‘We shall be going away to-morrow, Laurie,’ said Mrs. Westbury, ‘and I could not go without speaking to you. Oh, what a week this has been! When I think that it was only last Thursday night——’
‘Don’t speak of it, please,’ said Laurie; ‘one has need of all one’s strength. It is bad enough, but we must make the best of it. I wish you were not going away. I thought Mary would stay with my mother. How is she to get on when we are all gone?’
‘I might leave Mary for a little,’ said Mrs. Westbury, doubtfully; ‘and then we shall be close by at the Cottage, where your mother can send for us when she pleases. Ah, Laurie, if you had only had a sister of your own!’
‘If we had only had a great many things!’ said Laurie, with an attempt at a smile; ‘but, as for that, Mary is as good as a sister. I never knew the difference. I think she is the best creature in the world.’
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Lydia, looking at him keenly, with an inspection very different from her manner to Ben; ‘she is a good girl; but you always used to quarrel, Laurie. I did not think she was so much to you.’
‘She always thought me a good-for-nothing fellow,’ said Laurie, with a little laugh, ‘like most other people. I must show you now, if I can, that I’ve got some mettle in me. But, Aunt Lydia, you have not come to say good-bye?’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Westbury; and then she made a pause. ‘I can’t rest, Laurie; I can’t keep quiet and see you all in trouble,—when it is my fault!’
‘That is nonsense,’ said Laurence decidedly. ‘You may be quite sure it had been turning over in his mind for some time; and quite right, too,’ the young man added bravely. ‘How could we ever have known what stuff we were made of else? If there is any good in being a Renton, as you have so often told us, now is the time for it to show.’
‘Oh, Laurie,’ said his aunt, weeping, ‘that is what breaks my heart. ‘You have not a chance now, with the up-bringing you have had, and your poor mother’s soft ways,—not a chance! If my brother had only thought in time. This will could never stand if it was brought into a court of justice. He could not be in his right mind. Ben would not listen to me when I said so; but I must speak to you.’
‘You shall speak to me as much as you like,’ said Laurie, with his mother’s soft ways, ‘but not on that subject. It is sacred for us, whatever other people may think. And, after all, you know,’ he said, with a smile, ‘it is but for seven years. I shall only be about thirty at the end of the trial;—quite a boy!’
‘Quite a boy!’ said Aunt Lydia, very seriously; ‘but still I can’t bear it. And, Laurie, though youare the least like a Renton of any of them, I have always been the fondest of you!’
‘Thanks, dear aunt,’ said the young man, and he kissed her, and led her half resisting to her own room. ‘All this excitement and want of rest will upset you,’ he said to her tenderly; ‘and, Aunt Lydia, don’t say anything to Frank.’
Laurie went back to his musings and his papers when she had made him this promise;—and Mrs. Westbury had a good cry over the whole miserable business. ‘Upset me!’ she said to herself, ‘as if I was a woman like his mother to be upset! Oh, if I could but do anything for these poor boys!’
But at the same time she was glad in her heart that Laurie thought of Mary only as his sister. A mother has to consider everything; and that could never have been,—though it was a different thing with Ben.
These preliminaries, being told, and the singular and unexpected nature of this family crisis fully explained, the historian of the Renton family feels justified in proceeding with this narrative of the fortunes of the three boys, and their adventures in the big changed world, upon which they were launched so abruptly. They all left the Manor together on a sultry September day, just the day on which, under other circumstances, they would have been off to shoot grouse or to climb Mont Blanc. Their mourning prevented such invitations as even in their changed fortune they wouldcertainly have received, and the shock was so fresh on all of them that pleasure-making of any kind would have been impossible. They went out as if they had been put to sea, each man in his own bark, with no very sure compass or chart to rely on, and with minds braced high by resolution, but altogether unprepared for the trial, and unaccustomed to the labour. Perhaps it was as well for them that their ideas were so utterly vague and undefined touching the rocks and shoals and dangerous passages that lay in their way.
Theyoung men separated when they left the Manor,—one to his farm, and another to his merchandise, as Laurie said. It is our business at the present moment to follow only the eldest. Ben went back to his chambers in the Albany, his personal head-quarters, though he did not occupy them for more than three months in the year. Though he was called Ben, his name was the solemn family name of Benedict. It suited him better than the contraction. He was one of those men who are in the way of taking things very much in earnest,—too much in earnest, some people thought. The fashion of the period had accustomed him to the light outward appearance and pretence of general indifference common to his kind; but in his heart he was not indifferent to anything. He had felt his advantages keenly, taking all the more anxious care that no one should suspect him of doing so; and he felt his downfall now, to the bottom of his heart. He went back to London, which seemed the only place to go to in the emergency. He had been on a pleasant visit at a pleasant house when the call came to his father’s death-bed. Now, in September, when he had not a friend remaining in town, he took his solitary way there, and went to the handsome, forlorn rooms, the very rent of which would now have swallowed up so great a part of his income. He went in listlessly, amid all the tokens of his former life, almost hating the signs of a luxury so far beyond his means. Ben had taste as well as Laurie, though in a different way. His chambers were furnished daintily, as became a man accustomed to spend as he pleased and spare nothing. It had always been a comfort to Mr. Renton’s practical eye, that his son’s knick-knacks were all knick-knacks of a thoroughly saleable kind,—things which had a real value; and the same thought, as he entered, brought a smile upon Ben’s face. ‘I shall make some money out of the d——d trash,’ he said to himself bitterly, thrusting away with his foot a little graceful guéridon, on which stood a Sèvres déjeûner service. The toy tottered, and would have fallen, but that he put out his hand by instinct to save it. Then,—if the reader will not despise him for it,—it must be allowed that Ben sank down into a chair, and did something equivalent to what a woman would have done had she cried. He muttered ill things of himself under his breath,—he called himself a confounded fool to risk by his ill-temper anything that might bring him the money he stood so much inneed of,—and then he covered his eyes with his hands, and felt a sudden contraction in his throat. He had nobody to appeal to, nobody to consult. He had the problem of life to resolve for himself as he best could, and he had lost a father whom he loved, not a week before. All these thoughts came over him as he went into his old rooms, where all his favourite possessions were. Of course, neither the rooms nor their ornaments could be retained. All that Ben could pretend to now was of a much humbler description; but he would not hand over to another even the pain of putting things in order, and making ready for the final sacrifice. His servant would have to be given up too. He had not the means of hiring help to do anything that he could do for himself. Henceforward he would have to learn to do things for himself, and here was the first thing to do.
