And thus the days went by at Mont Oriol, and nothing broke the monotony of luxurious idleness — a life such as Guinevere and her knights and ladies may have led at Camelot, when things were beginning to go rather badly at the Court of King Arthur, a life of sensuous pleasures and dormant intellectuality — a life in which people talked about books, but rarely read, affected a profound interest in advanced philanthropy, yet would have hardly risen from an easy-chair to save a fellow-man from ruin, a life in which heart and brain were only half awake, while the desire of the eye and the delight of the ear were paramount.
Pleasant as this holiday time was, Gerard rejoiced when it came to an end and he was free to return to London and look after his architect and builder. October was half gone when he arrived in his old shabby quarters near the church, at which his new valet — vice Dodd, superannuated — looked with contempt. The builders were hard at work in the house near the Park — Stamford House it had been called, but it was to be known henceforward by the name of its new owner. The builders were working by night as well as by day, by the aid of the electric light which was already installed. Gerard went to sec them at work on the night after his return, and to his fancy there seemed something demoniac in the vision of these men swarming up and down ladders and balancing themselves upon narrow cornices in the cold clear light, and amidst the noise of many hammers.
They were a little behind with their work, the clerk of the works admitted, but there had been a difficulty in getting good men, and he was determined only to have first-rate workmen upon a job of such importance.
“Depend upon it, you’ll be satisfied with the result, sir,” he said. “The alteration of the façade has been a very difficult job, I can assure you. It isn’t like beginning fair, you see. We have had to adapt the loggia to the existing front, and to avoid all appearance of patchwork. You’ll be pleased when it’s done.”
“Perhaps I shall, if I live long enough to see it,” answered Gerard, fretfully. “But judging by the present aspect of the house, I may be in my grave before it is finished.”
“Oh, indeed, sir, we are more forward than you may think. The interior decorations are going on simultaneously. Things will come together in a day. The architect is thoroughly satisfied with the way the work is being done.”
“No doubt; but the architect is not waiting to occupy the house, as I am.”
He stayed there for nearly two hours betwixt midnight and morning, going about with the clerk of the works amidst all the litter and confusion of painters and carpenters, glaziers and plumbers, a veritable pandemonium, in which fiends were passing to and fro with cauldrons of boiling lead, and pots of acrid-smelling paint, a scene of discordant noises, shrill whistling from divers whistlers, sounds of plane and hammer, chisel and augur. It was out of this chaos his ideal mansion was to come, fresh as the world when the Creator saw that it was well.
He went there again next day with Mrs. Champion and her niece. She had at least a dozen nieces, and took up one or another as capriciously as she chose her gloves. Roger Larose and the furniture-man were there to meet them, and they all went over the house by daylight, peering into every comer, and discussing every detail, the mantelpieces, the stoves, the windows and window-seats, moulding, panelling, painting, carving, glass stained, and glass Venetian, Bohemian, Belgian.
Aunt and niece were both agreed that house and decorations would be quite too lovely. They did not attempt any more technical opinion. The niece, Miss Flora Bellinger, went about with her petticoats held up and her shoulders and elbows contracted, murmuring, “Lovely, lovely,” to everything, even the sink in the housemaid’s pantry, and in deadly fear of wet paint.
One suggestion Mrs. Champion ventured to make:
“Be sure you have plenty of corners,” she said to Mr. Larose; “quaint, odd angles, don’t you know — pretty little nooks that can be made Moorish, or Japanese, or Dutch, or Old English, just as one’s fancy may suggest.”
“My dear lady, you see the rooms,” replied the architect gravely, “and you see the angles. I cannot alter the shape of rooms that are practically finished.”
“That’s a pity. I thought you could have thrown in comers. The rooms are utterly lovely — but there are no cosy nooks.”
I see, Mrs. Champion, that you hanker after a Flemish style, which has now become the property of the restaurants. Were you ever in the Ricardi Palace at Florence?”
“Yes, I know it well.”
