It is needless to say that Helen's superstition about the fall of the
picture and the sighing of the wind vanished with the night, and that in
the morning her nervousness was gone, and her mind had returned to its
previous train of thought. Her passing weakness, however, had left one
trace behind. While he was soothing her fanciful terrors, Robert had
said, in a burst of candour and magnanimity, 'I will tell you what I
will do, Helen. I will not act on my own judgment. I'll ask Haldane and
Maurice for their advice,' 'But I do not care for their advice,' she had
said, with a certain pathos. 'Yes, to be sure,' Robert had answered;
for, good as he was, he liked his own way, and sometimes was perverse.
'They are my oldest friends; they are the most sensible fellows I know.
I will tell them all the circumstances, and they will give me their
advice.'
This was a result which probably would have come whether Helen had been
nervous or not; for Haldane and Maurice were the two authorities whom
the painter held highest after his wife. But Helen had never been able
to receive them with her husband's faith, or to agree to them as sharers
of her influence over him. It said much for her that she had so
tolerated them and schooled herself in their presence that poor Drummond
had no idea of the rebellion which existed against them in her heart.
But both of them were instinctively aware of it, and felt that they were
not loved by their friend's wife. He made the same announcement to her
next morning with cheerful confidence, and a sense that he deserved
nothing but applause for his prudence. 'I am going to keep my promise,'
he said. 'You must not think I say anything to please you which I don't
mean to carry out. I am going to speak to Haldane and Maurice. Maurice
is very knowing about business, and as for Stephen, his father was in an
office all his life.'
'But, Robert, I don't want you to ask their advice. I have no faith in
them. I would rather a hundred times you judged for yourself.'
'Yes, my darling,' said Robert; 'they are the greatest helps to a man
in making such a decision. I know my own opinion, and I know yours; and
our two good friends, who have no bias, will put everything right.'
And he went out with his hat brushed and a new pair of gloves, cheerful
and respectable as if he were already a bank director, cleansed of the
velvet coats and brigand hats and all the weaknesses of his youth. And
his wife sat down with an impatient sigh to hear Norah play her scales,
which was not exhilarating, for Norah's notions of time and harmony were
as yet but weakly developed. While the child made direful havoc among
the black notes, Helen was sounding a great many notes quite as black in
her inmost mind. What could they know about it? What were they to him in
comparison with herself? Why should he so wear his heart upon his
sleeve? It raised a kind of silent exasperation within her, so good as
he was, so kind, and tender, and loving; and yet this was a matter in
which she had nothing to do but submit.
These two cherished friends of Robert's were not men after Helen's
heart. The first, Stephen Haldane, was a Dissenting minister, a member
of a class which all prejudices were in arms against. It was not that
she cared for his religious opinions or views, which differed from her
own. She was not theological nor ecclesiastical in her turn of mind,
and, to tell the truth, was not given to judging her acquaintances by an
intellectual standard, much less a doctrinal one. But she shrank from
his intimacy because he was a Dissenter--a man belonging to a class not
acknowledged in society, and of whom she understood vaguely that they
were very careless about their h's, and were not gentlemen. The fact
that Stephen Haldane was a gentleman as much as good manners, and good
looks, and a tolerable education could make him, did not change her
sentiments. She was too much of an idealist (without knowing it) to let
proof invalidate theory. Accordingly, she doubted his good manners,
mistrusted his opinions, and behaved towards him with studied civility,
and a protest, carefully veiled but never forgotten, against his
admission to her society. He had no right to be there; he was an
intruder, an inferior. Such was her conclusion in a social point of
view; and her husband's inclination to consult him on most important
matters in their history was very galling to her. The two had come to
know each other in their youth, when Haldane was going through the
curious incoherent education which often leads a young man temporarily
to the position of Dissenting minister. He had started in life as a
Bluecoat boy, and had shown what people call 'great talent,' but not in
the academical way. As a young man he had loved modern literature better
than ancient. Had he been born to an estate of ten thousand a year, or
had he been born in a rank which would have secured him diplomatic or
official work, he would have had a high character for accomplishments
and ability; but he was born only of a poor Dissenting family, without a
sixpence, and when his school career was over he did not know what to do
with himself. He took to writing, as such men do, by nature, and worked
his way into the newspapers. Thus he began to earn a little money, while
vaguely playing with a variety of careers. Once he thought he would be a
doctor, and it was while in attendance at an anatomical class that he
met Drummond. But Haldane was soon sick of doctoring. Then he became a
lecturer, getting engagements from mechanics' institutions and literary
societies, chiefly in the country. It was at one of these lectures that
he fell under the notice of a certain Mr Baldwin, a kind of lay bishop
in a great Dissenting community. Mr Baldwin was much 'struck' by the
young lecturer. He agreed with his views, and applauded his eloquence;
and when the lecture was over had himself introduced to the speaker.
