CHAPTER III.
THE ABBEY PRECINCTS.
THE bells began to ring for evensong soon after the bridal party dispersed. Some of them, indeed, stayed for the beautiful service, which was a thing that visitors from a distance thought a great deal of, and there were a number of fine bonnets and dresses in the stalls when Lottie went in. The daily service was part of the daily life of the dwellers in the Abbey. There were those who went for devotion, and those who went for the music, and those who went because they had nothing else to do. It was an occupation and an amusement at the same time, and some people thought it a duty. To listen to the service more or less critically, to note if any of the boys’ voices were breaking, and whether Rowley sniffed as usual, or Bowler, the great bass, was hoarse; to observe how the minor canons sang, if they were in too great a hurry to get through the service, and who it was that read the lessons; to look at any notable persons that might be there; visitors to the Deanery, or other persons of distinction; to walk in the nave while the Signor played the voluntary; and finally to pause and talk to one’s friends before going home to tea, was the established rule of St. Michael’s. The old Chevaliers mixed with the ladies, here and there one. They were obliged to go in the morning, and they seldom repeated their church going in the afternoon; but still there were always two or three, and very interesting to strangers were the old soldiers, with their old moustaches and upright bearing. Some of them might have been veteran generals well entitled to command an army, and, indeed, there was valour enough among them, and such achievement as personal bravery is still capable of—enough to equip a dozen generals; but fortune had not been on the side of these noble old soldiers; and you may be sure there were no prosperous commanders among them. They stood about on the terrace in front of the Lodges and talked for five minutes or so before they went in to tea. But Lottie, when she came out of chapel and saw the last of the fine people streaming away in their light dresses through the aisle, did not feel much disposed to go indoors to Law and the bread and butter. They could wait. She went and leaned on the low wall close to the library and gazed out upon the landscape below. At the foot of the slope was the street of the little old town, a sweep of steep masonry, with old-fashioned red houses, like trees in autumn, on the other side; and beyond these the river meandered between its leafy banks in endless windings, and the great breadth of champaign swept away towards the horizon. At this time of the year it was rich and cloudy with foliage: the trees arranging themselves in every kind of way, singly and in clumps, and groves, and long hedgerows, and surrounding every house and every village and every church spire as far as you could see. The billowy greenness thus spreading far into the silvery-grey of the distance; the sky of a pale blue, faint with summer heat and long drought: stretched out like a map before the gazer from that mount of vision. The mottled clouds were floating together and rolling into masses as if with the intention of putting a stop to this long reign of brightness, and the level lines of the landscape and the great vault of the sky dropped together into a haze which also spoke of rain. Lottie leaned disconsolately over the wall, spreading abroad her thoughts over this vast breadth of space and silence. She let them go like a flock of birds flying to all the winds. Thoughts! they were not thoughts but feelings, vague movements of the mind, half sentiment, half-personal sensation. Why she should have been so deeply affected by this marriage she could not have told anyone. She did not herself know. It seemed to penetrate through and through her system of life, unsettling everything. After the disappointments of her beginning at St. Michael’s, this connection with the Deanery had seemed a thread of promise, a clue to something better; not a very splendid promise indeed, but still something; a little link of ambition which looked finer and more noble after it was snapped than it had ever done before. It was not very noble in itself. Lottie felt vaguely that to have so strong a desire for admission within that charmed circle was not a very lofty thing. The people she had seen within it had not satisfied her ideal. Except that they dressed better (some of them at least), they had been very much like the humbler classes with which she was acquainted; and to wish for a footing among them only because they were better off and more highly thought of than her own neighbours, was not an elevating sentiment. In the perpetual disappointments to which she had been subject, the slights she had been obliged to put up with, Lottie had felt a great many pangs of shame mingled with the stings of humiliation. She had felt that it was the poorest of ambitions which had taken possession of her. And now that it was over, this sense of unworthiness still mingled with her consciousness of failure and exclusion. But though it might not be a door into heaven, still to feel that it was shut, to be obliged to turn away, and to see no other door at which she could enter, was hard. Her heart sank down into painful depths of abandonment, and tears came to her eyes in spite of herself. She had nothing to cry about, but her lips quivered and two big tears rose and hung suspended under her long eyelashes, so filling up the whole space before her, that Lottie saw nothing but a waving greenness and blueness, a blurred shadow of earth and sky.
