DICK STANMORE
She had certainly succeeded in puzzling Dick Stanmore and already
began to interest him. The worry would surely follow in due time.
Dick was a fine subject for the scalpel--good-humoured, generous,
single-hearted, with faultless digestive powers, teeth, and colour to
correspond, a strong tendency to active exercise, and such a faculty
of enjoyment as, except in the highest order of intellects, seldom
lasts a man over thirty.
Like many of his kind, he _said_ he hated London, but lived there very
contentedly from April to July, nevertheless. He was fresh, just at
present, from a good scenting season in Leicestershire, followed by a
sojourn on the Tweed, in which classical river he had improved many
shining hours, wading waist-deep under a twenty-foot rod, any number
of yards of line, and a fly of various hues, as gaudy, and but little
smaller than a cock pheasant. Now he had been a week in town, during
which period he met Miss Bruce at least once every day. This constant
intercourse is to be explained in a few words.
Mrs. Stanmore, the Aunt Agatha with whom Maud expressed herself so
unwilling to reside, was a sister of the late Mr. Bruce. She had
married a widower with one son, that widower being old Mr. Stanmore,
defunct, that son being Dick. Mrs. Stanmore, in the enjoyment of
a large jointure (which rather impoverished her step-son), though
arbitrary and unpleasant, was a woman of generous instincts, so
offered Maud a home the moment she learned her niece's double
bereavement; which home, for many reasons, heiress or no heiress, Miss
Bruce felt constrained to accept. Thus it came about that she found
herself walking with Tom Ryfe _en cachette_ in the Square gardens;
and, leaving them, recognised the gentleman whom she was to meet at
luncheon in ten minutes, on whose intellect at least, if not his
heart, she felt pretty sure she had already made an impression.
"I won't show her up," said Dick to his neatest boots, while he
scraped them at his mother's door, "but I _should_ like to know who
that bumptious-looking chap is, and what the h----ll she could have to
say to him in the Square gardens all the same."
Mr. Stanmore's language at the luncheon-table, it is needless to
say, was far less emphatic than that which relieved his feelings in
soliloquy; nor was he to-day quite so talkative as usual. His mother
thought him silent (he always called her "mother," and, to do her
justice, she could not have loved her own son better, nor scolded
him oftener, had she possessed one); Miss Bruce voted him stupid and
sulky. She told him so.
"A merrythought, if you please, and no bread-sauce," said the young
lady, in her calm, imperious manner. "Don't forget I hate bread-sauce,
if you mean to come here often to luncheon; and do _say_ something.
Aunt Agatha can't, no more can I. Recollect we've got a heavy
afternoon before us."
Aunt Agatha always contradicted. "Not heavier than any other
breakfast, Maud," said she severely. "You didn't think that tea at the
Tower heavy last week, nor the ghosts in the mess-room of the Blues.
Lady Goldthred's an old friend of mine, and it was very kind of her to
ask us. Besides, Dick's coming down in the barouche."
Maud's face brightened, and be sure, Dick saw it brighten.
"That accounts for it," said she, with the rare smile in her eyes;
"and he thinks we sha'n't let him smoke, so he sulks beforehand, grim,
grave, and silent as a ghost. Mr. Stanmore, cheer up. You may smoke
the whole way down. _I'll_ give you leave."
"Nonsense, my dear," observed Aunt Agatha sternly. "He don't want
to do anything of the kind. What have you been about, Maud, all
the morning? I looked for you everywhere to help me with the
visiting-list."
"Puckers and I took a 'constitutional,'" answered Miss Bruce
unblushingly. "We wanted to do some shopping." But her dark eyes stole
towards Dick, and, although his never met them, she felt satisfied he
had witnessed her interview with Tom Ryfe in the Square gardens.
"I saw you both coming in, Miss Bruce," said Dick, breaking the
awkward pause which succeeded Maud's mis-statement. "I think Puckers
wears twice as smart a bonnet as yours. I hope you are not offended."
Again that smile from the dark eyes. Dick felt, and perhaps she meant
him to feel, that he had lost nothing in her good opinion by ignoring
even to herself that which she wished to keep unknown.
"I think you've very little taste in bonnets, whatever you may have in
faces," answered the young lady; "and I think I shall go and put one
on now that will make you eat your words humbly when I appear in it on
the lawn at Lady Goldthred's."
