CHAPTER XLI.
THE EFFECT OF GOOD FORTUNE: ROLLO.
THE night after that decisive talk upon the Slopes was a trying one for Rollo Ridsdale. He went home with the fumes of his resolution in his mind. Now the die was cast. Whatever prudence might say against it, the decision was made, and his life settled for him, partly by circumstances, but much more by his personal will and deed. And he did not regret what he had done. It was a tremendous risk to run; but he had confidence that Lottie’s voice was as good as a fortune, and that in the long run there would be nothing really imprudent in it. Of course it must be kept entirely “quiet.” No indiscreet announcements in the newspapers, no unnecessary publicity must be given to the marriage. Whosoever was absolutely concerned should know; but for the general public, what did it matter to them whether the bond which bound a man of fashion to a celebrated singer was legitimate or not? Lottie would not wish for society, she would not feel the want of society, and particularly in the interval, while she was still not a celebrated singer, it was specially necessary that all should be kept “quiet.” He would take her to Italy, and it would be not at all needful to introduce any stray acquaintance who might happen to turn up, to his wife. In short, there was no occasion for introducing anyone to her. Lottie would not want anything. She would be content with himself. Poor darling! what wonderful trust there was in her! By this time he was able to half-laugh at his own guilty intention, which she had so completely extinguished by her inability to understand it, her perfect acceptance of it as all that was honourable and tender. He was going to do the right thing now—certainly the right thing, without any mistake about it; but still that it should be made to look like the wrong thing, was the idea in Rollo’s mind. He would take her to Italy and train her for her future career; but neither at the present time nor in the future would it be necessary to put the dots upon the i’s in respect to her position. As for Lottie, he knew very well that she, having no doubt about her position, would not insist upon any publication of it. It would never once occur to her that there was any possibility of being misconstrued.
With these thoughts in his mind, Rollo dressed very hastily for dinner, as he had lingered with Lottie to the last moment. And as it happened, this was the very evening which Augusta chose for discussing openly the subject to which she had, without speaking of it, already devoted all her powers of research since she had arrived at home. In the evening after dinner Rollo was the only one of the gentlemen who came into the drawing-room. Augusta’s husband was an inoffensive and silent man, with what are called “refined tastes.” For one thing he was in a mild way an antiquary. He did not enter very much into his wife’s life, nor she into his. She was fashionable, he had refined tastes; they were perfectly good friends; and though not yet married six months, followed each their own way. Spencer Daventry had gone to his father-in-law’s study accordingly, to investigate some rare books, and his wife was in the drawing-room alone—that is, not exactly alone, for Lady Caroline was “on the sofa.” When Lady Caroline was on the sofa she did not trouble anybody much, and even the coming in of the lamps had not disturbed her. She had “just closed her eyes.” Her dress was carefully drawn over her feet by Mrs. Daventry’s care, and a wadded couvre-pied in crimson satin laid over them. Augusta liked to see to every little decorum, and would have thought the toe of her mother’s innocent shoe an improper revelation. Perhaps it was by her orders that Mr. Daventry had not come in. There was no company that evening, and when Rollo entered the drawing-room, he saw at once that he had fallen into a trap. Augusta sat on a comfortable chair by the fire, with a small table near her and a lamp upon it. The other lights were far away, candles twinkling in the distance on the piano, and here and there against the walls: but only this one spot by the fire in warm and full light; and a vacant chair stood invitingly on the other side of Augusta’s table. No more snug arrangement for a tête-à-tête could have been, for Lady Caroline was nothing but a bit of still life—more still almost than the rest of the furniture. Augusta looked up as her cousin came in, with a smile.
“Alone?” she said; “then come here, Rollo, and let us have a talk.”
Rollo would not have been Rollo if he had felt any repugnance to this amusement. Needless to say that in their boy and girl days there had been passages of something they were pleased to call love between the cousins; and equally needless to add that all this had long been over, both being far too sensible (though one had been led astray by Lottie, to his own consternation and confusion) to think of any serious conclusion to such a youthful folly. Rollo sat down with mingled pleasure and alarm. He liked a confidential talk with any woman; but in this case he was not without fear.
