MASKS AND FACES
Cherbuliez opens one of his stories with the remark that if the law of
probabilities ruled, the hero and heroine would never have met, seeing
that the one lived in Venice and the other seldom left Paris. That in
spite of this they fell in with one another was enough to suggest to
the lady that Destiny was at work to unite them.
He put into words a thought which has entertained millions of lovers.
If in face of the odds of three hundred and sixty-four to one Phyllis
shares her birthday with Corydon, if Frederica sprains her ankle and
the ready arm belongs to a Frederic, if Mademoiselle has a _grain de
beauté_ on the right ear, and Monsieur a plain mole on the left—here is
at once matter for reverie, and the heart is given almost before the
hands have met.
This was the fourth occasion on which Audley had come to Mary’s rescue,
and, sensible as she was, she was too thoroughly woman to be proof
against the suggestion. On three of the four occasions the odds had
been against his appearance. Yet he had come. To-day in particular, as
if no pain that threatened her could be indifferent to him, as if no
trouble approached her but touched a nerve in him, he had risen from
the very ground to help and sustain her.
Could the coldest decline to feel interest in one so strangely linked
with her by fortune? Could the most prudent in such a case abstain from
day dreams, in which love and service, devotion and constancy, played
their parts?
_Sic itur ad astra!_ So men and women begin to love.
She spent the morning between the room in which John Audley was making
a slow recovery, and the deserted library which already wore a cold and
unused aspect. In the one and the other she felt a restlessness and a
disturbance which she was fain to set down to yesterday’s alarm. The
old interests invited her in vain. Do what she would, she could not
keep her mind off the appointment before her. Her eyes grew dreamy, her
thoughts strayed, her color came and went. At one moment she would
plunge into a thousand attentions to her uncle, at another she opened
books only to close them. She looked at the clock—surely the hands were
not moving! She looked again—it could not be as late as that! The truth
was that Mary was not in love, but she was ready to be in love. She was
glad and sorry, grave and gay, without reason; like a stream that
dances over the shallows, and rippling and twinkling goes its way
through the sunshine, knowing nothing of the deep pool that awaits it.
Presently, acting upon some impulse, she opened a drawer in one of the
tables. It contained a portrait in crayons of Peter Basset, which John
Audley had shown her. She took out the sketch and set it against a book
where the light fell upon it, and she examined it. At first with a
smile—that he should have been so mad as to think what he had thought!
And then with a softer look. How hard she had been to him! How
unfeeling! Nay, how cruel!
She sat for a long time looking at the portrait. But in fact she had
forgotten that it was before her, when the clock, striking the
half—hour before noon, surprised her. Then she thrust the portrait back
into its drawer, and went with a composed face to put on her hat.
The past summer had been one of the wettest ever known, for rain had
fallen on five days out of seven. But to-day it was fine, and as Mary
descended the road that led from the house towards Riddsley, a road
open to the vale on one side and flanked on the other by a rising slope
covered with brushwood, a watery sun was shining. Its rays, aided by
the clearness of the air, brought out the colors of stubble and field,
flood and coppice, that lay below. And men looking up from toil or
pleasure, leaning on spades or pausing before they crossed a stile, saw
the Gatehouse transformed to a fairy lodge, gray, clear—cut,
glittering, breaking the line of forest trees—saw it as if it had stood
in another world.
Mary looked back, looked forward, admired, descended. She had made up
her mind that Lord Audley would meet her at a turn near the foot of the
hill, where a Cross had once stood, and where the crumbling base and
moss-clothed steps still bade travellers rest and be thankful.
He was there, and Mary owned the attraction of the big smiling face and
the burly figure, that in a rough, caped riding-coat still kept an air
of fashion. He on his side saw coming to meet him, through the pale
sunshine, not as yesterday an Atalanta, but a cool Dian, with her hands
in a large muff.
“You bring a good report, I hope?” he cried before they met.
“Very good,” Mary replied, sparkling a little as she looked at him—was
not the sun shining? “My uncle is much better this morning. Dr. Pepper
says that it was mainly exertion acting on a weak heart. He expects him
to be downstairs in a week and to be himself in a fortnight. But he
will have to be more careful in future.”
“That is good!”
“He says, too, that if you had not acted so promptly, my uncle must
have died.”
“Well, he was pretty far gone, I must say.”
“So, as he will not thank you himself, you must let me thank you.” And
Mary held out the hand she had hitherto kept in her muff. She was
determined not to be a prude.
