Robert Elsmere
'Get me out of this, Hugh, and I shall be obliged to you. Young people
may risk it, but if _I_ broke I shouldn't mend.'
And still grumbling audibly about the floor, he hobbled off towards the
picture gallery. Mr. Flaxman had only time for a smiling backward glance
at Rose.
'Have you given my pretty boy a dance?'
'Yes,' she said, but with as much stiffness as she might have shown to
his uncle.
'That's over,' said Lady Helen with relief. 'My uncle hardly meets any
of us now without a spar. He has never forgiven my father for going over
to the Liberals. And then he thinks we none of us consult him enough. No
more we do--except Aunt Charlotte. _She's_ afraid of him!'
'Lady Charlotte afraid!' echoed Rose.
'Odd, isn't it? The Duke avenges a good many victims on her, if they
only knew!'
Lady Helen was called away, and Rose was left standing, wondering what
had happened to her partner.
Opposite, Mr. Flaxman was pushing through a doorway, and Lady Florence
was again on his arm. At the same time she became conscious of a morsel
of chaperons' conversation such as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a
girl is tolerably sure to hear under similar circumstances.
The _debutante's_ good looks, Hugh Flaxman's apparent susceptibility to
them, the possibility of results, and the satisfactory disposition of
the family goods and chattels that would be brought about by such a
match, the opportunity it would offer the man, too, of rehabilitating
himself socially after his first matrimonial escapade--Rose caught
fragments of all these topics as they were discussed by two old ladies,
presumably also of the family 'ring,' who gossiped behind her with more
gusto than discretion. Highmindedness, of course, told her to move away;
something else held her fast, till her partner came up for her.
Then she floated away into the whirlwind of waltzers. But as she moved
round the room on her partner's arm, her delicate half-scornful grace
attracting look after look, the soul within was all aflame--aflame
against the serried ranks and phalanxes of this unfamiliar, hostile
world! She had just been reading Trevelyan's _Life of Fox_ aloud to her
mother, who liked occasionally to flavour her knitting with literature,
and she began now to revolve a passage from it, describing the upper
class of the last century, which had struck that morning on her quick
retentive memory: '"_A few thousand people who thought that the world
was made for them_"--did it not run so?--"_and that all outside their
own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each
other an amount of attention quite inconceivable.... Within the charmed
precincts there prevailed an easy and natural mode of intercourse, in
some respects singularly delightful._" Such, for instance, as the Duke
of Sedbergh was master of! Well, it was worth while, perhaps, to have
gained an experience, even at the expense of certain illusions, as to
the manners of dukes, and--and--as to the constancy of friends. But
never again--never again!' said the impetuous inner voice. 'I have my
world--they theirs!'
But why so strong a flood of bitterness against our poor upper class, so
well intentioned for all its occasional lack of lucidity, should have
arisen in so young a breast it is a little difficult for the most
conscientious biographer to explain. She had partners to her heart's
desire; young Lord Waynflete used his utmost arts upon her to persuade
her that at least half a dozen numbers of the regular programme were
extras and therefore at his disposal; and when royalty supped, it was
graciously pleased to ordain that Lady Helen and her two companions
should sup behind the same folding-doors as itself, while beyond these
doors surged the inferior crowd of persons who had been specially
invited to 'meet their Royal Highnesses,' and had so far been held
worthy neither to dance nor to eat in the same room with them. But in
vain. Rose still felt herself, for all her laughing outward
_insouciance_, a poor, bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel
of a world which was intolerably powerful, rich, and self-satisfied, the
odious product of 'family arrangements.'
Mr. Flaxman sat far away at the same royal table as herself. Beside him
was the thin tall _debutante_. 'She is like one of the Gainsborough
princesses,' thought Rose, studying her with involuntary admiration. 'Of
course it is all plain. He will get everything he wants, and a Lady
Florence into the bargain. Radical, indeed! What nonsense!'
Then it startled her to find that the eyes of Lady Florence's neighbour
were, as it seemed, on herself; or was he merely nodding to Lady
Helen?--and she began immediately to give a smiling attention to the man
on her left.
An hour later she and Agnes and Lady Helen were descending the great
staircase on their way to their carriage. The morning light was flooding
through the chinks of the carefully veiled windows; Lady Helen was
yawning behind her tiny white hand, her eyes nearly asleep. But the two
sisters, who had not been up till three, on four preceding nights, like
their chaperon, were still almost as fresh as the flowers massed in the
hall below.
'Ah, there is Hugh!' cried Lady Helen. 'How I hope he has found the
carriage!'
At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which had dropped
from the bouquet of some predecessor. To prevent herself from falling
downstairs, she caught hold of the stem of a brazen chandelier fixed in
the balustrade. It saved her, but she gave her arm a most painful
wrench, and leant limp and white against the railing of the stairs. Lady
Helen turned at Agnes's exclamation, but before she could speak, as it
seemed, Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just below them, was
on the stairs.
'You have hurt your arm? Don't speak--take mine. Let me get you
downstairs out of the crush.'
