CHAPTER V.

OUT OF THE WORLD.

THE arrival of Harold Jerningham disturbed the even tenor of life at the bailiff’s cottage, albeit he earnestly entreated there might be no change in his old friend’s existence. Theodore de Bergerac’s notion of hospitality was Arabian; and he would have slaughtered his daughter’s favourite Newfoundland if Mr. Jerningham had hinted an eccentric desire for _pâté de foie de chien_. He altered his dinner-hour from three o’clock to seven, in accordance with the habits of his guest; and he took pains to order such refined and delicate repasts as might have been chosen by a Lucullus in reduced circumstances. His cook was an old Frenchwoman, who had lived with him ever since he had occupied a house of his own; and for a _vol-au-vent_, an omelette _aux fines herbes_, a cup of coffee, or a batch of pistolets, white as snow and light as thistledown, old Nanon was prepared to enter herself in a _concours_ of the universe.

“Ne vous dérangez, donc pas, petite amour,” she said to Helen, when that young lady expressed some misgiving on the subject of Mr. Jerningham’s dinners; “nous avons toujours les vaches et les poulets; avec ça on a de quoi servir un dîner au lor maire. Et puis pour le café: n’est-ce pas que je l’ai fait pour madame la mère de monsieur dans le temps? C’était elle qui disait toujours, ‘Il n’y a que Nanon qui fait le café comme ça;’ et puis elle se meurt, la bonne dame, et puis il y avait la révolution, et monsieur me dit, ‘Nanon, adieu, je m’en vais;’ et puis j’ai tant pleuré, et puis----”

There was no end to Nanon’s “et puis.”

“C’est une espèce de puits qui n’a point de fond,” said M. de Bergerac, when his daughter repeated to him some of the old woman’s affectionate twaddlings.

It was some years since Mr. Jerningham had been to Greenlands, and in the past his visits had been of the briefest.

“Thou art always as one that falls from the heavens,” said M. de Bergerac.

This time, however, it seemed as if the restless demon that ruled Harold Jerningham’s existence was in some manner exorcised. The master of Greenlands took up his abode in those snug bachelor rooms on the ground-floor of the mansion, which he preferred to the statelier apartments above. There had crept upon the old house a silence and solemnity almost as profound as the mystic silence which reigned in the palace of the Sleeping Beauty, and not even the coming of the master could break the awful spell. By night and by day the doors shut with a clang that might have sounded in the Castle of Udolpho. The catacombs of subterranean Rome are more cheerful than the great stone entrance-hall; the chamber in which Frederick Barbarossa sat in a charmed sleep, awaiting the summons that was to call him once again to the battle-field, was not more appalling than the great dining-room, where the shutters were seldom opened, and where the pictured images of departed Jerninghams looked ghostlike in the gloom.

It was only natural, therefore, that Mr. Jerningham should prefer the pleasant, home-like rooms in the bailiff’s cottage. Considered as a habitation only, the cottage was much more pleasant than the great house; and at the cottage Mr. Jerningham enjoyed the society that was of all companionship most agreeable to him. With Theodore de Bergerac there was always some new subject for discussion; and the theme which employed the quiet days of the savant had a keen interest for his friend. The Frenchman might ride his hobby as hard as he pleased without inflicting weariness upon Mr. Jerningham, who in general society affected the tone and manner of a gentlemanly martyr.

He spent all his evenings at the cottage, after contriving to occupy himself somehow or other during the day; for this most selfish of men was too well-bred to intrude upon his friend’s studious hours. It was only between six and seven o’clock that Mr. Jerningham made his appearance in the little drawing-room, where he generally found Helen alone with her books and work, with the ponderous limbs of the Newfoundland stretched luxuriously upon the hearth at her feet.

The half-hour before dinner was by no means disagreeable to the master of Greenlands, nor was it unpleasant to Helen. Jerningham the irresistible had not lost the charm of manner that had won him renown in that modern Hôtel de Rambouillet, to whose saloons all that was brightest in the regions of intellect lent its light; and across whose floors, silent and inscrutable as a shadow, passed that exiled prince whose voice now rules the Western world. Mr. Jerningham had acquired the art of conversation amongst the best men of his day, and he talked well. Subdued in all things, he pleased without effort, and was instructive without taint of dogmatism. He discussed a subject with interest, but he never argued. That war of words which some people call conversation was detestable to him.

Helen was unversed in the hateful art of argument, and she was the most delightful, the most sympathetic of listeners. She had read just enough to make her a good listener. There were few subjects you could touch of which she did not know something, and about which she did not languish to know more. She was not unpleasantly demonstrative of her interest in your discourse, nor did she cut you down in the middle of a sentence from the desire to prove herself your equal in wisdom; but every now and then, by some apposite remark or well-timed question, she demonstrated her interest in your discourse, her perfect appreciation of your meaning.

“If my wife had been like this girl, my marriage would have been a turning-point in my life,” Harold Jerningham said to himself, very sadly, after one of these pleasant half-hours before dinner.

After that first interview between the two men, no more was said about Eustace Thorburn. To the secretary, Mr. Jerningham was unalterably polite, preserving always that tone of the grand seigneur which marks difference of rank, and yet is not the assumption of superiority; a manner that seems to say, “We are born of different races, and, unhappily, no condescension on my part can bring us any nearer to each other.” It was the manner of Louis the Great to Molière or Racine. But a very close observer might have discovered that the master of Greenlands liked neither the secretary’s presence nor the secretary himself. He talked to him a little now and then; for he was at his worst a gentleman, and could not insult a dependant; and he listened courteously to the young man’s talk. But he rarely pursued any subject that seemed a favourite with Mr. Thorburn; and on rare occasions when Eustace warmed with the excitement of some argument between himself and his employer, and talked with unusual warmth, Mr. Jerningham betrayed some slight weariness.

