CHAPTER XVII.
A STEP THE WRONG WAY.
WHEN Frank Renton had sent off his note to Nelly, accepting the invitation for the birthday fête, and adding such little compliments as have been recorded, a kind of sensation of having gone too far came over him. He had not yet by any means made up his mind finally, and he had no desire to commit himself. It seemed necessary, by way of holding the balance even, to take a step in the other direction. So he set about making very vigorous inquiries concerning the 200th, their destination, and the character of the officers, and all the other points of information most likely to be interesting. And the result of his inquiries was a resolution to go up to town and see Montague, who did not want to go to India. Edgbaston and the rest might laugh, but Frank said to himself that he was far from having made up his mind, and that it was very important for him to acquaint himself with all the circumstances. It was on a June day when he went up to town in pursuance of this resolution, hot enough to dissuade any man from business, and especially from business connected with India. ‘If it is like this in Pall Mall, what will it be in Calcutta?’ Frank asked himself; but, nevertheless, he was not to be dissuaded. Montague, however, though certified on all sides to be at home, was not to be found. Frank sought him at his rooms, at one club after another, at the agent’s,—everywhere he could think of,—but was unsuccessful. To be sure he got all the necessary information, which answered his purpose almost as well; but the ineffectual search tired him out. He was so thoroughly sick of it, and the day was so hot, that none of his usual haunts or occupations attracted him as it happened. After he had fortified himself with sherry and biscuits, he went rambling forth to spend his time in some misanthropical way till it should be time to return to Royalborough; but the best way that occurred to him for doing that was to take a walk. The Row was deserted; so, of course, it would have been foolish to go there; and he did not feel disposed to make calls; and lounging about the club,—or, indeed, anywhere where he should meet men and be questioned on all hands about himself and his brothers,—was a trial he was not equal to in his present frame of mind. So he went out to walk, which was a curious expedient. And of all places in the world to go to, turned his steps in the direction of the Regent’s Park, which, as everybody knows, is close to Fitzroy Square.
I have never been able to understand what was Frank’s motive in setting out upon this walk. He knew very well,—none better,—that it was entirely out of the world. What a Guardsman could have to do in such a neighbourhood, except, indeed, to visit a wayward brother, nobody could have imagined; and now the wayward brother was gone. He said to himself that he did not mind where he went, so long as it was quite out of the way of meeting anybody; and yet on ordinary occasions Frank had no objection to meeting people. He went up Harley Street, scowling at those scowling houses, and then he went into the smiling, plebeian park, among all the nursery-maids. How funny it was, he said to himself, to notice the difference between this and the other parks, and persuaded himself that he was studying life on its humdrum side. He looked into the steady little broughams meandering round and round the dull terraces. Was it any pleasure to the old ladies to drive about thus, each in her box? And then he walked down the centre walk, where all the children were playing. The children were just as pretty as if they had been in Kensington Gardens. Mrs. Suffolk’s babies trotted past, with signs of old Rich’s two hundred and fifty pounds in their little summer garments, though Frank knew nothing of them,—and he kept stumbling over two pretty boys, who recalled to him some face he knew, and to whom he seemed an object of lively curiosity. They held close conversations, whispering with their heads together, and discussing him, as he could see, and turned up wherever he went, hanging about his path. ‘I tell you it ain’t Laurie’s ghost,’ one of them said audibly, at length. ‘He’s twice as tall, and he’s Laurie’s brother.’ ‘Hallo!’ Frank said, turning round upon them; ‘you are the little Severns, to be sure.’ No doubt it was the first time the idea had occurred to him. He must be close to Fitzroy Square, and being so, and Mrs. Severn having been such a friend of Laurie’s, it was his duty to call. Clearly it was his duty to call. She was a friend of the Riches, too. There was thus a kind of connexion on two sides; and to be near and not to call would be very uncivil. Frank made friends with the boys without any difficulty, and took the opportunity of making them perfectly happy by a purchase of canes and whips from a passing merchant of such commodities, and set off for the Square under their guidance. It would not have mattered if Mrs. Severn had not known that he was in the neighbourhood; but of course the boys would hasten home and tell. And to be uncivil to so great a friend of Laurie’s was a sin Frank would not have been guilty of for the world. Thus it will be seen that it was in the simplest, most unpremeditated way that he was led to call at the Square.
