CHAPTER XV.
ROMANCE AND REALITY.
LOTTIE was entirely unconscious of the intimation that had been made to her father, and of the excitement which had risen among her neighbours about Mr. Ridsdale. It did not occur to her that anyone but herself knew anything about him. The delighted curiosity of the O’Shaughnessys and the anxious concern of Captain Temple were equally unknown to her. Her mind was still moved by an echo of the sentiment of their last meeting—a thrill of emotion half from the music, half from the awakening feelings, the curiosity, the commotion of her developing nature. Of all Law’s communications which had excited himself so powerfully, and which had also to some extent excited her, she remembered little in comparison. The large dim room at the Deanery, the faint night air breathing about, blowing the flames of the candles, the moths that circled about the lights and did themselves to death against every flame, seemed to glimmer before her eyes continually—everything else, even the danger of her father’s marriage, the danger of Law’s imprudence, fell into the background and became distant; everything receded before the perpetual attraction of this shadowy scene.
Mr. Ridsdale made a second call upon her in the morning after service, just at the moment when Captain Temple and Major O’Shaughnessy were talking to her father. This time he brought no note, and had no excuse ready to explain his visit. “I came to say good-by,” he said, holding out his hand and looking rather wistfully into her face. Lottie offered him her hand demurely. She scarcely met his eyes. Her heart began to beat as soon as she heard his voice asking for her at the door. It brought back all the terrors of the previous night. She did not however ask him to sit down, but stood faltering opposite to him, embarrassed, not knowing what to do.
“You would not accept my escort last night,” he said; “I was dreadfully disappointed when I came out and found you gone. I had been waiting, not wishing to hurry you. I hope you did not think I was a laggard?”
“Oh no, it was my fault,” said Lottie, not raising her eyes. “There was no need for anyone to come with me. It is but two steps, and at that hour there is no one about. There was no need—for any escort.”
“May I sit down for a few minutes, Miss Despard? My train is not till one o’clock.”
Lottie blushed crimson at this implied reproach. It might be right to be shy of him, but not to be rude to him. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said, pointing to a chair.
“You took us all by surprise last night,” he said, carefully placing hers for her. “I think it was a revelation to everybody. We hear that music in the Abbey, and we suppose we understand it; till someone like you suddenly interprets it to us, and we wake up and feel that we never heard it before.”
“I never knew what it was—to sing anything like that before,” said Lottie. It disturbed her even to think about it; “and it had all been so different—so——”
“Commonplace? from the ridiculous to the sublime; from poor dear Aunt Caroline on her sofa to Handel fluting among the angels. It was a step indeed.”
“I did not mean that. It was myself I was thinking of—I had been so full of silly fancies of my own.”
“But all at once the inspiration came? I should like to be capable of anything like that; but I am not. I can only listen, and worship,” said Rollo. There was fervour in his voice—a real something which was not mere fanaticism about music. And the two young people sat for a few moments in silence, a most dangerous thing to do, looking at each other—nay, not looking at each other—for Lottie did not feel either able or disposed to raise her eyes. She was the first to speak, in order to break the silence, which alarmed her, though she did not know why.
“It is wonderful how the Signor plays. I never understood it in the Abbey. He seems to place you up somewhere above yourself—and make your voice come independent of you.”
“Never in his life, I am sure, did he have such a beautiful compliment paid to him,” said Rollo; “but, Miss Despard, you do him too much credit. You permitted even me to accompany you—and sang just as divinely——”
“Oh no,” said Lottie. Then she blushed and recollected herself. “You play very well, Mr. Ridsdale; but we could not compare those trumpery songs with——”
“Trumpery songs! only Mozart and Bellini, and a few more,” he cried, with a gasp. “Ah, I know what you mean; you meant the ‘Marta’ song, which made your good friend, that good woman, cry——”
“I like the ‘Last Rose of Summer’ very much. I have always liked it. I used to hear an old fiddler play it in the street when I was a child, when I was lying in the dark, trying to go to sleep. It was like a friend keeping me company; but a friend that had a breaking heart, that cried and took all my thoughts off myself—I shall never forget it,” said Lottie, the tears coming to her eyes at the recollection. “I like it better than all the rest.”
