It has done Emanuel a world of good to have you here,” said Kathleen, on the morning of Christian’s leave-taking. “Of course it has been a delight to us both—but he has had a personal benefit from it, too. He works too hard. He carries such a burden of details about in his mind—by day and by night, for he sleeps badly and is forever dreaming of his work—that companionship with some new and attractive mind is of the greatest rest and help to him. And he is very fond of you.”
Christian nodded gratified acknowledgment of the words and their spirit, with a glow in his dark eyes. In little more than an hour he would be on his way to London—that mighty, almost fabulous goal of his lifelong dreams. He was already dressed for the journey, in a traveling-suit of rough, fawn-colored cloth, and as he sat at ease in the breakfast-room with his cousin’s wife, his glance wandered very often from her face to a pleased contemplation of these garments. They were what he individually liked best in the wonderful collection of clothes for which a fashionable tailor had come from London to measure him, and which were this moment being packed by the man up-stairs in bags and portmanteaus equally new. The tweeds enabled him to feel more like an Englishman than he had succeeded in doing before.
He smiled diffidently at her. “I am so excited about going,” he said, his voice wavering between exuberance and appeal—“and yet I ought to be thinking of nothing but my sorrow in leaving you dear people. But that will come to me soon enough—in a storm of homesickness—when once I find myself really alone.”
“Oh, I’ll not deny we expect alittlehomesickness,” she replied to him, cheerfully—“but it must not be enough to at all take the edge off your spirits. Oh, you’ll be vastly entertained and interested by all you see and hear. Young Lord Lingfield—you’ll be seeing him to-night at dinner—he will be greatly pleased to take you about, and properly introduce you; He will do it better than any other we can think of. He is not by any means an intellectual gladiator, but he is good-looking and amiable and he goes everywhere.”
“He is my relation, too, I think Emanuel said?”
“Let’s work it out—his grandfather’s sister was your grandmother. Yes, that is it. She was the Lady Clarissa Poynes, the sister of the old earl of Chobham, who used to wear the blue coat and brass buttons to the end of his days. So she would be the aunt of the present earl, and the grand-aunt of young Lingfield. You stand in exactly the same relationship to Lord Lingfield that you would to a son of Emanuel’s—if he had one, poor man!”
Christian had long since become sensible of the pathos which colored these references to the childlessness of the house. A tender instinct impelled him to hasten a diversion.
“And how strange it is!” he cried. “They are as close to me, these people, in blood as Emanuel is—and yet I care nothing for them whatever. I shall meet them, and know them, and not feel that I am bound to them at all—whereas Emanuel is like a brother to me, whom I have been with and loved all my life. And you,” he added, with a smile in his eyes—“you are more than any sister to me.”
“Well, then, let me talk to you like a sister,” she rejoined.
He thought he had not seen her before in precisely the mood which was discernible in her face and tone this morning. Outwardly she was as gay and light-hearted as ever, and certainly she had not seemed on any previous day to come so near being beautiful as well. The sense of sheer pleasure in being where she was, in listening to her and looking’ at her, and holding her affectionately bright attention for his own thoughts, was peculiarly strong in him to-day. But there was also the consciousness of a new gravity in her attitude toward him—a kind of yearning apprehension of dangers threatening him. He saw again in her eyes when she looked at him that likeness to his mother’s glance—a wistfully sad glance as he most often recalled it. And yet Kathleen smiled merrily with it all, when occasion required.
“You are entering upon the great experience now,” she said to him: “I think it was very wise of Emanuel to show you first what we may call his ideal state of society. By all the rules, it ought to help you to understand in the right way what you will see of the society which—well, which isn’t in an ideal state. But there are certain things which get to be understood, not so much by brains, as by years. That is to say, the very cleverest youth may not be able to see, in this one respect, what is plain enough to most dull persons at forty. Emanuel tells me that he has talked with you about women in general.”
“He does not like them very much,” said Christian, laughingly.
She twisted the corners of her mouth in a droll little grimace, which seemed to express approval of his mirth, and something more besides.
“He takes them with tremendous seriousness,” she answered. “That is his way with everything. He makes all sorts of classifications—the bigger they are and the more complicated the better he likes them—and then he treats each one as a problem, and he worries at it with all his energy until he works out a satisfactory solution. It is only in that sense that he has a grievance against women. He has proceeded upon the theory that the sex is a unit, for philosophical purposes at least, and that he ought to be able to get at the rules which govern its actions. But we continue to baffle him,” she added, again with the playful curl of the lips.
“Oh, you—you are not in the problem,” protested Christian. “For you and his mother he has only the veneration one gives to one’s favorite saints.”
“His mother was a great woman,” said Kathleen, serious once more. “I never saw her, but she is my patron saint, as you put it, quite as much as his. I never permit myself to doubt that we should have loved each other deeply—and it is the sweetest thing any one can think of me, or say to me—to link us together. But even the saints have their specialties—and that implies limitations. I have a notion that Emanuel’s mother did not know many women, and so fell into a way of generalizing about them. Emanuel has that same tendency. I, who work among them daily, and make it my business to be teacher and mistress and mother and sister to some five hundred of them, young and old, foolish and wise—I come to believe that these generalizations are entirely mistaken. If a woman is brought up like a man, and circumstanced precisely like a man, and knows nothing of any conventions save those which control a man—why, then you can’t tell the difference between her opinions and actions and those of her brother. But you never get the chance to view a woman under those conditions.”
“But here we shall see them!” cried Christian, with premature enthusiasm. “You will change all that!”
“Oh, no, I shan’t,” she answered abruptly. “It is not being tried—it is not desirable. What I am doing proceeds quite on orthodox lines. We make a point of developing them in the way of usefulness—material usefulness, I mean. We teach them the useful accomplishments—spinning, weaving, sewing, dairy and poultry work, and above all things good cooking.”
“That I can well believe,” he declared. “I have never eaten so many good dishes in my life as here.”
