Lady Connie Part 21

"Mrs. Maddison, will you come with us? I think that will about trim us."

Mrs. Maddison obeyed him with alacrity, and the first boat pushed off.

Mrs. Hooper, Alice, Sorell, two St. Cyprian undergraduates and Nora's girl friend, Miss Watson, followed in the second.

Then, while the June evening broadened and declined, the party wound in and out of the curves of the Cherwell. The silver river, br.i.m.m.i.n.g from a recent flood, lay sleepily like a gorged serpent between the hay meadows on either side. Flowers of the edge, meadow-sweet, ragged-robin and yellow flags, dipped into the water; willows spread their thin green over the embattled white and blue of the sky; here and there a rat plunged or a bird fled shrieking; bushes of wild roses flung out their branches, and everywhere the heat and the odours of a rich open land proclaimed the fulness of the midland summer.

Connie made the life of the leading boat. Something had roused her, and she began to reveal some of the "parlour-tricks," with which she had amused the Palazzo Barberini in her Roman days. A question from Pryce stirred her into quoting some of the folk-songs of the Campagna, some comic, some tragic, fitting an action to them so lively and true that even those of her hearers who could not follow the dialect sat entranced. Then some one said--"But they ought to be sung!" And suddenly, though rather shyly, she broke into a popular _canzone_ of the Garibaldian time, describing the day of Villa Gloria; the march of the morning, the wild hopes, the fanfaronade; and in the evening, a girl hiding a wounded lover and weeping both for him and "Italia" undone.

The sweet low sounds floated along the river.

"Delicious!" said Sorell, holding his oar suspended to listen. He remembered the song perfectly. He had heard her sing it in many places--Rome, Naples, Syracuse. It was a great favourite with her mother, for whom the national upheaval of Italy--the heroic struggle of the Risorgimento--had been a life-long pa.s.sion.

"Why did Connie never tell us she could sing!" said Mrs. Hooper in her thin peevish voice. "Girls really shouldn't hide their accomplishments."

Sorell's oar dropped into the water with a splash.

At Marston Ferry, there was a general disembarking, a ramble along the river bank and tea under a group of elms beside a broad reach of the stream. Sorell noticed, that in spite of the regrouping of the two boat loads, as they mingled in the walk, Herbert Pryce never left Connie's side. And it seemed to him, and to others, that she was determined to keep him there. He must gather yellow flag and pink willow-herb for her, must hook a water-lily within reach of the bank with her parasol, must explain to her about English farms, and landlords, and why the labourers were discontented--why there were no peasant owners, as in Italy--and so on, and so on. Round-faced Mrs. Maddison, who had never seen the Hoopers' niece before, watched her with amus.e.m.e.nt, deciding that, distinguished and refined as the girl was, she was bent on admiration, and not too critical as to whence it came. The good-natured, curly-haired Meyrick, who was discontentedly reduced to helping Alice and Nora with the tea, and had never been so bored with a river picnic before, consoled himself by storing up rich materials for a "chaff" of Douglas when they next met--perhaps that evening, after hall? Alice meanwhile laughed and talked with the freshman whom Meyrick had brought with him from Marmion. Her silence and pallor had gone; she showed a kind of determined vivacity. Sorell, with his strange gift of sympathy, found himself admiring her "pluck."

When the party returned to the boat-house in the evening, Sorell, whose boat had arrived first at the landing-stage, helped Constance to land.

Pryce, much against his will, was annexed by Nora to help her return the boats to the Isis; the undergraduates who had brought them being due at various engagements in Oxford. Sorell carried Constance off. He thought that he had never seen her look more radiant. She was flushed with success and praise, and the gold of the river sunset glorified her as she walked. Behind them, dim figures in the twilight, followed Mrs.

Hooper and Alice, with the two other ladies, their cavaliers having deserted them.

"I am so glad you like Mr. Pryce," said Sorell suddenly.

Constance looked at him in astonishment.

"But why? I don't like him very much!"