“Miss Despard, do not drive me to despair. Not better than ‘Casta Diva,’ or Margaret’s song, or——”
“You forget I don’t know where they come, nor the meaning of them,” said Lottie, calmly. “I never heard an opera. I think these things are beautiful, but they only sing to my ear, they don’t come in to me.”
Rollo shook his head. He was half touched, half shocked. It was her ignorance; but then a woman destined for a prima donna, a woman with musical genius, ought to know the best by intuition, he thought. All the same, he was more interested than if she had raved as the commonplace, half educated amateur raves. “But Handel does,” he said.
“Ah!” Lottie cried, her face lighting up. But she added, after a moment, “I am too ignorant to be worth talking to; you will be disgusted. I never thought much about Handel. It was not Handel, it was that.” A flush of colour came over her face with the recollection. She was too uninstructed (notwithstanding the neighbourhood of the Abbey) to have fully woke up to Handel or anyone. “I suppose I have heard it and did not pay much attention to it,” she said; “it was singing it. One does not understand at first—till suddenly one hears one’s self, and you say, ‘What is this that is speaking; what is this? it cannot be me!’”
“I think I understand—a little,” said Rollo doubtfully; “though it is simply you that makes a something quite familiar, a piece of music we have all heard a hundred times, become a new revelation to us all in a moment. I am going away, Miss Despard, and it may be some time before I return. Would you do me such a great favour—which I have no right to ask—as to sing me something now before I go?”
But Lottie would not sing. She said, “Oh no, no,” with a half terror which he did not understand, and which she did not understand herself. The tone was one which forbade the repetition of the request. He begged her pardon anxiously, and there was a little languid conversation about other subjects, and then he rose. He put out his hand again, looking into her eyes, which she raised shyly, almost for the first time. Rollo had a way of looking into the eyes of women to whom he wished to make himself agreeable. It is sometimes very impertinent, and always daring, but, especially when the woman’s imagination is on the side of the gazer, it is very efficacious. Lottie was entirely inexperienced, and she trembled under this look, but felt it penetrate to her very heart.
“Till we meet again,” he said, with a smile, holding her hand for that necessary moment while he said his good-by. “It will not be very long; and I hope that you will be kind to me, Miss Despard, and let me hear you——”
“Good-by,” said Lottie. She could not bear it any longer. She blamed herself afterwards for being rude, as she sat down and went over the incident again and again. She seemed to herself to have dismissed him quite rudely, pulling her hand away, cutting short what he was saying. But Rollo, for his part, did not feel that it was rude. He went down the narrow stairs with his heart beating a little quicker than usual, and a sense that here was something quite fresh and novel, something not like the little flirtations with which he was so familiar, and which amused him a great deal in general. This he had just touched, floated over with his usual easy sentiment, was something quite out of the common. It startled him with the throb in it. He went away quite thoughtful, his heart in a most unusual commotion, and forgot until he was miles away from St. Michael’s that Lottie Despard was to be the English prima donna, who was to make his fortune, if properly managed. “Ah, to be sure, that was it!” he said to himself suddenly in the railway carriage, as he was going to town. He really had forgotten what it was that took him to town at this unsuitable moment of the year.