“I don’t think you saw any quaint nooks or odd angles there, although you may find as many as you like in Earl’s Court.”
“Yes, I suppose they are getting common,” sighed Mrs. Champion; everything becomes common — everything pretty and fantastical, at least.”
After that searching inspection, which involved certain small emendations and final decisions. Gerard Hillersdon told himself that he would look no more upon his house until it was finished, except those two rooms which he was to furnish after his own devices. It would worry him too much to go there day after day only to see how slowly the British workman can work. Mrs. Champion and her husband were to spend November and December at Brighton, so Gerard went down to the Rectory, where mother and sister were full of delight when he told them that he had come to stay for at least a month.
He found his family rejoicing over the good fortune of Mr. Cumberland, who had been promoted from a rural curacy to a London living. The stipend was modest, but the parish was extensive, and included one of the poorest districts in the great city — a labyrinth of narrow streets and alleys lying between the churches of St. Anne and St. Giles. It was in just such a parish as this that John Cumberland desired to labour. He was at heart a Socialist. He believed in the stringent rights of the poor and the responsibilities of the rich, and saw in the increasing luxury and costliness which marked the existence of the upper classes the sign of a degenerate people and a profligate age. In his new parish of St. Lawrence. Wardour Street, there were all those elements of life which most deeply interested him. It was a parish of mixed classes and divers nationalities, the chosen haunt of the impecunious exile, the Nihilist and the Fenian, the Carbonaro and the Karl Marxian. It was a parish peopled by the intelligent British workman, the self-educated and self-sufficient mechanic. Great blocks of buildings, erected at different periods, and showing different stages of architectural and sanitary improvement, cast their mighty shadows over the lower level of slates and tiles that roofed the courts and alleys of the past. These huge edifices were model lodging-houses, more or less admirable in their arrangements, and at their worst a considerable advance upon the hovels that surrounded them.
Here, too, in the parish of St. Lawrence the Martyr, was the well-known club for women who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow — needlewomen of all kinds, factory girls of divers industries, from jam and pickle making in Soho to filling cartridges in the Gray’s Inn Road — a club which was the centre of civilisation, improvement, and all refining influences, for hundreds of hardworking girls and women, and which had flourished exceedingly under the fostering care of Lady Jane Blenheim, a woman who devoted her life to good works. John Cumberland was delighted at the prospect of having Lady Jane for his counsellor and ally; nor was he in any way disheartened by the knowledge that he and his young wife were to begin their wedded life in a district which smart people would call “impossible.” The Vicarage of St. Lawrence was a substantially built early Georgian house, in Greek Street, a street which was occupied by the very cream of modish society in the days of Chesterfield and Bolingbroke, but which is now chiefly distinguished by French laundries and restaurants. Italian grocery, and foreign conspirators of various types and nationalities.
The living was worth something under five hundred a year, but the Rector of Helmsleigh knew by experience how much of a clergyman’s income has to be sacrificed to the claims of his parish, and how little may be left for his own maintenance. He had, therefore, questioned the wisdom of allowing his daughter to marry a man wh
ose only independent means consisted of a legacy of railway shares from a spinster aunt, which shares produced about a hundred and twenty pounds a year. He was also averse from the idea of Lilian’s lines being set in the smoky atmosphere of Soho.
“Let Jack Cumberland dree his weird under the shadow of Cross and Blackwell, and take his fill of work in a poor parish for the next two or three years,” said the Lector, with his genial air, cheerily disposing of other people’s lives. “By that time he will have made himself a reputation as a powerful preacher, and something better will turn up — a fat living in a nice part of the country, where my pet can have her garden and glebe meadows.”
“Indeed, father, I don’t want a garden, and a sleepy, idle life, such as — as the very best people are content to lead in the country,” answered Lilian, eagerly. “I would much rather work hard with Jack in a poor parish like St. Lawrence.”
