The dream had come true at last. _This_ was romance--_this_ was life.
She knew now what a pallid and ghastly broker"s copy of a picture that last year"s business had been; the standing on the bridge to be worshipped by a country surgeon; the long tedious courtship; the dowdy, vulgar, commonplace wedding,--she knew now how poor and miserable a mockery all that had been. She looked with furtive glances at the tall figure bending now and then under the branches of the trees; the tall figure in loose garments, which, in the careless perfection of their fashion, were so unlike anything she had ever seen before; the wonderful face in which there was the mellow fight and colour of a Guido. She stole a few timid glances at Mr. Lansdell, and made a picture of him in her mind, which, like or unlike, must be henceforth the only image by which she would recognize or think of him. Did she think of him as what he was,--a young English gentleman, idle, rich, accomplished, and with no better light to guide his erratic wanderings than an uncertain glimmer which he called honour? Had she thought of him thus, she would have been surely wiser than to give him so large a place in her mind, or any place at all. But she never thought of him in this way. He was all this; he was a shadowy and divine creature, amenable to no earthly laws.
He was here now, in this brief hour, under the flickering sunlight and trembling shadows, and to-morrow he would melt away for ever and ever into the regions of light, which were his every-day habitation.
What did it matter, then, if she was fluttered and dazed and intoxicated by his presence? What did it signify if the solid earth became empyrean air under this foolish girl"s footsteps? Mrs. Gilbert did not even ask herself these questions. No consciousness of wrong or danger had any place in her mind. She knew nothing, she thought nothing; except that a modern Lord Byron was walking by her side, and that it was a very little way to the arbour.
CHAPTER XIII.
"OH, MY COUSIN, SHALLOW-HEARTED!"
Roland Lansdell dined with his uncle and cousin at Lowlands upon the day after the picnic; but he said very little about his afternoon ramble in Hurstonleigh Grove. He lounged upon the lawn with his cousin Gwendoline, and played with the dogs, and stared at the old pictures in the long dreary billiard-room, where the rattle of the rolling b.a.l.l.s had been unheard for ages; and he entered into a languid little political discussion with Lord Ruysdale, and broke off--or rather dropped out of it--in the middle with a yawn, declaring that he knew very little about the matter, and was no doubt making a confounded idiot of himself, and would his uncle kindly excuse him, and reserve his admirable arguments for some one better qualified to appreciate them?
The young man had no political enthusiasm. He had been in the great arena, and had done his little bit of wrestling, and had found himself baffled, not by the force of his adversaries, but by the _vis inerticae_ of things in general. Eight or nine years ago Roland Lansdell had been very much in earnest,--too much in earnest, perhaps,--for he had been like a racehorse that goes off with a rush and makes running for all the other horses, and then breaks down ignominiously midway betwixt the starting-post and the judge"s chair. There was no "stay" in this bright young creature. If the prizes of life could have been won by that fiery rush, he would have won them; but as it was, he was fain to fall back among the ranks nameless, and let the plodders rush on towards the golden goal.
Thus it was that Roland Lansdell had been a kind of failure and disappointment. He had begun so brilliantly, he had promised so much.
"If this young man is so brilliant at one-and-twenty," people had said to one another, "what will he be by the time he is forty-five?" But at thirty Roland was nothing. He had dropped out of public life altogether, and was only a drawing-room favourite; a lounger in gay Continental cities; a drowsy idler in fair Grecian islands; a scribbler of hazy little verses about pretty women, and veils, and fans, and daggers, and jealous husbands, and moonlit balconies, and withered orange-flowers, and poisoned chalices, and midnight revels, and despair; a beautiful useless, purposeless creature; a mark for manoeuvring mothers; a hero for sentimental young ladies,--altogether a mockery, a delusion, and a snare.
This was the man whom Lady Gwendoline and her father had found at Baden Baden, losing his money _pour se distraire_. Gwendoline and her father were on their way back to England. They had gone abroad for the benefit of the Earl"s income; but Continental residence is expensive nowadays, and they were going back to Lowlands, Lord Ruysdale"s family seat, where at least they would live free of house-rent, and where they could have garden-stuff and dairy produce, and hares and partridges, and silvery trout from the fish-ponds in the shrubberies, for nothing: and where they could have long credit from the country tradesfolk, and wax or composition candles for something less than tenpence apiece.
