VII
Melrose had gone to Carlisle. The c.u.mbria landscape lay in a misty sunshine, the woods and fields steaming after a night of soaking rain.
All the shades of early summer were melting into each other; reaches of the river gave back a silvery sky, while under the trees the shadows slept. The mountains were indistinct, drawn in pale blues and purples, on a background of lilac and pearl. And all the vales "were up," drinking in the streams that poured from the heights.
Tatham and his mother were walking through the park together. He was in riding-dress, and his horse awaited him at the Keswick gate. Lady Tatham beside him was attired as usual in the plainest and oldest of clothes.
Her new gowns, which she ordered from time to time mechanically, leaving the whole designing of them to her dress-maker, served her at Duddon, in her own phrase, mainly "for my maid to show the housekeeper." They lay in scented drawers, daintily folded in tissue paper, and a maid no less ambitious than her fellows for a well-dressed mistress kept mournful watch over them. This carelessness of dress had grown upon Victoria Tatham with years. In her youth the indulgence of a taste for beautiful and artistic clothes had taken up a great deal of her time. Then suddenly it had all become indifferent to her. Devotion to her boy, books, and natural history absorbed a mind more and more impatient of ordinary conventions.
"You are quite sure that Melrose will be out of the way?" she asked her son as they entered on the last stretch of their walk.
"Well, you saw the letter."
"No--give it me."
He handed it. She read it through attentively.
"Mr. Melrose asks me to say that he will not be here. He is going over to the neighbourhood of Carlisle on business, and cannot be home till ten o"clock at night."
"He has the decency not to "regret,"" said Lady Tatham.
"No. It is awkward of course going at all"--Tatham"s brow was a little furrowed--"but I somehow think I ought to go."
"Oh, go," said his mother. "If he does play a trick you will know how to meet it. It would be very like him to play some trick," she added, thoughtfully.
"Mother," said Tatham impetuously, "was Melrose ever in love with you?"
He coloured boyishly as he spoke. Lady Tatham looked up startled; a faint red appeared in her cheeks also.
"I believe he supposed himself to be. I knew him very well, and I might--possibly--have accepted him--but that some information came to my knowledge. Then, later on, largely I think to punish me, he nearly succeeded in entangling my younger sister--your Aunt Edith. I stood in his way. He hates me, of course. I think he suffered. In those days he was very different. But his pride and self-will were always a madness.
And gradually they have devoured everything else." She paused. "I cannot tell you anything more, Harry. There were other people concerned."
"Dearest, as if I should ask! He did my mother no injury?"
Under the shadow of the woods the young man threw his arm round her shoulders, looking down upon her with a proud tenderness.
"None. I escaped; and I won all along the line. I was neither to be pitied--nor he," she added slowly, "though I daresay he would put down his later mode of life to me."
"As if any woman could ever have put up with him!"
Lady Tatham"s expression showed a mind drawn back into the past.
"When I first saw him, he was a magnificent creature. For several years I was dazzled by him. Then when I--and others--broke with him, he turned his back on England and went to live abroad. And gradually he quarrelled with everybody who had ever known him."
"But you never did care about him, mother?" cried Tatham, outraged by the mere notion of any such thing.
"No--never." There was a deliberate emphasis on the words. The smile that followed was slight but poignant. "I knew that still more plainly, when, six months after I ceased to see him, your father came along."
Tatham who had drawn her hand within his arm, laid his own upon it for a moment. He was in the happy position of a son in whom filial affection represented no enforced piety, but the spontaneous instinct of his nature. His mother had been so far his best friend; and though he rarely spoke of his father his childish recollections of him, and the impression left by his mother"s constant and deliberate talk of him, during the boyish years of her son, had entered deep into the bases of character. It is on such feelings and traditions that all that is best in our still feudal English life is reared; Tatham had known them without stint; and in their absence he would have been merely the trivially prosperous young man that he no doubt appeared to the Radical orators of the neighbourhood.
The wood thinned. They emerged from it to see the Helvellyn range lying purple under a southwest sky, and Tatham"s gray mare waiting a hundred yards away.
"You have no note?"
Tatham tapped his breast pocket.
"Rather!"
"All right--go along!" Lady Tatham came to a halt. "And Harry--don"t call too often! Is this the third visit this week?"
"Oh, but the others were such little ones!" he said eagerly.
"Don"t try to go too quick." The tone was serious.
"Too quick! I make no way at all," he protested, his look clouding.
Tatham rode slowly along the Darra, the little river which skirted his own land and made its way at last into that which flowed beneath the Tower. He was going to Threlfall, but on his way he was to call at Green Cottage and deliver a note from his mother.
He had seen a good deal of Lydia Penfold during the weeks since her first appearance at Duddon. The two sisters had been induced to lunch there once or twice; there had been a picnic in the Glendarra woods; and for himself, in spite of his mother"s attack, he thought he had been fairly clever in contriving excuses for calls. On one occasion he had carried with him--by his mother"s suggestion--a portfolio containing a dozen early proofs of the "Liber Studiorium," things about which he knew little or nothing; but Lydia"s eyes had sparkled when he produced them, which was all he cared for. On the second, he had called to offer them a key which would admit their pony-carriage to some of the private drives of the park, wild enchanted ways which led up to the very eastern heart of Blencathra. That was not quite so successful, because both Lydia and her mother were out, and his call had been made chiefly on Susan, who had been even queerer than usual. After taking the key, she had let it fall absently into a waste-paper basket, while she talked to him about Ibsen; and he had been forced to rescue it himself, lest Lydia should never know of his visit. On all other occasions he had found Lydia, and she had been charming--always charming--but as light and inaccessible as mountain birds. He had been allowed to see the drawing she was now busy on--the ravines of Blencathra, caught sideways through a haze of light, edge beyond edge, distance behind distance; a brave attempt on the artist"s part at poetic breadth and selection. She had been much worried about the "values," whatever they might be. "They"re quite vilely wrong!" she had said, impatiently. "And I don"t know how to get them right." And all he could do was to stand like an oaf and ask her to explain. Nor could he ignore the fact--so new and strange to a princeling!--that her perplexities were more interesting to her than his visit.
