"UNDER BONNYBELL'S WINDOW-PANES."
But there was something more in Victor Heron's feeling of depression
that night than came from the mere fact that he had found a few young
artists not quite such heroic spirits as he thought they ought to be.
It was the demeanor of Herbert Blanchet that especially spoiled the
evening for him. In truth the head of the poet was not a strong one,
and was very easily turned by any little stimulant of whatever kind.
His volume of poems this night affected all his being. He felt sure
that he was at last about to force himself upon the recognition of the
world, and he made up his mind that Miss Grey was in love with him. He
conveyed hints of his approaching good fortune to his companions; and
he received at first with benign courtesy their compliments on the
success that seemed to await him in life and love. But when some too
forward person suggested that he could possibly guess at the name of
the heiress whose heart and hand were to bless the lucky poet, then
Blanchet became gravely and even severely dignified.
"You will excuse me, Mellifont," he said grandly, the brandy and soda
having, as was the wont of any such liquor taken by our poor poet, gone
straight upward to his head--"you will excuse me, I am sure, if I say
this is not exactly a subject for jocularity; or even, permit me to
add, for general conversation, although among friends. My distinguished
friend, Mr. Heron, will, I am sure, exactly appreciate what I say.
Things may not be so completely settled as to make it proper that they
should be spoken of as if--as if in short they were settled; you will
excuse me, Mellifont, my dear fellow--you will excuse me."
Victor Heron thought it time for him to go, and rose accordingly, and
Mr. Blanchet insisted on accompanying him down the stairs and to the
door of the house.
"I thought it right, you know," the over-dignified poet said, "to put a
stop to that sort of thing. Men have no right to make such inferences.
I should have no right myself to assume that things were settled in
that sort of way. It is not just to others--to another at least. You
appreciate my motives I am sure, Heron, my dear friend?"
"I don't know that I even quite understand what your friend was talking
about," said Heron coldly. "But if it was about any lady, I should
think such conjecturing highly improper and impertinent; and I should
be rather inclined to put a stop to it even more quickly."
"Quite my idea--I am glad you entirely concur with me, and approve of
the course I have taken. But of course you would do so. I knew I could
count on your approval. By the way, you know Mellifont?"
"The man you talked to just now?"
"Yes, Mellifont--a very good fellow, though a little too fond of
talking--I have had to reprove him more than once, I can tell you. But
a very good fellow for all that, and one of the only true artists now
alive. He is a composer--you must hear him play some bits from his
opera. He is at work on an opera, you know--or perhaps you have not
heard?"
"I have not heard--no. I am rather out of the way of such things, I
fear," said Victor, beginning to feel, in spite of himself, a certain
awe of a man who could compose an opera, and thinking that, after all,
a certain allowance must be made for the genius of one who could do
such things.
"Oh, you must hear some of it soon! We feel satisfied that it will
sound the death knell of all the existing schools of music. They are
all wrong, sir, from the first to the last, from Mozart to Wagner--all
wrong except Mellifont."
Victor was for the moment really staggered by the genius of this great
man.
"What is his opera to be called?" he asked, not venturing to hazard any
compromising observation.
"'The Seven Deadly Sins.' It is to be in seven acts, and each act is to
give an entirely new illustration of a deadly sin--which Mellifont will
show to be the only true virtues of mankind. It will make a revolution,
I can tell you."
Victor thought it could hardly fail to do that if it were at all
successful in the object set out by its author.
"It is to have seven heroines," the poet went on, still at the door,
and refusing to allow Victor to depart. "Lot's daughters--let me
see--Messalina, Locusta; Jezebel I think, Theodora, and I believe, Mrs.
Brownrigg. It will be a splendid thing."
It was not easy for Victor to get away, for the poet had to tell him of
other great works of art that were in the contemplation of members of
the school. At length Blanchet released him, thanking him grandly for
the assistance he had lent to the bringing out of his book, but adding
even more grandly some words that fell painfully on Victor's ear.
"I hope to be independent of publishers and drudgery before long; I
fancy--I rather believe it depends upon myself, and I think I owe it to
my own genius to raise myself above the necessity of drudgery. Then I
could do something worthy of myself, and the few whose praise I value."
Victor escaped at last and walked away. He was in a very discontented
mood, an unusual thing for him. He could not help believing that there
must be, or at least might be, something in the idea which Blanchet so
evidently wished people to receive. He feared that there must be
something more than mere kindly patronage in Miss Grey's generosity
toward Blanchet. The thought was strangely disagreeable to him. He
could not think with patience of such a girl being in love with such a
man. He was now disposed to exaggerate the demerits of the poet, and to
believe anything mean of one who could take a girl's money and give out
as an excuse for taking it that she was in love with him. "If I had a
sister," he thought, "and any fellow were to give such hints about her,
I wonder how I should like it, and I wonder how much of it I should
stand!"
He felt sorry, very sorry, for Minola, and perhaps a little angry with
her too for allowing to any man the chance of suggesting such things.
