THE WORKING OF THE SPELL.
For the next six months Ben Renton lived a strange life,--strange at
least for him, who up to this time had been a young man of
fashion,--répandu in the world,--with an interest in all the events, and
all the gossip almost as important as events, that circulated in that
curious, insincere, most limited sphere. He put his rooms into the hands
of Messrs. Robins to be let, and he put his buhl and his pictures into
those of the Messrs. Christie to sell,--and naturally, as it was
September, no good came of either attempt for some months; and he took
the ground-floor at No. 10, Guildford Street, Manchester Square. It
would be difficult to describe the change which thus fell upon him. He
who had gone about the Parks, about the highways and thoroughfares of
the world, as in a hamlet, knowing everybody,--dining, dancing,
chattering with every third person he met; now walked about the humdrum
streets like a creature dropped out of the sky,--a stranger to all,
seeing only strange faces around him. He whose life had been minutely
regulated and mapped out, not indeed by duty, but by that routine of
society which serves the same purpose, wandered aimlessly about all day,
or sat in his dingy parlour over a novel, with the strangest sense of
idleness and uselessness. He had not been much more industrious in the
old days, when he went from the Row to his club, from his club to the
Drive, with the weighty duties before him of dressing and dining,
strolling down, perhaps to the Lobby of the ‘House,’ or going from box
to box at an opera. These occupations were not of very profound note
among the industries of the day; but they filled up the vacant hours
with a certain system and necessity. Now he had nothing of that kind to
do. He might go and stroll about the deserted Parks; he might sit at
home and work his way through one bundle of three volumes after another,
and nobody would interfere with him. He had nothing to do. He had never
done anything all his life, and yet he had never found it out before.
One event there was still to break the monotonous existence of each dull
day. Sometimes it was that he encountered Mrs. Tracy and her daughter as
they went out, and was permitted to accompany them; sometimes that he
was admitted to the drawing-room up-stairs in the evening. They were
very cautious in those first openings of friendship; more cautious than
they had been in its earliest beginning. Sometimes it so happened that
for an entire day, or even two days, all that Ben heard of his
neighbours was the sound of their steps as they crossed the floor
overhead, sending vibrations through the house and through his foolish
heart. But yet the meeting with them was the event of the day to
him,--the only one that gave life or colour to it. It was the sole gleam
of light within his range of vision, and naturally his eye fixed on that
gleam. Sometimes it seemed to him that, instead of being the fallen man
he was, he had come there in a voluntary abandonment of luxury and
pleasantness for Millicent Tracy’s sake. Though the young men of the
nineteenth century are not given to romance, such a proceeding is still
possible among them. And there were moments in which Ben forgot that he
had any other motive for his seclusion. It was a sudden infatuation, and
yet there was nothing extraordinary in it. Everything was so new to him
in this changed and strange life, that any powerful influence suddenly
brought into being was sure to take entire possession of the vacant
space. As he sat in the gloom and quiet, with all that had hitherto
occupied him gone from his grasp, and this one subtle fascination
filling the air, it was scarcely wonderful that he should feel himself a
pilgrim of love, giving up everything for the sake of his
divinity,--keeping watch at her door, as it were, laying himself down at
her feet, separating himself from the world for her service. A certain
indescribable sense of her presence filled the house. The ceiling over
his head thrilled under her step,--the rustle of her dress on the
stair, the distant sound of her voice or her name, seemed to echo down
to him in the silence. Though he saw her at the most once a-day, and not
always so often, he felt her perpetually, and his mind was intoxicated
by this magical new sense. He lived upon it like a fool,--like a man in
love, which he was, though he knew nothing of Millicent except that her
eyes were heavenly eyes, and her voice as sweet as poetry. He had not
cared much even for poetry hitherto, nor had much time for dreaming, and
Nature now took her revenge. His youth, his extraordinary circumstances,
his unoccupied life, all conspired with this most potent of influences
against him. At first there was not even any intention in his mind
except that of seeing her, looking at her, filling his vacancy with the
new lovely creature so suddenly placed before him; the place was empty
and she had come in unawares, startling him by her smile. That was all
that Ben knew about it for the moment. To win her, and marry her, and
enter into another and fuller phase of life, had not yet dawned on his
thoughts. She had stolen in upon him like a new atmosphere,--a delicious
air in which he lived and breathed. That was all. He meant nothing by it
in the first place. He was not a free agent, voluntarily and consciously
approaching a woman whom he wanted to make his wife. On the contrary, he
was a man suddenly, without any will or purpose of his own, launched
into a new world. He might not have known that such worlds existed, so
strange and new was everything to him; but the unthought-of, unknown
influence possessed itself in a moment of the very fountains of his
life.
