amiable bit, the section of
existence which the world has accepted as its conventional type of life,
leaving all the profounder glooms and the higher lights apart. As in
heaven there can be no story-telling of the present, for happiness has
no story,--there, perhaps, for the first time, the mouth of the minstrel
may be opened to say or sing what is untellable by the frankest voice on
earth. But till then we must be content to break off after the fairy
chapter of life’s beginning, the history of Youth.
THE END.
LONDON:
Printed by STRANGEWAYS & WALDEN, Castle St. Leicester Sq.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Three Brothers Complete" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.