And his fears were thoroughly well founded as it turned out. After a few preliminaries about nothing at all, Augusta suddenly plunged into her subject.
“I am very glad,” she said, “to have a chance of speaking to you, by ourselves. Mamma does not pay any attention; it is quite the same as if she were not there. You know I’ve always taken a great interest in you, Rollo. We are cousins, and we are very old friends—more like brother and sister.”
“I demur to the brother and sister; but as old friends as memory can go,” said he; “and very happy to be permitted all the privileges of a cousin—with such a good fellow as Daventry added on.”
“Oh, yes. Spencer’s very nice,” said she. “He takes very kindly to my people; but it is not about Spencer I want to talk to you, Rollo, but about yourself.”
“That’s so much the better,” said Rollo; “for I might not have liked bridal raptures, not being able, you know, Augusta, quite to forget——”
“Oh, that’s all nonsense,” said Augusta, with the faintest of blushes; “bridal fiddlesticks! People in the world keep clear of all that nonsense, heaven be praised. No, Rollo, it’s about yourself. I am very anxious about you.”
“Angelic cousin!—but there is no cause for anxiety that I know of in me.”
“Oh, yes, Rollo, there is great cause of anxiety. I must speak to you quite frankly. When I was married you had never seen Lottie Despard——”
“Miss Despard!” He repeated the name in a surprised tone and with eyes full of astonishment. He was glad of the opportunity of looking to the buckles of his armour and preparing for the onset; and therefore he made the surprise of the exclamation as telling as he could. “What can she have to do with your anxiety?” he said.
“Yes, Lottie Despard. Oh, she has a great deal to do with it. Rollo, how can you think that any good can come of such a flirtation either to you or the girl?”
“Flirtation, Augusta?”
“Yes, flirtation, or something worse. Why do you always go to her lessons? Oh, I know you always go. She can’t sing a bit, poor thing; and it only fills her poor heart with vanity and nonsense; and you meet her when you walk out. Don’t contradict me, please. Should I say so, if I had not made quite sure? I know the view you men take of honour. You think when a girl is concerned you are bound to deny everything. So you may be sure I did not say it till I had made quite sure. Now, Rollo, I ask you what can possibly come of anything of this kind? Of course you only mean to amuse yourself; and of course it is the girl’s fault if she gets herself talked about; for she must know as well as I do that there can be nothing in it; but for all that——”
“You take away my breath,” said Rollo; “you seem to know so much better than I do the things that have happened or are happening to myself.”
“I do,” said Augusta, “for I have been thinking about it, and you have not. You have just done what was pleasant at the moment, and never taken any thought. You are doing a great deal of harm to Lottie, poor thing, filling her head with silly fancies, and turning her against people of her own class. And suppose some really nice girl were to turn up, some one with money, what would she think of you, dangling for ever after a young woman who is not even in society? I am taking it for granted that it is only a silly flirtation: for as for anything worse,” said Augusta, with severity, “it cannot be supposed for a moment that I could speak to you of that; but you know very well, Rollo, a man of the world, like you, how very dreadful, how fatal all those sort of entanglements are, even when you don’t look at them from a high moral point of view.”
“You make me out a pretty character,” said Rollo, with an angry smile. “I never knew I was a Lovelace till now.”
“Oh, all you men are the same,” said Augusta, “if women will let you. Women have themselves to thank when anything happens, for it is of ten times more importance to them than it is to you. A man is none the worse for things that would ruin a girl for ever. But, still, you are not in a position to be careless of what people say. You have not a penny, Rollo; and I don’t believe in your opera. The only way in which you will ever have anything is by a suitable marriage. Suppose that any of your relations were to find a really nice person for you, and you were to spoil it all by a folly like this! That is how I look at it. To ruin yourself for a girl’s pretty face! and her voice—when she can’t sing a note!”
