“ Life is a glorious thing,” said the girl.
Sylvester Lanyon looked at her half in amusement, half in wistfulness.
There was no doubt whatever of her sincerity. Therein lay the pathetic.
To reply that the shadow of death and suffering clouded life's glory was
too obvious a rejoinder. So he smiled and said,--
“Well?”
“We ought to conquer it, make it our own, and live it to the full.”
“If it is to be conquered by us weak wretches, it can't be such a
glorious thing,” he remarked.
“But who said we were weak wretches?” she retorted. “You're not one,
and I'm not one!” She laughed, flushing a little. “No, I'm not,” she
repeated.
If Sylvester Lanyon had been endowed with the power of graceful words,
here was a chance for a pretty compliment. It was challenged by the
girl's self-conscious glance and by the splendid vitality of her youth;
for Ella Defries usually carried the air of a conqueror with a certain
sweet insolence. Some such idea passed vaguely through his mind, but,
unable to express it, he said, shifting his ground lamely,--
“You see I'm getting elderly.”
“Nonsense!” she said. “You're only five and thirty. My own age to a
day.”
“I don't quite follow,” said he.
“A woman is always ten years older than a man. You ought to know that.”
“And that proves?”
“That you ought to go into the world and win fame and mix with the
brilliant men and women in London who can appreciate you.”
“I don't want to mix with more brilliant men and women than those who
are under this _roof of Woodlands_,” said Sylvester.
Ella flushed again, but this time she drooped her eyes and bent her head
over her sewing for some time abandoned. A smile played round her lips.
“Your Aunt Agatha, for instance.”
“No, dear soul. The other two.”
He rose and filled his pipe from a tobacco jar on the mantel-piece.
The room, furnished with the solid mahogany and leather of a bygone
generation, was his father's particular den, where, however, of all
rooms in the house, he was least likely to find the privacy for which it
was set apart. Ella, during her periodical visits to Ayresford, calmly
monopolised it; Sylvester strolled in naturally from his widowed house
over the way; Miss Agatha Lanyon, although she pretended to cough at
the smoke, would leave her knitting promiscuously about on chairs
and tables, while the little grandchild Dorothy spilled the ink with
impunity over the Turkey carpet.
There was a silence while Sylvester lit his pipe and settled down again
in the leathern armchair by the fire.
“I want no better company than the dear old man's, and yours,” said he.
“My conversation is not fit for an intellectual man,” said Ella, with a
humility that contrasted with her conquering attitude of a few moments
before.
“You are a very clever girl,” said Sylvester.
She shook her head with a little air of scorn and threw her sewing on
the table.
“Oh, no. It pleases my vanity to think so. But what do I know in
comparison with you? What can I do? You go to a bedside and hold the
keys of life and death in your hand. To you, all the hidden forces and
mysteries of nature are every-day commonplaces. Professor Steinthal of
Vienna, whom I met the other day at Lady Milmo's, told me that, if you
chose, you could become the greatest bacteriologist in Europe.”
“Did he say that?” asked Sylvester, eagerly.
“Yes, and that is why you ought to go away and live in London and fulfil
your life gloriously.”
A look of amusement came into his grave eyes, and lit for a moment the
sombreness of a face prematurely careworn.
“I _am_ going to London,” he said. “I sold the practice this morning.”
Ella rose from her chair impetuously. “Why didn't you tell me at once,
instead of letting me say all these silly things? It is just like a
man.”
“You took my apathy so much for granted,” he said, laughing.
“I suppose I am a weak wretch, after all,” said Ella.
Sylvester put down his pipe and stood by her side.
“It is really all your doing, Ella. This is not the first time you have
pointed out my way to me. And it won't be the last, will it?”
There was a note of pathetic appeal in his tone that made her heart beat
a little faster. Of all the phases of his manhood that her instinctive
feminine alertness had caused him to present to her, this one moved her
the most strongly. An unwonted shy tenderness came into her eyes.
“It is for you to settle that,” she said.
He looked at her for a moment as if about to speak, but some inward
conflict seemed to check the words. A man's memories and dead loves rise
up sometimes and stare at him in sad reproach.
“I wish I had the gift of speech,” he said.
“What do you want to say?” she asked gently.
He smiled whimsically. “If I could tell you that, I should have the
gift.”
“You'll let me see something of you in London, won't you?”
“Why, of course! Whom else should I want to see? Frodsham's practice is
a large one--I am buying a share, you know. A specialist generally has
his hands full. I shall have neither the time nor the desire to go
about butterflying. Besides, it is only a few people that like me. I'm
generally looked upon as a 'stick.'”
