'J'ai vu sous le soleil tomber bien d'autres choses
Que les feuilles des bois et l'écume des eaux,
Bien d'autres s'en aller que le parfum des roses
Et le chant des oiseaux.'
ALFRED DE MUSSET.
'Mummy,' said Peggy, a few days later, coming into her mother's
sitting-room and pressing her round, cool cheek against Lady
Pierpoint's, 'why does Sibyl want to marry Mr. Loftus?'
'Because she thinks she loves him, Peggy, as many other women have done
before her.'
'I think I love him, too, in a way,' said Peggy. 'He is better than
anybody. When I am with him, I feel--I don't know what I feel, only I
know it's good, and I want to do something for him, or make him
something really pretty for his handkerchiefs; but--I don't want to
marry him.'
'That is as well, my treasure, as he is going to marry Sibyl.'
'I never thought he would marry anybody. I can't believe it. It seems as
if it could not happen.'
'It will happen,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'if he lives.'
'Sibyl says,' continued Peggy, 'that he enters into her feelings as no
one else does, and that she understands him, and that hardly anyone else
does except her, because he is so superior.'
'Indeed!'
'And she says she can speak to him of aspirations and things that she
can't even mention to Molly and me. She says it isn't our fault--it is
only because we are different to her.'
'You are certainly very different,' said Lady Pierpoint, compressing her
lips.
'And to think that she might have married Mr. Doll,' continued Peggy, as
if Sibyl's actions were indeed inscrutable. 'Mr. Doll will be
twenty-eight next August. He was twenty-seven when we were at
Wilderleigh last year. If I had been Sibyl, I would have married him,
and then I'll tell you, mummy, what I would have done. I would have
asked Mr. Loftus to let us live with him at Wilderleigh, and I would
have taken such care of him--oh! such care--and I would have spent whole
bags of money on the farms and fences and things, and he would have
been happy, and Mr. Doll would have been happy, too.'
'Peggy,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'shall I tell you a secret? I think that
is exactly what Mr. Loftus hoped Sibyl would do.'
* * * * *
Mr. Loftus returned to London a day or two later, and had an interview
with Doll the day before the announcement of the engagement appeared in
the _Morning Post_.
Mr. Loftus was attached to his nephew--people always looked upon Doll as
his nephew, though he was in reality his first cousin--and to him and to
him alone he told the circumstances which had led to his engagement.
What passed between the elder man and the young one during that
interview will never be known. But when at last Mr. Loftus left him,
Doll sat for a long time looking over the geraniums into the park. The
somewhat dull, unimaginative soul that dwelt behind his handsome
expressionless face was vaguely stirred.
'It's a mistake,' he said at last, half aloud. 'But Uncle George is on
the square; he always is.'
And when he was ruthlessly twitted next day by his brother officers on
being cut out by his uncle, he replied simply enough:
'He is a better man than me, as all you fellows know. She would not have
looked at one of you any more than she would at me. I suppose she had a
fancy for marrying a man who could spell, which none of us can.'
'Spelling or none,' said the youngest sub--'which is an indecent
subject which should never be mentioned between gentlemen--anyhow, I
mean to borrow a thousand or a fiver off him. Mr. Loftus always tipped
me at school.'
One of Mr. Loftus's first actions was to stop the preliminary
proceedings regarding the sale of Wilderleigh, which he had been
arranging a month ago, on the afternoon when he had called on Lady
Pierpoint. It was like awakening from a nightmare to realize that
Wilderleigh would not be sold, after all. He almost wished that he might
live long enough to set the place in order for Doll.
The engagement was a nine days' wonder, and those nine days were
purposely spent by Mr. Loftus in London. He was aware that many cruel
things would be said at his expense, and that the bare fact that a man
of his years and in his state of health should marry a young heiress,
and so great an heiress as Sibyl Carruthers, must call forth
unfavourable comments. People who did not know him said it was perfectly
shameful, and that it was just the sort of thing which those people who
posed as being so extra good always did. How shocked Mr. Loftus had
pretended to be when old Lord Bugbear, after his infamous life, married
a girl of seventeen! And now he, Mr. Loftus, was doing exactly the same
himself. Of course he had a very fascinating manner--just the kind of
manner to impose on a young girl who, like Miss Carruthers, knew nothing
of the world, and had been nowhere. And everyone knew he was desperately
poor. Wilderleigh could hardly pay its way. A rumour had long been
afloat that it would shortly be for sale. If he had not been so hard up
for money it would have been different; but it was a most disgraceful
thing, and Lady Pierpoint ought to be ashamed of having exposed the poor
motherless girl left in her charge to his designs upon her. They
wondered how much Lady Pierpoint, whose means were narrow, had been
bought over for. The sums varied according to the sordidness of the
different speculators, who of course named their own price.
