XI
Victoria was sitting to Delorme in a corner of the Italian garden. Hewished to paint her _en plein air_, and he was restlessly walking to andfro, about her, choosing a point of view. Victoria was vaguely pleased bythe picturesqueness of his lion head set close on a pair of powerfulshoulders, no less than by the vivacity of his dark face and southerngesture. He wore a linen jacket with bulging pockets, and a blackskullcap, which gave him a masterful, pontifical air. To Victoria'sthinking, indeed, he "pontified" at all times, a great deal more than wasnecessary.
However she sat resigned. She did not like Delorme, and her preferencewas all for another school of art. She had moreover a critical respectfor her own features, and she did not want at all to see them rendered bywhat seemed to her the splashing violence of Delorme's brushwork. ButHarry had asked it of her, and here she was.
Her thoughts, moreover, were full of Harry's affairs, so that theconversation between her and the painter was more or less pretence on herpart.
Delorme, meanwhile, was divided between the passion of a new subject andthe wrath excited in him by a newspaper article which had reached him atbreakfast.
"A little more to the left, please, Lady Tatham. Admirable! One moment!"The scrabble of charcoal on paper.
Delorme stepped back. Victoria sat languidly passive.
"Did you read that article on me in _The Weekly_? The man's afool!--knows nothing, and writes like God Almighty. A little more fullface. That's it! I suppose all professions are full of these jealousbeasts. Ours is cluttered up with them--men who never sell a picture,and make up by living on the compliments of their own little snarlingset. But, upon my word, it makes one rather sick. Ah, that's good! Youmoved a trifle--that's better--just a moment!"
"I'm glad you let me sit," said Victoria absently. "I _stood_ to Whistleronce. It nearly killed me."
"Ah, Jimmy!" said Delorme. "Jimmy was a Tartar!"
He went off at score into recollections of Whistler, drawing hard all thetime.
Victoria did not listen. She was thinking of those sounds of footstepsshe had heard under her window at dawn, and passing her room. Thismorning Harry looked as usual, except for something in the eyes, whichnone but she would notice. What had he been doing all those hours? Therewas nothing erratic or abnormal about Harry. Sound sleep from the momenthe put his head on his pillow to the moment at eight o'clock when hisservant with great difficulty woke him, was the rule with him.
What could have happened the night before--while he and Lydia Penfoldwere alone together? Victoria had seen them come back into the generalcompany, had indeed been restlessly on the watch for their return. Ithad seemed to her--though how be sure in that mingled light?--both at themoment of their reappearance and afterward, that Harry was somewhatunusually pale and quiet, while the girl's look had struck her assingular--_exaltee_--the eyes shining--yet the manner composed and sweetas usual. She already divined the theorist in Lydia, the speculator withlife and conduct. "But not with my Harry!" thought the mother, fiercely.
But how could she prevent it? What could she do? What can any mother dowhen the wave of energy--spiritual and physical--has risen or is risingto its height in the young creature, and the only question is how andwhere it shall break; in crash and tempest, or in a summer sea?
Delorme suddenly raised his great head from his easel.
"That was a delicious creature that sat by me last night."
"Miss Penfold? She is one of your devotees."
"She paints, so she said. _Mon Dieu_! Why do women paint?"
Victoria, roused, hotly defended the right of her sex to ply any honestart in the world that might bring them either pleasure or money.
"_Mais la peinture_!" Delorme's shoulder shrugged still higher. "It is aninfernal thing, milady, painting. What can a woman make of it? She canonly unsex herself. And in the end--what she produces--what is it?"
"If it pays the rent--isn't that enough?"
"But a young girl like that! What, in God's name, has she do to withpaying the rent? Let her dance and sing--have a train of lovers--lookbeautiful!"
"The whole duty of woman!" laughed Victoria with a touch of scorn; "forour grandmothers."
"No: for all time," said Delorme stoutly. "Ask milord." He looked towardthe house, and Victoria saw Tatham emerging. But she had no intentionwhatever of asking him. She rose hastily, excused herself on the score ofneeding a few minutes' rest, and went to meet her son.
"I forgot to tell you, mother," he said, as they approached each other,"Faversham's coming this afternoon. I had a letter from him this morning.He seems to be trying to make the old man behave."
"I shall be glad to see him."
