Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Summer/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blessed are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she pleases."
In the Luttrell drawing-rooms, that open one out of the other, almost as lofty and wide as the aisles of a church, and which are darkly splendid with the pictures of the old masters, and bright with glowing, brilliant flowers, that bloom in every nook and corner like jewels set in dull brown leaves, are sitting a dozen or so of people, enduring that mauvais quart d'heure that precedes dinner. Silvia has not yet made her appearance, but all the other guests are present, I think, and I have bowed to so many, that my head feels like a pendulum that is bound to go on wagging by the force of its own momentum.
Mrs. Fleming reclines in an easy chair, fatter, kinder, fairer than ever—an agreeable contrast to the lady to whom she is talking, who is sallow and lean and ill-favoured. Her name is Lister, and she is mother to those two sweetly simpering young ladies who are frisking on yonder causeuse like lambkins, displaying an ostentatious affection for each other that speaks volumes for the encounters they have in private. Their nods and becks and wreathed smiles are evidently directed at two good-looking captains sitting near, who appear very insensible, and make no amative grimaces in return.
These latter are, I suppose, the detrimentals of whom Alice spoke. I like their clean, well-groomed looks much; they are the first "warriors bold" I ever saw, and they certainly seem to fulfil the whole duty of man, as understood by the youth of the present century, which is to be dressed to perfection and have the best possible manners compatible with the fewest possible ideas.
Talking to Alice is an ugly little fair man, who is looking at me through his eye-glass with attention, for do I not live near the rose?
Charles Lovelace, handsome as ever, a trifle steadier than he was on that terrible day when he ran away with Alice (and we wretched left-behinds were left to pay the piper), lounges beside my chair, giving me little historiettes of the people present.
Leaning against the mantel-piece is a rather tall, very dark man, with a perfectly handsome face, that does not give me the impression of being particularly sensible or wise. That is Silvia's lover. She seems to have a rare taste for dark men, but this one does not to me approach or touch the grander, more masculine good looks of that other, who could renounce his heart's desire rather than forfeit his own self-respect. How strong and kind he looked when he said "Good-bye" to me under the porch at the Manor House! How surprised he would be if he knew both Silvia and I are here! I wonder if he has ever seen her since that Sunday at Flytton? I wonder if he will ever see her again?
I look up and see Paul Vasher coming in at the open door. My heart seems to stop beating as he comes forward. Are my eyes playing me some trick? Am I dreaming? No; for he comes straight to my side after Milly has introduced him to Alice (apparently he has seen all the rest this afternoon), and holds out his hand with a quick look of gladness.
"I had no idea I should see you here, or that you were Mrs. Luttrell's sister! Did you know that I should be here too?" he says, as he takes a chair next me.
"No, indeed!" How small my voice sounds! How tongue-tied I always am before this man!
"I hope you left all well at home?"
"Quite well, thank you."
(Is Silvia ever coming? It only wants one minute to eight.)
"Do you know," I say rather nervously, "that you will see an old friend presently—or perhaps you have seen her already?"
"Do you mean Miss Fleming?" he asks quietly. "No, I have not seen her yet."
The door opens and enter Silvia. As she comes up the long rooms I see her clearly enough, a thought larger, a shade more voluptuous than she used to be—a woman now, not a girl. She wears dead white silk, with costly lace at breast and elbow, and faint golden yellow roses in her hair and the front of her gown. Her beauty strikes me as freshly and surprisedly as it did the first time I ever saw her.
Sir George Vestris goes to meet her with almost humble devotion, but she looks around her, seeking, I think, Paul Vasher, and he rises and approaches her. They are so near me that I could touch either with my hand, and cannot choose but hear their words.
"How do you do, Miss Fleming?" says Paul.
"Quite well, thank you, Mr. Vasher."
"It is many years since we met," says the gentleman politely.
"It does not seem so long," says the lady.
"Dinner is served," announces the butler.
"Will you take in my sister, Mr. Vasher?" says Milly and I put my hand under his arm.
So this is the meeting after long years between these two once passionate, despairing lovers. Cold and indifferent as their words were, their looks matched them; not a ray of excitement or interest stirred Mr. Vasher's face, and she was no whit behind him, and yet methinks there must lurk some danger when two people who parted so wildly meet so coldly.