Others who knew Mr. Loftus were puzzled and were silent. To know him at
all was to believe him to be incapable of an ignoble action; yet this
marriage had the appearance of being ignoble--not, perhaps, for another
man, but certainly for him. His intimate friends were distressed, and
greeted him with grave cordiality and affection, and hoped for an
explanation. He gave none. And they remembered that never in his public
or in his private life had he been known to give an explanation of his
conduct, and came to the conclusion that they must trust him.
Mr. Loftus had recognised early in life that explanations explain
nothing. If those who had had opportunities of knowing him well
misjudged him after those opportunities, they were at liberty to do so
as far as he was concerned. The weight of an enormous acquaintance
oppressed him, and, though he had never been known to wound anyone by
withdrawing from an unequal friendship, which he had not been the one to
begin, and which was an effort to him to continue, still, he took
advantage of being misunderstood to lay aside many such friendships. It
was not pride which prompted this line of action on Mr. Loftus's part,
though many put it down to pride, especially those who had held aloof
from him at a certain doubtful moment, and in whose regard subsequent
events had entirely reinstated him, and who complained that he expected
to be considered infallible. It was, in reality, the natural inclination
of a world-weary man of the world to lay aside, as far as he could
courteously do so, the claims of the artificial side of life, its vain
forms, its empty hospitalities.
He realized that for the purpose of winnowing its friendships the
various events of life may be relied on to furnish the fitting
occasions. Those who do not wish to offend others by leaving them need
make no effort, for they will certainly be presently deserted by those
who have never grasped the meaning of the character which has been the
object of their transient admiration. 'If he is unequal he will
presently pass away.' Mr. Loftus neither hurried the unequal,
self-constituted friend, nor sought to detain him. But when he departed,
shaking the dust from off his feet, the door was noiselessly closed
behind him, and his knock, however loud, was not heard when he returned
again.
A small batch of uneasy admirers left him on the occasion of his
engagement. They said openly that they were much disappointed in him,
and that he had shaken their belief in human nature.
'Will Sibyl also pass away?' Mr. Loftus wondered, as he sat on the
terrace at Wilderleigh on his return from London. 'Yes, she, too, will
presently pass away; but I shall not give her time to do so. She will be
absorbed by her first love for a few years, and I shall only remain a
few years at longest. By the time it wanes I shall be gone, and my
departure will pain her but very slightly.'
His face softened as he thought of Sibyl. His nature, which, in its
far-away youth, had been imaginative and romantic, had remained
sympathetic. He gauged, as few others could have done had they been the
object of it, the measure of her romantic attachment to himself. It was
perhaps safer in his hands than in those of a younger man. For youth
perpetrates many murders and mutilations in the name of love, as the
schoolboy's love of a butterfly finds expression in a pin and a cork.
But it would have cut Sibyl to the heart if she had even guessed that
his tranquil mind took for granted that her adoration would not last
until the stars fell from heaven and the earth fell into the sun. For
'Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères.' That is a hard saying,
but alas! and alas! that it is only the weak who believe that it is not
true. The strong know better, but if they are merciful they are silent.
'And so my second wife is also to be an _esprit faible_,' said Mr.
Loftus to himself, looking at the past through half-closed eyes. 'But in
the meanwhile I have learnt a lesson in natural history. I shall not
expect my butterfly to hew wood and draw water. And this time I shall
not break my heart because pretty wings are made to flutter with.'
And the remembrance slid through his mind of Millais's picture of the
dying cavalier, and the butterfly perched upon the drawn sword in the
ardent sunshine. And he thought of the drawn sword of Damocles hanging
over his own life, and Sibyl's love preening itself for one brief second
upon it. And at the thought he smiled.