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Robert Orange

by John Oliver Hobbes · English · Gutenberg #27997 · 595,494 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Robert Orange

Author: John Oliver Hobbes


        
Release date: February 4, 2009 [eBook #27997]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27997

Credits: Produced by Colin Bell and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT ORANGE ***




Produced by Colin Bell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






ROBERT ORANGE

BEING A CONTINUATION OF THE HISTORY OF ROBERT ORANGE, M.P.

AND A SEQUEL TO THE SCHOOL FOR SAINTS

By

John Oliver Hobbes


LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN

PATERNOSTER SQUARE. MDCCCC

(All rights reserved)




CHAPTER I


One afternoon during the first weeks of October, 1869, while wind, dust,
and rain were struggling each for supremacy in the streets, a small
yellow brougham, swung in the old-fashioned style on cumbersome springs
and attached to a pair of fine greys, was standing before the Earl of
Garrow's town residence in St. James's Square. The hall clock within
that mansion chimed four, the great doors were thrown open by two
footmen, and a young lady wearing a mauve silk skirt deeply flounced, a
black cloth jacket embroidered in gold, and a mauve hat trimmed with
plumes--appeared upon the threshold. She paused for a moment to admire
the shrubs arranged in boxes on each window-sill, the crimson vines that
brightened the grey walls; to criticise the fresh brown rosette under
the near horse's ear; to bestow a swift glance upon the harness, the
coachman's livery, and the groom's boots. Then she stepped into the
carriage and gave her order--

"To the Carlton Club."

The groom climbed on to his seat, and the horses, after a brilliant
display of their well-disciplined mettle, suffered themselves to be
driven, at an easy pace, toward Pall Mall.

Lady Sara-Louise-Tatiana-Valerie De Treverell, only child of the ninth
Earl of Garrow, had been, since her mother's death, the mistress of his
house and his chief companion. Essentially a woman of emotions, she was,
nevertheless, in appearance somewhat dreamy, romantic, even spiritual.
The eyes were blue, bright as a cut sapphire, and shone, as it were,
through tears. Her mouth, uneven in its line, had a scarlet eloquence
more pleasing than sculpturesque severity. At the moment, she wore no
gloves, and her tapering fingers shared their characteristic with her
nose, which also tapered, with exquisite lightness of mould, into a
point. For colour, she had a gypsy's red and brown. The string of gold
beads which she fastened habitually round her throat showed well against
the warm tints in her cheek; her long pearl earrings caught in certain
lights the dark shadow of her hair--hair black, abundant, and
elaborately dressed in the fashion of that time. Passionate yet
calculating, imperious yet susceptible of control, generous yet given to
suspicion, an egoist yet capable of self-abandoning enthusiasm--she
represented a type of feminine character often recognised but rarely
understood.

On this particular afternoon in October she had some pressing matters on
her mind. She was considering, among other things, an offer of marriage
which she had received by post two days before from a nobleman of great
fortune, the Duke of Marshire. But Sara was ambitious--not mercenary.
She wanted power. Power, unhappily, was the last thing one could
associate with the estimable personality of the suitor under
deliberation.

"I must tell papa," she said to herself, "that it would never do."

Here she fell into a reverie; but as her expression changed from one of
annoyance to something of wistfulness and sentimentality, the question
of marriage with the Duke of Marshire had clearly been dismissed for
that moment from her heart. At intervals a shy smile gave an almost
childish tenderness to her face. Then, on a sudden, her eyelashes would
droop, she would start with a sigh, and, apparently caught by some
unwelcome remembrance, sink into a humour as melancholy as it was
mysterious. Quiet she sat, absorbed in her own emotions, heedless alike
of the streets through which she was passing and the many acquaintances
who bowed as she drove by. It was her daily custom, when in town, to
call at the Carlton Club for her father and take him for a short drive
round the Park before his tea. To-day he was already waiting on the club
steps as the brougham halted before the entrance. He smiled, joined Lady
Sara at once, and seating himself by her side in his usual corner,
maintained his usual imperturbable reserve. As a rule, during these
excursions he would either doze, or jot down ideas in his note-book, or
hum one of the few songs he cared to hear: "Go tell Augusta, gentle
swain," "Revenge, revenge, Timotheus cries," and "She wore a wreath of
roses." This time, however, he did neither of these things, but watched
the reflection of his daughter's face in the carriage window before him.
He had white hair, a dyed moustache and a small imperial--also dyed the
deepest black--just under the lower lip. In appearance he was, spite of
the false touches, good-looking, sensitive, and perhaps too mild. The
cleft in his rounded chin was the sole mark of decision in a countenance
whose features were curved--wherever a curve was possible--to a degree
approaching caricature. Temples, eyebrows, nostrils, and moustache, all
described a series of semi-circles which, accentuated by a livid
complexion and curling hair, presented an effect somewhat commonplace
and a little tiresome. He had spent his existence among beings to whom
nothing seemed natural which did not depart most earnestly from all that
nature is and teaches: he had always endeavoured to maintain the ideal
of a Christian gentleman where, as a matter of fact, Christianity was
understood rather as a good manner than a faith, and ideals were
prejudices of race rather than aspirations of the soul. Well-born,
well-bred, and moderately learned, he was not, and could never be, more
than dull or less than dignified. The second son of his father, he had
spent the customary years of idleness at Eton and Oxford, he had
journeyed through France, Italy, and Spain, contested unsuccessfully a
seat in Mertford, and thought of reading for the Bar. But at
four-and-thirty he became, through the influence of his mother's family,
groom-in-waiting to the Queen--a post which he held till his elder
brother's death, which occurred six months later. At this point his
Court career ceased. A weak heart and a constitutional dislike of
responsibility assisted him in his firm decision to lead the life of a
country nobleman. He retired to his estate, and remained there in
solitude, troubling no one except his agent, till a Russian lady, whom
he had first met and loved during his early travels on the Continent,
happened to come visiting in the neighbourhood. As the daughter of a
Russian Prince and Ambassador, she had considered her rank superior to
Lord Garrow's, and therefore felt justified, as she informed her
relations after he had succeeded to the earldom, in making the first
advance toward their common happiness. The marriage was soon arranged;
the alliance proved successful if not always serene; one
child--Sara-Louise-Tatiana-Valerie--was born, an event which was
followed, nine days later, by the death of the Countess.

Lord Garrow, a man of refined ideas rather than profound feelings,
displayed in mourning his wife's loss the same gentle, dispassionate,
and courteous persistency with which he had remained constant to his
first impression of her charms. She had been a beautiful, high-hearted
girl; she became a fascinating but wayward woman; she died a creature
of such mingled ferocity and sentiment that, had she not perished when
she did, she must have existed in misery under the storms of her own
temperament. As Garrow watched his daughter's face, he may have been
touched to a deeper chord than usual at the sight of her strange and
growing resemblance to his dead Tatiana. Did she too possess--as her
mother had possessed--the sweet but calamitous gift of loving? He
himself had not been the object of his wife's supreme devotion. Before
the child's birth she had given him an emerald ring which, she declared,
was all that she valued on earth. It was no gift of his; it had belonged
to a young attache to her father's embassy. Affection had taught Lord
Garrow something; he asked no questions; the jewel was placed, by his
orders, on her dead hand; it was buried with her, and with that burial
he included any jealousy of her early romance. He had been sincerely,
wholly attached to her; he had been proud of her graces and
accomplishments; he knew her virtue and honoured her pure mind; she was
the one woman he had ever wished to marry. He did not regret, nay, it
was impossible to regret, their marriage. But she had been ever an alien
and a stranger. Each had too often considered the other's heart with
surprise. True love must rest on a perfect understanding; at the first
lifting of the eyes in wonder there is a jar which by and by must make
the whole emotion restless. An unconquerable curiosity lay at the very
root of their lives. She thought him English and self-sufficient; he
thought her foreign and a little superstitious. This ineffable criticism
was constant, fretful, and ever nearing the climax of uttered reproach.
Sara had inherited all the amazement, but she owned, as well, its
comprehension. She adored passionately the mother she had never seen;
she loved her father, whom she knew by heart. After exchanging an
affectionate glance with his lordship, she began to draw on her gloves.
Whilst buttoning one she said--

"Have you seen him?"

"No," he replied; "but, in any case, I think he would have avoided me
to-day."

"Why?"

"From motives of delicacy. Henry Marshire is a man of the nicest
feeling. He is never guilty of the least mistake."

Sara smiled, and so disguised a blush.

"I did not mean Marshire," she said. "I was thinking then of Robert
Orange."

"Robert Orange," exclaimed Lord Garrow in astonishment.

"Yes, dear papa. Is he not sometimes at the Carlton with Lord Wight? He
seems to me a coming man; and so good-looking. We must really ask him to
dinner."

Some minutes elapsed before the Earl could utter any comment on a
suggestion so surprising, and at that particular moment so
inconsequent. Was his daughter not weighing--with prayer, he hoped, and
certainly with all her senses--the prospect of an alliance with the Duke
of Marshire? How, then, could she pause in a meditation of such vital
interest to make capricious remarks about a mere acquaintance?

"Does Marshire know him?" he asked at last.

"I hope so. He is a remarkable person. But the party is blind."

"My dear, the English are an aristocratic people. They do not forgive
mysterious blood and ungentle origins. While we have our Howards, our
Talbots, and our Poulets--to say nothing of the De Courcys and
Cliftons--it would surely seem excessively absurd to endure the
intrusion of French _emigres_ into our midst."

"How I hate the great world!" exclaimed Sara, with vehemence; "how I
dislike the class which ambition, wealth, and pride separate from the
rest of humanity! My only happiness now is found in solitude."

"Your mother, dear Sara, had--or fancied so--this same desire to shun
companionship and be alone. Her delicate health after our marriage made
her fear society."

"There are days when it seems an arena of wild beasts!"

"Nevertheless, my darling, at your age you must learn to live among your
fellow creatures."

"How can I live where I should be afraid to die?"

"Ought you to give way to these moods? Is it not mistaking the
imagination for the soul? Young people do this, and you are very
young--but two-and-twenty."

"I am double-hearted," said Sara; "and when one is double-hearted the
tongue must utter contradictions. I like my advantages while I despise
them. I wish to be thought exclusive, yet I condemn the pettiness of my
ambition. And so on."

"I fear," said Lord Garrow gravely, "that your mind is disturbed by a
question which you must soon--very soon, my dearest child--answer."

"Papa, I cannot."

"Surely you will gratify me so far as to take time before you object to
what might possibly be most desirable."

"It may be desirable enough, but is it right?"

"Right," repeated her father, with exasperation. "How could it be
otherwise than right to marry a man of Marshire's position, means,
stamp, and general fitness? You would be in possession of a station
where your interest would be as independent as your spirit. Nothing
could have been more brilliant, or flattering, or more cordial than his
offer. I argue against my natural selfishness for your welfare. I don't
wish to part with you, but I must consider your future."

He spoke with energy, and Sara knew, from the length and substance of
the speech, that the subject had been for some time very near his heart.
She resolved, on the instant, not to fail him; but as she foresaw his
crowning satisfaction, she permitted herself the luxury of prolonging
his suspense.

"I do not love him," said she.

"In marriage one does not require an unconquerable love but an
invincible sympathy."

"An invincible sympathy!" she exclaimed. "I have had that for certain
friends--for one or two, at any rate. For Robert Orange, as an example."

"That man again? Why do you dwell upon him?"

"He is interesting, he has force, and, as for origin, do people ever
repeat pleasant facts about a neighbour's pedigree? I believe that his
family is every bit as good as ours. His second name is de Hausee. No
one can pretend that we are even so good as a genuine de Hausee. We may
make ourselves ridiculous!"

"Let me entreat you to guard against these inequalities in your
character. To-day I could even accuse you of levity. Dearest Sara,
Marshire is hardly the man to be kept waiting for his reply."

"I am not well," said Sara, almost in tears. "There are hours when I
would not give my especial blessings for any other earthly happiness,
and then, a moment after, the things which pleased me most become
vexations, all but intolerable!"

"How little importance, then, should we attach to our caprices, when we
know, by experience, how short is the pleasure and displeasure they can
give," was the careful reply.

"Caprices!" said Sara, "yes, you are right. My mind gets weary,
disgusted, and dismayed. But the soul is never bored--never tired. Poor
prisoner! It has so few opportunities."

She sighed deeply, and her father saw, with distress, the approach of a
sentimental mood which he deplored as un-English, and feared as
unmanageable.

"What is this languor, this inability to rouse myself, to feel the least
interest in things or people?" she continued. "I am not ill, and yet I
have scarcely the strength to regret my lassitude."

"What does it mean?"

He put his hand upon her jacket sleeve.

"Is this warm enough?" he said. "The autumn is treacherous. You are
careful, I hope."

She glanced out of the window and up at the clouds which, grey, heavy,
and impenetrable, moved, darkening all things as they went across the
sky.

"I wish it would rain! I like to be out when it rains!"

"A strange fancy," said her father, "but tastes, even odd ones, give a
charm to life, whereas passions--" he put some stress upon the word and
repeated it, "passions destroy it."

"Marshire, at any rate, does not seem to possess either!"

"Well, a man must begin at some point, and, at some point, he must
change. He admires and respects you, my darling, so we may hardly
quarrel with his judgment."

Sara shrugged her shoulders and turned her glance away from the few
carriages filled with invalids or elderly women which were still
lingering in the Row.

"Some people," said she, "are driven by their passions, others, the
smaller number, by their virtues. Marshire has asked me to marry him
because it is his duty to choose a wife from his own circle. I have no
illusions in the matter. Nor, I fancy, has he. We have talked, of
course, of love and Platonism till both love and Platonism became a
weariness!"

"Very far indeed am I from thinking you just. I have had an extremely
kind note from the Duchess."

"An old tyrant! She wants a daughter-in-law who will play piquet with
her in the evenings, and feed her peacocks in the morning. She is tired
of poor Miss Wilmington. An old tyrant!"

"She hopes to hear soon when the marriage is to take place. I wish I
could tell her the day. I do so long to have it fixed."

"Dear papa," she said, with a charming smile, "you are anxious, I see,
to be rid of me. I will write to him to-night."

"And to what effect?"

"The wisest."

"That means the happiest, too?" he asked with anxiety.

"For you and him, I hope. As for me--am I a woman who could, by any
chance, be both happy and wise at the same moment?"

Her existence was very solitary. The flippancy of the lives around her,
the inanity of her relatives' pursuits, their heedlessness of those
inner qualities which make the real--indeed, the only considerable
difference between man and man, could but fret, and mortify, and abash a
heart which, in the absence of any religious faith, had, at any rate,
the need of it. Her father, who entertained clear views of "the right
thing" and "the wrong thing" in social ethics, was still too rigid a
formalist in the exposition of his theories to reach an intelligence
with whom the desire of virtues would have to come as a
passion--inspiring and inspired or else be utterly repudiated.
Utilitarianism, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number,
comfortable domestic axioms, little schemes for the elevation of the
masses by the classes, had, on their logical basis, no attraction for
this sceptical, wayward girl. To be merely useful was, in her eyes, to
make oneself meddlesome and absurd. The object of existence was to be
heroic or nothing. She could imagine herself a Poor Clare: she could not
imagine herself as a great young lady dividing her hours judiciously
between district visiting and the ball-room, between the conquest of
eligible bachelors and the salvation of vulgar souls. Marshire, she
knew, had sisters and cousins who did these things and were considered
patterns. No wonder then that she turned pale and became fretful at the
prospect of her views clashing inevitably with his.

"I cannot be wise and happy at the same moment," she repeated.

At that instant the carriage, which was then rolling toward Hyde Park
Corner, came to an abrupt standstill, and, on looking out, Lord Garrow
observed that the coachman had halted in obedience to a signal from a
gentleman who was galloping, at a hard pace, after their brougham.

"It must be Reckage," said the Earl; "I never knew a man so fond of
riding who rode so ill."

"What, I wonder, does he want now?" said Sara, flushing a little. "I
didn't know that he was in town."

By that time the pursuer, a handsome man with an auburn beard and very
fine blue eyes, had reached them.

"This," he shouted, "is a rushing beast of a horse;" but, before he
could explain his errand, the hunter, who was nearly quite thoroughbred
and a magnificent animal, dashed on, evidently determined to gain,
without delay, some favourite destination.

"Extraordinary!" said Lord Garrow. "Extraordinary!"

"But so like him," observed his daughter.

"And he has made us late for tea. What a stupid fellow!"

It was exactly five minutes past five when they reached St. James's
Square. The sun, a globe, set in thin lines of yellow light, shone out
above the trees, which were dull but not yet leafless. Grey and
sulphurous and gold-edged clouds floated in masses on the blue sky. It
had been a day of changes--yet it seemed to Sara, whose own moods had
been as various, the ordinary passing away of time.

"Upon my word," said his lordship, "it is too bad! They may say what
they please about Reckage, but I call him a spooney. That horse was a
noble horse--a most superior horse. He couldn't manage him. I wish he
would sell him."

"He would never do anything so much to his own advantage," was the dry
response. "Poor Reckage is a brilliant fool--he's selfish, and therefore
he miscalculates."

Sara was now talking mechanically--as she often did when she was with
those whom she loved or liked, but from whom she was separated in every
thought, interest, and emotion. The lassitude of which she had
complained at the beginning of their drive returned upon her. Sighing
heavily, she entered the house and mounted the long staircase to the
drawing-room, where the tea-table was already spread, the flame
quivering under the kettle, the deep pink china laid out on a silver
tray. But the homeliness of the scene and its familiarity had no power
to soothe that aching, distracted heart. Had she been a man, she
thought, she might have sought her refuge in ceaseless work, in great
ambitions, in achievements. This eternal tea-pouring and word-mincing,
this business of forced laughter and garlanded conversation was more
than she could endure. A low cry of impatience, too long and also too
loosely imprisoned, escaped from her lips.

"What is the matter?" asked Lord Garrow, who was following close upon
her heels.

"Life," she said, "life! That is all that ever does matter."

"Ain't you happy?"

"No, but I have it in me to be happy--an appalling capability. Let us
say no more about it. I must join myself to eternity, and so find rest."

"Well," said her father, who now felt that he had a right to complain,
"my poor uncle used to say, if women deserved happiness they would bear
it better. Few of them bear it well--and this is a fact I have often
brought before me."




CHAPTER II


When Sara had prepared Lord Garrow's tea and cut the leaves of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, which he invariably read until he dressed for
dinner, she stole away to the further room, where she could play the
piano, write letters, muse over novels, or indulge in reverie without
fear of interruption. But as she entered it that afternoon its air of
peace seemed the bleakness of desolation. A terrible and afflicting
grief swept, like an icy breeze, through her heart, and, whether from
actual physical pain or the excitement of the last few hours, tears
started to her eyes, her cheeks flushed, and she fell to passionate
weeping. The smiling Nymphs painted on the ceiling above her head and
the rose leaves they were for ever scattering to the dancing Hours (a
charming group, and considered very cheerful), could not relieve her
woe. She cried long and bitterly, and was on the verge of hysterics when
the door opened and her most intimate woman friend, the Viscountess Fitz
Rewes, was announced. This bewitching creature--who was a widow, with
two long flaxen curls, a sweet figure, and the smile of an
angel--embraced her dear, dear Sara with genuine affection, and
pretended not to see her swollen eyelids. Sara possessed for Pensee Fitz
Rewes the fascination of a desperate nature for a meek one. The
audacity, brilliancy, and recklessness of the younger woman at once
stimulated and established the other's gentle piety.

They talked for fifteen minutes about the autumn visits they had paid,
the visits they would have to pay, and the visits which nothing in the
world would induce them to pay.

"I have been at home, at Catesby, most of the time," said Pensee; "a
very quiet, happyish time, on the whole. I had a few people down, but I
saw a great deal of a particularly nice person. She is a foreigner--an
archduchess really. Her father made a morganatic marriage. I am so glad
they don't have morganatic marriages in England. I don't like to be
uncharitable, but they seem, in a way, so improper. Madame de Parflete
is all one could wish. Her husband was a dreadful man."

"What did he do?" said Sara, who was a little absent.

"Oh, all kinds of things. He committed suicide in the end. And now--she
is going to marry a friend of mine."

"Who is he?"

"I never told you about him before," said Pensee, "but I am so miserable
to-day that you may as well know. He was a sort of brother, yet much
more. One didn't meet him often in our set, because he didn't and
doesn't care about it. Life, however, threw us together."

She covered her wan face with her hands.

