_Sweet Sympathy_
I AM sorry, my dear mother, that I cannot accompany you; but I must go
down to my yacht this morning, and on my return from Greenwich I have an
engagement.’
This was said about a week after the dinner at Sidonia’s, by Lord
Montacute to the duchess. ‘That terrible yacht!’ thought the duchess.
Her Grace, a year ago, had she been aware of it, would have deemed
Tancred’s engagement as fearful an affair. The idea that her son should
have called every day for a week on a married lady, beautiful and
attractive, would have filled her with alarm amounting almost to horror.
Yet such was the innocent case. It might at the first glance seem
difficult to reconcile the rival charms of the Basilisk and Lady Bertie
and Bellair, and to understand how Tancred could be so interested in the
preparations for a voyage which was to bear him from the individual in
whose society he found a daily gratification. But the truth is, that
Lady Bertie and Bellair was the only person who sympathised with his
adventure.
She listened with the liveliest concern to his account of all his
progress; she even made many admirable suggestions, for Lady Bertie and
Bellair had been a frequent visitor at Cowes, and was quite initiated
in the mysteries of the dilettante service of the Yacht Club. She was
a capital sailor; at least she always told Tancred so. But this was not
the chief source of sympathy, or the principal bond of union, between
them. It was not the voyage, so much as the object of the voyage, that
touched all the passion of Lady Bertie and Bellair. Her heart was at
Jerusalem. The sacred city was the dream of her life; and, amid the
dissipations of May Fair and the distractions of Belgravia, she had in
fact all this time only been thinking of Jehoshaphat and Sion. Strange
coincidence of sentiment--strange and sweet!
The enamoured Montacute hung over her with pious rapture, as they
examined together Mr. Roberts’s Syrian drawings, and she alike charmed
and astonished him by her familiarity with every locality and each
detail. She looked like a beautiful prophetess as she dilated with
solemn enthusiasm on the sacred scene. Tancred called on her every day,
because when he called the first time he had announced his immediate
departure, and so had been authorised to promise that he would pay his
respects to her every day till he went. It was calculated that by these
means, that is to say three or four visits, they might perhaps travel
through Mr. Roberts’s views together before he left England, which would
facilitate their correspondence, for Tancred had engaged to write to the
only person in the world worthy of receiving his letters. But, though
separated, Lady Bertie and Bellair would be with him in spirit; and
once she sighed and seemed to murmur that if his voyage could only be
postponed awhile, she might in a manner become his fellow-pilgrim, for
Lord Bertie, a great sportsman, had a desire to kill antelopes, and,
wearied with the monotonous slaughter of English preserves, tired even
of the eternal moors, had vague thoughts of seeking new sources of
excitement amid the snipes of the Grecian marshes, and the deer and wild
boars of the desert and the Syrian hills.
While his captain was repeating his inquiries for instructions on the
deck of the Basilisk at Greenwich, moored off the Trafalgar Hotel,
Tancred fell into reveries of female pilgrims kneeling at the Holy
Sepulchre by his side; then started, gave a hurried reply, and drove
back quickly to town, to pass the remainder of the morning in Brook
Street.
The two or three days had expanded into two or three weeks, and Tancred
continued to call daily on Lady Bertie and Bellair, to say farewell. It
was not wonderful: she was the only person in London who understood him;
so she delicately intimated, so he profoundly felt. They had the same
ideas; they must have the same idiosyncrasy. The lady asked with a sigh
why they had not met before; Tancred found some solace in the thought
that they had at least become acquainted. There was something about this
lady very interesting besides her beauty, her bright intelligence, and
her seraphic thoughts. She was evidently the creature of impulse; to
a certain degree perhaps the victim of her imagination. She seemed
misplaced in life. The tone of the century hardly suited her refined and
romantic spirit. Her ethereal nature seemed to shrink from the coarse
reality which invades in our days even the boudoirs of May Fair.
There was something in her appearance and the temper of her being which
rebuked the material, sordid, calculating genius of our reign of Mammon.
Her presence in this world was a triumphant vindication of the claims
of beauty and of sentiment. It was evident that she was not happy;
for, though her fair brow always lighted up when she met the glance
of Tancred, it was impossible not to observe that she was sometimes
strangely depressed, often anxious and excited, frequently absorbed in
reverie. Yet her vivid intelligence, the clearness and precision of her
thought and fancy, never faltered. In the unknown yet painful contest,
the intellectual always triumphed. It was impossible to deny that she
was a woman of great ability.