“Am I to infer that you have got a nice person for me?” said Rollo, furious inwardly, yet keeping his temper, and turning the conversation in this direction by way of diverting it from more dangerous subjects. And then Augusta (drawing somewhat upon her imagination, it must be allowed) told him of a very nice person indeed. Rollo listened, by way of securing his escape; but by and by he got slightly interested, in spite of himself. This really nice girl was coming to the Deanery for two or three days. She had a hundred thousand pounds. She had heard of Rollo Ridsdale, and already “took an interest” in him. It was perhaps partly fiction, for the visit of this golden girl to the Deanery was not by any means settled—but yet there was in it a germ of fact. “It is an opportunity that never may occur again,” Augusta said, like a shop that is selling off. And indeed it was a sale which she would have greatly liked to negotiate, though Rollo was less the buyer than the piece of goods of which sale was to be made.
A hundred thousand pounds! He could not help thinking of it later in the evening, when he smoked his cigar, and as he went to bed. His affairs seemed to him to be managed by some malign and tricky spirit. Just at this moment, when he was pledged to the most imprudent marriage that could be conceived, was it not just his luck that fate should take the opportunity of dangling such a prize before him? A hundred thousand pounds! Why was it not Lottie that had this money? or why, as she had no money, had she been thrown in his way? To be sure she had a voice, which was as good as a fortune, but not equal to a hundred thousand pounds. However, he said to himself, there was no help for it now. All this happened before the brief interview on the hill, which sent him off to town before the hour he intended, and which proved to him, over and over again, her trust in him, which was beyond anything he had ever dreamed of. That she should guard him even from her father, that she should believe in him, to the disdain of every safeguard which the vulgar mind relied on, astonished, confounded, and impressed his mind beyond description. To deceive her would be the easiest thing in the world, but, at the same time, would it not be the most impossible thing, the last that any man not a villain could do? And there was besides a glimmering perception in Rollo’s mind that deception would only be practicable up to a certain point, and that the scorn and horror and indignation with which Lottie would turn upon the criminal who had intended shame to her, would be something as much unlike the ordinary rage of a wronged woman as her trust was beyond the ordinary suspicious smoothness of ordinary belief. Shame and she had nothing to do with each other. She might die in the agony of the discovery, but first her eyes, her lips, the passion of her indignant purity would slay. With a deep regret he thought of the easier tie. Augusta’s words had been those of a silly woman when she spoke of fatal entanglements. On the contrary, marriage was the fatal thing. The other—what harm would it have done? None to Lottie in her career; no one would have thought any the worse of her. People would be sure to suppose that something of the kind had occurred in a singer’s life, whether it was true or not. It would have done her no harm; and it would not have done Rollo any harm. To think of it as fatal was the greatest folly. On the contrary, they would have been of use to each other now, and after they would each have been free to consult their own interests. He could not help thinking very regretfully of this so easy, agreeable expedient, which would have been anything but fatal. To be sure, this was not, as Augusta said, a high moral point of view; but Rollo did not pretend to be a moralist. All these thoughts poured through his mind again as he went to London, with the full intention of getting a license for his marriage, and making all the arrangements which would bind Lottie to him as his wife. He was obliged to do this; he could not help himself. Much rather would he have done anything else—taken the other alternative—but it was not possible. There was but this one thing to do—a thing which put it entirely out of his power for ever and ever to consider the claims of any really nice person with a hundred thousand pounds at her disposal. Rollo did not pretend to himself that he took the decisive step with any satisfaction. He was no triumphant bridegroom; but he was a true lover, and not a villain, and regretfully but steadfastly he gave himself up to what he had to do.