"How am I to give him up?" she asked. "How shall I bear it? I get so
unhappy. I asked my little boy the other day what he did when I went
away from home. He said--'I gather chestnuts and feel lonely.' And I
asked my little girl what she did, and she said--'I cry till you come
back again.' There's the difference between men and women. I am like my
poor Lilian. You, Sara, if you could be wretched, would be more like the
boy."

"Do you think so?" said Sara.

"That wonderful passage in the New Testament--I often remember it! After
all the agony and separation were over, Simon Peter said to the
disciples, _I go a fishing_. He went back to the work he was doing when
our Lord first called him. What courage!"

"Go on," said Sara, "go on!"

"Of course, my heart has been taking an undue complacency in the
creature, and this seldom fails to injure. I have a wish to be free from
distress, and enjoy life. As if we were born to be happy! No, this world
is a school to discipline souls and fit them for the other. I must
forget my friend."

"Nonsense!"

"It will be very hard. I took such an interest in his career. If I
didn't mention him to you, or to other people, I mentioned him often to
God. And now--it is somewhat awkward."

"You little goose," said Sara, "you have a heart of crystal. Nothing
could be awkward for you."

"My heart," said Pensee, with a touch of resentment, "is just as
dangerous and wicked as any other heart! You misunderstand me wilfully.
I like prayer at all times, because it is a help and because it lifts
one out of the world. Oh, when shall every thought be brought into
captivity?"

"Listen!" said Sara, "listen! If there is an attractiveness in human
beings so lovely that it could call your Almighty God Himself from
heaven to dwell among them and to die most cruelly for their sakes, is
it to be expected that they will not--and who will dare say that they
should not?--as mortals themselves, discover qualities in each other
which draw out the deepest affection? I have no patience with your
religion--none."

"You are most unkind, and I won't tell you any more," replied Pensee,
who looked, however, not ungrateful for Sara's view of the situation.

"Let me tell you something about me," said her friend fiercely. "I never
say my prayers, because I cannot say them, but I love somebody, too.
Whenever I hear his name I could faint. When I see him I could sink into
the ground. At the sight of his handwriting I grow cold from head to
foot, I tremble, my heart aches so that it seems breaking in two. I long
to be with him, yet when I am with him I have nothing to say. I have to
escape and be miserable all alone. He is my thought all day: the last
before I sleep, the first when I awake. I could cry and cry and cry. I
try to read, and I remember not a word. I like playing best, for then I
can almost imagine that he is listening. But when I stop playing and
look round, I find myself in an empty room. It is awful. I call his
name; no one answers. I whisper it; still no answer. I throw myself on
the ground, and I say, 'Think of me! think of me! you shall, you must,
you do think of me!' It is great torture and a great despair. Perhaps it
is a madness too. But it is my way of loving. I want to live while I
live. If I knew for certain that he loved me--me only--the joy, I think,
would kill me. Love! Do you know, poor little angel, what it means?
Sometimes it is a curse."

Pensee, before this torrent, was shaking like some small flower in a
violent gale.

"You say things, Sara, that no one says--things that one ought not to
say. You must be quieter. You won't be happy when you are married if you
begin with so much feeling!"

"I am not going to marry that one," said Sara bitterly. "I am going to
marry Marshire."

Lady Fitz Rewes had too delicate a face to contain any expression of
the alarm and horror she felt at this statement. She frowned, bit her
lips, and sank back in her chair. What stroke of fate, she wondered, had
overtaken the poor girl? Was she sane? Was she herself? Pensee found
some relief in the thought that Sara was not herself--a state into which
most people are presumed to fall whenever, from stress or emotion, they
become either strictly candid or perfectly natural.

"It is a fancy. Fancies are in my blood," said Sara; "you need not be
anxious."

"But--but what feeling have you for Marshire?" murmured Pensee.

"I have a faint inclination not to dislike him utterly. And I will be a
good wife to him. If I say so, I shall keep my word. You may be sure of
that."

"I could never doubt your honour, Sara. Is the other man quite, quite
out of the question?"

"Quite."

"But perhaps he does love you."

"Oh no, he doesn't. He may think me picturesque and rather entertaining.
It never went deeper than that. I saw at once that his mind was fixed on
some other woman."

"I suppose one can always tell when a man's affections are really
engaged," said Pensee, with a sigh.

"Yes, beyond any doubt. You feel that they are comparing you at every
point, in a silent, cold-blooded way, to the bright particular star. I
envy you, Pensee; you, at least, were desperately loved by Lionel. But
I--never, never was loved--except once."

"Who was he?"

"He was a Russian, very good-looking, and a genius. But oh, I wasn't old
enough to understand him. When he died, I cried for half a day and seven
nights. And after that, not a tear. You see, I didn't understand myself
either."

"Do I know this other one ... the one, now?"

"I won't tell you his name. Perhaps, another time, when we are all very
old ... and he is dead ... or I am dying...."

"Oh, don't say that!" exclaimed Pensee, "don't say that! You are making
a lot of misery for yourself."

"Not at all. I am making the most of my one saving grace. There is
nothing very nice about me--except that. And he is a man. The only real
one among all our friends--the only one for whom I have the least
respect. If any woman had his love--how sure, how happy she could be! I
could work, and starve, and lay down my life for a man like that. If he
had loved me, I think I could have been almost a good woman, a downright
good one, a Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. But you see that wasn't to be.
And so I am just this----" She looked in the glass and pointed a white
finger, loaded with rings of black pearls, at her reflection. "I am just
this--a vain, idle fool like all the rest--except you, poor darling."

"Why don't you keep up your music?--your wonderful playing? Every one
says it is so wonderful. That's a great outlet for emotion. And your
languages--why not work an hour a day each at Italian, Spanish, German,
and French? That would kill four hours of the day straight off!"

"Bah!" said Sara, "I cannot play--unless there is some one to play for.
As for languages--I cannot talk alone. And as for reading--I cannot find
all my world between the covers of a book."

"But live for others, dear Sara."

"I want to live for myself. I have one inseparable companion--that is
myself. I want to suffer my own sufferings, and enjoy my own enjoyments.
This living for others is absurd. I hate second-hand emotions; they are
stale and dull. But, Pensee, you haven't told me the name of your
friend."

"I thought I had," said Pensee, simply; "you will see it in the marriage
notice the day after to-morrow. It is Robert Orange."

Sara stared for a moment. Then the string of gold beads which she wore
round her throat suddenly broke, and the shining ornaments fell all
about her to the floor.

"Dear me!" said Sara, kneeling down with a ghastly laugh. Pensee knelt
too, and they gathered the scattered necklace between them. "Dear me! I
was never more surprised--never; and yet I cannot think why I am
surprised. He is very handsome. Any woman would like him."

"I wonder," said Pensee, full of thoughts.

Sara proceeded to count her beads, lest one should be missing. But they
were all there, and she tied them up in her handkerchief.

"Pensee," she said, presently. "I will tell his name after all, because
you have been so frank with me. The one I ... love is Beauclerk
Reckage." As she uttered this lie, she cast down her eyes and blushed to
the very heart.

"Beauclerk!" exclaimed Pensee, in amazement. "Then there _is_ some hope
after all! There is, there must be! Beauclerk! He is engaged to Agnes
Carillon, of course. But all the same...."

The conversation flagged. Lord Garrow, who had heard a distant murmuring
but not their words, now, as their animation failed, came in.

"My little girl," said he, "has been moping. I am very glad that you
called ... very glad indeed. And Sara, my darling...."

"Yes, papa."

"Have you asked Pensee the name of that extremely pretty song she sang
for us when we all dined together at Lord Wight's? You remember the
evening?"

But Sara, with a wail, fled away. Pensee caught a glimpse of her white,
agonised countenance as she rushed past them, moaning, to her own room.

"This is dreadful," said Lord Garrow, horribly annoyed--"dreadful!"

"It is indeed," replied Lady Fitz Rewes gravely. "I suppose...."

She wanted to say that she hoped the Marshire-de Treverell alliance was
still undecided. But something in his lordship's air--a hardness she had
never thought to see in his regard--forbade any reference to the
subject. He conducted her to her carriage, wished her "Goodbye" in his
Court manner, and led her to understand, by an unmistakable glance, that
a certain marriage which had been arranged would, inasmuch as it was
entirely agreeable to the will of Providence, take place.




CHAPTER III


Lord Reckage, in the meantime, had not been able to draw rein until he
reached Grafton Street, where the hunter, of its own will, stopped short
at a door, half glass and half mahogany, before which a groom stood
watching, evidently with some suspense, for their approach. At the first
sight of the animal and its rider, he hastened forward, and, seizing the
bridle, assisted his master to dismount. Once on the ground, the young
man satisfied his spleen by hitting the horse several vicious cuts with
his whip. Then he informed the servant that it was his intention to walk
home, and, with an ominous scowl, watched the "rushing beast" led from
his sight. No one, except himself, was permitted to occupy that saddle.

The house which he now entered had been the town mansion for three
generations of the Hampshires, but, despised by its then owner, whose
young duchess wanted an Italian villa on Piccadilly, or a French chateau
in Park Lane, the lease had been sold to a syndicate of rising
politicians who formed a small organisation known, in those days, as the
Mirafloreans.

"The little order," we read in the Hon. Hercy Berenville's Memoirs, a
malicious work printed for private circulation only--"the little order
first came into notice under the name of the 'Bond of Association,' a
High Church society founded by my brother, Lord Reckage. He formed his
executive committee, however, on timorous and unexpected lines. He had
tried to please the spiteful rather than the loyal. The loyal, he urged,
were always forbearing, but the spiteful needed every attention. He
disappointed alike the warmest and the most selfish among his
supporters. True to his policy, he made desperate attempts to win over
some vindictive men from among the Radicals, and, finally, in a fit of
nervousness, declared, after five months of fruitful folly, his
determination to reorganise the whole league on a strictly non-sectarian
basis. He described himself as a moral philosopher. Once more he became
a figure of interest, again he raised the standard, again he attracted a
small company of enthusiasts, again it was expected that God's enemies
would be scattered. He invited his former secretary, a Roman Catholic,
to join the new society, but he made it clear that Orange, a man of real
distinction, was in no sense a prominent member. The precise dogmata of
Mirafloreanism--a nickname given, I believe, in ironic sympathy by Mr.
Disraeli--were undefined, but the term gradually became associated with
those ideals of conduct, government, and Art which poets imagine, heroes
realise, and the ignorant destroy. Men of all, sundry, and opposing
beliefs presumed to its credentials. Some, because the club appeared to
flourish, many because it was not yet overcrowded, and a few because
they were in perfect agreement with the varying opinions of its ultimate
presiding genius, Disraeli himself. They worked quietly, not in the
House of Commons, but outside it, delivering lectures, writing books,
starting newspapers, holding meetings, and enlisting the sympathies of
rich, idle, ambitious, or titled women. There seemed no end or limit to
the variety of their interests, their methods of labour, or their
conceit. The club--judged by the leonine measure of success--as a club
did little for learning or literary men. It became a mere meeting-house
for dining and drinking, but it promoted cordiality among the leading
members of the young Tory party, and brought persons together who could
not, in the ordinary way of life, have met each other at all. Although
the more gaudy and best known among them came from the first second-rate
families in England, the rank and file were formed mainly by young men
of good estate and breeding--the sons of clergy, country squires, or
merchants, all sprung from that class which is called Middle, because it
represents civilised society neither in its rough beginnings nor in its
tawdry decay."

Berenville's remarks, it will be plainly seen, anticipate our history a
little, for, at the time of which we write, the Bond of Association was
still maintaining a sickly existence on its original programme. Orange
had not yet been invited to join it, nor had Lord Reckage declared
himself a moral philosopher.

On this particular afternoon his lordship entered, from the street, a
narrow vestibule, the red walls of which were lit up by wax candles set
at either end in ponderous bronze chandeliers. From this he passed into
a square inner hall, paved with marble, and furnished by carved seats
which had once belonged to the choir of an ancient chapel in
Northumberland. Here he paused, for his attention was immediately
arrested by a small group of four or five individuals who were talking
with great earnestness at the foot of the oak staircase. Not that this
was, in itself, an unusual event, for ever since a memorable day when
the Earl of Bampton and the young Archdeacon of Soham, feeling warm, had
ordered their tea to be served in that part of the building, it had been
the fashion for distinguished members to assemble there, dispersing
themselves in careless profusion among the statues of departed
ecclesiastics or reclining pleasantly on the blue velvet divan which
occupied the centre of the floor.

Foremost in the little company on this occasion stood Sir Edward
Ullweather and Nigel Bradwyn, both private secretaries, and each
secretly convinced that his peculiar powers would have found brilliant,
volcanic opportunities of demonstration in the other's more promising
berth. Ullweather, whose life had been devoted to the study of
agricultural problems, was subordinate to the Secretary of State for
War. Bradwyn, on the other hand, who had planted his soul in the East,
was now learning what he could, at the nation's expense, of the nation's
domestic policy. Demoralised by disappointment, and made cynical by
toiling over interests for which they had, at best, but a forced regard,
little remained in their breasts but a sore determination to make the
best of an abiding discontent. In joining Lord Reckage's Committee, they
found themselves again, as they believed, in a false position. The
second-rate mind, whether represented in a person or by a council,
shrinks from the adoption of simple measures, and invariably seeks to
make itself conspicuous by so placing others as to make them appear
unnecessary. The special genius of Lord Reckage was shown, perhaps, in
his abilities in this direction, and, while he missed no opportunity of
engaging men of proved capabilities for his service, his jealousy drove
him so to employ them that they were never permitted to do their best
either for him or for themselves. This policy carried in itself the
sting for its own destruction.

Not far from Ullweather and Bradwyn, Randall Hatchett, the youngest
member of the Executive, lounged against a pillar. Proud of a
distinction which he dared not comprehend (for a commercial shrewdness
made him suspect that he owed his position less to merit than to the
subtle promises conveyed by a weak chin), this distinguished person
tried to look the secrets which his colleagues had never permitted him
to learn. In moody weariness he would sometimes condescend to the
company of his subordinates on the General Committee and, while
listening to their irresponsible prattle, he would seem to forget the
onerous public interests the absolute neglect of which was his chief
duty at the Council board.

Near this gentleman were two others, Hartley Penborough, the editor of
_The Sentinel_, and the Hon. Charles Aumerle, whose guest he was.

As Lord Reckage entered and showed some intention of joining in the
conversation, they appeared by a silent and common consent to ignore his
approach. He turned to the hall porter, gave him some instructions in a
low voice and passed on, livid with annoyance, to the library beyond.

"Hullo!" exclaimed Aumerle, "that was Reckage."

"I know it," said Randall Hatchett.

"Why didn't you speak to him?" asked Aumerle.

"Because," said Bradwyn, "our good Hatchett is not so sure of himself
that he can afford to be civil even to a President out of fashion!"

No one smiled except Hatchett himself, because each one felt it was
unwise to encourage Bradwyn's peculiar humour.

"I would have spoken to Reckage," said Ullweather, with a superior air,
"but I have never felt the same toward him since he threw over Orange
at the time of his election."

"And several other old friends more recently!" observed the injudicious
Bradwyn.

"I don't speak of myself," said Ullweather, "but Orange was unusually
devoted to the fellow; and all I wish to make clear is this, that when
Reckage ever said or did the right thing in times past, the credit was
solely due to Orange. He weeded prophecy from his speeches, and rudeness
from his jokes. Great services, I assure you!"

"True," said Randall Hatchett, "for there is nothing more fatal to a
political career than brilliant impromptus and spirited orations. A
statesman's words, like butcher's meat, should be well weighed."

"You have so many prescriptions for success," said Bradwyn, "that I
wonder you ain't President yourself."

"Reckage has taken us all in," said Ullweather.

"By no means," said Bradwyn. "I maintained from the first that he was
overrated. His genial manner--his open-hearted smile! Men always smile
at creditors whom they don't intend to pay."

"I foretold the whole situation," observed Penborough. "I said, 'Let
Reckage once get full power, and he will fool us all.' He affects not to
be ambitious, and to prefer moral science to immoral politics. I have no
faith in these active politicians who make long speeches to the public,
and assure their friends, in very short notes, that they prefer
trout-fishing to the cares of State! There is but one man who can save
the society now."

Bradwyn, Hatchett, and Ullweather looked up, each armed with a modest
and repudiating smile.

"Who?" asked Hatchett, looking down.

"Robert Orange," said Penborough.

"Probably," replied Hatchett, after a minute's hesitation. "Probably,
Orange ... in time."

"Don't you like him?" said Penborough.

"Like him!" answered Hatchett, rolling up his eyes. "He's an angel!"

"He calls him an angel as though he wished he were one in reality," said
Bradwyn. "I know these generous rivals!"

Ullweather stood gnawing his upper lip.

"Orange," he said, at last. "Oh, Orange has arrived. He will get no
further. Of course, he won that election, but Dizzy managed that. Dizzy
is the devil! And then, he is still devoted to Reckage, and, for a man
of his supposed shrewdness, I call that a sign of evident weakness."

At this, Charles Aumerle, who had been listening with the deepest
attention to all that passed, looked straight at the speaker.

"You should respect," said he, "that liberty, which we all have to
deceive ourselves. Reckage has many good points."

"But," said Penborough, "he has no moral force, no imagination. He
judges men by their manners, which is silly. He thinks that every one
who is polite to him believes in him. He will have to send in his
resignation before long."

"You don't mean it," said Aumerle.

"I mean more," continued Penborough. "He could not choose a better
moment than the present. In another month, on its present lines, the
whole league will have foundered. Should he remain, he would have to
sink with the ship. Now, however, it appears safe enough--people see
only what you see--a good cargo of influential names on the committee
and a clear horizon. He could plead ill-health, or his marriage--in
fact, a dozen excellent reasons for momentary retirement. The world
would praise his tact. As for the rest, those who have been
disillusioned will lose their heads, those who were merely self-seekers
will probably lose their places, but the trimmers always keep something.
The thing, then, is to cultivate the art of trimming."

"But you forget that Reckage is going to marry Miss Carillon," said
Aumerle. "Miss Carillon will always advise the safe course."

"That's all very well," said Bradwyn, "but there has been too much
arrangement in that marriage! I can tell you how the engagement came
about. She was intimate with his aunt. He acquired the habit of her
society on all decorous occasions. Still, he never proposed. The aunt
invited her to Almouth. She stayed two months. Still, not a word. Her
papa grew impatient, ordered her home. The next day she came to the
breakfast-table with red eyes, and announced her departure. The boxes
were packed; she went to take a last look at the dear garden. Reckage
followed, Fate accompanied him. He spoke. She sent a telegram to her
papa: 'Detained. Important. Will write.' No, the real woman for him was
Lady Sara de Treverell."

Ullweather thrust his tongue into his cheek.

"Lady Sara has been called to higher destinies," said he, "than the
heavenly 'sweet hand in hand!'"

"I see you know," said Bradwyn, with a mysterious glance.

"Yes," said Ullweather. "The friendship of the Duke of Marshire for Lady
Sara increases every day, and the little fit of giddiness which seized
him when he was dining with my Chief makes me think that admiration is
developing into love. I am in great hopes that this match may come off."

"As to that," said Hatchett, "her father and the Duke were the night
before last at Brooks's, but no conversation passed between them. This
does not look as though a very near alliance were in contemplation."

"There are prettier women than she in the world," said Aumerle.

"I have never seen her," said Penborough.

"Large eyes, a small head, and the devil of a temper," said Bradwyn;
"and sympathies--there never was a young woman with so many sympathies!
There is an old proverb," he added, with a sneer, "'They are not all
friends of the bridegroom who seem to be following the bride.'"

Ullweather was still absorbed in his own meditation.

"Marshire," said he, "is the man for us. We might do something with
Marshire."

"Nevertheless," said Penborough, "I have my eye on Orange."

"I say," exclaimed Bradwyn, "be careful. Here is Reckage again. How the
dickens did he pass us?"

The men glanced up at a solitary figure which now appeared descending
the broad staircase. In silence, and with a studied expression of
contempt, without a look either to the right or to the left, the
unpopular leader passed through the hall and out into the street.

"A lonely beggar, after all," said Bradwyn.




