On garde longtemps son premier amant quand on n'en prend point de second.—La Rochefoucauld.
On garde longtemps son premier amant quand on n'en prend point de second.
—La Rochefoucauld.
The two aunts meanwhile were sitting waiting in the drawing-room.
When Mrs. Bellairs died, which event, according to Aunt Aggie, had been brought about by a persistent refusal to wear on her chest a small square of flannel, (quite a small square) sprinkled with camphorated oil, and according to Aunt Mary by a total misconception of the Bellairs' character; when this event happened, the two aunts became what they called supports to their brother's motherless children.
They were far from being broken reeds which pierce the hands of those who lean on them.
No one had ever leaned on Aunt Mary or Aunt Aggie. Aunt Mary might perhaps be likened to one of those stout beams which have a tendency to push ruthlessly through the tottering outer wall which they are supposed to prop, into the inner chamber of the tenement which has the misfortune to be the object of their good offices.
She had contracted, not in her first youth, a matrimonial alliance—it could hardly be called a marriage—with a general, distinguished in India and obscure everywhere else, who had built a villa called "The Towers" a few miles from Priesthope. The marriage had taken place after years of half-gratified reluctanceon his part and indomitable crude persistence on hers. In short it was what is generally called "a long attachment," and proves beyond dispute, what is already proven to the hilt, that the sterner sex prefer to have their affairs of the heart arranged for them; that once lost sight of they are mislaid, once let loose on parole they never return, once captured they endeavour to escape; that even when finally married nothing short of the amputation of all external interests will detain them within the sacred precincts ofTHE HOME.
Aunt Mary had had trouble with her general, but though she was no tactician, she was herself a general. His engagement to her had only been the first of the crushing defeats which she had inflicted upon him. Now at last at The Towers a deathlike peace reigned. Sir John, severely tried by rheumatism and advancing years, had, so to speak, given up his sword.
His wife's magnanimity had provided him with what she considered suitable amusements and occupations. He was told that he took an interest in breeding pigs, and he, who had once ruled a province rather larger than England, might now be seen on fine mornings tottering out, tilted forward on his stick, making the tour of the farmyard, and hanging over the low wall of his model pigstyes.
In Magdalen's recollections, Aunt Mary had always looked exactly the same, the same strong, tall, robust, large-featured, handsome woman, with black hair, and round, black, unwinking eyes, who invariably dressed in black and wore a bonnet. Even under the cedar at The Towers Aunt Mary wore a bonnet. When she employed herself in a majestic gardening the sunwas shaded from her Roman nose by a black satin parasol.
There are some men and women whom it is monstrous to suppose ever were children, ever young, ever different from what they are now. Whatever laws of human nature may rule the birth of others, they, at any rate, like the phœnix, sprang full grown, middle aged, in a frock coat, or a bugled silk gown, from some charred heap of unconsenting parental ashes.
Aunt Mary was no doubt one of these.
Near her, on the edge of her chair, perhaps not so entirely on the edge of it as at first appeared, sat Aunt Aggie. Aunt Aggie looked as if she had been coloured by some mistake from a palette prepared to depict a London fog.
Her eyes were greyish yellow, like her eyelashes, like her hair,—at least her front hair,—like her eyebrows, and her complexion. She was short and stout. She called slender people skeletons. Her gown, which was invariably of some greyish, drabbish, neutral-tinted material, always cocked up a little in front to show two large, flat, soft-looking feet.
Aunt Aggie began quite narrow at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction that others also had their place, a sort of back seat, in the Divine consciousness.
It would not be fair to Aunt Aggie to omit to mention, especially as she continually made veiled allusions to the subject herself, that she also had known the tender passion. There had been an entanglement in her youth with a High Church archdeacon. But we all know how indefinite, how inconclusive, how meagre in practical results archidiaconal conferences are apt to be! After one of them it was discovered that the entanglement was all on Aunt Aggie's side. The archdeacon remained unenmeshed. Under severe pressure from Lady Blore, then an indomitable bride of forty, flushed by recent victory, he even went so far as to say that his only bride was the Church. It was after this disheartening statement that Aunt Aggie found herself drawn towards an evangelical and purer form of religion. The Archdeacon subsequently married, or rather became guilty of ecclesiastical bigamy. But Aunt Aggie throughout life retained pessimistic views respecting the celibacy of the clergy.
Aunt Mary bestowed a strong businesslike peck, emphasized by contact with the point of a stone-cold nose, on Magdalen's cheek. Aunt Aggie greeted her niece with small inarticulate cluckings of affection. Have you ever kissed a tepid poached egg? Then you know what it is to salute Aunt Aggie's cheek.
"Where are Fay and Bessie?" enquired Aunt Mary instantly. When the aunts announced their coming, which was invariably at an hour's notice, they always expected to find the whole family, including Colonel Bellairs, waiting indoors to receive them. This expectation was never realised, but the annoyance thatinvariably followed had retained through many years the dew of its youth.
"Bessie and Fay are out. I am expecting them back every moment."
