CHAPTER II.
AFTER-THOUGHTS.
There was nothing but fair weather for the P. and O. steamerBerenicebetween Venice and Alexandria—fair weather and a calm sea; and John Vansittart had ample leisure in which to think over what he had done, and to live again through all the sensations of his last night in Venice.
He had to live through it all again, and again, in those long days at sea, out of sight of land, with nothing between him and his own dark thoughts but that monotony of cloudless sky and rolling waters. What did it matter whether the boat made eighteen or twenty knots an hour, whether progress were fast or slow? Each day meant an eternity of thought to him who sat apart in his canvas chair, staringblankly eastward, or brooding with bent head, and melancholy eyes fixed on the deck, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, irritated and miserable when some officious fellow-passenger insisted upon plumping down by his side in another deck chair, and talking to him about the weather, or his destination, with futile questionings as to whether this was his first voyage to the East, and all the idle inquisitiveness of the traveller who has nothing to do, and very little to think about.
Captain and steward had been very good to him. The former had asked him no questions after that first inquiry, content to know that he was a gentleman, and had a well-filled purse; the latter had put him to bed in the most comfortable of berths, and had given him a hot drink, and dried his clothes ready for the next morning. And in that one suit of clothes, with changes of linen borrowed from the captain, he made the voyage to Alexandria in the bright spring weather, under the vivid blue that canopies the Mediterranean. Perhaps the fact of living in that one suit of clothes all through those hot days intensified his sense of being a pariah among the other passengers; he who had come among them with a hand red with murder.
Hour after hour he would sit in his corner of the deck, always the most secluded spot he could find, and brood over the thing that he had done.
He had an open book upon his knee for appearance’s sake, and pretended to be absorbed in it whenever a curious saunterer passed his way. He smoked all day long for comfort’s sake, the only comfort possible for his troubled brain, and all day long he thought of his last evening in Venice and the thing that he had done there.
To think that he, a gentleman by birth and education, should have slain a man in a tavern row; that he, who in his earliest boyhood had been taught to use his fists, and to defend himself after the manner of Englishmen, should have yielded to a tigerish impulse, and stabbed an unarmed foe to the heart! He, the well-bred Englishman, had behaved no better than a drunken Lascar.
He scorned—he hated—himself for that blind fury which had made him grip the weapon that accident had placed in his way.
He was not particularly sorry for the man he had killed; a violent, drunken brute, who for the sake of the rest of humanity was better dead than alive. A profligate who had betrayed that lovely ignoramus under a promise of marriage, a promise which he had never meant to keep. He hated himself for the manner of the brute’s death rather than for the death itself. If he had killed the man in fair fight he would have felt no regret at having made an end of him; but to have stabbed an unarmed man! There was the sting, there was the shame of it. All night long, between snatches of troubled sleep, he writhed and tossed in his berth, wishing that hewere dead, wondering whether it were not the best thing he could do to throw himself overboard before daybreak and so make an end of these impotent regrets, this maddening reiteration of details, this perpetual representation of the hateful scene, for ever beginning and ending and beginning again in his tortured brain.
He would have decided upon suicide, perhaps, not having any strong religious convictions at this stage of his existence; but his life was not his own to fling away, however unpleasant he might have made it for himself.
He had a mother who adored him, and to whom he, for his part, was warmly attached. She was a widow, and he was the head of the house, sole master of the estate, and to him she looked for dignity and comfort. Were he to die the landed property would pass to his uncle, a dry old bachelor, and though his mother would still have her income, she would be banished from the house in which her wedded life had been spent, and she would be the loser in social status. He had an only sister, too, a fair, frivolous being, of whom, in a lesser degree, he was fond; a sister who had made her appearance in Society at the pre-Lenten Drawing-Room, and had been greatly admired, and who was warranted to make a good match.
Poor little Maud! What would become of Maud if he were to throw himself off a P. and O. steamer? Think of the scandal of it. And yet, if he lived, and that brutal business in the Venetian caffè were to be brought home to him—murder, or manslaughter—it would be even worse for his sister. Society would look askance at a girl with such a ruffian for a brother—an Englishman who used the knife against his fellow-man. Daggers and stilettos might be common wear among Venetians; but the knife was not the less odious in the sight of an Englishman because he happened to be in a city where traditions of treachery and secret murder were interwoven with all her splendour and her beauty. It would be horrible, humiliating, disgraceful for his people if ever that story came to be known—a choice topic for the daily papers, with just that spice of romance and adventure which would justify exhaustive treatment.
