CHAPTER XIV.
“Then through my brain the thought did pass,Even as a flash of lightning there,That there was something in her air,Which would not doom me to despair;And on the thought my words broke forth.”
“Then through my brain the thought did pass,Even as a flash of lightning there,That there was something in her air,Which would not doom me to despair;And on the thought my words broke forth.”
“Then through my brain the thought did pass,Even as a flash of lightning there,That there was something in her air,Which would not doom me to despair;And on the thought my words broke forth.”
“Then through my brain the thought did pass,
Even as a flash of lightning there,
That there was something in her air,
Which would not doom me to despair;
And on the thought my words broke forth.”
Harrington Dalbrook was as keenly impressed with a sense of stupendous self-sacrifice in giving up his prospects in the Church as if the Primacy had only been a question of time; yet as his Divinity examination had twice ended in disappointment and a shamefaced return to the paternal roof-tree, it might be thought that, in his friend Sir Henry Baldwin’s phraseology, he was very well out of it. Sir Henry was the average young man of the epoch, sharp, shallow, and with a strong belief in his own superiority to the human race in general, and naturally to a friend whose father plodded over leases and agreements in an old-fashioned office in a country town; but the two young men happened to have been thrown together at Oxford, where Sir Henry was at Christ Church while Harrington Dalbrook was at New; and as Sir Henry’s ancestral home was within six miles of Dorchester, the friendship begun at the University was continued in the county town.
Sir Henry lived at a good old Georgian house called the Mount, between Dorchester and Weymouth. It was a red brick house, with a centre and two wings, a Corinthian portico of Portland stone, and a wide level lawn in front of the portico, that was brilliant with scarlet geraniums all the summer. There were no novelties in the way of gardening at the Mount, and there were never likely to be any new departures while Lady Baldwin held the reins of power.She was known in the locality as a lady of remarkable “closeness,” a lady who pared down every department of expenditure to the very bone. The gardens and shrubberies were always in perfect order, neat, trim, weedless; but everything was reduced to the minimum of outlay; there were no new plants or shrubs, no specimen trees, no innovations or improvements; there was very little “glass,” and there were only two gardeners to do the work in grounds for which most people would have kept four or five.
The dowager was never ashamed to allude to the smallness of her jointure or to bemoan her son’s college debts. She had two daughters, the younger pale, sickly, and insignificant; the elder tall and large, with a beauty of the showy and highly-coloured order, brown eyes, a complexion of milk and roses, freely sprinkled with freckles, and light wavy hair, which in a young woman of meaner station might have been called red.
The neighbourhood was of opinion that it was time for the elder Miss Baldwin to marry, and that she ought to marry well; but that important factor in marriage, the bridegroom, was not forthcoming. It was a ground of complaint against Sir Henry that he never brought any eligible young men to the Mount.
“My mother’s housekeeping would frighten them away if I did,” answered Henry, when hard driven upon this point. “The young men of the present day like a good dinner. There isn’t a third-rate club in London where the half-crown house dinner isn’t better than the food we have here—better cooked and more plentiful.”
“Perhaps, if you helped mother a little things would be more comfortable than they are,” remonstrated Laura, the younger sister, who generally took upon herself the part of Mentor. “You must know that her income isn’t enough to keep up this place as it ought to be kept.”
“I don’t know anything of the kind. I believe she is hoarding and scraping for you two girls; but she’ll find by-and-by that she has been penny wise and pound foolish, for nobody worth having will ever propose to Juliet in such a dismal hole as this,” continued the baronet, scornfully surveying the old-fashioned furniture, which had never been vivified by modern frivolities, or made more luxurious by modern inventions.
“Juliet is not the beginning and end of our lives,” replied Laura, sourly. “She has plenty of opportunities, if she were only capable of using them. I know her visiting costs a small fortune.”
“A very small one,” said Juliet; “I have fewer gowns than any girl I meet, and have to give smaller tips when I am leaving. The servants are hardly civil to me when I go back to a house.”
