Robert Orange
encourage art without having any real enjoyment of it. Garrow is one of
those persons. But his daughter, Lady Sara, has a touch of genius. She's
a musician. You have heard her play, haven't you, Robert?"
"Yes."
Robert had, at that instant, observed upon the mantelpiece a letter
addressed to himself. It was from Brigit. He grew pale, and retired,
with the little envelope lightly written on, to a far corner of the
room. For some moments he could not break the seal. The sight of her
writing filled him with a kind of agony--something beyond his control,
beyond his comprehension. What did it mean--this tightening of the
heart, this touch of fear, and love, and fear again, so deep that the
whole web of life trembled and its strings grew confused one with
another, and all was anguish, darkness, self-renunciation, and a wild, a
dreadful mystery of human influence? At last he opened the letter.
"MY DEAREST," it began, "I can never say all that I wish to say,
because when I am with you I forget everything and watch your face.
When I am away from you I forget your face, and I long to see it
again in order that I may remember it more perfectly! It is so hard
not to think of you too often. But I have had a great deal of
sorrow, and everything I have in the world--except you--is a grief.
I know that we are not born to be happy, and so, I wonder, have we
stolen our happiness? If it is a gift--I know not what to do with
it. I cannot speak a happy language: the atmosphere is strange and
frightens me. Dear Robert, I am terrified, uncertain, but when we
meet to-morrow you will give me courage. And then, as we shall not
part again, I need never again be, as I am now, too anxious. Your
BRIGIT."
Reckage's voice broke in again.
"I do wish you would try this rum omelette. It is capital."
Orange laughed, but left the room. Rennes remarked that he had a
powerful face.
"Yes. He has a strong character. And he would never deceive another. But
he deceives himself hourly--daily."
"In what way?" asked Rennes.
"He doesn't know," said Reckage, "what a devilish fine chap he is! I
wish to God that I could prevent this marriage."
"Why?"
"I say nothing against Mrs. Parflete. She's a high-class woman and so
on. Awfully beautiful, too. As clever as they make 'em, and not a breath
against her. All the same, I am not very sweet on love matches for men
of Orange's calibre. They never answer--never."
"I don't agree with you there," replied the artist, "because I believe
that a love match--even when it dissolves, as it may, into a mistake--is
the best thing that can happen to any man."
After this they discussed bindings. Lord Reckage was the first amateur
authority on the subject.
CHAPTER VI
At five the next morning Robert was writing letters. Then, as soon as
the gates of Hyde Park were open, he walked out. The recurrence of
familiar sentiments on the essentials that make up the condition known
as happiness would neither convince, nor inspire, the powers of an
imagination which, with all its richness, was, apart from the purely
artistic faculty, analytical and foreboding. Self-doubt, however, has no
part in passion. Of the many miseries it may bring, this, perhaps the
worst of human woes, can never be in its train. Men in love--and women
also--may distrust all things and all creatures, but their own emotion,
like the storm, proves the reality of its force by the mischief it
wreaks. Robert's spirit, borne along by this vehemence of feeling,
caught the keen sweetness of the early air, not yet infected by the
day's traffic. His melancholy--the inevitable melancholy produced by
sustained thought on any subject, whether sublime or simple--was
dispelled. The Park, which was empty but for a few men on their way to
work, and runners anxious to keep in training, had its great trees
still beautiful from the lingering glance of summer; the wide and misty
stretches of grey grass were fresh in dew; the softness and
haze--without the gloom--of autumn were in the atmosphere. The pride of
love requited and the instincts of youth could not resist these spells
of nature. Robert remembered only that it was his wedding-day: that
every throb of his pulse and every second of time brought him nearer to
the supreme joy of his life and the supreme moment. He had never used
his nerves with bliss and tears, and he did not belong to the large army
of young gentlemen who own themselves proudly
"Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd....
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day."
This view of heroism was not possible to him, and he was too strong in
mind and body to pretend to it. The two things which affect a career
most profoundly are religion, or the lack of it, and marriage--or not
marrying; for these things only penetrate to the soul and make what may
be called its perpetual atmosphere. The Catholic Faith, which ignores no
single possibility in human feeling and no possible flight in human
idealism, produces in those who hold it truly a freshness of heart very
hard to be understood by the dispassionate critic who weighs character
by the newest laws of his favourite degenerate, but never by the
primeval tests of God. Robert, therefore, was thinking of his bride's
face, the pure curves of her mouth, her sapphirine eyes, her pretty
hands, her golden hair, the nose which others found fault with, which
he, nevertheless, thought wholly delightful. He wondered what she would
say and how she would look when they met. Would she be pale? Would she
be frightened? There had always been a certain agony in every former
meeting because of the farewell which had to follow. With all his habits
of self-control, he had never been able to feel quite sure that the word
too much would not be said, that the glance too long would not be given.
