SENTIMENT AND "BACCY."
"Esther," said Mr. Tremain a few hours later, as they sat together in
the library, just before the time for the tea-tray and the return of the
other visitors, who, at Dick Darling's suggestion and under her
guidance, had gone _en masse_ to deal out tobacco and small sums of
money to the old salts at Snug Harbour, "Esther, did you know Patricia
was to be here, when you asked me to come?"
His voice was more stern than reproachful, and Mrs. Newbold, glancing up
at him furtively, thought how cold and impassive was his face. She
paused a moment before answering him, and the flames from the pine-logs
on the wide hearth, leaping high, revealed a half-anxious,
half-hesitating expression in her blue eyes and about her delicately-cut
mouth. She held a screen of scarlet Ibis feathers, as she sat in a low
chair, to shield her from the heat, and her hand trembled just enough to
set the scarlet feathers moving, like so many vivid fire-tongues. She
answered somewhat evasively:
"And if I did, Philip, what then? Is the old wound so deep it cannot be
healed, and do you, a Hercules among men, shrink from the light touch of
a woman's fingers?"
"We are but courageous," he made answer, "according to time and
opportunity, and the weakness or strength of the temptation. A woman's
hand has been the cause of a man's undoing ever since the world began,
Esther. I have no desire to become another sacrifice on the altar of a
woman's vanity."
"What do you fear, Philip?" she asked, presently, turning the feather
fan round and round in her fingers, and watching him intently as she
spoke.
"What do I fear? Everything and nothing. You, who know the whole
miserable old story, must also know the bitterness of its ending. What
do I fear? I fear Patricia; I fear the light coming and going in her
eyes; I fear the grace and beauty of her motions; I fear the subtle
witchery of her voice; I fear the sweetness of her smile, the studied
trick of her down-drooped mouth, the soft lingering pressure of her
hand; I fear--but there, why fight against shadows? I have the remedy in
my own hands--I can leave you, Esther. Even you cannot compel me to see
her."
He had risen as he spoke, and moved about restlessly, stopping
half-unconsciously at a table that stood in his path, and fingered
absently the several articles of _bric-à-brac_ upon it.
Esther followed his movements with her eyes, a look of pity and yet
triumph on her face. As his voice grew passionate, she dropped the
feather-screen, and clasping her hands across her knee, drew a quick
long breath; but when he came towards her again, she sank back into her
former listless attitude. He stood up tall and straight before her,
resting one arm upon the chimney-shelf, and looked down at her with dark
excited eyes, which the slight smile upon his lips failed to
counterbalance.
"Did you ask her here with some deep-laid plan of reconciliation?
Esther, was that your motive? Did you think, knowing me since your
girlhood--not so many years ago, Esther--and finding me fairly
good-natured and forgiving, as men go, that you would take the spindle
of fate into your own hands, and like Atropos of old, cut the tangled
skein of my life, in the vain hope of reuniting it with hers? It was
kindly meant, Esther, but--it cannot be."
Mrs. Newbold stopped him with an upward gesture of her hand.
"Philip," she said, slowly, and looking at him steadily, "does it not
strike you--do you not think--you are taking her acquiescence rather too
much as a matter of course? Has Patricia no right to repudiate you,
before even you endeavour to reclaim her?"
He paused before he answered, and the lines about his mouth and eyes
grew sterner and more defined. When he spoke he took his arm from the
chimney-shelf, on which he had been resting, as though disdaining that
slight support, and his voice sounded harsh and uncompromising.
"Has she that right, Esther? Has she not rather by her own actions cut
herself adrift from the usual consideration granted to women? Did she
consider me, when she cast me off so lightly? And for what, forsooth?
Because I was a too eager and too rustic a lover; because my outward
appearance offended her hypercritical eyes; because she was but a
butterfly of the hour, as vain and frivolous as the frailest _cigale_ of
a summer's hour; and because her world, before which she shone as a
bright particular star--and oh, what a little, trifling world it
was!--and over which she reigned as a queen, repudiated me. I was not of
their mode; I was not a _super-chic_; I could not speak their _argot_,
or join in their light impertinent persiflage. I was too honest, Esther,
for her world--too honest and too brutally straightforward, and so--she
threw me over."