Lord Ruysdale persuaded Roland to return with them, and the young man a.s.sented readily enough. He was tired of the Cantinent; he was tired of England too, for the matter of that; but those German gaming-places, those Grecian islands, those papist cities where the bells were always calling the faithful to their drowsy devotions in darksome old cathedrals, were his last weariness, and he said, Yes; he should be glad to see Mordred again; he should enjoy a month"s shooting; and he could spend the winter in Paris. Paris was as good as any other place in the winter.
He had so much money and so much leisure, and so little knew what to do with himself. He knew that his life was idle and useless; but he looked about him, and saw that very little came of other men"s work; he cried with the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem, "Behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no profit under the sun: that which is crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered: the thing that has been, it is that which shall be."
Do you remember that saying of Mirabeau"s which Mr. Lewes has put upon the t.i.tle-page of his wonderful Life of Robespierre: "This man will do great things," said the statesman,--I quote loosely from memory,--"for he believes in himself?" Roland Lansdell did not believe in himself; and lacking that grand faculty of self-confidence, he had grown to doubt and question all other things, as he doubted and questioned himself.
"I will do my best to lead a good life, and be useful to my fellow-creatures," Mr. Lansdell said, when he left Magdalen College, Oxford, with a brilliant reputation, and the good wishes of all the magnates of the place.
He began life with this intention firmly implanted in his mind. He knew that he was a rich man, and that there was a great deal expected of him.
The parable of the Talents was not without its import to him, though he had no belief in the divinity of the Teacher. There was no great enthusiasm in his nature, but he was very sincere; and he went into Parliament as a progressive young Liberal, and set to work honestly to help his fellow-creatures.
Alas for poor humanity! he found the task more wearisome than the labour of Sisyphus, or the toil of the daughters of Danaus. The stone was always rolling back upon the labourer; the water was perpetually pouring out of the perforated buckets. He cultivated the working man, and founded a club for him, where he might have lectures upon geology and astronomy, and where, after twelve hours" bricklaying or road-making, he might improve his mind with the works of Stuart Mill or M"Culloch, and where he could have almost anything; except those two simple things which he especially wanted,--a pint of decent beer and a quiet puff at his pipe. Roland Lansdell was the last man to plan any inst.i.tution upon puritanical principles; but he _did not believe in himself_, so he took other people"s ideas as the basis of his work; and by the time he opened his eyes to the necessity of beer and tobacco, the workman had grown tired and had abandoned him.
This was only one of many schemes which Mr. Lansdell attempted while he was still very young, and had a faint belief in his fellow-creatures: but this is a sample of the rest. Roland"s schemes were not successful; they were not successful because he had no patience to survive preliminary failure, and wade on to ultimate success through a slough of despond and discouragement. He picked his fruit before it was ripe, and was angry when he found it sour, and would hew down the tree that bore so badly, and plant another. His fairest projects fell to the ground, and he left them there to rot; while he went away somewhere else to build new schemes and make fresh failures.
Moreover, Mr. Lansdell was a hot-headed, impulsive young man, and there were some things which he could not endure. He could bear ingrat.i.tude better than most people, because he was generous-minded, and set a very small price upon the favours he bestowed; but he could not bear to find that the people whom he sought to benefit were bored by his endeavours to help them. He had no ulterior object to gain, remember. He had no solemn conviction of a sacred duty to be performed at any cost to himself, in spite of every hindrance, in the face of every opposition.
He only wanted to be useful to his fellow-creatures; and when he found that they repudiated his efforts, he fell away from them, and resigned himself to be useless, and to let his fellow-creatures go their own wilful way. So, almost immediately after making a brilliant speech about the poor-laws, at the very moment when people were talking of him as one of the most promising young Liberals of his day, Mr. Lansdell abruptly turned his back upon St. Stephen"s, accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and went abroad.
He had experienced another disappointment besides the failure of his philanthropic schemes,--a disappointment that had struck home to his heart, and had given him an excuse for the cynical indifference, the hypochondriacal infidelity, which grew upon him from this time.