Her own simplicity, he told himself, had saved him from disaster. She
showed her affection so fearlessly--with such tender and discerning
trust--that his worst struggles were in solitude--not in her presence at
all. It was when he was away from her immediate peaceful influence that
the fever, the restlessness, the torments and the desperation (has not
old Burton summed up for us the whole situation and all the symptoms in
his "_Anatomy_"?) had to be endured and conquered. These trials now--for
even a sense of humour could not make them less than trials--were ended.
The tragi-comic labour of walking too much and riding too much, working
and smoking too much, thinking and sleeping too little--the whole dreary
business, in fact, of stifling any absorbing idea or ruling passion,
would be no more.
When he returned to Almouth House, Reckage was already dressed for his
official duties as "best man." He felt an unwonted and genuine
excitement about Robert's marriage. He put aside the languor, _ennui_,
and depression which he felt too easily on most occasions, and, that day
at least, he was, as his own servant expressed it, "nervous and cut-up."
"I shall miss the swimming, the boxing, the fencing, and the pistol
practice," he complained, referring to diversions in which Orange was an
expert and himself the bored but dutiful participant. "They nearly
always drop these things when they marry." The loss he really feared was
the moral support and affection of his former secretary--advantages
which a selfish nature is slow to appreciate, yet most tenacious of when
once convinced of their use. The nuptial mass had been fixed for eight
o'clock, the wedding party were to breakfast at Almouth House
afterwards, then the bride and groom were to leave by the mail for
Southampton _en route_ for Miraflores in Northern France. The two young
men drove together to the chapel attached to the Alberian Embassy. Not a
word passed between them, but Reckage, under his eyelids, examined every
detail of his friend's attire. He wondered at its satisfactoriness on
the whole, inasmuch as Orange had not seen fit to consult him on the
point. The church was small and grey and sombre; the flowers on the
altar (sent by his lordship) were all white; their perfume filled the
building.
"They look very nice," said Reckage, "and in excellent taste. Some of
these old pictures on the wall are uncommonly good, and I particularly
like that bronze crucifix. Ten to one if it isn't genuine eleventh
century. I will ask the old fellow afterwards. He's a dear. His Latin is
lovely. It's an artistic pleasure to hear him read the Gospel. I looked
in the other morning, just to get the run, as it were, of the place. By
Jove! Here they are."
Pensee Fitz Rewes came first--very graceful in lavender silk, and
accompanied by her little boy, who showed by an unconscious anxiety of
expression that he felt instinctively his mother's air of contentment
was assumed. Then Baron Zeuill, with Brigit on his arm, followed. The
Baron looked grave--too grave for the happy circumstances. Brigit seemed
as pale as the lilies on the altar; she was less beautiful but more
ethereal than usual. There was something frail, transparent,
unsubstantial about her that day which Robert had never noticed before.
Had the many emotional strains of the last year tried her delicate youth
beyond endurance? She seemed very childish, too, and immature. She took
Orange's hand when he met her, held it closely, and watched the others
with a kind of wonder most pitiful to witness--as though she had
suffered too much from her contact with life and could no more. Her eyes
seemed darker than the sapphires to which Robert had so often compared
them: this effect, he told himself, was due to the strong contrast given
by the pallor of her face. It was quite clear, however, that she was
not under the influence then of any dominant thought. Her nerves and
senses were strained to that extreme tension resembling apathy, until
the vibration given by some touch or tone sets the whole system
trembling with all the spiritual and bodily forces which make the
mystery of human life. She spoke her responses, signed the register, and
walked out from the church on Robert's arm without a single change of
countenance or token of feeling. As they drove away from the church, she
flushed a little and drew far back, with a new timidity, into her
corner. One look she gave of perfect love and confidence. She pressed
his hand and held it, for a moment, against her cheek. But neither of
them spoke. And indeed, what was there to be said? The identification of
their two minds had been full and absolute from the moment of their
first encounter long ago in Chambord. The accidental differences of sex
and age, training, accomplishments, and education had not affected--and
could not affect--a sympathy in temperament which depended--not on the
similarity of opinions--but on a similarity of moral fibre. Many forms
can be cut, by the same hand, from the same piece of marble, and
although one may be a grotesque and the other a cross, one a pursuing
goddess and the other an angel for a tomb, the same substance, light,
touch, and colour will be characteristic of all four. Marriage, at best,
could but give a certain crude emphasis to the strange spiritual bond
which united these two beings. Practical as they both were in the common
affairs of life, they shrank from anything which would promise to
materialise the subtleties of the mind. Some thoughts, they felt, were
as impalpable as sounds, and, just as music ceases to be divine when it
is poured out of some mechanical contrivance, so the mysteries of the
human soul become mere bodily conditions--more or less humiliating--when
demonstrated, catalogued, and legalised. There is nothing modern nor