by George Moore
And it was necessary to make that survey of psychical cause and effect to appreciate the sentiments that actuated Alice in her relationship with Harding. She loved him, but more through the imagination than the heart. She knew he was deceiving her, but to her he meant so much that she had not the force of will to cast him off, and abandoned herself to the intellectual sensualism of his society. It was this, and nothing more. What her love might have been it is not necessary to analyze; in the present circumstances, it was completely merged in the knowledge that he was to her, light, freedom, and instruction, and that when he left, darkness and ignorance would again close in upon her. They had not spoken for some moments. With a cruelty that was peculiar to him, he waited for her to break the silence.
‘I am sorry you are going away; I am afraid we shall never meet again.’
‘Oh yes, we shall,’ he replied: ‘you’ll get married one of these days and come to live in London.’
‘Why should I go to live in London?’
‘There are Frenchmen born in England, Englishmen born in France. Heine was a Frenchman born in Germany — and you are a Kensingtonian. I see nothing Irish in you. Oh, you are very Kensington, and therefore you will — I do not know when or how, but assuredly as a stream goes to the river and the river to the sea, you will drift to your native place — Kensington. But do you know that I have left the hotel? There were too many people about to do much work, so I took rooms in Molesworth Street — there I can write and read undisturbed. You might come and see me.’
‘I should like to very much, but I don’t think I could ask mother to come with me; she is so very busy just now.’
‘Well, don’t ask your mother to come; you won’t be afraid to come alone?’
‘I am afraid I could not do that.’
‘Why not? No one will ever know anything about it.’
‘Very possibly, but I don’t think it would be a proper thing to do — I don’t think it would be a right thing to do.’
‘Right! I thought we had ceased to believe in heaven and hell.’
‘Yes; but does that change anything? There are surely duties that we owe to our people, to our families. The present ordering of things may be unjust, but, as long as it exists, had we not better live in accordance with it?’
‘A very sensible answer, and I suppose you are right.’
Alice looked at him in astonishment, but she was shaken too intensely in all her feelings to see that he was perfectly sincere, that his answer was that of a man who saw and felt through his intelligence, and not his conscience.
The conversation had come to a pause, and the silence was broken suddenly by whispered words, and the abundant laughter that was seemingly used to hide the emotions that oppressed the speakers. Finally they sat down quite close to, but hidden from, Alice and Harding by a screen, and through the paper even their breathing was audible. All the dancers were gone; there was scarcely a white skirt or black coat in the pale blueness of the room. Evidently the lovers thought they were well out of reach of eavesdroppers. Alice felt this, but before she could rise to go Fred Scully had said —
‘Now, May, I hope you won’t refuse to let me come and see you in your room to-night. It would be too cruel if you did. I’ll steal along the passage; no one will hear, no one will ever know, and I’ll be so very good. I promise you I will.’
‘Oh, Fred, I’m afraid I can’t trust you; it would be so very wicked.’
‘Nothing is wicked when we really love; besides, I only want to talk to you.’
‘You can talk to me here.’
‘Yes, but it isn’t the same thing; anyone can talk to you here. I want to show you a little poem I cut out of a newspaper to-day for you. I’ll steal along the passage — no one will ever know.’
‘You’ll promise to be very good, and you won’t stop more than five minutes.’
The words were spoken in low, soft tones, exquisitely expressive of the overthrow of reason and the merging of all the senses in the sweet abandonment of passion.
Alice sat unable to move, till at last, awakening with a pained look in her grey eyes, she touched Harding’s hand with hers, and, laying her finger on her lips, she arose. Their footfalls made no sound on the deep, soft carpet.
‘This is very terrible,’ she murmured, half to herself.
Harding had too much tact to answer; and, taking advantage of the appearance of Violet Scully, who came walking gaily down the room on the Marquis’s arm, he said:
‘Your friend Miss Scully seems to be in high spirits.’
Violet exchanged smiles with Alice as she passed. The smile was one of triumph. She had waltzed three times with the Marquis, and was now going to sit out a set of quadrilles.