"I have no doubt there won't be a dry eye in the place," answered
Dick, looking after her, as she left the room, with undisguised
admiration in his honest face--with something warmer and sweeter than
admiration creeping and gathering about his heart.
So they all went down together in the barouche, Dick sitting with his
back to the horses, and gazing his fill on the young beauty opposite,
looking so cool and fair in her fresh summer draperies, so thoroughly
in keeping with the light and sparkle of everything around--the
brilliant sunshine, the spring foliage, the varying scenery, even to
the varnish and glitter of the well-appointed carriage, and the plated
harness on the horses.
Aunt Agatha conversed but sparingly. She was occupied with the phantom
pages of her banker's book; with the shortcomings of a new housemaid;
not a little with the vague sketch of a dress, to be worn at certain
approaching gaieties, which should embody the majesty of the chaperon
without entirely resigning all pretensions to youth. But for one
remark, "that the coachman was driving very badly," I think she
travelled in stately silence as far as Kew. Not so the other
occupants of the barouche. Maud, desirous of forgetting much that was
distasteful to her in the events of the morning, and indeed, in the
course of her daily life, resolved to accept the tangible advantages
of the present, nor scrupled to show that she enjoyed fresh air, fine
weather, and pleasant company. Dick, stimulated by her presence,
and never disinclined to gaiety of spirit, exerted himself to be
agreeable, pouring forth a continuous stream of that pleasant nonsense
which is the only style of conversation endurable in the process of
riding, driving, or other jerking means of locomotion.
It is only when his suit has prospered that a man feels utterly
idiotic and moonstruck in the presence of the woman he adores. Why,
when life is scarce endurable but at her side, he should become a bore
in her presence, is only another intricacy in the many puzzles that
constitute the labyrinth of love. So long as he flutters unsinged
about its flame, the moth is all the happier for the warmth of the
candle, all the livelier for the inspiration of its rays. Dick
Stanmore, turning into the Kensington Road, was the insect basking in
those bright, alluring beams; but Dick Stanmore on the farther side of
Kew felt more like the same insect when its wings have been already
shrivelled and its powers of flight destroyed in the temerity of its
adoration.
Still it was pleasant, very pleasant. She looked so beautiful, she
smiled so kindly, always with her eyes, sometimes with the perfect,
high-bred mouth; she entered so gaily into his gossip, his fancies,
his jokes, allowing him to hold her parasol and arrange her shawls
with such sweetness and good-humour, that Dick felt quite sorry to
reach the Portugal laurels and trim lawns of their destination, when
the drive was over from which he had derived this new and unforeseen
gratification. Something warned him that, in accordance with that rule
of compensation which governs all terrestrial matters, these delights
were too keen to last, and there must surely be annoyance and vexation
in store to complete the afternoon.
His first twinge originated in the marked admiration called forth by
Miss Bruce's appearance at the very outset. She had scarcely made
her salaam to Lady Goldthred, and passed on through billiard-room,
library, and verandah, to the two dwarfed larches and half-acre of
mown grass which constitute the wilderness of a suburban villa, ere
Dick felt conscious that his could be no monopoly of adoration. Free
trade was at once declared by glances, whispers and inquiries from a
succession of well-dressed young gentlemen, wise doubtless in their
own conceit, yet not wanting in that worldly temerity which impels
fools to rush in where angels fear to tread, and gives the former
class of beings, in their dealings with that sex which is compounded
of both, an immeasurable advantage over the latter.
Miss Bruce had not traversed the archery-ground twenty-five feet, from
target to target, on her way to the refreshment-tent, ere half-a-dozen
of the household troops, a bachelor baronet, and the richest young
commoner of his year were presented by her host, at their own earnest
request. Dick's high spirits went down like the froth in a glass of
soda-water, and he fell back discouraged, to exchange civilities with
Lady Goldthred.
That excellent woman, dressed, painted, and wound-up for the occasion,
was volubly delighted with everybody; and being by no means sure of
Dick's identity, dashed the more cordiality into her manner, while
careful not to commit herself by venturing on his name.
"_So_ good of you to come," she fired it at him as she had fired it at
fifty others, "all this distance from town, and such a hot day, to see
my poor little place. But isn't it pretty now? And are we not lucky in
the weather? And weren't you smothered in dust coming down? And you've
brought _the_ beauty with you too. I declare Sir Moses is positively
smitten. I'm getting quite jealous. Just look at him now. But he's not
the only one, that's a comfort."
