"It is my lady! Oh, it is my love--
Would that she knew she were!"
"Jack is late," said Phillis.
She was making the prettiest picture that painter ever drew, standing
in the sunlight, with the laburnums and lilacs behind her in their
fresh spring glory. Her slender and shapely figure, clad in its black
riding habit, stood out in relief against the light and shade of the
newly-born foliage; she wore one of the pretty hats of last year's
fashion, and in her hand she carried the flowers she had just been
gathering. Her face was in repose, and in its clear straight lines
might have served for a model Diana, chaste and fair. It was
habitually rather a grave face; that came of much solitude and long
companionship with an old man. And the contrast was all the greater
when she lit up with a smile that was like a touch of tender sunshine
upon her face and gave the statue a soul. But now she stood waiting,
and her eyes were grave.
Agatha L'Estrange watched her from her shady garden seat. The girl's
mind was full of the hidden possibilities of things--for herself; the
elder lady--to whom life had given, as she thought, all it had to
give--was thinking of these possibilities too--for her charge. Only
they approached the subject from different points of view. To the
girl, an eager looking forward to new joys which were yet not the
ordinary joys of London maidenhood. Each successive day was to reveal
to her more secrets of life; she was born for happiness and sunshine;
the future was brighter in some dim and misty fashion, far brighter
than the present; it was like a picture by Claude, where the untrained
eye sees nothing but mist and vapour, rich with gorgeous colour,
blurring the outlines which lie behind. But the elder lady saw the
present and feared the future. Every man thinks he will succeed till
he finds out his own weakness; every woman thinks she is born for the
best of this world's gifts--to happiness, to be lapped in warmth and
comfort, to be clothed with the love of husband and children as with a
garment. Some women get it. Agatha had not received this great
happiness. A short two years of colourless wedded life with a man old
enough to be her father, and twenty years of widowhood. It was not the
lot she might have chosen; not the lot she wished for Phillis. And
then she thought of Jack Dunquerque. Oddly enough, the future, in
whatever shape it was present to the brain of Phillis, was never
without the figure of Jack Dunquerque.
"Jack is late," said Phillis.
"Come here, dear, out of the sun; we must take a little care of our
complexion. Sit down and let us talk."
Agatha took Phillis's hand in hers, as the girl sat upon the grass at
her feet.
"Let us talk. Tell me, dear Phillis, don't you think a little too much
about Mr. Dunquerque?"
"About Jack? How can I, Agatha? Is he not my first friend?"
She did not blush; she did not hesitate; she looked frankly in
Agatha's face. The light of love which the elder lady expected was not
there yet.
"Changed as you are, my dear, in some things, you are only a child
still," said Agatha.
"Am I only a child?" asked Phillis. "Tell me why you say so now, dear
Agatha. Is it because I am fond of Jack?"
"No, dear," Mrs. L'Estrange laughed. What was to be said to this
_jeune ingénue_? "Not quite that."
"I have learned a great deal--oh, a great deal--since I came here. How
ignorant I was! How foolish!"
"What have you learned, Phillis?"
"Well, about people. They are not all so interesting as they seemed at
first. Agatha, it seems like a loss not to think so much of people as
I did. Some are foolish, like the poor curate--are all curates
foolish, I wonder?--some seem to say one thing and mean another, like
Mr. Cassilis; some do not seem to care for anything in the world
except dancing; some talk as if china was the only thing worth living
for; but some are altogether lovely and charming, like yourself, my
dear."
"Go on, Phillis, and tell me more."
"Shall I? I am foolish, perhaps, but most of our visitors have
disappointed me. How _can_ people talk about china as if the thing
could be _felt_, like a picture? What is it they like so much in
dancing and skating-rinks, and they prefer them to music and painting,
and--and--the beautiful river?"
"Wait till you come out, dear Phillis," said Agatha.
For all the things in which young ladies do most delight were to her a
vanity and foolishness. She heard them talk and she could not
understand. She was to wait till she came out. And was her coming out
to be the putting on of the Coping-stone?
"Jack is late," said Phillis.
