Rorie makes a Speech.
Somewhat to his surprise, and much to his delight, Roderick Vawdrey
escaped that maternal lecture which he was wont undutifully to describe
as a "wigging." When he entered the drawing-room in full dress just
about ten minutes before the first of the guests was announced, Lady
Jane received him with a calm affectionateness, and asked him no
questions about his disposal of the afternoon. Perhaps this unusual
clemency was in honour of his twenty-first birthday, Rorie thought. A
man could not come of age more than once in his life. He was entitled
to some favour.
The dinner-party was as other dinners at Briarwood; all the
arrangements perfect; the _menu_ commendable, if not new; the general
result a little dull.
The Ashbourne party were among the first to arrive; the Duke portly and
affable; the Duchess delighted to welcome her favourite nephew; Lady
Mabel looking very fragile, flower-like, and graceful, in her pale blue
gauze dinner-dress. Lady Mabel affected the palest tints, half-colours,
which were more like the shadows in a sunset sky than any earthly hues.
She took possession of Rorie at once, treating him with a calm
superiority, as if he had been a younger brother.
"Tell me all about Switzerland," she said, as they sat side by side on
one of the amber ottomans. "What was it that you liked best?"
"The climbing, of course," he answered.
"But which of all the landscapes? What struck you most? What impressed
you most vividly? Your first view of Mont Blanc, or that marvellous
gorge below the Tête Noire,--or----?"
"It was all uncommonly jolly. But there's a family resemblance in Swiss
mountains, don't you know? They're all white--and they're all peaky.
There's a likeness in Swiss lakes, too, if you come to think of it.
They're all blue, and they're all wet. And Swiss villages, now--don't
you think they are rather disappointing?--such a cruel plagiarism of
those plaster châlets the image-men carry about the London streets, and
no candle-ends burning inside to make 'em look pretty. But I liked
Lucerne uncommonly, there was such a capital billiard-table at the
hotel."
"Roderick!" cried Lady Mabel, with a disgusted look. "I don't think you
have a vestige of poetry in your nature."
"I hope I haven't," replied Rorie devoutly.
"You could see those sublime scenes, and never once feel your heart
thrilled or your mind exalted--you can come home from your first Swiss
tour and talk about billiard-tables!"
"The scenery was very nice," said Rorie thoughtfully. "Yes; there were
times, perhaps, when I was a trifle stunned by all that grand calm
beauty, the silence, the solitude, the awfulness of it all; but I had
hardly time to feel the thrill when I came bump up against a party of
tourists, English or American, all talking the same twaddle, and all
patronising the scenery. That took the charm out of the landscape
somehow, and I coiled up, as the Yankees say. And now you want me to go
into second-hand raptures, and repeat my emotions, as if I were writing
a tourist's article for a magazine. I can't do it, Mabel."
"Well, I won't bore you any more about it," said Lady Mabel, "but I
confess my disappointment. I thought we should have such nice long
talks about Switzerland."
"What's the use of talking of a place? If it's so lovely that one can't
live without it, one had better go back there."
This was a practical way of putting things which was too much for Lady
Mabel. She fanned herself gently with a great fan of cloudy looking
feathers, such as Titania might have used that midsummer night near
Athens. She relapsed into a placid silence, looking at Rorie
thoughtfully with her calm blue eyes.
His travels had improved him. That bronze hue suited him wonderfully
well. He looked more manly. He was no longer a beardless boy, to be
patronised with that gracious elder-sister air of Lady Mabel's. She
felt that he was further off from her than he had been last season in
London.
"How late you arrived this evening," she said, after a pause. "I came
to five-o'clock with my aunt, and found her quite anxious about you. If
it hadn't been for your telegram from Southampton, she would have
fancied there was something wrong."
"She needn't have fidgeted herself after three o'clock," answered Rorie
coolly; "my luggage must have come home by that time."
"I see. You sent the luggage on before, and came by a later train?"
"No, I didn't. I stopped halfway between here and Lyndhurst to see some
old friends."
"Flattering for my aunt," said Mabel. "I should have thought she was
your oldest friend."
"Of course she has the prior claim. But as I was going to hand myself
over to her bodily at seven o'clock, to be speechified about and
rendered generally ridiculous, after the manner of young men who come
of age, I felt I was entitled to do what I liked in the interval."
"And therefore you went to the Tempests'," said Mabel, with her blue
eyes sparkling. "I see. That is what you do when you do what you like."
"Precisely. I am very fond of Squire Tempest. When I first rode to
hounds it was under his wing. There's my mother beckoning me; I am to
go and do the civil to people."
And Roderick walked away from the ottoman to the spot where his mother
stood, with the Duke of Dovedale at her side, receiving her guests.
"It was a very grand party, in the way of blue blood, landed estate,
diamonds, lace, satin and velvet, and self-importance. All the magnates
of the soil, within accessible distance of Briarwood, had assembled to
do honour to Rorie's coming of age. The dining-tables had been arranged
in a horse-shoe, so as to accommodate fifty people in a room which, in
its every-day condition, would not have been too large for thirty. The
orchids and ferns upon this horse-shoe table made the finest
floricultural show that had been seen for a long time. There were rare
specimens from New Granada and the Philippine Islands; wondrous flowers
lately discovered in the Sierra Madre; blossoms of every shape and
colour from the Cordilleras; richest varieties of hue--golden yellow,
glowing crimson, creamy white; rare eccentricities of form and colour
beside which any other flower would have looked vulgar; butterfly
flowers and pitcher-shaped flowers, that had cost as much money as
prize pigeons, and seemed as worthless, save to the connoisseur in the
article. The Vawdrey racing-plate, won by Roderick's grandfather, was
nowhere by comparison with those marvellous tropical blossoms, that
fairy forest of fern. Everybody talked about the orchids, confessed his
or her comparative ignorance of the subject, and complimented Lady Jane.