His head had been turned aside; and while there had been no danger of
his glance, Ella had scanned his face as a girl does that of a
man who is already something more to her than friend or brother. It
was thin and intellectual, somewhat careworn, with deep vertical lines
between the brows. The hair was black and wavy, thinning a little over
the temples; the features well cut and sensitive; the eyes, deeply
sunken, possessing keenness, but little brilliance; a moustache,
standing well away at each end from the cheeks, accentuated their sharp
contours. Yet in spite of the intellectual delicacy of the face, the
tanned, rough skin, corresponding with the well-knit wiriness of his
frame, gave assurance of strong physical health.
The last epithet in his remarks, so at variance with the character she
was idealising from her scrutiny, moved her ready indignation.
“I should like to have, a quarter of an hour with the fool that said
so!” she exclaimed.
“You are loyal to your friends,” said Sylvester.
They discussed the point. Ella let loose the fine scorn of five and
twenty for the shallow society that could not appreciate a man of his
calibre. Her championship was sweet for him to hear. For some time
past he had been gradually growing conscious of the force that this
sympathetic intelligence and this warm nature were bringing into his
life. Unwittingly he had revealed the fact to Ella. As woman, and
especially the fresh girl, is responsive, and gives bit by bit of
herself, as it is craved, Ella, when she looked into her heart, found
much that had been yielded. The situation therefore was sweet and
delicate.
“My going will be a blow to my father,” he said after a while. “I hardly
like to tell him.”
“He wouldn't stand in your way,” said Ella. “He's not like that. We have
talked it over scores of times. He is as anxious as I am for you to take
your proper place in the world.”
“Dear old fellow,” said Sylvester, his face brightening. “He would cut
off both his feet for me, gladly. But he would feel the pain all the
same.”
“Yes, who wouldn't love him?” said Ella.
“I wish I had a father.”
“We'll go shares in him,” said Sylvester.
“His heart is big enough.”
And again the girl coloured and felt very happy, as if the puzzle of her
life were being explained to her.
“And Dorothy?”
“That's where the difficulty comes in. Would London be good for her?”
“Why not leave her here?”
Ella looked at him sharply and saw, as she had expected, the alarm on
his face.
“You don't know what she is to me,” he said.
“It would cheer Uncle Matthew when you 're gone. He is devoted to her.”
He was silent awhile. The thought of parting from the child, the living
memory of his dead wife; was a pang whose intensity he could not express
even to Ella. She was seven. For four years he had brought her up alone
in his own house, under the care of an old family servant who had taught
her to read, and say her prayers, and use her knife and fork in a way
befitting her station. The rest of her tiny education Sylvester himself
had seen to. She was his constant companion, abroad and at home.
He could talk to her as it was in his power to--talk to no one else,
almost persuading himself that her innocent clear eyes saw into the
depths of his heart. To leave her behind was a prospect filled with
unspeakable dismay.
“It's a weary world,” he said, by way of generalisation.
“It isn't!” cried Ella. “It's a glorious world, full of love and heroism
and beauty. I won't have my dear world abused! It is sweet to be alive
in it, to use all one's faculties, to go about among men and women, to
hear the rain, to smell the hay--”
“And get hay fever and then come to me--the misanthrope--to cure you.
Paganism generally ends that way.”
“I should call your being able to cure me a very beautiful thing too,”
she exclaimed conclusively. “Isn't your knowledge of healing a glorious
thing?”
“Oh, don't tell me about the child gathering pebbles by the sea-shore.”
It was modesty on Newton's part, but mock modesty on that of the people
who quote him now. “Children can pick up a tremendous lot of pebbles in
two hundred years!”
The door opened and Matthew Lanyon stood on the threshold, with an
amused smile on his grave face. For the girl had been speaking with
animation, and the fresh colour in her cheeks and the happiness in her
eyes made her goodly to look upon.
“Syl annihilated as usual?” he asked, coming forward.
“I hope so. He won't be converted, Uncle Matthew. What do you think of
the world? Isn't it a beautiful world?”
“Since it holds you, my dear, how could it be otherwise?”
She laughed and looked at Sylvester with some coquetry. Here was a
lesson in compliment by which he might profit. Sylvester thrust forward
an armchair for his father.
“Tired?”
“Of course not. What has a healthy man got to do with being tired? No,
my dear Ella, please don't. You know I disapprove of cushions. They are
for the young and delicate.”
“Where shall we haye tea?” asked Ella. “Here, or in the drawing-room?
Aunt Agatha is in her district.”
“Oh, here, then, by all means. We can have it comfortably.”
Ella rang the bell and cleared an occasional table of a litter of pipes,
cigar-boxes, and papers. Matthew Lanyon lay back in his chair with the
air of a man who had earned his home comforts, and stretched out his
feet to the fire. Then he put his invariable question,--
“How's Dorothy?”
