At The Relton Arms Part 6

Then he went to the table by the window, and cleared it of Sonny's monkey without a tail, and the fat pink pin-cus.h.i.+on, and the pale green gla.s.s pot with a lid, and the s.h.i.+ning porcelain shepherdess with a chipped crook, and the knitted toilet-cover that entrapped the legs of all these ornaments, and sat down to write the best song he had ever composed, to some words by George Meredith.

"Men are always brutes," said Lady Joan, "but this one has only become so by accident. Stupid people do more harm than bad ones, ever so much.

The fates will help you out of a hole if you have been a clever sinner, but they will lay a pitfall for you if you are a blundering, good-intentioned sort of creature. The fact is, this world of ours was made for clever people, and the fools haven't a chance. That is why he has gone wrong."

"Is he a fool then?" asked the weary voice on the sofa. One disillusionment more than another did not matter now that her idol was broken.

"He lives by his emotions, and he has no sense of proportion. It comes to the same thing. He had no intention of being faithless to you, and if you had not gone away he would have married you, and remained dull and virtuous to the end of his days. But you did go away, and I came home; and he can't live without a woman, and so he persuaded himself that his friends.h.i.+p for me was love. That was how it was done. Perhaps I encouraged him too. He was interesting to me, and he was never in love with me, so I amused myself by trying to fascinate him. I can't help being a woman."

"Are women like that too?" thought the other, and she added out loud, "I am a woman too, but--" and left her sentence unfinished.

"No, you are not a woman, you are only a child," said Lady Joan; "the world is a place for you to play in. You were born to be happy, and you will never have to realize the things I have been telling you."

"I shall never be happy again," said the tired voice, with a sob.

"We all say that at eighteen; it comforts us sometimes to be the most miserable person in the world. Then we turn round a bit, and the sun comes out again, and some one gives us a tonic, and we endow a cot at the hospital, or give a farthing meal to five hundred brats in the East End, and then we go on again. You have never been in love before, of course?"

"Don't," moaned the other from the corner of the unsympathetic sofa.

The clear calm tones of her Mentor softened a little.

"I don't want to hurt you, Norah; I only mean that if you go in for loving once in a lifetime and that sort of thing, you really cannot properly understand the utter insouciance of an emotional man like Digby. He will love you more than ever now that you have come back, and you will be ten times happier than if you had been married straight off without any drawbacks. You have got rid of your ideals, to begin with, which most of them do not accomplish until after marriage, and that is always a risk. And you will find there is lots of time to be happy."

"Oh," said the other, in an altered tone, sitting upright, and speaking with startling emphasis, "and do you really mean to say that you think I should marry him _now_?"

Lady Joan did not turn a hair, vulgarly speaking; she felt she had done wonders already by getting rid of the battered, hopeless little voice, and she merely smiled to herself in the twilight in a triumphant, self-satisfied manner.

"You are to come home with me now, and I will send down for your maid, and you shall stay the night and get rested. I suppose you have eaten nothing for hours? Then how can you expect to take a proper view of things? Half the troubles of life come from a bad digestion; it's not romantic, but then I don't belong to your musical set."

And she carried Norah off through the back door, leaving Mrs. Haxtell with material for a year's gossip, and a note for the musician to the effect that he was to come up to the Court after dinner and give them some music.

"That is the cleverest woman I know," he sputtered, as he plunged his head into a basin of cold water after reading the scrawled sc.r.a.p of paper. And he added grimly, "I suppose she will tell me which one I am to marry. And I am not in a position to object."

But he felt grateful to her for asking him in such a commonplace sort of way, and he put the song he had been writing into the pocket of his Inverness coat, and walked up to the Court in the dusk.

She was just as commonplace in her greeting. He found them in the big drawing-room near the open window, and he had to walk the whole length of the room before they took any notice of the butler's announcement, or turned round. Lady Joan was knitting a large white shawl, and talking vigorously; Norah was lying silently on a couch, with her great sentimental eyes looking out into the garden; and the curate, who had also dropped in after dinner, was sipping his coffee and listening deferentially to his hostess.

