The flocks will go forth to feed, and the harvests will be sown and gathered in, and the voice of the green summer will chant among the red and the yellow roses, and the serenades of the bees will make musical the scented air. By the ruined, moss-clothed barn the owl will build her nest, and the twilight will tread a measure with the night. And the rustic maidens will gather the sh.e.l.l-pink honeysuckle with their lovers, and the amorous clouds will slumber above the exquisite plough-boy with his primrose locks, as he wanders, whistling, on his way. Nature, inartistic, monotonous Nature, will renew the sap of her youth, and the dewy freshness of her first pale springtime, but the sap of your youth will have run dry for ever, and the voice of your springtime will be mute and toneless. Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy! cling to your youth!"
Jimmy looked painfully embarra.s.sed, and helped himself to some pickled walnuts which one of the tall footmen handed to him at that moment. Mrs.
Windsor had a vague idea that all poor people lived upon pickles, and she had commanded her housekeeper to lay in a large store of them for this occasion. Having landed them safely upon his plate, Jimmy proceeded to devour them, helping himself to some cold beef as a species of condiment, and keeping an amazed eye all the time upon Amarinth, who surveyed the horse-shoe table with a glance of comfortable and witty superiority.
"I have composed a catch, Jimmy," he proceeded, "a beautiful rainbow catch, which we will flute presently in the moonlight. Do you know "Three Blind Mice"?"
"Yes, sir," answered Jimmy, with a sudden smile of radiant understanding, while the little boys nearest leaned their round heads forward, happy in hearing an expression which they could well understand.
"How beautiful it is in its simplicity! My catch is even simpler and more beautiful. We will sing it, Jimmy, as no nightingales could ever sing it. Take some more of those walnuts. Their rich mahogany colour reminds me of the background of a picture by Velasquez."
Jimmy took some more with wondering acquiescence, and Amarinth leaned back negligently peeling a peach, and smiling--as if, having begun to smile, he had fallen into a reverie and forgotten to stop.
Madame Valtesi was a little bored. Youth did not appeal to her at all, except in young men, of whom she was pertinaciously fond. As to small boys, she considered them an evil against which somebody ought to legislate. These small boys, though they had been slow in beginning to eat, were slower still in finishing. Their appet.i.tes seemed to grow gradually but continuously, with what they fed upon, and it was impossible for the tall footmen to take them unawares and remove their plates, having regard to the fact that, as they never spoke, they were always steadily eating. The feast seemed interminable.
"I am afraid they will all be very seedy to-morrow," she croaked to Mr.
Smith, whose asceticism seemed to have been left at home on this occasion. "Surely they are bursting by this time."
"I trust not," he replied; "I sincerely trust not. Much food late at night is certainly imprudent, but really I have not the heart to stop them."
"But they will never stop. I believe they think it would be bad manners."
Mr. Smith cast his eyes round, and, observing that the little boys"
faces were considerably flushed, and that an air of mere gourmandising had decidedly set in, suddenly became ascetic again. After making certain that all the people of the house had finished, he, therefore, abruptly rose to his feet, knocked upon the table with the handle of a knife, and muttered a rapid and unintelligible High Church grace. The effect of this was astonishing. A tableau ensued, in which the mouths of all the performers were seen to be wide open for at least half a minute, while spoons full of pudding, or fruit, were lifted towards them, and the round eyes above them were focussed with a concentration of complete surprise and agitation upon the intermittent clergyman, who had sat down again, and was speaking to Mrs. Windsor about chasubles. Then, as at a signal, all the spoons, still full, were pensively returned to the plates, and an audible sigh stole softly round the room. The gates of Paradise were swinging to.
Mrs. Windsor rose, and said, as she went out, to Mr. Amarinth--
"Do teach them your catch now. We will go into the garden. If only they had on their nightgowns? It is such a disappointment."
In the garden, which was rather dark, for the moon had not yet fully risen, Lady Locke found Lord Reggie standing by her side with Tommy, who had formed a pa.s.sionate attachment to him, and showed it violently both in words and deeds.
"Let us sit down here," he said, drawing forward a chair for her. "Esme wants me to hear his music from a distance. Tommy, you go in and sing.
We want to listen to you."
Tommy ran off excitedly.
Lady Locke and Lord Reggie sat down silently. A few yards away Mrs.
Windsor, Madame Valtesi, and Mr. Smith formed a heterogeneous and singularly inappropriate group. Through the lighted windows of the drawing-room a mult.i.tude of bobbing small heads might be discerned, and the large form of Esme Amarinth in the act of reciting the words of his catch.
Lord Reggie looked at Lady Locke, and sighed softly.
"Why are beautiful things so sad?" he said. "This night is like some exquisite dark youth full of sorrow. If you listen, you can hear the murmur of his grief in the wind. It is as if he had shed tears, and known renunciations."
"We all know renunciations," she answered. "And they are sad, but they are great too. We are often greatest when we give something up."
"I think renunciations are foolish," he said. "I only once gave up a pleasure, and the remembrance of it has haunted me like a grey ghost ever since. Why do people think it an act of holiness to starve their souls? We are here to express ourselves, not to fast twice in a week.
Yet how few men and women ever dare to express themselves fully?"
Lady Locke looked up, and seemed to come to a sudden resolution.
