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« on: December 12, 2022, 10:20:53 am » |
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IT was natural that with other people in the house Sainty should see less of Cissy; he told himself so several times a day, yet the thought was not altogether a pleasant one that she only welcomed his society as a refuge from solitude or Lady Eccleston. The frost had put a stop to the works in front of the house, and a bad chill and sharp attack of neuralgia warned Sainty to discontinue his drives until milder weather. Skating on the big pond became the amusement of the moment, a pastime in which his lameness prevented his joining. Gerald Newby, in a straw hat, spent hours upon the ice, and fell down with Spartan perseverance in his determination to accomplish figures of eight.
"Why is it a necessary part of the make-up of the good young man to wear a straw hat in the winter?" Claude asked; "I notice that serious youths always do, curates and schoolmasters. Is it a mark of asceticism, as being obviously not the comfortable thing to do, or to give the impression that their brains are overheated with excess of thought?"
Claude, who skated, as he did everything else that he attempted, with elegance and precision, had undertaken to instruct Cissy in the art, and Sainty had to watch them gliding about together, both her hands tightly clasped in his, and even a sustaining arm occasionally flung out when the maiden was more than usually wobbly. It was all perfectly natural; there was not the smallest ground for objecting. Lady Susan Trafford and her sons, Claude's mother, Newby, and Cissy's three brothers were all on the ice the whole time; the pond, though a good-sized sheet of water, was visible from end to end; there were no corners or islands behind which the flirtatiously-inclined could disappear; yet the sight of those perpetually clasped hands became a constant irritation to Belchamber, and it was quite vain for him to reiterate that with her mother and brothers in the house, it was less than no business of his how Miss Eccleston amused herself. "Had it been any one else but Claude," he thought, "he should not have minded."
It soon became evident to him that he was not alone in the apprehension with which he watched the growing intimacy between Cissy and his cousin. Lady Eccleston, it was plain, viewed it with quite as little favour as he did. Swathed in furs, and with a blue nose, the poor lady fluttered on the bank, in a manner strongly suggestive of a hen whose ducklings have taken to the water. One day, having invited him to take her for a walk, while the hoar frost crackled under their feet in the winding mazes of the shrubbery, she quite unexpectedly unburthened herself to him on the subject.
"I can talk to you, dear Lord Belchamber," she said, "as I would to an older man; you are so good, so pure, so unlike the others, and I am so sorely in need of advice."
"Good gracious! Lady Eccleston," said Sainty, with hypocritical surprise, "what's the matter? How can I help you?"
"I'm so afraid you'll think it strange of me to talk to you on such a subject, but, as I say, you are not like an ordinary young man; you have always been so serious for your age, and then, you know your cousin better than any one; you have been boys together."
"Claude?"
"Yes, Mr. Morland. How kind of you to understand and help me out; but you are so sympathetic, more like a woman in some ways, I always say."
Sainty was only partially pleased by this equivocal compliment. "What about Claude?" he asked.
"I will be quite frank with you; you won't misunderstand me, I know. A mother's solicitude; and, after all, what can be more natural? Left so early a widow, and with these young ones to guide and bring up. If my dear husband had lived it would all have been so different; but I have no one to turn to. Tom is a mere boy, really no more help than the young ones. Ah! Lord Belchamber, children are a sad responsibility."
"Yours seem to be very good ones," said Sainty.
"You do think so? I am so glad. Yes, I think they are, but of course I feel a mother is not a judge---her great love blinds her; but they are good children, I must say they give me very little trouble. Only the high spirits of youth are always a pitfall. And Cissy---she's a dear, good girl, and we haven't a secret from one another; we are more like sisters. Yet it is for her that I sometimes feel the greatest anxiety."
"Yes?"
"Some people think her pretty; again, of course, my partiality prevents my judging; but lots of people have told me she was pretty. Do you think her pretty?"
"I should think no one could help admiring Miss Eccleston," said Sainty.
"Ah! that's it. There's no denying it. I can't help seeing it; why should I pretend I don't? The girl does have a lot of admiration; I do hope it won't turn her head. She's as good as gold, but London's an awful place. I've done all I can to keep her from all knowledge of evil, and so far, thank God! the child is a thoroughly healthy-minded, pure girl. Doesn't she strike you so?"
"Oh, certainly; but what----"
"You were going to say 'What has all this to do with Mr. Morland?' You won't mind my talking to you quite frankly? it is such a comfort. Well---any one can see your cousin admires Cissy immensely. And of course she's pleased by his attentions. I must admit he is charming; but is he the kind of young man a mother would like to give her daughter to?"