She was too far gone to resist, and when she was mistress of herself
again she found herself in the library with some water in her hand which
Mr. Flaxman had just put there.
'Is it the playing hand?' said Lady Helen anxiously.
'No,' said Rose, trying to laugh; 'the bowing elbow.' And she raised it,
but with a contortion of pain.
'Don't raise it,' he said peremptorily. 'We will have a doctor here in a
moment, and have it bandaged.'
He disappeared. Rose tried to sit up, seized with a frantic longing to
disobey him, and get off before he returned. Stinging the girl's mind
was the sense that it might all perfectly well seem to him a planned
appeal to his pity.
'Agnes, help me up,' she said with a little involuntary groan; 'I shall
be better at home.'
But both Lady Helen and Agnes laughed her to scorn, and she lay back
once more overwhelmed by fatigue and faintness. A few more minutes, and
a doctor appeared, caught by good luck in the next street. He pronounced
it a severe muscular strain, but nothing more; applied a lotion and
improvised a sling. Rose consulted him anxiously as to the interference
with her playing.
'A week,' he said; 'no more, if you are careful.'
Her pale face brightened. Her art had seemed specially dear to her of
late.
'Hugh!' called Lady Helen, going to the door. '_Now_ we are ready for
the carriage.'
Rose leaning on Agnes walked out into the hall. They found him there
waiting.
'The carriage is here,' he said, bending towards her with a look and
tone which so stirred the fluttered nerves, that the sense of faintness
stole back upon her. 'Let me take you to it.'
'Thank you,' she said coldly, but by a superhuman effort; 'my sister's
help is quite enough.'
He followed them with Lady Helen. At the carriage door the sisters
hesitated a moment. Rose was helpless without a right hand. A little
imperative movement from behind displaced Agnes, and Rose felt herself
hoisted in by a strong arm. She sank into the farther corner. The glow
of the dawn caught her white delicate features, the curls on her
temples, all the silken confusion of her dress. Hugh Flaxman put in
Agnes and his sister, said something to Agnes about coming to inquire,
and raised his hat. Rose caught the quick force and intensity of his
eyes, and then closed her own, lost in a languid swoon of pain, memory,
and resentful wonder.
Flaxman walked away down Park Lane through the chill morning quietness,
the gathering light striking over the houses beside him on to the misty
stretches of the Park. His hat was over his eyes, his hands thrust into
his pockets; a close observer would have noticed a certain trembling of
the lips. It was but a few seconds since her young warm beauty had been
for an instant in his arms; his whole being was shaken by it, and by
that last look of hers. 'Have I gone too far?' he asked himself
anxiously. 'Is it divinely true--_already_--that she resents being left
to herself? Oh, little rebel! You tried your best not to let me see. But
you _were_ angry, you were! Now, then, how to proceed? She is all fire,
all character; I rejoice in it. She will give me trouble; so much the
better. Poor little hurt thing! the fight is only beginning; but I will
make her do penance some day for all that loftiness to-night.'
If these reflections betray to the reader a certain masterful note of
confidence in Mr. Flaxman's mind, he will perhaps find small cause to
regret that Rose _did_ give him a great deal of trouble.
Nothing could have been more 'salutary,' to use his own word, than the
dance she led him during the next three weeks. She provoked him indeed
at moments so much that he was a hundred times on the point of trying to
seize his kingdom of heaven by violence, of throwing himself upon her
with a tempest shock of reproach and appeal. But some secret instinct
restrained him. She was wilful, she was capricious; she had a real and
powerful distraction in her art. He must be patient and risk nothing.
He suspected, too, what was the truth--that Lady Charlotte was doing
harm. Rose, indeed, had grown so touchily sensitive that she found
offence in almost every word of Lady Charlotte's about her nephew. Why
should the apparently casual remarks of the aunt bear so constantly on
the subject of the nephew's social importance? Rose vowed to herself
that she needed no reminder of that station whereunto it had pleased God
to call her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those
anxieties and reluctances which the girl's quick sense detected, in
spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwick Gardens.
The end of it all was that Hugh Flaxman found himself again driven into
a corner. At the bottom of him was still a confidence that would not
yield. Was it possible that he had ever given her some tiny involuntary
glimpse of it, and that but for that glimpse she would have let him make
his peace much more easily? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end
of his resources.
'I must change the venue,' he said to himself; 'decidedly I must change
the venue.'
So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish in Norway
with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the news with a callousness
which made even Lady Helen want to shake her.
On the eve of his journey, however, Hugh Flaxman had at last confessed
himself to Catherine and Robert. His obvious plight made any further
scruples on their part futile, and what they had they gave him in the
way of sympathy. Also Robert, gathering that he already knew much, and
without betraying any confidence of Rose's, gave him a hint or two on
the subject of Langham. But more not the friendliest mortal could do for
him, and Flaxman went off into exile announcing to a mocking Elsmere
that he should sit pensive on the banks of Norwegian rivers till fortune
had had time to change.
BOOK VII
GAIN AND LOSS
CHAPTER XLVI