"Mates are chosen marketwise
Coolest bargainer best buys,
Leap not, nor let leap the heart;
Trot your track and drag your cart,
So your end may be in wool
Honoured and with manger full."
GEORGE MEREDITH.
Mrs. Boringdon, sitting in the drawing-room at Chancton Cottage, looked,
in spite of her handsome dress and her manner and appearance of
refinement, strangely unsuited to the place in which she found herself.
Even the Indian tea-table--one of the few pieces of furniture added to
the room by its present occupant, and now laden with substantial silver
tea-pot, cream-jug, and sugar-basin burnished to their highest point of
brilliancy--was out of keeping with its fragile charm. The room, indeed,
had been scarcely altered since it had been furnished, some sixty years
before, as a maiden retreat for one of Madame Sampiero's aunts, the Miss
Lavinia Rebell of whom tradition still lingered in the village, and
whose lover had been killed in the Peninsular War.
On her arrival at Chancton Mrs. Boringdon would have dearly liked to
consign the shabby old furniture, the faded water-colours and colour
prints, to some unhonoured lumber-room of the Priory, but even had such
desecration been otherwise possible, the new mistress of Chancton
Cottage was only too well aware that she lacked the means to make the
old-fashioned house what she would have considered habitable. Indeed,
she had been thankful to learn that the estate agency offered to her son
through the intermediary of his friend, James Berwick, carried with it
the use of a fully furnished house of any sort.
Whenever Mrs. Boringdon felt more than usually dissatisfied and critical
of the furnishings of the rooms where she was fated to spend so much of
her time--for she had no love of the open air--she tried to remind
herself that this phase of her life was only temporary; that soon--her
son thought in two or three years, but Berwick laughed at so prudent a
forecast--the present Government would go out, and then "something" must
surely be found for her clever Oliver.
To-day, her son had brought his friend back to lunch, and the two young
men had stayed on in the dining-room and in the little smoking-room
beyond, talking eagerly the one with the other. As the mother sat in her
drawing-room patiently longing for her cup of tea, but content to wait
Oliver's good pleasure--or rather that of James Berwick--she could hear
the voices rising and falling, and she rejoiced to think of the intimacy
which those sounds betokened.
Mrs. Boringdon was one of the many in whom the mere possession of wealth
in others excites an almost hypnotic feeling of interest and goodwill.
When in his presence--nay, when simply even in his neighbourhood--she
never forgot that her son's intimate friend and one-time chief, James
Berwick, was an enormously rich man. That fact impressed her far more,
and was ever more present to her mind, than the considerable political
position which his personality and his wealth together had known how to
win for him. When with Berwick Mrs. Boringdon was never wholly at ease,
never entirely her cool, collected self. And now this afternoon, sitting
there waiting for them to come in and join her, she wondered for the
thousandth time why Oliver was not more amenable to his important
friend--why he had not known how to make himself indispensable to James
Berwick. Had there only been about him something of the sycophant--but
Mrs. Boringdon did not use the ugly word--he would never have been
allowed to slip into this backwater. She was one of the few remaining
human beings who believe that everything is done by "influence," and she
had never credited her son's assurance that no "job" was in the least
likely to be found for him.
His mother's love for Oliver was tempered by fear; she was keenly
desirous of keeping his good opinion, but of late, seeing how almost
intolerable to him was the position he had accepted, she had been sorely
tempted to speak--to point out to him that men in the position of James
Berwick come to expect from those about them something like
subserviency, and that then they often repay in lavish measure those who
yield it them.
At last the dining-room door opened and the two men came in.
"Well," cried Berwick, "we've thrashed out the whole plan of campaign!
There's never anything like a good talk with Oliver to confirm me in my
own opinion! It's really absurd he should stick on here looking after
the Chancton cabbages, dead and alive--but he's positively
incorruptible! I'm thinking of starting a newspaper, Mrs. Boringdon, and
to coax him into approval--also, I must say, to secure him a little
freedom--I offered him the editorship, but he won't hear of it."