Struck by something lifeless and jaded in the voice she loved, Victoriashot a glance at her son, then slipped her hand into his arm, and walkedback with him to his library.
He sat down silently to his books and papers. A couple of officialreports lay open, and Victoria knew that he was going to an importantcounty meeting that evening, where he was to be in the chair. Many oldermen, men who had won their spurs in politics or business, would be there,and it was entirely by their wish--their kindly wish--that Harry wouldtake the lead. They desired to see him treading in the steps of hisforefathers.
Perched on the end of his writing table, she watched her son a moment. Itseemed to her she saw already what the young face would be like when itwas old. A pang struck her.
"Harry--is there anything wrong?"
He looked up quite simply and stretched his hand to her.
"I asked her to marry me last night."
"Well?" The colour rushed into the mother's face.
"No go. She doesn't love me. She wants us to be friends."
Victoria gasped.
"But she's coming to sit to Delorme this afternoon!"
"Because I asked her."
"Harry, dear boy, for both your sakes--either all or nothing! If shedoesn't care--break it off."
"There's nothing to break off, dearest. And don't ask me not to see her.I couldn't. Who knows? She's got her ideas. Of course I've got mine.Perhaps--after all--I may win. Or, if not--perhaps"--he shaded his facewith his hand--"she'll show me--how not to mind. I know she wants to."
Silence a moment. Then the lad's hand dropped. He smiled at Victoria.
"Let's fall in! There's nothing else to do anyway. She's not like othergirls. When she says a thing--she means it. But so long as I can seeher--I'm happy!"
"You ought to forget her!" said Victoria angrily, kissing his hair."These things should _end_--one way or the other."
He looked perplexed.
"She doesn't think so--and I'm thankful she doesn't, mother--don't sayanything to her. Promise me. She said last night--she loved you. Shewants to come here. Let's give her a jolly time. Perhaps--"
The patience in his blue eyes nearly made her cry. And there was also thejealousy that no fond mother escapes, the commonest of all jealousies. Hewas passing out of her hands, this creature of her own flesh. Till nowshe had moulded and shaped him. Henceforward the lightest influencerained by this girl's eyes would mean more to him than all the intensityof her own affection.
* * * * *
Victoria's mind for the rest of the sitting was in a state ofabstraction, and she sat so still that Delorme was greatly pleased withher. At luncheon she was still absent-minded, and Lady Barbara whisperedin Gerald Tatham's ear that Victoria was always a poor hostess, but thistime her manners were really impossible.
"But you intend to stay a fortnight, don't you?" said Gerald, not withoutmalice.
"If I can possibly stay it out." The reply was lofty, but the situation,as Gerald knew, was commonplace. Lady Barbara's house in town was let foranother fortnight, and Duddon's Castle was more agreeable and moreeconomical than either lodgings or a hotel.
Meanwhile a pair of eyes belonging to the young man whose dinner jacketand black tie had marked him out amid the other male guests of the nightbefore were observing
matters with a more subtle and friendly spiritbehind them. Cyril Boden was a Fellow of All Souls, a journalist, anadvanced Radical, a charmer, and a fanatic. He hated no man. That indeedwas the truth. But he hated the theories and the doings of so many men,that the difference between him and the mere revolutionary was hard toseize. He had a smooth and ruddy face, in which the eyebrows seemed to bealways rising interrogatively; longish hair; stooping shoulders, and anamiable, lazy, mocking look that belied a nature of singular passion,always occupied with the most tremendous problems of life, and afraid ofno solution.
He had been overworking himself in the attempt to settle a dock strike,and had come to Duddon to rest. Victoria was much attached to him in amotherly way, and he to her. They sparred a good deal; she attacking"agitators" and "demagogues," he, fierce on "feudal tyranny," especiallywhen masked in the beauties and amenities of such a place as Duddon. Butthey were friends all the same, exchanging the unpaid services offriends.
In the afternoon, before Lydia Penfold appeared, Boden found amusementin teasing Delorme--an old acquaintance. Delorme was accustomed to posein all societies as Whistler's lawful and only successor. "Pattern" and"harmony" possessed him; "finish" was only made for fools, and thestory-teller in art was the unclean thing. His ambition, like Whistler's,was to paint a full length in three days, and hear it hailed amasterpiece. And, like Whistler, he had no sooner painted it than hescraped it out; which most sitters found discouraging.
