The little grey ghost which visited Gertrude Carston in the early
morning, soon became a _habitué_ of her waking hours. He was a very
importunate little ghost, and having once been given the _entrée_, he
concluded that he was always welcome. But, though he was unpleasant
enough at the time, he was slightly medicinal in character, or rather,
not so much medicinal as health-giving. He did not exactly correct
existing defects, but opened fresh springs within her. So far, however,
he was medicinal, in that he was operative after the dose, which always
continued bitter to the taste. But the bitterness was a good bitterness,
and occasioned not discontent with Reggie, but discontent with herself,
and it is always worth a good deal of bitterness to become wholesomely,
not morbidly, discontented with oneself. She began to see in her nature
unsuspected limitations, a thing quite as salutary, though not perhaps
so pleasant, as the sight of unsuspected distances. A consciousness of
unsuspected distance is liable to breed content, which is more injurious
to the average mind--and she was quite average--than the discouraging
discovery of a near horizon of unsuspected limitations, for the latter
cause a revolt of something within us--which some call pride, and others
spiritual aspiration--which refuses to acquiesce, and insists on those
limitations becoming merely landmarks and milestones.
And, indeed, to see such a limitation is a long step towards correcting
it. The young mind, to which growth is as natural as it is to the young
body, if it has any of that irrepressible, unconscious elasticity,
which is the main characteristic of its divine remoteness from age,
will never acquiesce in a limitation it sees. It will, somehow or other,
clamber over that horizon's rim, and though it may get many a fall,
though it may be benighted and foot-sore and weary, that same divine
youthfulness, which heals its physical fibres when they are bruised or
cut, will repair its mental fibres. Its potentialities for recuperation
are as strong as its refusal to be bounded. Youth may be crude,
exaggerated, headstrong, but when the advocates of a temperate and
bloodless senility have said all they can against it, they must confess
that it is young.
What made this inward struggle so trying to Gertrude was, that she was
unable, from the essential nature of it, to guess what was happening.
All she knew was the sense of tangible limitations and dim tracts
beyond, and an imperative necessity to flounder, as best she could,
towards them. But she found much comfort in her love for Reggie, and in
the knowledge of his love for her; she felt as if she was following some
thin golden thread through a maze of bewildering twilight, but while
that was secure in her hand, the maze and the twilight and the
bewilderment were comparatively unimportant.
The Davenports had moved up to London in April, and Gertrude was with
them again for a week before she went abroad to Aix with her mother in
May. Mrs. Carston was a weak, fretful invalid, who always insisted on
her daughter's cheerful and robust support while she went through a
course of somewhat unnecessary baths and massages. The great city was
just beginning to settle down to its great effort of amusing itself for
three months, and the _Morning Post_ recorded, morning by morning, some
fresh additions to the big fair. The Davenports, in virtue of Mr.
Davenport's modest contribution to the task of governing the nation, had
been duly entered on the books for the year, and their blinds in
Grosvenor Square testified to the accuracy of the announcement.
Reggie and Gertrude were sitting in the dining-room about half-past ten
one morning. Reggie was apt to treat breakfast as a movable feast, and
this morning he had been out riding till after ten, and had only just
come back. It was a hot, bright day, and he had taken the liberty, which
had broadened down from precedent to custom, to ride in a straw hat.
This particular straw hat was new, and had a very smart I. Z. ribbon
round it, and Gertrude was seeing how it would look on her. She was
suffering from a slight cold, and had not gone out with him, but she
found it pleasant enough to wait, after she had finished breakfast, and
skim the daily papers till he returned.
She was deeply absorbed in the total disappearance of a French poodle
when Reggie entered after dressing, and she laid down the paper to pour
out tea for him.
"The Row was fuller this morning," said he, "and the Parliamentary train
was in great force."
"What's the Parliamentary train?"
"Oh! the string of people who walk up and down very slowly, with a row
of grooms behind; you know the sort."
"Any one there you knew?"
