WALPOLE ALONE
Once more in his own room, Walpole returned to the task of that letter to
Nina Kostalergi, of which he had made nigh fifty drafts, and not one with
which he was satisfied.
It was not really very easy to do what he wished. He desired to seem a
warm, rapturous, impulsive lover, who had no thought in life--no other hope
or ambition--than the success of his suit. He sought to show that she had
so enraptured and enthralled him that, until she consented to share his
fortunes, he was a man utterly lost to life and life’s ambitions; and while
insinuating what a tremendous responsibility she would take on herself if
she should venture by a refusal of him to rob the world of those abilities
that the age could ill spare, he also dimly shadowed the natural pride a
woman ought to feel in knowing that she was asked to be the partner of
such a man, and that one, for whom destiny in all likelihood reserved the
highest rewards of public life, was then, with the full consciousness of
what he was, and what awaited him, ready to share that proud eminence with
her, as a prince might have offered to share his throne.
In spite of himself, in spite of all he could do, it was on this latter
part of his letter his pen ran most freely. He could condense his raptures,
he could control in most praiseworthy fashion all the extravagances of
passion and the imaginative joys of love, but, for the life of him, he
could abate nothing of the triumphant ecstasy that must be the feeling of
the woman who had won him--the passionate delight of her who should be his
wife, and enter life the chosen one of his affection.
It was wonderful how glibly he could insist on this to himself; and
fancying for the moment that he was one of the outer world commenting
on the match, say, ‘Yes, let people decry the Walpole class how they
might--they are elegant, they are exclusive, they are fastidious, they are
all that you like to call the spoiled children of Fortune in their wit,
their brilliancy, and their readiness, but they are the only men, the only
men in the world, who marry--we’ll not say for “love,” for the phrase is
vulgar--but who marry to please themselves! This girl had not a shilling.
As to family, all is said when we say she was a Greek! Is there not
something downright chivalrous in marrying such a woman? Is it the act of a
worldly man?’
He walked the room, uttering this question to himself over and over.
Not exactly that he thought disparagingly of worldliness and material
advantages, but he had lashed himself into a false enthusiasm as to
qualities which he thought had some special worshippers of their own,
and whose good opinion might possibly be turned to profit somehow and
somewhere, if he only knew how and where. It was a monstrous fine thing he
was about to do; that he felt. Where was there another man in his position
would take a portionless girl and make her his wife? Cadets and cornets in
light-dragoon regiments did these things: they liked their ‘bit of beauty’;
and there was a sort of mock-poetry about these creatures that suited that
sort of thing; but for a man who wrote his letters from Brookes’s, and
whose dinner invitations included all that was great in town, to stoop to
such an alliance was as bold a defiance as one could throw at a world of
self-seeking and conventionality.
‘That Emperor of the French did it,’ cried he. ‘I cannot recall to my mind
another. He did the very same thing I am going to do. To be sure, he had
the “pull on me” in one point. As he said himself, “_I_ am a parvenu.” Now,
_I_ cannot go that far! I must justify my act on other grounds, as I hope
I can do,’ cried he, after a pause; while, with head erect and swelling
chest, he went on: ‘I felt within me the place I yet should occupy. I
knew--ay, knew--the prize that awaited me, and I asked myself, “Do you see
in any capital of Europe one woman with whom you would like to share
this fortune? Is there one sufficiently gifted and graceful to make her
elevation seem a natural and fitting promotion, and herself appear the
appropriate occupant of the station?”
‘She is wonderfully beautiful: there is no doubt of it. Such beauty as they
have never seen here in their lives! Fanciful extravagances in dress, and
atrocious hair-dressing, cannot disfigure her; and by Jove! she has tried
both. And one has only to imagine that woman dressed and “coifféed,” as she
might be, to conceive such a triumph as London has not witnessed for the
century! And I do long for such a triumph. If my lord would only invite
us here, were it but for a week! We should be asked to Goreham and the
Bexsmiths’. My lady never omits to invite a great beauty. It’s _her_ way to
protest that she is still handsome, and not at all jealous. How are we to
get “asked” to Bruton Street?’ asked he over and over, as though the sounds
must secure the answer. ‘Maude will never permit it. The unlucky picture
has settled _that_ point. Maude will not suffer her to cross the threshold!
