IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.
The feeling of curiosity which had actuated Miss Deane in her desire
to see her rival, as she called Eleanor Lloyd in her thoughts, had
been almost as powerful as that which, for the time being, had made
John Pomeroy its slave. When Miss Deane did see Eleanor, she could not
help acknowledging to herself that Matthew Kelvin's violent passion
for that lady was not without some justification. That Miss Lloyd was
indeed very lovely, she at once admitted; for Olive was free from that
common feminine failing which refuses to acknowledge that another, and
more especially a rival, can be the possessor of superior charms,
either of person or mind; and she told herself at once that, as far as
mere good looks went, she could not hope to stand the slightest chance
in a comparison with Miss Lloyd. So long as Miss Lloyd should remain
unmarried, Matthew Kelvin would never look with serious eyes
elsewhere; and Olive saw with a sort of savage satisfaction how
quickly and readily Mr. John Pomeroy had fallen into the same toils in
which the lawyer had been enmeshed before him. Her keen eyes saw that
which was suspected by no one else--that a few short hours had indeed
sufficed to seal Pomeroy's fate. So far everything had gone well with
her; everything had answered her highest expectations. But when she
looked on the other side of the question; when she came to ask
herself, "Does this girl return this man's love?" she could not feel
quite so sanguine as to the result. That Eleanor liked the company of
John Pomeroy, and that his conversation interested her, Olive could
see clearly enough. But liking is not love, though it is often a big
stride on the road towards it. All that was left her to do was to hope
for the best and to remain as quietly watchful as she had hitherto
been.
Of all these plottings and counter-plottings that were going on under
her very nose, poor innocent Lady Dudgeon dreamt nothing. She had long
ago made up her mind that her ensuing season in town should be
fruitful of much pleasure and much enjoyment to her. But chief of all
the pleasures that she looked forward to was that of assisting her
darling Eleanor to select--or, better still, of selecting for her--a
suitable partner for life. She had not been more than a fortnight in
Harley Street before she began to cast wary eyes around, and to make
cautious inquiries here and there with respect to the pretensions and
positions of certain individuals who, even thus early, had evinced a
generous alacrity to sell themselves for life for the sake of twenty
thousand pounds--the young lady who was tacked to the money being of
course thrown in as an unavoidable necessity.
The interest shown by Lady Dudgeon in the fortunes of Miss Lloyd had
its origin in a feeling that dated from the time when Eleanor was
little more than a mere child. At the risk of his own life, Jacob
Lloyd had succeeded in stopping her ladyship's ponies one day when
they were running away with her, and making in a straight line for a
very deep gravel-pit that may still be seen close by the edge of
Dingley Common. Jacob having been considerably bruised and knocked
about in his struggle with the ponies, Lady Dudgeon could do no less
than call several times at Bridgeley to inquire after his health.
There it was that she first saw Eleanor, at that time a flaxen-haired,
blue-eyed child of eight, in short frocks and pinafores. She drew the
child to her, looked her fixedly in the face for a moment or two, and
then stooped and kissed her. Impulsive Nelly at once flung her arms
round Lady Dudgeon's neck. "You _are_ pretty, and I _do_ love you!"
she cried; and from that moment her ladyship's heart was won. She
would insist upon taking Nelly back to Stammars, and that first visit
was but the precursor of several others.
Lady Dudgeon was generally looked upon as a cold-mannered,
unimpressionable sort of person, and her strange partiality for Mr.
Lloyd's daughter was a surprise to all who knew her--to her husband as
much as anyone. But Sir Thomas was eminently good-natured, and he
yielded to his wife's whim in this respect as in everything else.
Before long, indeed, he grew almost as fond of his Bonnybell, as he
called her, as Lady Dudgeon herself. Having no children of his own at
this time, he liked very well to have Eleanor about him--he liked to
have her tugging at his coat-tails, or banging on his arm, or sitting
in front of him on his pony as he rode about the fields looking at his
crops or watching his labourers at work.
Even as a child there was about Eleanor Lloyd a native distinction of
manner that few people failed to observe. Combined with this was a
sweet, fearless freedom--like the fearlessness of a fawn--that sprung
from a total unconsciousness of self, and that charmed without being
aware of its own existence. At ten years of age Eleanor felt as much
at home in Lady Dudgeon's drawing-room, among Lady Dudgeon's fine
company, as she did when helping Biddy to make a custard in the
kitchen.
