Robert Elsmere
'Don't read,' said Lady Charlotte complacently. 'Look at me. It's your
duty to talk to me, you know; and I won't make myself any more
disagreeable than I can help. I generally make myself disagreeable, and
yet, after all, there are a great many people who like me.'
Rose turned a countenance rippling with suppressed laughter on her
companion. Lady Charlotte had a large fair face, with a great deal of
nose and chin, and an erection of lace and feathers on her head that
seemed in excellent keeping with the masterful emphasis of those
features. Her eyes stared frankly and unblushingly at the world, only
softened at intervals by the glasses which were so used as to make them
a most effective adjunct of her conversation. Socially, she was
absolutely devoid of weakness or of shame. She found society extremely
interesting, and she always struck straight for the desirable things in
it, making short work of all those delicate tentative processes of
acquaintanceship by which men and women ordinarily sort themselves.
Rose's brilliant vivacious beauty had caught her eye at dinner; she
adored beauty as she adored anything effective, and she always took a
queer pleasure in bullying her way into a girl's liking. It is a great
thing to be persuaded that at bottom you have a good heart. Lady
Charlotte was so persuaded, and allowed herself many things in
consequence.
'What shall we talk about?' said Rose demurely. 'What a magnificent old
house this is!'
'Stuff and nonsense! I don't want to talk about the house. I am sick to
death of it. And if your people live in the parish, you are too. I
return to my question. Come, tell me, what is your particular line in
life? I am sure you have one, by your face. You had better tell me; it
will do you no harm.'
Lady Charlotte settled herself comfortably on the sofa, and Rose, seeing
that there was no chance of escaping her tormentor, felt her spirits
rise to an encounter.
'Really--Lady Charlotte--' and she looked down, and then up, with a
feigned bashfulness--'I--I--play a little.'
'Humph!' said her questioner again, rather disconcerted by the obvious
missishness of the answer. 'You do, do you? More's the pity. No woman
who respects herself ought to play the piano nowadays. A professional
told me the other day that until nineteen-twentieths of the profession
were strung up, there would be no chance for the rest; and as for
amateurs, there is simply _no_ room for them whatever. I can't conceive
anything more _passe_ than amateur pianoforte playing!'
'I don't play the piano,' said Rose meekly.
'What--the fashionable instrument, the banjo?' laughed Lady Charlotte.
'That would be really striking.'
Rose was silent again, the corners of her mouth twitching.
'Mrs. Darcy,' said her neighbour, raising her voice, 'this young lady
tells me she plays something; what is it?'
Mrs. Darcy looked in a rather helpless way at Catherine. She was
dreadfully afraid of Lady Charlotte.
Catherine, with a curious reluctance, gave the required information; and
then Lady Charlotte insisted that the violin should be sent for, as it
had not been brought.
'Who accompanies you?' she inquired of Rose.
'Mr. Langham plays very well,' said Rose indifferently.
Lady Charlotte raised her eyebrows. 'That dark, Byronic-looking creature
who came with you? I should not have imagined him capable of anything
sociable. Letitia, shall I send my maid to the rectory, or can you spare
a man?'
Mrs. Darcy hurriedly gave orders, and Rose, inwardly furious, was
obliged to submit. Then Lady Charlotte, having gained her point, and
secured a certain amount of diversion for the evening, lay back on the
sofa, used her fan, and yawned till the gentlemen appeared.
When they came in, the precious violin which Rose never trusted to any
other hands but her own without trepidation had just arrived, and its
owner, more erect than usual, because more nervous, was trying to prop
up a dilapidated music-stand which Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As
Langham came in, she looked up and beckoned to him.
'Do you see?' she said to him impatiently, 'they have made me play.
Will you accompany me? I am very sorry, but there is no one else.'
If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, it was any
sort of performance in public. But the half-plaintive look which
accompanied her last words showed that she knew it, and he did his best
to be amiable.
'I am altogether at your service,' he said, sitting down with
resignation.
'It is all that tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,' she whispered
to him behind the music-stand. 'I never saw such a person in my life.'
'Macaulay's Lady Holland without the brains,' suggested Langham with
languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note.
Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the squire sauntered in together.
'A village Norman-Neruda?' whispered the guest to the host. The squire
shrugged his shoulders.
'Hush!' said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. Mr.
Wynnstay's smile instantly disappeared; he leant against the doorway and
stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musicians began, on some
Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms. They had
not played twenty bars before the attention of every one in the room was
more or less seized--unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children,
good soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and who
was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time to see when it
would be decent to order round the pony-carriage which would take him
back to his pale overweighted spouse.
First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage,
non-European; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken here
and there by strange barbaric clashes; then a song, plaintive and
clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melancholies of modern
feeling.