"Have you any reason to suppose your daughter cares at all for Claude?"
"Oh no, no, no! don't misunderstand me; I'm quite sure she doesn't. But girls are so thoughtless; the more innocent they are, the more imprudent. If I so much as try to venture a hint to her to be a little more circumspect, she says, 'I don't know what you mean, mother,' and she looks at me in such a way I'm quite ashamed, I really am."
"Of course Miss Eccleston is all that is delicate and refined, but if you are certain she does not at all return my cousin's partiality----"
"Oh, of that I'm sure; she's such a mirror of candour---if she had the very smallest feeling she would have told me---but your cousin is most fascinating, that I must admit, and she might get to think she cared. Now, I ask you, who know him so well, is he just the sort of man in whose hands a very pure-minded girl with high ideals would be happy? I know my child so well; if she were ever to find out that the man she married had been at all fast, it would simply kill her. And the young men of the day are so wicked, or so they tell me. One can't help hearing things de temps en temps in London, no matter how much one hates gossip, and no one hates it as I do."
Sainty thought he knew some one who hated it at least as much as her ladyship. He was wondering what Claude really felt for Cissy. In the light of their conversation about Miss Winston, he found it difficult to believe that his cousin was courting a portionless girl with a view to marriage; but he could not catechise him as to his intentions towards every young woman with whom he ever saw him, especially after the scanty encouragement he had met with on that occasion. Were he to answer Lady Eccleston truthfully, there could be little doubt of what he must say; but the thought of acting secret police in this fashion was not agreeable to him.
"You must see----" he began.
"Oh! I do, I do," cried the lady; "I see just how unpleasant it would be for you to have to say a word against your cousin, and, dear Lord Belchamber, do let me say how much it makes me like you, though to be sure, that wasn't necessary, for I've always said you were my ideal young man. Cissy and I have so often agreed in talking over some of the young men we know, Tom's friends, and the men we see at balls, and others, that there is no one quite like you."
"No, I'm well aware that I am not like other young men----"
"Ah! be thankful you're not, dear Lord Belchamber; the young men of the day, I'm sorry to say, are not nice. And thank you so much for listening to me so patiently, and telling me just what I wanted to know. I can't tell you the comfort this little talk has been to me. You see, I have no one to turn to, and I do think it so sweet of you not to want to say a word against Mr. Morland."
Sainty wondered a little afterwards just what the information was for which Lady Eccleston was so grateful, for though the interview was nominally sought with a view to consulting him, while he had received a number of interesting confidences, he could not recollect having expressed any opinion at all. Lady Eccleston, however, had apparently found him a satisfactory counsellor, for the next day she returned to the subject.
"You remember what I said to you yesterday about Cissy and Mr. Morland," she whispered, dropping down beside him on one of the seats in the winter-garden after lunch. "I'm more than ever convinced she doesn't care for him; it is foolish of me to take fright as I do, but there is just one point I do want to put myself right with you about. I was so afraid afterwards you might think---and yet---no, come to think of it, I'm sure you wouldn't; but I should like just to say that I hope you didn't think what I said had anything to do with Mr. Morland being poor, or what the world would call not a good match. As long as he was a good man, and a man of principle, and some one in her own monde, I've always said I didn't care who my girl married. No one can say I'm mercenary. My poor dear husband and I married on next to nothing, and there never was a happier marriage. I wish you had known Sir Thomas, you would have loved him."
Sainty expressed a suitable regret at having missed the pleasure of Sir Thomas's acquaintance. "Some people," Lady Eccleston continued pensively, "some people think I'm wrong. Only last week a dear friend of mine said to me that it was all very well to despise money, but that other things being equal, it was a great power, and that in this age of the world it was impossible to get on without it. I said 'You may be right, dear, and I don't deny that for my children's sake I've sometimes wished I had a little more of it, but money isn't everything. It can't give happiness.'" And her ladyship raised her eyes to a statuette of Venus in a cluster of palms, with the expression of a dying martyr regarding a crucifix.
"No, Lord Belchamber, if a man's a gentleman and a good man, for me, he may be as poor as---as he pleases---that isn't what I fear; but though Cissy seems such a child, she has a very strongly marked character, and intensely deep feelings, and were she to marry a man she could not respect, she would never know a moment's happiness. What she needs above all is a man of strict principles, of high ideals, and with a pure mind and life, and where is such a man to be found? But forgive me for boring you with all this; it can't interest you. George, dear," to her second son, who passed at the moment, "are you going skating? Do you know where Cissy is? Is she going with you? I want to speak to her"; and with a little nod of good understanding to her host, Lady Eccleston skipped with her usual amazing agility off the ottoman, and departed with her arm twined about the boy's waist.