It was just at this moment, while she was still uncertain whether she could get these tears swallowed or whether they must fall, betraying her, that she was aware of some one at her elbow. “I think we shall have rain, Miss Despard,” said a deliberate voice; “do you not think we shall have rain? The summer has been so fine that we have no right to grumble. You were the one lady in all St. Michael’s whom I most wanted to see.”
“I, Signor? I do not know what you should want with me,” said Lottie, forced by circumstances into rudeness. She did not want to be rude, but the shock of his sudden address had brought down that shower, falling like drops of a thunderstorm, and she would not turn round to show him her wet eyes. He smiled a little to himself at this petulance, and that was all. He was used to waywardness in young ladies. He was a spare, olive-coloured man, not tall, but wiry and close-knit. He had all the aspect of an Italian and the name; but he was not really an Italian, being an Englishman born, a good Tory and a good Churchman, and all that the organist of St. Michael’s ought to be. But he was not disinclined to keep up a mystery on this score, having a little love of mystery by nature, and feeling, musically, that his foreign name and looks were in his favour. How far back the Signor had to go for his claim to be considered an Italian, nobody knew, but everybody (except the perverse and disagreeable, who would occasionally say Mr. Rossinetti to annoy him) called the musician the Signor. His complexion, his moustache, the wonderful dark eyes, which were the chief feature in his face, were all of Southern origin; and he spoke with a curious deliberation and clear pronunciation of every syllable, which almost looked as if, at one time, there had been difficulties about the language, and as if he had not courage even yet to take any liberties with it. But his accent was as good English as could be desired; and in respect to this as well as to all other questions about his origin the community of St. Michael’s were entirely in the dark, as he intended them to be.
“This event,” said the Signor, in his clear slow voice, “will bring our little societies, our practisings, to an end, Miss Despard. We were getting on very well. I am sorry to come to an end of anything, and of these above all.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Lottie, drearily. “Will it, do you think? She had not very much of a voice.”
“No; but there are other things besides voice. You have a very beautiful voice, Miss Despard.”
“But I have nothing else,” said Lottie, forgetting her precautions and turning quickly upon him; “that is what you mean to say? And you never even allowed before that I had a voice.”
“No, not much else,” said the deliberate organist; “you have no science, no method. You don’t know how to manage what you have got. It is a fine organ by nature, but you cannot produce it as you ought, because you do not know how. To have so much and to do so little is a great pity. It is a waste of a great gift, it is——”
“How dare you tell me all this to my face?” said Lottie, transported with vivid anger. She would have taken it more quietly if she had not been weakened in spirit by the discouragement into which she had fallen before. Her fierce, sudden glance was even still unwillingly softened by the wetness of her eyes. But the Signor did not flinch. There was a kind of smile in his own as he met her look. He was not afraid of her. He looked, indeed, amiably, genially at Lottie—as she had never seen him look before—and as she turned round she became aware that he was not alone. Over his shoulder, with an alarmed, indignant aspect, which half amused while it consoled her, was another face with which Lottie was very well acquainted. It was the face of his favourite pupil, a young man who followed the Signor about like his shadow, always a few steps behind him, always in devout contemplation of him. But young Purcell was not of this mind to-day; he was looking at his beloved master with a mixture of rage and pathos very droll in their combination. Lottie was easily moved, and almost before the words of defiance had left her lips a laugh forced itself after them. She had to turn round again to conceal the conflict of sudden mirth in her face.