The rest of the morning glided dreamily away after an incident like this; and it was not till late in the afternoon that Lottie suddenly awoke to the necessity of making an effort, and shaking off the empire of dreams: and this was how she became convinced of the necessity for doing so. She had been sitting, as on the former occasion, with a basket of mending by her when Rollo came in. She had all the clothes of the household to keep in order, and naturally they were not done in one day. After Mr. Ridsdale was gone, she took up her work languidly, keeping it on her knee while she went over all that had happened, again and again, as has been recorded. When, at last startled by a sound outside, she began to work in earnest, then and there a revelation of a character totally distinct from that made by Handel burst upon her. It was not a revelation of the same kind, but it was very startling. Lottie found—that she had not yet finished the hole in the sock which she had begun to mend before Mr. Ridsdale’s first visit! She was still in the middle of that one hole. She remembered exactly where she stuck her needle, in the middle of a woolly hillock, as she heard him coming upstairs; and there it was still, in precisely the same place. This discovery made her heart jump almost as much as Mr. Ridsdale’s visit had done. What an evidence of wicked idling, of the most foolish dreaming and unprofitable thought was in it! Lottie blushed, though she was alone, to the roots of her hair, and seizing the sock with an impassioned glow of energy, never took breath till the stern evidence of that hole was done away with. And then she could not give herself any rest. She felt her dreams floating about her with folded pinions, ready to descend upon her and envelope her in their shadow if she gave them the chance; but she was determined that she would not give them the chance. As soon as she had finished the pair of socks, and folded them carefully up, she went to look for Law to suggest that they should go immediately to Mr. Ashford. Law had only just come in from a furtive expedition out of doors, and had scarcely time to spread his books open before him when she entered his room. But he would not go to Mr. Ashford. It was time enough for that, and he meant in the meantime to “work up” by himself, he declared. Lottie became more energetic than ever in the revulsion of feeling, and determination not to yield further to any vanity. She pleaded with him, stormed at him, but in vain. “At the worst I can always ’list,” he said, half in dogged resistance to her, half in boyish mischief to vex her. But he would not yield to her desire to consult Mr. Ashford, though he had assented at first. He did not refuse to go “some time,” but nothing that she could say would induce him to go now. This brought in again all the contradictions and cares of her life to make her heart sore when she turned back out of the enchanted land in which for a little while she had been delivered from these cares. They all came back upon her open-mouthed, like wild beasts, she thought. Law resisting everything that was good for him, and her father——. But Lottie could not realise the change that threatened to come upon her through her father. It seemed like the suggestion of a dream. Law must be deceived, it must be all a delusion, it was not possible, it was not credible. The Captain came in early that night, and he came upstairs into the little drawing-room, to which he had no habit of coming. He told his daughter in a stately way that he heard her singing had given great satisfaction at the Deanery. “More than one person has mentioned it to me,” he said; “that is of course a satisfaction. And—who is the gentleman you have been having here so much?”
“There has been no one here very much,” said Lottie; then she blushed in spite of herself, though she did not suppose that was what he alluded to. “You do not mean Mr. Ridsdale?” she said.
“How many visitors have you got?” he said, in high good humour. “Perhaps it is Mr. Ridsdale—Lady Caroline’s nephew? Ah, I like the family. It was he you sang to? Well, no harm; you’ve got a very pretty voice—and so had your mother before you,” the Captain added, with a carefully prepared sigh.
“It was only once,” said Lottie, confused. “Mrs. O’Shaughnessy was here; it was after we had been singing at the Deanery; it was——”
“My child,” said the Captain, “I am not finding fault. No harm in putting your best foot foremost. I wish you’d do it a little more. At your age you ought to be thinking about getting married. And, to tell the truth, it would be a great convenience to me, and suit my plans beautifully, if you would get married. You mustn’t stand shilly-shallying; let him come to the point: or, if he won’t, my dear, refer him to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” cried Lottie. Fortunately for her, he had thought her a child up to the time of their migration to St. Michael’s, and she had been subjected to very little advice of this description. But, though she gazed at him with wondering eyes, she knew very well by the instinct of horror and repulsion in her mind what he meant. It gave her a shock of pain and shame which ran like electricity to her very finger points. “I think you must be making a mistake,” she said. “I scarcely know Mr. Ridsdale at all. He has called here twice—on business—for Lady Caroline—and now he has gone away.”
“Gone away!” the Captain said, his face lengthening with disappointment and dismay; “gone away! then you’re a fool—a greater fool than I thought you. What’s to become of you, do you ever ask yourself? Good lord, what a chance to throw away! One of the Courtland family—a fellow with a turn for music—that you could have turned round your little finger! And to let him go away! By George,” said the Captain, making a stride towards her, and clenching his fist in the energy of his disapproval, “I don’t believe you’re any child of mine. Clever—you think you’re clever? and so did your mother, poor woman! but you’re an idiot, that is what you are—an idiot! to let such a chance slip through your fingers. Good lord! to think such a fool should be a child of mine!”
