Lord Kilgobbin Part 87

'He has many rare gifts, my lord,' said Walpole, with the sly air of one who had said a covert impertinence. 'I am very curious to know what you mean to do with him.'

'Mean to do with him? Why, what should I mean to do with him?'

'The very point I wish to learn. A protege, my lord, is a parasitic plant, and you cannot deprive it of its double instincts--to cling and to climb.'

'How witty my cousin has become since his sojourn in Ireland,' said Maude.

Walpole flushed deeply, and for a moment he seemed about to reply angrily; but, with an effort, he controlled himself, and turning towards the timepiece on the chimney, said, 'How late! I could not have believed it was past one! I hope, my lord, I have made your despatch intelligible?'

'Yes, yes; I think so. Besides, he will be here in a day or two to explain.'

'I shall, then, say good-night, my lord. Good-night, Cousin Maude.' But Lady Maude had already left the room unnoticed.

CHAPTER LXVII

WALPOLE ALONE

Once more in his own room, Walpole returned to the task of that letter to Nina Kostalergi, of which he had made nigh fifty drafts, and not one with which he was satisfied.

It was not really very easy to do what he wished. He desired to seem a warm, rapturous, impulsive lover, who had no thought in life--no other hope or ambition--than the success of his suit. He sought to show that she had so enraptured and enthralled him that, until she consented to share his fortunes, he was a man utterly lost to life and life's ambitions; and while insinuating what a tremendous responsibility she would take on herself if she should venture by a refusal of him to rob the world of those abilities that the age could ill spare, he also dimly shadowed the natural pride a woman ought to feel in knowing that she was asked to be the partner of such a man, and that one, for whom destiny in all likelihood reserved the highest rewards of public life, was then, with the full consciousness of what he was, and what awaited him, ready to share that proud eminence with her, as a prince might have offered to share his throne.

In spite of himself, in spite of all he could do, it was on this latter part of his letter his pen ran most freely. He could condense his raptures, he could control in most praiseworthy fashion all the extravagances of pa.s.sion and the imaginative joys of love, but, for the life of him, he could abate nothing of the triumphant ecstasy that must be the feeling of the woman who had won him--the pa.s.sionate delight of her who should be his wife, and enter life the chosen one of his affection.

It was wonderful how glibly he could insist on this to himself; and fancying for the moment that he was one of the outer world commenting on the match, say, 'Yes, let people decry the Walpole cla.s.s how they might--they are elegant, they are exclusive, they are fastidious, they are all that you like to call the spoiled children of Fortune in their wit, their brilliancy, and their readiness, but they are the only men, the only men in the world, who marry--we'll not say for "love," for the phrase is vulgar--but who marry to please themselves! This girl had not a shilling.

As to family, all is said when we say she was a Greek! Is there not something downright chivalrous in marrying such a woman? Is it the act of a worldly man?'

He walked the room, uttering this question to himself over and over.

Not exactly that he thought disparagingly of worldliness and material advantages, but he had lashed himself into a false enthusiasm as to qualities which he thought had some special worshippers of their own, and whose good opinion might possibly be turned to profit somehow and somewhere, if he only knew how and where. It was a monstrous fine thing he was about to do; that he felt. Where was there another man in his position would take a portionless girl and make her his wife? Cadets and cornets in light-dragoon regiments did these things: they liked their 'bit of beauty'; and there was a sort of mock-poetry about these creatures that suited that sort of thing; but for a man who wrote his letters from Brookes's, and whose dinner invitations included all that was great in town, to stoop to such an alliance was as bold a defiance as one could throw at a world of self-seeking and conventionality.

'That Emperor of the French did it,' cried he. 'I cannot recall to my mind another. He did the very same thing I am going to do. To be sure, he had the "pull on me" in one point. As he said himself, "_I_ am a parvenu." Now, _I_ cannot go that far! I must justify my act on other grounds, as I hope I can do,' cried he, after a pause; while, with head erect and swelling chest, he went on: 'I felt within me the place I yet should occupy. I knew--ay, knew--the prize that awaited me, and I asked myself, "Do you see in any capital of Europe one woman with whom you would like to share this fortune? Is there one sufficiently gifted and graceful to make her elevation seem a natural and fitting promotion, and herself appear the appropriate occupant of the station?"

'She is wonderfully beautiful: there is no doubt of it. Such beauty as they have never seen here in their lives! Fanciful extravagances in dress, and atrocious hair-dressing, cannot disfigure her; and by Jove! she has tried both. And one has only to imagine that woman dressed and "coiffeed," as she might be, to conceive such a triumph as London has not witnessed for the century! And I do long for such a triumph. If my lord would only invite us here, were it but for a week! We should be asked to Goreham and the Bexsmiths'. My lady never omits to invite a great beauty. It's _her_ way to protest that she is still handsome, and not at all jealous. How are we to get "asked" to Bruton Street?' asked he over and over, as though the sounds must secure the answer. 'Maude will never permit it. The unlucky picture has settled _that_ point. Maude will not suffer her to cross the threshold!

But for the portrait I could bespeak my cousin's favour and indulgence for a somewhat countrified young girl, dowdy and awkward. I could plead for her good looks in that _ad misericordiam_ fashion that disarms jealousy and enlists her generosity for a humble connection she need never see more of!

