Lord Kilgobbin
‘Dear me! dear me!’ muttered he, ‘how pleasant one’s life might be if it were not for the clever fellows! I mean, of course,’ added he, after a second or two, ‘the clever fellows who want to impress us with their cleverness.’
Maude would not be entrapped or enticed into what might lead to a discussion. She never uttered a word, and he was silent.
It was in the perfect stillness that followed that Walpole entered the room with the telegram in his hand, and advanced to where Lord Danesbury was sitting.
‘I believe, my lord, I have made out this message in such a shape as will enable you to divine what it means. It runs thus: “Athens, 5th, 12 o’clock. Have seen S – , and conferred at length with him. His estimate of value” or “his price” – for the signs will mean either – “to my thinking enormous. His reasonings certainly strong and not easy to rebut.” That may be possibly rendered, “demands that might probably be reduced.” “I leave to-day, and shall be in England by middle of next week.– ATLEE.”’
Walpole looked keenly at the other’s face as he read the paper, to mark what signs of interest and eagerness the tidings might evoke. There was, however, nothing to be read in those cold and quiet features.
‘I am glad he is coming back,’ said he at length. ‘Let us see: he can reach Marseilles by Monday, or even Sunday night. I don’t see why he should not be here Wednesday, or Thursday at farthest. By the way, Cecil, tell me something about our friend – who is he?’
‘Don’t know, my lord.’
‘Don’t know! How came you acquainted with him?’
‘Met him at a country-house, where I happened to break my arm, and took advantage of this young fellow’s skill in surgery to engage his services to carry me to town. There’s the whole of it.’
‘Is he a surgeon?’
‘No, my lord, any more than he is fifty other things, of which he has a smattering.’
‘Has he any means – any private fortune?’
‘I suspect not.’
‘Who and what are his family? Are there Atlees in Ireland?’
‘There may be, my lord. There was an Atlee, a college porter, in Dublin; but I heard our friend say that they were only distantly related.’
He could not help watching Lady Maude as he said this, and was rejoiced to see a sudden twitch of her lower lip as if in pain.
‘You evidently sent him over to me, then, on a very meagre knowledge of the man,’ said his lordship rebukingly.
‘I believe, my lord, I said at the time that I had by me a clever fellow, who wrote a good hand, could copy correctly, and was sufficient of a gentleman in his manners to make intercourse with him easy, and not disagreeable.’
‘A very guarded recommendation,’ said Lady Maude, with a smile.
‘Was it not, Maude?’ continued he, his eyes flashing with triumphant insolence.
‘I found he could do more than copy a despatch – I found he could write one. He replied to an article in the Edinburgh on Turkey, and I saw him write it as I did not know there was another man but myself in England could have done.’
‘Perhaps your lordship had talked over the subject in his presence, or with him?’
‘And if I had, sir? and if all his knowledge on a complex question was such as he could carry away from a random conversation, what a gifted dog he must be to sift the wheat from the chaff – to strip a question of what were mere accidental elements, and to test a difficulty by its real qualities. Atlee is a clever fellow, an able fellow, I assure you. That very telegram before us is a proof how he can deal with a matter on which instruction would be impossible.’
‘Indeed, my lord!’ said Walpole, with well-assumed innocence.
‘I am right glad to know he is coming home. He must demolish that writer in the Revue des Deux Mondes at once – some unprincipled French blackguard, who has been put up to attack me by Thouvenel!’
Would it have appeased his lordship’s wrath to know that the writer of this defamatory article was no other than Joe Atlee himself, and that the reply which was to ‘demolish it’ was more than half-written in his desk at that moment?
‘I shall ask,’ continued my lord, ‘I shall ask him, besides, to write a paper on Ireland, and that fiasco of yours, Cecil.’
‘Much obliged, my lord!’
‘Don’t be angry or indignant! A fellow with a neat, light hand like Atlee can, even under the guise of allegation, do more to clear you than scores of vulgar apologists. He can, at least, show that what our distinguished head of the Cabinet calls “the flesh-and-blood argument,” has its full weight with us in our government of Ireland, and that our bitterest enemies cannot say we have no sympathies with the nation we rule over.’
‘I suspect, my lord, that what you have so graciously called my fiasco is well-nigh forgotten by this time, and wiser policy would say, “Do not revive it.”’
