To be a popular invalid is in itself a career: it blesses those that
call and those that receive. The visitors who used day by day to go and
see Lady Gore used to congratulate themselves as they stood on her
doorstep on the knowledge that they would find her within, and glad--or
so each one individually thought--to see them. She was an attractive
person, certainly, as she lay on her sofa. Her hair had turned white
prematurely early, it enhanced the effect of the delicate faded
colouring and the soft brown eyes. The sweet brightness of her manner
was mingled with dignity, with the comprehensive sympathy and pliability
of a woman of the world; an innate distinction of mind and person
radiated from her looks. Those who watched the general grace and repose
of her demeanour and surroundings involuntarily felt that there might be
advantages in a condition of life which prevented the mere thought of
being hot, untidy, hurried, like some of the ardent ladies who used to
rush into her room between a committee meeting and a tea-party and tell
her breathlessly of their flustered doings. Rachel had inherited
something of her mother's dainty charm. She had the same brown eyes and
delicate features, framed by bright brown hair. It was certainly
encouraging to those who looked upon the daughter to see in the mother
what effect the course of the years was likely to have on such a
personality. There was not much dread in the future when confronted with
such a picture. But in truth, as far as most of the spectators who
frequented the house were concerned, Rachel's personality had been
merged in her mother's, and any comparison between the two was perhaps
more likely to be in the direction of wondering whether Rachel in the
course of years would, as time went on, become so absolutely delightful
a human product as Lady Gore. Rachel's own attitude on this score was
entirely consonant with that of others. Her mother was the centre of her
life, the object of her passionate devotion, her guide, her ideal. It
was when Rachel was seventeen that Lady Gore became helpless and
dependent, and the girl suddenly found that their positions were in some
ways reversed; it was she who had to take care of her mother, to
inculcate prudence upon her, to minister incessantly to her daily wants;
there was added to the daughter's love the yearning care that a loving
woman feels for a helpless charge, and there was hardly room for
anything else in her life. Rachel, fortunately for herself and for
others, had no startling originality; no burning desire, arrived at
womanhood, to strike out a path for herself. She was unmoved by the
conviction which possesses most of her young contemporaries that the
obvious road cannot be the one to follow. Lady Gore's perceptions, far
more acute as regarded her daughter than her husband, and rendered more
vivid still by the whole concentration of her maternal being in Rachel,
had entirely realised, while she wondered at it, the complete lack in
her child of the modern ferment that seethes in the female mind of our
days. But she had finally come to see that if Rachel was entirely happy
and contented with her life it was a result to rejoice over rather than
be discontented with, even though her horizon did not extend much beyond
her own home. Besides, it is always well to rejoice over a result we
cannot modify. Needless to say that the girl, who blindly accepted her
mother's opinion even on indifferent subjects, was, biassed by her own
affection, more than ready to endow her father with all the qualities
Lady Gore believed him to possess. She had arrived at the age of
twenty-two without realising that there could be for her any claims in
the world that would be paramount to these, anything that could possibly
come before her allegiance to her parents.
One of the bitterest pangs of Lady Gore's bitter renunciation was the
moment when she realised that she could not be the one to guide Rachel's
first steps in a wider world than that of her home, that all her plans
and theories about the moment when the girl should grow up, when her
mother would accompany her, steer her, help her at every step, must
necessarily be brought to nought. And this mother, alas! had been so
full of plans; she had so anxiously watched other people and their
daughters, so carefully accumulated from her observation the many
warnings and the few examples which constitute what is called the
teaching of experience. But when the time came the lesson had been
learnt in vain. Rachel's eighteenth and nineteenth years were spent in
anxious preoccupations about her mother's health, in solicitous care of
her father and the household, and the girl had glided gently from
childhood into womanhood with nothing but increased responsibility,
instead of more numerous pleasures, to mark the passage. But the result
was something very attractively unlike the ordinary product of the age.
She had had, from the conditions of her life, no very intimate and
confidential girl friends by whose point of view to readjust and
possibly lower her own, and with whom to compare every fleeting
manifestation of thought and feeling. She remained unconsciously
surrounded by an atmosphere of reticence and reserve, a certain shy
aloofness, mingled with a direct simple dignity, that gave to her
bearing an ineffable grace and charm. The mothers of more dashing
damsels were wont to say that she was not "effective" in a ballroom. It
was true that she had nothing particularly accentuated in demeanour or
appearance which would at once arrest attention, an inadequate
equipment, perhaps, in the opinion of those who hold that it is better
to produce a bad effect than none at all.
Mrs. Feversham, of Bruton Street, was an old friend of Lady Gore's,
whose junior she was by a few years. She had no daughters of her own,
and had in consequence an immense amount of undisciplined energy at the
service of those of other people. She was not a lady whose views were
apt to be matured in silence; she was ardently concerned about Rachel's
future, and she was constantly imparting new projects to Lady Gore, who
received them with smiling equanimity.
