Robert Orange Part 8

"I don't think so," said Agnes, in a trembling voice. "There is duty, you know; that is something higher than happiness, I believe."

"Are you so sure?"

"Oh, yes!"

"I envy you. I don't even know what you mean by duty. It seems to me another name for the tyranny of false sentiment."

"Don't disturb my ideas," she exclaimed, with an appealing gesture.

"Don't say these things. They make me wretched. I can't afford to doubt and question. One must have a few permanent rules of conduct."

"But if they are fantastic, capricious, insincere?"

"I can't argue. I am not clever. I will not change my views. I dare not.

It would make me hate you."

"You are the slave of convention."

"That may be. That is safer, after all, than being the slave of some other will stronger than my own. Why do you try to disturb my life--now--after so many really happy months of friendship?"

"Were they so happy? Agnes, were they happy?"

She hesitated.

"Yes," she said, at last; "relatively, yes."

"It is quite true. Good women drive us to the bad ones."

"Oh! what can you mean? Surely we are saying too much. We shall reproach ourselves later. I live, again and again, through one conversation. The phrases come into my mind with every possible shade of significance."

She pushed back her hat, and pressed her hand to her brow, which was contracting nervously as she spoke.

"I don't wish to be altered by any change in principle," she continued, "nor distracted, from my plain obligations, into other interests. I daresay I sound quite heartless and odd. I daresay you won't like me any more." Her voice faltered, but her lips remained precise. "But one must know one's mind--one _must_. You don't know yours; that is the whole trouble, David."

She had never called him by his Christian name before, and now the forced sternness of her tone gave it almost the accent of a farewell.

"Perhaps we have helped each other," she went on; "at all events, you have taught me how to look at things. You are clever and original and all that. I am rather commonplace, and I never have new or surprising thoughts. The more I learn, the more I grow attached to the ordinary ways. Once you called me the ideal _bourgeoise_. You were right."

"Not entirely," said Rennes. "You think too much."

"You taught me that. I never used to consider people or notions. I accepted them without criticism."

"The madness of criticism has entered into you," he said. "It is the worst, most destructive thing on earth."

"How could I have accepted you--as my friend--without it?" she asked.

"You puzzled me. I tried to understand you. No one had ever puzzled me before. No one, you may be quite sure, will ever puzzle me, in the same degree, again."

She gave him a long, tearful glance, in which defiance, reproach, determination, and a certain cruelty shone like iron under water. He made a movement toward her. The strength of his more emotional nature might have made a final a.s.sault--not uselessly--on her a.s.sumed "reasonableness." No appeal, no threat could have moved her from the mental att.i.tude she had decided on--the duty of keeping her word to Lord Reckage. But she might have been urged to the more candid course of ascertaining how far his lordship's true happiness was really involved in the question. At that moment, however, Mrs. Rennes came into the room. She gave a little cry of surprise when she saw her son. Then she kissed Agnes, and sat down, looking anxiously from one to the other with something not unlike grief, not unlike jealousy.

Her life and habits of thought were simple, but she had been highly educated. She was an accomplished linguist, a good musician, a most intelligent companion. Things which she could not comprehend she would, at least, accept on faith. There had never been the shadow of a quarrel between David and herself. But she felt, by intuition, that Agnes Carillon had, in some way, affected his life, his work, his whole nature. She could not blame her, because she knew nothing definite about the understanding which existed, plainly enough, between her son and this young lady. She had a horror, however, of flirtation and flirts. It seemed to her that, under all this talk and correspondence on art, poetry, scenery, and the like, there was a strong under-current of emotion. So she smiled upon Agnes with a certain reserve, as though she were not quite sure whether she had any great reason to feel delighted at her call. At a glance from David, however, her look softened into real friendliness.

"I was so surprised to see Mr. Rennes here," said Agnes.

"I am surprised, too," said the older woman.

