The Gateless Barrier Part 7

"Always a.s.suming, dear Mrs. Bellingham, that there is a family spectre for Virginia, or anybody else, to be on terms with?"

"Why, you do not really propose to call that thrilling fact in question?" the lady answered, very brightly. "That would be too mortifying. It would const.i.tute the climax of the _ennui_ from which I have suffered during the many months of this English winter. I had promised myself at least one vital sensation when you and I should meet, and you should tell me the true, inward history of that romantic, old house of yours, Stoke Rivers."

She sat in an att.i.tude, arranged the folds of her boxcloth shirt, patted the lace into place about her neck.

"You make me feel very badly," she said.

Laurence objected to soiling his conscience by lying at least as much as most men. But surely, he argued, there are cases of justifiable perjury, as of justifiable homicide.

"I am awfully sorry," he said, "to dash your hopes of a sensation. But, you see, neither the romantic, old house or its inward history are my property as yet, so I can't give either away however much I may desire to do so."

"I know it. I do not ask you to commit any indiscretion. I do not ask you to tell me anything."

Laurence braced himself.

"How fortunate, since there's nothing to tell!" he said.

His hostess looked hard at him for a moment, and then at the floor.

"There was a time, before I lived among them, when I believed the English to be a simple and undiplomatic nation," she said. "I know better now."

Laurence was half-amused, half-irritated.

"Oh, come!" he retorted, "it's too bad to make it an international question."

"I had promised myself such a fine time in that house," she continued, still gazing abstractedly at the floor. "Virginia is, I consider--and I believe you know that--the most perfectly lovely woman of my acquaintance. She represents the last word of our American culture; and I would advise every young girl, who was ambitious of social success, to study her as a model. She catches right on to everything new at once, and her power of repartee is great. My admiration for Virginia is so overpowering, that it would really be a wonderful encouragement to my self-respect to get a step ahead of her for once. Well, I concluded I could do that in a perfectly legitimate manner. I planned to ask you to let me go right around that house from cellar to garret, and acquaint myself with the whole interior. I wanted to see it before Virginia had brought our younger and more complex Western civilisation to bear upon it. I promised myself great gratification from doing that."

As she finished speaking, Mrs. Bellingham raised her eyes. That she was in earnest, keenly inquisitive, there could be no doubt.

"But, unhappily, in asking that you would be asking me to commit the greatest possible indiscretion," Laurence answered, laughing a little.

"You see, my uncle is alive as yet. And while he lives I must obey orders."

"Orders?"

"Yes; and they are such preposterously unchivalrous orders that I tremble to mention them to you."

Mrs. Bellingham looked away. She grew a trifle anxious, having the greatest fear of hearing anything even remotely, morally or socially, incorrect. But the young man's manner tended to rea.s.sure her. He appeared particularly engaging at that moment.

"Yes, it will shock you," he said, "shock you outrageously, coming as you do from a country where no member of your delightful s.e.x is ever requested to take a back seat. My uncle is a brilliantly clever person, but on some points he is a little mad. And simply at Stoke Rivers--I blush to mention it--no woman is admitted, no woman is permitted to exist."

Mrs. Bellingham's eyes positively flashed, her face went extremely pink.

"But this is the most unparalleled country!" she exclaimed. "Mr. Rivers, do you seriously intend me to believe that no lady may enter that house?

Why, I ask you, how is it possible to conduct a domestic establishment under such circ.u.mstances?"

"Ah! that's the worst of it," Laurence said. He was beginning to be amused again. "I tell you, the condition of that house suggests the most awful reflections."

"I am glad to hear it."

"Yes, awful," he repeated. "For it is the best mounted, the best served, the best kept house I have ever stayed in. It is as clean as a new pin.

The whole thing moves on wheels--and yet never the trace of a petticoat!

It follows that one is a.s.sailed by the unholy suspicion that woman may be, after all, a quite superfluous luxury; and that the work of the world, even in its humble, domestic aspects, can get along just as well without her. My uncle entertains this opinion anyhow, and gives the most convincing practical exposition of it. He has supplied me with a large amount of information under this head; and, upon my word, I'm afraid I am beginning to see the force of his arguments. After that, I'd better go, hadn't I?"

"Well, I really believe perhaps you had," she answered. For once she looked perplexed, almost flurried. Her face was still decidedly pink.

But she rallied herself, and fired a parting shot.--"Unless," she added, "to make amends for having told me so very plainly that my presence would not be tolerated at Stoke Rivers, you relent and give me the whole story of that family spectre."

Laurence raised his head sharply, and once more his sense of amus.e.m.e.nt evaporated. The return to this theme jarred on him. The lady's persistence appeared to him in singularly bad taste. The reiteration of that word angered him moreover. In hearing it he was sensible of a turn in his blood, as though an insult were being offered to one very dear to him.

"Spectre?" he said slowly. "Pardon me--I--I don't quite follow you. What spectre?"

His hostess was roused in her turn.

