Mrs. John Chevenix, a young and lively woman with ash-coloured hair, audacious nose, and a clear complexion, was devoted to her husband's family, and especially tender to our young friend and Sanchia's, with whom she had a strong alliance. Her husband had a sense of humour, which he indulged for the most part in silence. He spoke rarely, swallowed his laughter, and yet was good company. You felt his sympathy, found yourself depending on it. You gauged his relish by a twinkle, by a deeper shade of purple in his cheeks, by a twitching ear. The Stock Exchange gave him a sufficiency, and his wife, with her taste for dinner-parties, saw to it that it gave him no more. “Let's bleed old John,” was Bill Chevenix's pleasant way of suggesting an escapade which might run into hundreds. “It will do him good,” Mrs. John used to agree; and John Chevenix would chuckle internally, and say, “Go it, you two.” On these terms they were all very happy.
Bill Chevenix had told his sister-in-law as much about Sanchia as he thought fitting. To begin with, he took all responsibility upon himself for the opening scene of her wild adventure. He had introduced “the chap” into the Percival household, and it was he, too, who hadnotintroduced the fact of his unhappy marriage. “Took it all for granted—thought they knew it—forgot they didn't belong to that gang—your gang, my gang, Nevile's gang. Rotten of me, my dear, but there you are.” Mrs. John understood him to feel more contrite than he appeared. And next he lauded Sanchia, after his own manner. As thus: “A queer young fish. You can't judge her by the rules of the game. She shows her strength by breaking 'em. She'd break anything and anybody. Oh, she's as deep as the Dogger. But mighty pleasant with it, you know, Fine, quiet style of her own. And a beauty. My word, but she's like a rose.” Then his eyes met hers confidentially. A wink passed. “No. We're great friends. That's all there is to it, on my honour. But you can't leave a girl like that stranded, can you now? Especially when you've run her aground yourself—in a way. So I thought of old Aunt Wenman in a minute. In fact, I've seen her about it, and, by George, she hit on a phrase in a trice. 'Unfortunate attachment.' She's perfectly happy with that, and rather keen. Now all you have to do is to give a party, and I'll ask Sancie.”
Mrs. John thought that was too casual. “You mustn't treat her like a dancing man,” she told him. “I shall call on her, and you can tell her I'm coming. We'll do the thing in form.”
All this had been done, and the call returned. Sanchia's still serenity, seen through the rosy mist of her momentary confusion, pleased Mrs. John. The invitation was made and accepted in parting.
“Do come. We shan't have many people, you know; but I won't let you be dull. And Bill will be there, of course—and you rather like Bill—and a queer old Aunt of ours who knows everybody. So I hope you won't mind.”
“I'm sure I shan't,” Sanchia said, and then they shook hands.
Bill Chevenix, who had been present, waved himself away from the doorstep. “By-by, my dear,” he said. “You've done bravely by me. Isn't she splendid?”
“I like her,” said Mrs. John. “But she's rather unapproachable.”
Bill chuckled. “That's her little way. She don't kiss easily.”
Mrs. John said that he ought to know.
The party was anything but dull. Lady Maria dined with seven other people, the best that could be mustered on short notice—and Sanchia came in at ten o'clock, when the drawing-room was full. She came with an elderly friend, a Mrs. Quantock, whose acquaintance she had made in an omnibus, and renewed at the British Museum. Mrs. Quantock was an authoress by profession, a poetess by temperament. Her emotions, not always under control, consorted oddly with her broad and placid face. She knew Lady Maria Wenman, and it was she who actually performed the introduction, Mrs. John being fast at her stair-head.
“I particularly want you to know my dear friend—Miss Sanchia Percival—Lady Maria Wenman. A great heart, Lady Maria, in a frame of steel.”
“Oh, indeed,” said Lady Maria. Then, “Come and sit with me, my dear; I've heard about you. But I hope you've left your steels at home.”
“If I had a trumpet,” said good Mrs. Quantock, “instead of a penny whistle, all the world should hear what I think of Sanchia.”
“Then it's a very good thing you haven't,” said Lady Maria. “The less young ladies are trumpeted in public the better!”
Sanchia, during this interchange, had stood smiling and self-possessed; but she was a little fluttered, and looked none the worse for that. Without a word she obeyed the twinkling and puckered old lady, sat by her on the sofa and awaited, her hands folded in her lap, what might be in store for her. She liked the looks of Lady Maria, and had no disrelish for her sharp tongue, nor fear of what might fall to her share when Mrs. Quantock took herself off. She liked the little, deep-set, dark grey eyes, the beaked nose, like the prow of a trireme, and the drawn-in mouth, which seemed to be victim of the astringencies it was driven to utter. And then she liked the signs of race, the disregard of opinion, the keen look which lit on a man or woman and saw him negligible and left him in the road. She had herself an artist's eye for style, and saw in Lady Maria the grand manner. The praise or blame of such as she would be worth having; awaiting either, she felt herself braced. She could envisage the past, collect it, display it in her lap without fear. “Here's my life's work, so far as it has gone. Now beat me, if you will; I'm not afraid of honest blows.” She knew there would be no sham outcries from this high-looking old dame.
