OUT OF THE WORLD.
THE arrival of Harold Jerningham disturbed the even tenor of life at
the bailiff’s cottage, albeit he earnestly entreated there might be no
change in his old friend’s existence. Theodore de Bergerac’s notion of
hospitality was Arabian; and he would have slaughtered his daughter’s
favourite Newfoundland if Mr. Jerningham had hinted an eccentric desire
for _pâté de foie de chien_. He altered his dinner-hour from three
o’clock to seven, in accordance with the habits of his guest; and he
took pains to order such refined and delicate repasts as might have
been chosen by a Lucullus in reduced circumstances. His cook was an old
Frenchwoman, who had lived with him ever since he had occupied a house
of his own; and for a _vol-au-vent_, an omelette _aux fines
herbes_, a cup of coffee, or a batch of pistolets, white as snow
and light as thistledown, old Nanon was prepared to enter herself in a
_concours_ of the universe.
“Ne vous dérangez, donc pas, petite amour,” she said to Helen, when
that young lady expressed some misgiving on the subject of Mr.
Jerningham’s dinners; “nous avons toujours les vaches et les poulets;
avec ça on a de quoi servir un dîner au lor maire. Et puis pour le
café: n’est-ce pas que je l’ai fait pour madame la mère de monsieur
dans le temps? C’était elle qui disait toujours, ‘Il n’y a que Nanon
qui fait le café comme ça;’ et puis elle se meurt, la bonne dame, et
puis il y avait la révolution, et monsieur me dit, ‘Nanon, adieu, je
m’en vais;’ et puis j’ai tant pleuré, et puis----”
There was no end to Nanon’s “et puis.”
“C’est une espèce de puits qui n’a point de fond,” said M. de Bergerac,
when his daughter repeated to him some of the old woman’s affectionate
twaddlings.
It was some years since Mr. Jerningham had been to Greenlands, and in
the past his visits had been of the briefest.
“Thou art always as one that falls from the heavens,” said M. de
Bergerac.
This time, however, it seemed as if the restless demon that ruled
Harold Jerningham’s existence was in some manner exorcised. The master
of Greenlands took up his abode in those snug bachelor rooms on the
ground-floor of the mansion, which he preferred to the statelier
apartments above. There had crept upon the old house a silence and
solemnity almost as profound as the mystic silence which reigned in
the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, and not even the coming of the
master could break the awful spell. By night and by day the doors shut
with a clang that might have sounded in the Castle of Udolpho. The
catacombs of subterranean Rome are more cheerful than the great stone
entrance-hall; the chamber in which Frederick Barbarossa sat in a
charmed sleep, awaiting the summons that was to call him once again to
the battle-field, was not more appalling than the great dining-room,
where the shutters were seldom opened, and where the pictured images of
departed Jerninghams looked ghostlike in the gloom.
It was only natural, therefore, that Mr. Jerningham should prefer the
pleasant, home-like rooms in the bailiff’s cottage. Considered as a
habitation only, the cottage was much more pleasant than the great
house; and at the cottage Mr. Jerningham enjoyed the society that was
of all companionship most agreeable to him. With Theodore de Bergerac
there was always some new subject for discussion; and the theme which
employed the quiet days of the savant had a keen interest for his
friend. The Frenchman might ride his hobby as hard as he pleased
without inflicting weariness upon Mr. Jerningham, who in general
society affected the tone and manner of a gentlemanly martyr.
He spent all his evenings at the cottage, after contriving to occupy
himself somehow or other during the day; for this most selfish of
men was too well-bred to intrude upon his friend’s studious hours.
It was only between six and seven o’clock that Mr. Jerningham made
his appearance in the little drawing-room, where he generally found
Helen alone with her books and work, with the ponderous limbs of the
Newfoundland stretched luxuriously upon the hearth at her feet.
