The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 21

“Sit down,” continued the parasite, setting the example. “Fortune has gone against me. (I am just sirrupping a little brandy – after my journey.) I was going down, Mr. Naseby; between you and me, I was décavé; I borrowed fifty francs, smuggled my valise past the concierge – a work of considerable tact – and here I am!”

“Yes,” said Dick, “and here you are.” He was quite idiotic.

Esther, at this moment, re-entered the room.

“Are you glad to see him?” she whispered in his ear, the pleasure in her voice almost bursting through the whisper into song.

“Oh yes,” said Dick; “very.”

“I knew you would be,” she replied; “I told him how you loved him.”

“Help yourself,” said the Admiral, “help yourself; and let us drink to a new existence.”

“To a new existence,” repeated Dick; and he raised the tumbler to his lips, but set it down untasted. He had had enough of novelties for one day.

Esther was sitting on a stool beside her father’s feet, holding her knees in her arms, and looking with pride from one to the other of her two visitors. Her eyes were so bright that you were never sure if there were tears in them or not; little voluptuous shivers ran about her body; sometimes she nestled her chin into her throat, sometimes threw back her head, with ecstasy; in a word, she was in that state when it is said of people that they cannot contain themselves for happiness. It would be hard to exaggerate the agony of Richard.

And, in the meantime, Van Tromp ran on interminably.

“I never forget a friend,” said he, “nor yet an enemy: of the latter, I never had but two – myself and the public; and I fancy I have had my vengeance pretty freely out of both.” He chuckled. “But those days are done. Van Tromp is no more. He was a man who had successes; I believe you knew I had successes – to which we shall refer no further,” pulling down his neckcloth with a smile. “That man exists no more: by an exercise of will I have destroyed him. There is something like it in the poets. First, a brilliant and conspicuous career – the observed, I may say, of all observers including the bum-baily: and then, presto! a quiet, sly, old, rustic bonhomme, cultivating roses. In Paris, Mr. Naseby – ”

“Call him Richard, father,” said Esther.

“Richard, if he will allow me. Indeed, we are old friends, and now near neighbours; and, à propos, how are we off for neighbours, Richard? The cottage stands, I think, upon your father’s land, a family which I respect – and the wood, I understand, is Lord Trevanion’s. Not that I care; I am an old Bohemian. I have cut society with a cut direct; I cut it when I was prosperous, and now I reap my reward, and can cut it with dignity in my declension. These are our little amours propres, my daughter: your father must respect himself. Thank you, yes; just a leetle, leetle tiny – thanks, thanks; you spoil me. But, as I was saying, Richard, or was about to say, my daughter has been allowed to rust; her aunt was a mere duenna; hence, in parenthesis, Richard, her distrust of me; my nature and that of the duenna are poles asunder – poles! But, now that I am here, now that I have given up the fight, and live henceforth for one only of my works – I have the modesty to say it is my best – my daughter – well, we shall put all that to rights. The neighbours, Richard?”

Dick was understood to say that there were many good families in the Vale of Thyme.

“You shall introduce us,” said the Admiral.

Dick’s shirt was wet; he made a lumbering excuse to go; which Esther explained to herself by a fear of intrusion, and so set down to the merit side of Dick’s account, while she proceeded to detain him.

“Before our walk?” she cried. “Never! I must have my walk.”

“Let us all go,” said the Admiral, rising.

“You do not know that you are wanted,” she cried, leaning on his shoulder with a caress. “I might wish to speak to my old friend about my new father. But you shall come to-day, you shall do all you want; I have set my heart on spoiling you.”

“I will take just one drop more,” said the Admiral, stooping to help himself to brandy. “It is surprising how this journey has fatigued me. But I am growing old, I am growing old, I am growing old, and – I regret to add – bald.”

He cocked a white wide-awake coquettishly upon his head – the habit of the lady-killer clung to him; and Esther had already thrown on her hat, and was ready, while he was still studying the result in a mirror: the carbuncle had somewhat painfully arrested his attention.

“We are papa now; we must be respectable,” he said to Dick, in explanation of his dandyism: and then he went to a bundle and chose himself a staff. Where were the elegant canes of his Parisian epoch? This was a support for age, and designed for rustic scenes. Dick began to see and appreciate the man’s enjoyment in a new part, when he saw how carefully he had “made it up.” He had invented a gait for this first country stroll with his daughter, which was admirably in key. He walked with fatigue; he leaned upon the staff; he looked round him with a sad, smiling sympathy on all that he beheld; he even asked the name of a plant, and rallied himself gently for an old town-bird, ignorant of nature. “This country life will make me young again,” he sighed. They reached the top of the hill towards the first hour of evening; the sun was descending heaven, the colour had all drawn into the west; the hills were modelled in their least contour by the soft, slanting shine; and the wide moorlands, veined with glens and hazelwoods, ran west and north in a hazy glory of light. Then the painter awakened in Van Tromp.

“Gad, Dick,” he cried, “what value!”

An ode in four hundred lines would not have seemed so touching to Esther; her eyes filled with happy tears: yes, here was the father of whom she had dreamed, whom Dick had described; simple, enthusiastic, unworldly, kind, a painter at heart, and a fine gentleman in manner.

And just then the Admiral perceived a house by the wayside, and something depending over the house door which might be construed as a sign by the hopeful and thirsty.

“Is that,” he asked, pointing with his stick, “an inn?”

There was a marked change in his voice, as though he attached some importance to the inquiry: Esther listened, hoping she should hear wit or wisdom.

Dick said it was.

“You know it?” inquired the Admiral.

“I have passed it a hundred times, but that is all,” replied Dick.