CHAPTER IV


Reckage was dining at home that evening with Orange, whose marriage was
to take place at the Alberian Embassy on the morrow. The young man was
not in good spirits at his friend's step, for he himself was about to
take a wife also, and much of the apprehension which he felt on his own
account found its vent in dreary soliloquies on the risk, sacrifices,
responsibilities, and trouble involved by the single act of saddling
oneself for a lifetime with some one woman. Reckage, for his own part,
had loved one lady very well, yet not so madly that he could resign
himself to loving her only, to the exclusion of all others. He walked
along toward Almouth House in a mood of many vexations, cursing the
impudence of Bradwyn and Ullweather, wondering whether he had done
wisely, after all, in engaging himself to the blameless Miss Carillon,
sighing a little over a rumour which had reached him about Sara de
Treverell and the Duke of Marshire, deploring the obstinacy of Robert
Orange where Mrs. Parflete was concerned. He admitted that Mrs. Parflete
was an exceedingly beautiful, young, and, as it happened, rich person.
He owned her delightfulness for a man of Robert's dreamy, romantic,
intense temperament. But marriage between two idealists so highly
strung, and so passionately attached as these two beings were--what
would happen? No doubt they would be able to endure the inevitable
disillusions--(inevitable because Nature is before all things sensual
and has no care for mental prejudices one way or the other)--the
inevitable disillusions of family life. It was scarcely possible that
the devotion of Robert and Mrs. Parflete would not waver or seem less
exquisite under this discipline. Their dream of love would become
unparadised. It would gain a sadness, a melancholy, a note of despair
hard to endure and most difficult to repress. Reckage had no
transcendentalism in his own philosophy: he divided men into two
classes--those who read, and those who could not stand, Dante. He
included himself among the latter with a frankness at once astonishing
and welcome even to numbers who thought him, in most matters, a
hypocrite. The hold of the world was growing daily stronger upon him.
His ambitions were already sullied by many unworthy and deadening ideas.
He dwelt a great deal on the fleetingness of life, and the wisdom of
making the best of its few charming things. Food, and wine, and money,
and fine houses, and amusements were subjects on which he expended a
large amount of silent enthusiasm. But, for all this, he could still
see much to admire--perhaps to envy--in Robert's more spiritual mind,
and he dreaded--as men often do dread in such cases--the effect of a
woman's companionship on so ascetic a character.

"He knows nothing about women--nothing," he told himself. "He has no
experience. He takes them too seriously."

He was, while he admitted his own unreasonableness, a little shocked at
the very notion of Orange with a wife and children. It went against the
grain, and upset the ideals of austerity which he had carefully
planned--not for himself, but for his friend. Robert, he urged, was born
to be an example--an encouragement to those who were called, by the
mercy of God, to less rigorous vocations. Reckage suffered many scruples
of conscience on Robert's account; he surveyed him with a sense of
disappointment; he had always supposed that he would ultimately turn
Jesuit in sober earnest, and die a martyr's death in the Far East. This
would, in his opinion, have been a fine end to a Quixotic, very
touching, most remarkable life. Would he now immaturely fall a victim to
an enticing face and the cares of a household? Would he be able to
sustain his character? One thing was certain. He could never again
expect to exercise precisely the same potent influence as he had in the
past, over his earth-bound, self-indulgent friends. Self-indulgent
people always exacted unusual privations from those who would seek to
move them--and Robert's call was clearly to materialists rather than to
the righteous. Pusey married, it was true. Keble married. No one thought
the less of them on that account. Even the judicious Hooker married. And
they were clergymen. Reckage called them priests. But Newman did not
marry, and, while Reckage was unable to agree in the main with Newman's
views, he had a fixed notion that he was the strong man--the master
spirit--among them. And another consideration. The passion of love has a
danger for very sensitive, reserved, and concentrated minds unknown to
creatures of more volatile, expansive, and unreflecting disposition.
Reckage knew well that he was himself too selfish a man to let affection
for any one creature come between his soul and its God. There was no
self-discipline required in his case when a choice had to be made
between a human being and his own advantage--whether temporal or
eternal. He had never--since he was a youth--felt an immoderate fondness
for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities,
jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in
question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The
imaginative and visionary parts of life--and no one is wholly without
them--soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself
confronted with that sole absorbing interest--his career. Marriage, in
his own case, seemed an imperative duty. He was an eldest son, the heir
to an earldom and a vast estate; he wished to lead a distinguished,
comfortable, and edifying existence. His wife would be a helpmate, not a
snare; the mother of his children, not the light of his eyes. But what a
difference in Robert's case--with his capacity for worship, for really
intense and absorbing passion. All this was especially transparent to
Reckage, who, as a man of the world, had watched his friend for months,
detecting the shattering physical effects of an iron restraint imposed
on every thought, mood, and inclination. He had enjoyed the spectacle:
it was a good fight--this sharp, unceasing struggle between mere human
nature, young, vigorous, sane, indefatigable, and an upright soul full
of tenderness, yet forced to live in constant warfare. Awe, too, had
mingled in Reckage's sensations while he looked on; something of pity
and terror stirred under the callous muscle which he called his heart at
the sight of a voiceless, stifled despair outside the range of his
personal experience, though not entirely beyond his sympathy. All men
did not love after this fashion, he knew, but humanity was full of
surprises, and he had been too calm a student of other men's lives to
feel astonishment at any fresh revelation either of their pain, their
perversity, or their humours. He had felt so sure, however, that Robert
would, in the end, get the better of that unhappy attachment; everything
in the process of time had to surrender to reason, and it was not
possible, he thought, that a strong, self-reliant man could long remain
subdued by a mere infatuation.

"And why doesn't he think of his health?" insisted Reckage; "it is
really going between all this sleeplessness, and fasting, and over-work.
Flesh and blood cannot bear the strain. He is never idle for one moment.
He is afraid of brooding."

It was with these sentiments of fear for the one creature he believed
in, and hostility toward the woman who had presumed to interfere with
the progress of that clear spirit, that he found himself at Almouth
House. The blinds of the dining-room were but partially down. He could
see the menservants within preparing the table which, set for two
covers, showed a pretty display of cut-glass, flowers, old silver, and
shining damask under the yellow rays of the lit candles. Some family
portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, a Holbein, and a Vandyck, with
lamps shining like footlights beneath them, were darkly visible on the
dull blue walls. The famous mantelpiece inlaid with uncut turquoise was
also within sight; and the sideboard with its load of Sevres china and
gold dishes. Reckage took great pride in these possessions, but it
shocked his sense of dignity to see them thus exposed to the vulgar
gaze.

He let himself into the mansion with a latchkey, stormed at the servants
for their carelessness, and made what is commonly known as a scene.

Then he crossed the hall, and went into another fine room, which led by
steps into a garden, and caught the sunset.

Here, standing by the window with his back to the door, looking at the
clouds, greyer than a gull's wing, which fled like driven souls across
the sky, stood Orange.

He turned as the latch moved, and Reckage, coming in, perceived the pale
face, resolute, a little proud, and thoroughly inscrutable of his former
secretary. Of fine height and broad-shouldered, Robert bore himself with
peculiar firmness and ease. His brown eyes, with their brilliant,
defiant glance, his close, dark beard, and powerful aquiline features;
the entire absence of vanity, or the desire to produce an impression
which showed itself in every line of his face and every movement of his
body, indicated a type of individual more likely to attract the
confidence of men than the sentimentality of women.

The two young men greeted each other pleasantly, but with a certain
reserve on each side.

"So you are here!" said Reckage, seating himself. "I am sorry to be
late. The fact is I caught sight of old Garrow and Sara de Treverell
driving together in the Park, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask 'em
to dine with us to-night. I raced after their brougham, but my brute of
a horse--Pluto: you know the beast--gave me such a lot of trouble that I
couldn't speak to them. How are you? You don't look very fit. Perhaps
you are glad that we are alone. But Sara is a nice girl, and full of
kindness. She's a good friend, too--just the friend for your wife. I
thought of that."

Robert resumed his post at the window, and studied the heavens. But if
he sought for any answer to the many impassioned questions which were
thronging his heart and mind at that moment, he looked in vain. For
himself the struggles of the last year had been to a great degree
subconscious. He had been like a sick man who, ignorant of the real
gravity of his condition, fights death daily without a thought of the
unequal strife, or the suspense of his physicians. He had abandoned
himself to study, immersed himself in work; he was neither morbid nor an
amorist; and while he felt a stinging misery for ever in his heart, he
bore it with manly reticence, without complaint, without despair. Love,
in his case, had meant the idealisation of the whole of life--the life
of action and the life within the soul. It had transfigured the world,
lit up and illumined every dark corner, answered every turbulent doubt.
From the habit of this wholly mental emotion, he had lost, little by
little, the sense of the actual bodily existence of the woman herself.
It is true that he thought of her always as some one modestly beautiful,
of childish form, with a face like a water-nymph's--imperious, magical,
elusive, yet, whenever he found himself in her presence, she seemed
further away than when they were, in fact, apart. The kiss he had given
her on the day of their betrothal had been as strange, indefinable, and
irrealisable as the passing of one hour into the next. There had been
the time before he kissed her, there was the time afterwards, but the
transition had been so swift, and so little recognised, so inevitable,
that while it drew both their lives down deep into the wild, pitiless
surge of human feeling, she still remained more dearly and completely
his by intuition than when he held her--a true woman--in his arms. The
moral training of a lifetime, the unceasing, daily discipline of a mind
indulgent to others, but most severe with itself, had given him a
self-mastery in impulse and desire which, although the aspect of affairs
had changed, he could not easily, or even willingly, relax. His soul
drew back from its new privileges, sweet as they were--and he was too
honest to deny their overpowering sweetness--they seemed like the
desecration of a most sacred thought. Vainly he reasoned, vainly he
admitted the folly of such scruples. They remained. Asceticism is a
faithful quality. It is won by slow and painful stages, with bitter
distress and mortifying tears, but once really gained, the losing is
even harder than the struggle for its acquisition.

And so the young man found himself in that hard position when judgment
and prejudice stand opposed so utterly that victory either way must mean
a lasting regret. Perhaps he was not the first bridegroom who felt
loath, on the eve of his marriage, to change the delicate, almost
ethereal tenderness of betrothed lovers for the close and intimate
association of husband and wife. The one relationship has something in
it immaterial, exquisite, and unearthly, a bond invisible and yet as
potent as the winds we cannot see and the melodies we only hear. The
other, with its profound appeals to mortality, its demands upon all that
is strongest in affection and eternal in courage, its irreparableness,
suffering, and constancy, might, indeed, have the grandeur of all human
tragedy, and the dignity of a holy state; but that it could ever be so
beautiful as the love which is a silent influence was to Robert then, at
least, an inconceivable idea. He felt upon him and around him, in his
flesh and in his spirit, in the air and in the whole world, the
all-enveloping shadow of remorse. The dormant possibilities of his own
fanatical nature rose up before him--pale, inarticulate fiercenesses
crushed so long, and now trembling eagerly under his breath at the
prospect of a little more liberty in loving. A suspicion that already he
loved perhaps too well and far too passionately thrilled through his
conscience, and tortured a heart to whom thought was a refuge and
feeling a martyrdom.

Reckage, watching Robert from a corner of the room, grew irritated at
the silence, and wondered, with a cruel and jealous curiosity, what was
passing in his mind. He wondered whether he was praying. An impulse,
which had something in it of brute fury, urged him to tear open that
still face and drag the thoughts behind it to the light. Why was it
that one could never, by any sense, enter into another's spirit?
The same torturing mystery had often disturbed him during the
half-hours--outwardly placid and commonplace--which he spent, out of
etiquette, with his future bride. She, too, retired behind the veil of
her countenance to live a hidden life that he could never hope to join.
How lonely was companionship in these conditions, and how desolate
marriage!

He could not resist the temptation to break in, with a touch of crude
satire, upon his friend's solitude.

"What is the matter?" he exclaimed, "are you hungry?"

"No," said Robert, so well accustomed to such violent jars that they
could no longer disturb him; "I was only thinking...."

"About what?"

"All sorts of things."

Reckage turned pale from dissatisfied inquisitiveness.

"I think, too," he answered, "but I can throw out a word now and again."

Then, making the remark that he was not dressed for dinner, he left the
room.




CHAPTER V


The dinner, in the ordering of which the host had expended all his
gastronomical knowledge and much anxiety, seemed long. Orange found
himself opposite the famous portrait of "Edwyn, Lord Reckage of
Almouth," which represents that nobleman elaborately dressed, reclining
on a grassy bank by a spring of water, with a wooded landscape, a
sunrise, and a squire holding two horses in the distance. Robert
studied, and remembered always, every detail of that singular
composition. The warrior's shield, with its motto "_Magica sympathia_,"
his fat white hands, velvet breeches, steel cuirass, and stiff lace
collar remained for days a grotesque image before his mind. He traced,
too, a certain resemblance between Reckage and that ancestor--they both
wore pointed red beards, both were fair of skin, both had a dreaming
violence in their blue eyes.

"You must have some pheasant," said his lordship, at last. "You are
eating nothing. And that Burgundy, you know, is unique of its kind. It
was a present from the Emperor of the French to mamma. Her people were
civil to him when he was regarded as a sort of adventurer. And he never
forgot it. He's a very decent fellow. I dined with him at the
Tuileries--did I mention it?"

Robert replied that he fancied he had heard of the occurrence.

"Well," continued his friend, "I might have enjoyed that experience, but
I was feeling depressed at the time; a lot of the depression went under
the influence of frivolous talk, military music, and champagne. Yet, all
the same, do these things really count for much? I felt just as wretched
afterwards."

The glimpse he had obtained that afternoon of Sara de Treverell--Sara
flushed with agitation, very bright in her glance, exceedingly subtle in
her smile, had stirred a great tenderness he had once felt for that
young lady. The news, too, that she had been chosen as a bride by the
prudent, rich, and most important Duke of Marshire made his lordship
feel that perhaps he had committed a blunder in not having secured her,
during her first season, for himself. He feared that he had lost an
opportunity; and this reflection, while it lowered temporarily his
self-esteem, placed Sara on a dangerous eminence. She would be a
duchess--one of the great duchesses. Little Sara!

"She was looking extraordinarily handsome," he exclaimed. "Of course she
means to take him. But she liked me at one time. I am speaking of Sara
de Treverell. Marshire is by way of being a stick. Who could have
imagined him going in for a high-spirited, brilliant girl like Sara?"

Formerly he had always spoken of Sara as a clever little devil, but
Robert showed no surprise at the new adjective.

"Brilliant!" repeated his lordship. "Don't you agree?"

"Absolutely. She is the most brilliant girl in London."

"But heartless," said his lordship pathetically; "she hasn't one bit of
heart."

"There I don't agree with you. Of course she is strange and rather
wild."

"_Tete-montee._ And then the Asiatic streak!"

"True. The fiercest wind cannot take the angles out of the bough of a
tree an inch thick. You may break it, but you cannot destroy its angles.
That is so, no doubt, with one's racial tendencies. The girl is wilful
and romantic. It will be very bad for them both if there is no love on
her side. She is capable, I should say, of very deep affection."

"She did like me," said his lordship, with emphasis and
satisfaction--"she really did. And I wouldn't encourage it. I had no
notion then of marrying. Her singularity, too, made me cautious. I
couldn't believe in her. She talked like an actress in a play. I felt
that she was not the woman for me. Essentially she thought as I did,
and seemed to comprehend my embarrassment. The worst of it is now--I may
have been wrong."

"I doubt it. You may be sure, on the whole, that your instincts were
right."

"Still, there is a distinct misgiving. I was drawn toward her, and, when
I made up my mind to put an end to the matter, our friendship was
severely strained. But it was not broken. Something I saw in her face
to-day makes me sure that it was not broken."

While he was speaking the servant entered with a salver, and on the
salver was a note. The address showed Sara's large, defiant
hand-writing. Reckage, who had a touch of superstition in his nature,
changed colour and even hesitated before he broke the seal. The
coincidence seemed extraordinary and fatal. What did it mean? He read
the letter with an irresistible feeling of proud delight.

"20A, ST. JAMES'S SQUARE, W.

"MY DEAR BEAUCLERK,--Will you lunch with us to-morrow at two o'clock?
Papa has invited a friend--a dreadful, boring friend--who has been
absent from England for five years. Do you know the man? Sir Piers
Harding? But I want some one to encourage me. You? Do!

"Yours sincerely,

"S. L. V. DE TREVERELL.

"P.S.--I am so happy about you and Agnes. Be kind to her always? Won't
you?"

All his life he had found a difficulty in understanding women--the
significance of their words, the precise translation of their glances,
and their motives generally. He had nourished his experience on French
novels; he had corrected it by various friendships; he had crowned it
with the confession that one could never tell what the sex meant one way
or the other. But this fact remained--he was a coxcomb, and, whenever he
owned himself puzzled, it was on a single ground only--how seriously was
the lady at stake affected by his charms? Feeling, as he did, the
infinite inequality that existed between men, and conscious of his own
reputation as a leader among them, it was not in his conscience to
encourage any woman whom he did not find especially attractive or
useful. Why spoil her chances? Why make her discontented with the
average male creature? Had Sara written to him in ordinary
circumstances, inviting him, after some months of mutual coldness, to
lunch, he would have replied, with sorrowful dignity, that it was wiser
to leave things as they were. But the case had altered. The future
Duchess of Marshire was a personage. He made no secret of his admiration
for all people of high rank. They represented influence and traditions;
what was more, they could exercise a certain power, and introduce, when
necessary, the ideas upon which fresh traditions could be based. A
friend like Sara de Treverell with her new honours made life itself
more rich to him. When he remembered that she was young, handsome,
enthusiastic, and impulsive, his pleasure thrilled into something of
genuine passion. He told himself that he had always been fond of the
girl; that hundreds of times he had felt the hardness of his scrupulous
position where she was concerned. If he had been asked what especially
he conceived his own duty to be now, he would have said that it was not
for him to hang back when she showed a coming spirit. But this was not
all. He was a gamester; he was ambitious.

"This is very odd," said he, reading Sara's note for the second time,
"very odd. There's no harm in showing it to you, because there is
nothing in it."

He gave it to his friend, and ate, pleasantly, while Orange glanced down
the page. His soul's wish was to be left alone. The effort of forcing
himself--not to affect but honestly to feel--an interest in Reckage's
conversation had proved successful. He had indeed put aside his own
thoughts, and followed, with the exaggerated earnestness of a mind
determined on self-sacrifice, every word his companion had uttered. The
spirit invisible wears the laurel of mental victories, but the body has
to bear the exhaustion, the scars, and the soreness. He was tired, but
he stirred himself again to consider Sara's note. In the course of that
year she had written several letters to Orange--letters about books, new
pictures, and new music. Once she had given him a little song of her
own composition as something of which she "desired to hear no more for
ever." The song was sentimental, and he locked it away, wondering at the
time whether she really had an unfortunate affection for Lord Reckage.
But in reading her note that evening he decided against his original
fear. Women did not write in that strain to men whom they loved, or had
ever loved ... even passably well. He returned it to the owner with this
comment--

"A woman, you know, is like your shadow: run away from her and she
follows you; run after her and she flies from you. That's an old saying.
It is true so long as she does not love the man. And when she loves the
man--well, then she ceases to be a shadow. She becomes a living thing."

"That is no answer at all. If you could read her heart and whole thought
at this moment, what would you see there?"

"Unhappiness," said Robert; "discontent."

Reckage took the little sheet and folded it into his pocket-book.

"That's wonderful," said he, "because the same things are in my mind,
too. I wish I could describe my feelings about Agnes. She satisfies the
aesthetic side of my nature. But there is another side. And Sara comes
nearer to it than she. Mind you, I know my duty in the matter. There are
things which one is compelled to do under tremendous penalties. I have
chosen, and I must abide by my choice."

Robert looked well at his friend, and saw, in his expression, all that
he had known would inevitably, either soon or too late, work to the
surface.

"Yet the old tremulous affection lies in me," continued Reckage; "my
nerves are in a kind of blaze. You couldn't tell anything about it,
because you don't know."

The Emperor's burgundy, no doubt, had warmed his spirit to
communicativeness. He drew his chair closer to the table, and talked in
a low voice about his ghastly solitude of soul. His engagement to Miss
Carillon had not been an agreeable experience.

"And marriage," said he, "will be the crowning point of these unbearable
days. In the present state of my feelings it would be awful. Agnes is
very kind and most conscientious, but she does not know what is in me,
what was always and will always be there. Old reminiscences crowd round
me. They are very beautiful, although they are so sad."

"What is one to do?" said Robert, "in the presence of fate and facts? It
is necessary to look the affair in the face. Do you, or don't you, wish
to marry Miss Carillon?"

"I do, and I don't," answered Reckage doggedly. "But I can't close my
eyes to the circumstances of the case. I found myself hard bested from
the very beginning. I knew that I was expected to marry her. I knew,
too, that it was a suitable match in every way. But then every girl is,
to some extent, accomplished, pious, virtuous, and intelligent. I
believe sometimes that my apparent indifference towards Agnes arises
from the fact that I respect her--if anything--too much. She seems too
remote--that is the word--for the ordinary wear and tear of domesticity.
Other men--who might be called impassioned lovers--would be less
scrupulous. I maintain that devotion of that violent kind is worth
absolutely nothing. And I claim to know a little about life and love."

