Lady Connie Part 55

"The coast is always clear here between two and four. I get my walk in the morning."

Two or three days a week accordingly, Constance, or Mrs. Mulholland, or both took their way to the cottage. They did all that women with soft hearts can do for a sick man. Mrs. Mulholland managed the servants, and enquired into the food. Connie brought books and flowers, and all the Oxford gossip she could collect. Their visit was the brightness of the boy's day, and thanks to them, many efforts were made to soften his calamity. The best musical talent that Oxford could furnish was eager to serve him; and a well-known orchestra was only waiting for the completion of his symphony and the result of his examination to produce the symphony in the hall of Marmion.

Meanwhile Connie very rarely saw Falloden--except in connection either with Otto's health, or with the "Orpheus," as to which Falloden was in constant communication with the inventor, one Auguste Chaumart, living in a garret on the heights of Montmartre; while Constance herself was carrying on an eager correspondence with friends of her own or her parents, in Paris, with regard to the "records" which were to make the repertory of the Orpheus. The automatic piano--or piano-player--which some years later became the pianola, was in those days rapidly developing. The difference between it and the Orpheus lay in the fact that the piano-player required hands and feet of flesh and blood for anything more than a purely mechanical rendering of the music provided by the rolls; while in the Orpheus, expression, accent, interpretation, as given by the best pianists of the day, had been already registered in the cylinders.

On the pianola, or what preceded it--then as now--the player provided his own rendering. But the Orpheus, the precursor also of types that have since been greatly perfected, was played by an electrical mechanism, and the audience was intended to listen to Chopin or Beethoven, to Schumann or Brahms, as interpreted by the famous players of the moment, without any intervening personality.

These things are very familiar to our generation. In the eighties, they were only a vision and a possibility, and Falloden's lavish expenditure was in fact stimulating one of the first inventors.

But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and flirted and talked during a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most brilliant success. Otto's story, as told by her vivacious letters, had gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a college frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto's father and mother and the musical promise of the bright-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland's exodus under the revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young Polish marvel of the day--Paderewski--had been drawn in, and his renderings of Chopin's finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie's dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania--the most characteristic utterance of a martyred people.

"They are songs, _chere pet.i.te_," wrote the old man--"of revolt, of exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the world, just as there is no history in the world like Poland's. Your poor friend knows them all--has known them all from his childhood. They will speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle--the White Eagle of Poland--as she soars wounded and bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs that we Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs--our music--our poets--our memories:--as a nation that is all we have--except the faith in us that never dies. _Hinc surrectura!_ Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is in G.o.d, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much, poor boy!--but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland--they will some day reward him!"

And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series of variations on the lovely theme of the "Heynal"--that traditional horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of Panna Marya--of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.

But all these things were as yet hidden from Otto. Falloden and Constance corresponded about them, in letters that anybody might have read, which had behind them, nevertheless, a secret and growing force of emotion. Even Mrs. Mulholland, who was rapidly endearing herself both to Constance and Radowitz, could only guess at what was going on, and when she did guess, held her tongue. But her relations with Falloden, which at the beginning of his residence in the cottage had been of the coldest, gradually became less strained. To his own astonishment, he found the advice of this brusque elderly woman so important to him that he looked eagerly for her coming, and obeyed her with a docility which amazed himself and her. The advice concerned, of course, merely the small matters of daily life bearing on Otto's health and comfort, and when the business was done, Falloden disappeared.

But strangely amenable, and even humble as he might appear in these affairs to those who remembered his haughty days in college, for both Constance and Mrs. Mulholland quite another fact emerged from their experience of the cottage household during these weeks:--simply this--that whatever other people might do or be, Falloden was steadily, and perhaps unconsciously, becoming master of the situation, the indispensable and protecting power of Otto's life.