It is not, however, to be supposed that Ben was petted or made much of
by the ladies whose retirement he had thus hastened to share. At first
they even appeared to keep him at arm’s length with a reserve which
chilled him much after their frank reception of dear Mary Westbury’s
cousin. They retired within the enclosure of their grief when he became
their fellow-lodger, passing him with slight salutations, with crape
veils over their faces and all the adjuncts of woe, and receiving his
visits, when he screwed up his courage to the point of going up-stairs,
with the dignity of sorrow not yet able ‘to see people,’--a mode of
treatment which gave Ben a pang, not only of disappointment, but of
shame, at his own vain hopes, and the false interpretations he had put
on their first little overtures of cordiality. ‘That I should have
dreamed they would care to see me,--and their grief still so fresh,’ he
muttered to himself with self-disgust. But the ladies up-stairs, in
their retirement, were by no means without thoughts of their new
acquaintance. They discussed him fully, though he was so little aware of
it, and considered him and his ways in more detail, and with much more
understanding, than characterised his brooding over theirs. It was not
Mrs. Tracy’s fault that he was so coldly received. It was Millicent who
had barred the way against him,--Millicent herself, whose paleness and
sorrowful looks had given the last touch of tender pity and interest to
his admiration. They were mutually mistaken in each other, as it
happened; for the mother and daughter knew no more of Ben than that he
was the heir of Renton, and were so foolish in their dreams as to
believe that he had, indeed, given up all the delights of his former
life to live in dingy lodgings in order to be near Millicent. He had
been struck with ‘love at first sight,’ they thought, and despised him a
little, and were amused at the fact, though fully determined to take
advantage of it. And so strange is human nature, that the mother and
daughter would have been as much disgusted and disappointed had they
known the complication of motives which sent the young man into their
snare, as Ben would have been had he been able to conceive the aspect in
which they regarded him. He was a man of the world; and they were of the
still sharper class of adventurers living on their wits; and yet they
mutually believed in the single-mindedness, each of the other, with the
simplicity of the peasant of romance. He thought the beautiful creature
who had smiled so softly on him, and her kind mother, were interested
really about himself; and they believed that he had thrown away all the
daily brightness of existence for Millicent’s sweet sake;--so much
faith had remained at the bottom of natures so sophisticated. It was a
curious conjunction of cunning and innocence.
‘I am not going to make any pounce upon him,’ said Millicent to her
mother. ‘I won’t. You need not look so surprised. You may say what you
like, but I know it is fatal to go too fast. Men don’t like that sort of
thing. They see through it, though you don’t think they do. They are not
quite such fools. You must go softly this time, or I shall not go into
it at all.’
‘Millicent!’ said her mother severely, ‘when you talk in this wild way,
how can you expect me to know what you mean?’
‘Oh, bother!’ said Millicent. The profile turned half away as she spoke
was so perfect, and the lips that uttered the words so soft and
rose-like, that any listener less accustomed would have distrusted her
ears. Mrs. Tracy only made a little gesture of disapproval. Even to
herself the mother kept up her pretensions; but Millicent was a girl of
her century, and made believe only when the eye of the world was upon
her. ‘I mean to take this into my own hands,’ she said. ‘You are not so
clever as you were, mamma. You are getting rather old. Let me alone to
treat a man like Ben Renton. I must not throw myself at his head; he
must suppose, at least, that he has had hard work to secure me.’