It was a little expedition. Mrs. L'Estrange and Gilead Beck were to
drive to Hampton Court, while Jack and Phillis rode. It was the first
of such expeditions. In late May and early June the Greater London, as
the Registrar calls it, is a marvel and a miracle of loveliness; in
all the world there are no such meadows of buttercups, with fragrant
hedges of thorn; there are no such generous and luxuriant growths
of wisteria, with purple clusters; there are no such woods of
horse-chestnuts, with massive pyramids of white blossom; there are no
such apple-orchards and snow-clad forests of white blossomed
plum-trees as are to be seen around this great city of ours. Colonials
returned from exile shed tears when they see them, and think of arid
Aden and thirsty Indian plains; the American owns that though Lake
George with its hundred islets is lovely, and the Hudson River a thing
to dream of, there is nothing in the States to place beside the
incomparable result of wealth and loving care which the outlying
suburbs of south and western London show.
If it was new to Phillis--if every new journey made her pulses bound,
and every new place seen was another revelation--it was also new to
the American, who looked so grave and smiled so kindly, and sometimes
made such funny observations.
Gilead Beck was more silent with the ladies than with Jack, which was
natural, because his only experience of the sex was that uncomfortable
episode in his life when he taught school and fought poor Pete
Conkling. And to this adventurer, this man who had been at all
trades--who had roamed about the world for thirty years; who had
habitually consorted with miners and adventurers, whom the comic
American books have taught us to regard as a compound of drunkard,
gambler, buccaneer, blasphemer, and weeping sentimentalist--his manner
of life had not been able to destroy the chivalrous respect for women
with which an American begins life. Only he had never known a lady at
all until now; never any lady in America.
In spite of his life, this man was neither coarse nor vulgar. He was
modest, knowing his defects, and he was humble. Nevertheless, he had
the self-respect which none of his countrymen are without. He was an
undeniable "ranker," a fact of which he was proud, because, if he had
a weakness, it was to regard himself as another Cromwell, singled out
and chosen. He had two languages, of one of which he made sparing use,
save when he narrated his American experiences. This, as we have seen,
was a highly ornamental tongue, a gallery of imagery, a painted
chamber of decorated metaphor--the language of wild California, an
_argot_ which, on occasions, he handled with astounding vigour. The
other was the tongue of the cultivated American. In England we bark;
in the States they speak. We fling out our conversation in jerks; the
man of the States shapes his carefully in his brain before he speaks.
Gilead Beck spoke like a gentleman of Boston, save that his defective
education did not allow him to speak so well.
His great terror was the word Shoddy. He looked at Shoddy full in the
face; he made up his mind what Shoddy was--the thing which pretends to
be what it is not, a branch of the great family which has the Prig at
one end and the Snob at the other--and he was resolute in avoiding the
slightest suspicion of Shoddy.
If he was of obscure birth, with antecedents which left him nothing to
boast of but honesty, he was also soft-hearted as a girl, quick in
sympathy, which Adam Smith teaches us is the groundwork of all morals,
and refined in thought. After many years, a man's habitual thoughts
are stamped upon his face. The face of Gilead Beck was a record of
purity and integrity. Such a man in England would, by the power of
circumstances, have been forced into taprooms, and slowly dragged
downwards into that beery morass in which, as in another Malebolge,
the British workman lies stupefied and helpless. Some wicked
cynic--was it Thackeray?--said that below a certain class no English
woman knows the meaning of virtue. He might have said, with greater
truth, that below a certain class no Englishman knows the meaning of
self-respect.
To go into that orderly house at Twickenham, where the higher uses of
wealth were practically illustrated by a refinement new to the good
ex-miner, was to this American in itself an education, and none the
less useful because it came late in life. To be with the ladies, to
see the tender graces of the elder and the sweetness of the younger,
filled his heart with emotion.
"The Luck of the Golden Butterfly, Mrs. L'Estrange," he said, "is more
than what the old squaw thought. It began in dollars, but it has
brought me--this."
They were sitting in the garden, Agatha and Gilead Beck, while Jack
Dunquerque and Phillis were watering flowers, or gathering them, or
always doing something which would keep Jack close to the girl.
"If by 'this' you mean friendship, Mr. Beck," said Agatha, "I am very
glad of it. Dollars, as you call money, may take to themselves wings
and fly away, but friends do not."
It will be observed that Agatha L'Estrange had never seen reason to
abandon the old-fashioned rules invented by those philosophers who
lived before Rochefoucauld.
"I sometimes think I should like to try," said Gilead Beck. "Poor men
have no friends; they have mates on our side of the water, and pals on
yours."
"Mates and pals?" cried Phillis, laughing. "Jack, do you know mates
and pals?"