“I dare say not,” retorted Laura, “considering that you expect other people’s maids to do more for you than your own maid would do, if you had one.”
Juliet sighed, and shrugged her graceful shoulders.
“It is all very horrid and very sordid,” she said, “and I wish I were dead.”
“I don’t go so far as that,” replied Laura, “but I wish with all my heart you were married, and that mother and I could live in peace.”
All this meant that the handsome Miss Baldwin was seven and twenty, and that although she had drunk the cup of praise from men and women, not one eligible man with place and fortune to offer had offered himself. Eligible men had admired and had praised and had flattered, and had ridden away, like the knight of old, and had married some other girl; a girl with money generally, an American girl sometimes. Juliet Baldwin hated the very name of Columbus.
For want of some one better to flirt with, Juliet had flirted with Harrington Dalbrook. He was her junior by two years, and on his first visit to the Mount had succumbed to her beauty, and to the charm of manners which somewhat exaggerated the progressive spirit of the smart world. Miss Baldwin was amused by her conquest, though she had no idea of allowing her acquaintance with her brother’s friend to travel beyond the strictest limits of that state of things which our neighbours call “flirtage.” But “flirtage” nowadays is somewhat comprehensive; and with Juliet it went so far as to allow her admirer to gratify her with offerings of gloves and flowers for her ball-dresses, when she was staying with friends in Belgravia, and the young man was taking a holiday in London.
It may be that the fascinations of this young lady had something to do with Harrington’s failure to pass his Divinity examination, and with his subsequent renunciation of the Church of England for the wider faith of the naturalist and the metaphysician. He told his family that he had got beyond Christianity as it was understood by Churchmen, and set forth in the Thirty-nine Articles. He had gone from the river to the sea, as he explained it, from the narrow banked-in river of orthodoxy to the wide ocean of the new faith—faith in humanity—faith in a universal brotherhood—faith in one’s self as superior to anything else in the universe, past or present. In this enlightened attitude he had grasped at Theodore’s offer,—all the more eagerly, perhaps, because he had lately heard Juliet Baldwin’s emphatic declaration apropos to nothing particular—that she would never marry a parson, and that the existence of a parson’s wife in town or country seemed to her of all lives the most odious.
Would she take more kindly to a lawyer, he asked himself with a sinking heart. Would a country practice, life in an old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned market-town, satisfy her ambition? He feared not. If he wanted that radiant creature for his wife, he must exchange country for town, Dorchester for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and a house in Chester Street, or at least Gloucester Place. She had been used to Belgravia; but she might perhaps tolerate the neighbourhoodof Portman Square, the unaristocratic sound of Baker Street, the convenience of Atlas omnibuses, until he should be able to start his brougham.
Led on by this guiding star he told himself that what he had to do was to become learned in the law, particularly in the science, art, and mystery of conveyancing, which branch of a family practice he believed to be at once dignified and lucrative. He had to make himself master of his profession, to make his experiments upon the inferior clay of Dorsetshire—upon farmers and small gentry,—and then to persuade his father to buy him a London practice, an aristocratic London practice, such as should not call a blush to the cheek of a fashionable wife. He had met solicitors’ wives who gave themselves all the airs of great ladies, and who talked as if the Bench and the Bar were set in motion and kept going by their husbands. Such a wife would Juliet be could he be so blessed as to win her.
The mild “flirtage,” involving much tribute from the glover and the florist, the bookseller and the photographer, had been going on for nearly three years, and Harrington was tremendously in earnest. His sisters had encouraged him in his infatuation, thinking that it would be rather a nice thing to have a baronet as a family connection, and with a sneaking admiration for Sir Henry Baldwin’s club-house manners, and slangy vocabulary, which had to be translated to them in the first instance by Harrington. They liked to be intimate with Miss Baldwin of the Mount, liked to see her smart little pony-cart waiting for an hour in front of the door in Cornhill, while the young lady prattled about her conquests, her frocks, and her parties, over the afternoon tea-table. True that she never talked about anybody but herself, except when she depreciated a rival belle; but the background of her talk was the smart world, and that was a world of which Janet and her sister loved to hear, albeit “plain-living and high-thinking” was their motto.