Boden, meanwhile, made amends for all that was revolutionary in hispolitics or economics, by reaction on two subjects--art and divorce. Hehad old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorcemade easy. And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believingthat all art should appeal to ethical or poetic emotion.
"Boden admires a painter because he is a good man and pays his washingbills," drawled Delorme behind his cigarette, from the lazy depths of agarden chair. "His very colours are virtues, and his pictures must bemasterpieces, because he subscribes to the Dogs' Home, and doesn't beathis wife."
"Excellently put," said Boden, his hat on the back of his head, his eyesbeginning to shine. "Do men gather grapes off thistles?"
"Constantly. There is no relation whatever between art and morality."Delorme smoked pugnaciously. "The greater the artist, generally speaking,the worse the man."
"I say! Really as bad as that?"
Boden waved a languid hand toward the smoke-wreathed phantom of Delorme.The circle round the two laughed, languidly also, for it was almost toohot laugh. The circle consisted of Victoria, Gerald Tatham, Mrs. Manisty,and Colonel Barton, who had reappeared at luncheon, in order to urgeTatham to see Faversham as soon as possible on certain local affairs.
"Oh! I give you my head in a charger," said Delorme, not without heat."For you, Burne-Jones is 'pure' and I am 'decadent'; because he paintsanemic knights in sham armour and I paint what I see."
"The one absolutely fatal course! Don't you agree?"
Boden turned smiling to Mrs. Manisty, of whose lovely head and soft eyeshe was conscious through all the chatter.
The eyes responded.
"What do we see?" she said, with her shy smile. "Surely we only see whatwe think--or dream!"
"True!" cried Delorme; "but a painter thinks _in paint_."
"There you go," said Boden, "with your esoteric stuff. All your greatpainters have thought and felt with the multitude--painted for themultitude."
"Never." The painter jerked away his cigar, and sat up. "The multitude isa brute beast!"
"A just beast," murmured Boden.
"Anything but!" said the painter. "But you know my views. In everygeneration, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men whomatter--in all the world!"
"Artists?" The voice was Lucy Manisty's.
"Good heavens, no! Artists--and judges--together. The gate of art is adeal straiter than the gate of Heaven."
Boden caught Victoria's laugh.
"Let him alone," he said, indulgently. "His is the only aristocracy I canstand--with apologies to my hostess."
"Oh, we're done for," said Victoria, quietly.
Boden turned a humorous eye, first to the great house basking in thesunshine, then to his hostess.
"Not yet. But you're doomed. As the old Yorkshireman said to his son,when they were watching the triumphs of a lion-tamer in the travellingmenagerie--that 'genelman's to be wooried _soom_ day.' When the realArmageddon comes, it'll not find you in possession. _You'll_ have gonedown long before."
"Really? Then who will be in possession?" asked Gerald Tatham, a veryperceptible sneer in his disagreeable voice. He disliked Boden as one of"the infernal Radicals" whom Victoria would inflict on the sacredprecincts of Duddon, but he was generally afraid of him in conversation.
"Merely the rich"--the tone was still nonchalant--"the Haves against theHaven'ts. No nonsense left, by that time, about 'blood' and 'family.'Society will have dropped all those little trimmings and embroideries.We shall have come to the naked fundamental things."
"The struggle of rich and poor?" said Delorme. "Precisely. That's whatall you fellows who go and preach revolution to dockers are after. Andwhat on earth would the world do without wealth? Wealth is onlymaterialized intelligence! What's wrong with it?"
"Only that we're dying of it."
The young man paused. He sat silently smoking, his eyes--unseeing--fixedupon the house. Lucy Manisty looked at him with sympathy.
"You mean," she said, "that no one who has the power to be rich has nowever the courage to be poor?"
He nodded, and turning to her he continued in a lower voice: "Andthink what's lost! Are we _all_ to be smothered in this paraphernaliaof servants, and motor cars and gluttonous living? There's scarcely aman--for instance--among my friends who'll dare to marry! Hundreds usedto be enough--now they must have thousands--or say their wives must. Andthey'll sell their souls to get the thousands. Who's the better--who'sthe happier for it in the end? We have left ourselves nothing to lovewith--nothing to be happy with. What does natural beauty--or humanfeeling--matter to the men who spend their days speculating in the City?I know 'em. I have watched some of them for years. It's a thirst thatdestroys a man. To want to be rich is bad enough--to want to be rich_quick_ is death and damnation ..."
