Memory-haunted.
Had Lord Sandilands been less preoccupied by certain thoughts, and
less disturbed by certain associations and recollections, suddenly
aroused by the incidents which had just taken place, and of a painful
and distracting kind, he would have been more strongly moved by Miles
Challoner's abrupt and extraordinary communication. But the old
nobleman's mood just then was a strange one; and the scene which had
passed before his eyes, the words which his young friend had spoken,
affected him but slightly and vaguely. There had been some
unpleasantness for Miles in the meeting with that clever-looking
fellow, Lloyd; and he was sorry for it. That was all. Old Mark has
desired Miles to avoid this man, had he? The Squire had been very odd
latterly, and had taken strong dislikes, and entertained strong
prejudices all his life, but especially since that bad business about
his son; and in the midst of his personal preoccupation and
abstraction, Lord Sandilands had time for a shudder at the thought of
his old friend's great grief, and a sort of pang of thankfulness that
it had come to an end, even though a life he valued dearly was
finished with it. But his mind was full of his own concerns, and
before he had reached the seclusion of his own particular sanctum--a
small room within the library--he had almost forgotten the occurrence.
Lord Sandilands sighed heavily as he sat down in a deep leather chair
by the window, which opened into a small verandah, with trellised
walls well clothed with creeping plants, and tiled with cool
quaint-patterned porcelain. A light iron staircase led thence to the
garden, which, though unavoidably towny, was cool, pretty, and
well-cared for. The summer air passed lightly over the flowers, and
carried their fresh morning breath to the old man. But he did not meet
its perfume gladly; it had no soothing, no refreshing influence for
him. He moved uneasily, as though some painful association had come to
him with the scented breeze; then rose impatiently, and shut the
window down, and paced the room from end to end. "A wonderful
likeness," he muttered; "quite too close for accident. There is more
expression, more power in the face, but just the same beauty. Yes, it
must be so; but why have I not been told?"--He stopped before a table,
and tapped it with his fingers. "And yet, why should I have been told?
I made the conditions, I defined the rules myself; and why should I
wonder that they have not been broken? What beauty and what talent!
Who would have thought it of poor Gerty's child!--for her child and
mine, Grace Lambert is, I am certain. What a strange sudden shock it
was to me! I wonder if anyone perceived it--thought I was ill,
perhaps. The room was hot and overcrowded, as usual; and Lady Carabas
cackled more unbearably than ever; still, I hope I did not make a fool
of myself; I hope I did not look upset."
Thus, Lord Saudi lands, true to the ruling principles of his order and
his age, was disturbed in the midst of greater and deeper disturbance,
and even diverted from his thoughts of it, by the dread so touchingly
proper to every British mind, that he had been betrayed into emotion,
into any departure from the unruffled and impassive calm which British
society demands.
At this stage of his soliloquy Lord Sandilands looked at himself in
the chimney-glass, passed his aristocratically slender fingers through
his aristocratically fine silver hair, and assured himself that his
outward man had not suffered from the internal perturbation and
surprise which he had experienced. This critical examination
concluded, he resumed his walk and his soliloquy, which we need not
follow in form. Its matter was as follows:
In Grace Lambert, Lord Sandilands had recognised so strong a likeness
to the mother of the little girl whom he had placed under Mrs.
Bloxam's care, and towards whom he had never displayed any fatherly
affection beyond that implied by the punctual and uninterrupted
discharge of the pecuniary obligations which he had contracted towards
that lady, that he entertained no doubt whatever of her identity with
Gertrude Keith. This discovery had agitated him less by reason of any
present significance which it possessed--the girl was clever, and had
achieved in his presence a success of a kind which was undeniably
desirable in such a position as hers--than because it had touched
long-silent chords, and touched them to utterances full of pain for
the old man, who had been so thoroughly of the world, and whom the
world had, on the whole, treated remarkably well. But Lord Sandilands
was growing old, and was naturally beginning to yield just a little to
the inevitable feeling, of being rather tired of it all, which comes
with age, to the best-treated among the sons of men, and had come
perceptibly to him, since Mark Challoner's death had done away with
the last of the old landmarks. Things might have been so different; he
had often thought so, and then put the thought from him hurriedly and
resolutely. He thought so to-day, and he could not put the thought
from him; it would not go; but, as he paced the room, it grew stronger
and stronger and came closer and closer to him, and at last looked him
sternly and threateningly in the face, demanding harbour and reply;
and Lord Sandilands gave it both--no more expelling it, but taking
counsel with himself, and repeating to himself an old story of the
past, which, with a different ending, might have set all his present
in another key;--which story was not very different from many that
have--been told, and not difficult to tell.