Nor could it for a moment be imagined that these fitful moods were
merely the routine intimations that her domestic hearth was not as happy
as it deserved to be. On the contrary, Lord and Lady Bertie and Bellair
were the very best friends; she always spoke of her husband with
interest and kindness; they were much together, and there evidently
existed between them mutual confidence. His lordship’s heart, indeed,
was not at Jerusalem; and perhaps this want of sympathy on a subject
of such rare and absorbing interest might account for the occasional
musings of his wife, taking refuge in her own solitary and devoutly
passionate soul. But this deficiency on the part of his lordship could
scarcely be alleged against him as a very heinous fault; it is far from
usual to find a British noble who on such a topic entertains the notions
and sentiments of Lord Montacute; almost as rare to find a British
peeress who could respond to them with the same fervour and facility
as the beautiful Lady Bertie and Bellair. The life of a British peer is
mainly regulated by Arabian laws and Syrian customs at this moment;
but, while he sabbatically abstains from the debate or the rubber,
or regulates the quarterly performance of his judicial duties in his
province by the advent of the sacred festivals, he thinks little of the
land and the race who, under the immediate superintendence of the Deity,
have by their sublime legislation established the principle of periodic
rest to man, or by their deeds and their dogmas, commemorated by their
holy anniversaries, have elevated the condition and softened the lot of
every nation except their own.
‘And how does Tancred get on?’ asked Lord Eskdale one morning of the
Duchess of Bellamont, with a dry smile. ‘I understand that, instead of
going to Jerusalem, he is going to give us a fish dinner.’
The Duchess of Bellamont had made the acquaintance of Lady Bertie and
Bellair, and was delighted with her, although her Grace had been told
that Lord Montacute called upon her every day. The proud, intensely
proper, and highly prejudiced Duchess of Bellamont took the most
charitable view of this sudden and fervent friendship. A female friend,
who talked about Jerusalem, but kept her son in London, was in the
present estimation of the duchess a real treasure, the most interesting
and admirable of her sex. Their intimacy was satisfactorily accounted
for by the invaluable information which she imparted to Tancred; what
he was to see, do, eat, drink; how he was to avoid being poisoned and
assassinated, escape fatal fevers, regularly attend the service of
the Church of England in countries where there were no churches, and
converse in languages of which he had no knowledge. He could not have a
better counsellor than Lady Bertie, who had herself travelled, at least
to the Faubourg St. Honoré, and, as Horace Walpole says, after Calais
nothing astonishes. Certainly Lady Bertie had not been herself to
Jerusalem, but she had read about it, and every other place. The duchess
was delighted that Tancred had a companion who interested him. With
all the impulse of her sanguine temperament, she had already accustomed
herself to look upon the long-dreaded yacht as a toy, and rather an
amusing one, and was daily more convinced of the prescient shrewdness of
her cousin, Lord Eskdale.
Tancred was going to give them a fish dinner! A what? A sort of
banquet which might have served for the marriage feast of Neptune and
Amphitrite, and be commemorated by a constellation; and which ought
to have been administered by the Nereids and the Naiads; terrines of
turtle, pools of water _souchée_, flounders of every hue, and eels in
every shape, cutlets of salmon, salmis of carp, ortolans represented by
whitebait, and huge roasts carved out of the sturgeon. The appetite is
distracted by the variety of objects, and tantalised by the restlessness
of perpetual solicitation; not a moment of repose, no pause for
enjoyment; eventually, a feeling of satiety, without satisfaction, and
of repletion without sustenance; till, at night, gradually recovering
from the whirl of the anomalous repast, famished yet incapable of
flavour, the tortured memory can only recall with an effort, that it has
dined off pink champagne and brown bread and butter!
What a ceremony to be presided over by Tancred of Montacute; who, if
he deigned to dine at all, ought to have dined at no less a round table
than that of King Arthur. What a consummation of a sublime project!
What a catastrophe of a spiritual career! A Greenwich party and a tavern
bill!