Dick _did_ look, wondering vaguely why the sunshine should have faded
all at once. Sir Moses, a little bald personage, in a good-humoured
fuss, whom no amount of inexperience could have taken for anything but
the "man of the house," was paying the utmost attention to Miss Bruce,
bringing her tea, placing a camp-stool for her that she might see the
archery, and rendering her generally those hospitable services which
it had been his lot to waste on many less attractive objects during
that long sunny afternoon.
"Sir Moses is always so kind," answered Dick vaguely, "and nobody's
breakfasts are so pleasant as yours, Lady Goldthred."
"I'm _too_ glad you think so," answered his hostess, who, like
a good-hearted woman as she was, took enormous pains with these
festivities, congratulating herself, when she washed off her rouge,
and doffed her robes of ceremony at night, that she had got through
the great penance of her year. "You're always so good-natured. But I
_do_ think men like to come here. The country air, you know, and
the scenery, and plenty of pretty people. Now, there's Lord
Bearwarden--look, he's talking to Miss Bruce, under the cedar--he's
actually driven over from Windsor, and though he's a way of being
so fine and _blasé_ and all that, he don't look much bored at this
moment, does he? Twenty thousand a year, they say, and been everywhere
and done everything. Now, I fancy, he wants to marry, for he's much
older, you know, than he looks. To hear him talk, you'd think he was
a hundred, and broken-hearted into the bargain. For my part, I've no
patience with a melancholy man; but then I'm not a young lady. You
know him, though, of course?"
Dick's reply, if he made one, was drowned in a burst of brass music
that deafened people at intervals throughout the afternoon, and Lady
Goldthred's attention wandered to fresh arrivals, for whom, with fresh
smiles and untiring energy, she elaborated many more remarks of a
similar tendency.
Dick Stanmore _did_ know Lord Bearwarden, as every man about London
knows every other man leading the same profitable life. There were
many whom he would have preferred as rivals; but thinking he detected
signs of weariness on Maud's face (it had already come to this, that
he studied her countenance, and winced to see it smile on any one
else), he crossed the lawn, that he might fill the place by her side,
to which he considered himself as well entitled as another.
His progress took some little time, what, with bowing to one lady,
treading on the dress of another, and parrying the attack of a third
who wanted him to give her daughter a cup of tea; so that by the time
Dick reached her Lord Bearwarden had left Miss Bruce to the attentions
of another guest, more smart than gentlemanlike, in whose appearance
there was something indefinably out of keeping with the rest. Dick
started. It was the man with whom he had seen Maud walking before
luncheon in the Square.
People were pairing for a dance on the lawn, and Mr. Stanmore, wedged
in by blocks of beauty and mountains of muslin, could neither advance
nor retreat. It was no fault of his that he overheard Miss Bruce's
conversation with the stranger.
"_Will_ you dance with me?" said the latter, in a whisper of
suppressed anger, rather than the tone of loving entreaty with which
it is customary to urge this pleasant request.
"Impossible!" answered Maud energetically. "I'm engaged to Lord
Bearwarden--it's the Lancers, and he's only gone to make up the set."
The man ground his teeth and knit his brows.
"You seem to forget," he muttered--"you carry it off with too high a
hand. I have a right to bid you dance with me. I have a right, if I
chose, to order you down to the river there and row you back to Putney
with the tide; and I _will_, I swear, if you provoke me too far."
She seemed to keep her temper with an effort.
"_Do_ be patient," she whispered, glancing round at the bystanders.
"Surely you can trust me. Hush! here comes Lord Bearwarden."
And taking that nobleman's arm, she walked off with a mournful
pleading look at her late companion, which poor Dick Stanmore would
have given worlds to have seen directed to himself.
There was no more pleasure for him now during the rest of the
entertainment. He did indeed obtain a momentary distraction from his
resolution to ascertain the name of the person who had so spoilt his
afternoon. It helped him very little to be told the gentleman was "a
Mr. Ryfe." Nobody seemed to know any more, and even this information
he extracted with difficulty from Lady Goldthred, who added, in a tone
of astonishment--
"Why, you brought him, didn't you?"
