CHAPTER VI.

‘BY HEAVEN, I LOVE THEE BETTER THAN MYSELF.’

While Lucius dreamed his dream beside the wharf where the barges lay moored under the smoky London sky, Geoffrey was following his siren from one provincial town to another, not without some enjoyment in the chase, which filled his empty life with some kind of object, no matter though it were a foolish one. Given youth, health, activity, and a handsome income, there yet remains something wanting to a man’s existence, without which it is apt to become more or less a burden to him. That something is a purpose. Geoffrey having failed—from very easiness of temper, from being everybody’s favourite, first in every pleasure-party, foremost in every sport that needed pluck and endurance, rather than from lack of ability—to achieve distinction at the University, had concluded that he was fit for nothing particular in life; that he had no vocation, no capacity for distinguishing himself from the ruck of his fellow men; and that the best thing he could do was to live upon the ample fortune his merchant father had amassed for him, and get as much pleasure as he could out of life.

Almost his first experience of pleasure and independence had been those two years’ travel in the Far West. Pleasure in that particular instance had brought him face to face with death, but was counted pleasure nevertheless. After doing America, he had done as much of the old world as he happened to feel interested in doing, not scampering round the globe in ninety days like Mr. Cook’s excursionists, but taking an autumn in Norway, a winter in Rome, a spring in Greece, a summer in Sweden, and so on, until he began to feel, in his own colloquial phrase, that he had used up the map of Europe.

Apart from his passion for the lovely concert-singer, Mrs. Bertram, which was strong enough to have sustained his energies had the siren sought to lure him to the summit of Mount Everest, he really enjoyed this scamper from one provincial town to another, these idle days spent in sleepy old cities, which were as new to him as any unexplored region in central Europe. The great dusky cathedrals or abbey-churches into which he strolled before breakfast, careless but not irreverent; and where he sometimes found white-robed curates and choristers chanting the matin service; the empty square, where the town-pump and a mediæval cross had it all to themselves, except on market-days; the broad turnpike-road beyond the High-street, where, perhaps, an avenue of elms on the outskirt of the town testified to the beneficent care of some bygone corporation not quite destitute of a regard for the picturesque; these things, which repeated themselves, with but little variety, in most of the towns he explored, were not without a certain mild interest for Mr. Hossack.

He would gaze in wondering contemplation upon those handsome red-brick houses at the best end of the High-street, those respectable middle-class houses which every one knows, and of which every English town can boast, no matter how remote from the fever of that commerce which makes the wealth of nations. Houses whose windows shine resplendent, without stain or blemish of dust, smoke, or weather; houses on whose spotless doorstep no foot seems to have trodden, whose green balconies are filled with geraniums more scarlet than other geraniums, and on whose stems no faded leaf appears; houses whose sacred interior—archtemple of those homelier British virtues, ready money and soapsuds—is shrouded from the vulgar eye by starched muslin curtains pendant from brazen rods; houses at which the taxgatherer never calls twice, doors whose shining knockers have never trembled in the rude grasp of a dun.

Sometimes, in the gloaming, Geoffrey beheld the bald head of an elderly gentleman above the brass curtain-rod, and a pair of elderly eyes gazing gravely across the empty street, not as if they expected to see anything. The brass-plate on the door would inform him of the elderly gentleman’s profession—whether he was family solicitor or family surgeon, architect or banker; and then Mr. Hossack would lose himself in a labyrinth of wonder, marvelling how this old man had borne the burden of his days in that atmosphere of monotonous respectability, always looking out of the same shining window, above the same brazen bar. He would go back to his hotel, after this small study of human life, a wiser and a happier man, thanking Providence for that agreeable combination of youth, health, and independent fortune which gave him, in a manner, the key of the universe.

