THE GARDEN PARTY.
Next morning Mr. Longcluse rose with a sense of something before him.
"So I shall see her to-day! If she's the girl I've thought her, she will
meet me as usual. That frantic scene, in which I risked all on the turn
of a die, will be forgotten. Hasty words, or precipitate letters, are
passed over every day; the man who commits such follies, under a
transitory insanity, is allowed the privilege of recalling them. There
were no witnesses present to make forgiveness difficult. It all lies
with her own good sense, and a heart proud but gentle. Let but those mad
words be sponged out, and I am happy. Alice, if you forgive me, I
forgive your brother, and take his name from where it is, and write it
in my heart. Oh, beautiful Alice! will you belie your looks? Oh, clear
bright mind! will you be clouded and perverted? Oh, gentle heart! can
you be merciless?"
Mr. Longcluse made his simple morning toilet very carefully. A very
plain man, extremely ugly some pronounce him; yet his figure is good,
his get-up unexceptionable, and altogether he is a most gentlemanlike
man to look upon, and in his movements and attitudes, quite unstudied,
there is an undefinable grace. His accent is a little foreign--the
slightest thing in the world, and Lady May Penrose declares it is so
very pretty. Then he is so agreeable, when he pleases; and he is so very
rich!
Some people wonder why he does not withdraw from all speculations,
retire upon his enormous wealth, and with his elegant tastes, and the
art of being magnificent without glare, even gorgeous without
vulgarity--for has he not shown this refined talent in the service of
others, who have taken him into council?--he could eclipse all the world
in splendid elegance, and make his way, _force d'argent_, to the
pinnacle of half the world's ambition. Were those stories true that
Richard Arden told his sister on the night before?
I don't think that Richard Arden stuck at trifles, where he had an
object to gain, and I don't believe a word of his story of Mr.
Longcluse's insulting talk. It was not his way to boast and vapour; and
he had a secret contempt for many of the Jewish and other agents whom he
chose to employ. But undoubtedly Mr. Longcluse had the reputation among
his discounting admirers of being a dangerous man to quarrel with; and
also it was true that he had fought three or four savage duels in the
course of his Continental life. There were other stories,
unauthenticated, unpleasant. These were whispered with sneers by Mr.
Longcluse's enemies. But there's a divinity doth hedge a King Croesus,
and his character bore a charmed life, among the missiles that would
have laid that of many a punier man in the dust.
With an agitated heart, Mr. Longcluse approached the pretty little place
known as Raleigh Court, to which he had been invited. Through the
quaint, old-fashioned gate-way, under the embowering branches of tall
trees, he drove up a short, broad avenue, clumped at each side with old
timber, to the open hall-door of the pretty Elizabethan house. Carriages
of all sorts were discernible under the branches, assembled at the
further side to the right of the hall-door, over the wide steps of which
was spread a scarlet cloth. Croquet parties were already visible on the
shorn grass, under boughs that spread high in the air, and cast a
pleasant shadow on the sward. Groups were strolling among the
flower-beds--some walking in, some emerging from the open door--and the
scene presented the usual variety of dress, and somewhat listless to-ing
and fro-ing.
Did anyone, of all the guests of Lady May, mask so profound an
agitation, under the conventional smile, as that which beat at Walter
Longcluse's heart? Two or three people whom he knew, he met and talked
to--some for a minute, others for a longer time--as he drew near the
steps. His eye all the time was busy in the search after one pretty
figure, the least glimpse of which he would have recognised with the
thrill of a sure intuition, far or near. He would have liked to ask the
friends he met whether the Ardens were here. But what would have been
easy to him a week before, was now an effort for which he could not find
courage.
He entered the hall, quaint and lofty, rising to the entire height of
the house, with two galleries, one above the other, surrounding it on
three sides. Ancestors of the late Mr. Penrose, who had left all this
and a great deal more to his sorrowing relict, stood on the panelled
walls at full length--some in ruffs and trunk-hose, others in perukes
and cut-velvet, one with a bâton in his hand, and three with falcon on
fist--all stately and gentlemanlike, according to their several periods;
with corresponding ladies, some stiff and pallid, who figured in the
days of the virgin queen, and others in the graceful _déshabille_ of Sir
Peter Lely. This quaint oak hall was now resonant with the buzz and
clack of modern gossip, prose, and flirtation, and a great deal crowded,
notwithstanding its commodious proportions. Lady May was still receiving
her company near the doorway of the first drawing-room, and her kindly
voice was audible from within as the visitor approached. Mr. Longcluse
was very graciously received.
"I want you so particularly, to introduce you to Lady Hummington. She is
such a charming person. She is so thoroughly up in German literature.
She's a great deal too learned for me, but you and she will understand
one another so perfectly, and you will be quite charmed with her. Mr.
Addlings, did you happen to see Lady Hummington, or have you any idea
where she's gone?"