Thinking over the question from the Society point of view—and in most of the great acts of life Society stands with the modern Christian in the place which the religious man gives his Creator—Vansittart told himself that every effort of his intelligence must be bent upon dissociating himself from that tragedy in the Venetian caffè. He had got clear of the city by a wonderful bit of luck; for had the steamer started five minutes earlier, or a quarter of an hour later, escape that way would have been impossible.
He had heard the men giving chase on the Piazzetta as he jumped from the quay; heard them shouting when he was in the water.Had the steamer been stationary those men would have boarded her, and the whole story would have been known. She had weighed anchor in the nick of time for him. But what then? A telegram to the police at Brindisi or Alexandria might stop him, as other fugitive felons are caught every month in the year—men who get clear off at Liverpool, to be arrested before they step ashore at New York.
He paid his passage on the morning after his flight, and gave his name as John Smith, of London. The captain scrutinized him rather suspiciously on hearing that name of Smith; but Vansittart did not look like a swindler or a blackguard. He was under a cloud, perhaps, the captain thought, and Smith was most likely an alias; but anyhow he was a gentleman, and the captain meant to stand his friend.
“Are you going to stay long in Cairo?” he asked Vansittart, when they were within sight of Alexandria.
“Not long. Perhaps only till I get my luggage. I shall go up the Nile.”
“You’ll find it rather hot before you’ve been a long way.”
“Oh, I don’t mind heat. I’m not a feverish subject,” said Vansittart, lightly, having no more idea of going up the Nile than of going to the moon.
“You’ll stop at Sheppard’s, of course?”
“Yes, decidedly. I’m told it’s a very good hotel.”
While they were nearing their port he contrived to get a good deal of information about the steamers that touched there. He meant to get off on the first boat that sailed after he landed. All the interval he wanted was the time to buy some ready-made clothes and a valise, so that he might not appear on board the homeward-bound steamer in the miserable condition in which he had introduced himself to the captain of the P. and O.
He parted with that officer with every expression of friendliness.
“I shan’t forget how good you’ve been to a traveller in distress,” he said lightly; “you may not hear of me for a month or two, perhaps. I may be up the Nile——”
“Take care of the climate,” interjected the captain.
“But as soon as I go back to London I shall write to you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Smith, and good luck to you for a fine swimmer wherever you go.”
“Oh, I won a cup or two at Oxford,” answered the other. “We rather prided ourselves on our swimming in my set.”
He went to a restaurant where he could sit under an awning and read the latest papers that had found their way to Alexandria. There were plenty of Paris papers—Galignani,Le Figaro,LeTemps. There was a Turin paper, very stale—and there was a copy of theDaily Telegraphthat had been left by some traveller, and which was a fortnight old. Nothing to fear there. Vansittart breathed more freely, and thought of going on to Cairo. But second thoughts warned him that Cairo was very English, and that he might meet some one he knew there. Better to stick to his first plan, and go back to England by the first steamer that would take him.
He had to think of his possessions at Danieli’s, and whether the things he had left there would provide a clue to his identity. He thought not. He had not given his name to the hall porter.
The hotel was crowded, and he had—like a convict—been simply known as “150,” the number of his room.
Clothes, portmanteau, dressing-bag, bore only his initials, J. V. He had been travelling in lightest marching order; carrying no books save those which he picked up on his way, no writing materials, except the compact little case in his dressing-bag. It was his habit to destroy all letters as soon as he had read them—even his mother’s, after a second or third reading. His card-case, note-case, and purse were all in his pockets when he made the plunge. No, he had left nothing at Danieli’s; nor had he left Danieli’s deep in debt, for he had paid his account on Tuesday morning, with a half-formed intention of starting for Verona by the early train on Wednesday. He could resign himself to the loss of portmanteau and contents, and the plain pigskin bag, which had seen good service and had been scraped and battered upon many a platform.
Reflection told him that he had nothing to fear from the newspapers yet awhile, since no newspaper could have travelled faster than the steamer that had brought him, while the news of that homicide at Venice was hardly important enough to be telegraphed to any Egyptian journal. No, he was safe so far; but he told himself that the best thing he could do was to get back to England and the wilderness of London; while theBereniceand her good-natured captain went on to Bombay, where, no doubt, the captain would read of that fatal brawl in the Venetian caffè, and identify his passenger as the English tourist who had stabbed another man to death.
