Hugh's intention had been to stay several days, at the least, with the
Chesterfords, and he had brought down luggage that would last any
reasonable person a fortnight. Unluckily he had not foreseen the very
natural effect that the sight of Seymour would have on him, and as soon
as lunch was over he took his hostess into a corner and presented the
situation with his usual simplicity.
"It is like this, Aunt Dodo," he said. "I didn't realize exactly what it
meant to me till I saw Seymour again. He drove me up from the station,
and it got worse all the time. I thought perhaps since Nadine had chosen
him, I might see him differently. I think perhaps I do, but it is worse.
It is quite hopeless: the best thing I can do is to go away again at
once."
Dodo had lit two cigarettes by mistake, and since, during their ride
Jack had (wantonly, so she thought) accused her of wastefulness, she was
smoking them both, holding one in each hand, in alternate whiffs. But
she threw one of them away at this, and laid her hand on Hugh's knee.
"I know, my dear, and I am so dreadfully sorry," she said. "I was sure
it would be so, and that's why I didn't want you to come here. I knew it
was no good. I can see you feel really unwell whenever you catch sight
of Seymour or hear anything he says. And about Nadine? Did you have a
nice talk with her?"
Hugh considered.
"I don't think I should quite call it nice," he said. "I think I should
call it necessary. Anyhow, we have had it and--and I quite understand
her now. As that is so, I shall go away again this afternoon. It was a
mistake to come at all."
"Yes, but probably it was a necessary mistake. In certain situations
mistakes are necessary: I mean whatever one does seems to be wrong. If
you had stopped away, you would have felt it wrong too."
"And will you answer two questions, Aunt Dodo?" he asked.
"Yes, I will certainly answer them. If they are very awkward ones I may
not answer them quite truthfully."
"Well, I'll try. Do you approve of Nadine's marriage? Has it your
blessing?"
"Yes, my dear: truthfully, it has. But it is right to tell you that I
give my blessings rather easily, and when it is clearly no use
attempting to interfere in a matter, it is better to bless it than curse
it. But if you ask me whether I would have chosen Seymour as Nadine's
husband, out of all the possible ones, why, I would not. I thought at
one time that perhaps it was going to be Jack. But then Jack chose me,
and, as we all know, a girl may not marry her stepfather, particularly
if her mother is alive and well. But I should not have chosen you
either, Hughie, if your question implies that. I used to think I would,
but when Nadine explained to me the other day, I rather agreed with her.
Of course she has explained to you."
Hugh looked at her with his honest, trustworthy, brown eyes.
"Several times," he said. "But if I agreed, I shouldn't be worrying. Now
another question: Do you think she will be happy?"
"Yes, up to her present capacity. If I did not think she would be happy,
I would not bless it. Dear Edith, for example, thinks it is a shocking
and terrible marriage. For her I daresay it would be, but then it isn't
she whom Seymour proposed to marry. They would be a most remarkable
couple, would they not? I think Edith would kill him, with the intention
of committing suicide after, and then determine that there had been
enough killing for one day. And the next day suicide would appear quite
out of the question. So she would write a funeral march."
Dodo held the admirable sensible view that if discussion on a particular
topic is hopeless, it is much better to abandon it, and talk as
cheerfully as may be about something different. But this entertaining
diversion altogether failed to divert Hugh.
"You said she would be happy up to her present capacity?" he reminded
her.
"Yes: that is simple, is it not? We develop our capacity for happiness;
and misery, also, develops as well. Whether Nadine's capacity will
develop much, I cannot tell. If it does, she may not be happy up to it.
But who knows? We cannot spend our lives in arranging for contingencies
that may never take place, and changes in ourselves that may never
occur."
Dodo looked in silence for a moment at his grave reliable face, and felt
a sudden wonder at Nadine for having chosen as she had done. And yet her
reason for rejecting this extremely satisfactory youth was sound enough,
their intellectual levels were such miles apart. But Dodo, though she
did not express her further thought, had it very distinct in her mind.
"If she does develop emotionally like a woman," she said to herself,
"there will not be a superfluity of happiness about. And she will look
at you and wonder how she could have refused you."
But necessarily she did not say this, and Hugh got up.