But for the portrait I could bespeak my cousin’s favour and indulgence for
a somewhat countrified young girl, dowdy and awkward. I could plead for her
good looks in that _ad misericordiam_ fashion that disarms jealousy and
enlists her generosity for a humble connection she need never see more of!
If I could only persuade Maude that I had done an indiscretion, and that I
knew it, I should be sure of her friendship. Once make her believe that I
have gone clean head over heels into a _mésalliance_, and our honeymoon
here is assured. I wish I had not tormented her about Atlee. I wish
with all my heart I had kept my impertinences to myself, and gone no
further than certain dark hints about what I could say, if I were to be
evil-minded. What rare wisdom it is not to fire away one’s last cartridge.
I suppose it is too late now. She’ll not forgive me that disparagement
before my uncle; that is, if there be anything between herself and Atlee,
a point which a few minutes will settle when I see them together. It would
not be very difficult to make Atlee regard me as his friend, and as one
ready to aid him in this same ambition. Of course he is prepared to see in
me the enemy of all his plans. What would he not give, or say, or do, to
find me his aider and abettor? Shrewd tactician as the fellow is, he will
know all the value of having an accomplice within the fortress; and it
would be exactly from a man like myself he might be disposed to expect the
most resolute opposition.’
He thought for a long time over this. He turned it over and over in his
mind, canvassing all the various benefits any line of action might promise,
and starting every doubt or objection he could imagine. Nor was the thought
extraneous to his calculations that in forwarding Atlee’s suit to Maude he
was exacting the heaviest ‘vendetta’ for her refusal of himself.
‘There is not a woman in Europe,’ he exclaimed, ‘less fitted to encounter
small means and a small station--to live a life of petty economies, and be
the daily associate of a snob!’
‘What the fellow may become at the end of the race--what place he may win
after years of toil and jobbery, I neither know nor care! _She_ will be an
old woman by that time, and will have had space enough in the interval to
mourn over her rejection of me. I shall be a Minister, not impossibly at
some court of the Continent; Atlee, to say the best, an Under-Secretary
of State for something, or a Poor-Law or Education Chief. There will be
just enough of disparity in our stations to fill her woman’s heart with
bitterness--the bitterness of having backed the wrong man!
‘The unavailing regrets that beset us for not having taken the left-hand
road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after
forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these
miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of
torture--would seem actually to revel in it.’
He turned once more to his desk, and to the letter. Somehow he could make
nothing of it. All the dangers that he desired to avoid so cramped his
ingenuity that he could say little beyond platitudes; and he thought with
terror of her who was to read them. The scornful contempt with which _she_
would treat such a letter was all before him, and he snatched up the paper
and tore it in pieces.
‘It must not be done by writing,’ cried he at last. ‘Who is to guess for
which of the fifty moods of such a woman a man’s letter is to be composed?
What you could say _now_ you dared not have written half an hour ago. What
would have gone far to gain her love yesterday, to-day will show you the
door! It is only by consummate address and skill she can be approached at
all, and without her look and bearing, the inflections of her voice, her
gestures, her “pose,” to guide you, it would be utter rashness to risk her
humour.’
He suddenly bethought him at this moment that he had many things to do
in Ireland ere he left England. He had tradesmen’s bills to settle, and
‘traps’ to be got rid of. ‘Traps’ included furniture, and books, and
horses, and horse-gear: details which at first he had hoped his friend
Lockwood would have taken off his hands; but Lockwood had only written him
word that a Jew broker from Liverpool would give him forty pounds for his
house effects, and as for ‘the screws,’ there was nothing but an auction.
Most of us have known at some period or other of our lives what it is to
suffer from the painful disparagement our chattels undergo when they become
objects of sale; but no adverse criticism of your bed or your bookcase,
your ottoman or your arm-chair, can approach the sense of pain inflicted by
the impertinent comments on your horse. Every imputed blemish is a distinct
personality, and you reject the insinuated spavin, or the suggested splint,
as imputations on your honour as a gentleman. In fact, you are pushed into
the pleasant dilemma of either being ignorant as to the defects of your
beast, or wilfully bent on an act of palpable dishonesty. When we remember
that every confession a man makes of his unacquaintance with matters
‘horsy’ is, in English acceptance, a count in the indictment against his
claim to be thought a gentleman, it is not surprising that there will be
men more ready to hazard their characters than their connoisseurship.
‘I’ll go over myself to Ireland,’ said he at last; ‘and a week will do
everything.’