Sylvester replied, gave the usual bulletin as to her health, recounted
the small incidents in the child's day. She had driven with him on his
rounds that morning; during one of the waits had urgently requested
Peck, the coachman, to die forthwith--straight and stiff--so that she
might have the pleasure of seeing how her father brought him to life
again. Her mind had been much exercised by a picture in the Family Bible
of the raising of Jairus' daughter, and had identified her parent with
the chief actor in the scene.
Tea arrived during the narration. Matthew listened with amused interest,
for his son and his son's child were the dearest things earth held for
him. His wife had died many years ago, when Sylvester was just emerging
from boyhood and the great glory had gone out of his heaven. But his
love for Sylvester had deepened, and of late years the sad parallelism
of their widowed lives had drawn the two men very near together. In many
ways they were singularly alike, the mere facial resemblance
stamping them at the first glance as father and son; both were grave,
intellectual-looking men, of the same clean, wiry make, with an air
of reserve and good breeding that commanded respect. But the older man
possessed that peculiar grace of manner, called nowadays of the old
school, which the brusquer habits of more modern times have forbidden to
flourish. Both faces bore the marks of suffering; but the passage of the
years had chastened that of the father, who looked more frankly at the
world than the son and out of kindlier grey eyes. He was a little over
sixty, his hair whitening fast; still he held himself erect, and scoffed
satirically at old age.
“The prime of life, my dear sir,” he would say, “the heyday of
existence! Up to sixty a man gathers his experience and tears his
fingers dreadfully. After sixty he can sit down quietly and enjoy it and
let his fingers heal.”
There was a pause in the talk, and the three sat, as they often did,
content to be together, looking into the fire and thinking their own
thoughts. Perhaps the girl's were the happiest. The room had darkened,
and the firelight played on their faces gathered round the hearth.
Suddenly Sylvester spoke.
“I was talking to Ella about my plans, father, before you came in.”
“A very sensible person to talk to,” said Matthew.
“I've burned my ships. I have sold the practice and am going to join
Frodsham in London.”
“I'm very glad indeed to hear it,” said the old man; “you should have
done it years ago.”
His voice was suave and even, but the keen eye of the physician detected
a trembling of the fingers resting on the broad leathern arm of the
chair.
“I don't at all like to leave you,” said Sylvester, feeling guilty.
Matthew waved away the reluctance.
“Nonsense, my boy. I'm not a cripple that requires to be taken care of.
Grown up men can't be for ever hanging on to--I was going to say, to
each other's apron strings. London is your place. Perhaps after a time,
when I am dead and gone,--a man must die some day, you know,--you'll
like to come back to the old house and devote yourself entirely to
research and be independent of two guinea fees and that kind of thing.
That would be nice, wouldn't it, Ella?”
The girl's heart throbbed at the share implied, but a tenderer feeling
quieted it at once.
“It would be impossible without you, Uncle Matthew,” she said.
He rose with a laugh. “None of us are indispensable, not even the most
futile. I'm going to dress. You'll dine here, of course, Syl? And, Ella,
tell them to get up some of the '84' Pommery to drink good luck to Syl.”
He walked out of the room with the brisk air of a man thoroughly pleased
with life; but outside, in the passage, his face grew sad, and he
mounted the stairs to his dressing-room very slowly, holding on to the
balusters.
The younger folks remained for a while longer in the library. Sylvester
bent forward and broke a great lump of coal with the poker.
“I'm not fit to black his boots, you know, My companionship means much
more to him than Dorothy's does to me, and he gives it up without a
murmur.”
“And that settles the Dorothy question?” asked Ella, in the direct
manner that sometimes embarrassed him.
“Of course it settles it,” he cried warmly. “What a selfish beast you
must have thought me!”
“If you didn't love others so warmly, I shouldn't--”
She came to a dead stop because his eyes were full upon her.
“Well?”
“I shouldn't care for you so much.”
“Do you care very much for me?” he asked rather wistfully, and came to
where she was standing with one foot on the fender.
“You know I would do anything in the world you asked,” she answered in a
low voice.
“Some day I may claim your promise.”
“You know I always keep my promises,” she said.
The dressing bell clanged loudly through the house. Sylvester hurriedly
departed so as to dress in time for dinner. But Ella lingered by the
fire, the girl in her wondering whether she had said too much, and
the woman in her filled with a delicious pity for the strong-brained,
deep-natured man who seemed dumbly to be holding out his hands for her
love. She gave it generously and gratefully. Compared with him, all
other men seemed of small account, and in her aunt Lady Milmo's house,
where most of her life was spent, she had seen all the sorts and
conditions of males that a well-to-do collector of minor celebrities can
gather around her in London. But to her direct mind the truest men of
her acquaintance were Matthew Lanyon, her former guardian, whose title
of uncle was purely one of courtesy, and Sylvester, with whom the old
quasi-cousinly relations were being transmuted into sweeter ties.