It is true that he would have given up these same rooms without a pang for various other reasons;—had he been going to take possession of the house in Berkeley Square, which now, he supposed, would either be let or shut up;—had he been going abroad, or, indeed, for almost any other reasonable cause;—just as the people would do who break their hearts over the hall, or rectory, or deceased father’s house, which they would have abandoned joyfully a dozen times in as many years, had a pleasant chance come in their way. It was the wreck of circumstance surrounding this change which wounded Ben; thebreaking up of all his habits, and failure of everything he had been used to. When he had recovered himself a little, he took a disconsolate stroll through the rooms, and reckoned up what his things had cost him;—his pictures,—some of which were copies picked up abroad, and some chef-d’œuvres of young artists at home, which Laurie had persuaded him to give good prices for;—the cabinets he had attained after unexampled efforts at Lady Bertram’s sale,—his choice little collection of old Dresden,—even his pipes and his whips, and a hundred other trifles, which, when he counted them up, had cost heaps of money. Some of them, alas! were not even paid for, which was the worst sting of all. Ben had been in debt before now, and cared little enough, perhaps too little for it. He had felt the weight of wealth behind him, and that he could pay his arrears without much difficulty when he chose to make the effort. But now everything was changed. It is only when debt becomes a necessity that it is a burden. He felt it now, dragging him down, as it were staring into his face, hemming him in. Debt for bits of china, and pretty follies of furniture! And now, for aught he could tell, he might not have enough for daily bread. To be sure, a man could not starve upon two hundred a-year; but there are such different ways of starving. And his whole first year’s income would not be nearly enough to pay off his rent, and his man, and the expenses of the break-up, not to speak of tradesmen.Such reflections were so novel to him that he sat down again in despair, with his brain going round and round. He did not even know how to set about being ruined. There was nobody in town likely to buy his pretty things at this time of the year, or to take his rooms off his hands. He had come up fully resolved to be sufficient to himself, to manage everything himself, and to give no one the opportunity of pity or remark. But it was less easy than he supposed. As for his servant, he had been with him at the Manor, and had heard, or found out, or divined, as servants do, something of what had happened, and was not unprepared for dismissal. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, without hesitation, when his master spoke to him. ‘I hope it’s not that I don’t give satisfaction, sir: I’ve always done my best.’
‘No, no,’ said Ben, with a young man’s unnecessary explanatoriness. ‘I can’t afford now to keep anybody but myself. I am very sorry. It is not that I have any objection to you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the man once more. ‘Of course it’s understood that there’s board-wages, sir, if I’m sent away in a hurry before the end of the month?’
‘Have what you like,’ said Ben, with a little indignation; ‘if that’s all; give me a note exactly of what’s owing to you, and you can take yourself off as soon as you like.’
‘Yes, sir; but it looks pecooliar being sent away so sudden,’ said the fellow standing his ground.‘Perhaps you would not mind just giving a bit of an explanation to any gentleman as may come about my character. I hope you consider I deserve a good character, sir. Gentlemen, and ‘specially ladies, is very apt to ask, “How was it as you was turned away?”’
‘You may go now,’ said Ben, coldly. ‘I have nothing more to say to you. I’ll give you your money as soon as you’re ready to go.’
‘But my character, sir?’ insisted the man. Ben, in his wrath, seized his hat and went off, leaving Morris holding the door open with these words on his lips. He was unreasonably angry in spite of his better judgment. The very first man he had spoken to after his downfall was so entirely indifferent to his concerns, so wrapped up in his own! What were Morris’s board-wages or miserable character in comparison to Ben’s overthrow and changed existence? He went out angry—in a passion, as Morris said not without reason. Naturally the man had his own theory of the whole matter, and held it for certain that his master had been going to the bad, or why should his father disinherit him?—to which question, indeed, it was difficult to make any answer. Ben’s next errand was to a fashionable auctioneer and house-agent, who was very civil, and yet very different from what he had been when the young man of fashion took his rooms. ‘Going abroad, sir?’ Mr. Robins said, with a certain scrutiny whichmade the young fellow, for the first time in his life, feel himself a doubtful character, required to give an account of himself.
‘Perhaps. I can’t say,’ he answered; ‘but these rooms have become too expensive for me, anyhow, and I want to sell my things.’
‘The worst possible time to do it,’ said the auctioneer, shaking his head. ‘There is not a soul in town, sir, as you know as well as I do. Even in our humble way, we are going to the country ourselves. They would not fetch a third of their proper price now.’
‘But I want the money,’ said Ben; ‘and I can’t keep up the place. I must get rid of them now.’
‘I can take your orders, of course, sir,’ said Mr. Robins, deprecatingly; ‘but it will be at a frightful sacrifice. Nobody but dealers will look at them now,—and we all know what dealers are. Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest,—a fine maxim, sir, for trade; but ruinous for fancy articles, when you have to push them to a sale, and there’s nobody to buy.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ said Ben, abruptly. He had almost said, ‘What would you advise me to do?’ But his mind was in such a restless state, that the pendulum had veered back again to its first throb of obstinacy ere he could say the other words. And the orders were taken accordingly. Then he went to his club with the listlessness of a man who does notknow what to do. What was he to do? Supposing he could make his club his home, with a bedroom somewhere to sleep in, and the Manor and his friends to fall back upon—would that do? Probably he could manage it, even on his small income, by dint of economy,—that unknown quality to which ignorance gave a certain appearance of facility. With no servant, no expensive habits, no entertainment of friends, he might be able to manage. This was what some one of his spiritual enemies whispered in Ben’s ear. The next moment he jumped up and began to walk about the long vacant room,—of which at the moment he was the sole occupant,—with sudden agitation. His idle, pleasant life had come natural to him in the past; but already, though so little time had elapsed, it was no longer natural. To spend seven years of his existence planning how to save shillings and keep up appearances,—to live, he a young man at the height of his strength and powers, the life of a genteel old maid! That was impossible. A day-labourer would be better, he said to himself. But it is so easy to say that. He knew well enough that he could not be a day-labourer; and what could he be?
He had come thus far in his uncomfortable thoughts when somebody struck him familiarly on the shoulder, with an exclamation of surprise. ‘You here!’ said the new-comer. ‘You in London when there is nobody in it, Ben Renton! You are the last fellow I expected to see.’
‘What, Hillyard!’ said Ben, though his cordiality was languid in comparison. ‘Back so soon? Have you made your fortune already?’ And as he spoke it occurred to him that going to Australia must be the thing to do.
‘Not much of that,’ said his friend, who was very brown and very hairy, and in clothes that would not bear examination. ‘That is easier said than done. I have spent all I had, which comes to about the same thing; and now I’ve come back to try my luck at home,—my ill-luck, I should say.’
‘Then it is no good going to Australia,’ was the thought that passed, rapid as the light, through Ben’s mind. ‘But I thought all sorts of people made fortunes at the diggings, or in the bush, or whatever you call it,’ was what he said.
‘Yes, that’s how one deceives one’s self,’ said the adventurer. ‘One throws everything together in a lump, and one thinks it’s all right; whereas it’s all wrong, you know. If I had been brought up to be a shepherd, I might have got on in the bush; and if I had been brought up a bricklayer’s labourer, I might have succeeded at the diggings; but I was not, you see. And even in these elevated branches of industry the requirements are quite different. Let us have some dinner, Renton. It’s great luck to find any one to hob-and-nob with, especially such a fellow as you.’
‘Dinner!’ said Ben amazed, looking at his watch. ‘Why, it’s only three o’clock.’
Upon which Mr. Hillyard burst into a great laugh. ‘I forgot I was back in civilisation,’ he said; ‘but I must have something to eat, whatever you call it. Yes, here I am, no better than when I went away. I believe it’s all luck, after all. Some fellows get on like a house on fire. Some are thankful for bread and cheese all their lives. Some, if they work themselves sick, don’t get that. What’s the good of making one’s self miserable?—it’s all fate.’