Vansittart pulled himself together, counted his money, and rejoiced at finding that he had enough for his voyage home, and a trifle over for incidental expenses and a small outfit. The greater part of his money was in English bank-notes, about which no questions would be asked.
He went to the steamboat office, and found that there was a P. and O. boat leaving that night for London, so he took his passageon board her, selected his berth, and then drove off to an outfitter’s to get his kit, and a new cabin trunk, just big enough to hold his belongings. He bought a few French novels, and those small necessities of life without which the civilized man feels himself a savage.
His ship sailed at midnight. He was on board her early in the evening, pacing the deck in the balmy night, and looking at the lighted town, the massive quays, which testify to English enterprise, the Pharos sending out its long lines of bright white light seaward—the gigantic breakwater—all that makes the Egyptian port of to-day in some wise worthy of the Alexandria of old, when her twin obelisks stood out against the sky, and when her name meant all that was grandest in the splendour of the antique world.
Vansittart looked at the starlit sky and lamplit city with a dull unobservant gaze, while the burden upon his mind deadened his sense of all things fair and strange, and made him indifferent to scenes which would once have aroused his keenest interest. How often he had dreamed his summer daydream of Egypt, lying on a velvet lawn in Hampshire, with a volume of old Herodotus, or some modern traveller, flung upon the grass beside him, in the idlesse of a July afternoon! How often he had promised himself a long winter in that historic land! He had not much of the explorer’s ardour in those boyish days, no bent towards undiscovered watersheds and unpleasant encounters with blackamoors, no ambition to be reckoned amongst the mighty marksmen of the world, or to be called the father of lions; though in some vague visions he had fancied himself wandering in that lone land where the Zambesi leaps headlong into the fathomless gorge, in blinding whiteness of foam and deafening thunder of sound, a beauty and a terror to eye and ear. The things he most wanted to see were the things that his fellow-men had made, the palaces and statues, and fortresses and tombs that mean history. He was not a naturalist or a scientific traveller, had no hope of making the world any richer by his discoveries, or of reading the smallest paper at the Geographical Society. He wanted to see men and cities, and all splendid memorials of past ages, for his own pleasure and amusement; and Egypt was one of the countries to which he had looked for delight, if ever satiety and weariness should overtake him amidst the nearer delights of his beloved Italy.
And, behold, to-day he had walked those Egyptian streets, and let those Egyptian faces pass by him, with eyes that saw not, and with a mind that felt no interest in the things the eyes looked at. The distress in his thoughts, the perpetual labouring of his troubled mind, would not allow of pleasure in anything. That aching agony of remorse had taken hold of him, and left room for no other feeling.To the end of his life all that was picturesque and individual in this Egyptian seaport would be part and parcel of his self-humiliation, associated for ever with the thought that he had slain a fellow-creature, under circumstances for which he could find no excuse.
Again and again, as he paced the deck in the starlight, the face of the man he had killed stood out against the deep azure of the sky and sea, as it had looked at him in that awful moment when one last ejaculation, “God!” broke from the parted lips, and the man fell as if struck by a thunderbolt. There was scarcely any change in his face as he fell—no ghastly pallor, no convulsion of the features. As he lay there looking up at the ceiling, one might hardly have thought him dead. No torrent of blood rushed from those parted lips. The stream ebbed slow and dull from the pierced heart. That savage thrust of the dagger had done its work well. How many daggers and what a gory butchery had been needed to make an end of Cæsar; and behold this man was done for with one movement of an angry hand. For John Vansittart murder had been made easy.
The homeward voyage seemed ever so much longer than the outward, and the gloom of his mind deepened as the summer days wore out; summer, for it was summer here on the Mediterranean, whatever season it might seem in London, summer at Genoa, summer all along the Riviera, where the mimosas flung their fairy gold across the villa gardens, and the lateen sails shone dazzling white in the vivid sun, and the berceaus were beginning to clothe themselves with young vine leaves, unfolding out of crumpled woolly greyness into tender, translucent green.
He thought of Fiordelisa, and his thoughts of her were bitterest of all. He could not doubt that he had robbed her of her protector, the man whose purse provided for the little household of which she and her aunt had talked so gaily. It might be that he had left her to starve—or worse. Was it likely she would ever go back to Burano, and her lace-work, and her threepence-halfpenny a day, and her slipshod shoes, and her polenta, after having tasted the flesh-pots of Venice, the pallid asparagus and fat cauliflowers from the market in the Rialto, the savoury messes at the sign of the Black Hat? Would she go back and be a peasant again, after trapesing the Piazzetta in her flashy black and yellow gown, and sitting in a lantern-lit gondola, and twanging on her mandoline?