"Do you ever express your real self by what you say or do?" she asked.
"Yes, always nearly."
"Even by wearing that green carnation?"
There was a ring of earnestness in her voice that evidently surprised him a little.
"Because," she went on, speaking more rapidly, "I take that as a symbol.
I cannot help it. It seems like the motto of your life, and it is a tainted motto. Why----"
But at this moment a delicate sound of "Sh-sh!" came from Mrs. Windsor, and the voice of Jimmie Sands, an uncertain treble with a quaver in it, was heard singing Esme Amarinth"s catch. He sang it right through before the other circling voices rippled in--
"Rose-white youth, Pas-sionate, pale, A singing stream in a silent vale, A fairy prince in a prosy tale, Ah! there"s nothing in life so finely frail As rose-white youth."
"Rose-white youth," chimed the other voices, one upon one, until the air of the night throbbed with the words, and they seemed to wander away among the sleeping pageant of the flowers, away to the burnished golden disc of the slowly ascending moon.
Lord Reggie, with his fair head bent, listened with a smile on his lips, a smile in his grey blue eyes, and Lady Locke watched him and listened too, and thought of his youth and of all he was doing with it, as a sensitive, deep-hearted woman will.
And the shrill voices wound on and on, and, at last, detaching themselves one by one from the melodic fabric in which they were enmeshed, slipped into silence.
Then Mrs. Windsor spoke aloud and plaintively--
"How exquisite!" she said. "If only they had had on their little nightgowns!"
And Mr. Smith was shocked.
XI.
Lord Reggie had quite made up his mind to ask Lady Locke to marry him.
He didn"t in the least wish to be married, and felt that he never should. But he also felt that marriage did not matter much either way.
In modern days it is a contract of no importance, as Esme Amarinth often said, and therefore a contract that can be entered into without searching of heart or loss of perfect liberty. To him it simply meant that a good-natured woman, who liked to kiss him, would open an account for him at her banker"s, and let him live with her when he felt so disposed. He considered that such an arrangement would not be a bad one, especially as the good-natured woman would in course of time cease to like kissing him, and so free him from the one awkwardness that walked in the train of matrimony. He told Esme Amarinth of his decision.
Esme sighed.
"So you are to be a capitalist, Reggie," he said. "Will you sing in the woods near Esher? Will you flute to the great G.o.d whom stockbrokers vulgarly worship? I wonder what a stockbroker is like. I don"t think I have ever seen one. I go out in Society too much, I suppose. Society has its drawbacks. You meet so few people in it nowadays, and Royalties are of course strictly tabooed. I was dining with Lady Murray last week and mentioned the Prince by mistake. She got quite red all down her neck and snorted--you know how she snorts, as if she had been born a Baroness!--"One must draw the line somewhere." The old aristocracy draws it at Princes now, and who can blame them? Vulgarity has become so common that it has lost its charm, and I shall really not be surprised if good manners and chivalry come into vogue again. How strange it will feel being polite once more, like wearing a long curled wig, and making a leg and carrying a sword. You would look perfectly charming in a wig, Reggie, and a cloak of carnation velvet with rosy shadows in the folds.
You would wear it beautifully, as you wear your sins, floating negligently over your shoulders. Yes, you will be a strange and unique capitalist. The average capitalist has the face of a Gentile, and the stupidity of a Jew. I wonder how the fallacy that the Jews are a clever race grew up? It is not the man who makes money that is clever, it is the man who spends it. The intelligent pauper is the real genius. I am an intelligent pauper."
"You are marvellous, Esme. You are like some heavy scent that hangs in clouds upon the air. You make people aware of you, who have never seen you, or read you. You are like a fifth element."
"What shall I give you for a wedding present, Reggie? I think I will give you the book of Common Prayer in the vulgar tongue. One would think it was something written by a realist. The adjectives would apply to the productions of George Moore, which are boycotted by Smith on account of their want of style or something of the sort. If George Moore could only learn the subtle art of indecency he might be tolerable. As it is, he is, like Miss Yonge, merely tedious and domesticated. He ought to a.s.sociate more with educated people, instead of going perpetually to the dependent performances of the independent theatre, whose motto seems to be, "If I don"t shock you, I"m a Dutchman!" How curiously archaic it must feel to be a Dutchman. It must be like having been born in Iceland, or educated in a Grammar School. I would give almost anything to feel really Dutch for half-an-hour."
Reggie was looking a little pensive. The performance of his anthem on the morrow weighed slightly upon his mind. He had an uneasy feeling that Jimmy Sands and his followers would throw nuances to the winds when they found themselves in the public eye. When the critical morning was over he meant to propose to Lady Locke, and in the meanwhile he supposed that he ought to woo her, or court her, or do something of the kind. He was not in the least shy, but he had not the faintest idea how to woo a woman. The very notion of such a proceeding struck him as highly ridiculous and almost second-rate. It was like an old-fashioned notion.
"Esme," he said, "what do people do before they propose? I suppose they lead up to it in some absurd way. If I were a rustic I could go and sit upon a stile with a straw in my mouth, and whistle at Lady Locke, while she stood staring at me and giggling. But I am not a rustic--I am an artist. Really, I don"t see what I can do. Will she expect something?"