"They will probably be later than usual to-day," said Aunt Mary grimly, with the half-conscious intuition of those whom others avoid. Did she know that with the exception of Sir John, whose vanity had led him to take refuge in acul-de-sac, her fellow creatures rushed out by back doors, threw themselves out of windows, hid behind haystacks, had letters to write, were ordered by their doctors to rest, whenever she appeared? Did she know? One thing was certain. Magdalen was one of the very few persons who had never avoided her, who at times openly sought her society. And Aunt Mary, though she would have been ashamed to own it, loved Magdalen. She intended that Magdalen should live with her some day at the Towers, as an unpaid companion, when Sir John and Aunt Aggie had entered into peace.
"And your father," continued Aunt Mary. "Did he get my letter? I intend to have a serious conversation with him after tea."
"Father has this moment come in, and he asked me to tell you that he had business letters which he is obliged to write."
"I know whatthatmeans."
"Oh! Mary!" interpolated Aunt Aggie eagerly. "You forget that Algernon always, from the time he was a young man, left his letters to the last moment. All the Bellairs do."
The Bellairs had other unique family characteristics,as peculiar to themselves as their choice of time for grappling with their correspondence, which Aunt Aggie was never tired of quoting. "Bellairs are always late for breakfast. It is no kind of use finding fault with Bessie about it. I was just the same at her age."
Aunt Aggie went through life under the belief that she was a peacemaker, which delicate task she fulfilled by making in an impassioned manner small statements which seldom contained a new or healing view of existing difficulties. She often spoke of herself as a "buffer" between contending forces. Sir John Blore had been known to remark that he could not fathom what Aggie meant by that expression, as it certainly was not appropriate to the domestic circle at The Towers, consisting, as it did, of one rheumatic Anglo-Indian worm, and one able-bodied blackbird.
"I intend to see your father after tea," repeated Aunt Mary, taking no notice of her sister's remark.
"Father is much worried about the right of way," continued Magdalen. "He showed me your most kind letter about myself, and——"
"Showed it toyou!" said Aunt Mary, becoming purple. "It was not intended for any eye except your father's."
"Confidence between a father and his child," began Aunt Aggie, clasping her stout little hands, and looking eagerly from her sister to her niece.
Magdalen went on tranquilly. "It only told me what I knew before, Aunt Mary, that you have my welfare at heart. Father said that he thought it would be best if you and I talked the matter over. I agreedwith him. It would be easier for me to discuss it with you. It would not be for the first time."
It would not indeed!
"Aggie," said Aunt Mary instantly, "you expressed a wish on your way here to see Bessie's fossils. You will go to the schoolroom and investigate them."
"I think they are kept locked," said Aunt Aggie faintly. She longed to stay. She had guessed the subject of the letter. She took in a love affair the fevered interest with which the unmarried approach the subject.
"They are unlocked," said Aunt Mary with decision.
Aunt Aggie swallowed the remains of her tea, and holding a little bitten bun in her hand slid out of the room. She never openly opposed her sister, with whom she lived part of the year when she let her cottage at Saundersfoot to relations in need of sea air.
An unmistakable aspect of concentration deepened in Aunt Mary's fine countenance.
"Magdalen," she said at once, "in the presence of that weak sentimentalist my lips are closed. But now that we are alone, and as it is your wish to reopen the subject, it is my duty to inform myself whether anything has transpired about Everard Constable—Lord Lossiemouth, as I suppose he now is."
"Nothing," said Magdalen with a calmness that was almost cheerful. If she was as sensitive as she looked she had a marvellous power of concealing it. She never shrank. She was apparently never wounded. She seldom showed that any subject jarred on her. It is affirmed that animals develop certain organs to meet the exigencies of their environment. A sole's eye (oris it a sand-dab's?) travels up round its head regardless of appearances when it finds it is more wanted there than on the lower side. We often see a similar distortion in the mental features of the wives of literary men. So perhaps also Magdalen had adapted herself to the Bellairs' environment, with which it was obvious that she had almost nothing in common except her name.
Aunt Mary loved Magdalen in a way, yet she never spared her the discussion of that long-ago attachment of her youth, violently mismanaged by Colonel Bellairs. The rose of Aunt Mary's real affection had a little scent, but it was set round with thorns.
"He has behaved disgracefully," she said, looking with anger and disappointment at her niece's faded face.
"We have discussed that before," said Magdalen tranquilly. "I, as you know, do not blame him. But it is all a hundred years ago, and better forgotten."
"He was poor then. No one ever thought he would succeed with two lives between. But it is different now that he is wealthy and in a position to marry."
"He has never been in a position to marry me," said Magdalen, "because he never cared enough for me to make an effort on my behalf. That was not his fault. He mistook a romantic admiration for love, and naturally found it would not work. How could it? It was not necessary to turn heaven and earth to gain me. But itwasnecessary to turn a few small stones. He could not turn them."
"Well, at any rate, he asked you, and you accepted him."
"A hundred years ago."
"And you have waited for him ever since."
"Not at all. I am not waiting for him or for anyone."
"You would have married Mr. Grenfell if it had not been for Everard."
"Perhaps I should have married Everard if it had not been for Everard," said Magdalen.
It seemed as if nothing could shake her dispassionate view of the matter.
"Your feelings were certainly engaged, Magdalen. There is no use in denying that."
"Have I ever denied it?"
Aunt Mary was silent for a moment, but her under lip was ominously thrust out. She was not thinking of what Magdalen had said. If she had ever listened to the remarks of others when they differed from her, she would not have become Lady Blore. She was only silent because she was rallying her forces.