‘I suppose one must live, however, in spite of fate,’ said Ben, not caring much what were the first words that came to his lips, nor with any positive meaning in what he said.
‘Oh, I never was one of your tragical heroes,’ said Hillyard; ‘better luck next time is always my motto; though, mind you, I’m not so sure that one is bound to live in spite of everything. I don’t see the necessity. If there’s anything better to go to, why shouldn’t one have a try for it? And if there isn’t, what does it matter? It’s a man’s own responsibility. If he likes to face it, let him, and don’t abuse the poor devil as if he were a pickpocket. Why, there was a fellow the other day,—and, by the way, I am taking his things home to his mother, which is a nice commission,—who squared off his fate with a bullet, by my side. I must say, I can’t blame him for one. Things could not well be worse up there,’ said this savage philosopher, waving his hand vaguely towards the roof, ‘than they were down below. Butthis is a queer sort of talk when one has just come home, and to a favourite of fortune like you.’
‘I am not much of a favourite of fortune just now,’ said Ben, with a certain longing for human sympathy. ‘But I’ll tell you about that afterwards. Now you have come home, are you going to stay in town, or what do you mean to do?’
The question was asked not quite in good faith, for it glided vaguely across Ben’s mind that the plans of a man who had long lived on his wits might suggest something for his own aid; and the answer was not more ingenuous, for it naturally occurred to Hillyard that his friend, who had the liberal hospitality of a great country-house to fall back on, and the probability of a shooting-box somewhere of his own, might intend to offer him an invitation, and so bridge over some portion of those autumn months, which were of so little use to a man who is looking for something to do.
‘I shall get along, I suppose, in the old way,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I’ll serve up my Australian experiences for the papers, perhaps; or do them philosophically, with all their chances and dangers for intending emigrants, for the “Monthly,” if I can get hold of Rathbone; or go in as a coach. I flatter myself I could give the Colonial Secretary a hint or two if I could get at him. A little tall talk hurts no one. The fact is, I don’t know what I am going to be about,’ he added with a sigh. ‘Living onone’s wits is hard work enough. I have kept up nothing of old days except the club, which is always a kind of haven; though, I daresay, that sounds strange to you.’
‘Not now,’ said Ben, with a contraction in his throat. ‘I am as poor as you, and more helpless. I rather think I am good for nothing. I suppose I shall get used to it in time, but it’s not a pleasant feeling as yet.’ And then he told his companion all with a curious effusion, which did not surprise Hillyard more than it did himself. He had resolved to say nothing to anyone,—to lock up his troubles in his own breast, and seek no advice even from his oldest friends; and here he was unbosoming himself to the first-comer,—a man whom he had not seen for two years, and who was by no means one of his close friends. He was not aware, poor fellow, what necessity of nature it was that moved him. He justified himself afterwards by the reflection that Hillyard was, so to speak, a stranger and safe confidant,—that there was nobody in town to whom he could repeat it,—that he was a brother in misfortune, shifty and full of expedients, and might help him. But all these were after-thoughts. His real impulse was the mere instinct of nature to relieve himself from the secret pressure of a burden which was more than his unaccustomed shoulders could bear.
Hillyard was much amazed and mystified by thestrange tale, and could with difficulty be brought to believe it. But he was very sympathetic and consolatory when his first incredulity was got over. ‘After all, it’s only for seven years,’ he said; ‘that is not so very much in a life. If I knew I should come into a good estate at forty,—ay, or at fifty,—I shouldn’t mind the struggle now; and you will be only a little over thirty. It’s nothing,—it’s absolutely nothing. You’re down just now, and taken by surprise, and out of spirits with what’s happened, and all that. But things will look better presently. You think it’s hard to struggle and work, and never know where you’re to get to-morrow’s dinner,’ said the adventurer, with a certain light kindling in his eyes; ‘but sometimes it gives a wonderful relish to life. You enjoy the dinner all the better. It’s more exciting than fox-hunting, or even elephant-hunting; and what does a fellow want in life but lots of excitement and movement and stir? As long,’ he added, after a pause, ‘as your strength lasts, and your mind, and your spirit, it is all very well. I don’t care for tame well-being, with no risks in it. It will be nothing but fun for you.’
‘I don’t see the fun,’ said Ben; but certainly the dark clouds over him were moved by the suggestion. ‘And I have not your knowledge or resources. Absolutely, if you’ll believe me, I have not an idea what to do.’
‘So I should think,’ said Hillyard. ‘It would be odd if you had, plunged into it like this, without a moment’s notice. Lie on your oars, my dear fellow, for a day or two, and come about with me. We may hit on something, you know; and, at all events, a few days’ waiting can do you no harm.’
By this time his meal had been served to him, and its arrival interrupted the talk. Ben rose and walked away to a distant window, already feeling some qualms of self-disgust at what he had done. As he stood looking out upon the flood of human beings, each absorbed in his own interests, he felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, how utterly unimportant to the world was his individual comfort, or that of any one mortal creature. He was no more to the crowd, not so much, as one drop of perfume or of bitterness would be to the pleasant Thames as it floated past his father’s house,—not near so much. The sea would be a juster emblem,—that sea which swallowed up rivers and showed no increase, which threw forth its lavish atoms to the air and knew no diminution. He had been an important personage up to this moment, even in his own opinion, though he had always known theoretically the insignificance of the individual. But he knew it now with a certainty beyond theory. When Hillyard and he were driven against the rocks, who would know the difference or be any the wiser? He who a month ago would have compassionatelytaken Hillyard home with him, to give him a little time to consider, was now, under the adventurer’s guidance, a more hopeless adventurer than Hillyard. Ben’s thoughts were not pleasant as he stood and looked out, watching the stream,—deep, no doubt, with human passion, sorrow, and perplexity, but so inexpressive on the surface,—which kept flowing on like water, as perennial and unbroken. His own life flitted before him like a dream as he stood looking out,—so useless, and luxurious, and free; so care-laden and overwhelmed by storms; so vague and doubtful in the future. Had he even known what would await him in the end his fate would have been less hard. Perhaps his very efforts to work out the time of his probation might secure the loss of his birthright. He might find that he worked the wrong way, that he had missed the end, even after his best exertions. A funeral procession was making its way at the moment up the busy street, to which it gave so strange a moral. And Ben turned away his head and sat down, sickened by the sight of the slow hearse with its waving plumes. To think he should have been defrauded even of his natural grief, even of the softening of his heart, which should have come over his father’s grave! Was the inmate of that other coffin leaving a wrong behind him, casting a stone with his dead hands to crush his children? This, no doubt, was a harsh way of taking his trouble; butthere are men to whom all crosses come harshly, and Ben Renton was one of them. Hillyard, satisfied and comfortable, with a slight flush of bodily well-being on his face, came up to him as he mused, with a glass of sherry in his hand.
‘Not bad wine,’ he said, with a sigh of comfort, ‘and not a bad dinner, I can tell you, to a man fresh from the backwoods. Ben, I’ve got a wretched thing to do, and I want you to go with me. You’re out of spirits, at any rate, and it will do you no harm.’
‘What is it?’ said Ben.