“Would you rather I said it to others than to you? No, because that would do you no good——”
“And do you really think that I—I——” Why should she laugh? Young Purcell’s face brightened slightly, but took a still more curious look of bewildered inquiry. As for the Signor, he thought she had become hysterical, which he believed was a common weakness with womankind in general, and he was alarmed.
“I beg you a thousand pardons if I have seemed rude,” he said. “All that I wanted was to begin the conversation; for I have—a little proposal to make.”
“Do you call that beginning a conversation to tell me I am quite ignorant, and cannot sing, and waste my voice?” said Lottie, recovering her indignation. “It is not a very civil way.”
“Miss Despard, I think you will miss the society’s singing, and I want to tell you it was not good for you. These people were dazzled by your voice,” said the organist, with unintentional confusion of metaphor, “and they made use of it. All these fine people, they make use of us, and often forget to say ‘thank you.’ I was sorry that you should suffer, too; so was Purcell; he knows what it is—a little. And you have had no teaching, you have not had a thorough professional training as he has——”
Lottie turned upon him with flashing eyes; and this time she did not laugh at the young man who, over the Signor’s shoulder, followed every movement of hers with such eager attention. His look of wonder and fear was not less comic than the other changes which had come over his countenance, but she took no notice of it. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, “by professional training. What do I want with professional training? What has Mr. Purcell to do with it? What do you mean, or how should I suffer? If they thank me, or if they don’t thank me, what is that to me?”
The Signor cast a glance round at young Purcell, who answered with a look of despair. “If you would but confide in us, we thought we could help you. Indeed, Miss Despard, it is no presumption on Purcell’s part, only a fellow-feeling——”
“Only a feeling—of respect!” This Purcell timidly gasped out, with alarm painted on every feature. Lottie, turning her back to the wall and confronting the two musicians, solemnly made them a very awful curtsey. It was an art she had learned (though the teacher was unaware of the fact) from Lady Caroline; and therefore it was of the very finest and most imposing kind.
“The puzzle is,” she said grandly, in a voice not unlike Lady Caroline’s, “what the link between us may be.”
They were both silenced by this speech, and by her imposing aspect generally; for Lottie was very handsome, and this defiant grandeur suited her. Purcell felt disposed to sink into the earth, and showed it; but as for the Signor, he was less alarmed, and, indeed, a little amused—he had seen a great number of heroines, both in public and private life.
“It is always wrong to beat about the bush,” he said. “Perhaps I have made a mistake; I thought you probably intended to sing, Miss Despard, as a profession.”
“I!” Lottie’s voice broke into a half shriek. “I!” The suggestion gave her a shock which it was hard to get over. She felt a trembling of giddiness and insecurity, as if the ground had suddenly been cut from under her; she could have cried for mortification, injured pride, horrible humbling and downfall. She who had been mourning this change as taking from her all chance of ascent into the society she had a right to, the society she really belonged to, and they thought it was professional work, a profession that she was thinking of! She drew back unconsciously to the support of the wall, and propped herself by it. She could have cried, but pride would not let her. “You are mistaken, altogether mistaken,” she said. “I don’t suppose that you mean to insult me; but you forget that I am a gentleman’s daughter.”
Here the ghost of a smile flitted across the Signor’s olive-coloured face. It was as momentary as the passing of a shadow, but yet Lottie saw it, and it stung her as nothing else could have done; she was angry before, but this excited her to passion. She could have flown at him and strangled him for this smile; she understood it well enough. “You smile!” she said. “You think, perhaps, that a poor Chevalier, a soldier who is not rich, is not a gentleman. You think it is only money that makes a gentleman. There are many people who are of that opinion; but,” said Lottie with a smile, “you will perhaps not be surprised if I think differently. I will bid you good evening, please, now.”