"A woman's hands become talons when they try to hold on to a man when he wants to get away," said Magdalen gently.
Aunt Mary turned on her niece an opaque eye that saw nothing beyond the owner's views.
"Something ought to be done," she said with emphasis. "After all, your father dismissed him. I shall advise your father to write to him, and if he does not—I shall write to him myself."
"I hope you will not do that," said Magdalen. "Do you remember what a subject for gossip it was at the time? When father became angry with Everard he told everyone, and it became a sort of loud turmoil.The servants knew, the parish knew, the whole county knew that I had had a disappointment. I have remained ever since in the eyes of the neighbours a sort of blighted creature, a victim of the heartlessness of man. A new edition of that old story now that my hair is grey would be, I think, a little out of place. I had hoped——"
The door was suddenly thrown open, and Bessie marched into the room with Aunt Aggie hanging nervously at her heels.
"I came back as quickly as I could from the Carters' in order not to miss you," said Bessie to Aunt Mary in her stentorian voice, and she presented a glowing rose cheek to be kissed.
Magdalen shot a grateful glance at her sister, and the conversation became general.
After the aunts had departed, Bessie said to Magdalen on their way upstairs to dress, "I found when I reached the Carters' that they had gone out with Professor Ridgway to see the Roman camp. Only old Mrs. Carter was at home, and she was rather chilly, and said they had expected me to luncheon. They had had a little party to meet the Professor. I saw that my conduct called for an apology. I made one."
"I am glad of that."
"I see now that it would have been wiser to have gone over for luncheon as arranged. I also thought how selfish it was of Fay not to help you with the aunts. And then I perceived that there were not two pins to choose between us, as I had been just as bad myself, so I hurried back as quickly as I could."
"I was most grateful to you when I saw you comein. And Aunt Mary was pleased too. She never shows it much; but she was."
"It is of secondary importance whether she was pleased or not. My object in returning was twofold: to help you, and also for the sake of my own character. I begin to see that unless I am careful I shall become as selfish as father."
Magdalen did not answer.
"The aunts never do things like other people," continued Bessie. "I found Aunt Aggie standing, eating a bun, just outside the drawing-room door. She was quite flurried when I came up, and said she wanted to see my fossils, but would rather look at them another day."
La vie est un instrument dont on commence toujours par jouer faux.
La vie est un instrument dont on commence toujours par jouer faux.
Wentworth and Fay did not follow Colonel Bellairs and Magdalen back to the house. When they reached the end of the avenue they turned back silently by mutual consent, and retraced their steps down it.
Presently they reached the trunk of the tree where Fay had been sitting with Magdalen.
Fay sank down upon it once more, white and exhausted. He sat down at a little distance from her.
"How is Michael?" she said at last, twisting her ungloved hands together.
"I came to tell you about him; I only got back last night. I knew you would wish to hear."
"How is he?"
"He has been ill. He has had double pneumonia. It started with hæmorrhage, and some of the blood got into the lungs, and caused pneumonia. He is better now, nearly well, in fact. The prison doctor seemed a sensible man, and he spoke as if he were interested in Michael. From what he said I gathered that he did not think Michael would survive another winter there. The prison[1]stands in a sort of marsh. It is a very good place to prevent prisoners escaping, but not a good place for them to keep alive in. The doctor ispressing to have Michael moved. He thinks he might do better at the 'colonia agricola,' where the labour is more agricultural; or that even work in the iron mines of Portoferriao would try his constitution less than the swamp where he now is."
[1]The prison described has no counterpart in real life.
[1]The prison described has no counterpart in real life.
"Was he still in chains?"
"No. And the doctor said there was some talk of abolishing them altogether. If not, he will be obliged to go back to them now he is better. He is looking forward to the sea lavender coming out. He says the place is beautiful beyond words when it is in flower: whole tracts and tracts of grey lilac blossom in the shallows, and hordes of wild birds. He asked me to tell you that you were to think of him as living in fairyland."
Fay winced as if struck.
"You gave him my message?" she stammered.
"Of course I did. And he said I was to tell you not to grieve for him, for he was well and happy."
"Happy!" echoed Fay.
"Yes, happy. He said he had committed a great sin, but that he hoped and believed that he was now expiating it, and that it would be forgiven."
"I am absolutely certain," said Fay in a suffocated voice, "that Michael did not murder the Marchese di Maltagliala."
"That is impossible," said Wentworth.
"Then what great sin can he be expiating?"
Even as Fay asked the question she knew the answer. Michael believed he was expiating the sin of loving another man's wife. In his mind that was probably on a par with the murder he had not committed.
"I asked him that," said Wentworth, "but he would not say. He would only repeat that his punishment was just."
Two large tears ran down Fay's cheeks.
"It is unjust, unjust, unjust!" she gasped. "Why does God allow these dreadful things?"
There was a long silence.
For a time Wentworth had forgotten Fay. He saw again the great yellow building standing in a waste of waters. He saw again the thin, prematurely aged face of his brother, the shaved head, the coarse, striped convict dress, the arid light from the narrow barred window. He saw again Michael's grave smile, and heard the tranquil voice, "This place is beautiful in autumn. Mind you come next when the sea lavender is out."