“Yes, Ihavea talent in that direction,” she assented. “And I am prouder of it because it represents a triumph over my ancestral prejudices. You will get nothing good to eat in Ireland. The Irish have never respected food as a proper subject for serious human thought. It is the rarest thing to hear them mention it. There may be some fine spiritual quality in that—but at all events we cook well here, and I have worked a complete revolution in that respect on the estate. There are certainly no such cooks and housekeepers anywhere else in England as my women. But you see what I mean. There is no effort to take women away from the work they have always been doing, but only to make them do it better.”
“But that in itself is very much,” urged Christian. Somehow he had the feeling that he was defending the System against a critic.
“Undoubtedly,” she admitted. “And of course we do something more than that. In a good many cases, when it was not inconvenient, I have put young girls of aptitude forward to learn designing and other arts. Some of them have made me some very tolerable tapestry, and a few of them are as intelligent and valuable in the greenhouses as our best men. In the matter of music they really beat them. Emanuel insists on a choir of glee singers in each village—and at Christmas time we have a competition of ‘waits’ which will be worth your while coming to hear. For my part, I have a string orchestra of girls that I should not be ashamed to have play in London.”
The word seemed to bring them back, “You were going to speak to me,” Christian ventured, “about London. One thing—I shall see you there often, shall I not?”
She slowly shook her head. “No, we have outgrown London, I’m afraid. It can be proved, I believe, that it is the biggest town in the world—but to us it is too small for comfort. It is now more than a year since we have been up at all. Why should we go? We have the National Gallery by heart, and the year’s pictures are rather distressing than otherwise. The theaters are intellectually beneath notice. There is the opera of course, and the concerts, but the people annoy us by talking loudly, and besides, we have our own music, and occasionally we bring down a Paderewski or a Sarasate for our people to hear. At the houses where we would naturally go, the women talk about matters of which I know absolutely nothing, and Emanuel either quarrels with the men about what they call their politics, or chokes silently with rage and disgust. And then the spectacle of the people in the streets—the poor of London!—that fairly sickens our hearts. We have no joy of going at all. Occasionally we have guests down here, but it is not a very happy time they have of it. Everything is so strange to them that they are confused, and walk about with constraint, as if they were being shown around an asylum. So it happens that I see very few women of my own class—and really know less about them than most people. And yet,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye, “so naturally audacious a race are the Irish—it is precisely about ladies in London society that I am going to read you a lecture.”
Christian drew up his feet, and assumed an air of delighted anticipation.
“First of all, you are six and twenty, and you will be thinking of marrying. What is more, you are what is called a great match, and for every thought that you give to the subject of a wife, others will give ten thousand to the subject of you as a possible husband.”
The young man looked into her kindly eyes with a sustained glance of awakening thought. This dazzling and princely position which she had thus outlined—sure enough, it was his! How extraordinary that this had not suggested itself to him before! Or had the perception of it not really lain dormant in his consciousness all the while? This question propounded itself to a mind which was engrossed in something else—for of a sudden there rose upon the blank background of his thoughts the luminous face of a lady, beautiful, distinguished, exquisitely sensitized, and as by the trick of a dream she first wore a large garden hat, and then was bare-headed, her fair hair gathered loosely back into a careless knot. The mental picture expanded, to show the full length of her queenly figure as she descended a broad staircase, with one lovely hand like a lily against the oak of the rail. Then it contracted, and underwent a strange metamorphosis, for it was another face which he saw, a pale, earnest, clever face, and instead of the great stairway, there was the laced tawdriness of a French railway compartment.
Then, with a start, and a backward movement of the head, he was free of dreamland, and blushingly conscious of having stared his cousin out of countenance. He laughed with awkward embarrassment. “I—I suppose it is true—what you say,” he remarked, stumblingly.
She had perhaps some clew to the character of his reverie. She smiled in a gently quizzical way, but went on soberly enough. “The thing of all things,” she said, “is to be clearly and profoundly convinced in your own mind that your marriage will be the most important event of your life—that it will indeed affect, for good or for bad, every conceivable element of your life. You have the kind of temperament which would be peculiarly susceptible to such intimate influences. There are great numbers of men—the vast majority—to whom it does not matter so much. They accommodate themselves to their burdens, and shuffle along somehow, with the patience of a cart-horse. But you—the wrong wife would wreck you and kill you. I am speaking frankly, laddie,”—she gave the novel word an intonation which made it music in his ears—“because you have no mother, and because you are going into a very trying and delicate situation with what I feel to be a pathetic lack of preparation.”
Christian drew his chair nearer to her, and crossed his knees, and leaned back in an attitude of intimate ease. The conversation appealed powerfully to him as having more of the atmosphere of domesticity and sweet home influences in it than any he had ever heard.
“I know almost nothing at all of women,” he said, quite simply. “The mothers of my pupils I saw sometimes and occasionally a sister, but they were not in any sense my friends. As to marriage—of course that has never been in my head. Until only the other day, the idea of a wife would have been absurd. But now—as you say—it is not any longer absurd.” He paused and gazed absently past her, as if in pursuit of the thoughts his own words had set in motion. “I wonder—I wonder”—he murmured, and then turned his bright eyes to her, full of wistful expectancy. “Have you, par exemple, some one in your mind for me?” he asked.
She laughed and shook her head. The implication in his tone, of entire readiness to accept the bride of her selection, had its amusing and its flattering sides; upon a second glance, however, it contained something else not so much to her liking. She frowned a little at this something.
“Oh, you must not approach the subject in that spirit,” she adjured him. “It is the one affair of all others on earth in which you must be guided absolutely by your own heart and your own mind. We speak of the heart and mind as distinct from each other; I don’t know that they are not one and the same. Perhaps I would put it this way—when your heartandyour mind are completely agreed, when your personal liking and your deliberate judgment pull together in exactly the same direction—so that it seems to you that theyareone and the same thing—then—then——-”
“Then what?” demanded Christian, bending forward.