Dick was mystified--worse, he was unhappy. For a few minutes he
wandered about behind the dancers, watching Maud and her partner as
they threaded the intricacies of those exceedingly puzzling evolutions
which constitute the Lancer quadrilles. Lord Bearwarden was obviously
delighted with Maud, and that young lady seemed by no means
unconscious or careless of her partner's approval. I do not myself
consider the measure they were engaged in threading as particularly
conducive to the interchange of sentiment. If my memory serves me
right, this complicated dance demands as close an attention as whist,
and affords almost as few opportunities of communicating with a
partner. Nevertheless, there is a language of the eyes, as of the
lips; and it was not Lord Bearwarden's fault if his looks were
misunderstood by their object. All this Dick saw, and seeing, grew
more and more disgusted with life in general, with Lady Goldthred's
breakfast in particular. When the dance ended, and Dick
Stanmore--hovering about his flame, like the poor moth to which I have
compared him, once singed and eager to be singed again--was hesitating
as to whether he, too, should not go boldly in and try his chance,
behold Mr. Ryfe, with an offensive air of appropriation, walks off
with Miss Bruce arm-in-arm, towards the sequestered path that leads
to the garden-gate, that leads to the shady lane, that leads to the
shining river!
It was all labour and sorrow now. People who called this sort of thing
amusement, thought Dick, would go to purgatory for pastime, and a
stage farther for diversion. When he broke poor Redwing's back three
fields from home in the Melton steeplechase he was grieved, annoyed,
distressed. When he lost that eleven-pounder in the shallows below
Melrose, because "Aundry," his Scottish henchman, was too drunk to
keep his legs in a running stream, he was angry, vexed, disgusted; but
never before, in his whole life of amusement and adventure, had he
experienced anything like the combination of uncomfortable feelings
that oppressed him now. He was ashamed of his own weakness, too, all
the time, which only made matters worse.
"Hang it!" thought Dick, "I don't see why I should punish myself by
staying here any longer. I'll tell my mother I must be back in London
to dinner, make my bow, jump into a boat, and scull down to Chelsea.
So I will. The scull will do me good, and if--if she _has_ gone on the
water with that snob, why I shall know the worst. What a strange, odd
girl she is! And O, how I wish she wasn't!"
But it takes time to find a lady, even of Mrs. Stanmore's presence,
amongst five hundred of her kind jostled up in half-an-acre of ground;
neither will the present code of good manners, liberal as it is,
bear a guest out in walking up to his hostess _à bout portant_, to
interrupt her in an interesting conversation, by bidding her a solemn
good-bye hours before anybody else has begun to move. Twenty minutes
at least must have elapsed ere Dick found himself in a dainty
outrigger with a long pair of sculls, fairly launched on the bosom of
the Thames--more than time for the corsair, if corsair he should be,
to have sailed far out of sight with false, consenting Maud in the
direction of London Bridge.
Dick was no mean waterman. The exercise of a favourite art, combining
skill with muscular effort, is conducive to peace of mind. A swim, a
row, a gallop over a country, a fencing-bout or a rattling set-to with
"the gloves" bring a man to his senses more effectually than whole
hours of quiescent reflection. Ere the perspiration stood on Dick
Stanmore's brow, he suspected he had been hasty and unjust; by the
time he caught his second wind, and had got fairly into swing, he was
in charity with all the world, reflecting, not without toleration and
self-excuse, that he had been an ass.
So he sculled on, like a jolly young waterman, making capital way with
the tide, and calculating that if the fugitive pair should have done
anything so improbable as to take the water in company, he must have
overhauled, or at least sighted them, ere now.
His spirits rose. He wondered why he should have been so desponding an
hour ago. He had made excuses for himself--he began to make them for
Maud, nay, he was fast returning to his allegiance, the allegiance of
a day, thrown off in five minutes, when he sustained another damper,
such as the total reversal of his outrigger and his own immersion,
head uppermost, in the Thames, could not have surpassed.
At a bend of the river near Putney he came suddenly on one of those
lovely little retreats which fringe its banks--a red-brick house, a
pretty flower-garden, a trim lawn, shaded by weeping-willows, kissing
the water's edge. On that lawn, under those weeping-willows, he
descried the graceful, pliant figure, the raven hair, the imperious
gestures that had made such havoc with his heart, and muttering the
dear name, never before coupled with a curse, he knew for the first
time, by the pain, how fondly he already loved this wild, heedless,
heartless girl, who had come to live in his mother's house. Swinging
steadily along in mid-stream, he must have been too far off, he
thought, for her to recognise his features; yet why should she have
taken refuge in the house with such haste, at an open window, through
which a pair of legs clad in trousers denoted the presence of some
male companion? For a moment he turned sick and faint, as he resigned
himself to the torturing truth. This Mr. Ryfe, then, had been as good
as his word, and she, his own proud, refined, beautiful idol, had
committed the enormity of accompanying that imperious admirer down
here. What could be the secret of such a man's influence over such a
girl? Whatever it was, she must be Dick's idol no longer. And he would
have loved her so dearly!--so dearly!
