"My engagements never do seem to go right," sighed the musician.
He was sitting in the little bedroom upstairs by the side of his
sleeping son, with his thumb tightly clasped in a fat brown hand. But he
was not thinking of Sonny, although the clasp of the tiny fingers was
comforting, as betokening some one who still believed in him.
"There is a curse upon my love affairs," said the musician. "Why should
those letters never reach her? And why did she choose that moment of all
others to come back? Another man might do a dirty trick and not be found
out. God knows I never wanted to harm a woman in my life, least of all
those two; and yet I've blundered in and got engaged to both of them at
once; and I've broken the heart of the purest and most innocent
child--merciful heavens, what haven't I done? And here I am, left up
here like a great fool, while they are tearing my character to ribbons
downstairs. Was there ever such an unfortunate brute as myself?"
The musician's voice became husky, whether from self-pity, or from the
recollection of the poor little scared face of the child who had found
her happiness only to lose it again, it would be impossible to say.
"Women are such deuced odd things," continued the musician,
complainingly; "they expect you to look on while they scratch one
another's eyes out, and then if you touch a hair of their heads you have
the whole lot of them against you. Bless her! I would give my life to
undo what I have done to her to-day."
Which did he mean? Perhaps he hardly knew. But Lady Joan did all the
while that she sat by Norah Bisley on the horse-hair sofa, downstairs in
the oak-panelled parlor.
The child stirred in his sleep.
"Happy Sonny," murmured the musician, sentimentally, "your turn has yet
to come. Why can't children always remain children? Norah ought never to
have grown up; she was meant for eternal childhood. It was a mistake to
make Lady Joan a child at all, she ought to have been born a full-grown
woman. _I_ ought never to have been born at all, of course. Who arranges
these things?"
Then he went to the table by the window, and cleared it of Sonny's
monkey without a tail, and the fat pink pin-cushion, and the pale green
glass pot with a lid, and the shining porcelain shepherdess with a
chipped crook, and the knitted toilet-cover that entrapped the legs of
all these ornaments, and sat down to write the best song he had ever
composed, to some words by George Meredith.
"Men are always brutes," said Lady Joan, "but this one has only become
so by accident. Stupid people do more harm than bad ones, ever so much.
The fates will help you out of a hole if you have been a clever sinner,
but they will lay a pitfall for you if you are a blundering,
good-intentioned sort of creature. The fact is, this world of ours was
made for clever people, and the fools haven't a chance. That is why he
has gone wrong."
"Is he a fool then?" asked the weary voice on the sofa. One
disillusionment more than another did not matter now that her idol was
broken.
"He lives by his emotions, and he has no sense of proportion. It comes
to the same thing. He had no intention of being faithless to you, and if
you had not gone away he would have married you, and remained dull and
virtuous to the end of his days. But you did go away, and I came home;
and he can't live without a woman, and so he persuaded himself that his
friendship for me was love. That was how it was done. Perhaps I
encouraged him too. He was interesting to me, and he was never in love
with me, so I amused myself by trying to fascinate him. I can't help
being a woman."
"Are women like that too?" thought the other, and she added out loud, "I
am a woman too, but--" and left her sentence unfinished.
"No, you are not a woman, you are only a child," said Lady Joan; "the
world is a place for you to play in. You were born to be happy, and you
will never have to realize the things I have been telling you."
"I shall never be happy again," said the tired voice, with a sob.
"We all say that at eighteen; it comforts us sometimes to be the most
miserable person in the world. Then we turn round a bit, and the sun
comes out again, and some one gives us a tonic, and we endow a cot at
the hospital, or give a farthing meal to five hundred brats in the East
End, and then we go on again. You have never been in love before, of
course?"
"Don't," moaned the other from the corner of the unsympathetic sofa.
The clear calm tones of her Mentor softened a little.