“Oh, I am not fortunate in expressing myself to-day,” Kathleen declared, with a gesture of playful impatience. “But in general, this is what I wanted to say: Do not be betrayed into haste in this matter of deciding about a girl. You will see a large number of extremely attractive young ladies. They will certainly not be looking or behaving their worst for your benefit, and you on your side will be lacking the experience to tell precisely what it is all worth. So walk quietly along, with your wits about you, and see what there is to be seen for a time, and commit yourself to nothing. A year hence, for example, you will look back upon your present condition of mind with surprise. You will not seem to yourself at all the same person. I can’t promise that you’ll be happier,” she added, with a little smiling sigh, “but you will know a great deal more about what you want—or rather about making sure that you are getting what you want.”
“I know what I shall do,” he declared, after a moment’s reflection. “I shall come always to you, and beg your wise and good advice. You will tell me if I am making a bad choice.”
“You talk as if you were entering upon a lifelong series of experiments,” she laughed at him. “No, I’ll undertake no such responsibility as that, young man.” She explained, more gravely: “It is never quite possible for a friend, no matter how wise and fond the friend may be, to advise upon this matter. To give information upon the subject, that is another affair. But specific advice, no. But let me finish what I had in mind to say. You have seen here, during this past fortnight, what great hopes are built upon your administration of your affairs when you come into the title. No, don’t speak yet. You must not pledge yourself at all to the System. It would be unfair to let you do it. But at all events you have seen it, and you will think it all over, and, whether you take it up altogether or not, I know it will have its effect on you. You will set an ideal of usefulness and duty before you, and you will have your heart fixed on realizing it. Well, then, I counsel you above all things to keep that idea in mind whenever you think of marriage. A man has a good many sides to his life, but the side which is most vital to him is that of the work he wants to do in the world. If the wife fits perfectly on that side, the discrepancies elsewhere are of small account by comparison. They smooth away, they adjust themselves. But the misfit on the side of the man’s ambitions—that never effaces itself. And so, just in proportion as the work you want to do becomes clear in your mind, you ought to define to yourself the type of woman who will be most sympathetic toward that work, and who will best help you in it—or rather, who will help you in it in the way you like best. I don’t say you will find the perfect type of that woman—but you should have the type before you, and be able to measure people by its standards. But I have harangued you long enough! There is something in the atmosphere here: we all deliver lectures to each other at the most unscrupulous length. Poor boy! We’ve done nothing but make speeches to you since you showed in sight.”
Christian deprecated her suggestion with persuasive hands. “I have learned here, I think, all that I know,” he protested. He did not, however, insist upon further generalizations. “One thing you said,” he remarked, thoughtfully, “puts a question into my head. You said it was better to give information than advice. Now there is so much that I am in ignorance about. Perhaps I do wrong to ask you—but I am curious to know more about the people of the family—our own family. There are no ladies of my own blood? I mean, all I have seen or heard of come to us by marriage, like yourself.”
“You hit upon the weakest and unhappiest point,” she replied. “There has not been a daughter born in the Torr family for over a hundred years. I have always insisted that this has operated like a curse on the family. The beautiful humanizing charm of little girls about the house—this they have never felt. The mothers have had no daughters to lean upon, the men have never known what a sister was like. That one fact, it seems to me, is enough to account for everything that is hard and rough and cruel in their story.”
Christian bowed his head in silent token of comprehension.
“I am always more grieved than angry, when I’m thinking of the black sheep in the family fold,” she went on. “They had never a chance. It was like a tradition in the family that the father should be a brute and the mother a fool. A daughter here and there might have softened the combination—but with little boys alone face to face with it—what could they do? They grew up in the stables and the kennels. Think of those two young men whom you met at Caermere, for example. Lord Julius told me of their scene with you, and I’m far from blaming you—but think of their bringing up! Their father, Lord Edward, I remember very well. I saw him when I was a girl, at the Punchestown races, and my brother told me his name. Even without it, I should have remembered his face as the coarsest and meanest I ever saw. He married a woman out of some vile gambling set that he was in as a young man. She is still alive somewhere, and has an allowance from Lord Julius for suppressing herself, and not using the family name. Well, when I think of the blood in those two boys, and of the horrors of their childhood till they were taken away from their mother, and sent into the country to school—upon my soul I can only wonder that they come so near decency as they do. Your encounter with them happened to strike out sparks, but you must remember what a blow it represented to them.”
The young man gave a somewhat perfunctory nod. His sympathies were somehow obdurate upon this particular point.
“Oh, and that reminds me,” she went on. “I said that the family was daughterless—but Eddy has a little girl. It is very quaint to think what she will grow up like, under the maternal wing of Cora Bayard. Yet I am told there are worse mothers than Cora. I’ve never seen her, myself.”
“I saw her at Caermere,” Christian remarked. “She seemed very frightened and sad—and since it was because of me, I did not look much at her. I remember only the effect of a likeness to Pierrot—the red lips on the white face. But”—he drew his chair still nearer, and betrayed by manner and tone alike his approach to a subject of more than casual interest—“the other lady whom I saw there—Lady Cressage—I had much conversation with her. I feel that she and I are friends. I liked her very much indeed—but I have no information about her whatever. If I am permitted to confess it—I tried to talk about her with Lord Julius and with Emanuel, but they at once spoke of other things. You see how frankly I am telling you everything; that is because you make me feel so wonderfully at home. But perhaps you do not like to talk about her, either.”
She smiled pleasantly enough in comment upon his faltering conclusion. “Oh, I think you exaggerate the conspiracy of silence,” she answered. “Neither Lord Julius nor Emanuel has anything hostile to say about Edith Cressage, but she doesn’t quite appeal to their imagination, and so they find nothing of any sort to say. But it is only fair to remember that they are both men with peculiar and exacting standards for women. They would be equally silent about a hundred other ladies of unblemished character, and of beauty and wit untold. It is nothing at all against her that she hasn’t excited their enthusiasm. I do not know her at all well, but I think she is very nice. Now—is that what you wanted me to say?”