"I should say," said Orange, "that you knew more about mere physiology."

Reckage laughed uneasily.

"You keep your mediaeval views!" said he. "Perhaps I envy you. I can't
say. I don't think I envy any one. I am quite contented."

"Then what are you driving at?"

"Oh well, a fellow must think. You see, Sara suits me, in a sense. I am
not afraid of her. Now a wife is a sacred object. You might as well
flirt with the Ten Commandments as fall in love with your wife. I say,
never begin love-making with the lady you hope to marry. It will end in
disaster. Because the day must come when she will wonder why you have
changed. No, a wife should be the one woman in the world with whom you
can spend days and weeks of unreproved coldness."

They were now smoking, and the tobacco seemed to produce a
tranquillising effect upon his lordship. He closed his lips and amused
himself by puffing rings of smoke into the air. When he next spoke, he
suggested a visit to the theatre. He had engaged a box for the new
burlesque, "_The Blue Princess_."

"It will be very good, and it will cheer us up," said he.

Orange was in no mood for the entertainment, but Reckage's evident
misery seemed to require a fresh scene. The streets, as they left the
house, were full of a deep purple fog, through which shone out, with a
dull and brazen gleam, the lights of lamps and passing carriages. Above
them, the sky was but a pall or vapour; the air, charged with the
emotions, the struggling energy, the cruelty, confusion, painfulness,
and unceasing agitation of life in a vast city, was damp and stifling; a
noise of traffic--as loud but not so terrible as a breaking
storm--destroyed the peace of night; there were foot passengers of every
age and description moving like rooks in the wind, over the pavement,
and vehicles filled with men and women--an irremediable pilgrimage
bound, for the greater part, on pleasure. Robert felt that he would have
given gladly the treasures of a universe for just the time to think a
little while of his own love. So far that great attachment had brought
him aberrations, sorrow, and perplexities; all its sweetness had flown,
moth-like, into his heart, there to be burnt--burnt yet left unburied:
all its happiness had glorified his life against his will; all its
beauty had been starved with a pitiless rigour. What then had remained?
A certain state of mind--a passionate resignation to its own
indomitable cravings. And now on the eve of his marriage--a marriage
never so much as imagined, far less hoped for--he could not have the
leisure to behold, through tears of relief, the complete transformation
of his destiny--once so frightful, now so joyous. The theatre was
crowded, and when the two young men entered their box the burlesque was
at the beginning of the second act. The scene represented an orange
grove by moonlight, and a handsome girl in spangled muslin was
whispering loudly, to an accompaniment of harps, her eternal fidelity to
a gesticulating troubadour. Both performers were immensely popular, and
the duet, with its refrain--

    "Love, I will love thee always,
      For ever is not too long;
    Love, e'en in dark and dreary days,
      This shall be my one song,"

was repeated three times to the smiling, serene, and thoroughly
convinced audience. Reckage, who attended public places of amusement
solely from the desire of exhibiting himself, gave but a side-glance at
the stage and turned his opera glass upon the auditorium.

"Really, town is very full," said he; "I suppose many of them are up for
the Hauconberg wedding. There's old Cliddesdon--just look at him. Did
you ever see such an infernal ass? Hullo! I thought that Millie
Warfield wouldn't be far off. She's a perfect rack of bones. Lady
Michelmarsh is getting rather pretty--it's wonderful how these dowdy
girls can work up their profiles after a month or two in town. She was a
lump as a bride--a regular lump. You never met anything like it. Aumerle
is talking to her now. He was at the Capitol this afternoon. He begins
to give himself airs. I can't stand him. In fact, I cannot understand
those fellows on my sub-committee. Sometimes they are--if anything--too
civil. A bit servile, in fact. Then they turn out and look as though
they would like to make their teeth meet in my backbone. They sulk, and
whisper in groups, and snicker. I am getting sick of it. I must get rid
of them. By Jove! there's David Rennes, the painter. I thought he was at
Amesbury--with the Carillons, doing Agnes's portrait. It can't be
finished. She said distinctly in her letter this morning--"I may not add
more because I have to give Mr. Rennes a sitting while the light is
good." Where's the letter? I must have left it on the breakfast-table.
Anyhow that is what she said. I'll catch Rennes' eye and have him up. He
is not a bad sort."

The act-drop had now descended, the lights were turned on to their full
power, and Orange, following the direction of Reckage's gaze, saw, in
the last row of the stalls, a large man about nine-and-thirty with an
emotional, nervous face, a heavy beard, and dense black hair. He was
leaning forward, for the seat in front of him was, at the moment,
vacant; his hands were tightly locked, his eyes fixed on the curtain. At
last Reckage's determined stare produced its effect. He moved, glanced
toward the box, and, in response to his lordship's signal, left his
place. Two minutes later Orange heard a tap at the door.

"That's right," said Reckage, as Rennes entered, "take Orange's chair.
He doesn't care a bit about the play, or anything in it. He is going to
get married to-morrow. You know Robert Orange, don't you? You ought to
paint him. Saint Augustine with a future. _Mon devoir, mes livres, et
puis ... et puis, madame, ma femme._"

The Emperor's burgundy, indeed, had not been opened in vain. Rennes
could talk well, sometimes brilliantly, often with originality, and,
with the tact of all highly sensitive beings, he led the conversation
into impersonal themes. He said Miss Carillon's portrait was not yet
finished, but he changed that subject immediately, and the evening,
which had been to Orange a trial of patience, ended rather better than
it began. Lord Reckage invited Rennes to accompany them home. The artist
did not appear, at first, in the mood to accept that invitation. He,
too, seemed to have many things he wished to think about undisturbed,
and in the silence of his own company. His hesitation passed, however;
the kindness in his nature had been roused by something unusual,
haunting, ominous in Robert's face.

"I will come," said he.

All the way, on their walk to Almouth House, he kept Reckage amused.
Orange never once felt under the necessity to speak. He was able to
dream, to hold his breath, to remember that he loved and was loved
again, that he would see her to-morrow--to-morrow quite early, and then,
no more unutterable farewells, heart-desolating separations. He
surprised himself by saying aloud--"I love you ... I love you." The two
men, engrossed in talk, did not hear him. But he had caught the words,
and it seemed as though he heard his own voice for the first time.

"You must want some supper," said Reckage--"a rum omelette."

"No! no! I couldn't."

He sat down to the table, however, and watched them eat. First the
burlesque was discussed, then the actresses, the dresses, the dancing.

"Russia is the place for dancing," said Reckage, "I assure you. There
was a dancer at Petersburg.... Something-or-other-_ewski_ was her name,
and a fellow shot himself while I was there on her account. An awful
fool. I can tell you who painted her portrait. A Frenchman called
Carolus-Duran. I believe he has a career before him. What is your
opinion of French art?"

Rennes had studied in Paris and was well acquainted with the artist in
question. They talked about the exhibitions of the year and the prices
paid at a recent sale of pictures.

"Old Garrow has some fine pictures," said Reckage. "I would give a good
deal for his Ghirlandajo. Do you know it? And then that noble Tintoret?
There are so many persons whose position in life compels them to
encourage art without having any real enjoyment of it. Garrow is one of
those persons. But his daughter, Lady Sara, has a touch of genius. She's
a musician. You have heard her play, haven't you, Robert?"

"Yes."

Robert had, at that instant, observed upon the mantelpiece a letter
addressed to himself. It was from Brigit. He grew pale, and retired,
with the little envelope lightly written on, to a far corner of the
room. For some moments he could not break the seal. The sight of her
writing filled him with a kind of agony--something beyond his control,
beyond his comprehension. What did it mean--this tightening of the
heart, this touch of fear, and love, and fear again, so deep that the
whole web of life trembled and its strings grew confused one with
another, and all was anguish, darkness, self-renunciation, and a wild, a
dreadful mystery of human influence? At last he opened the letter.

     "MY DEAREST," it began, "I can never say all that I wish to say,
     because when I am with you I forget everything and watch your face.
     When I am away from you I forget your face, and I long to see it
     again in order that I may remember it more perfectly! It is so hard
     not to think of you too often. But I have had a great deal of
     sorrow, and everything I have in the world--except you--is a grief.
     I know that we are not born to be happy, and so, I wonder, have we
     stolen our happiness? If it is a gift--I know not what to do with
     it. I cannot speak a happy language: the atmosphere is strange and
     frightens me. Dear Robert, I am terrified, uncertain, but when we
     meet to-morrow you will give me courage. And then, as we shall not
     part again, I need never again be, as I am now, too anxious. Your
     BRIGIT."

Reckage's voice broke in again.

"I do wish you would try this rum omelette. It is capital."

Orange laughed, but left the room. Rennes remarked that he had a
powerful face.

"Yes. He has a strong character. And he would never deceive another. But
he deceives himself hourly--daily."

"In what way?" asked Rennes.

"He doesn't know," said Reckage, "what a devilish fine chap he is! I
wish to God that I could prevent this marriage."

"Why?"

"I say nothing against Mrs. Parflete. She's a high-class woman and so
on. Awfully beautiful, too. As clever as they make 'em, and not a breath
against her. All the same, I am not very sweet on love matches for men
of Orange's calibre. They never answer--never."

"I don't agree with you there," replied the artist, "because I believe
that a love match--even when it dissolves, as it may, into a mistake--is
the best thing that can happen to any man."

After this they discussed bindings. Lord Reckage was the first amateur
authority on the subject.




CHAPTER VI


At five the next morning Robert was writing letters. Then, as soon as
the gates of Hyde Park were open, he walked out. The recurrence of
familiar sentiments on the essentials that make up the condition known
as happiness would neither convince, nor inspire, the powers of an
imagination which, with all its richness, was, apart from the purely
artistic faculty, analytical and foreboding. Self-doubt, however, has no
part in passion. Of the many miseries it may bring, this, perhaps the
worst of human woes, can never be in its train. Men in love--and women
also--may distrust all things and all creatures, but their own emotion,
like the storm, proves the reality of its force by the mischief it
wreaks. Robert's spirit, borne along by this vehemence of feeling,
caught the keen sweetness of the early air, not yet infected by the
day's traffic. His melancholy--the inevitable melancholy produced by
sustained thought on any subject, whether sublime or simple--was
dispelled. The Park, which was empty but for a few men on their way to
work, and runners anxious to keep in training, had its great trees
still beautiful from the lingering glance of summer; the wide and misty
stretches of grey grass were fresh in dew; the softness and
haze--without the gloom--of autumn were in the atmosphere. The pride of
love requited and the instincts of youth could not resist these spells
of nature. Robert remembered only that it was his wedding-day: that
every throb of his pulse and every second of time brought him nearer to
the supreme joy of his life and the supreme moment. He had never used
his nerves with bliss and tears, and he did not belong to the large army
of young gentlemen who own themselves proudly

    "Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
    Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd....
    Who hesitate and falter life away,
    And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day."

This view of heroism was not possible to him, and he was too strong in
mind and body to pretend to it. The two things which affect a career
most profoundly are religion, or the lack of it, and marriage--or not
marrying; for these things only penetrate to the soul and make what may
be called its perpetual atmosphere. The Catholic Faith, which ignores no
single possibility in human feeling and no possible flight in human
idealism, produces in those who hold it truly a freshness of heart very
hard to be understood by the dispassionate critic who weighs character
by the newest laws of his favourite degenerate, but never by the
primeval tests of God. Robert, therefore, was thinking of his bride's
face, the pure curves of her mouth, her sapphirine eyes, her pretty
hands, her golden hair, the nose which others found fault with, which
he, nevertheless, thought wholly delightful. He wondered what she would
say and how she would look when they met. Would she be pale? Would she
be frightened? There had always been a certain agony in every former
meeting because of the farewell which had to follow. With all his habits
of self-control, he had never been able to feel quite sure that the word
too much would not be said, that the glance too long would not be given.
Her own simplicity, he told himself, had saved him from disaster. She
showed her affection so fearlessly--with such tender and discerning
trust--that his worst struggles were in solitude--not in her presence at
all. It was when he was away from her immediate peaceful influence that
the fever, the restlessness, the torments and the desperation (has not
old Burton summed up for us the whole situation and all the symptoms in
his "_Anatomy_"?) had to be endured and conquered. These trials now--for
even a sense of humour could not make them less than trials--were ended.
The tragi-comic labour of walking too much and riding too much, working
and smoking too much, thinking and sleeping too little--the whole dreary
business, in fact, of stifling any absorbing idea or ruling passion,
would be no more.

When he returned to Almouth House, Reckage was already dressed for his
official duties as "best man." He felt an unwonted and genuine
excitement about Robert's marriage. He put aside the languor, _ennui_,
and depression which he felt too easily on most occasions, and, that day
at least, he was, as his own servant expressed it, "nervous and cut-up."

"I shall miss the swimming, the boxing, the fencing, and the pistol
practice," he complained, referring to diversions in which Orange was an
expert and himself the bored but dutiful participant. "They nearly
always drop these things when they marry." The loss he really feared was
the moral support and affection of his former secretary--advantages
which a selfish nature is slow to appreciate, yet most tenacious of when
once convinced of their use. The nuptial mass had been fixed for eight
o'clock, the wedding party were to breakfast at Almouth House
afterwards, then the bride and groom were to leave by the mail for
Southampton _en route_ for Miraflores in Northern France. The two young
men drove together to the chapel attached to the Alberian Embassy. Not a
word passed between them, but Reckage, under his eyelids, examined every
detail of his friend's attire. He wondered at its satisfactoriness on
the whole, inasmuch as Orange had not seen fit to consult him on the
point. The church was small and grey and sombre; the flowers on the
altar (sent by his lordship) were all white; their perfume filled the
building.

"They look very nice," said Reckage, "and in excellent taste. Some of
these old pictures on the wall are uncommonly good, and I particularly
like that bronze crucifix. Ten to one if it isn't genuine eleventh
century. I will ask the old fellow afterwards. He's a dear. His Latin is
lovely. It's an artistic pleasure to hear him read the Gospel. I looked
in the other morning, just to get the run, as it were, of the place. By
Jove! Here they are."

Pensee Fitz Rewes came first--very graceful in lavender silk, and
accompanied by her little boy, who showed by an unconscious anxiety of
expression that he felt instinctively his mother's air of contentment
was assumed. Then Baron Zeuill, with Brigit on his arm, followed. The
Baron looked grave--too grave for the happy circumstances. Brigit seemed
as pale as the lilies on the altar; she was less beautiful but more
ethereal than usual. There was something frail, transparent,
unsubstantial about her that day which Robert had never noticed before.
Had the many emotional strains of the last year tried her delicate youth
beyond endurance? She seemed very childish, too, and immature. She took
Orange's hand when he met her, held it closely, and watched the others
with a kind of wonder most pitiful to witness--as though she had
suffered too much from her contact with life and could no more. Her eyes
seemed darker than the sapphires to which Robert had so often compared
them: this effect, he told himself, was due to the strong contrast given
by the pallor of her face. It was quite clear, however, that she was
not under the influence then of any dominant thought. Her nerves and
senses were strained to that extreme tension resembling apathy, until
the vibration given by some touch or tone sets the whole system
trembling with all the spiritual and bodily forces which make the
mystery of human life. She spoke her responses, signed the register, and
walked out from the church on Robert's arm without a single change of
countenance or token of feeling. As they drove away from the church, she
flushed a little and drew far back, with a new timidity, into her
corner. One look she gave of perfect love and confidence. She pressed
his hand and held it, for a moment, against her cheek. But neither of
them spoke. And indeed, what was there to be said? The identification of
their two minds had been full and absolute from the moment of their
first encounter long ago in Chambord. The accidental differences of sex
and age, training, accomplishments, and education had not affected--and
could not affect--a sympathy in temperament which depended--not on the
similarity of opinions--but on a similarity of moral fibre. Many forms
can be cut, by the same hand, from the same piece of marble, and
although one may be a grotesque and the other a cross, one a pursuing
goddess and the other an angel for a tomb, the same substance, light,
touch, and colour will be characteristic of all four. Marriage, at best,
could but give a certain crude emphasis to the strange spiritual bond
which united these two beings. Practical as they both were in the common
affairs of life, they shrank from anything which would promise to
materialise the subtleties of the mind. Some thoughts, they felt, were
as impalpable as sounds, and, just as music ceases to be divine when it
is poured out of some mechanical contrivance, so the mysteries of the
human soul become mere bodily conditions--more or less humiliating--when
demonstrated, catalogued, and legalised. There is nothing modern nor
uncommon in this especial disposition. One may describe it as ascetic,
anaemic, sentimental, hysterical, neurotic; but the men and women who
possess this fragile organism show, as a rule, powers of endurance and a
strength of will by no means characteristic of the average sanguine and
sensual creature who eats, drinks, fights, loves, and does his best in a
world which he calls vile, yet would not renounce for all the ecstasies
of Paradise.

The carriage wheels rolled on--as swift and noiseless as the sand in an
hour-glass. Why was the road so short? Why could they not be carried
thus for ever, tranquil with happiness, wanting nothing, seeking
nothing, bound no-whither? Foolish questions and a foolish longing: yet
happiness consists in being able to formulate wishes with the serene
knowledge that a better wisdom directs their fulfilment. Neither
passers-by nor other vehicles, neither houses nor streets caught the
entranced attention of these young lovers. The delight of being purely
self-absorbed is very great and intoxicating to those who are
constantly--either by desire or the force of circumstances--unselfish. A
faint flush swept into Brigit's face under the effect of an experience
so novel. Their twofold consciousness had all the pathos of
self-effacement, and all the thrill of satisfied egoism. Such instants
cannot last, and they are shortest when one's habits of thought are
antagonistic to such luxury. Brigit sighed deeply, and roused herself
with a painful sense that the minute she wilfully cut short had been the
sweetest in her life.

"Pensee," she said, "has been so kind to me. She gave me her room at
Wight House last night. She had the little dressing-room just off it.
Did you notice her dress? She was very anxious that you should like it."

"She seemed all right," said Robert; "and wasn't Reckage splendid?"

Having spoilt their perfect moment, they became as mere mortals, more at
ease in this planet, where complete joy has an unfamiliar mien. Brigit's
actual physical beauty returned. The sunshine stole in at the open
window and lit up her golden hair, which was half hidden by a hat with
white plumes. She looked down at her hand with its new wedding ring, and
was pleasantly aware of Robert's admiration.

"I am so glad," she exclaimed, "that you think my hand is nice. Because
I have given it to you for all time. And if you are ever tired, or
discouraged, or unhappy, or lonely, and you want me, I shall come to
you."

"But you will be with me now always."

"Yes," she answered. "Yes, Robert, always."

They had now reached Almouth House. Her little foot, with its arched
instep, seemed too slight and delicate for the pavement. Robert knew
that her arm rested upon his, because he felt it trembling. They crossed
the threshold together. The doors closed after them.

"And he never once kissed her on the way from church!" exclaimed the
footman.

But the coachman did not think this very peculiar. "I don't hold with
kissing," said he; "to my mind there's nothing in it. Kissing is for
boys and gals--not for men and wives."

Baron Zeuill was unable to join them all at breakfast, but Pensee, and
Reckage, and David Rennes (who had been especially invited the night
before because he had proved so entertaining), did more than their duty
as friends by talking feverishly, eating immoderately, and affecting the
conventional joyousness universally thought proper at such times. Pensee
ventured to make a reference to the forthcoming marriage of the "best
man," and expressed the faltering hope that "dear Agnes would be as
happy as dear Brigit." Reckage scowled. Rennes was seized with a fit of
coughing. It was the one unlucky hit in the whole conversation, and it
was soon forgotten by every one present except Orange, who remembered
it frequently in later days. At last the hour for departure came.
Pensee, weeping, kissed Brigit on both cheeks, looked into her grave
eyes long and lovingly, put her arms around the slight, girlish form
with that exquisite, indefinable tenderness, unconscious,
unpremeditated, and protective, which married women show toward very
youthful brides. Robert handed his wife into the brougham, the order was
given "To Waterloo," the horses started, rice and slippers were thrown.

"They go into the world for the first time," exclaimed Rennes.

Then Pensee was assisted into the barouche, and drove homewards.

"We shall meet again," she said, as she parted from Reckage; "we meet at
Sara's at lunch."

The two men were thus left alone. They decided to smoke, for they were
both a little affected by the pathos of the situation.

"Explain Robert," said his lordship, as they returned to the
dining-room, "explain that kind of love. You are an artist."

"Well, it isn't my way," rejoined the other, with a forced laugh, "but
there are many manifestations of personal magnetism."