"I shall go and look for her, with pleasure. Is not she the tall lady
with grey hair? Shall I tell her you want to say a word to her?"
"You're very kind, but I'll not mind, thank you very much. It is so
provoking, Mr. Longcluse! you would have been perfectly charmed with
her."
"I shall be more fortunate, by-and-by, perhaps," said Mr. Longcluse.
"Are any of our friends from Mortlake here?" he added, looking a little
fixedly in her eyes, for he was thinking whether Alice had betrayed his
secret, and was trying to read an answer there.
Lady May answered quite promptly--
"Oh, yes, Alice is here, and her brother. He went out that way with some
friends," she said, indicating with a little nod a door which, from a
second hall, opened on a terrace. "I asked him to show them the three
fountains. You must see them also; they are in the Dutch garden; they
were put up in the reign of George the First.--How d'ye do, Mrs.
Frumply? How d'ye do, Miss Frumply?"
"What a charming house!" exclaims Mrs. Frumply, "and what a day! We were
saying, Arabella and I, as we drove out, that you must really have an
influence with the clerk of the weather, ha, ha, ha! didn't we,
Arabella? So charming!"
Lady May laughed affably, and said--"Won't you and your daughter go in
and take some tea? Mr. (she was going to call on Longcluse, but he had
glided away)--Oh, Mr. Darnley!"
And the introduction was made, and Vivian Darnley, with Mrs. Frumply on
his arm, attended by her daughter Arabella, did as he was commanded and
got tea for that simpering lady, and fruit and Naples biscuits, and
plum-cake, and was rewarded with the original joke about the clerk of
the weather.
Mr. Longcluse, in the meantime, had passed the door indicated by Lady
May, and stood upon the short terrace that overlooked the pretty
flower-garden cut out in grotesque patterns, so that looking down upon
its masses of crimson, blue, and yellow, as he leaned on the balustrade,
it showed beneath his eye like a wide deep-piled carpet, on the green
ground of which were walking groups of people, the brilliant hues of the
ladies' dresses rivalling the splendour of the verbenas, and making
altogether a very gay picture.
The usual paucity of male attendance made Mr. Longcluse's task of
observation easy. He was looking for Richard Arden's well-known figure
among the groups, thinking that probably Alice was not far off. But he
was not there, nor was Alice; and Walter Longcluse, gloomy and lonely in
this gay crowd, descended the steps at the end of this terrace, and
sauntered round again to the front of the house, now and then passing
some one he knew, with an exchange of a smile or a bow, and then lost
again in the Vanity Fair of strange faces and voices.
Now he is at the hall door--he mounts the steps. Suddenly, as he stands
upon the level platform at top, he finds himself within four feet of
Richard Arden. He looks on him as he might on the carved pilaster, at
the side of the hall door; no one could have guessed, by his inflexible
but unaffected glance, that he and Mr. Arden had ever been acquainted.
The younger man showed something in his countenance, a sudden hauteur, a
little elevation of the chin, a certain sternness, more melodramatic,
though less effective, than the simple blank of Mr. Longcluse's glance.
That gentleman looked about coolly. He was in search of Miss Arden, but
he did not see her. He entered the hall again, and Richard Arden a
little awkwardly resumed his conversation, which had suddenly subsided
into silence on Longcluse's appearance.
By this time Lady May was more at ease, having received all her company
that were reasonably punctual, and in the hall Longcluse now encountered
her.
"Have you seen Mr. Arden?" she inquired of him.
"Yes, he's at the door, at the steps."
"Would you mind telling him kindly that I want to say a word to him?"
"Certainly, most happy," said Longcluse, without any distinct plan as to
how he was to execute her awkward commission.
"Thank you very much. But, oh! dear, here is Lady Hummington, and she
wishes so much to know you; I'll send some one else. I must introduce
you, come with me--Lady Hummington, I want to introduce my friend, Mr.
Longcluse." So Mr. Longcluse was presented to Lady Hummington, who was
very lean, and a "blue," and most fatiguingly well up in archæology, and
all new books on dry and difficult subjects. So that Mr. Longcluse felt
that he was, in _Joe Willett's_ phrase, "tackled" by a giant, and was
driven to hideous exertions of attention and memory to hold his own.
When Lady Hummington, to whom it was plain kind Lady May, with an
unconscious cruelty, had been describing Mr. Longcluse's accomplishments
and acquirements, had taken some tea and other refection, and when Mr.
Longcluse's kindness "had her wants supplied," and she, like Scott's
"old man" in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," "was gratified," she
proposed visiting the music-room, where she had heard a clever organist
play, on a harmonium, three distinct tunes at the same time, which being
composed on certain principles, that she explained with much animation
and precision, harmonised very prettily.
So this clever woman directed, and Mr. Longcluse led, the way to the
music-room.