“There will be no darkness,” Mary said, as she drew back the curtains and opened the casements and let in the splendour of the full moon, riding high under a world of greater lights.
“When you told me your sad story, I told you that some day you should hear mine.”
There was a long silence, while Mary waited motionless in the old Italian chair, watching the moonlight on the polished floor, and that far-off light, a long line of silver on the crest of the waves between Venice and the Lido.
“I was the spoilt child of fortune and a too indulgent father, my dear, and there are not many lads who could have borne such a youth as mine and not come out of it badly — worse perhaps than I did. I was full of whims and caprices — vague dreams — idle ambitions — and every caprice was gratified. My father was too rich to care what I spent, or even to realize that I was spending too much for my own welfare. Nor did he realize that the rich set at the ‘Varsity is almost always the worst set. I had been in the rich set at Eton, and I had my chequebook before I was fifteen. I was at the House, and a notoriety in the Bullingdon Club. My hunting stable cost me a thousand a year. But I soon got tired of it all — except the hunting. I was a sybarite, but not a sensualist — and I was never a profligate, nor a woman-hunter.
“When I left Oxford I was twenty-two, and tired of everything except my hunters, and the rapture of flying over a six-foot hurdle. I oscillated between London and Madingley, where my father was absorbed in the creation of an estate which he told everybody was to be mine, and where my two younger sisters were being courted by the men they were soon to marry and my eldest sister was being hotly pursued by half the county. She was handsome in those days, though always like Eleanor of Aquitaine, and she was credited with greater expectations than the fifty thousand my father intended for her.
“I had always been able to draw and paint more or less badly. It was my only accomplishment except riding; and, though I painted worse than I rode, I had a keen love of art. All my time in London was spent among artists. They did not discourage, but they never flattered me. And they told me that my only chance was to work hard for two or three years in one of the famous Continental schools — Antwerp or Paris. I chose Paris, and I lived there for a year in the Quartier Latin, Trilby’s Paris. You know Trilby?”
“Yes. A charming story.”
“I had never cared ardently for women. They are too troublesome. They want too much from a man. But I suppose in every man’s life there is one woman — the inevitable. My fate was waiting for me in the Quartier Latin. I came upon an artist’s model as lovely but not so prodigal of her beauty as poor Trilby. No painter, in fact, had seen more of her charms than a débutante displays at her first ball — an exquisite head, a perfect throat and shoulders. It took me a long time to make her mine. But with the help of a mother who had been ground all her life under the heel of poverty, I succeeded at last. I established her in a commodious apartment, a third floor in a tall new house near the Champs Élysées — spacious rooms, prettily furnished, with the finest view in Paris. She soon forgot the sacrifice she had made for me, and I knew that she was happy. She was the only woman I ever loved, and I was completely happy with her. If she had been as clever as Trilby — if she had had a mind as well as a heart — I would have married her. Class distinctions had little weight with me, but beauty without intellect, however sweet, however tender, was not enough. There was always something wanting — the au delà. I could imagine Talleyrand, as an old man, satisfied with a lovely simpleton. But I was young, with my life before me, and I could not look down the long avenue of years, and see myself happy with this dear creature.”
There was a long pause, and Mary, waiting in the silence, heard a stifled sob. And then Conway Field went on.
His voice had changed; his speech was more laboured, and Mary knew that every word was pain.
“We were utterly happy. I slacked off in my work. I gave myself up to that sweet companionship. We went about holiday-making in the villages near Paris, we spent the late summer at Fontainebleau, where I made a pretence of open-air painting. At the first touch of winter, seeing that she was frail and delicate, I took her off in a hurry to the Italian Riviera, where we stayed till spring.
Her hope of being a mother was disappointed; but she gave me all her love, and that was enough. Still, at the back of my head there was always the thought of our parting. Soon or late that sad farewell had to come.”
“Oh, what a pity!” sighed Mary.
“Yes, child, the pity of it! I received an urgent letter from my father. He had always impressed upon me that I must marry well, that is to say, marry a woman whose people would look down upon me, even if she did not. And now the time had come and the opportunity. I was eight-and-twenty, high time for me to set about the only duty that indulgent parent had ever laid upon me. I was to marry, and found a family. The hour had come and with it the woman — Lord Riversdale’s daughter, good-looking, amiable, poor enough to be attracted by a handsome establishment and generous pin-money. The husband would be a detail.
“My father had been with me in Paris for more than one visit during my work at the Art School. He stayed at Meurice’s, and asked no embarrassing questions about my rooms in the Champs Élysées, though I had never withheld my address there. The sympathy between us was too complete for him to be in doubt as to what had happened, and he was not long in obtaining my confidence. I could keep no secrets from such a father and such a friend. I think if I had told him that it would break my heart to leave Suzanne, he would have told me to marry her. He was capable of relinquishing his cherished plan, and accepting this girl as a daughter-in-law. But I made no appeal to him. I did not tell him that my happiness was at stake. He did not ask to see her. But he urged me to leave Paris as soon as possible, and take up my quarters at Madingley early in October. I was to provide generously for Suzanne’s future. He gave me carte blanche, and would make himself responsible for any settlement I thought fit to make.