There was silence again, till suddenly Boden addressed Colonel Barton,who was sitting opposite half asleep in the sun.
"I say, what's the name of a village, about two miles from here, I walkedthrough while you were all at church this morning?--the most God-forsakenplace I ever saw!--a horrible, insanitary hole!"
"Mainstairs!" said Barton, promptly, waking up. "That's the only villagehereabout that fits the description. But Melrose owns two or three ofthem."
"The man that owns that village ought to be hung," said Boden with quietferocity. "In any decent state of society he would be hung."
Barton shrugged his shoulders.
"I'm on the sanitary authority. We've summoned him till we're tired, toput those cottages in repair. No use. Now, we've told him that we shallrepair them ourselves and send in the bill to him. That's stirred him,and he's immediately given everybody notice to quit--says he'll close thewhole village. But the people won't go. There are no other cottages formiles--they've taken to stoning our inspectors."
"And you think our land system's going to last on these terms?" saidBoden, his eyes flaming.
The little Tory opposite drew himself up.
"It's not the system--it's the man."
"The system's judged--that permits the man."
"Melrose is unique," said Barton, hotly; "we are a model county, but forthe Melrose estate."
"But the exception is damning! It compromises you all. That such a placeas Mainstairs should be _possible_--that's the point!"
"For you Socialists, I daresay!" cried Barton. "The rest of us knowbetter than to expect a perfect world!"
Boden laughed, the passion dying from his face.
"Ah, well, we shall have to make you marc
h--you fellows in possession. Nohope--unless we are 'behind you with a bradawl!'"
"On the contrary! We marched before you Socialists were thought of. Whohave put the bulk of the cottages of England in repair during the lasthalf century, I should like to know--and built most of the new ones? Thelandlords of England! Who stands in the way of reform at the presentmoment? The small owner. And who are the small owners? Mainly Radicaltradesmen."
Boden looked at him--then queerly smiled. "I daresay. I trust noman--further than I can see him. But if what you say is true, why don'tyou Conservatives--in your own interest--coerce men like Melrose? He'sgiving you away, every month he exists."
"Well, Tatham's at it," said Barton quietly; "we're all at it. Andthere's a new agent just appointed. Something to be hoped from him."
"Who is it?"
"You didn't hear us discussing him last night? A man called ClaudeFaversham."
"Claude Faversham? A tall, dark fellow--writes a little--does a littlelaw--but mostly unemployed? Oh, I know him perfectly. Faversham? Youdon't mean it!" Boden threw himself back in his chair with a sarcasticlip, and relit his pipe. As he watched the spirals of smoke he recalledthe few incidents of his acquaintance with the young man. They had bothbeen among the original members of a small club in London, frequentedby men of letters and junior barristers. Faversham had long since droppedout of the club, and was now the companion, so Boden understood, of muchricher men, and a great frequenter of the Stock Exchange, where money ismysteriously made without working for it. That fact alone was enough forCyril Boden. He felt an instinctive, almost a fanatical, antipathy towardthe new agent. On the one side the worshippers of the Unbought and theUnpriced; on the other Mammon and all his troop. It was so that Bodenhabitually envisaged his generation. It was so, and by no other test,that he divided the sheep from the goats.
Meanwhile, Lydia Penfold, driving a diminutive pony, was slowlyapproaching the castle through the avenue of splendid oaks which led upto it. Faversham was walking beside her. He had overtaken her at thebeginning of the avenue, and had sent on his motor that he might havethe pleasure of her society.
The daintiness of her white dress, with all its pretty details, the touchof blue in her hat, and at her waist, delighted his eyes. It pleased himthat there was not a trace in her of Bohemian carelessness in theserespects. Everything was simple, but everything was considered. She knewher own beauty; that was clear. It gave her self-possession; but, so faras he could see, without a trace of conceit. He had never met a younggirl with whom he could talk so easily.
She had greeted him with her most friendly smile. But it seemed to himnevertheless that she was a little pensive and overcast.
"You dined here last night?" he asked her. "Did the lion roar properly?"
"Magnificently. You weren't there?"
"No. Undershaw put down his foot. I shan't submit much longer!"
"You're really getting strong?"
Her kind eyes considered him. He had often marveled that one so youngshould be mistress of such a look--so softly frank and unafraid.
