AFTER-THOUGHTS.
There was nothing but fair weather for the P. and O. steamer _Berenice_
between Venice and Alexandria--fair weather and a calm sea; and John
Vansittart had ample leisure in which to think over what he had done,
and to live again through all the sensations of his last night in
Venice.
He had to live through it all again, and again, in those long days
at sea, out of sight of land, with nothing between him and his own
dark thoughts but that monotony of cloudless sky and rolling waters.
What did it matter whether the boat made eighteen or twenty knots an
hour, whether progress were fast or slow? Each day meant an eternity
of thought to him who sat apart in his canvas chair, staring blankly
eastward, or brooding with bent head, and melancholy eyes fixed on the
deck, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, irritated and miserable when
some officious fellow-passenger insisted upon plumping down by his side
in another deck chair, and talking to him about the weather, or his
destination, with futile questionings as to whether this was his first
voyage to the East, and all the idle inquisitiveness of the traveller
who has nothing to do, and very little to think about.
Captain and steward had been very good to him. The former had asked him
no questions after that first inquiry, content to know that he was a
gentleman, and had a well-filled purse; the latter had put him to bed
in the most comfortable of berths, and had given him a hot drink, and
dried his clothes ready for the next morning. And in that one suit of
clothes, with changes of linen borrowed from the captain, he made the
voyage to Alexandria in the bright spring weather, under the vivid blue
that canopies the Mediterranean. Perhaps the fact of living in that one
suit of clothes all through those hot days intensified his sense of
being a pariah among the other passengers; he who had come among them
with a hand red with murder.
Hour after hour he would sit in his corner of the deck, always the most
secluded spot he could find, and brood over the thing that he had done.
He had an open book upon his knee for appearance’s sake, and pretended
to be absorbed in it whenever a curious saunterer passed his way. He
smoked all day long for comfort’s sake, the only comfort possible for
his troubled brain, and all day long he thought of his last evening in
Venice and the thing that he had done there.
To think that he, a gentleman by birth and education, should have slain
a man in a tavern row; that he, who in his earliest boyhood had been
taught to use his fists, and to defend himself after the manner of
Englishmen, should have yielded to a tigerish impulse, and stabbed an
unarmed foe to the heart! He, the well-bred Englishman, had behaved no
better than a drunken Lascar.
He scorned--he hated--himself for that blind fury which had made him
grip the weapon that accident had placed in his way.
He was not particularly sorry for the man he had killed; a violent,
drunken brute, who for the sake of the rest of humanity was better dead
than alive. A profligate who had betrayed that lovely ignoramus under
a promise of marriage, a promise which he had never meant to keep. He
hated himself for the manner of the brute’s death rather than for the
death itself. If he had killed the man in fair fight he would have
felt no regret at having made an end of him; but to have stabbed an
unarmed man! There was the sting, there was the shame of it. All night
long, between snatches of troubled sleep, he writhed and tossed in his
berth, wishing that he were dead, wondering whether it were not the
best thing he could do to throw himself overboard before daybreak and
so make an end of these impotent regrets, this maddening reiteration of
details, this perpetual representation of the hateful scene, for ever
beginning and ending and beginning again in his tortured brain.
He would have decided upon suicide, perhaps, not having any strong
religious convictions at this stage of his existence; but his life was
not his own to fling away, however unpleasant he might have made it for
himself.
He had a mother who adored him, and to whom he, for his part, was
warmly attached. She was a widow, and he was the head of the house,
sole master of the estate, and to him she looked for dignity and
comfort. Were he to die the landed property would pass to his uncle, a
dry old bachelor, and though his mother would still have her income,
she would be banished from the house in which her wedded life had been
spent, and she would be the loser in social status. He had an only
sister, too, a fair, frivolous being, of whom, in a lesser degree,
he was fond; a sister who had made her appearance in Society at the
pre-Lenten Drawing-Room, and had been greatly admired, and who was
warranted to make a good match.
Poor little Maud! What would become of Maud if he were to throw
himself off a P. and O. steamer? Think of the scandal of it. And yet,
if he lived, and that brutal business in the Venetian caffè were to
be brought home to him--murder, or manslaughter--it would be even
worse for his sister. Society would look askance at a girl with such
a ruffian for a brother--an Englishman who used the knife against his
fellow-man. Daggers and stilettos might be common wear among Venetians;
but the knife was not the less odious in the sight of an Englishman
because he happened to be in a city where traditions of treachery and
secret murder were interwoven with all her splendour and her beauty.
It would be horrible, humiliating, disgraceful for his people if ever
that story came to be known--a choice topic for the daily papers, with
just that spice of romance and adventure which would justify exhaustive
treatment.