“I have never forgotten the aspect of Paris that peerless day in late September: a city built for happy people and happy thoughts.
“I walked up and down the bright gay avenues with a heart of lead, thinking of what I was to say to my dear Suzanne, and of how my young years were to end that afternoon. I felt somehow that when I shut the door upon the rooms where we had been so fond and so happy, I should shut the door upon youth.
“The world seemed full of sunshine, not a leaf had fallen from the chestnuts, and the flower-beds were aflame with scarlet and gold. Paris was alive again after its summer solitude, and the broad avenue was full of carriages and gaily-dressed people. I felt like a man in a bad dreain — such brightness without, and such blackness within.
“I had done nothing to prepare Suzanne for our separation. God forgive me! I had thought of myself and my own feelings. For I felt that I could better bear the parting if I made it short and sharp, like the fall of the headsman’s sword. I was walking about to steady my nerves, and think out what I had to say, first to her mother and then to her. To her mother all business details of the provision I was to make for them both. To Suzanne only words of love and grief.
“I found the mother tractable, as she had been in all the time of our association. She had suffered the martyrdom of poverty long enough to feel that with ample means for comfort and security no other trouble mattered. She shed tears when she told me that her girl would be heartbroken, but the tears were soon dried when she heard the amount of the income I was going to settle upon mother and daughter, and she thanked me for my generosity and unvarying kindness to herself. No, she did not think her daughter would ever marry. She loved me too well to care for anyone else, though she had had admirers pour le bon motif, before she met me. With such a dot as I proposed a comfortable marriage would be easy. But she did not believe Suzanne would endure the sight of a lover, however worthy.
“She followed me into the room where I found Suzanne — our little salon, so bright and gay, with its wi
de window opening on a balcony, where we had so often sat late upon a sultry evening, watching the lamps of carriages moving in a triple line towards the Bois, foolish coloured lamps that made a chain of jewels, vanishing into the dusk of the night.
“The casements were open, and I could hear the murmur of multitudinous voices, and see far away across the white roads and green trees to the purple distance beyond the race-course.
“And then I told her! I had promised my father that I would go back to England at the end of the month, and that to please that kindest of fathers I was going to marry an English lady whom he had chosen for my wife.
“She stood before me white and speechless while I struggled through my wretched explanation, dwelling on my love for her — my father’s goodness — the immeasurable debt of gratitude and obedience that I owed him. Her eyes grew wider and wider as she looked at me — dry eyes, terrible with an infinite despair. But she spoke no word, till she rushed to me, and flung her arms round my neck, and implored me not to leave her. Her passionate entreaty, her flood of tears unmanned me. I unwound the clinging arms and put her gently from me. Think what it was to put her away! I had loved her, and she had given me all that love could give. The two best years of my life had been spent with her, and the future looked cold and dark as I left her! I was halfway down the stairs to the next story when I heard a wild shriek from above, and rushed back — back to her. But it was not she who had shrieked. The room was empty.
“Her mother was in the balcony, leaning over the railing, screaming to the people below. There were voices and cries in the street. She had thrown herself out of the balcony. There were frantic men and women clustering round a white figure, lying on the pavement.
“That was the end of my only love story. The one inevitable love had come to me, and that was what I made of it.”
Mary was crying silently, suppressing her tears in her infinite pity for this poor wreck of manhood.
“Not a day passes that I do not think of her, and think of what might have been: how I might have had her educated, and how her mind would have widened and ripened in association with the friends I could have given her, and the best side of life and the world. She would not have always been a simpleton. There were no vulgar instincts, no stubborn self-conceit to be overcome. As years went on she would have made herself all I wanted her to be. We should have grown as near in thought as we were in love. Useless regrets! Wasted pain! Now you know my story, you and I will be even more in sympathy than we have been. Good-night, my dear.”
XII
GEORGE BERTRAM was “fed up” with Swiss mountains.
“It is a hateful phrase, Austin, but there’s nothing else that so well expresses a man’s feeling when he has had more than enough of a thing. I am fed up with Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa and the Jungfrau — and I think you must be pretty much the same. We have run all the risks — seen all that the earth and sky in these regions can give us — all the colours and all the splendid accidents of sunrise and sunset from mountain tops. We have done the thing ad nauseam, and nothing less than the steepest peak in the Karakorum range could give me a thrill worth having. I swear there is more adventure to be had in a night in Poplar or Bethnal Green than in all these everlasting snows. If a man wants to live at high pressure he can do it in your London slums. I am dead sick of mountaineering.”
“And of a good many other things, I’m afraid.”
“What is there on this earth that doesn’t sicken a man when he has broken his toy drum and found nothing inside?” George gave a long melancholy yawn, like the howl of a solitary dog in his kennel — a prisoner — unpitied — and hungry.
“Shall I give a name to your complaint, George?” his cousin asked gently.