His experience of her sex and degree inclined him to think that she would not return to the old laborious life, with its hardships and privations. The first step upon the broad high-road of sin having been taken, there would be but little scruple about the second; and those bold, beautiful eyes, that swan throat and graceful form, would belong to somebody else. The easy-going aunt would hardly standin the way of a new settlement, when the last of their poor possessions had been carried to the Monte di Pietà, and hunger was at hand. Somebody else would pay the little old singing-master, and listen admiringly while Lisa sang to the wiry tinkling of her mandoline; and the lanterns would swing from the beak of the gondola in the festival evenings, and the rockets would shoot up through the purple night in front of Santa Maria della Salute, and all the palaces on the Grand Canal would shine rosy red, reflecting the Bengal fires, and Lisa would forget her murdered man, while those substantial feet of hers tripped gaily down the brimstone path.
If that tall, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man had lived he might have kept his promise and married her. Who is to be sure that he would not? There are men in the world who will wed the girl they love, be she barmaid or ballet-dancer; and that this man was fond of Fiordelisa there could be little doubt. His savage jealousy indicated the passionate force of the civilized savage’s love.
Alas for Fiordelisa, widowed in the very morning of life! He who had wrecked her fortune could do nothing to help her. He dared not stretch out his hand towards her. His interest, for the sake of others as well as for his own sake, lay in severing every link that could connect him with the catastrophe of that fatal night. No, he could do nothing for Fiordelisa. He would not have grudged her the half of his income; and he dared not send her so much as a ten-pound note! She must sink or swim.
The thought of her peril doubled the sum of his remorse.
He landed at Marseilles, and here, too, it was summer—summer at her brightest, with azure skies, and a sea deeper, bluer, more darkly glorious than the lapis lazuli in a jewelled châsse. The streets were full of traffic and abloom with flower-girls, noisily pressing their bunches of roses and pale Parma violets upon him as he walked up the Rue de la Cannebière on his way from the quay to the railway hotel. There had been a time when the sights and sounds of that southern port were like strong wine, exhilarating, delighting him, when he could not have too much of the animation and picturesqueness of the place, the Corniche road, the wide-stretching bay with rocks and lighthouses, the sea marks of every kind, and that glittering point where the waterways divide—to the left for Hindostan, China, Japan; to the right for the New World and the setting sun; two paths upon the trackless blue that seemed each to lead direct to fairyland.
And behold he had come from the land of glamour and mystery, from the tombs of the Pharaohs, from the ashes of Cleopatra, heart-weary, caring for nothing.
He went into one of the big caffès on his right hand, seated himself at a table in an obscure corner, and began to examine the papers,hastily turning them over one after another, worried by the sticks to which they were fastened. Yes, here it was, in the ParisFigaro.
“A fatal brawl occurred last Tuesday night in one of the caffès in the Piazza at Venice. Two Englishmen fought savagely about a Venetian girl who had entered the caffè in the company of one of them. Both men appeared to have been drinking, and after a desperate encounter with fists, in the English fashion, the younger and better-looking of the two snatched up a dagger and stabbed his antagonist to the heart. Death was almost instantaneous. The murderer managed to get away in the confusion caused by the unexpected catastrophe, the crowded state of the Piazzetta and the Riva favouring his escape. It is supposed that he jumped into the water, and either managed to scramble into a gondola and get himself conveyed to the railway station or was drowned—though the latter supposition seems unlikely when it is considered that the canal was crowded with boats. Every effort to discover traces of the missing man has been made by the Venetian police, but as yet without success. The name of the murdered man was John Smith. He had been some time resident in Venice, but did not bear a good character in the city, where he was in debt to several of the smaller tradespeople in the Rialto. Very little seems to have been known about his surroundings, even by the elderly woman who kept house for him, or the girl whose existence cost him his life.”
John Smith. An assumed name, no doubt; just as false as that name of Smith which Vansittart had given to the captain and steward of theBerenice.