"Of course, indifference is the characteristic of the times, as you say, Mr. Johnson, but I am not sure that it matters much. There is not much to choose between the negative virtue of the present day and the positive wickedness of our forefathers."

Mr. Johnson ventured the unavoidable reply that negative virtue was worse than positive wickedness, because it professed more.

"That is true, but we must continue to be miserable sinners in some way or other, or else the Litany would have to be expunged, and that would offend the Conservatives," said Lady Joan, with a flippancy which was merely to hide the fact that she was feeling what women call overwrought; and she turned to Digby to conceal her consciousness of having been extravagant instead of witty. "Ah, Mr. Raleigh, how do you do? How good of you to come on such a short notice. You have seen Norah to-day, I think? Our new curate, Mr. Johnson. We were just longing for some music."

Digby was again thankful for her _sang froid_. He touched her fingers, and bowed to the others, and he took his black coffee from the tray presented to him by the butler, and apologized in the most ordinary manner for not being in evening dress.

"And may we have some music, please? Mr. Raleigh is a musician, you know, Mr. Johnson; perhaps you know his songs, though?"

Mr. Johnson said he was pa.s.sionately fond of music, and he knew Mr.

Raleigh's name quite well, and had once sung a song of his called "Love's Sweet Illusions."

"I have not written a song of that name; I never write ballads," said the musician, crus.h.i.+ngly, as he opened the piano.

"Something stormy, please," said Lady Joan, carelessly; "it is so hot that if you played anything sentimental I think it might affect even my unmusical nerves."

"Something of your own," said Norah. They were the first words she had spoken, and the musician glanced nervously in her direction.

He sat down and played the song he had just written, and hummed the words to show how it went. They were taken from the "Shaving of s.h.a.gpat," and the music was full of the reckless pa.s.sion and meaning of the original.

"Whether we die or we live, Matters it now no more; Life hath naught further to give; Love is its crown and its core; Come to us either, we're rife,-- Death or life!

"Death can take not away, Darkness and light are the same; We are beyond the pale ray, Wrapt in a rosier flame; Welcome which will to our breath,-- Life or Death!"

When he began to play, all the stormy and conflicting feelings of the last few hours pa.s.sed through his mind, and he was seized with the grimness and humor of the situation in which he found himself, and he played better than either of the two women, who were so strangely woven into his life, had ever heard him play before. When he reached the second verse he stopped humming the words, though none of them noticed it; and when he came to the end no one spoke for some seconds.

The musician was thinking that he knew now which one he wanted to marry, and that it did not matter if his love affairs went wrong so long as there was music to be made.

Lady Joan went on with her shawl, and reflected that if she lived to be a hundred she should never understand musical people or their ways.

Norah lay with her brown eyes full of tears, and she was thinking that love was the strongest thing in the world, for it could outlive its ideals.

The curate was not thinking at all, and he got up and put down his cup with a clatter.

"Very sweet and pretty," he said; "it quite reminds me of a little Italian thing I once heard on a military band at Leamington. Have you ever taken the waters at Leamington, Mr. Raleigh?"

"Play something else," said Lady Joan, abruptly, for the spell was working well, she thought, and she smiled triumphantly again at the tears in Norah's eyes.

This time Lady Joan walked to the window and stepped out on the terrace.

"Have you seen the lake in moonlight, Mr. Johnson?" she called out when the music stopped; and the curate followed her into the garden.

The musician crossed over to the couch by the other window, and sat down on a chair close to it.

"Norah," he said in a low tone, "do you know when I wrote the last thing I played?"

She said nothing, and her fingers trembled.

"I wrote it when you went away, last time, with your father. It was full of tears for you."

She still kept her face turned from him, and she spoke almost in a whisper.

"And the other? The song?"

"Guess," he said, also in a whisper.

She swept her tearful eyes round upon him searchingly, hungrily.

"Was it this evening--after--?"

He bowed his head gravely. Her hands went out to him impetuously.