‘I am going to see the mother of the poor fellow I told you of. She’s a widow living somewhere about Manchester Square. I rather think he was the only son. He made a mull of it at some of those confounded examinations, and rushed out to Australia in despair; and all went wrong with him there, and he squared it off, as I told you. I have to take her some of his things. You look more like the kind of thing, with your black clothes and your grave face, than I do. Stand by me, Ben, and I’ll stand by you.’
‘As you please,’ said Ben, languidly. Already the familiarity of his new-old friend jarred on him a little. But he did not care what he did at that moment; he did not much care even what became of him. He had nothing to do and nobody to see. It was as easy to go to Manchester Square as anywhere else, though the locality was not delectable. He suffered Hillyard to take his arm and draw him along, without much interest one way or another, not seeing how his compliance with such a trifling request could particularly affect even the hour of time which it occupied, much less his character or his life.
Theaddress was Guildford Street, Manchester Square, a narrow, dingy, very respectable street, with a good many public-houses in it, and livery stables under three or four different archways, where the genteel population round about got their ‘flys.’ The houses were tall and rather decayed, with smoky remains of the flowers which had been kept fresh and bright in the season lingering in their narrow little balconies, and no small amount of cards hung up in the windows announcing lodgings to let. It occurred to Ben as he walked listlessly through it that here was a place which would be more suitable to his fallen fortunes than the Albany; but the thought was inarticulate, and took no form. There was even a similar ticket in the ground-floor window of No. 10, where Mrs. Tracy lived, and where they were immediately admitted and conducted to the drawing-room. Ben followed his friend mechanically into the dingy room, with three long windows glimmering down to the faded carpet, commanding a view of the oppositelivery stable, from which one inevitable fly was creeping slowly out under the archway. This particular vehicle was drawn by an old white horse, and it was that spot of white upon the dim foreground, and the white cotton gloves of the driver, that caught Ben’s eye as he went in. He was so little interested that he scarcely noticed anything in the room. It was a disagreeable business. He had come listlessly because he had been asked. But though he had heard the story of the widow’s son it had not touched him. Perhaps he was not very tender-hearted by nature; perhaps it was because he was absorbed in his own affairs. But certainly when he saw a tall figure in black rise from the small room behind and make a step forward to meet his friend, Ben woke up with a little start to realise the fact that he was thrusting himself in, without any call, to be a spectator of what might be a tragical scene. He stopped short and grew red with the embarrassment of a well-bred man suddenly placed in a position where he is one too many; and, notwithstanding Hillyard’s almost nervous glance back at him and appeal for support, might have made his way out again had not his course been suddenly arrested by another figure in intense mourning, which rose from a low seat by the vacant window. It was getting late in the afternoon, and twilight begins soon in a narrow London street; besides which the blinds were half down, the curtains hanging over the longnarrow windows, and such light as there was falling on the floor. For this reason the lady at the window had been seated on a very low chair against the wall, to secure all the light she could for the work in her hand. She rose up facing Ben as the other faced his friend, rising slowly from the long sweep of black drapery which had lain coiled round her on the carpet, and suddenly flashing upon the young man, out of the shadows, with such a face as he had never in all his life seen before. She gave him a hurried glance from head to foot, taking in every detail of his appearance, and settling in a second what manner of man he was; and then she pointed to a chair, with a soft murmur of invitation to him to seat himself. He obeyed her, not knowing why. His brain began to whirl. The long window bound with its high, narrow, smoky rail of balcony; the faded curtains hanging over and darkening the room; the pale light below upon the carpet, and the figure which sank slowly down once more with its black dress in waves on the floor; the white hands joined with some white work between them; the face against that dusky background,—was it true that he had never seen them all till that moment, or had they been there waiting for him, attending this moment all his life?
Ben Renton had been a great deal in society, and had seen beautiful women in his day; and he knew quantities of pretty girls, and had fancied himself alittle in love with some of them also in his time. But something, perhaps, in the surrounding made this woman different from anything he had ever seen. She was very tall, almost as tall as himself. She was pale, with none of that adventitious charm of colour which often stands in the place of beauty. Her hair was dark, without any gleams in it. The only colour about her was in her eyes, which were blue, like a winter sky,—blue of the sweetest and purest tone, shining out under her dark hair from her pale, beautiful face, from the shadow and the darkness, like a bit of heaven itself. Ben sat down and looked at her, struck dumb, in a kind of stupor. What had he to do with this wonderfully beautiful, silent creature? Who was she? How came she here? How did it come about that he sat by her, having no right to such an acquaintance, struck dumb, like a man in a dream? He looked on stupidly, and saw the other lady sink down and cover her face with her hands as Hillyard delivered his melancholy commission. Of course it was Hillyard’s duty to do so, and even to remain with them while the daughter rose noiselessly and went to her mother, bending over her, turning her beautiful pale face appealingly to the strangers, with the blue eyes full of tears. With all this strange scene his companion had a certain connexion by right of his errand; but why was Ben Renton there, or what could it ever be to him?
And yet she came back to the seat by the window, and Ben, looking on, saw the tears fall upon her white hands and white work, and met in his turn the same wistful look. ‘Were you there too?’ she said with a little sob. He was ashamed of himself to say no; but perhaps because her heart was full of her dead brother she gave no sign that she thought his presence was intrusive. She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and then she looked into his face again. ‘It is very, very hard for poor mamma,’ she said, in the softest, lowly-whispering voice. ‘Her only son! She was so proud of him. She always hoped he would do so well; and papa died so long ago, and we had no one else to look to. It is so hard upon mamma!’
‘She has you,’ said Ben, wildly, feeling that some reply was looked for, and not knowing what he said.
‘Ah! yes; but I am only a girl. I can love her, but what more can I do?’ said this celestial creature with piteous looks. Ben’s brain went round and round. He was in some enchanted place, some magician’s castle. What had he to do there, listening to these soft plaints, receiving those looks which would have melted a heart of stone? In his amaze he turned half round to his friend, who alone gave him any title to be present, and his appeal was not in vain.
‘I came home only this morning,’ said Hillyard, ‘and, of course, the first thing I thought of was to discharge my sad commission. My friend, Mr. Renton, came with me, as he knows better how things go on here than I do. If we could be of any use——’
Ben had got up and bowed in his embarrassment. He was overcome, he thought, with pity, certainly with another and stronger sentiment. ‘If there is anything I can do—?’ he said eagerly. As he spoke the mother raised her head and shot him through and through with a sudden glance of her eyes,—eyes which must once have been soft like her daughter’s, but which had grown keen, clear, and cold, instead of soft—with a hungry look in them. But how can you criticise a woman in such circumstances? They might be puckered up with grief; it might be the anguish of Rachel’s weeping that looked through them. She said, ‘It is very kind,’ looking at them both, contrasting as it were the two together; and then with a certain abruptness, ‘What was it you were saying to me about some Rentons, Millicent?’ she asked.
‘You know, mamma,’ said the daughter, ‘Thornycroft, where I was at school, was close to the Manor, and Mary Westbury was always talking of her cousins. But perhaps this gentleman——’
‘Yes; I am one of Mary Westbury’s cousins,’ said Ben, with a throb of delight; and then he paused, thinking what else he could say to ingratiate himself. ‘I am the eldest;—Ben,’ he added, with heightened colour;—and mother and daughter both looked at him with an interest which they did not attempt to disguise.