Thinking over the question from the Society point of view--and in most
of the great acts of life Society stands with the modern Christian
in the place which the religious man gives his Creator--Vansittart
told himself that every effort of his intelligence must be bent upon
dissociating himself from that tragedy in the Venetian caffè. He had
got clear of the city by a wonderful bit of luck; for had the steamer
started five minutes earlier, or a quarter of an hour later, escape
that way would have been impossible.
He had heard the men giving chase on the Piazzetta as he jumped from
the quay; heard them shouting when he was in the water. Had the
steamer been stationary those men would have boarded her, and the whole
story would have been known. She had weighed anchor in the nick of
time for him. But what then? A telegram to the police at Brindisi or
Alexandria might stop him, as other fugitive felons are caught every
month in the year--men who get clear off at Liverpool, to be arrested
before they step ashore at New York.
He paid his passage on the morning after his flight, and gave his
name as John Smith, of London. The captain scrutinized him rather
suspiciously on hearing that name of Smith; but Vansittart did not look
like a swindler or a blackguard. He was under a cloud, perhaps, the
captain thought, and Smith was most likely an alias; but anyhow he was
a gentleman, and the captain meant to stand his friend.
“Are you going to stay long in Cairo?” he asked Vansittart, when they
were within sight of Alexandria.
“Not long. Perhaps only till I get my luggage. I shall go up the Nile.”
“You’ll find it rather hot before you’ve been a long way.”
“Oh, I don’t mind heat. I’m not a feverish subject,” said Vansittart,
lightly, having no more idea of going up the Nile than of going to the
moon.
“You’ll stop at Sheppard’s, of course?”
“Yes, decidedly. I’m told it’s a very good hotel.”
While they were nearing their port he contrived to get a good deal of
information about the steamers that touched there. He meant to get off
on the first boat that sailed after he landed. All the interval he
wanted was the time to buy some ready-made clothes and a valise, so
that he might not appear on board the homeward-bound steamer in the
miserable condition in which he had introduced himself to the captain
of the P. and O.
He parted with that officer with every expression of friendliness.
“I shan’t forget how good you’ve been to a traveller in distress,” he
said lightly; “you may not hear of me for a month or two, perhaps. I
may be up the Nile----”
“Take care of the climate,” interjected the captain.
“But as soon as I go back to London I shall write to you. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Smith, and good luck to you for a fine swimmer wherever
you go.”
“Oh, I won a cup or two at Oxford,” answered the other. “We rather
prided ourselves on our swimming in my set.”
He went to a restaurant where he could sit under an awning and read the
latest papers that had found their way to Alexandria. There were plenty
of Paris papers--_Galignani_, _Le Figaro_, _Le Temps_. There was a
Turin paper, very stale--and there was a copy of the _Daily Telegraph_
that had been left by some traveller, and which was a fortnight old.
Nothing to fear there. Vansittart breathed more freely, and thought of
going on to Cairo. But second thoughts warned him that Cairo was very
English, and that he might meet some one he knew there. Better to stick
to his first plan, and go back to England by the first steamer that
would take him.
He had to think of his possessions at Danieli’s, and whether the things
he had left there would provide a clue to his identity. He thought not.
He had not given his name to the hall porter.
The hotel was crowded, and he had--like a convict--been simply known as
“150,” the number of his room.
Clothes, portmanteau, dressing-bag, bore only his initials, J. V. He
had been travelling in lightest marching order; carrying no books save
those which he picked up on his way, no writing materials, except the
compact little case in his dressing-bag. It was his habit to destroy
all letters as soon as he had read them--even his mother’s, after a
second or third reading. His card-case, note-case, and purse were all
in his pockets when he made the plunge. No, he had left nothing at
Danieli’s; nor had he left Danieli’s deep in debt, for he had paid his
account on Tuesday morning, with a half-formed intention of starting
for Verona by the early train on Wednesday. He could resign himself to
the loss of portmanteau and contents, and the plain pigskin bag, which
had seen good service and had been scraped and battered upon many a
platform.
Reflection told him that he had nothing to fear from the newspapers
yet awhile, since no newspaper could have travelled faster than the
steamer that had brought him, while the news of that homicide at Venice
was hardly important enough to be telegraphed to any Egyptian journal.
No, he was safe so far; but he told himself that the best thing he
could do was to get back to England and the wilderness of London; while
the _Berenice_ and her good-natured captain went on to Bombay, where,
no doubt, the captain would read of that fatal brawl in the Venetian
caffè, and identify his passenger as the English tourist who had
stabbed another man to death.