The more he thought of her and all he had seen of her, the less she
seemed fitted for such a lover as Mr. Blanchet. She had impressed
Victor greatly by her manners, her fresh and frank character, and the
simple, trusting generosity which was her transparent attribute. He
began to look on the poet now as a mere fortune-hunter, who was
fastening upon the girl because of the money which he expected her to
have. He did not know how consuming a passion is the vanity of the
small artistic mind--the mind which has art's ambition only and not
art's inspiration. Mr. Blanchet was not a fortune-hunter in the
ordinary sense. His poems were to him as yet much dearer than any
fortune. He was drawn to Minola not because she had money, but because
having money she was willing to spend some of it in bringing out his
poems in a handsome edition.
Our hero's quixotic temper was thoroughly roused by the thought of some
wrong which he fancied was about to be done to Minola. He was not one
of those lucky beings who can let things alone. He never could let
things alone. Had he had the gift of those who can, he would just then
have been governor of some rising colony, and would have been in a fair
way of promotion. He was tormented by the thought that there was
something he ought to do to save Minola from some vaguely terrible
fate, and by not being able to see what the something was which lay
within his power to do. Before he had walked many yards he had worked
himself into the idea that a plot of some sort was in preparation to
entrap Minola into a marriage with one who, poet or not, was wholly
unworthy of her.
His energetic spirit at length suggested something to be done. It was
not, perhaps, a very practical or useful stroke of policy, but it was
the only thing which occurred to him and the only thing which he did
just then. He started off at full speed to walk under the windows of
the house where Miss Grey was living. It was now fully midnight, and of
course he had not the slightest idea of seeing Minola, and, indeed,
would have been greatly embarrassed if he had seen her. But he started
off, nevertheless, to walk under her windows with as eager a step and
as steady a purpose as if he were really hastening to rescue her from
some imminent danger. It was only a short walk from where he then was
to Minola's lodgings; but Heron was so eager in his purpose that the
way seemed miles, which he was covering with hasty strides.
When he reached the house where Minola lived, the aspect of the place
was just such as, if he had been a lover, he might have expected or
desired to find. The house was all in darkness save for one window.
There was a looking-glass in that window, making it plain to the least
observant of human creatures that it must be the window of a bedroom.
How could a lover doubt that that must be the window of the room which
was hers, and that she then watched the stars of midnight, and that she
thought of love, and that her soul was, as Jean Paul puts it, in the
blue ether? For the moment Victor Heron found himself wishing that he
were a lover--were the lover of whom the lady, fancy-fixed in that one
lighted room, might be thinking. But if it were Minola's room, he
thought, she certainly had not him or any memory of him in her mind. It
was a clear, soft midnight, and the moon that shone on the near roof of
the British Museum seemed as poetic and as sad as though it fell on the
ruins of the Parthenon. No practice in colonial administration can
wholly squeeze the poetic and the romantic out of the breast of a young
man of Heron's time of life. As he stood there his grievance seemed as
far off as the moon herself, but not by any means so poetic and
beautiful. He paced up and down, feeling very young and odd, and unlike
his usual self. He was happy in a queer, boyish way that had a certain
shamefaced sensation about it, as when a youth for the first time
drinks suddenly of some sparkling wine, and feels his brain and senses
all aflame with delicious ecstasy, and is afraid of the feeling
although he delights in it.
It was a natural part of the half fantastic chivalry of his character
that he should have felt a sort of satisfaction in thus for the moment
being near Minola, as if by that means he were in some sort protecting
her against danger. If at that time any softer and warmer feeling than
mere friendship were mingling itself with Heron's sensations, he did
not then know it. He thought of the girl as a sweet friend, new to him,
indeed, but very dear, in whose happiness he felt deeply interested,
and over whom he had taken it into his head that he had a right to
watch. She seemed to be strangely alone in the world of London, and,
indeed, to be at the same time not suited for anything in London but
just such isolation. He never could think of her as mixing in the
ordinary society of the metropolis. He could not think of her as one of
the common crowd, following out mechanically the registered routine of
the season's amusements, listening to the commonplace talk, and
compliments, and cheap cynicism of the drawing-room and the five
o'clock tea. To him she appeared as different from all that, and as
poetically lifted above it, as if she were Hawthorne's Hilda, high up
in her Roman tower, among her doves, and near to the blue sky. Except
in the home of the Moneys, Heron had never seen Minola in anything that
even looked like society; and there was a good deal of the odd and the
fresh in that home which took it out of the range of the commonplace,
and did not interfere with his poetic idealization of Minola. Her
presence and her way of life appeared alike to him a poetic creation.
