A MORNING CALL.
Tonia worked at the comedy, but did not find her idea of a woman of
_ton_ greatly enlarged by the women she had seen at Mrs. Mandalay's.
Indeed, she began to think that her father was right, and that Mrs.
Millamant--whose coarseness of speech disgusted her--was her best
model. Yet, disappointing as that tawdry assembly had been, she felt as
if she had gained something by her brief encounter with Lord Kilrush,
and her pen seemed firmer when she tried to give life and meaning to
the leading character in her play, the _rôle_ intended for Garrick.
She had begun by making him young and foolish. She remodelled the
character, and made him older and wiser, and tried to give him the
grand air; evolving from her inner consciousness the personality which
her brief vision of Kilrush had suggested. Her ardent imagination made
much out of little.
Of the man himself she scarcely thought, and would hardly have
recognized his person had they met in the street. But the ideal man she
endowed with every fascinating quality, every attracting grace.
Her father noted the improvement in her work.
"Why, this fourth act is the best we have done yet," he said, "and I
think 'twas a wise stroke of mine to make our hero older----"
"Oh, father, 'twas my notion, you'll remember."
"You shall claim all the invention for your share, if you like, slut,
so long as we concoct a piece that will satisfy Garrick, who grows more
and more finical as he gets richer and more fooled by the town. The
part will suit him all the better now we've struck a deeper note. He
can't wish to play schoolboys all his life."
It was three weeks after the masquerade when there came a rap at the
parlour door one morning, and the maid-servant announced Lord Kilrush.
Thornton was lying on a sofa in shirt-sleeves and slippers, smoking a
long clay pipe, the picture of a self-indulgent sloven--that might have
come straight from Hogarth. Tonia was writing at a table by an open
window, the June sunshine gleaming in her ebon hair. Her father had
been dictating and suggesting, objecting and approving, as she read her
dialogue.
The visit was startling, for though Thornton was on easy terms with
his lordship, who had known him at the University, and had patronized
and employed him in his decadence, Kilrush had never crossed his
threshold till to-day. Had he come immediately after the meeting at
Mrs. Mandalay's, Antonia's father might have suspected evil; but
Thornton had flung that event into the rag-bag of old memories, and
had no thought of connecting his patron's visit with his daughter's
attractiveness. He was about as incapable of thought and memory as a
thinking animal can be, having lived for the past fourteen years in the
immediate present, conscious only of good days and bad days, the luck
or the ill-luck of the hour, without hope in the days that were coming,
or remorse for the days that were gone.
Kilrush knew the man to the marrow of his bones, and although he had
been profoundly impressed by Antonia's unlikeness to other women, he
had waited a month before seeking to improve her acquaintance, and thus
hoped to throw the paternal Argus off his guard.
Tonia laid down her pen, rose straight and tall as a June lily, and
made his lordship her queenly curtsey, blushing a lovely crimson at the
thought of the liberties that rapid quill had taken with his character.
"He is not half so handsome as my Dorifleur!" she thought; "but he has
the grand air that no words can express. Poor little Garrick! What a
genius he must be, and what heels he must wear, if he is to represent
such a man!"
Kilrush returned the curtsey with a bow as lofty, and then bent over
the ink-stained fingers and kissed them, as if they had been saintly
digits in a crystal _reliquaire_.
"Does Miss Thornton concoct plays, as well as her gifted parent?" he
inquired, with the smile that was so exquisitely gracious, yet not
without the faintest hint of mockery.
"The jade has twice her father's genius," said Thornton, who had
risen from the sofa and laid his pipe upon the hob of the wide iron
grate, where a jug of wall-flowers filled the place of a winter fire.
"Or, perhaps I should say, twice her father's memory, for she has a
repertory of Spanish and Italian plays to choose from when her Pegasus
halts."
"Nay, father, I am not a thief," protested Tonia.
Kilrush glanced at the hack-scribbler, remembering that awkward
adventure with the farmer's cash-box which had brought so worthy a
gentleman to the treadmill, and which might have acquainted him with
Jack Ketch. He glanced from father to daughter, and decided that
Antonia was unacquainted with that scandalous episode in her parent's
clerical career.
