DORA ASHTON ALONE.
Dora Ashton was greatly shocked and distressed by the peril of Oscar
Leigh and his subsequent behaviour.
"I am sure, Miss Ashton, I hope you will not imagine for a moment
either that I was riding carelessly or that I recognised Mr. Leigh
until you spoke. I saw him plainly enough as he was crossing the road.
He was not minding in the least where he was going. He would have got
across us in good time if he had only kept on; but he pulled up
suddenly right under my horse's nose. I am sure I was more frightened
than he. By Jove! how he glared at me. I think he would have killed me
there and then if he could. He was going to strike my horse with that
dreadful bludgeon of his. I am sure I was much more frightened than he
was," said Sir Julius, in a penitential tone of voice, as the two rode
on side by side.
The other members of the party, including Mr. Ashton, had fallen
behind and were also discussing the incident among themselves.
"You were quite blameless," said the girl, who was still pale and
trembling. "I don't suppose the poor man was much afraid. Of what
should he be afraid?"
"Well," said the baronet, stroking the arching neck of his bay, "he
was within an ace of being ridden over, you know."
"And suppose he had been knocked down and ridden over, what has he to
fear, poor man?" she said. Her eyes were fixed, and she was speaking
as if unconscious she uttered her words. The group had turned out of
the noise of Piccadilly and were riding close together.
"He might have been hurt, I mean seriously hurt. Particularly he?"
"Hurt! How could he be hurt? You might be hurt, or I might be hurt,
but how could he be hurt. Particularly he! You fancy because he is
maimed and misshapen he is more likely to be hurt than a sound man?"
"Assuredly."
"I cannot see that. When people say a man was hurt, they do not mean
merely or mostly that he endured pain. They mean that he was injured
or disabled in some way. How can you injure or disable him? He is as
much injured and disabled as a man can be and live."
"That is very true; but he might have been killed. Miss Ashton, you do
not mean to say you think it would be better he had been killed?"
cried Sir Julius in a tone of one shocked and surprised.
"I do not know. Surely death and Heaven must be conditions of greater
ease and happiness for him than for ordinary mortals."
"I am entirely of your opinion there. But from what I saw and heard
of this man yesterday and to-day, I am disposed to think he has
self-esteem enough to sustain him in any difficulty and carry him
through any embarrassment."
"How are we to know how much of this self-esteem is assumed?"
"It does not matter whether it is assumed or not, so long as it is
sustaining."
"What! Does it not matter at what expense it is hired for use? You
amaze me, Sir Julius. You are generally sympathetic and sound, I think
you have not been taking your lessons regularly under Lady Forcar. She
would be quicker sighted in a matter of this kind." The girl shook off
her air of abstraction and smiled at the young man.
"No, Miss Ashton, I am not neglecting the lectures of Lady Forcar, but
of late they have not been much concerned with man. I deeply deplore
it, but she has taken to pigs. Anyway she would talk of nothing but
pigs yesterday, at your mother's. And even the improvement of my mind
does not come within her consideration under the head of pigs,
although I begged of her to be gracious and let it."
"That is very sad indeed. You must feel sorely slighted. And what has
she to say about pigs?"
"Oh, I really couldn't think of half the distractingly flattering
things she has to say about them. She made me miserably jealous, I
assure you. She says she is going to write an article for one of the
heavy, of the very heaviest, magazines, and she is going to call her
article 'Dead Pigs and the Pigs that eat them,' and such harmless
people as you and I are to be considered among the latter class in the
title. Isn't that fearful. She says from this forth, her mission is
pigs."
"I shall certainly read this wonderful article when it appears," said
the girl with a laugh. "Can you tell me anything more about this
article?"
"No; except that it was Mr. Leigh started the subject between her and
me."
"Mr. Leigh?" said Dora gravely.
"Yes. When she saw him eat all your bread and butter, she said he was
a man who, in the hands of a clever wife, might act the part of a
Napoleon the Great in social matters."
The grave look on Dora's face changed to one of sadness. At first,
when Sir Julius mentioned the dwarf's name, she thought some unkind
reference was about to be made to his unhappy physical deformities.
Now her anxiety was relieved on that score only to have her feelings
aroused anew over the spectacle of his spiritual desolation. He marry!
How could he marry? And yet he had told them he had found the model
for his Pallas-Athena. She was not so simple as to think the mere
intellectual being was represented to him by the model for his
Pallas-Athena. Suppose he used the name of Pallas-Athena only out of
shyness for what struck him as mere loveliness in woman, mere good
looks and kindliness of nature? What a heart-breaking thought! What an
awful torture it must be to be hungry for love and beauty in such a
form!
Sir Julius Whinfield left her at the house in Curzon Street, and she
went up to her own room to change her dress. She had nothing arranged
for between that and dinner. Her father had gone away on foot from the
house, and her mother had taken the carriage before luncheon to pay a
visit to some people in whom Dora was not interested. The girl had all
the afternoon to herself, and she had plenty of thought to occupy it.