Lord Sandilands had not succeeded early in life to his old title and
respectable but not magnificent estates. The Honourable John Borlase
was much more clever, agreeable, and fascinating than rich, when,
having left the University of Oxford after a very creditable career,
he began to lead the kind of life which is ordinarily led by young men
who have only to wait for fortune and title, and who possess
sufficient means to fill up the interval comfortably, and sufficient
intellect to occupy it with tolerable rationality. The dilettanteism
which was one of Lord Sandilands' characteristics developed itself
later in life; while he was a young man, his tastes were more active,
and he had devoted himself to sporting and travel. In the pursuit of
the first he had made Mark Challoner's acquaintance; and the
_camaraderie_ of the hunting-field had strengthened into a strong and
congenial tie of friendship, which had been broken only by the
Squire's death. In the pursuit of the second, John Borlase had
encountered many adventures, and made more than one acquaintance
destined to influence his future, either sensibly or insensibly; and
among the many was one with whom we have to do, for a brief interval
of retrospection.
John Borlase did not affect "Bohemianism" (the phrase had not then
been invented, but the thing existed); but he liked character, and he
liked Art,--liked it better than he understood it, selected the
society of those who knew more about it than he did; and though he by
no means restricted himself to the society of artists, he certainly
frequented them more than any other class. It was at Berlin that he
fell in with Etienne Gautier, an eccentric and very clever Frenchman,
exiled by the cruelty of fortune from his native paradise, Paris, and
employed by the French Government in some mysterious commission
connected with the Galleries of Painting and Sculpture at Berlin,--a
city which he never ceased to depreciate, but where he nevertheless
appeared to enjoy himself thoroughly. Etienne Gautier was a dark,
active, restless man; vivacious of speech; highly informed on all
matters appertaining to Art; a liberal in politics and religion--of a
degree of liberalism very unusual at that period, though it would not
be regarded as particularly "advanced" at present; an oddity in his
manners; evidently in poor circumstances, which he treated with that
perfect absence of disguise and affectation which is so difficult for
English people to comprehend, so impossible for them to imitate; and
devotedly, though injudiciously, attached to his beautiful daughter,
Gertrude. The girl's mother, an Englishwoman, had died at her birth,
and her father had brought her up after a completely unconventional
fashion, and one which would have horrified his own countrymen in
particular. She was allowed as much freedom as "bird on branch," and
her education was of the most desultory description. Gertrude Gautier
was very handsome, very wilful, and totally destitute of knowledge of
the world. She was her father's companion in all places and at all
times; and when the Hon. John Borlase made Etienne Gautier's
acquaintance and took to frequenting his society, he found that it
included that of one of the handsomest, cleverest, and most spirited
girls he had ever met. John Borlase was not quite a free man when he
first saw Gertrude Gautier. Had her position in life been such as to
render his marrying her a wise and suitable proceeding, he could not
have offered to do so with honour, though the engagement, if so it
could be called, which bound him to the Lady Lucy Beecher, was of a
cool and vague description, and much more the doing of their
respective families than their own. But he had carried the not
unpleasant obligation cheerfully for a year or more; and it was only
when he fully and freely acknowledged to himself that he had fallen in
love with Gertrude Gautier, and felt a delightful though embarrassing
consciousness that she had fallen in love with him, that he grumbled
at his engagement, and persuaded himself that but for its existence he
would certainly have married Gertrude, and boldly set the opinions and
wishes of his family at defiance. It was a pleasing delusion: there
never existed a man less likely to have done anything of the kind
than John Borlase; but he cherished the belief, which nothing in his
former life tended to justify. He was a proud man in a totally
unaffected way; and only his fancy--not for a moment his real
practical self--regarded the possibility of the elevation into a
future British peeress of a girl whose father was a painter, of the
Bohemian order, and in whose maternal ancestry the most noteworthy
"illustration" was a wholesale grocer. As for Gertrude, she loved him,
and that was enough for her. The untaught, undisciplined, passionate
girl thought of nothing beyond; and her father, who was as blind as
fathers usually are to the fact that his daughter was longer a child,
but with all the charm and beauty of womanhood had entered upon all
its danger gave the matter no consideration whatever. This state of
things lasted for several months, and then came a crisis. Etienne
Gautier fell from a height, in one of the Berlin galleries, and died
of the injuries he had received, after recovering consciousness for
just sufficient time to commend his daughter to the care and kindness
of John Borlase.