Berwick had thrown himself as he spoke into a low chair, which creaked
ominously under his weight. How indignant would Mrs. Boringdon have felt
had any other young man, looking as James Berwick now looked, his fair
hair tossed and rumpled with the constant ruffling of his fingers, come
and thrown himself down in this free and easy attitude on one of the few
comfortable chairs in Chancton Cottage! But his hostess smiled at him
very indulgently, and turned a look of gentle reproach at her son's
stern dark face.
"An editorship," she said, vaguely, "that sounds very nice. I suppose it
would mean going and living in London?" Her quick mind, darting this way
and that, saw herself settled in a small house in Mayfair, entertaining
important people, acting perhaps as hostess to Berwick's friends and
supporters! She had once been able to render him a slight service--in
fact, on two occasions he had been able to meet a friend, a lady, in her
drawing-room. In doing what she had done Mrs. Boringdon had lowered
herself in her own eyes, and she had had the uncomfortable sensation
that she had lost in his some of the prestige naturally attaching to his
friend's mother, and yet, for all she knew, these interviews might have
been of a political nature. Women now played a great part in politics.
Mrs. Boringdon preferred to think that the fair stranger, concerning
whose coming to her house there had been so much mystery, had been one
of these.
Her son's next words rudely interrupted her pleasant dream.
"The ownership of a newspaper," Oliver was saying abruptly, "has never
yet been of any use to a politician or statesman, and has certainly
prevented some from getting into the Cabinet," and he named two
well-known members of Parliament who were believed to be financially
interested in certain important journals. "It isn't as if you wanted
what the Americans call a platform," he went on. "No man is more sure of
a hearing than you are yourself. But just now, the less you say the more
you will be listened to when the moment comes for saying it!"
The speaker was walking up and down the narrow room, looking restless
and impatient, with Berwick smiling lazily up at him, though evidently
rather nettled at the frank, unasked-for advice.
Mrs. Boringdon judged the moment had come to intervene. "I hear that
Lord Bosworth and your sister are back at Fletchings, and that they are
expecting a good many people down--" She added, in a tone of apology,
"Chancton, as you know, has half-a-dozen Court newsmen of its own."
"To me"--Berwick had jumped up and was helping himself to sugar, to
cake, with the eager insouciance of an intimate--"to me Chancton always
has been, what it is now more than ever, the most delightful spot on
earth! I know that Oliver doesn't agree with me, but even he, Mrs.
Boringdon, ought to enjoy the humours of the place. What other village
can offer such a range of odd-come-shorts, of eccentrics? Where else in
these prosaic days can one see gathered together in one spot our
McKirdys, our Vipens----"
"Our Mrs. Turkes," said Oliver slily. He came forward smiling, good
humour restored, and took his share of the good things his mother had
provided.
"Oh! yes," said Berwick, rather hastily, "of course we must throw in my
foster-mother--in fact, I'm sure she would be deeply offended at being
left out! And then, there's another thing I think I can claim for
Chancton. Here one may always expect to come across the unexpected!
To-day whom should we meet, Mrs. Boringdon, but McKirdy, wrapped in his
historic plaid and snuff-coloured hat, and accompanied by a nymph, and
an uncommonly attractive nymph too!"
Mrs. Boringdon looked gently bewildered. "A nymph!" she exclaimed, "do
you mean a lady? What an extraordinary thing!"
Berwick looked across at his hostess and grinned. Now and again Oliver's
mother actually reminded this whimsical young man of Mistress Quickly,
and it was an added delight to picture to himself her surprise and
horror if only she had known what was in his mind.
But Boringdon was frowning. "Nonsense!" he said, irritably, "From what I
could see, she was simply a very oddly dressed young woman! McKirdy has
always been fond of making friends with the summer visitors, and he
always prefers strangers to acquaintances. I must say the doctor is one
of the Chancton characters with whom I, for one, could well dispense! He
was really insolent to me yesterday, but there is no redress possible
with an old man like that. His latest notion is that I must only
communicate with Madame Sampiero through him!"
