logic? You think selfishness a vice. None the less you must concede that
the world has invariably progressed because, upon the whole, we find
civilisation to be more comfortable than barbarism; and that a wholesome
apprehension of the penitentiary enables many of us to rise to
deaconships. Why, deuce take it, Jill! I may endow a hospital because I
want to see my name over the main entrance, I may give a beggar a penny
because his gratitude puts me in a glow of benevolence that is cheap at
the price. So let us not rashly declare that selfishness is a vice,
and--let us part friends, my dear."
And I assumed possession of the thin hands that seemed to push me from
her in a species of terror, and I gallantly lifted them to my lips.
The ensuing event was singular. Gillian Hardress turned to the door of
her bedroom and brutally, as with two bludgeons, struck again and again
upon its panels with clenched hand. She extended her hands to me, and
everywhere their knuckles oozed blood. "You kissed them," she said, "and
even today they liked it, and so they are not clean. They will never
again be clean, my dear. But they were clean before you came."
Then Gillian Hardress left me, and where she had touched it, the brass
door knob of her bedroom door was smeared with blood....
4
When I had come again to Lichfield I found that in the brief interim of
my absence Elena Barry-Smith, without announcement, had taken the train
for Washington, and had in that city married Warwick Risby. This was, I
knew, because she comprehended that, if I so elected, it was always in
my power to stop her halfway up the aisle and to dissuade her from
advancing one step farther.... "I don't know _how_ it is!--" she would
have said, in that dear quasi-petulance I knew so well....
But as it was, I met the two one evening at the Provises', and with
exuberant congratulation. Then straddling as a young Colossus on the
hearth-rug, and with an admonitory forefinger, I proclaimed to the
universe at large that Mrs. Risby had blighted my existence and
beseeched for Warwick some immediate and fatal and particularly
excruciating malady. In fine, I was abjectly miserable the while that I
disarmed all comment by being quite delightfully boyish for a whole
two hours.
I must record it, though, that Mrs. Vokins patted my hand when nobody
else was looking, and said: "Oh, my dear Mr. Bob, I wish it had been
you! You was always the one I liked the best." For that, in view of
every circumstance, was humorous, and hurt as only humour can.
So in requital, on the following morning, I mailed to Mrs. Risby some
verses. This sounds a trifle like burlesque; but Elena had always a sort
of superstitious reverence for the fact that I "wrote things." It would
not matter at all that the verses were abominable; indeed, Elena would
never discover this; she would simply set about devising an excellent
reason for not showing them to anybody, and would consider Warwick
Risby, if only for a moment, in the light of a person who, whatever his
undeniable merits, had neither the desire nor the ability to write
"poetry." And, though it was hideously petty, this was precisely what I
desired her to do.
So I dispatched to her a sonnet-sequence which I had originally
plagiarized from the French of Theodore Passerat in honour of Stella. I
loathed sending Stella's verses to anyone else, somehow; but, after all,
my one deterrent was merely a romantic notion; and there was not time to
compose a new set. Moreover, "your eyes are blue, your speech is
gracious, but you are not she; and I am older,--and changed how
utterly!--I am no longer I, you are not you," and so on, was absolutely
appropriate. And Elena most undoubtedly knew nothing of Theodore
Passerat. And Stella, being dead, could never know what I had done.
So I sent the verses, with a few necessitated alterations, to the
address of Mrs. Warwick Risby.
5
I had within the week, an unsigned communication which, for a long while
afterward, I did not comprehend. It was the photograph of an infant,
with the photographer's address scratched from the cardboard and without
of course any decipherable postmark; and upon the back of the thing was
written: "His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, and the
flowers; and gentle ears have listened to him, and gentle eyes have been
upon him. Let others eat his honey that please, so that he has had his
morsel and his song."
I thought it was a joke of some sort.
Then it occurred to me that this might be--somehow--Elena's answer. It
was an interpretation which probably appealed to the Supernal
Aristophanes.
23.
_He Reviles Destiny and Climbs a Wall_
But now the spring was come again, and, as always at this season, I was
pricked with vague longings to have done with roofs and paven places. I
wanted to be in the open. I think I wanted to fall in love with
somebody, and thereby somewhat to prolong the daily half-minute,
immediately after awakening in the morning, during which I did not think
about Elena Risby.