This good man had a great many peculiarities, and was rich enough to be
permitted to indulge them. One of these peculiarities was an inclination
to find out and encourage 'rising talent.' And he told everybody he had
seldom been so much impressed as by the talents of this young man, who
was living (innocently) by his wits, and did not know what to do with
himself. It is not necessary to describe the steps by which young
Haldane ripened from a lecturer upon miscellaneous subjects, literary
and philosophical, into a most esteemed preacher. He pursued his studies
for a year or two at Mr Baldwin's cost, and at the end of that time was
promoted, not of course nominally, but very really, by Mr Baldwin's
influence, to the pulpit of the flourishing and wealthy congregation of
which that potentate was the head.
This was Stephen Haldane's history; but he was not the sort of man to be
produced naturally by such a training. He was full of natural
refinement, strangely blended with a contented adherence to all the
homely habits of his early life. He had not attempted, had not even
thought of, 'bettering' himself. He lived with his mother and sister,
two homely Dissenting women, narrow as the little house they lived in,
who kept him, his table, and surroundings, on exactly the same model as
his father's house had been kept. All the luxuries of the wealthy chapel
folks never tempted him to imitation. He did not even claim to himself
the luxury of a private study in which to write his sermons, but had his
writing-table in the common sitting-room, in order that his womankind
might preserve the cold fiction of a 'best room' in which to receive
visitors. To be sure, he might have been able to afford a larger house;
but then Mrs Haldane and Miss Jane would have been out of place in a
larger house. They lived in Victoria Villas, one of those smaller
streets which copy and vulgarize the better ones in all London suburbs.
It was close to St Mary's Road, in which Drummond's house was situated,
and the one set of houses was a copy of the other in little. The
arrangement of the rooms, the shape of the garden, the outside aspect
was the same, only so many degrees smaller. And this, it must be
allowed, was one of the reasons why the Haldanes were unpalatable
neighbours to Mrs Drummond; for, as a general rule, the people who lived
in St Mary's Road did not know the inferior persons who inhabited
Victoria Villas. The smaller copied the greater, and were despised by
them in consequence. It was 'a different class,' everybody said. And it
may be supposed that it was very hard upon poor Helen to have it known
that her husband's closest friend, the man whose opinion he asked about
most things, and whom he believed in entirely, was one who combined in
himself almost all the objectionable qualities possible. He was a
Dissenter--a Dissenting minister--sprung of a poor family, and adhering
to all their shabby habits--and lived in Victoria Villas. The very
address of itself was enough to condemn a man; no one who had any
respect for his friends would have retained it for an hour. Yet it was
this man whom Robert had gone to consult at the greatest crisis of his
life.
The other friend upon whom poor Drummond relied was less objectionable
in a social point of view. He was a physician, and not in very great
practice, being a crotchety man given to inventions and investigations,
but emphatically 'a gentleman' according to Helen's own sense of the
word. This was so far satisfactory; but if he was less objectionable, he
was also much less interesting than Stephen Haldane. He was a shy man,
knowing little about women and caring less. He lived all by himself in a
great house in one of the streets near Berkeley Square, a house twice
as big as the Drummonds', which he inhabited in solitary state, in what
seemed to Helen the coldest, dreariest loneliness. She was half sorry
for, half contemptuous of him in his big, solemn, doubly-respectable
hermitage. He was rich, and had nothing to do with his money. He had few
friends and no relations. He was as unlike the painter as could be
conceived; and yet in him too Robert believed. Their acquaintance dated
back to the same anatomical lectures which had brought Haldane and
Drummond together, but Dr Maurice was a lover of art, and had bought
Robert's first picture, and thus occupied a different ground with him.
Perhaps the irritating influence he had upon Helen was greater than that
exercised by Haldane, because it was an irritation produced by his
character, not by his circumstances. Haldane paid her a certain shy
homage, feeling her to be different from all the women who surrounded
himself; but Maurice treated her with formal civility and that kind of
conventional deference which old-fashioned people show to the wishes and
tastes of an inferior, that he may be set at his ease among them. There
were times when she all but hated the doctor, with his courtesy and his
silent air of criticism--but the minister she could not hate.