Vansittart pulled himself together, counted his money, and rejoiced at
finding that he had enough for his voyage home, and a trifle over for
incidental expenses and a small outfit. The greater part of his money
was in English bank-notes, about which no questions would be asked.
He went to the steamboat office, and found that there was a P. and O.
boat leaving that night for London, so he took his passage on board
her, selected his berth, and then drove off to an outfitter’s to get
his kit, and a new cabin trunk, just big enough to hold his belongings.
He bought a few French novels, and those small necessities of life
without which the civilized man feels himself a savage.
His ship sailed at midnight. He was on board her early in the evening,
pacing the deck in the balmy night, and looking at the lighted town,
the massive quays, which testify to English enterprise, the Pharos
sending out its long lines of bright white light seaward--the gigantic
breakwater--all that makes the Egyptian port of to-day in some wise
worthy of the Alexandria of old, when her twin obelisks stood out
against the sky, and when her name meant all that was grandest in the
splendour of the antique world.
Vansittart looked at the starlit sky and lamplit city with a dull
unobservant gaze, while the burden upon his mind deadened his sense of
all things fair and strange, and made him indifferent to scenes which
would once have aroused his keenest interest. How often he had dreamed
his summer daydream of Egypt, lying on a velvet lawn in Hampshire,
with a volume of old Herodotus, or some modern traveller, flung upon
the grass beside him, in the idlesse of a July afternoon! How often he
had promised himself a long winter in that historic land! He had not
much of the explorer’s ardour in those boyish days, no bent towards
undiscovered watersheds and unpleasant encounters with blackamoors, no
ambition to be reckoned amongst the mighty marksmen of the world, or
to be called the father of lions; though in some vague visions he had
fancied himself wandering in that lone land where the Zambesi leaps
headlong into the fathomless gorge, in blinding whiteness of foam and
deafening thunder of sound, a beauty and a terror to eye and ear. The
things he most wanted to see were the things that his fellow-men had
made, the palaces and statues, and fortresses and tombs that mean
history. He was not a naturalist or a scientific traveller, had no hope
of making the world any richer by his discoveries, or of reading the
smallest paper at the Geographical Society. He wanted to see men and
cities, and all splendid memorials of past ages, for his own pleasure
and amusement; and Egypt was one of the countries to which he had
looked for delight, if ever satiety and weariness should overtake him
amidst the nearer delights of his beloved Italy.
And, behold, to-day he had walked those Egyptian streets, and let those
Egyptian faces pass by him, with eyes that saw not, and with a mind
that felt no interest in the things the eyes looked at. The distress
in his thoughts, the perpetual labouring of his troubled mind, would
not allow of pleasure in anything. That aching agony of remorse had
taken hold of him, and left room for no other feeling. To the end
of his life all that was picturesque and individual in this Egyptian
seaport would be part and parcel of his self-humiliation, associated
for ever with the thought that he had slain a fellow-creature, under
circumstances for which he could find no excuse.
Again and again, as he paced the deck in the starlight, the face of the
man he had killed stood out against the deep azure of the sky and sea,
as it had looked at him in that awful moment when one last ejaculation,
“God!” broke from the parted lips, and the man fell as if struck by a
thunderbolt. There was scarcely any change in his face as he fell--no
ghastly pallor, no convulsion of the features. As he lay there looking
up at the ceiling, one might hardly have thought him dead. No torrent
of blood rushed from those parted lips. The stream ebbed slow and dull
from the pierced heart. That savage thrust of the dagger had done its
work well. How many daggers and what a gory butchery had been needed
to make an end of Cæsar; and behold this man was done for with one
movement of an angry hand. For John Vansittart murder had been made
easy.
The homeward voyage seemed ever so much longer than the outward, and
the gloom of his mind deepened as the summer days wore out; summer, for
it was summer here on the Mediterranean, whatever season it might seem
in London, summer at Genoa, summer all along the Riviera, where the
mimosas flung their fairy gold across the villa gardens, and the lateen
sails shone dazzling white in the vivid sun, and the berceaus were
beginning to clothe themselves with young vine leaves, unfolding out of
crumpled woolly greyness into tender, translucent green.
He thought of Fiordelisa, and his thoughts of her were bitterest of
all. He could not doubt that he had robbed her of her protector, the
man whose purse provided for the little household of which she and
her aunt had talked so gaily. It might be that he had left her to
starve--or worse. Was it likely she would ever go back to Burano, and
her lace-work, and her threepence-halfpenny a day, and her slipshod
shoes, and her polenta, after having tasted the flesh-pots of Venice,
the pallid asparagus and fat cauliflowers from the market in the
Rialto, the savoury messes at the sign of the Black Hat? Would she
go back and be a peasant again, after trapesing the Piazzetta in her
flashy black and yellow gown, and sitting in a lantern-lit gondola, and
twanging on her mandoline?
