"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 d.i.c.kens did he pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 Emba.s.sy 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 pa.s.sionately 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 cla.s.ses--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 amus.e.m.e.nts 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sion. 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-gla.s.s, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.bleman elaborately dressed, reclining on a gra.s.sy 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 cuira.s.s, 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 d.u.c.h.ess--one of the great d.u.c.h.esses. 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.