‘And I trust it will be so, Millicent,’ said Mrs. Tracy. ‘Heaven forbid
that a child of mine should throw herself at any gentleman’s head! It
would break my heart, you know.’
‘Oh, yes; I know,’ said the daughter, with a laugh; ‘though I never can
understand what pleasure you have in pretending and keeping up your
character to me. We ought to understand each other,--if any two people
do understand each other in the world,’ the young woman added, not with
much perception of the melancholy mystery she was thus skimming over,
but yet vaguely conscious that even the mother beside her had secrets,
and would take her own way if occasion served. Each of them shocked the
other by turns, though both stood low enough in point of moral
appreciation. ‘You would sell me, as soon as look at me, if you could,’
Millicent went on. ‘Don’t deny it, for I know it; but Ben Renton is not
in your line. It is I who must manage him.’
‘You will have your own way, I suppose, Millicent,’ said her mother;
‘though what you mean by these coarse expressions I don’t understand.
What I feel is that the poor young fellow is very solitary. And I am a
mother,’ Mrs. Tracy said, with a little grandeur. ‘I feel it might be of
use to him to ask him up here. It keeps a young man respectable when
ladies notice him. It keeps him out of bad hands.’
Millicent looked at her mother, with a gleam of laughter in her eyes.
‘It is beautiful to see you, mamma,’ she said; ‘it is as good as a
sermon. But I am not so anxious about his morals. You had much better
leave it in my hands.’
This was how it came about that Ben was so much thrown back on himself,
and dismissed from the paradise of a drawing-room where his lady was, to
the close, little, dingy, black-hair-clothed purgatory on the lower
floor, to wait his promotion. A word, a look, half-an-hour’s talk now
and then, raised him into the seventh heaven; but he was always cast
back again; while, at the same time, her presence so near, the constant
possibility of a meeting, the excitement of the situation, and the utter
havoc of his own life, kept him suspended, he could not tell how, and
banished all wholesome thoughts out of his head. The mutual pursuit and
defence, the plans to see and to avoid being seen, the art of bestowing
and with-holding, the perpetual expectation and possibility, engrossed
the two completely after a time. It engrossed the witch as much as it
did the victim. When men and women have passed the age,--if the age is
ever passed,--of such contests, it is difficult to realise the way in
which the lives of those engaged in them become absorbed in one
interest. Each meeting between the two, were it only of a minute’s
duration, occupied their minds as if it had been an event. To watch him
out and in, to calculate what she should say to him next time, how soon
she might venture the next tightening of her line, filled Millicent’s
thoughts as she sat over her work by the window up-stairs; while the
sound of her foot, the faintest movement over-head, the coming or going
on the stairs, the rustle of the dress passing his door, occupied Ben
like the most exciting drama. It was madness, yet it was nature. The
mother, who was looking on with an eve merely to the result, grew
impatient, and felt disposed to throw up the matter and turn her
attention to other things. Mrs. Tracy was poor, and now that her son had
altogether failed her, even in possibility, it was essential that her
daughter should take his place. But Millicent gave no encouragement to
the vague plans that fluttered through her mother’s mind. She, too, was
engrossed, as people are engrossed only by such a strange duel and
struggle of two lives. And the six months passed with her, as with Ben,
like one long, exciting, feverish day.
‘You don’t get a step farther on,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘you are just where
you were, shilly-shallying,--no better than your brother. My poor
Fitzgerald! if he had been spared, he might have been a help to me.
Providence is very strange! He lived long enough to be a burden and take
every penny we had; and then, when he might have made me some return----
And it is just the same thing, over again, with you.’
‘Don’t speak of Fitzgerald, mamma,’ said Millicent. ‘I was fond of him,
although you may not think it. You worried him till he could not bear
it any longer; but you cannot get rid of me like that. I will never
shoot myself. I mean to live in spite of everything,--and I mean to take
my own time.’