His experience of her sex and degree inclined him to think that she
would not return to the old laborious life, with its hardships and
privations. The first step upon the broad high-road of sin having been
taken, there would be but little scruple about the second; and those
bold, beautiful eyes, that swan throat and graceful form, would belong
to somebody else. The easy-going aunt would hardly stand in the way
of a new settlement, when the last of their poor possessions had been
carried to the Monte di Pietà, and hunger was at hand. Somebody else
would pay the little old singing-master, and listen admiringly while
Lisa sang to the wiry tinkling of her mandoline; and the lanterns would
swing from the beak of the gondola in the festival evenings, and the
rockets would shoot up through the purple night in front of Santa Maria
della Salute, and all the palaces on the Grand Canal would shine rosy
red, reflecting the Bengal fires, and Lisa would forget her murdered
man, while those substantial feet of hers tripped gaily down the
brimstone path.
If that tall, broad-shouldered, sandy-haired man had lived he might
have kept his promise and married her. Who is to be sure that he would
not? There are men in the world who will wed the girl they love, be
she barmaid or ballet-dancer; and that this man was fond of Fiordelisa
there could be little doubt. His savage jealousy indicated the
passionate force of the civilized savage’s love.
Alas for Fiordelisa, widowed in the very morning of life! He who had
wrecked her fortune could do nothing to help her. He dared not stretch
out his hand towards her. His interest, for the sake of others as well
as for his own sake, lay in severing every link that could connect him
with the catastrophe of that fatal night. No, he could do nothing for
Fiordelisa. He would not have grudged her the half of his income; and
he dared not send her so much as a ten-pound note! She must sink or
swim.
The thought of her peril doubled the sum of his remorse.
He landed at Marseilles, and here, too, it was summer--summer at her
brightest, with azure skies, and a sea deeper, bluer, more darkly
glorious than the lapis lazuli in a jewelled châsse. The streets were
full of traffic and abloom with flower-girls, noisily pressing their
bunches of roses and pale Parma violets upon him as he walked up the
Rue de la Cannebière on his way from the quay to the railway hotel.
There had been a time when the sights and sounds of that southern port
were like strong wine, exhilarating, delighting him, when he could not
have too much of the animation and picturesqueness of the place, the
Corniche road, the wide-stretching bay with rocks and lighthouses, the
sea marks of every kind, and that glittering point where the waterways
divide--to the left for Hindostan, China, Japan; to the right for the
New World and the setting sun; two paths upon the trackless blue that
seemed each to lead direct to fairyland.
And behold he had come from the land of glamour and mystery, from the
tombs of the Pharaohs, from the ashes of Cleopatra, heart-weary, caring
for nothing.
He went into one of the big caffès on his right hand, seated himself at
a table in an obscure corner, and began to examine the papers, hastily
turning them over one after another, worried by the sticks to which
they were fastened. Yes, here it was, in the Paris _Figaro_.
“A fatal brawl occurred last Tuesday night in one of the caffès in
the Piazza at Venice. Two Englishmen fought savagely about a Venetian
girl who had entered the caffè in the company of one of them. Both
men appeared to have been drinking, and after a desperate encounter
with fists, in the English fashion, the younger and better-looking of
the two snatched up a dagger and stabbed his antagonist to the heart.
Death was almost instantaneous. The murderer managed to get away in the
confusion caused by the unexpected catastrophe, the crowded state of
the Piazzetta and the Riva favouring his escape. It is supposed that he
jumped into the water, and either managed to scramble into a gondola
and get himself conveyed to the railway station or was drowned--though
the latter supposition seems unlikely when it is considered that the
canal was crowded with boats. Every effort to discover traces of the
missing man has been made by the Venetian police, but as yet without
success. The name of the murdered man was John Smith. He had been some
time resident in Venice, but did not bear a good character in the city,
where he was in debt to several of the smaller tradespeople in the
Rialto. Very little seems to have been known about his surroundings,
even by the elderly woman who kept house for him, or the girl whose
existence cost him his life.”
John Smith. An assumed name, no doubt; just as false as that name of
Smith which Vansittart had given to the captain and steward of the
_Berenice_.