It did not seem to him, as he re-read this paragraph among the Faits Divers in theFigaro, that the fatal event had created so much stir as he had supposed it would create. It seemed to him that he was getting off cheaply, and that he might go down to the grave without being called upon to answer for that deadly stroke. The man’s isolation saved him. Had his victim been the member of a respectable English family, had there been father and mother, brothers and sisters to bewail his loss, much more stringent efforts might have been made to find his murderer. But a reprobate Englishman, a man who had perhaps severed every link that bound him to kindred and country, a scampish individual, living under an assumed name and unable to pay his way, was not the kind of person whose death in a tavern brawl was likely to make a great stir.
Had he disappeared, had there been the attraction of mystery about his doom, a riddle to solve, a crime unexplained and seemingly unexplainable, French and English newspapers might have given columns or florid writing to the case. But here there was no mystery, no dark enigma of love and murder. In the full glare of the gas, in sight of the crowd, these two men had fought, and onehad proved himself unworthy of his British birthright by using a dagger against an unarmed antagonist.
Vansittart found the same paragraph repeated in several papers, and amongst his researches, aided by a waiter who brought him the accumulation of the last ten days, he found an oldDaily Telegraphin which his crime formed the basis for a spirited leader, full of vivacity and local colour, written by a journalist who evidently knew Venice by heart. In this article the picturesqueness of the city, the riot of Carnival time, the historical associations of Doge and Republic, were more insisted upon than the brutality of the fight, or the unfair use of the dagger.
He felt a little easier in his mind after his examination of the papers. It seemed to him that by the time he arrived at Charing Cross most people would have forgotten all about an event which was already three weeks old, and it would hardly occur to any one to connect him with the fatal brawl in the Piazza di San Marco.
He dined in the crowded, bustling restaurant in the Station Hotel with a little better appetite than he had felt for a long time, and took his seat in a corner of a compartment of the Rapide—not affecting the stuffy luxury of the “Sleeping”—for the long night journey to Paris, with a calmer mind than he had known since Shrove Tuesday. He looked out into the darkness when the train stopped at Avignon, and it was winter again, the bleak March winter before the Easter Noon; and at Lyons the blasts from the two rivers blew colder still, and he felt that he was near home.
He was in Charles Street by afternoon teatime, sitting in the cosy drawing-room with his mother and sister, being petted and made much of in a manner calculated to stimulate any young man’s self-love. His mother adored him, and he had been away from her nearly half a year. His sister was seven years his junior, a pretty, frivolous young creature, whose mind rarely dwelt upon any more serious question than the fashion of her next ball-dress or how she should wear her hair, or the newest toy on her silver table. Yet she, too, adored Jack Vansittart in her pretty frivolous way, and had not yet begun to adore anybody else.
The room was full of flowers and old china, and little tables crowded with silver, and enamels, and Dresden boxes, and ivory paper-knives; and there were books in every available corner; an old room with panelled walls and a low ceiling, in a somewhat shabby old house which had belonged to Mrs. Vansittart’s grandfather, an East India director, in the days when the Pagoda tree was still worth shaking. The furniture was seventy years old, a quaint mixture of old-fashioned English things, before the influence of Sheraton and Chippendale had died out, and Indian things, really and intensely Indian, bought in the East, long before Oriental goodsbegan to be manufactured wholesale for English buyers. Bombay blackwood, with its clumsy bulkiness enriched by elaborate carving, ivories, screens of black and gold, rainbow-hued embroideries which time had scarcely faded, porcelain jars and enamelled vases, relieved the stern simplicity of rosewood and pale chintz. A few choice water-colours on the walls, and an abundance of flowers harmonized everything, and made Mrs. Vansittart’s drawing-room a fitting nest for a very elegant woman and her very pretty daughter.
The London house was Mrs. Vansittart’s own property; the house in Hampshire belonged to her son, and she spoke of herself and her daughter laughingly as caretakers.
“When you marry,” said Maud, tossing up her pretty head, with pale gold hair crisped and curled in the prevailing fashion, “mother and I will have to budge. Whatever slut you may choose to fall in love with will be mistress of Merewood.”
“Why must you needs suppose I may fall in love with a slut?”
“Oh, by the doctrine of opposites. You are one of those orderly, superior persons who are foredoomed to admire some wild girl of the woods, some harum-scarum minx, with fine eyes and half an inch of mud on the edge of her gown.”
“However fine the eyes were, I think the half-inch of mud would be a warning that I could hardly ignore. But I do not claim to be either orderly or superior. My father’s Irish blood has infused a spice of disorder into my Anglo-Saxon character.”