“Ah, that is the way with young people,” sighed the Rector, whose favourite maxim for the last twenty years had been that of Parson Dale, Quitta non movere, “they are always wanting to go out and fight dragons. If they are not rampant for pleasure, tennis, dances, hunting, why then they are rampant for work. The girls want to he hospital nurses, the boys want to be East End curates, or to go to Africa, or, at the first whisper of some purposeless, unnecessary war, they rush off to enlist. Young people have no idea how good it is to take life quietly, and make the most of one’s allotted span.”
The young people in this instance were so resolute, and their elders so yielding, that it was finally agreed that Lilian and Jack should be married a year after he had read himself in at the church of St. Lawrence. A year would give him time to settle down in his parish, to put a good many crooked things straight, and get into a groove in which his life and Lilian’s might move quietly along, without over much worry or emotion. He would have time to furnish those gloomy old panelled rooms which to Lilian’s eyes were beautiful, fraught with delightful memories of patch and powder, lovely ladies in rustling brocade sacques, daintily emerging from their sedan chairs to trip lightly up the stone steps, while their running footmen quenched their torches under the iron extinguishers. The panelled walls, the iron extinguishers were left, but who now has a running footman? Duchess Georgina had six, six splendid over-fed creatures in plush and bullion, silk stockinged, powdered, beautiful, six to run in the mud beside her chair, and hover about her and protect her when she alighted. Lilian was charmed at the thought of the old-fashioned London house, and the rapture of picking up quaint old cabinets and secretaires, and tables with claw and ball feet, to furnish withal. She was in no wise depressed by the notion of a year’s engagement. This time of courtship was such a happy time — a season of tenderest chivalry, and pretty trivial gifts, and small innocent pleasures which needed much planning beforehand, season of letters perpetual and unending, letters about nothing, yet so delightful to the recipient, letters written at midnight, letters pencilled hastily in the early morning — nay, one letter written in the vestry, which seemed a kind of sacrilege, but was not less esteemed on that account.
“There are hours in which you are my religion, and I almost forget that I have any other,” said Jack, when his sweetheart reproached him for that vestry letter.
Mr. Cumberland was still doing duty as curate at Helmsleigh when Gerard came on the scene. He was to assume his new duties shortly after Christmas.
“Then Lilian can come and keep house for me,” said Gerard, “and then she will be able to see her lover every day, and I can help in the furnishing.”
“Oh, please don’t,” cried his sister. “You would spoil all our fun. You have too much money. You would just say to an upholsterer, ‘famish,’ and he would come with his men and take possession of — our house,” with a shy smile, and a blushing glance at her lover, “and everything would be done splendidly, expensively, and as the upholsterer liked, not as we like. No, dear Gerard, we are going to pick up our furniture bit by bit, and it is to be all as old as that wicked old George who shut up his poor wife in the Castle at Alden. We have begun already. We bought a walnut-wood bureau with brass handles, in Exeter, the other day — so old — oh, so old — and all genuine.”
“Except the handles,” said Cumberland, laughing; “I shouldn’t like to answer for the handles. They look very like having been put on last week.”
“They have been newly lacquered, sir. You are dreadfully ignorant. The dear old drawers and pigeon holes and secret recesses smell of old papers — lost wills — marriage certificates upon which great fortunes depend — love letters — sermons preached a hundred and fifty years ago. That bureau is a romance in walnut-wood, and if you could see the dirty old shop in which we found it—”
“I am answered,” said Gerard; “the wealth of the Indies cannot give you half the pleasure you will find in bargain-hunting in dirty shops. Perhaps when you have found that most of your treasures are spurious, and that you could have got better and truer antiques for less money at a West End upholsterer’s, your bargain hunting will lose some of its zest. I bide my time.”
It amused him a little, and interested him deeply to see how small a significance his wealth had in the eyes of his sister, as compared with her lover and her own outlook of genteel poverty in a crowded London parish. For this girl, deep in love with an enthusiast, and sharing his enthusiasm, wealth had no fascination.