"This kind is very interesting," said Reckage, "although it is, of
course, high-flown. Orange is romantic and scrupulous--he knows next to
nothing of the sensual life; and that next to nothing is merely a source
of disgust and remorse. You follow me?"

"Perfectly," said Rennes. "It is a question of temperament. The wonder
is that he has not entered, in some delirium of renunciation, the
priesthood."

"That would mean, for his gifts, a closed career. It beats my wits to
guess how this marriage will turn out. He is madly in love. He has
suffered frightfully. Too much moral anguish has a depraving effect in
the long run."

"I am not so sure of that."

"I think so, at any rate. Now many a decent sort of fellow can get along
well enough--if he has a woman to his taste and wine which he considers
good. You observe I condense the situation as much as possible. But
Orange is different."

"Not so different--except in degree, or experience. At present, he
oscillates between the woe of love and the joy of life. You compared him
to St. Augustine. St. Augustine never pretended that earthly happiness
was a delusion. He knew better. He said, 'Do not trust it, but seek the
happiness which hath no end.' Personally, I can accept with gratitude as
much as I can get. 'Is not the life of men upon earth all trial, without
any interval?' This may be; yet it is something to learn how to
sympathise with happiness. Our best men and women devote themselves too
exclusively to the diagnosis of misery."

"You have thought a lot, I can see," said Reckage.

The artist gave him a quick, friendly glance.

"I have played the fool," said he. "I envy Orange. He will know things
that I can never know--now. I haven't lived up to my thoughts. I am not
remorseful--I don't believe in remorse. It is a thing for the
half-hearted. But if I am not sad, I am not especially gay. The middle
course between sentimentality and gallantry seems to me intimately
immoral and ridiculous into the bargain. So I am an idealist with
senses. There are times when I hate life. And why? Because life is evil?
By no means; but because we tell lies about it, and write lies about it,
from morning till night."

"You seem a bit depressed," said Lord Reckage. "But, by the by, how is
the portrait going? My brother Hercy, who paints a little, always
declared that Agnes was unpaintable. Do you find her unpaintable?"

"No," said Rennes; "oh no!"




CHAPTER VII


When Reckage asked Rennes whether he found Miss Carillon "unpaintable,"
the artist was conscious of a swift, piercing emotion, which passed,
indeed, but left an ache. And as the day advanced the smart of the wound
grew more intense. A visit to the National Gallery, a call at his
tailor's, an inspection of maps at his club, afforded little relief to
the indefinable misery. He was tortured by the disingenuousness of his
own mind. He had done so much, and thought so much, and read so much; he
could give so many scientific reasons for each idea and each movement of
his mental and physical being, that the joy of life had been cut up in
its machinery. He had lost the power of being natural either in his
pains or his pleasures. He knew all the answers, but not one of the
questions which trouble youth. He had never wondered at anything.
Wonder--the lovely mistress of wisdom--had taught him none of her
secrets. Dead certainty had dogged his steps from his first appearance
on this unknowable world. Once, when a very little boy, he admired a
vase full of pink roses. "They will keep twice as long," said his
nurse, "in dirty water. It is such a waste to put fresh water on roses!"
This remark--slight in itself--remained in his memory as the first
truth--the Logos, in fact--from which all other truths generated. He was
now nine-and-thirty: he had executed an abnormal amount of work, and he
had a just reputation as a portrait-painter. His technical skill was
considered unique. The something lacking was that mysteriousness which
belongs to all great art, and is, essentially, in life.

"Rennes," said one of his friends, "can work for sixteen hours a day. It
is all taken from without. He gives nothing except his undivided
attention." The saying was not true; he gave himself absolutely--soul,
brain, and heart--to his task, but the gift was too premeditated,
too accurately weighed. There was no self-abandonment, nor
self-forgetfulness. His admiration for Miss Carillon had been of this
kind. Having added up her attractions, her figure, her face, her youth,
her intelligence, her grace, he decided that she was exceptional in many
ways. He found real happiness in her society--she was so sane, so clear,
so unaffected. His attitude toward her had remained for some time one of
fraternal affection, partly by force of will, chiefly because his
relations with other women were not so restrained. But the position was
changing. Certain forces in life were assuming for him a complicated and
threatening aspect. What if, after all, there was an incalculable
element in man?

"Now to be practical," he said to himself. He had not seen his mother
for a fortnight. She lived in Kensington Square. "I must really go and
see my mother!" The cab drove quickly; the little grey house was soon
reached. David opened the door with his latch-key and rushed upstairs
into the small drawing-room, furnished in white and green, with fresh
flowers on the mantelpiece, and many shelves of vellum-bound books. A
bronze lamp hung from the ceiling, and its globe, covered in violet
silk, cast a light like that of the early dawn in hilly regions. A faint
odour of lavender filled the air. In one corner of the room there was a
chess-table with its chessmen showing an interrupted game. A velvet
footstool, much indented by the pressure of a firm foot, stood in front
of the carved armchair in which Mrs. Rennes usually sat. Her
work-basket, lined with blue satin and shining with steel fittings,
stood in its customary place on a gipsy stool near the fireplace. A few
old English prints hung on the walls, and between the windows there was
a Chippendale cabinet filled with Worcester and Crown Derby china. The
aspect of all things was restful, emotionless, and some of its calm
seemed to overtake and soothe David's agitated spirit. He sat down at
the piano and played, with much passion, bits from Wagner's "_Tristan_,"
the first performance of which he had seen at Munich. "Good Heavens!" he
thought. "What a genius! What a soul! What a phrase!" Suddenly the door
opened and Agnes Carillon was ushered in. She hesitated a second, and
then recognised Rennes, who had his back to the light. Her first
instinct was to retreat; her first feeling was a strange sensation of
pleasure and fear. His usually cold and wearied face took an expression
of controlled but unmistakable delight. She blushed, though not with
resentment, yet she avoided, by appearing to have some difficulty with
her muff, his outstretched hand.

"I have called on your mother," said she. "I thought you would be on
your way to Rome."

Her lips were red and rather full: her cheeks were pink, her throat and
brows were white. Her demeanour was, while modest, neither shy nor
self-conscious. David was struck by her height and the extreme
slightness of her figure. She wore a large Gainsborough hat with long
plumes, a black gown, and a collar of old _point de Venise_. She had
come up from the country, and her presence brought its freshness.

"Why are you in town?" he asked abruptly.

"I was bored at home."

"And the trousseau?"

"The trousseau?" she said, lifting her eyes for the first time to his.

"They say it is unlucky to try on your wedding-dress," he continued,
seeking relief in the very torture of reminding himself that the date of
her marriage with Lord Reckage was fixed.

"I never think about luck," she answered.

"I met Reckage at the play last night. I lunched with him to-day," said
Rennes.

"I am so glad that you are friends. I want you to like him."

"No doubt he thinks me mad. Politicians always regard artists as
madmen."

"But Beauclerk is considered very cultured. I hate the word. He is
interested in art."

"No doubt--as a means of investment, an educational influence, or a
topic of conversation for light moments."

"You are severe. Yet I like to hear you talk."

She hoped that his talk would drown the singing in her heart, the
whispering in her ears, the footsteps of doubt--doubt of herself, doubt
of Reckage, coming nearer and nearer. She had been taught everything.
She had discovered nothing. Love itself had come to her in the shape of
a cruel code of responsibilities. Lately she had been dwelling with an
almost feverish emphasis on the question of duty. She had wearied
Reckage; she had exhausted herself by the tenacity of her mind toward
that dull subject. And the real truth about much in life was forcing
itself upon her. She was essentially a woman of affairs. Her face
absorbed the poetry of her nature, just as a flower extracts every
excellence from its surrounding soil, and, shining out for the sun,
wastes no blossom underground. It had been her earliest ambition to
marry a Member of Parliament and help him--by her prayers and
counsel--on his conscientious career toward Downing Street. She had
received an austere education, and even her native generosity of heart
could not soften the indignation she had been trained to feel against
any neglect of duty. Duty was a term which she applied to that science
of things generally expedient which tradition has presented to us in the
household proverbs and maxims of every nation. Early rising, controlling
one's temper, paying one's debts, consideration for others, working
while it is day, taking stitches in time--all these to that orthodox
mind were matters of imperative obligation, if not Divine command.
David's impulsive nature and self-indulgent habits filled her with
overwhelming sorrow and dismay. She could not understand the rapid
changes of mood, the disordered views, the storm and violence which are
characteristic of every artist whose work is a form of autobiography
rather than a presentment of impersonal forms and effects.

In Rennes there were two principles constantly at work: the David who
acted, and the David who observed, criticised, and reproduced in
allegorical guise, the inspiring performance. Agnes knew nothing of this
common phenomenon in creative genius, and when her friend refreshed his
imagination by appearing in a new _role_, she was as terrified as a
child before some clever trick in experimental chemistry. From time to
time he expressed opinions which startled her. She begged him once to
paint a "religious" picture. He would not. A feeling that she had
experienced some bitter disappointment weighed upon her spirit. Yet when
she seemed to give that disappointment a cause, she was careful to leave
it in obscurity. She would not permit herself to think, and, pale with
suffering, she would check the painful questions which rose already
answered. Her affection for Rennes was one of those serious passions
which sometimes take root in an unsentimental nature, and derive a
strength from philosophy which romantic considerations, pleasant as they
are, can never bestow. Romance will add a magical delight to the
pleasures of existence, but for the burden of the day one needs a
sobriety of thought which would ring singularly flat in a love-lyric,
which is certainly opposed to those emotions which produce what is
commonly regarded as interesting behaviour. Agnes had not been drawn to
Rennes at first sight, but rather by degrees and against her better
judgment. She had found him unstable and affected; on the other hand,
she admired his fine figure, his talent, his conversation, and the fire
in his brilliant eyes. She told herself that she was deeply anxious
about his soul, but, in a crowd, she watched for his broad shoulders and
his handsome face. Such was her friendship, and she had known him for
two years. Her first season had been a startling success. She had the
misery of rejecting several suitors of whom her father fully
approved--one was an Archdeacon. She had been drawn more than kindly
toward a consumptive violinist whom she had met at a Saturday
entertainment for the poor at Kensal Green. Not a single word of love
ever passed between them. He called once or twice at her aunt's house in
Chester Square, and they had played together some of Corelli's sonatas.
Her aunt carried her away to Brighton, and no more was heard of the
young violinist till a rumour reached them that he was drinking himself
to death at St. Moritz. Agnes said many prayers for him. At last a
second rumour reached her that the first was wholly incorrect. He had
married a very nice girl with a lot of money and was building a villa at
Cannes. Agnes told herself that she was thankful to hear it. The next
year she became engaged to a young Member of Parliament with really fine
prospects. She was not in love, but she liked him better than all her
friends. She felt serene, and at last useful. Then a story reached her
about another woman, and yet another woman before that one. The story
was true and not at all pretty. The Bishop was obliged to support his
daughter in her refusal to regard matters in what her betrothed
described as a sane and reasonable manner. He had sinned and he was
sorry, and what was more, he had every desire to reform. But Agnes
remained firm, although she had probably never been so nearly in love
with him as she was on the day when she returned all his charming
letters and the ring and his photograph. It was a trying moment. She
was ordered abroad, and she spent the winter at Rome, where she read
ancient history and visited churches and excited a great deal of
admiration. Mrs. Rennes and David were also at Rome. The three met at
the house of an irreproachable Marchesa. They became friends. Miss
Carillon's aunt, who was a maiden lady with means, succumbed to the
fascinating eloquence of an amateur _connoisseur_ of antique gems. In
her new character of _fiancee_, she found it inconvenient to chaperon a
young niece. She joined a widowed friend, and gladly assented to the
suggestion that dear Agnes should visit Mrs. Rennes in Paris. The Bishop
saw no impediment to the plan. He had been at Oxford with the late
Archibald Rennes, an odd fellow but high-minded. Mrs. Rennes was the
daughter of a General Hughes-Drummond. Every one knew the
Hughes-Drummonds. They were very good people indeed. The Bishop hoped
that Agnes would enjoy herself, give her kind friend as little trouble
as possible, and come home fully restored in spirits. He forgot David.
It may be that others omitted to mention him. The Bishop was not pleased
when the rumour reached him that this artist was included in the party.
What were his habits? What were his prospects? Were his artistic talents
such that he might reasonably hope to become a Royal Academician and
maintain an establishment? What _class_ of pictures did he paint? Were
they lofty in tone? Did they exalt and purify the mind? Would they make
good engravings--such engravings as one might hang on one's walls? The
correspondence and the questions were endless. David spent a week end at
the Episcopal Palace, and behaved so well that he became frightened at
his own capabilities for John Bullism. He was a little annoyed, too, to
find himself at ease in a British home circle. The Bishop was, at all
events, satisfied. Agnes was enchanted, and, transfigured by unconscious
passion, looked more beautiful than ever. David enjoyed the services in
the cathedral; he liked the quiet Sunday afternoon, he was impressed by
Dr. Carillon's real earnestness in the pulpit. The visit was a great
success. Before he left, he begged Agnes to write to him "when she could
spare the time." The young man had tried everything except a Platonic
friendship with a lovely girl. He fancied that he found in Agnes
Carillon that purity coupled with magnetism which makes such experiments
attractive. They corresponded regularly, but they did not meet again for
several months. When he returned, a little tired of platonism,
letter-writing, intellectuality, and longing a great deal for the sight
of her face, he found her engaged to Lord Reckage. So nature revenges
itself. He detected a certain triumph and also a certain deep reproach
in her gaze. She insisted that she was more than happy, but something
under these words seemed to murmur--"You have spoilt our lives." Her
manner, nevertheless, never altered. She was invariably sympathetic,
gracious, delicately emotional. In letters she signed herself, "Yours
affectionately, Agnes Carillon."

"How I should like to paint you in this light!" he said, all at once.
"That is the dress I love best. Don't wear it often." The remark was
slight enough as a pretty speech within the bounds of flirtation, but
the tone in which he uttered it meant more, and the girl's womanly
instinct told her that the dangerous limit in their "friendship" had
been reached. He saw her turn pale. She looked away from him, and
swallowed thoughts which were far more bitter than any words she could
have spoken.

"You never used to say these things," she exclaimed at last; "why do you
say them now?"

"I thought them--always," he answered. "But I am a Pagan. I tried to
keep my Paganism for others, and what you would call 'the best in me'
for you. You may be able to understand. Anyhow, I made a mistake--a
terrible mistake. It was a false position, and I couldn't maintain it.
Now I don't even want to maintain it. Then it was a kind of vanity. I
mean that time when I was at the Palace. I had been reading a lot of
beautiful unreal stuff about the soul. I thought I had reached a very
high place. Of course I had--because nothing is higher or purer than
real human love. But I wouldn't call it love. So I went abroad, and
wrote any amount of 'literature' to you. And all the time Reckage was
here--asking you, wisely enough, to marry him. And you, wisely enough,
accepted him."

Agnes sat still, with her eyes down, cold, silent, forbidding. She did
not understand him. She had neither the knowledge of life, nor the
imagination, which could make such understanding possible. But she saw
in his look that he loved her, that he was unhappy. She knew that
Reckage had never shown so much feeling. Yet had she not given her word
to Reckage? Was it not irrevocable? Was Rennes behaving well in speaking
out--too late? Was it too late? A torrent of questions poured into her
mind. She dragged off her gloves, and spread out her hands, which were
slim and white, and stared at her sapphire engagement ring.

"A weak man submits to destiny," said Rennes, "a strong one makes his
own. It is what we think of ourselves which determines our fate. If I
regard myself as a poor creature, I shall, no doubt, act the part of a
poor creature. But," he added, with an ironical smile, "it is never too
late to give up one's prejudices. I can't stand by and look on any
longer. I intend to leave England for some years. I hope we may never
meet again. Don't answer me, because there is nothing for you to say.
You have been perfectly kind, perfectly charming, perfectly consistent.
You have never deceived me and you have never deceived yourself."

She interrupted him:

"I hope not. Oh, I hope I have never deceived myself--or you."

"I was grateful for your friendship," he said. "I can't be grateful for
it now."

Agnes drew a long breath and murmured random words about the "time." Was
it getting late?

"Yes," replied Rennes, "too late. Did I ever tell you why my father,
with all his prospects, became a drawing-master? He told me that he had
suffered so much learning why he could never paint, nor hope to paint,
that he was determined to devote his knowledge to the service of
apprentices. It seemed to him such an awful thing to mistake one's
vocation. Now I feel that one of us--perhaps both of us, you and I, are
doing even a worse thing. We are deliberately throwing happiness to the
dogs."

"I don't think so," said Agnes, in a trembling voice. "There is duty,
you know; that is something higher than happiness, I believe."

"Are you so sure?"

"Oh, yes!"

"I envy you. I don't even know what you mean by duty. It seems to me
another name for the tyranny of false sentiment."

"Don't disturb my ideas," she exclaimed, with an appealing gesture.
"Don't say these things. They make me wretched. I can't afford to doubt
and question. One must have a few permanent rules of conduct."

"But if they are fantastic, capricious, insincere?"

"I can't argue. I am not clever. I will not change my views. I dare not.
It would make me hate you."

"You are the slave of convention."

"That may be. That is safer, after all, than being the slave of some
other will stronger than my own. Why do you try to disturb my
life--now--after so many really happy months of friendship?"

"Were they so happy? Agnes, were they happy?"

She hesitated.

"Yes," she said, at last; "relatively, yes."

"It is quite true. Good women drive us to the bad ones."

"Oh! what can you mean? Surely we are saying too much. We shall reproach
ourselves later. I live, again and again, through one conversation. The
phrases come into my mind with every possible shade of significance."

She pushed back her hat, and pressed her hand to her brow, which was
contracting nervously as she spoke.

"I don't wish to be altered by any change in principle," she continued,
"nor distracted, from my plain obligations, into other interests. I
daresay I sound quite heartless and odd. I daresay you won't like me any
more." Her voice faltered, but her lips remained precise. "But one must
know one's mind--one _must_. You don't know yours; that is the whole
trouble, David."

She had never called him by his Christian name before, and now the
forced sternness of her tone gave it almost the accent of a farewell.

"Perhaps we have helped each other," she went on; "at all events, you
have taught me how to look at things. You are clever and original and
all that. I am rather commonplace, and I never have new or surprising
thoughts. The more I learn, the more I grow attached to the ordinary
ways. Once you called me the ideal _bourgeoise_. You were right."

"Not entirely," said Rennes. "You think too much."

"You taught me that. I never used to consider people or notions. I
accepted them without criticism."

"The madness of criticism has entered into you," he said. "It is the
worst, most destructive thing on earth."

"How could I have accepted you--as my friend--without it?" she asked.
"You puzzled me. I tried to understand you. No one had ever puzzled me
before. No one, you may be quite sure, will ever puzzle me, in the same
degree, again."

She gave him a long, tearful glance, in which defiance, reproach,
determination, and a certain cruelty shone like iron under water. He
made a movement toward her. The strength of his more emotional nature
might have made a final assault--not uselessly--on her assumed
"reasonableness." No appeal, no threat could have moved her from the
mental attitude she had decided on--the duty of keeping her word to Lord
Reckage. But she might have been urged to the more candid course of
ascertaining how far his lordship's true happiness was really involved
in the question. At that moment, however, Mrs. Rennes came into the
room. She gave a little cry of surprise when she saw her son. Then she
kissed Agnes, and sat down, looking anxiously from one to the other with
something not unlike grief, not unlike jealousy.

Her life and habits of thought were simple, but she had been highly
educated. She was an accomplished linguist, a good musician, a most
intelligent companion. Things which she could not comprehend she would,
at least, accept on faith. There had never been the shadow of a quarrel
between David and herself. But she felt, by intuition, that Agnes
Carillon had, in some way, affected his life, his work, his whole
nature. She could not blame her, because she knew nothing definite about
the understanding which existed, plainly enough, between her son and
this young lady. She had a horror, however, of flirtation and flirts. It
seemed to her that, under all this talk and correspondence on art,
poetry, scenery, and the like, there was a strong under-current of
emotion. So she smiled upon Agnes with a certain reserve, as though she
were not quite sure whether she had any great reason to feel delighted
at her call. At a glance from David, however, her look softened into
real friendliness.

"I was so surprised to see Mr. Rennes here," said Agnes.

"I am surprised, too," said the older woman.

A restraint fell upon all three. David walked about the room, looking
for things he did not want, and asking questions he did not wish
answered, although he hoped they would interest his mother. But his
spirits soon flagged. The conversation became trivial and absurd.

"Where are you staying?" asked Mrs. Rennes.