"She was young, Philip," pleaded Mrs. Newbold, "young and flattered and
spoilt. Cannot you now make allowance for her surroundings then, and
understand how terrible and impossible poverty, imperious poverty,
seemed to her? You, who so well appreciate the luxuries of life now,
cannot you put yourself in Patricia's place, and judge from her
standpoint, and see with her eyes, what it meant, when you asked her to
fling her old life behind her, and start on a new and untried one, with
you alone, and you only as recompense and compensation?"
"If she had loved me," broke in Mr. Tremain, "she would not have
considered, she would not have hesitated; my love and my devotion would
have weighed heavier with her than all the baubles and gewgaws of her
fashionable life."
For all answer to this Mrs. Newbold laughed, throwing back her pretty
head, and throwing out her pretty hands dramatically.
"Ah," she cried, "for wholesale, downright vanity commend me to a man!
It's no use looking savage, Philip; I cannot help it, I must have my
laugh out; your cool assumption of the be-all and end-all of Patricia's
existence is too irresistibly funny. It's very man-like, and very
characteristic. You never take into consideration, you lords of
creation, the up-bringing, education and surroundings of a girl of the
world. You forget that the very trifles you stigmatise as frivolities
are the daily small necessities of her life: she knows nothing
different. It is as natural to her to have pretty clothes, artistic
surroundings, and dainty employments, as it is for you to go to a crack
tailor and smoke an irreproachable cigar. She cannot understand another
sort of world where these elements are not: she accepts them as a matter
of course, and could not fashion her day without them. Then comes some
untoward fate, in the shape of a lover from that unfamiliar world, whose
habits, manner of life, occupations, are all opposed to hers--as
opposite as the luxurious civilisation of Europe is to that of the heart
of Africa. What she deems necessities, he calls luxuries; her natural
pastimes become frivolities; her occupations, idleness; her unconscious
acceptation of all that money brings, worldliness; and her hesitation,
when her lover and her love demand the sacrifice of all this,
pusillanimity and calculativeness. And what does the man offer in
exchange?--for luxurious comfort, straitened means; for dainty clothes,
the resuscitated dresses of last year; for society--a tired harassed
husband; and for recreation--perhaps a cheap place at some theatre,
two or three times a year."
"You are painfully frank, Esther," said Mr. Tremain, stiffly.
"Yes, and I mean to be," continued Mrs. Newbold, "because it is a
subject I have very much at heart, and because it is the fashion of the
day to cry down the worldly maiden, and cry up the poor, but
self-sacrificing lover. Had you anything better to offer Patricia, than
what my words picture? Was there any brighter prospect for her? Did you
not make the sacrifice as great a one as possible, and could you
honourably and reasonably have expected the change in your fortunes,
when you urged Patricia's choice, and left her no alternative between
poverty with you, and her accustomed luxury without you? Do you not
understand her position somewhat better, Philip, since _you_ have become
a man of luxury and wealth?"
"You should qualify as a special pleader, Esther," was Mr. Tremain's
reply; "but you are in a manner right, a woman's motives are always
beyond a man's fathoming;" and then with half a sigh she heard him add,
under his breath, "poor Patty, poor pretty wilful Patty!" and she smiled
at the inconsequent words, and nodded her pretty head at the dancing
flames, while the lurking look of triumph in her eyes shone out
defiantly, and drove away the droop of apprehension from her lips.
Then came Long, and the tea-tray, and little Marianne, and Mrs. Esther
was very gracious and sweet, and full of _petits soins_ for Mr.
Tremain's comfort, and withal so winsome and so subduedly elated, that
Dick Darling--who returned presently with all her volunteers in
outrageous spirits--declared she was "the daisyest thing out, and quite
too superlatively lovely!"
"And how did you find the old salts, Dick?" asked Esther, when every one
had been served with tea, and little Marianne was particularly happy,
forcing some scalding milk down the luckless throat of "Trim," her
_fidus Achates_ in terrier-dog form.
"Oh, as fresh as paint, and as delightfully greedy and selfish as it
behoves all old men to be. They minutely inspected the 'baccy,' and one
of them told me, ''tweren't his sort, but shiver his timbers if he could
expect a young leddy ter know the difference atween "old virginny," and
"honey dew";' and another one spat rather unpleasantly upon the new
silver dollar I gave him, and expressed his rather blasphemous opinion,
as to its being a 'Blaine dollar,' and only worth ninety cents! Oh, my
dear, they are a most edifying old crew, and their simplicity and
naturalness is only worthy of that respectable old party, and his
residence, known familiarly as 'Davy Jones's locker.'"