"I don't want to hurt you, Norah; I only mean that if you go in for
loving once in a lifetime and that sort of thing, you really cannot
properly understand the utter insouciance of an emotional man like
Digby. He will love you more than ever now that you have come back, and
you will be ten times happier than if you had been married straight off
without any drawbacks. You have got rid of your ideals, to begin with,
which most of them do not accomplish until after marriage, and that is
always a risk. And you will find there is lots of time to be happy."
"Oh," said the other, in an altered tone, sitting upright, and speaking
with startling emphasis, "and do you really mean to say that you think I
should marry him _now_?"
Lady Joan did not turn a hair, vulgarly speaking; she felt she had done
wonders already by getting rid of the battered, hopeless little voice,
and she merely smiled to herself in the twilight in a triumphant,
self-satisfied manner.
"You are to come home with me now, and I will send down for your maid,
and you shall stay the night and get rested. I suppose you have eaten
nothing for hours? Then how can you expect to take a proper view of
things? Half the troubles of life come from a bad digestion; it's not
romantic, but then I don't belong to your musical set."
And she carried Norah off through the back door, leaving Mrs. Haxtell
with material for a year's gossip, and a note for the musician to the
effect that he was to come up to the Court after dinner and give them
some music.
"That is the cleverest woman I know," he sputtered, as he plunged his
head into a basin of cold water after reading the scrawled scrap of
paper. And he added grimly, "I suppose she will tell me which one I am
to marry. And I am not in a position to object."
But he felt grateful to her for asking him in such a commonplace sort of
way, and he put the song he had been writing into the pocket of his
Inverness coat, and walked up to the Court in the dusk.
She was just as commonplace in her greeting. He found them in the big
drawing-room near the open window, and he had to walk the whole length
of the room before they took any notice of the butler's announcement, or
turned round. Lady Joan was knitting a large white shawl, and talking
vigorously; Norah was lying silently on a couch, with her great
sentimental eyes looking out into the garden; and the curate, who had
also dropped in after dinner, was sipping his coffee and listening
deferentially to his hostess.
"Of course, indifference is the characteristic of the times, as you say,
Mr. Johnson, but I am not sure that it matters much. There is not much
to choose between the negative virtue of the present day and the
positive wickedness of our forefathers."
Mr. Johnson ventured the unavoidable reply that negative virtue was
worse than positive wickedness, because it professed more.
"That is true, but we must continue to be miserable sinners in some way
or other, or else the Litany would have to be expunged, and that would
offend the Conservatives," said Lady Joan, with a flippancy which was
merely to hide the fact that she was feeling what women call
overwrought; and she turned to Digby to conceal her consciousness of
having been extravagant instead of witty. "Ah, Mr. Raleigh, how do you
do? How good of you to come on such a short notice. You have seen Norah
to-day, I think? Our new curate, Mr. Johnson. We were just longing for
some music."
Digby was again thankful for her _sang froid_. He touched her fingers,
and bowed to the others, and he took his black coffee from the tray
presented to him by the butler, and apologized in the most ordinary
manner for not being in evening dress.
"And may we have some music, please? Mr. Raleigh is a musician, you
know, Mr. Johnson; perhaps you know his songs, though?"
Mr. Johnson said he was passionately fond of music, and he knew Mr.
Raleigh's name quite well, and had once sung a song of his called
"Love's Sweet Illusions."
"I have not written a song of that name; I never write ballads," said
the musician, crushingly, as he opened the piano.
"Something stormy, please," said Lady Joan, carelessly; "it is so hot
that if you played anything sentimental I think it might affect even my
unmusical nerves."
"Something of your own," said Norah. They were the first words she had
spoken, and the musician glanced nervously in her direction.
He sat down and played the song he had just written, and hummed the
words to show how it went. They were taken from the "Shaving of
Shagpat," and the music was full of the reckless passion and meaning of
the original.
"Whether we die or we live,
Matters it now no more;
Life hath naught further to give;
Love is its crown and its core;
Come to us either, we're rife,--
Death or life!
"Death can take not away,
Darkness and light are the same;
We are beyond the pale ray,
Wrapt in a rosier flame;
Welcome which will to our breath,--
Life or Death!"