Sir Henry had a small hunting stud, and somewhat ungraciously allowed his elder sister an occasional mount, although, as he took care to impress upon her, he hated hunting women. For the pleasure of being in the young lady’s society Harrington, who had no passion for horsemanship, became all of a sudden an ardent sportsman, borrowed his brother’s cob, Peter, and was ultimately cajoled into the purchase of an elderly hunter, which was not quite quick enough for his friend Sir Henry.
“You don’t mean hunting in the shires, so pace is not of so much consequence to you as it is to me,” said the baronet. “Mahmud will carry you beautifully in our country, and he’s as quiet as a sheep.”
It is possible that this qualification of sheepishness was Mahmud’s chief merit in Harrington’s estimation. He was a black horse, and looked a good deal for the money. Sir Henry asked a hundredguineas for him, and finally took his friend’s acceptance for eighty, and this transaction was the first burden of debt which Harrington Dalbrook laid upon his shoulders after leaving the University. There had been college debts, and he had considerably exceeded a very liberal allowance, but his father had paid those debts to the last shilling; and one grave and stern remonstrance, with a few fatherly words of advice for the future, had been all that Harrington had been called upon to endure. But he did not forget that his father had warned him against the consequences of any future folly.
He felt rather uncomfortable when the black horse was brought to the door one hunting morning, and when his father happened to be in the front office, whence he could see the unknown animal.
“Where did you get that black horse, Harrington? Is it a hire?” he asked.
“No. The fact is I’ve bought him.”
“Have you really? You must be richer than I gave you credit for being if you can afford to buy yourself a hunter. He looks a well-bred one, but shows work. I hope you didn’t give much for him.”
“No; I got him on easy terms.”
“Not on credit, I hope.”
“No; of course not. Sir Henry Baldwin sold him to me. I had saved a little out of my allowance, don’t you know?”
“I’m very glad to hear it. And now be off and get a good day’s sport, if you can. I shall want you to stick to your desk to-morrow.”
Harrington took up his crop and hurried out, with a heart as heavy as lead. Never until to-day had he told his father a deliberate falsehood; but Matthew Dalbrook’s searching look had frightened him out of his veracity. Only six months ago he had solemnly pledged himself to avoid debt, and he had broken his promise already, and owed eighty guineas for a beast which he could hardly hope to ride to hounds half a dozen times that season. He had involved himself for the beast’s maintenance also, for his father’s stables were full, and he had been obliged to put this new animal out at livery. He began to feel now that he had made a fool of himself; that he had been talked into buying a horse for which he had very little use.
He was jogging along in a low-spirited way when Sir Henry and his sister came up behind him at a sharp trot, whereat Mahmud gave a buck-jump that almost unseated him.
“The black looks a trifle fresh this morning,” said Sir Henry. “You’ll take it out of him presently. He suits you capitally, and he’s well up to your weight. I was a little bit too heavy for him. You’ll find him go like old boots.”
Miss Baldwin, flushed with fresh air and exercise, looked more than usually brilliant. She was particularly amiable too; and when Harrington complained that he might not be able to give Mahmud enough work she offered to meet the difficulty.
“Send him over to me whenever you don’t want him,” she said, cheerily. “I’ll make him handy for you.”
The black gave another buck-jump, and Harrington felt inclined to lay him at her feet there and then. It was only the remembrance of that horrid slip of stamped paper, which had doubtless already been turned into cash by Sir Henry, which restrained him. He made up his mind to send Mahmud to Tattersall’s at the end of the hunting season, to be sold without reserve. Juliet was riding a thoroughbred of which she was particularly fond, and was in very high spirits during the earlier part of the day; and in her lively society Harrington forgot the stamped paper, and gradually got on good terms with his horse. Mahmud had, indeed, no fault but age. He knew a great deal better how to keep near the hounds than his new master, and promised to be a valuable acquisition.