And now on this bright April afternoon Jack Vansittart was being petted and fed by these two loving women, who could not do too much to prove their devotion to him after the long severance. They had only given him time to wash his hands and brush the Kentish dust and chalk out of his hair and clothes before he sat down between them to a cup of tea. He had to assure them that he had lunched heartily at Calais, and wanted nothing but tea, or else a substantial meal would have been set out in the dining-room below.
“And you have come straight through from Marseilles?” said Mrs. Vansittart. “What a terrible journey!”
“Hot and dusty, mother; not very appalling to a traveller. But you are such a stay-at-home.”
“To my cost,” pouted Maud. “I haven’t the least idea of what the world is like. I have to take other people’s word that it is round.”
“We found your telegram from Marseilles at two o’clock this morning when we came home from Mrs. Mountain’s dance, and, rejoiced as I was to know you were coming back to us, I took it for granted you would loiter in Paris for a week,” said Mrs. Vansittart.
“Paris is always delightful,” replied her son; “but I was tired of wandering, and was honestly homesick. And here I am safe athome, and ever so much better off than poor old Odysseus. By the way, mother, your Italian spaniel did her level best to bite me as I came upstairs, and she and I were once such friends. Dogs have altered since the days of Argus.”
“How silly of her! but she’ll love you again after a day or two. And now tell me, Jack, all you have been doing and seeing since you left Merewood last October. You are such a bad correspondent that one knows nothing about your wanderings, and if I were not well broken to your neglect I should be miserable about you.”
“See how wise my system is,” he said, laughing; “were I a good correspondent an interval of a week without a letter would scare you. I have heard of men who write regularly once a week to their people, or who keep a journal of their travels and send it home every fortnight for family perusal. But since you and Maud both know that I detest letter-writing, you expect nothing of me, and are never anxious.”
“Indeed you are wrong, Jack,” said his mother, with a sigh. “I have had many an anxious hour about you. But I’m not going to be doleful now I have you at home again, and for a long time, I hope.”
“Yes, for a long time,” echoed Jack. “I am sick of travelling.”
There was a weariness in his tone that sounded as if he meant what he said.
“And now tell me your adventures.”
The word hurt him like the sharp edge of a knife.
“I have had none. No one has adventures nowadays,” he said. “I had a fortnight on an American friend’s yacht in the Mediterranean, and we had some rather dirty weather, but nothing to hurt. That’s my nearest approach to an adventure. I had a month at Monte Carlo, shot a good many pigeons, and missed nearly as many as I shot; played a little, with varying luck, but am not ruined; came off on the whole a winner, though to no substantial amount, perhaps enough to buy a pair of solitaires for Maud’s pretty little ears”—pinching the ear that was nearest him, as the girl sat on a low chair at his side. “No, I have had no adventures. I have only been in familiar places. Let me see, from where did I write last?”
“From Bologna, ages ago; a shabby little letter,” answered Maud.
“Ah, I spent a few days in Bologna after I left Florence. I am rather fond of Bologna.”
“And after that? Where did you go after Bologna? It must be nearly two months since you were there.”
“Oh, I went to Padua and—and Verona,” he answered carelessly, “and then back to Genoa, and then I dawdled along the Riviera, stopping a night or two here and there, to Marseilles; and here I am. That is my history—and I am ready for another cup of tea.”
Maud filled his cup, and offered him dainty biscuits and tempting cakes, and hung about him fondly, touching the thick hair which made such a waving line across the broad forehead.
“Why, how tremendously sunburnt you are!” she exclaimed. “You look as if you had just come off a sea voyage.”
“Do I? Well, I have basked in the sun that shines upon the Mediterranean; and a March sun on the Riviera is a blazer.”
“And you were at Bologna and Padua, and did not go to your beloved Venice?” said his mother. “I thought you were so fond of Venice?”
“Yes, I delight in the place, but I wanted to go back to the Riviera, where I should be more secure of sunshine and balmy air.”
“And you left Italy without revisiting Venice?” exclaimed Maud, who had often listened to his raptures about the City by the Sea.
There was no more to be said. For the first time in his life he had deliberately lied, and to his mother and sister, of all people—to those who in all the world most trusted and believed in him. He hated himself for what he had done; and yet he meant to maintain that false assertion doggedly. He had not been to Venice. Let no casual acquaintance come forward to allege that he had been seen there. In the very teeth of assertion he would declare that in this springtime of 1886 he had not been in Venice. He rejoiced in the thought that he had told his name to no one at Danieli’s, and that he had entered the hotel as a stranger, having stopped at one of the hotels on the Grand Canal on his previous visits. He told himself that no one could convict him of having been in the fatal city last Shrove Tuesday—no one who knew him as Jack Vansittart.