"I ought to," said Jack, "because I'm poor enough."
"Friends come to rich folk naturally, like the fruit to the tree,
or--or--the flower to the rose," Gilead added poetically.
"Or the mud to the wheel," said Jack.
"Suppose all my dollars were suddenly to vamose--I mean, to vanish
away," Gilead Beck went on solemnly; "would the friends vanish away
too?"
"Jack would not," said Phillis promptly, "and Agatha would not. Nor
should I."
She held out her hand in the free frank manner which was her greatest
charm. Gilead Beck took the little fingers in his big rough hand the
bones of which seemed to stick out all over it, so rugged and hard it
was, and looked in her face with the solemn smile which made Phillis
trust in him, and raised her fingers to his lips.
Then she blushed with a pretty confusion which drove poor Jack to the
verge of madness. Indeed, the ardour of his passion and the necessity
for keeping silence were together making the young man thin and pale.
They were gradually exploring, this party of four, the outside
gardens, parks, castles, and views of London. Of course, they were as
new to Jack and Mrs. L'Estrange as they were to Phillis and the
American. Jack knew Greenwich, where he had dined; and Richmond, where
he had dined; and the Crystal Palace, where he had also dined,
revealed to him one summer evening an unknown stretch of fair country;
more than that he knew not.
Perhaps more exciting pleasures might have been found, but this simple
party found their own unsophisticated delight in driving and riding
through green lanes.
"Phillis will have to come out next year," said Agatha, half
apologising to herself for enjoying such things. "We must amuse her
while we can."
They went to Virginia Water, where Mr. Beck made some excellent
observations on the ruins and on the flight of time, insomuch that it
was really sad to discover that they were only, so to speak, new
ruins.
They went to Hampton Court, where they strolled through the picture
galleries and looked at the Lely beauties; walked up the long avenues,
and saw that quaint old mediæval garden which lies hidden away at the
side of the Palace, marked by few. Gilead Beck said that if he was the
Queen and had such a place he should sometimes live in it, if only for
the sake of giving a dinner in the great Hall. But Phillis liked best
the gardens, with their old-fashioned flowers, and the peace which
reigns perpetually in the quaint old courts. And Gilead Beck asked
Jack privately if he thought the Palace might be bought, and if so,
for how much.
They visited Windsor. Mr. Beck said that if he had such a location he
should always live there; he speculated on the probable cost of
erecting such a fortress on the banks of the Hudson River; and then he
cast his imagination backwards up the stream of time and plunged into
history.
Phillis allowed him to go on, while he jumbled kings, mixed up
cardinals, and tried, by the recovery of old associations, to connect
the venerable pile with the past.
"From one of those windows, I guess," he said, pointing his long arm
vaguely round the narrow lattices, "Charles came out to be beheaded,
while Oliver Cromwell spurted ink in his face. It was rough on the
poor king. Seems to me, kings very often do have a rough time. And
perhaps, too, that Cardinal Thomas à Beckett, when he told Henry IV.
that he wished he'd served his country as well as he'd loved his God,
it was on this very terrace. Perhaps----"
"O Mr. Beck! when _did_ you learn English history," cried Phillis.
Then, like a little pedant as she was, she began to unfold all that
she knew about the old fortress and its history. Its history is not so
grim as that of the Tower of London, which she had once narrated to
Jack Dunquerque; but it has a picturesque story of its own, which the
girl somehow made out from the bare facts of English history--all she
knew. But these her imagination converted into living and indisputable
truths, pictures whose only fault was that the lights were too bright
and the shadows too intense.
Alas, this is the way with posterity! The dead are to be judged as
they seem from such acts as have remained on record. The force of
circumstances, the mixture of motives, the general muddle of good and
bad together, are lost in the summing-up; and history, which after all
only does what Phillis did, but takes longer to do it, paints Nero
black and Titus white, with the clear and hard outline of an etching.
Gilead Beck, after the lecture, looked round the place with renewed
interest.
"I am more ignorant than I thought," he said humbly. "But I am trying
to read, Miss Fleming."
"Are you!" she cried, with a real delight in finding, as she thought,
one other person in the world as ignorant of that art as herself. "And
how far have you got?"