James Berwick turned round, and Mrs. Boringdon thought he looked
annoyed; he always chose to regard everything and everybody connected
with the Priory as his very particular concern. "I must be off now," he
said, "Arabella has several people arriving this afternoon, and I ought
to be there to look after them. Walk with me as far as the great gates,
old fellow?"
But Boringdon shook his head. "Sorry I can't," he said, shortly, "but
I'm expecting one of the village boys to come in any minute. Kemp
promised me to talk to him, to try and persuade him to enlist, and he's
coming up to tell me the result."
"Then you're not returning to the Priory to-night, Mr. Berwick?" a note
of delicate reserve had come into Mrs. Boringdon's voice; she never, if
she could help it, referred to the Priory or to the Priory's mistress.
"No, I'm still at Chillingworth. But I expect to be over just for the
night to-morrow. Then I'm off for a month's yachting."
* * * * *
Oliver came back from the hall door and sat down. His mother saw with a
pang how tired and how discouraged he looked. "I think," she said, "that
you might have done, dear, what Mr. Berwick asked you to do--I mean, as
to seeing him back part of the way to Fletchings. That village lad could
have waited for you--and--I suppose it was all a joke about the new
paper and the editorship?"
"Oh! no, he's thinking of it," he said. "I suppose, mother, you never
heard of the _Craftsman_, the paper in which the great Duke of Berwick's
friend, Lord Bolingbroke, wrote. Some fellow has been talking to him
about it, and now he thinks he would like to resuscitate it. Incredible
that so shrewd a man should sometimes choose to do such foolish things,
actuated, too, by the silliest of sentimental motives! If I were he, I
should feel anything but proud of my descent from the Stuarts. However,
I hope I've choked him off the whole idea."
As he caught her look of fresh disappointment, he added, with a certain
effort, "I'm afraid, mother, that you've as little reason to like
Chancton as I have. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't do better to
throw it all up and go to London. I certainly don't want to edit any
paper for Berwick, but I dare say I could get work, literary work of
sorts; and, after all, I should be far more in touch there with the
things I really care about."
His tone of dejection went to her heart, but she answered, not the last,
but the first sentence he had uttered. "You are right," she said, rather
slowly, "I do not like Chancton any better than you do, but I shall
always be glad we came here, if only because it has brought us in
contact with the Kemps--or perhaps I should say with their daughter."
Oliver looked up at his mother uneasily; he was aware that with her a
confidence was rarely spontaneous.
"I wonder," she said, and turning she fixed her eyes on the fire, away
from his face, "I have often been tempted to wonder lately, my dear boy,
what you really think of Lucy--how you regard her? Pray do not answer me
if you would rather not do so."
Boringdon hesitated. His mother's words, her extreme frankness, took him
completely by surprise; for a moment he felt nearer to her than he had
done for years. Still, he was glad that she went on staring into the
fire, and that he was safe from meeting the acute, probing glance he
knew so well.
"You've asked me a very difficult question," he said at last--"one I
find almost impossible to answer truly."
Mrs. Boringdon's hands trembled. She also felt unwontedly moved. She had
not expected so honest a confession.
But Oliver was again speaking, in a low, preoccupied voice. "Perhaps we
have not been wise, you and I, in having so--so"--his lips sought to
frame suitable words--"so charming a girl," he said at last, "constantly
about the house. I have certainly become fond of Lucy--in fact, I think
I may acknowledge to you, mother, that she is my ideal of what a girl
should be." How odd, how inadequate, how priggish his words sounded to
himself! Still he went on, with gathering courage, "But no one knows
better than you do how I am situated. For what I am pleased to call my
political ambitions, you have already made sacrifices. If I am to do
what I wish with my life, such a marriage--indeed, any marriage, for
years to come--would be for me quite out of the question. It would mean
the condemnation of myself to such a life as that I am now leading, and
I do not feel--perhaps I ought to be ashamed of not feeling--that my
attraction to Miss Kemp is so strong as to make me desirous of giving up
all I have striven for."
Mrs. Boringdon made no reply. She still stared on into the fire; a
curious look, one of perplexity and hesitation, had come over her face.