At the same time it must be allowed that to see her husband set out with
his new gloves to ask the opinion of these two men, after all the
profound thought she had herself given to the subject, and the
passionate feeling it had roused within her, was hard upon Helen. To
them it would be nothing more than a wise or unwise investment of money,
but to her it was a measure affecting life and honour. Perhaps she
exaggerated, she was willing to allow--but they would not fail to
underrate its importance; they could not--Heaven forbid they ever
should!--feel as she did, that Robert, though an R.A., had failed in his
profession. They would advise him to hold fast by that profession and
leave business alone, which was as much as condemning him to a constant
repetition of the despairs and discontents of the past; or they would
advise him to accept the new opening held out to him and sever himself
from art, which would be as good as a confession of failure. Thus it is
evident, whatever his friends might happen to advise, Helen was prepared
to resent.
At this moment Mrs Drummond's character was the strangest mixture of two
kinds of being. She was, though a mature woman, like a flower bursting
out of a rough husk. The old conventional nature, the habits and
prejudices of the rich _bourgeois_ existence to which she had been born,
had survived all that had as yet happened to her in life. The want of a
dining-room, which has been already noted, had been not a trivial
accident but a real humiliation to her. She sighed when she thought of
the great dinner-parties with mountains of silver on table and
sideboard, and many men in black or more gorgeous beings in livery to
wait, which she had been accustomed to in her youth; and when she was
obliged to furnish a supper for a group of painters who had been smoking
half the night in the studio, and who were not in evening dress, she
felt almost disgraced. Robert enjoyed that impromptu festivity more than
all the dinner-parties; but Helen felt that if any of her old friends or
even the higher class of her present acquaintances were to look in and
see her, seated at the head of the table, where half a dozen bearded men
in morning coats were devouring cold beef and salad, she must have sunk
through the floor in shame and dismay. Robert was strangely, sadly
without feeling in such matters. It never occurred to him that they
could be a criterion of what his wife called 'position;' and he would
only laugh in the most hearty way when Helen insisted upon the habits
proper to 'people of our class.' But her pride, such as it was, was
terribly wounded by all such irregular proceedings. The middle-class
custom of dining early and making a meal of 'tea,' a custom in full and
undisturbed operation round the corner in Victoria Villas, affected her
with a certain horror as if it had been a crime. Had she yielded to it
she would have felt that she had 'given in,' and voluntarily descended
in the social scale. 'Late dinners' were to her as a bulwark against
that social downfall which in her early married life had seemed always
imminent. This curious raising up of details into the place of
principles had given Helen many an unnecessary prick. It had made her
put up with much really inferior society in the shape of people of
gentility whose minds were all absorbed in the hard struggle to keep up
appearances, and live as people lived with ten times their income, while
it cut her off from a great many to whom appearances were less
important, and who lived as happened to be most convenient to them,
without asking at what hour dukes dined or millionnaires. The dukes
probably would have been as indifferent, but not the millionnaires, and
it was from the latter class that Helen came. But in the midst of all
these all-important details and the trouble they caused her, had risen
up, she knew not how, a passionate, obstinately ideal soul. Perhaps at
first her thirst for fame had been but another word for social
advancement and distinction in the world, but that feeling had changed
by means of the silent anguish which had crept on her as bit by bit she
understood her husband's real weakness. Love in her opened, it did not
blind, her eyes. Her heart cried out for excellence, for power, for
genius in the man she loved; and with this longing there came a hundred
subtle sentiments which she did not understand, and which worked and
fermented in her without any will of hers. Along with the sense that he
was no genius, there rose an unspeakable remorse and hatred of herself
who had found it out; and along with her discontent came a sense of her
own weakness--a growing humility which was a pain to her, and against
which her pride fought stoutly, keeping, up to this time, the upper
hand--and a regretful, self-reproachful, half-adoration of her husband
and his goodness, produced by the very consciousness that he was not so
strong nor so great as she had hoped. These mingled elements of the old
and the new in Helen's mind made it hard to understand her, hard to
realise and follow her motives; yet they explained the irritability
which possessed her, her impatience of any suggestion from outside,
along with her longing for something new, some change which might bring
a new tide into the life which had fallen into such dreary, stagnant,
unreal ways.