All the world now is philosophical, and therefore they can account for
this disaster. Without doubt we are the creatures of circumstances; and,
if circumstances take the shape of a charming woman, who insists upon
sailing in your yacht, which happens to to be at Blackwall or Greenwich,
it is not easy to discover how the inevitable consequences can be
avoided. It would hardly do, off the Nore, to present your mistress
with a sea-pie, or abruptly remind your farewell friends and sorrowing
parents of their impending loss by suddenly serving up soup hermetically
sealed, and roasting the embalmed joint, which ought only to have smoked
amid the ruins of Thebes or by the cataracts of Nubia.
There are, however, two sides of every picture; a party may be pleasant,
and even a fish dinner not merely a whirl of dishes and a clash of
plates. The guests may be not too numerous, and well assorted; the
attendance not too devoted, yet regardful; the weather may be charming,
which is a great thing, and the giver of the dinner may be charmed, and
that is everything.
The party to see the Basilisk was not only the most agreeable of the
season, but the most agreeable ever known. They all said so when they
came back. Mr. Vavasour, who was there, went to all his evening parties;
to the assembly by the wife of a minister in Carlton Terrace; to a rout
by the wife of the leader of opposition in Whitehall; to a literary
soirée in Westminster, and a brace of balls in Portman and Belgrave
Squares; and told them all that they were none of them to be compared
to the party of the morning, to which, it must be owned, he had greatly
contributed by his good humour and merry wit. Mrs. Coningsby declared to
every one that, if Lord Monta-cute would take her, she was quite ready
to go to Jerusalem; such a perfect vessel was the Basilisk, and such an
admirable sailor was Mrs. Coningsby, which, considering that the river
was like a mill-pond, according to Tancred’s captain, or like a mirror,
according to Lady Bertie and Bellair, was not surprising. The duke
protested that he was quite glad that Mon-tacute had taken to yachting,
it seemed to agree with him so well; and spoke of his son’s future
movements as if there were no such place as Palestine in the world. The
sanguine duchess dreamed of Cowes regattas, and resolved to agree to
any arrangement to meet her son’s fancy, provided he would stay at home,
which she convinced herself he had now resolved to do.
‘Our cousin is so wise,’ she said to her husband, as they were
returning. ‘What could the bishop mean by saying that Tancred was a
visionary? I agree with you, George, there is no counsellor like a man
of the world.’
‘I wish M. de Sidonia had come,’ said Lady Bertie and Bellair, gazing
from the window of the Trafalgar on the moonlit river with an expression
of abstraction, and speaking in a tone almost of melancholy.
‘I also wish it, since you do,’ said Tancred. ‘But they say he goes
nowhere. It was almost presumptuous in me to ask him, yet I did so
because you wished it.’
‘I never shall know him,’ said Lady Bertie and Bellair, with some
vexation.
‘He interests you,’ said Tancred, a little piqued.
‘I had so many things to say to him,’ said her ladyship.
‘Indeed!’ said Tancred; and then he continued, ‘I offered him every
inducement to come, for I told him it was to meet you; but perhaps if
he had known that you had so many things to say to him, he might have
relented.’
‘So many things! Oh! yes. You know he has been a great traveller; he has
been everywhere; he has been at Jerusalem.’
‘Fortunate man!’ exclaimed Tancred, half to himself. ‘Would I were
there!’
‘Would we were there, you mean,’ said Lady Bertie, in a tone of
exquisite melody, and looking at Tancred with her rich, charged eyes.
His heart trembled; he was about to give utterance to some wild words,
but they died upon his lips. Two great convictions shared his being:
the absolute necessity of at once commencing his pilgrimage, and the
persuasion that life, without the constant presence of this sympathising
companion, must be intolerable. What was to be done? In his long
reveries, where he had brooded over so many thoughts, some only of which
he had as yet expressed to mortal ear, Tancred had calculated, as he
believed, every combination of obstacle which his projects might have
to encounter; but one, it now seemed, he had entirely omitted, the
influence of woman. Why was he here? Why was he not away? Why had he
not departed? The reflection was intolerable; it seemed to him even
disgraceful. The being who would be content with nothing less than
communing with celestial powers in sacred climes, standing at a tavern
window gazing on the moonlit mudbanks of the barbarous Thames, a river
which neither angel nor prophet had ever visited! Before him, softened
by the hour, was the Isle of Dogs! The Isle of Dogs! It should at least
be Cyprus!
The carriages were announced; Lady Bertie and Bellair placed her arm in
his.