Sir William Blancove did business at his Bank till the hour of three in
the afternoon, when his carriage conveyed him to a mews near the park of
Fashion, where he mounted horse and obeyed the bidding of his doctor for
a space, by cantering in a pleasant, portly, cock-horsey style, up and
down the Row.
It was the day of the great race on Epsom Downs, and elderly gentlemen
pricked by the doctors were in the ascendant in all London congregations
on horseback.
Like Achilles (if the bilious Shade will permit the impudent
comparison), they dragged their enemy, Gout, at their horses' heels
for a term, and vengeance being accomplished went to their dinners and
revived him.
Sir William was disturbed by his son's absence from England. A youth
to whom a baronetcy and wealth are to be bequeathed is an important
organism; and Sir William, though his faith reposed in his son, was
averse to his inexplicably prolonged residence in the French metropolis,
which, a school for many things, is not a school for the study of our
Parliamentary system, and still less for that connubial career Sir
William wished him to commence.
Edward's delightful cynical wit--the worldly man's profundity--and his
apt quotations of the wit of others, would have continued to exercise
their charm, if Sir William had not wanted to have him on the spot that
he might answer certain questions pertinaciously put by Mama Gosling on
behalf of her daughter.
“There is no engagement,” Edward wrote; “let the maiden wait and discern
her choice: let her ripen;” and he quoted Horace up to a point.
Nor could his father help smiling and completing the lines. He laughed,
too, as he read the jog of a verse: “Were I to marry the Gosling, pray,
which would be the goose?”
He laughed, but with a shade of disappointment in the fancy that
he perceived a wearing away of the robust mental energy which had
characterized his son: and Sir William knew the danger of wit, and how
the sharp blade cuts the shoots of the sapling. He had thought that
Edward was veritable tough oak, and had hitherto encouraged his light
play with the weapon.
It became a question with him now, whether Wit and Ambition may dwell
together harmoniously in a young man: whether they will not give such
manifestation of their social habits as two robins shut in a cage
will do: of which pretty birds one will presently be discovered with a
slightly ruffled bosom amid the feathers of his defunct associate.
Thus painfully revolving matters of fact and feeling, Sir William
cantered, and, like a cropped billow blown against by the wind, drew up
in front of Mrs. Lovell, and entered into conversation with that lady,
for the fine needles of whose brain he had the perfect deference of an
experienced senior. She, however, did not give him comfort. She informed
him that something was wrong with Edward; she could not tell what. She
spoke of him languidly, as if his letters contained wearisome trifling.
“He strains to be Frenchy,” she said. “It may be a good compliment for
them to receive: it's a bad one for him to pay.”
“Alcibiades is not the best of models,” murmured Sir William. “He
doesn't mention Miss Gosling.”
“Oh dear, yes. I have a French acrostic on her name.”
“An acrostic!”
A more contemptible form of mental exercise was not to be found,
according to Sir William's judgement.
“An acrostic!” he made it guttural. “Well!”
“He writes word that he hears Moliere every other night. That can't harm
him. His reading is principally Memoirs, which I think I have heard you
call 'The backstairs of history.' We are dull here, and I should not
imagine it to be a healthy place to dwell in, if the absence of friends
and the presence of sunshine conspire to dullness. Algy, of course, is
deep in accounts to-day?”
Sir William remarked that he had not seen the young man at the office,
and had not looked for him; but the mention of Algernon brought
something to his mind, and he said,--
“I hear he is continually sending messengers from the office to you
during the day. You rule him with a rod of iron. Make him discontinue
that practice. I hear that he despatched our old porter to you yesterday
with a letter marked 'urgent.'”
Mrs. Lovell laughed pleadingly for Algernon.
“No; he shall not do it again. It occurred yesterday, and on no other
occasion that I am aware of. He presumes that I am as excited as he is
himself about the race--”
The lady bowed to a passing cavalier; a smarting blush dyed her face.
“He bets, does he!” said Sir William. “A young man, whose income, at the
extreme limit, is two hundred pounds a year.”
“May not the smallness of the amount in some degree account for the
betting?” she asked whimsically. “You know, I bet a little--just a
little. If I have but a small sum, I already regard it as a stake; I am
tempted to bid it fly.”
“In his case, such conduct puts him on the high road to rascality,” said
Sir William severely. “He is doing no good.”
“Then the squire is answerable for such conduct, I think.”
“You presume to say that he is so because he allows his son very little
money to squander? How many young men have to contain their expenses
within two hundred pounds a year!”
“Not sons of squires and nephews of baronets,” said Mrs. Lovell. “Adieu!
I think I see a carrier-pigeon flying overhead, and, as you may suppose,
I am all anxiety.”
Sir William nodded to her. He disliked certain of her ways; but they
were transparent bits of audacity and restlessness pertaining to a
youthful widow, full of natural dash; and she was so sweetly mistress of
herself in all she did, that he never supposed her to be needing caution
against excesses. Old gentlemen have their pets, and Mrs. Lovell was a
pet of Sir William's.
She was on the present occasion quite mistress of herself, though the
stake was large. She was mistress of herself when Lord Suckling, who had
driven from the Downs and brushed all save a spot of white dust out of
his baby moustache to make himself presentable, rode up to her to say
that the horse Templemore was beaten, and that his sagacity in always
betting against favourites would, in this last instance, transfer a “pot
of money” from alien pockets to his own.