‘I have heard so often of Ben,’ said Miss Tracy, with a soft, little laugh. The sound of his own name so softly uttered completed the young man’s bewilderment. He forgot how soon that laugh had followed on the tears, and how entirely the mother and daughter had both thrown themselves into the new subject. As for Hillyard, he sat between the two with a puzzled expression on his face. Nobody took any notice of him after the telling of his story. His friend who had the cachet of the latest civilisation on him, who was a Renton of Renton, the eldest son, was a very different person from an adventurer out of the bush. Mrs. Tracy herself came forward from the little back drawing-room where she had been sitting, and took a chair near the new object of interest. She was a handsome woman still for her age, and showed traces of having been like her daughter. She had the same clear, fine features; the same dark hair, still unchanged in colour; the same height and drooping grace of form. But her eyes, instead of being soft and dewy, were hard and keen; her lips were thin, and the muscles all tightened about them. Her hands were thin and long, and looked as if they could grasp and hold fast. ‘The daughter will grow like the mother, and I’d trust neither of them,’ Hillyard said to himself; but there might be a certain spite in it, for they showed no interest in him.
‘It is very kind of you to come,’ said the widow, leaving it undecided whom she was addressing, butlooking at Ben. ‘Though it is three months since I first heard of my dear boy’s death, this visit brings it all back. He was my only son; and oh! what hopes are buried with him, Mr. Renton! I thought that it was he that would have restored us to our natural place in the world. My Millicent was not born to live in a back street opposite livery stables. I expected everything from her brother. Man proposes, but God disposes. I cannot tell you what heaps of money I spent on him getting him ready for that examination; and yet it all came to nothing:—and now he is gone!’
‘Dear mamma, we must not strive against Providence,’ said Millicent, putting her handkerchief lightly to her eyes.
‘No, my dear,’ said her mother; ‘but if it was to be, I might have been spared all that waste of money,—when we are so ill able to afford it. Providence knows best, to be sure; but still, when it was to be, it might have been so arranged that I should have saved that. You will think it strange of me to say so; but my thought by night and by day is, what will my child do when I die?’
‘Dear mamma, don’t say any more,’ said Millicent again. ‘I never grudged anything that was for poor Fitzgerald’s advantage; and I am sure, neither did you.’
‘Not if it had been for his advantage,’ said Mrs. Tracy, gloomily; ‘but you know how he broke downin his examination, poor fellow. I don’t want to blame Providence,—but still I might have been spared that.’
‘Perhaps, Ben, we had better go,’ said Hillyard. ‘We are only intruding upon painful recollections. He was heartbroken, poor fellow. He never could forget what you had spent upon him, and that he made so little return. Ben, I think we should go.’
‘No; he never made any return,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘When one spends so much on one child without a return, one feels that one has been unjust to the rest. We are not very lively people; but I hope you will not hurry away. It was so very good of you to come. Millicent, ring for some tea. I shall be very glad to see both of you if you like to come to us sometimes of an evening. It is a very dull time of year to be in town. My poor boy has made it impossible for me to take Millicent to the sea this year; and if you are going to be in town, Mr. Renton, as you and she are almost old friends, I shall be very glad to see you; and you too, Mr. Hillyard,’ she added, turning half round to him. Hillyard muttered ‘By Jove!’ to himself, under his breath. But as for Ben, so suddenly and enthusiastically received into the bosom of the family, his eyes brightened, and his face crimsoned over with pleasure.
‘I shall be in town all the rest of the year,’ he said; ‘indeed, I am looking for rooms in this neighbourhood. I have something to do,—that is,—I shall want to be near Manchester Square. I shall be too glad, if you will let me, to come now and then. I must write to Mary and tell her what her relationship has gained me,’ said Ben, with a glow of satisfaction; while Hillyard looked on sardonic, probably because he had been asked, ‘too,’ as Ben’s appendage, which was a curious reversal of affairs.
‘How is dear Mary?’ said Miss Tracy; ‘and where is she just now? I dare say going on a round of nice visits,’ she added, with a soft sigh; ‘her circumstances are so different from ours.’
‘She was with my mother when I left home,’ said Ben, his face clouding over. ‘She will not have many visits this year, poor girl. My mother is very fond of her, which is a great comfort to us all just now.’
Millicent Tracy looked at him with her blue eyes, which seemed ready to overflow with soft tears; and Ben, who had the calm consciousness, common to great people, that everybody must ‘know what had happened,’ felt her sympathy go to his heart. But as it chanced she had not the least idea what had happened. The ladies had not had their ‘Times’ the day on which Mr. Renton’s death was announced, or else they had been interrupted by visitors, or some accident had happened to the supplement; but, anyhow, they were in ignorance of that event. It was sufficiently clear, however, that something had come upon theRenton family to call for sympathy, and sympathy accordingly shone sweetly out of Millicent’s eyes. As for Mrs. Tracy, her attention was turned to more practical matters.
‘The ground-floor here is to let,’ she said. ‘I can’t suppose it would be good enough for you, Mr. Renton; but still, if you had any particular reason for being in this neighbourhood,—the people of the house are honest sort of people. There is a parlour and a bedroom, quite quiet and respectable. And if we could be of any use——’
‘A thousand thanks,’ said Ben. He was very reluctant to leave the paradise on which he had thus suddenly stumbled, but Hillyard, the neglected one, had got up and stood waiting for him. ‘I shall look at them as I go down-stairs.’
And then Millicent gave him her soft hand. ‘I have known Mary’s cousin for years,’ she said, smiling at him, with a little blush and half apology. It was as if an angel had apologised for entering a mortal household unawares. Ben went down the narrow staircase dazed and giddy, treading, not on the poor worn carpets, but on some celestial path of flowers. He looked at the low, melancholy room below clothed in black haircloth, and veiled with curtains of darkling red, and thought it a bower of bliss. Something, however, restrained him from securing this paradise while Hillyard was still with him. He whispered to the eager landlady that he would return and settlewith her, and went out into the street a different being. It looked a different street, transfigured somehow. The old white horse and the rusty carriage, and the man in white cotton gloves, with his pretence at livery, stood before a house, a little farther down; and it seemed to Ben an equipage for the gods. Everything was changed. The only thing that troubled him was that Hillyard took his arm once more, as if supposing he meant to be dragged back to that wretched club.
‘It is easy to see I am not a swell like you,’ said Hillyard. ‘I never pretended I was; but I had no idea it was written on my face so plainly till I read it in that old woman’s eyes.’
‘She is not exactly an old woman,’ said Ben, making an effort to get free of his companion’s arm.
‘Oh dear, no; not at all!’ said Hillyard. ‘But if the daughter is,—say five-and-twenty——’
‘I should say eighteen,’ said Ben.
‘Oh, by Jove! that’s going too fast,’ cried his companion; ‘though I can’t wonder, considering the dead set they made at you. That girl is stunning, Ben; but she thinks you’re the heir of all your father’s property, and have the Manor at your command. Mind what you’re after if you go there again. The old woman is as crafty as an old fox, and as for the young one——’
‘Look here, Hillyard,’ said Ben, hotly. ‘I amintroduced to this family not by you, but by my cousin Mary. If it had been you, of course you might say what you like of your own friends; but I consider they are Mary Westbury’s friends, and I can’t have you speak of them in such a tone,—for my cousin’s sake.’