"Well, then, at the risk of appearing a worse prig than John Sturgis,"
he said, "I may tell you that as long as Nadine is happy, the main
object is accomplished. My own happiness consists so largely in the fact
of hers. Dear me, I wonder you are not sick at my sententiousness. I am
quite too noble to live, but I don't really want to die. Would it make
Nadine happier if I told Seymour I should be a brother to him?"
Dodo laughed.
"No, Hughie; it would make her afraid that your brain had gone, or that
you were going to be ill. It would only make her anxious. Is the motor
around? I am sorry you are going, but I think you are quite right to do
so. Always propose yourself, whenever you feel like it."
"I don't feel like it at present," said he. "But thanks awfully, Aunt
Dodo."
Dodo felt extremely warmly towards this young man, who was behaving so
very well and simply.
"God bless you, dear Hugh," she said, "and give you your heart's
desire."
"At present my heart's desire appears to be making other plans for
itself," said Hugh.
* * * * *
Esther had said once in a more than usually enlightened moment, that
Nadine's friends did her feeling for her, and she observed them, and put
what they felt into vivacious and convincing language and applied it to
herself. Certainly Hugh, when he drove away again this afternoon, was
keenly conscious of what Nadine had talked about to Edith: he felt lost,
and the flag he had industriously waved so long for her seemed to be
entirely disregarded. He hardly knew what he had hoped would have come
of this ill-conceived visit, which had just ended so abruptly, but a
vague sense of Nadine's engagement being too nightmare-like to be true
had prompted him to go in person and find out. Also, it had seemed to
him that when he was face to face with Nadine, asking her at point-blank
range, whether she was going to marry Seymour, it was impossible that
she should say "Yes." Something different must assuredly happen: either
she would say it was a mistake, or something inside him must snap. But
there was no mistake about it, and nothing had snapped. The world
proposed to proceed just as usual. And he could not decline to proceed
with it; unless you died you were obliged to proceed, however
intolerable the journey, however unthinkable the succession of days
through which you were compelled to pass. Life was like a journey in an
express train with no communication-cord. You were locked in, and could
not stop the train by any means. Some people, of course, threw
themselves out of the window, so to speak, and made violent ends to
themselves; but suicide is only possible to people of a certain
temperament, and Hugh was incapable of even contemplating such a step.
He felt irretrievably lost, profoundly wretched, and yet quite apart
from the fact that he was temperamentally incapable of even wishing to
commit suicide, the fact that Nadine was in the world (whatever Nadine
was going to do) made it impossible to think of quitting it. That was
the manner and characteristic of his love: his own unhappiness meant
less to him than the fact of her.
Until she had suggested it, the thought of traveling had not occurred to
him; now, as he waited for his train at the station, he felt that at all
costs he wanted to be on the move, to be employed in getting away from
"the intolerable anywhere" that he might happen to be in. Wherever he
was, it seemed that any other place would be preferable, and this he
supposed was the essence of the distraction that travel is supposed to
give. His own rooms in town he felt would be soaked with associations of
Nadine, so too would be the houses where he would naturally spend those
coming months of August and September. Not till October, when his duties
as a clerk in the Foreign Office called him back to town, had he
anything with which he felt he could occupy himself. An exceptional
capacity for finding days too short and few, even though they had no
duties to make the hours pass, had hitherto been his only brilliance;
now all gift of the kind seemed to have been snatched from him: he could
not conceive what to do with to-morrow or the next day or any of the
days that should follow. An allowance of seven days to the week seemed
an inordinate superfluity; he was filled with irritation at the thought
of the leisurely march of interminable time.
He spent the evening alone, feeling that he was a shade less intolerable
to himself than anybody else would have been; also, he felt incapable of
the attention which social intercourse demands. His mind seemed utterly
out of his control, as unable to remain in one place as his body. Even
if he thought of Nadine, it wandered, and he would notice that a picture
hung crooked, and jump up to straighten it. One such was a charming
water-color sketch by Esther of the beach at Meering, with a splash of
sunlight low in the West that, shining through a chimney in the clouds,
struck the sea very far out, and made there a little island of reflected
gold. Esther had put in this golden islet with some reluctance: she had
said that even in Nature it looked unreal, and would look even more
unreal in Art, especially when the artist happened to be herself. But
Nadine had voted with Hugh on behalf of the golden island, just because
it would appear unreal and incredible. "It is only the unreal things
that are vivid to us," she had said, "and the incredible things are just
those which we believe in. Isn't that so, Hughie?"