The remembrance of that meeting cut sharper than the actual pain of it at the moment. He had gone through with it with a sort of stolid endurance, letting Michael see but a tithe of what he felt. But the remembrance was anguish unalloyed. For a time he could neither speak nor see.
A yellow butterfly that had waked too soon floated towards them on a wavering trial trip. Close at hand a snowdrop drooped "its serious head." The butterfly knew its own, and lit on the meek, nunlike flower, opening and shutting its new wings in the pallid sunshine. It had perhaps dreamed, as it lay in its chrysalis, "that life had been more sweet." Was this chill sunshine that could not quicken his wings, was this grim desert that held no goal for butterfly feet, was this one snowdrop—all? Was this indeed the summerof his dreams, in the sure and certain hope of which he had spun his cocoon, and laid him down in faith?
Fay looked at it in anguish not less than Wentworth's, whose dimmed eyes saw it not at all. She never watched a poised butterfly open and shut its wings without thinking of Michael. The flight of a seagull across the down cut her like a lash. He had been free once. He who so loved the down, the sea, the floating cloud, had been free once.
When Wentworth had winked his steady grey eyes back to their normal state, he looked furtively at Fay. She was weeping silently. He had seen Fay in tears before, but never without emotion. With a somewhat halting utterance he told her of certain small alleviations of Michael's lot. The permission, urgently asked, had at last been granted that English books might be sent him from time to time. The lonely, aching smart of Wentworth's morning hours was vaguely soothed and comforted by Fay's gentle presence.
She appeared to listen to him, but in reality she heard nothing. She sat looking straight in front of her, a tear slipping from time to time down her white cheek. Except on one or two occasions Fay had that rarest charm of looking beautiful in tears. She became paler than ever, never red and disfigured and convulsed, with the prosaic cold in the head that accompanies the emotions of less fortunate women.
"How old is Michael?" she asked suddenly in the midst of a painstaking account of certain leniencies as to diet, certain macaronis and soups which the doctor had insisted on for Michael.
"He is twenty-seven."
"And how long has he been in prison?"
"Nearly two years."
"And he has thirteen more," said Fay, looking at Wentworth with wide eyes blank with horror.
"No," said Wentworth, his voice shaking a little. "No, Michael will not live long in that swamp, not many years, I think."
"But they will move him to a better climate."
"He does not want to be moved. I should not, either, in his case."
Fay's hands fell to her sides.
"When my mother died," said Wentworth, "I promised her to be good to Michael. There was no need for me to promise to be good to him. I always liked him better than anyone else. I taught him to ride and to shoot. He got his gun up sharp from the first. It's easy to do things for anyone you like. But what is hard is when the time comes"—Wentworth stopped, and then went on—"when the time comes that you can't do anything more for the person you care for most."
Silence.
The yellow butterfly was still feebly trying to open and shut his wings. The low sun had abandoned him to the encroaching frost, and was touching the bare overarching branches to palest gold, "so subtly fair, so gorgeous dim"; so far beyond the reach of tiny wings.
"I don't think," said Wentworth, "I would stick at anything. I don't know of anything I would not do, anything I would not give up, to get him back his freedom. But it's no use, I can do nothing for him."
"Oh! Why does not the real murderer confess?" said Fay with a sob, wringing her hands. "How can he go on, year after year, letting an innocent man wear out his life in prison, bearing the punishment of his horrible crime?"
That mysterious murderer occupied a large place in Fay's thoughts. She hated him with a deadly hatred. He was responsible for everything. That one crooked channel of thought that persistently turned aside all blame onto an unknown offender, had at last given a certain crookedness, a sort of twist, to the whole subject in Fay's mind.
"I begged Michael again for the twentieth time to tell me anything that could act as a clue to discovering the real criminal," said Wentworth. "I told him I would spend my last shilling in bringing him to justice, but he only shook his head. I told him that some of his friends felt certain that he knew who the murderer was, and was shielding him. He shook his head again. He would not tell me anything the first day I went to him after he was arrested. And still, after two years in prison, he will not speak. Michael will never say anything."
The despair in Wentworth's voice met the advancing chill of the waning afternoon. The sun had gone. The gold had faded into grey. A frosty breath was stirring the dead leaves. The butterfly had closed his wings for the last time, and clung feebly, half reversed, to his snowdrop. A tiny trembling had laid hold upon him. He was tasting death.
Fay shivered involuntarily, and drew her fur cloak around her.
"I must go in," she said.
They walked slowly to the wooden, ivied gate which separated the woods from the gardens. A thin, white moon was already up, peering at them above the gathering sea mist.
They stood a moment together by the gate, each vaguely conscious of the consolation of the other's presence in the face of the great grief which had drawn them together.
"I will come again soon, if I may," he said diffidently, "unless seeing me reminds you of painful things." His voice had lowered itself involuntarily.
"I like to see you," said Fay in a whisper, and she slipped away from him like a shadow among the shadows.
The entire dejection of her voice and manner sheared from her words any possible reassurance which Wentworth might otherwise have found in them, which he suddenly felt anxious to find in them.
He pondered over them as he rode home.
How she had loved her husband! People had hinted that they had not been a happily assorted couple, but it was obvious that her grief at his loss was still overwhelming. And what courageous affection she had shown towards Michael, whom she had known from a boy; first in trying to shield him when he had taken refuge in her room, and afterwards in her sorrowing compassion for his fate. And what a steadfast belief she had shown from first to last in his innocence, against overwhelming odds!
