Laura Wing hastened to her room to prepare herself for her walk; but when she reached it she simply fell on her knees, shuddering, beside her bed. She buried her face in the soft counterpane of wadded silk; she remained there a long time, with a kind of aversion to lifting it again to the day. It burned with horror and there was coolness in the smooth glaze of the silk. It seemed to her that she had been concerned in a hideous transaction, and her uppermost feeling was, strangely enough, that she was ashamed--not of her sister but of herself. She did not believe her--that was at the bottom of everything, and she had made her lie, she had brought out her perjury, she had a.s.sociated it with the sacred images of the dead. She took no walk, she remained in her room, and quite late, towards six o"clock, she heard on the gravel, outside of her windows, the wheels of the carriage bringing back Mrs. Berrington.
She had evidently been elsewhere as well as to Plash; no doubt she had been to the vicarage--she was capable even of that. She could pay "duty-visits," like that (she called at the vicarage about three times a year), and she could go and be nice to her mother-in-law with her fresh lips still fresher for the lie she had just told. For it was as definite as an aching nerve to Laura that she did not believe her, and if she did not believe her the words she had spoken were a lie. It was the lie, the lie to _her_ and which she had dragged out of her that seemed to the girl the ugliest thing. If she had admitted her folly, if she had explained, attenuated, sophisticated, there would have been a difference in her favour; but now she was bad because she was hard. She had a surface of polished metal. And she could make plans and calculate, she could act and do things for a particular effect. She could go straight to old Mrs. Berrington and to the parson"s wife and his many daughters (just as she had kept the children after luncheon, on purpose, so long) because that looked innocent and domestic and denoted a mind without a feather"s weight upon it.
A servant came to the young lady"s door to tell her that tea was ready; and on her asking who else was below (for she had heard the wheels of a second vehicle just after Selina"s return), she learned that Lionel had come back. At this news she requested that some tea should be brought to her room--she determined not to go to dinner. When the dinner-hour came she sent down word that she had a headache, that she was going to bed.
She wondered whether Selina would come to her (she could forget disagreeable scenes amazingly); but her fervent hope that she would stay away was gratified. Indeed she would have another call upon her attention if her meeting with her husband was half as much of a concussion as was to have been expected. Laura had found herself listening hard, after knowing that her brother-in-law was in the house: she half expected to hear indications of violence--loud cries or the sound of a scuffle. It was a matter of course to her that some dreadful scene had not been slow to take place, something that discretion should keep her out of even if she had not been too sick. She did not go to bed--partly because she didn"t know what might happen in the house. But she was restless also for herself: things had reached a point when it seemed to her that she must make up her mind. She left her candles unlighted--she sat up till the small hours, in the glow of the fire.
What had been settled by her scene with Selina was that worse things were to come (looking into her fire, as the night went on, she had a rare prevision of the catastrophe that hung over the house), and she considered, or tried to consider, what it would be best for her, in antic.i.p.ation, to do. The first thing was to take flight.
It may be related without delay that Laura Wing did not take flight and that though the circ.u.mstance detracts from the interest that should be felt in her character she did not even make up her mind. That was not so easy when action had to ensue. At the same time she had not the excuse of a conviction that by not acting--that is by not withdrawing from her brother-in-law"s roof--she should be able to hold Selina up to her duty, to drag her back into the straight path. The hopes connected with that project were now a phase that she had left behind her; she had not to-day an illusion about her sister large enough to cover a sixpence.
She had pa.s.sed through the period of superst.i.tion, which had lasted the longest--the time when it seemed to her, as at first, a kind of profanity to doubt of Selina and judge her, the elder sister whose beauty and success she had ever been proud of and who carried herself, though with the most good-natured fraternisings, as one native to an upper air. She had called herself in moments of early penitence for irrepressible suspicion a little presumptuous prig: so strange did it seem to her at first, the impulse of criticism in regard to her bright protectress. But the revolution was over and she had a desolate, lonely freedom which struck her as not the most cynical thing in the world only because Selina"s behaviour was more so. She supposed she should learn, though she was afraid of the knowledge, what had pa.s.sed between that lady and her husband while her vigil ached itself away. But it appeared to her the next day, to her surprise, that nothing was changed in the situation save that Selina knew at present how much more she was suspected. As this had not a chastening effect upon Mrs. Berrington nothing had been gained by Laura"s appeal to her. Whatever Lionel had said to his wife he said nothing to Laura: he left her at perfect liberty to forget the subject he had opened up to her so luminously.