Mr. Lansdell had been his own master from his earliest manhood, for his father and mother had died young. The Lansdells were not a long-lived race; indeed, there seemed to be a kind of fatality attached to the masters of Mordred Priory: and in the long galleries where the portraits of dead-and-gone Lansdells looked gravely down upon the frivolous creatures of to-day, the stranger was apt to be impressed by the youth of all the faces--the absence of those grey beards and bald foreheads which give dignity to most collections of family portraits. The Lansdells of Mordred were not a long-lived race, and Roland"s father had died suddenly when the boy was away at Eton; but his mother, Lady Anna Lansdell, only sister of the present Earl of Ruysdale, lived to be her son"s companion and friend in the best and brightest years of his life.
His life seemed to lose its brightness when he lost her; and I think this one great grief, acting upon a naturally pensive temperament, must have done much to confirm that morbid melancholy which overshadowed Mr.
Lansdell"s mind.
His mother died; and the grand inducement to do something good and great, which might have made her proud and happy, died with her. Roland said that he left the purest half of his heart behind him in the Protestant cemetery at Nice. He went back to England, and made those brilliant speeches of which I have spoken; and was not too proud to seek for sympathy and consolation from the person whom he loved next best to her whom he had lost,--that person was Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey, his betrothed wife, the beloved niece of his dead mother.
There had been so complete a sympathy between Lady Anna Lansdell and her son, that the young man had suffered himself, half unconsciously, to be influenced by his mother"s predilections. She was very fond of Gwendoline; and when the two families were in Midlandshire, Gwendoline spent the greater part of her life with her aunt. She was two years older than Roland, and she was a very beautiful young woman. A fragile-looking, aristocratic beauty, with a lofty kind of gracefulness in all her movements, and with cold blue eyes that would have frozen the very soul of an aspiring young Lawrence. She was handsome, self-possessed, and accomplished; and Lady Anna Lansdell was never tired of sounding her praises. So young Roland, newly returned from Oxford, fell--or imagined himself to have fallen--desperately in love with her; and while his brief access of desperation lasted, the whole thing was arranged, and Mr. Lansdell found himself engaged.
He was engaged, and he was very much in love with his cousin. That two years" interval between their ages gave Gwendoline an immense advantage over her lover; she practised a thousand feminine coquetries upon this simple generous lad, and was proud of her power over him, and very fond of him after her own fashion, which was not a very warm one. She was by no means a woman to consider the world well lost for love. Her father had told her all about Roland"s circ.u.mstances, and that the settlements would be very handsome. She was only sorry that poor Roland was a mere n.o.body, after all; a country gentleman, who prided himself upon the length of his pedigree and the grandeur of his unt.i.tled race; but whose name looked very insignificant when you saw it at the tail of a string of dukes and marquises in the columns of the "Morning Post."
But then he might distinguish himself in Parliament. There was something in that; and Lady Gwendoline brought all her power to bear upon the young man"s career. She fanned tha faint flames of his languid ambition with her own fiery breath. This girl, with her proud Saxon beauty, her cold blue eyes, her pale auburn hair, was as ardent and energetic as Joan of Arc or Elizabeth of England. She was a grand ambitious creature, and she wanted to marry a ruler, and to rule him; and she was discontented with her cousin because a crown did not drop on to his brows the moment he entered the arena. His speeches had been talked about; but, oh, what languid talk it had been! Gwendoline wanted all Europe to vibrate with the clamour of the name that was so soon to be her own.
At the end of his second session Roland went abroad with his dying mother. He came back alone, six weeks after his mother"s death, and went straight to Gwendoline for consolation. He found her in deep mourning; all a-glitter with bracelets and necklaces of shining jet; looking very fair and stately in her trailing black robes; but he found her drawing-room filled with callers, and he left her wounded and angry. He thought her so much a part of himself, that he had expected to find her grief equal to his own. He went to her again, in a pa.s.sionate outbreak of grief and anger; told her that she was cold-hearted and ungrateful, and that she had never loved the aunt who had been almost a mother to her. Lady Gwendoline was the last woman in the world to submit to any such reproof. She was astounded by her lover"s temerity.
"I loved my aunt very dearly, Mr. Lansdell," she said; "so dearly that I could endure a great deal for her sake; but I can _not_ endure the insolence of her son."
And then the Earl of Ruysdale"s daughter swept out of the room, leaving her cousin standing alone in a sunlit window, with the spring breezes blowing in upon him, and the shrill voice of a woman crying primroses sounding in the street below.
