Isabel Clarendon, Vol. I (of II)

“Mr. Lacour told me the other day that he thought of going on to the stage himself. He didn’t see any harm in it.”

As she spoke, Rhoda examined the border of her hat.

“Mr. Lacour!” exclaimed Isabel. “Oh, Mr. Lacour says wonderful things, and has wonderful plans. So you confided your project to Mr. Lacour, did you?”

Isabel threw a rapid glance at Ada whilst speaking; the latter appeared busy with her book.

“No, no,” disclaimed Rhoda rapidly, “I didn’t say a word to him of my own idea. It only came out in conversation.”

Mrs. Clarendon gave a little “h’m,” and stroked the back of one hand with the fingers of the other.

“It’s a mistake, my dear Rhoda,” she said. “Like it or not, we have to consider our neighbour’s opinion, and that doesn’t yet regard the stage as a career open to gentlemen’s daughters.”

“There’s no knowing what we may come to,” remarked Ada absently.

“Then what am I to do, Mrs. Clarendon?” cried the other girl almost piteously.

“A great many things. To begin with, you have to help me to make my garden party on Monday a success. Then again–oh, you have to become acquainted with my cousin, Mr. Asquith. Here he is!”

From the covered pathway issued a tall gentleman of middle age, dressed in a cool summer suit, holding his hat in his hands. His appearance was what is called prepossessing; by his own complete ease and air of genial well-being he helped to put others in the same happy state, his self-satisfaction not being of the kind which irritates by excess. His head was covered with a fine growth of black hair, which continued itself in the form of full whiskers, and with these blended the silken grace of a moustache long enough to completely conceal the lips. His features were slightly browned by Eastern suns. His eyes, as he viewed in turn each of the three ladies, had a calm, restful gaze which could have embarrassed no one, hinting only the friendliest of inward comment.

Isabel rose and stepped forward to meet him. In the act of greeting she was, perhaps, seen to greatest advantage. The upright grace of her still perfect figure, the poise of her head, the face looking straight forward, the smile of exquisite frankness, the warmth of welcome and the natural dignity combined in her attitude as she stood with extended hand, made a picture of fair womanhood which the eye did not readily quit. It was symbolical of her inner self, of the large affections which made the air about her warm, and of the sweet receptiveness of disposition which allowed so many and so different men to see in her their ideal of a woman.

“You found the trap at the station?” she asked, and, satisfied on this point, presented him to her companions. Though Asquith had just reached England in time to see his cousin once or twice before she left London, he had still to become acquainted with Ada Warren, who did not go to town with Mrs. Clarendon, but preferred to make her visits at other times, staying with Mr. Meres and his daughters. Ada was silent during the ceremony of introduction, and did not give her hand; Rhoda showed her more expansive nature and smiled prettily in Robert’s face.

“I thought you would find it pleasant to come and sit here a little before lunch,” said Isabel, by way of leading to conversation.

But Asquith merely bent his head; he seemed all at once to have become a trifle absent, and, after letting his gaze rest on Miss Warren for a few moments, had turned his look groundwards. But the interval was very short.

“That groom of yours who drove me over,” he began, in a leisurely tone and with an appreciative smile, “is a wonderful man.”

“That’s interesting,” said Isabel. “I fear I haven’t discovered his exceptional qualities.”

“They are remarkable. His powers of observation. I make a point of conversing whenever opportunity offers. The suggestive incident was a pig crossing the road; I remarked that it was a fine pig. By a singular accident I must have hit upon the man’s specialty; he looked at me with gratitude, and forthwith gave me—you can’t imagine—the most wonderful disquisition on pigs. He spoke as if he loved them. ‘Now, a pig’s heye, sir! Did you ever happen to notice a pig’s heye, sir?’ I was afraid to say that I had. ‘There’s more in a pig’s heye, sir, than you’d find creditable,’—meaning credible, of course. ‘There’s that knowingness in a pigs heye, sir, it can’t be described in words. When it isn’t fierce,—and if it is, the fierceness of it there’s no imagining!’”

This narration, given with much quiet humour, made Mrs. Clarendon and Rhoda laugh. Ada Warren had resumed her review, or at all events had it lying open on her lap, and showed no smile. Robert watched her with his quiet eyes. In Miss Meres he seemed to have little interest, and he looked far more frequently at Ada than at Mrs. Clarendon.

“By-the-bye, some one we passed on the road,” he said presently. He had a curious habit of mentioning in this disjointed way the subject of the remark he was about to make, and, so reposeful was his habit of speech, it often seemed as if the comment would never follow. “A young man, rather good-looking, or perhaps, rather noticeable. My friend the groom told me he was a settler in these parts; a gentleman who has taken a labourer’s cottage, and lives in a more or less eccentric way. It sounded interesting. Do you know anything of him?”

“Oh yes,” said Isabel, “our rector, Mr. Vissian, knows him, and speaks of him in superlatives. His name is Kingcote.”

“But what is he doing here?—reading, rusticating? I suppose he’s taken the cottage just for the summer months?”

“Mr. Vissian says he has settled here for good—a philosopher, who is tired of town life. He comes from London. I haven’t been favoured with a glimpse of him yet, but several people have spoken of him. I think I must ask Mr. Vissian to bring him here.”