"Mother!" he cried, and the tone forced her to look round at him,
"surely you don't think--it is not your impression that Lucy----"
"I think she has become very fond of you," said Mrs. Boringdon
deliberately. "But I confess that I have sometimes thought that she
seemed fonder of me than of you." She smiled as she spoke, but to
Boringdon this was no smiling matter--indeed, it was one which to his
mind could scarcely be discussed with decency by himself and his mother.
Then a vision of Lucy Kemp, steady, clear-eyed Lucy, almost too
sensible--so the people at Chancton, he knew, regarded her to be--came
to his help. "No, no," he said, with a sudden sense of relief, "I'm
quite sure, mother, that any feeling--I mean the kind of feeling of
which we are speaking--has been entirely on my side! We will be more
careful. I am willing to admit that I have been foolish."
But Mrs. Boringdon scarcely heard what he was saying. She who so seldom
doubted as to her course of action, was now weighing the pros and cons
of what had become to her a matter for immediate decision. Unfortunately
her son's next words seemed to give her the opening she sought.
"Sometimes I am tempted to think"--Oliver had got up, he was
leaning against the mantel-piece, looking down into his mother's
face--"Sometimes, I say, I am tempted to think that after all money is
the one important thing in life! When I look back to how I regarded
James Berwick's marriage--he once accused me of condemning what he did,
and I could not deny that I had done so--I see how much more wise he was
than I. Why, to him that marriage which so shocked me was the turning
point--ay, more, that money, together, perhaps, with his wife's death,
steadied him--amazingly--I refer of course to his intellectual
standpoint, and to his outlook on life! And you, mother--you've always
thought more of money than I've ever done. But even you once thought
that it could be too dearly purchased."
Mrs. Boringdon reddened. Her son's words gratified her. She was aware
that he was alluding to an offer of marriage which she herself had
unhesitatingly rejected at a time when her daughter was still in the
schoolroom, and her son at Charterhouse. Her middle-aged wooer had been
a man of some commercial standing and much wealth, but "not a
gentleman," so the two pitiless young people had decided, and Mrs.
Boringdon, her children believed, had not hesitated for a moment between
a life of poor gentility and one of rather vulgar plenty.
"Oh! yes," she said slowly, "money can certainly be too dearly
purchased. But still, you on your side, you and your sister Grace, have
always thought far too little of it. Of late I have sometimes wondered,
Oliver, if you knew--whether you are aware"--for the life of her she
could not help the sudden alteration in her measured voice--"that our
dear little friend, Lucy Kemp, is something of an heiress--that in four
years time, when she is five-and-twenty, that is, there will be handed
over to her £25,000?"
And then, while her son listened to her in complete silence, giving no
clue as to how he regarded the information, she explained her knowledge
as having come to her from an absolutely sure source, from a certain
Miss Vipen, the chartered gossip of Chancton, whose information could be
trusted when actual facts were in question.
Even after Mrs. Boringdon had done speaking, Oliver still sat on,
resting his head on his hands. "I wonder if Laxton knows of this?" he
said at last. "What a brute I should think him if he does!" and Mrs.
Boringdon felt keenly, perhaps not unreasonably, irritated. Her son's
words also took her by surprise--complete silence would have satisfied
her, but this odd comment on the fact she had chosen to reveal was very
different from what she had expected.
But when, some three hours later, the mother and son had finished their
simple dinner, and Oliver announced to his mother that he must now go
down to the Grange for half an hour in order to consult General Kemp
over that village lad whose conduct was giving Oliver so much trouble,
Mrs. Boringdon smiled. Her son caught the smile and it angered him. How
utterly his mother misunderstood him, how curiously little they were in
sympathy the one with the other!
As he left the house she heard the door bang, and sitting in the
drawing-room knitting him a pair of silk socks, she allowed her smile to
broaden till it transformed her face almost to that likeness which
Berwick sometimes saw in her, to that of a prim Mistress Quickly.
* * * * *
Boringdon did not go straight down to the Grange. Instead, after having
groped his way through the laurel hedges and so into the moonlit road,
he turned to the left, and struck out, making a long round before
seeking the house for which he was bound.