This was very characteristic of his good-nature; it had come over him that after all she wouldn"t like it, and if the free use of the gray ponies could make up to her for the shock she might order them every day in the week and banish the unpleasant episode from her mind.
Laura ordered the gray ponies very often: she drove herself all over the country. She visited not only the neighbouring but the distant poor, and she never went out without stopping for one of the vicar"s fresh daughters. Mellows was now half the time full of visitors and when it was not its master and mistress were staying with their friends either together or singly. Sometimes (almost always when she was asked) Laura Wing accompanied her sister and on two or three occasions she paid an independent visit. Selina had often told her that she wished her to have her own friends, so that the girl now felt a great desire to show her that she had them. She had arrived at no decision whatever; she had embraced in intention no particular course. She drifted on, shutting her eyes, averting her head and, as it seemed to herself, hardening her heart. This admission will doubtless suggest to the reader that she was a weak, inconsequent, spasmodic young person, with a standard not really, or at any rate not continuously, high; and I have no desire that she shall appear anything but what she was. It must even be related of her that since she could not escape and live in lodgings and paint fans (there were reasons why this combination was impossible) she determined to try and be happy in the given circ.u.mstances--to float in shallow, turbid water. She gave up the attempt to understand the cynical _modus vivendi_ at which her companions seemed to have arrived; she knew it was not final but it served them sufficiently for the time; and if it served them why should it not serve her, the dependent, impecunious, tolerated little sister, representative of the cla.s.s whom it behoved above all to mind their own business? The time was coming round when they would all move up to town, and there, in the crowd, with the added movement, the strain would be less and indifference easier.
Whatever Lionel had said to his wife that evening she had found something to say to him: that Laura could see, though not so much from any change in the simple expression of his little red face and in the vain bustle of his existence as from the grand manner in which Selina now carried herself. She was "smarter" than ever and her waist was smaller and her back straighter and the fall of her shoulders finer; her long eyes were more oddly charming and the extreme detachment of her elbows from her sides conduced still more to the exhibition of her beautiful arms. So she floated, with a serenity not disturbed by a general tardiness, through the interminable succession of her engagements. Her photographs were not to be purchased in the Burlington Arcade--she had kept out of that; but she looked more than ever as they would have represented her if they had been obtainable there. There were times when Laura thought her brother-in-law"s formless desistence too frivolous for nature: it even gave her a sense of deeper dangers. It was as if he had been digging away in the dark and they would all tumble into the hole. It happened to her to ask herself whether the things he had said to her the afternoon he fell upon her in the schoolroom had not all been a clumsy practical joke, a crude desire to scare, that of a schoolboy playing with a sheet in the dark; or else brandy and soda, which came to the same thing. However this might be she was obliged to recognise that the impression of brandy and soda had not again been given her. More striking still however was Selina"s capacity to recover from shocks and condone imputations; she kissed again--kissed Laura--without tears, and proposed problems connected with the rearrangement of tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and of the flowers at dinner, as candidly--as earnestly--as if there had never been an intenser question between them. Captain Crispin was not mentioned; much less of course, so far as Laura was concerned, was he seen. But Lady Ringrose appeared; she came down for two days, during an absence of Lionel"s. Laura, to her surprise, found her no such Jezebel but a clever little woman with a single eye-gla.s.s and short hair who had read Lecky and could give her useful hints about water-colours: a reconciliation that encouraged the girl, for this was the direction in which it now seemed to her best that she herself should grow.
VII
In Grosvenor Place, on Sunday afternoon, during the first weeks of the season, Mrs. Berrington was usually at home: this indeed was the only time when a visitor who had not made an appointment could hope to be admitted to her presence. Very few hours in the twenty-four did she spend in her own house. Gentlemen calling on these occasions rarely found her sister: Mrs. Berrington had the field to herself. It was understood between the pair that Laura should take this time for going to see her old women: it was in that manner that Selina qualified the girl"s independent social resources. The old women however were not a dozen in number; they consisted mainly of Lady Davenant and the elder Mrs. Berrington, who had a house in Portman Street. Lady Davenant lived at Queen"s Gate and also was usually at home of a Sunday afternoon: her visitors were not all men, like Selina Berrington"s, and Laura"s maidenly bonnet was not a false note in her drawing-room. Selina liked her sister, naturally enough, to make herself useful, but of late, somehow, they had grown rarer, the occasions that depended in any degree upon her aid, and she had never been much appealed to--though it would have seemed natural she should be--on behalf of the weekly chorus of gentlemen. It came to be recognised on Selina"s part that nature had dedicated her more to the relief of old women than to that of young men.