I was bored in Lichfield. For nothing of much consequence seemed, as I
yawned over the morning paper, to be happening anywhere. The Illinois
Legislature had broken up in a free fight, a British square had been
broken in Somaliland, and at the Aqueduct track Alado had broken his
jockey's neck. A mob had chased a negro up Broadway: Russia had demanded
that China cede the sovereignty of Manchuria; and Dr. Lyman Abbott was
explaining why the notion of equal suffrage had been abandoned finally
by thinking people.
Such negligible matters contributed not at all to the comfort or the
discomfort of Robert Etheridge Townsend; and I was pricked with vague
sweet longings to have done with roofs and paven places. If only I
possessed a country estate, a really handsome Manor or a Grange, I was
reflecting as I looked over the "Social Items," and saw that Miss
Hugonin and Colonel Hugonin had re-opened Selwoode for the summer
months....
So I decided I would go to Gridlington, whither Peter Blagden had
forgotten to invite me. He was extremely glad to see me, though, to do
him justice. For Peter--by this time the inheritor of his unlamented
uncle's estate,--had, very properly, developed gout, which is, I take
it, the time-honoured appendage of affluence and, so to speak, its
trade-mark; and was, for all his wealth, unable to get up and down the
stairs of his fine house without, as we will delicately word it, the
display and, at times, the overtaxing of a copious vocabulary.
2
I was at Gridlington entirely comfortable. It was spring, to begin with,
and out of doors in spring you always know, at twenty-five, that
something extremely pleasant is about to happen, and that She is quite
probably around the very next turn of the lane.
Moreover, there was at Gridlington a tiny private garden which had once
been the recreation of Peter Blagden's aunt (dead now twelve years ago),
and which had remained untended since her cosseting; and I in nature
took charge of it.
There was in the place a wilding peach-tree, which I artistically sawed
into shape and pruned and grafted, and painted all those profitable
wounds with tar; and I grew to love it, just as most people do their
children, because it was mine. And Peter, who is a person of no
sensibility, wanted to ring for a servant one night, when there was a
hint of frost and I had started out to put a bucket of water under my
tree to protect it. I informed him that he was irrevocably dead to all
the nobler sentiments, and went to the laundry and got a wash-tub.
Peter was not infrequently obtuse. He would contend, for instance, that
it was absurd for any person to get so gloriously hot and dirty while
setting out plants, when that person objected to having a flower in the
same room. For Peter could not understand that a cut flower is a dead
or, at best, a dying thing, and therefore to considerate people is just
so much abhorrent carrion; and denied it would be really quite as
rational to decorate your person or your dinner table with the severed
heads of chickens as with those of daffodils.
"But that is only because you are not particularly bright," I told him.
"Oh, I suppose you can't help it. But why make _all_ the actions of your
life so foolish? What good do you get out of having the gout, for
instance?"
Whereupon Mr. Blagden desired to be informed if I considered those
with-various-adjectives-accompanied twinges in that qualified foot to be
a source of personal pleasure to the owner of the very-extensively-hiatused
foot. In which case, Mr. Blagden felt at liberty to express his opinion of
my intellectual attainments, which was of an uncomplimentary nature.
"Because, you know," I pursued, equably, "you wouldn't have the gout if
you did not habitually overeat yourself and drink more than is good for
you. In consequence, here you are at thirty-two with a foot the same
general size and shape as a hayrick, only rather less symmetrical, and
quite unable to attend to the really serious business of life, which is
to present me to the heiress. It is a case of vicarious punishment which
strikes me as extremely unfair. You have made of your stomach a god,
Peter, and I am the one to suffer for it. You have made of your
stomach," I continued, venturing aspiringly into metaphor, "a brazen
Moloch, before which you are now calmly preparing to immolate my
prospects in life. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Peter!"
Mr. Blagden's next observation was describable as impolite.
"Fate, too," I lamented, in a tragic voice, "appears to have entered
into this nefarious conspiracy. Here, not two miles away, is one of the
greatest heiresses in America,--clever, I am told, beautiful, I am sure,
for I have yet to discover a woman who sees anything in the least
attractive about her,--and, above all, with the Woods millions at her
disposal. Why, Peter, Margaret Hugonin is the woman I have been looking
for these last three years. She is, to a hair, the sort of woman I have
always intended to make unhappy. And I can't even get a sight of her!
