Robert Orange
at St. James's Hall, and I am sure it will be most interesting. More I
cannot tell you, because they have gone no further in their plans."
But misfortune had entered the room, and that wayfarer--once
admitted--asserts her ill-will without let or hindrance. Agnes, barely
touching her tea, rose to say goodbye. Lord Garrow and Reckage escorted
her to the hall. They helped her into a carriage (lent her for that
afternoon by the Duchess of Pevensey), and she drove away, trembling,
tearful, afraid, not reminding her _fiance_ that they were to meet at
dinner in the evening. He walked homeward, but not until he had decided,
after much hesitation, that he could scarcely go back again to Lady
Sara. His thoughts were fixed now to one refrain--"I must have my
freedom." Freedom, at that moment, had a mocking, lovely face, the
darkest blue eyes, and quantities of long, black hair. She wore a violet
dress, her hands were white, and she talked like a Blue Book set to
music by Beethoven. Yes, he must have his freedom and live.
Sara and Orange, meanwhile, left alone in the drawing-room, were
exchanging interrogatory glances, "What do you think now?" she asked;
"do you pretend to believe that Agnes and Beauclerk can make each other
even moderately contented?"
"Then you are to blame."
A flush swept over her face. She looked bitter reproaches, but she made
no answer.
"And why are you so interested in Anglican Orders?" he continued. "How
is it that you know your subject so well? For you do know it well."
"Catholic questions always appeal to me," she said coldly. "I have no
religion, but I come from a race of politicians and soldiers--on my
mother's side. I must have an intellectual _pied a terre_, and I require
a good cause. Party politics are too parochial for me. So I am on the
side of the Vatican."
"_La reine s'amuse_," said Robert. "Is that all?"
"Yes, that's all."
She turned over the music on her writing-table and hummed some bars from
the Kyrie of Mozart's Twelfth Mass.
"If you were a Jesuit," said she, "you would try to convert me."
"St. Ignatius never wasted time over insincere women."
"I am not insincere," she said frankly. "I own I may seem so. But you
are not kind, and some day you may be sorry for this."
Her eyes filled with tears--which he noticed and attributed to fatigue.
"I wonder how men ever accomplish anything!" she exclaimed.
"Why?"
"They have no insight. They mistake self-control for coldness, and
despair for flippancy. Isn't that the case?"
"One can be light and true as well as light and false. Now you are
witty, beautiful, brilliant--but you don't always ring true."
She seemed confused for a minute, and hung her head.
"All the same," she said, suddenly, "I am always sincere with you. It is
not in my power to be so with every one. 'Fate overrules my will.'"
"That is the trouble with most of us."
Then he wished her goodbye, promising, however, to call again with
regard to the Meeting. Lord Garrow met him on the staircase.
"I congratulate you on your election to Brookes's," stammered his
lordship, "but for Heaven's sake be cautious at play. Really, the
younger men there are trying to revive the worst traditions in gaming.
The loo was rather high at Chetwynd's last night," he added, with a
studied air of guilt. "I won L500 from my host. I call that the
limit--even on old Cabinet Steinberg!"
He smiled, he waved his hand, feeling that he had displayed great taste
in a situation of enormous difficulty. Something unusual, too, in the
young man's face touched his heart. It seemed to him that here was one
who had felt the world's buffets.
"I have never been just in my estimate of Mr. Orange," said he to Sara,
as he re-entered the drawing-room. "I quite took to him to-day. He has a
fine countenance, and I am sure he is very much cut up by this painful
affair. It's a pity he's a Catholic, for he would make such an excellent
canon for St. Paul's. He would _look_ the part so well."
"'Happiness, that nymph with unreturning feet,' has passed him by," said
Sara, watching herself in one of the mirrors.
"She has passed a good many," sighed his lordship. "But play me that
lovely air which Titiens sings in _Il Flauto Magico_."
CHAPTER XVI
Agnes was too ill to appear at the Duchess of Pevensey's dinner that
evening. Lord Reckage's melancholy, absent air during the entertainment,
and his early withdrawal from the distinguished party, were referred,
with sympathy, to the very proper distress he felt at Miss Carillon's
tiresome indisposition. The time passed well enough for him--far better,
in fact, than he had expected, for he was relieved from the strain of
"dancing attendance" on his betrothed--a thing which he, even more than
most men, found silly. In the chivalrous days of tournaments,
troubadours and crusades this romantic exercise of seeming enslaved was,
he held, justifiable, even interesting. But in modern life it had an
appearance of over-emphasis.
Poor Agnes, however, could neither eat, nor sleep, nor rest. Her temples
throbbed, her eyes ached; every nerve was a barbed wire; her soul was
manacled by promises; she would not use her reason; the fever in her
veins was not to be quelled, and the one agitating relief to her
physical suffering was a constant perusal of David Rennes's letter. It
was the first passionate love-letter she had ever received. Just as a
river may stream peacefully through pastoral lands till it joins the sea
and becomes one with that vast element of unrest, so the little flame of
her girl's nature was absorbed at last into the great fire underlying
all humanity. Was she in love? she asked herself. When she was with
Rennes she became silent, incapable of conversation, of thought. All she
asked was to be near him, to watch him, to hear him.