Lady Maria Wenman was rich, imperious, whimsical, and afraid only of boredom. By birth a daughter of Lord Starcross, by fate the widow of a judge, she was strongly of opinion that she could do as she pleased. It was not so clear to her that other people could also; but the reason of that was that other people, not immediately about her, were not themselves clear. She once said of a prime minister, “My dear, he seemed to me a very good sort of man”; and that was her attitude all the world over towards those not connected with her by blood or the affections. Marks of race she had, but not pride of it. She was her own fountain of honour, and were you omnibus-tout or commander-in-chief, if she liked you you were in being, if not, you didn't exist. One consequence of this was that she hated nobody, and was offended at nothing. The vices or crimes of a non-existent world were mere shadows, naturally; those of her circle of cognizance she had a way, very much her own, of accounting for. A trick of hers, which had become inveterate, was to explain states of being by phrases. These not only explained, they seemed to condone; and to her there's no doubt, they accounted for everything. Mr. William Chevenix, aware of her foible, did not scruple to turn it to his ends when putting before her Sanchia's case. “You see, Aunt, one rather admires her loyalty to the chap. He was precious miserable, and she pitied him. Well, we know what comes of that, don't we? It turns to liking, and gratitude, and all those swimmy feelings; and then they swim together, all in a flux, eh? And there you are.” To which, when Lady Maria had nodded her head of kindly vulture sagely, and mused aloud, “I see; an unfortunate attachment. Very common, I believe, and quite sad,” he knew that he had scored a point. When she had added, “We must do what we can, of course; I'll see her; I've nobody with me just now,” he presumed that he had won the rubber.
Apart from the comfortableclichein which she was seen enfolded, Sanchia pleased the eye. Her father, in league with her throughout, had “stood” her a frock, the cunningest that Madame Freluche could supply, and would have added pearls for her hair and neck if she had not tenderly refused them. She took his counsels in the general—that she was to show them what was what, “for the honour of the Percival girls”—and her own for the particular; would have no ornaments at all. By an entirely right instinct she chose to wear black. It set her off as dazzlingly fair, as more delicate than she was. Her eyes, from her pale brows and faintly tinted cheeks, gleamed intensely, burningly blue. Her strength appeared in her shut lips and firm chin—subtle, and, as Mrs. Quantock said, like that of steel wire.
She did not talk much, but what she said was simple and direct. She seemed to be reticent about herself, not by any means from shame, but because her acts and intentions appeared too obvious to be worth rehearsing. Once or twice her laugh, low and musical, showed that she relished a joke. Lady Maria occasionally made jokes. Here was a girl who understood them.
To the old gentlewoman, who never beat about bushes, but mostly walked through them, Sanchia's bluntness made immediate appeal. Her reply, for instance, to the enquiry, What had induced her to go on with the affair, was a counter-question. “What else could I do?” she had asked, with pencilled brows arched. “I thought it made no difference. I wanted to, you see. What you do is nothing compared with what you want to do.”
“Then why do it, my dear?” said Lady Maria. Sanchia did not blink the answer, “Nevile wanted me. He was very unhappy.”
“Well,” said the old woman, “what is he now?” This time Sanchia did not reply.
Lady Maria drew her lips in until her mouth looked like a dimple in her face. “Oho! That's it, is it? He's neglected you, and now you don't care?”
“I care for some things very much,” said Sanchia. “I want to please Papa, and Vicky, my sister, you know—and I think I want to put myself right with the world. But—”
“But you don't care two pins about him?”
Sanchia shook her head sadly. Her brows were arched to her hair. “No,” she said, “I don't care one pin.”
Lady Maria was no fool. She saw exactly what was going to happen, and no reason why she should not declare it. She had formed already a high enough opinion of Sanchia—which is to say no more than that she liked her—to be sure that it would not influence her conduct. “I'll tell you what the end of this will be,” she said. “You'll have him on the floor, kissing your toes. He'll be mad to have you—and you'll marry him. Then he'll be your slave for life. And they tell me that's the happiest state a woman can live in. I have some reason for believing it. I and the judge got along admirably, though the poor man might have bored me to extinction. Oh, you'll do very well. But don't make him jealous.”
Sanchia considered this. “I don't think he would be jealous,” she decided; “but we are rather premature, aren't we?” And then she related, as if they were an anecdote, the circumstances of her departure from Wanless.
Lady Maria listened carefully, nodding a dispassionate head at details which would have raised Philippa's hair, and depilated Mrs. Percival. “I think he's a human being, if you'll allow me to say so,” was the conclusion she came to. “It was no affair of the gardener's that I can see; and to be battered in your own drive by your own servant, even you must allow to be provoking.”
“Oh,” Sanchia assured her, “I didn't at all mind his being vexed. But he accused me of—all sorts of things.”
“Of course he did, my dear,” cried Lady Maria. “He was in a towering rage. How was he to know that you hadn't egged on the gardener?”
“By what he knew of me already,” said Sanchia with spirit. Lady Maria twinkled; but her scrutiny was keen. “I don't think you have explained the gardener,” she told her. Sanchia blushed.