"A Hercules! Besides, the work's so interesting, one's no time to thinkof one's game leg!"
"You're getting to know the estate?"
"I've been motoring about it for a fortnight, that's something for abeginning. And I've got plenty of things to tell you."
He plunged into them. It was evident that he was resuming topics familiarto them both. Their talk indeed showed them already intimate, sharers ina common enterprise, where she was often inspiration, and he executiveand practical force. Ever since, indeed, she had said to him with thatkindled, eager look--"Accept! Accept!"--he had been sharply aware of howbest to approach, to attract her. She was, it seemed, no mere passivegirl. She was in her measure a thinker--a character. He perceived inher--deep down--enthusiasms and compassions, that seemed often as thoughthey shook her beyond her strength. They made him uncomfortable; theywere strange to his own mind; and yet they moved and influenced him.During the short time, for instance, that she had lived in their midst,she had made friends everywhere--so he discovered--among these Cumbriafolk. She never harangued about them; a few words, a few looks, burningfrom an inward fire--these expressed her: as when, twice, he had met herat dusk, with the aspect of a wounded spirit, coming out of hovels thathe himself must now be ashamed of, since they were Melrose's hovels.
"I've just come from Mainstairs," he said to her abruptly, as the housein front drew nearer.
The colour rushed into Lydia's cheeks.
"Are you going to put that right?"
"I'm going to try. I've been talking to your old friend Dobbs. I saw hispoor daughter, and I went into most of the cottages."
Somewhat to his dismay he saw the delicate face beside him quiver, andthe eyes cloud. But the emotion was driven back.
"You're too late--for Bessie!" she said--how sadly! The accent touchedhim.
"The girl is really dying? Was it diphtheria?"
"She has been dying for months--and in such _pain_."
"It is paralysis?"
"After diphtheria. Did they show you the graves in the churchyard?--theycall it the Innocents' Corner. Thirty children died in that village lastyear and the year before."
There was silence a little.
"I wonder what I can do," said Faversham, at last, reflectively. "I havebeen working out a number of new proposals--and I submit them to Mr.Melrose to-night."
She looked wistfully at the speaker.
"Good luck! But Mr. Melrose is hard to move."
Faversham assented.
"The hope lies in his being now an old man--and anxious to get rid ofresponsibilities. I shall try to show him that bad citizenship costs moremoney than good."
"I hope--oh! I _hope_--you'll succeed!" she said fervently. Her emotioninfected him. He smiled down upon her.
"That ought to make me succeed! But of course I have no experience. I ama townsman."
"You've always been a Londoner?"
"Practically, always. But I was tired of London before all thishappened--dying to get out of it."
And he began a short account of himself, more intimate than any he hadyet given her; to which Lydia listened with her open, friendly look,perhaps a little shyer than before. And so different, instinctively, isthe way in which a man will tell his story to a woman, from that in whichhe tells it to a man, that the same half-ironic, half-bitter narrativewhich had repelled Tatham, attracted Lydia. Her sympathy rose at once tomeet it. He was an orphan, and till now lonely and unsuccessful;tormented, too, by unsatisfied ideals and ambitions. Her imagination waspitiful and quick; she imagined she understood. She liked his frankness;it flattered and touched her. She liked his deep rich voice, and his darkface, with its lean strength, and almost southern colour. During hisillness he had grown a small peaked beard, and it pleased her artisticsense, by giving him a look of Cardinal Richelieu--as that great manstood figured in an old French print she had picked up once in a box onthe Paris quays. Moreover his friendship offered her so much freshknowledge of the world and life. Here, again, was comradeship. She waslucky indeed. Harry Tatham--and now this clever, interesting man,entering on his task. It was a great responsibility. She would not faileither of her new friends! They knew--she had made--she would make itquite plain, that she was not setting her cap at either. Wider insights,fresh powers, honourable, legitimate powers, for her sex--it was theseshe was after.
In all all this Lydia was perfectly sincere. But the Comic Spirit sittingaloft took note.
They paused a moment on the edge of the plateau on which the housestood--the ground breaking from it to the west. A group of cottagesappeared amid the woods far away.
"If all estates were like this estate!" cried Lydia, pointing to them,"and all cottages like their cottages!"
Faversham flushed and stiffened.
"Oh! the Tathams are always perfection!"