“You are too good,” she told her brother, when they two were alone, and he pressed her to accept a handsome dowry, “but I shouldn’t care to have money settled upon me, for fear Jack should feel humiliated. He cannot afford to settle anything; and I shouldn’t like the settlement to be one-sided.”
“But, my dear girl, that is all nonsense.”
“Perhaps it is, only please let me have my own way. We are sure to want your help by-and-by, to build schools, or to improve the church, perhaps. There is sure to be some pressing want in the parish, and then we will appeal to you. And in the meantime, as we are to live among poor people, it is good for us to be poor. We shall be able to sympathise with them, and understand them all the better.”
Gerard argued no longer, but he meant that his sister should be dowered by him, all the same. She should not be poor, while he was inordinately rich. The settlement would have to be made. In the meantime he was glad that the marriage was delayed a year, so that he might have this bright young creature for his companion in the new home whose splendour he thought of sometimes with a thrill of apprehension. Would he not feel lonely in that large house until he could bring a wife home, and all his wife’s feminine surroundings of cousins and bosom friends, with their flutter, and fuss, and life, and movement? A house occupied only by men has always a gloomy atmosphere. There lacks the colour and frou-frou of women’s brighter raiment.
He pleaded with his mother that she should spare Lilian to him, until she should be claimed by a husband, and the mother, who dearly loved this wayward son — her poet as she had called him in the fond exaggeration of maternal love, intoxicated by his juvenile success in literature — could refuse him nothing. She would have to part with her only daughter in a little time. That was inevitable. The light-hearted daughter of the house, she whose heaviest task hitherto had been the making of a new frock for a smart-garden-party, she whose only sorrows had been the sorrows of others, was now to go out into the thick of the fight, and bear her own burdens as wife and mother, and carry on her shoulders and in her heart the care of a man’s life, his mistakes and disappointments, his failures and difficulties, all his frailties and feebleness, physical and mental. These were to be her burden, and these she must carry patiently to the end, or else go out into the dismal company of faithless, dishonoured wives. The Rector of Helmsleigh had been a good husband, as husbands go, yet his wife looked at her fair young daughter, sitting at the piano under the soft lamp-light, accompanying her lover’s song, very much as Abraham may have looked at Isaac on the eve of the intended sacrifice.
“It will not be a parting for y
ou and Lilian,” pursued Gerard, intent upon his purpose, “for I shall expect you to spend all the best part of the year at Hillersdon House. We will do the London season together. We will drink the cup of pleasure to the dregs.”
“My dearest boy, what do I know of the season? I should be out of my element among the people you call smart. When Barbara Vere rattled on about her great parties, and her lords and ladies, I felt as if she was talking an unknown language. I can get on very well with our county people here — we are county ourselves, you know — but I dare say I should hardly feel comfortable with them if I met them in London, in all their London finery.”
“Dear mother, you underrate the adaptability of your plastic sex. I can conceive my father feeling bored by town gaieties, and pining for his poultry-yard, his county papers, and his infallible barometer. He has got into the rustic groove, and might suffer by transplantation — but you would enjoy the quick, eager existence, and intellectual friction.”
“I certainly should delight in meeting intellectual people — Tennyson, Browning, Tyndall, and Owen for instance,” said Mrs. Hillersdon, as if a little group of that kind were to be met at every evening party in the season.
“And the music and the pictures,” suggested Gerard.
“Yes, indeed, there is so much to see and to hear in London. When we have gone up to Limmer’s for a fortnight the time has been all too short. A Greenwich dinner, which I shall always consider a sad waste of time and money, an afternoon at Richmond, perhaps a day at Ascot, and luncheon parties in London with too hospitable friends. The fortnight goes by in a rush, and one seems to have seen nothing.”
“It shall be otherwise when you are with me, mother. We will go about in a leisurely way, and see everything. I know my little London, all that she is and all that she is not, and I will teach you how to get the best she can give you. I wonder what you will think of my house.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 902