How well he remembered her saying that; her voice rang in his ears like
a haunting tune! And while Esther made this artistic sacrifice to the
god of things as they are not, he and Nadine strolled along the firm
sandy beach, shining with the moisture of the receding tide. She had
taken his arm, and just as her voice now sounded in his ears, so he
could feel the pressure of her hand on his coat.
"You live among unrealities," she said, "although you are so simple and
practical. You are thinking now that some day you and I will go to live
on that golden island. But there is no island really, it is just like
the rest of the sea, only the sun shines on it."
The bitter truth of that struck him now as applied to her and himself.
Though she had refused him before, the sun shone on those days, and not
until she had engaged herself to Seymour did the gold fade. Not until
to-day when he had definite confirmation of that from her own lips, had
he really believed in her rejection of him. He well knew her affection
for him; he believed, and rightly, that if she had been asked to name
her best friend, she would have named none other than himself. It had
been impossible for him not to be sanguine over the eventual outcome,
and he had never really doubted that some day her affection would be
kindled into flame. He had often told himself that it was through him
that she would discover her heart. As she had suggested, he would some
day crack the nut for her, and show her her own kernel, and she would
find it was his.
And now all those optimisms were snuffed out. He had completely to alter
and adjust his focus, but that could not be done at once. To-night he
peered out, as it were upon familiar scenes, and found that his sight of
them was misty and blurred. The whole world had vanished in cold gray
mists. He was lost, quite lost, and ... and there was a letter for him
on the table which he had not noticed. The envelope was obviously of
cheap quality, and was of those proportions which suggest a bill. A bill
it was from a bookseller, of four shillings and sixpence, incurred over
a book Nadine had said she wanted to read. He had passed the
bookseller's on his way home immediately afterwards and of course he had
ordered it for her. She had not cared for it; she had found it unreal.
"The man is meant to arouse my sympathy," she had said, "and only
arouses my intense indifference. I am acutely uninterested in what
happens to him." Hugh felt as if she had been speaking of himself, but
the moment after knew that he did her an injustice. Even now he could
not doubt the sincerity of her affection for him. But there was
something frozen about it. It was like sleet, and he, like a parched
land, longed for the pity of the soft rain.
Hugh had a wholesome contempt for people who pity themselves, and it
struck him at this point that he was in considerable danger of becoming
despicable in his own eyes. He had been capable of sufficient manliness
to remove himself from Nadine that afternoon, but his solitary evening
was not up to that standard; he might as well have remained at Winston,
if he was to endorse his refusal to dangle after her with nothing more
virile than those drawling sentimentalities. She was not for him: he had
made this expedition to-day in order to convince himself on that point,
and already his determination was showing itself unstable, if it
suffered him to dangle in mind though not in body. And yet how was it
possible not to? Nadine, physically and tangibly, was certainly going to
pass out of his life, but to eradicate her from his soul would be an act
of spiritual suicide. Physically there was no doubt that he would
continue to exist without her, spiritually he did not see how existence
was possible on the same terms. But he need not drivel about her. There
were always two ways of behaving after receiving a blow which knocked
you down, and the one that commended itself most to Hugh was to get up
again.
* * * * *
Lady Ayr at the end of the London season had for years been accustomed
to carry out some innocent plan for the improvement and discomfort of
her family. One year she dragged them along the castles by the Loire,
another she forced them, as if by pumping, through the picture galleries
of Holland, and this summer she proposed to show them a quantity of the
English cathedrals. These abominable pilgrimages were made pompously and
economically: they stayed at odious inns, where she haggled and
bargained with the proprietors, but on the other hand she informed the
petrified vergers and custodians whom she conducted (rather than was
conducted by) round the cathedrals or castles in their charge, that she
was the Marchioness of Ayr, was directly descended from the occupants of
the finest and most antique tombs, that the castle in question had once
belonged to her family, or that the gem of the Holbeins represented some
aunt of hers in bygone generations. Here pomp held sway, but economy
came into its own again over the small silver coin with which she
rewarded her conductor. On English lines she had a third class carriage
reserved for her and beguiled the tedium of journeys by reading aloud
out of guide-books an account of what they had seen or what they were
going to visit. Generally they put up at "temperance" hotels, and she
made a point of afternoon tea being included in the exiguous terms at
which she insisted on being entertained. John aided and abetted her in
those tours, exhibiting an ogreish appetite for all things Gothic and
mental improvement; and her husband followed her with a white umbrella
and sat down as much as possible. Esther's part in them was that of a
resigned and inattentive martyr, and she fired off picture postcards of
the places they visited to Nadine and others with "This is a foul hole,"
or "The beastliest inn we have struck yet" written on them, while
Seymour revenged himself on the discomforts inflicted on him, by
examining his mother as to where they had seen a particular rose-window
or portrait by Rembrandt, and then by the aid of a guide-book proving
she was wrong. Why none of them revolted and refused to go on these
annual journeys, now that they had arrived at adult years, they none of
them exactly knew, any more than they knew why they went, when summoned,
to their mother's dreadful dinner-parties, and it must be supposed that
there was a touch of the inevitable about such diversions: you might
grumble and complain, but you went.