"Really? I was glad because I suppose--doesn't everybody suppose?"--he looked at her smiling--"that there'll be some news in that quarter presently?"

Constance was silent a moment. At last, she said--

"You mean--he'll propose to Alice?"

"Isn't that what's expected?" He too had reddened. He was a shy man, and he was suddenly conscious that he had done a marked thing.

Another silence. Then Constance faced him, her face now more than flushed--aflame.

"I see. You think I have been behaving badly?"

He stammered.

"I didn't know perhaps--whether--you have been such a little while here--whether you had come across the Oxford gossip. I wish sometimes--you know I'm an old friend of your uncle--that it could be settled. Little Miss Alice has begun to look very worn."

Constance walked on, her eyes on the ground. He could see the soft lace on her breast fluttering. What foolish quixotry--what jealousy for an ideal--had made him run this hideous risk of offending her? He held his breath till she should look at him again. When she did, the beauty of the look abashed him.

"Thank you!" she said quietly. "Thank you very much. Alice annoyed me--she doesn't like me, you see--and I took a mean revenge. Well, now you understand--how I miss mamma!"

She held out her hand to him impulsively, and he enclosed it warmly in his; asking her, rather incoherently, to forgive his impertinence. Was it to be Ella Risborough's legacy to him--this futile yearning to help--to watch over--her orphaned child?

Much good the legacy would do him, when Connie's own will was really engaged! He happened to know that Douglas Falloden was already in Oxford again, and in a few more days Greats would be over, and the young man's energies released. What possible justification had he, Sorell, for any sort of interference in this quarter? It seemed to him, indeed, as to many others, that the young man showed every sign of a selfish and violent character. What then? Are rich and handsome husbands so plentiful? Have the moralists ever had their way with youth and s.e.x in their first turbulent hour?

CHAPTER VIII

This little scene with Sorell, described in the last chapter, was of great importance to Connie's after history. It had placed her suddenly on a footing of intimacy with a man of poetic and lofty character, and had transformed her old childish relation to him--which had alone made the scene possible--into something entirely different. It produced a singular effect upon her that such a man should care enough what befell her to dare to say what he had said to her. It had been--she admitted it--a lesson in scrupulousness, in high delicacy of feeling, in magnanimity. "You are trifling with what may be the life of another--just to amuse yourself--or to pay off a moment's offence. Only the stupid or cruel souls do such things--or think lightly of them. But not you--your mother's daughter!"

That had been the meaning of his sudden incursion. The more Connie thought of it, the more it thrilled her. It was both her charm and her weakness, at this moment, that she was so plastic, so responsive both for good and evil. She said to herself that she was fortunate to have such a friend; and she was conscious of a new and eager wish to win his praise, or to avoid his blame.

At the same time it did not occur to her to tell him anything of her escapade with Douglas Falloden. But the more closely she kept this to herself, the more eager she was to appease her conscience and satisfy Sorell, in the matter of Alice and Herbert Pryce. Her instinct showed her what to do, and Sorell watched her struggling with the results of her evening's flirtation with much secret amus.e.m.e.nt and applause.

Herbert Pryce having been whistled on, had to be whistled off, and Alice had to be gently and gradually rea.s.sured; yet without any obvious penitence on Connie's part, which would only have inflicted additional wounds on Alice's sore spirit.

And Connie did it, broadly speaking, during the week of Falloden's schools. Sorell himself was busy every day and all day as one of the Greats examiners. He scarcely saw her for more than two half-hours during a hideously strenuous week, through which he sat immersed in the logic and philosophy papers of the disappearing generation of Honour men. Among the papers of the twenty or thirty men who were the certain Firsts of the year, he could not help paying a special attention to Douglas Falloden's. What a hard and glittering mind the fellow had!--extraordinarily competent and well-trained; extraordinarily lacking, as it seemed to Sorell, in width or pliancy, or humanity. One of the ablest essays sent in, however, was a paper by Falloden on the "Sentimentalisms of Democracy"--in which a reasoned and fierce contempt for the popular voice, and a brilliant glorification of war and of a military aristocracy, made very lively reading.