Harrington felt that he was distinguishing himself.
“The black suits you down to the ground,” shouted Sir Henry, in the middle of a run, as he bucketed past his friend upon a pulling chestnut that had no respect for anybody, but clove his way through the ruck of riders like a battering-ram.
Sir Henry boasted of this animal that he never kicked a hound.
“Small thanks to him,” said the Master, “for he kicks everything else. Hounds are not good enough for him. He nearly smashed my leg last Monday.”
Harrington and Juliet did a good deal of quiet flirtation while the hounds were drawing a spinney rather late in the day, after a very good run and a kill. He told her all about the change in his position, and that he was to be his father’s partner after a very short apprenticeship to the law.
“And you will live in Dorchester all your life,” said Juliet, with an involuntary disgust.
“Not if I can help it. I don’t mean to vegetate in a dead-alive provincial town. My father has a London connection already, and all his business wants is a little new blood. I hope to start chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields before I am many years older. And if I should marry,” he continued, faltering a little, “I could afford to have a house in the West End—May Fair or Belgravia, for instance.”
“Let it be May Fair, I beg—for your wife’s sake, whoever she may be,” exclaimed Juliet lightly. “A small house in Belgravia is an abomination. There is an atmosphere of invincible dreariness throughout that district which can only be redeemed by wealth and splendour. Perhaps it is because the place is on a level with Millbank. There is a flavour of the prison in the very air. Now, in Curzon or Hertford Street one breathes the air of the Park and Piccadilly, and one could exist in a bandbox. But really now, Harrington, joking apart, is it not rather wild in a young man like you—not out of paternal leading-strings—to talk about marriage and housekeeping?”
“One can’t help thinking of the future. Besides, I am not so very young. I am four and twenty.”
Juliet laughed a short cynical laugh, which ended in a sigh. She wondered whether he knew that she was three years older. Brothers are such traitors.
“I am four and twenty, and I feel that it is in me to succeed,” concluded Harrington, with a comfortable vanity which he mistook for the self-confidence of genius.
The hounds drew blank, and the riders jogged homewards presently, by lane and common, Sir Henry keeping in front with one of his particular friends, and talking horse-flesh all the way, while Juliet and Harrington followed slowly side by side in earnest conversation.
He told her the history of his doubts, about which she did not care twopence—his “phases of faith and feeling,” as he expressed it alliteratively. All she wanted to know was about his prospects—whether his father was as well off as he was said to be—she had heard people talk of him as a very rich man—those officious people who are always calculating other people’s incomes, and descanting upon the little their neighbours spend, and the much that they must contrive to save. Juliet had heard a good deal of this kind of talk about Matthew Dalbrook, whose unpretentious and somewhat old-fashioned style of living gave an impression of reserved force—wealth invested and accumulating for a smarter generation. After all, perhaps, this young man, whose adoration was obvious, might not be a despicableparti. He might be pretty well off by-and-by, with a fourth, or better than a fourth, share of Matthew Dalbrook’s scrapings,—and he was Lord Cheriton’s cousin, and therefore could hardly be called a nobody.
Moved by these considerations, gravely weighed in the grave and grey November dusk, as they rode slowly between tall hedges, leafy still, but sear and red with the frost, Juliet felt inclined to let herself be engaged to her legal lover. She had been engaged to several people since she danced at her first ball. The bond did not count for very much in her mind. One could always slip out of that kind of thing, if it became inconvenient—one could manage with such tact that the man himself cried off, if one were afraid of being denounced as a jilt. Juliet and her lovers had always parted friends; and she wore more than one half-hoop of sapphires or of brilliants which had once played a solemn part as her engagement ring, but which had lapsed into a souvenir of friendship.