Lottie stood her ground firmly. She was not afraid of the clenched fist, nor even of the angry voice and eyes, which were more genuine. If there was a slight tremor in her, it was of her own excited nerves. She made no reply; if she had spoken, what could she have done but express her own passionate loathing for his advice, and for his disapproval, and perhaps even for himself? for she had not been brought up to reverence the faulty father, whose evil qualities her mother had discussed in Lottie’s presence as long as she could remember. There had not been any illusion in his children’s eyes after their babyhood, in respect to Captain Despard, and perhaps in the present emergency this was well. She stood and met his fury, pale, but more disdainful than desperate. It was no more than she would have expected of him had she ever thought of the emergency at all.
Law had heard the sound of the battle from afar; he heard his father’s voice raised, and the sound of the stroke upon the table with which he had emphasised one of his sentences. It was a god-send to the unenthusiastic student to be disturbed by anything, and he came in sauntering with his hands in his pockets, partly with the intention of taking Lottie’s part, partly for the sake of “the fun,” whatever it might be. “What’s the row?” he asked. He had slippers on, and shuffled along heavily, and his coat was very old and smelt of tobacco, though that was a luxury in which Law could indulge but sparingly. He had his hands in his pockets, and his hair was well rubbed in all directions by the efforts he had made over his unbeloved books. Thus it was but a slovenly angel that came to Lottie’s aid. He stopped the yawn which his “reading” had brought on, and looked at the belligerents with some hope of amusement. “I say, don’t bully Lottie,” he exclaimed, but not with any fervour. He would not have allowed anyone to lay a finger upon her, but a little bullying, such as she administered to him daily, that perhaps would do Lottie no harm. However, he was there in her defence if things should come to any extremity. She was of his faction, and he of hers; but yet he thought a little bullying of the kind she gave so liberally might do Lottie no harm.
“Go away, Law; it is no matter; it is nothing. Papa was only communicating some of his ideas—forcibly,” said Lottie, with a smile of defiance; but as there was always a fear in her mind lest these two should get into collision, she added hastily, “Law, I don’t want you—go away.”
“He can stay,” said the Captain. “I have something to say to you both. Look here. I thought in the first place that she had hit off something for herself,” he said, turning half round to his son. “I thought she had caught that fellow, that Ridsdale; from what I had heard, I thought that was certain—that there would be no difficulty on that side.”
The Captain had left his original ground. Instead of reproaching Lottie, in which he was strong, he was in the act of disclosing his own intentions, and this was much less certain ground. He looked at Law, and he wavered. Big lout! he knew a great deal too much already. Captain Despard looked at Law as at a possible rival, a being who had been thrust into his way. The workroom had no secrets from Law.
“I think the governor’s right there,” said Law confidentially; “he’s a big fish, but he’s all right if you give him time.”
A gleam of sudden fury blazed over Lottie’s face. She, too, clenched her hands passionately. She stamped her foot upon the floor. “How dare you?” she said, “how dare you insult me in my own home, you two men? Oh, yes, I know who you are—my father and my brother, my father and my brother! the two who ought to protect a girl and take care of her! Oh! is it not enough to make one hate, and loathe and despise—!” said Lottie, dashing her white clenched hand into the air. Tears that seemed to burn her came rushing from her eyes. She looked at them with wild indignation and rage, in which there was still a certain appeal. How could they, how could they shame a girl so? They looked at her for a moment in this rage, which was so impotent and so pitiful, and then they gave a simultaneous laugh. When an exhibition of passionate feeling does not overawe, it amuses. It is so ludicrous to see a creature crying out, weeping, suffering for some trifle which would not in the least affect ourselves. Lottie was struck dumb by this laugh. She gave a startled look up at them through those hot seas of salt scalding tears that were in her eyes.
