ARCADIAN RED BRICK, LILAC, AND LABURNUM.
AS time proceeds, renewal and decay, its twin principles of mutation,
are everywhere and necessarily active, applying to the moral as well
as to the material world. Affections displace and succeed one another.
The most beautiful are often the first to die. Characteristics in
their beginning, minute and unsubstantial as the fairy brood that
people the woodland air, enlarge and materialize till they usurp the
dominion of the whole man, and the people and the world are changed.
Sir Booth Fanshawe is away at Paris just now, engaged in a great
negotiation, which is to bring order out of chaos, and inform him at
last what he is really worth _per annum_. Margaret and her cousin,
Miss Sheckleton, have revisited England; their Norman retreat is
untenanted for the present.
With the sorrow of a great concealment upon her, with other sorrows
that she does not tell, Margaret looks sad and pale.
In a small old suburban house, that stands alone, with a rural
affectation, on a little patch of shorn grass, embowered in lilacs and
laburnums, and built of a deep vermillion brick, the residence of
these ladies is established.
It is a summer evening, and a beautiful little boy, more than a year
old, is sprawling, and babbling, and rolling, and laughing on the
grass upon his back. Margaret, seated on the grass beside him,
prattles and laughs with him, and rolls him about, delighted, and
adoring her little idol.
Old Anne Sheckleton, sitting on the bench, smiling happily, under the
window, which is clustered round with roses, contributes her quota of
nonsense to the prattle.
In the midst of this comes a ring at the bell in the jessamine-covered
wall, and a tidy little maid runs out to the green door, opens it, and
in steps Cleve Verney.
Margaret is on her feet in a moment, with the light of a different
love, something of the old romance, in the glad surprise, "Oh,
darling, it is you!" and her arms are about his neck, and he stoops
and kisses her fondly, and in his face for a moment, is reflected the
glory of that delighted smile.
"Yes, darling. Are you better?"
"Oh, yes--ever so much; I'm always well when you are here; and look,
see our poor little darling."
"So he is."
"We have had such fun with him--haven't we, Anne? I'm sure he'll be so
like you."
"Is this in his favour, cousin Anne?" asked Cleve, taking the old
lady's hand.
"Why should it not?" said she gaily.
"A question--well, I take the benefit of the doubt," laughed Cleve.
"No, darling," he said to Margaret, "you mustn't sit on the grass; it
is damp; you'll sit beside our Cousin Anne, and be prudent."
So he instead sat down on the grass, and talked with them, and
prattled and romped with the baby by turns, until the nurse came out
to convey him to the nursery, and he was handed round to say what
passes for "Good night," and give his tiny paw to each in turn.
"You look tired, Cleve, darling."
"So I am, my Guido; can we have a cup of tea?"
"Oh, yes. I'll get it in a moment," said active Anne Sheckleton.
"It's too bad disturbing you," said Cleve.
"No trouble in the world," said Anne, who wished to allow them a word
together; "besides, I must kiss baby in his bed."
"Yes, darling, I _am_ tired," said Cleve, taking his place beside her,
so soon as old Anne Sheckleton was gone. "That old man"----
"Lord Verney, do you mean?"
"Yes; he has begun plaguing me again."
"What is it about, darling?"
"Oh, fifty things; he thinks, among others, I ought to marry," said
Cleve, with a dreary laugh.
"Oh, I thought he had given up that," she said, with a smile that was
very pale.
"So he did for a time; but I think he's possessed. If he happens to
take up an idea that's likely to annoy other people, he never lets it
drop till he teases them half to death. He thinks I should marry
_money_ and political connection, and I don't know what all, and I'm
quite tired of the whole thing. What a vulgar little box this
is--isn't it, darling? I almost wish you were back again in that place
in France."
"But I can see you so much oftener here, Cleve," pleaded Margaret,
softly, with a very sad look.
"And where's the good of seeing me here, dear Margaret? Just consider,
I always come to you anxious; there's always a risk, besides, of
discovery."
"Where you are is to me a paradise."
"Oh, darling, do _not_ talk rubbish. This vulgar, odious little
place! No place can be _either_--_quite_, of course--where _you_ are.
But you must see what it is--a paradise"--and he laughed
peevishly--"of red brick, and lilacs, and laburnums--a paradise for
old Mr. Dowlas, the tallow-chandler."
There was a little tremor in Margaret's lip, and the water stood in
her large eyes; her hand was, as it were, on the coffin-edge; she was
looking in the face of a dead romance.
"Now, you really must not shed tears over _that_ speech. You are too
much given to weeping, Margaret. What have I said to vex you? It
merely amounts to this, that we live just now in the future; we can't
well deny _that_, darling. But the time will come at last, and my
queen enjoy her own."
And so saying he kissed her, and told her to be a good little girl;
and from the window Miss Sheckleton handed them tea, and then she ran
up to the nursery.
"You _do_ look very tired, Cleve," said Margaret, looking into his
anxious face.
"I _am_ tired, darling," he said, with just a degree of impatience in
his tone; "I said so--horribly tired."
"I wish so much you were liberated from that weary House of Commons."