She was not so foolish as to hasten matters. She wanted to see her way before her; and she opposed Harrington’s youthful ardour with the calmsavoirfaireof seven and twenty. She called him a foolish boy, and declared that they must cease to be friends if he insisted upon talking nonsense. She would have to accept a very urgent invitation to Lady Balgowny Brigg’s Castle in Scotland,which she had been fencing with for years, if he made it difficult for them to meet. She threw him into a state of abject alarm by this stupendous threat.
“I won’t say a word you can take objection to,” he protested, “though I can’t think why you should object.”
“You forget that I have to study other people’s ideas as well as my own,” she answered gently. “I hope you won’t be offended if I tell you that my mother would never speak to me again if I were engaged to you.”
“No doubt Lady Baldwin has higher views,” the young man said meekly.
“Much higher views. My poor mother belongs to the old school. She cannot forget that her grandfather was a marquis. It is foolish, but I suppose it is human nature. Don’t let us talk any more about this nonsense. I like you very much as my brother’s friend, and I shall go on liking you if you don’t make me unhappy by talking nonsense.”
Harrington took comfort from that one word “unhappy.” It implied depths of feeling beneath that fashionable manner which held him at arm’s length.
His spirits were somewhat dashed presently when Miss Baldwin looked with friendly contemptuousness at his neat heather-mixture coat and mud-stained white cords, and said carelessly,—
“It’s a pity you don’t belong to the Hunt. I fancy you would look rather nice in pink!”
“I—I—have so lately given up the idea of the Church,” he faltered.
“Yes, but now you have given it up, you ought to be a member of the Hunt. Let my brother put you up at the next meeting. You are pretty sure of being elected, and then you can order your pink swallow-tail coat in time for the Hunt Ball in December.”
Harrington shivered. That would mean two red coats—a hunting coat and a dancing coat. But this idea of twenty pounds laid out upon coats was not the worst. Twenty years ago, when he had ridden as hard and kept as good horses as any member of the Hunt, Matthew Dalbrook had resolutely declined the honour of membership. He had considered that a provincial solicitor had other work than to ride to hounds twice or three times a week. He might allow himself that pleasure now and again as an occasional relaxation in a hard-working professional life; but it was not for him to spend long days tearing about the country with the men of whose lands and interests he was in some wise custodian.
Theodore, who was at heart much more of a sportsman than his younger brother, had respected his father’s old-fashioned prejudices, whatever line they took, and he had never allowed his name to be put up for the Hunt. He had subscribed liberally to the fund forcontingent expenses, as his father and grandfather had done before him; but he had been content to forego the glory of a scarlet coat, and the privilege of the Hunt buttons.
Harrington was not strong in that chief virtue of man, moral courage—the modern and loftier equivalent for that brute-courage which was the Roman’s only idea of virtue. He felt that to acknowledge himself afraid to put up for election into the sacred circle of the Hunt lest he should offend his father, was to own by implication that a solicitor was not quite upon the social level of landed gentry and retired military men, the colonels and majors who form the chief ornament of the average Hunt club.
He murmured something to the effect that his father was not sporting, and wouldn’t like him to waste too much time riding to hounds.
“What does that matter?” exclaimed Juliet. “You needn’t go out any oftener because you are a member of the Hunt. There are men who appear scarcely half a dozen times in a season—men who have left the neighbourhood, and only come down for a run now and then for old sake’s sake.”
“I’ll think it over,” faltered Harrington. “Don’t say anything to Sir Henry about it just yet.”
“As you please; but I shan’t dance with you at the ball if you wear a black coat,” said Juliet, giving her bridle a sharp little shake and trotting forward to join her brother.
Mahmud, discomposed by that sudden start, gave a shambling elderly shy; Harrington pulled him up into a walk, and rode sulkily on, and allowed the other three riders to melt from him in the shades of evening.