"Yes; several people. Gerty, give me another bit of sugar. Percy was
there, looking for his sister. Apparently they've come back. Jim Armine
was there too, also looking for Percy's sister."
"Lady Hayes?"
"Yes," said Reggie, eating steadily on. "I went and looked too. But we
couldn't find her. By the way, Percy wants us to go there to lunch."
Gertrude had a sudden sense that all this had happened before, that she
was going to act again in a rather distasteful scene. She had a sudden,
instinctive desire not to go there, a quite irrational dislike to the
idea.
"Oh! I can't," she said. "I've got a cold."
Reggie looked up innocently.
"Oh! I'm so sorry for not asking. Is it worse? Poor dear!"
Gertrude had a quite unusual dislike of white, excusable lies.
"No, it's not worse; it's rather better," she said.
"Let's go, then."
"Oh! I don't want to, Reggie," she said. "I want to go to the concert at
St. James'. They're going to do the Tannhäuser overture."
"That's Wagner, isn't it?" said Reggie, doubtfully. "I think Wagner is
ugly."
"Oh, you exceedingly foolish boy," said Gertrude. "You might as well
call a storm at sea ugly."
"I don't care," said Reggie, "I think it is hideous. Besides, I want to
go to the Hayes."
"Oh, well, then you just sha'n't," said Gertrude. "Really, I want to go
awfully to this."
"But it'll be much worse for your cold than going out to lunch."
"Oh, I give up my cold," said she. "I haven't got one, really."
Reggie ate marmalade attentively.
"Do take me to the concert," said Gertrude. "I'm going away in two days.
You can go and lunch with the Hayes then. It's a waste of time going out
to lunch."
"You see, I promised to go to the Hayes," he said.
"Oh, nonsense! Send a note to say you have got to go to the concert.
It's quite true; you have got to go."
"Of course, if I have got to--" said he slowly.
"That's right. It begins at three, doesn't it? No; don't say we can do
both, because it is quite impossible. You're very good to me, Reggie."
Gertrude felt intensely relieved, but she could not have told why. There
had been something in the conversation she had held with Reggie, six
months before, on the subject of Eva, which remained in her mind, and
gave her a sense, not of danger, but of distrust. A sensitive mind need
not, usually is not, the most analytical, and for this reason, to apply
analysis to her unwillingness to see Eva, would yield either no results,
or false ones. There is an instinct in animals which enables them to
discriminate between their friends and their foes, and the keener that
instinct is, the more instantaneous it is in its working. The anatomist
can tell us the action of the heart with almost absolute accuracy; he
can say how the blood gets oxydised in the lungs, how it feeds the
muscles and works the nerves--but the one thing he cannot tell us is,
why it does so. And these instincts, like the action of the heart, can
be noted and expressed, but the reason of their working we shall not
know just yet. An action may be pulled to pieces like a flower, and
divided into its component parts, and labelled with fifty crack-jaw
names, but the life of the flower ceases not to be a delicate, insoluble
mystery to us.
Reggie was very fond of music, but it was compatible, or rather
essential, that his particular liking for it prompted him to say that
Wagner seemed to him to be "awfully ugly." Nor was it such a far cry
that he should assert, that same evening to Gertrude, that he had
thought the "Overture to Tannhäuser" "awfully pretty."
Gertrude had been rather silent as they drove back. But something had
prompted her to say to Reggie that evening, as they sat in the
drawing-room before dinner:
"Ah! Reggie, I am so glad you are good."
Reggie's powers of analysis were easily baffled, and it is no wonder
that he felt puzzled.
"I don't like bad people," he said.
"Nor do I, a bit," said Gertrude. "I am glad you don't either. I thought
of that this afternoon at the concert."
"Oh! I listened to the music," said Reggie. "I liked it awfully."
"Yes, I know, but it suggested that to me. Half of the overture--all
that rippling part seemed so wicked. I think Wagner must have been a bad
man. He evidently meant it to be much more attractive than the other."
"I don't see how you can say some parts are wicked and some good. It's
all done on the fiddles, you know."