“He's a boy,” was her suggestion: but Lady Maria's comment on that was, “And a bruiser it seems.”
Sanchia smiled gently. “Poor Struan! He was very difficult. He made me furiously angry. What he did was outrageous. But I am sure he is a genius.”
“What!” cried her ladyship. “A genius at gardening? or at thrashing gentlemen?”
Sanchia said simply, “It's extraordinary what he can do with plants. He's certainly a genius there. He's like a plant himself. He never goes to bed, but walks about the garden all night, talking to them.”
“Like a burglar,” said Lady Maria. “Pray, what does he talk to them about? Growing?”
“Sometimes, I think. I don't know what he says to them. But he talks about all sorts of things.”
“You, for instance?” Lady Maria asked, suddenly; and Sanchia blushed again, and presently looked at Lady Maria. “He's always nice to me,” she said, mildly.
“I think,” her ladyship resumed, “I think I like to think of him best in prison;” and then washed him out of her memory as she faced more serious topics.
“It will be much better for you to come to me,” she told Sanchia. “I'm an old woman, and an old tyrant, I daresay, but I'm somebody, you know. And I'm pretty lonely, and happen to want company just now. It will be good that you have a foothold to your name when your Nevile Ingram comes after you. I shall bring him to reason quicker than most people, I don't doubt. Your quarrel is absurd; you can't afford to quarrel with your bread and cheese. You've your father, you'll say; but my answer is that it's not very decent to live upon your father when you've got yourself kicked out of his house. I quite see your point of view, mind you. These things will happen, and in theory you're perfectly in the right. It's your practice that won't do. All for love and the world well lost—very fine indeed. But so long as we're in the world, you see, wecan'tlose it. There it is. Now you've had your kisses, and can afford to settle down; but you must do it in the world's way if you want peace and quietness; and I'm very ready to help you. Really, I don't see anything better for you—short of your own home.”
“I shall never go there again,” Sanchia told her, directly.
“Very right, my dear,” said the old lady. “Then you had better come to me.”
Sanchia said, “I should like that,” and Lady Maria, taking her by the chin, patted her cheek.
“And so should I, my dear,” she said—and the thing was as good as settled.
Mrs. John, released from her stair-head, came up presently; Bill Chevenix was with her. “Dear Aunt Wenman,” she said, “I haven't had a word with you since you came; but I'm sure you've been happy.”
“Miss Sanchia and I have been swearing eternal friendship,” said Lady Maria.
“Exchanging drops of blood, eh, Aunt?” chirped the cheerful youth. “Nothing like it.”
“I have no blood to spare, William,” she replied, “and if I had, Miss Sanchia has too much. Now you can take her away while I talk to Helen. Good-by, my dear,” she bade Sanchia.
“Good-by, Lady Maria,” the girl replied, with deeply sincere eyes. “You've been very kind to me.”
“Fiddlesticks,” said Lady Maria. “I like you. Now run away, the pair of you.”
“Right, Aunt,” said Chevenix, and crooked his arm.
After a decent interval, in which we may suppose formal visits exchanged between Charles Street and Great Cumberland Place, Sanchia set up her rest in the former mansion. The time was full June.
The string of episodes which discovered before the autumn was over the heart of Mr. Cyrus Worthington at her feet hardly deserves record in her history but for the fillip which it gave to her spirits. Tribute is tribute, and Mr. Worthington was a warrantable gentleman. The tarnish she had discerned upon her armour, the foxmarks upon her fair page, dispersed under his ardent breath; she realised herself desirable and loveworthy; she arose from the thicket in which she cowered with the light of triumph prophetic in her eyes, the flush of victory after victory prophetic in her cheeks. Therefore Mr. Worthington's career in the Charles Street lists shall be chronicled.
He was a portly widower, a banker, a father, who made his bow to Lady Maria some three times a year when he dined in Charles Street. In return, he received her ladyship once during a summer at his mansion of Fallowlea, Walton-on-Thames. On such occasions the Misses Worthington and their cousins, the Pascoe girls, who lived at Esher, would enact a pastoral play in the shrubberies with various entangled curates, with young Sam Worthington from Oxford and friends of his. Mr. Worthington himself, master of the difficult art of declining verse as if it were bad prose, rehearsed the Prologue and Epilogue in a master's gown and mortarboard, which he would retain for the rest of the afternoon. It was in that guise that, his caution deserting him, he allowed himself to dwell upon Sanchia's beauty.
Lady Maria had taken her down to Walton in mid-July; she had chanced to meet Melusine there, and the two had embraced as sisters should. It is to be owned that her adoption by Charles Street had restored her credit with her family more certainly than any white sheet and taper which she could have supported would have done. Her mother was highly gratified, though she affected a shrug when good Mr. Percival, in the simplicity of his heart, overflowed with the joy of it. “Sancie in Berkeley Square—where Lord Rosebery lives: think of that, my dear!” And Mrs. Percival, who knew where Lord Rosebery lived as well as anybody, would reply, “These things will be balanced hereafter. Neither you nor I, Welbore, are assessing angels, I believe. I pray to God that she has made her peace with our Church.”
