STORIES ABOUT MR. LONGCLUSE.
The irritation of this unpleasant interview soon subsided, but Mr.
Longcluse's anxiety rather increased.
Next day early in the afternoon he drove to Lady May's and she received
him just as usual. He learned from her, without appearing to seek the
information, that Alice Arden was still at Mortlake. His visit was one
of but two or three minutes. He jumped into a hansom and drove out to
Mortlake. He knocked. Man of the world as he was, his heart beat faster.
"Is Miss Arden at home?"
"No, Sir."
"Not at home?"
"Miss Arden is gone out, Sir."
"Oh! perhaps in the garden?"
"No, Sir; she has gone out, and won't be back for some time."
The man spoke with the promptitude and decision of a servant instructed
to deny his mistress to the visitor. He had not a card; he would call
again another day.
He heard the piano faintly, and, he thought, Alice's voice also; and
certainly he saw Vivian Darnley in the drawing-room window, as his cab
turned away from the door. With a swelling heart he drove into town. The
portcullis, then, had fallen; access was denied him; and he should see
her no more!
Good Heaven! what had he done? He walked distractedly, for a while, up
and down his study. Should he employ Lady May's intervention, and tell
her the whole story? Good-natured Lady May! Perhaps she would undertake
his cause, and plead for his re-admission. But was even that so certain?
How could he tell what view she might take of the matter? And were she
to intercede for him ever so vehemently, how could he tell that she had
any chance of prevailing?
No; on the whole it was better to be his own advocate. He would sit down
then and there, and write to the offended or alarmed lady, and lay his
piteous case before her in his own words and rely on her compassion,
without an intervenient.
How many letters he began, how many he even finished, and rejected, I
need not tire you by telling. Some were composed in the first, others in
the third person. Not one satisfied him. Here was the man of a million
and more, who would dash off a note to his stock-broker, to buy or sell
a hundred thousand pounds' worth of stock--who would draft a resolution
of the bank of which he was the chairman, directing an operation which
would make men open their eyes, without the tremor of a nerve or the
hesitation of a moment--unmanned, helpless, distracted in the endeavour
to write a note to a young and inexperienced girl!
O beautiful sex! what a triumph is here! O Love! what fools will you not
make of us poor masculine wiseacres! The letter he dispatched was in
these terms. I daresay he had torn better ones to pieces:--
"DEAR MISS ARDEN,--I had hoped that my profound contrition might
have atoned for a momentary indiscretion--the declaration, though in
terms the most respectful, of feelings which I had not self-command
sufficient to suppress, and which had for nearly a year remained
concealed in my own breast. I am sure, Miss Arden, that you are
incapable of a gratuitous cruelty. Have I not sworn that one word to
recall the remembrance of that, to me, all but fatal madness shall
never escape my lips, in your presence? May I not entreat that you
will forget it, that you will forbear to pass upon me the agonising
sentence of exclusion? You shall never again have to complain of my
uttering one word that the merest acquaintance, who is permitted the
happiness of conversing with you, might not employ. You shall never
regret your forbearance. I shall never cease to bless you for it;
and whatever decision you arrive at, it shall be respected by me as
sacred law. I shall never cease to reverence and bless the hand that
spares or--afflicts me. May I be permitted this one melancholy hope,
may I be allowed to interpret your omitting to answer this miserable
letter as a concession of its prayer? Unless forbidden, I will
endeavour to construe your silence as oblivion.
"I have the honour to remain, dear Miss Arden, with deep compunction
and respect, but not altogether without hope in your mercy,
"Yours the most unhappy and distracted man in England,
"WALTER LONGCLUSE."
Mr. Longcluse sealed this letter in its envelope, and addressed it. He
would have liked to send it that moment, by his servant, but an odd
shyness prevented. He did not wish his servants to conjure and put their
heads together over it; he could not endure the idea; so with his own
hand he dropped it in the post. Somewhat in the style of the old novel
was this composition of Mr. Longcluse's--a little theatrical, and, one
would have fancied, even affected; yet never was man more desperately
sincere.