While she waited at home with all these thoughts whirling about her,
Robert went out cheerfully seeking advice. He did it in the spirit which
is habitual to men who consult their friends on any important matter. He
made up his mind first. As he turned lightly round the corner, swinging
his cane, instead of wondering what his friend would say to him, he was
making up his mind what he himself would do with all the unusual power
and wealth which would come to him through the bank. For instance, at
once, there was poor Chance, the sculptor, whose son he could find a
place for without more ado. Poor Chance had ten children, and was no
genius, but an honest, good fellow, who would have made quite a superior
stonemason had he understood his own gifts. Here was one immediate
advantage of that bank-directorship. He went in cheerful and confident
in this thought to the little house in Victoria Villas. Haldane had
been ill; he had spent the previous winter in Italy, and his friends had
been in some anxiety about his health; but he had improved again, and
Robert went in without any apprehensions into the sitting-room at the
back, which looked into the little garden. He had scarcely opened the
door before he saw that something had happened. The writing-table was
deserted, and a large sofa drawn near the window had become, it was easy
to perceive, the centre of the room and of all the interests of its
inhabitants. Mrs Haldane, a homely old woman in a black dress and a
widow's cap, rose hastily as he came in, with her hand extended, as if
to forbid his approach. She was very pale and tremulous; the arm which
she raised shook as she held it out, and fell down feebly by her side
when she saw who it was. 'Oh, come in, Mr Drummond, he will like to see
_you_,' she said in a whisper. Robert went forward with a pang of alarm.
His friend was lying on the sofa with his eyes closed, with an ashy
paleness on his face, and the features slightly, very slightly,
distorted. He was not moved by the sound of Robert's welcome nor by his
mother's movements. His eyes were closed, and yet he did not seem to be
asleep. His chest heaved regularly and faintly, or the terrified
bystander would have thought he was dead.
Robert clutched at the hand which the old lady stretched out to him
again. 'Has he fainted?' he cried in a whisper. 'Have you had the
doctor? Let me go for the doctor. Do you know what it is?'
Poor Mrs Haldane looked down silently and cried. Two tears fell out of
her old eyes as if they were full and had overflowed. 'I thought he
would notice you,' she said. 'He always was so fond of you. Oh, Mr
Drummond, my boy's had a stroke!'
'A stroke!' said Drummond under his breath. All his own visions flitted
out of his mind like a shadow. His friend lay before him like a fallen
tower, motionless, speechless. 'Good God!' he said, as men do unawares,
with involuntary appeal to Him who (surely) has to do with those wild
contradictions of nature. 'When did it happen? Who has seen him?' he
asked, growing almost as pale as was the sufferer, and feeling faint and
ill in the sense of his own powerlessness to help.
'It was last night, late,' said the mother. Oh, Mr Drummond, this has
been what was working on him. I knew it was never the lungs. Not one of
us, either his father's family or mine, was ever touched in the lungs.
Dr Mixwell saw him directly. He said not to disturb him, or I would have
had him in bed. I know he ought to be in bed.'
'I'll go and fetch Maurice,' cried Robert. 'I shall be back directly,'
and he rushed out of the room which he had entered so jauntily. As he
flew along the street, and jumped into the first cab he could find, the
bank and his directorship went as completely out of his mind as if they
had been a hundred years off. He dashed at the great solemn door of Dr
Maurice's house when he reached it and rushed in, upsetting the decorous
servant. He seized the doctor by the shoulder, who was seated calmly at
breakfast. 'Come along with me directly,' he said. 'I have a cab at the
door.'
'What is the matter?' said Dr Maurice. He had no idea of being disturbed
so unceremoniously. 'Is Mrs Drummond ill? Sit down and tell me what is
wrong.'
'I can't sit down. I want you to come with me. There is a cab at the
door,' said Robert panting. 'It is poor Haldane. He has had a fit--come
at once.'
'A fit! I knew that was what it was,' said Dr Maurice calmly. He waved
his hand to the importunate petitioner, and swallowed the rest of his
breakfast in great mouthfuls. 'I'm coming; hold your tongue, Drummond. I
knew the lungs was all nonsense--of course that is what it was.'
'Come then,' cried Robert. 'Good heavens, come! don't let him lie there
and die.'
'He will not die. More's the pity, poor fellow!' said the doctor. 'I
said so from the beginning. John, my hat. Lungs, nonsense! He was as
sound in the lungs as either you or I.'
'For God's sake, come then,' said the impatient painter, and he rushed
to the door and pushed the calm physician into his cab. He had come to
consult him about something? Yes, to be sure, about poor Haldane--not to
consult him--to carry him off, to compel, to drag that other back from
the verge of the grave. If there was anything more in his mind when he
started Drummond had clean forgotten it. He did not remember it again
till two hours later, when, having helped to carry poor Haldane
up-stairs, and rushed here and there for medicines and conveniences, he
at last went home, weary with excitement and sympathetic pain. 'I have
surely forgotten something,' he said, when he had given an account of
all his doings to his wife. 'Good heavens! I forgot altogether that I
went to ask somebody's advice.'