‘What a beautiful waltz the Blue Danube is!’ she said, leading her admirer to where the blue fans were numerous. Upon the glistening piano stood a pot filled with white azaleas; and, in the pauses of the conversation, one heard the glass of the chandeliers tinkling gently to the vibration of the music.
‘It is a beautiful waltz when I am dancing it with you.’
‘I am sure you say that to every girl you dance with.’
‘No, I shouldn’t know how to say so to anyone but you,’ said the little man humbly; and so instinct were the words with truth that the girl, in the violence of her emotion, fancied her heart had ceased to beat.
‘But you haven’t known me a fortnight,’ she answered involuntarily.
‘But that doesn’t matter; the moment I saw you, I — I — liked you. It is so easy to know the people we — like; we know it at once — at least I do.’
She was more self-possessed than he, but the words ‘Am I — am I going to be a marchioness?’ throbbed like a burning bullet sunk into the very centre of her forehead. And to maintain her mental equipoise she was forced, though by doing so she felt she was jeopardizing her chances, to coquette with him. After a long silence she said:
‘Oh, do you think we know at first sight the people we like? Do you believe in first impressions?’
‘My first and last impressions of you are always the same. All I know is that when you are present all things are bright, beautiful, and cheering, and when you are away I don’t much care what happens. Now, these Castle balls used to bore me to death last year; I used to go into a back room and fall asleep. But this year I am as lively as a kitten — I think I could go on for ever, and the Castle seems to me the most glorious place on earth. I used to hate it; I was as bad as Parnell, but not for the same reasons, of course. Now I am only afraid he will have his way, and they’ll shut the whole place up. Anyhow, even if they do, I shall always look back upon this season as a very happy time.’
‘But you do not really think that Parnell will be allowed to have his way?’ said Violet inadvertently.
‘I don’t know; I don’t take much interest in politics, but I believe things are going to the bad. Dublin, they say, is undermined with secret societies, and the murder that was committed the other day in Sackville Street was the punishment they inflict on those whom they suspect of being informers, even remotely.’
‘But don’t you think the Government will soon be obliged to step in and put an end to all this kind of thing?’
‘I don’t know; I’m afraid they’ll do nothing until we landlords are all ruined.’
Violet’s thin face contracted. She had introduced a subject that might prevent him from ever proposing to her. She knew how heavily the Kilcarney estates were mortgaged; and, even now, as she rightly conjectured, the poor little man was inwardly trembling at the folly it had been on his lips to speak. Three of his immediate ancestors had married penniless girls, and it was well known that another love-match would precipitate the property over that precipice known to every Irish landowner — the Encumbered Estates Court. But those dainty temples, so finely shaded with light brown tresses, that delicately moulded head — delicate as an Indian carven ivory, dispelled all thoughts of his property, and he forgot his duty to marry an heiress.
Violet meanwhile, prompted by her instinct, said the right words:
‘But things never turn out as well or as badly as we expect them to.’
This facile philosophy went like wine to the little Marquis’s head, and he longed to throw himself at the feet of his goddess and thank her for the balm she had poured upon him. The gloom of approaching ruin disappeared, and he saw nothing in the world but a white tulle skirt, a thin foot, a thin bosom, and a pair of bright grey eyes. Vaguely he sought for equivalent words, but loud-talking dancers passed into the room, and, abashed by their stares, the Marquis broke off a flowering branch and said, stammering the while incoherently:
‘Will you keep this in memory of this evening?’
Violet thrust the flowers into her bosom, and was about to thank him, when an A.D.C. came up and claimed her for the dance. She told him he was mistaken, that she was engaged; and, taking Lord Kilcarney’s arm, they made their way in silence back to the ball-room. Violet was satisfied; she felt now very sure of her Marquis, and, as they approached Mrs. Scully, a quick glance said that things were going as satisfactorily as could be desired. Not daring to trust herself to the gossip of the chaperons, this excellent lady sat apart, maintaining the solitary dignity to which the Galway counter had accustomed her. She received the Marquis with the same smile as she used to bestow on her best customers, and they talked for a few minutes of the different aspects of the ball-room, of their friends, of things that did not interest them. Then Violet said winsomely, affecting an accent of command that enchanted him:
‘Now I want you to go and dance with someone else; let me see — what do you say to Olive Barton? If you don’t, I shall be in her mother’s black books for the rest of my life. Now go. We shall be at home to-morrow; you might come in for tea;’ and, suffocated with secret joy, Lord Kilcarney made his way across the room to Mrs. Barton, who foolishly cancelled a couple of Olive’s engagements, and sent her off to dance with him, whereas wise Violet sat by her mother, refusing all her partners; but, when God Save the Queen was played, she accepted Lord Kilcarney’s arm, and they pressed forward to see the Lord-Lieutenant and Her Excellency pass down the room.