He pressed it discreetly. “I am glad,” he said. “Very glad. Perhaps
after this he may think better of me.”
She laughed. “I don’t think that there is a chance of it,” she said.
“No? Well, I suppose it was foolish, but do you know, I did hope that
this might bring us together.”
“You may dismiss it,” she answered, smiling.
“Ah!” he said. “Then tell me this. How in the world did he come to be
there? Without a hat? Without a coat? And so far from the house?”
Mary hesitated. He had turned, they were walking side by side. “I am
not sure that I ought to tell you,” she said. “What I know I gathered
from a word that Mr. Audley let fall when he was rambling. He seems to
have had some instinct, some feeling that you were there and to have
been forced to learn if it was so.”
“But forced? By what?” Lord Audley asked. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand either,” Mary answered.
“He could not know that we were there?”
“But he seems to have known.”
“Strange,” he murmured. “Does he often stray away like that?”
“He does, sometimes,” she admitted reluctantly.
“Ah!” Audley was silent a moment. Then, “Well, I am glad he is better,”
he said in the tone of one who dismisses a subject. “Let us talk of
something else—ourselves. Are you aware that this is the fourth time
that I have come to your rescue?”
“I know that it is the fourth time that you have been very useful,” she
admitted. She wished that she had been able to control her color, but
though he spoke playfully there was meaning in his voice.
“I, too, have a second sense it seems,” he said, almost purring as he
looked at her. “Did you by any chance think of me, when you missed your
uncle?”
“Not for a moment,” she retorted.
“Perhaps—you thought of Mr. Basset?”
“No, nor of Mr. Basset. Had he been at the Gatehouse I might have. But
he is away.”
“Away, is he? Oh!” He looked at her with a whimsical smile. “Do you
know that when he met us the other evening I thought that he was a
little out of temper? It was not a continuance of that which took him
away, I suppose?”
Mary would have given the world to show an unmoved face at that moment.
But she could not. Nor could she feel as angry as she wished. “I
thought we were going to talk of ourselves,” she said.
“I thought that we were talking of you.”
On that, “I am afraid that I must be going back,” she said. And she
stopped.
“But I am going back with you!”
“Are you? Well, you may come as far as the Cross.”
“Oh, hang the Cross!” he answered with a masterfulness of which Mary
owned the charm, while she rebelled against it. “I shall come as far as
I like! And hang Basset too—if he makes you unhappy!” He laughed.
“We’ll talk of—what shall we talk of, Mary? Why, we are cousins—does
not that entitle me to call you ‘Mary’?”
“I would rather you did not,” she said, and this time there was no lack
of firmness in her tone. She remembered what Basset had said about her
name and—and for the moment the other’s airiness displeased her.
“But we are cousins.”
“Then you can call me cousin,” she answered.
He laughed. “Beaten again!” he said.
“And I can call you cousin,” she said sedately. “Indeed, I am going to
treat you as a cousin. I want you, if not to do, to think of doing
something for me. I don’t know,” nervously, “whether I am asking more
than I ought—if so you must forgive me. But it is not for myself.”
“You frighten me!” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s about Mr. Colet, the curate whom you helped us to save from those
men at Brown Heath. He has been shamefully treated. What they did to
him might be forgiven—they knew no better. But I hear that because he
preaches what is not to everybody’s taste, but what thousands and
thousands are saying, he is to lose his curacy. And that is his
livelihood. It seems most wicked to me, because I am told that no one
else will employ him. And what is he to do? He has no friends——”
“He has one eloquent friend.”
“Don’t laugh at me!” she cried.
“I am not laughing,” he answered. He was, in fact, wondering how he
should deal with this—this fad of hers. A little, too, he was wondering
what it meant. It could not be that she was in love with Colet. Absurd!
He recalled the look of the man. “I am not laughing,” he repeated more
slowly. “But what do you want me to do?”
“To use your influence for him,” Mary explained, “either with the
rector to keep him or with some one else to employ him.”
“I see.”
“He only did what he thought was his duty. And—and because he did it,
is he to pay with all he has in the world?”
“It seems a hard case.”