‘You are an unnatural girl!’ cried Mrs. Tracy, with excitement. ‘Did not
I do everything for that boy? Tutors and books, and I don’t know what;
and then to break down. A young man has no business to fail when his
people have done so much for him. And now there is you,--I have spared
no expense about you, either. You have had the best masters I could give
you, and the prettiest dresses; and now you stand doing nothing. I
should like to know what this young Renton means.’
‘It would be very easy to ask him,--and drive him away for ever,’ said
Millicent, with a heightened colour. ‘Mamma, I tell you, you are not so
clever as you were.’
‘I believe you are in love with him,’ said the mother, with an accent of
scorn;--‘nothing else could account for it. That is all that is wanting
to make up the story. But I tell you this will not do,’ she added, with
an instant change of tone. ‘We shall have to run away if some
determination is not come to. I have no money to carry on with, and
there is a month’s rent owing to this horrid woman; and the tradespeople
and all---- Millicent, there must be something done. If you are going to
marry young Renton, it will be all very well; but if it is to come to
nothing, as so many other things have done----’
‘What would you have me do?’ said Millicent, in a low tone of restrained
passion. Perhaps she was angry with herself for playing so poor a
_rôle_; but, at all events, she was disgusted with the mother who had
trained her to do it, and thus kept her to the humiliating work. Mrs.
Tracy was getting, as her daughter said, rather old. Her ear was not
fine enough for the inflections of tone and shades of meaning which once
she could have caught in a moment.
‘If you will listen to me,’ she answered, in perfect good faith, ‘I will
soon tell you what to do. Tell him that we are going abroad. You know
how often I have spoken of going abroad. If we could only get a hundred
pounds, we might go to Baden, or Homburg, or somewhere. We don’t want so
many dresses, being in mourning; and, with your complexion, you look
very nice in mourning. I should like to start to-morrow, for my part.
You might tell him it was for my health,--that I was ordered to take the
baths. And I am sure it would be quite true. After all the wear and tear
I have gone through I must want baths when you come to think of it. That
ought to bring matters to a decision; and the fact is, that unless
something happens, we shall have to make a change. It will be impossible
to stay here.’
‘If it is an explanation you want,’ said Millicent, ‘it will not be
difficult to bring that about,--now;’ and the blood rushed to her face,
and her heart began to beat. Not because she loved Ben. It was a
different feeling that moved her. The object for which she had been
trained, the aim of her life, had come so near to her,--in a day, in an
hour, in a few minutes more, if it came to that, she might be a changed
creature, with all that was wretched banished from her, and all that was
good made possible. She might be, instead of a poor girl, immersed in
all the shameful shifts of dishonest poverty, a rich man’s bride,
fearing no demand, above all tricks, with honourable plenty in her hands
and about her. What a change it would be! The chance of leaping at one
step from misery to wealth, from destitution to luxury, has always a
more or less demoralising effect when held steadily before human eyes,
and this chance had always been put foremost in those of Millicent
Tracy. Nobody had ever dreamed of work for her, or honest earning. She
was to win wildly the prize of wealth out of the very depths of abject
poverty. Hers was not the extraordinary nobility of character which
could resist the influences of such training. She was demoralised by it.
Ben Renton was to her a prize in the lottery which she might win and be
rich and splendid and exalted for ever,--or which she might lose in
mortification and deepest downfall. It was this which flushed her cheek
and made her heart beat. Not because he was a man who loved her. And yet
something not mercenary, something like nature, had been in the vague
intercourse between the two,--the man’s advances, the woman’s retreat
from them and interest in them. Alas! Millicent had been wooed, and had
done her best to attract and fascinate before. It was a trade to her.
She lighted up into a gambler’s flush of excitement now when the crisis
was so near.