The mild note of banter which informed her words put Christian if possible even more at his ease. He stood up, with his hands in the sleek pockets of his new coat, and bent down upon her a joyous smile.
“No, ever so much more!” he insisted, gaily. “She is very beautiful; she has the air and the distinction of a grande dame; she speaks like a flute, and what she says is clever and apropos; she is unhappy, and yet with no bitterness toward any one; she seemed to like me very much, and, mind you, she was the first fine lady whom I had ever met. Enfin, she is my cousin, and the fact impresses me. What is more natural than that I should be eager to know all about her?”
Kathleen did not respond readily to his mood. She knitted her brows slightly once more, and looked away from him toward the window. “It is rather hard for me to explain,” she began at last, doubtfully. “From a good many points of view—her own included—I dare say we do her an injustice. Don’t misunderstand me; we are all sorry for her—and I for one have my moments of doubt whether we oughtn’t to be something more than sorry.”
“Yes, that is the phrase,” put in Christian, strenuously. “I think that I myself am something more than sorry for her.”
She looked up at him, at first with a shadow of apprehension in her eyes. Then she estimated aright his enthusiasm with a gentle smile. “I will explain as well as I can,” she said, softly. “As you say, you are entitled to be told. The feeling, then, is—I am speaking of Lord Julius and Emanuel, and more or less of myself too—the feeling is that she ought not to have made the marriage she did. Everybody knew that the young man she married was a worthless creature—a violent, ignorant, low-minded fellow. You could not see him, much less talk with him, without recognizing this. One knows perfectly well that she must have hated the very thought of him as a lover or a companion. But he is the heir to a dukedom, and so she marries him. You see what I mean; it seemed an unpleasant thing to us.”
Christian considered with a puzzled air the situation thus defined. “But,” he commented, with hesitation, “it is the metier of a young woman to get a husband, and to get the best one for herself that she can. If she is so beautiful that a man wishes to make her a duchess, why, that is her triumph. Would you have her forego it? And if she says ‘no’, why, then the next one he asks says ‘yes’—and it is merely that the first one has waived her place in the queue for another. The queue remains the same. And if this were not so, why, then, young men who are not very good, they would get no wives at all. But,” he added, in extenuation of his dissent, “all these matters are so differently regarded, you know, in France.” She did not look altogether pleased with him. “I thought you would have caught my meaning more readily,” she said, “despite your Continental point of view. For that matter, it is the common English point of view also. There is a matrimonial market, of course, and girls offer themselves in it to the highest bidder, and nothing that we can do will change it. But at least we are free to think what we like of the wretched business—and to hold our own opinions of the people who traffic in it.”
Kathleen had stated her position with a certain argumentative warmth, which gave her tone a novel effect of reproof. The sight now of the young man’s saddened and surprised expression sent her mood up with a rebound. She put a hand on his arm, as he stood before her, and reassured him by a kindly laugh. “Ah, now,” she said, with genial pleading in her soft voice, “don’t be making a mountain of my molehill. I only wanted you to understand how we felt. And as I have told you, we have our reservations about even that feeling. The poor girl did only what she was expected to do—what her mother and her family and all the friends that surrounded her took it quite as a matter of course that she should do. Probably she never once encountered the opinion that she should do otherwise. No doubt that is to be said for her. In fact, I should never have dreamed of blaming her to you, if you had not pressed me. And after it’s all said and done, you may take it from me that perhaps I don’t blame her so very much. She was poor, and not over comfortable at home, I think, and she was very young, and people ran after her to an extraordinary extent—and to be the beauty of the season in London is enough to turn any one’s head. Poor creature—it’s bitterly enough she’s paid for her whistle!”
He smiled down into her eyes. “That is how I knew you would end by speaking of her,” he said. “It is in that same way that she moves me—by my compassion. And this is my fancy”—he began, in a more vivacious tone—“I should like to tell it to you—it seems that I am to have the power to do so many such wonderful things—well, then, nothing would delight me more than to be very good to her. It is myfantaisie—and there is no harm in it,isthere?—to atone to her for some of the unhappiness she has suffered. I have thought about it much since I left Caermere. It seems that it would be a good thing for me to do—like an act of piety. You must remember—she was the first lady who spoke kindly to me in England. And I think you will be pleased with me for being grateful. But, of course, if Emanuel tells me ‘no’——”
“Oh, no one will tell you ‘no,’” she assured him, rising as she spoke, and looking into his face with beaming eyes. “It is the kind of spirit we like in you. Never imagine that we will be obstacles in its way. Only be on your guard against the soft heart running away with you. The world is full of clever and adroit people who practice upon innocent generosity. It is not so much the worth of what they wheedle from you, as the shock of your discovery of their tricks. That hurts a young nature, and very often callouses and hardens it. But here I am, lecturing you again!”
Christian had not, in truth, been following her remarks with complete attention. Something had come up in his mind, which by the time she stopped he seemed to have turned over and over, and examined from many standpoints, and finally decided to speak about.
“I was not wholly exact,” he began, with constraint, “when I said that Lady Cressage was the first lady who spoke kindly to me in England. I mentioned it to Lord Julius—there was a very charming and good young lady who traveled with me from Rouen, and crossed on the boat—and it is a very curious thing, but when we became acquainted, and I hinted to her about my story, she knew who I was. Indeed, it was she who told me who I was. I had the whole wonderful tale from her—and the kindness and sweet sympathy with which she told it to me, a little at a time—ah, that is what I will never forget! I am bound to remember her with gratitude all my life. And that is anotherfantaisieof mine—that I shall do something good for her. Oh, she has no selfish thoughts! She would not even tell me her name!”