Gertrude laughed.
"I hope you'll never understand, then," she said. "I prefer you as you
are. After all, that matters a great deal."
The gong had sounded, and Mrs. Davenport, as she entered the room, heard
the last words.
"What doesn't Reggie understand?" she asked.
"Gertrude said she thought some of the overture was wicked," said he,
"and I said I didn't know what she meant. Is it very stupid of me?"
Mrs. Davenport looked up quickly at Gertrude.
"No, dear; I think it's very wise of you," she said.
Reggie jumped up.
"I didn't know I was ever wise," he said. "It's really a delightful
discovery. Thank you, mummy. Gerty, you'll have to respect me for ever,
now you know I'm wise. I shall invest in a sense of dignity."
"I never said you were wise," remarked Gertrude, "and I refuse to be
responsible for any opinions but my own."
"Oh, I'll be responsible," murmured Mrs. Davenport.
Reggie looked from one to the other with the air of an intelligent dog.
"I daresay it's all right," he said, "but I don't know what it's all
about."
"Oh! Reggie, you do understand," said Gertrude; "don't be ridiculous."
Reggie looked at her with the most genuine frankness.
"I don't understand a word, but I should like you to explain it very
much."
Gertrude frowned and turned away to greet Jim Armine, who was dining
with them. The vague pain which she had felt before was with her now.
Somehow, she and Reggie seemed to have got on to different levels. It
was his moral, not his intellectual, understanding which appeared to her
every now and then as almost entirely wanting. What puzzled her was that
she had been entirely unconscious of any such defect till a few months
ago, and her present knowledge of it struck her somehow as not being the
natural outcome of increased intimacy, but rather as if her own moral
understanding, by which she judged Reggie, had been developed and showed
the want of it in him. But here again the vague instinctiveness of the
feeling in her mind precluded analysis. All she knew was that she viewed
things rather differently from him, and that this difference had not
always been there. But pity is akin to love, and love, when joined with
pity, is not less love, but love joined to the most human protective
instinct, which, if anything, adds tenderness to passion.
Jim Armine had been lunching with the Hayes, and brought a minatory
message for Reggie. Why had he said he would come to lunch and bring
Miss Carston, and then never turned up.
Reggie behaved in the most unchivalrous manner.
"It was all Gerty's fault," he said. "She made me go to hear music."
"But you wrote to say so, didn't you, Reggie?"
Reggie began to wish he had taken the blame on himself.
"Yes, I _wrote_," he said.
"And forgot to send it," interpolated Mrs. Davenport. "Reggie, you are
simply abominable. You must go to call, and explain."
"Oh, you can write a note to say how sorry you are," said Gertrude,
suddenly.
The remark was insignificant enough, but to Gertrude it was the outcome
of a feeling not at all insignificant. She felt as if she had
inadvertently said something she did not mean to say, without reflecting
that, to the others, the words were capable of a much less momentous
interpretation. She looked up quickly at Mrs. Davenport, fearing for a
moment that her self-betrayal was patent. Mrs. Davenport also remembered
at the moment a certain conversation which she and Gertrude had had one
night some months ago, and their eyes met. That look puzzled the elder
woman; she had not fathomed Gertrude's feeling on the subject of Lady
Hayes, when she spoke to her about her, and the mystery remained still
unsolved. The idea that Gertrude was in any way the prey of a jealous
fear was too ridiculous to be entertained.
The Dowager Lady Hayes, who was staying with them, entered somewhat
opportunely at this moment, followed by Mr. Davenport, and they all went
in to dinner. That veteran lady appeared to be in a state of mind
which, when it occurs in children, is called fractiousness.
She always took a homoeopathic dose in globular form before dinner,
which was placed in a little wooden box by her place, but to-night the
dose had not been set out, and she disconcerted everybody horribly by
saying, during the first moment of silence, inevitable, when English
people meet to dine together, and in a voice of stentorian power,--
"My dinner pills."