‘Ah! I see,’ said Hillyard, ironically. ‘But poor Tracy was my friend, not Miss Westbury’s, and I suppose I may talk of him if I like. It was the mother that drove him to it, Ben. Don’t you think it’s my line to speak ill of women. I’ve a dear little mother myself, thank God; and a little sister as sweet as a daisy,—and about as poor,’ the adventurer added, with a sigh; ‘but I hate that kind of woman. You may growl if you please. I do. After he broke down in his examination she never gave him a moment’s peace. She kept writing to him for money, and upbraiding him for having none to send her, when the poor wretch could not earn bread for himself. That much I know;—and you heard how she spoke of him. If you have anything to do with these two women you will come to grief.’
‘If every woman who has a good-for-nothing son or brother was to be judged as harshly——’ said Ben, making an effort to keep his temper. Hillyard turned round upon him with a hoarse exclamation of anger.
‘He was not a good-for-nothing, by——!’ he cried. ‘You know nothing about him. You call aman names in his grave, poor fellow, because a girl has got a pair of pretty blue eyes.’
‘It appears to me that our road is no longer the same,’ said Ben, with the superiority of temper and good manners. ‘I am going to my rooms, and you, I suppose, are going back to the club. I daresay we shall meet there shortly, as we are the only men in town. Good morning, just now.’
And thus they parted almost as suddenly as they met. Ben went into the Park, and composed himself with a long walk, at first with a pretence of making his way to his rooms, as he had said. He went across almost to the gate, and then he turned and made a circuit back again. He wanted cheap lodgings, that was evident,—and then!—The truth was that his mind was swept and garnished, emptied of all the traditions, and occupations, and hopes of his previous life. All had ended for him as by a sudden deluge, and the chambers stood open for the first inhabitant that had force enough to enter. Was it love that had burst in like an armed man? A certain sweet agitation took possession of his whole being. His agitation had been bitter enough in the morning, when he took the account of all those dead household gods of his, from which no comfort came; or rather it had been a kind of bitter calm,—death after a fashion. Now life had rushed back and tingled in all his veins. The world was no more a desert, but full of unknown beauty and wonder. Since his first step out of thefamiliar ways had taught him so much, what might not his further progress reveal? Might it not be, after all, that his deliverance from the conventional round was the opening of a new, and fresh, and glorious existence? Would not he be as free in Guildford Street, Manchester Square, as in the backwoods,—as undisturbed by impertinent observation? What were the buhl cabinets and the old Dresden in comparison with horsehair, and mahogany, and Millicent Tracy’s blue eyes up-stairs? He tried to consider the matter calmly without reference to those eyes, and he thought he succeeded in doing so. He reminded himself with elaborate, almost judicial, calm that he had but two hundred pounds a-year; that he could not afford to live at the Albany any longer; that cheap lodgings were necessary to him, not altogether out of reach of the world, but beyond the inspection of curious acquaintances. Under these circumstances the adaptation to all his wants of the ground-floor at No. 10 was almost miraculous. It was Providential. Ben had not been in the habit of using that word as some people do; but yet he felt that in the present remarkable circumstances the use of it was justifiable. Something beyond ordinary chance must have guided him in his ignorance to exactly the place he wanted. And the machinery employed to bring about this single result had been so elaborate and complicated. First, a suicide far off in Australia; second, the return of an adventurerwho had been sent there expressly to make Fitzgerald Tracy’s acquaintance, and convey his dying message;—a friendship which had been brought about by such means surely must count for something in a man’s life.
And so by degrees Ben found himself once more approaching the street. He knocked at the door with a curious thrill and tremor. What if he should see her again! What if she might be passing up and down after some of her celestial concerns! He was admitted by a dismal maid-of-all-work, and shown in this time to the rooms which were the object of his ambition. They were very dingy little rooms. In their original and normal state they made a double room with folding-doors; but as arranged for a lodger, the folding-doors had been closed and barricaded, the front half made into a sitting-room, and the back into a bed-room. The windows were closed, and in the sultry September evening the four mean walls seemed to close round the inmate and stifle him. Such a thought had half stolen across his mind when a sudden movement above thrilled him through and through. It seemed to vibrate through the house and through him. No need to ask any further question—undoubtedly it must have been her step; and immediately the musty air grew sweet as summer to foolish Ben.
The result was that he took the wretched little rooms for thirty shillings a-week, conveying to hisfuture landlady as he did so the meanest possible opinion of his intellectual powers. ‘Some fool,’ she replied to her husband, ‘as never asked no questions.’ He thought them very cheap, poor fellow; he thought them highly economical, retired, respectable, and exactly what he wanted. And he was rewarded, and more than rewarded, for his promptitude. Just as he had settled with the landlady a little creak on the stairs and rustling of ladies’ dresses set all his pulses beating. And when he turned sharply round there were the mother and daughter in their crape bonnets equipped for their evening walk. They were immensely surprised at the sight of Ben; more, perhaps, than could have been fully accounted for in conjunction with the fact that Miss Tracy had been seated, all this time, at the window, seeing who came and went.
‘Is it possible that Mr. Renton has come to look at the rooms?’ the innocent Millicent said to her mother, stopping short in the narrow little lobby.
‘I have not only come to look at them, but I have taken them,’ Ben said, coming forward. ‘They suit me exactly.’ And there was a charming little flutter of pleasure and surprise.
‘I never thought you could be in earnest,’ Mrs. Tracy said; ‘the rooms are well enough, but after what you have been accustomed to,—I was just saying to Millicent that of course it was impossible. But now I shall be quite comfortable in my mind,knowing you are there. Living in lodgings is very trying for ladies,’ continued the widow, lowering her voice confidentially as she went in with Ben to give a critical look round the sitting-room. ‘You cannot think how anxious I have been to have some one I know here,—on Millicent’s account, Mr. Renton. The last lodger used positively to lie in wait for my innocent child at the door.’
‘Confounded impudence!’ said Ben. ‘I hope the fellow was kicked out.’
‘Ah, we had no such champions as you,’ said Mrs. Tracy, with a dubious smile. ‘It was after my poor boy went away on that ill-fated voyage, so much against my will, Mr. Renton.—Yes, he has actually taken them, Millicent,’ she went on, speaking louder as she turned round. ‘We were just going out for our little walk. It is cool now, and there are not so many people about. We neither of us feel equal to fashionable promenades, Mr. Renton. We take our little walk for health’s sake in the cool of the evening. It is all the amusement my poor child has.’
‘Don’t say so, mamma dear,’ said Millicent. ‘I am quite happy. And oh, Mr. Renton, couldn’t you have dear Mary up for a day or two to see you? Cousins may visit, may not they, mamma? It would be such a pleasure to see her again.’
