Robert Orange
"Large eyes, a small head, and the devil of a temper," said Bradwyn;
"and sympathies--there never was a young woman with so many sympathies!
There is an old proverb," he added, with a sneer, "'They are not all
friends of the bridegroom who seem to be following the bride.'"
Ullweather was still absorbed in his own meditation.
"Marshire," said he, "is the man for us. We might do something with
Marshire."
"Nevertheless," said Penborough, "I have my eye on Orange."
"I say," exclaimed Bradwyn, "be careful. Here is Reckage again. How the
dickens did he pass us?"
The men glanced up at a solitary figure which now appeared descending
the broad staircase. In silence, and with a studied expression of
contempt, without a look either to the right or to the left, the
unpopular leader passed through the hall and out into the street.
"A lonely beggar, after all," said Bradwyn.
CHAPTER IV
Reckage was dining at home that evening with Orange, whose marriage was
to take place at the Alberian Embassy on the morrow. The young man was
not in good spirits at his friend's step, for he himself was about to
take a wife also, and much of the apprehension which he felt on his own
account found its vent in dreary soliloquies on the risk, sacrifices,
responsibilities, and trouble involved by the single act of saddling
oneself for a lifetime with some one woman. Reckage, for his own part,
had loved one lady very well, yet not so madly that he could resign
himself to loving her only, to the exclusion of all others. He walked
along toward Almouth House in a mood of many vexations, cursing the
impudence of Bradwyn and Ullweather, wondering whether he had done
wisely, after all, in engaging himself to the blameless Miss Carillon,
sighing a little over a rumour which had reached him about Sara de
Treverell and the Duke of Marshire, deploring the obstinacy of Robert
Orange where Mrs. Parflete was concerned. He admitted that Mrs. Parflete
was an exceedingly beautiful, young, and, as it happened, rich person.
He owned her delightfulness for a man of Robert's dreamy, romantic,
intense temperament. But marriage between two idealists so highly
strung, and so passionately attached as these two beings were--what
would happen? No doubt they would be able to endure the inevitable
disillusions--(inevitable because Nature is before all things sensual
and has no care for mental prejudices one way or the other)--the
inevitable disillusions of family life. It was scarcely possible that
the devotion of Robert and Mrs. Parflete would not waver or seem less
exquisite under this discipline. Their dream of love would become
unparadised. It would gain a sadness, a melancholy, a note of despair
hard to endure and most difficult to repress. Reckage had no
transcendentalism in his own philosophy: he divided men into two
classes--those who read, and those who could not stand, Dante. He
included himself among the latter with a frankness at once astonishing
and welcome even to numbers who thought him, in most matters, a
hypocrite. The hold of the world was growing daily stronger upon him.
His ambitions were already sullied by many unworthy and deadening ideas.
He dwelt a great deal on the fleetingness of life, and the wisdom of
making the best of its few charming things. Food, and wine, and money,
and fine houses, and amusements were subjects on which he expended a
large amount of silent enthusiasm. But, for all this, he could still
see much to admire--perhaps to envy--in Robert's more spiritual mind,
and he dreaded--as men often do dread in such cases--the effect of a
woman's companionship on so ascetic a character.
"He knows nothing about women--nothing," he told himself. "He has no
experience. He takes them too seriously."
He was, while he admitted his own unreasonableness, a little shocked at
the very notion of Orange with a wife and children. It went against the
grain, and upset the ideals of austerity which he had carefully
planned--not for himself, but for his friend. Robert, he urged, was born
to be an example--an encouragement to those who were called, by the
mercy of God, to less rigorous vocations. Reckage suffered many scruples
of conscience on Robert's account; he surveyed him with a sense of
disappointment; he had always supposed that he would ultimately turn
Jesuit in sober earnest, and die a martyr's death in the Far East. This
would, in his opinion, have been a fine end to a Quixotic, very
touching, most remarkable life. Would he now immaturely fall a victim to
an enticing face and the cares of a household? Would he be able to
sustain his character? One thing was certain. He could never again
expect to exercise precisely the same potent influence as he had in the
past, over his earth-bound, self-indulgent friends. Self-indulgent
people always exacted unusual privations from those who would seek to
move them--and Robert's call was clearly to materialists rather than to
the righteous. Pusey married, it was true. Keble married. No one thought
the less of them on that account. Even the judicious Hooker married. And
they were clergymen. Reckage called them priests. But Newman did not
marry, and, while Reckage was unable to agree in the main with Newman's
views, he had a fixed notion that he was the strong man--the master
spirit--among them. And another consideration. The passion of love has a
danger for very sensitive, reserved, and concentrated minds unknown to
creatures of more volatile, expansive, and unreflecting disposition.
