Robert Orange
force stronger than her own nature. A little afraid, she shrank
instinctively away from him, and as she dared not look up, she did not
see the expression of triumph, mingled with other things, which, for a
moment, lit up Lord Reckage's ordinarily inscrutable countenance.
Lately, he had been somewhat depressed by his encounter with refractory
wills. His horse, his colleagues on the Bond of Association, his future
bride, had showed themselves fatiguing, perhaps worthless, certainly
disheartening and independent accessories to his life. Here, at last,
was some one brilliant, stimulating, by no means self-seeking, Quixotic
in enthusiasms.
"Sara," he said, obeying an impulse which surprised himself, "do you
believe in me?"
This time she gave him a straight glance.
"Yes," she answered. "You might do a great deal if you could forget
yourself for a few months."
Pensee, much troubled and full of thoughts, walked over to them.
"Oh, Sara!" she said, "isn't it terrible? If you could have seen them
both this morning--she looked so beautiful, perfectly lovely--a sight I
never can forget. And now this blow! What man can teach men to
understand the will of God?"
CHAPTER IX
Robert and Brigit were silent with happiness on their way to
Southampton. Side by side they watched the country through the carriage
windows. There had been a fog in London when they left, and the sun, at
intervals, shone out like a live coal among dying embers. All was
obscured; the foot-passengers and passing vehicles seemed black straying
shadows in the atmosphere. But the express emerged at last from the
clinging darkness into autumnal fields, some brown after the harvest,
others studded with hay-ricks. At one point in the landscape they
noticed a flock of sheep drinking at a stream. The boy who guarded them
waved his cap at the train, and this little signal, coming, as it were,
from human nature, gave them a reassurance of the day's reality. Near
Bishopstoke the clouds were white and dense, but, rippling in places,
they disclosed blue stretches of the heaven which, in their masses, they
concealed. Southampton began with small houses. One had a tattered
garden, where a stone copy of the Medicean Venus stood on a patch of
squalid turf near a clothes' line and against an ivy-grown wall. Then
the green sands were reached. The sea, like liquid granite, sparkled in
the distance. Rows of dull dwellings, shops, public-houses, and hotels
came next. The train, with a shriek, rushed into the station. It was
still too early for lunch, so they walked down to the pier, where they
saw several yachts and pleasure-boats at anchor in the harbour, and the
New Forest greenly outlined in the distance. These were the things which
engraved themselves on Brigit's mind. The impressibility of youth is
retentive for outward objects, but the inner mood--the sensation and
idea which make the mental state--lives unconsciously, and is recognised
only in the long process of time. Brigit could have described the scene,
but her emotions did not seem to her, emotions. Absorbed by them, and in
them, she neither abandoned herself to the hour nor asked herself what
the hour held. She and the hour were one--a single note; and the joy she
felt at being with Robert, leaning on his arm and hearing his voice, was
so simple that, even if a psychologist of the deepest experience had
been able to probe into the workings of her mind, he would have found
nothing there to analyse. Hers was a child's affection--the first love
of a heart still immature, and not yet made suspicious of itself by
contact with others less innocent. Parflete had been too worldly-wise
not to guard and value--at its true price--a disposition so graceful in
its very essence. She had a knowledge of affairs beyond her years, yet
her own instincts, her education, her few friendships, had kept her
curiously ignorant of evil, of much also that is neither good nor evil,
but merely human. The sombre sentimentality which lurks in most young
girls of seventeen was not in her character at all, and in its stead she
possessed the gaiety and carelessness of feeling which belongs to
imaginative rather than to sensuous natures. A boy-like spirit showed
itself in all her words, movements, moods; her womanhood still slept,
and thus, while her intelligence made her an unusual companion and her
beauty presented a constant appeal to all that is romantic, it was
inevitable that melancholy and reserve should enter largely into the
passionate love which Robert felt for her. He told himself that he would
not have her different. The glance of her eyes, which stirred him
strangely to the very depths of his being, never varied in its sweetness
nor its calm. When her lightest touch could sway his body and spirit,
she, unconscious of her power, would press his hand against her cheek
and talk about the geraniums in the convent garden or the chances of the
Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet--and
yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some
straying angel--some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and
intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at
the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor
control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had
ever realised. She cared for him--how could he doubt it? But was the
indefinable, indispensable feeling absent?
"Do you remember our journey from Catesby?" she asked suddenly. "I
slept. Wasn't I dull? Did you mind?"
No one could see them. He stooped and kissed her fragrant, animated
face. "I wish," said he, "I wish that you were not quite such a child."