“Chapel Royal,” said Mr. Percival, “will be her ladyship's ticket—or St. James's, Piccadilly. They tell me that the great world go there now in the evenings, dressed for dinner.” Privately he vowed that, should his Sancie be one of those immaculate worshippers, she should not fail in toilet. And he had not missed the point so far as you might think. Philippa Tompsett-King, who had been present when these things were discussing, had lifted an inflamed face over the dinner-table. “I only know,” she had said, “that I would rather live in Bloomsbury than have her conscience. Cynicism has always seemed to me the sin against the Holy Ghost.” But Melusine Scales, the gentle creature, had written meekly of her joy; and Vicky Sinclair said to her husband, the captain—“Sancie always tumbles on her feet. She always did—like a sweet cat.” Shrewd and affectionate at once, she alone had discerned the god's prerogative immanent in the youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival.
But the picture of Sanchia and Melusine, two fair girls, standing together embraced under the cedarn shade had smitten deep into the well-cased heart of Cyrus Worthington. He had come upon them at a pretty moment, when Melusine, the willowy and tall, having opened her arms to the dear truant, one arm still about her, with her free hand touched her cheek that lips might meet lips. “Darling, I'm so glad—so very glad,” she was whispering, and Sanchia, with the same light laughing in her eyes, “Dear old Melot—how sweet you are to me.” Mr. Worthington pushed back his mortarboard and revealed the crimson chevron which it had bitten into his bald brow. “A charming scene—two charming young ladies! Mrs. Gerald Scales and her sister, I think. Lady Maria's adoption—charming, charming!” A right instinct sent him tiptoe over his lawn, another made him doff his mortarboard.
“Mrs. Scales, we begin. The hunt is up. Poesy calls, 'Follow, follow, follow!' Your sister, I think?”
Sanchia played the rogue. “Oh, Mr. Worthington, have you forgotten already? Lady Maria explained me half-an-hour-ago. Must Melusine introduce me again?”
“Not for the world, Miss Percival, not for the world!” the banker protested. “I was in a sense explaining myself. Pray, do not suppose that I forget either you or my manners so completely. No, no. But I am a little near-sighted, I fear; there is a little difficulty of focussing; nothing organic, no loss of function.” He cleared his throat, and to give himself assurance, jingled half-crowns with his plunged hand. “No loss of function whatever.” He took the thing a little more seriously than he need, was in danger of labouring it. Melusine turned the talk. He invited them to the play, as “master of the revels,” and walked between them, looking a very decent figure of a don on a college lawn, substantial, serene, and with an air of displaying his possessions:“Parva sed apta mihi; Deus nobis haec otia fecit!”He still possessed the rags of his Latin. “This little bay-tree will interest you, Miss Percival. It was planted many years ago by the late Lord Meeke—the uncle of the present peer. We had had some business relations; they were happily cemented into something more intimate by this little fellow.” He touched it tenderly. “A sturdy growth! Like my affection for my noble but departed friend. Dear me!Labuntur anni, indeed!” His fig tree, which some one else had planted, his laburnum—a slip from one at Rickmansworth, the seat of the late Lord Mayor Burgess—a catalpa seedling from Panshanger, which the late Lady Cowper did him the honour to present with her own hands: as Sanchia said afterwards to Melot, his garden was rather like a cemetery of dead friendships....
Then they sat to witness the revels. Sanchia's fancy, uplifted by her contentment, played with the play, and suggested flights undreamed of for many a year. She sat by Melusine and her husband, and Mr. Worthington watched her in the long intervals of his duty. Charming indeed, and most high-bred: now where did old Welbore Percival, whom he met daily in Throgmorton Street, fetch up such a strain of blood? His wife, too, Kitty Blount, as she had been—what had Kitty Blount been but a high-coloured, bouncing romp of a girl when they had all been paddling together at Broadstairs? Extraordinary! And now here was one of his girls sister-in-law of a county baronet—none of your city knights, mind you—and the other, with the lift of a princess and the clear sight which is hers by title. Extraordinary!
And there was another thing: where had old Welbore and Kitty Blount kept her all this time? And why wasn't she married, a girl like that? She came next to Mrs. Scales, he supposed. Well, but there was another, younger still, married only the other day—to an army man. He remembered Welbore chirping about it at a Board meeting. What was that in the Bible—what was it? Ha!—“But thou hast kept the good wine until now.” By George, he must remember that for old Welbore. And now he came to think of it, old Jack Etherington had come in one morning full of Percival's daughter—“A lovely gal”—he had said, that old Jack—“colour of a Mildred Grant—quiet as the truth.”