On the later occasion, when Sorell and Constance met during the week, he found Radowitz in the Hoopers' drawing-room. Sorell had gone in after dinner to consult with Ewen Hooper, one of his fellow examiners, over some doubtful papers, and their business done, the two men allowed themselves an interval of talk and music with the ladies before beginning work again till the small hours.

Constance, in diaphanous black, was at the piano, trying to recall, for Radowitz's benefit, some of the Italian folk-songs that had delighted the river-party. The room was full of a soft mingled light from the still uncurtained windows and the lamp which had been just brought in.

It seemed to be specially concentrated on the hair, "golden like ripe corn," of the young musician, and on Connie's white neck and arms.

Radowitz lay back in a low chair gazing at her with all his eyes.

On the further side of the room Nora was reading, Mrs. Hooper was busy with the newspaper, and Alice and Herbert Pryce were talking with the air of people who are, rather uncomfortably, making up a quarrel.

Sorell spent his half-hour mostly in conversation with Mrs. Hooper and Nora, while his inner mind wondered about the others. He stood with his back to the mantelpiece, his handsome pensive face, with its intensely human eyes, bent towards Nora, who was pouring out to him some grievances of the "home-students," to which he was courteously giving a jaded man's attention.

When he left the room Radowitz broke out--

"Isn't he like a G.o.d?"

Connie opened astonished eyes.

"Who?"

"My tutor--Mr. Sorell. Ah, you didn't notice--but you should. He is like the Hermes--only grown older, and with a soul. But there is no Greek sculptor who could have done him justice. It would have wanted a Praxiteles; but with the mind of Euripides!"

The boy's pa.s.sionate enthusiasm pleased her. But she could think of nothing less conventional in reply than to ask if Sorell were popular in college.

"Oh, they like him well enough. They know what trouble he takes for them, and there's n.o.body dares cheek him. But they don't understand him.

He's too shy. Wasn't it good fortune for me that he happens to be my friend?"

And he began to talk at headlong speed, and with considerable eloquence, of Sorell's virtues and accomplishments. Constance, who had been brought up in a southern country, liked the eloquence. Something in her was already tired of the slangy brevities that do duty in England for conversation. At the same time she thought she understood why Falloden, and Meyrick, and others called the youth a _poseur_, and angrily wished to snub him. He possessed besides, in-bred, all the foreign aids to the mere voice--gesticulation of hands and head, movements that to the Englishman are unexpected and therefore disagreeable. Also there, undeniably, was the frilled dress-shirt, and the two diamond studs, much larger and more conspicuous than Oxford taste allowed, which added to its criminality. And it was easy to see too that the youth was inordinately proud of his Polish ancestry, and inclined to rate all Englishmen as _parvenus_ and shopkeepers.

"Was it in Paris you first made friends with Mr. Sorell?" Connie asked him.

Radowitz nodded.

"I was nineteen. My uncle had just died. I had n.o.body. You understand, my father was exiled twenty years ago. We belong to German Poland; though there has always been a branch of the family in Cracow. For more than a hundred years these vile Germans have been crushing and tormenting us. They have taken our land, they have tried to kill our language and our religion. But they can not. Our soul lives. Poland lives. And some day there will be a great war--and then Poland will rise again. From the East and the West and the South they will come--and the body that was hewn asunder will be young and glorious again." His blue eyes shone. "Some day, I will play you that in music. Chopin is full of it--the death of Poland--and then her soul, her songs, her hopes, her rising again. Ah, but Sorell!--I will explain. I saw him one night at a house of kind people--the master of it was the Directeur of the Ecole des Sciences Politiques--and his wife. She was so beautiful, though she was not young; and gentle, like a child; and so good. I was nothing to them--but I went to some lectures at the school, while I was still at the Conservatoire, and I used to go and play to them sometimes. So when my uncle died, they said, 'Come and stay with us.' I had really n.o.body.