Both his long talk with Berwick, and the short, strange conversation
with his mother, had disturbed and excited him, bringing on a sudden
nostalgia for the life he had left, and to which he longed so much to
get back. During his eager discussion with the man whom he regarded as
being at once his political chief and his political pupil, Chancton and
its petty affairs had been forgotten, and yet now, to-night, he told
himself with something like dismay that even when talking to Berwick he
had more than once thought of Lucy Kemp. The girl had become his friend,
his only confidante: into her eager ears he had poured out his views,
his aspirations, his hopes, his ambitions, sure always of sympathy, if
not of complete understanding. A bitter smile came over his face--no
wonder Mrs. Boringdon had so often left them together! Her attitude was
now explained.
Boringdon had no wish to pose, even to himself, as a Don Quixote, but,
in his views as to the fitting relationship of the sexes, he was most
punctilious and old-fashioned, perhaps lacking the essential nobility
which would have been required in such a man as himself to accept a
fortune, even from a beloved hand. What, take Lucy's £20,000--or was it
£25,000--in order to start his bark once more on the perilous political
sea? How little his mother understood him if she seriously thought he
could bring himself to do such a thing, and in cold blood!
As he strode along in the darkness, there came back to his mind the
circumstances connected with an experience in his life which he had
striven not unsuccessfully to forget,--the passion of feeling he had
wasted, when little more than a boy, on James Berwick's sister.
Those men and women who jeer at first love have surely never felt its
potent spell. Twelve years had gone by since Boringdon had dreamed the
dream which had to a certain extent embittered and injured the whole of
his youth. What a fool he had been! But, on the other hand, so he
remembered now, how little he had thought--if indeed he had thought at
all--as to any question connected with Arabella Berwick's fortune or
lack of it!
Miss Berwick had been mistress of her uncle's house, that Lord Bosworth
who was a noted statesman as well as a man of rank: of course she must
have money, so Boringdon in his young simplicity had thought, and
certainly that belief had been no bar to what he had brought himself
tremblingly to believe might come to pass. The beautiful girl, secure in
her superior altitude of twenty-five years of life, and an already
considerable knowledge of the world, had taken up the clever boy, her
brother's Oxford friend, with pretty enthusiasm. She had liked him quite
well enough to accept smilingly his adoration, to allow that he should
amuse her (so he had realised ever since) in the intervals of a more
serious love affair. Well, as he reminded himself to-night, they had
been quits! Small wonder indeed that even now, after twelve years had
gone by, the recollection of certain bitter moments caused Boringdon to
quicken his footsteps!
To-night it all came back to him, in a flood of intolerable memories. It
had been late in the season, on the eve--or so he had thought--of his
dream's fruition, during the last days of his first spring and summer in
London after he had gone down from Oxford. Some merciful angel or some
malicious devil--he had never quite known which--had caused him, one
Sunday afternoon, while actually on the way to Bosworth House, to turn
into Kensington Gardens.
There, in a lonely grassy by-way among the trees, where he had turned
aside to think in solitude of his beautiful lady, he had suddenly come
on her face to face,--on Arabella Berwick, on his goddess, on the woman
whose every glance and careless word had been weighed by him with
anxious thought,--finding her in such a guise that for a moment he had
believed that his mind, his eyes, were playing him some evil trick.
Miss Berwick, her eyes streaming with tears, was clinging to a man's
arm; and, what made the scene the more unreal, the more incredible, to
the amazed onlooker, Boringdon knew the man quite well, and had often,
in his young importance, looked down on him as being so much less
intimate at Bosworth House than he was himself. The man into whose
plain, powerful face Arabella Berwick was gazing with such agonised
intensity was Daniel O'Flaherty, an Irish barrister, but lately come to
practise at the English Bar, a Paddy whose brogue--so Berwick had
assured his friend Boringdon--you could cut with a knife, but who was,
he had added good-naturedly, said by many people to be a clever fellow!
And now Oliver was walking straight upon them,--on O'Flaherty and
Arabella Berwick. He stopped short, staring with fascinated,
horror-stricken eyes, making no effort to pass by, to show the decent
hypocrisy he should have shown; and what he heard made it only too easy
to reconstitute the story. Miss Berwick had also dreamed her dream, and
she was now engaged in deliberately putting it from her.