Night came, and brought no reply. Was no news good news, or would the
morning bring, perhaps from Richard Arden, a withering answer? Morning
came, and no answer: what was he to conjecture?
That day, in Grosvenor Square, he passed Richard Arden, who looked
steadily and sternly a little to his right, and _cut_ him.
It was a marked and decided cut. His ears tingled as if he had received
a slap in the face. So things had assumed a very decided attitude
indeed! Longcluse felt very oddly enraged, at first; then anxious. It
was insulting that Richard Arden should have taken the initiative in
dissolving relations. But had he not been himself studiously impertinent
to Arden, in that brief colloquy of yesterday? He ought to have been
prepared for this. Without explanation, and the shaking of hands, it was
impossible that relations of amity should have been resumed between
them. But Longcluse had been entirely absorbed by a threatened
alienation that affected him much more nearly. There was a thesis for
conjecture in the situation, which made him still more anxious. A very
little time would probably clear all up.
He was walking homeward, saying to himself as he went, "No, I shall find
no answer; I should be a fool to fancy anything else;" and yet walking
all the more quickly, as he approached his house, in the hope of the
very letter which he affected, to himself, to have quite rejected as an
impossibility. Some letters had come, but none from Mortlake. His letter
to Alice was still unanswered. He was now in the agony of suspense and
distraction.
The same evening Richard Arden was talking about him, as he leaned with
his elbow on the mantelpiece at Mortlake. He and Alice were alone in the
drawing-room, awaiting the arrival of the little dinner-party. This, as
you know, was to include Lord Wynderbroke, before whose advances, in
Richard Arden's vision, Mr. Longcluse had waned, and even become an
embarrassment and a nuisance.
"It is easier to cut him than to explain," thought Richard Arden. "It
bores one so inexpressibly, giving reasons for what one does, and I'm so
glad he has saved me the trouble by his vulgar impertinence."
They had talked for some time, Alice chiefly a listener. How was she
affected toward Mr. Longcluse? He was agreeable; he flattered her; he
was passionately in love with her. All but this latter condition she
liked very well; but this was embarrassing, and quite impracticable. Who
knows what that tiny spark we term a fancy, a whim, a _penchant_ might
have grown to, had it not been blown away by this untimely gust? But,
for my part, I don't think it ever would have grown to a matter of the
heart. There was something in the way. A fancy is one thing, and passion
quite another. Pique is a common state of mind, and comes and goes, and
comes again, in many a courtship. But a liking that has once entered the
heart cannot be torn out in a hasty moment, and takes a long time, and
many a struggle, to kill.
She was a little sorry, just then, to lose him so inevitably. Perhaps
his letter, to which he had trusted to move her, had rendered the return
of old relations impossible. In this letter she felt herself the owner
of a secret--a secret which she could not keep without a sort of
understanding growing up between them--which therefore she had no idea
of keeping.
She was resolved to tell it. The letter she had locked, in marked
isolation, as if no property of hers, but simply a document that was in
her keeping, in the pretty ormolu casket that stood on the drawing-room
chimney-piece. She had intended showing it, and telling the story of the
scene in the garden, to Richard. But he was speaking with a mysterious
asperity of Mr. Longcluse, which made her hesitate. A very little thing,
it seemed to her, might suffice to make a very violent quarrel out of a
coldness. Instinctively, therefore, she refrained, and listened to
Richard while, with his arm touching the casket on the chimney-piece, he
descanted on the writer of the unknown letter.
She experienced an odd feeling of insecurity as, in the course of his
talk, his fingers began to trifle with the pretty fingers that stood out
in relief upon the casket; for she knew that the ordeal of the pistol,
discountenanced in England, was still in force on the Continent, and Mr.
Longcluse's ideas were all Continental; and how near were those fingers
to the letter which might suffice to explode the dangerous element that
had already accumulated!
"He has talked of us to his low companions; he chooses to associate with
usurers and worse people; and he has been speaking of us in the most
insolent terms."
"Really!" said Alice. Her large eyes looked larger as they fixed on him.