This year the tour was to start with the interesting city of Lincoln and
the party assembled on the platform at King's Cross at an early hour.
The plan was to lunch in the train, so as to start sight-seeing
immediately on arrival, and continue (with a short excursion to the
hotel in order to have the tea which had been included in the terms)
until the fading light made it impossible to distinguish ancestral tombs
or Norman arches. Lady Ayr had not seen Seymour since his engagement,
and, as she ate rather grisly beef sandwiches, she gave him her views on
the step. Though they were all together in one compartment the
conversation might be considered a private one, for Lord Ayr was
sleeping gently in one corner, John was absorbed in the account of the
Roman remains at Lincoln (Lindum Colonia, as he had already announced),
and Esther with a slightly leaky stylograph was writing a description of
their depressing journey to Nadine.
"What you are marrying on, Seymour, I don't know," she said. "Neither
your father nor I will be able to increase your allowance, and Nadine
Waldenech has the appearance of being an expensive young woman. I hope
she realizes she is marrying the son of a poor man, and that we go third
class."
"She is aware of all that," said Seymour, wiping his long white
finger-tips on an exceedingly fine cambric handkerchief, after
swallowing a sandwich or two, "and we are marrying really on her money."
"I am not sure that I approve of that," said his mother.
"The remedy is obvious," remarked Seymour. "You can increase my
allowance. I have no objection. Mother, would you kindly let me throw
the rest of that sandwich out of the window? It makes me ill to look at
it."
"We are not talking about sandwiches. Why do you not earn some money
like other younger sons?"
"I do. I earned four pounds last week, with describing your party and
other things, and there is my embroidery as well, which I shall work at
more industriously. I shall do embroidery in the evening after dinner
while Nadine smokes."
Lady Ayr looked out of the window and pointed magisterially to the
towers of some great church in the town through which the train was
passing.
"Peterborough," she said. "We shall see Peterborough on our way back.
Peterborough, John. Ayr and Esther, we are passing through
Peterborough."
Esther looked out upon the mean backs of houses.
"The sooner we pass through Peterborough the better," she observed.
John turned rapidly over the leaves of his guide-book.
"Peterborough is seventy-eight miles from London, and contains many
buildings of interest," he informed them.
Lady Ayr returned to Seymour.
"I hope you will insist on her leaving off smoking when you are married
to her," she said. "I cannot say she is the wife I should have chosen
for you."
"I chose her myself," observed Seymour.
"Tell me more about her. Certainly the Waldenechs are a very old family,
there is that to be said. Is she serious? Does she feel her
responsibilities? Or is she like her mother?"
Seymour brushed a few remaining sandwich-crumbs off his trousers.
"I think Aunt Dodo is one of the most serious people I know," he said.
"She is serious about everything. She does everything with all her
might. Nadine is not quite so serious as that. She is rather flippant
about things like food and dress. However, no doubt my influence will
make her more serious. But as a matter of fact I can't tell you about
Nadine. A fortnight ago, when I proposed to her, I could have. I could
have given you a very complete account of her. But I can't any longer: I
am getting blind about her. I only know that it is she. Not so long ago
I told her a quantity of her faults with ruthless accuracy, but I
couldn't now. I can't see them any more: there's a glamor."
Esther looked up.
"Oh, Seymour," she said, "are you talking about Nadine? Are you falling
in love with her? How very awkward! Does she know?"
Seymour pointed a withering finger at his sister.
"Little girls should mind their own business," he said.
"Oh, but it is my business. Nadine matters far more than any one else.
She might easily think it not right to marry you if you were in love
with her."