“And now that you’ve had the history of my travels——”
“A sorry history, forsooth!” cried Maud. “You men have no capacity for description. When Lucy Calder came home from her Italian honeymoon she talked to me for hours about the places and things she had seen there.”
“Pretty prattler! Would you like me to recite a few pages of Murray or Joanne? All travelling is alike nowadays, Maud, and pleasure and comfort are only a question of good railway service and well-found hotels. We have done with romance and adventure. Life is pretty much the same all over Europe. And now tell me what you have been doing; there is more interest in a girl’s life in her first season than in all the cities of Europe.”
“Well, Jack, to begin with, I was presented at the February Drawing-Room. I went out with mother a goodish bit last November, don’t you know, but I was not actually out. That only began after the Drawing-Room.”
“And had you a pretty frock, and did the Royalties look kindly at you when you made your curtsy?”
“The Royalties might all have been waxwork, from Her Majesty downwards, for anything I knew to the contrary,” said Maud. “I saw no faces—only a cloud of feathers, and a splendour of jewels, and velvet, and satin, all vague and troubled, like the figures in a dream—but I got through the business somehow, and mother said I made no mistakes.”
“And the frock?”
“Oh, the frock was just as pretty as a frock can be. It was mother’s taste. She talked out every detail with Mdlle. Marie. She was not content to hear that Lady Lucille Plantagenet had worn this sort of thing, or Lady Gwendoline Tudor that sort of thing. She insisted on having just the frock she thought would suit me, Maud Vansittart. The train and petticoat were white satin—the satin you see in old pictures, satin in which there are masses of deep, steel-grey shadow and floods of white, silvery light—and then there was a cloud of aerophane arranged as only Marie can arrange a drapery, and in the cloud there were clusters of lilies of the valley and fluffy ostrich tips. The papers—the lady-papers mostly—went into raptures about my frock.”
“And did the lady-papers say nothing of the wearer?”
“Oh, some of them were so good as to say I was not quite the most hideous débutante of the year, and that they liked the way I had my hair dressed—and now I find our French hair-dresser has the impertinence to advertise the style as the Vansittart Coiffure.”
“What a frightful outrage! And having been presented, and being now actually out, I conclude you have found London a very pleasant place, under mother’s wing?” said Jack.
“Oh, it is all very quiet so far, and will be till after Easter, no doubt; but we have been to a few friendly dinners and a good many luncheons, and we have a cloud of invitations and engagements for May, and some of our Hampshire friends are in town, so there is plenty to do.”
“And have you seen anything of your Yorkshire friend, Sir Hubert Hartley?” asked Jack.
“Yes. Sir Hubert is in town.”
“And did he see you in your débutante’s finery?”
“Yes, mother had a tea-party that afternoon, and there were a good many people—and, yes, Sir Hubert dropped in.”
“And didn’t that finish him?”
“Finish him! oh, Jack, what a horrid expression! I don’t understand you in the least!”
“Of course not. Well, I’ll say no more about my old friend Hubert. I can look him up at the Devonshire to-morrow.”
“The Devonshire,” sighed Maud. “How sad to think that he is one of the few respectable people who can find it in their hearts to be Liberals!”
“Yes, he is on the wrong side, no doubt, but that doesn’t matter to us,” said Jack.
Mrs. Vansittart sighed slightly as she touched her daughter’s fluffy hair, the girl sitting on her low chair between mother and brother.
“My Maud would like her friends to be of the same opinion as herself,” she said, “and she is such an ardent Conservative, and knows so much about politics.”
“At least, I know that I am not a Radical, and that I hate what people call Progress,” protested Maud. “Progress means pulling down every historical house and widening every picturesque street, cutting railways through Arcadian valleys, and turning romantic lakes into reservoirs.”
“And progress sometimes means feeding the hungry, and teaching the ignorant,” said her mother, “and building healthy dwellings for people who are herding in poisonous slums. I think we are all agreed as to the necessity for reform, Maud, whether we are Whigs or Tories.”
“Oh, of course I want people to be taken care of all over the world,” replied Maud, “and I am prouder of our sound, roomy cottages than anything on our estate.”
“Ah, that’s the mother’s work,” said Vansittart. “One can see that a woman’s eye watches over the parish.”