“It is more, it is an abominable injustice!” she cried.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “It seems so. It certainly seems hard. But let
me—don’t be angry with me if I put another side.” He spoke with careful
moderation. “It is my experience that good, easy men, such as I take
the rector of Riddsley to be, rarely do a thing which seems cruel,
without reason. A clergyman, for instance; he has generally thought out
more clearly than you or I what it is right to say in the pulpit; how
far it is lawful, and then again how far it is wise to deal with
matters of debate. He has considered how far a pronouncement may offend
some, and so may render his office less welcome to them. That is one
consideration. Probably, too, he has considered that a statement, if
events falsify it, will injure him with his poorer parishioners who
look up to him as wiser than themselves. Well, when such a man has laid
down a rule and finds a younger clergyman bent upon transgressing it,
is it unreasonable if he puts his foot down?”
“I had not looked at it in that way.”
“And that, perhaps, is not all,” he resumed. “You know that a thing may
be true, but that it is not always wise to proclaim it. It may be too
strong meat. It may be true, for instance, that corn-dealers make an
unfair profit out of the poor; but it is not a truth that you would
tell a hungry crowd outside the corn-dealer’s shop on a Saturday
night.”
“No,” Mary allowed reluctantly. “Perhaps not.”
“And again—I have nothing to say against Colet. It is enough for me
that he is a friend of yours——”
“I have a reason for being interested in him. I am sure that if you
heard him——”
“I might be carried away? Precisely. But is it not possible that he has
seen much of one side of this question, much of the poverty for which a
cure is sought, without being for that reason fitted to decide what the
cure should be?”
Mary nodded. “Have you formed any opinion yourself?” she asked.
But he was too prudent to enter on a discussion. He saw that so far he
had impressed her with what he had said, and he was not going to risk
the advantage he had gained. “No,” he said, “I am weighing the matter
at this moment. We are on the verge of a crisis on the Corn Laws, and
it is my duty to consider the question carefully. I am doing so. I have
hitherto been a believer in the tax. I may change my views, but I shall
not do so hastily. As for your friend, I will consider what can be
done, but I fear that he has been imprudent.”
“Sometimes,” she ventured, “imprudence is a virtue.”
“And its own reward!” he retorted. They had passed the Cross, they were
by this time high on the hill, with one accord they came to a stand.
“However, I will think it over,” he continued. “I will think it over,
and what a cousin may, a cousin shall.”
“A cousin may much when he is Lord Audley.”
“A poor man in a fine coat! A butterfly in an east wind.” He removed
his curly-brimmed hat and stood gazing over the prospect, over the wide
valley that far and near gleamed with many a sheet of flood-water.
“Have you ever thought, Mary, what that means?” he continued with
feeling. “To be the shadow of a name! A ghost of the past! To have for
home a ruin, and for lands a few poor farms—in place of all that we can
see from here! For all this was once ours. To live a poor man among the
rich! To have nothing but——”
“Opportunities!” she answered, her voice betraying how deeply she was
moved—for she too was an Audley. “For, with all said and done, you
start where others end. You have no need to wait for a hearing. Doors
stand open to you that others must open. Your name is a passport—is
there a Stafford man who does not thrill to it? Surely these things are
something. Surely they are much?”
“You would make me think so!” he exclaimed.
“Believe me, they are.”
“They would be if I had your enthusiasm!” he answered, moved by her
words. “And, by Jove,” gazing with admiration at her glowing face, “if
I had you by me to spur me on there’s no knowing, Mary, what I might
not try! And what I might not do!”
Womanlike, she would evade the crisis which she had provoked. “Or fail
to do!” she replied. “Perhaps the most worthy would be left undone. But
I must go now,” she continued. “I have to give my uncle his medicine. I
fear I am late already.”
“When shall I see you again?” he asked, trying to detain her.
“Some day, I have no doubt. But good-bye now! And don’t forget Mr.
Colet! Good-bye!”
He stood awhile looking after her, then he turned and went down the
hill. By the time he was at the place where he had met her he was glad
that she had broken off the interview.
“I might have said too much,” he reflected. “She’s handsome enough to
turn any man’s head! And not so cold as she looks. And she spells
safety. But there’s no hurry—and she’s inclined to be kind, or I am
mistaken! That clown, Basset, too, has got his dismissal, I fancy, and
there’s no one else!”
Presently his thoughts took another turn. “What maggots women get into
their heads!” he muttered. “That pestilent Colet—I’m glad the rector
acted on my hint. But there it is; when a woman meddles with politics
she’s game for the first spouter she comes across! Fine eyes, too, and
the Audley blood! With a little drilling she would hold her own
anywhere.”
Altogether, he found the walk to the place where he had left his
carriage pleasant enough and his thoughts satisfactory. With Mary and
safety on one side, and Lady Adela and a plum on the other—it would be
odd if he did not bring his wares to a tolerable market.