Such were the ruminations of Cyrus Worthington at his own garden-party, and he pursued them at favoured moments—with his glass of port at dessert, with his last cigar, with his whisky night-cap. In the city next day he rallied Thomas Welbore, who betrayed unlimited relish for the diversion; and within a few days more he left a card in Charles Street and took a late train to Walton-on-Thames. Asked in due course to dinner, he handed Sanchia to the table, and spent the evening by her side. He begged her better acquaintance with his daughters, made the most of that which he had with Melusine Scales, and ended a successful adventure by winning Lady Maria's acceptance “for herself and her young friend,” of a banquet at the Cooper's Company of which he was warden. The occasion was a great one-a foreign potentate, the Prime Minister, Lord Mayor, and Sheriffs. The Coopers were to distinguish themselves, or be extinguished. He could promise them of the best. Sanchia, new to courtship, was quietly elated, and her amusement did nothing to diminish her elation. She had never been wooed before: there had been nothing of the kind in those shuddering days when she and Ingram, trembling in each other's sight, had mutely cried across the waste of London for balm upon their wounds. The flattery of attentions had never been hers, nor the high credit of admiration so respectful as the good merchant's. He esteemed her the fairest and holiest of women, was as timid as a boy in her company, gasped like a fish and grew unmannerly hot; but I defy a young woman to be anything but gratified. Miranda shunned Caliban; but had she not rather he had been there to be shunned?
Thus, under Lady Maria's watchful eye, the thing proceeded, and Mr. Worthington, within an ace of committing himself, scared his family. The climax was reached at Kissingen, whither the infatuated gentleman had followed his charmer.
She was very kind to him, but perfectly clear that she could not, and would not, make him the happiest of men. She said that she was flattered, which I believe to have been true, though he deprecated the phrase. “My dear young lady—ha! I must really be allowed—I assure you that you overwhelm me. Flattered—oh, Lord!” He limped the conclusion, and left for England that night.
She felt the thing to have been rather ridiculous, and yet she was pleased. She was gently elated, and had a kindly eye for herself as she dressed before her glass. Power lay with her; she could choose and weigh, accept or refuse. She was loveworthy yet. In spite of her disaster, a man had sought her. Others would do that same, moved by what had moved him. Shining eyes, body's form, softness, roundness—she had hardly thought of these things before, nor looked at them with an eye to their value. Mr. Worthington's ardent glances had illuminated her own, and by-and-by she found, oddly enough, that they threw a backward beam, and illuminated others. She found herself smiling tenderly as she thought of Jack Senhouse, and repeating some of that poetry which he had literally poured into her lap. It was so long ago! But when she remembered how much it had puzzled her, she now found that she was not puzzled by it at all.
Your eyes are twin mountain lakes, and the lashes of themLike the swishing sedgeThat hideth the water's edge....
Were her eyes, then, so fair! Mr. Worthington had found them so. Others would—others had.
“Thy face drinketh the light,”—he had written that of her—and now she knew that he had believed it. Had Nevile felt these things? Could Nevile—as she knew him? Her lip curved back. If she could not think of herself without thinking of Nevile—who wanted to mangle her—better take the veil.
But she felt the strange reality behind that wild and adoring passion of Jack Senhouse's, which had made him so incalculable a mixture. He advised her, and adored, he received her confidences, and emptied verses out of his heart into her lap. And she had had nothing to give him, who had given her all! All indeed; for now she saw that he had loved her beyond measure, reason, or stint.
There had been that last of his letters—a despairing cry from Chanctonbury, written when she was Nevile's shadow, and he hers. She felt stabbed to the heart to remember how perfunctorily she had read that. How did it go? What had he said? She could not recall the words, but their sense beat upon her. Oh, he had set her too high! He had called her Artemis—the chaste, the bright. Artemis the Bright had been one of his names for her—and Queen Mab another. He had set her too high! And how far had she fallen? She bowed her burning head, and even as she did so, remembered another phrase of his, sent with flowers—a line from the Anthology, begging her to grant his rose “the grace of a fair breast.” No longer fair, no longer fair—except to Nevile, who craved it—and to a Mr. Worthington.
The bravest gentleman, a poet, a thinker, a man like a beacon-fire, had loved her and cried her aloud as a goddess out of his reach. “Farewell, Sanchia, too dear for my possessing!” She had the words. And she had passed him by for Nevile, who made her a housekeeper, and loved her when he wanted solace. What more had Jack said? What, indeed, had he not said? That her life was like the scent of bean-flowers over a hedgerow—a fragrance caught in passing by wayfarers, whereby men and women might thank God for a fair sight who had chanced upon her in the street. Praise indeed! But he had loved her, and saw her so—and all that was gone for ever. He had left her because he dared not do otherwise, and now he was happy without her. Her new-found elation was like to die in self-pity. It required more than the complacency inspired by Mr. Worthington to clear her eyes.
Thus were the flowers laid up for her by an honest merchant changed for a wreath of rue as he was reminded of his better—his better and (she thought) hers, alas! A wave of desire to catch back at far-off things played her a trick. She found herself yearning for her childhood, found herself crying for her innocence, for the sweet scent of opening life. Even as she longed and strained, she knew herself vain. But the temptation for the semblance of what was gone was strong and took a subtle form. If she could not have the thing, she would have the thing's name; if she could not be innocent again, she would ape innocency. Prodigal of Pity as she has been, she could say to Senhouse's ghost, I am no more worthy of thee; and from that to being worthy was but a short step. The rest of her sojourn abroad was preparation for what was to be done on her return home.