“One moment,” said the Signor; “you must not go away with a wrong impression. Forgive me the mistake, if it is a mistake. You are mistaken, too, Miss Despard, if you think a gentleman’s daughter may not sing—to the great generous public as well as to poor little coteries that never say thank you. You mistake, too; but never mind. I meant to have offered, if you would let me, to help you——”
“Thank you, very much!” said Lottie with great state, “it is not necessary. When I want lessons, I can—ask for them, M. Rossinetti.” She had been about to say pay, but Lottie was honest, and though she longed to inflict the insult, would not say what was not true. She did not even see young Purcell’s pathetic looks as he gazed at her, with the air of a suppliant on his knees, over his master’s shoulder; but she saw the half shrug of the Signor’s shoulders as he stood aside to let her pass. And perhaps had she but known it there was something comic, too, in the dignity with which she swept past with a little wave of her hand. It was like Lady Caroline, though Lottie did not intend it to be so. The two musicians stood looking after her as she walked majestically homewards, with so many commotions in her bosom. She had to pass through the little square in which the lay clerks lived, on her way, and as if to accomplish Lottie’s humiliation, Rowley the tenor—who was her teacher—was standing at his door as she passed. The Chevaliers of St. Michael’s took little notice of the lay clerks as, may be supposed (except the O’Shaughnessys, who were not particular); and though Lottie was his pupil, Rowley had never transgressed the due limits of respectfulness or pretended to any friendship with the young lady. But the wedding had affected the morals of St. Michael’s generally, and made a revolution for the day; and as Lottie passed, the tenor took advantage of the opportunity. “How are you, Miss?” he said, with a sniff and a lurch which showed the source of his boldness; “won’t you come in and have a chat? won’t you come in and have some tea with my little girl, Miss Lottie?” Good heavens! what had Lottie done to be addressed in this way? and she knew that the two others would hear this demonstration of intimacy. She rushed past, stumbling over her dress, wild with resentment and mortification. This was what it was to be poor, to be in a false position, to be a poor gentlewoman among the rich! One mortification had followed another, so that she did not know how to bear it. Augusta’s neglect, the Signor’s insulting suggestion, and Rowley’s familiarity! Lottie did not know which was the most hard to bear. She never drew breath until she had reached her own door.
“Is that you, Lottie? and where have you been?” said Law. “Let’s have tea now; I’ve been waiting and waiting, wanting to go out, and wondering what had become of you.” He had begun his bread and butter on the spot.
“Where is papa, Law?”
“Papa? How should I know? You didn’t expect him, did you? I say, I’m going out—do make haste. And look here! I wish you’d speak to him, Lottie. I wish you’d tell him he oughtn’t to; I’d give twenty pounds (if I had it) not to have such an uncommon name!”
“It is a very good name—better than anyone else’s I know. The Despards never were anything but gentlemen.”
“Oh! it’s a great deal you know about it,” said Law, with a groan. “Perhaps once upon a time we were somebody when everybody else was nobody! But when it turns the other way, when we are nobody and everybody else somebody, and when it’s known where-ever you go whose son you are——”
“You don’t need to continue nobody,” she said; “you are a boy, you can do what you like. If we are down now, you need not stay down, Law. But then you must not hang about and lose your time any longer. If you will work, you can soon change that.”
“Can I!” said the youth; “that shows how much you know. I have never been taught to do anything. If I had been put apprentice to a butcher or a baker when I was young—but you never did anything but bully me to work and go to school. What good is school? If you are to do anything, you ought to be taught when you are young. I have been mismanaged. I doubt if I will ever be good for much now.”
“Oh—h!” cried Lottie, with a deep breath of aspiration from the depths of her chest, “if it was only me! I should find something to do! I should not be long like this, lounging about a little bit of a place, following bad examples, doing no work. Oh, Law! if I could put some of me into you; if I could change places with you! Fancy what was said to me to-day: the Signor came up to me when we came out of church, and asked me if I was going to sing—for a profession.”