Somehow or other we are all matched; the stray men come out of their corners and fall in with the rest, and we go across the hall and into the dining-room, dim with wax lights, faint and subdued as a room devoted to the worship of the palate should be—or so gourmands tell us.
As yet, however, I am too young to love my dinner very heartily. As yet I "eat to live"; in the fulness of time I may perhaps "live to eat," but not now, not yet! I would rather be out in the garden than sitting here watching unhungry people tempted with good things, and I want to be able to think. It is all so wonderful, that Silvia and Paul Vasher should have met again. Will it be my lot to see the last act played out, and the lovers, after all their misunderstandings, made happy?
"It is the oddest thing, my meeting you here," says Paul, as we sit down. "Did you know you were coming when I wished you good-bye at Silverbridge?"
"I did not even know it for certain myself until eleven o'clock this morning," I say laughing, "When I saw you last I never thought any such dissipation was likely to befall me as paying a visit."
"You have left your colour behind," he says, looking at me, "with the poppies."
"Those poppies!" I say ruefully. "Oh! how good it was of you not to laugh!"
"I felt no inclination," he says; "the picture would not have been half so pretty without the flowers."
Here he betakes himself to his soup, for apparently he is hungry if I am not. Across the table, and plainly visible (for Milly's servants understand the art of arranging a dinner table, and no enormous épergnes and show pieces of plate make a wall to block out our opposite neighbour, compelling us to gaze at our plates or our left and right companions for several hours), are Silvia and Sir George Vestris—she flirting as lightly as though the man sitting before her had never been any more to her than any other present; he, with his soul his eyes and words, watching her exquisite face as though his life hung upon her favour.
"Do you think she is altered?" asks Paul's voice beside me; and I turn with a start.
"She is more lovely, I think. I see no other difference."
He is looking at her with a glance that is most coldly critical. It has none of the suppressed intensity of the unwilling lover, or the open admiration of the enamoured one; it is simply and utterly indifferent. Verily, a man's love passeth quickly. And yet I wrong Paul Vasher in this, for his love did not pass away; he wrestled with and cast it out.
"Do you know," he says, "that you are the quietest young lady I ever took in to dinner in my life? I have not heard the sound of your voice for quite———"
"A minute!" I say, laughing; "and those at home would tell you that is an enormous time for me. But I know men hate to be talked to at dinner. You look upon women as a nuisance in that respect, and would abolish us from the table altogether if you could; now, would you not?"
"Not when they are as considerate as you," he says; "although I will confess that I have before now got up from dinner as hungry as I sat down, thanks to my companion's conversational talents."
"But if she talked, you were safe, surely? You need only have answered in monosyllables."
"Only, unfortunately, she had the finest knack of interrogatory conversation that I ever heard. She would ask questions that could not be answered 'in russet yeas and honest kersey noes.'"
"I should have feigned deafness," I say, laughing. "She could not shout at you!"
There is a little pause while he helps himself to vol-au-vent, and I look round the room at the dark oak, at the massive sideboard, on which is carved the date 1690. How small and insignificant that date makes me feel, and how evanescent a thing life is. For how many generations has not that sideboard held food and drink? for how many more will it not hold the same? Just as those dead and gone Luttrells, looking out from the canvas on the walls, once sat here, jocund and happy, so will others fill up our places who are sitting here to-night, and these sober pictures will look down on them as benignly as they are looking on us. Stately old houses certainly lessen one's sense of self-importance. It is impossible, in the face of the stored traditions and memories of many hundred years, not to feel that these things remain and we go.
I glance round the table. Mrs. Fleming is steadily laying the foundation for a fourth chin. Mrs. Lister is boring Fane to a pitch that almost brings tears into his eyes. He makes no secret of hating old women, and every night he is bound to take one in for his sins. Lord St. John is gazing at Alice, who is placidly eating her dinner; every one of us Adairs has fine appetites, and are not ashamed of them. Miss Lister is worrying Captain Brabazon who is trying with secret wrath, I am certain, to eat his dinner. The other sister looks sulky; apparently her squire is better skilled in the art of repelling unwelcome advances than the other poor captain.
Ah, me! I wonder why it should be that when lovers do not come to look for Chloe, Chloe should invariably go to look for them!
"Can you tell me who that gentleman sitting next to my sister is?" I ask Mr. Vasher.
"Silvestre of Melton. Do you like his looks?"