Kathleen’s comment was prefaced by a mirthful chuckle. “I can’t deny that gratitude is a very active and resourceful element in your composition,” she declared, and laughed again. “Oh, we’ll advertise for her. How would this do: ‘The young lady who meets returning lost heirs to the British nobility at Rouen, and lets them down easily’? Or we might——”
“Ah,” Christian interrupted, pleadingly, “I am really very sincere about her. You cannot imagine anything finer or more delicate than her character. And besides,”—he added this with visible reluctance—“I have learned since who she is. Lady Cressage told me. She is the sister of the lady you call Cora—the wife of that young man Edward—but she is not an actress! It is not in the least hertype!She earns her own living—she has some work to do—I think it is with a writing-machine—that is, a type-writer, n’est-ce pas?”
Mrs. Emanuel did not immediately reply, but moved to the window, looked out and then walked slowly back to where he stood. “I am not going to suggest an unkind thought about this girl,” she said, deliberately. “I would not want you to think differently of her, or of the grateful impulse you have toward her. Indeed, I have heard something of her—and it is much to her credit. But—this sounds a mean thing to say, and yet it has its important true side—people should stick to their class. Bear that always in mind. There seem to be brilliant exceptions to the rule, whenever we look about us—but just the same, the rule exists. But—now Iwillstop, once for all!” She mused at him, with a twinkling eye. “You poor lad, there’s something about you that draws down lectures as a lightning-rod draws electricity. And here’s the trap!”
When Emanuel returned from London a few days later, to report that his young cousin had been comfortably installed in chambers on Duke Street, St. James’s, and seemed to get on capitally with Lord Lingfield, who was showing him the ropes, Kathleen received the news with less than her accustomed cheerfulness.
“I haven’t been quite happy, thinking of him alone in London,” she admitted, in the course of their conversation. “I feel, somehow, as if we should have gone up, and taken a house for the winter.”
“Ah, but, sweetheart,” he urged, almost reproachfully, “you see how I am up to my eyes in all sorts of work. This is really about the most trying and ticklish stage we have gone through yet. If the fibrous silk processes are what is claimed for them, and your girls display the aptitude that you count upon——”
But Kathleen for once seemed not to listen. She had turned, and moved a few steps listlessly away. She took a flower from a vase, picked it to pieces and gazed in a brown study at the meaningless fragments.
“Yes, I know,” she remarked at last, with a half sigh. Then she threw the petals into the grate, and, with a decisive little shake of head and shoulders, wheeled round, and came smilingly to her husband.
“And whom did you see in town?” she asked.
Toward the end of April, there came an afternoon on which Christian seemed to himself to wake up of a sudden as from a harassed sleep.
He had been in England for over six months, when all at once he became conscious of this queer sensation: the experiences of his half year put themselves together before his mental eye in the aspect of a finished volume—of something definitely over and done with.
There was warm spring in the London air, and at first the vague feeling of unrest impressed him as a part of the general vernal effect. The device of taking a stroll through the parks, to note the early flowers and the wonderful infancy of leafage among the trees, seemed at the outset to fit this new mood that was upon him. Then abruptly he wearied of nature and turned his back upon it, driving in a hansom to his club. Here there was no one whom he knew, or at least cared to speak with. He sat for a time in the billiard-room, watching with profound inattention the progress of a game he knew nothing about. From this he wandered into the library, where some fierce-faced old gentlemen slept peacefully in armchairs about the alcoves. The sound of their breathing vexed him; he pretended to himself that otherwise he would have found solace in a book. The whim seized him to go home to his chambers, and have tea there comfortably in gown and slippers, and finish a novel Lady Milly Poynes had induced him to begin weeks before.
Once in his own easy-chair, the romance lying opened beside him, he put back his head, stretched his feet and yawned. He left untasted the tea which Falkner brought in; with fingers interlaced behind his neck he stared up at the blue of the sky through his window in formless rumination.
His earlier glimpses of London were dim enough memories now. The town had been described by his cousin Lingfield as empty when he arrived, and after a few days of desultory sight-seeing, he had been carried off to the earl of Chobham’s place in Derbyshire. Here, among people who behaved like kindly kinsmen to the young new-comer, yet failed to arouse much interest in his mind, he learned to shoot well enough to escape open protests by the autocratic head gamekeeper, and to keep his seat in the saddle after a fashion of his own. These acquirements stood him in good stead at the four or five other country houses to which the amiable Lingfield in due course led him. Without them, meager as they were, he would have been in a sorry plight indeed. They provided him with a certain semblance of justification for his presence among people who seemed incapable of amusing themselves or their guests in any other way. There were always ladies, it was true, and it was generally manifest to him that he might spend his time with them if he chose, but after a few tentative experiments he fell back upon the conviction that he did not know how to talk to English ladies. He drifted somehow through these months of hospitable entertainment, feeling that he had never known before what loneliness could mean.
When, at Christmas, he went to spend another fortnight with Emanuel, he had it in his heart to confess to disappointment, and even depression. He had not thus far fitted at all into the place which had been prepared for him, and he looked forward, with wistful eagerness, as he journeyed westward, to the balm of sympathy and tender comprehension with which Kathleen and Emanuel, dear people that they were, would soothe and heal his wounded self-consciousness. Somehow, the opportunity of unburdening his troubled mind, however, did not come to him. There were other guests, including Lord Julius, and such exceptional attention was devoted on the estates to elaborating the holiday festivities of the various villages, that no individual could hope to secure consideration for his own private emotions. It was sometimes suspected that Emanuel made so much of Christmas in his System, unconsciously no doubt, because the Jewish side of him felt the need of ostentation in its disavowal of theological prejudices. For whatever reason, the festival was observed here in a remarkable spirit. The little churches were embowered in holly and mistletoe, and were the scenes of numerous ornate services. There were processions, merry-makings, midnight visitations of the “waits,” concerts and dances throughout the week, and only the strictly necessary work of the community was performed meanwhile. On New Year’s Day the rejoicings culminated in a children’s carnival from one end of the property to the other, with big trees laden with lights and gifts in the German fashion, and exhibitions of the magic lantern, and other juvenile delights. The fortnight passed, and Christian returned to London, as has been said, without having anything like the intimate talk he had expected. Both Kathleen and Emanuel had seemed pleased with him; they had noted with approving comment his progress in the use of idiomatic English, and his rapid assimilation of the manners and bearing of those about him; they had heard none but welcome reports of him from outside, and made clear to him their gratification at the fact. Their smile for him was as affectionate, their display of pleasure in his presence as marked, as ever, but he had the sense, none the less, of something altered. Lord Julius bore him company on his journey to London, and after a brief halt, took him away again for another fortnight, this time at Brighton. He was no more successful with the father, in the matter of helpful confidences, than he had been with the son. It was impossible to tell the strong, big, redoubtable old gentleman of what he felt to be his weaknesses. A kind of desponding pride possessed him, and closed his lips. He was not happy, as he had supposed he would be, and he could not bring himself to feel that at any point the fault was his. It was the position that was incongruous. Yet how could he complain, or avow his discontent, without seeming an ingrate to the benefactors whose heart had been in the work of shaping and gilding that position for him?