After that one startled blush and conscious smile, the cause whereof
he knew not, she was as unconcerned in his lordship's company to-day
as she had been at Mrs. Mandalay's. She gave him no _minauderies_,
no downcast eyelids or shy glances; but sat looking at him with a
pleased interest while he talked of the day's news with her father, and
answered him frankly and brightly when he discussed her own literary
work.
"You are very young to write plays," he said.
"I wrote plays when I was five years younger," she answered, laughing,
"and gave them to Betty to light the fires."
"And your father warmed his legs before the dramatic pyre, and never
knew 'twas the flame of genius?"
"She was a fool to burn her trash," said Thornton. "I might have made a
volume of it--'Tragedies and Comedies, by a young lady of fifteen.'"
"I'll warrant Shakespeare burnt a stack of balderdash before he wrote
_The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, poor stuff as it is," said Kilrush.
"Is your lordship so very sure 'tis poor stuff?" asked Tonia.
"If it wasn't, don't you think Garrick would have produced it? He loves
Shakespeare--a vastly respectable poet whose plays he can act without
paying for them. Be sure you let me know when your comedy is to be
produced, madam, for I should die of vexation not to be present at the
first performance."
"Alas! there is a great gulf between a written play and an acted one,"
sighed Tonia. "Mr. Garrick may not like it. But 'tis more my father's
play than mine, my lord. He finds the ideas, and I provide the words."
"She has a spontaneous eloquence that takes my breath away. But for
the machinery, the fabric of the piece, the arrangement of the scenes,
the method, the taste, the scope of the characters, and their action
upon one another, I confess myself the author," Thornton said, in
his grandiloquent way, having assumed his company manner, a style of
conversation which he kept for persons of quality.
"I doubt Miss Thornton is fonder of study than of pleasure, or I should
have seen her at Mrs. Mandalay's again----"
"I hate the place," interjected Tonia; "and if women of fashion are all
like the painted wretches I saw there----"
"They all paint--white lead is the rule and a clean-washed face the
exception," said Kilrush; "but 'twould not be fair to judge the _beau
monde_ by the herd you saw t'other night. Mrs. Mandalay's is an _olla
podrida_ of good and bad company. Your father must initiate you in the
pleasures of Ranelagh."
"I have had enough of such pleasures. I had a curiosity--like
Fatima's--to see a world that was hid from me. But for pleasure I
prefer the fireside, and a novel by Richardson. If he would but give us
a new Clarissa!"
"You admire Clarissa?"
"I adore, I revere her!"
"A pious simpleton who stood in the way of her own happiness. Why, in
the name of all that's reasonable, did she refuse to marry Lovelace,
when he was willing?"
Tonia flashed an indignant look at him.
"If she could have stooped to marry him she would have proved herself
at heart a wanton!" she said, with an outspoken force that startled
Kilrush.
Hitherto he had met only two kinds of women--the strictly virtuous,
who affected an Arcadian innocence and whose talk was insupportably
dull, and the women whose easy morals allowed the widest scope for
conversation; but here was a girl of undoubted modesty, who was not
afraid to argue upon a hazardous theme.
"You admire Clarissa for her piety, perhaps?" he said. "That is what
our fine ladies pretend to appreciate, though they are most of them
heathens."
"I admire her for her self-respect," answered Tonia. "That is her
highest quality. When was there ever a temper so meek, joined with such
fortitude, such heroic resolve?"
"She was a proud, self-willed minx," said Kilrush, entranced with the
vivid expression of her face, with the fire in her speech.
"'Twas a woman's pride in her womanhood, a woman fighting against her
arch enemy----"
"The man who loved her?"
"The man she loved. 'Twas that made the struggle desperate. She knew
she loved him."
"If she had been kinder, now, and had let love conquer?" insinuated
Kilrush.
"She would not have been Clarissa; she would not have been the
long-suffering angel, the martyr in virtue's cause."
"Prythee, my lord, do not laugh at my daughter's high-flown
sentiments," said Thornton. "I have done my best to educate her reason;
but while there are romancers like Samuel Richardson to instil folly
'tis difficult to rear a sensible woman."
"That warmth of sentiment is more delightful than all your cold reason,
Thornton; but I compliment you on the education which has made this
young lady to tower above her sex."