"Dick, you are incorrigible!" laughed Mrs. Newbold, and that young lady,
on whom the afternoon's expedition seemed to have acted as champagne,
began again.
"There was one most particularly refreshing old hero; he said he had
been all through the civil war, and got his promotion, and his leg
bowled off, at Gettysburgh----"
"Oh, but I say, Miss Dick," here broke in Freddy Slade, "he couldn't do
it, you know, not there, because Gettysburgh was a land battle, and how
could your old man-o'-war's man be there?"
"He said Gettysburgh, I am perfectly sure he did," answered Dick,
"because I quite well remember how he winked at me when he said it,
and--yes, I did, I couldn't help it, it must have been capillary
attraction, Esther--I winked back at him, and then he spun a tremendous
yarn, all about his gory wounds, and bloody hurts; mixed up, you know,
with reefing topsails, and belaying mizzen-masts, and setting fore and
aft sheets, and rolling in the scuppers, and weltering in his own gore,
and piping up the dog-watch, and losing his leg, and fighting for his
country, and scoffing at its rewards; and I am sure, yes, very sure, he
said it was at Gettysburgh it all happened. But really now, when you
come to think of it, things _were_ a little mixed, and I am not
responsible for the geography of this country."
At this there was another laugh, in which Dick joined, and then in the
silence that followed, Marianne's shrill treble made itself heard:
"I do quite think with Perkins, mumsey, Miss Dick's the gal for my
money!"
At which astounding revelation Esther gasped, and the rest of the
company fell into renewed shouts of laughter.
"Come here, Mimi," said Mr. Slade at last, putting out his hand, and
catching hold of the child and the dog, and drawing them towards him, he
lifted Marianne on to his knee, causing Trim to stand in perilous
fashion on his back legs, since his little mistress refused to release
him.
"Now, Mimi," Mr. Slade continued in the hush of a breathless silence,
"you are a most interesting little girl, and what you have just told us
has made Miss Dick very happy, only we should like to know a little
more. Can you remember anything else said by the ingenuous Mr. Perkins?"
"He isn't _Mister_ Perkins, 'cept to Sarah," said Marianne, very proud
of her position, and rather consequential in consequence; "he's her
young man, and he comes under her window sometimes, and sings 'Sally in
our Alley,' real beautiful, and that's _her_, and I heard her tell Jane,
and she's my very own nursery-maid, that he said 'that there wasn't no
one could hold a candle to Miss Dick, and she was the gal for his money;
he wouldn't mind putting a fiver on her, 'cause she'd run straight; but
he wouldn't go much on that there pal of hers, Miss James, 'cause she
was a shifty one.'"
"Oh, Marianne, Marianne!" cried out Esther, trying vainly to cover the
confusion caused by Miss Newbold's parrot-like revelations, "come here
to me." Then as Mimi struggled down from Mr. Slade's detaining arms,
and danced over to her mother, she said, reprovingly:
"What were you doing, to hear all that senseless gossip? Where was
Mdlle. Lamien?"
"Poor Lammy had a 'cruciation' headache," lisped the little girl,
standing first on one foot and then on the other; "so I was just put off
on to Jane, 'cause nursey was out, and so she and Sarah did their work
together and I helped 'em, and they were having 'a crack' over the
company. Is you sorry, mumsey?" the little thing asked suddenly,
noticing the look of annoyance on her mother's face. "Was I naughty?"
"Yes, I am very sorry," answered Mrs. Newbold, emphatically; "my little
daughter, you must not listen to such nonsense. You must get your dolly
next time, or come to me, when Mdlle. Lamien has a headache."
"Poor Lammy!" echoed the child, "she was cross, too, and said Sarah was
very wrong, every one wasn't made with Miss Dick's bright face and
sweet temper; but I could make myself like her if I tried to always say
a kind thing and not a horrid one, though the horrid one might be
cleverer."
There was a moment's unbearable awkwardness as Mimi's sage remarks fell
upon the burning ears of her audience; then Esther made a move, quickly
followed by the other ladies, and the party broke up, each glad to
escape the embarrassment of the moment. Esther alone noticed Miss
James's face, flushed with passion and mortification, and sighed
involuntarily.
She had reason afterwards to remember that look, and her sigh.