The two men were wide as the poles asunder in character and ideas. One was keenly interested in his fellow-men, full of purpose and unselfish, as nearly an altruist as a man can be, and yet live in the everyday world — not a professed Socialist, but with an almost divine sense of brotherhood with all suffering creatures, down to the dregs and offscouring of society. The other was unsympathetic from want of understanding, rather than from want of heart.
He had been down into the depths with Austin more than once — had spent nights in workmen’s shelters and even in thieves’ kitchens; but he had got no nearer to the men he saw there. Though their haggard faces had haunted him, and the sound of their raucous voices had mixed with his gloomy dreams, the experience had ended in nothing more than a twenty-pound cheque to Austin.
“You are simply splendid,” he said, “and as far as money can go I love to help you. But I could never do such work on my own. I don’t understand your poor wretches. I should never get in touch with them.”
“If they were dogs you would understand them.”
“Dogs are such pathetic beasts, they go straight to one’s heart.”
George had a passion for animals. It was the soft side of a nature that most people had found hard. He did not care for women. His first love had been unlucky, and having been deceived by one woman he had hardened his heart against all the rest — would just acknowledge that his mother was a good woman and stop at that.
“Of course there are good mothers and good wives in the world,” he said, “but they are the exceptions — the blue diamonds — the black pearls — and a man is a fool who thinks he can come by such creatures easily. Rare as rubies, said King Solomon, and he knew what he was talking about.”
This fit of disgust at the end of a season in Switzerland had happened a good many years ago, when George was still in his first youth, and when he was still bruised and broken by the blow that had left him inert and hopeless in the time that should have been the morning of life. There had always been something difficult in his nature — something in his temperament that came between him and the joy of life. Even before his first passionate attachment came to a bitter end, there had been an inclination to doubt all that seemed fairest on the surface of life. He had taken up the attitude of a cynic before he left Oxford, perhaps with some touch of affectation — the young man’s desire to be unlike other young men — and that unhappy first love affair had made him cynical to the core. He took no more interest in that quintessence of dust, the mass of his fellow-creatures, and thought badly of all mankind because one woman had cheated him.
He had left Oxford with the reputation of being the most promising among the clever young men of his year. But perhaps it was the kind of promise that rarely results in great performance. He had the all-round cleverness of a young man of various tastes and inclinations, talent without perseverance. Quick at understanding, he was never strenuous in labour. He had been able to take a first in “greats,” although in his ‘Varsity days he had a passion for art, and spent a good deal of his time roaming about the country round Oxford painting in water-colour and thinking poetry.
He had a fancy for verse at this youthful stage of his life, and wrote a tragedy on the classic lines — awful as Aeschylus — musical as Milton — which seemed splendid while he was writing it and worthless when it was finished. He read his play to a friendly don and a few college chums. And, seeing a certain coldness in their reception of his grandest scenes — despite their flattering assurance that the piece was magnificent as poetry, although hardly suited to the modern stage — he stirred his fire to a cheerful blaze while his guests were bidding him good-night, and threw his manuscript into the heart of the flames when they were gone.
His love of art and his talent for water-colour landscape were stronger than his capacity for verse, and his youthful performances pleased his uncle, who talked to him with a curious sadness of his own early ambition.
There was always a certain sympathy between Conway Field and this brilliant nephew of his. And the sympathy lasted when the brilliancy had worn off and the eminent K.C.’s only son had taken a back seat in London society, where only the undergraduates of his year remembered what a superior person he had been at Oxford.
Meeting a fellow of Magdalen at a dinner-party, he might be reminded with urbane reproach how much had been expected of him in those old days. And the reproach was the only recognition that he was ever likely to receive of gifts which had been called exceptional. He had had his chance and missed it. His father had wanted him to go to the Bar, could have done much for him, but the Law had no attraction for him. The very fact of his father’s success seemed to shut the door against him. His father was wonderful, had worked his way to the front with nothing but his own talent and invincible patience to help him, and was one of the foremost men of his time; one of those supreme advocates who are at their best when the issues are tremendous and the odds against them, like the incomparable jockeys who can win any race on any horse — whose failures are a negligible quantity.
The father’s success had a deterrent influence on the son. It irked him to play second fiddle — to have briefs given to him because he was John Bertram’s son.
“I should never come near you in any of the qualities that make a great advocate,” he told his father. “The solicitors would be civil to me for your sake, and I should waste the brightest hours of youth on counsel’s opinions at two guineas each. If I were to work hard and steadily — which I’m afraid isn’t in me to do — I should remain a rotter. I have neither love nor understanding for Law. When I think of your career I seem to be looking across a vast impenetrable labyrinth, a land of thorny paths and prickly hedges and blind pitfalls, which you have trodden with indomitable resolve and the patience of a martyr until the thorny paths are worn smooth and the prickly pears are changed to roses. You had the brain and the will to conquer where I should be a hopeless failure.”
John Bertram heard him with a touch of scorn for youth that wanted ease and pleasure. In the hard school where he had graduated youth had to work for its bread. He had known the discipline of grinding poverty before he made his mark at the Bar, and seemed to have a long life behind him at five-and-thirty when he married Enid Field. His practice as a stuff gown had been so good, that he only took silk to please his fiancée.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1014