The scene he saw when he went in was a scene of which Laurie had once made a little drawing. Though it was so hot and blazing out of doors, the great window of Mrs. Severn’s dining-room, which looked into her garden, was by this time of the afternoon, overshadowed by the projecting ends of her neighbours’ houses, and admitted only a softened light. Alice sat full in the midst of this colourless day with her curls hanging about her shoulders, and her delicate face, with all its soft bright tints, like a flower a little bent upon its stem. The door of the dining-room was ajar; and this was how Frank managed to catch a passing glimpse as he was being ushered into the decorum of the great vacant drawing-room; for to be sure he was a stranger, and had no right to go as familiar visitors did, and tap at the padrona’s studio-door. He saw as he passed Alice sitting by the window, her hands full of work, and her face full of contentment and sweet peace. And at her feet, like a rose-bud, sat little Edith, in all a child’s carelessness of attitude, her little white frock tucked about her shapely, rosy limbs, her little feet crossed. Miss Hadley was in the shadow, and Frank did not see her. He thought Alice and her little sister were alone, and that he was in luck. He paused at the open door, though the maid led the way to the other. ‘May I come in?’ he said. Perhaps the tone was too much like that in which he had asked permission to enter the music-room at Richmont. Alice gave a great start at the sound of his voice, and dropped her work on the floor. ‘Oh, Mr. Laurie’s brother!’ cried Edith, who was quite unembarrassed. And Frank felt himself charmed out of all reason by the little start and the flutter of the white work as it fell. ‘I feared you were still at Richmont,’ he said, ‘and that I should not see you.’ And so he went lightly in and found himself in Miss Hadley’s presence, with her sternest countenance on, a face enough to have driven out of his wits the most enterprising cavalier in the world.
‘It is Mr. Frank Renton,’ said Alice. ‘Miss Hadley, Mr. Renton’s brother;’ and Miss Hadley made him a curtsey, and looked him through and through with her sharp eyes, for which Frank was so entirely unprepared. The thought of finding Alice all by herself had been so charming to him, and he had brightened into such genuine exultation, that the way in which his face fell was amusing to see.
‘Your mamma will be very glad to see Mr. Renton’s brother, I am sure,’ said Miss Hadley. ‘Run, my dear, and tell her; and ask if he shall go to the studio, or if she will come here.’
‘Don’t disturb Mrs. Severn, pray, for me,’ said the discomfited Frank. ‘I was in the neighbourhood, and by accident met the boys in the park. I could not be so near without calling; but pray don’t disturb her for me.’
‘She is sure to want to see you,’ said Miss Hadley. ‘Have you heard from your brother? It was so very unexpected to us all his going away. I hope it was not his health. But you young men think so little of travelling now-a-days. Is it you who are going to India, Mr. Renton? Your brother used to talk a great deal of you.’
‘Yes, I think I am going to India,’ said Frank. Alice was standing putting her work aside before she went to tell her mother of Frank’s presence; but at these words she turned half round with an involuntary movement,—he could see it was involuntary, almost unconscious,—and gave him a soft look of inquiry and grief. ‘Must you go away,—shall we never see you again?’ said the eyes of Alice. The tears were ready to spring and the lips to quiver, and then she returned to the folding of her work, and blushed all over her pretty throat. And Frank saw it, and his heart swelled within him. To think she should care! Nelly disappeared out of his thoughts like the merest shadow,—indeed, Nelly had not been in his thoughts since he left Royalborough. ‘I have not quite made up my mind yet; but I fear I must go,’ he continued, answering her look. And Miss Hadley, always sharp, noticed at once the changed direction of his eyes.
‘Run, my dear, and tell your mother,’ she said. ‘I will put your work away for you, and Edie may go and play with the boys. Run out into the garden, children. We cannot have you all making a noise when people are here.’
‘But I want to stay and talk to Mr. Laurie’s brother,’ cried Edith. ‘I love Laurie; there is nobody so nice ever comes now. And Alice loves him too,’ said the little traitor, ‘and tells me such stories when she is putting me to bed, about Richmont.’
‘But, you silly child, it was Mr. Frank Renton who was at Richmont,’ said Miss Hadley. Upon which the child nodded her head a great many times, and repeated, ‘I know, I know.’
‘Your brother was such a favourite with them all,’ said Miss Hadley, apologetically, ‘they get confused to know which Mr. Renton it is. He is very nice. Is he just wandering about on the face of the earth, or has he settled down anywhere? I don’t think Mrs. Severn has heard; and that is strange too.’