If I could only persuade Maude that I had done an indiscretion, and that I knew it, I should be sure of her friendship. Once make her believe that I have gone clean head over heels into a _mesalliance_, and our honeymoon here is a.s.sured. I wish I had not tormented her about Atlee. I wish with all my heart I had kept my impertinences to myself, and gone no further than certain dark hints about what I could say, if I were to be evil-minded. What rare wisdom it is not to fire away one's last cartridge.

I suppose it is too late now. She'll not forgive me that disparagement before my uncle; that is, if there be anything between herself and Atlee, a point which a few minutes will settle when I see them together. It would not be very difficult to make Atlee regard me as his friend, and as one ready to aid him in this same ambition. Of course he is prepared to see in me the enemy of all his plans. What would he not give, or say, or do, to find me his aider and abettor? Shrewd tactician as the fellow is, he will know all the value of having an accomplice within the fortress; and it would be exactly from a man like myself he might be disposed to expect the most resolute opposition.'

He thought for a long time over this. He turned it over and over in his mind, canva.s.sing all the various benefits any line of action might promise, and starting every doubt or objection he could imagine. Nor was the thought extraneous to his calculations that in forwarding Atlee's suit to Maude he was exacting the heaviest 'vendetta' for her refusal of himself.

'There is not a woman in Europe,' he exclaimed, 'less fitted to encounter small means and a small station--to live a life of petty economies, and be the daily a.s.sociate of a sn.o.b!'

'What the fellow may become at the end of the race--what place he may win after years of toil and jobbery, I neither know nor care! _She_ will be an old woman by that time, and will have had s.p.a.ce enough in the interval to mourn over her rejection of me. I shall be a Minister, not impossibly at some court of the Continent; Atlee, to say the best, an Under-Secretary of State for something, or a Poor-Law or Education Chief. There will be just enough of disparity in our stations to fill her woman's heart with bitterness--the bitterness of having backed the wrong man!

'The unavailing regrets that beset us for not having taken the left-hand road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of torture--would seem actually to revel in it.'

He turned once more to his desk, and to the letter. Somehow he could make nothing of it. All the dangers that he desired to avoid so cramped his ingenuity that he could say little beyond plat.i.tudes; and he thought with terror of her who was to read them. The scornful contempt with which _she_ would treat such a letter was all before him, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the paper and tore it in pieces.

'It must not be done by writing,' cried he at last. 'Who is to guess for which of the fifty moods of such a woman a man's letter is to be composed?

What you could say _now_ you dared not have written half an hour ago. What would have gone far to gain her love yesterday, to-day will show you the door! It is only by consummate address and skill she can be approached at all, and without her look and bearing, the inflections of her voice, her gestures, her "pose," to guide you, it would be utter rashness to risk her humour.'

He suddenly bethought him at this moment that he had many things to do in Ireland ere he left England. He had tradesmen's bills to settle, and 'traps' to be got rid of. 'Traps' included furniture, and books, and horses, and horse-gear: details which at first he had hoped his friend Lockwood would have taken off his hands; but Lockwood had only written him word that a Jew broker from Liverpool would give him forty pounds for his house effects, and as for 'the screws,' there was nothing but an auction.

Most of us have known at some period or other of our lives what it is to suffer from the painful disparagement our chattels undergo when they become objects of sale; but no adverse criticism of your bed or your bookcase, your ottoman or your arm-chair, can approach the sense of pain inflicted by the impertinent comments on your horse. Every imputed blemish is a distinct personality, and you reject the insinuated spavin, or the suggested splint, as imputations on your honour as a gentleman. In fact, you are pushed into the pleasant dilemma of either being ignorant as to the defects of your beast, or wilfully bent on an act of palpable dishonesty. When we remember that every confession a man makes of his unacquaintance with matters 'horsy' is, in English acceptance, a count in the indictment against his claim to be thought a gentleman, it is not surprising that there will be men more ready to hazard their characters than their connoisseurship.

'I'll go over myself to Ireland,' said he at last; 'and a week will do everything.'

CHAPTER LXVIII

THOUGHTS ON MARRIAGE

Lockwood was seated at his fireside in his quarters, the Upper Castle Yard, when Walpole burst in upon him unexpectedly. 'What! you here?' cried the major. 'Have _you_ the courage to face Ireland again?'

'I see nothing that should prevent my coming here. Ireland certainly cannot pretend to lay a grievance to my charge.'

'Maybe not. I don't understand these things. I only know what people say in the clubs and laugh over at dinner-tables.'

'I cannot affect to be very sensitive as to these Celtic criticisms, and I shall not ask you to recall them.'

'They say that Danesbury got kicked out, all for your blunders!'

'Do they?' said Walpole innocently.

'Yes; and they declare that if old Daney wasn't the most loyal fellow breathing, he'd have thrown you over, and owned that the whole mess was of your own brewing, and that he had nothing to do with it.'

'Do they, indeed, say that?'

'That's not half of it, for they have a story about a woman--some woman you met down at Kilgobbin--who made you sing rebel songs and take a Fenian pledge, and give your word of honour that Donogan should be let escape.'

'Is that all?'

'Isn't it enough? A man must be a glutton for tomfoolery if he could not be satisfied with that.'

'Perhaps you never heard that the chief of the Cabinet took a very different view of my Irish policy.'

'Irish policy?' cried the other, with lifted eyebrows.

'I said Irish policy, and repeat the words. Whatever line of political action tends to bring legislation into more perfect harmony with the instincts and impulses of a very peculiar people, it is no presumption to call a policy.'

'With all my heart. Do you mean to deal with that old Liverpool rascal for the furniture?'

'His offer is almost an insult.'