"He seems good-tempered," I say, smiling, "and he is very amusing to listen to. His ideas seem to sprawl all over the place, and he requires his companion to pick them up and put them before his eyes in a recognizable form! Is he not very lazy?"
"Very," he says; and are not you rather sarcastic?"
"Sarcastic!" I repeat, staring. "Where could I have possibly picked up that trick? I only watch people, you know."
"And some day you will turn my character inside out, and hold it up for me to look at," says Paul.
"If you cannot hold your own against a village maid, I am sorry for you!" I say slyly. "Does it not seem droll that Miss Fleming and you and I should all have met together again here?
It reminds one of the witches' meetings in Macbeth—does it not you?"
"Only I trust we shall not work such disasters as they did?" he says laughing. "Do you know that I was in such a hurry to get back to Silverbridge, that I only came here intending to remain until Wednesday, but now I shall stay."
"So he loves her still," I say to myself, glancing at Silvia.
"Will you be glad or sorry?" he says, looking at me.
"I am glad you are going to stay," I say, "very glad. I will even, if you like, play gooseberry for you. There!"
I have made another mistake. He never knew till this moment that I knew he was in love with Silvia. Having made the observation, however, I will not attempt to eat it: telling stories is so painful and hard, one had need to be so clever to fib successfully; and I never was clever, thank heaven!
"Gooseberry!" he says, with a swift amused gleam in his eyes; "for me and whom?"
I do not answer, for the sound of voices is ceasing, Milly is drawing on her gloves; and who cares to hear his or her witty or flattering remarks cut ignominiously short by an universal uprising of petticoats?
"And whom?" says Paul's eager voice in my ear, but I turn my head away with a mischievous smile. Milly is collecting the glances of her compeers now, and I leave my seat with the rest.
"You shall tell me by-and-by," says Paul decidedly, as he holds the door open for me to pass out last of all, behind the bashaw-like tails of my elders and betters.
"Do not be too sure," I say laughing. "And now," I think to myself, "for a time of penance. Women can be cosy enough together if they all know one another well, but a jumble of relations, friends, and acquaintances—never!"
Silvia has vanished when I reach the drawing-room. No one abhors her own sex more heartily than she, and I do not feel inclined to make friends with the sisters, who are sitting on a distant couch, chattering very earnestly, reporting progress no doubt. The matrons sit in a ring and discourse of babies and the extraordinary rascality of their servants, male and female. I am not married, and I have no servants, not even a lady's maid, so I turn my back on the drawing-room and go upstairs to the Lovelace and Luttrell nurseries, and look at the babies, happy little souls, with their perfectly blank memories, that enable them to sleep on and on and on, with nothing to awaken them save hunger. They look such soft, round little cherubs, with their tiny clenched fists touching their cheeks. I never can see a baby without pausing to dream over it, and recalling with an amazed wonder the fact that all our great heroes and statesmen and illustrious men were even thus once—yes, and our murderers, our felons, and our outlaws.
The young mothers and the others come up, and an enormous amount of baby-worship is gone through, during which I slip away, and going to my room look out at the night and promise myself a stroll by the sea on Monday. I wonder why people always eschew the sea on Sundays? On the same principle as they make themselves uncomfortable in every imaginable way, I suppose.
We all go downstairs, and as I cross the drawing-room I see Silvia sitting by the window. She has not spoken to me yet, but then she has had no chance; I will go and speak to her.
"Have you forgotten me?" I say, putting out my hand. I stayed with your aunt once at Flytton, you know; I am Helen Adair."
She looks at me for a moment, considering; then she lays her hand in mine. "You are Helen Adair?" she says, with a kind of amazement. "I thought I had seen you somewhere before, but I did not know it was at Charteris."
And as we stand hand in hand, the door opens and Paul Vasher comes in, first of the advancing party of men, and looks at us with a quick and keen scrutiny. In another minute Sir George Vestris is beside her, and I am sitting on a velvet chair, professedly looking at Milly's album; in reality wasting a little malicious pity on the Misses Lister, who, having laid themselves out in shady corners, with room beside them for one, are baulked by Silvia, whose lovely face detains the Captains on their enforced pilgrimage to those charmers. Has she not Sir George Vestris, and is it not mean of her to prevent those flies from walking into the parlours the spiders have so carefully prepared! Mr. Vasher comes and sits down beside me, taking half of the heavy book on his knee.
"Do not make fun of them," I say, laughing, "for nearly everybody here is a relation."
