The king informed him, through an interpreter, that he had been unspeakably gratified by what he had just witnessed; expressed great surprise that Cashel, notwithstanding his prowess, was neither in the army nor in Parliament; and finally offered to provide him with three handsome wives if he would come out to Africa in his suite. Cashel was much embarra.s.sed; but he came off with credit, thanks to the interpreter, who was accustomed to invent appropriate speeches for the king on public occasions, and was kind enough to invent equally appropriate ones for Cashel on this.
Meanwhile, Lord Worthington had returned to his place. "It is all settled now," he said to Lydia. "Byron shut up when I told him his aristocratic friends were looking at him; and Paradise has been so bullied that he is crying in a corner down-stairs. He has apologized; but he still maintains that he can beat our mutual friend without the gloves; and his backers apparently think so too, for it is understood that they are to fight in the autumn for a thousand a side."
"To fight! Then he has no intention of giving up his profession?"
"No!" said Lord Worthington, astonished. "Why on earth should he give it up? Paradise"s money is as good as in his pocket. You have seen what he can do."
"I have seen enough. Alice, I am ready to go as soon as you are."
Early in the following week Miss Carew returned to Wiltstoken. Miss Goff remained in London to finish the season in charge of a friendly lady who, having married off all her own daughters, was willing to set to work again to marry Alice sooner than remain idle.
CHAPTER XI
Alice was more at her ease during the remnant of the London season.
Though she had been proud of her connection with Lydia, she had always felt eclipsed in her presence; and now that Lydia was gone, the pride remained and the sense of inferiority was forgotten. Her freedom emboldened and improved her. She even began to consider her own judgment a safer guide in the affairs of every day than the example of her patroness. Had she not been right in declaring Cashel Byron an ignorant and common man when Lydia, in spite of her warning, had actually invited him to visit them? And now all the newspapers were confirming the opinion she had been trying to impress on Lydia for months past. On the evening of the a.s.sault-at-arms, the newsmen had shouted through the streets, "Disgraceful scene between two pugilists at Islington in the presence of the African king." Next day the princ.i.p.al journals commented on the recent attempt to revive the brutal pastime of prize-fighting; accused the authorities of conniving at it, and called on them to put it down at once with a strong hand. "Unless," said a clerical organ, "this plague-spot be rooted out from our midst, it will no longer be possible for our missionaries to pretend that England is the fount of the Gospel of Peace." Alice collected these papers, and forwarded them to Wiltstoken.
On this subject one person at least shared her bias. Whenever she met Lucian Webber, they talked about Cashel, invariably coming to the conclusion that though the oddity of his behavior had gratified Lydia"s unfortunate taste for eccentricity, she had never regarded him with serious interest, and would not now, under any circ.u.mstances, renew her intercourse with him. Lucian found little solace in these conversations, and generally suffered from a vague sense of meanness after them. Yet next time they met he would drift into discussing Cashel over again; and he always rewarded Alice for the admirable propriety of her views by dancing at least three times with her when dancing was the business of the evening. The dancing was still less congenial than the conversation.
Lucian, who had at all times too much of the solemnity of manner for which Frenchmen reproach Englishmen, danced stiffly and unskilfully.
Alice, whose muscular power and energy were superior to anything of the kind that Mr. Mellish could artificially produce, longed for swift motion and violent exercise, and, even with an expert partner, could hardly tame herself to the quietude of dancing as practised in London.
When waltzing with Lucian she felt as though she were carrying a stick round the room in the awkward fashion in which Punch carries his baton.
In spite of her impression that he was a man of unusually correct morals and great political importance, and greatly to be considered in private life because he was Miss Carew"s cousin, it was hard to spend quarter-hours with him that some of the best dancers in London asked for.
She began to tire of the subject of Cashel and Lydia. She began to tire of Lucian"s rigidity. She began to tire exceedingly of the vigilance she had to maintain constantly over her own manners and principles. Somehow, this vigilance defeated itself; for she one evening overheard a lady of rank speak of her as a stuck-up country girl. The remark gave her acute pain: for a week afterwards she did not utter a word or make a movement in society without first considering whether it could by any malicious observer be considered rustic or stuck-up. But the more she strove to attain perfect propriety of demeanor, the more odious did she seem to herself, and, she inferred, to others. She longed for Lydia"s secret of always doing the right thing at the right moment, even when defying precedent. Sometimes she blamed the dulness of the people she met for her shortcomings. It was impossible not to be stiff with them. When she chatted with an entertaining man, who made her laugh and forget herself for a while, she was conscious afterwards of having been at her best with him. But she saw others who, in stupid society, were pleasantly at their ease. She began to fear at last that she was naturally disqualified by her comparatively humble birth from acquiring the well-bred air for which she envied those among whom she moved.
One day she conceived a doubt whether Lucian was so safe an authority and example in matters of personal deportment as she had hitherto unthinkingly believed. He could not dance; his conversation was priggish; it was impossible to feel at ease when speaking to him. Was it courageous to stand in awe of his opinion? Was it courageous to stand in awe of anybody? Alice closed her lips proudly and began to be defiant.
Then a reminiscence, which had never before failed to rouse indignation in her, made her laugh. She recalled the scandalous spectacle of Lucian"s formal perpendicularity overbalanced and doubled up into Mrs.
Hoskyn"s gilded arm-chair in ill.u.s.tration of the prize-fighter"s theory of effort defeating itself. After all, what was that caressing touch of Cashel"s hand in comparison with the tremendous rataplan he had beaten on the ribs of Paradise? Could it be true that effort defeated itself--in personal behavior, for instance? A ray of the truth that underlay Cashel"s grotesque experiment was flickering in her mind as she asked herself that question. She thought a good deal about it; and one afternoon, when she looked in at four at-homes in succession, she studied the behavior of the other guests from a new point of view, comparing the most mannered with the best mannered, and her recent self with both. The result half convinced her that she had been occupied during her first London season in displaying, at great pains, a very unripe self-consciousness--or, as she phrased it, in making an insufferable fool of herself.