Violet’s eyes feasted on the bowing black coats and light toilettes, and, leaning on her escutcheon, she dreamed vividly of the following year when she would take her place amid all these noble people, and, as high as they, stand a peeress on the daïs.
XX
‘SO YOU COULDN’T manage to keep him after all, my lady? When did he leave the hotel?’
‘Mr. Harding left Dublin last Monday week.’
Alice wondered if her mother hated her; if she didn’t, it was difficult to account for her cruel words. And this was the girl’s grief, and she feared that hatred would beget hatred, and that she would learn to hate her mother. But Mrs. Barton was a loving and affectionate mother, who would sacrifice herself for one child almost as readily for the other. In each of us there are traits that the chances of life have never revealed; and though she would have sat by the bedside, even if Alice were stricken with typhoid fever, Mrs. Barton recoiled spitefully like a cat before the stern rectitudes of a nature so dissimilar from her own. She had fashioned Olive, who was now but a pale copy of her mother according to her guise: all the affectations had been faithfully reproduced, but the charm of the original had evaporated like a perfume. It would be rash to say that Mrs. Barton did not see that the weapons which had proved so deadly in her hands were ineffectual in her daughter’s; but twenty years of elegant harlotry had blunted her finer perceptions, and now the grossest means of pushing Olive and the Marquis morally and physically into each other’s arms seemed to her the best. Alice was to her but a plain girl, whose misfortune was that she had ever been born. This idea had grown up with Mrs. Barton, and fifteen years ago she had seen in the child’s face the spinster of fifty. But since the appearance of Harding, and the manifest interest he had shown in her daughter, Mrs. Barton’s convictions that Alice would never be able to find a husband had been somewhat shaken, and she had almost concluded that it would be as well — for there was no knowing what men’s tastes were — to give her a chance. Nor was the dawning fancy dispelled by the fact that Harding had not proposed, and the cutting words she had addressed to the girl were the result of the nervous irritation caused by the marked attention the Marquis was paying Violet Scully.
For, like Alice, Mrs. Barton never lived long in a fool’s paradise, and she now saw that the battle was going against her, and would most assuredly be lost unless a determined effort was made. So she delayed not a moment in owning to herself that she had committed a mistake in going to the Shelbourne Hotel. Had she taken a house in Mount Street or Fitzwilliam Place, she could have had all the best men from the barracks continually at her house. But at the hotel she was helpless; there were too many people about, too many beasts of women criticizing her conduct. Mrs. Barton had given two dinner-parties in a private room hired for the occasion; but these dinners could scarcely be called successful. On one occasion they had seven men to dinner, and as some half-dozen more turned in in the evening, it became necessary to send down to the ladies’ drawing-room for partners. Bertha Duffy and the girl in red of course responded to the call, but they had rendered everything odious by continuous vulgarity and brogue. Then other mistakes had been made. A charity costume ball had been advertised. It was to be held in the Rotunda. An imposing list of names headed the prospectus, and it was confidently stated that all the lady patronesses would attend. Mrs. Barton fell into the trap, and, to her dismay, found herself and her girls in the company of the rag, tag, and bobtail of Catholic Dublin: Bohemian girls fabricated out of bed-curtains, negro minstrels that an application of grease and burnt cork had brought into a filthy existence. And from the single gallery that encircled this tomb-like building the small tradespeople looked down upon the multicoloured crowd that strove to dance through the mud that a late Land League meeting had left upon the floor; and all the while grey dust fell steadily into the dancers’ eyes and into the sloppy tea distributed at counters placed here and there like coffee-stands in the public street.