‘Hush, child, you don’t think what you are saying. Young ladies can’t visit young men, yousilly girl,’ said Mrs. Tracy. And Millicent blushed and glided round to the other side of her mother, as they all emerged into the street. Why should that mass of crape be put between them? Ben thought. But yet he had the happiness of walking to the Park with them, and catching, across Mrs. Tracy’s shadow now and then, a glance of the blue eyes. They talked and amused him the whole way, leading him to the grateful shadows of Kensington Gardens, away from all chance of recognition by his fashionable friends, even had there been any fashionable friends to recognise him. They would not permit him, however, to return with them, but dismissed him under the trees. ‘I am sure we are keeping you from dinner,’ Mrs. Tracy said, ‘and we could only ask you to tea. But I trust you will come to us often to tea, Mr. Renton, when you are our fellow-lodger at No. 10.’
And he went back to the Albany, not miserable and misanthropical as he left it, but full of loving-kindness and charity to all mankind. He went and dressed himself in honour of ‘the ladies’ whom he had just left, and who had already taken that name in his thoughts; and was most Christian in his treatment of Morris, promising him the best of characters and fullest explanations of why he was leaving; and he dined at his club, feeling that there was still light and comfort in the world. Hillyard was there, too, in the evening, reading all the newspapers, andyawning horribly over them. To him ‘the ladies’ had opened no paradise. With a temper that was half angelical, notwithstanding the adventurer’s rudeness in the morning, Ben was pitiful and compassionate to him in his heart.
Forthe next six months Ben Renton lived a strange life,—strange at least for him, who up to this time had been a young man of fashion,—répandu in the world,—with an interest in all the events, and all the gossip almost as important as events, that circulated in that curious, insincere, most limited sphere. He put his rooms into the hands of Messrs. Robins to be let, and he put his buhl and his pictures into those of the Messrs. Christie to sell,—and naturally, as it was September, no good came of either attempt for some months; and he took the ground-floor at No. 10, Guildford Street, Manchester Square. It would be difficult to describe the change which thus fell upon him. He who had gone about the Parks, about the highways and thoroughfares of the world, as in a hamlet, knowing everybody,—dining, dancing, chattering with every third person he met; now walked about the humdrum streets like a creature dropped out of the sky,—a stranger to all, seeing only strange faces around him. He whose life hadbeen minutely regulated and mapped out, not indeed by duty, but by that routine of society which serves the same purpose, wandered aimlessly about all day, or sat in his dingy parlour over a novel, with the strangest sense of idleness and uselessness. He had not been much more industrious in the old days, when he went from the Row to his club, from his club to the Drive, with the weighty duties before him of dressing and dining, strolling down, perhaps to the Lobby of the ‘House,’ or going from box to box at an opera. These occupations were not of very profound note among the industries of the day; but they filled up the vacant hours with a certain system and necessity. Now he had nothing of that kind to do. He might go and stroll about the deserted Parks; he might sit at home and work his way through one bundle of three volumes after another, and nobody would interfere with him. He had nothing to do. He had never done anything all his life, and yet he had never found it out before. One event there was still to break the monotonous existence of each dull day. Sometimes it was that he encountered Mrs. Tracy and her daughter as they went out, and was permitted to accompany them; sometimes that he was admitted to the drawing-room up-stairs in the evening. They were very cautious in those first openings of friendship; more cautious than they had been in its earliest beginning. Sometimes it so happened that for an entire day, oreven two days, all that Ben heard of his neighbours was the sound of their steps as they crossed the floor overhead, sending vibrations through the house and through his foolish heart. But yet the meeting with them was the event of the day to him,—the only one that gave life or colour to it. It was the sole gleam of light within his range of vision, and naturally his eye fixed on that gleam. Sometimes it seemed to him that, instead of being the fallen man he was, he had come there in a voluntary abandonment of luxury and pleasantness for Millicent Tracy’s sake. Though the young men of the nineteenth century are not given to romance, such a proceeding is still possible among them. And there were moments in which Ben forgot that he had any other motive for his seclusion. It was a sudden infatuation, and yet there was nothing extraordinary in it. Everything was so new to him in this changed and strange life, that any powerful influence suddenly brought into being was sure to take entire possession of the vacant space. As he sat in the gloom and quiet, with all that had hitherto occupied him gone from his grasp, and this one subtle fascination filling the air, it was scarcely wonderful that he should feel himself a pilgrim of love, giving up everything for the sake of his divinity,—keeping watch at her door, as it were, laying himself down at her feet, separating himself from the world for her service. A certain indescribable sense of her presence filled the house. The ceiling over his head thrilled under herstep,—the rustle of her dress on the stair, the distant sound of her voice or her name, seemed to echo down to him in the silence. Though he saw her at the most once a-day, and not always so often, he felt her perpetually, and his mind was intoxicated by this magical new sense. He lived upon it like a fool,—like a man in love, which he was, though he knew nothing of Millicent except that her eyes were heavenly eyes, and her voice as sweet as poetry. He had not cared much even for poetry hitherto, nor had much time for dreaming, and Nature now took her revenge. His youth, his extraordinary circumstances, his unoccupied life, all conspired with this most potent of influences against him. At first there was not even any intention in his mind except that of seeing her, looking at her, filling his vacancy with the new lovely creature so suddenly placed before him; the place was empty and she had come in unawares, startling him by her smile. That was all that Ben knew about it for the moment. To win her, and marry her, and enter into another and fuller phase of life, had not yet dawned on his thoughts. She had stolen in upon him like a new atmosphere,—a delicious air in which he lived and breathed. That was all. He meant nothing by it in the first place. He was not a free agent, voluntarily and consciously approaching a woman whom he wanted to make his wife. On the contrary, he was a man suddenly, without any will or purpose of his own, launched into a new world. He might not haveknown that such worlds existed, so strange and new was everything to him; but the unthought-of, unknown influence possessed itself in a moment of the very fountains of his life.
It is not, however, to be supposed that Ben was petted or made much of by the ladies whose retirement he had thus hastened to share. At first they even appeared to keep him at arm’s length with a reserve which chilled him much after their frank reception of dear Mary Westbury’s cousin. They retired within the enclosure of their grief when he became their fellow-lodger, passing him with slight salutations, with crape veils over their faces and all the adjuncts of woe, and receiving his visits, when he screwed up his courage to the point of going up-stairs, with the dignity of sorrow not yet able ‘to see people,’—a mode of treatment which gave Ben a pang, not only of disappointment, but of shame, at his own vain hopes, and the false interpretations he had put on their first little overtures of cordiality. ‘That I should have dreamed they would care to see me,—and their grief still so fresh,’ he muttered to himself with self-disgust. But the ladies up-stairs, in their retirement, were by no means without thoughts of their new acquaintance. They discussed him fully, though he was so little aware of it, and considered him and his ways in more detail, and with much more understanding, than characterised his brooding over theirs. It was notMrs. Tracy’s fault that he was so coldly received. It was Millicent who had barred the way against him,—Millicent herself, whose paleness and sorrowful looks had given the last touch of tender pity and interest to his admiration. They were mutually mistaken in each other, as it happened; for the mother and daughter knew no more of Ben than that he was the heir of Renton, and were so foolish in their dreams as to believe that he had, indeed, given up all the delights of his former life to live in dingy lodgings in order to be near Millicent. He had been struck with ‘love at first sight,’ they thought, and despised him a little, and were amused at the fact, though fully determined to take advantage of it. And so strange is human nature, that the mother and daughter would have been as much disgusted and disappointed had they known the complication of motives which sent the young man into their snare, as Ben would have been had he been able to conceive the aspect in which they regarded him. He was a man of the world; and they were of the still sharper class of adventurers living on their wits; and yet they mutually believed in the single-mindedness, each of the other, with the simplicity of the peasant of romance. He thought the beautiful creature who had smiled so softly on him, and her kind mother, were interested really about himself; and they believed that he had thrown away all the daily brightness of existence for Millicent’s sweet sake;—so much faith had remained at the bottom of natures so sophisticated. It was a curious conjunction of cunning and innocence.
