Sir William Blancove did business at his Bank till the hour of three in the afternoon, when his carriage conveyed him to a mews near the park of Fashion, where he mounted horse and obeyed the bidding of his doctor for a space, by cantering in a pleasant, portly, cock-horsey style, up and down the Row.
It was the day of the great race on Epsom Downs, and elderly gentlemen pricked by the doctors were in the ascendant in all London congregations on horseback.
Like Achilles (if the bilious Shade will permit the impudent comparison), they dragged their enemy, Gout, at their horses' heels for a term, and vengeance being accomplished went to their dinners and revived him.
Sir William was disturbed by his son's absence from England. A youth to whom a baronetcy and wealth are to be bequeathed is an important organism; and Sir William, though his faith reposed in his son, was averse to his inexplicably prolonged residence in the French metropolis, which, a school for many things, is not a school for the study of our Parliamentary system, and still less for that connubial career Sir William wished him to commence.
Edward's delightful cynical wit—the worldly man's profundity—and his apt quotations of the wit of others, would have continued to exercise their charm, if Sir William had not wanted to have him on the spot that he might answer certain questions pertinaciously put by Mama Gosling on behalf of her daughter.
“There is no engagement,” Edward wrote; “let the maiden wait and discern her choice: let her ripen;” and he quoted Horace up to a point.
Nor could his father help smiling and completing the lines. He laughed, too, as he read the jog of a verse: “Were I to marry the Gosling, pray, which would be the goose?”
He laughed, but with a shade of disappointment in the fancy that he perceived a wearing away of the robust mental energy which had characterized his son: and Sir William knew the danger of wit, and how the sharp blade cuts the shoots of the sapling. He had thought that Edward was veritable tough oak, and had hitherto encouraged his light play with the weapon.
It became a question with him now, whether Wit and Ambition may dwell together harmoniously in a young man: whether they will not give such manifestation of their social habits as two robins shut in a cage will do: of which pretty birds one will presently be discovered with a slightly ruffled bosom amid the feathers of his defunct associate.
Thus painfully revolving matters of fact and feeling, Sir William cantered, and, like a cropped billow blown against by the wind, drew up in front of Mrs. Lovell, and entered into conversation with that lady, for the fine needles of whose brain he had the perfect deference of an experienced senior. She, however, did not give him comfort. She informed him that something was wrong with Edward; she could not tell what. She spoke of him languidly, as if his letters contained wearisome trifling.
“He strains to be Frenchy,” she said. “It may be a good compliment for them to receive: it's a bad one for him to pay.”
“Alcibiades is not the best of models,” murmured Sir William. “He doesn't mention Miss Gosling.”
“Oh dear, yes. I have a French acrostic on her name.”
“An acrostic!”
A more contemptible form of mental exercise was not to be found, according to Sir William's judgement.
“An acrostic!” he made it guttural. “Well!”
“He writes word that he hears Moliere every other night. That can't harm him. His reading is principally Memoirs, which I think I have heard you call 'The backstairs of history.' We are dull here, and I should not imagine it to be a healthy place to dwell in, if the absence of friends and the presence of sunshine conspire to dullness. Algy, of course, is deep in accounts to-day?”
Sir William remarked that he had not seen the young man at the office, and had not looked for him; but the mention of Algernon brought something to his mind, and he said,—
“I hear he is continually sending messengers from the office to you during the day. You rule him with a rod of iron. Make him discontinue that practice. I hear that he despatched our old porter to you yesterday with a letter marked 'urgent.'”
Mrs. Lovell laughed pleadingly for Algernon.
“No; he shall not do it again. It occurred yesterday, and on no other occasion that I am aware of. He presumes that I am as excited as he is himself about the race—”
The lady bowed to a passing cavalier; a smarting blush dyed her face.
“He bets, does he!” said Sir William. “A young man, whose income, at the extreme limit, is two hundred pounds a year.”
“May not the smallness of the amount in some degree account for the betting?” she asked whimsically. “You know, I bet a little—just a little. If I have but a small sum, I already regard it as a stake; I am tempted to bid it fly.”
“In his case, such conduct puts him on the high road to rascality,” said Sir William severely. “He is doing no good.”
“Then the squire is answerable for such conduct, I think.”
“You presume to say that he is so because he allows his son very little money to squander? How many young men have to contain their expenses within two hundred pounds a year!”
“Not sons of squires and nephews of baronets,” said Mrs. Lovell. “Adieu! I think I see a carrier-pigeon flying overhead, and, as you may suppose, I am all anxiety.”
Sir William nodded to her. He disliked certain of her ways; but they were transparent bits of audacity and restlessness pertaining to a youthful widow, full of natural dash; and she was so sweetly mistress of herself in all she did, that he never supposed her to be needing caution against excesses. Old gentlemen have their pets, and Mrs. Lovell was a pet of Sir William's.
She was on the present occasion quite mistress of herself, though the stake was large. She was mistress of herself when Lord Suckling, who had driven from the Downs and brushed all save a spot of white dust out of his baby moustache to make himself presentable, rode up to her to say that the horse Templemore was beaten, and that his sagacity in always betting against favourites would, in this last instance, transfer a “pot of money” from alien pockets to his own.