How he did it remained obscure. But Mrs. Mulholland at least--out of a rich moral history--guessed that what they saw in the Boar's Hill cottage was simply the working out of the old spiritual paradox--that there is a yielding which is victory, and a surrender which is power. It seemed to her often that Radowitz was living in a constant state of half-subdued excitement, produced by the strange realisation that he and his life had become so important to Falloden that the differences of training and temperament between them, and all the little daily rubs, no longer counted; that he existed, so to speak, that Falloden might--through him--escape the burden of his own remorse. The hard, strong, able man, so much older than himself in character, if not in years, the man who had bullied and despised him, was now becoming his servant, in the sense in which Christ was the "servant" of his brethren.

Not with any conscious Christian intention--far from it; but still under a kind of mysterious compulsion. The humblest duties, the most trivial anxieties, where Radowitz was concerned, fell, week by week, increasingly to Falloden's portion. A bad or a good night--appet.i.te or no appet.i.te--a book that Otto liked--a visit that amused him--anything that for the moment contented the starved musical sense in Otto, that brought out his gift, and his joy in it--anything that, for the moment, enabled him to forget and evade his injuries--these became, for Falloden also, the leading events of his own day. He was reading hard for his fellows.h.i.+p, and satisfying various obscure needs by taking as much violent exercise as possible; but there was going on in him, all the time, an intense spiritual ferment, connected with Constance Bledlow on the one side, and Otto Radowitz on the other.

Meanwhile--what was not so evident to this large-hearted observer--Otto was more than willing--he burned--to play his part. All that is mystical and pa.s.sionate in the soul of a Polish Catholic, had been stirred in him by his accident, his growing premonition of short life, the bitterness of his calamity, the suddenness of his change of heart towards Falloden.

"My future is wrecked. I shall never live to be old. I shall never be a great musician. But I mean to live long enough to make Constance happy!

She shall talk of me to her children. And I shall watch over her--perhaps--from another world."

These thoughts, and others like them, floated by day and night through the boy's mind; and he wove them into the symphony he was writing.

Tragedy, pa.s.sion, melody--these have been the Polish heritage in music; they breathe through the Polish peasant songs, as through the genius of a Chopin; they are bound up with the long agony of Polish history, with the melancholy and monotony of the Polish landscape. They spoke again through the beautiful thwarted gift of this boy of twenty, through his foreboding of early death, and through that instinctive exercise of his creative gift, which showed itself not in music alone, but in the shaping of two lives--Falloden's and Connie's.

And Constance too was living and learning, with the intensity that comes of love and pity and compunction. She was dropping all her spoilt-child airs; and the bower-bird adornments, with which she had filled her little room in Medburn House, had been gradually cleared away, to Nora's great annoyance, till it was almost as bare as Nora's own. Amid the misty Oxford streets, and the low-ceiled Oxford rooms, she was played upon by the unseen influences of that "august place," where both the great and the forgotten dead are always at work, shaping the life of the present. In those days Oxford was still praising "famous men and the fathers who begat" her. Their shades still walked her streets. Pusey was not long dead. Newman, the mere ghost of himself, had just preached a tremulous last sermon within her bounds, returning as a kind of spiritual Odysseus for a few pa.s.sing hours to the place where he had once reigned as the most adored son of Oxford. Thomas Hill Green, with the rugged face, and the deep brown eyes, and the look that made pretence and cowardice ashamed, was dead, leaving a thought and a teaching behind him that his Oxford will not let die. Matthew Arnold had yet some years to live and could occasionally be seen at Balliol or at All Souls; while Christ Church and Balliol still represented the rival centres of that great feud between Liberal and Orthodox which had convulsed the University a generation before.

In Balliol, there sat a chubby-faced, quiet-eyed man, with very white hair, round whom the storms of orthodoxy had once beaten, like the surges on a lighthouse; and at Christ Church and in St. Mary's the beautiful presence and the wonderful gift of Liddon kept the old fires burning in pious hearts.