Shortly afterwards, she met Lucian at a cinderella, or dancing-party concluding at midnight. He came at eleven, and, as usual, gravely asked whether he might have the pleasure of dancing with her. This form of address he never varied. To his surprise, she made some difficulty about granting the favor, and eventually offered him "the second extra." He bowed. Before he could resume a vertical position a young man came up, remarked that he thought this was his turn, and bore Alice away.
Lucian smiled indulgently, thinking that though Alice"s manners were wonderfully good, considering her antecedents, yet she occasionally betrayed a lower tone than that which he sought to exemplify in his own person.
"I wish you would learn to reverse," said Alice unexpectedly to him, when they had gone round the room twice to the strains of the second extra.
"I DO reverse," he said, taken aback, and a little indignant.
"Everybody does--that way."
This silenced him for a moment. Then he said, slowly, "Perhaps I am rather out of practice. I am not sure that reversing is quite desirable.
Many people consider it bad form."
When they stopped--Alice was always willing to rest during a waltz with Lucian--he asked her whether she had heard from Lydia.
"You always ask me that," she replied. "Lydia never writes except when she has something particular to say, and then only a few lines."
"Precisely. But she might have had something particular to say since we last met."
"She hasn"t had," said Alice, provoked by an almost arch smile from him.
"She will be glad to hear that I have at last succeeded in recovering possession of the Warren Lodge from its undesirable tenants."
"I thought they went long ago," said Alice, indifferently.
"The men have not been there for a month or more. The difficulty was to get them to remove their property. However, we are rid of them now. The only relic of their occupation is a Bible with half the pages torn out, and the rest scrawled with records of bets, recipes for sudorific and other medicines, and a ma.s.s of unintelligible memoranda. One inscription, in faded ink, runs, "To Robert Mellish, from his affectionate mother, with her sincere hope that he may ever walk in the ways of this book." I am afraid that hope was not fulfilled."
"How wicked of him to tear a Bible!" said Alice, seriously. Then she laughed, and added, "I know I shouldn"t; but I can"t help it."
"The incident strikes me rather as being pathetic," said Lucian, who liked to show that he was not deficient in sensibility. "One can picture the innocent faith of the poor woman in her boy"s future, and so forth."
"Inscriptions in books are like inscriptions on tombstones," said Alice, disparagingly. "They don"t mean much."
"I am glad that these men have no further excuse for going to Wiltstoken. It was certainly most unfortunate that Lydia should have made the acquaintance of one of them."
"So you have said at least fifty times," replied Alice, deliberately. "I believe you are jealous of that poor boxer."
Lucian became quite red. Alice trembled at her own audacity, but kept a bold front.
"Really--it"s too absurd," he said, betraying his confusion by a.s.suming a carelessness quite foreign to his normal manner. "In what way could I possibly be jealous, Miss Goff?"
"That is best known to yourself."
Lucian now saw plainly that there was a change in Alice, and that he had lost ground with her. The smarting of his wounded vanity suddenly obliterated his impression that she was, in the main, a well-conducted and meritorious young woman. But in its place came another impression that she was a spoiled beauty. And, as he was by no means fondest of the women whose behavior accorded best with his notions of propriety, he found, without at once acknowledging to himself, that the change was not in all respects a change for the worse. Nevertheless, he could not forgive her last remark, though he took care not to let her see how it stung him.
"I am afraid I should cut a poor figure in an encounter with my rival,"
he said, smiling.
"Call him out and shoot him," said Alice, vivaciously. "Very likely he does not know how to use a pistol."
He smiled again; but had Alice known how seriously he entertained her suggestion for some moments before dismissing it as impracticable, she would not have offered it. Putting a bullet into Cashel struck him rather as a luxury which he could not afford than as a crime. Meanwhile, Alice, being now quite satisfied that this Mr. Webber, on whom she had wasted so much undeserved awe, might be treated as inconsiderately as she used to treat her beaux at Wiltstoken, proceeded to amuse herself by torturing him a little.
"It is odd," she said, reflectively, "that a common man like that should be able to make himself so very attractive to Lydia. It was not because he was such a fine man; for she does not care in the least about that.
I don"t think she would give a second look at the handsomest man in London, she is so purely intellectual. And yet she used to delight in talking to him."
"Oh, that is a mistake. Lydia has a certain manner which leads people to believe that she is deeply interested in the person she happens to be speaking to; But it is only manner--it means nothing."
"I know that manner of hers perfectly well. But this was something quite different."
Lucian shook his head reproachfully. "I cannot jest on so serious a matter," he said, resolving to make the attempt to re-establish his dignity with Alice. "I think, Miss Groff, that you perhaps hardly know how absurd your supposition is. There are not many men of distinction in Europe with whom my cousin is not personally acquainted. A very young girl, who had seen little of the world, might possibly be deceived by the exterior of such a man as Byron. A woman accustomed to a.s.sociate with writers, thinkers, artists, statesmen, and diplomatists could make no such mistake. No doubt the man"s vulgarity and uncouth address amused her for a moment; but--"
"But why did she ask him to come to her Friday afternoons?"
"A mere civility which she extended to him because he a.s.sisted her in some difficulty she got into in the streets."
"She might as well have asked a policeman to come to see her. I don"t believe that was it."
Lucian at that moment hated Alice. "I am sorry you think such a thing possible," he said. "Shall we resume our waltz?"