It was too late to do anything in respect to the license when he arrived in town, but there were many other things to be settled, in order to make a considerably long absence practicable, and these he arranged in his own mind as he approached his journe y’s end. For one thing, he had the funds to provide; and that, as will be readily perceived, was no small matter. He walked out of the railway station, pondering this in his mind. It was a grave question, not one to be lightly solved. He did not want to return to town till the season should have begun. No doubt five months’ honeymooning would bore any man, but he felt it to be too important to think of mere personal amusement; and he could always make expeditions himself to more lively places, and get a share of any amusement that might be going, when he had settled down Lottie to her studies, under the best masters that were to be had. All this was quite easily settled; but for an absence of five months, if you have not any income to speak of, it is necessary to have an understanding with your bankers, or somebody else. He meant to try his bankers, for his confidence in Lottie’s future success was extreme, and he felt justified in speaking of it as money which his future wife would be entitled to. All these plans he was laying very deliberately in his head, calculating how much he would need, and various other particulars, when the face of a man approaching in a hansom suddenly struck him. It was Rixon, his father’s confidential servant, a man who had been in Lord Courtland’s service as long as anybody could recollect. What was he doing there? The hansom was directing its course towards the railway from which Rollo had just come, and Rixon’s countenance was of an extreme gravity. What could it mean? Could anything have happened? Rollo saw the hansom pass, but its occupant did not see him. He could not banish from his thoughts the idea that something must have happened—that it was to tell him something, some news more or less terrible that Rixon was on his way to the railway which went to St. Michael’s. After a moment’s hesitation he turned and went back to the station, not being able to divest himself of this idea. To be sure Rixon might be going somewhere on business of his own; he might be looking grave about his own affairs. Still Rollo turned and went back; in any case it was best to know. The man was standing among several others, waiting to take his ticket for the train, when Rollo re-entered the station; he was getting his money out of his pocket to pay his fare; but looking up as he did this, Rixon started, put his money back, and immediately disengaged himself from the queue. It was then a message from home of sufficient importance to be sent by special envoy. Rollo had time to examine this bearer of ill-news as he approached. What but ill-news was ever so urgent? special messengers do not travel about to stray sons of a family with news of birth or bridal. There is but one thing which calls for such state, and that is death. Rollo ran over all the chances in a moment, in his mind. His father—if it were his father there would be a little delay, a little ready money, more need than ever, and a very good excuse, for keeping everything quiet. It was not absolute want of feeling that suggested this thought. If it was his father there would be many reasons for being sorry. Home, with your brother at the head of affairs, is not home like your father’s house. And Lord Courtland, though his second son had worn out his kindness, was still kind more or less. Rollo was not insensible; he felt the dull consciousness of a blow before he received it, as he fixed his eyes upon Rixon’s mournful countenance, and the band on his hat.
“What is the matter?” he said, as the man approached. “What has happened? You were going to me? Tell me at once what it is.”
“I beg your pardon, Sir,” said Rixon, with the perpetual apology of a well-bred servant. “Yes, Sir, I was going to St. Michael’s. My lord sent me to tell you——”
“Thank heaven, that it is not my father! You mean that my father sent you? That is a relief,” said Rollo, drawing a long breath.
“Yes, my—Sir!” said Rixon, with confusion, “My lord is in the enjoyment of perfect health—at least as good as is compatible with the great misfortune, the catastrophe that has—snatched ——”
“What do you mean?” said Rollo. Rixon was fond of long words. He laughed, “You are always mysterious. But if my father is all right——”
“Oh, don’t! my—don’t, Sir!” said the man, “laughing is not what ought to be on your lips at such a moment. Your brother has had an accident——”
“My brother—Ridsdale? Good heavens! Can’t you speak out? What has happened?” said Rollo, with blanched cheeks. Horror, fear, hope, all sprung up within him, indistinguishable the one from the other. The moment seemed a year during which he stood waiting for Rixon’s next words.
“It is too true, my lord,” said the man, and the address threw around Rollo a sudden gleam of growing light. “Your brother had a terrible accident on the hunting-field. His horse stumbled on King’s Mead, at that bad fence by Willowbrook. He was taken up insensible, and died before he could be got home. Things are in a terrible state at Courtlands. I was sent to let your lordship know. My lord would be glad if you would come home at once.”
Rollo staggered back, and put himself against the wall. A cold moisture burst out over him. He grew so pale that Rixon thought he was going to faint. The man said afterwards that he could not have believed that Mr. Ridsdale had so much feeling. And partly it was feeling as Rixon thought. For the first moment the thought that his brother, upon whom fate had always smiled—Ridsdale! Ridsdale!—the very impersonation of prosperity and good fortune, should be lying dead, actually dead, at his age, with all his prospects, appalled him. It seemed too much, unnatural, beyond all possibility of belief. Then the blood rushed back through all his veins with a flush and suffusion of sudden heat. The change alarmed the messenger of so much evil and so much good. He put out his hand to support his young master. “My lord, my lord!” he said (they were words which Rixon loved to repeat, and which added to his own dignity as a gentleman’s gentleman), “remember your father; now that your lamented brother is gone, all his lordship’s trust is in you.”