When he began to play, all the stormy and conflicting feelings of the
last few hours passed through his mind, and he was seized with the
grimness and humor of the situation in which he found himself, and he
played better than either of the two women, who were so strangely woven
into his life, had ever heard him play before. When he reached the
second verse he stopped humming the words, though none of them noticed
it; and when he came to the end no one spoke for some seconds.
The musician was thinking that he knew now which one he wanted to marry,
and that it did not matter if his love affairs went wrong so long as
there was music to be made.
Lady Joan went on with her shawl, and reflected that if she lived to be
a hundred she should never understand musical people or their ways.
Norah lay with her brown eyes full of tears, and she was thinking that
love was the strongest thing in the world, for it could outlive its
ideals.
The curate was not thinking at all, and he got up and put down his cup
with a clatter.
"Very sweet and pretty," he said; "it quite reminds me of a little
Italian thing I once heard on a military band at Leamington. Have you
ever taken the waters at Leamington, Mr. Raleigh?"
"Play something else," said Lady Joan, abruptly, for the spell was
working well, she thought, and she smiled triumphantly again at the
tears in Norah's eyes.
This time Lady Joan walked to the window and stepped out on the terrace.
"Have you seen the lake in moonlight, Mr. Johnson?" she called out when
the music stopped; and the curate followed her into the garden.
The musician crossed over to the couch by the other window, and sat down
on a chair close to it.
"Norah," he said in a low tone, "do you know when I wrote the last thing
I played?"
She said nothing, and her fingers trembled.
"I wrote it when you went away, last time, with your father. It was full
of tears for you."
She still kept her face turned from him, and she spoke almost in a
whisper.
"And the other? The song?"
"Guess," he said, also in a whisper.
She swept her tearful eyes round upon him searchingly, hungrily.
"Was it this evening--after--?"
He bowed his head gravely. Her hands went out to him impetuously.
"Oh, Digby, did it make you feel all that?"
* * * * *
"There is no doubt," said Lady Joan, loudly, "that our sympathies or our
antipathies make us sometimes imagine a likeness where it cannot exist.
I remember when I was a small child and came to stay with my great-uncle
here, I used to invent every kind of excuse for going down to the
post-office, because I thought the boy behind the counter was like a
cousin of mine I had a romantic admiration for at the time. And of
course you know how there are some days when everybody in the street
reminds you of some one you don't want to meet, and others when you feel
you have not the least affinity to your own sister. The fact is, family
likeness is all rubbish, like most of the traditions we have grown up
with; I mean, there is just as much chance of two strangers being alike,
which you have just proved yourself, Mr. Johnson, by supposing Mr.
Raleigh and my little friend Norah to be brother and sister. Shall we go
in, now, or would you like another turn round the garden?"
The curate felt he had been sufficiently battered in that one brief
stroll to the lake, and he consulted his watch and said he had some work
waiting for him at home. So they came back again through the open
window, and found Norah still lying on the couch, and the musician on
the low chair at her side.
"What a horrid little man," said Lady Joan, when the curate had left.
"Is he?" said Norah, vaguely.
"Oh, I don't think he's bad," said the musician, cheerfully.
Their hostess made a huge effort, and preserved her smile.
"It may be because I had to entertain him," she said, knitting busily
at her large white shawl.
"Why didn't you leave him alone?" they asked, with the sublime innocence
of the selfish.
"Because that was what you did," she replied.
"Oh, but we thought you were getting on so well with him," said Norah.
"Besides," added Digby, "you need not have asked him into the garden."
"Perhaps I needn't," said Lady Joan, and counted her stitches.
"I am so dreadfully worried about something," she said, presently.
"What about?" they asked, feeling that it had somehow been the
atmosphere of the whole day.
"The dilapidation of my pig-styes; Jones says two of them will go on for
some time, but the others want repairing. Now, is it worth while to have
two repaired, or shall I wait until they all fall to pieces, and put up
brick ones?"