Lady Ayr turned a petrifying gaze from one to the other.
"She seems a very extraordinary young person," she said. "And in any
case Esther has no business to know anything about it."
"Whether she thinks it right or not, she is going to marry me," said
Seymour.
Esther shook her head.
"You are indeed blind about Nadine," she said, "if you think she would
ever do anything she thought wrong."
"You might be describing John," said Seymour rather hotly.
"Anyhow, Nadine is not like John."
"I see no resemblance," said Lady Ayr. "But it is something to know she
would not do anything she thought wrong."
"When you say it in that voice, Mother," said Esther, "you make nonsense
of it."
"The same words in any voice mean the same thing," said Lady Ayr.
Seymour sighed.
"I am on Esther's side for once," he said.
Esther turned to her brother.
"Seymour, you ought to tell Nadine you are falling in love with her,"
she said. "I really don't think she would approve. Why, you might become
as bad as Hugh. Of course you are not so stupid as Hugh--ah, stupid is
the wrong word--you haven't got such a plain kind of intellect as
Hugh--which was Nadine's main objection--"
Seymour patted Esther's hand with odious superiority. "You are rather
above yourself, my little girl," he said, "because just now I agreed
with you. It has gone to your head, and makes you think yourself clever.
Shut your eyes till we get to Lincoln. You will feel less giddy by
degrees. And when you open them again, you can mind your own business,
and mother will tell you about the Goths and Vandals who built the
cathedral. You are a Vandal yourself: you will have a fellow-feeling.
Mother, dear, put down that window. I am going to see cathedrals to
please you, but I will not be stifled to please anybody. The carriage
reeks of your beef sandwiches. But I think I have some scent in my bag."
"I am quite sure you have," said Esther scornfully. "I am writing to
Nadine, by the way. I shall tell her you are falling in love with her."
"You can tell her exactly what you please," said Seymour suavely. "Ah,
here is some wall-flower scent. It is like a May morning. Yes, tell
Nadine what you please, but don't bother me. What is the odious town we
are coming to? I think it must be Lincoln. John, here is Lincoln, and
all the people are ancient Romans."
Seymour obligingly sprayed the expensive scent about the carriage, even
though they were so shortly to disembark.
"The river Witham," said John, pointing to a small and fetid ditch.
"Remains of Roman villas--"
"The inhabitants of which died of typhoid," said Seymour. "Tell Nadine
we are enjoying Lincoln, Esther. Had father better be allowed to sleep
on, or shall I wake him? There is a porter: call him, Mother--I won't
carry my bag even to save you sixpence. But don't tell him we are
marchionesses and lords and ladies, because then he will expect a
shilling. I perceive a seedy-looking 'bus outside. That is probably
ours. It looks as if it came from some low kind of inn. I wish I had
brought Antoinette. And yet I don't know. She would probably have given
notice after seeing the degradation of our summer holiday."
"Seymour, you are making yourself exceedingly disagreeable," said his
mother.
"It is intentional. You made yourself disagreeable to me: you began. As
for you, Esther, you must expect to see a good deal less of Nadine after
she and I are married. I will not have you mooning about the house,
reminding her of all the damned--yes, I said damned--nonsense you and
she and Berts and Hugh talked about the inequality of marriages where
one person is clever and the other stupid, or where one loves and the
other doesn't. You have roused me, you and mother between you, and I am
here to tell you that I will manage my own affairs, which are Nadine's
also, without the smallest assistance from you. Put that in--in your
ginger-beer, or whatever we have for dinner, and drink it. You thought I
was only a sort of thing that waved its hands and collected jade, and
talked in rather a squeaky voice, and walked on its toes. Well, you have
found out your mistake, and don't let me have to teach it you again. You
can tell Nadine in your letter exactly what I have said. And don't rouse
me again: it makes me hot. But mind your own business instead, and
remember that when I want either your advice or mother's I will ask for
it. Till then you can keep it completely to yourselves. You needn't
answer me: I don't want to hear anything you have got to say. Let us go
to the cathedral. I suppose it is that great cockshy on the top of the
hill. I know it will prove to have been built by our forefathers. The
verger will like to know about it. But bear in mind I don't want to be
told anything about Nadine."