Laura had a distinct sense of interfering with the free interchange of anecdote and pleasantry that went on at her sister"s fireside: the anecdotes were mostly such an immense secret that they could not be told fairly if she were there, and she had their privacy on her conscience.
There was an exception however; when Selina expected Americans she naturally asked her to stay at home: not apparently so much because their conversation would be good for her as because hers would be good for them.
One Sunday, about the middle of May, Laura Wing prepared herself to go and see Lady Davenant, who had made a long absence from town at Easter but would now have returned. The weather was charming, she had from the first established her right to tread the London streets alone (if she was a poor girl she could have the detachment as well as the helplessness of it) and she promised herself the pleasure of a walk along the park, where the new gra.s.s was bright. A moment before she quitted the house her sister sent for her to the drawing-room; the servant gave her a note scrawled in pencil: "That man from New York is here--Mr. Wendover, who brought me the introduction the other day from the Schoolings. He"s rather a dose--you must positively come down and talk to him. Take him out with you if you can." The description was not alluring, but Selina had never made a request of her to which the girl had not instantly responded: it seemed to her she was there for that.
She joined the circle in the drawing-room and found that it consisted of five persons, one of whom was Lady Ringrose. Lady Ringrose was at all times and in all places a fitful apparition; she had described herself to Laura during her visit at Mellows as "a bird on the branch." She had no fixed habit of receiving on Sunday, she was in and out as she liked, and she was one of the few specimens of her s.e.x who, in Grosvenor Place, ever turned up, as she said, on the occasions to which I allude. Of the three gentlemen two were known to Laura; she could have told you at least that the big one with the red hair was in the Guards and the other in the Rifles; the latter looked like a rosy child and as if he ought to be sent up to play with Geordie and Ferdy: his social nickname indeed was the Baby. Selina"s admirers were of all ages--they ranged from infants to octogenarians.
She introduced the third gentleman to her sister; a tall, fair, slender young man who suggested that he had made a mistake in the shade of his tight, perpendicular coat, ordering it of too heavenly a blue. This added however to the candour of his appearance, and if he was a dose, as Selina had described him, he could only operate beneficently. There were moments when Laura"s heart rather yearned towards her countrymen, and now, though she was preoccupied and a little disappointed at having been detained, she tried to like Mr. Wendover, whom her sister had compared invidiously, as it seemed to her, with her other companions. It struck her that his surface at least was as glossy as theirs. The Baby, whom she remembered to have heard spoken of as a dangerous flirt, was in conversation with Lady Ringrose and the guardsman with Mrs. Berrington; so she did her best to entertain the American visitor, as to whom any one could easily see (she thought) that he had brought a letter of introduction--he wished so to maintain the credit of those who had given it to him. Laura scarcely knew these people, American friends of her sister who had spent a period of festivity in London and gone back across the sea before her own advent; but Mr. Wendover gave her all possible information about them. He lingered upon them, returned to them, corrected statements he had made at first, discoursed upon them earnestly and exhaustively. He seemed to fear to leave them, lest he should find nothing again so good, and he indulged in a parallel that was almost elaborate between Miss f.a.n.n.y and Miss Katie. Selina told her sister afterwards that she had overheard him--that he talked of them as if he had been a nursemaid; upon which Laura defended the young man even to extravagance. She reminded her sister that people in London were always saying Lady Mary and Lady Susan: why then shouldn"t Americans use the Christian name, with the humbler prefix with which they had to content themselves? There had been a time when Mrs. Berrington had been happy enough to be Miss Lina, even though she was the elder sister; and the girl liked to think there were still old friends--friends of the family, at home, for whom, even should she live to sixty years of spinsterhood, she would never be anything but Miss Laura. This was as good as Donna Anna or Donna Elvira: English people could never call people as other people did, for fear of resembling the servants.