“By Jove!” cried Law! he woke up even from his bread and butter, and looked at her with sparkling eyes.
“I had almost said, ‘You may be very glad my brother is not with me to hear you ask such a question.’ But on the whole I am glad you were not. I said all that was necessary,” said Lottie with dignity. “He will never repeat such an insult again.”
“By Jove!” Law repeated, taking no heed of what she said, but looking at her with visibly increased respect. “Do you mean to say that he thought you good enough for that?”
“Good enough!” she said, with severe contempt. “I always knew I could sing; even poor mamma knew. But I did not condescend to say much to them. I said, ‘I am a gentleman’s daughter,’ and walked away.”
“Well, girls are very funny,” said Law. “How you bully me about working! morning, noon, and night, you are never done nagging; but the moment it comes to your own turn——”
“To my own turn!” Lottie looked at him aghast.
“To be sure. Oh, that’s all very fine about being a gentleman’s daughter. We know pretty well what that means, and so does everybody. I wonder, Lottie, you that have some sense, how you could be so silly? He must have laughed.”
“Oh, hold your tongue, Law! I suppose they think nothing counts but money. When you are poor you are always insulted. I should not care for money, not for itself, not for the gold and silver,” said Lottie; “nor even so very much for the nice things that one could buy; but, oh, to be above people’s remarks, to be known for what you are, not looked down upon, not insulted——”
“It depends upon what you call being insulted,” said Law; “if any man had said that to me, I should have thought him next to an angel. What is insulting about it? If you like money (and who doesn’t like money?) why there’s the easiest way in the world of getting it. Sing! I’d sing my head off,” said Law, “if that was all that was wanted. And you sing for pleasure; you like singing! I can’t tell what you are thinking of. If I had known you were so good as that—but one never thinks much of one’s own sister, somehow,” the youth added, with easy frankness. He was so much excited, however, that he left his tea, and strode up and down the room (three paces and a half, that was all the size of it) repeating “by Jove!” to himself. “If you mean not to do it, you had better not let him know you could do it,” he announced, after an interval. Never in his life before had the easy-going young man been so moved. “It’s untold the money they make,” he said.
As for Lottie, her whole being was in a ferment. She looked at her brother with a gasp of pain. The bread and butter had no charms for her on that night of emotion. She took up her basket which was full of things to mend, and sat down in the window, speechless with vague passion, pain, discontentment. Lottie was not a wise or enlightened young woman. She had not even taken the stamp of her age as many people do who are not enlightened. She had never learned that it was desirable that women should have professions like men. Her thoughts ran entirely in the old-fashioned groove, and it seemed to her that for “a gentleman’s daughter” to work for her living, to be known publicly to work for her living, was a social degradation beyond words to express. It implied—what did it not imply? That the family were reduced to the lowest level of poverty; but that was a small part of it—that the men were useless, worthless, without pride or honour; that they had no friends, no means of saving themselves from this betrayal of all the secrets of pride. These were the foolish feelings in her mind. Gentlemen’s daughters were governesses sometimes she had heard, and Lottie pitied the poor girls (orphans—they were always orphans, and thus set aside from the general rule), with an ache of compassion in her heart; but it was her private impression that this was a stigma never to be wiped off, a stain, not upon the girl, but upon her family who could permit such a sacrifice. Lottie’s view of sacrifice was one which is rarely expressed, but which exists not the less among women and all other persons from whom sacrifices are demanded. Could Alcestis have the same respect after for the man who could let her die for him? Could she go on living by his side and think just the same of him as if he had borne his own burden instead of shuffling it off upon her shoulders? The ancients did not trouble themselves with such questions, but it is a peculiarity of the modern mind that it does. And Lottie, though her point of view was very old-fashioned, still looked at it in this modern way. When Law, whom it was impossible to stir up to any interest in his own work, became so excited over the thought of a possible profession for her, she looked at him with something of the feeling with which Isabella contemplated the caitiff brother in his prison who would have bought his life by her shame. What! would he be “made a man” in such a way? would he buy idleness and ease for himself by exposing her to a life unworthy of “a gentleman’s daughter”? She knew he was lazy, careless, and loved his own gratification; but it hurt her to her very heart to think so poorly of Law, who was the only being in the world whom she had ever been able to love heartily as belonging to herself.