Stillmington, in Warwickshire, was a place considerably in advance of the dull old market towns where one could hear the butcher’s morning salutation to his neighbour from one end of the street to the other, where, indeed, the buzzing of a lively bluebottle made an agreeable interruption of the universal silence. Stillmington lay in the bosom of a fine hunting country, and, as long as foxes were in season, was gay with the cheery clatter of horses’ hoofs on its well-kept roads, the musical clink of spurs on its spotless pavements. Stillmington boasted an aristocratic hotel, none of your modern limited-liability palaces, but a family hotel of the fine old English expensive and exclusive school, where people ate and drank in the splendid solitude of their private apartments, and stared at one another superciliously when they met in the corridors or on the staircase, instead of herding together at stated intervals to gorge themselves in the eye of their fellow man, like the passengers on board a Cunard steamer. Stillmington possessed also a wholesome spring, whose health-restoring waters were, however, somewhat out of vogue, and a public garden, through whose leafy groves meandered that silvern but weedy stream the river Still; a garden whose beauties were somewhat neglected by the upper five hundred of Stillmington, except on the occasion of an archery meeting or a croquet tournament.

In the bright April weather, all sunshine and blue skies, like a foretaste of summer, Geoffrey found himself at Stillmington. His enchantress had been delighting the ruder inhabitants of Burleysbury, the great manufacturing town fifteen miles away, whose plethora of wealth served to sustain the expensive elegance of her unproductive neighbour, and was now at Stillmington. There were to be two concerts, with an interval of a week between them, and Geoffrey, whose knowledge of Mrs. Bertram’s movements was of the fullest, had ascertained that she meant to spend that intervening week in Stillmington. He had followed her from town to town, through all the deviations of a most circuitous tour; now at Brighton, anon at Liverpool, now at Cheltenham, anon at York. He had heard her sing the same songs again and again, and had known no weariness. But in all his wanderings he had never yet spoken to her. It was not that he lacked boldness. He had written to her—letters enough to have made a bulky volume had he cared to publish those sentimental compositions—but on her part there had been only the sternest silence. No response whatever had been vouchsafed to those fervid epistles, offering his hand and fortune, his heart’s best blood even, if she should happen to desire such a sacrifice; letters teeming with unconscious and somewhat garbled quotations from Byron, made eloquent by plagiarism from Moore, with here and there a touch of that energetic passion which glows in the love-songs of Robert Burns; yet to the very core honest and manly and straightforward and true. She must have been colder than ice surely to have been unmoved by such letters.

She had recognised the writer. That he knew. However crowded the hall where she sang, Geoffrey knew that his presence was not unperceived by her. He saw a swift sudden glance shot from those deep gray eyes as she curtsied her acknowledgment of the applause that welcomed her entrance; that keen glance which swept the crowd and rested for one ecstatic moment upon him. The lovely face never stirred from its almost statuesque repose—a pensive gravity, as of one who had done with the joys and emotions of life—yet he had fancied more than once that the eyes brightened as they recognised him; as if even to that calm spirit there were some sense of triumph in the idea of so much dogged devotion, such useless worship.

‘I daresay she feels pretty much as Astarte, or Baal, or any of those ancient parties would have felt, if they had been capable of feeling, when they were propitiated with human sacrifices. She won’t answer my letters, or afford me a ray of encouragement, but likes to know that there is an honest fool breaking his heart for her. No matter. I would rather break my heart for her than live happy ever afterwards, as the story-books say, with any one else. So courage, Geoffrey; let us show her how much ill-usage true lovers can bear, and still love on, and hope on, till love and hope are extinguished together in one untimely grave.’

And Geoffrey, whose philosophic mind was wont thus to relieve the tedium of the toilet, would contemplate his visage in the glass as he arranged his white tie, and wonder that ill-starred passion had not made greater ravages in his countenance; that he had not grown pale and wan, and seamed with premature wrinkles.

‘I wonder I’m not as grim-looking as Count Ugolino, by this time,’ he said to himself; and then went down to his private sitting-room at the Royal George, to eat a dinner of five courses in solitary state, for the benefit of that old-established family hotel. Love as yet had not affected his appetite. He did excellent justice to the _cuisine_ of the _chef_ at the George, an artist far above the common type of hotel cooks.

This young worldling was not without expedients. Inaccessible as his bright particular star might be, he yet contrived to scrape acquaintance with one of the lesser lights in that planetary system of which she was a part. A little finesse and a good deal of brandy-and-soda obtained for him the friendship of a youthful pianist, whose duty it was to accompany the singers. From this youth, who wore his hair long, affected the dreamily classical school, and believed himself a mute inglorious Chopin, Geoffrey heard all that was to be heard about Mrs. Bertram. But, alas, this all was little more than the musicsellers had already told him.