‘I am not going to make any pounce upon him,’ said Millicent to her mother. ‘I won’t. You need not look so surprised. You may say what you like, but I know it is fatal to go too fast. Men don’t like that sort of thing. They see through it, though you don’t think they do. They are not quite such fools. You must go softly this time, or I shall not go into it at all.’
‘Millicent!’ said her mother severely, ‘when you talk in this wild way, how can you expect me to know what you mean?’
‘Oh, bother!’ said Millicent. The profile turned half away as she spoke was so perfect, and the lips that uttered the words so soft and rose-like, that any listener less accustomed would have distrusted her ears. Mrs. Tracy only made a little gesture of disapproval. Even to herself the mother kept up her pretensions; but Millicent was a girl of her century, and made believe only when the eye of the world was upon her. ‘I mean to take this into my own hands,’ she said. ‘You are not so clever as you were, mamma. You are getting rather old. Let me alone to treat a man like Ben Renton. I must not throw myself at his head; he must suppose, at least, that he has had hard work to secure me.’
‘And I trust it will be so, Millicent,’ said Mrs.Tracy. ‘Heaven forbid that a child of mine should throw herself at any gentleman’s head! It would break my heart, you know.’
‘Oh, yes; I know,’ said the daughter, with a laugh; ‘though I never can understand what pleasure you have in pretending and keeping up your character to me. We ought to understand each other,—if any two people do understand each other in the world,’ the young woman added, not with much perception of the melancholy mystery she was thus skimming over, but yet vaguely conscious that even the mother beside her had secrets, and would take her own way if occasion served. Each of them shocked the other by turns, though both stood low enough in point of moral appreciation. ‘You would sell me, as soon as look at me, if you could,’ Millicent went on. ‘Don’t deny it, for I know it; but Ben Renton is not in your line. It is I who must manage him.’
‘You will have your own way, I suppose, Millicent,’ said her mother; ‘though what you mean by these coarse expressions I don’t understand. What I feel is that the poor young fellow is very solitary. And I am a mother,’ Mrs. Tracy said, with a little grandeur. ‘I feel it might be of use to him to ask him up here. It keeps a young man respectable when ladies notice him. It keeps him out of bad hands.’
Millicent looked at her mother, with a gleam of laughter in her eyes. ‘It is beautiful to see you,mamma,’ she said; ‘it is as good as a sermon. But I am not so anxious about his morals. You had much better leave it in my hands.’
This was how it came about that Ben was so much thrown back on himself, and dismissed from the paradise of a drawing-room where his lady was, to the close, little, dingy, black-hair-clothed purgatory on the lower floor, to wait his promotion. A word, a look, half-an-hour’s talk now and then, raised him into the seventh heaven; but he was always cast back again; while, at the same time, her presence so near, the constant possibility of a meeting, the excitement of the situation, and the utter havoc of his own life, kept him suspended, he could not tell how, and banished all wholesome thoughts out of his head. The mutual pursuit and defence, the plans to see and to avoid being seen, the art of bestowing and with-holding, the perpetual expectation and possibility, engrossed the two completely after a time. It engrossed the witch as much as it did the victim. When men and women have passed the age,—if the age is ever passed,—of such contests, it is difficult to realise the way in which the lives of those engaged in them become absorbed in one interest. Each meeting between the two, were it only of a minute’s duration, occupied their minds as if it had been an event. To watch him out and in, to calculate what she should say to him next time, how soon she might venture the next tightening of her line, filled Millicent’s thoughts as she sat over her work by the window up-stairs; while the sound of her foot, the faintest movement over-head, the coming or going on the stairs, the rustle of the dress passing his door, occupied Ben like the most exciting drama. It was madness, yet it was nature. The mother, who was looking on with an eve merely to the result, grew impatient, and felt disposed to throw up the matter and turn her attention to other things. Mrs. Tracy was poor, and now that her son had altogether failed her, even in possibility, it was essential that her daughter should take his place. But Millicent gave no encouragement to the vague plans that fluttered through her mother’s mind. She, too, was engrossed, as people are engrossed only by such a strange duel and struggle of two lives. And the six months passed with her, as with Ben, like one long, exciting, feverish day.
‘You don’t get a step farther on,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘you are just where you were, shilly-shallying,—no better than your brother. My poor Fitzgerald! if he had been spared, he might have been a help to me. Providence is very strange! He lived long enough to be a burden and take every penny we had; and then, when he might have made me some return—— And it is just the same thing, over again, with you.’
‘Don’t speak of Fitzgerald, mamma,’ said Millicent. ‘I was fond of him, although you may not think it. You worried him till he could not bear itany longer; but you cannot get rid of me like that. I will never shoot myself. I mean to live in spite of everything,—and I mean to take my own time.’
‘You are an unnatural girl!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, with excitement. ‘Did not I do everything for that boy? Tutors and books, and I don’t know what; and then to break down. A young man has no business to fail when his people have done so much for him. And now there is you,—I have spared no expense about you, either. You have had the best masters I could give you, and the prettiest dresses; and now you stand doing nothing. I should like to know what this young Renton means.’
‘It would be very easy to ask him,—and drive him away for ever,’ said Millicent, with a heightened colour. ‘Mamma, I tell you, you are not so clever as you were.’
‘I believe you are in love with him,’ said the mother, with an accent of scorn;—‘nothing else could account for it. That is all that is wanting to make up the story. But I tell you this will not do,’ she added, with an instant change of tone. ‘We shall have to run away if some determination is not come to. I have no money to carry on with, and there is a month’s rent owing to this horrid woman; and the tradespeople and all—— Millicent, there must be something done. If you are going to marry young Renton, it will be all very well; but if it is to cometo nothing, as so many other things have done——’
‘What would you have me do?’ said Millicent, in a low tone of restrained passion. Perhaps she was angry with herself for playing so poor arôle; but, at all events, she was disgusted with the mother who had trained her to do it, and thus kept her to the humiliating work. Mrs. Tracy was getting, as her daughter said, rather old. Her ear was not fine enough for the inflections of tone and shades of meaning which once she could have caught in a moment.
‘If you will listen to me,’ she answered, in perfect good faith, ‘I will soon tell you what to do. Tell him that we are going abroad. You know how often I have spoken of going abroad. If we could only get a hundred pounds, we might go to Baden, or Homburg, or somewhere. We don’t want so many dresses, being in mourning; and, with your complexion, you look very nice in mourning. I should like to start to-morrow, for my part. You might tell him it was for my health,—that I was ordered to take the baths. And I am sure it would be quite true. After all the wear and tear I have gone through I must want baths when you come to think of it. That ought to bring matters to a decision; and the fact is, that unless something happens, we shall have to make a change. It will be impossible to stay here.’