Yet of course Tatham had his own natural conceit of himself, like any normal young man, in the first bloom of prosperous life. He was accustomed to be smiled on; to find his pleasure consulted, and his company welcome, whether as the young master of Duddon, or as a comrade among his equals of either s.e.x. The general result indeed of his happy placing in the world had been to make him indifferent to things that most men desire. No merit in that! As he truly said, he had so much of them!
But he was proud of his health and strength--his shooting and the steady lowering of his golf handicap. He was proud also of certain practical apt.i.tudes he possessed, and would soon allow no one to interfere with him--hardly to advise him--in the management of his estate. He liked nothing better than to plan the rebuilding of a farm, or a set of new cottages. He was a fair architect, of a rough and ready sort, and a decent thatcher and bricklayer. All the older workmen on the estate had taught him something at one time or another; and of these various handicrafts he was boyishly vain.
None of these qualifications, however, gave him the smallest confidence in himself, with regard to Lydia Penfold. Ever since he had first met her, he had realized in her the existence of standards just as free as his own, only quite different. Other girls wished to be courted; or they courted him. Miss Penfold gave no sign that she wished to be courted; and she certainly had never courted anybody. Many pretty girls a.s.sert themselves by a kind of calculated or rude audacity, as though to say that gentleness and civility are not for the likes of them. Lydia was always gentle--kind, at least--even when she laughed at you. Unless she got upon her "ideas." Then--like Susan--she could harangue a little, and grow vehement--as she had at Duddon that day, talking of the new independence of women. But neither her gentleness nor her vehemence seemed to have any relation to what a man--or men--might desire of her.
She lived for herself; not indeed in any selfish sense; for it was plain that she was an affectionate daughter and sister; but simply the world was so interesting to her in other ways that she seemed to have no need of men and matrimony. And as to money, luxury, a great _train de vie_--he had felt from the beginning that those things mattered nothing at all to her. It might be inexperience, it might be something loftier. But, at any rate, if she were to be bribed, it must be with goods of another kind.
As to himself, he only knew that from his first sight of her at the Hunt Ball, she had filled his thoughts. Her delicate, pale beauty, lit by those vivacious eyes; so quiet, so feminine, yet with its suggestion of something unconquerable, moving in a world apart--he could not define it in any such words; but there it was, the attraction, the lure.
Something difficult; something delightful! A dear woman, a woman to be loved; and yet a thorn hedge surrounding her--how else can one put the eternal challenge, the eternal chase?
But as three parts of love is hope, and hope is really the mother of invention, Tatham, though full of anxiety, was also, like General Trochu, full of plans. He had that morning made his mother despatch an invitation to one of the great painters of the day; a man who ruled the beauties of the moment _en Sultan_; painted whom he would; when he would; and at what price he would. But while those who were dying to be painted by him must often wait for years, and put up with manners none too polite, there were others who avenged them; women, a few, very few women, whom the great man, strange to say, sighed to paint, and sighed in vain. Such women were generally women of a certain age; none of your soft-cheeked beauties. And Lady Tatham was one of them. The great artist had begged her to let herself be painted by him. And Victoria had negligently replied that, perhaps, at Duddon, some day, there might be time. Several reminders, launched from the Chelsea studio, had not brought her to the point; but now for her son"s sake she had actually named a time; and a jubilant telegram from London had clenched the bargain. The great man was to arrive in a fortnight from now, for a week"s visit; and Tatham had in his pocket a note from Lady Tatham to Mrs. Penfold requesting the pleasure of her company and that of her two daughters at dinner, to meet Mr. Louis Delorme, the day after his arrival.
And all this, because, at a mention of the ill.u.s.trious name, Lydia had looked up with a flutter of enthusiasm. "You know him? How lucky for you!
He"s _wonderful_! I? Oh, no. How should I? I saw him once in the distance--he was giving away prizes. I didn"t get one--alack! That"s the nearest I shall ever come to him."
Tatham chuckled happily as he thought of it.
"She shall sit next the old boy at dinner, and she shall talk to him just as much as she jolly well pleases. And of course he"ll take to her, and offer to give her lessons--or paint her--or something. Then we can get her over--lots of times!"
Still dallying with these simple plans, Tatham arrived at Green Cottage, and tying up his horse went in to deliver his note.
He had no sooner entered the little drive than he saw Lydia under a laburnum tree on the lawn. Hat in hand, the smiling youth approached her.
She was sewing, apparently mending house-linen, which she quietly put down to greet him. There was a book before her; a book of poetry, he thought. She slipped it among the folds of the linen.
He could not flatter himself that his appearance disturbed her composure in the least. She was evidently glad to see him; she was gratefully sure that they would all be delighted to dine with Lady Tatham on the day named; she came with him to the gate, and admired his horse. But as to any flutter of hand or eye; any consciousness in her, answering to the eager feeling in him--he knew very well there was nothing of the kind.
Never mind! There was an inner voice in him that kept rea.s.suring him all the time; telling him to be patient; to go at it steadily. There was no other fellow in the way, anyhow! He had a joyous sense of all the opportunities to come, the summer days, the open country, the resources of Duddon.
With his hand on his horse"s neck, and loath to ride away, he told her that he was on his way to the Tower to call on Faversham.