Belchamber pondered much on these conversations. "The ordinary clever man," he thought, "who prides himself on knowledge of human nature, would be sure that Lady Eccleston was trying to 'hook him' for her daughter, and would, as usual, be wrong. If the lady is not a monument of wisdom, at least I give her credit for not being so obvious as that. No; she is treating me, as women always do, as a creature removed from all thoughts and hopes of love, a sexless being set apart like the priest in Catholic countries to be the safe recipient of tender confidences in which he can have no personal concern." Still he sometimes dreamed (as who may not at twenty-three?) of what life might come to mean if Love should breathe on its dry bones and bid them live; if it were possible that some maid more discerning than her fellows should see with the eye of the soul, beneath his dreary, unattractive exterior, the wealth of love that was waiting like the sleeping princess for the awakening kiss! "Perhaps I might even have the luck of the unhappy monster in L'Homme qui rit, and meet with a blind girl!" Hideousness, even deformity, was no bar to the love of woman, that he knew. He thought of Wilkes, of Mirabeau, of many others who had been more passionately loved than your pretty fellows. Deep in his heart he knew his real disability; it was not his lack of personal beauty, nor even his lameness that was the bar, but his miserable inherent effeminacy. A man might be never so uncouth, so that the manhood in him cried imperiously to the other sex and commanded surrender. "More like a woman in some ways." Had not Lady Eccleston said it? There lay the sting. And yet---who could tell? Might not a miracle be worked? Might he not some day find himself face to face with this stupendous, unhoped-for happiness?
He wrote many poems at this time, poems not addressed to any concrete personality, but to that "not impossible she," the divine abstraction who should recognise and respond to what lay hidden in his heart. He felt very sure that Cissy Eccleston, with her frank, pagan enjoyment of life and the moment, was not the lady of his dreams. Those little curved lips of hers might seek the red mouth of a lover, but would never bestow the heroic salute that should cleanse the leper, or restore his true form to the enchanted beast. Yet, forasmuch as he had seen so few girls, his Beatrice sometimes came to him clad in something of the outward semblance, the virginal candour and freshness of this sojourner within his gates. He found himself wondering if Lady Eccleston's account of her daughter's ermine-like recoil from all contact with moral impurity had any foundation in fact, or whether this fancy portrait of the girl dying of a stain on the premarital robe of her husband were not as purely fallacious as some of his mother's theories about Arthur. It had been borne in on him that mothers were not always infallible in what concerned their children's characters; he was farther rendered a little sceptical as to the young lady's excessive innocence by some of her own conversation, and notably a certain curiosity displayed with what seemed to him a lack of delicacy on more than one occasion as to his unfortunate sister-in-law.
"Of course one knew all those girls by sight," she remarked, with engaging candour, "but I'm not sure just which was Cynthia de Vere; it was the tall one with the beautiful legs and the rather big mouth, wasn't it? I told Tom so, and he said it wasn't; but I'm sure I'm right, ain't I?"
On another occasion she startled him by the plainest possible reference to the relations of Charley Hunter and Miss Baines.
"I didn't know young ladies knew anything about such things,"
Sainty said rather severely.
"They do now," said Cissy, "whatever they used to; but I suspect they always knew more than they let on. There was a friend of mine who married Teddie Hersham last season; I was one of her bridesmaids; she was awfully proud of taking him away from Totty Seymour; she used to boast of it to all her friends."
"I can't bear to hear you talk like that," Sainty answered. "It would give people who didn't know you such a wrong idea of you."
"I'll try not to, if you don't like it; but it isn't easy for me to pretend to be different to what I am."
"I don't want you to. I only ask you to be true to yourself, and not say things that I am sure are quite foreign to you for the sake of startling people."
"Well, I must own I do enjoy shocking you. You are so awfully proper, you know; but why should you care what I do or say?" she added, with a little arch glance.
"I don't know, I'm sure, but I do. I suppose I---I like you too well not to mind your behaving in a way I don't think worthy of you."
What wonder if Miss Eccleston found Claude Morland a more amusing companion than his cousin? Sainty was the first to admit the likelihood. He was well aware that Claude would not have offended her by championing her innocence against herself, or have made any difficulties about gratifying her girlish curiosity as to that other world of which she knew so little. The thought of Morland's long, deft fingers delicately removing the bloom from this young creature irritated him unaccountably. Oh no! it was not jealousy; that, again, was what the stupid, knowing people would think; he could never care for this empty-headed little thing in that way, and knew only too well how much more impossible it was that she should care for him. Only, he did not want her to suffer, nor to coarsen and deteriorate.