"Oh, my lord, do not laugh at me. I have just learnt enough to know
that I am ignorant," said Tonia, with her grand air--grand because so
careless, as of one who is alike indifferent to the effect of her words
and the opinion of those with whom she converses.
Kilrush prolonged his visit into a second hour, during which the
conversation flitted from books to people, from romance to politics,
and never hung fire. He took leave reluctantly, apologizing for having
stayed so long, and gave no hint of repeating his visit, nor was
asked to do so. But he meant to come again and again, having as he
thought established himself upon a footing of intimacy. A Grub-Street
hack could have no strait-laced ideas--a man who had been in jail for
something very like larceny, and who had educated his young daughter as
a free-thinker.
"She finds my conversation an agreeable relief after a ten years'
_tête-à-tête_ with Thornton," he told himself, as he picked his way
through the filth of Green Street to Leicester Fields. "But 'tis easy
to see she thinks I have passed the age of loving, and is as much at
home with me as if I were her grandfather. Yet 'twas a beautiful red
that flushed her cheek when I entered the room. Well, if she is pleased
to converse with me 'tis something; and I must school myself to taste a
platonic attachment. A Lovelace of seven and forty! How she would jeer
at the notion!"
* * * * *
Lord Kilrush waited a fortnight before repeating his visit, and again
called at an hour when Thornton was likely to be at home; but his third
visit, which followed within a week of the second, happened late in
the afternoon, when he found Antonia alone, but in no wise discomposed
at the prospect of a _tête-à-tête_. She enjoyed his conversation with
as frank and easy a manner as if she had been a young man, and his
equal in station; and he was careful to avoid one word or look which
might have disturbed her serenity. It was unflattering, perhaps, to be
treated so easily, accepted so frankly as a friend of mature years; but
it afforded him the privilege of a companionship that was fast becoming
a necessity of his existence. The days that he spent away from Rupert
Buildings were dull and barren. His hours with Antonia had an unfailing
charm. He forgot even twinges of gout, and the burden of time--that
dread of old age and death which so often troubled his luxurious
solitude.
She grew more enchanting as she became more familiar. She treated him
with as cordial a friendship as if he had been her uncle. She would
talk to him with her elbows on the table, and her long tapering fingers
pushing back those masses of glossy hair which the ribbon could
scarcely hold in place. Stray curls would fall over the broad white
brow, and she had a way of tossing those random ringlets from her eyes
that he could have sworn to among a thousand women.
He told her all that was worth telling of the world in which he lived
and had lived. He had been a soldier till his thirtieth year; had
travelled much and far; had lived in Paris among the encyclopedists,
and had entertained Voltaire at his house in London. He had seen every
dramatic troupe worth seeing in France, Italy, and Spain; had dabbled
in necromancy, and associated with savants in every science, at home
and abroad.
All his experiences interested Antonia. She had a way of entering into
the ideas of another which he had never met with in any except the
highest grade of women.
"Your kindness makes me an egotist," he said. "You ought to be the
mistress of a political _salon_. Faith, I can picture our party
politicians pouring their griefs and hatreds into your ear, cheered by
your sympathy, inspired by your wit. But I doubt you must find this
prosing of mine plaguey tiresome."
"No, no, no," she cried eagerly. "I want to know what the world is
like. It is pleasant to listen to one who has seen all the places and
people I long to see."
"You will see them with your own young eyes, perhaps, some day," he
said, smiling at her.
She shook her head despondently, and waved the suggestion away as
impossible.
One day in an expansive mood she consented to read an act of the
comedy, now finished, and waiting only Thornton's final touches, and
that spicing of the comic episodes on which he prided himself, and
against which his daughter vainly protested.
"My father urges that we have to please three distinct audiences, and
that scenes which delight people of good breeding are _caviare_ to the
pit, while the gallery wants even coarser fare, and must have some
foolery dragged in here and there to put them in good humour. I'll not
read you the gallery pages."