"I am with Pensee Fitz Rewes," said Agnes; "she has gone in the carriage
to do a little shopping. She will send it here for me."

The carriage was at that instant announced. David went down the stairs
with Agnes and handed her in. He said nothing. Mrs. Rennes watched the
pair from the window and nodded her farewell with much gravity. When
David returned to her, he found her reading peacefully Trollope's last
novel. It was for these graces that he loved her most. He scribbled
letters at her writing-table for the next hour. Then he spoke--

"I am going," said he, "to the East. I need a change. I suppose it will
mean six months."

"But how you will enjoy it!"

"And what will you do?"

"I live from day to day, my dear. I am quite contented."

"This journey is not a mere caprice. I have been contemplating it for
some time," he said.

Mrs. Rennes' hair was white and her long, equine countenance, sallow.
When her feelings were stirred, she showed it only by a cloudy pallor
which would steal over her face as a kind of veil--separating her from
the rest of mortals.

"One has to get away from England," continued Rennes: "one has to get
away from one's self."

"And where is your self now?" she asked, not venturing to look at him.

"With that girl," he answered, suddenly; "with that girl."

"Do you love her?"

"I don't know. I suppose I do. Oh! I would love her if I could ever be
absolutely sincere. But this I do know--I can't see her married to that
fellow Reckage. So I must go away."

"I am afraid she is a coquette--a serious coquette, my dear boy."

"She is nothing of the kind. She is a true woman. Don't talk about
her."




CHAPTER VIII


Sara had spent the morning crying bitterly, in bed. Her letter to the
Duke of Marshire was on the table by her side. From time to time she had
taken it up, turned it over, shed fresh tears, and reproached herself
for indecision. She held at bay every thought of Robert Orange, and
formed the resolve of banishing him from her mind for ever. When the
time came to dress for luncheon, she brightened a little, for the
prospect of disguising her true feelings in the presence of Lord Reckage
and Pensee appealed to that genius for mischief which animated the whole
current of her life. _To baffle the looker-on_ seemed not merely a great
science, but the one game of wits which could never lose its interest.
She was not insincere. She thought that lies, as a rule, were clumsy
shifts, and abominable. Even in the moments when she was most thoroughly
conscious of her talent for misleading others, she had never brought
herself to think well of deception. She would have liked to feel that
her heart was an open book for her friends to read. It would have been
pleasant, she believed, if all could have known always that she
practised a delicate art and played, consummately, fine comedy whenever
she found spectators. But a solitary, mismanaged childhood, and the
constant sense of being in many ways a foreigner, had taught her the
penalty of frankness where sympathy could not supply, from its own
knowledge, the unutterable half which makes up every confidence. The
bitter pleasures of a conscience which caresses its worst burden were
the only real ones of her daily existence. When she could say, at the
end of the day, "I have fooled them all: they think I am happy, I am
not: they think Reckage amuses me, he doesn't. They think I delight in
these dull dinners and balls, I hate them," a sort of exultation--the
pride of a spirit singing under torture--would fill her whole being. All
youth that is strong and thoughtful has much of this instinct of
dissimulation. The world--to a young mind--appears controlled by
elderly, suspicious, hateful custodians ever on the alert to capture, or
thwart, every high enterprise and every passionate desire. There seems a
vast conspiracy against happiness--the withered, dreary wiseacres in
opposition to the joy, the daring, the beauty, the reckless vitality of
souls still under the spell of spring. When poor Sara could escape from
town into the country, mount her horse, and tear through a storm, the
neighbours compared her to a witch on a broomstick, and, shaking their
heads, would foresee much sipping of sorrow by the spoonful in the
future of Lord Garrow. To-day, however, the young lady assumed her most
demure expression, and received the guests at luncheon as though she had
never learnt the meaning of tears nor joined the gale in spirit.

Sir Piers Harding was the last to arrive. He was a thick-set, livid man
with an unyielding smile and the yellow eyes of one whom rich diet
rather than an angry god had rendered melancholy.

"You haven't changed in the least," he said, considering Lord Garrow
with some resentment.

"Ah, well!" replied his lordship, "eleven years do not make much
difference at my time of life. You, however, are decidedly greyer. Where
have you been hiding yourself? I think you were foolish to leave
England. Gladstone was remarking but the other day, 'Harding was always
so cocksure.' 'And wasn't he right?' said I. 'Of course,' said he; 'and
that was the worst of him. He _was_ right. Who could stand it?' That's
the world. It's devilish unappreciative of the truth."

Reckage, much bored by the old men, stood by Pensee's chair, where he
could watch Sara and angle for her glance. When it happened that she
smiled at him a little--either in mere friendship or mockery--he felt a
kind of fire steal through his veins, and he told himself that she was a
dangerous woman--a woman who could get her own way in the long run. That
she was a girl--and, with all her shortcomings, a very innocent
one--made her odd powers of fascination but the more insidious. She
wore a dress of wine-coloured silk which fitted plainly over her breast
and shoulders and fell in graceful flounces from the waist. The warm,
olive lines of her cheek and throat appeared the darker in contrast with
a twist of white lace which she wore round her neck; and her black hair,
dressed higher than usual, was held in place by a large ruby comb which
caught the fire-light as she moved. Reckage was conscious, for the first
time in his life, of a real embarrassment. He could not talk to her; he
felt tongue-tied when she addressed him. Ill at ease, yet not unhappy,
he struggled to maintain some coherence in his conversation; but, at
each moment, his own ideas grew less certain and Sara's voice more
enchanting. It seemed to convey the lulling powers of an anodyne. When
he tried to rouse himself, the effort was as painful as the attempt to
wake from a dream within a dream.

"You were at the wedding this morning?" she asked lightly.

"No.... What a fool I am! Yes, of course. You mean Robert's wedding?"

She gave a little smile, and murmured, dropping her voice, "I meant
Robert's wedding."

Luncheon was then announced: the sliding doors which separated the
dining-room from Lord Garrow's library were rolled back. They all walked
in--Pensee and Sara leading the way.

"A sweet creature!" whispered his lordship behind their backs,
indicating Lady Fitz Rewes. He sighed as he spoke. He could never feel
that there was not something deplorable in Sara's physical brilliancy.
Her upper-lip that day had a certain curl which he had learnt to regard
as a danger-signal. What would she do next? As he sat down at the table
and observed the sweep of her eyelashes toward Reckage, a presentiment
of trouble clouded the new hopes he had formed for her career.

"Who are your strong men now?" asked Harding suddenly, after a moment's
contemplation of Reckage, who sat opposite.

"Our strong men?" faltered Lord Garrow.

"Aren't most of 'em place-hunters and self-seekers?"

"You must meet Robert Orange," said Pensee; "Mr. Disraeli believes in
Robert Orange."

"I never heard of him," observed Sir Piers. "Who is he?"

"You may well ask," said Lord Garrow. "He claims to be a de Hausee--on
his father's side. Reckage can tell you about him. Many have a high
opinion of the fellow, and say that if he will stick to one branch of
politics, he may become useful. Personally, I don't call him a man of
the world."

"Not of our world, perhaps, papa. But there are so many other worlds!"

"Sara likes him. A lot of women like him," said his lordship. He was
annoyed at her interruption and took his revenge by a feminine thrust.
"The hero," said he, "married some mysterious person this very morning.
We may not hear so much about him in the future!"

"Dear Lord Garrow," said Pensee, "his wife is a friend of mine--she is
the most charming person."

Sara put out her hand and touched Reckage on the arm.

"Do you think," she asked, "that the wife will be an obstacle in his
way?"

"Who can tell? Of course she has means, and he likes to do everything
well."

"Speaking for myself," said Harding, "I have always held that a man's
career rests rather on his genius than his marriage."

"But you, my dear fellow," put in Lord Garrow, testily, "you retired
from political life because your theories could find no illustration
there."

"Pardon me," said Sir Piers, with a grim laugh. "I retired because I had
a faultless wife but unfortunately no genius. I shall therefore watch
your friend's triumph or failure--for his position would seem to be
precisely the reverse of my own--with peculiar sympathy."

"Ah! I fear you are rather heartless," exclaimed Sara. "For a man to
have gone so far as Orange, and to know that perhaps--I say, perhaps--he
can hope no higher because he made a fool of himself about a woman!"

"You speak as though it were a romantic marriage--a question of love."

"Of course," said the young lady softly. "It is a great passion."

"Well, after all," observed Harding, who was not insensible himself to
Sara's delightfulness, "the British public is absurdly fond of a
love-match. They adore a sentimental Prime Minister. They want to see
him either marrying for love, or jilted in his youth for a richer man.
These things enlist the popular sympathy. What made Henry Fox? His
elopement with Lady Caroline Lennox."

"To be sure," said Reckage--"to be sure. That's a point."

"It is a compliment to the sex," continued Harding, "when a great man is
taken captive by a pretty face. Men, too, rally round a Lochinvar. Such
an evidence of heart--or folly, if you prefer to call it so--is also
an evidence of disinterestedness. So, on the whole, I cannot follow your
objections to the new Mrs. Orange."

"You have been away so long," said Garrow fussily, "that you have
forgotten our prejudices. Orange himself, to begin with, has something
mysterious in his origin. They say he is French--related to the old
French aristocracy; but the less one says in England about foreign
pedigrees the better. All that of itself is against him, and Mrs.
Orange, it seems, is more or less French, or Austrian, too. We can't
help regarding them as foreigners, and I always distrust foreigners in
politics. Why should they care for England? I ask myself."

"Why, indeed?" said Harding, with irony.

"Have I made myself clearer?" asked Garrow. "I can afford to speak. My
own wife was a Russian. But I was not in political life, and she was an
Ambassador's daughter."

"You think you would feel more sure of Orange's patriotic instinct if he
had chosen an Englishwoman?" said Reckage.

"I am bound to say that he would have shown discretion in settling down
with one of our simple-hearted Saxon girls."

"And who was Mrs. Orange before she married Orange?" asked Harding.

"A widow--a Mrs. Parflete," said Garrow.

"Parflete!" exclaimed Harding. "Mrs. Parflete! But I have met her. She
married Wrexham Parflete, an extraordinary creature. He lived for years
with the Archduke Charles of Alberia. People used to say that Mrs.
Parflete was the Archduke's daughter. I ran across Parflete the other
day in Sicily."

"But he is dead," said Pensee, much agitated; "he drowned himself."

"I cannot help that," repeated Sir Piers. "I met him last week, and he
beat me at ecarte."

"Then it is not the same man," said Reckage, "quite obviously."

"Wrexham Parflete had a wife; I heard her sing at a dinner-party in
Madrid. She was living with the Countess Des Escas; there was a row and
a duel on her account. I never forget names or faces."

"But this looks serious," said Reckage. "Do you quite understand? It's
the sort of thing one hardly dares to think. That is to say if you mean
what I mean. The marriage can't be legal."

The two women turned pale and looked away from each other.

"I mean as much or as little as you like," said Harding. "But Parflete
was alive last Monday."

"But bigamy is so vulgar," observed Lord Garrow. "You must be mistaken.
It is too dreadful!"

"Dreadful, indeed! And a great piece of folly into the bargain. It is
selling the bear's skin before you have killed the bear."

Lady Fitz Rewes glanced piteously at the three men and wrung her hands.

"Don't you see," she exclaimed, "don't you see that if there is the
least doubt of Mr. Parflete's death, we ought to go to them. Some one
must follow them."

"There is that touch of the absurd about it," said Reckage, "which makes
it difficult for a friend to come forward. To pursue a man on his
wedding journey----"

"It is no laughing matter," put in Lord Garrow; "and if the woman has
deceived the poor fellow, it's a monstrous crime."

"Oh, she hasn't; she couldn't deceive him," said Pensee. "I know her
intimately."

"She was considered very clever--at Madrid," said Sir Piers, finely. "To
you she may appear more to be pitied than she really is."

"Don't say such things! I won't hear them. I love her very much."

"Perhaps she is clever enough to appear stupid in public."

"No, no!" Her voice trembled and tears gushed from her eyes. "You will
regret these words. This news will kill her."

"Something must be done," said Sara. "Beauclerk, you ought to follow
them and tell them. Pensee is right."

"This will make a horrid scandal," said Lord Garrow, who was appalled at
the prospect of being mixed up in so disagreeable an affair. "Why not
leave it alone? It is not our business."

"But it is Beauclerk's business, papa. Just put yourself in his place.
Surely that is not asking too much."

"We must avoid everything precipitate," said Reckage; "we mustn't be
over-hasty."

Lady Fitz Rewes wiped her eyes, rose from the table, and began to draw
on her gloves.

"But we must be friends," she said; "if you cannot go to them, I will.
Do you realise the poor child's position? An illegal marriage! She is
the most gentle, beautiful person I ever saw, with the best head, the
purest heart. She professes _nothing_. I judge her by her actions."

"But you must see," said Reckage, "that I can't give Orange all this
pain unless I have something more definite to go on. Sir Piers tells us
that he played cards with Wrexham Parflete last week." He paused.

"Wait a moment," said Harding; "wait a moment. Does any one present know
Parflete's handwriting?"

"I do," said Pensee. "I saw his last letter to his wife. He wrote it
before he committed suicide."

Sir Piers took out his pocket-book, and, from the several papers it
contained, selected a three-cornered note.

"By the merest chance," said he, "I have this with me."

The others unconsciously left their seats and looked over his shoulder
while he smoothed out the sheet. It was dated plainly, "October 7,
1869," and contained the acknowledgment of two L10 notes won at ecarte.

"That is the hand," said Pensee. "One could not mistake it."

"Then this is really very serious," said Lord Reckage, with twitching
lips. "The whole story has had all along something of unreality about
it. Robert seems fated to a renunciant career--colourless,
self-annihilating."

"What will you do?" murmured Pensee, with an imploring gesture. "What
will you do?"

"They leave Southampton at three o'clock," said Reckage; "it is now
half-past two. The steamer goes twice a week only. I can send him a
telegram and follow them overland--by way of Calais."

"Then I must go also," said Pensee firmly. "She will need me. I have had
a presentiment of trouble so long that now I feel 'Here it is come at
last.' I cannot be too thankful to God that it isn't worse."

Nothing showed under the innavigable depths of Sara's eyes. She had
moved to the fireplace and stood there holding one small foot to the
blaze.

"Are you cold?" asked her father anxiously.

"I am ice," she said, "ice!"

Reckage joined her and said, under his voice, "You think I ought to go,
don't you?"

This question--given in a half-whisper--seemed to establish a fresh
intimacy between them. It was the renewal of their old friendship on
deeper terms.

"Yes, you must go," she answered; "and, Beauclerk, write to me and tell
me how he bears it."

"He is accustomed to a repressive discipline on these matters. The
philosophic mind, you know, is never quite in health. Probably, he won't
show much feeling."

His gaze seemed to burn into her face. It was as though she had been
walking in an arbour and suddenly, through some rift in the boughs,
found herself exposed to the scorching sun. She felt dominated by a
force stronger than her own nature. A little afraid, she shrank
instinctively away from him, and as she dared not look up, she did not
see the expression of triumph, mingled with other things, which, for a
moment, lit up Lord Reckage's ordinarily inscrutable countenance.
Lately, he had been somewhat depressed by his encounter with refractory
wills. His horse, his colleagues on the Bond of Association, his future
bride, had showed themselves fatiguing, perhaps worthless, certainly
disheartening and independent accessories to his life. Here, at last,
was some one brilliant, stimulating, by no means self-seeking, Quixotic
in enthusiasms.

"Sara," he said, obeying an impulse which surprised himself, "do you
believe in me?"

This time she gave him a straight glance.

"Yes," she answered. "You might do a great deal if you could forget
yourself for a few months."

Pensee, much troubled and full of thoughts, walked over to them.

"Oh, Sara!" she said, "isn't it terrible? If you could have seen them
both this morning--she looked so beautiful, perfectly lovely--a sight I
never can forget. And now this blow! What man can teach men to
understand the will of God?"




CHAPTER IX


Robert and Brigit were silent with happiness on their way to
Southampton. Side by side they watched the country through the carriage
windows. There had been a fog in London when they left, and the sun, at
intervals, shone out like a live coal among dying embers. All was
obscured; the foot-passengers and passing vehicles seemed black straying
shadows in the atmosphere. But the express emerged at last from the
clinging darkness into autumnal fields, some brown after the harvest,
others studded with hay-ricks. At one point in the landscape they
noticed a flock of sheep drinking at a stream. The boy who guarded them
waved his cap at the train, and this little signal, coming, as it were,
from human nature, gave them a reassurance of the day's reality. Near
Bishopstoke the clouds were white and dense, but, rippling in places,
they disclosed blue stretches of the heaven which, in their masses, they
concealed. Southampton began with small houses. One had a tattered
garden, where a stone copy of the Medicean Venus stood on a patch of
squalid turf near a clothes' line and against an ivy-grown wall. Then
the green sands were reached. The sea, like liquid granite, sparkled in
the distance. Rows of dull dwellings, shops, public-houses, and hotels
came next. The train, with a shriek, rushed into the station. It was
still too early for lunch, so they walked down to the pier, where they
saw several yachts and pleasure-boats at anchor in the harbour, and the
New Forest greenly outlined in the distance. These were the things which
engraved themselves on Brigit's mind. The impressibility of youth is
retentive for outward objects, but the inner mood--the sensation and
idea which make the mental state--lives unconsciously, and is recognised
only in the long process of time. Brigit could have described the scene,
but her emotions did not seem to her, emotions. Absorbed by them, and in
them, she neither abandoned herself to the hour nor asked herself what
the hour held. She and the hour were one--a single note; and the joy she
felt at being with Robert, leaning on his arm and hearing his voice, was
so simple that, even if a psychologist of the deepest experience had
been able to probe into the workings of her mind, he would have found
nothing there to analyse. Hers was a child's affection--the first love
of a heart still immature, and not yet made suspicious of itself by
contact with others less innocent. Parflete had been too worldly-wise
not to guard and value--at its true price--a disposition so graceful in
its very essence. She had a knowledge of affairs beyond her years, yet
her own instincts, her education, her few friendships, had kept her
curiously ignorant of evil, of much also that is neither good nor evil,
but merely human. The sombre sentimentality which lurks in most young
girls of seventeen was not in her character at all, and in its stead she
possessed the gaiety and carelessness of feeling which belongs to
imaginative rather than to sensuous natures. A boy-like spirit showed
itself in all her words, movements, moods; her womanhood still slept,
and thus, while her intelligence made her an unusual companion and her
beauty presented a constant appeal to all that is romantic, it was
inevitable that melancholy and reserve should enter largely into the
passionate love which Robert felt for her. He told himself that he would
not have her different. The glance of her eyes, which stirred him
strangely to the very depths of his being, never varied in its sweetness
nor its calm. When her lightest touch could sway his body and spirit,
she, unconscious of her power, would press his hand against her cheek
and talk about the geraniums in the convent garden or the chances of the
Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet--and
yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some
straying angel--some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and
intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at
the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor
control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had
ever realised. She cared for him--how could he doubt it? But was the
indefinable, indispensable feeling absent?

"Do you remember our journey from Catesby?" she asked suddenly. "I
slept. Wasn't I dull? Did you mind?"

No one could see them. He stooped and kissed her fragrant, animated
face. "I wish," said he, "I wish that you were not quite such a child."

The feeling of solitariness weighed upon his soul with a crushing weight
unknown until that day--the day of days, his wedding day. Heretofore he
had craved for solitude because it had been full of her imagined
companionship. Now that she actually lived and talked by his side, the
fancied image of her paled, vanished. The real creature was adorable,
but, for some reason, maddening, and not, at all events, the being of
his fancy. Their old relations--ethereal and exquisite, no doubt--now
seemed an empty mockery, self-deluding foolishness. He coloured at the
remembrance of all that Disraeli had hinted, and Reckage had brutally
declared, on the large topic of idealism in passion. A man, in spite of
all determinations to be uncomplaining, knows the How much and How
little that he may demand, merely as a man, from any given advantage or
disadvantage in existence. Robert, hating himself, condemning himself,
was conscious, in spite of himself, that Brigit's affection for him was
not love in the full human sense of the word. He had exchanged an
ordinary self-restraint for an impossibly false position. She could
inspire his life, but could she enter into it, be it, live it with him
daily? Would there not have to be great reservations, half statements,
and, worst of all, a subtle kind of hypocrisy? He reproached himself for
selfishness, yet the fear came and it remained. He had captured the
rainbow and married the goddess. Were there not many legends
illustrating this folly?--stories of men who had married divinities and
perished, not because the divinities were at fault, but because mortals
must wed with mortals. The sight of his wife's beauty caused a sudden,
violent irritation. He wished she had none, for then, perhaps, he
thought he would have been satisfied, more than content, in the placid
consideration of her charms of character. He found himself reduced to
the absurd predicament of deciding to banish her from his thoughts--a
last sophism which showed him, all too clearly, how wretched he was.
Their silence, which had been due in the first instance to the
sufficient delight of being in each other's company, became that long
pause which arises from an unutterable embarrassment. Brigit felt by
instinct some change in Robert's mood, but as she could not account for
it then, her sympathy failed. The keen salt air filled her with its own
free buoyancy; her delicate skin flushed in the wind; she forgot the
nervous strain of the morning, the awfulness of the grey chapel, the new
state of things, griefs that were past, responsibilities that were to
come. She turned to Orange as a child would turn to its inseparable
comrade, and clapped her hands with amusement at an organ-grinder with a
monkey and a dog whom she noticed sitting at the end of the pier,
waiting, apparently, for one of the excursion steamers bound for the
Isle of Wight.