Wentworth did not know till he met Fay that such women existed. Women he was aware were an enigma.Men could not fathom them. They were fickle, mysterious creatures, on whom no sane man could rely, whom the wisest owned they could not understand, capable alternately of devotion and treachery, acting from instincts that men did not share, moved by sudden, amazing impulses that men could not follow.
But could a woman like Fay, who towered head and shoulders above the ordinary run of women, removed to a height apart from their low level of pettiness and vanity, by her simplicity and nobility and capacity for devotion—could such a woman love a second time?
The thirst to be loved, to be the object of an exquisite tenderness, what man has not, consciously or unconsciously longed for that? What woman has not had her dream of giving that and more, full measure, running over?
To find favour in a woman's eyes a man need only do his stupid bungling best. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had a best of any kind in him to do.
At twenty-five he would not have risked as much for love as even cautious men of robuster fibre will still ruefully but determinedly risk in the forties. And now at forty he would risk almost nothing.
Where Michael was concerned Wentworth's love had reached the strength where it could act, indefatigably, if need be. Michael had been so far the only creature who could move his brother's egotism beyond the refinements of bedridden sentiment.
It was as well for Fay that she did not realise, and absolutely essential for Wentworth that he did not realise either, that in spite of an undoubted naturalattraction towards her he would have seen no more of her unless she had come within easy reach.
A common trouble had drawn them towards each other. A common interest, a common joy or sorrow, a house within easy distance—these are some of the match makers between the invalids of life, who are not strong enough to want anything very much, or to work for what they want. For them favourable circumstance is everything.
Wentworth could ride four and a half miles down a picturesque lane to see Fay. But he could not have taken a journey by rail.
A few years before Wentworth met Fay he had been tepidly interested in the youthful sister of one of his college friends and contemporaries, an Oxford Don at whose house he stayed every year. The sister kept house for her brother. It was the usual easy commonplace combination of circumstances that has towed lazy men into marriage since the institution was first formed. He saw her without any effort on his part. He arrived at a kind of knowledge of her. He found her to be what he liked. She was sympathetic, refined, shy, cultivated, unselfish, and of a wild rose prettiness. After a time he kept up, mainly on her account, a regular intercourse with the brother, who was becoming rather prosy, as was Wentworth himself. Presently the brother married, and the sister ceased to live with him.
Wentworth's visits to Oxford gradually ceased to give him pleasure. He found his friend's wife middle-class, self-absorbed, and artificial, the friend himself donnish, cut and dried, and liable to anecdotic seizuresof increasing frequency. The intimacy dwindled and was now moribund. But it never entered his mind to enquire into the whereabouts of the sister, and to continue his acquaintance with her independently. If he had continued to meet her regularly he would almost certainly have married her. She on her side seemed well disposed towards him. As it was he never saw her again. He gradually ceased to think of her, except on summer evenings, as a charming possibility which Fate had sternly removed, as one lost to him for ever. He wrote a little poem about her, beginning, "Where are you now?" (She was at Kensington all the time.) Wentworth never published his verses. He said there was no room for a new poet who did not advertise himself. There had been room for one of his college friends, but that had been a case of log rolling.
I do not know whether it was a fortunate or an unfortunate fate that had prevented the gay little lady of the pink cheeks from being at that moment installed at Barford as the wife of a poet who scorned publicity.
If Wentworth had been riding home to his wife on that February evening he would not have taken unconsciously another of the many steps which entailed so many more, by saying to himself, thinking of Fay:
"Could a woman like that love a second time?"
Then he hastened his speed as he remembered that his old friend the Bishop of Lostford had by this time arrived at Barford.
If you feel no love, sit still; occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.—Tolstoy.
If you feel no love, sit still; occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men.
—Tolstoy.
In Wentworth's youth he had been attracted towards many, besides the Bishop, among the bolder and less conventional of his contemporaries. Their fire, their energies, their enthusiasm, warmed his somewhat under-vitalized nature. He regarded himself as one of them, and his refinement and distinction drew the robuster spirits towards himself. But gradually, as time went on, these energies and enthusiasm took form, and, alas! took forms which he had not expected—he never expected anything—and from which his mind instinctively recoiled. He had supposed that energy was energy. He had not realised that it was life in embryo, that might develop, not always on lines of beauty, into a new policy, or a great discovery, or a passion, or a vocation. He hated transformations, new births, all change. His friends at first rallied him unmercifully, then lost patience, and finally fell from him, one by one. Some openly left him, the more good-natured among them forgot him, and if by chance they found themselves in his society, hurried back with affectionate cordiality to reminiscences of school and college life, long-passed milestones before the parting of the ways.
The Bishop when he plunged into his work also for a time lost sight of Wentworth, but when he wasappointed to the See of Lostford, within five miles of Barford, the two men resumed, at first with alacrity, something of the old intercourse.
Wentworth had an element of faithfulness in him which enabled him to take up a friendship after a long interval, but it was on one condition, namely that the friend had remainedplanté làwhere he had been left. If in the meanwhile the friend had moved, the friendship flagged.