‘We don’t know exactly what route he has taken,’ said Frank, ‘He is not much of a letter-writer. Of course my mother hears. And I don’t think it is anything about his health. There is such pleasure to a fellow like Laurie, who never thinks of anything, in the mere fact of travelling about.’
‘I always thought he considered everybody before himself,’ said Miss Hadley.
‘He never pays the slightest attention to his own affairs,’ said Frank, ‘which comes to very nearly the same thing; and yet he is the best fellow that ever was born.’
Having thus exhausted the only subject which they had in common, he and Miss Hadley sat and gazed at each other for some time in silence. The governess was very well aware that Laurie had not gone away for his health,—indeed, she had a shrewd suspicion what it was that had driven him away,—and she could not but look at Frank with watchful, suspicious eyes, feeling that there was something in his uncalled-for visit, in his embarrassment, and Alice’s start and look of interest, more than met the eye. There might have been no harm in that, had he been staying at home. But a young man on the eve of starting for India! It would break her mother’s heart, Miss Hadley said to herself; and though she was sometimes troublesome, and almost intrusive in her vigilance, the governess loved her friend with that intense affection of one woman to another,—generally of a lonely woman to one more fortunate than herself,—which is so seldom appreciated and so little understood, but which sometimes rises to the height of passion. Jane Hadley made herself disagreeable by times to the padrona, but would have been cut in pieces for her,—would have lain down to be trampled over,—could she have done any good by such an act to the being she held highest in the world. Therefore it immediately occurred to her that her first duty was to discourage and snub this new visitor. Going away to India, and yet trying to make himself agreeable in the eyes of Alice, was a sin of the deepest dye.
‘You were going to change into another regiment, your brother said,’ remarked Miss Hadley. ‘When do you leave? I should think, on the whole, it would be pleasanter to change the monotony of your leisure for a more active life.’
‘It is not settled yet,’ said Frank. ‘But I suppose I’ll go. Yes; it is rather monotonous doing garrison work at home.’
‘And what part of India are you going to?’ Miss Hadley continued. Frank began to get irritated by the questions. Confound India! he did not want to think of it,—or, indeed, to trouble his mind with anything at that moment. He wanted Alice to come back again, to look at him, to speak to him, to play for him. He kept his eyes on the door, and felt that the place was empty till she came. Here it was he had seen her first. There, under the curtains in the doorway, she had stood lighting up the darkness with her face; there she had sat making the tea;—how clearly every little incident dwelt on his mind! As for Nelly Rich, he had not the slightest recollection where he saw her first, nor what the circumstances were. He was never restless for her return when she was out of the room; but at that moment he did not even pay Nelly Rich the compliment of contrasting his feelings in respect to her with his feelings to Alice Severn. He simply forgot her existence, and watched the door, and stammered what reply he could to the inquisitor who sat opposite to him,—like an old cat he said,—watching him with her keen eyes.
And when the door opened at last it was only Mrs. Severn who came in. Frank absolutely changed colour, and grew pale and green with disappointment. Laurie had thought her a type of everything most perfect in woman; but to Frank she was a sober personage, comely and middle-aged, and Alice’s mother, which indeed was her real appearance in the world. She came in with a gleam of interest in her eyes, and a little eagerness in her manner. She had not taken off her painting-dress, but she had put aside her brushes and her palette, and sat down by him without any fuss about abandoning her work. With her intimates she worked on without intermission, but to strangers the padrona ignored the constant labour which filled her life.
‘Have you brought us some news of your brother, Mr. Renton?’ she said. ‘I shall be so glad to hear he is safe in Rome. He should not have gone so late in the year.’
‘No, I have no particular news,’ said Frank. ‘His going took us all by surprise. My mother has had two or three little notes, I believe. I was in the neighbourhood,’ he added in an explanatory, apologetic way, ‘and thought I would call.’
‘I am very glad to see you,’ said the padrona; ‘Laurie Renton’s brother can never be but welcome here. I have known him so long,—since he was a boy,’ she added, with a little colour rising on her cheek, seeking in her turn to excuse the warmth with which she spoke; but the blush was for Jane Hadley quietly seated in the background seeing everything, and not for the unconscious Frank.
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Frank. ‘Laurie was always speaking of you. I met Miss Severn the other day at Richmont. She might tell you, perhaps. How she plays! I don’t think I ever heard anything like it. It draws the heart out of one’s breast.’