It did not seem to him, as he re-read this paragraph among the Faits
Divers in the _Figaro_, that the fatal event had created so much stir
as he had supposed it would create. It seemed to him that he was
getting off cheaply, and that he might go down to the grave without
being called upon to answer for that deadly stroke. The man’s isolation
saved him. Had his victim been the member of a respectable English
family, had there been father and mother, brothers and sisters to
bewail his loss, much more stringent efforts might have been made to
find his murderer. But a reprobate Englishman, a man who had perhaps
severed every link that bound him to kindred and country, a scampish
individual, living under an assumed name and unable to pay his way, was
not the kind of person whose death in a tavern brawl was likely to make
a great stir.
Had he disappeared, had there been the attraction of mystery about
his doom, a riddle to solve, a crime unexplained and seemingly
unexplainable, French and English newspapers might have given columns
or florid writing to the case. But here there was no mystery, no dark
enigma of love and murder. In the full glare of the gas, in sight
of the crowd, these two men had fought, and one had proved himself
unworthy of his British birthright by using a dagger against an unarmed
antagonist.
Vansittart found the same paragraph repeated in several papers,
and amongst his researches, aided by a waiter who brought him the
accumulation of the last ten days, he found an old _Daily Telegraph_
in which his crime formed the basis for a spirited leader, full of
vivacity and local colour, written by a journalist who evidently knew
Venice by heart. In this article the picturesqueness of the city,
the riot of Carnival time, the historical associations of Doge and
Republic, were more insisted upon than the brutality of the fight, or
the unfair use of the dagger.
He felt a little easier in his mind after his examination of the
papers. It seemed to him that by the time he arrived at Charing Cross
most people would have forgotten all about an event which was already
three weeks old, and it would hardly occur to any one to connect him
with the fatal brawl in the Piazza di San Marco.
He dined in the crowded, bustling restaurant in the Station Hotel with
a little better appetite than he had felt for a long time, and took
his seat in a corner of a compartment of the Rapide--not affecting the
stuffy luxury of the “Sleeping”--for the long night journey to Paris,
with a calmer mind than he had known since Shrove Tuesday. He looked
out into the darkness when the train stopped at Avignon, and it was
winter again, the bleak March winter before the Easter Noon; and at
Lyons the blasts from the two rivers blew colder still, and he felt
that he was near home.
He was in Charles Street by afternoon teatime, sitting in the cosy
drawing-room with his mother and sister, being petted and made much
of in a manner calculated to stimulate any young man’s self-love. His
mother adored him, and he had been away from her nearly half a year.
His sister was seven years his junior, a pretty, frivolous young
creature, whose mind rarely dwelt upon any more serious question than
the fashion of her next ball-dress or how she should wear her hair,
or the newest toy on her silver table. Yet she, too, adored Jack
Vansittart in her pretty frivolous way, and had not yet begun to adore
anybody else.
The room was full of flowers and old china, and little tables crowded
with silver, and enamels, and Dresden boxes, and ivory paper-knives;
and there were books in every available corner; an old room with
panelled walls and a low ceiling, in a somewhat shabby old house
which had belonged to Mrs. Vansittart’s grandfather, an East India
director, in the days when the Pagoda tree was still worth shaking.
The furniture was seventy years old, a quaint mixture of old-fashioned
English things, before the influence of Sheraton and Chippendale had
died out, and Indian things, really and intensely Indian, bought in the
East, long before Oriental goods began to be manufactured wholesale
for English buyers. Bombay blackwood, with its clumsy bulkiness
enriched by elaborate carving, ivories, screens of black and gold,
rainbow-hued embroideries which time had scarcely faded, porcelain jars
and enamelled vases, relieved the stern simplicity of rosewood and pale
chintz. A few choice water-colours on the walls, and an abundance of
flowers harmonized everything, and made Mrs. Vansittart’s drawing-room
a fitting nest for a very elegant woman and her very pretty daughter.
The London house was Mrs. Vansittart’s own property; the house in
Hampshire belonged to her son, and she spoke of herself and her
daughter laughingly as caretakers.
“When you marry,” said Maud, tossing up her pretty head, with pale gold
hair crisped and curled in the prevailing fashion, “mother and I will
have to budge. Whatever slut you may choose to fall in love with will
be mistress of Merewood.”
“Why must you needs suppose I may fall in love with a slut?”
“Oh, by the doctrine of opposites. You are one of those orderly,
superior persons who are foredoomed to admire some wild girl of the
woods, some harum-scarum minx, with fine eyes and half an inch of mud
on the edge of her gown.”
“However fine the eyes were, I think the half-inch of mud would be a
warning that I could hardly ignore. But I do not claim to be either
orderly or superior. My father’s Irish blood has infused a spice of
disorder into my Anglo-Saxon character.”