Here are you, laid up with the gout, and unable to help me; and yonder
is the heiress, making a foolish pretence at mourning for the old
curmudgeon who left her all that money, and declining to meet people.
Oh, but she is a shiftless woman, Peter! At this very moment she might
be getting better acquainted with me; at this very moment, Peter, I
might be explaining to her in what points she is utterly and entirely
different from all the other women I have ever known. And she prefers to
immure herself in Selwoode, with no better company than her father, that
ungodly old retired colonel, and a she-cousin, somewhere on the
undiscussable side of forty--when she might be engaging me in amorous
dalliance! That Miss Hugonin is a shiftless woman, I tell you! And
Fate--oh, but Fate, too, is a vixenish jade!" I cried, and shook my fist
under the nose of an imaginary Lachesis.
"You appear," said Peter, drily, "to be unusually well-informed as to
what is going on at Selwoode."
"You flatter me," I answered, as with proper modesty. "You must remember
that there are maids at Selwoode. You must remember that my man Byam,
is--and will be until that inevitable day when he will attempt to
blackmail me, and I shall kill him in the most lingering fashion I can
think of,--that Byam is, I say, something of a diplomatist."
Mr. Blagden regarded me with disapproval.
"So you've been sending your nigger cousin over to Selwoode to spy for
you! You're a damn cad, you know, Bob," he pensively observed. "Now most
people think that when you carry on like a lunatic you're simply acting
on impulse. I don't. I believe you plan it out a week ahead. I sometimes
think you are the most adroit and unblushing looker-out for number one I
ever knew; and I can't for the life of me understand why I don't turn
you out of doors."
"I don't know where you picked up your manners," said I, reflectively,
"but it must have been in devilish low company. I would cut your
acquaintance, Peter, if I could afford it." Then I fell to pacing up and
down the floor. "I incline, as you have somewhat grossly suggested, to a
certain favouritism among the digits. And why the deuce shouldn't I? A
fortune is the only thing I need. I have good looks, you know, of a
sort; ah, I'm not vain, but both my glass and a number of women have
been kind enough to reassure me on this particular point. And that I
have a fair amount of wits my creditors will attest, who have lived
promise-crammed for the last year or two, feeding upon air like
chameleons. Then I have birth,--not that good birth ensures anything but
bad habits though, for you will observe that, by some curious freak of
nature, an old family-tree very seldom produces anything but wild oats.
And, finally, I have position. I can introduce my wife into the best
society; ah, yes, you may depend upon it, Peter, she will have the
privilege of meeting the very worst and stupidest and silliest people in
the country on perfectly equal terms. You will perceive, then, that the
one desirable thing I lack is wealth. And this I shall naturally expect
my wife to furnish. So, the point is settled, and you may give me a
cigarette."
Peter handed me the case, with a snort. "You are a hopelessly conceited
ass," Mr. Blagden was pleased to observe, "for otherwise you would have
learned, by this, that you'll, most likely, never have the luck of
Charteris, and land a woman who will take it as a favour that you let
her pay your bills. God knows you've angled for enough of 'em!"
"You are painfully coarse, Peter," I pointed out, with a sigh. "Indeed,
your general lack of refinement might easily lead one to think you owed
your millions to your own thrifty industry, or some equally unpleasant
attribute, rather than to your uncle's very commendable and lucrative
innovation in the line of--well, I remember it was something extremely
indigestible, but, for the moment, I forget whether it was steam-reapers
or a new sort of pickle. Yes, in a great many respects, you are
hopelessly parvenuish. This cigarette-case, for instance--studded with
diamonds and engraved with a monogram big enough for a coach-door! Why,
Peter, it simply reeks with the ostentation of honestly acquired
wealth,--and with very good tobacco, too, by the way. I shall take it,
for I am going for a walk, and I haven't any of my own. And some day I
shall pawn this jewelled abortion, Peter,--pawn it for much fine gold;
and upon the proceeds I shall make merriment for myself and for my
friends." And I pocketed the case.
"That's all very well," Peter growled, "but you needn't try to change
the subject. You know you _have_ angled after any number of rich women
who have had sense enough, thank God, to refuse you. You didn't use to
be--but now you're quite notoriously good-for-nothing."