And now into this old, old place, with its thick soil of dead lives and deeds, there had come a new seed, as to which no one could tell how it would flower. Women students were increasing every term in Oxford.

Groups of girl graduates in growing numbers went shyly through the streets, knowing that they had still to justify their presence in this. .h.i.therto closed world--made by men for men. There were many hostile eyes upon them, watching for mistakes. But all the generous forces in Oxford were behind them. The ablest men in the University were teaching women how to administer--how to organise. Some lecture-rooms were opening to them; some still entirely declined to admit them. And here and there were persons who had a clear vision of the future to which was trending this new eagerness of women to explore regions. .h.i.therto forbidden them in the House of Life.

Connie had no such vision, but she had a boundless curiosity and a thrilling sense of great things stirring in the world. Under Nora's lead she had begun to make friends among the women students, and to find her way into their little bed-sitting-rooms at tea time. They all seemed to her superhumanly clever; and superhumanly modest. She had been brought up indeed by two scholars; but examinations dazzled and appalled her.

How they were ever pa.s.sed, she could not imagine. She looked at the girls who had pa.s.sed them with awe, quite unconscious the while of the glamour she herself possessed for these untravelled students, as one familiar from her childhood with the sacred places of history--Rome, Athens, Florence, Venice, Sicily. She had seen, she had trodden; and quiet eyes--sometimes spectacled--would flame, while her easy talk ran on.

But all the time there were very critical notions in her, hidden deep down.

"Do they never think about a _man_?" some voice in her seemed to be asking. "As for me, I am always thinking about a man!" And the colour would flush into her cheeks, as she meekly asked for another cup of tea.

Sometimes she would go with Nora to the Bodleian, and sit patiently beside her while Nora copied Middle-English poetry from an early ma.n.u.script, worth a king's ransom. Nora got sevenpence a "folio," of seventy-two words, for her work. Connie thought the pay scandalous for so much learning; but Nora laughed at her, and took far more pleasure in the small cheque she received at the end of term from the University Press than Connie in her quarterly dividends.

But Connie knew very well by this time that Nora was not wholly absorbed in Middle English. Often, as they emerged from the Bodleian to go home to lunch, they would come across Sorell hurrying along the Broad, his master's gown floating behind him. And he would turn his fine ascetic face towards them, and wave his hand to them from the other side of the street. And Connie would flash a look at Nora,--soft, quick, malicious--of which Nora was well aware.

But Connie rarely said a word. She was handling the situation indeed with great discretion; though with an impetuous will. She herself had withdrawn from the Greek lessons, on the plea that she was attending some English history lectures; that she must really find out who fought the battle of Hastings; and was too lazy to do anything else. Sometimes she would linger in the schoolroom till Sorell arrived, and then he would look at her wistfully, when she prepared to depart, as though to say--"Was this what I bargained for?"

But she always laughed and went. And presently as she crossed the hall again, and heard animated voices in the schoolroom, her brown eyes would show a merry satisfaction.

Meanwhile Nora was growing thinner and handsomer day by day. She was shedding awkwardness without any loss of that subacid sincerity that was her charm. Connie, as much as she dared, took her dressing in hand. She was never allowed to give a thing; but Annette's fingers were quick and clever, and Nora's Spartan garb was sometimes transformed by them under the orders of a coaxing or audacious Constance. The mere lifting of the load of care had let the young plant shoot. So that many persons pa.s.sing Ewen Hooper's second daughter in the street would turn round now to look at her in surprise. Was that really the stout, podgy schoolgirl, who had already, by virtue of her strong personality, made a certain impression in the university town? People had been vaguely sorry for her; or vaguely thought of her as plain but good. Alice of course was pretty; Nora had the virtues. And now here she was, bursting into good looks more positive than her sister's.