The half-hour before dinner was by no means disagreeable to the
master of Greenlands, nor was it unpleasant to Helen. Jerningham the
irresistible had not lost the charm of manner that had won him renown
in that modern Hôtel de Rambouillet, to whose saloons all that was
brightest in the regions of intellect lent its light; and across
whose floors, silent and inscrutable as a shadow, passed that exiled
prince whose voice now rules the Western world. Mr. Jerningham had
acquired the art of conversation amongst the best men of his day, and
he talked well. Subdued in all things, he pleased without effort, and
was instructive without taint of dogmatism. He discussed a subject with
interest, but he never argued. That war of words which some people
call conversation was detestable to him.
Helen was unversed in the hateful art of argument, and she was the
most delightful, the most sympathetic of listeners. She had read just
enough to make her a good listener. There were few subjects you could
touch of which she did not know something, and about which she did not
languish to know more. She was not unpleasantly demonstrative of her
interest in your discourse, nor did she cut you down in the middle of
a sentence from the desire to prove herself your equal in wisdom; but
every now and then, by some apposite remark or well-timed question, she
demonstrated her interest in your discourse, her perfect appreciation
of your meaning.
“If my wife had been like this girl, my marriage would have been a
turning-point in my life,” Harold Jerningham said to himself, very
sadly, after one of these pleasant half-hours before dinner.
After that first interview between the two men, no more was said about
Eustace Thorburn. To the secretary, Mr. Jerningham was unalterably
polite, preserving always that tone of the grand seigneur which marks
difference of rank, and yet is not the assumption of superiority;
a manner that seems to say, “We are born of different races, and,
unhappily, no condescension on my part can bring us any nearer to each
other.” It was the manner of Louis the Great to Molière or Racine.
But a very close observer might have discovered that the master of
Greenlands liked neither the secretary’s presence nor the secretary
himself. He talked to him a little now and then; for he was at his
worst a gentleman, and could not insult a dependant; and he listened
courteously to the young man’s talk. But he rarely pursued any subject
that seemed a favourite with Mr. Thorburn; and on rare occasions when
Eustace warmed with the excitement of some argument between himself and
his employer, and talked with unusual warmth, Mr. Jerningham betrayed
some slight weariness.
“Do you not find that young man insufferable with his rhapsodies about
Homer and Æschylus?” he said to Helen one evening. But the young lady
declared her sympathies with Mr. Thorburn, and this time without
blushes or confusion whatsoever.
There is a calm, sweet peace that attends the monotony of a happy life,
in which doubt and bewilderment of mind are unknown. On that first day
of Mr. Jerningham’s return, Helen had been just a little embarrassed
in her conversation with the unexpected guest; hence the blushes and
confusion that had accompanied her mention of Eustace Thorburn. But
now she had no more restraint in talking of the secretary with Mr.
Jerningham than when she talked of him with her father. Harold saw
this, and began to fancy that he had been mistaken. There might be no
love-affair between these young people after all. He was very willing
to think it was so. “I should be sorry to see Helen de Bergerac waste
her regard upon that pedantic young prig,” he said to himself.
Now most assuredly Eustace Thorburn was neither prig nor pedant; but
in his own tranquil manner Mr. Jerningham was a good hater, and he
had taken it into his head to hate this young man. The prejudice was,
perhaps, not entirely unnatural, since Eustace was in some manner a
protégé of Laurence Desmond’s.
Happily for the secretary, this unprovoked dislike was yet unknown to
him. He was no sycophant, to languish for a rich man’s friendship; and
he had never studied Mr. Jerningham’s looks or tones so closely as to
discover the state of that gentleman’s feelings. There was, indeed, no
room in his mind for any consideration of Mr. Jerningham’s thoughts or
feelings. He was a poet, and he was in love, and he was happy; happy,
in spite of the lurking consciousness that there might come a sudden
end to his happiness.
Yes, he was happy--calmly, completely happy; and it is just possible
that this very fact was irritating to Mr. Jerningham, who was a
creature of whims and fancies, capricious and exacting as a woman.