No one knew any more about her than the one fact of her supreme isolation, and that reserve of manner which was, perhaps unjustly, called pride. She lived alone; received no one, visited no one, kept her fellow performers at the farthest possible distance. If she took a lodging, it was always remote from the quarter affected by the rest of the little company; if she stayed at an hotel, it was never the hotel chosen by the others.

So much as this Geoffrey contrived to hear—not once only, but many times—without committing himself to the faintest expression of his feelings. He would have perished sooner than degrade his passion by making it the subject of vulgar gossip.

‘If I cannot win her without a go-between,’ he said to himself, ‘I am not worthy of her.’

Many times, stung to the quick by the freezing contempt with which she treated his letters, he had watched and lain in wait for her, determined to force an interview, should the opportunity arise. But no such opportunity had yet arisen. He would do nothing to create a scandal.

Here at Stillmington he had new hopes. The little town was almost empty, and offered a depressing prospect to the speculator who was to give the two concerts. The hunting season was over; the water-drinking and summer-holiday season had not yet begun. Stillmington had assumed its most exclusive aspect. The residents—a class who held themselves infinitely above those birds of passage who brought life and gaiety and a brisk circulation of ready money to the place—had it all to themselves. Respectable old Anglo-Indian colonels and majors paraded the sunny High-street, slow and solemn and gouty, and passed the time of day with their acquaintance on the opposite pavements in stentorian voices, which all the town might hear, and with as much confidence in the splendour of their social position as if they had been the ground-landlords of the town. Indeed, the lords of the soil were for the most part a very inferior race of men, who wore dusty coats, shabby hats with red-cotton handkerchiefs stuffed into the crown, and had a sprinkling of plaster of paris in their hair, and a three-foot rule sticking out of their breast pockets—men who belong to the bricklaying interest, and had come into Stillmington thirty years ago, footsore and penniless, in search of labour. These in their secret souls made light of the loud-voiced majors.

The town was very quiet; the glades and groves in the subscription garden—where the young lilacs put forth their tender leaves in the spring sunshine, and the first of the nightingales began her plaintive jug-jug at eventide—were lonely as those pathless regions of brushwood at the mouth of the Mississippi where the alligator riots at large among his scaly tribe. To this garden came Geoffrey, on the second day of his residence at Stillmington. Mr. Shinn, the pianist, had dropped a few words that morning, which were all-sufficient to make this one spot the most attractive in the world for Geoffrey Hossack. Mrs. Bertram and her little girl had walked here yesterday afternoon. Mr. Shinn had seen them go in at the gate while he was enjoying a meditative cigar, and thinking out a reverie in C minor during his after-dinner stroll.

Geoffrey was prompt to act upon this information. “What more likely than that his divinity would walk in the same place this afternoon? There was a blue sky, and the west wind was balmy as midsummer zephyrs. All nature invited her to those verdant groves.”

Mr. Hossack paid his money at the little gate, where a comfortable-looking gatekeeper was dozing over a local newspaper, and went in. Nature had liberally assisted the landscape gardener who laid out the Stillmington Eden. Geoffrey followed a path which wound gently through a shady grove, athwart whose undergrowth of rhododendron and laurel flashed the bright winding river. Here and there a break in the timber revealed a patch of green lawn sloping to the bank, where willows dipped their tremulous leafage into the rippling water. Ferns, and such pale flowers as will flourish in the shade—primrose, wild hyacinth, and periwinkle—grew luxuriantly upon the broken ground beside the path, where art had concealed itself beneath an appearance of wildness. To the right of this grove there was a wide stretch of lawn, where the toxophilites held their festivals—where the croquet balls went perpetually on certain days of the week, from the first of May to the last of September. But happily the croquet season had not yet begun, and the birds had grove and lawn to themselves.

Geoffrey went to the end of the grove, meeting no one. He strolled down to the bank and looked at the river, contemplated the weeds with the eye of boatman and of angler.