So quiet, self-sufficing a life, alone in the midst of the crowd, such
simple strength of purpose, such a tranquil choice of the kind of
existence that suited her best, such generosity and such gracious,
loving kindness--all this together made up a picture which had a
natural fascination for a chivalrous young man, who had never before
had time to allow the softer and more romantic elements of his nature
any chance of expression. It may be that for the present Minola was to
him but the first suggestion of an embodiment of all the vague,
floating thoughts and visions of love and womanhood that must now and
then cross the spiritual horizon of every young man, no matter how
closely he may be occupied with colonial affairs and the condition of
the colored races. The hero of a French story, whereof there is not
otherwise over-much good to be said, speaks with a feeling as poetic as
it is true when he says that in the nightingale's song he heard the
story of the love that he ought to have known, but which had not yet
come to him. Perhaps in the eyes and in the voice of Minola Victor
Heron unconsciously found this story told for him.
However that might be, it is certain that Heron found a curious
satisfaction this night in passing again and again before Minola's
door, and making believe to himself as if he were guarding her against
danger. He might have remained on guard in this way, heaven knows how
long--for, as we know, he was not fond of early going to bed--but that
he suddenly "was aware," as the old writers put it, of another watcher
as well as himself. It was unmistakable. Another man came up and passed
slowly once or twice under the same windows, and on the side of the
street where Heron had put himself on guard. Then the new comer,
observing, no doubt, that he was not alone, had crossed to the other
side of the street, and Heron thought he was only a chance passer and
was gone altogether. Presently, however, he crossed the road again, and
stood a short distance away from Heron as if he were watching him. Now,
though Victor Heron was not a lover, he had just as much objection as
any lover could have to being seen by observant eyes when watching
under a girl's window. The mere thought recalled him at once to
chilling commonplace. He was for going away that moment; all the
delight was gone out of his watching. But he was a little curious to
know if the new comer were really only a casual stranger whom his
movements had stirred into idle curiosity. So he went straightway down
the street and passed the unwelcome intruder. He felt sure the face of
the man was known to him, although he could not at first recall to mind
the person's identity. He felt sure, too, by the way in which the man
looked at him and then turned suddenly off, that the new comer had
recognized him as well. This was tormenting for the moment, as he went
on perplexing himself by trying to think who it was that he had seen in
this unexpected and unwished-for way. He walked slowly, and looked back
once or twice. He could not see his disturber any more. The man had
either gone away or was, perhaps, standing in the shadow of a doorway.
Suddenly an idea flashed upon Heron.
"Why, of course," he exclaimed, "it's he! I ought to have known! It's
the man from Keeton--the hated rival."
By "hated rival," however, Heron did not mean a rival in love, but only
in electioneering; for he now knew that it was Mr. Sheppard he had
seen, and he remembered how Mr. Sheppard, when he met him in Minola's
room, had seemed oddly sullen and unwilling to fraternize. This was the
reason why Heron called him the hated rival. His own idea of a rival in
an election contest was that of a person whom one ought to ask to
dinner, and treat with especial courtesy and fair offer of friendship.
Suddenly, however, another idea had occurred to him.
"What on earth can he be doing there," he asked, "under her window? Can
it be possible that he too is a lover?"
He too? Who then was _the_ lover--the other lover? Heron did not
believe, and would not admit, that Blanchet was a genuine lover at all.
The whole theory of Victor's duty to watch under Minola's windows was
based on the assumption that Blanchet was no true lover, but a cunning
hunter of fortune. Why then ask, was Mr. Sheppard too a lover? Heron
did not at the moment stop to ask himself any such question, but after
awhile the absurdity of his words occurred to him, and he was a little
amused and a good deal ashamed of his odd and hasty way of putting the
question.
"Why shouldn't he be there as well as I?" he said. "Why should he be a
lover any more than I?"
Then he began to assure himself that the hated rival must have been
there only by chance; and it is doubtful whether if he had thought much
longer over the question he would not have ended by convincing himself
that nothing but the merest chance had brought him, too, under Minola's
window panes.
It was, indeed, Minola's window under which he had been watching; and
she too was watching, and never dreamed that he was so near. She looked
from her window not long after he had gone, and saw the street all
lonely, and felt lonely herself, and shuddered, thinking that life
would ever be a dreary piece of work for her. It is a melancholy fact
that all that time, and even long after she had gone in shuddering from
the window, poor Sheppard was standing in a doorway at the opposite
side of the street, and that she not only never saw him, but never
thought of him. Her thoughts were of Victor Heron, and of her own folly
and her own love--that love which seemed such folly, which was so
hopeless, which she knew, or at least believed it was a sort of treason
against friendship to indulge, although in absolute secret.
In Uhland's pretty poem called "Departure" a youth is going on his
wanderings, and his comrades escort him a little on his way, and as
they go along they pass beneath the windows of a pretty girl. The lad
looks up, and would fain if he might have a rose from her hand, and yet
tells himself that he would not have it--for to what end to have the
rose when she whom he loved cared nothing for him, and the rose would
only wither with him, and to no purpose? When he has gone the girl
strains her eyes after him in grief, and wonders what the world is to
be to her now that he she loved is going far away, and never knew of
her love. A few timely words might have spared all the heart-ache, no
doubt; but it will be a very different world from that which we have
known when all the words that might have been timely are spoken in
time, or even when the feelings that might prompt the timely words have
learned their own meaning at the right moment to give it breath.