‘Then let it come,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘it is time after six months of
nonsense. I never knew a young man before who would be kept off and on
so long, living in such a hole, out of those lovely rooms. And,
by-the-bye, I wonder why he wants to sell those sweet cabinets. Getting
rid of his chambers one can understand. Perhaps it is for some racing
debt or something; but he must not be allowed to do it. If the family
should make themselves disagreeable, Millicent, I hope I can trust to
your good sense. Of course they must come round in the end.’
‘You may trust me, mamma,’ said Millicent, with a smile; and her mother
came round to her and kissed her, as she might have kissed her had she
been on her way to draw the fateful ticket at a lottery.
‘Now, mind you have your wits about you,’ Mrs. Tracy said.
It was the afternoon of a spring day, rather cold but bright, and a
remnant of dusty fire, half choked with ashes, was in the grate.
Millicent trembled as she sat in her favourite place by the window,
chiefly with cold,--for she was very susceptible to discomfort,--and a
little with excitement. When her mother left her, she let her work fall
on her lap, and felt, as many a woman of truer heart has felt, the very
air rustling and whispering in her ears with excess of stillness, as if
a hundred unseen spectators were pressing round to look on. He would
come, and she would listen to him and lead him on, and the step would be
taken;--the immense, unspeakable change would be made. A curious medley
of thoughts was in the young woman’s mind,--not all of them bad or
unnatural thoughts. She would be grateful to the man who changed her
life for her so completely. She would be kind to the poor,--those poor,
struggling, shifting, miserable creatures upon whom already she felt
herself entitled to look with pity. She would be very fine and grand,
and deck her beauty with every adornment, and win admiration on every
side; and yet she would be good at the same time. She would be
good,--that she determined upon. And poor Fitz, if he had but been less
impatient! if he had but lived to see this day! Thus she sat awaiting
her lover. Poor, polluted, and yet unawakened virgin soul, knowing
nothing about love!
The mother for her part put on her bonnet,--not without a keen momentary
observation that the crape was beginning to be rusty,--and drew her
shawl slowly round her shoulders. She had been a handsome woman in her
day, and with her rusty crape still looked more imposing than many a
silken fine lady. With a thrill of excitement, too, she took her way
down-stairs, with more sordid thoughts than those of her child. She was
thinking, also, which would be best for herself,--to live with them and
share their grandeur, or to secure a certainty for herself from the
bridegroom’s liberality. There are women ignoble enough to act as Mrs.
Tracy was doing, and still with so much divinity in them as to be
willing to disappear, or die, or obliterate themselves when the daughter
for whom they laboured has won her prize. But Millicent’s mother had not
even this virtue. She was drawing her ticket by her child’s hand;--which
would be most comfortable, she was thinking; and it was in the very
midst of this thought that she contrived to brush past Ben, who was
lingering at the door of his room, hoping to see something of his
neighbours.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr. Renton,’ she said. ‘I did not see you were
there. Not out this lovely afternoon? It is the old people who are
active now; you young ones are all alike, dreaming and building castles,
I suppose. Millicent stays up-stairs all by herself, instead of coming
out with me. But indeed she is dull, poor child. An old woman, even when
it is her mother, is poor company for a young girl.’
‘I am sure she does not think so,’ said Ben, to whom Millicent was half
divine.
‘No, I am sure she does not think so,’ said Mrs. Tracy; ‘she is such a
good child. But you may run up and talk to her for half-an-hour, and
cheer her up while I am gone. There are not many gentlemen I would say
as much to,’ she added playfully. Her playful speeches were not very
successful generally, but Ben was no critic at that moment. His eyes
blazed up with sudden fire. He took her hand, and would have kissed it,
so much was he touched by this mark of confidence, but Mrs. Tracy knew
there were holes in her glove, and drew it back.
‘May I?’ he said. ‘How good you are to me!’ and had rushed up-stairs
before she had time to draw breath. She turned round, looking after him,
with a certain grim satisfaction on her handsome worn face.
‘That is all safe,’ she said to herself with a little sigh of relief;
and went out philosophically to let the crisis enact itself, and buy a
little lobster for Millicent’s supper, by way of reward to her fortunate
child.