At last the man had cut the painful scene short, but not before
Boringdon had seen the woman, whom he had himself set on so high a
pedestal, fling her arms round her companion's neck in one last agonised
attempt to say good-bye. It was the Irishman, of whom Boringdon had made
such small account in his own mind, who at last--with the measured
dignity born of measureless grief and loss--led her towards the
spectator whom he vaguely recognised as one of James Berwick's younger
friends. "Perhaps you will kindly take Miss Berwick home?" and then he
had turned and gone, and she who had renounced him, taking no heed of
Boringdon, had stood and gazed after him as long as he remained in
sight.
During the walk back to Bosworth House it had been Boringdon's lot to
listen while his companion told him, with a sort of bald simplicity, the
truth.
"I love him, Mr. Boringdon, with all my heart--with all my body--with
all my soul! But certain things are impossible in this world,--apart
from everything else, there is the fact that for the present we are both
penniless. He admits that often years go by before a man situated as he
is makes any real way at the Bar. I ought not to have allowed it to come
to this! I have been a fool,--a fool!" She had tried to smile at him.
"Take example by me, Mr. Boringdon, never allow yourself to really care.
It's not worth it!"
She had gone on, taking very little notice of him, talking as if to
herself--"Of course I shall never marry, why should I? I have
James,--till now I have never cared for anything but James." Then at
last had come a word he had felt sorely. Arabella Berwick had looked at
him with something like fear in her eyes,--"You will not say anything of
this to my brother, Mr. Boringdon? I trust to your honour,"--much as she
might have spoken to a schoolboy, instead of to a man--a man, as he
angrily reminded himself, of one-and-twenty!
How well he remembered it all still, and yet what a long time ago all
that happened! He himself had altered, incredibly, in these short years.
O'Flaherty was no longer an unknown, uncouth Irishman: he had won a
place even in the Berwicks' high little world: steady, moderate
adherence to his country's unpopular cause had made him something of a
personage even in the House of Commons, and he was known to be now
earning a large,--nay, a huge,--income at the Bar. Of the two men who at
one and the same moment had loved Arabella Berwick, it was he who had
forged ahead, Oliver Boringdon who had lagged behind.
And the heroine of the adventure? She was still what all those about
her, with the possible exception of these two men, had always thought
her to be--the accomplished, rather cold, brilliant woman of the world,
content to subordinate exceptional intellectual gifts to the exigencies
of her position as mistress of her uncle's house; bending her fine mind
to the problem of how to stretch Lord Bosworth's always uncertain and
encumbered income to its furthest possible limit, for one of Miss
Berwick's virtues had always been a great horror of debt. More, she had
so fashioned her life during the last ten years that she was regarded by
many shrewd observers as being quite as remarkable a person as her
brother--in fact, where he was concerned, the power behind the throne.
She loved, too, to exercise her power, to obtain good places for her
favourites, to cause some humble climber of the ladder of fame to leap
at one bound several of the hard intervening bars. It was admitted that
the only strong feeling finding place in her heart was love of her
brother, James Berwick, and for him, in a worldly sense, she had indeed
done well.
Since that afternoon, twelve years before, Miss Berwick and Oliver
Boringdon had never been on really cordial terms. She had at first
tried, foolishly, to make a friend of him, a confidant, but he had not
been possessed of the requisite amount of philosophy, and she had drawn
back mortified at the condemnation, even at the dislike, which she had
read in his eyes.
Very early Berwick had said to his friend, "I don't know what has
happened to my sister and yourself, old fellow, but it will not make any
difference to us, will it?" But, as Boringdon was well aware, it had
made a difference. The sister's influence was on the whole always thrown
in against that of the friend. It had certainly not been with Miss
Berwick's goodwill that Boringdon had been offered, through her
brother's intermediary, work which would bring him within two miles of
Lord Bosworth's country house; but Oliver Boringdon was very rarely at
Fletchings, and never without a direct invitation from its mistress.