‘I never felt so low in my life,’ said the lady who always brought back an A.D.C. from the Castle, and the phrase was cited afterwards as being admirably descriptive of the festival.
When it became known that the Bartons had been present at this ball, that the beauty had been seen dancing with the young Catholic nobodies, their names were struck off the lists, and they were asked to no more private dances at the Castle. Lord Dungory was sent to interview the Chamberlain, but that official could promise nothing. Mrs. Barton’s hand was therefore forced. It was obligatory upon her to have some place where she could entertain officers; the Shelbourne did not lend itself to that purpose. She hired a house in Mount Street, and one that possessed a polished floor admirably suited to dancing.
Then she threw off the mask, and pirate-like, regardless of the laws of chaperons, resolved to carry on the war as she thought proper. She’d have done once and for ever with those beasts of women who abused and criticized her. Henceforth she would shut her door against them all, and it would only be open to men — young men for her daughters, elderly men for herself. At four o’clock in the afternoon the entertainment began. Light refreshments, consisting of tea, claret, biscuits, and cigarettes, were laid out in the dining-room. Having partaken, the company, consisting of three colonels and some half-dozen subalterns, went upstairs to the drawing-room. And in recognition of her flirtation with Harding, a young man replaced Alice at the piano, and for half-a-crown an hour supplied the necessary music.
Round and round the girls went, passing in turn out of the arms of an old into those of a young man, and back again. If they stayed their feet for a moment, Mrs. Barton glided across the floor, and, with insinuating gestures and intonations of voice, would beg of them to continue. She declared that it was la grâce et la beauté, etc. The merriment did not cease until half-past six. Some of the company then left, and some few were d
etained for dinner. A new pianist and fresh officers arrived about nine o’clock, and dancing was continued until one or two in the morning. To yawning subalterns the house in Mount Street seemed at first like a little paradise. The incessant dancing was considered fatiguing, but there were interludes in which claret was drunk, cigarettes smoked, and loose conversation permitted in the dining-room.
Then the dinners! Mrs. Barton’s dinners are worthy of special study. Her circle of acquaintances being limited, the same guests were generally found at her table. Lord Dungory always sat next to her. He displayed his old-fashioned shirt-front, his cravat, his studs, his urbanity, his French epigram. Lord Rosshill sat opposite him; he was thin, melancholy, aristocratic, silent, and boring. There was a captain who, since he had left the army, had grown to the image of a butler, and an ashen-tinted young man who wore his arm in a sling; and an old man, who looked like a dirty and worn-out broom, and who put his arm round the backs of the chairs. These and three A.D.C.’s made up the party. There was very little talking, and what there was was generally confined to asking the young ladies if they had been to the Castle, and if they liked dancing.
The Marquis was a constant, although an unwilling guest at all these entertainments. He would fain have refused Mrs. Barton’s hospitalities, but so pressing was she that this seemed impossible. There were times when he started at the postman’s knock as at the sound of a Land Leaguer’s rifle. Too frequently his worst fears were realized. ‘Mon cher Marquis, it will give us much pleasure if you will dine with us to-morrow night at half-past seven.’ ‘Dear Mrs. Barton, I regret extremely that I am engaged for to-morrow night.’ An hour later, ‘Mon cher Marquis, I am very sorry you cannot come to-morrow night, but Thursday will suit us equally well.’ What was to be done? A second excuse would result only in a proposal to fix a day next week; better accept and get it over. He must do this or send a rude message to the effect that he was engaged for every day he intended to dine out that season, and he lacked the moral courage to write such a letter. Mrs. Barton’s formula for receiving the Marquis never varied. If he arrived early he found Olive waiting to receive him in the drawing-room. She was always prepared with a buttonhole, which she insisted on arranging and pinning into his coat. Then allusion was made to the forget-me-nots that the bouquet was sure to contain; and laughing vacantly — for laughter with Olive took the place of conversation — she fled through the rooms, encouraging him to pursue her. During dinner attempts were made to exchange a few words, but without much success. Nor was it until Olive pelted him with flowers, and he replied by destroying another bouquet and applying it to the same purpose, that much progress was made towards intimacy. But this little scene was exceptional, and on all other occasions Lord Kilcarney maintained an attitude of reserve.