‘It ought to be a good place for jack,’ he muttered, yawned, and went back to the grove.

It was lonely as before. Thrushes, linnets, blackbirds, burst forth with their little gushes of melody, now alone, now together, then lapsed into silence. He could hear the fish leap in the river; he could hear the faint splash of the willow branches shaken by the soft west wind. He yawned again, walked back to within a few yards of the gate, came back again, stretched himself, looked at his watch, and sank exhausted on a rustic seat under the leafy arm of a chestnut.

‘I wonder if she will come to-day,’ he thought, wishing he had been at liberty to solace himself with a cigar. ‘It would be just like my luck if she didn’t. If I had only seen her yesterday instead of that ass Shinn, with his confounded reverie in C minor. But there was I loafing at the other end of the town, expecting to find her looking at the shop-windows, or getting a novel at the circulating library, when I ought to have been down here. And if I ever do contrive to speak to her, I wonder what she’ll say. Treat me with contumely, no doubt; blight me with her scorn, as she has blighted my epistolary efforts. And yet, sometimes, I have seen a look in those gray eyes that seemed to say, “What, are you so true? Would to God I could reward your truth!” A delusion, of course—mad as my love for her.’

The mildness of the atmosphere, those little gushes of song from the birds, the booming buzz of an industrious bee, the faint ripple of the river, made a combination of sound that by and by beguiled him into forgetfulness, or not quite forgetfulness, rather a pleasant blending of waking thought and dreaming fancy. How long this respite from the cares of actual life lasted he knew not; but after a while the sweet voice of his enchantress, which had mingled itself with all his dreams, seemed to grow more distinct, ceased to be a vague murmur responsive to the voice of his heart, and sounded clear and ringing in the still afternoon atmosphere. He woke with a start, and saw a tall slim figure coming slowly along the path, half in sunshine, half in shadow—a lady with a face perfect as a Greek sculptor’s Helen, dark chestnut hair, eyes of that deep gray which often seems black—a woman about whose beauty there could hardly be two opinions. She was dressed in black and gray—a black-silk dress of the simplest fashion, a loose mantle of some soft gray stuff, which draped her like a statue, a bonnet made of black lace and violets.

She was talking to a little girl with a small round face, which might or might not by and by develop into some likeness of the mother’s beauty. The child carried a basket, and knelt down every now and then to gather primroses and violets on the uneven ground beside the path.

‘Sweet child,’ said Geoffrey within himself, apostrophising the infant, ‘if you would only run ever so far away, and leave me quite free to talk to your mamma!’

He rose and went to meet her, taking off his hat as she approached.

‘I would not lose such an opportunity for worlds,’ he thought, ‘even at the risk of being considered a despicable cad. I’ll speak to her.’

She tried to pass him, those glorious eyes overlooking him with a superb indifference, not a sign of discomposure in her countenance. But he was resolute.

‘Mrs. Bertram,’ he began, ‘pray pardon me for my audacity: desperation is apt to be rash. I have tried every means of obtaining an introduction to you, and am driven to this from very despair.’

She gave him a look which made him feel infinitely small in his own estimation.

‘You have chosen a manner of introducing yourself which is hardly a recommendation,’ she said, ‘even were I in the habit of making acquaintances, which I am not. Pray allow me to continue my walk. Come, Flossie, pick up your basket, and come with mamma.’

‘How can you be so cruel?’ he asked, almost piteously. ‘Why are you so determined to avoid me? I am not a scoundrel or a snob. If my mode of approaching you to-day seems ungentlemanlike—’

‘Seems!’ she repeated, with languid scorn.

‘If it _is_ ungentlemanlike, you must consider that there is no other means open to me. Have I not earned some kind of right to address you by the constancy of my worship, by the unalterable devotion which has made me follow you from town to town, patiently waiting for some happy hour like this, in which I should find myself face to face with you?’

‘I do not know whether I ought to feel grateful for what you call your devotion,’ she said coldly; ‘but I can only say that I consider it very disagreeable to be followed from town to town in the manner you speak of, and that I shall be extremely obliged if you will discontinue your most useless pursuit.’