Lydia's eyebrows lifted.
"It is a crime?"
"No--but one hears too much of it."
"Not from them!" The tone was indignant.
"I daresay."
Suddenly, he threw her a look which startled her. She descended from herpony-cart at the steps of the castle, her breath fluttering a little.What had happened?
"Her ladyship is in the garden," said the footman who received them. Andhe led the way through a door in the wall of the side court. Theyfollowed--in a constrained silence. Lydia felt puzzled, and rather angry.
Faversham recovered himself.
"I apologize! They have all the virtues."
His voice was lowered--for her ear; there was deference in his smile. Butsomehow Lydia was conscious of a note of stormy self-assertion in him,which was new to her; something strong and stubborn, which refused totake her lead as usual.
Lady Tatham advanced. The eyes of a group of people sitting in a circleunder the shade of a spreading yew tree turned toward them.
Boden, who had given Faversham a perfunctory greeting, fell back into hischair again, and watched the new agent's reception with coolly smilingeyes.
Tatham came hurrying up to greet them. No one but Lydia could havedistinguished any change in the boyish voice and look. But it was there.She felt it.
He turned from her to Faversham.
"Awfully glad to see you. Hope you're quite fit again."
"Very nearly all right, thank you."
"Are you actually at work? Great excitement everywhere about you!"
Tatham stood, with his straw hat tilted toward the back of his head, andhis hands on his sides, observing his guest.
Faversham shrugged his shoulders.
"I feel horribly nervous!"
"Well you may!" laughed Tatham. "Never mind. We'll all back you up, ifyou'll let us."
"As far as I am concerned--the smallest contributions thankfullyreceived. Who are these people here?"
Tatham introduced him.
Then to Lydia:
"Delorme is waiting for you." He carried her off.
By this time Mr. Andover, the old grizzled squire who had been Lydia'spartner at dinner the night before, had dropped in, and various otherresidents from the neighbourhood. They gathered eagerly round Faversham,in the deep shade of the yews.
And before long, the new man had produced an excellent first impressionupon these country gentlemen who were now to be his neighbours. It wasevident that he was anxious to remove grievances. His tone as to hisemployer was guarded, but not at all servile; and he made the impressionof a man of ability accustomed to business, though modestly avowing hisignorance of rural affairs; independent, yet anxious to do his best witha great trust.
After half an hour's discussion, Barton drew Victoria aside, and said toher excitedly that the new agent was "a capital fellow!"
"He'll do the job, you'll see! Melrose is breaking up--thank God! Everyone who's seen him lately says he's not half the man he was. He'll haveto give this fellow a free hand. That estate has been a plague-spot!But we'll get it cleared up now."
Victoria wondered. Secretly, she doubted the power of any man to manageMelrose even _moriturus_.
Meanwhile it had not escaped her that the new agent and Lydia Penfold hadarrived together. It had struck her also that their manner toward eachother, as she went to meet them, had been the manner of persons justemerged from a somewhat intimate conversation. And she already perceivedthe nascent jealousy in Harry.
Well, no doubt the agent also was to be practised on by thesenewfangled arts. For no girl could have had the audacity to make thecompact Lydia Penfold had made with Harry, if she were already in lovewith another man! No. Faversham, it was plain, would be the next addedto her train. Victoria beheld the golden-haired creature as the modernCirce, surrounded by troops of ex-suitors--lovers transmogrified toFriends--docile at the heel of the sorceress. You took your chance,received your "No," and subsided cheerfully into the pen. Victoria vowedto herself that her Harry should do nothing of the kind!
She looked round her for the presumptuous maiden. There she was, under afountain wall in the Italian garden, her white dress gleaming from thewarm shadow in which the stone was steeped; Delorme, with an easel, infront. He was making a rapid charcoal sketch of her, and she was sittingdaintily erect, talking and smiling at intervals. A little way off, agroup of people, critical observers of the proceeding, lounged on thegrass or in garden chairs; among them, Tatham. And as he sat watching thesitting, his hat drawn forward over his brow and eyes, although hechatted occasionally with Mrs. Manisty beside him, his mother wasmiserably certain that he was in truth alive to nothing but the whitevision under the wall--the delicate three-quarter face, with its pointedchin, and the wisps of gold hair blowing about the temples.