And now on this bright April afternoon Jack Vansittart was being petted
and fed by these two loving women, who could not do too much to prove
their devotion to him after the long severance. They had only given him
time to wash his hands and brush the Kentish dust and chalk out of his
hair and clothes before he sat down between them to a cup of tea. He
had to assure them that he had lunched heartily at Calais, and wanted
nothing but tea, or else a substantial meal would have been set out in
the dining-room below.
“And you have come straight through from Marseilles?” said Mrs.
Vansittart. “What a terrible journey!”
“Hot and dusty, mother; not very appalling to a traveller. But you are
such a stay-at-home.”
“To my cost,” pouted Maud. “I haven’t the least idea of what the world
is like. I have to take other people’s word that it is round.”
“We found your telegram from Marseilles at two o’clock this morning
when we came home from Mrs. Mountain’s dance, and, rejoiced as I was to
know you were coming back to us, I took it for granted you would loiter
in Paris for a week,” said Mrs. Vansittart.
“Paris is always delightful,” replied her son; “but I was tired of
wandering, and was honestly homesick. And here I am safe at home, and
ever so much better off than poor old Odysseus. By the way, mother,
your Italian spaniel did her level best to bite me as I came upstairs,
and she and I were once such friends. Dogs have altered since the days
of Argus.”
“How silly of her! but she’ll love you again after a day or two. And
now tell me, Jack, all you have been doing and seeing since you left
Merewood last October. You are such a bad correspondent that one knows
nothing about your wanderings, and if I were not well broken to your
neglect I should be miserable about you.”
“See how wise my system is,” he said, laughing; “were I a good
correspondent an interval of a week without a letter would scare you. I
have heard of men who write regularly once a week to their people, or
who keep a journal of their travels and send it home every fortnight
for family perusal. But since you and Maud both know that I detest
letter-writing, you expect nothing of me, and are never anxious.”
“Indeed you are wrong, Jack,” said his mother, with a sigh. “I have had
many an anxious hour about you. But I’m not going to be doleful now I
have you at home again, and for a long time, I hope.”
“Yes, for a long time,” echoed Jack. “I am sick of travelling.”
There was a weariness in his tone that sounded as if he meant what he
said.
“And now tell me your adventures.”
The word hurt him like the sharp edge of a knife.
“I have had none. No one has adventures nowadays,” he said. “I had a
fortnight on an American friend’s yacht in the Mediterranean, and we
had some rather dirty weather, but nothing to hurt. That’s my nearest
approach to an adventure. I had a month at Monte Carlo, shot a good
many pigeons, and missed nearly as many as I shot; played a little,
with varying luck, but am not ruined; came off on the whole a winner,
though to no substantial amount, perhaps enough to buy a pair of
solitaires for Maud’s pretty little ears”--pinching the ear that was
nearest him, as the girl sat on a low chair at his side. “No, I have
had no adventures. I have only been in familiar places. Let me see,
from where did I write last?”
“From Bologna, ages ago; a shabby little letter,” answered Maud.
“Ah, I spent a few days in Bologna after I left Florence. I am rather
fond of Bologna.”
“And after that? Where did you go after Bologna? It must be nearly two
months since you were there.”
“Oh, I went to Padua and--and Verona,” he answered carelessly, “and
then back to Genoa, and then I dawdled along the Riviera, stopping a
night or two here and there, to Marseilles; and here I am. That is my
history--and I am ready for another cup of tea.”
Maud filled his cup, and offered him dainty biscuits and tempting
cakes, and hung about him fondly, touching the thick hair which made
such a waving line across the broad forehead.
“Why, how tremendously sunburnt you are!” she exclaimed. “You look as
if you had just come off a sea voyage.”
“Do I? Well, I have basked in the sun that shines upon the
Mediterranean; and a March sun on the Riviera is a blazer.”
“And you were at Bologna and Padua, and did not go to your beloved
Venice?” said his mother. “I thought you were so fond of Venice?”
“Yes, I delight in the place, but I wanted to go back to the Riviera,
where I should be more secure of sunshine and balmy air.”
“And you left Italy without revisiting Venice?” exclaimed Maud, who had
often listened to his raptures about the City by the Sea.
There was no more to be said. For the first time in his life he had
deliberately lied, and to his mother and sister, of all people--to
those who in all the world most trusted and believed in him. He hated
himself for what he had done; and yet he meant to maintain that
false assertion doggedly. He had not been to Venice. Let no casual
acquaintance come forward to allege that he had been seen there. In the
very teeth of assertion he would declare that in this springtime of
1886 he had not been in Venice. He rejoiced in the thought that he had
told his name to no one at Danieli’s, and that he had entered the hotel
as a stranger, having stopped at one of the hotels on the Grand Canal
on his previous visits. He told himself that no one could convict him
of having been in the fatal city last Shrove Tuesday--no one who knew
him as Jack Vansittart.