Her treasure lay hidden there, in a desk in her room: three portly packets of letters, tied with ribbon, and labelled “Jack to Me.” Stained and yellow, she now turned over the pages, and inhaled the faint, sweet scent of them—a scent as of lavender and tears. Her eyes filled, her heart beat; but she read on and on. Impossible praises! Love beyond reason, without bounds—immeasurable homage! Did any man ever—save Dante—love a woman so greatly, set her so high? So presently she was caught up into a kind of heaven of wonder, and spent a night with the past.... From that she arose clear-eyed to meet the future. If she had been so loved, so served by man so generous and so fine, the rest of her life might well be spent in testimony. Her single aim now should be to recover herself, to be what he had once seen her. And for all this high remembrance and high hope—thanks to Mr. Cyrus Worthington!
Lady Maria, as the weeks went by, watched her carefully, and marked the change. Sanchia was very subdued, and now went to church. This to the old lady, who did not, was remarkable. She was not aware, naturally, of a passage in a letter which pictured her in church—with her “dear obsequious head, bowed in a fair place to a fair emblem.” She could not have understood, if she had had it explained, that the girl, conscious of her stiff neck, was teaching herself obsequiousness for the sake of him who had seen her so and found her dear. None of these things were for Lady Maria's comprehension; but she reflected aloud upon church-going, and got her young friend to explanations.
“Yes,” Sanchia said, “I do go to church. For a long time, you see, I couldn't—but now I feel that I can. We were all brought up to go to church.”
“So was I,” said Lady Maria, “and that, I take it, is why I don't go now. I was taught to take it as physic.”
Sanchia's explanation, which she yielded on pressure, of why she had stopped, was very artless. “I wanted to do something that they thought wicked, but which I thought quite good. If I went to confession, I should have been told that I was wicked. So I couldn't go. It was a difference of opinion, you see.”
“Beg pardon,” said Lady Maria, “but I don't see. What you mean is that, if you'd told your priest you were going off with Ingram, he'd have said, Don't, and put you under the necessity of disobeying him.” She owned to it. And then she owned to something more. If the difficult choice came before her again, she would think twice. “I can't see, even now, that I was wrong in what I did. I am sure it must be right, somehow, to follow your own conscience. But I do see that it's a pity to break rules. Yes, I see that.”
“I didn't suppose myself religious,” Lady Maria had replied, “but if that is what your religion tells you, I agree with it. It's common sense. What's a heart or two compared with peace and quietness? And how, pray, is a child of eighteen to know what her conscience is worth?”
“It is all she has to go upon,” said Sanchia; but the old lady retorted, “Nothing of the kind. She's got the experience of all Nature behind her, from the poultry-yard to the House of Lords. You'll find that the Ten Commandments are rigidly enforced among the cocks and hens. If a member of the zenana breaks bounds there, she rues it. How else do you suppose this world is to be peopled? Read the history of marriage, my dear. You'll find that the more primitive your man the more complicated his marriage laws. Why, bless my soul, I don't need the Church to tell me that I mustn't run away with a married man. I can learn that from the pigeons in the piazza at Venice. But I suppose I'm an old pagan. Now, you run away to your priest and make a clean breast of it.”
Perhaps Lady Maria was fanciful, but she put down this return to the Church's knees to the fact that Mr. Worthington had gone upon his. “The child finds that she's a valuable article,” she said to herself; “so she locks herself up in the cupboard, like the best china.” Sanchia's resolution persisted, and enthusiasm followed its growth. She frequented the churches early in the mornings, and one fine day presented herself in the vestry of one of them. Upon her knees, but with unbent head and eyes fixed steadily to the grille, she rehearsed her tale from the beginning, neither faltering nor losing countenance. What followed upon that was not communicated to her protectress, nor do I care to pry. I imagine that she had always said her prayers, but that now she was answering them.
That is, when one thinks upon it, the first office of prayer.
Lady Maria Wenman grew to be extremely fond of Sanchia, really as fond of her as she was capable of becoming of anybody. She had been good to travel with, and was good to live with. She found her so reasonable, she said. One could discuss anything without shocking her, or without fear of being made uncomfortable by seeing her discomfort. Lady Maria, in fact, being entirely without prejudice, experienced the little luxury of being able to express herself without trampling.
On her side also, Sanchia sincerely liked her old protectress, and found Charles Street agree with her. There was a primordial air about it, which made habits seem like laws of Nature; an absence of fuss which soothed her nerves, and did much better than slay her monsters for her, when it exposed them for no monsters at all, but simple, everyday, rather tiresome concomitants of our makeshift existence.
“You will, of course, marry Nevile Ingram,”—thus Lady Maria disposed of the most dread of all monsters—“because it is, on the whole, more agreeable to avoid scandal, and because it is certainly more decent to pay one's bills. Long credit is a mistake; but you found it a convenience, I suppose; and now you are in funds, you will, of course, get out of debt. If only that you may run into it again at need, you will draw a cheque. Now, you had eight years of it at Wanless, you tell me? Very well, my dear, that must be written off Society's books. Meanwhile, the more you see of amusing, emancipated people like Alexis Morosine the better.”