* * * * *
Seymour had become quite red in the face with the violence of the
feelings that prompted these straightforward remarks, and before putting
the spray of wall-flower scent back into his bag, he shut his eyes and
squirted himself in the face in order to cool himself, while Esther
stared at him open-mouthed. She hardly knew him, for he had become
exactly like a man, a transformation more unexpected than anything that
ever happened at a pantomime, and she instantly and correctly connected
this change in him with what he had been saying. For the reason of the
change was perfectly simple and sufficient: during those last days at
Winston, after the departure of Hugh, he had fallen in love with Nadine,
and his nature, which had really been neither that of man or woman, had
suddenly sexed itself. He had not in the least cast off his tastes and
habits; to spray himself and a stuffy railway-carriage with wall-flower
scent was still perfectly natural to him, and no doubt, unless Nadine
objected very much, he would continue to take Antoinette about with him
as his maid, but he had declared himself a man, and found, even as his
sister found, that the change in him was as immense as it was
unexpected. He thought with more than usual scorn of Nadine's friends,
such as Esther and Berts, who all played about together like healthy,
but mentally anemic, children, for he, the most anemic of them all, had
suddenly had live blood, as it were, squirted into him. Indeed the only
member of the clan whom he thought of with toleration was Hugh, with
whom he felt a bond of brotherhood, for Hugh, like himself, loved Nadine
like a man. Already also he felt sorry for him, recognizing in him a
member of his own sex. Hitherto he had disliked his own sex, because
they were men, now he found himself detesting people like Berts, because
they were not. For men, so he had begun to perceive, are essentially
those who are aware of the fact of women; the rest of them, to which he
had himself till so lately belonged, he now classified as more or less
intellectual amoebæ. And the corresponding members of the other sex
were just as bad: Esther had no sense of sex, nor perhaps, and here he
paused, had Nadine.
That, it is true, gave him long pause. He knew quite well that Nadine
had been no more in love with him, when they had got engaged, than he
had been with her. They had both been, and she so he must suppose was
still, quite undeveloped as regards those instincts. Hugh with all his
devotion and developed manliness awoke no corresponding flame in her,
and Seymour was quite clear-sighted enough to see that there was no sign
of his having succeeded where Hugh had failed. She belonged, as Dodo had
remarked, to that essentially modern type of girl, which, unless she
marries while quite young, will probably be spinster still at thirty.
They had brains, they had a hundred intellectual and artistic interests,
and studied mummies, or logic, or Greek gems, or themselves, and lived
in flats, eagerly and happily, and smoked and substituted tea for
dinner. They knew of nothing in their natures that gave them any
imperious call; on the other hand they called imperiously though
unintentionally to others. Nadine had called like that to Hugh, and was
dismayed at the tumult she had roused, regretting it, but not
comprehending it. And now she had called like that to Seymour. She was
like the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, calling in her sleep. Hugh had
answered her first and had fought his way through thicket and briar, but
his coming had not awakened her. Then she had called again, and this
time Seymour stood by her. She had given him her hand, but her sleep
had been undisturbed. She smiled at him, but she smiled in her sleep.
* * * * *
The seedy 'bus, of the type not yet quite extinct, with straw on the
bottom of it, proved to be sent for them and they proceeded over cobbled
streets, half deafened by the clatter of ill-fitting windows. After a
minute or two of this Seymour firmly declined to continue, for he said
the straw got up his trousers and tickled his legs, and the drums of his
ears were bursting. So he got delicately out, in order to take a proper
conveyance, and promised to meet the rest of them at the west door of
the cathedral. Here he sat very comfortably for ten minutes till they
arrived, and entering in the manner of a storming party, they literally
stumbled over an astonished archdeacon who was superintending some
measurement of paving stone immediately inside, and proved to be a
cousin of Lady Ayr's. This fact was not elicited without pomp, for the
cathedral was not open to visitors at this hour, as he informed them, on
which Lady Ayr said, "I suppose there will be no difficulty in the way
of the Marquis of Ayr--Ayr, this is an archdeacon--and his wife and
family seeing it." Upon which "an" archdeacon said, "Oh, are you Susie
Ayr?" Explanations of cousinship--luckily satisfactory--followed, and
they were conducted round the cathedral by him free of all expense, and
dined with him in the evening, at a quarter to eight, returning home at
ten in order to get a grip of all they were going to see next day, by a
diligent perusal of the guide-books.