“And now that you’ve had the history of my travels----”
“A sorry history, forsooth!” cried Maud. “You men have no capacity for
description. When Lucy Calder came home from her Italian honeymoon she
talked to me for hours about the places and things she had seen there.”
“Pretty prattler! Would you like me to recite a few pages of Murray
or Joanne? All travelling is alike nowadays, Maud, and pleasure and
comfort are only a question of good railway service and well-found
hotels. We have done with romance and adventure. Life is pretty much
the same all over Europe. And now tell me what you have been doing;
there is more interest in a girl’s life in her first season than in all
the cities of Europe.”
“Well, Jack, to begin with, I was presented at the February
Drawing-Room. I went out with mother a goodish bit last November,
don’t you know, but I was not actually out. That only began after the
Drawing-Room.”
“And had you a pretty frock, and did the Royalties look kindly at you
when you made your curtsy?”
“The Royalties might all have been waxwork, from Her Majesty downwards,
for anything I knew to the contrary,” said Maud. “I saw no faces--only
a cloud of feathers, and a splendour of jewels, and velvet, and satin,
all vague and troubled, like the figures in a dream--but I got through
the business somehow, and mother said I made no mistakes.”
“And the frock?”
“Oh, the frock was just as pretty as a frock can be. It was mother’s
taste. She talked out every detail with Mdlle. Marie. She was not
content to hear that Lady Lucille Plantagenet had worn this sort of
thing, or Lady Gwendoline Tudor that sort of thing. She insisted on
having just the frock she thought would suit me, Maud Vansittart.
The train and petticoat were white satin--the satin you see in old
pictures, satin in which there are masses of deep, steel-grey shadow
and floods of white, silvery light--and then there was a cloud of
aerophane arranged as only Marie can arrange a drapery, and in the
cloud there were clusters of lilies of the valley and fluffy ostrich
tips. The papers--the lady-papers mostly--went into raptures about my
frock.”
“And did the lady-papers say nothing of the wearer?”
“Oh, some of them were so good as to say I was not quite the most
hideous débutante of the year, and that they liked the way I had
my hair dressed--and now I find our French hair-dresser has the
impertinence to advertise the style as the Vansittart Coiffure.”
“What a frightful outrage! And having been presented, and being now
actually out, I conclude you have found London a very pleasant place,
under mother’s wing?” said Jack.
“Oh, it is all very quiet so far, and will be till after Easter, no
doubt; but we have been to a few friendly dinners and a good many
luncheons, and we have a cloud of invitations and engagements for May,
and some of our Hampshire friends are in town, so there is plenty to
do.”
“And have you seen anything of your Yorkshire friend, Sir Hubert
Hartley?” asked Jack.
“Yes. Sir Hubert is in town.”
“And did he see you in your débutante’s finery?”
“Yes, mother had a tea-party that afternoon, and there were a good many
people--and, yes, Sir Hubert dropped in.”
“And didn’t that finish him?”
“Finish him! oh, Jack, what a horrid expression! I don’t understand you
in the least!”
“Of course not. Well, I’ll say no more about my old friend Hubert. I
can look him up at the Devonshire to-morrow.”
“The Devonshire,” sighed Maud. “How sad to think that he is one of the
few respectable people who can find it in their hearts to be Liberals!”
“Yes, he is on the wrong side, no doubt, but that doesn’t matter to
us,” said Jack.
Mrs. Vansittart sighed slightly as she touched her daughter’s fluffy
hair, the girl sitting on her low chair between mother and brother.
“My Maud would like her friends to be of the same opinion as herself,”
she said, “and she is such an ardent Conservative, and knows so much
about politics.”
“At least, I know that I am not a Radical, and that I hate what
people call Progress,” protested Maud. “Progress means pulling down
every historical house and widening every picturesque street, cutting
railways through Arcadian valleys, and turning romantic lakes into
reservoirs.”
“And progress sometimes means feeding the hungry, and teaching the
ignorant,” said her mother, “and building healthy dwellings for people
who are herding in poisonous slums. I think we are all agreed as to the
necessity for reform, Maud, whether we are Whigs or Tories.”
“Oh, of course I want people to be taken care of all over the world,”
replied Maud, “and I am prouder of our sound, roomy cottages than
anything on our estate.”
“Ah, that’s the mother’s work,” said Vansittart. “One can see that a
woman’s eye watches over the parish.”