"Yes, and I'll tell you how I heard it. You must know, dear Alice, that
I happened to want a little money; and when one does, the usual course
is to borrow it. So I paid a visit to my harpy--and a harpy in need is a
harpy indeed. Being hard up, he fleeced me; and the gentleman, I
suppose, thinking he might be familiar, told me he was on confidential
terms with Mr. Longcluse and wished me a good deal of joy. 'Of what?' I
ventured to ask, for he had just hit me rather hard. 'Of your chance,'
or, as he called it _chanshe_, he said, with a delightfully arch leer. I
thought he meant I had backed the right horse for the Derby, but it
turned out he meant our chance of inducing Mr. Longcluse to make up his
mind to marry you. I was very near knocking him down; but a man who has
one's bill for three hundred pounds must be respected. So I merely
ventured to ask on whose authority he congratulated me, when it appeared
it was on Mr. Longcluse's own, who, it seems, had said a great deal
more, equally intolerable. In plain, coarse terms, he says that, being
poor, we have conspired with you to secure him, Mr. Longcluse, for your
husband. As to the fact of his having actually conveyed that, and to
more people than one, there is and can be no doubt whatever. I can
imagine, considering all things, nothing more vulgar, audacious, and
cowardly."
A blush of anger glowed in Alice's face. Richard Arden liked the proud
fire that gleamed from her dark grey eyes. It satisfied him that his
words were not lost.
"I lighted on a man who knew more about him than I had learned before,"
resumed Richard Arden. "He was suspected at Berlin of having been
engaged in a conspiracy to pigeon Dacre and Wilmot, who were travelling.
He did not appear, but he is said to have supplied the money, and had a
lion's share of the spoil. There is no good in repeating these things
generally, you know, because they are so hard to prove; and a fellow
like that is dangerous. They say he is very litigious."
"Upon my word, if your information is at all to be relied on, it is
plain we _have_ made a great mistake. It is a disappointing world, but I
could not have fancied him doing anything so low; and I must say for him
that he was gentlemanlike and quiet, and very unlike the person he
appears to be. I think I never heard of anything so outrageous! Vivian
Darnley told me that he was a great duellist, and thought to be a very
quarrelsome, dangerous companion abroad. But he had only heard this, and
what you tell me is so much worse, so mean, so utterly intolerable!"
"Oh! There's worse than that," said Richard, with a faint sinister
smile.
"What?" said she, returning it with an almost frightened gaze.
"There was a very beautiful girl at the opera in Vienna; her name was
Piccardi, a daughter of a good old Roman family. You can't imagine how
admired she was! And she was thought to be on the point of marrying
Count Baddenoff; Mr. Longcluse, it seems, chose to be in love with her;
he was not then anything like so rich as he became afterwards--and this
poor girl was killed."
"Good heavens! Richard--what can you mean?"
"I mean that she was assassinated, and that from that day Mr. Longcluse
was never received in society in Vienna, and had to leave it."
"You ought to tell May Penrose," said she, after a silence of dismay.
"Not for the world," said Richard; "she talks enough for six--and
where's the good? She'll only take up the cudgels for him, and we shall
be in the centre of a pretty row."
"Well, if you think it best----" she began.
"Certainly," said he. And a silence followed.
"Here is a carriage at the door," said Richard Arden. "Let us dismiss
Longcluse, and look a little more like ourselves."
That evening there came letters as usual to Mr. Longcluse, and among
others a note from Lady May Penrose, reminding him of her little
garden-party at Richmond next day.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, starting up and reading the cards on his
chimney, "I thought it was the day after. It was very good-natured, poor
old thing, her reminding me. I shall see Alice Arden there. Not one line
does she vouchsafe. But is not she right? I think the more highly of her
for not writing. I don't think she ought to write. Oh, Heaven grant she
may meet me as usual? Does she mean it? If she did not, would she not
have got her brother to write, or have written herself a cold line, to
end our acquaintance?"
So he tried to comfort himself, and to keep alive his dying hope by
these artificial stimulants.