“Ah,” said Van Tromp, with a smile, and shaking his head; “you are not an old campaigner; you have the world to learn. Now I, you see, find an inn so very near my own home, and my first thought is – my neighbours. I shall go forward and make my neighbours’ acquaintance; no, you needn’t come; I shall not be a moment.”

And he walked off briskly towards the inn, leaving Dick alone with Esther on the road.

“Dick,” she exclaimed, “I am so glad to get a word with you; I am so happy, I have such a thousand things to say; and I want you to do me a favour. Imagine, he has come without a paint-box, without an easel; and I want him to have all. I want you to get them for me in Thymebury. You saw, this moment, how his heart turned to painting. They can’t live without it,” she added; meaning perhaps Van Tromp and Michelangelo.

Up to that moment she had observed nothing amiss in Dick’s behaviour. She was too happy to be curious; and his silence, in presence of the great and good being whom she called her father, had seemed both natural and praiseworthy. But now that they were alone, she became conscious of a barrier between her lover and herself, and alarm sprang up in her heart.

“Dick,” she cried, “you don’t love me.”

“I do that,” he said heartily.

“But you are unhappy; you are strange; you – you are not glad to see my father,” she concluded, with a break in her voice.

“Esther,” he said, “I tell you that I love you; if you love me, you know what that means, and that all I wish is to see you happy. Do you think I cannot enjoy your pleasure? Esther, I do. If I am uneasy, if I am alarmed, if – . Oh, believe me, try and believe in me,” he cried, giving up argument with perhaps a happy inspiration.

But the girl’s suspicions were aroused; and though she pressed the matter no further (indeed, her father was already seen returning), it by no means left her thoughts. At one moment she simply resented the selfishness of a man who had obtruded his dark looks and passionate language on her joy; for there is nothing that a woman can less easily forgive than the language of a passion which, even if only for the moment, she does not share. At another, she suspected him of jealousy against her father; and for that, although she could see excuses for it, she yet despised him. And at least, in one way or the other, here was the dangerous beginning of a separation between two hearts. Esther found herself at variance with her sweetest friend; she could no longer look into his heart and find it written in the same language as her own; she could no longer think of him as the sun which radiated happiness upon her life, for she had turned to him once, and he had breathed upon her black and chilly, radiated blackness and frost. To put the whole matter in a word, she was beginning, although ever so slightly, to fall out of love.

CHAPTER VI

THE PRODIGAL FATHER GOES ON FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

We will not follow all the steps of the Admiral’s return and installation, but hurry forward towards the catastrophe, merely chronicling by the way a few salient incidents, wherein we must rely entirely upon the evidence of Richard, for Esther to this day has never opened her mouth upon this trying passage of her life, and as for the Admiral – well, that naval officer, although still alive, and now more suitably installed in a seaport town where he has a telescope and a flag in his front garden, is incapable of throwing the slightest gleam of light upon the affair. Often and often has he remarked to the present writer: “If I know what it was all about, sir, I’ll be – ” in short, be what I hope he will not. And then he will look across at his daughter’s portrait, a photograph, shake his head with an amused appearance, and mix himself another grog by way of consolation. Once I have heard him go further, and express his feelings with regard to Esther in a single but eloquent word. “A minx, sir,” he said, not in anger, rather in amusement: and he cordially drank her health upon the back of it. His worst enemy must admit him to be a man without malice; he never bore a grudge in his life, lacking the necessary taste and industry of attention.

Yet it was during this obscure period that the drama was really performed; and its scene was in the heart of Esther, shut away from all eyes. Had this warm, upright, sullen girl been differently used by destiny, had events come upon her even in a different succession, for some things lead easily to others, the whole course of this tale would have been changed, and Esther never would have run away. As it was, through a series of acts and words of which we know but few, and a series of thoughts which any one may imagine for himself, she was awakened in four days from the dream of a life.

The first tangible cause of disenchantment was when Dick brought home a painter’s arsenal on Friday evening. The Admiral was in the chimney-corner, once more “sirrupping” some brandy-and-water, and Esther sat at the table at work. They both came forward to greet the new arrival; and the girl, relieving him of his monstrous burthen, proceeded to display her offerings to her father. Van Tromp’s countenance fell several degrees; he became quite querulous.

“God bless me,” he said; and then, “I must really ask you not to interfere, child,” in a tone of undisguised hostility.

“Father,” she said, “forgive me; I knew you had given up your art – ”

“Oh yes!” cried the Admiral; “I’ve done with it to the judgment-day!”

“Pardon me again,” she said firmly, “but I do not, I cannot think that you are right in this. Suppose the world is unjust, suppose that no one understands you, you have still a duty to yourself. And, oh, don’t spoil the pleasure of your coming home to me; show me that you can be my father and yet not neglect your destiny. I am not like some daughters; I will not be jealous of your art, and I will try to understand it.”

The situation was odiously farcical. Richard groaned under it; he longed to leap forward and denounce the humbug. And the humbug himself? Do you fancy he was easier in his mind? I am sure, on the other hand, that he was actually miserable; and he betrayed his sufferings by a perfectly silly and undignified access of temper, during which he broke his pipe in several places, threw his brandy-and-water into the fire, and employed words which were very plain although the drift of them was somewhat vague. It was of very brief duration. Van Tromp was himself again, and in a most delightful humour within three minutes of the first explosion.

“I am an old fool,” he said frankly. “I was spoiled when a child. As for you, Esther, you take after your mother; you have a morbid sense of duty, particularly for others; strive against it, my dear – strive against it. And as for the pigments, well, I’ll use them some of these days; and to show that I’m in earnest, I’ll get Dick here to prepare a canvas.”