"Do relations love one another?" he asks. "If I wanted a real service done me, or had got into a scrape, I would go to a friend not a man bound to me by blood. Relations give ton-loads of good advice, and there they stop."
"I never had any," I say; "and I always have been so sorry that I had not. Why should one always be getting into scrapes?"
"It is human nature," says Mr. Vasher. "Now, does she not look a little duck?"
The "little duck" is our queen, and the photograph represents her as she was in her beautiful youth, with the gentlest, prettiest, most lovable face in the world; looking upon it one's heart aches as one thinks of the long, dark, empty years that came to her after those blessed and happy early days. Her daughter-in-law looks from the opposite page, with her exquisite tender smile. As Englishwomen beat all other women, does not our princess beat all empresses, queens, and princesses with her fair face? Our prince was in luck when he went a-wooing.
"Are you loyal?" I ask, looking up at Paul Vasher; "I hope so, for I could never like you if you were not. Some people say rude things about royalty; they think it sounds grand, but I think it is simply very bad taste."
"Shall you think I am disrespectful if I say that in my opinion kings and queens are not as good-looking as every-day people?" he asks.
"No, for that is often true. For instance," I say, looking across at Silvia and her lover, "where would you see such a pair as that?"
He does not wince in the very least, as his eye falls upon them, and yet he is going to stay on here for her sake.
So that is the couple for whom you are kindly going to act the part of gooseberry?" he asks with a smile. "I thought you said you were going to play it for me?"
"So I was," I say, turning very red, but still looking him well in the face; "it was you I meant."
"And the lady?"
"Look at this photograph," I say, quickly; "is it not pretty?" In my hurry I have laid my finger down on a fat baby taken à la fig-leaf, so precipitately shift it, and indicate a couple of Luttrell lovers, who look even more foolish than they feel.
"Very," says Mr. Vasher, with emphasis. "But where is the gooseberry?"
"I wonder," I say, raising my voice a little, that I may talk my colour down, "why plain people have their photographs taken so much oftener than handsome ones? It is such a rare thing to find a pretty face in an album. Do you think those people know how ugly they are?"
We are looking at a man whose eyes, already well rolled by nature, have evidently acquired a distinct and supererogatory roll by long practice; he looks as if a smart rap on the back of his head would send them into his lap.
"No," says Paul, "for the plainest people always think themselves the handsomest. Have you ever had yours taken?"
"Once, at Pimpernel; it was a horrid experience, and I never wish to have another like it."
"What did he do?" asks Paul. "Did he, like the little fat photographer in Punch, say, 'Look at me, miss, and don't smile?'"
"No, but he did worse; he wished me to smile, only he would not let me do it my own way—he regulated it. When I had got up a moderate grin, he would say, 'A little more, miss!' but on trying to oblige him, I showed a little of my teeth, which was strictly forbidden. Then, when I had nailed a painful smile to my countenance, and at his command made an arch grimace with my eyes, he took the cap off, and it was a horrible thing to feel my smile slipping away from me, though I held on to it with my eyelids, and to know that it was going—going—gone!"
"I am afraid the Pimpernel process is a long one," says Paul, laughing.
While he puts the book back I glance around me. The men look amiable and cheerful in the extreme, as all mankind has a way of doing after dinner—one or two of them sentimental; tears will stand in their eyes by-and-by, if a plaintive ballad is sung. It is not an ennobling reflection that the best of men is better after a good dinner than he was before; and that the hottest lover can be made hotter still by a choice vintage. Miss Lister is going to sing; she spreads out her green skirts, and takes off her bracelets, and clears her throat. Do the birds make any preparations before bursting out in a rush of exquisite song? She sings "Only," and Jack's ridiculous verse comes into my mind as I listen—
Only a face, nothing more;
If ever it owned any legs,
They must have walked out at the door."
Some songs move me, but this one never does. Give me, "When sparrows build," with the yearning cry of the girl's broken heart wailing through it, and "the faded bents o'erspread." Alice sits down and plays glorious "Tam O'Shanter." How the rollicking, dare-devil, spirited notes ring out! How we seem to see the hot pursuit, feel the witch fingers creeping nearer and nearer to the terrified galloping horse! An hour slips away. It has been a charming evening.
"Good-night!" says Paul Vasher, standing before me; we are banished to billiards. Are you going to begin your duties as gooseberry to-morrow morning?"