Lady Dudgeon's liking for Eleanor did not lessen with years. The child
was a frequent visitor at Stammars up to the time that she was sent to
Germany to finish her education. And when her two years of absence
were over, and she was back again at home, the intercourse was at once
resumed, although by this time Lady Dudgeon had two young daughters of
her own. After the sudden death of Jacob Lloyd, and the announcement
that Eleanor had come into a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, there
seemed all the more reason why the bond of intimacy should be drawn
still closer: and no one was surprised when it was given out that Miss
Lloyd had, for the present, accepted Lady Dudgeon's invitation to live
with her at Stammars.
A day or two before the departure of the family for Harley Street,
Lady Dudgeon called Eleanor into her bedroom. "My dear," she
said, "I am going to show you something that you have never seen
before--something that no eyes but my own have seen for years. To you
they may, perhaps, seem hardly worth keeping, but they are very
precious to me."
She opened a drawer as she spoke, the contents of which were covered
with several layers of tissue-paper. When the paper had been carefully
removed, there were displayed to Eleanor's view several articles that
had evidently belonged to a child. There was a little crimson frock
and a sash, a pair of tiny shoes, a broken doll, and part of a
necklace of coral beads. Eleanor looked up wonderingly. For the first
time in her life she saw tears in the eyes of Lady Dudgeon. "They
belonged to my little daughter, whom I lost before I ever saw you. She
died when she was four years old. She would just have been your age
had she lived. Like you, she was fair and had blue eyes. That first
day when I saw you at your father's, it almost seemed to me as if my
own lost darling had come back again. I could not help loving you
then, dear, and I have loved you ever since."
From the first moment that Gerald Warburton set eyes on Eleanor Lloyd,
he made up his mind that, if it were in the possibility of things to
do so, he would make her his wife, and from that determination he had
never wavered. The more he saw of her the more settled became his
conviction that he had never really loved till now. Flirtations he had
had, and little love-smarts in plenty. Many a pleasant face had
haunted his dreams for a night or two, but never for longer. In his
writing-desk were two or three crumpled gloves, a ribbon or two, and
at least half a dozen cartes-de-visite: tokens all, as he sometimes
said to himself, of how hard he had tried to love, of how often he had
fancied himself to be in love, and of the very short space of time it
had taken him to discover either what an ass he had made of himself,
or what an ass some girl had made of him. Such mementoes are not
without a certain amount of instructiveness. Gerald looked upon them
in the light of warnings. "How terrible and strange it is to think,"
he said to himself one day, "that each one of these gages d'amour
represents a most foolish moment in my life, a moment that might have
been the turning-point of my existence: such a moment as has been the
turning-point of many a man's existence! How well one knows the
history of such relics A pair of bright eyes, a waltz, a glass of
champagne, a glove or a ribbon dropped by accident or design; or else
a moonlight ramble capped with some poet's soft nonsense, and a little
hand nestling timidly under your arm. Then comes a pressure of the
tiny hand, an appealing glance into the bright eyes, a whispered word,
and unless your enslaver does not really care for you--in which case
nothing but your vanity suffers--your fate is sealed, and the chances
are that you wake up next morning to find that, for the sake of an
hour's foolish romance, you have bound yourself for life to a person
for whom in your heart, you don't care the price of a box of cigars."
So moralized Gerald, as he took his relics out of their resting-place
for the last time and dropped them quietly, one by one, into the fire.
Without a single pang he saw them flare and shrivel into ashes. Let
the dead past bury its dead.
No doubt ever clouded his mind as to the strength and reality of that
passion which in these latter days had taken possession of his heart.
It was no mere will-o'-the-wisp, to be followed with passionate
footsteps through brake and morass, but the Planet of Love itself,
serene and beautiful: the lodestar of his life and fortune shining
down on him at last with a light that nothing but death could ever
again eclipse.
Since that first meeting with Eleanor he had made it his business to
see as much of her as the exigencies of his position would allow of
his doing. Except when they had company, he generally dined with Sir
Thomas and Lady Dudgeon. He had the happy knack of being able to
select topics of conversation that had an interest for both of them.
He did his best to please them, and he succeeded, simply that he might
be able thereby to see more of Miss Lloyd than he could otherwise have
hoped to do. The peculiar circumstances under which Eleanor and he had
first met had done more to break the ice between them than a month of
ordinary intercourse would have done; besides which, it had supplied
them with a subject for conversation that Eleanor seemed never to grow
tired of, and one in which our artful Gerald feigned a far deeper
interest than he really felt.
Days and weeks had come and gone, and he was still as undecided as
ever what steps to take in the matter of the sealed packet. Kelvin
still maintained his mysterious silence. Gerald had said to himself
that, after having been at Stammars for a little while, after having
seen and made the acquaintance of Eleanor, should Kelvin not then have
spoken, he would write to him in his real name, and demand some
explanation of his unaccountable silence. This would at once force
matters to a climax, and he, Gerald, would then be able, in the
natural course of events, to assume his proper name and position. But
day by day was flitting away, and he still neglected to take this very
obvious course. As matters had turned out, he shrank from doing so. He
loved this girl with all the strength of his ardent temperament.