Yes, she was beautiful exceedingly, and it would be promotion for a country solicitor to be engaged to a girl of such high standing; but he felt that his relations with her were hedged round with difficulty. She was expensive herself, and a cause of expense in others. She had spent the brightest years of her girlhood in visiting in country houses, where everything was on a grander scale than at the Mount. She had escaped from the barrenness of home to the mansions of noblemen and millionaires. She had strained all her energies towards one aim—to be popular, and to be asked to good houses. She had run the gauntlet of most of the best smoke-rooms in the three kingdoms, and had been talked about everywhere as the handsome Miss Baldwin. Yet her twenty-seventh birthday had sounded, and she was Miss Baldwin still. Half a dozen times she had fancied herself upon the eve of a great success—such a marriage as would at once exalt her to the pinnacle of social distinction—and at the last moment, as it seemed, the man had changed his mind. Some malicious mother of ugly daughters, or disappointed spinster, had told the eligible suitor “things” about Miss Baldwin—harmless little deviations from the rigid lines of maidenly etiquette, and thesuitor had cried off, fearing in his own succinct speech that he was going to be “had.”
At seven and twenty, damaged by the reputation of failure—spoken of by the initiated as “that handsome girl Maltravers so nearly married, don’t you know?”—Miss Baldwin felt that all hope of a great match was over. The funeral bell of ambition had tolled. She began to grow reckless; eat her dinner and took her dry champagne with a masculine gusto; smoked as many cigarettes as a secretary of legation; read all the new French novels, and talked about them unreservedly with her partners; was keen upon racing, and loved euchre and nap. She had half made up her mind to throw herself away upon the first wealthy cotton-spinner she might meet up in the North when she allowed herself to be touched by Harrington Dalbrook’s somewhat boyish devotion, and began to wonder whether it might not be well for her to end her chequered career by a love match.
He was good-looking, much better educated than her brother and her brother’s set, and he adored her. But, on the other hand, he was utterly without any claims to be considered “smart,” and marriage with him would mean at best bread and cheese—or would at least mean nothing better than bread and cheese until they should both be middle-aged, and she should have lost all semblance of a waist. She had met solicitors’ wives in society who wore diamonds, and who hurried away from evening parties because they were afraid of their horses catching cold—a carefulness which to her mind implied that horses were a novelty. She had even heard of solicitors making big fortunes; but she concluded that those were exceptional men, and she did not see in Harrington’s character the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Moved by these mixed feelings she allowed her lover to dangle in a state of uncertainty, and to spend all his spare cash upon those airy nothings which a young lady of Miss Baldwin’s easy temper will accept from even a casual admirer. He knew the glover whose gloves she approved, and she occasionally told him the colour of a gown in advance, so that he might give her a suitable fan; and she had, furthermore, an off-hand way of mentioning any songs or new French novels she fancied.
“How very sweet of you,” she would say, when the songs or the books appeared, “but it is really too bad—I must never mention anything I want in your hearing.”
In spite of which wise remark the volatile damsel went on mentioning things, and being surprised when her wishes were gratified.
Miss Baldwin had met Lady Cheriton and her daughter both in town and country, and she and her people had been invited to garden parties at Cheriton Chase, but there had been no intimacybetween the families. Lady Cheriton shrank with an inward terror from a young lady of such advanced opinions as those which dropped like pearls and diamonds—or like toads and adders—according to the idea of her hearers—from Miss Baldwin’s lips. Rumours of the young man’s infatuation had been conveyed to the Priory by Lady Jane, and Harrington having gone to a family dinner at Milbrook was severely interrogated by his cousin.
“I hope there is no truth in what I have heard about you, Harry,” she said confidentially, when he was sitting by her in her favourite corner within the shadow of the tall screen.
“I cannot answer that question until you tell me what you have heard,” he replied with offended dignity.
“Something that would make me very unhappy if it were true. I was told you were getting entangled with that Miss Baldwin.”
“I don’t know why you should lay such an offensive emphasis upon the demonstrative pronoun. Miss Baldwin is beautiful and accomplished—and—I am very proud of being attached to her.”
“Has it gone so far as that, Harry? Are you actually engaged to her?”
“I am not actually engaged—she has a right to look a good deal higher—but I hope to make her my wife as soon as I am in a position to marry. She has given me so much encouragement that I don’t think she will refuse me when the right time comes.”