And the owner of the face! Was she quite unmoved by a situation whichmight, Victoria felt, have strained the nerves even of the experienced?
A slight incident seemed to show that she was not unmoved. Lydia hadshown a keen, girlish pleasure in the prospect of sitting to Delorme, thegod, professionally, of her idolatry. Yet the sketch, for that afternoon,came to nothing. For after an hour's sitting Delorme, as usual, becamerestless and excited, exclaimed at the difficulty of the subject, cursedthe light, and finally, in a fit of disgust, wiped out everything he haddone. Lydia rose from her seat, looking rather white, and threw astrange, appealing glance--the mother caught it--at her young host.Tatham sprang up, released her instantly and peremptorily, though Delormeimplored for another half-hour. Lydia, unheard by the artist, gave softthanks to her deliverer, and, presently, there they were--she andHarry--strolling up and down the rose-alleys together, as though nothing,absolutely nothing, had happened.
And yet Harry had only asked her to marry him the night before, and shehad only refused! Impossible to suppose that it was the mere plotting ofthe finished coquette. This lover required neither teasing nor kindling.
However, there it was. This little struggling artist had refused Harry;and she had refused Duddon.
For one could not be so absurd as to ignore _that_. Victoria, sitting inthe shade beside Lady Barbara, who had gone to sleep, looked dreamilyround on the rose-red pile of building, on the great engirdling woods,the hills, the silver reaches of river--interwoven now with the darktree-masses, now with glades of sunlit pasture. Duddon was one of thegreat possessions of England. And this slip of a girl, with her home-madeblouses, and her joy in making twenty pounds out of her drawings,wherewith to pay the rent, had put it aside, apparently without amoment's hesitation. Magnanimity--or stupidity?
The next moment Victoria was despising her own amazement. "One takesone's own lofty feelings for granted--but never other people's! She saysshe doesn't love him--and that's the reason. And I straightway don'tbelieve her. What snobs we all are! One's astonishment betrays one'sstandard. Gerald says, 'What have the poor to do with fine feelings?' andI detest him for it. But I'm no better."
Suddenly, on the other side of the yew hedge behind her--voices. Harryand Lydia Penfold, in eager and laughing discussion. And all at once aname reached her ears:
"Lydia"--pronounced rather shyly, in Tatham's voice.
"_Lydia!"_ No doubt by the bidding of the young lady.
"I did not know I was so old-fashioned," thought Lady Tatham indignantly.
Yet the tone in which the name was given was neither caressing nortender. It simply meant, of course, that the young woman was breaking himin to her ideas; her absurd ideas, from which Harry must be protected.
They emerged from the shrubbery and came toward her. Lydia timidlyapproached Victoria. With Tatham she had not apparently been timid. Butfor his mother she was all deference.
"Isn't there a flower-show here to-morrow? May Susan and I come andhelp?"
The speaker raised her eyes to Lady Tatham, and Victoria read in themsomething beautiful and appealing, that at once moved and angered her.The girl seemed to offer her heart to Tatham's mother.
"_I can't marry your son!--but let me love you--be your friend!--thefriend of both_."
Was that what it m
eant?
What could Victoria do? There was Harry hovering in the background, withthat eager, pale look. She was helpless. Mechanically she said, "We shallbe delighted--grateful. I will send for you."
Thenceforward, however, Lydia allowed Tatham no more private speech withher. She made herself agreeable to all Victoria's guests in turn. Delormefell head over ears in love with her, so judicious, yet so evidentlysincere were the flatteries she turned upon him, and so docile herconsent to another sitting. Sweet, grave Lucy Manisty watched her withfascination. The Manisty boy dragged her to the Long Pond, to show herthe water-beasts there, as the best way of marking his approval. ColonelBarton forgot politics to chat with her; and the mocking speculation inCyril Boden's eyes gradually softened, as the girl's charm and beautypenetrated, little by little, through all the company.
Faversham alone seemed to have no innings with her till he wasabout to take his departure. Then Victoria noticed that Lydia made aquick movement toward him, and they stood together a few minutes,talking--certainly not as strangers.
Gerald Tatham also noticed it. There were few things, within his powers,that he left unnoticed.
"Now _that_ would be suitable!" he said in Lady Barbara's ear, noddingtoward the pair. "You saw how they came in together. But of course it's ablind. Any one with half an eye can see that she's just fishing forHarry!"