"It is the one blemish," said I, sweetly, "upon an otherwise perfect
character. And it is true," I continued, after an interval of
meditation, "that I have, in my time, encountered some very foolish
women. There was, for instance, Elena Barry-Smith, who threw me over for
Warwick Risby; and Celia Reindan, who had the bad taste to prefer Teddy
Anstruther; and Rosalind Jemmett, who is, very inconsiderately, going to
marry Tom Gelwix, instead of me. These were staggeringly foolish women,
Peter, but while their taste is bad, their dinners are good, so I have
remained upon the best of terms with them. They have trodden me under
their feet, but I am the long worm that has no turning. Moreover, you
are doubtless aware of the axiomatic equality between the fish in the
sea and those out of it. I hope before long to better my position in
life. I hope--Ah, well, that would scarcely interest you. Good morning,
Peter. And I trust, when I return," I added, with chastening dignity,
"that you will evince a somewhat more Christian spirit toward the world
in general, and that your language will be rather less reminiscent of
the blood-stained buccaneer of historical fiction."
"You're a grinning buffoon," said Peter. "You're a fat Jack-pudding.
You're an ass. Where are you going, anyway?"
"I am going," said I, "to the extreme end of Gridlington. Afterward I am
going to climb the wall that stands between Gridlington and Selwoode."
"And after that?" said Peter.
I gave a gesture. "Why, after that," said I, "fortune will favour the
brave. And I, Peter, am very, very brave."
Then I departed, whistling. In view of all my memories it had been
strangely droll to worry Peter Blagden into an abuse of marrying for
money. For this was on the twenty-eighth of April, the anniversary of
the day that Stella had died, you may remember....
3
And a half-hour subsequently, true to my word, I was scaling a ten-foot
stone wall, thickly overgrown with ivy. At the top of it I paused, and
sat down to take breath and to meditate, my legs meanwhile bedangling
over an as flourishing Italian garden as you would wish to see.
"Now, I wonder," I queried, of my soul, "what will be next? There is a
very cheerful uncertainty about what will be next. It may be a
spring-gun, and it may be a bull-dog, and it may be a susceptible
heiress. But it is apt to be--No, it isn't," I amended, promptly; "it is
going to be an angel. Or perhaps it is going to be a dream. She can't be
real, you know--I am probably just dreaming her. I would be quite
certain I was just dreaming her, if this wall were not so humpy and
uncomfortable. For it stands to reason, I would not be fool enough to
dream of such unsympathetic iron spikes as I am sitting on."
"Perhaps you are not aware," hazarded a soprano voice, "that this is
private property?"
"Why, no," said I, very placidly; "on the contrary I was just thinking
it must be heaven. And I am tolerably certain," I commented further, in
my soul, "that you are one of the more influential seraphim."
The girl had lifted her brows. She sat upon a semi-circular stone bench,
some twenty feet from the wall, and had apparently been reading, for a
book lay open in her lap. She now inspected me, with a sort of languid
wonder in her eyes, and I returned the scrutiny with unqualified
approval in mine.
And in this I had reason. The heiress of Selwoode was eminently good to
look upon.
24.
_He Reconciles Sentiment and Reason_
So I regarded her for a rather lengthy interval, considering meanwhile,
with an immeasurable content how utterly and entirely impossible it
would always be to describe her.
Clearly, it would be out of the question to trust to words, however
choicely picked, for, upon inspection, there was a delightful ambiguity
about every one of this girl's features that defied such idiotic
makeshifts. Her eyes, for example, I noted with a faint thrill of
surprise, just escaped being brown by virtue of an amber glow they had;
what colour, then, was I conscientiously to call them?
And her hair I found a bewildering, though pleasing, mesh of shadow and
sunlight, all made up of multitudinous graduations of some anonymous
colour that seemed to vary with the light you chanced to see it in,
through the whole gamut of bronze and chestnut and gold; and where,
pray, in the bulkiest lexicon, in the very weightiest thesaurus, was I
to find the adjective which could, if but in desperation, be applied to
hair like that without trenching on sacrilege? ... For it was spring,
you must remember, and I was twenty-five.
So that in my appraisal, you may depend upon it, her lips were quickly
passed over as a dangerous topic, and were dismissed with the mental
statement that they were red and not altogether unattractive. Whereas
her cheeks baffled me for a time,--but always with a haunting sense of
familiarity--till I had, at last, discovered they reminded me of those
little tatters of cloud that sometimes float about the setting
sun,--those irresolute wisps which cannot quite decide whether to be
pink or white, and waver through their tiny lives between the
two colours.