“But, my dear boy, she is always giving encouragement,” exclaimed Juanita, anxiously.
Dear little Lucy Grenville was at the piano at the other end of the room playing an infantile arrangement of “Batti, batti,” with fingers of iron, while mother and grandmother hung over her enraptured, and while the rest of the family party talked their loudest, so the cousins in the nook by the fire were not afraid of being overheard. “She is the most encouraging young lady I ever heard of. She has jilted and been jilted a dozen times, I believe——”
“Youbelieve,” echoed Harrington, with intense indignation; “I wonder that a girl of your good sense—in most things—can give heed to such idle gossip.”
“Do you mean to say that she has not been jilted?”
“Certainly not. I admit that her name has been associated with the names of men in society. Silly people who write for the papers have given out things about her. She was to marry Lord Welbeck, Sir Humphrey Random—Heaven knows whom. A girl can’t stay at big houses, and be admired as she has been, without all manner of reports getting about. But she is heartily sick of that kind of life, an endless web of unmeaning gaieties—that is what she herself called it. She will be very glad to settle down to a refined, quiet life—say, at the West End of London, with a victoria and brougham, and a small house, prettily furnished. One can furnish so prettily and so cheaply nowadays,” concluded Harrington, with his mind’seye upon certain illustrated advertisements he had seen of late—Jacobean dining-rooms—Sheraton drawing-rooms—for a mere song.
“I have heard people say that a reformed rake makes a good husband,” said Juanita gravely, “but I have never heard that a reformed flirt makes a good wife.”
“It is a shame to talk like that, Juanita. Every handsome girl is more or less a flirt. She can’t help flirting. Men insist upon flirting with her.”
“Does your father know you mean to marry Miss Baldwin?”
“No, I have never mentioned marriage to him. That will come in good time.”
“And do you think he will approve?”
“I don’t know. He is full of old-fashioned prejudices; but I don’t see how he can object to my marrying into one of the county families.”
“Don’t you think it will be more like Miss Baldwin marrying out of one of the county families? I’m afraid from what I know of her brother and of old Lady Baldwin they would both want her to marry money.”
“I suppose they have wanted that for the last four or five years,” answered Harrington; “but it has not come off, and they must be satisfied if she chooses to marry for love.”
“Well, I mustn’t plague you any more, Harry. I see your heart is too deeply involved. I hope Miss Baldwin is a nicer girl than I have ever thought her. Girls are sometimes prejudiced against each other.”
“Occasionally,” said Harrington, with satirical emphasis.
Lucy finished “Batti, batti,” with a final chord in the bass and a final twirl in the treble, and was pronounced by her grandmother to have achieved wonders.
“Her time is a little uncertain,” her mother remarked modestly; “but she has a magnificent ear. You should see her run to the window when there is an organ in the street.”
“Yes, mother,” cried Johnny, “but she never stays to listen unless there is a monkey on the top.”
December came, and the Hunt Ball, at which more than one of Miss Baldwin’s discarded or discarding admirers were present. The young lady looked very handsome in white satin and gauze, without a vestige of colour about her costume, and with her bodice cut with an audacity which is the peculiar privilege of dressmakers who live south of Oxford Street. The white gown set off Miss Baldwin’s brilliant colouring, and looked well against the pink coats of her partners.
Harrington’s dress suit had been a thing of beauty and a joy to him when it came home from his London tailor’s, folded as no human hands could ever fold it again, enshrined in layers of tissue paper.His sisters had helped to unpack the tailor’s parcel, and had exclaimed at the extravagance of the corded-silk lapels and the satin sleeve-lining, and he had himself deemed that the archetypal coat could scarcely be more beautiful. Yet in this lurid ball-room he felt ashamed of his modest black twilled kersimere, and the insignificance of his white tie. The fox-hunters seemed to him to have it all their own way.