"I've got so far," he said, "that I've lost my way, and shall have to
go back again. It was all through Robert Browning. My dear young
lady,--" he said this in his most impressive tones,--"if you should
chance upon one of his books with a pretty title, such as _Red
Cotton Nightcap Country_, or _Fifine at the Fair_, don't read it,
don't try it. It isn't a fairy story, nor a love story. It's a story
without an end, it's a story told upsy-down; it's like wandering in a
forest without a path. It gets into your brain and makes it go round;
it gets into your eyes and makes you see ghosts. Don't you look at
that book.
"Reading in a general way, and if you don't take too much of it, is a
fine thing," he continued. "The difficulty is to keep the volumes
separate in your head. Anybody can write a book. I've written columns
enough in the _Clearville Roarer_ for a dozen books; but it takes
a man to read one."
"Ah, but it is different with you," said Phillis. "I am only in words
of two syllables. I've just got through the first reading-book. 'The
cat has drunk up all the milk.' I suppose I must go on with it, but I
think it is better to have some one to read for you. I am sure Jack
would read for me whenever I asked him."
"I never thought of that," said Gilead Beck. "Why not keep a clerk to
read for you, and pay out the information in small chunks? I should
like to tackle Mr. Carlyle that way."
"Agatha is reading a novel to me now," Phillis went on. "There is a
girl in it; but somehow I think my own life is more interesting than
hers. She belongs to a part of the country where the common people say
clever things!--Oh, very clever things!--and she herself says all
sorts of clever things."
"Mr. Dunquerque," interrupted Gilead Beck, who was not listening,
"would read to you all the days of his life, I think, if you would let
him."
Phillis made no reply. As she neither blushed, nor smiled, nor gave
any of the ordinary signs of apprehension with which most young ladies
would have received this speech, it is to be presumed that she did not
take in the full meaning of it.
"There is one thing about Mr. Dunquerque," Gilead Beck went on, "that
belongs, I reckon, to you English people only. He is not a young
man----"
"Jack not a young man? Why, Mr. Beck----"
"Not what we call a young man. Our young men are sixteen and
seventeen. Mr. Dunquerque is five-and-twenty. Our men of
five-and-twenty are grave and full of care. Mr. Dunquerque is
light-hearted and laughs. That is what I like him for."
"Yes; Jack laughs. I should not like to see Jack grave."
She spoke of him as if he were her own property. To be sure, he was
her first and principal friend. She could talk to him as she could
talk to no one else. And she loved him with the deep and passionless
love, as yet, of a sister.
"Yes," said Gilead Beck, looking round him, "England is a great
country. Its young men are not all mad for dollars; they can laugh and
be happy; and the land is one great garden. Miss Fleming, that is the
happiest country, I guess, whose people the longest keep their youth."
She only half understood him, but she looked in his face with her
sweet smile.
"It is like a dream. That I should be walking here with you, such as
you, in this grand place--I, Gilead P. Beck. To be with you and Mr.
Dunquerque is like getting back the youth I never had: youth that
isn't always thinkin' about the next day; youth that isn't always
plannin' for the future; youth that has time to enjoy the sunshine, to
look into a sweet gell's eyes and fall in love--like you, my pretty,
and Mr. Dunquerque--who saved my life."
He added these last words as an after-thought, and as if he was
reminded of some duty forgotten.
Phillis was silent, because his words fell upon her heart and made her
think. It was not her youth that was prolonged; it was her childhood.
And that was dropping from her now like the shell of the chrysalis.
She thought how, somewhere in the world, there were people born to be
unhappy, and she felt humiliated when she was selfishly enjoying what
they could not. Somewhere in the world--and where? Close to her, in
the cottages where Mrs. L'Estrange had taken her.
For until then the poor, who are always with us, were not unhappy, to
Phillis, nor hungry, nor deserving of pity and sympathy; they were
only picturesque.
They went to St. George's Chapel, after over-ruling Gilead Beck's
objections to attending divine service--for he said he hadn't been to
meetin' for more than thirty years; also, that he had not yet "got
religion"--and when he stood in the stall under the banner of its
rightful owner he looked on from an outsider's point of view.
The ceremonial of the ancient Church of England was to him a pageant
and a scenic display. The picture, however, was very fine; the grand
chapel with its splendor of ornamentation; the banners and heraldry;
the surpliced sweet-voiced boys; the dignified white-robed clergy-men;
the roll of the organ; the sunlight through the painted glass; even
the young subaltern who came clanking into the chapel as the service
began,--there was nothing, he said, in America which could be reckoned
a patch upon it. Church in avenue 39, New York, was painted and gilded
in imitation of the Alhambra; that was considered fine, but could not
be compared with St. George's, Windsor. And the performance of the
service, he said, was so good as to have merited a larger audience.