The girl's heart indeed was young at last, for the neighbourhood of Connie was infectious. The fairy-G.o.dmothering of that young woman was going finely. It was the secret hope at the centre of her own life which was playing like captured suns.h.i.+ne upon all the persons about her. Her energy was prodigious. Everything to do with money matters had been practically settled between her and Sorell and Uncle Ewen; and settled in Connie's way, expressed no doubt in business form. And now she was insisting firmly on the holiday visit to Rome, in spite of many protests from Uncle Ewen and Nora. It was a promise, she declared.

Rome--Rome--was their fate. She wrote endless letters, enquiring for rooms, and announcing their coming to her old friends. Uncle Ewen soon had the startled impression that all Rome was waiting for them, and that they could never live up to it.

Finally, Connie persuaded them to settle on rooms in a well-known small hotel, overlooking the garden-front of the Palazzo Barberini, where she had grown up. She wrote to the innkeeper, Signor B., "a very old friend of mine," who replied that the "_amici_" of the "_distintissima signorina_" should be most tenderly looked after. As for the contessas and marchesas who wrote, eagerly promising their "dearest Constance"

that they would be kind to her relations, they were many; and when Ewen Hooper said nervously that it was clear he must take out both a frock-coat and dress clothes, Constance laughed and said, "Not at all!--Signer B. will lend you any thing you want,"--a remark which, in the ears of the travellers to be, threw new and unexpected light on the functions of an Italian innkeeper. Meanwhile she piled up guide-books, she gathered maps; and she taught both her uncle and Nora Italian. And so long as she was busied with such matters she seemed the gayest of creatures, and would go singing and laughing about the house.

In another old house in Oxford, too, her coming made delight. She spent many long hours beside the Master of Beaumont's fire, gathering fresh light on the ways of scholars.h.i.+p and scholars. The quarrels of the learned had never hitherto come her way. Her father had never quarrelled with anybody. But the Master--poor great man!--had quarrelled with so many people! He had missed promotions which should have been his; he had made discoveries of which others had got the credit; and he kept a quite amazing stock of hatreds in some pocket of his vast intelligence.

Constance would listen at first to the expression of them in an awed silence. Was it possible the world contained such mean and treacherous monsters? And why did it matter so much to a man who knew everything?--who held all the cla.s.sics and all the Renaissance in the hollow of his hand, to whom "Latin was no more _difficile_, than to a blackbird 'tis to whistle"? Then, gradually, she began to have the courage to laugh; to try a little soft teasing of her new friend and mentor, who was at once so wonderful and so absurd. And the Master bore it well, could indeed never have too much of her company; while his white-haired sister beamed at the sight of her. She became the child of a childless house, and when Lady Langmoor sent her peremptory invitations to this or that country mansion where she would meet "some charming young men," Connie would reply--"Best thanks, dear Aunt Langmoor--but I am very happy here--and comfortably in love with a gentleman on the sunny side of seventy. Please don't interfere!"

Only with Herbert Pryce was she ever th.o.r.n.y in these days. She could not forgive him that it was not till his appointment at the Conservative Central Office, due to Lord Glaramara's influence, was actually signed and sealed that he proposed to Alice. Till the goods had been delivered, he never finally committed himself. Even Nora had underrated his prudence. But at last one evening he arrived at Medburn House after dinner with the look of one whose mind is magnificently made up. By common consent, the drawing-room was abandoned to him and Alice, and when they emerged, Alice held her head triumphantly, and her lover was all jocosity and self-satisfaction.

"She really is a dear little thing," he said complacently to Connie, when the news had been told and excitement subsided. "We shall do capitally."

"_Enfin?_" said Connie, with the old laugh in her eyes. "You are quite sure?"

He looked at her uneasily.

"It never does to hurry these things," he said, rather pompously. "I wanted to feel I could give her what she had a right to expect. We owe you a great deal, Lady Constance--or--perhaps now--I may call you Constance?"