Miss Baldwin, however, was not unkind. She danced with him oftener than with any one else, especially after supper, when she became unconscientious and forgetful as to her engagements, and when her card was found to hold twice as many names as there were dances, together with a pencil sketch of a lobster waltzing with a champagne bottle, supplied by an unknown hand.
It was a cold, clear night, and youth and imprudence were going in couples to the garden behind the ball-room for coolness between the dances, and to look at the frosty stars, which in the enthusiasm of girlhood were accepted as a novelty. Harrington and Juliet were among those who ventured into the garden, the lady wrapped in a great white fur cloak, which made her look like a haystack in a snow-piece.
“Poor Doriscourt brought me this polar bear-skin,” she said. “He shot the bear himself, at the risk of his life. I had asked him to bring me a skin when he came home.”
“You asked him to give you something for which he must risk his life, and yet you make a great fuss at accepting Daudet’s last novel from me,” said Harrington, with tender reproachfulness.
“Ah, but you and Doriscourt are so different,” exclaimed Juliet, rather contemptuously. “He was a great dare-devil, who would have come down hand-over-hand on a rope from the moon if there had been any way of getting up there.”
“What has become of him?”
“Dead! He died a year ago—of drink, I’m afraid—lung-complaint complicated with del. trem. Poor fellow!”
She breathed a deep sigh, with that little pensive air which in a young lady of experience is as much as to say, “He was the only man I ever loved,” and then she turned the conversation and talked of the supper and the champagne, which she sweepingly condemned.
Harrington hated that talk about the supper. He would have preferred talking of the stars like a schoolgirl, or Claude Melnotte, “wondering what star should be our home when love becomes immortal.” To be told that the wine which now glowed in his veins and intensified his passion was not worth three-and-sixpence a bottle jarred upon his finer feelings. “You are such a cynic,” he said. “I think I shall never get any nearer to your real self—for I know there is a heart under that mocking vein.”
And then he repeated his simple story of a humble, devoted love—humble because the woman he loved was the loveliest among allwomankind, and because she occupied a higher plane than that on which his youth had been spent.
“But you have taught me what ambition means,” he said. “Only promise to be my wife and you shall see that I am in earnest—that it is in me to succeed.”
She had long been wavering—touched by his truthfulness, his boyish devotion—very weary of life at the Mount, where the mother scolded and the sister sneered, where the underfed and underpaid servants were frankly disobliging, where her brother rarely saw his womankind except at meals, which periods of family life he enlivened by a good deal of strong language, grumbling at the cookery, and at the deterioration of landed property in general, and his own in particular. The rest of his home-life he spent in the billiard-room or the stables, since he found the society of the saddle-room more congenial than the dreariness of the drawing-room, where his mother and sisters were not always on speaking terms.
From such a house as the Mount—goodly and fair to look upon without as many other whited sepulchres—any escape would be welcome. Juliet felt that she was a great deal too good for a young man of uncertain prospects and humdrum surroundings; but he was very much in love, and he was good-looking, and in her own particular phraseology she was beginning to be rather weak about him. She was so weak that she let him hold her unresisting hand as they stood side by side in the garden, and devour it with kisses.
“You certainly ought to do well in the world,” she said, sweetly; “for you are the most persistent person I ever knew.”
He looked round, saw that they were alone in the garden, and clasped her in his arms, polar bear and all, and kissed the unresisting lips, as he had kissed the unresisting hand.
“My dearest,” he exclaimed, “that means for life, does it not?”
“You are taking everything for granted,” she said; “but I suppose it must be so. Only remember I don’t want our engagement talked about till you are in a more assured position. My mother would make home a hell upon earth, if she knew.”
“I will do nothing rash, nothing that you do not approve,” replied Harrington, considerably relieved by this injunction; for although it was not Matthew Dalbrook’s habit to make a pandemonium of the family circle, Harrington feared that he would strongly disapprove of such an alliance as that which his younger son had chosen for himself. He welcomed the idea of delay, hoping to be more firmly seated at the office desk before he must needs make the unpleasing avowal. “When my father finds I am valuable to him he will be more inclined to indulgence,” he thought.