This man was understood to be a Pole in exile, though his title to that distinction could only have been on the side of the distaff, since his father's descent from a ducal family of Venice was not denied; but neither nationality nor expatriation was very obvious upon him. At first sight you would have supposed him a sallow Englishman, spare of flesh and too narrow in the chest; you might have put down his dead complexion and his leanness to India or Jamaica, and been inclined to attribute his dry cynicism to the same superfervent experience. But presently you would be alive to his hungry mind, to his hungry, raging air, his restless habit and large way of looking at circumstance—as if by no possibility could it be any concern of his. And then the trick he had of considering our people as Europeans, of dividing the races of the world by continents rather than kingdoms; and that other of judging all cases, including yours and his own, upon their merits—such traits, to an experienced mind, would have established him for a foreigner, one of a people who had had too much elbowing for breath to have time or space for prejudice or minute classification. Superficially, to be sure, he was English enough—from his speech to his tailoring; and his phlegm (of which we boast) was unassailable. Nobody knew much of his history; Bill Chevenix used to say that he was born whole, and thirty, out of an egg dropped upon our coasts by a migratory roc; that he stepped out, exquisitely dressed, and ordered a whisky and Apollinaris at the nearest buffet. This, said Chevenix, was his ordinary breakfast. When Sanchia objected that he might have stepped out in the afternoon, he replied that it also formed his usual tea, and, so far as he knew, was the staple of all his meals. “And cigarettes,” he added. “But he would have had those with him. I bet you what you like he came out smoking.”
It was certain that he had been to Eton and to Oxford, and was member of two good clubs. He was extremely rich, and he was by profession, said Chevenix, a prince. He had no territory, and was not apparently scheming to get any, either of his own or other people's. Nobody at the Foreign Office believed that he corresponded with any intransigent; he used to go there often and exchange urbane gossip with under-secretaries. He lodged in Duke Street, gave dinner-parties at the Bachelors, had a large visiting-list, and was, as they say, always “about.” One saw him everywhere—in the city, in Mayfair drawing-rooms, at Kensington tea-parties, and at Lambeth Palace. Chevenix swore that he had met him at a Church Congress—and the only answer to that was that if Chevenix had truly been there to see, Morosine might well have been there to be seen. But this catholicity of experience was characteristic of the man; his attraction to the nice observer lay precisely in that, that he was a nomad, unappeased and unappeasable, ranging hungrily. There was a probability, too, that below a surface exquisitely calm there lurked corrosive tooth and claw. Here are sufficient elements of danger to draw any woman; so Sanchia found herself presently drawn.
He came to Charles Street one evening late in November, to what Lady Maria called a little party. There was an autumn session that year, and London full. To her little party, then, came a solid wedge of three hundred people into rooms capable of holding with comfort fifty.
Chevenix was by Sanchia's side at the top of the stair, chatting pleasantly about every new-comer, when he suddenly stopped. “Hulloa,” he said, “here's Morosine, as smooth as a glass stiletto. He'll amuse you. I'll introduce him.”
Sanchia followed the leading of his eyes. She saw a tall and slim young man, inordinately thin, slightly bald, with a moustache like a rake, and heavy-browed, mournful eyes, pushing his way slowly upstairs. Without effort, his hands behind his back, working from the shoulders, he made room for himself, but so quietly that nobody seemed to observe how aggressively he was at it. Occasionally some ousted dowager turned redly upon him, or it might be some pushing gentleman smothered an oath as he faced the attack. But Morosine's mournful eyes gazed calmly their fill, seemed to be communing beyond the surging guests, beyond the wall, with the eternal stars, and, without faltering, the narrow frame glided forward into the space which indignation had cleared. Sanchia, above him, and out of the game, was highly amused.
“He's very selfish, your friend. He takes care of himself; but no one seems to know it.”
Chevenix chuckled. “That's the beauty of Alexis. But, as he asks, whom else should he take care of? It's not queer if the Poles have learned that lesson.”
“Oh,” said Sanchia. “Is he a Pole?” Jack Senhouse had been in Poland.
“Half of him is hungry Pole. The other part is bad Italian—pampered Italian, fed for generations on oil and polenta. He's always dining out, but he eats nothing because the Pole is feeding on the Venetian all day.” Then he told her about the miraculous birth, the whisky and Apollinaris, and concluded, “Oh, he'll amuse you vastly. Stay where you are. I'll net him at the top.”
Presently after she saw the process. It consisted in violent effort on Chevenix's part, languid attention from the other. Morosine dreamed over the speaker as if he were a lost soul. Then, his consideration being caught, he looked about him, and presently fixed upon her his melancholy eyes. She felt a little shiver, the sensation of goose-flesh in the spine—not unpleasantly. It was as if a light wind had ruffled her blood. Shortly afterwards Morosine was bowing before her. In this, perhaps, he betrayed himself; his hat covered his heart, he inclined from the hips, and his head bent with his body. An Englishman bows with the head only, and does not nowadays carry his hat upstairs.