She threw herself in a large easy chair by the open window. Her room
was at the back of the house, and looked out on a space of roofs and
walls and tiny gardens. There was nothing in view to distract the eye.
There was much within to exercise the spirit.
"It would be madness," was the result of deep and long thought, "to go
any further. I like him well enough and admire him greatly, and I
daresay--no, let me be quite candid--I _know_ he likes me. I daresay
we are better disposed towards each other than one tenth of the people
who marry, but that is not enough.
"We did not fall in love with one another at first sight. It was no
boy and girl attachment. We were attracted towards one another by the
intellectual sides of our characters. I thought I was wiser than other
girls in not allowing my fancy to direct my fate. I thought he and I
together might achieve great things. I am now afraid it is as great,
even a greater, mistake to marry for intellect than to marry for money
or position.
"I have made up my mind now. Nothing shall change me. My decision is
as much for his good as my own. Last night was not the climax of what
would be. It was only the first of a long line of difficulties or
quarrels that would increase as time went on.
"We have been enduring one another out of admiration for one another,
not loving one another for our own and love's own sake.
"It will cost me many a pang, but it must be done. I shall make no
sign. I shall make no announcement. No one has been formally told we
are engaged, and no one has any business to know. If people have
guessed it, let them now guess the engagement has been broken off. I
am not bound to enlighten them."
Then she rose and found materials for a letter, and wrote:
"Dear Mr. Hanbury,
"I have been thinking a great deal of the talk we had last night after
dinner, and I have come to the conclusion that it was all for the
best. We should never be able to agree. I think the least said now the
better. Our engagement has not been announced to anyone. Nothing need
be said about its being broken off. I hope this arrangement will be
carried out with as little pain to either as possible. I shall not
send you back your letters. I am sure getting back letters is always
painful, and ought to be avoided. I shall burn yours, and I ask you to
do the same with any notes you may have of mine. Neither will I return
the few things that cannot be burned. None of them is, I think, of any
intrinsic value to you beyond the value it had between you and me. I
shall keep them for a week and then destroy them.
"Believe me, Mr. Hanbury, I take this step with a view to our mutual
good, and in no haste or pique. I shall always think of you, with the
greatest interest and respect. I should like, if you think well of it,
that we may remain friends in appearance as I hope we may always be in
spirit.
"I ask you for only one favour. Pray do not make any attempt whatever
to treat this decision as anything but final and irrevocable.
"Yours very sincerely,
"Dora Ashton."
She determined not to post this letter until late that night.
To-morrow she was dining out. She should leave home early and not come
back until she had to go straight to her room to dress. After dinner,
they were going to the theatre, so she should avoid all chance of
meeting him if he disregarded her request and called.
So far the difficult parts of the affair had been done, and done too
with much less pain than she could have imagined. She had taken the
two great steps without faltering. She had made up her mind to end the
engagement between her and John Hanbury, and she had written to him
saying the engagement was at an end. If ill-matched people who found
themselves engaged to one another only acted with her decision and
promptness what an infinity of misery would be avoided. She was almost
surprised it had required so little effort for her to make up her mind
and to put her decision on paper. She had often heard of the miseries
such a step entailed, and here she was now sitting alone in her own
room after doing the very thing and feeling little the worse of it.
She was but twenty-one, and she had broken with the only man she had
ever seriously thought of as a lover, and it had not caused her
anything like the pang she had suffered last night when he reproached
her so bitterly and told her he could expect nothing but betrayal at
her hands.
And now that the important part of the affair had been disposed of in
a business-like way, what had she to do?
Nothing.
She could do nothing else whatever. It wanted some hours of
dinner-time, and no one ever called upon them of Fridays except--him,
and he would not call to-day. She should have the whole of the
afternoon to herself. That was fortunate, for although she did not
feel greatly depressed or cast down, she was not inclined towards
company of any kind. It had been arranged early yesterday that she
should ride with her father in the Park to-day, and she had not cared
to plead any excuse, for she did not want to attract attention to
herself, and besides, she did not feel very much in need of any excuse
since she knew he would not be there. He knew they were to ride there.
In fact he had promised to meet her there, but after last night he
would not of course go, for he would not like the first meeting after
last night to occur in so public a place and so soon after that scene.
Yes, everything was in perfectly regular order now and she had the
afternoon to herself without any fear of interruption. So she could
now sit down and rest, and--think.
Then she remained quite still for a long time in her easy chair, quite
still, with her hand before her face and her eyes closed. The
difficulties had been faced and overcome in a wise and philosophical
way, and nothing remained to be done but to do nothing, and as she sat
and thought this doing of nothing became harder than all that had gone
before. She had told herself she was a person of convictions and
principles when she was resolving on action and acting on resolve. She
had no further need of her convictions and principles. She laid them
aside with the writing materials out of which she had called forth
that letter to Jack--to Mr. Hanbury. She did not realize until this
moment, she had not had time to realize it, that she was a woman, a
young girl who had given her heart to a young man, and that now he and
she had parted to meet no more on the old terms.