‘Ah, yes, Alice plays very well,’ said Mrs. Severn, with placid complacency. ‘She is doing something for me in the studio. She is as clever with her needle as she is with her music,’ she added, calmly. Clever! and to compare her needlework with her music! This speech went a long way to prove that the padrona was a very ordinary, commonplace personage in Frank’s eyes. That, however, did not matter so much. What was a great deal more important was that Alice did not return.
‘I hope she liked Richmont,’ he said; ‘they are kind people, and the country is lovely just now. You don’t know Renton, Mrs. Severn? My mother, I am sure, would be charmed to see you, and Laurie must have told you of our woods. My mother is a great invalid. She has always been so as long as I can recollect, but she would be delighted to see you. I wish I could persuade you and Miss Severn to come down for a day; I could row you up from Cookesley,’ said Frank, eagerly. Alice came in just in time to hear these last words, and gazed at her mother with a longing look. She had not heard the previous part of the proposal, but to be rowed up the river from Cookesley! The words flushed her young imagination with every kind of delight.
‘It is very tempting,’ Mrs. Severn said, ‘but I fear we must not think of it. Alice, you must go and make some music for Mr. Renton; he likes your playing. Are you in town only for the day?’
‘Only for the day,’ said Frank; and then he paused and put on his suppliant look. ‘When I was here with Laurie I was allowed to stay to tea.’
‘And so you shall stay to tea if you like it,’ said the padrona, laughing. And Alice gave him a momentary glance and a soft little smile of content. A paradisiacal sense of well-being and happiness glided over Frank he could not tell how. It was something quite new and strange to him. He had been happy most part of his life,—not being yet quite one-and-twenty, poor fellow!—happy for no particular reason,—because he was alive, because he was Frank Renton, because he had got something he wanted; but this was a totally different sort of happiness. It seemed to float him away from all mean and indifferent things; he was mounted up on a pinnacle from the heights of which he contemplated the rest of the world with a tender pity; he was enveloped in an atmosphere of blessedness. This intoxicating yet subduing delight seemed to him the natural air of the place in which he was. They must breathe it all day long these happy people; even the governess who sat grim over her knitting and watched him with keen eyes. It was the air of the place, though the place was Fitzroy Square, in the heart of London, on the way to the City; for never in the summer woods, never at home in his hereditary house, never amid the luxuries and delights of society, had he breathed anything like it. He did his best to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Severn, but it cannot be asserted that he was sorry when she left the room, which she did after a while. True, Miss Hadley was there, more watchful than a dozen padronas; but the watchfulness seemed appropriate somehow and was harmonised by the atmosphere, just as summer air harmonises all out-door noises. The children rushed to the garden, getting tired of the quiet, and Alice went into the other room and began to play. I have said it was the only poetry of which Frank was susceptible. All the poets in one could not have moved him as these sweet, inarticulate floods of sound did, making the atmosphere more heavenly still, breathing a heart into it full of soft longings and a tender languor. The house, as we have said, was on the shady side of the Square—the great drawing-room felt like some cool, still, excluded place, in the midst of the hot and lingering afternoon. Frank threw himself into a chair at the other end of the room, from whence he could watch the musician without disconcerting her. There were the three great windows draped in white like tall ghosts ranged against the wall; and the chairs and tables all grouped in a mysterious way as if there were whispering spectators who marked all; and the cool grey-green walls with here and there the frame of a picture catching the light; and Alice in her fresh muslin gown, white, with lines and specks of blue, with blue ribbons tied among her curls, and her bright eyes intent and her white hands rippling among the ivory keys. The only thing that had ever made a painter of Frank was his meeting with Alice. His mind was becoming a kind of picture-gallery hung with sketches of her. He remembered every look, almost every dress she had ever worn,—the dark neutral-tinted one that night, the white at Richmont, and now the glimmer of blue ribbons among the curls,——
After a time Miss Hadley, who sat there patient with her knitting, like a cat watching a mouse, was called away for something and had to leave them reluctantly. And then it is undeniable that Frank took advantage of her absence and stole a little closer to the piano. He even interrupted Alice ruthlessly in the midst of her sonata.
‘Play me this,’ he said, humming the bars that haunted him. He was even so bold as to approach his hand to the piano and run over the notes. ‘It was the first thing I had ever heard you play,’ the young man added; ‘I have done nothing but sing it ever since. Ah, forgive me for stopping you! Let me hear it again.’