'Ah, but _excellent_!' said Lady Charlotte once, under her breath, at a
pause; 'and what _entrain_--what beauty!'
For Rose's figure was standing thrown out against the dusky blue of the
tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every curve, every
grace, each tint--hair and cheek and gleaming arm gained an enchanting
picture-like distinctness. There was jessamine at her waist and among
the gold of her hair; the crystals on her neck, and on the little shoe
thrown forward beyond her dress, caught the lamplight.
'How can that man play with her and not fall in love with her?' thought
Lady Charlotte to herself, with a sigh, perhaps, for her own youth. 'He
looks cool enough, however; the typical don with his nose in the air!'
Then the slow passionate sweetness of the music swept her away with it,
she being in her way a connoisseur, and she ceased to speculate. When
the sounds ceased there was silence for a moment. Mrs. Darcy, who had a
piano in her sitting-room whereon she strummed every morning with her
tiny rheumatic fingers, and who had, as we know, strange little veins of
sentiment running all about her, stared at Rose with open mouth. So did
Catherine. Perhaps it was then for the first time that, touched by this
publicity, this contagion of other people's feeling, Catherine realised
fully against what a depth of stream she had been building her useless
barriers.
'More! more!' cried Lady Charlotte.
The whole room seconded the demand save the squire and Mr. Bickerton.
They withdrew together into a distant oriel. Robert, who was delighted
with his little sister-in-law's success, went smiling to talk of it to
Mrs. Darcy, while Catherine with a gentle coldness answered Mr.
Longstaffe's questions on the same theme.
'Shall we?' said Rose, panting a little, but radiant, looking down on
her companion.
'Command me!' he said, his grave lips slightly smiling, his eyes taking
in the same vision that had charmed Lady Charlotte's. What a 'child of
grace and genius!'
'But do you like it?' she persisted.
'Like it--like accompanying your playing?'
'Oh no!'--impatiently; 'showing off, I mean. I am quite ready to stop.'
'Go on; go on!' he said, laying his finger on the A. 'You have driven
all my _mauvaise honte_ away. I have not heard you play so splendidly
yet.'
She flushed all over. 'Then we will go on,' she said briefly.
So they plunged again into an Andante and Scherzo of Beethoven. How the
girl threw herself into it, bringing out the wailing love-song of the
Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of the Scherzo, in a way which set
every nerve in Langham vibrating! Yet the art of it was wholly
unconscious. The music was the mere natural voice of her inmost self. A
comparison full of excitement was going on in that self between her
first impressions of the man beside her, and her consciousness of him,
as he seemed to-night, human, sympathetic, kind. A blissful sense of a
mission filled the young silly soul. Like David, she was pitting herself
and her gift against those dark powers which may invade and paralyse a
life.
After the shouts of applause at the end had yielded to a burst of talk,
in the midst of which Lady Charlotte, with exquisite infelicity, might
have been heard laying down the law to Catherine as to how her sister's
remarkable musical powers might be best perfected, Langham turned to his
companion,--
'Do you know that for years I have enjoyed nothing so much as the music
of the last two days?'
His black eyes shone upon her, transfused with something infinitely soft
and friendly. She smiled. 'How little I imagined that first evening that
you cared for music!'
'Or about anything else worth caring for?' he asked her, laughing, but
with always that little melancholy note in the laugh.
'Oh, if you like,' she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. 'I
believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, when you
weren't reading _Hamlet_ in the corner, about the arrangements for
women's education at Oxford.'
'Could I have found a more respectable subject?' he inquired of her.
'The adjective is excellent,' she said with a little face, as she put
her violin into its case. 'If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it
personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing,
English history, the Catechism, and _Paradise Lost_. I taught myself
French at seventeen, because one Moliere wrote plays in it, and German
because of Wagner. But they are _my_ French and _my_ German. I wouldn't
advise anybody else to steal them!'
Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl's agile fingers.
'I wonder,' he said at last, slowly, 'when I shall play that Beethoven
again?'
'To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,' she said drily; 'we
murdered one or two passages in fine style.'
He looked at her, startled. 'But I go by the morning train!' There was
an instant's silence. Then the violin case shut with a snap.
'I thought it was to be Saturday,' she said abruptly.
'No,' he answered with a sigh, 'it was always Friday. There is a meeting
in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.'
'Then we shan't finish these Hungarian duets,' she said slowly, turning
away from him to collect some music on the piano.
Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind him, with all
its ups and downs, its quarrels, its _ennuis_, its moments of delightful
intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare
monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in
him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity.
'No, we shall finish nothing,' he said in a voice which only she could
hear, his hands lying on the keys; 'there are some whose destiny it is
never to finish--never to have enough--to leave the feast on the table,
and all the edges of life ragged!'
Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, from the group