There were tears in the eyes of this jolly young waterman as he pulled
on. These things hurt, you see, while the heart is fresh and honest,
and has been hitherto untouched. Those should expect rubbers who play
at bowls; if people pull their own chestnuts out of the fire they
must compound for burnt fingers; and when you wager a living, loving,
trustful heart against an organ of wax, gutta-percha, or Aberdeen
granite, don't be surprised if you get the worst of the game all
through.
He had quite given her up by the time he arrived at Chelsea, and
had settled in his own mind that henceforward there must be no more
sentiment, no more sunshine, no more romance. He had dreamt his dream.
Well for him it was so soon over. _Semel insanivimus omnes_. Fellows
had all been fools once, but no woman should ever make a fool of him
again! No woman ever _could_. He should never see another like _her_!
Perhaps this was the reason he walked half-a-mile out of his homeward
way, through Belgrave Square, to haunt the street in which she lived,
looking wistfully into those gardens whence he had seen her emerge
that very day with her mysterious companion--gazing with plaintive
interest on the bell-handle and door-scraper of his mother's
house--vaguely pondering how he could ever bear to enter that house
again--and going through the whole series of those imaginary throes,
which are indeed real sufferings with people who have been foolish
enough to exchange the dignity and reality of existence for a dream.
What he expected I am at a loss to explain; but although, while pacing
up and down the street, he vowed every turn should be the last, he
had completed his nineteenth, and was on the eve of commencing his
twentieth, when Mrs. Stanmore's carriage rolled up to the door,
stopping with a jerk, to discharge itself of that lady and Maud,
looking cool, fresh, and unrumpled as when they started. The revulsion
of feeling was almost too much for Dick. By instinct, rather than with
intention, he came forward to help them out, so confused in his ideas
that he failed to remark how entirely his rapid retreat from the
breakfast had been overlooked. Mrs. Stanmore seemed never to have
missed him. Maud greeted him with a merry laugh, denoting more of
good-humour and satisfaction than should have been compatible with
keen interest in his movements or justifiable pique at his desertion.
"Why, here you are!" she exclaimed gaily. "Actually home before us,
like a dog that one takes out walking to try and lose. Poor thing! did
it run all the way under the carriage with its tongue out? and wasn't
it choked with dust, and isn't it tired and thirsty? and won't it come
in and have some tea?"
What could Dick say or do? He followed her up-stairs to the back
drawing-room, meek and submissive as the dog to which she had likened
him, waiting for her there with a dry mouth and a beating heart while
she went to "take off her things"; and when she reappeared smiling and
beautiful, able only to propound the following ridiculous question
with a gasp--
"Didn't you go on the water then, after all?"
"On the water!" she repeated. "Not I. Nothing half so pleasant,
I assure you. I wish we had! for anything so slow as the whole
performance on dry land, I never yet experienced. I danced five
dances, none of them nice ones--I hate dancing on turf--and I had a
warm-water ice and some jelly that tasted of bees'-wax. What became
of you? We couldn't find you anywhere to get the carriage. However, I
asked Aunt Agatha to come away directly somebody made a move, because
I was cross and tired and bored with the whole business. I think
she liked it much better than I did; but here she is to answer for
herself."
Dick had no dinner that day, yet what a pleasant cigar it was he
smoked as he coasted Belgrave Square once more in the sweet spring
evening under the gas-lamps! He had been very unhappy in the
afternoon, but that was all over now. Anxiety, suspicion, jealousy,
and the worst ingredient of the latter, a sense of humiliation, had
made wild work with his spirits, his temper, and indeed his appetite;
yet twenty minutes in a dusky back drawing-room, a cup of weak tea
and a slice of inferior bread-and-butter, were enough to restore
self-respect, peace of mind, and vigour of digestion. He could not
recall one word that bore an unusually favourable meaning, one look
that might not have been directed to a brother or an intimate friend,
and still he felt buoyed up with hope, restored to happiness. The
reaction had come on, and he was more in love with her than ever.