It was at an "At Home" given by Mrs. Feversham one evening early in the
season, when the rooms were full of hot people talking at the top of
their voices, that the hostess, looking round her with a comprehensive
glance, saw Rachel standing alone. There was, however, in the girl's
demeanour none of that air of aggressive solitude sometimes assumed by
the neglected. The eye fell upon Rachel with a sense of rest, looking on
one who did not wish to go anywhere or to do anything, who was standing
with unconscious grace an entirely contented spectator of what was
passing before her. Mrs. Feversham's one idea, however, as she perceived
her was instantly to suggest that she should do something else, that at
any price some one should take her to have some tea, or make her eat or
walk, or do anything, in fact, but stand still. Rachel, however, at the
moment she was swooped down upon, was well amused; a smile was
unconsciously playing on her lips as she listened to an absurd
conversation going on between a young man and a girl just in front of
her.
"By George!" said the boy, "it is hot. Let's go and have ices."
"Ices? Right you are," the girl replied, and attempted to follow her
gallant cavalier, who had started off, trying to make for himself a path
through the serried hot crowd, leaving the lady he was supposed to be
convoying to follow him as near as she might.
"Hallo!" he said suddenly. "There's Billy Crowther. Do you mind if I go
and slap him on the back?"
"All right, buck up, then, and slap him on the back," replied the fair
one. "I'll go on." Thus gracefully encouraged, the youth flung himself
in another direction, and almost overturned his hostess, who was coming
towards Rachel.
"Sorry," he said, apparently not at all discomposed, and continued his
wild career.
"Well! the young men of the present day!..." said Mrs. Feversham, as she
joined Rachel; then suddenly remembering that a wholesale condemnation
was not the attitude she wished to inculcate in her present hearer, she
went on: "Not that they are all alike, of course; some of them are--are
different," she supplemented luminously. "Now, my child, have you had
anything to eat?"
"I don't think I want anything, thank you," said Rachel.
"Oh, nonsense!" said Mrs. Feversham. "You must." And, looking round for
the necessary escort, she saw a new arrival coming up the stairs. "The
very man!" she said to herself, but fortunately not aloud, as "Mr.
Rendel!" was announced. A young man of apparently a little over thirty,
with deep-set, far-apart eyes and clear-cut features, came up and took
her outstretched hand with a little air of formal politeness refreshing
after the manifestations she had been deploring.
"I am so glad to see you," she said cordially. Rendel greeted her with a
smile. "Do you know Miss Gore?" Rendel and Rachel bowed.
"I have met Sir William Gore more than once," he said.
"She is dying for something to eat," said Mrs. Feversham, to Rachel's
great astonishment. "Do take her downstairs, Mr. Rendel." The young
people obediently went down together.
"I am not really dying for something to eat," Rachel said, as soon as
they were out of hearing of their hostess. "In fact, I am not sure that
I want anything."
"Oh, don't you?" said Rendel.
"Two hours ago I was still dining, you see."
"Of course," said Rendel, "so was I." They both laughed. They went on
nevertheless to the door of the room from whence the clatter of glass
and china was heard.
"Now, are you sure you won't be 'tempted,' according to the received
expression?" said Rendel, as a hot waiter hurried past them with some
dirty plates and glasses on a tray.
"No, I am afraid I am not at all tempted," said Rachel.
"Well, let us look for a cooler place," said Rendel. What a soothing
companion this was he had found, who did not want him to fight for an
ice or a sandwich! They went up again to a little recess on the landing
by an open window. The roar of tongues came down to them from the
drawing-room.
"Just listen to those people," said Rendel. A sort of wild, continuous
howl filled the air, as though bursting from a company of the condemned
immured in an eternal prison, instead of from a gathering of peaceable
citizens met together for their diversion. "Isn't it dreadful to realise
what our natural note is like?" he added. "It is hideous."
"It isn't pretty, certainly," said Rachel, unable to help smiling at his
face of disgust. The roar seemed to grow louder as it went on.
"It is a pity we can't chirp and twitter like birds," said Rendel.
"I don't know that that would be very much better," said Rachel. "Have
you ever been in a room with a canary singing? Think of a room with as
many canaries in it as this."
"Yes, I daresay--it might have been nearly as bad," Rendel said; "though
if we were canaries we should be nicer to look at perhaps," and his eye
fell on an unprepossessing elderly couple who were descending the stairs
with none of the winsomeness of singing birds. "Have you read
Maeterlinck's 'Life of the Bees'?"
"No," Rachel answered simply.
"I agree with him," Rendel said, "that it would be just as difficult to
get any idea of what human beings are about by looking down on them from
a height, as it is for us to discover what insects are doing when we
look down on them."
"Yes, imagine looking at that," said Rachel, pointing towards the
drawing-room. "You would see people walking up and down and in and out
for no reason, and jostling each other round and round."
"Yes," said Rendel. "How aimless it would look! Not more aimless than it
is, after all," he added.
"It amuses me, all the same," said Rachel, rather deprecatingly. "I
mean, to come to a party of this kind every now and then; perhaps
because I don't do it very often."
"Why, don't you go out every night of your life in the season?" said
Rendel; "I thought all young ladies did."