* * * * *
As so often happens, the stirring of heart depths brings up to the
surface of the mind more than one emotion. Had it not been for his
mother's smile, Boringdon would not now have turned into the Grange
gate, but it was his great wish that what had been said this day should
make no difference to his relations with the Kemps--save, of course,
that of making him personally more prudent in the one matter of his
indulging in Lucy's society.
Alas for Boringdon's good resolutions! He had meant that this evening
call at the Grange should be of a purely business character, and at the
door he asked only for General Kemp.
"The master's upstairs with Mrs. Kemp. She's got a chill, but I'll tell
him you're here, sir," and Oliver had been shown as a matter of course
into the panelled parlour where Lucy sat reading alone. The very sight
of the girl seemed to bring with it peace--restored in subtle measure
the young man's good opinion of himself. And then she seemed so simply,
so unaffectedly glad to see him! Within the next hour, he was gradually
brought to tell her, both of the long talk with Berwick--Lucy had proved
an apt student of political economy within the last year--even of the
proposed newspaper and the editorship, of which the offer, coming from
anyone else, would, he said, "have tempted me."
"Ah! but you think Mr. Berwick ought not to start such a paper--that it
might do him harm?" Lucy looked up with quick intelligent eyes.
Boringdon had scarcely said so,--in so many words,--yet, yet--certainly
yes, that was what he had meant, and so, "Exactly!" he exclaimed; "and
if I don't join in, the scheme will probably come to nothing." Lucy
allowed her softened gaze to linger on the face of the man who had
gradually made his way into her steadfast heart. How good, how noble he
was, she thought, and, how unconscious of his own goodness and nobility!
The girl was in that stage of her mental development when the creature
worshipped must necessarily appear heroic. Two men now fulfilled Lucy's
ideal--the one was her father, the other Oliver Boringdon. Poor Laxton,
with his humble passion for herself, his half-pretended indifference to
the pleasures and duties of the British officer's life in time of
profound peace, his love of hunting and rough out-door games,--all
seemed to make him most unheroic in Lucy's eyes. She was dimly aware
that Captain Laxton's love for her was instinctive, that he was
attracted in spite of himself; and the knowledge perplexed and angered
her. She knew well, or thought she knew well, the sort of woman with
whom the young soldier ought to have fallen in love,--the well-dressed,
amusing, "smart" (odious word, just then coming into fashion!) type of
girl, whom he undoubtedly, even as it was, much admired. But Oliver
Boringdon--oh! how different would be the natural ideal of such a man.
Lucy was only now beginning to see into her own heart, and she still
believed that her regard for Boringdon was "friendship." Who could
hesitate as to which was the better part--friendship with Boringdon, or
marriage with Laxton?
"I--I want to ask you something." Lucy's heart was beating fast.
"Yes, what is it?" He turned sharply round.
"I've been reading the life of Edmund Burke."
He bent forward eagerly. "It's interesting, isn't it?"
"Yes, yes, indeed it is! But I want to ask you why a hundred years have
made such a change? Why it is that now a young man who has every
aptitude for political life----" Lucy hesitated, the words were not
really her own, they had been suggested--almost put into her mouth--by
Oliver's mother.
"Yes?" he said again, as if to encourage her.
"Why such a person cannot now accept money from--from--a friend, if it
will help him to be useful to his country?"
"You mean"--he went straight to the point--"why cannot I take money from
James Berwick?" He was looking at her rather grimly. He had not thought
that Mrs. Boringdon would find the girl so apt a pupil.
Poor Lucy shrank back. "Forgive me," she said, in a low tone, "I should
not have asked you such a question."
"You have every right," he said, impulsively. "Are we not friends, you
and I? Perhaps you did not know that this was an old quarrel between my
mother and myself. Berwick did once make me such an offer, but I think
you will see--that you will feel--with me that I could not have accepted
it."
General Kemp, coming down half an hour later, found them still eagerly
discussing Edmund Burke, and so finding, told himself, and a little
later told his wife, that the world had indeed changed in the last
thirty years, and that he, for his part, thought the old ways of love
were better than the new.