It was soon apparent that the Bishop had not by any means remainedplanté là, and the friendship quickly drooped. It would long since have died a natural death if it had not been kept alive by the Bishop himself, a man of robust affections and strong compassions, without a moment to spend on small resentments. After Michael's imprisonment he had redoubled his efforts to keep in touch with Wentworth, and the great grief of the latter, silently and nobly endured, had been a bond between the two men which even a miserable incident which must have severed most friendships had served to loosen, not to break.
The Bishop had in truth arrived at Barford, and was now sitting apparently unoccupied by the library fire. To be unoccupied even for an instant except during recuperative sleep was so unusual with the Bishop, so unprecedented, that his daughter would have been terrified could she have seen him at that moment. He had only parted from her and her husband at mid-day, yet it was a sudden thought suggested by his visit to them which was now holding him motionless by the fire, his lean person bulging with unanswered letters.
The Bishop was a small ugly man of fifty,unconventional to the core, the younger son of a duke, and a clergyman by personal conviction. He had been born in a hurry, and had remained in a hurry ever since. He had neither great administrative capacities, nor profound scholarship, but what powers he had were eked out by a stupendous energy. His Archbishop said that he believed that the Bishop's chaplains died like flies, and that he merely threw their dead bodies into the Loss, which flowed beneath his palace windows, without even a burial service. His chaplains and secretaries certainly worked themselves to the bone for him. They could have told tales against him, but they never did. For it was a strain to serve the Bishop, to get his robes thrown over him at the right—I mean the last—second, to thrust him ruthlessly into his carriage just in time to catch the tail ends of departing trains—he generally travelled with the guard. His admirable life had been spent in a ceaseless whirl. He had never had time to marry. He had hurried to the altar when he was an eager curate with a pretty young bride who was a stranger to him, whom his mother had chosen for him. During the years that followed what little he saw of her at odd moments he liked. After ten years of what he believed to be married life she died, leaving one child; tactful to the last, pretty to the last, having made no claim from first to last, kissing his hand, and thanking him for his love, and for the beautiful years they had spent together.
His friends said that he bore her loss with heroism, but in reality he missed her but little. Her death occurred just after he had become an ardent suffragan. His daughter grew up in a few minutes, and quicklytook her mother's place. She was her mother over again in character and appearance. His wife had lived in his house for ten years, his daughter for twenty. By dint of time he learned to know her as he had never known her mother. At twenty she married his chaplain.
The chaplain was a tall, stooping, fleckless, flawless, mannerless, joyless personage, middle-aged at twenty-eight, with a voice like a gong, with a metallic mind constructed of thought-tight compartments, devoted body and soul to the Church, an able and indefatigable worker, smelted from the choice ore of that great middle class from which, as we know, all good things come. That he was a future ornament, or at any rate an iron girder of the Church was sufficiently obvious.
The Bishop saw his worth, and ruefully endured him until the chaplain, in the most suitable language, desired to become his son-in-law, and that at the most inconceivably awkward moment, namely, just when the Bishop had presented him with a living. The marriage had to be. The daughter wished it with an intensity that amazed her father. And gradually the Bishop discovered that he detested his paragon of a son-in-law. But why? It was not jealousy. He really was a paragon, not a sham. To the Bishop it seemed, and with truth, that any other woman would have done as well as his daughter, that her husband neither understood her nor wished to understand her, that he accepted ruthlessly without knowing that he accepted it, her selfless devotion, that he used her as a cushion to make his rare moments of leisure more restful, that her love was not even a source of happiness to him, only asolace. And she, extraordinary to behold, was radiantly content.
"Just like her mother over again," the Bishop had wrathfully said to himself as he drove away from his daughter's door. And at that moment a slide was drawn back from his mind, and he saw that the marriage was a replica of his own, except in so far that his son-in-law, greatly assisted by circumstances, had actually taken a little trouble to arrange his marriage for himself, while the Bishop's—what there was of it—had been done for him by his mother.
Till this morning he had believed his marriage to have been an ideally happy one, that he had felt all that man can feel; and he had been inclined to treat as womanish the desperate desolation of men who had after all only suffered the same bereavement as he had himself, and which he had quickly overcome. He saw now that he had missed happiness exactly as his son-in-law was missing it. The same thing had befallen them both. Love could do there no mighty works because of their unbelief. When he remembered his wife's face he realised that her joy had been something beyond his ken. He had not shared it. He had not known love, even when it had drawn very nigh unto him.
As he waited motionless for Wentworth to come in, his strong, intrepid mind worked. The Bishop at fifty went to school to a new thought. It was that power of going to school at fifty to a new thought which had made his Archbishop, who loved him, give him the See of Lostford, to the amazement of the demurer clergy who were scandalised by his unconventionality, and hisfearful baldness of speech. They could only account for the appointment by the fact that he was the son of a duke. It was that power which made the Bishop seem a much younger man than Wentworth, who was in reality ten years his junior. The Bishop was still a learner. He still moved with vigour mentally. Wentworth, on the contrary, had arrived—not at any place in particular, but at the spot where he intended to remain. His ideas, and some of them had been rather good ones at twenty-five, had suffered from their sedentary existence. They had become rather stout. He called them progressive because in the course of years he had perceived in them a slight glacier-like movement. To others they appeared fixed.