A hurried consultation took place among the flunkies, and, after a few
moments' search, the box was found, and handed to her on a salver. Old
Lady Hayes held them up a moment and rattled them.
"Pepsine," she announced; "obtained from the gastric juices of pigs. An
ostrich couldn't eat the food we eat, and at these hours, without
suffering from indigestion. I would sooner eat a box of tin tacks than
an ordinary English dinner at half-past eight, without my pepsine."
Mrs. Davenport cast a responsible eye over the _menu_, which, to the
ordinary mind, appeared sufficiently innocent. She was always divided
between the inclination to laugh and to be polite when dealing with Lady
Hayes, which produced an inability to say anything.
Eva, as we have seen, adopted a different method; she neither laughed
nor was she polite, but she was respectfully insolent, which is a very
different matter. The utter indifference of her manner produced a sort
of chemical affinity in those widely-sundered qualities, just as
electricity produces a chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen,
which turns them into pure water, though both gases seem sufficiently
remote, to the unchemical mind, from their product.
"_Soufflé_," continued the dowager, glancing down the _menu_, "when
composed of meat--that is, of nitrogenous substance--is utterly
unsuitable to human food. It produces a distention--"
But Mrs. Davenport broke in,--
"Dear Lady Hayes, let me send for the wing of a chicken. I know you like
chicken wing."
A sigh resembling relief went round the table. Mrs. Davenport had broken
the charmed circle, who were waiting, like the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah, for the unaccountable brimstone to descend on them. Reggie
began to talk very rapidly about the Ascot cup; Jim Armine engaged Mrs.
Davenport on the Irish question; and Mr. Davenport, by way of
transition, asked Lady Hayes whether gas was not very unhealthy.
But the subject of gas did not appear to interest the old lady. She
wished to talk about something else, and when she wished to do anything,
she did it.
"My daughter-in-law--" she began.
Reggie was still discussing, or rather enunciating, truths or untruths
on the chances of Orme, and Lady Hayes's words did not reach him. But
Lady Hayes was accustomed to demand a universal deference and attention
for her remarks. So she glared at Reggie, who soon caught her eye--it
was impossible not to catch her eye very soon when it meant
business--and subsided.
"My daughter-in-law," repeated the dowager--"whom I saw this afternoon,
driving a dogcart in the Park--it was quite unheard of for a young woman
to drive a dogcart alone when I was young--asked me to tell you all to
keep Monday week open. She is sending out cards for a dance on that
day--or rather she has sent them out, and she forgot to send them to
you. Therefore I am a penny postman. She would be glad to see you all.
Personally, I think the dances that are given now are simply disgusting.
They are very unhealthy, because everyone sits up at the time when the
ordinary evening fever sets in; that is, from twelve to two. But I
promised to give her message. I am responsible no further. And the
cotillion is indecent."
Mr. Davenport made a bad matter worse.
"I am sure there will be none of that romping which you so
rightly--ah!--dislike," he said. "I always think--"
But what Mr. Davenport always thought will never be known, for her
ladyship interrupted him.
"It is based on immorality," she announced; "it is an exhibition that
would disgrace any Christian country, and more especially England."
"Why especially England?" asked Jim, who was conscious of a challenge in
her words.
"Because English people seem to pretend to a high morality more than any
other nation."
"And are you cruel enough to include your daughter-in-law in that
category?" asked Jim.
"Eva Hayes is very English," said the old lady.
"I am sure she never made any pretence of an exceptional morality,"
remarked Jim, eating his nitrogenous food, and getting angry.
"No one would accuse her of being exceptionally moral."
"I said she didn't make a pretence of it," said Jim.
Mrs. Davenport threw herself into the breach, and asked the dowager how
digitalis was made.
Gertrude was sitting next Jim Armine, and wished to know more. Old Lady
Hayes was well embarked on the structure of foxglove seeds, and she
turned to Jim.
"You know Lady Hayes very well, don't you?" she asked.
"I was with them in Algiers last year."
"Do you like her very much?"