He went home, dispirited, disheartened, doubtful of himself, doubtful of Lady Gwendoline, doubtful of all the world; and early the next morning he received a letter from his cousin coolly releasing him from his engagement. The experience of yesterday had proved that they were unsuited to each other, she said; it was better that they should part now, while it was possible for them to part friends. Nothing could be more dignified or more decided than the dismissal.
Mr. Lansdell put the letter in his breast; the pretty perfumed letter, with the Ruysdale arms emblazoned on the envelope, the elegant ladylike letter, which recorded his sentence without a blot or a blister, without one uncertain line to mark where the hand had trembled. The hand may have trembled, nevertheless; for Lady Gwendoline was just the woman to write a dozen copies of her letter rather than send one that bore the faintest evidence of her weakness. Roland put the letter in his breast, and resigned himself to his fate. He was a great deal too proud to appeal against his cousin"s decree; but he had loved her very sincerely, and if she had recalled him, he would have gone back to her and would have forgiven her. He lingered in England for a week or more after all the arrangements for his departure had been made; he lingered in the expectation that his cousin would recall him: but one morning, while he was sitting in the smoking-room at his favourite club, with his face hidden behind the pages of the "Post," he burst into a harsh strident laugh.
"What the deuce is the matter with you, Lansdell?" asked a young man who had been startled by that sudden outbreak of unharmonious hilarity.
"Oh, nothing particular; I was looking at the announcement of my cousin Gwendoline"s approaching marriage with the Marquis of Heatherland. I"m rejoiced to see that our family is getting up in the world."
"Oh, yes, that"s been in the wind a long time," the lounger answered, coolly. "Everybody saw that Heatherland was very far gone six months ago. He"s been mooning about your cousin ever since they met at The Bushes, Sir Francis Luxmoor"s Leicestershire place. They used to say you were rather sweet in that quarter; but I suppose it was only a cousinly flirtation."
"Yes," said Mr. Lansdell, throwing down the paper, and taking out his cigar-case; "I suppose it was only what Gwendoline would call a flirtation. You see, I have been abroad six months attending the deathbed of my mother. I could scarcely expect to be remembered all that time. Will you give me a light for my cigar?"
The faces of the two young men were very close together as Roland lighted his cigar. Mr. Lansdell"s pale-olive complexion had blanched a little, but his hand was quite steady, and he smoked half his Trabuco before he left the club-room. The blow was sharp and unexpected, but Lady Gwendoline"s lover bore it like a philosopher.
"I am unhappy because I have lost her," he thought; "but should I have been happy with her, if I had married her? Have I ever been happy in my life, or is there such a thing as happiness upon this unequally divided earth? I have played all my cards, and lost the game. Philanthropy, ambition, love, friendship--I have lost upon every one of them. It is time that I should begin to enjoy myself."
Thus it was that Mr. Lansdell accepted the Chiltern Hundreds, and turned his back upon a country in which he had never been especially happy. He had plenty of friends upon the Continent; and being rich, handsome, and accomplished, was feted and caressed wherever he went. He was very much admired, and he might have been beloved; but that first disappointment had done its fatal work, and he did not believe that there was in all the world any such thing as pure and disinterested affection for a young man with a landed estate and fifteen thousand a year.
So he lounged and dawdled away his time in drawing-rooms and boudoirs, on moonlit balconies, in shadowy orange-groves, beside the rippling Arno, in the colonnades of Venice, on the Parisian boulevards, under the lime-trees of Berlin, in any region where there was life and colour and gaiety, and the brightness of beautiful faces, and where a man of a naturally gloomy temperament might forget himself and be amused. He started with the intention of doing no harm; but with no better guiding principle than the intention to be harmless, a man can contrive to do a good deal of mischief.
Mr. Lansdell"s life abroad was neither a good nor a useful one. It was an artificial kind of existence, with spurious pleasures, spurious brilliancy,--a life whose brightest moments but poorly compensated for the dismal reaction that followed them. And in the meanwhile Lady Gwendoline did not become Marchioness of Heatherland; for, only a month before the day appointed for the wedding, young Lord Heatherland broke his neck in an Irish steeple-chase.