Mr. Wendover was very attentive, as well as communicative; however his letter might be regarded in Grosvenor Place he evidently took it very seriously himself; but his eyes wandered considerably, none the less, to the other side of the room, and Laura felt that though he had often seen persons like her before (not that he betrayed this too crudely) he had never seen any one like Lady Ringrose. His glance rested also on Mrs.
Berrington, who, to do her justice, abstained from showing, by the way she returned it, that she wished her sister to get him out of the room.
Her smile was particularly pretty on Sunday afternoons and he was welcome to enjoy it as a part of the decoration of the place. Whether or no the young man should prove interesting he was at any rate interested; indeed she afterwards learned that what Selina deprecated in him was the fact that he would eventually display a fatiguing intensity of observation. He would be one of the sort who noticed all kinds of little things--things she never saw or heard of--in the newspapers or in society, and would call upon her (a dreadful prospect) to explain or even to defend them. She had not come there to explain England to the Americans; the more particularly as her life had been a burden to her during the first years of her marriage through her having to explain America to the English. As for defending England to her countrymen she had much rather defend it _from_ them: there were too many--too many for those who were already there. This was the cla.s.s she wished to spare--she didn"t care about the English. They could obtain an eye for an eye and a cutlet for a cutlet by going over there; which she had no desire to do--not for all the cutlets in Christendom!
When Mr. Wendover and Laura had at last cut loose from the Schoolings he let her know confidentially that he had come over really to see London; he had time, that year; he didn"t know when he should have it again (if ever, as he said) and he had made up his mind that this was about the best use he could make of four months and a half. He had heard so much of it; it was talked of so much to-day; a man felt as if he ought to know something about it. Laura wished the others could hear this--that England was coming up, was making her way at last to a place among the topics of societies more universal. She thought Mr. Wendover after all remarkably like an Englishman, in spite of his saying that he believed she had resided in London quite a time. He talked a great deal about things being characteristic, and wanted to know, lowering his voice to make the inquiry, whether Lady Ringrose were not particularly so. He had heard of her very often, he said; and he observed that it was very interesting to see her: he could not have used a different tone if he had been speaking of the prime minister or the laureate. Laura was ignorant of what he had heard of Lady Ringrose; she doubted whether it could be the same as what she had heard from her brother-in-law: if this had been the case he never would have mentioned it. She foresaw that his friends in London would have a good deal to do in the way of telling him whether this or that were characteristic or not; he would go about in much the same way that English travellers did in America, fixing his attention mainly on society (he let Laura know that this was especially what he wished to go into) and neglecting the antiquities and sights, quite as if he failed to believe in their importance. He would ask questions it was impossible to answer; as to whether for instance society were very different in the two countries. If you said yes you gave a wrong impression and if you said no you didn"t give a right one: that was the kind of thing that Selina had suffered from. Laura found her new acquaintance, on the present occasion and later, more philosophically a.n.a.lytic of his impressions than those of her countrymen she had hitherto encountered in her new home: the latter, in regard to such impressions, usually exhibited either a profane levity or a tendency to mawkish idealism.
Mrs. Berrington called out at last to Laura that she must not stay if she had prepared herself to go out: whereupon the girl, having nodded and smiled good-bye at the other members of the circle, took a more formal leave of Mr. Wendover--expressed the hope, as an American girl does in such a case, that they should see him again. Selina asked him to come and dine three days later; which was as much as to say that relations might be suspended till then. Mr. Wendover took it so, and having accepted the invitation he departed at the same time as Laura. He pa.s.sed out of the house with her and in the street she asked him which way he was going. He was too tender, but she liked him; he appeared not to deal in chaff and that was a change that relieved her--she had so often had to pay out that coin when she felt wretchedly poor. She hoped he would ask her leave to go with her the way she was going--and this not on particular but on general grounds. It would be American, it would remind her of old times; she should like him to be as American as that. There was no reason for her taking so quick an interest in his nature, inasmuch as she had not fallen under his spell; but there were moments when she felt a whimsical desire to be reminded of the way people felt and acted at home. Mr. Wendover did not disappoint her, and the bright chocolate-coloured vista of the Fifth Avenue seemed to surge before her as he said, "May I have the pleasure of making my direction the same as yours?" and moved round, systematically, to take his place between her and the curbstone. She had never walked much with young men in America (she had been brought up in the new school, the school of attendant maids and the avoidance of certain streets) and she had very often done so in England, in the country; yet, as at the top of Grosvenor Place she crossed over to the park, proposing they should take that way, the breath of her native land was in her nostrils. It was certainly only an American who could have the tension of Mr. Wendover; his solemnity almost made her laugh, just as her eyes grew dull when people "slanged" each other hilariously in her sister"s house; but at the same time he gave her a feeling of high respectability. It would be respectable still if she were to go on with him indefinitely--if she never were to come home at all. He asked her after a while, as they went, whether he had violated the custom of the English in offering her his company; whether in that country a gentleman might walk with a young lady--the first time he saw her--not because their roads lay together but for the sake of the walk.