Was this love? Was it love to press his letter to her heart, to read it
again and again, to keep it under her pillow at night? Was it love to
think of him every moment of the day, to compare all others to him and
find them wanting, to see his face always before her eyes? Was it love
to know that if he called her, as he called her now, she would leave
home, father, mother, friends, all things, all people, and follow him to
the world's end, to the beginning of hell, or--further? At
one-and-twenty such questions need no answer. They belong to the
innocent rhetoric of youth which will cry out to June, "Are you fair?"
and to the autumnal moon in mist, "Must there be rain?" Neither June nor
the moon make reply, but youth has no doubts. The girl, weeping tears of
joy over Rennes's perilous words, had but one clear regret in her
mind--she could not see him for some hours. His declaration dispelled
the terrible bitterness, scepticism, and indifference to all sentiment
which had gradually permeated, during their acquaintance, her whole
heart. Repulsed affection may turn to hatred in haughty, impatient
souls. But in Agnes it produced a moral languor--a mental indolence--the
feeling that no one was in earnest, and nothing ought to matter. The
more this feeling deepened, the more attentively did she observe the
mere outward etiquette of all that passes for seriousness, attending
scrupulously to the minor obligations of existence and exhausting her
courage in those petty matters which die with the day and yield no
apparent fruit. How different now seemed the colourless, harsh fabric
which she had mistaken for duty and wrapped--as a shroud--about her
secret hopes! She had held every aspiration implying happiness as a
"proverb of reproach"; she had endeavoured to believe that all
poetry--except hymns--was false prophecy leading one to hard
entanglements and grievous falls.
And what had been the impoverishment of her soul under this grim
discipline? How could she tell the many thoughts which had travelled
unquestioned over the highway of her heart during that process of
disillusion? But all was changed now, and all that had been difficult,
painful or obscure in the world seemed perfect with the inexhaustible
glory of young passion. Rennes begged her to see him once more before he
left England for some years. Would she meet him in Kensington Gardens?
She had often walked there, under the old trees, with himself and Mrs.
Rennes, and the place had become very dear, very familiar to her from
these associations. At any other time, however, the idea of a
clandestine meeting with David would have been intolerable. To go now
was misery, yet she dared not stay away. The sunny morning mixed with
her mood, which was one of determination to risk all in order to win
all. Driven by a sense of her capabilities for endurance, she faced,
with a kind of exultation, the possible disaster or remorse which might
follow her action. Was there not a possible joy also? For ten days now
she had been ill in body as well as mind; she had suffered a hard
struggle. She knew now that she could not, could not, could not, no
matter what happened, become the wife of Lord Reckage. The result of
great self-delusion for so long a period was a condition of mind in
which she was practically unable to distinguish between candour and
disingenuousness. Any appearance of deceit--which she regarded as wrong
in itself--always excited her scorn, but desperation now urged a step
which might lead, she thought, to much good or much evil. That it could
lead to more evil than a loveless marriage was not, however, to be
feared. She started from the house with feverish cheeks, a beating
pulse, and a new strange consciousness of power--power over herself, her
fate, the world.
Rennes was waiting for her under the long avenue of trees by the
Lancaster Gate walk. She had a tall, stately figure of that type
immortalised by Du Maurier--indeed, she herself may be recognised in
some of his famous society sketches about the year 1870. The clear,
decisive features, the tender discerning expression, the poise of the
head, were irresistibly attractive to all artists with a strong sense of
grace--even artificial grace--as opposed to rude vigour or homeliness.
She possessed naturally that almost unreal elegance which many
painters--Frederick Walker, for instance--have been accused of
inventing.
"This is very wrong of me," she said, blushing as Rennes advanced, hat
in hand, to meet her, "very wrong. I never do these things."
"I said in my letter--right or wrong it matters not--what I thought.
This is a thing which runs up into eternity, Agnes. It had to be. We
needn't try to justify it."
"I cannot--I dare not regard it as you do."
"But you have come! Let me look at you!"
"Does it require much looking to see that I am really unhappy?"
"I see that you are beautiful, that you are here--with me. Ah, don't be
unhappy! When we take into account our scanty time together"--he grew
pale at the thought--"and the danger we have just missed of losing each
other, perhaps for ever----" She caught his hand for a second and he
kept it.
"What is to be done?" she asked, after an agitated silence. "What will
people say? Not that I can think of _anything_ to do."
"Darling, I know I have asked you to make an impossible sacrifice--to
break off a most brilliant marriage, to marry me and share the despair,
hardships, tortures of a life very different to any you have seen. Well
has Goethe said--
_'Love not the sun too much, nor yet the stars,
Come, follow me to the realms of night.'_
This is what I offer you, dearest. You can hardly realise what a
wretched, desolate existence mine has been. Resignation is a miserable
refuge. They say work gives one contentment, but unless one is servile
and gives in to the spirit of the age, it is rarely understood till one
is dead. And so the discouragement is perpetual. Even your sympathy