"That's a wrong word to use, somehow," he said. "I think she is the
cleverest woman I ever saw, and, perhaps, the most interesting," he
added, in a burst of veiled confidence.
"Ah!"--it was somewhat discouraging to hear that so many people took
this as their main characteristic--"I don't know her at all. But I don't
feel as if I should like her."
"I believe women dislike her very much, as a rule," remarked Jim, drily.
Something in his speech made Gertrude angry. It is always annoying,
however modest an opinion we may have of ourselves, to be classed as a
probable example to an universal rule. She waited a moment before she
answered him.
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, there are very few people whom both women and men like much. Of
course, I am not referring to the ordinary, stupid, good-natured people
who are universal favourites--that is to say, whom no one dislikes--but
to the people whom many men or women get excited about. She is one of
those."
Mrs. Davenport was beginning to collect eyes--that is to say, she was
looking at Gertrude, for no one could collect the dowager's eyes--and
Gertrude rose in obedience.
"I think I know what you mean," she said.
Jim was left in excusable uncertainty as to what she meant, and the
ladies left the room.
Mr. Davenport sat down again with an air of relief.
"I have always been considered a strong man," he said, "but, by the side
of that old lady, I am a cripple and a baby. Get the cigarettes,
Reggie."
"She told me that cigarettes were slow but certain death, yesterday,"
remarked Reggie, "but she cannot make me rude to her. It would be such a
pity."
"Oh! she regards you as a possible convert," said Jim. "She hopes that
you will go about with eight holes in your boots before long."
"How does she get on with Percy's sister?" asked Reggie, innocently.
Jim Armine laughed.
"Didn't you know you were her ark? She got routed in several pitched
battles, and retired precipitately."
"That was when you were abroad last year, Reggie," said Mr. Davenport.
"She came here one day with her boxes and medicines, and asked us to
take her in. She gave no reason; but Lady Hayes told your mother."
"Was Lady Hayes so rude to her?"
Jim Armine laughed.
"She was so polite, on the contrary. Don't you know her?"
Gertrude went off next morning to meet Mrs. Carston at Tunbridge, and go
with her to Aix. Reggie went with her to Victoria, and had parting words
on the platform.
"I wish you were coming with me, Reggie," said Gertrude. "We're going to
Lucerne in a month from now, when mother has had her course. That will
be towards the end of June. Do come. It is an awfully nice place, and
you can go up mountains--or row if you like. Will you?"
Reggie thought it a brilliant and feasible idea.
"I don't care a bit about London," he said, "and I do happen to care
about you. It will be lovely. Write to me just before you go there, and
tell me the hotel, and so on. Of course, I'll come. Ah! good-bye,
Gerty."
The train moved slowly out of the station, and Reggie was left standing
on the platform, waiting for it to curl away into the dark arch which
soon swallowed it up. He had lost a great deal, and he went home
somewhat silently.
That evening there was a great reception at one of the Foreign
Embassies. Mrs. Davenport was the sister of the Ambassador's wife, and,
after dinner, she asked whether anybody was going with her. Her husband
eschewed such festivities; like a sensible man, he preferred, he said,
to sit quietly at home, than to stand wedged in among a crowd of people
who didn't care whether they saw him or not, and fight his way into a
stuffy drawing-room. Reggie was sitting in the window, which he had
thrown wide open, and was reading _The Field_. He had written a short
note to Gertrude because he missed her, and as her bodily presence was
not there, he felt it was something to communicate with her, but
letter-writing was a difficulty to him, and the note had been very
short.
An idea seemed to strike Mrs. Davenport when she saw him.
"Reggie, why don't you come?"
"I'll come if you like. Will it be amusing? Yes; I should like to come.
Let me smoke in the carriage, mummy."
The two went downstairs together, and got into the carriage.
"Poor old boy," said Mrs. Davenport, laying her hand on his, "you will
feel rather lonely to-night. I thought you'd like to come."