Wentworth's attitude towards life, of which he was so fond of speaking, was perhaps rather like that of a shrimper who, in ankle-deep water, watches the heavily freighted whale boats come towering in. He does not quite know why he, of all men, with his special equipment for the purpose, and his expert handling of the net, does not also catch whales. That they seldom swim in two-inch water does not occur to him. At last he does not think there are any whales. He has exploded that fallacy. For, in a moment of adventurous enthusiasm, counting not the cost, did he not once wade recklessly up to his very shoulders in deep water:and there were no whales,—only pinching crabs. Crabs were the one real danger, the largest denizens of the boundless main, whatever his former playmates the whalers might affirm.
When the shrimper and the whaler had dined together, and the Bishop had heard with affectionatesympathy the little there was to hear respecting Michael, and the conversation tended towards more general topics, the radical antagonism between the two friends' minds threatened every moment to make itself felt.
The Bishop tried politics somewhat tentatively, on which they had sympathised in college days, but it seemed they had widely diverged since. Wentworth, though he frequently asserted that no one enjoyed more than he "the clashing of opposite opinions," seemed nevertheless only able to welcome with cordiality a mild disagreement, just sufficiently defined to prove stimulating to the expression of his own views. A wide divergence from them he met with a chilly silence. He did so now. The Bishop looked at his neat ankle, and changed the subject.
"Have you seen or heard anything of Everard Constable since he came into his kingdom, such a very unexpected kingdom, too?"
"No. I fancy he is still abroad. But I can't say that for some time past I have found Constable's aims in life very sympathetic. His unceasing struggle after literary fame appears to me somewhat undignified."
"Oh! come. Give the devil his due. Constable can write."
"Of course, of course. That is just what I am saying. But he and I differ too widely in our outlook on life to remain really intimate. He cares for the big things, ambition, popularity, a prominent position, luxury. He will enjoy being a personage, and having wealth at his command. For my part, I am afraid I care infinitely more for the small things of life, love, friendship, sympathy."
"Thesmallthings! Good Lord!" said the Bishop, and his jaw dropped. He also dropped the subject.
"I ran up against Grenfell last week," he continued immediately. "Do you seehimnow? You and he used to be inseparable at Cambridge."
Wentworth became frigid.
Grenfell had accused him at their last meeting of being an old maid, an accusation which had wounded Wentworth to the quick, and which he had never forgotten or forgiven. He had not in the least realised that Grenfell was not alluding to the fact that he happened to be unmarried.
"I can't say I care to see him now," he said. "He has become entirely engrossed in his career. A simple life like mine, the life of thought, no longer interests him. He is naturally drawn to people who are playing big parts."
"What nonsense! He is just the same as ever. A little vehement and fiery, but not as much as he was. They say he will be the next Chancellor of the Exchequer to a certainty."
"I daresay he will. He has the art of keeping himself before the public eye. Being myself so constituted—it is not any virtue in me, only a constitutional defect—that I cannot elbow for a place, it is difficult for me to understand how another, especially a man like Grenfell, can bring himself to do so. I had always thought he was miles above that kind of thing."
"So he is. So he is. A blind man can see Grenfell's unworldliness. It sticks a yard out of him. My dear Wentworth, if energetic elbows were, as you imply, the key to success, how do you account for the fact thathundreds of painful persons have triumphantly passed that preliminary examination who never achieve anything beyond a diploma in the art of pushing?"
Wentworth did not answer.
He firmly believed that in order to attain the things he had not attained, had never striven for, of which he invariably spoke disparagingly, but which he secretly and impotently desired, the co-operation of certain ignoble qualities was essential, sordid allies whom he would have disdained to use.
"I don't blame Grenfell," he said at last. "He had his way to make. I know how blinding the glamour of ambition is, how insidious and insistent the claims of the world may become. I don't pretend to be superior to certain temptations if they came in my way. But I happen to have kept out of their way. That is all."
"You have certainly kept out of the way of—nearly everything."
"For my part, I daresay I am hopelessly out of date, but I value beauty and peace and simplicity higher than a noisy success. But a noisy success is the one thing that counts nowadays."
"Does it?"
"And Grenfell has taken the right steps to gain it. If a man craves for popularity, if he really thinks the bubble worth striving for, he must lay himself out for it. If he wants a place he must jostle for it. If he wants power he must discard scruples. If he wants social success it can be got—we see it every day—by pandering to the susceptibilities and seeking the favour of influential persons. Everything has its price. I don't say that everyone obtains these things who isready to bid for them. But some do. Grenfell is among those who have. I don't blame him. I am not sure that I don't rather envy him."
The Bishop could respect a conviction.
"Are you not forgetting Grenfell's character?" he said gently, as one speaks to a sick man. "Think of him, his nobility, his integrity, his enthusiasm, his transparent unworldliness which so often in the old days put us all to shame!"
"That is just what makes it all so painful to me," said Wentworth, and there was no possibility of doubting his sincerity. "That contact with the world can taint even beautiful natures like his. He was my ideal at one time. I almost worshipped him at Cambridge."