He was revolving some such thoughts as these as he walked by himself one day, perhaps a week after his conversation with Lady Eccleston, when he was startled by loud cries from the neighbourhood of the pond, and made all the haste he was able in that direction. The air was certainly milder; there had been unmistakable premonitions of a thaw. He remembered the discussion at breakfast as to whether the ice would still bear, and the eager affirmations of the young Traffords and Ecclestons that it was as sound as ever. Bertie Trafford and Randolph Eccleston had been sliding all over it, and even had stamped in places to see if it would give way; but Mr. Danford, the agent, had come in in the course of the morning to say that it had a damp look about the edges he did not like, and to advise them to keep off it. Sainty had not been greatly interested; the pond, though large, was mostly artificial, and nowhere more than three or four feet deep, and if the boys liked to risk a wetting, it did not seem to him to matter much. Now his thoughts flew to Cissy; he wondered he had not thought of her before, and the next moment he turned a corner, and found himself one of an excited group, the centre of which was Claude, hatless, dishevelled, and very wet, bearing in his arms the inanimate form of Miss Eccleston. Her eyes were closed, and every trace of colour was gone from her face; her lips were blue, and the water ran in streams from her clothing. The boys crowded round, all talking at once, and making a number of foolish suggestions.
"Is she drowned? Is she dead?" wailed little Randolph, and was sternly bidden by George not to be an ass unless he wanted to get kicked.
"What is the matter? What has happened?" asked Sainty, and was conscious of saying the silly thing even before Claude answered with studied politeness, "Don't you see? Miss Eccleston has caught fire, but we have luckily extinguished the flames."
Claude was seldom cross, but he hated scenes and emotions and spoilt clothes. "If some one would help me to get her up to the house it would be some use," he added; "and can't any one lend a dry coat to wrap round her? Mine's no good, it's as wet as a sponge. Oh! not you, Sainty, you'll catch cold."
A little way from the house they encountered Lady Eccleston, who had got wind of the catastrophe, and was hurrying to meet them; and Sainty was struck by the change in her manner in face of emergency. Her foolish flightiness seemed to have dropped from her like a garment that an athlete throws off. She had all her wits about her, and gave the most sensible directions. She had her daughter upstairs and in bed between warm blankets in less time than it takes to write it down, and by the afternoon she was able to report to them that Cissy was quite comfortable, only a little feverish and upset by the shock; but she did not think she would be much the worse for her wetting.
Cissy however, was a most unaccountable time in getting over that shock. Lady Eccleston expressed herself as amazed that her daughter should take so long to recover from so small a thing.
"Really, Lord Belchamber, I'm ashamed; you'll think you are never going to get rid of us; but the doctor says positively that the child mustn't come down yet. I can't understand it at all, for the chill she has quite got over. Of course she had a dreadful feverish cold, and at first we thought it would settle on her lungs, but, thank God! all danger of that seems at an end. Then I ask what is the matter? and Dr. Lane says, 'It's the shock to the nervous system.' But I'm mortified. I really am. Do you know how long we've been here?"
"I don't want to know, Lady Eccleston. I only know we are too glad to keep you as long as you can stay, and I am sure my mother feels as I do about it."
"Oh! you are too kind about it, both of you! But one has some compunctions, you know. And after all your goodness about the boys and all!"
George and Randolph had returned to Harrow, and Tom to his hated office in Throgmorton Avenue, Claude's presence had been once more required by his respected chief, and the rest of the party had melted like the snow that had followed the long frost; but still Cissy lay in a most becoming pink dressing-gown in a small boudoir that had been arranged for her next her bedroom. It took Lady Eccleston days of modest trepidation to bring herself to admit Sainty to these sacred precincts. "Was she very unconventional? Well, she supposed she was---people always said so---but she was weak where her children were concerned, and Cissy had said, 'Why shouldn't Lord Belchamber come to see me, mamma?' Not for worlds would she have introduced the ordinary young man"; and then Sainty was once more assured of his "difference," his purity, the perfect confidence an anxious mother could repose in him.
"Her brothers are gone, you see, and she misses them so, poor child. And though we are such friends, an old woman is dull company pour tout potage; and then my wretched throat gives out; I am no good for reading aloud. Now it would be angelic of you, if you would read to her a little; would you? Oh! how kind! She is a perfect baby about being read to; and you are so clever; you will know just what to read; you have such literary taste; everybody says so."