Should he declare himself, such a declaration would take from her all
that she had hitherto deemed her own, all that was most dear to her in
life: name, wealth, position--everything. Should his be the hand to
knowingly strike her such a blow? The more he thought of it, the more
hateful such a proceeding seemed to him. He could never hope to see
Love's sweet light dawn in those beautiful eyes were he to smite her
thus. And then how much more precious to him would it be to win her
love for his own sake, to win it as a poor man, to fight for her
against the host of other suitors who would surely come when they
should discover what a golden prize was there for the winning; to say
no word to her of this thing, but to let her rest in blissful
ignorance till their wedding day was come. After that, she might,
perchance, learn to love him all the more for his long silence. Thus
it was that Gerald argued with himself, and thus it was that to the
world at large he was still known as John Pomeroy, secretary to Sir
Thomas Dudgeon, at an honorarium of one hundred and fifty guineas per
annum.
As Gerald was strolling quietly through Kensington Gardens one day
between luncheon and dinner, he was met by Eleanor, who was coming
from an opposite direction. They shook hands, and Gerald turned and
walked back with her.
"What are you meditating this morning?" asked Eleanor. "A sonnet, or
another speech on the Sugar Duties?" She had seen and heard enough to
know from what fount it was that Sir Thomas derived the stream of his
Parliamentary eloquence.
"Neither anything so sentimental on the one hand, nor anything so
prosaic on the other," answered Gerald. "I was better employed in
listening to the birds, and in marking how the brown buds were here
and there beginning to open themselves to the sun."
"You are easily satisfied. I should have thought that the Ride would
have had more attractions for you."
"Not at all. In London, humanity is so plentiful that trees and birds
seem sometimes the best of company. In the country, where trees and
birds are so common, a fresh face is sometimes a godsend."
"But you, who have been so accustomed to change--to seeing fresh faces
and visiting strange places--must surely find it both dull and tedious
to spend your days among blue-books and parliamentary reports, wading
through columns of dreary statistics, and concocting speeches which
another than yourself will deliver?"
"I did find it both dull and tedious at first, but I don't find it so
now."
"And why do you not find it so now?"
He would have liked to answer: "Because your presence here has made my
work glad. Because I could count no work as slavery if through it I
were brought into contact with you. Because, since I have learned to
love you, life has assumed for me an altogether different complexion
from that which it wore before--is imbued with altogether different
purposes and ambitions." But the time was not yet ripe for him to say
all this, or even part of it. Some more commonplace answer must be
found to her question.
"I think," said he, "it must be because human motives and human
purposes are so intimately mingled with the dry bones of politics,
that politics exercise such a strange fascination over nearly everyone
who is brought into close contact with them. Certainly to me, and that
no very long time ago, they seemed the dryest and most uninteresting
study to which a man could devote his time."
"But you have seen reason to change your opinion since then?" said
Eleanor.
"I have," said Gerald, emphatically. "From the moment I leapt into the
arena--from the moment that I ceased to be a looker-on and became a
gladiator myself--in the very humblest of positions though it was--my
blood seemed to warm to the struggle. I buckled my armour round me
with gladness at the thought that I was about to contend with shapes
of bone and sinew; that my life need no longer have to content itself
with pottering about among the petty dilettanteisms of Art, while
never quite certain in my own mind whether it was Nature's intention
that I should develop into a man of genius or degenerate into a
blockhead."
Eleanor laughed. "Then you think you have found your right groove at
last," she said.
"As to the right groove, I don't know that this particular one is
better for me than any other in which there would be earnest work to
do in which I could take a hearty interest. Certainly I have come to
find a degree of interest in what I am now doing that could surprise
no one more than it does myself."
"You ought to be in Parliament yourself, Mr. Pomeroy, instead of
filling the anomalous position you do now."
"One must learn to creep before one can walk," said Gerald, with a
shrug.
"But some people never get beyond creeping.----If I were a man, I
should certainly strive to get into Parliament," added Eleanor, a
minute or two later. "How easy it is for a man to have a noble
ambition!"
"Then you like a man to be ambitious?"
"I could certainly never look up to anyone who was not so."
"I am afraid that you aim your arrow too high for these commonplace
days. There are many kinds of ambition that a man may occupy himself
with, and yet none of them may be really ignoble: Sir Thomas
Dudgeon's, for instance. It is his ambition to breed superior sheep
and oxen--and it is decidedly for our benefit that he should do so. I
have a friend in Paris who has a crippled sister, and the object of
his ambition is the invention of an invalid's chair that shall be
superior to any other. These are not large ambitions, but they are
certainly very laudable ones."