2
To this effect, then, I discoursed with my soul, what time I sat upon
the wall-top and smiled and kicked my heels to and fro among the ivy. By
and by, though, the girl sighed.
"You are placing me in an extremely unpleasant position," she
complained, as if wearily. "Would you mind returning to your sanatorium
and allowing me to go on reading? For I am interested in my book, and I
can't possibly go on in any comfort so long as you elect to perch up
there like Humpty-Dumpty, and grin like seven dozen Cheshire cats."
"Now, that," I spoke, in absent wise, "is but another instance of the
widely prevalent desire to have me serve as scapegoat for the sins of
all humanity. I am being blamed now for sitting on top of this wall. One
would think I wanted to sit here. One would actually think," I cried,
and raised my eyes to heaven, "that sitting on the very humpiest kind of
iron spikes was my favorite form of recreation! No,--in the interests of
justice," I continued, and fell into a milder tone, "I must ask you to
place the blame where it more rightfully belongs. The injuries which are
within the moment being inflicted on my sensitive nature, and,
incidentally, upon my not overstocked wardrobe, I am willing to pass
over. But the claims of justice are everywhere paramount. Miss Hugonin,
and Miss Hugonin alone, is responsible for my present emulation of
Mohammed's coffin, and upon that responsibility I am compelled
to insist."
"May one suggest," she queried gently, "that you are
probably--mistaken?"
I sketched a bow. "Recognising your present point of view," said I,
gallantly, "I thank you for the kindly euphemism. But may one allowably
demonstrate the fallacy of this same point of view? I thank you: for
silence, I am told, is proverbially equal to assent. I am, then, one
Robert Townsend, by birth a gentleman, by courtesy an author, by
inclination an idler, and by lucky chance a guest of Mr. Peter Blagden,
whose flourishing estate extends indefinitely yonder to the rear of my
coat-tails. My hobby chances to be gardening. I am a connoisseur, an
admirer, a devotee of gardens. It is, indeed, hereditary among the
Townsends; a love for gardens runs in our family just as a love for gin
runs in less favoured races. It is with us an irresistible passion. The
very founder of our family--one Adam, whom you may have heard of,--was a
gardener. Owing to the unfortunate loss of his position, the family
since then has sunken somewhat in the world; but time and poverty alike
have proven powerless against our horticultural tastes and botanical
inclinations. And then," cried I, with a flourish, "and then, what
follows logically?"
"Why, if you are not more careful," she languidly made answer, "I am
afraid that, owing to the laws of gravitation, a broken neck is what
follows logically."
"You are a rogue," I commented, in my soul, "and I like you all the
better for it."
Aloud, I stated: "What follows is that we can no more keep away from a
creditable sort of garden than a moth can from a lighted candle.
Consider, then, my position. Here am I on one side of the wall, and with
my peach-tree, to be sure--but on the other side is one of the most
famous masterpieces of formal gardening in the whole country. Am I to
blame if I succumb to the temptation? Surely not," I argued; "for surely
to any fair-minded person it will be at once apparent that I am brought
to my present very uncomfortable position upon the points of these very
humpy iron spikes by a simple combination of atavism and
injustice,--atavism because hereditary inclination draws me irresistibly
to the top of the wall, and injustice because Miss Hugonin's perfectly
unreasonable refusal to admit visitors prevents my coming any farther.
Surely, that is at once apparent?"
But now the girl yielded to my grave face, and broke into a clear,
rippling carol of mirth. She laughed from the chest, this woman. And
perched in insecure discomfort on my wall, I found time to rejoice that
I had finally discovered that rarity of rarities, a woman who neither
giggles nor cackles, but has found the happy mean between these two
abominations, and knows how to laugh.
"I have heard of you, Mr. Townsend," she said at last. "Oh, yes, I have
heard a deal of you. And I remember now that I never heard you were
suspected of sanity."
"Common-sense," I informed her, from my pedestal, "is confined to that
decorous class of people who never lose either their tempers or their
umbrellas. Now, I haven't any temper to speak of--or not at least in the
presence of ladies,--and, so far, I have managed to avoid laying aside
anything whatever for a rainy day; so that it stands to reason I must
possess uncommon sense."
"If that is the case," said the girl "you will kindly come down from
that wall and attempt to behave like a rational being."