“Do you not find that young man insufferable with his rhapsodies about Homer and Æschylus?” he said to Helen one evening. But the young lady declared her sympathies with Mr. Thorburn, and this time without blushes or confusion whatsoever.

There is a calm, sweet peace that attends the monotony of a happy life, in which doubt and bewilderment of mind are unknown. On that first day of Mr. Jerningham’s return, Helen had been just a little embarrassed in her conversation with the unexpected guest; hence the blushes and confusion that had accompanied her mention of Eustace Thorburn. But now she had no more restraint in talking of the secretary with Mr. Jerningham than when she talked of him with her father. Harold saw this, and began to fancy that he had been mistaken. There might be no love-affair between these young people after all. He was very willing to think it was so. “I should be sorry to see Helen de Bergerac waste her regard upon that pedantic young prig,” he said to himself.

Now most assuredly Eustace Thorburn was neither prig nor pedant; but in his own tranquil manner Mr. Jerningham was a good hater, and he had taken it into his head to hate this young man. The prejudice was, perhaps, not entirely unnatural, since Eustace was in some manner a protégé of Laurence Desmond’s.

Happily for the secretary, this unprovoked dislike was yet unknown to him. He was no sycophant, to languish for a rich man’s friendship; and he had never studied Mr. Jerningham’s looks or tones so closely as to discover the state of that gentleman’s feelings. There was, indeed, no room in his mind for any consideration of Mr. Jerningham’s thoughts or feelings. He was a poet, and he was in love, and he was happy; happy, in spite of the lurking consciousness that there might come a sudden end to his happiness.

Yes, he was happy--calmly, completely happy; and it is just possible that this very fact was irritating to Mr. Jerningham, who was a creature of whims and fancies, capricious and exacting as a woman. Had he not lived a womanish, self-indulgent life, eminently calculated to render the best and bravest of men something less than manly? Mr. Jerningham had chosen his position in life, and had never outstepped it. In the great opera of existence he had played only one part, and that was the rôle of the lover--the false, the fickle, the devoted, the disdainful, the jealous, the exacting--what you will--but always the same part in the same familiar drama; and now that he was too old for the character, he felt that he had no further use in life, and that for him the universe must henceforward be a blank.

He felt this always, but never with a pang so keen as that which smote him when Eustace Thorburn’s freshness and enthusiasm marked the depth of his own gentlemanly hopelessness. For the last fifteen years of his life he had kept himself carefully aloof from young men, holding the youth of his generation as an inferior species, something lower than his dog, infinitely worse than his horse. He saw young men from afar off at his club, and on those rare occasions when he condescended to appear in society, and it seemed to him that they were all alike, and all equally inane. The only clever young men he had ever met were older in feeling than himself, and more wicked, with the wickedness of the Orleans regency as distinguished from the wickedness of the Augustan age, it followed--the decadence from a Lauzun to a Riom, from the stately saloons of Versailles to the _luxe effréné_ of the Palais Royal.

But, behold, here was a young man who was intellectual and not cynical, learned and not a scoffer, ambitious without conceit, enthusiastic without pretence. Here was a young man whom Harold Jerningham admired in spite of himself, and whose virtues and graces inspired in his breast a feeling that was terribly like envy.

“Is it his happiness or his youth that I envy him?” Mr. Jerningham asked himself, when he tried to solve the mystery of his own sentiments with regard to this matter. “His youth surely; for the other word is only a synonym for youth. Yes, if I am angry with his obtrusive brightness and hopefulness, I suppose it is because I see him in full possession of that universal heritage which I have wasted. He is young, and life is all before him. How will he spend his ten talents, I wonder? Will he turn them into small change, and squander them in fashionable drawing-rooms, as I squandered mine? or will he invest them in some grand undertaking where they will carry interest till the end of time? Helen tells me he is to be a poet. I have seen his lighted window shining between the bare black branches when I have been restless, and prowled in the park after midnight. Ah, what delight to be three-and-twenty, with a spotless name, a clear conscience, a good digestion, and to be able to sit up late on a winter’s night to scribble verses! I dare say his fire goes out sometimes, and he writes on, supremely unconscious of the cold, and fancying himself Homer. Happy youth!”

A perfectly idle man is naturally the subject of strange whims and caprices; for that saying of Dr. Watts, about the work that Satan supplies to the idle, is as true as if it had been composed by Plato or Seneca. It must surely have been from very _désœuvrement_ that Mr. Jerningham wasted so much of his life at the cottage, and devoted so much of his leisure to the study of Eustace Thorburn as a member of the human family, and Eustace Thorburn in his relation to the student’s daughter. Certain it is that he bestowed as much of his attention upon the affairs of these young people as he could well have done had he been the appointed guardian of Helen de Bergerac’s peace. Closely as he studied these young persons, he could not arrive at any definite conclusion about them. Helen’s bright, changeful face told so many different stories; and the countenance of the secretary was almost as bright and changeful.

Sweet though the charms of friendship must always be to the jaded spirit, Mr. Jerningham was not altogether happy in his intercourse with the family at the bailiff’s cottage. He found pleasure there, and he dallied with the brief glimpses of happiness, loth to lose the brightness of those transient rays; but he found pain far keener than the pleasure, and every day when he went to his old friend’s house he told himself this visit should be the last.

But when the next day came, the outlook over life’s desert seemed more than ever dark and dreary; so he lingered a little longer by the cool waters of the green oasis.