It was easy to shut up the ceremonious gates of the temple and say
worship was at an end in that place for ever. But how fared it in the
penetralia of her heart? How did she face the inner chambers of her
soul where the statue of her hero stood enshrined for worship? It cost
but little effort to say that the god was deposed, but could she all
at once effectually forbid the priestess to worship?
Ah, this doing of nothing when all had been done, was ten thousand
times harder than action!
All the faculties of her reason were in favour of her decision, but
what has the reason to do with the glance of an eye, or the touch of a
hand, of the confiding commune of a soul in sympathy with one's own?
She understood him better than any other woman ever should. It was her
anxiety that he should stand high in his own regard that made her
jealous of his little weaknesses, and they were little, and only
weaknesses after all, and only weaknesses in a giant, not the
weaknesses of a man of common clay. If she had loved more what he was
to her than what she dreamed he might be to himself and all the world,
she would have taken no trouble in these matters that angered him to
fury.
And why should he not be angered with her for her poor, feeble woman's
interference with his lion nature? Why should he not turn upon her and
revile her for coming across his path? Who was she that she must
irritate him that was all the world to her, and deferred to by all men
who came his way? Why should she thwart or impede him?
He was not perfect, no doubt, but who had set her the task of
perfecting him?
Her haughty love.
Yes, the very intensity of her love had ended in the estrangement of
the lover. She found noble qualities in the man, and she had tried to
make him divine. Not because he was _her_ lover, but because she
_loved him_. She had given him her heart and soul, and now she had
sacrificed her love itself upon the altar of her devotion.
That was the heroic aspect of the affair, and as in all other sorrows
that take large shape, the heroic aspect elevated above pain and
forbade the canker of tears.
But this girl saw other aspects too.
She should miss him--oh, so bitterly! She should miss him the whole of
her life forth from that hour! She should miss him in the immediate
future. She had missed him that day in the Park. She should miss him
tomorrow. He always came on Saturdays. He used to say he always came
to Curzon Street on Saturday afternoon, like any other good young man,
to see his sweetheart when the shop was shut. She should miss him on
Sunday, too, for he always came on Sunday, saying, the better the day
the better the deed. On Mondays he made it a point to stay away, but
contrived to meet her somewhere, in the Park, or at a friend's place,
or in Regent Street, and now he would stay away altogether, not making
a point of it, but because she had told him to make an observance of
always staying away.
She should miss his voice, his marvellous voice, which could be so
clarion toned and commanding among men, and was so soft and tunable
for her ear. When he spoke to her it always seemed that the
instrumental music designed to accompany his words had fined off into
silence for shame of its inadequacy. How poor and thin and harsh all
voices would sound now. They would merely make idle sounds to the idle
air. Of old, of that old which began its backward way only yesterday,
all voices had seemed the prelude of his. They sounded merely as notes
of preparation and awakening. They were only the overture, full of
hints and promises.
She should miss his eyes. She should miss the clear vivid leap of
flame into his eyes when he glanced at her with enthusiasm, or joy, or
laughter. She should miss the gleam of that strange light which, once
having caught his eye in moments of enthusiasm, appeared to bathe his
face while he looked and spoke. She should miss the sound of his
footstep, that fleet herald of his impatient love!
Oh, it was hard--hard--hard to be doomed to miss so much!
And all this was only what she should miss in the immediate future.
In the measure of her after life would be nothing but idle air. In her
dreams of the future she had pictured him going forth from her in the
morning radiant and confident, to mingle in some worthy strife, and
coming back in the evening suffused with glory, to draw breaths of
peaceful ease in her society, in her home, her new home, their joint
home. She had thought of the reverse of this picture. She had thought
of him returning weary and unsuccessful, coming home to her for rest
now, and soothing service of love and inspiriting words of hope.
She had visions of later life and visions of their gradual decay, and
going down the hill of life hand in hand together. She had dreamed
they should never, never, never be parted.
And now they were parted for ever and ever and ever, and she should
miss him to-day and to-morrow and all the days of the year now half
spent, and of all the after years of her life.
She should miss him in death. She should not lie by his side in the
grave. She should not be with him in the Life to Come.
All the glory of the world was only a vapour, a mist. The sunlight was
a purposeless weariness. The smell of the flowers in the window-sill
was thin and foretold decay. What was the use of a house and servants
and food. Lethe was a river of Hell. Why? Why not a river of Paradise?
She should not be with him even in the grave--even in the grave where
he could have no fear of her betraying him!
She would now take any share of humbleness in life if she might count
on touching his hand and being for ever near him in the tomb.