‘It is very lovely,’ faltered Alice, stooping her head over the keys; and then by chance their eyes met and they knew—— What? Neither said another word. Alice’s fingers flew at the keys with the precipitancy of haste and fear. She spoiled the air, her heart beating so loud as to drown both tune and time. As the notes rushed out headlong after each other, an indifferent looker-on would have concluded poor Alice to be a school-girl in the fullest musical sense of the word. But Frank, though he was a connoisseur, never found it out. He sat down behind her listening with a perfect imbecility of admiration. It might have been St. Cecilia, it might have been the angels playing in heaven whom Cecilia heard. To him it was a strain divine. To think that he had not known of Alice’s existence when he heard these notes first! He began to babble in the midst of the music, quite unconscious of doing anything amiss.
‘When I heard you play that first I had never seen you,’ he said, and though Alice was at the crisis of the melody her hand slackened and lightened to listen. ‘I could not think who it could be. I thought you must be the sick one of the family or something. And then, when your mother called you and you came and stood in the door——’
Alice now stopped altogether and did her best to laugh. ‘What a very good memory you must have,’ she said. ‘I am sure I could not have remembered all that.’
‘Yes; I have a good memory,—for some things,’ said Frank, while she half unconsciously kept running on with one hand among the treble keys, half drowning his voice, half making an accompaniment to it. ‘Your mother spoke of you in such a tone—I understand it now, but it bewildered me at the time, I thought you must be ill—or—sickly—or something. And then she called Alice, and you appeared under the curtains; I can see it all as plain as if it had happened yesterday. Laurie chattering enough for six with his back turned, and you standing in the doorway like——’
Alice made a great crash on the piano and burst at once into a grand symphony. Instinct told her to play, and it was just as well she had done so, for one minute after Miss Hadley appeared with her perpetual knitting in her hand. She gave Frank a look when she perceived his change of position and herself approached the piano. A young fellow who was going to India! That was his sole and unique description to Miss Hadley,—and she was deeply indignant at his presumption. The symphony was a long one, but Alice was restored to herself. Safety had come in place of danger. She had not wanted Miss Hadley to return, and yet under shelter of Miss Hadley her faculties came back to her. There was a good deal of crash and execution in what she was now playing, and it suited her feelings. It was a kind of music which Frank would have scorned at from any other player, but oddly enough it chimed in with his feelings now. They were both tingling all over with soft emotion and that first excitement of early love, in which it is the man’s object to say as much as he may under covert of commonplace observations, and the woman’s to receive it as if it meant nothing and to escape from all appearance of comprehension. And yet if by chance they looked at each other both knew, not what they were aiming at certainly, but in some darkened, vague degree that there was a meaning, and a very decided one underneath.
Then Mrs. Severn appeared again in her black silk gown, and the tea was set upon the table, and Alice made it as she had done before. It was like the same scene repeated, and yet it was not the same. Alice who had been to him but a fairy vision was now—— What was she now? Frank made a sudden jump from that side of the question, and felt his cheeks flush and a delicious glow come over his heart. But, not to speak of Alice, he himself was no longer an accidental guest received for his brother’s sake; but if not a friend, at least an acquaintance received for his own. To Alice at least he was more than an acquaintance. ‘I have lived in the same house with Miss Severn, and I feel as if we were old friends,’ he said, and Alice, with a soft blush and smile, did not reject the claim. ‘How pretty it was at Richmont!’ she said, with a soft, little sigh. And if it had not been for that dreadful old governess, who broke in, in the most abrupt way, with something about India! What was India to her? What had she to do with it? If a man wanted for the moment to forget everything that was disagreeable, what business had Miss Hadley to interfere? Frank as nearly turned his back upon her when she made her second interpellation on the subject as good-breeding would allow. Was it her business? He was very wroth with the meddler, but very soft and benignant with every one else, talking to Edith—to the child’s immense delight—as if she were grown up, and discussing games with the boys, and making himself very generally agreeable. He stayed long enough to watch the people beginning to arrive on their evening calls, and accepted all the circumstances of the house with the profoundest satisfaction and sense of fitness. But he could not find any more private opportunities of making known his recollections or his fancies to Alice, and went away at last when he had but time for his train, with a sense of intoxication and absorption in he knew not what golden dreams. India!—but soft—India, when a man came to think of it, might for anything he knew, involve brighter possibilities than he had yet contemplated. Speak low; whisper low. When this thought occurred to Frank he ran and took his leave with a sensation as if a whole hive of bees had set to buzzing in his head. As I have said it intoxicated him. He had need to go away, to get himself into the morose solitude of the train to think it over. The sudden light that had burst upon his path took all power of vision from his dazzled eyes.