‘Must it be always useless? Is there no hope for me? My letters have told you who and what I am, and what I have dared to hope.’

‘Your letters?’

‘Yes; you have received them, have you not?’

‘I have received some very foolish letters. Are you the writer?’

‘Yes; I am Geoffrey Hossack.’

‘And you go about the world, Mr. Hossack, asking ladies of whom you know nothing whatever to marry you,’ she replied, looking him full in the face, with a penetrating look in the full clear gray eyes—eyes which reminded him curiously of other eyes, yet he knew not whose.

‘Upon my honour, madam,’ he answered gravely, and with an earnest warmth that attested his sincerity, ‘you are the first and the only woman I ever asked to be my wife.’

That truthful tone, those candid eyes boldly meeting her gaze, may have touched her. A faint crimson flushed her cheek, and her eyelids drooped. It was the first sign of emotion he had seen in her face.

‘If that be true, I can only acknowledge the honour of your preference, and regret that you have wasted so much devotion upon one who can never be anything more than a stranger to you.’

Geoffrey shot a swift glance after the child before opening the floodgates of his passion. Blessed innocent, she had strayed off to a distant patch of sunlit verdure carpeted with wild hyacinths—‘the heavens upbreaking through the earth.’

‘Never?’ he echoed; ‘never more than a stranger? Is it wise to make so light of an honest passion—a love that is strong to suffer or to dare? Put me to the test, Mrs. Bertram. I don’t ask you to trust me or believe in me all at once. God knows I will be patient. Only look me in the face and say, “Geoffrey Hossack, you may hope,” and I will abide your will for all the rest. I will follow you with a spaniel’s fidelity, worship you with the blind idolatry of an Indian fakir; will do for you what I should never dream of doing for myself—strive to win reputation and position. Fortune has been won for me.’

‘Were you the Lord Chancellor,’ she said, with a slow sad smile, ‘it would make no difference. You and I can never be more than strangers, Mr. Hossack. I am sorry for your foolish infatuation, just as I should pity a spoiled child who cried for the moon. But that young moon sailing cold and dim in the sky yonder is as near to you as I can ever be.’

‘I won’t believe it!’ he exclaimed passionately, feeling very much like that spoiled child who will not forego his desire for the moon. ‘Give me only a chance. Do not be so cruel as to refuse me your friendship: let me see you sometimes, as you might if we had met in society. Forgive me for my audacity in approaching you as I have done to-day. Remember it was only by such a step I could cross the barrier that divides us. I have waited so long for this opportunity: for pity’s sake do not tell me that I have waited in vain.’

He stood bareheaded in the fading sunlight—young, handsome—his candid face glowing with fervour and truth; a piteous appealing expression in those eyes that had been wont to look out upon life with so gay and hopeful a glance,—not a man to be lightly scorned, it would seem; not a wooer whose loyal passion a wise woman would have spurned.

‘I can only repeat what I have already told you,’ Mrs. Bertram said quietly, as unmoved by his appeal as if beneath her statuesque beauty there had been nothing but marble; no pitiful impulsive woman’s heart to be melted by his warmth, or touched by his self-abasement. ‘Nothing could be more foolish or more useless than this fancy—’

‘Fancy!’ he repeated bitterly. ‘It is the one heartfelt passion of a lifetime, and you call it fancy!’

‘Nothing could be more foolish,’ she went on, regardless of his interruption. ‘I cannot accept your friendship in the present; I cannot contemplate the possibility of returning your affection in the future. My path in life lies clear and straight before me—very narrow, very barren, perhaps—and it must be trodden in solitude, except for that dear child. Forget your mistaken admiration for one who has done nothing to invite it. Go back to the beaten way of life. What is that Byron says, Byron who had drained the cup of all passions? Love makes so little in a man’s existence. You are young, rich, unfettered, with all the world before you, Mr. Hossack. Thank God for so many blessings, and’—with a little laugh that had some touch of bitterness—‘do not cry for the moon.’

She left him, with a grave inclination of the proud head, and went away to look for her child—left him planted there, ashamed of himself and his failure; loving her desperately, yet desperately angry with her; ready, had there only been a loaded pistol within reach, to blow his brains out on the spot.