He began to talk quietly and at once, and maintained a perfectly even flow of comment, reflection, anecdote, reminiscence, and sudden, flashing turns of inference. He seemed always to be searching after general principles, cosmic laws, and to be always jumping at them, testing them, finding them not comprehensive enough, and letting them drift behind him as he pursued his search. She remarked on this afterwards to Lady Maria, who said that principles were the last thing to interest Morosine. He had none! at all, said Lady Maria, unless his own immediate gratification was a principle; and perhaps with men you might almost say that it was.
Chevenix remained, chuckling and interjecting here and there an exclamation, just (as he told her later) to “start the chap on his meander,” and presently betook himself elsewhere. It was then to be observed that Morosine allowed himself to drift into the discussion of matters not usually subjects of ordinary conversation; but he did so without consciousness, and therefore without offence. Sanchia neither disapproved nor felt uncomfortable. They were, moreover, interesting, and rather material.
It began with Poland, a country which, the less it existed politically, he said, was the better to live in, and be of. We live by our emotions, the beasts by their appetites—a material distinction. Now, the condition of the Poles was perfectly adapted to the quickening of the emotional parts. Shorten time, you make love a precious ecstasy; restrict liberty, freedom is a lust—none the worse for being lawful. No Pole knows how long he may have to live: Russia or phthisis will have him late or soon. What he pursues, then, must be fleeting—imagine with what rapture he takes it to his breast! with what frenzy he guards it, never knowing when it will be required of him again. Feverish? (This was upon a remark from her.) Yes, and why not? Are not dreams more vivid than waking life? Can you gallop your material horse as your courser of the mind? Better to burn than to rust. That's the secret of life—which all the laws of bureaucrats are directed to destroy. The establishments want to see us as fixed as themselves. They are tentacled, stationary creatures, feeding at ease. They would have us handy of access, falsely secure, so that they can fasten on us one by one and suck our juices. But the world is changing, thrones and churches are slackening in their hold. Men are discovering how short a time they have to live, and that eternity is more than questionable. A mild Epicureanism is gaining ground. Instincts founded on the patriarchal system must give way to that. “Have you ever considered,” he asked abruptly, “that the flocks and herds of the Semitic patriarch are the sole cause of the moral code which we still profess? Thou shalt not steal. Why not? Because you injure the patriarch. Not murder? You might attack one of his family. You have the habit in England of tracing prejudices to the Feudal System: believe me, there is hardly anything in Europe so modern. I should date at 4000 B.C. nearly all our present conventions, from the British Sunday to the law of conspiracy. So long as you say that property is sacred, you uplift the Patriarch and lose sight of the man.”
Sanchia, reminded of Senhouse—a Senhouse with his tongue dipped in vinegar—objected that society may have demanded some of these laws in defiance of the engrossing patriarch; but Morosine shook his head. “Society is the patriarch's weapon. Society is a syndicate of patriarchs who cannot live unless all men are enslaved. Man is not by nature gregarious; he's solitary, like all the nobler beasts. Wolves and dogs hunt in herds, but not the great cats; oxen and buffaloes, but not elephants; rooks, but not eagles; bream, never salmon. And the time is not so very far when man will discover why it is that he is herded and marshalled hither and thither by police, legislatures, and monstrous assemblies called armies or fleets. He has but to know it to abolish these things; they fade like dreams in the morning. But hitherto everything has been banded to make his sleep secure—his religion, his cupidity, his timidity, his affections. Religion tells him it is wrong to love without the Church; patriotism, that it is glorious to bleed in making other men bleed; timidity, that property keeps the wolf from the door; appetite, that under cover of the law you may devour your neighbour and fear no indigestion. Finally, there are the affections of a man which have been so guided that they see the aged more venerable than the young, the old thing more sacred than the new 'Woodman, spare that tree,' they cry: 'it dates from at least 2000 B.C.' Because old wine is good, they argue, old laws must needs be. As well might a man say, Because I relish old wine, I will love only old women. And so we go on!” He shrugged and broke off—to talk shrewdly of books. They got to Leopardi, from him to Dante; he heard of her studies at the British Museum, and hoped he might meet her there. She reads there often? Mostly in the afternoons? The light was bad: he usually devoted his mornings to what work he had there. He was studying Persian, he said, but fitfully, as the mood took him.
So far he had scarcely looked at her, but had talked out his monologue as if he had been alone, clasping one thin ankle, staring wide-eyed over the heads of guests, occasionally, when he was vehement, throwing his head up, shooting his words at the ceiling as if they had been Greek fire. Now, as he got up to leave her, his eyes dwelt earnestly on her. “It will be a pleasure, to which I shall aspire—that of meeting you again. There or elsewhere.”
She thanked him as she gave him her hand. Excitement made her eyes bright, mantled her cheeks. She felt that she was communing with Senhouse at third hand.
“Then—it is understood—we meet again,” he concluded. He bowed over her hand, on a second thought kissed her fingers, then left her immediately and went downstairs. He paid no farewell to Lady Maria; was ascertained to have left the house at once.