"Why should it matter to me whether it is the custom of the English? I am not English," said Laura Wing. Then her companion explained that he only wanted a general guidance--that with her (she was so kind) he had not the sense of having taken a liberty. The point was simply--and rather comprehensively and strenuously he began to set forth the point.
Laura interrupted him; she said she didn"t care about it and he almost irritated her by telling her she was kind. She was, but she was not pleased at its being recognised so soon; and he was still too importunate when he asked her whether she continued to go by American usage, didn"t find that if one lived there one had to conform in a great many ways to the English. She was weary of the perpetual comparison, for she not only heard it from others--she heard it a great deal from herself. She held that there were certain differences you felt, if you belonged to one or the other nation, and that was the end of it: there was no use trying to express them. Those you _could_ express were not real or not important ones and were not worth talking about. Mr.
Wendover asked her if she liked English society and if it were superior to American; also if the tone were very high in London. She thought his questions "academic"--the term she used to see applied in the _Times_ to certain speeches in Parliament. Bending his long leanness over her (she had never seen a man whose material presence was so insubstantial, so unoppressive) and walking almost sidewise, to give her a proper attention, he struck her as innocent, as incapable of guessing that she had had a certain observation of life. They were talking about totally different things: English society, as he asked her judgment upon it and she had happened to see it, was an affair that he didn"t suspect. If she were to give him that judgment it would be more than he doubtless bargained for; but she would do it not to make him open his eyes--only to relieve herself. She had thought of that before in regard to two or three persons she had met--of the satisfaction of breaking out with some of her feelings. It would make little difference whether the person understood her or not; the one who should do so best would be far from understanding everything. "I want to get out of it, please--out of the set I live in, the one I have tumbled into through my sister, the people you saw just now. There are thousands of people in London who are different from that and ever so much nicer; but I don"t see them, I don"t know how to get at them; and after all, poor dear man, what power have you to help me?" That was in the last a.n.a.lysis the gist of what she had to say.
Mr. Wendover asked her about Selina in the tone of a person who thought Mrs. Berrington a very important phenomenon, and that by itself was irritating to Laura Wing. Important--gracious goodness, no! She might have to live with her, to hold her tongue about her; but at least she was not bound to exaggerate her significance. The young man forbore decorously to make use of the expression, but she could see that he supposed Selina to be a professional beauty and she guessed that as this product had not yet been domesticated in the western world the desire to behold it, after having read so much about it, had been one of the motives of Mr. Wendover"s pilgrimage. Mrs. Schooling, who must have been a goose, had told him that Mrs. Berrington, though transplanted, was the finest flower of a rich, ripe society and as clever and virtuous as she was beautiful. Meanwhile Laura knew what Selina thought of f.a.n.n.y Schooling and her incurable provinciality. "Now was that a good example of London talk--what I heard (I only heard a little of it, but the conversation was more general before you came in) in your sister"s drawing-room? I don"t mean literary, intellectual talk--I suppose there are special places to hear that; I mean--I mean----" Mr. Wendover went on with a deliberation which gave his companion an opportunity to interrupt him. They had arrived at Lady Davenant"s door and she cut his meaning short. A fancy had taken her, on the spot, and the fact that it was whimsical seemed only to recommend it.
"If you want to hear London talk there will be some very good going on in here," she said. "If you would like to come in with me----?"