Let it not be thought, however, that any unwillingness to work for Law, to make any sacrifice for him, was at the bottom of this disappointment in him. She was ready to have worked her fingers to the bone, indoors, in the privacy of the family, for her father and brother. She did not care what menial offices she did for them. Their “position” demanded the presence of a servant of some kind in the house, but Lottie was not afraid of work. She could sweep and dust; she could cook; she could mend with the most notable of housewives, and sang at her work, and liked her people all the better because of what she had to do for them in the course of nature. That was altogether different; there was no shame to a lady in doing this, no exposure of the family. And Lottie was not of the kind of woman who requires personal service from men. She was quite willing to serve them, to wait upon them if necessary, to take that as her share of the work of life; but to work publicly for her living, what was that but to proclaim to all the world that they were incapable, that they were indifferent to their duties, that there was no faith to be put in them? If Law had leaped up in wrath, if he had said, “No, it is my place to work; I will work; no one shall say that my sister had to earn her living,” how happy, how proud Lottie would have been! That was the ideal for a man. It was what she would do herself if she was in his place; and, oh, if she could but put herself in his place, and do what Law would not do! oh, if she could but put herself, a bit of herself, into him, to quicken the sluggish blood in his veins! When Law, having exhausted all that was to be said on the subject, went out (and where did he go when he went out?), Lottie sat at the window and darned and darned till the light failed her. She ploughed furrows with her needle in the forefinger of her left hand; but that did not hurt her. Oh, if she could but move them, inspire them, force them to do their duty, or at the worst do it for them, so that the world might suppose it was they who were doing it! That was the aspiration in her heart; and how hopeless it was! “Oh, if I could put some of me into him!” Lottie thought, as many a helpless soul has thought before her. But to move out from the shadow of the house, and betray its nakedness, and take the burden visibly on herself, that was what Lottie felt she would rather die than do.
Meanwhile, in the soft evening, various people were promenading up and down between the Abbey church and the lodges of the Chevaliers. Some of the old Chevaliers themselves were out, with their wives hanging on their arms. Either there would be two old gentlemen together, with the wife of one by his side, or two ladies with a white-haired old gallant walking along beside them, talking of various things, perhaps of politics when there were two men, and of any signs of war that might be on the horizon; and if two were women, of the wedding, and how Lady Caroline took the marriage of her only daughter. The Signor was practising in the Abbey, and the great tones of the organ came rolling forth in a splendour of softened sound over the slope with its slowly strolling groups. Some of the townspeople were there too, not mixing with the others, for the Signor’s practising nights were known. The moon began to climb after a while behind the Chevaliers’ lodges, and throw a soft whiteness of broad light upon all the pinnacles of the Abbey; and Lottie dropped her work on her knee, unable to see any longer. When the moon rose, she was thrown into shade, and could watch the people with the light in their faces at her ease. And by and by her attention was caught by two single figures which passed several times, coming from different directions, and quite distinct from each other. They both looked up at her window each time they passed, calling forth her curiosity, her scorn, her laughter, finally her interest. Watching them she forgot the immediate presence of her own annoyances. One was the young musician Purcell, at whom Lottie had secretly laughed for a long time past, at his longing looks and the way in which the vicissitudes of her countenance would reflect themselves in his face. But the other she could not for a long time make out. It was not till, seeing no one, he stood still for a full half-minute in the light of the moon, and looked up at her, that she recognised him—and then Lottie’s heart gave a jump. It was young Rollo Ridsdale, Lady Caroline’s nephew, the best man at the wedding; and what could he want here?