Rollo waved his hand, not caring for the moment to speak. “Let me alone!” he said. “Let me alone! leave me to myself.” And it did not take him long to recover and shake off the horrible impression, and realise the astounding change that had occurred. Perhaps it is not possible that the death of a brother, which produces so extraordinary and beneficial a change in the situation and prospects of the next in succession, can be regarded with the natural feeling which such an event uncomplicated by loss or gain of a pecuniary kind calls forth. There was a sudden shock, then a consciousness that something was expected from him, some show of grief and profound distress; and then a bewildering, overwhelming, stupefying, yet exciting realisation of the change thus suddenly accomplished in himself. He was no longer merely Rollo, a fashionable adventurer, dealing in every kind of doubtful speculation, and legitimatised gambling, a man of no importance to anyone, and free to carry out whatever schemes might come into his head; but now—an altogether different person—Lord Ridsdale, his father’s heir; the future head of a great family; a future peer; and already endowed with all the importance of an heir-apparent. The world seemed to go round and round with Rollo, and when it settled again out of the whirling and pale confusion as of an earthquake, it was not any longer the same world. The proportion of things had changed in the twinkling of an eye. The distant and the near had changed places. What was close to him before receded; what was far away became near. In the hurry of his thoughts he could not even think. Pain mingled with everything, with the giddiness of a strange elation, with the bewilderment of a surprise more startling than any that had ever come to him before in all his life. Ridsdale!—he who had always been so smiling and prosperous; he to whom everything was forgiven; whose sins were only peccadilloes; whose lightest schoolboy successes were trumpeted abroad, whose movements were recorded where -ever he went; it was inconceivable that he should be lying—dead; inconceivable that Rollo, the detrimental, the one in the family whom all disapproved of, should be put in his place, and succeed to all his privileges and exemptions. It did not seem possible. It needed Rixon saying my lord to him at every moment, to make the curious fiction seem true. Rixon got a cab to drive his young master to the other station, by which he must go to Courtlands; and Rollo—leaving all his former life behind him, leaving his license, his marriage, his bride, in the opposite direction, fading into misty spectres—turned his back upon all that had been most important to him half an hour ago, and drove away.
He went through that day like a dream—the whole course of his existence turned into another channel. He got home, rolling up to the familiar door with sensations so different from any that had ever moved him when entering that door before. He looked at it this time with a feeling of proprietorship. It had been his home for all his early life; but now it was going to be his own, which is very different. He looked at the very trees with a different feeling, wondering why so many should be marked for cutting down. What had they been doing to want to get rid of so many trees? When he went into the room where his brother lay dead, it was to him as if a waxen image lay there, as if it were all a skilful scene, arranged to make believe that such a change, one man substituted for another, could be real. To Rollo it did not seem to be real. It was the younger son who had died, with all his busy schemes—his plans for the future, his contrivances to get money, and the strange connections which he had formed. Rollo, who was the founder of the new opera, the partner of the bustling manager; it was he who was lying on that bed. All his plans would be buried with him—his Bohemianism, his enterprises, his——. What was it that the poor fool had gone in for, the last of all his undertakings, the thing in which he had been happily arrested ere he could harm himself or embarrass the family?—his love——. It was when standing by the bed on which his brother lay dead that this thought suddenly darted into the new Lord Ridsdale’s mind. He turned away with a half groan. Providence had interposed to prevent that foolish fellow from consummating his fate. He had not yet reached the highest pitch of folly when the blow fell. Something there was which the family had escaped. When the key was turned again in the door, and he went back to another darkened room and heard all about the accident, it was almost on his lips to contradict the speakers, and tell them it was not Ridsdale that was dead. But he did not do so. He preserved his decorum and seriousness. He was “very feeling.” Lord Courtland, who had been afraid of his son’s levity, and had trembled lest Rollo, who had never been on very intimate terms with his brother, should show less sorrow than was becoming, was deeply satisfied. “How little we know what is in a man till he’s tried,” he said to his sister, Lady Beatrice. Lady Courtland, the mother of the young man, was happily long ago dead.
