Paths of Judgement Part 4

Geoffrey responded promptly. "To see you--in a quiet place where he _can_ see you."

She let the a.s.sertion pa.s.s, forestalling a possible retort with--

"And I came for you and for Maurice and for Mrs. Merrick. I am fond of Mrs. Merrick."

"Of ugly Mrs. Merrick? Really?"

"Really indeed. My likings are not founded on alluring faces or sophisticated gowns. I saw a good deal of her in London. She is interested in many of my objects. She is trying to grow."

"And you are down here to help her. I hope that your efforts will bring something out. I confess that to me the plant looks dry and th.o.r.n.y."

"Ah! that is because she is in such an arid soil. I can help her. She made me feel that, and I never refuse help."

Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely playful.

"Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship's sake," he said, "rather than for Mrs. Merrick's." And Angela was unable to repress an a.s.senting though superficial lightness.

CHAPTER VI

Geoffrey and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an heiress of good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her greater intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under the wife's guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate, a seat in Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the Government's disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted in the extremest forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were at all veracious.

Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters all well-married, inherited the father's heavy determination, the mother's nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took their place among the more tawdry great names of England. They never distinguished the name, and after the first swift climb aspired to no further heights. They were wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what they had, and held it firmly.

Angela's father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and sentimental. She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open scandal, and written a flimsy political novel interesting only from its thinly veiled personalities; she long posed as the typical _femme incomprise_, and just before her death she became fervently religious.

Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as possible, finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her mother's character seemed absurdly to hold up to her.

Geoffrey's strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against all manner of restrictions.

The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his wife's tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley blood, possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal forms. The strain, in pa.s.sing through the two or three generations of simple and dignified squires who had been her un-ill.u.s.trious forbears, had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high places, and when, with not unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity for self-advancement, she transferred her pa.s.sionate and patient hopes to her son. For him she saved, slaved and battled. Geoffrey never learned, until shortly after his father's death, that his own opportunities were won not only by his mother's battlings, but by his father's martyrdom.

John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to G.o.d and man, found, in a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense, had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of thinking about them--they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving the Church.

How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that.

His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities.

His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he would find something to do.

"Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?" Mrs. Daunt's eyes flashed fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among them;--what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?--the wrecking of others' faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking ship--she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her; yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor.

Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father's death, told her son of the spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though very tender towards her husband's memory, in the strength that had saved them all from his weakness.

Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. "It shouldn't have happened had I known," he said; "I could have made my way."

"Made your way, my dear child!" cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and yet more wounded than angered by this ingrat.i.tude. "Do your realize, I wonder, what it cost us to make you?--cost me, rather, for I did it all.

Do you know how I have sc.r.a.ped and struggled? Do you know that every stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way, but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from determines the height one attains."

"No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible," said Geoffrey.

He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only.

Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of it, poisoned all her happiness.

Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the rapacities only.

Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other.

The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism.

Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his sentiments towards this significant young relative, "I don't like her.

She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn't ask her here any more."

Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela's fortune to back him, Geoffrey's career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive seemed forthcoming.

She died before seeing that Angela's affections were centred on Maurice Wynne. She could hardly have suspected Angela of such folly, seeing Maurice as a charming young n.o.body, a mere satellite of Geoffrey's, who had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him the barrier to her hopes.

At present, three years after his mother's death, Geoffrey's position in the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his const.i.tuency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them, and showed an a.s.surance that was completely contagious; the average man became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real supremacy.

The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small income sufficed for the bread and b.u.t.ter of existence, and Lord Glaston, the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his resources. Towards these rather undignified methods of replenishment he had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all a.s.sumed.

Ingrained in Geoffrey's nature was the sense that power was his, and that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his own strength and in the plasticity of outward circ.u.mstance, a faith that had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him--though Geoffrey did not appeal to these dubious sanctions--that in a great man's ends the world also found its best.

He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never blinded by this motive's various disguises--idealistic, aesthetic, or philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of sight; but his own gift of clear, dispa.s.sionate vision justified him, he would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation's interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended that each should survive to the best of its ability.

So far only outer circ.u.mstances had opposed him--and been walked through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares for him.

Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal, most exquisitely furbelowed--he granted her good taste in spiritual trappings--he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual.

Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art was Maurice's object; his att.i.tude that of the spectator at the drama of life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogether inappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the arabesque in moments of leisure.

Maurice did not fight beside him; but he was an affectionate troubadour, who looked on at the combat and chanted it, often with friendly irony.

He was much like a dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the world. He was glad of the restful week after a fatiguing session, and looked to see Maurice's future settled, the arabesque engraved upon a good, solid blade of prosperity, before he left Trensome Hall.

CHAPTER VII

Felicia was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about the last evening. An altogether novel one in her experience.

She had never before been conscious of being interested in so many people, and, especially, she had never before been conscious of interesting anybody. Now she was almost sure that last night she had much interested one person. The brightest spot in this consciousness had been after her own performance at the piano. Various young women played and sang; Felicia's place among them was an unimportant one. Miss Bulmer, as usual, distinguished herself in a pa.s.sionate ballad, her eyes fixed on the cornice, her meagre white satin form swayed by emotions strangely out of keeping with the appearance of the singer. Miss Bulmer's shouts of despair and yearning stirred, as usual, all the enthusiasm of which her audience was capable; and Felicia, when she sat down to the piano, was accustomed to the subsequent torpor, to the undercurrent of talk while she played, and to having Miss Bulmer, flushed and generous in her own triumph, lean over her and watch her fingering with an air of much benignity. But it was a new experience when she rose, among cool expressions of pleasure, while Miss Bulmer said, "You really do improve so much," to have some one, some one who knew, and that some one Maurice Wynne, come forward all radiant with recognition, clapping his hands and crying, "Magnificent, simply magnificent! Where did you learn to play Brahms like that? I didn't know that you really were a musician--I thought you merely played the piano!"

He stood, excited, delighted, smiling at her, and his enthusiasm went, an uncomprehended thrill round the room. Every eye turned on Felicia with a new discernment.

"But you mustn't stop," said Maurice; "she mustn't stop, must she, Mrs.

Merrick? Why didn't you prepare us for this treat? You never told us that your niece was a genius."