Had he not lived a womanish, self-indulgent life, eminently calculated
to render the best and bravest of men something less than manly? Mr.
Jerningham had chosen his position in life, and had never outstepped
it. In the great opera of existence he had played only one part, and
that was the rôle of the lover--the false, the fickle, the devoted, the
disdainful, the jealous, the exacting--what you will--but always the
same part in the same familiar drama; and now that he was too old for
the character, he felt that he had no further use in life, and that for
him the universe must henceforward be a blank.
He felt this always, but never with a pang so keen as that which smote
him when Eustace Thorburn’s freshness and enthusiasm marked the depth
of his own gentlemanly hopelessness. For the last fifteen years of his
life he had kept himself carefully aloof from young men, holding the
youth of his generation as an inferior species, something lower than
his dog, infinitely worse than his horse. He saw young men from afar
off at his club, and on those rare occasions when he condescended to
appear in society, and it seemed to him that they were all alike, and
all equally inane. The only clever young men he had ever met were older
in feeling than himself, and more wicked, with the wickedness of the
Orleans regency as distinguished from the wickedness of the Augustan
age, it followed--the decadence from a Lauzun to a Riom, from the
stately saloons of Versailles to the _luxe effréné_ of the Palais
Royal.
But, behold, here was a young man who was intellectual and not cynical,
learned and not a scoffer, ambitious without conceit, enthusiastic
without pretence. Here was a young man whom Harold Jerningham admired
in spite of himself, and whose virtues and graces inspired in his
breast a feeling that was terribly like envy.
“Is it his happiness or his youth that I envy him?” Mr. Jerningham
asked himself, when he tried to solve the mystery of his own sentiments
with regard to this matter. “His youth surely; for the other word
is only a synonym for youth. Yes, if I am angry with his obtrusive
brightness and hopefulness, I suppose it is because I see him in full
possession of that universal heritage which I have wasted. He is
young, and life is all before him. How will he spend his ten talents,
I wonder? Will he turn them into small change, and squander them in
fashionable drawing-rooms, as I squandered mine? or will he invest
them in some grand undertaking where they will carry interest till
the end of time? Helen tells me he is to be a poet. I have seen his
lighted window shining between the bare black branches when I have been
restless, and prowled in the park after midnight. Ah, what delight
to be three-and-twenty, with a spotless name, a clear conscience, a
good digestion, and to be able to sit up late on a winter’s night to
scribble verses! I dare say his fire goes out sometimes, and he writes
on, supremely unconscious of the cold, and fancying himself Homer.
Happy youth!”
A perfectly idle man is naturally the subject of strange whims and
caprices; for that saying of Dr. Watts, about the work that Satan
supplies to the idle, is as true as if it had been composed by Plato
or Seneca. It must surely have been from very _désœuvrement_ that
Mr. Jerningham wasted so much of his life at the cottage, and devoted
so much of his leisure to the study of Eustace Thorburn as a member of
the human family, and Eustace Thorburn in his relation to the student’s
daughter. Certain it is that he bestowed as much of his attention upon
the affairs of these young people as he could well have done had he
been the appointed guardian of Helen de Bergerac’s peace. Closely as
he studied these young persons, he could not arrive at any definite
conclusion about them. Helen’s bright, changeful face told so many
different stories; and the countenance of the secretary was almost as
bright and changeful.
Sweet though the charms of friendship must always be to the jaded
spirit, Mr. Jerningham was not altogether happy in his intercourse
with the family at the bailiff’s cottage. He found pleasure there,
and he dallied with the brief glimpses of happiness, loth to lose the
brightness of those transient rays; but he found pain far keener than
the pleasure, and every day when he went to his old friend’s house he
told himself this visit should be the last.
But when the next day came, the outlook over life’s desert seemed more
than ever dark and dreary; so he lingered a little longer by the cool
waters of the green oasis.