“Algy Blancove's in for five hundred to me,” he said; adding with
energy, “I hope you haven't lost? No, don't go and dash my jolly feeling
by saying you have. It was a fine heat; neck-and-neck past the Stand.
Have you?”
“A little,” she confessed. “It's a failing of mine to like favourites.
I'm sorry for Algy.”
“I'm afraid he's awfully hit.”
“What makes you think so?”
“He took it so awfully cool.”
“That may mean the reverse.”
“It don't with him. But, Mrs. Lovell, do tell me you haven't lost.
Not much, is it? Because, I know there's no guessing, when you are
concerned.”
The lady trifled with her bridle-rein.
“I really can't tell you yet. I may have lost. I haven't won. I'm not
cool-blooded enough to bet against favourites. Addio, son of Fortune!
I'm at the Opera to-night.”
As she turned her horse from Lord Suckling, the cavalier who had saluted
her when she was with Sir William passed again. She made a signal to her
groom, and sent the man flying in pursuit of him, while she turned and
cantered. She was soon overtaken.
“Madam, you have done me the honour.”
“I wish to know why it is your pleasure to avoid me, Major Waring?”
“In this place?”
“Wherever we may chance to meet.”
“I must protest.”
“Do not. The thing is evident.”
They rode together silently.
Her face was toward the sunset. The light smote her yellow hair, and
struck out her grave and offended look, as in a picture.
“To be condemned without a hearing!” she said. “The most dastardly
criminal gets that. Is it imagined that I have no common feelings? Is it
manly to follow me with studied insult? I can bear the hatred of fools.
Contempt I have not deserved. Dead! I should be dead, if my conscience
had once reproached me. I am a mark for slander, and brave men should
beware of herding with despicable slanderers.”
She spoke, gazing frontward all the while. The pace she maintained in no
degree impeded the concentrated passion of her utterance.
But it was a more difficult task for him, going at that pace, to make
explanations, and she was exquisitely fair to behold! The falling beams
touched her with a mellow sweetness that kindled bleeding memories.
“If I defend myself?” he said.
“No. All I ask is that you should Accuse me. Let me know what I have
done--done, that I have not been bitterly punished for? What is it? what
is it? Why do you inflict a torture on me whenever you see me? Not
by word, not by look. You are too subtle in your cruelty to give me
anything I can grasp. You know how you wound me. And I am alone.”
“That is supposed to account for my behaviour?”
She turned her face to him. “Oh, Major blaring! say nothing unworthy of
yourself. That would be a new pain to me.”
He bowed. In spite of a prepossessing anger, some little softness crept
through his heart.
“You may conceive that I have dropped my pride,” she said. “That is the
case, or my pride is of a better sort.”
“Madam, I fully hope and trust,” said he.
“And believe,” she added, twisting his words to the ironic tongue. “You
certainly must believe that my pride has sunk low. Did I ever speak to
you in this manner before?”
“Not in this manner, I can attest.”
“Did I speak at all, when I was hurt?” She betrayed that he had planted
a fresh sting.
“If my recollection serves me,” said he, “your self-command was
remarkable.”
Mrs. Lovell slackened her pace.
“Your recollection serves you too well, Major Waring. I was a girl. You
judged the acts of a woman. I was a girl, and you chose to put your own
interpretation on whatever I did. You scourged me before the whole army.
Was not that enough? I mean, enough for you? For me, perhaps not, for I
have suffered since, and may have been set apart to suffer. I saw you in
that little church at Warbeach; I met you in the lanes; I met you on the
steamer; on the railway platform; at the review. Everywhere you kept
up the look of my judge. You! and I have been 'Margaret' to you. Major
Waring, how many a woman in my place would attribute your relentless
condemnation of her to injured vanity or vengeance? In those days I
trifled with everybody. I played with fire. I was ignorant of life.
I was true to my husband; and because I was true, and because I was
ignorant, I was plunged into tragedies I never suspected. This is to be
what you call a coquette. Stamping a name saves thinking. Could I
read my husband's temper? Would not a coquette have played her cards
differently? There never was need for me to push my husband to a
contest. I never had the power to restrain him. Now I am wiser; and now
is too late; and now you sit in judgement on me. Why? It is not fair; it
is unkind.”
Tears were in her voice, though not in her eyes.
Major Waring tried to study her with the coolness of a man who has
learnt to doubt the truth of women; but he had once yearned in a young
man's frenzy of love to take that delicate shape in his arms, and he was
not proof against the sedate sweet face and keen sad ring of the voice.
He spoke earnestly.
“You honour me by caring for my opinion. The past is buried. I have some
forgiveness to ask. Much, when I think of it--very much. I did you a
public wrong. From a man to a woman it was unpardonable. It is a blot on
my career. I beg you humbly to believe that I repent it.”
The sun was flaming with great wings red among the vapours; and in the
recollection of the two, as they rode onward facing it, arose that day
of the forlorn charge of English horse in the Indian jungle, the thunder
and the dust, the fire and the dense knot of the struggle. And like
a ghost sweeping across her eyeballs, Mrs. Lovell beheld, part in his
English freshness, part ensanguined, the image of the gallant boy who
had ridden to perish at the spur of her mad whim. She forgot all present
surroundings.
“Percy!” she said.
“Madam?”
“Percy!”
“Margaret?”
“Oh, what an undying day, Percy!”
And then she was speechless.