"If you know the object of a man's ambition, cannot you from that
gauge, to a certain extent at least, the quality of his mind?"
"Undoubtedly you can, to a certain extent, as you say. But there are
many men who keep their ambitious dreams to themselves as closely as
they do their bankbook. When such a man dies, the general verdict is
that he might have succeeded very much better in life if he had only
had a little more ambition, whereas the probability is that he
succeeded so ill because he had too much ambition."
"I hardly follow you," said Eleanor.
"Let us say that such a man's ambition was to stand on the topmost
pinnacle of the Jungfrau; and because he felt that he had neither the
strength nor the skill requisite to carve his way step by step to the
summit, rather than content himself with any lesser altitude, he
preferred to sit quietly down, dumb and disappointed, among the
ignoble crowd at the bottom."
They walked on for a little while in silence. Gerald kept feasting
himself with little side glances at Eleanor's face. And it was a face
well worth looking at. A delicate, slightly aquiline nose; two eyes of
the deepest and tenderest blue, that put you in mind of an April sky
when the clouds have divided after a shower; and massive coils of rich
flaxen hair that seemed full of stolen sunshine. Her upper lip had a
chiselled fineness of curve and outline rarely found among English
women, and this feature it was that gave a special distinction to the
character of her face. But far before everything else was a prevailing
sweetness of expression--a sweetness that was without insipidity, that
only served to heighten that delicate verve--the outcome of an ardent
and generous nature--which shone through everything she said and did.
She had a small basket on her arm this morning, for she had her
pensioners already, and was returning from visiting two of them: a
poor old orange woman who had broken her arm through slipping on the
ice; and a young mother whose husband lay ill of a fever in the
hospital. Gerald, glancing now and again into the beautiful face
beside him, felt his heart thrill strangely. He would have dearly
liked to fling his arms about her and print a thousand kisses on her
lips.
"What is the latest news of the little waif?" asked Gerald suddenly,
after a pause.
"I have no news other than that which you know already."
"Then she has not been claimed?"
"No. She is still under Mrs. Nixon's care."
"It is not at all likely that anyone will now come forward and claim
her."
"I hope with all my heart that they won't. Those to whom she belonged
left her to be found by a stranger, or to perish; and after such an
act as that they can hardly want to reclaim her."
"I should think that they would hardly dare do so."
"The law would surely punish a deed so detestable. But I have little
fear of anyone coming forward. I feel that the child belongs to me,
and to me alone."
"Have I, then, no share in her?" asked Gerald, with a smile.
"It was agreed that you should give your share over to me," answered
Eleanor.
"I may at least be allowed to feel a little interest in the child's
future fortunes?"
"As deep an interest as you like. You are her preserver, and yours
shall be the first name that she shall be taught to speak. But for all
that, you must let me claim her as altogether my own."
"Oh, with all my heart. I should make a very poor guardian, I am
afraid, for such a wee morsel of humanity."
"I have regular accounts from Mrs. Nixon every two or three days, and
next week I am going down to Stammars to see her."
"I wish she only thought half as much of me as she does of that young
customer down at Stammars!" said Gerald, rather disconsolately, to
himself, when he had parted from Eleanor.
"What has come over you, child?" said Lady Dudgeon to Eleanor, two or
three days afterwards. "This is the third time this morning that I
have caught you in a day-dream. Anyone who did not know better, would
certainly say that you were in love."
"Then they would certainly say what was not true," said Eleanor, with
a blush and a smile.
"I hope so, I am sure," said her ladyship, emphatically. "I don't
think your time has come yet, dear."
Eleanor was used to Lady Dudgeon's phraseology, and did not reply.
No; she certainly was not in love, she said to herself. But it was
rather strange how often Mr. Pomeroy had been in her thoughts of late.
She had caught herself thinking about him several times: daydreaming,
Lady Dudgeon called it. And why should she not think about him? she
asked herself. He interested her. There was about him something
different from anyone she had ever met before. If only she could have
assisted him to get into Parliament, how happy that would have made
her! Despite his careless, easy way of talking, she felt sure that he
was ambitious. But with only a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and no
friends to push him forward, a man's ambitious dreams must perforce be
buried in his heart. If only she could endow him with some portion of
her wealth!---- But here she broke off with a blush, and made up her
mind that for the future she would not think quite so much about Mr.
Pomeroy. "I must remember that I am not to think quite so much about
him," she said to herself. But the very fact of having to remember
this had only the effect of bringing his image more frequently to her
mind.