It was a terrible and bitter disappointment; but Lady Gwendoline showed her high breeding and her philosophy at the same time. She retired from the world in which her career had been hitherto so brilliantly successful, and bore her sorrow in silence. She, too, had played her best card, and had lost; and now that the Marquis was dead, and Rowland Lansdell far away, people began to say that the lady had jilted her cousin, and that the loss of her t.i.tled lover was Heaven"s special judgment upon her iniquity,--though why poor Lord Heatherland should be sacrificed to Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey"s sin is rather a puzzling question.
It may be that Lord Ruysdale"s daughter hoped her cousin would return when he heard of the Marquis"s death. She knew that Roland had loved her: and what was more likely than that he should come back to her, now that he knew she was once more free to be his wife? Lady Gwendoline kept the secrets of her own heart, and no one knew which of her two lovers had been dearest to her. She kept her own secrets; and, by-and-by, when she reappeared in the world, people saw that her beauty had suffered very little from her sorrow for her disappointment.
She was still very handsome, but her prestige was gone. Impertinent young _debutantes_ of eighteen called this splendid creature of four-and-twenty "quite old." Wasn"t she engaged to a Mr. Lansdell ever so long ago, and then to the Marquis of Heatherland? Poor thing, how very sad! They wondered she did not go over to Rome, or join Miss Sellon"s sisterhood, or something of that kind. Lady Gwendoline"s portrait still held its place in books of beauty, and she could see herself smiling in West-end printshops, with a preternaturally high forehead, and very long ringlets; but she felt that she was old--very old. Gossipping dowagers talked aristocratic scandal openly before her, and said, "We don"t mind _your_ hearing it, Gwendoline dear, for of course you know the world, and that such things _do_ happen;" and a woman has seen the last of her youth when people say that sort of thing to her.
She felt that she was very old. She had led a high-pressure kind of existence, in which a year stands for a decade; and now in her lonely old age she discovered that her father was very poor, and that his estates were mortgaged, and that henceforth her existence must be a wretched hand-to-mouth business, unless some distant relation, from whom Lord Ruysdale had expectations, would be good enough to die.
The distant relation had died within the last twelve months, and the fortune inherited from him, though by no means a large one, had set the Earl"s affairs tolerably straight; so he had returned to Lowlands, after selling the lease and furniture of his town-house. It was absurd to keep the town-house any longer for the sake of Gwendoline, who was two-and-thirty years of age, and never likely to marry. Lord Ruysdale argued. So he had paid his debts, and had released his estate from some of its many inc.u.mbrances, and had come back to the home of his boyhood, to set up as a model farmer and country gentleman.
So, in the bright July sunshine, Gwendoline and her cousin lounged upon the lawn, and talked of old pleasures and old acquaintances, and the things that happened to them when they were young. If the lady ever cherished any hope that Roland would return to his allegiance, that hope has now utterly vanished. He has forgiven her for all the past, and they are friends and first-cousins again; but there is no room for hope that they can ever be again what they have been. A man who can forgive so generously must have long ceased to love: that strange madness, so nearly allied to hatred, and jealousy, and rage, and despair, has no kindred with forgiveness. Lady Gwendoline knew that her chance was gone.
She knew this; and there was a secret bitterness in her heart when she thought of it, and she was jealous of her cousin"s regard, and exacting in her manner to him. He bore it all with imperturbable good temper. He had been hot-headed and fiery-tempered long ago, when he was young and chivalrous, and eager to be useful to his fellow-creatures; but now he was only a languid loiterer upon the earth, and his creed was the creed of the renowned American who has declared that "there is nothing new, and nothing true; and it don"t signify."
What did it matter? The crooked sticks would never be straight: that which was wanting would never be numbered. Roland Lansdell suffered from a milder form of that disease in a wild paroxysm of which Swift wrote "Gulliver," and Byron horrified society with "Don Juan." He suffered from that moody desperation of mind which came upon Hamlet after his mother"s wedding, and neither man nor woman delighted him.
But do not suppose that this young man gave himself melancholy or Byronic airs upon the strength of the aching void at his own weary heart. He was a sensible young man; and he did not pose himself _a la_ Lara, or turn down his collars, or let his beard grow. He only took life very easily, and was specially indulgent to the follies and vices of people from whom he expected so very little.