Parliament met this year in January, and Christian saw now a London which he had not imagined to himself—for which nothing, indeed, had prepared him. There came all at once a great many invitations, and the young man, surprised and not a little dismayed, called Lord Lingfield to his assistance. The prospect unfolded to him by this accomplished professor of the proprieties was terrifying enough. At the end of a week Christian cried out that the reality was too much. But Lingfield could see no alternative to going on. “You will get used to it soon enough, now that you have once taken the plunge,” he assured him. “There are certain things that a fellow has to do, you know, when he’s in London in the season, or even now, in what you may call the half season, unless he’s going to chuck the thing altogether.” Christian replied with excitement that this was precisely what he wished to do. In his own mind he had already reached the point of debating whether he could honorably go on using the money placed to his credit at the bank, most of which was still there, if he fled from London, and even England.
Lord Lingfield was a fine young man, irreproachable in attire and manners, who expected to do something in politics, and who regarded his duty both to the future which he hoped to create for himself, and to the immediate present which had been created for him, with conscientious gravity. He had never thought of lightening or evading the tasks set before him; he had no perception whatever of the possibility of making such things easier for others. He assured Christian with gentle solemnity that desertion was not to be mentioned, and that even mitigation was undesirable. “It has all been arranged for you,” he urged. “Upon my word, you are very lucky. You have been to two houses already where I never get asked except to luncheon, and here is a card here which I could hardly believe my eyes to see To trifle with such chances would be simple madness. You will get to have all London at your fingers’ ends, your very first season. Such a start as you’re likely to have, I’ve never seen in my life. My dear fellow—you don’t understand what it means.”
“But I’m tired to death!” groaned Christian. “No doubt they are excellent people, but they weary me to the bone. The dinners, the calls, the receptions, the dances—I have no talent whatever for these things. It is very kind of these people—but I know I am ridiculous in it all. I give them no pleasure, and God knows I receive none. Then why must it go on? For whose benefit is it? I swear to you, I would not mind the labor and fatigue, if it was any good that I was doing. Emanuel, for example, toils like a slave, but then his work has great results. But this of mine——!”
“Ah, yes,” interposed Lingfield, smilingly. “But Emanuel could never have made much running in London. He disputes with people too much, don’t you know. They don’t like that. And I think you make much too hard work of it all. There’s no need foryouto talk, you know. It isn’t expected of you. And I don’t see why you can’t move quietly along, going everywhere, being seen at the right places, and being civil to everybody, and not worry yourself at all. That’s what you need, my dear boy—repose! Let the other people do the worry. Now, of course, in a case like Dicky Westland’s it’s different. He has to be amusing and useful, or he wouldn’t get asked. But you are not on all fours with him at all. To tell the truth—no doubt it’ll sound strange to you, but it is the truth all the same—it’s better form for you not to be amusing, or brilliant, or that sort of thing. Fellows in your place don’t go in for it, you know.”
Christian sighed, and chafing at the necessity of submission, still submitted.
Now, as he lay back in his chair, the retrospect was augmented by six other weeks, in which he had passively yielded to what Lingfield had assured him was the inevitable. He had dined out almost every-night, and had made countless calls. It seemed to him that he must have met everybody in this huge metropolis who had a pair of shoulders or possessed a dress coat. He yawned at the thought of them.
Was he not himself to blame for this? At Christmas time he had been quite confident in answering “no” to this question; now he did not feel so sure about it. At one place or another he had come into contact with most of the members of the government, and with many of those distinguished statesmen on the opposite bench who, by the grace of the genial British electorate, would be ministers next time. He had talked with eminent artists, eminent scientists, eminent writers, eminent soldiers and sailors, and watched them and listened to them as they sat over their cigars, or moved about among the ladies in the drawing-rooms. Hostesses whose cordial good will toward him seemed equaled only by their capable control over others, had said to him time and time again: “If there is any one you want to know, tell me.” The phrase lingered in his mind as a symbol of his position. He had merely to mention his wish, like some lucky person of the fables who possessed a talisman. It could not be said that he had used his magic power foolishly or perversely. He had followed in dutiful, painstaking solicitude the path marked out for him by his advisers. He had done the best that was in him to do; he had gone wherever Lingfield bade him go; he had loyally kept awake late at night; he had smiled and bowed and spoken affable words; he had fulfilled punctually all the engagements imposed upon him. What was more, he could no longer pretend that he made a failure of the thing; it was known to him that he had created a pleasant impression upon London, and that people liked him.
For all that, he could not feel that in turn he liked these people. Among those of whom he had seen the most, was there any whom he profoundly desired ever to see again? He passed some random figures in mental review, and suffered them to vanish without thrusting forth any tentacle of thought to detain them. They had not entered his real life; they meant nothing to him. Positively he was as much alone in London to-day as he had been when he first set foot in it. Indeed, was he not the poorer to-day by all those lost illusions and joyous, ardent hopes now faded to nothingness? In return for these departed treasures, he had only empty hands to show—and a jaded, futilely mutinous, empty mind as well.