Jack Dunquerque, I grieve to say, did not attend to the service. He
was standing beside Phillis, and he watched her with hungry eyes. For
she was looking before her in a sort of trance. The beauty of the
place intoxicated her. She listened with soft eyes and parted lips.
All was artistic and beautiful. The chapel was peopled again with
mailed knights; the voices of the anthem sang the greatness and the
glory of England; the sunshine through the painted glass gave colour
to the picture in her brain; and when the service was over she came
out with dazed look, as one who is snatched too suddenly from a dream
of heaven.
This too, like everything else, was part of her education. She had
learned the beauty of the world and its splendours. She was to see the
things she had only dreamed of, but by dreaming had wrapped in a cloud
of coloured mist.
When was it to be completed, her education? Phillis waited for that
Coping-stone for which Joseph Jagenal was vainly searching. She
laughed when she thought of it, the mysterious completion of Abraham
Dyson's great fabric. What was it?
She had not long to wait.
"I love her, Mrs. L'Estrange," said Jack Dunquerque passionately, on
the evening of the last of their expeditions: "I love her!"
"I have seen it for some time," Agatha replied. "And I wanted to speak
to you before, but I did not like to. I am afraid I have been very
wrong in encouraging you to come here so often."
"Who could help loving her?" he cried "Tell me, Mrs. L'Estrange, you
who have known so many, was there ever a girl like Phillis--so sweet,
so fresh, so pretty, and so good?"
"Indeed, she is all that you say," Agatha acknowledged.
"And will you be my friend with Colquhoun? I am going to see him
to-morrow about it, because I cannot stand it any longer."
"He knows that you visit me; he will be prepared in a way. And--Oh,
Mr. Dunquerque, why are you in such a hurry? Phillis is so nice and
you are so young."
"I am five-and-twenty, and Phillis is nineteen."
"Then Phillis is so inexperienced."
"Yes; she is inexperienced," Jack repeated. "And if experience comes,
she may learn to love another man."
"That is what all the men say. Why, you silly boy, if Phillis were to
love you first, do you think a thousand men could make her give you
up?"
"You are right: but she does not love me; she only likes me; she does
not know what love means. That is bad enough to think of. But even
that isn't the worst."
"What more is there?"
"I am so horribly, so abominably poor. My brother Isleworth is the
poorest peer in the kingdom, and I am about the poorest younger son.
And Colquhoun will think I am coming after Phillis's money."
"As you are poor, it will be a great comfort for everybody concerned,"
said Agatha, with good sense, "to think that, should you marry
Phillis, she has some money to help you with. Go and see Lawrence
Colquhoun, Mr. Dunquerque, and--and if I can help your cause, I will.
There! Now let us have no more."
"They will make a pretty pair," said Mr. Gilead Beck presently to Mrs.
L'Estrange.
"O Mr. Beck, you are all in a plot! And perhaps after all--and Mr.
Dunquerque is so poor."
"Is that so?" Mr. Beck asked eagerly. "Will the young lady's guardian
refuse the best man in the world because he is poor? No, Mrs.
L'Estrange, there's only one way out of this muss, and perhaps you
will take that way for me."
"What is it, Mr. Beck?"
"I can't say myself to Mr. Dunquerque, 'What is mine is yours.' And I
can't say to Mr. Colquhoun--not with the delicacy that you would put
into it--that Mr. Dunquerque shall have all I've got to make him
happy. I want you to say that for me. Tell him there is no two ways
about it--that Jack Dunquerque _must_ marry Miss Fleming. Lord, Lord!
why, they are made for each other! Look at him now, Mrs. L'Estrange,
leanin' towards her, with a look half respectful and half hungry. And
look at her, with her sweet innocent eyes; she doesn't understand it,
she doesn't know what he's beatin' down with all his might: the strong
honest love of a man--the best thing he's got to give. Wait till you
give the word, and she feels his arms about her waist, and his lips
close to hers. It's a beautiful thing, love. I've never been in love
myself, but I've watched those that were; and I venture to tell you,
Mrs. L'Estrange, that from the Queen down to the kitchen-maid, there
isn't a woman among them all that isn't the better for being loved.
And they know it, too, all of them, except that pretty creature."