"I love him still," said the Bishop. "A cat may look at a king, so I suppose a poor crawler of a bishop may look at a man like Grenfell. Don't you think, Wentworth, that sometimes a man who succeeds may have worked as nobly as a man who fails—you always speak so feelingly of failure, it is one of the many things I like about you. Don't you think that perhaps sometimes success may be—I don't say it always is—as high-minded as failure, that a hard-won victory may be as honourable as defeat, that achievement maysometimesbe the result not of chance or interest, but of unremitting toil? Don't you think you may be unconsciously cutting yourself adrift from Grenfell's friendship by attributing his success to unworthy means which a man like him could never have stooped to?"
"It is he who has cut himself adrift from me," said Wentworth icily. "I have not changed."
"That is just it. A slight change, shall we sayexpension on your part, might have enabled you to"—the Bishop chose his words as carefully as a doctor counts drops into a medicine glass—"to keep pace with him?"
"I do not regard friendship as a race or a combat of wits," said Wentworth. "Friendship is to my mind something sacred. I hope I can remain Grenfell's friend without believing him to be absolutely faultless. If he is so unreasonable as to expect that of me, which I should not for a moment expect of him, why then——" Wentworth shrugged his shoulders.
One of the few friends who had not drifted from him looked at him with somewhat pained affection.
Why does a life dwelt apart from others tend to destroy first generosity and then tenderness in man and woman? Why does one so often find a certain hardness and inhumanity encrusting those who have withdrawn themselves behind the shutters of their own convenience, or is it, after all, their own impotence?
"Has he always been hard and cold by nature?" said the Bishop to himself, "and is the real man showing himself in middle age, or is his meagre life starving him?"
He tried again.
"You nearly lost my friendship a year ago by attributing a sordid motive to me, Wentworth."
Wentworth understood instantly.
"That is all past and forgotten," he said quickly. "I never think of it. Have I ever allowed it to make the slightest difference?"
"No," said the Bishop, looking hard at him, "and for that matter neither have I. We have never talkedthe matter out. Let us do so now. I don't suppose you have forgotten the odium I incurred over the living of Rambury. It had been held for generations by old men. It had become a kind of clerical almshouse. When it fell vacant there was of course yet another elderly cleric——"
"My uncle," said Wentworth, "a most excellent man."
"Just so, but in failing health. Rightly or wrongly I was convinced that it was my duty to give the place a chance by putting there a younger man, of energy and capacity for hard work. I gave it to my future son-in-law as you know."
Wentworth nodded. "Everyone said at the time he was an excellent man," he said with evident desire to be fair.
"I daresay, but that is not the point. The point is that I had no idea that iron traction engine wanted to marry my daughter or anybody's daughter. The tactless beast got up steam and proposed for her the day after I had offered him the living. He had never given so much as a preliminary screech on the subject, never blown a horn to show what his horrid intentions were—I only hope that if I had known I should still have had the moral courage to appoint him. The Archbishop assures me I should—but I doubt it. I was loudly accused of nepotism, of course. Your uncle, who died soon afterwards, forgave me in the worst of taste on his deathbed. I had no means of justifying myself. The Archbishop and Grenfell and a few other old friends believed.Why were you not among those old friends, Wentworth?"
"Iwasamong them," said Wentworth, meeting the Bishop's sombre eyes. "You never answered it, so I suppose you never received it, but at the time I wrote you a long letter assuring you that I for one had not joined in the cry against you, even though my uncle did. I frankly owned that, while I regarded the appointment as an ill-considered one, I took for granted that Mr. Rawlings was suited for the place. I said that I knew you far too well to suppose even for a moment that you would have given the post to a man, even if he were your son-in-law, unless he had been competent to fill it. You never answered the letter, so I suppose it failed to reach you."
"I received it," said the Bishop slowly. "I felt it to be an illuminating document, but it did not seem to call for an answer. It was in itself a response to a tacit appeal."
There was a pause, and then he continued cheerfully. "Rawlings has proved himself dreadfully competent as you prophesied, and Lucy is very happy in her new home. I came on from there this morning. My son-in-law, with the admirable promptitude and economy of time which endeared him to me as my chaplain, had arranged that every moment of my visit should be utilised; that I should christen their first child, dedicate a thank-offering in the shape of a lectern, consecrate the new portion of the churchyard, open a reading-room, and say a few cordial words at a drawing-room meeting before I left at mid-day. I told him if he went on like this he would certainly come to grief and be made a bishop some day. But he only remarked that he was not solicitous of high preferment.I think you would like Rawlings if you knew him better. You and he have a certain amount in common. I must own that I am glad that it is Lucy who has to put up with him and not I. I should think even God Almighty must find him rather difficult to live with at times. And now, Wentworth, if I am to be up and away at cock-crow, I must go to bed."
But the Bishop did not go to bed at once when Wentworth had escorted him to his room.
"It was no use," he said to himself. "It was worth trying, but it was no use. He never saw that he had misjudged me. He met my eye. He has a straight, clean eye. He is sincere as far as he goes, but how fardoeshe go? He has never made that first step towards sincerity of doubting his own sincerity. He mistakes his moods for convictions. He has never suspected his own motives, or turned them inside out. He suspects those of others instead. He is like a crab. He moves sideways by nature, and he thinks that everyone else who moves otherwise is not straightforward, and that he must make allowances for them. According to his lights he has behaved generously by me. Has he! Damn him! God forgive me. Well, I must stick to him, for I believe I am almost the only friend he has left in the world."