“What a fool you are making of yourself!” said the Captain. “Women are the greatest fools there are on this earth, always with some high-flown rubbish or other in their stupid heads. Your own home! and who made it your home, I should like to know? I don’t say you hadn’t a right to shelter when you were a little thing; but that’s long out of the question. A girl of twenty ought to be thinking about getting herself a real home of her own. How are you going to do it? that’s the question. You are not going to stay here to be a burden upon me all your life; and what do you mean to do?”
“I will go to-morrow!” cried Lottie, wildly; “I would go to-night if it were not dark. I will go—and free you of the burden!” Here she stopped; all the angry colour went out of her face. She looked at them with great wide eyes, appalled; and clasped her hands together with a lamentable cry. “Oh! but I never thought of it before, I never thought of it!” she cried; “where am I to go?”
Law’s heart smote him; he drew a step nearer to her. To agree with his father (however much in his heart he agreed with his father) was abandoning his sister—and his own side. “He doesn’t mean it,” he said soothingly in an undertone; “he only wants to bully you, Lottie. Never mind him, we’ll talk it over after,” and he put his big hand upon her shoulder to console her. Lottie turned upon him, half furious, half appealing. She could not see him till two big tears fell out of her eyes, and cleared her sight a little. She clutched at the hand upon her shoulder in her distraction and despair.
“Come with me, Law. Two of us together, we can go anywhere; two can go anywhere. Oh! how can you tell me never to mind? Do you hear me?” she cried, seizing his arm with both her hands, half shaking him, half clinging to him; “say you will come with me, Law!”
“Stop this stuff!” said the Captain. “I am not telling you to go; I am telling you what is your plain duty, the only thing a woman is fit for. Besides, this young fellow would be of great use to me; it’s your duty to get hold of him for the good of the family. He might say a good word for me at the Horse Guards; he might get Law something. I never expected you would have such a chance. Do you think I want you to go away just when there’s a chance that you might be of some use? Am I a fool, do you think? You’ll stay where you are, Lottie Despard! you’ll not go disgracing your family, governessing, or anything of that sort.”
“Ah!” said Law suddenly, “she’ll wish she had listened to the Signor now.”
“To the Signor? what of the Signor? is he after her too?” cried the Captain eagerly. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; and though the Signor had no interest with the Horse Guards, he had money, and might be of use in many ways. Captain Despard’s eyes lighted up. “Whew!” he whistled. “Lottie! so, my child, you’ve got two strings to your bow?”
Lottie turned upon her brother, whose arm she had been holding with both her hands. She pushed him, flung him from her with an energy of which she had not appeared capable, and throwing her head high, looked her father in the face and walked out of the room. Law, confounded by the force with which she threw him from her, caught at her angrily as she passed; but she pulled her dress from his hand, and walked past him with a contempt that stung him—callous as he was. As for the Captain, he made no effort to detain her, partly because of his surprise, partly that he was anxious to have more information about (as he supposed) this second suitor. She went straight to her own room, while they stood listening till she had shut the door upon herself and her passion. Then the Captain ventured to laugh again, but low, not to be heard; for the look of any creature driven to bay is alarming, and Lottie’s sudden withdrawal was a relief.
“Whoever gets her will catch a Tartar! eh, Law?” he said. “But now that she’s gone, let’s hear all about the Signor.”
There was no light in Lottie’s room; nothing but the faint starlight outside, and as much of the familiar glimmer of the few feeble lamps in the Dean’s Walk as could get in through her small window. How is it that so small a bit of space, such four straight walls, should hold in such a throbbing, palpitating, agitated being, with projects wide enough and fury hot enough to burst them like a child’s toy? It was in her to have torn her hair or anything that came in the way of her fevered hands; to have filled the air with cries; to have filled the whole world with her protest against the intolerable shame and wretchedness which they were trying to force upon her thoughts! But she only threw herself on her bed in the dark and silence, letting no sound or movement betray her. She was not prostrated as by unkindness, or stung by reproach; but wounded, shamed, desecrated—the very sanctity of her dreams turned into a horror to her. And Law gone against her—Law gone over to the other side!