"Send her to Leamington," said the dying man; "her mother's uncle
lives there. She knows his name."
There is little need to pursue the story of Gertrude Gautier further.
She never went to Leamington; she never saw the prosperous grocer, her
mother's uncle. The story is not a new one, but at least it ended
better than many a one like it has ended. Gertrude was happy; she had
no scruples; she knew no better. She had no friends to forfeit; she
had no position to lose. Her lover was true to her, and all the more
devoted that he had many stings of conscience of which she had no
suspicion, in which she never shared. He brought her to England, and
the girl was happy in her pretty suburban house, with her birds, her
flowers, and his society. But a time came in which John Borlase had
the chance of testing his own sincerity; and he applied the test, and
recognised its failure. When the institution of the suburban house was
a year old, and when he had frequently congratulated himself upon the
successful secrecy which had been maintained, John Borlase found a
letter to his address awaiting him at his father's town-house. The
letter was from Lady Lucy Beecher, and it contained the intelligence
of her marriage. "I knew you did not care for me," said the fair and
frank writer, "in any sense which would give us a chance of being
happy together; but I did not make a fuss about the family arrangement
before it became necessary to do so. That necessity arose when I found
myself deliberately preferring another man to you. I do so prefer
Hugh Wybrant, and I have married him. My people are very angry, of
course--perhaps yours will be so also; but you will not care much
about that; and I am sure you will heartily thank me for what I have
done. We shall always be good friends, I hope; and if we had married,
we could never have been more, and might easily--indeed should very
certainly, I am convinced--have been less." John Borlase was much
relieved by the intelligence contained in this characteristic letter.
Lady Lucy had troubled his mind, had been a difficulty to him. Under
the circumstances he would not have married, he would not have done so
doubly dishonourable an action; but he was very glad the ostensible
breach was of her making and not his. He derived a pleasant
self-congratulatory conviction that he was rather a lucky fellow from
this fortunate occurrence; and he answered Lady Lucy's flippant letter
by one which was full of kindliness and good-humour, and accompanied
by a set of Neapolitan coral.
Then came the question which would make itself heard. Should he marry
Gertrude? He could do so without risk of her antecedents being
discovered; the only odium he would have to bear would be that of her
foreign birth and insignificant, indefinite origin. The girl's own
feelings, strange to say, counted but little with John Borlase, in the
discussion he held with himself, and which need not be pursued
further. If he had decided in her favour, he felt that a first and
important preliminary would be that he should explain to her the
degradation of her present position, and the immense advantages to her
of the compensation which he should offer her by marrying her. Their
life would be changed, of course; and what had such a change to give
him? He reasoned entirely as a man of the world; and the upshot of his
deliberations was that he did not marry Gertrude Gautier. It made no
difference to her; she did not know that the subject had ever occupied
him; she had never heard Lady Lucy's name. Her calm, happy, guilty
love-dream went on for a little longer, and then it ended. The doom of
her mother was on Gertrude; and John Borlase came home one day, as
Etienne Gautier had come home, to find a dead woman and a helpless
infant where he had left youth and health and beauty in the morning.