"Pennies for the monkey, Robert," she cried; "a lot of pennies! And then
we must have our lunch. May I have some chicken and one of those very
droll, very stupid, English rice puddings? Please let me have one....
And may I kiss the dog? It is a nice little dog--quite as nice as
Pensee's Fidelio. Now I am going to talk to the monkey."

She ran toward the little animal, who was shivering, pathetic and
grotesque, in a military cap and red petticoat trimmed with yellow
braid. The dog, which was a young pug with excellent points, gave
Brigit, after many entreaties, his paw. She addressed the monkey in
Italian, and laughed till she cried at its absurdities. Robert looked
on, consumed by a sensation which he recognised, with much shame, as
jealousy. He thought the pug dull and the monkey revolting. Yet she
kissed one, and showered heavenly smiles on both.

"I did not know that you were so fond of animals," he said, as they
walked to the hotel for lunch.

"I am not," she answered frankly, "as a rule. But when I am with you I
feel so happy that I want to kiss everything--the ground, and the
trees, and chairs, and poodle dogs, and the whole world!"

"Then why not--me?"

She looked at him, blushed a little, and waited some moments before she
replied.

"I don't know," she said at last. "It must be because I am not in the
habit of doing so. I am not accustomed to you yet. I keep thinking 'I
shall wake up in a minute and he will be miles away.' Can't you
understand? So I am pretending to myself all the time that you are not
really here."

"I see."

"No, dearest, you don't quite understand; and you are a little
disappointed in me because I seem--I must seem--rather flippant. I
daren't be serious--I daren't. I daren't believe that I am your wife."

"But why not?"

She shook her head, and her whole face became clouded by the old,
terrible, unnatural sadness which he knew so much better than her
laughter.

"I am not used to joy," she said. "Perhaps, if we ever get to Heaven,
our first impulse will be to run back again to Purgatory, where we are
more at home!"

"You have too much wit, darling, to be happy anywhere!"

"No! no! I don't ask to be conventionally happy, but I want you always.
That is all ... you, always, on any terms--on a rag-heap, in a storm,
with jackals howling at us!"

"What a picture!"

"My idea of unalloyed bliss, or, at least, the only one I have ever
permitted myself. I can even believe that might be realised." A smile
hovered again about her lips, but she looked steadily ahead, as though
she were still resolved not to reassure herself, by any too-frequent
glances, of his much-loved presence.

The peculiar tenderness of her voice was in itself a charm against
ill-humour. A rush of bitter self-reproach told Robert that his
dissatisfaction had been the inevitable result of too many blessings on
a base nature. He tried to speak; he watched instead, with a desperate,
eager gaze, the play of her expressive features.

"I wonder," she said, "what our life is to be? Not that I wish to pry
into the future, but, for some reason, I can never feel settled. Every
morning is a surprise. I think, too, about your character ... your
career. Have I helped you, or have I been a hindrance? I am perverse,
capricious--not an angel. No human influence can help me very much. I
must depend on the discipline of God. Oh, if I could know all that He
wants me to do!"

"Most of us have that desire, Brigit. At least it is better to be
damned, in the world's opinion, trying to do the will of God than
saved--doing nothing! One has to take a good many chances--even the
chance of displeasing Him--if it comes to a crisis."

"Many people would call that reckless."

"Let them call it anything," said the young man; "names do not matter.
The ghastly, unspeakable dread is to be timorous, halting, the creature
of indecision."

"We are too much alike," she sighed. "Oh, Robert, if we did not suffer
horribly within ourselves when we do wrong, I believe we should both
defy every law in the world! I am a born rebel."

More than a note of her mother's insolence was in the speech, but the
whole spirit of the dead actress seemed to possess Brigit for that
moment. Her being rippled, as it were, with the new disturbance, just as
a pond will tremble to its edges at the mere dip of a swallow's wing.
The artistic hatred of all restraint and the wild desire of liberty were
the imperious passions of her heart--more vehement than any other
feeling--even her love for Orange.

"I could fight," she said, "a visible devil, but this struggle with
moods and tastes is deadening."

"What are the moods and tastes?" he asked.

"I cannot describe them well. But music calls me; I hear it trilling,
and sobbing, and whispering everywhere; and sometimes it is so loud and
so beautiful that I wonder why every one else doesn't stop to listen.
They never do. So I sing back my answer. It is silent singing. You would
only wonder why I was so quiet all at once."

"But I have heard you sing."

"Not with my real voice, Robert. It is stronger than it used to be."
She checked herself and hesitated, stopped by a sudden scruple--a sort
of delicacy. She thought nothing at all of her beauty and never of her
fortune; but in giving Robert her voice, and the nameless ambitions
which enveloped it, she was conscious that she had made, in some way, a
renunciation.

"Say what you were going to say, dearest?"

"I cannot forget," she exclaimed desperately, "that mama was an actress.
And I remember some of the nights at the theatre.... I liked the
theatre.... I believe I could act.... I have learned the whole of
_Phedre_ and the whole of _Juliet_. That is why I live."

This avowal of her secret over-ruling instinct set free the sanguine
strength which circumstances had imprisoned, but could not destroy, in
her character. The constant effort of hiding from all observation the
irrepressible yearnings of a talent that would not be denied, had given
her that quality of mysteriousness, of dreamy habits of thought, of
languor, which, even to Robert, had looked as though she might find this
earth too rough to live on. But the despair which comes from fighting,
unsuccessfully, the world, is not that appearance of weakness which is
the result of fighting--more or less effectively--one's own energy. In
this latter issue the beaten foe joins forces obediently enough with the
conqueror, till at last the opposing elements are directed, whether for
good or evil, by one will.

"So you want to go on the stage," said Orange quietly.

She turned to him and saw, with anguish, the deep amazement his words
had not expressed.

"No," she said, "no. I have you instead. I want to devote myself to
you--to exist for you."

"Oh, don't you see, my dear child, that this is a kind of--of pity--of
anything you like, except the one thing----"

"I adore you, Robert. Oh, I can't get at what I want to say! Any talk
about love always sounds very stilted or hollow. I only know that I want
to live intensely in all that concerns you; that just to think of you
makes me perfectly happy. When I said that learning _Phedre_ and
_Juliet_ was the reason I lived, I was thinking of the time when I had
no right to think of you. Of course I loved you always, from the
beginning. It began at Chambord when I first met you. I very seldom say
these things, and it is better that they should remain unsaid for the
most part. But you must never doubt me, and I feel to-day, in spite of
all we know about each other and all we have suffered, that you are
doubting me now. You fear I don't know my own mind. Isn't this the
trouble?"

The intuition which comes to men and women through suffering has always
the certain sharpness of a surgeon's knife. It may be a reassurance to
have the inmost thought plucked at by some loving spirit, and yet it is
seldom that the touch can be given without inflicting agony. Orange
could not reply at once. In his resolve to be unselfish--to put aside
that personal equation which was nothing less than his whole nature--he
had to steel his heart to her, contradicting painfully, by curt, unfelt
phrases, the promptings of a soul turned in upon itself, desolate and
confused.

"I have been selfish and thoughtless," he said abruptly; "a missed
vocation is irreplaceable and it is also indestructible. You hear the
echo of the call as long as you live--perhaps afterwards. At your age
you could feel, but you could not wholly understand your talents. If you
had told me all this before----"

She laughed with real joyousness and clung more closely to his arm.

"I didn't tell you," she exclaimed, "because you would have said just
what you are saying now. You are the one. All the rest is a means of
forgetting you. It is something resembling happiness to be alone in the
turmoil of the world with one unspoilt illusion. This illusion in my
case is a little idea that I could be a great actress--perhaps! Don't
look grave, Robert. It makes you sad when I talk this way."

"Those who can be disillusioned have no convictions. Disillusion is the
failure of a half-belief. I learnt that long ago. But I hate the very
word in your mouth. Woe to us both if we cannot be resolute now. I
could have waited--had I seen any reason to wait. Time could make no
difference in my love. As it is, I have stolen you from yourself. But
now I have stolen you I will keep you. I cannot--cannot give you back
again to anything or anybody."

He spoke with that almost mocking tenderness which dissembles its
passion. At the practical difficulty which now confronted him, all that
was merely romantic and speculative in his soul took flight, as birds
that are frightened from a quiet orchard by the yelp of dogs. He became
aware that he was bitterly independent of the joys he had once found in
the mere spectacle of the exterior world--the play of light and shade,
the changing visions of the sky, the charm of the earth. His own
thoughts were now the sole realities, and the dulness which suddenly
came over his vision for outward things seemed to render it the more
acute and concentrated for the things of the mind. As distant hills and
tree tops show most distinctly before a storm, so every possibility
which can arise from a conflict of duties stood out with a decisive
clearness for his consideration. He had married in haste a child-bride.
There was no blinking the fact. She had the strenuous religious fibre,
and with it real Bohemian blood. She was also at the yielding age, when
a dominant influence could do much to divert or modify every natural
trait. He could not doubt that he had this power over her then. How far,
and to what purpose, should he exert it? For himself he wished to
discourage any hankering on her part for public life, and, most of all,
public life behind the footlights, under an artificial sky. No one knew
better than he that there are certain things of love, of nobility, of
temperament, of pride, in certain lives which the world at large would
rather calumniate than comprehend. People in general clung to their
opinions not because they were true, but because they were their own,
and among pretty general opinions--particularly in the year 1869--there
was a strong prejudice against handsome young women who went on the
stage. It was not in him to consider--even as an egoistic reflection to
be put aside--how far Brigit's project, carried into action, could
effect his own political career. His apprehensions were all for her and
her own content.

"Promise me," he said, "that you will always tell me when the acting
mood comes over you. Never fight it, never try to resist it, give it the
liberty to die, but also the right to live. There is an old Hindoo
proverb: 'Find the flower which can bloom in the silence that
follows--not that which precedes--the storm.' This applies perfectly to
a talent or a vocation. If the mood is there, in spite of fatigue, or
discouragement, or other claims--happiness for that matter--you may
depend that it is the ruling motive of your life and not to be
vanquished. You must follow the bent or you will suffer--suffer till you
die of it."

"How? in what way?"

"Either in your vanity or your conscience; either by the world's
judgment on your conduct or by your own estimate of your conduct. You
have no vanity, so the world doesn't count. But you have a conscience,
and that counts for all!"

He had not calculated, and he could not have foreseen, the effect of his
words. Her eyes filled with tears.

"My dearest," she said, "don't you see how trivial everything is to me
in comparison with you? But I dare not love you so much as I can! So I
encourage other enthusiasms--out of fear. Sometimes it seems as though
the extraordinary, impossible ideal would be to have you with me for
ever, and be an actress as well. But that is out of the question. And if
I had my choice--if I could be as great as Rachel or Mrs. Siddons, or
live with you on my dear rag-heap, with the jackals howling--do you
think that I would hesitate, that I could hesitate?"

"If I believed you I should be a dreadful coxcomb!"

"Risk the coxcomb," she said. "I can!"

A clanging bell and the noise of traffic on the quay recalled them to
the moment. They had barely time to reach the steamer and get on board.
A strong, cold breeze was blowing; the sun shone full on the sea, which,
near the horizon, was as green as the sky on a summer evening. But
clouds were gathering in the north-west, and the peculiar brightness
which presages rain lent a fugitive brilliancy to the atmosphere. The
town and its spires glittered; the water, frothing round the
paddle-wheels, sent its shining spray upon the brown boards of the
wharf. Brigit kissed her hands toward France.

"Soon," she exclaimed, "soon I can kiss its ground. How I love my
country and the place where you lived, Robert, as a boy!"




CHAPTER X


Lady Fitz Rewes had determined to prevent the marriage of Lord Reckage
with Agnes Carillon. She could not forget the dreadful scene with Sara
when that poor girl was endeavouring to reconcile herself to the Duke of
Marshire's proposal. Pensee had studied each person concerned in the
possible tragedy. She saw that Agnes was by no means serene, that the
portrait by Rennes somehow made no progress, that Reckage was feverish
and excitable. His bearing toward Sara during the lunch confirmed
Pensee's suspicion that the love which had existed between them as boy
and girl was still unextinguished on either side. He would have been
less than mortal, she thought, if he had not felt, with all the
bitterness of a conscious fool, that he had missed his true destiny.
Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements
his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate,
invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of
strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its
effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be
supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensee that Sara had behaved very
naturally, very touchingly, through the trying conversation on the
subject of rising men and their marriages. Her demeanour had been
unsurpassable. But it was not in nature that a woman who understood a
man could look on, inactive and indifferent, while he fettered himself
with some damaging influence. Perhaps her ladyship felt the situation
the more keenly, because, much as she loved Mrs. Parflete, she could not
bring herself to think that she was the wife for Robert. She had spent
many weeks refusing admittance to this thought, yet prudence was
prudence, and, by virtue of its stability, it prevailed. The union, even
viewed in the most favourable light, had always seemed imprudent. It was
too hurried. Shocking, mortifying as the possibility of its being
illegal was, Pensee's conviction that Almighty God ordered all things
for the best seemed less a faith and more a matter of pure reason than
was usual in the ordinary run of hard cases which made demands upon her
piety. "Two diamonds do not easily form cup and socket," was an old
saying in her home circle. The more she had seen of Brigit Parflete the
more she had been struck with her--struck with her moodiness, struck
with her contempt for received opinions, her vigour and independence of
will. Was she the wife to further the advance of a man of extraordinary
ability, already much handicapped on the world's course by a proud
spirit, a reckless, impetuous disdain of creatures generally considered
the pink of human excellence? He was passionately in love, and the
strength of this sentiment carried, for the time, every thought of his
being along with it. But love was not unalterable. The change would
surely come. The fever and folly, the exaltation and ardours would fade
into a sacred affection--an instinctive tenderness; yet other interests,
as vital, and in their season more absorbing, would flock into his life.
What then?

Pensee and Reckage did not exchange many words till they found
themselves alone, face to face, in the railway carriage bound for Dover.
Then they looked with wonder at each other, stupefied at the errand on
which they were bound, and the strangeness of the whole proceeding.
Reckage noticed that his companion was attired so correctly and with
such discretion that no one could have told she was a pretty woman. Her
veil was not unusually thick, yet it disguised every charm of expression
and feature. He had bought her a novel, some papers, and a few
magazines; she turned these over listlessly, and murmured, as the train
sped along--

"Of course, I had to come. No one will say a word when the circumstances
are known. I hope poor Renshaw is comfortable in the next carriage."

Reckage replied--

"You have behaved like an angel!"

He probably but half understood Pensee's character: he underrated her
intellect, and he misconstrued her friendship for Orange into a weak
infatuation. Agnes Carillon shared his view on this point, for, as he
and his future bride could never be confidential with each other, they
managed an appearance of intimacy by discussing with great freedom the
private affairs of their friends. Agnes, in the fervour of godliness,
had even seen much that was reprehensible in Lady Fitz Rewes's devotion
to a man who had no idea of marrying her. She had declared that she
could not understand it--an attitude pleasing to her fancy and
gratifying to her pride. Reckage had thought it was not quite clear that
the danger was immediate. Such was his feeling now toward Pensee,
although he was conscious of a certain curiosity with regard to her
motive in taking Brigit's part with such magnificent self-effacement.
This seemed to him unnatural; and although she had impressed him with
the highest opinion of her kindness, he could not believe that a woman
of genuinely tender sensibilities could have approached such an
altruistic height. She was an excellent creature--as creatures went, he
thought, but hard in a feeble way. Then he closed his eyes and called up
the elusive image of Sara de Treverell--very dark, very handsome, with
her superb black hair reaching to her knees--as he had often seen it
when she was a little girl--her blue eyes shining with a strange light,
her lips smiling, her white arms held out....

"Sara may not be a happy girl," said Pensee suddenly, "but she is a
clever one."

Reckage started from his reverie.

"How odd!" he exclaimed, surprised into candour. "I was thinking of her
at that very moment."

Pensee had read as much on his face, but she did not tell him so.

"I feel for her very much," she observed instead. "She must be the
greatest possible comfort to her father, although he may not realise it.
Yet he is forcing on the engagement to Marshire. She keeps up in the
most courageous way, but she has ideals, and no persuasion will induce
her to change them."

He turned red, and said, looking out of the window--

"Ideals do no harm when, for some reason or other, we are unable to
carry them out."

"I cannot imagine what she will do, or how she will bear her life if
things continue as they are."

"What things?"

"She is like a slave to Lord Garrow. She is with him constantly, reading
to him, and doing everything for him. She will be a cruel loss to his
home when she marries."

"I rather revel at the thought of the dismay which will attend her final
capture of Marshire."

"I used to hope that you perhaps----"

He glanced up and smiled with an air of satisfaction.

"I don't like the appearance of measuring myself against Marshire....
But--but he certainly seems, in character, the culminating point of
mediocrity! In fact, Mr. Disraeli, whom I seldom quote, so described
him."

"What a husband for that brilliant, affectionate girl! She likes all
that is simple and grand. A real love--if it were a happy one--would
make her even more charming, and if it caused her suffering, it would
make her even more noble. But failing this, there will be a frightful
void in her life."

Reckage, whose imagination began to play round this thought, replied
with unusual seriousness--

"I should be horribly grieved to see any declension from her better
nature. I think I am getting to think less of mere social power. I feel
more than I used to do that, if one could literally _live_ one's
theories on moral strength, it would be a complete refutation of these
ideas about the influence of money or a big accidental position. Old
Harding was right when he said at luncheon to-day that disinterestedness
counted very highly in the popular vote. The point about Henry Fox's
elopement with Caroline Lennox was sound."

"It would not have been sound," said Pensee, "if Caroline Lennox had
been a third-rate woman. A man can be desperate so long as his choice,
on the whole, justifies, either by her beauty, or her talents, or
something uncommon, an extreme measure. Now, Robert may not have made a
wise choice, but it is certainly a distinguished one. It can be
understood and it commands respect."

"Oh, yes, his is a thorough-going emotion, and one couldn't find a fault
with its object. A strong man is always a man who feels strongly _and_
who can carry his feeling into action. Robert, with all his mysticism,
is never subject to the deep depressions of spirit which usually afflict
men of his gifts. He does not know what it is to be languid; or to have
invincible indecisions. He will die game--even if he does know German
metaphysic backwards!"

She was astonished.

"How well you understand him!"

He leant forward a little and adopted a more confidential tone--

"Sara spoke of him at lunch. Her judgment of men and affairs--for so
young a woman--is nothing short of amazing. I attribute it to the
Asiatic streak on her mother's side. It is a kind of second-sight. What
a wife for a Prime Minister! And Marshire, a fellow of middling ability
and no experience, has had the sense to perceive her qualities!... My
feelings can't be easily defined, nor, indeed, is it necessary they
should.... I have gone so far that I cannot see anything for it but to
go on."

"You mean--in your own marriage?"

He sighed profoundly, remained for several minutes silent, and finally
roused himself with a painful effort.

"There are some griefs which can defy any consolation save that of time.
Time ultimately cures everything. It is a matter of history that I was
once very much attached to Sara."

"I know," murmured Pensee. "I know."

He covered his eyes with one hand and looked through his fingers at her
face, asking himself by what transition he could best arrive at a frank
exposition of his embarrassed sentiments. It seemed to him that she was
intelligent as well as trustworthy, and he felt impelled to call in her
assistance, being sure that, in any cause where love could be pleaded,
she would show a judicious leniency.

"If you have not observed that I am still--too interested, you have not
observed with your usual sagacity," said he.

"I think--if I may say so--that time seems only to deepen a sorrow of
that kind."