The feeling of solitariness weighed upon his soul with a crushing weight
unknown until that day--the day of days, his wedding day. Heretofore he
had craved for solitude because it had been full of her imagined
companionship. Now that she actually lived and talked by his side, the
fancied image of her paled, vanished. The real creature was adorable,
but, for some reason, maddening, and not, at all events, the being of
his fancy. Their old relations--ethereal and exquisite, no doubt--now
seemed an empty mockery, self-deluding foolishness. He coloured at the
remembrance of all that Disraeli had hinted, and Reckage had brutally
declared, on the large topic of idealism in passion. A man, in spite of
all determinations to be uncomplaining, knows the How much and How
little that he may demand, merely as a man, from any given advantage or
disadvantage in existence. Robert, hating himself, condemning himself,
was conscious, in spite of himself, that Brigit's affection for him was
not love in the full human sense of the word. He had exchanged an
ordinary self-restraint for an impossibly false position. She could
inspire his life, but could she enter into it, be it, live it with him
daily? Would there not have to be great reservations, half statements,
and, worst of all, a subtle kind of hypocrisy? He reproached himself for
selfishness, yet the fear came and it remained. He had captured the
rainbow and married the goddess. Were there not many legends
illustrating this folly?--stories of men who had married divinities and
perished, not because the divinities were at fault, but because mortals
must wed with mortals. The sight of his wife's beauty caused a sudden,
violent irritation. He wished she had none, for then, perhaps, he
thought he would have been satisfied, more than content, in the placid
consideration of her charms of character. He found himself reduced to
the absurd predicament of deciding to banish her from his thoughts--a
last sophism which showed him, all too clearly, how wretched he was.
Their silence, which had been due in the first instance to the
sufficient delight of being in each other's company, became that long
pause which arises from an unutterable embarrassment. Brigit felt by
instinct some change in Robert's mood, but as she could not account for
it then, her sympathy failed. The keen salt air filled her with its own
free buoyancy; her delicate skin flushed in the wind; she forgot the
nervous strain of the morning, the awfulness of the grey chapel, the new
state of things, griefs that were past, responsibilities that were to
come. She turned to Orange as a child would turn to its inseparable
comrade, and clapped her hands with amusement at an organ-grinder with a
monkey and a dog whom she noticed sitting at the end of the pier,
waiting, apparently, for one of the excursion steamers bound for the
Isle of Wight.
"Pennies for the monkey, Robert," she cried; "a lot of pennies! And then
we must have our lunch. May I have some chicken and one of those very
droll, very stupid, English rice puddings? Please let me have one....
And may I kiss the dog? It is a nice little dog--quite as nice as
Pensee's Fidelio. Now I am going to talk to the monkey."
She ran toward the little animal, who was shivering, pathetic and
grotesque, in a military cap and red petticoat trimmed with yellow
braid. The dog, which was a young pug with excellent points, gave
Brigit, after many entreaties, his paw. She addressed the monkey in
Italian, and laughed till she cried at its absurdities. Robert looked
on, consumed by a sensation which he recognised, with much shame, as
jealousy. He thought the pug dull and the monkey revolting. Yet she
kissed one, and showered heavenly smiles on both.
"I did not know that you were so fond of animals," he said, as they
walked to the hotel for lunch.
"I am not," she answered frankly, "as a rule. But when I am with you I
feel so happy that I want to kiss everything--the ground, and the
trees, and chairs, and poodle dogs, and the whole world!"
"Then why not--me?"
She looked at him, blushed a little, and waited some moments before she
replied.
"I don't know," she said at last. "It must be because I am not in the
habit of doing so. I am not accustomed to you yet. I keep thinking 'I
shall wake up in a minute and he will be miles away.' Can't you
understand? So I am pretending to myself all the time that you are not
really here."
"I see."
"No, dearest, you don't quite understand; and you are a little
disappointed in me because I seem--I must seem--rather flippant. I
daren't be serious--I daren't. I daren't believe that I am your wife."
"But why not?"
She shook her head, and her whole face became clouded by the old,
terrible, unnatural sadness which he knew so much better than her
laughter.
"I am not used to joy," she said. "Perhaps, if we ever get to Heaven,
our first impulse will be to run back again to Purgatory, where we are
more at home!"
"You have too much wit, darling, to be happy anywhere!"
"No! no! I don't ask to be conventionally happy, but I want you always.
That is all ... you, always, on any terms--on a rag-heap, in a storm,
with jackals howling at us!"
"What a picture!"
"My idea of unalloyed bliss, or, at least, the only one I have ever
permitted myself. I can even believe that might be realised." A smile
hovered again about her lips, but she looked steadily ahead, as though
she were still resolved not to reassure herself, by any too-frequent
glances, of his much-loved presence.
The peculiar tenderness of her voice was in itself a charm against
ill-humour. A rush of bitter self-reproach told Robert that his
dissatisfaction had been the inevitable result of too many blessings on
a base nature. He tried to speak; he watched instead, with a desperate,
eager gaze, the play of her expressive features.
"I wonder," she said, "what our life is to be? Not that I wish to pry
into the future, but, for some reason, I can never feel settled. Every
morning is a surprise. I think, too, about your character ... your