The blow fell heavily upon John Borlase, and remorse as well as sorrow
was for a long time busy at his heart. During this period he was
extremely restless, and the world was quite concerned and edified to
see how much he had taken Lady Lucy's defection to heart. Who would
have thought a man could possess so much feeling? And then, the
generosity with which he acted, the pains he had taken to show how
completely he was _sans rancune_; how could Lady Lucy have done such a
thing! But everybody flocked to see Lady Lucy, for all that; and as
for Captain Wybrant, never was there anyone so charming. John Borlase
did not hear all the talk, or if he did, he did not heed it. He was
not a sentimental man, and he was sufficiently unscrupulous; but
Gertrude's death was more than a racking grief and loss to him.
Alongside of her shrouded figure he saw her father's; and now, too
late, he was haunted by the unfulfilled trust bequeathed him by the
dead. Deceiving himself again, he tried to persuade himself that only
the suddenness of Gertrude's death had prevented his marrying her; he
tried to throw the blame, which he could not ignore, on circumstances.
At first he succeeded, to a certain extent, in this--succeeded
sufficiently to deaden the acuteness--of the pain he could not escape
from. Then, after a time, he knew better; he no longer indulged in
self-deception; he acknowledged that the wrong was irreparable, and
the self-reproach life-long; and he bowed to the stern truth. John
Borlase was never afterwards talked of as a marrying man; and Lady
Lucy Wybrant, whose sources of social success were numerous and
various, enjoyed that one in addition, that the inexorable celibacy of
Lord Sandilands was ascribed to his chivalrous fidelity to her. She
knew that this was a fiction, as well as he knew it; but as it was a
gleam of additional glorification for her, and such a supposition
saved him a great deal of trouble, and preserved him from match-making
mammas, each acquiesced in the view which society chose to adopt, with
most amiable affability. Captain Wybrant laughed at the theory of
Sandilands' celibacy, as he laughed at most other theories; and said
(and believed) that if a man must be fool enough to wear the willow
for any woman, his Lucy was the best worth wearing it for, of all the
women in the world. And though the whole thing was a myth, Lord
Sandilands never cordially liked jolly Hugh Wybrant--perhaps no man
ever yet did cordially like the individual in whose favour he has been
jilted, though he may not have cared a straw for the fickle fair one,
but have honestly regarded her inconstancy as a delightful
circumstance, demanding ardent gratitude.
For several years after Gertrude Gautier's death, the Hon. John
Borlase indulged in frequent and extensive foreign travel; and during
this period the infant girl who had inherited her beauty, apparently
without her delicacy of constitution, was well cared for. The child's
father cared little for her, beyond scrupulously providing for her
physical welfare. She was an embodied reproach to him, though he never
said so to himself, but persuaded himself his indifference to the
little girl whom he saw but rarely and at long intervals, arose from
his not naturally caring about children. When she was eight years old,
and the memory of her mother had almost died out, though the indelible
effect of the sad and guilty episode in his life with which she was
connected remained impressed upon him, Lord Sandilands placed the
little girl under Mrs. Bloxam's care, with the conditions already
stated and the results already partially developed. He had provided
ample funds to meet the exigencies of her education; he had made due
arrangements for their safe and punctual transmission to Mrs. Bloxam;
he had but vague notions concerning the requirements and the risks of
girlhood: his dominant idea was, that in a respectable boarding-school
the girl must be safe; he did not want to see her; she must not know
him as her father; and he had no fancy for playing any part,
undertaking any personation,--in short, having any trouble
unrepresented by money,--about her. John Borlase had been
unscrupulous, and a trifle hard in his nature; and despite the
conflict in his breast which had ensued on Gertrude Gautier's death,
and which for all his impassive bearing had been fierce and long, Lord
Sandilands was not much more scrupulous, and was decidedly harder. If
the girl married, or if she died, he should be made acquainted with
the circumstance; and as a matter of fact--fact, not sentiment, being
the real consideration in this matter--either was all he need know. As
time went on, this frame of mind about his unknown daughter became
habitual to Lord Sandilands; and of late he had never remembered
Gertrude's existence, except when an entry in his accounts, under a
certain appointed formula, recalled the fact to his mind.