"I don't," she said. "It isn't quite the same for me as it is for other
people--at least, I mean that I have only my father to go out with;" and
then, seeing in his face the interpretation he put on her words, she
added, "my mother is an invalid, and we do not like to leave her too
often."
"Ah! but she is alive still," said Rendel, with a tone that sounded as
if he understood what the contrary might have meant.
"Oh yes," said Rachel quickly. "Yes, yes, indeed she is alive," in a
voice that told the proportion that fact assumed in existence.
"My mother died long years ago," said Rendel, in a lower voice. "Not so
long, though, that I did not understand." Rachel looked at him with a
soft light of pity flooding her face, and drawing the words out of him,
he knew not how. "My father married again," he said, "while I was still
a child--while I needed looking after, at least."
"Oh," said Rachel, "you had a stepmother?"
"Yes," he said, "I had a stepmother," and his face involuntarily became
harder as he recalled that long stretch of loveless years--the father
had never quite understood the shy and sensitive child--during which he
had been neglected, suppressed, lonely, with no one to care that he did
well at school and college, and that later he was getting on in the
world, with no place in the world that was really his home. Then he went
on after a moment: "And now my father is dead, too, so I am pretty much
alone, you see."
"How terrible it must be!" said Rachel softly. "How extraordinary! I
can't quite imagine what it is like."
"Well, it is not very pleasant," said Rendel looking up, and again
penetrated by the sweet compassion in Rachel's face. "You can't think
how strange it is----" He broke off and got up as Sir William Gore came
downstairs towards them. Sir William, with the true instinct of a
father, had chosen this moment to wonder whether Rachel was being
sufficiently amused, and was bearing down upon her and her companion
with an air of cheerful virtue which proclaimed that her conversation
with Rendel was at an end. Sir William's political principles did not
permit him to think very much of Rendel, since he was private secretary
to a man whose policy Sir William cordially detested, Lord Stamfordham,
the Foreign Minister, whose acute and wide-reaching sagacity inspired
his followers with a blind confidence to himself and his methods. Lord
Stamfordham had soon discovered the practical aptitude, the political
capacity, the determined, honourable ambition that lay behind Francis
Rendel's grave exterior, and had made up his mind, as indeed had others,
that the young man had a distinguished future before him.
"Ah, Rendel, how are you?" said Gore. "What is your Chief going to do
next, eh?"
"I am afraid I can't tell you, Sir William," said Rendel with a half
smile.
"Well, the people round him ought to put the brake on," said Gore, "or I
don't know where the country will be."
"I am afraid it is a brake I am not strong enough to work," said Rendel;
"like Archimedes, I have not a lever powerful enough to move the
universe."
"H'm!" said Sir William, with a sort of snort. There are fortunately
still some sounds left in our vocabulary which convey primeval emotions
without the limitations of words. "Come, Rachel, it is time for us to be
going."
* * * * *
Mrs. Feversham's watchful eye had managed to observe what appeared to
be the sufficiently satisfactory sequel to the introduction she had
made. She was not a woman to let such a seed die for want of planting
and watering. She asked Rendel to dinner to meet the Gores, she talked
to Lady Gore about him, she it was who somehow arranged that he should
go to call at Prince's Gate, and he finally grew into a habit of finding
his way there with a frequency that surprised himself. Lady Gore
subjugated him entirely by her sweet kindly welcome, and the interest
with which she listened to him, until he found himself to his own
astonishment telling her, as he sat by her sofa, of his hopes and fears
and plans for the future.
Gradually new possibilities seemed to come into his life, or rather the
old possibilities were seen in a new light shed by the womanly sympathy
which up to now he had never known. He came away from each visit with
some fresh spurt of purpose, some new impulse to achievement. Lady Gore,
on her side, had been more favourably impressed by Rendel than by any of
the young men she had seen, until she realised that here at last was a
possible husband who might be worthy of Rachel. But with her customary
wisdom she tried not to formulate it even to herself: she did not
believe in these things being helped on otherwise than by opportunity
for intercourse being given. But where Mrs. Feversham was, opportunity
was sure to follow. Lady Gore one morning had an eager letter from her
friend saying, "I know that you and Rachel make it a rule of life that
she can never go away from home. But you must let her come to me next
Thursday for the night. I shall have"--and she underlined this
significantly without going into more details--"_just the right people
to meet her_." And for once, as Lady Gore folded up the letter, she too
was seized with an ardour of matchmaking. She had a real affection for
Rendel, and the devotion of the young man to herself touched and pleased
her. His probably brilliant future and comfortable means were not the
principal factors in the situation, but there was no doubt that they
helped to make everything else easy. So it was that, to Rachel's great
surprise, the day after the party at Bruton Street, her mother having
told her without showing her the letter of Mrs. Feversham's invitation,
advised her to accept it, and, to the mother's still greater surprise,
the daughter, in her turn, after a slight protest, agreed to do so,
stipulating, however, that she should not be away more than twenty-four
hours. The accusation that Rachel "gadded" as much as other girls of her
age was obviously an unmerited one.