“Sir Hubert tells me they have very good cottages at Hartley,” pursued
Maud, “but I cannot imagine either comfort or picturesqueness within
twenty miles of Sheffield.”
“Yet there are some romantic spots and some fine, bold scenery in that
part of the world, I believe,” said her brother.
* * * * *
Later in the evening mother and son were alone together in the room
which had always been John Vansittart’s sanctum and tabagie, a snug
little room on the ground floor; and here the conversation was more
serious than it had been at teatime, for wherever Maud was frivolity
reigned. She had not yet discovered that life is a troublesome
business. For her life meant new frocks and new admirers.
“Dear Jack,” sighed the mother, looking fondly at the young man’s
sunburnt face, as he sat silently enjoying his pipe, “I hope now we
have you home again you are going really to settle down.”
“Really to settle down,” he repeated; “that sounds rather alarming.
Settle down to what, mother? Not to matrimony, I hope!”
“To that in good time, dear; but at your own good time, not mine. That
is a crisis I would be the last to hasten--not because I am afraid of
being turned out of the big house at Merewood; this house will be more
than enough for me--but because a hasty union is seldom a happy union.”
“Ah, that’s the old-fashioned way of looking at it. I believe in the
love of a day, the happiness of a lifetime. I believe in elective
affinities, and upon this teeming earth there is somewhere just the one
woman who could make me happy. Don’t be frightened, mother, the chances
are against my meeting her; but till I do, till my heart goes tick-tack
at the sight of her face, at the first sound of her voice, I shall not
marry. I shall not marry because the wisdom of my elders says that it
is good for a man to marry. I shall not marry just to place a handsome
woman at the head of my table. I will be content with a round table,
where there need be no headship.”
“I was not thinking of marriage, Jack. I only want to see you settle
down to the real business of life. I should be sorry to see you always
an idler--sauntering through a London season, yachting a little in
the Cowes week, shooting a little in September and October, hunting a
little in November, and running away from the winter to amuse yourself
at Nice or Monte Carlo. Independent as you are, you ought to do
something better with your talents.”
“My talents are an unknown quantity. I doubt if any one in this world,
except my fond mother, gives me credit for being even moderately
clever.”
“I remember what you were as a boy, Jack, and how well you got on at
Balliol.”
“Oh, that was in the atmosphere, I think. I was in love with Greek
because I worshipped Jowett. That was a boyish dream. All scholarly
ambition is a thing of the past. I shall never do anything in that
line.”
“Perhaps not. You have too much energy and activity for a student’s
life. I should like to see you a power in the House.”
“Dearest flatterer, you would like to see me Prime Minister. I have no
doubt you think that it simply rests with myself to become First Lord
of the Treasury at an earlier age than William Pitt.”
“No, no, Jack, I am not a foolish mother, fondly as I love you. But
I know that you have good gifts, and I want the world to profit by
them. I should like to see you in Parliament. There is so much to be
done by good men in the shaping of our new England--the England of
enlightenment and humanity--and I want to see my son’s hand at the
plough.”
“The field to be ploughed is wide and the soil is stubborn; but I don’t
know that my hand would be strong enough to drive a furrow.”
“You could help, Jack; every good man can help.”
“Mother, I believe you are at heart a Radical.”
“I don’t think one need be a Radical to wish that the masses were
better off and more thought of than they are. Some of the best and
noblest things that have been done for the poor have been done by
Conservatives. No, Jack, it is because I am not a Radical that I want
to see you in Parliament. You are rich, well-born, well-educated. You
could fill a place that might be filled by some Radical adventurer who
would look to Parliamentary life as a means of pushing his own fortune.”
“If I can find any constituency willing to elect Conservative me
instead of that Radical adventurer--who would in all probability be a
much better speaker than I am, and appeal to a larger electorate--well
and good. I have no great aversion to Parliament, but oh, you artful
woman, I know why you would have me write M.P. after my name. ‘If I can
pen him up with the other sheep in the House of Commons he can go no
more a-roving.’ That is what you say to yourself, mother mine.”
“No, no, Jack. I sadly want you at home, but I am not a hypocrite.
Most of all I want to see you with higher aims than those of a mere
pleasure-seeker. I want to be proud of my son.”
She drew her chair nearer his and took his strong, broad hand in both
her own. In her eyes he was all that youth and manhood should be. She
was proud of him already, though he had done nothing for fame. She was
proud of his height and strength, proud of his good looks, courage,
good temper, of all those qualities which go to make an English
gentleman.
“Proud of me,” he echoed. “Poor mother!” He drew his hand away,
remembering that it was stained with the blood of his fellow-man.