The soft, equable tinkle of the door-bell caught his ear, but scarcely arrested his attention. Perhaps unconsciously the sound served to polarize his thoughts, for suddenly it became apparent to him that he was in revolt. All this intolerable social labor was ended for him—definitely and irrevocably ended. He would not dine at another house; he would burn forthwith his basket of cards, and the little book with its foolish record of ladies’ days “at home.”
He sat up and sipped at his lukewarm tea, with the glow of a new resolve on his face.
Falkner—a smooth-mannered, assiduous, likable man of middle age whom Emanuel had given him from his own household—entered the room to announce a caller. A brisk, alert tread on the polished hall floor behind him cut into his words, so that Christian did not catch them. He rose, and looked inquiringly.
For an instant, he felt that he was not glad to see the person who came in. It was a young man of about his age, tall and fair, and handsome in a buoyant, bright-faced way of his own. His blue eyes sparkled cheerfully into Christian’s doubtful glance, and he held out a hand as he advanced. Everybody in the world called him Dicky Westland, and for this opening moment Christian thought of him as preeminently typical of all the vanities and artificialities he was on the point of forswearing.
“Not seedy, I hope?” the new-comer said in comment upon the other’s loose attire—and perhaps upon his dubious countenance as well. His voice had a musical vivacity in it which seemed to lighten the room. Christian, as he took the hand and shook his head, smiled a little. It began to occur to him that really he did like this young man.
“No,” he replied, with a gesture toward a chair. “I’m all right. Only the whim seized me—to come home and read a book. I got homesick, I think.”
This statement, once in the air, seemed funny to the young men, and Dicky Westland laughed aloud. Christian, sitting down opposite his visitor, felt himself sharing his animation. ‘“It was good of you to come,” he declared, with a refreshed tone. “The truth is, I’m tired out. I am up too late. I run about too much.”
“Yes, a fellow does get hipped,” assented Dicky. “But you are so tremendously regular, it doesn’t do you any harm. A days’ rest now and then, and you’re right as a trivet again.”
“Regular,” Christian repeated, musingly. He formed his lips to utter some reflection upon the theme, and then closed them again. “Will you have a cup of tea?” he asked, with the air of thinking of something else.
The other shook his head, and preserved a posture of vivacious anticipation, as if Christian had made a literal promise to unburden his mind. The suggestion was so complete that Christian accepted it as a mandate.
“I am glad you came,” he said, “because—well, because I have come to a conclusion in my mind, and I should like to put it into words for you—so that I can also hear it myself. I am resolved to go away—to leave London.”
Dicky lifted his brows in puzzled interrogation. “How do you mean?” he asked.
“I do not like it,” Christian replied, speaking more readily now, and enforcing his words with eager hands. Lingfield had cautioned him against this gesticulatory tendency, but the very consciousness that he was in rebellion brought his hands upward into the conversation. “It is not what I care for. I come into it too late, no doubt, to understand—appreciate it, properly. The people I meet—I have no feeling for them. It seems a waste of my time to sit with them, to stand and talk, to go about from one of their houses to another. At the end of it all, there is nothing. They have all thick shells on, and they are not going to let me get inside of them. And, moreover, if I did get inside, who can be sure there would be anything of value there? It does not often look so to me, from the outside. But it is a waste of time and labor, and it does not amuse me in the least, and why should I pursue it?”
“Quite right!” said Dicky.
“Then you agree with me?—you approve?” asked Christian, not concealing his surprise.
“Of course I do. It’s awful rot,” the other affirmed. He observed his host silently for a space, and meanwhile, by a quite visible process, the familiar external elasticity, not to say flippancy, of his manner seemed to fall away from him. “With me, of course,” he went on, almost gravely, “I have to do it. I must get my secretaryship, or I can’t live. My relations could put me into the swim, but they can’t support me there indefinitely. I have only two aunts, you know—dear old things, they are—and they keep me going, but they have only life interests, and I fancy they have to scrape a little as it is.
“So you see,” pursued Dicky Westland, “I must help myself, and it’s only by knowing the right people, and being seen at the right places, that a fellow can bring anything off. For example, now: Lady Winsey is a distant cousin of mine, and she’s promised the aunts, you know, and there’s an old Sir Hogface Something-or-Other dodging about the place, who’s going to get a West Indian governorship in May, and Lady Winsey has not only had him at her house to dinner, where he could see me, but has contrived to throw me at him at three other houses. Next week I’m to go down to a closing meet in Berkshire, just because he’s to be there—and that she arranged, too. And it’s all to get a place worth perhaps three hundred a year, with yellow fever thrown in—if it comes to anything at all.”
“Three hundred a year,” commented Christian, knitting his brows. “I still make pounds into francs to know what a sum means,” he explained, smilingly, after a moment. “Once I would have thought that a great fortune—and only a few months ago, too, at that.”
“Well, you see how it is,” said Dicky. “I mustn’t let any chance slip by. But if I stood in your shoes, dear God! how I would chuck it all!”
“But what would you do instead?” Christian propounded this question sitting back in his chair, with the tips of his fingers joined, and a calm twinkle in his eye. He discovered himself feeling as if it were his companion who had made confessions and craved sympathy.
Dicky looked into his hat, and pouted his lips in whimsical indecision. “What I mean is,” he explained at last—“my point was this—I hate the whole thing, and if I didn’t have to do it, why then I wouldn’t do it, d’ye see? I’d go about with nobody except the people I really cared about—my right-down, intimate friends. That’s the idea.”
“Ah—friends!” said Christian. “That is the word that sings in my ears!”