Reckage knew well that he was himself too selfish a man to let affection
for any one creature come between his soul and its God. There was no
self-discipline required in his case when a choice had to be made
between a human being and his own advantage--whether temporal or
eternal. He had never--since he was a youth--felt an immoderate fondness
for anybody; he had likes and dislikes, admirations and partialities,
jealousies, too, and well-defined tastes where feminine beauty was in
question, but it was not in him to err from excess of charity. The
imaginative and visionary parts of life--and no one is wholly without
them--soon turned into severe reality whenever he found himself
confronted with that sole absorbing interest--his career. Marriage, in
his own case, seemed an imperative duty. He was an eldest son, the heir
to an earldom and a vast estate; he wished to lead a distinguished,
comfortable, and edifying existence. His wife would be a helpmate, not a
snare; the mother of his children, not the light of his eyes. But what a
difference in Robert's case--with his capacity for worship, for really
intense and absorbing passion. All this was especially transparent to
Reckage, who, as a man of the world, had watched his friend for months,
detecting the shattering physical effects of an iron restraint imposed
on every thought, mood, and inclination. He had enjoyed the spectacle:
it was a good fight--this sharp, unceasing struggle between mere human
nature, young, vigorous, sane, indefatigable, and an upright soul full
of tenderness, yet forced to live in constant warfare. Awe, too, had
mingled in Reckage's sensations while he looked on; something of pity
and terror stirred under the callous muscle which he called his heart at
the sight of a voiceless, stifled despair outside the range of his
personal experience, though not entirely beyond his sympathy. All men
did not love after this fashion, he knew, but humanity was full of
surprises, and he had been too calm a student of other men's lives to
feel astonishment at any fresh revelation either of their pain, their
perversity, or their humours. He had felt so sure, however, that Robert
would, in the end, get the better of that unhappy attachment; everything
in the process of time had to surrender to reason, and it was not
possible, he thought, that a strong, self-reliant man could long remain
subdued by a mere infatuation.
"And why doesn't he think of his health?" insisted Reckage; "it is
really going between all this sleeplessness, and fasting, and over-work.
Flesh and blood cannot bear the strain. He is never idle for one moment.
He is afraid of brooding."
It was with these sentiments of fear for the one creature he believed
in, and hostility toward the woman who had presumed to interfere with
the progress of that clear spirit, that he found himself at Almouth
House. The blinds of the dining-room were but partially down. He could
see the menservants within preparing the table which, set for two
covers, showed a pretty display of cut-glass, flowers, old silver, and
shining damask under the yellow rays of the lit candles. Some family
portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, a Holbein, and a Vandyck, with
lamps shining like footlights beneath them, were darkly visible on the
dull blue walls. The famous mantelpiece inlaid with uncut turquoise was
also within sight; and the sideboard with its load of Sevres china and
gold dishes. Reckage took great pride in these possessions, but it
shocked his sense of dignity to see them thus exposed to the vulgar
gaze.
He let himself into the mansion with a latchkey, stormed at the servants
for their carelessness, and made what is commonly known as a scene.
Then he crossed the hall, and went into another fine room, which led by
steps into a garden, and caught the sunset.
Here, standing by the window with his back to the door, looking at the
clouds, greyer than a gull's wing, which fled like driven souls across
the sky, stood Orange.
He turned as the latch moved, and Reckage, coming in, perceived the pale
face, resolute, a little proud, and thoroughly inscrutable of his former
secretary. Of fine height and broad-shouldered, Robert bore himself with
peculiar firmness and ease. His brown eyes, with their brilliant,
defiant glance, his close, dark beard, and powerful aquiline features;
the entire absence of vanity, or the desire to produce an impression
which showed itself in every line of his face and every movement of his
body, indicated a type of individual more likely to attract the
confidence of men than the sentimentality of women.
The two young men greeted each other pleasantly, but with a certain
reserve on each side.
"So you are here!" said Reckage, seating himself. "I am sorry to be
late. The fact is I caught sight of old Garrow and Sara de Treverell
driving together in the Park, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask 'em
to dine with us to-night. I raced after their brougham, but my brute of
a horse--Pluto: you know the beast--gave me such a lot of trouble that I
couldn't speak to them. How are you? You don't look very fit. Perhaps
you are glad that we are alone. But Sara is a nice girl, and full of
kindness. She's a good friend, too--just the friend for your wife. I
thought of that."
Robert resumed his post at the window, and studied the heavens. But if
he sought for any answer to the many impassioned questions which were
thronging his heart and mind at that moment, he looked in vain. For
himself the struggles of the last year had been to a great degree
subconscious. He had been like a sick man who, ignorant of the real
gravity of his condition, fights death daily without a thought of the
unequal strife, or the suspense of his physicians. He had abandoned
himself to study, immersed himself in work; he was neither morbid nor an
amorist; and while he felt a stinging misery for ever in his heart, he
bore it with manly reticence, without complaint, without despair. Love,
in his case, had meant the idealisation of the whole of life--the life
of action and the life within the soul. It had transfigured the world,
lit up and illumined every dark corner, answered every turbulent doubt.
From the habit of this wholly mental emotion, he had lost, little by