These were the circumstances on which Lord Sandilands mused, as he
paced his room in the early morning, after he had seen Grace Lambert
at Lady Carabas' concert. The girl's face had risen up before him like
a ghost,--not only her mother's, but that of his own youth; and in the
proud, assured, but not bold glance of her splendid brown eyes a story
which had no successor in the old man's lonely life was written. This
beautiful, gifted girl was his daughter. She might have been the pride
of his life, the darling, the ornament of his home, the light of his
declining years, the inheritor of his fortune, if-if he had done right
instead of wrong, if he had repaired the injury he had done to her,
whose grave lay henceforth and for ever between him and the
possibility of reparation.
"How very handsome she is!" he thought; "and how fine and highly
cultivated her voice! If I had known she possessed such a talent as
that!" And then he thought how that talent might have been displayed
in society, in which the possessor might have mixed on equal terms. A
long train of images and fancies, of vain and bitter regrets, came up
with the strong impression of the girl's grace, beauty, and gifts. Of
her identity there could be no doubt. As Gertrude Gautier had looked
out from the garden-gate, where she had bidden him the fond and
smiling farewell destined to be their last, so this girl, as beautiful
as his lost Gertrude, and with something of grandeur in her look,
which Gertrude had not, and which was the grace added by genius, had
looked that night, as she calmly, smilingly, received the applause of
her audience. As he recalled that look, and dwelt on it in his memory
with the full assurance that his conviction was correct, an idea
struck him. He was a known connoisseur in music, a known patron of
musical art; everyone who was anyone in the musical world sought an
introduction to Lord Sandilands. In the case of Miss Grace Lambert,
his generally extended patronage had been especially requested by Lady
Carabas for her _protégée_. Here was a fair and legitimate expedient
within his reach for securing access to Miss Lambert, without the
slightest risk of awakening suspicion, either in her mind or in that
of sharp-sighted observers, that he was actuated by any particular
motive in this instance. He must see her, he must know her! How
bitterly he lamented now, and condemned himself for the indifference
which had kept him for so many years contented that his child should
be a stranger to him! How ready he was, now that he saw her beautiful
and gifted, to accord credence and attention to the voice of nature,
in which he had never before believed, and which under other
circumstances would have found him just as deaf as usual! Then he
resolved that he would write to Mrs. Bloxam, and prepare her for a
long-deferred visit to her charge, stipulating in his letter that
Gertrude should know nothing of the intended visit, and that Mrs.
Bloxam should receive him alone. "She shall tell me my child's
history," he said; "at least it has been a bright and happy story
hitherto." And Lord Sandilands sighed, and his face looked old and
worn, as he arranged his note-paper, and dipped his pen in the ink,
and then hesitated and pondered long before he commenced his letter to
Mrs. Bloxam.
The letter consisted of but a few lines, and Lord Sandilands put it in
another cover, addressed to Mr. Plowden, his solicitor, and the medium
of his payments to Mrs. Bloxam. It was not until he had retired to
rest, after sunrise, and had been for some time vainly trying to
sleep, that his thoughts reverted to Miles Challoner and the incident
which had taken place just before they parted.
Miles Challoner, also wakeful, was thinking of it too, and debating
with himself whether he should mention the matter again to Lord
Sandilands. He shrank from reviving a subject so full of pain. The man
whom he had met evidently had an object in concealing his identity, or
he would not have been so reticent by a first impulse. They were not
likely to meet again. So Miles Challoner took a resolution to keep his
own counsel; and acted upon it.