He rose impulsively, and began walking about the room with a restless step. Now and again he halted briefly to look down upon his companion, to enforce with eyes as well as gesture some special thing in his talk. “Yes, friends!” he cried. “Tell me, you Dicky Westland, where are friends to be found? Have you some, perhaps? Then where did you come upon them? It is what I should like very much to know. Listen to me! I have been in England six months. I possess in England, say two—three—no, five friends—and all these came to me in my first week here. All but one belong to my family, so they were here, ready-made for me. But since that time, now that I am for myself, I have not gained one friend. Is there then something strange—what do I say—forbidding in me? Or no—it is nonsense for me to say that. It is the other way about. I have seen nobody who awakened voices within me. There has been no one who appealed to me as a friend should appeal. I live among a thousand rich and fine people who are as good to me as they know how to be—and yet I am as if I lived in a desert. And it is very cold—and lonely—and heartbreaking in this desert of mine!”
Westland looked at him, as he stood now in the pathetic abandonment of his peroration, with a contemplative squint in one eye.
“I see what you mean,” he remarked finally. “You’ve been looking for flesh and blood, and you find only gun-metal.” He thrust out his lips a little, and gave further consideration to the problem. “There isn’t any need for you to go away, you know,” he added after a pause. “You can have any kind of life you like in London. It is all here, if you want it. But what is it that you do want?”
Christian threw himself sidewise into his chair, and bent his head with a sigh. Then, with a new light in his eyes, he looked up. “You yourself said it”—he exclaimed—“to see only my true friends. That is my idea of life: To have a small circle of people whom I love very much, and to make constant opportunities to be with some of them—talking as we like to talk, going about together, making life happy for one another as we go along. All my youth, I envied rich people, because I thought that they used their wealth to command this greatest of delights. I imagined that if one had much money, then one could afford to spend his time only with his close, dear friends. But what I discover is that they do something entirely different. They seem not to let friendship come into their lives at all. They desire only acquaintances, and of these the more they have the better, if they bear the proper cachet.”
“It is the women,” said Dicky, sententiously.
“They like the crowd, and the new faces. And what they like, of course they have. They run the whole show.”
Christian nodded comprehension—then put out a hand to signalize a reservation. “I know women—here in England—who have a higher idea than this,” he declared, softly.
“Of course, so we all do,” assented Westland. “There are a million splendid women, if one could only get at them. But it’s a sort of trades union, don’t you know. You don’t take the workmen you want, on your own terms; you take those the society gives you, and the terms are arranged for you. It’s like that with women. You meet some awfully jolly girls now and then, but they are not in the least degree their own masters. If you try to get to know them well, either they’re frightened, and pull back into their shells, or you’re headed off by their mothers. But,” he added upon reflection—“of course it’s different with you.”
“At least I am not interested,” said Christian, wearily. The advice of Kathleen had produced upon his mind an even greater effect, perhaps, than he imagined. He had encountered, by the dozen, extremely beautiful and engaging girls, whose charm should have been enhanced in his eyes by the dignity and even grandeur of their surroundings. But an impalpable yet efficient barrier had stood always between them and him. If they exhibited reserve, he was too shy for words. If they expanded toward him with smiles or any freedom of demeanor, he recalled instantly the warning of Emanuel’s wife, and that was fatal. “I have not cared for any of them,” he reaffirmed.
“Oh!” cried Westland of a sudden, his comely, boyish face beaming with the thought that had come to him. “How stupid of me! I’d forgotten what I came for—and I’m not sure it doesn’t precisely fill the bill. Are you doing anything to-night? Will you come with me to the Hanover Theater at midnight? It’s the five-hundredth performance of ‘Pansy Blossoms’—and there’s to be supper on the stage and a dance. I don’t think you’ve seen much of that sort of thing, have you?”
Christian shook his head, and regarded his companion doubtfully. “Nothing at all of it,” he said, slowly. “But it does not attract me very much, I’m afraid. You would better take some one else. I should be a fish out of water there. The people of the theaters—they are not congenial to me—that is, I do not think they would be.”
“But, hang it all, man, how do you know till you’ve tried?” Dicky put a little worldly authority into his tone as he proceeded. “You mustn’t mind my saying it to you—it is you who make your own desert, as you call it, for yourself. If you say in advance that you know you won’t like this sort of person, or that, how are you ever going to form any friendships?”
Christian received the remonstrance with meekness. “You do not quite understand me,” he said, amiably enough. “I have some work to do in the world, and I don’t think that actresses and actors would help me much to do it. The young men who run after them do not seem, somehow, to do much else. It is only a prejudice I have; it applies only to myself. If others feel differently, why, I have not a word to say.”
“No, you must come!” Westland declared, rising. “It’s nonsense for you not to see that side of things. My dear fellow, it’s as respectable as the Royal Academy—or Madame Tussaud’s. Are you dining anywhere? Then I’ll run home and dress, and I’ll drive round here for you. We’ll dine together, and then look in at some of the halls. Shall I say seven? It gives us more time over our dinner.”
Christian accepted, with a rueful little smile, his committal to the enterprise. “You must not mind if I come away early,” he said, getting to his feet in turn.
The other laughed at him. “My dear man, you’ll never want to come away at all. But no, seriously—it’s just the kind of thing you want. It’ll amuse you, for one thing—and deuce take it, you’ll be young only once in your life. But more than that—here you are swearing that you’ll do no more social work at all, and you don’t know in the least what other resources are open to you. It isn’t alone actresses that you meet at a place like this, but all sorts of clever people who know how to get what there is out of life. That is what you yourself want to do, isn’t it? Well, it’ll do you no harm, to say the least, to see how they go about it.”
“Very likely,” Christian replied, as the other turned. “I will be ready at seven.” He followed him to the door, and into the hallway. “Mind,” he said, half jokingly, half gravely, as he leaned over the banister, “I have not altogether promised. When midnight comes, I may lose my courage altogether.”
“Ah, it’s that kind of timidity that storms every fortress in its path,” Dicky called up to him from the stairway.