“Algy Blancove's in for five hundred to me,” he said; adding with energy, “I hope you haven't lost? No, don't go and dash my jolly feeling by saying you have. It was a fine heat; neck-and-neck past the Stand. Have you?”
“A little,” she confessed. “It's a failing of mine to like favourites. I'm sorry for Algy.”
“I'm afraid he's awfully hit.”
“What makes you think so?”
“He took it so awfully cool.”
“That may mean the reverse.”
“It don't with him. But, Mrs. Lovell, do tell me you haven't lost. Not much, is it? Because, I know there's no guessing, when you are concerned.”
The lady trifled with her bridle-rein.
“I really can't tell you yet. I may have lost. I haven't won. I'm not cool-blooded enough to bet against favourites. Addio, son of Fortune! I'm at the Opera to-night.”
As she turned her horse from Lord Suckling, the cavalier who had saluted her when she was with Sir William passed again. She made a signal to her groom, and sent the man flying in pursuit of him, while she turned and cantered. She was soon overtaken.
“Madam, you have done me the honour.”
“I wish to know why it is your pleasure to avoid me, Major Waring?”
“In this place?”
“Wherever we may chance to meet.”
“I must protest.”
“Do not. The thing is evident.”
They rode together silently.
Her face was toward the sunset. The light smote her yellow hair, and struck out her grave and offended look, as in a picture.
“To be condemned without a hearing!” she said. “The most dastardly criminal gets that. Is it imagined that I have no common feelings? Is it manly to follow me with studied insult? I can bear the hatred of fools. Contempt I have not deserved. Dead! I should be dead, if my conscience had once reproached me. I am a mark for slander, and brave men should beware of herding with despicable slanderers.”
She spoke, gazing frontward all the while. The pace she maintained in no degree impeded the concentrated passion of her utterance.
But it was a more difficult task for him, going at that pace, to make explanations, and she was exquisitely fair to behold! The falling beams touched her with a mellow sweetness that kindled bleeding memories.
“If I defend myself?” he said.
“No. All I ask is that you should Accuse me. Let me know what I have done—done, that I have not been bitterly punished for? What is it? what is it? Why do you inflict a torture on me whenever you see me? Not by word, not by look. You are too subtle in your cruelty to give me anything I can grasp. You know how you wound me. And I am alone.”
“That is supposed to account for my behaviour?”
She turned her face to him. “Oh, Major blaring! say nothing unworthy of yourself. That would be a new pain to me.”
He bowed. In spite of a prepossessing anger, some little softness crept through his heart.
“You may conceive that I have dropped my pride,” she said. “That is the case, or my pride is of a better sort.”
“Madam, I fully hope and trust,” said he.
“And believe,” she added, twisting his words to the ironic tongue. “You certainly must believe that my pride has sunk low. Did I ever speak to you in this manner before?”
“Not in this manner, I can attest.”
“Did I speak at all, when I was hurt?” She betrayed that he had planted a fresh sting.
“If my recollection serves me,” said he, “your self-command was remarkable.”
Mrs. Lovell slackened her pace.
“Your recollection serves you too well, Major Waring. I was a girl. You judged the acts of a woman. I was a girl, and you chose to put your own interpretation on whatever I did. You scourged me before the whole army. Was not that enough? I mean, enough for you? For me, perhaps not, for I have suffered since, and may have been set apart to suffer. I saw you in that little church at Warbeach; I met you in the lanes; I met you on the steamer; on the railway platform; at the review. Everywhere you kept up the look of my judge. You! and I have been 'Margaret' to you. Major Waring, how many a woman in my place would attribute your relentless condemnation of her to injured vanity or vengeance? In those days I trifled with everybody. I played with fire. I was ignorant of life. I was true to my husband; and because I was true, and because I was ignorant, I was plunged into tragedies I never suspected. This is to be what you call a coquette. Stamping a name saves thinking. Could I read my husband's temper? Would not a coquette have played her cards differently? There never was need for me to push my husband to a contest. I never had the power to restrain him. Now I am wiser; and now is too late; and now you sit in judgement on me. Why? It is not fair; it is unkind.”
Tears were in her voice, though not in her eyes.
Major Waring tried to study her with the coolness of a man who has learnt to doubt the truth of women; but he had once yearned in a young man's frenzy of love to take that delicate shape in his arms, and he was not proof against the sedate sweet face and keen sad ring of the voice.
He spoke earnestly.
“You honour me by caring for my opinion. The past is buried. I have some forgiveness to ask. Much, when I think of it—very much. I did you a public wrong. From a man to a woman it was unpardonable. It is a blot on my career. I beg you humbly to believe that I repent it.”
The sun was flaming with great wings red among the vapours; and in the recollection of the two, as they rode onward facing it, arose that day of the forlorn charge of English horse in the Indian jungle, the thunder and the dust, the fire and the dense knot of the struggle. And like a ghost sweeping across her eyeballs, Mrs. Lovell beheld, part in his English freshness, part ensanguined, the image of the gallant boy who had ridden to perish at the spur of her mad whim. She forgot all present surroundings.
“Percy!” she said.
“Madam?”
“Percy!”
“Margaret?”
“Oh, what an undying day, Percy!”
And then she was speechless.
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