"Particularly when it is associated--as in this case--with a certain
self-reproach. In times of trial my pen is my refuge. I could not write
for a year after I had decided--irrevocably as I believed--that Sara and
I could not make each other happy."

"Then you never actually proposed to her? There was never any tacit
understanding?"

"Never. And if there be any part of my conduct in life upon which I can
look with entire satisfaction, it is my behaviour with regard to Sara. I
did not mislead her in any way. I was even over-scrupulous, and
purposely avoided opportunities of meeting. I say this in order that you
may know how very determined a man's will must be--if he does not wish
to be selfish. A course of struggling is miserable indeed. I spared her
any knowledge of my misery."

"She might have been happier had she known of it! Last year she remained
entirely alone; and solitude is full of bad things--it is very
dangerous, however much one is accustomed to it."

"Poor girl! But I could not, in honour, suffer a false impression to be
formed. As a matter of fact, my family wouldn't hear of the match. There
is no denying that they were set on my marrying Agnes."

At last he had been able to mention her. He leant back and relied on his
companion's tact to elaborate the theme.

Pensee murmured--

"Dear Agnes! If there are storms, they won't come from her side. She is
of a very elevated spirit----"

He winced, but she continued--

"Generous, sternly honest, greatly esteemed by every one. Neither pique
nor passion nor petty feelings could ever influence her mind. She is the
most angelic, good woman I ever met--she is one to whom one may
complain, and be a bore. She has such utter patience!"

"You would not be impressed by professions, nor am I very clever at
making them," said he, "but you know, by sympathy, that my affection for
her is--is the heroic feeling of devotion which has also a kind of
exclusiveness----"

He could not finish the sentence.

"It leads you to imagine that you could never survive her loss," said
Pensee gravely. "But need you lose her--as a friend?" Something in his
countenance encouraged her to pursue this train of thought. "Agnes has
the deepest admiration for your qualities. No doubt, you truly realise
the high standard of character which she would hope for in one to whom
she gave her love. You have proved yourself worthy to call out her best
feelings."

Reckage was very touched by this tribute.

"And _her_ best feelings," said he, "ought to make us--at our best--very
humble."

Pensee lifted her veil just above her eyes, clasped her hands tightly
together, and kept her earnest glance full upon his.

"I believe," she continued, "that if it were in man, or woman, to
command the heart, you would have her entire affection. I believe she is
unhappy. During the last week she has had many ups and downs. She has
passed with astonishing rapidity from the lowest despair to the height
of joy. She has tried to distract her mind by incessant occupation. But
you know her manner--it is transparent near the surface, difficult to
sound in its depths."

"Yes, she has a childlike openness--up to a certain point."

"I can only tell you, therefore, what I think, judging as a woman, by
outward signs. I seem to detect a sort of self-doubt--as though she
feared making some error. She has become of late strangely intense and
vivid--she is fascinated by books, and drawn to music, as she never was
before. Perhaps she sees that you give her a priceless, beautiful
friendship which must indeed be flattering. Yet--yet in marriage
friendship is not enough. So she is acquiring a stock of interests which
are impersonal."

Loyalty to Agnes forbade any reference to David Rennes. She had no
intention of giving the least hint of her own private conviction on the
subject. She desired merely that Reckage should learn how the engagement
might be broken off without giving unimaginable grief to the young lady.
The move under this aspect was skilful and successful. Reckage received
her words as a subtle appeal to his honour and kindness.

He said at once--

"I am glad you have told me this. I could bear my own mistakes. I could
not bear hers. Let me look at the step which I have taken! The choice is
for life. Agnes is inflexibly conscientious and self-denying. Several
years of attachment have tried us both. She knows my faults; I know
where her"--he paused for a moment--"her qualities might clash with
mine. We spoke of this together; we considered every circumstance that
could, by any remote chance, weigh against our common happiness."

Pensee shook her head.

"Of course, that was right," she said doubtfully.

"It is no easy matter to get a promise from Agnes," he went on; "but
when once given it is inviolate. This throws a grisly responsibility
upon me. I must risk everything, if I am to do anything. You have
expressed a dread which I have been endeavouring to stifle. I am making
her wretched."

"I don't say that _you_ are making her wretched; I say she seems
disturbed and unsettled when she ought to be full of the brightest
hopes."

"Quite so. I fear the unsettlement is exceedingly great. A neutrality on
your part is all I could in reason expect; but your counsel in such a
grave matter----"

Pensee summoned all her energy, and breathed a little prayer for the
well-being of the two women whose lives were at stake.

"I saw Agnes this morning," she said, speaking at a rapid pace; "she
came up for some shopping, and she returned home directly after tea."

"She ought to have told me that she was in town," he exclaimed.

"My dear Beauclerk, you know her sweetness! She said, 'I don't wish to
take up his time; an engagement ought not to be a servitude.' That is
the reason why she did not tell you."

"She ought to have told me," he repeated. "Such extreme delicacy was
most uncalled for. It wasn't even friendly. When we were old friends,
and nothing more, she would have told me."

"Yes, when you were friends."

"I think she gave me a nasty rap in so acting; I do, indeed. One would
infer that I had failed in some ordinary attentiveness. It is a distinct
reprimand."

"You are quite wrong. She meant it in the noblest way."

"Then it is a desperately near thing between noble conduct and a
downright snub. I can't help lashing out about it."

In Pensee's own private perception this outburst of temper was no bad
sign. It convinced her, at least, of the sincerity of his feelings
towards Agnes and his genuine desire to behave well at every point in
their relationship.

"Don't you understand," she said, "that Agnes _dares_ not love you. This
being the case, I cannot see that she could go on in what might be
called a natural way. Will you bear with me, and, if I am indiscreet,
forgive me? She wants all the sympathy and support she can get. She is
suffering very much from want of courage. She trusts, perhaps, in her
friends' prayers. It seems as though something very momentous were going
on, but that she has nothing to do but to wait for it. I think there
may be a way out still; God may overrule people's hearts."

She had never intended to say so much, and she trembled with an
excitement which she could not subdue.

"I must admit," said Reckage, "that for some time I have had a
conviction, weaker or stronger, but, on the whole, constantly growing,
that Agnes and I are unsuited to each other. I am too much accustomed to
this idea to feel pain at it."

"O, it makes my heart ache--I mean so much painfulness for every one
concerned!"

"This conviction must, sooner or later, lead me to action. The world is
indulgent to the impetuous, because they appear strong; and it is most
severe to those who hesitate, because hesitation is taken for a sign of
weakness. Lookers-on have no patience with moral combats--and least of
all in affairs of this kind. But no opinion will force me to do what I
do not think right. If our engagement is a mistake, I don't intend to
'lump it,' as they say. We must mend the evil. And, thank God, it is not
too late. The merciful part is that in relieving my own mind I shall
also greatly relieve hers. It is clear she doesn't love me. This last
act proves the fact conclusively."

Pensee did not agree with this, but she remained silent, fearing lest a
rash word should spoil her good work.

"For a long, long time," he continued, "my constant question has been,
'Can this last? is it a delusion?' But I do not shut my eyes now. I knew
they were all wrong at home when they made out that she was in love with
me, and expected me to propose. We are both the victims of an
impertinent, if well-meant, interference--what Robert calls 'the
jabbering of the damned.' Poor Robert, we are forgetting him. I am
ashamed to talk so much about myself."

"In his case, I see no help but resignation to the will of God," said
Pensee.

"But that resignation is an awful thing," said Reckage. "It is a shade
better than the atheism of despair; yet only a shade better."

By degrees Pensee was learning why Robert had such a strong, tenacious
attachment to this man. He was always faithful to his mood. All he did
and all he said represented accurately all he thought and all he felt.
Some live a dual life--he lived but one; and, with his faults,
peculiarities, and egoism, there was never the least dissimulation. It
was true that, if occasion required, he could hold his tongue; but he
abhorred tact and hated doctrines of expediency--everything, in fact,
which put any restraint upon the "development of his inclinations."

The train was now approaching Dover. He decided to put his own troubles
aside, and, out of mere decency, concentrate his thoughts on the severe
trial in store for Orange.

"This business about Parflete," said he, "is a great blow. One becomes
indifferent to what is said of, or done to, one's self; but that all
this uncommon, saddening, sickening trouble should come upon Robert is
too bad. It seems a kind of hacking and hacking, bit by bit."

"You are certainly very fond of him," said Pensee.

"Yes, I am. He's so dependable."

Pensee engaged a private cabin for the crossing, and she retired there
with her maid. Too tired and over-strung to sleep, she lay down, closed
her eyes, and lived again through the many fatiguing, agitating moments
of that day. Her affection for Orange had been so steeped in
hopelessness from the hour, months before, when he told her of his love
for Brigit, that the wedding of these two had been a relief rather than
a final anguish. The agonising possibilities which had sometimes darted
into her mind would never again surprise her: the questions which she
had always striven to prohibit were no longer even in existence. He had
taken the unredeemable step: he was married. Jealousy had no part in her
suffering. Robert had never given her the smallest right to feel
slighted, or neglected, or abandoned. Some women are jealous by
temperament, but the greater number are jealous only when their trust is
insulted or their dignity brought down to the humiliating struggle for a
lost empire. Empire over Orange she had never possessed or claimed: she
could feel no bitterness, therefore, at the thought of the small place
she occupied in his destiny. The sorrow which cut and severed her heart
was loneliness. She felt that, after the wedding, she could hardly do
anything or take interest in anything. It seemed as if the waters were
gathered in heaps on either side; things, she thought, could not be
better, or worse. God was with her still, and her children--her dear
children--were with her still, but she could not disguise the greatness
of the loss. Her single wish, as far as she dared have a wish, had been
to benefit Robert and to win his confidence. She had seen his mind
working in various directions, and although she was not, in the faintest
sense, his fit companion intellectually, she had a knowledge and
experience of life which made her friendship valuable--a gift worth
offering to any man. She had been able to advise him. Brigit now had
even this privilege also. "I shall seem an intruder," thought Pensee,
again and again.

It was altogether a terrible crisis. How she should struggle through all
the parts of it, or what she should be when it was over, she could not
trust herself to say. The world seemed too heavy a burden to be fought
against. Yet with what thoughts and aspirations and earnest prayers she
had stood by Brigit's side at the altar rails. She had been given a
supernatural strength for the marriage ceremony. She was by nature and
before all things, from first to last, unalterably a good friend, and at
that moment of intensest difficulty the sight of Robert's happiness had
made her oblivious to every other consideration. Glad tears had risen to
her eyes. She had been swayed by one feeling--a deep, sincere
thankfulness that his love-story, which had promised sorrow only from
the very beginning, was ending, unexpectedly, so well. She might have
feared that he was changing one form of unhappiness for another, but she
knew his impatient spirit, and, knowing it, she could not imagine that
any earthly pain could try him so sorely as a lifelong separation from
the one woman he loved--loved to the pitch of madness.

And then--in one moment--the strange tidings came which drove her from
the stupor of resignation to fevers of anxiety more consuming than any
she had ever felt before. A great flame, successive flames, of terror
swept over her, as she feigned placid sleep in the little cabin, at the
thought of the news poor Reckage would have to break on the morrow. How
would Robert bear it? That he would act a noble and true part she could
not doubt. But at a certain degree of suffering, the strongest man can
think of nothing except himself, and she felt already, in anticipation,
the dumb torture she would have to endure in looking on, helpless and
unnoticed, at an agony which she could neither share nor relieve. The
fear of losing him had been dreadful, but it was even more dreadful to
know that although she might have, after all, a certain right now to
offer him sympathy, she could never make him happy, that she could never
hope to learn the secret regrets, griefs, and torments, the unspoken
broodings which would surely enough prey upon his spirit. She pictured
herself sitting at his side, or walking with him, for hours--he absorbed
in his own sorrowful thoughts, she striving vainly to distract him by a
tinkling prattle on every topic except the one nearest his heart. Oh,
how fearfully wide asunder they were! A sensation of the enormous
distance which can exist between two souls in daily companionship filled
her with a sickening, shivering heaviness. She thought she would have to
cry out because of the slow fire which seemed to scorch her dry and
aching eyes. Robert would never really need her, never really care about
her. This new trouble would take him farther away than ever. He would
burn all his ships, and any poor little tenderness he might have had in
the past for her, with them. Some great revulsion would take place in
his character; he would perhaps grow silent, reserved, enigmatic, his
face would show to the world the terrible, false, unknowable peace which
is the veil of the dead. It was useless to smooth her difficulties which
existed. It was foolish and wrong to encourage herself in unreal ideas
about him. It was best always to be straightforward and admit the
truth--no matter how bitter. And yet he had been kind and helpful to her
in a way in which scarce any one else could have been. She clung to the
belief that she would be able to do something to make his hour of trial
less severe. The hope which insinuates itself into every unrequited love
still lingered. He could at least always talk to her about Brigit: that
common memory would be a constant link between them. She had earned his
esteem, and perhaps with his esteem an affection deeper than he himself
realised. Under the pressure of a sudden and tragical necessity, he
would turn to her with the certainty that she would not fail him. She
was modest enough about her own powers. A remark she had once heard
Reckage pass, to the effect that religious women of devoted lives were
unhappily conspicuous, as a rule, for feebleness of mind and strength of
prejudice, haunted her as a kind of doom from which there was no appeal.
She knew, too, the verdict usually passed on those of either sex who
have the courage to maintain an unselfish attitude whether toward God or
some fellow-creature. But here she comforted herself by deciding that
her utter isolation in this universe rested on the fact that she did not
much deserve to be loved by anybody. This granted--not without a
pang--she felt the signs of weariness in her heart, but none of
wavering. She resolved to be foolish in the eyes of the self-satisfied.

Lord Reckage meanwhile was pacing the deck. His conversation with Pensee
had cast a darkness over his spirit. He had made up his mind, weeks
before, that the marriage years of his life would be the best, the most
distinguished, and most useful. With the utmost pains he had chosen a
wife. He had acted with the greatest caution in no weak or superficial,
or haphazard, or fitful way. Nevertheless, the outlook was dismal. This
first step in decline from his ideal caused him much pain and
restlessness, and led him to think cynically of many doctrines to which,
in serene moments, he had unconditionally subscribed. He compared his
own case with Robert's. Robert, in his headstrong passion, had certainly
rattled up sleeping lions, heedless of all consequences, and in defiance
of every warning. He had now met, poor fellow, with an appalling
chastisement, but could any one pretend that he had not brought it, to a
great extent, upon himself? He (Reckage), however, had behaved, from
first to last, in an unexceptionable manner. He had studiously avoided
the one girl of whom he was inclined to be immoderately fond. It was
true that he had practised this restraint less in her interest than his
own. But this was because he feared--as every creature will fear by
instinct its mortal enemy--the power of an ardent attachment. His mind
had revolted in a panic at the thought of becoming dependent on a
woman's humours. The noblest of the sex were capricious, and far and
away the best course was to select a partner whose unavoidable nonsense
would leave one, merely from indifference, undisturbed. Sara de
Treverell, in the past, had been, by her vagaries, directly responsible
for several sleepless nights, and a sleepless night was one of the few
things he simply could not stand. Thoughts of her had seemed to unfit
him for his work, to weaken his nerves, to act, in various ways, to his
disadvantage. She had been exacting in her demands upon his nature. They
were not uttered demands, or demands which he could formulate, but he
had been conscious of them always. He had been obliged to pause and ask
himself at every thought, at every step--"What would Sara say to this?"
It was a tyranny--if not a species of witchcraft. And so he had
determined to see her no more. Following the usual, most correct method
in such procedures, he went abroad. After a week of irritating
meditations, furtive, all but unconquerable desires, after he had passed
the day on which it had been his custom for months to call upon her,
after he had learned how to discipline the hours he had used to spend
riding with her in the Row, he felt as a convalescent after some
exhausting malady--quiescent, dulled, possessed by a drowsy stupidity,
inaccessible to any serious emotion. He was cured of his fancy, although
no effort of will could protect the soreness of the bruise. He had
persevered in his course of treatment--congratulating himself, at the
end, on his escape from a dangerous obsession. The picture of Sara grew
paler and paler before his eyes--indeed, it seemed to fade all too
quickly, and, with the perversity of consistent egoism, he felt many
twinges of sadness to think that he had forgotten her so soon. His
vanity would have preferred a longer combat--for even the most shallow
admit the romantic admirableness of an obstinate love. Still, what could
he ask better than this triumph over a cruel, an obstructive memory? He
had regained, so he believed, his old independence as the man of action,
energetic, self-controlled, moved by one passion only, and that the
finest of all--ambition. In surveying once more the great design of his
career, he found it an effort to bring up--from the far recesses of his
experience--the poor little sentimental episode, so insignificant and
commonplace, which, in a kind of aberration, he had taken for an affair
of the heart. He returned to England. He threw himself with vigour into
the questions which were then disturbing Churchmen. He revived a
touching acquaintance with Agnes Carillon, an acquaintance which was
peculiarly soothing to his preoccupied mind. Here was a girl, he
thought, who could be a fit helpmate. She asked for nothing,
absorbed nothing, and gave a great deal of gentle, kind companionship
when he wanted it. When he did not want it, she understood
perfectly--possessing, in an eminent degree, the rare domestic art of
being able to make herself scarce--alike in his thoughts and his
engagements. The truths did not occur to him that a woman in love could
never have been so unnaturally prudent, or that a woman whom he loved
could not have interested him so slightly. He took great pride in her
perfect skin and hair and eyes, in her beautiful, graceful, and gracious
manners, but his soul never kindled at her approach, his pulse beat no
slower at her departure. He requited her agreeableness with respect. And
so they had become engaged--to the unbounded gratification of all his
relatives, amidst the congratulations of his friends. There seemed a
certain shadowiness in his conception of their future existence together
as man and wife: something which he recognised as an interior voice
chimed in, from time to time, with provoking interrogations, mostly
unanswerable. A plaintive need of happiness, melancholy, obscure, but
recurrent, mixed in his fluctuating thoughts. Finally, it pursued him,
haunted him, and caught him with the strange tenacity of an incorporeal
grasp. Sara, now dethroned from her place of power, loomed in all his
dreams. Irresistibly, he was drawn toward the forbidden recollection of
her delightfulness. There seemed no longer any danger in these musings.
He had entrusted his actual life to the safe-keeping of the nicest woman
he had ever known. Where then was the harm in harking back, merely in
reverie, to the frivolous, amusing phantom of a renounced sentiment?
Yet, after a reverie of the kind, why did he often wonder how he and
Agnes could look in one another's faces and pretend to any sort of real
intimacy? Sara knew him better than he knew himself. Her sympathy ran
into a hundred sinuosities--she understood his silence as well as his
conversation. He was never conscious of the smallest strain, the least
dissimulation, in her society. Beneath their curious disparities an
identity seemed to unite them. There was an unrepenting quality in her
conscience which braced and stimulated his moral courage. Agnes, on the
contrary, with her instinct of behaviour, made him over-cautious and
encouraged the tendency to indecision which interfered with the
comfortable balance of his soul. And he wished his faculties to work
with astronomic punctuality. It is certain, however, that he would have
accepted his choice as a thing settled beyond any readjustment, but for
the news of the Duke of Marshire's proposal, and the sight of Sara
herself on the fatal afternoon when he was feeling especially forlorn.
She had thrown him a glance in which defiance, disdain, and an
indistinct affection were blended in one provoking dart. He was a
moralist who believed that there is always, between men and women, the
dormant principles of mistrust and hatred. He had discussed this theory
frequently with Robert, who found the notion as repulsive as it was
false. But it seemed a truth beyond contradiction to Reckage, who
possessed, in his own mind, constant irrefutable testimony in support of
the view. Sara had never before defied him. She had never before seemed
to feel her power as a creature incomparably superior in brilliancy to
all the other girls in their circle. She had never before seemed to
pity him as a man who had feared to do what Marshire--a being considered
remarkable only for his family and his fortune--had boldly, gladly
volunteered to carry out to the ultimate consequence. That glance
pierced his self-love, his pride, his will. After his long hesitations,
after the wearisome, interminable debates between his judgment and his
inclination, he decided suddenly, all at once, without further
reflection, that he no longer belonged to himself. He was the slave once
more of doubts, fears, and temptations. His excited nerves and troubled
senses asserted their right to be regarded as threads, at least, in the
web of destiny. From the hour of that chance encounter in the Park, till
he and Sara met at Lord Garrow's that day, he had not been able to
escape from the inexorable cruelty of an ill-used passion, once more, in
full command. Every individual has his rule--could one but find it
out--and a rule to which there are no exceptions. With Reckage it was
simple enough: he invariably followed the line of his own glory. The
distress he suffered--really, and not colourably--took its rise from the
intervention of Marshir

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