A restraint fell upon all three. David walked about the room, looking for things he did not want, and asking questions he did not wish answered, although he hoped they would interest his mother. But his spirits soon flagged. The conversation became trivial and absurd.

"Where are you staying?" asked Mrs. Rennes.

"I am with Pensee Fitz Rewes," said Agnes; "she has gone in the carriage to do a little shopping. She will send it here for me."

The carriage was at that instant announced. David went down the stairs with Agnes and handed her in. He said nothing. Mrs. Rennes watched the pair from the window and nodded her farewell with much gravity. When David returned to her, he found her reading peacefully Trollope's last novel. It was for these graces that he loved her most. He scribbled letters at her writing-table for the next hour. Then he spoke--

"I am going," said he, "to the East. I need a change. I suppose it will mean six months."

"But how you will enjoy it!"

"And what will you do?"

"I live from day to day, my dear. I am quite contented."

"This journey is not a mere caprice. I have been contemplating it for some time," he said.

Mrs. Rennes' hair was white and her long, equine countenance, sallow.

When her feelings were stirred, she showed it only by a cloudy pallor which would steal over her face as a kind of veil--separating her from the rest of mortals.

"One has to get away from England," continued Rennes: "one has to get away from one's self."

"And where is your self now?" she asked, not venturing to look at him.

"With that girl," he answered, suddenly; "with that girl."

"Do you love her?"

"I don't know. I suppose I do. Oh! I would love her if I could ever be absolutely sincere. But this I do know--I can't see her married to that fellow Reckage. So I must go away."

"I am afraid she is a coquette--a serious coquette, my dear boy."

"She is nothing of the kind. She is a true woman. Don't talk about her."

CHAPTER VIII

Sara had spent the morning crying bitterly, in bed. Her letter to the Duke of Marshire was on the table by her side. From time to time she had taken it up, turned it over, shed fresh tears, and reproached herself for indecision. She held at bay every thought of Robert Orange, and formed the resolve of banishing him from her mind for ever. When the time came to dress for luncheon, she brightened a little, for the prospect of disguising her true feelings in the presence of Lord Reckage and Pensee appealed to that genius for mischief which animated the whole current of her life. _To baffle the looker-on_ seemed not merely a great science, but the one game of wits which could never lose its interest.

She was not insincere. She thought that lies, as a rule, were clumsy shifts, and abominable. Even in the moments when she was most thoroughly conscious of her talent for misleading others, she had never brought herself to think well of deception. She would have liked to feel that her heart was an open book for her friends to read. It would have been pleasant, she believed, if all could have known always that she practised a delicate art and played, consummately, fine comedy whenever she found spectators. But a solitary, mismanaged childhood, and the constant sense of being in many ways a foreigner, had taught her the penalty of frankness where sympathy could not supply, from its own knowledge, the unutterable half which makes up every confidence. The bitter pleasures of a conscience which caresses its worst burden were the only real ones of her daily existence. When she could say, at the end of the day, "I have fooled them all: they think I am happy, I am not: they think Reckage amuses me, he doesn't. They think I delight in these dull dinners and b.a.l.l.s, I hate them," a sort of exultation--the pride of a spirit singing under torture--would fill her whole being. All youth that is strong and thoughtful has much of this instinct of dissimulation. The world--to a young mind--appears controlled by elderly, suspicious, hateful custodians ever on the alert to capture, or thwart, every high enterprise and every pa.s.sionate desire. There seems a vast conspiracy against happiness--the withered, dreary wiseacres in opposition to the joy, the daring, the beauty, the reckless vitality of souls still under the spell of spring. When poor Sara could escape from town into the country, mount her horse, and tear through a storm, the neighbours compared her to a witch on a broomstick, and, shaking their heads, would foresee much sipping of sorrow by the spoonful in the future of Lord Garrow. To-day, however, the young lady a.s.sumed her most demure expression, and received the guests at luncheon as though she had never learnt the meaning of tears nor joined the gale in spirit.