Thus Sainty found himself installed as reader to the invalid, and spent many hours a day by her sofa. At first Lady Eccleston was always there; then, when they were deep in their book, she would sometimes slip away to her voluminous correspondence or long consultations with her maid over the endless transmutations of her wardrobe. Sometimes Lady Charmington would look in, with a few words of grim tenderness, and lay a large, cool hand on Cissy's hair. Gradually the young people came to be left alone for longer and longer intervals. Belchamber rather wondered, himself, at the relaxation of all watchfulness on the part of their chaperons. "It is the old story," he told himself gloomily; "I am certainly not considered dangerous."
One day Lady Eccleston was much perturbed at breakfast over her letters.
"I don't know what to do," she cried, "it is most unfortunate; do advise me, dear Lady Charmington. There are a dozen things I ought to be in London for. I have a committee on Tuesday; they say they can't do without me; and things seem to be all at sixes and sevens at home: poor Tommy writes that he is most uncomfortable; he says the maids are always out, and he believes the cook gives parties; that there are---what is it? Oh! yes, here---'sounds of revelry by night'; he is always so absurd, poor dear; but it is hard on him. I really feel we ought to go, and Cissy is just beginning at last to be a little better."
"Why don't you run up for a day or two, and do what you have to, attend to your committee, and give an eye to things in Chester Square?" said Lady Charmington. "Leave Cissy to us, if you will trust us; we will take every care of her."
"O dear Lady Charmington, I couldn't; that would be an imposition. Of course she would be ever so much better here, and she is so happy, poor child; Chester Square is so noisy, and of course directly she gets back to London, people will begin to want her to do things, and I shall never keep her quiet. But I simply couldn't; it would be monstrous to put on you to such an extent."
"Nonsense," said Lady Charmington. "It is a thousand pities to take her back to town just when she is getting on so well; a few weeks more of good air and rest will do everything for her; she must come downstairs first, go out for a few drives, before she thinks of a journey. Don't you agree with me, Sainty?"
"Of course we shall be only too glad, if you think Miss Eccleston would not be dull----" Sainty began.
"Ah! dear Lord Belchamber! dear Lady Charmington! how good you both are!" cried the tender mother. "I am ashamed, positively ashamed, but what can I say? She will be overjoyed. She had to gulp down a big lump in her throat when I told her we must go home; she was so good, she wouldn't say anything, but I could see; love sharpens our wits when it is a question of our children's happiness, doesn't it, dear?"
"It is generally not difficult to see through young people," said Lady Charmington. Sainty was wondering, if the necessity for Lady Eccleston's presence in London had arisen out of the letters she had received since she came downstairs, when she could have had the conversation on the subject which had brought the lump into her daughter's throat, but he was too polite to inquire.
The conclusion of the whole matter, as might have been foreseen, was that Lady Eccleston departed to London: leaving Cissy at Belchamber, and the readings were continued with even less supervision than before.
Cissy's literary taste was decidedly undeveloped, and it may be doubted if some of her host's finest reading was not merely an accompaniment to the thinking out of new hats; but Sainty enjoyed immensely introducing a novice to his best beloved authors, and the new sensation of being able to minister to a sufferer, and lighten the long hours of some of their dulness and depression. He wasted an immense amount of care and thought on the selection of suitable gems, passages that should be characteristic and of the highest beauty, and yet milk to the intellectual babe. Sometimes he almost forgot his listener in the pleasure of voicing things long dear to himself, especially poetry, and he read a good deal of poetry. Cissy displayed but little enthusiasm; she always thanked him very prettily when he finished, if she was not asleep, and "hoped it didn't bore him awfully," but she made few comments, and listened for the most part in silence and often with her eyes closed. Sainty put down her apparent indifference to the languor of convalescence. Once, indeed, she startled him by the energy of her appreciation. He was reading Maud to her, and she had several times disappointed him with a calm "very pretty" when he had paused after some exquisite lyric that left him vibrating like a harpstring. When, however, he came to---
"Oh that 'twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!"
her quickened respiration showed her interest; and at the stanza beginning "When I was wont to meet her," she half raised herself, saying eagerly, "I like that; read that bit again, please; do you mind?" and on Sainty's complying, she repeated dreamily to herself, as though the words called up some image that gave her pleasure,
"We stood tranced in long embraces,
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter
Than anything on earth,"
"Who did you say wrote that?" she asked. "Oh! of course, yes, Tennyson," and with a great sigh she sank back on her cushions. Then she looked suddenly at him, as though she feared she had betrayed something, and flushed crimson. "Go on," she murmured; "beg pardon," and relapsed into her habitual expression of polite endurance. Next day she asked him to lend her the book, as she wanted to copy some of it out.
Sainty was delighted, but surprised.
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