‘There’s a great policy in saying in “an article” all that could be said in “a debate,” and showing, after all, how little it comes to. Even the feeble grievance-mongers grow ashamed at retailing the review and the newspapers; but, what is better still, if the article be smartly written, they are sure to mistake the peculiarities of style for points in the argument. I have seen some splendid blunders of that kind when I sat in the Lower House! I wish Atlee was in Parliament.’
‘I am not aware that he can speak, my lord.’
‘Neither am I; but I should risk a small bet on it. He is a ready fellow, and the ready fellows are many-sided – eh, Maude?’ Now, though his lordship only asked for his niece’s concurrence in his own sage remark, Walpole affected to understand it as a direct appeal to her opinion of Atlee, and said, ‘Is that your judgment of this gentleman, Maude?’
‘I have no prescription to measure the abilities of such men as Mr. Atlee.’
‘You find him pleasant, witty, and agreeable, I hope?’ said he, with a touch of sarcasm.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘With an admirable memory and great readiness for an apropos?’
‘Perhaps he has.’
‘As a retailer of an incident they tell me he has no rival.’
‘I cannot say.’
‘Of course not. I take it the fellow has tact enough not to tell stories here.’
‘What is all that you are saying there?’ cried his lordship, to whom these few sentences were an ‘aside.’
‘Cecil is praising Mr. Atlee, my lord,’ said Maude bluntly.
‘I did not know I had been, my lord,’ said he. ‘He belongs to that class of men who interest me very little.’
‘What class may that be?’
‘The adventurers, my lord. The fellows who make the campaign of life on the faith that they shall find their rations in some other man’s knapsack.’
‘Ha! indeed. Is that our friend’s line?’
‘Most undoubtedly, my lord. I am ashamed to say that it was entirely my own fault if you are saddled with the fellow at all.’
‘I do not see the infliction – ’
‘I mean, my lord, that, in a measure, I put him on you without very well knowing what it was that I did.’
‘Have you heard – do you know anything of the man that should inspire caution or distrust?’
‘Well, these are strong words,’ muttered he hesitatingly.
But Lady Maude broke in with a passionate tone, ‘Don’t you see, my lord, that he does not know anything to this person’s disadvantage; that it is only my cousin’s diplomatic reserve – that commendable caution of his order – suggests his careful conduct? Cecil knows no more of Atlee than we do.’
‘Perhaps not so much,’ said Walpole, with an impertinent simper.
‘I know,’ said his lordship, ‘that he is a monstrous clever fellow. He can find you the passage you want or the authority you are seeking for at a moment; and when he writes, he can be rapid and concise too.’
‘He has many rare gifts, my lord,’ said Walpole, with the sly air of one who had said a covert impertinence. ‘I am very curious to know what you mean to do with him.’
‘Mean to do with him? Why, what should I mean to do with him?’
‘The very point I wish to learn. A protégé, my lord, is a parasitic plant, and you cannot deprive it of its double instincts – to cling and to climb.’
‘How witty my cousin has become since his sojourn in Ireland,’ said Maude.
Walpole flushed deeply, and for a moment he seemed about to reply angrily; but, with an effort, he controlled himself, and turning towards the timepiece on the chimney, said, ‘How late! I could not have believed it was past one! I hope, my lord, I have made your despatch intelligible?’
‘Yes, yes; I think so. Besides, he will be here in a day or two to explain.’
‘I shall, then, say good-night, my lord. Good-night, Cousin Maude.’ But Lady Maude had already left the room unnoticed.
CHAPTER LXVII
WALPOLE ALONEOnce 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.’
CHAPTER LXVIII
THOUGHTS ON MARRIAGELockwood was seated at his fireside in his quarters, the Upper Castle Yard, when Walpole burst in upon him unexpectedly. ‘What! you here?’ cried the major. ‘Have you the courage to face Ireland again?’
‘I see nothing that should prevent my coming here. Ireland certainly cannot pretend to lay a grievance to my charge.’
‘Maybe not. I don’t understand these things. I only know what people say in the clubs and laugh over at dinner-tables.’
‘I cannot affect to be very sensitive as to these Celtic criticisms, and I shall not ask you to recall them.’
‘They say that Danesbury got kicked out, all for your blunders!’
‘Do they?’ said Walpole innocently.