"It's an awful bore, Gerty having to go away," said Reggie, without any
obvious discontent, "but it's only for a month, you know. I'm going to
join her at Lucerne, if you don't want me. I hope there's something to
do there. She said there were some mountains about. I shall climb."
Mrs. Davenport was conscious of a slight chill.
"Well, there'll be Gerty there," she said.
"Oh, yes; of course," said Reggie. "I shouldn't think of going if she
wasn't there. You said I might smoke, didn't you?"
"I'm very happy about you and Gerty," said Mrs. Davenport, after a
pause. "I should have chosen her of all others for a daughter-in-law."
"Oh! but I chose her first," said Reggie. "That's more important, isn't
it? I wrote her a line this evening. I wish I didn't hate writing
letters so. I can never think of anything to say. What do you say in
letters, mother, you always write such good ones?"
"But you don't find it difficult to talk, Reggie. Why should you find it
difficult to write?"
"Oh! but I do find it difficult to talk," said he. "It's dreadfully
puzzling. I never talk to Gerty."
"Are you always quite silent, then?"
"No; but I don't talk. At least, I suppose I do talk, in a way. I
babble, you know. She does most of the talking."
Mrs. Davenport laughed.
"Babble on paper, then," she said; "Gerty will like it just as well."
"Oh! but I can't. It's so silly if you put it down. Is this the Embassy?
I hope I shall meet a lot of people I know."
Reggie's common sense was enormous. Gertrude had gone away, and she
wouldn't come back for the wishing. He wished she had not gone very
much, but here he was in England without her. Surely England without her
was the same as England with her, except that she was not there. Her
absence, from a practical point of view, did not take the taste out of
everything else. How should it? She was a very charming person, the most
charming person Reggie had ever met. But there were other charming
people, on a distinctly lower level, no doubt, but they did not cease to
be charming because Gertrude had gone to Aix. After all, Reggie agreed
with the great materialistic philosophers of all time, though he had
never read their works. Mrs. Davenport felt somewhat annoyed with this
school of thought as she dismounted from the carriage.
The Embassy stood at the corner of a large square, and a broad, red
carpet ran from the door across to the road, for royalty was expected.
Inside the house the arrangements all corresponded with the magnificent
promise of the red carpet. A row of gorgeous flunkies, a band in the
hall beneath the stairs, several hundred pounds' worth of hot-house
flowers banked up against the wall, a crowd of perfectly-dressed,
bustling aristocrats, crowding up and staring, in the worst possible
breeding, at a small space between two pillars, where three princesses
were looking rather bored, and a similar number of princes were talking
to the few who had managed, by dint of loyal shoves, to edge themselves
into the august presences; the smiling host and hostess, the pleasant
music of women's voices, crossing the somewhat sombre strains of the
band below, all these things are the invariable concomitants of such
festivities, and on the whole one crush is rather like another crush.
Mrs. Davenport and Reggie had moved slowly up the staircase, and Reggie
certainly was finding it amusing. There were lots of people he knew, and
he stood chatting on the stairs while Mrs. Davenport talked for a few
moments to her sister.
Later on he was standing in a doorway between two of the big reception
rooms, talking and laughing, and commanding, by reason of his height, a
good deal of the room beyond, when he saw the crowd by the door opposite
to him sway and move, as if a wind had passed over it; and through the
room, plainly visible, for the crowd made way for her as she was walking
with a prince, came a woman he had never seen before. She was tall,
dressed in some pale, soft material; round her neck went a single row of
diamonds, and above it rose a face for the like of which men have lived
and died. Eva had a habit of looking over people's heads and noticing no
one, but Reggie happened to be six foot three, and in his long, eager
gaze was something that arrested Eva's attention. She looked at him
fixedly and gravely, until the thing became absurd, and then she turned
away with a laugh, and asked who that pretty boy was.
Reggie, when the spell of her look was broken, turned away too, and
asked who the most beautiful woman in the world was.
"There, there," he cried, pointing at her, regardless of men or manners.
So the great loom clashed and crossed, and two more threads were woven,
side by side, into the garment of God.