Thus, after setting out in the morning—full of tender ardour, notwithstanding his many doubts—to make the arrangements for his marriage, Rollo found himself at night one of the chief mourners in a house full of weeping. It was late at night when he got to his own room, and was able really to set himself to consider his own affairs. Which were his own affairs? The cares of the head of the family, the earl’s heir and right hand—or those strangely different anxieties which had been in the mind of the second son? When he sat down to think it over, once more there came a giddiness and bewilderment over Rollo’s being. He seemed scarcely able to force back upon himself the events which had happened at St. Michael’s only this morning. The figure of Lottie appeared to him through the mist, far, far away, dimly apparent at the end of a long vista. Lottie. What had he intended to do? He had meant to get a license for his marriage to her, to arrange how he could get money—if money was to be had by hook or by crook—to see about the tickets for their journey, to decide where to go to—even to provide travelling-wraps for his bride. All this he had come to London to do only this morning, and now it almost cost him an effort to recollect what it was. He would have been glad to evade the subject, to feel that he had a right to rest after such a fatiguing day; but the revolution in and about him was such that he could not rest. St. Michael’s and all its scenes passed before him like dissolving views, fading off into the mist, then rising again in spectral indistinctness. He could not think they belonged to him, or that the central figure in all these pictures was his own. Was it not rather his brother—he who had died? It seemed to Lord Ridsdale that he was settling Rollo’s affairs for him, thinking what was best to be done. He had been horribly imprudent, and had planned a still greater imprudence to come, when death arrested him in mid-career; but, Heaven be praised, the heedless fellow had been stopped before he committed himself! Rollo shuddered to think what would have happened had the family been hampered by a wife. A wife! What a fool he had been; what a dream he had been absorbed in; folly, unmitigated, inexcusable; but, thank Heaven, he had been stopped in time. Lottie—that was her name, and she had been very fond of him; poor girl, it would be a great disappointment for her. Thus Rollo thought, not feeling that he had anything to do with it. It was all over, so completely over, that there was scarcely a struggle in his mind, scarcely any controversy with himself, on the subject. No advocate, heavenly or diabolical, spoke on Lottie’s behalf. The whole affair was done with—it was impossible—there was no room even for consideration. For Lord Ridsdale to marry a nameless girl, the highest possibility in whose lot was to become a singer, and who had to be educated before even that was practicable, was not to be thought of. It was a bad thing for the poor girl; poor thing! no doubt it was hard upon her.
Thus—was it any doing of Rollo’s? Providence itself opened a door of escape for him from his unwary folly. Law did not act in the same way; when good fortune came to him, by a mere savage and uncultivated sentiment of honour, he had gone to the girl who had been his sweetheart to propose that she should share it. Lord Ridsdale, however, was not of this vulgar strain. The savage virtues were not in his way—they were not possible in his circumstances. Noblesse oblige; he could not raise Lottie to the sublime elevation of the rank he had so unexpectedly fallen into. That was not possible. The matter was so clear that it barred all question. There was not a word to be said on her side.
Nevertheless, had it not been for all the trouble about poor Ridsdale’s funeral, and the attentions required by the father, whose manner had so entirely changed to his surviving son, and who was now altogether dependent upon him—the new heir to the honours of the Courtland family might have broken off with his old love in a more considerate way. But he had no time to think. The very day had come before he could communicate with her; and then it had to be done abruptly. And, after all, a little more or less, what did it matter? The important point, for her sake especially, was that the change should be perfectly definite and clear. Poor Lottie! he was so sorry for her. It would be better, much better for her to hate him now, if she could; and, above all, it was the kindest thing to her to make the disruption distinct, beyond all possibility either of doubt or of hope.