Constance winced, and pointedly avoided giving him leave. But for Alice's sake, she held her tongue. The wedding was to be hurried on, and Mrs. Hooper, able for once to buy new frocks with a clear conscience, and possessed of the money to pay for them, was made so happy by the bustle of the trousseau that she fell in love with her prospective son-in-law as the cause of it. Ewen Hooper meanwhile watched him with mildly shrewd eyes, deciding once more in his inner mind that mathematicians were an inferior race.

Not even to Nora--only to Mrs. Mulholland, did Constance ever lift the veil, during these months. She was not long in succ.u.mbing to the queer charm of that lovable and shapeless person; and in the little drawing-room in St. Giles, the girl of twenty would spend winter evenings, at the feet of her new friend, pa.s.sing through various stages of confession; till one night, Mrs. Mulholland lifted the small face, with her own large hand, and looked mockingly into the brown eyes:

"Out with it, my dear! You are in love with Douglas Falloden!"

Connie said nothing. Her little chin did not withdraw itself, nor did her eyes drop. But a film of tears rushed into them.

The truth was that in this dark wintry Oxford, and its neighbouring country, there lurked a magic for Connie which in the high summer pomps it had never possessed. Once or twice, in the distance of a winding street--on some football ground in the Parks--in the gallery of St.

Mary's on Sunday, Constance caught sight, herself unseen, of the tall figure and the curly head. Such glimpses made the fever of her young life. They meant far more to pa.s.sion than her occasional meetings with Falloden at the Boar's Hill cottage. And there were other points of contact. At the end of November, for instance, came the Merton Fellows.h.i.+p. Falloden won it, in a brilliant field; and Connie contrived to know all she wanted to know as to his papers, and his rivals. After the announcement of his success, she trod on air. Finally she allowed herself to send him a little note of congratulation--very short and almost formal. He replied in the same tone.

Two days later, Falloden went over to Paris to see for himself the condition of the Orpheus, and to arrange for its transport to England.

He was away for nearly a week, and on his return called at once in Holywell, to report his visit. Nora was with Connie in the drawing-room when he was announced; and a peremptory look forbade her to slip away.

She sat listening to the conversation.

Was this really Douglas Falloden--this grave, courteous man--without a trace of the "blood" upon him? He seemed to her years older than he had been in May, and related, for the first time, to the practical every-day world. This absorption too in Otto Radowitz and his affairs--incredible!

He and Connie first eagerly discussed certain domestic details of the cottage--the cook, the food, the draughts, the arrangements to be made for Otto's open-air treatment which the doctors were now insisting on--with an anxious minuteness! Nora could hardly keep her face straight in the distance--they were so like a pair of crooning housewives. Then he began on his French visit, sitting sideways on his chair, his elbow on the back of it, and his hand thrust into his curly ma.s.s of hair--handsomer, thought Nora, than ever. And there was Connie listening spell-bound in a low chair opposite, her delicate pale profile distinct against the dark panelling of the room, her eyes fixed on him.

Nora's perplexed eyes travelled from one to the other.

As to the story of the Orpheus and its inventor, both girls hung upon it. Falloden had tracked Auguste Chaumart to his garret in Montmartre, and had found in him one of those marvellous French workmen, inheritors of the finest technical tradition in the world, who are the true sons of the men who built and furnished and carved Versailles, and thereby revolutionised the minor arts of Europe. A small pinched fellow!--with a sickly wife and children sharing his tiny workshop, and a brain teeming with inventions, of which the electric piano, forerunner of the Welte-Mignons of later days, was but the chief among many. He had spent a fortune upon it, could get no capitalist to believe in it, and no firm to take it up. Then Falloden's astonis.h.i.+ng letter and offer of funds, based on Radowitz's report--itself the echo of a couple of letters from Paris--had encouraged the starving dreamer to go on.

Falloden reproduced the scene, as described to him by the chief actor in it, when the inventor announced to his family that the thing was accomplished, the mechanism perfect, and how that very night they should hear Chopin's great Fantasia, Op. 49, played by its invisible hands.