"That is a question," said Norah, gravely.
The musician laughed heartily.
"What a fuss ladies make about trifles. If you had a man to manage your
affairs--"
"But I haven't," she said quickly, and looked him full in the face; "I
thought of getting one, but--it has fallen through."
The musician did not laugh any more, and Norah's big eyes began to shine
again. Lady Joan felt she had fully deserved that little bit of revenge.
But it was not amusing enough to carry any further, and she was
beginning to weary of the protracted love-making of the day, especially
now that she was no longer a principal actor in the play. So she folded
up her work elaborately, and pinned it in a white silk handkerchief, and
put her hand on her mouth to conceal a yawn.
"It has been the longest day I have ever spent. I suppose it is the
weather. Would you shut the piano, Mr. Raleigh? You look tired to death,
Norah, and I am going to take you to bed. Come along at once, please."
They all rose to their feet, and there was an embarrassing moment. But
Lady Joan took another little bit of revenge here, and kept her arm
round Norah's waist, and her sharp eyes on both of them.
"You will come to breakfast to-morrow, and bring Sonny with you? Say
good-night and come, Norah, I am so sleepy."
So they all shook hands frigidly, and the musician asked what time
breakfast was; and they left him alone in the long drawing-room, and
went upstairs. Lady Joan still found him there when she came down again,
half-an-hour later; he was at the piano, but he got up as she came in.
"You are the finest woman I ever met," he said with emotion.
She made a gesture of impatience.
"Don't cover me with virtues I don't possess; I can't stand it," she
said sharply; she had a very unmusical voice, he thought. "Don't you
know that my god is expediency? It is the only one that is any good for
this world. I don't want you to marry Norah, or I should not have come
back to the inn to ask you to marry me. Do you suppose my pride suffered
nothing by that? However, you are going to marry her because it is
absolutely the only way out of it, and I have been obliged to give in to
you both. But for Heaven's sake don't imagine I am doing it from
unselfishness, or any of that bosh, because I'm not."
"Then you have not forgiven me?" he asked humbly.
"I shall never forgive you," said Lady Joan, decidedly; "is it not an
insult that you should suppose me capable of forgiveness?"
"Perhaps it is," said the musician, thoughtfully. "Why was I born so
accursedly unlucky?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you. But you seem to be going to have all you
want now, so it is about time you ceased railing at your fate. I suppose
if I were properly unselfish I should efface myself at once, and part
from you in an affecting scene. But the people who make affecting
scenes are apt to forget that they have got to meet again afterwards as
ordinary actors in an ordinary play, and then the memory of the
affecting scene makes them sheepish; so I prefer to tell you that I am
merely and vulgarly angry with you for inviting me to make a fool of
myself. Not that I envy that poor child upstairs either; she doesn't
understand you a bit, and you will wound her half-a-dozen times a day.
It is not my affair, however, and you will have to get through it
together somehow; I wash my hands of you both."
The musician said he thought they might manage it, perhaps; and Lady
Joan pulled down the blind in eloquent silence, and rang the bell. He
took the hint and held out his hand.
"Good-night. You will come to breakfast?"
"Since you say so; I always do what you tell me," he said, with truth.
"No, you don't," she contradicted, "or you would never have cajoled me
into saying I would marry you. If you had done what I told you to-day
all this trouble would not have arisen. How brutally forgetful men are!"
Which was hardly fair of her, he thought, as it was his distinct
recollection that she had really ended in asking him to marry her, and
had hardly waited for his assent to the proposal; if she had meant what
she said in the castle meadow, and kept to it, there would have been no
complications at all. And the musician finished his cigar in the orchard
of the "Relton Arms," and came to the conclusion that Lady Joan with all
her excellent qualities had an unpleasant amount of worldly wisdom and
egoism in her composition, which he had never discovered until he had
seen it contrasted with the womanly innocence of his dear little
betrothed.
"How brutally forgetful men are!" were the words that remained on the
lips of the worldly wise woman all through that hot night in August.