They were staying at an ancient hostelry called the "Goat and
Compasses," a designation the origin of which John very obligingly
explained to them, but Seymour, still perhaps suffering from the straw
at the bottom of the 'bus, thought that the "Flea and Compasses" would
be a more descriptive title. No room was on the level with any other
room or with the passage outside it, and short obscure flights of steps
designed to upset the unwary communicated between them. A further trap
was laid down for unsuspicious guests in the matter of doors and
windows, for the doors were not quite high enough to enable the person
of average height to pass through them without hitting his forehead
against the jamb, and the windows, when induced to open, descended
violently again in the manner of a guillotine. The floors were as wavy
as the pavement of St. Mark's at Venice, the looking-glasses seemed like
dusky wells, at the bottom of which the gazer darkly beheld his face,
and the beds had feather mattresses on them. Altogether, it was quite in
the right style, except that it was not a "temperance hotel," for the
accommodation of Lady Ayr on a tour of family culture, and she and John,
after a short and decisive economical interview with the proprietor,
took possession of the largest table in the public drawing-room,
ejecting therefrom two nervous spinsters who had been looking forward to
playing _Patience_ on it, and spreading their maps of the town over it,
read to each other out of guide-books, while Lord Ayr propped himself up
dejectedly in a corner, where he hoped to drop asleep unperceived. The
troublesome interview with the proprietor had been on the subject of
making a deduction from the agreed terms, since they had all dined out.
He was finally routed by a short plain statement of the case by Lady
Ayr.
"If you can afford to take us in for so much, dinner included," she
said, "you can afford to take us in for less without dinner. I think
there is no more to be said on the subject. Breakfast, please, at a
quarter past eight punctually and I shall require a second candle in my
bedroom. I think your terms, which I do not say are excessive, included
lights? _Thank_ you!"
* * * * *
Seymour had declined to take part in this guide-book conference, saying
with truth that he felt sure it would all be very completely explained
to him next day, and let himself out into the streets of the town which
were already growing empty of passengers. Above the sky was lucent with
many stars, and the moon which had risen an hour before, cleared the
house-roofs and shone down into the street with a very white light,
making the gas-lamps look red. Last night it had been full, and from the
terrace at Winston they had all watched it rise, full-flaring, over the
woods below the house. Then he and Nadine had strolled away together,
and in that luminous solitude with her, he had felt himself constrained
and tongue-tied. He had no longer at command the talk that usually rose
so glibly to his lips, that gay, witty, inconsequent gabble that had
truthfully represented what went on in his quick discerning brain. His
brain now was taken up with one topic only, and it was as hard for him
to speak to her of that, as it was for him to speak of anything else. He
knew that she had entered into her engagement with him, in the same
spirit in which he had proposed to her. They liked each other; each
found the other a stimulating companion; by each no doubt the attraction
of the other's good looks was felt. She, he was certain, regarded him
now as she had regarded him then, while for him the whole situation had
undergone so complete a change, that he felt that the very fortress of
his identity had been stormed and garrisoned by the besieging host. And
what was the host? That tall girl with the white slim hands, who,
without intention, had picked up a key and, cursorily, so it seemed, had
unlocked his heart, so that it stood open to her. Honestly, he did not
know that it was made to unlock: he had thought of it always as some toy
Swiss _châlet_, not meant to be opened. But she had opened it, and gone
inside.
The streets grew emptier: lights appeared behind blinds in upper
windows, and only an occasional step sounded on the pavements. He had
come to an open market place, and from where he paused and stood the
western towers of the cathedral rose above the intervening roofs, and
aspired whitely into the dark velvet of the night. Hitherto, Seymour
would have found nothing particular to say about moonlight, in which he
took but the very faintest interest, except that it tended to provoke an
untimely loquaciousness in cats. But to-night he found his mind flooded
with the most hackneyed and commonplace reflections. It reminded him of
Nadine; it was white and chaste and aloof like her ... he wanted her,
and he was going to get her, and yet would she really be his in the
sense that he was hers? Then for a moment habit asserted itself, and he
told himself he was being common, that he was dropping to the level of
plain and barbarous Hugh. It was very mortifying, yet he could not keep
off that level. He kept on dropping there, as he stared at the moonlit
towers of the cathedral, unsatisfied and longing. But it may be doubted
whether he would have felt better satisfied, if he had known how
earnestly Nadine had tried to drop, or rise, to the moonlit plane, or
how sincerely, even with tears, she had deplored her inability to do so.
For it was not he whom she had sought to join there.