"Oh, you are very kind--I should be delighted," replied Mr. Wendover, endeavouring to emulate her own more rapid processes. They stepped into the porch and the young man, antic.i.p.ating his companion, lifted the knocker and gave a postman"s rap. She laughed at him for this and he looked bewildered; the idea of taking him in with her had become agreeably exhilarating. Their acquaintance, in that moment, took a long jump. She explained to him who Lady Davenant was and that if he was in search of the characteristic it would be a pity he shouldn"t know her; and then she added, before he could put the question:
"And what I am doing is _not_ in the least usual. No, it is not the custom for young ladies here to take strange gentlemen off to call on their friends the first time they see them."
"So that Lady Davenant will think it rather extraordinary?" Mr. Wendover eagerly inquired; not as if that idea frightened him, but so that his observation on this point should also be well founded. He had entered into Laura"s proposal with complete serenity.
"Oh, most extraordinary!" said Laura, as they went in. The old lady however concealed such surprise as she may have felt, and greeted Mr.
Wendover as if he were any one of fifty familiars. She took him altogether for granted and asked him no questions about his arrival, his departure, his hotel or his business in England. He noticed, as he afterwards confided to Laura, her omission of these forms; but he was not wounded by it--he only made a mark against it as an ill.u.s.tration of the difference between English and American manners: in New York people always asked the arriving stranger the first thing about the steamer and the hotel. Mr. Wendover appeared greatly impressed with Lady Davenant"s antiquity, though he confessed to his companion on a subsequent occasion that he thought her a little flippant, a little frivolous even for her years. "Oh yes," said the girl, on that occasion, "I have no doubt that you considered she talked too much, for one so old. In America old ladies sit silent and listen to the young." Mr. Wendover stared a little and replied to this that with her--with Laura Wing--it was impossible to tell which side she was on, the American or the English: sometimes she seemed to take one, sometimes the other. At any rate, he added, smiling, with regard to the other great division it was easy to see--she was on the side of the old. "Of course I am," she said; "when one _is_ old!"
And then he inquired, according to his wont, if she were thought so in England; to which she answered that it was England that had made her so.
Lady Davenant"s bright drawing-room was filled with mementoes and especially with a collection of portraits of distinguished people, mainly fine old prints with signatures, an array of precious autographs.
"Oh, it"s a cemetery," she said, when the young man asked her some question about one of the pictures; "they are my contemporaries, they are all dead and those things are the tombstones, with the inscriptions.
I"m the grave-digger, I look after the place and try to keep it a little tidy. I have dug my own little hole," she went on, to Laura, "and when you are sent for you must come and put me in." This evocation of mortality led Mr. Wendover to ask her if she had known Charles Lamb; at which she stared for an instant, replying: "Dear me, no--one didn"t meet him."
"Oh, I meant to say Lord Byron," said Mr. Wendover.
"Bless me, yes; I was in love with him. But he didn"t notice me, fortunately--we were so many. He was very nice-looking but he was very vulgar." Lady Davenant talked to Laura as if Mr. Wendover had not been there; or rather as if his interests and knowledge were identical with hers. Before they went away the young man asked her if she had known Garrick and she replied: "Oh, dear, no, we didn"t have them in our houses, in those days."
"He must have been dead long before you were born!" Laura exclaimed.
"I daresay; but one used to hear of him."
"I think I meant Edmund Kean," said Mr. Wendover.
"You make little mistakes of a century or two," Laura Wing remarked, laughing. She felt now as if she had known Mr. Wendover a long time.
"Oh, he was very clever," said Lady Davenant.
"Very magnetic, I suppose," Mr. Wendover went on.
"What"s that? I believe he used to get tipsy."
"Perhaps you don"t use that expression in England?" Laura"s companion inquired.
"Oh, I daresay we do, if it"s American; we talk American now. You seem very good-natured people, but such a jargon as you _do_ speak!"
"I like _your_ way, Lady Davenant," said Mr. Wendover, benevolently, smiling.
"You might do worse," cried the old woman; and then she added: "Please go out!" They were taking leave of her but she kept Laura"s hand and, for the young man, nodded with decision at the open door. "Now, wouldn"t _he_ do?" she asked, after Mr. Wendover had pa.s.sed into the hall.
"Do for what?"
"For a husband, of course."
"For a husband--for whom?"
"Why--for me," said Lady Davenant.
"I don"t know--I think he might tire you."
"Oh--if he"s tiresome!" the old lady continued, smiling at the girl.
"I think he is very good," said Laura.