"The orchids made the hit of the evening," Rorie said afterwards. "It
was their coming of age, not mine."
There was a moderate and endurable amount of speechifying by-and-by,
when the monster double-crowned pines had been cut, and the purple
grapes, almost as big as pigeons' eggs, had gone round.
The Duke of Dovedale assured his friends that this was one of the
proudest moments of his life, and that if Providence had permitted a
son of his own to attain his majority, he, the Duke, could have hardly
felt a deeper interest in the occasion than he felt to-day. He
had--arra--arra--known this young man from childhood, and
had--er--um--never found him guilty of a mean
action--or--arra--discovered in him a thought unworthy of an English
gentleman.
This last was felt to be a strong point, as it implied that an English
gentleman must needs be much better than any other gentleman.
A continental gentleman might, of course, be guilty of an unworthy
thought and yet pass current, according to the loose morality of his
nation. But the English article must be flawless.
And thus the Duke meandered on for five minutes or so, and there was a
subdued gush of approval, and then an uncomfortable little pause, and
then Rorie rose in his place, next to the Duchess, and returned thanks.
He told them all how fond he was of them and the soil that bred them.
How he meant to be a Hampshire squire, pure and simple, if he could.
How he had no higher ambition than to be useful and to do good in this
little spot of England which Providence had given him for his
inheritance. How, if he should go into Parliament by-and-by, as he had
some thoughts of attempting to do, it would be in their interests that
he would join that noble body of legislators; that it would be they and
their benefit he would have always nearest his heart.
"There is not a tree in the Forest that I do not love," cried Rorie,
fired with his theme, and forgetting to stammer; "and I believe there
is not a tree, from the Twelve Apostles to the Knightwood Oak, or a
patch of gorse from Picket Post to Stony Cross, that I do not know as
well as I know the friends round me to-night. I was born in the Forest,
and may I live and die and be buried here. I have just come back from
seeing some of the finest scenery in Europe; yet, without blushing for
my want of poetry, I will confess that the awful grandeur of those
snow-clad mountains did not touch my heart so deeply as our beechen
glades and primrose-carpeted bottoms close at home." There was a burst
of applause after Rorie's speech that made all the orchids shiver, and
nearly annihilated a thirty-guinea _Odontoglossum Vexillarium_. His
talk about the Forest, irrelevant as it might be, went home to the
hearts of the neighbouring landowners. But, by-and-by, in the
drawing-room, when he rejoined his cousin, he found that fastidious
young lady by no means complimentary.
"Your speech would have been capital half a century ago, Rorie," she
said, "and you don't arra--arra--as poor papa does, which is something
to be thankful for; but all that talk about the Forest seemed to be an
anachronism. People are not rooted in their native soil nowadays, as
they used to be in the old stage-coach times, when it was a long day's
journey to London. One might as well be a vegetable at once if one is
to be pinned down to one particular spot of earth. Why, the Twelve
Apostles," exclaimed Mabel, innocent of irreverence, for she meant
certain ancient and fast-decaying oaks so named, "see as much of life
as your fine old English gentleman. Men have wider ideas nowadays. The
world is hardly big enough for their ambition."
"I would rather live in a field, and strike my roots deep down like one
of those trees, than be a homeless nomad with a world-wide ambition,"
answered Rorie. "I have a passion for home."
"Then I wonder you spend so little time in it."
"Oh, I don't mean a home inside four walls. The Forest is my home, and
Briarwood is no dearer to me than any other spot in it."
"Not so dear as the Abbey House, perhaps?"
"Well, no. I confess that fine old Tudor mansion pleases me better than
this abode of straight lines and French windows, plate glass and gilt
mouldings."
They sat side by side upon the amber ottoman, Rorie with Mabel's blue
feather fan in his hand, twirling and twisting it as he talked, and
doing more damage to that elegant article in a quarter of an hour than
a twelvemonth's legitimate usage would have done. People, looking at
the pretty pair, smiled significantly, and concluded that it would be a
match, and went home and told less privileged people about the evident
attachment between the Duke's daughter and the young commoner. But
Rorie was not strongly drawn towards his cousin this evening. It seemed
to him that she was growing more and more of a paragon; and he hated
paragons.
She played presently, and afterwards sang some French _chansons_. Both
playing and singing were perfect of their kind. Rorie did not
understand Chopin, and thought there was a good deal of unnecessary
hopping about the piano in that sort of thing--nothing concrete, or
that came to a focus; a succession of airy meanderings, a fairy dance
in the treble, a goblin hunt in the bass. But the French _chansons_,
the dainty little melodies with words of infantile innocence, all about
leaves and buds, and birds'-nests and butterflies, pleased him
infinitely. He hung over the piano with an enraptured air; and again
his friends made note of his subjugation, and registered the fact for
future discussion.