He listened as if to inspiration. He easily recognized her own work
as opposed to her father's, the womanly sentiment of her heroine's
speeches, her hero's lofty views of life. He ventured a suggestion or
two at that first reading, and finding her pleased with his hints, he
insisted on hearing the whole play, and began seriously to help her,
and so breathed into her dialogue that air of the _beau monde_ which
enhances the charm of contemporary comedy. This collaboration, so
delightful to him, so interesting to her, brought them nearer to each
other than all their talk had done. He became the partner of her ideas,
the sharer of her hopes. He taught her all that her father had left
untaught--the mystery of modish manners, the laws of that society which
calls itself good, and how and when to break them.
"For the parvenu 'tis a code of iron; for the fine gentleman there is
nothing more pliable," he told her. "I have seen Chesterfield do things
that would make a vulgarian shudder, yet with such benign grace that no
one was offended."
Thornton was with them sometimes, and they sat on the play in
committee. He, who professed to be the chief author, found himself
overruled by the other two. They objected to most of his jokes as
vulgar or stale. They would admit no hackneyed turns of speech. The
comedy was to be a picture of life in high places.
"Begad, my lord, you'll make it too fine for the town, and 'twill be
played to empty benches," remonstrated Thornton.
"Nothing is ever too fine for the town," answered Kilrush. "Do you
think the folks in the gallery want their own humdrum lives reflected
on the stage, or to look on at banquets of whelks and twopenny porter?
The mob love splendour, Mr. Thornton, and when they have not Bajazet or
Richard, they like to see the finest fine gentlemen and ladies that a
playwright can conceive."
Thornton gave way gracefully. He knew his lordship's influence at the
theatres, and he had told Garrick that Kilrush had written a third of
the play, but would not have his name mentioned.
"'Tis no better for that," said the manager, but in his heart liked the
patrician flavour, and on reading _The Man of Mind_ owned 'twas the
best thing Thornton had written, and promised to produce it shortly.
By this time Kilrush and Antonia seemed old friends, and she looked
back and thought how dull her life must have been before she knew him.
He was the only man friend she had ever had except her father. She
found his company ever so much more interesting than Patty Lester's,
so that it was only for friendship's sake she ever went to the parlour
over the piazza, or bade Patty to a dish of tea in Rupert Buildings.
Patty opened her great brown eyes to their widest when she heard of
Kilrush's visits.
"You jeer at my ancient admirers," she said, "and now you have got one
with a vengeance!"
"He is no admirer--only an old friend of my father's who likes to sit
and talk with me."
"Is that all? He must be very fond of you to sit in a second floor
parlour. He is one of the finest gentlemen in town, and the richest. My
General told me all about him."
"I thought that Irish peers were seldom rich," Tonia said carelessly,
not feeling the faintest interest in her friend's fortune or position.
"This one is; and he is something more than an Irish landowner. His
mother was an East India merchant's only child, and one of the richest
heiresses in England. Those Indian merchants are rank thieves, the
General says--thieves and slave-traders, and they used to bring home
mountains of gold. But that was fifty years ago, in the good old times."
"Poor souls!" said Tonia, thinking of the slaves. "What a cruel world
it is!"
It grieved her to think that her friend's wealth had so base a source.
She questioned her father on their next meal together.
"Is it true that Lord Kilrush's grandfather was a slave-trader?" she
asked.
"'S'death, child, what put such trash in your head? Miss Lavenew was
the daughter of a Calcutta merchant who dealt with the native princes
in gold and gems, and who owned a tenth share of the richest diamond
mine in the East. 'Tis the West Indian merchants who sometimes take a
turn at the black trade, rather than let their ships lie in harbour
till they ground on their own beef-bones."
It was a relief to know that her friend's fortune was unstained by
blood.
"I do not think he would exist under the burden of such a heritage,"
she said to herself, meditating upon the question in the long summer
afternoons, while she sat with open windows, trying not to hear street
cries, as she bent over an Eastern story by Voltaire, which she was
translating for one of the magazines.
Kilrush came in before her task was finished, but she laid her pen
aside gladly, and rose to take his hat and stick from him with her
dutiful daughterly air, just as she did for her father.
"Nay, I will not have you wait upon me, when 'tis I should serve you on
my knees, as queens are served," he said.