“A month or so of summer would be pleasant, spent in that way,” observed Mr. Asquith; “but to settle finally! Something morbid about him, I suppose; he looks, in fact, rather bloodless, like a man with a fixed idea. Ten to one, he’s on precisely the wrong tack; instead of wanting more of his own society, he ought to have less of it. I suppose he lives alone?”

“Quite.”

“The worst thing for any man. I shouldn’t dare to converse with myself exclusively for two consecutive days. The great, preservative of sanity is free intercourse with one’s fellow men—to see the world from all points, and to refrain from final conclusions.”

Chat of this kind went on for a few minutes, all taking part in it except Ada.

“You are fond of the country, Miss Warren,” Asquith said at length, addressing the latter directly.

“Yes, I’m fond of the country,” was the reply, given in a mechanical way, and with a cold, steady look, whilst she ruffled the edges of her review. Asquith had found it at first difficult to determine whether the peculiarity of the girl’s behaviour were due to excessive shyness or to some more specific cause; but shyness it certainly was not, her manner of speaking and of regarding him put that out of the question. Did she, then, behave in this way to every stranger, or was he for some reason personally distasteful to her; or, again, had something just happened to disturb her temper?

“Your liking for it, though, would scarcely go to the extent of leading you to take up a solitary abode in a labourers cottage?”

“I can’t say,” Ada replied slowly. “One is often ready to do anything for the sake of being left alone.”

“Ada would stipulate, however, to be supplied with the Fortnightly or the Nineteenth Century,” put in Mrs. Clarendon laughingly.

“If anything could drive me into the desert,” was Robert’s remark, “it would be the hope of never again being called upon to look at them. I shouldn’t wonder if Mr.—Mr. Kingcote, isn’t it?—has fled from civilisation for the very same reason. Probably he has cast away books, and aims at returning to the natural state of man.”

“By no means,” said Isabel. “He has brought down quite a library.”

“Alas!” exclaimed Robert, with a humorous shaking of the head, “then he is, I fear, engaged in adding to the burden which oppresses us. No wonder he hides his head; he is writing a book.”

“Perhaps he is a poet, Mrs. Clarendon,” puts in Rhoda.

“Perhaps so, Rhoda; and some day we may have pilgrims from all corners of the earth visiting the cottage he has glorified.”

“With special omnibuses from Winstoke station,” added Robert, “and a colony of licensed victuallers thriving about the sacred spot.”

“Let us be thankful,” exclaimed Isabel, “that a poet’s fame is usually deferred for a generation or two. Ha, there’s the first luncheon bell! It brings a smile to your face, Robert.”

“Did I betray myself? I confess I breakfasted early.”

The two girls walked towards the house together, their elders following more slowly.

“Isn’t Rhoda Meres a nice girl?” said Isabel, when the object of her remark was out of hearing.

“Very,” her cousin assented, though without enthusiasm. He seemed to be thinking of something else.

“The poor child has got a foolish idea into her head; she wants to go on to the stage.”

“Does she—ha? Most young people have that idea at one time or another, I believe. In default of a special audience of one, you see–”

“And she is such a good, dear girl!” pursued Isabel, when Asquith showed no sign of continuing. “Her father is a literary man, the editor of a magazine called Ropers Miscellany—do you know it? He and I are the best of old friends. Its only with the thought of helping her father, I’m sure, that Rhoda has taken up this fancy; we must drive it out of her head somehow.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” remarked Robert, more absently than before.

Isabel glanced at him, and kept silence till they reached the house.

There was nothing remarkable about the structure itself of Knightswell; the front was long and low, built of brick faced with stone, and the level entrance was anything but imposing. The main portion of the building was early eighteenth century, but in the rear there still existed a remnant of the sixteenth century manor-house which had once stood here; the ancient hall now served as kitchen, its fine stone fireplace being filled up with an incongruous modern range. The present hall was surrounded with oak panelling, which Mr. Clarendon had obtained at the dismantling of an old house in the neighbourhood; all else of the interior had become, by successive changes, completely modernised, with the exception of an elaborate chimney-piece in the drawingroom—massive marble-work resting on caryatides—always said, though without corroborative evidence, to be a production of Grinling Gibbons. The faces of the two supporters were curiously unlike each other: on the one side it was that of a youthful maiden, who smiled, and seemed to be upraising her arms in sport; the other was an aged but not unbeautiful face, wearing an expression of long-suffering sadness, worn under the burden which the striving arms sustained. In the dining-room were a few good pictures, taken with the house from the preceding occupants. For Knightswell was not the ancestral abode of Mr. Clarendon’s family; it had passed, by frequent changes, from tenant to tenant, all inglorious. Notwithstanding his historic name, Mr. Clarendon was a novus homo; his father had begun life as an obscure stockbroker, had made a great fortune, and ended his life in a comfortable dwelling in Bayswater; his daughters, there were two, married reputably, and were no more heard of.

During luncheon Asquith was still much occupied in observing Ada Warren whenever he could unobtrusively do so. The young ladies were rather silent, and even Isabel showed now and then a trace of effort in the bright flow of talk which she kept up. Between herself and her cousin, however, there was no lack of ease; a graceful intimacy had established itself on the basis of their kinship, though not exactly that kind of intimacy which bespeaks life-long association. Their talk was of the present, or of the immediate past; neither spoke of things or people whose mention would have revived the memory of years ago.