‘Yes; and they declare that if old Daney wasn’t the most loyal fellow breathing, he’d have thrown you over, and owned that the whole mess was of your own brewing, and that he had nothing to do with it.’
‘Do they, indeed, say that?’
‘That’s not half of it, for they have a story about a woman – some woman you met down at Kilgobbin – who made you sing rebel songs and take a Fenian pledge, and give your word of honour that Donogan should be let escape.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t it enough? A man must be a glutton for tomfoolery if he could not be satisfied with that.’
‘Perhaps you never heard that the chief of the Cabinet took a very different view of my Irish policy.’
‘Irish policy?’ cried the other, with lifted eyebrows.
‘I said Irish policy, and repeat the words. Whatever line of political action tends to bring legislation into more perfect harmony with the instincts and impulses of a very peculiar people, it is no presumption to call a policy.’
‘With all my heart. Do you mean to deal with that old Liverpool rascal for the furniture?’
‘His offer is almost an insult.’
‘Well, you’ll be gratified to know he retracts it. He says now he’ll only give £35! And as for the screws, Bobbidge, of the Carbineers, will take them both for £50.’
‘Why, Lightfoot alone is worth the money!’
‘Minus the sand-crack.’
‘I deny the sand-crack. She was pricked in the shoeing.’
‘Of course! I never knew a broken knee that wasn’t got by striking the manger, nor a sand-crack that didn’t come of an awkward smith.’
‘What a blessing it would be if all the bad reputations in society could be palliated as pleasantly.’
‘Shall I tell Bobbidge you take his offer? He wants an answer at once.’
‘My dear major, don’t you know that the fellow who says that, simply means to say: “Don’t be too sure that I shall not change my mind.” Look out that you take the ball at the hop!’
‘Lucky if it hops at all.’
‘Is that your experience of life?’ said Walpole inquiringly.
‘It is one of them. Will you take £50 for the screws?’
‘Yes; and as much more for the break and the dog-cart. I want every rap I can scrape together, Harry. I’m going out to Guatemala.’
‘I heard that.’
‘Infernal place; at least, I believe, in climate – reptiles, fevers, assassination – it stands without a rival.’
‘So they tell me.’
‘It was the only thing vacant; and they rather affected a difficulty about giving it.’
‘So they do when they send a man to the Gold Coast; and they tell the newspapers to say what a lucky dog he is.’
‘I can stand all that. What really kills me is giving a man the C.B. when he is just booked for some home of yellow fever.’
‘They do that too,’ gravely observed the other, who was beginning to feel the pace of the conversation rather too fast for him. ‘Don’t you smoke?’
‘I’m rather reducing myself to half batta in tobacco. I’ve thoughts of marrying.’
‘Don’t do that.’
‘Why? It’s not wrong.’
‘No, perhaps not; but it’s stupid.’
‘Come now, old fellow, life out there in the tropics is not so jolly all alone! Alligators are interesting creatures, and cheetahs are pretty pets; but a man wants a little companionship of a more tender kind; and a nice girl who would link her fortunes with one’s own, and help one through the sultry hours, is no bad thing.’
‘The nice girl wouldn’t go there.’
‘I’m not so sure of that. With your great knowledge of life, you must know that there has been a glut in “the nice-girl” market these years back. Prime lots are sold for a song occasionally, and first-rate samples sent as far as Calcutta. The truth is, the fellow who looks like a real buyer may have the pick of the fair, as they call it here.’
So he ought,’ growled out the major.
‘The speech is not a gallant one. You are scarcely complimentary to the ladies, Lockwood.’
‘It was you that talked of a woman like a cow, or a sack of corn, not I.’
‘I employed an illustration to answer one of your own arguments.’
‘Who is she to be?’ bluntly asked the major.
‘I’ll tell you whom I mean to ask, for I have not put the question yet.’
‘A long, fine whistle expressed the other’s astonishment. ‘And are you so sure she’ll say Yes?’
‘I have no other assurance than the conviction that a woman might do worse.’
‘Humph! perhaps she might. I’m not quite certain; but who is she to be?’
‘Do you remember a visit we made together to a certain Kilgobbin Castle.’
‘To be sure I do. A rum old ruin it was.’
‘Do you remember two young ladies we met there?’
‘Perfectly. Are you going to marry both of them?’