“Sir Hubert tells me they have very good cottages at Hartley,” pursued Maud, “but I cannot imagine either comfort or picturesqueness within twenty miles of Sheffield.”
“Yet there are some romantic spots and some fine, bold scenery in that part of the world, I believe,” said her brother.
Later in the evening mother and son were alone together in the room which had always been John Vansittart’s sanctum and tabagie, a snug little room on the ground floor; and here the conversation was more serious than it had been at teatime, for wherever Maud was frivolity reigned. She had not yet discovered that life is a troublesome business. For her life meant new frocks and new admirers.
“Dear Jack,” sighed the mother, looking fondly at the young man’s sunburnt face, as he sat silently enjoying his pipe, “I hope now we have you home again you are going really to settle down.”
“Really to settle down,” he repeated; “that sounds rather alarming. Settle down to what, mother? Not to matrimony, I hope!”
“To that in good time, dear; but at your own good time, not mine. That is a crisis I would be the last to hasten—not becauseI am afraid of being turned out of the big house at Merewood; this house will be more than enough for me—but because a hasty union is seldom a happy union.”
“Ah, that’s the old-fashioned way of looking at it. I believe in the love of a day, the happiness of a lifetime. I believe in elective affinities, and upon this teeming earth there is somewhere just the one woman who could make me happy. Don’t be frightened, mother, the chances are against my meeting her; but till I do, till my heart goes tick-tack at the sight of her face, at the first sound of her voice, I shall not marry. I shall not marry because the wisdom of my elders says that it is good for a man to marry. I shall not marry just to place a handsome woman at the head of my table. I will be content with a round table, where there need be no headship.”
“I was not thinking of marriage, Jack. I only want to see you settle down to the real business of life. I should be sorry to see you always an idler—sauntering through a London season, yachting a little in the Cowes week, shooting a little in September and October, hunting a little in November, and running away from the winter to amuse yourself at Nice or Monte Carlo. Independent as you are, you ought to do something better with your talents.”
“My talents are an unknown quantity. I doubt if any one in this world, except my fond mother, gives me credit for being even moderately clever.”
“I remember what you were as a boy, Jack, and how well you got on at Balliol.”
“Oh, that was in the atmosphere, I think. I was in love with Greek because I worshipped Jowett. That was a boyish dream. All scholarly ambition is a thing of the past. I shall never do anything in that line.”
“Perhaps not. You have too much energy and activity for a student’s life. I should like to see you a power in the House.”
“Dearest flatterer, you would like to see me Prime Minister. I have no doubt you think that it simply rests with myself to become First Lord of the Treasury at an earlier age than William Pitt.”
“No, no, Jack, I am not a foolish mother, fondly as I love you. But I know that you have good gifts, and I want the world to profit by them. I should like to see you in Parliament. There is so much to be done by good men in the shaping of our new England—the England of enlightenment and humanity—and I want to see my son’s hand at the plough.”
“The field to be ploughed is wide and the soil is stubborn; but I don’t know that my hand would be strong enough to drive a furrow.”
“You could help, Jack; every good man can help.”
“Mother, I believe you are at heart a Radical.”
“I don’t think one need be a Radical to wish that the masses were better off and more thought of than they are. Some of the best and noblest things that have been done for the poor have been done by Conservatives. No, Jack, it is because I am not a Radical that I want to see you in Parliament. You are rich, well-born, well-educated. You could fill a place that might be filled by some Radical adventurer who would look to Parliamentary life as a means of pushing his own fortune.”
“If I can find any constituency willing to elect Conservative me instead of that Radical adventurer—who would in all probability be a much better speaker than I am, and appeal to a larger electorate—well and good. I have no great aversion to Parliament, but oh, you artful woman, I know why you would have me write M.P. after my name. ‘If I can pen him up with the other sheep in the House of Commons he can go no more a-roving.’ That is what you say to yourself, mother mine.”
“No, no, Jack. I sadly want you at home, but I am not a hypocrite. Most of all I want to see you with higher aims than those of a mere pleasure-seeker. I want to be proud of my son.”
She drew her chair nearer his and took his strong, broad hand in both her own. In her eyes he was all that youth and manhood should be. She was proud of him already, though he had done nothing for fame. She was proud of his height and strength, proud of his good looks, courage, good temper, of all those qualities which go to make an English gentleman.
“Proud of me,” he echoed. “Poor mother!” He drew his hand away, remembering that it was stained with the blood of his fellow-man.