It was seven o'clock, and he had come from a Jacobite dinner in Golden
Square--a dinner at which the champagne and Burgundy had gone round
freely before it came to drinking the king's health across a bowl of
water. There was an unusual brightness in his eyes, and a faint flush
upon cheeks that were more often pale.
"I did not expect to see your lordship to-day," Tonia said, repelled by
his manner, so unlike the sober politeness to which he had accustomed
her. "I thought you were going to Tunbridge Wells."
"My coach was at the door at ten o'clock this morning, the postillions
in their saddles, when I sent them all to the devil. I found 'twas
impossible to leave this stifling town."
"A return of your gout?" she asked, looking at him wonderingly.
"No, madam, 'twas not my gout, as you call it, though I never owned to
more than a transient twinge. 'Twas a disease more deadly, a malady
more killing."
He made a step towards her, wanting to clasp her to his breast in the
recklessness of a long suppressed passion, but drew back at the sound
of a step on the stair.
She looked at him still with the same open wonder. She could scarcely
believe that this was Kilrush, the friend she admired and revered. Her
father came in while she stood silent, perplexed, and distressed at the
transformation.
Kilrush flung himself into an armchair with a muttered oath. Then
looking up, he caught the expression of Tonia's face, and it sobered
him. He had been talking wildly; had offended her, his divinity, the
woman to win whom was the fixed purpose of his mind--to win her at his
own price, which was a base one. He had been tactful hitherto, had
gained her friendship, and in one unlucky moment he had dropped the
mask, and it might be that she would trust him no more.
"Too soon, too soon," he told himself. "I have made her like me. I must
make her love me before I play the lover."
He let Thornton talk while he sat in a gloomy silence. It wounded him
to the quick to discover that she still thought of him as an elderly
man, whose most dreaded misfortune was a fit of the gout. 'Twas to
sober age she had given her confidence.
Thornton had been with Garrick, and had come home radiant. The play was
to be put in rehearsal next week, with a magnificent cast.
"But I fear your lordship is indisposed," he said, when Kilrush failed
to congratulate him on his good fortune.
"My lordship suffers from a disease common to men who are growing old.
I am sick of this petty life of ours, and all it holds."
"I am sorry to hear you talk like one of the Oxford Methodists," said
Thornton. "It is their trick to disparage a world they have not the
spirit or the fortune to enjoy."
"They have their solatium in the kingdom of saints," said Kilrush. "I
dare not flatter myself with the hope of an Elysium where I shall again
be young and handsome, and capable of winning the woman I love."
"Nor do you fear any place of torment where the pleasing indiscretions
of a stormy youth are to be purged with fire," retorted Thornton, gaily.
"No, I am like you--and Miss Thornton--I stake my all upon the only
life I know and believe in."
He glanced at Tonia to see how the materialist's barren creed sat on
her bright youth. She gave a thoughtful sigh, and her eyes looked
dreamily out to the summer clouds sailing over Wren's tall steeple. She
was thinking that if she could have accepted Mrs. Potter's creed, and
believed in a shining city above the clouds and the stars, it would
have been sweet to hope for reunion with the mother whose face she
could not remember, but whose sweetness and beauty her father loved to
praise, even now after nineteen years of widowhood.
"Your lordship is out of spirits," said Thornton. "Tonia shall give us
a dish of tea."
"No, I will not be so troublesome. I am out of health and out of
humour. Miss Thornton was right, I dare swear, when she suggested the
gout--my gout--an old man's chronic malady. I have been dining with a
crew of boisterous asses who won't believe the Stuarts are beaten, in
spite of the foolish heads that are blackening on Temple Bar. _J'ai le
vin mauvais_, and am best at home."
He kissed Antonia's hand, that cold hand which had never thrilled at
his touch, nodded good-bye to Thornton, and hurried away.
"Kilrush is not himself to-day," said Thornton.
"I'm afraid he has been taking too much wine," said Antonia. "He had
the strangest manner, and said the strangest things."
"What things?"
"Oh, a kind of wild nonsense that meant nothing."
She was not accustomed to see any one under the influence of liquor.
Her father was, by long habit, proof against all effects of the nightly
punch-bowl, and however late he came from "The Portico," he had always
his reasoning powers, and legs steady enough to carry him up two
flights of stairs without stumbling.