"Now, my wise little woman is talking of what she doesn't
understand--not the least; besides, what would you have me turn to? I
should be totally without resource and pursuit--don't you see? We must
be reasonable. No, it is not that in the least that tires me, but I'm
really overwhelmed with anxieties, and worried by my uncle, who wants
me to marry, and thinks I can marry whom I please--that's all."
"I sometimes think, Cleve, I've spoiled your fortunes," with a great
sigh, said Margaret, watching his face.
"Now, where's the good of saying that, my little woman? I'm only
talking of my uncle's teasing me, and wishing he'd let us both alone."
Here came a little pause.
"Is that the baby?" said Margaret, raising her head and listening.
"I don't hear our baby or any one else's," said Cleve.
"I fancied I heard it cry, but it wasn't."
"You must think of me more, and of that child less, darling--you must,
indeed," said Cleve, a little sourly.
I think the poor heart was pleased, thinking this jealousy; but I fear
it was rather a splenetic impulse of selfishness, and that the baby
was, in his eyes, a bore pretty often.
"Does the House sit to-night, Cleve, darling?"
"Does it, indeed? Why it's sitting now. We are to have the second
reading of the West India Bill on to-night, and I must be
there--yes--in an hour"--he was glancing at his watch--"and heaven
knows at what hour in the morning we shall get away."
And just at this moment old Anne Sheckleton joined them. "She's coming
with more tea," she said, as the maid emerged with a little tray, "and
we'll place our cups on the window-stone when we don't want them. Now,
Mr. Verney, is not this a charming little spot just at this light?"
"I almost think it is," said Cleve, relenting. The golden light of
evening was touching the formal poplars, and the other trees, and
bringing out the wrinkles of the old bricks duskily in its flaming
glow.
"Yes, just for about fifteen minutes in the twenty-four hours, when
the weather is particularly favourable, it _has_ a sort of Dutch
picturesqueness; but, on the whole, it is not the sort of cottage that
I would choose for a permanent dove-cot. I should fear lest my pigeons
should choke with dust."
"No, there's no dust here; it is the quietest, most sylvan little lane
in the world."
"Which is a wide place," said Cleve. "Well, with smoke then."
"Nor smoke either."
"But I forgot, love does not die of smoke or of anything else," said
Cleve.
"No, of course, love is eternal," said Margaret.
"Just so; the King never dies. Les roix meurent-ils? Quelquefois,
madame. Alas, theory and fact conflict. Love is eternal in the
abstract; but nothing is more mortal than a particular love," said
Cleve.
"If you think so, I wonder you ever wished to marry," said Margaret,
and a faint tinge flushed her cheeks.
"I thought so, and yet I did wish to marry," said Cleve. "It is
perishable, but I can't live without it," and he patted her cheek, and
laughed a rather cold little laugh.
"No, love never dies," said Margaret, with a gleam of her old fierce
spirit. "But it may be killed."
"It is terrible to kill anything," said Cleve.
"To kill love," she answered, "is the worst murder of all."
"A veritable murder," he acquiesced, with a smile and a slight shrug;
"once killed, it never revives."
"You like talking awfully, as if I might lose your love," said she,
haughtily; "as if, were I to vex you, you never could forgive."
"Forgiveness has nothing to do with it, my poor little woman. I no
more called my love into being than I did myself; and should it die,
either naturally or violently, I could no more call it to life, than I
could Cleopatra or Napoleon Bonaparte. It is a principle, don't you
see? that comes as direct as life from heaven. We can't create it, we
can't restore it; and really about love, it is worse than mortal,
because, as I said, I am sure it has _no_ resurrection--no, it has no
resurrection."
"That seems to me a reason," she said, fixing her large eyes upon him
with a wild resentment, "why you should cherish it _very_ much while
it lives."
"And _don't_ I, darling?" he said, placing his arms round her neck,
and drawing her fondly to his breast, and in the thrill of that
momentary effusion was something of the old feeling when to lose her
would have been despair, to gain her heaven, and it seemed as if the
scent of the woods of Malory, and of the soft sea breeze, was around
them for a moment.
And now he is gone, away to that tiresome House--lost to her, given up
to his ambition, which seems more and more to absorb him; and she
remains smiling on their beautiful little baby, with a great misgiving
at her heart, to see Cleve no more for four-and-twenty hours more.
As Cleve went into the House, he met old Colonel Thongs, sometime whip
of the "outs."
"You've heard about old Snowdon?"
"No."
"In the Cabinet, by Jove!"
"Really?"
"Fact. Ask your uncle."
"By Jove, it _is_ very unlooked for; no one thought of him; but I dare
say he'll do very well."
"We'll soon try that."
It _was_ a _very_ odd appointment. But Lord Snowdon was gazetted; a
dull man, but laborious; a man who had held minor offices at different
periods of his life, and was presumed to have a competent knowledge of
affairs. A dull man, owing all to his dulness, quite below many, and
selected as a negative compromise for the vacant seat in the Cabinet,
for which two zealous and brilliant competitors were contending.
"I see it all," thought Cleve; "that's the reason why Caroline Oldys
and Lady Wimbledon are to be at Ware this autumn, and I'm to be
married to the niece of a Cabinet minister."
Cleve sneered, but he felt very uneasy.