"Why, Mr. Rivers, what has happened to you?" she inquired. "What have I said to disturb your equanimity? I had not supposed you to be so sensitive."

Whereupon the folly of his anger became extremely apparent to Laurence; the more so that he had so recently concluded to eschew ambitious adventures and decline upon the large and unexciting levels of the Commonplace. In those regions hasty resentments, hot blood, the fine-gentleman-duelling-spirit, in short, is clearly out of the picture.

And then, why quarrel with Mrs. Bellingham of all people? She was a very charming, little person, specially when--as just now--her glance dwelt fondly upon her red-coated babies and their escort of nurses, donkey, and dogs. If she had trodden on his toes, it was unwittingly, and without any intention of malice. So he proceeded to make _amende honorable_ with proper despatch.

"Forgive me," he said; "I am an idiot. But the legends to which my poor old uncle's crankiness have given rise really begin to get upon my brain. Wherever I go they crop up. You can understand it becomes a little exasperating.--Good-bye. I have had a delightful time. Love to Jack."

The lady smiled upon him, yet with an air of criticism and slight reserve.

"Oh yes," she said, "certainly, Mr. Rivers, love to Jack. But I am going to write to Virginia and report on our interview. I believe it is inc.u.mbent on me as a true friend to do that.--Yes, you may come again just as soon as you like. Now, do I not display a perfectly lovely spirit in inviting you here after you have done just all you know to explode my romance? Mr. Rivers, this day will leave a scar. I know it. I do regret that spectre."

Laurence smiled back, looking down at her.

"Yes, it's a pity, isn't it," he said, "ever to explode a romance? There aren't too many of them about. Perhaps I too could find it in my heart to regret that spectre."

And there, at least, the young man spoke truth, for regrets pursued him on his homeward way. All this talk, moreover, was a nuisance, an intolerable nuisance. And, though he did not stay to a.n.a.lyse the probabilities of when and how, he apprehended up-croppings, developments, and ramifications of the said nuisance in the future. Mrs.

Bellingham's question, as to the att.i.tude Virginia might adopt towards the occult element in her husband's fine inheritance, was more uncomfortably pertinent than the questioner could by any means have imagined. It suggested most disturbing complications. Thus Laurence rode onward heedlessly, hara.s.sed by vexatious and perplexing thoughts.

"What a confounded bother it all is!" he exclaimed impatiently. "I wish to goodness the poor old man would live for ever--outlive me anyhow.

That would be the simplest solution of the situation."

He raised his head and looked about him, then became aware that he must have taken some wrong turn in the labyrinth of cross-country roads between Bishop's Pudbury and Stoke Rivers, that he must have struck too far southward and so lost his way. The mouth of the steep, rutted lane, shut in by copse on either hand, which he had been following, now debouched on a high-lying table-land. Small, rough fields bordered the road, their crumbling, ill-kept banks bare of trees. Some fifty yards ahead, where four roads crossed, stood a lonely, one-story, turnpike house; it was six-sided, white-washed, and had a slated roof, rising extinguisher-like to a single central chimney. Placed in an angle of the intersecting roads, it was without garden ground. The turnpike-gate had long ago disappeared; and the house, a thing that had lost its use and become obsolete, was in a half-ruinous condition. An air of cheap desolation pervaded it. Bundles of rags bulged from the broken window-panes. Long-legged, high-shouldered fowls pecked and squatted in the dust before the half-open door. Yet, seeing it, Laurence was sensible that this unsightly building had a tally somewhere in his memory, and claimed recognition. And this impression received unexpected reinforcement when suddenly its squalid walls changed from dirty-white to warm primrose, while the surviving gla.s.s in its rickety windows gave off dazzling splendours of light.

Anxious to learn the cause of this transformation, the young man drew up, and, laying his right hand upon his horse's sleek quarters, turned half round in the saddle, and stayed thus, looking and listening.

The view was very n.o.ble. Southward the fall of the ground was sufficiently abrupt to exclude all middle distance, with the result that the rough gra.s.ses, withered bents and sorrel-stalks of the near pasture-field were outlined against the immense sweep of the flat coastline far below--this last, mauve, and russet, and dim green, was broken here and there by a pallor of sandhills and the shimmer of seaward-tending streams. Looking west, the suave contours of the Downs and Beachy Head rose, in indigo and purple, against a great s.p.a.ce of saffron-coloured sky. Above them, but with a bar of strong light between, heavy ma.s.ses of purple-grey cloud gathered, from out which the freshening wind blew chill. The sea, steel-blue and dashed with white-capped waves, lifted a hard, serrated edge against the horizon.

All this Laurence saw. It made a rather splendid picture, big with the drama of approaching storm. Yet he was persuaded something was lacking.

As three days ago upon first entering the yellow drawing-room at Stoke Rivers, he had, after the first moment of surprise, instinctively looked for certain ornaments and pieces of furniture, and derived a singular satisfaction from the conviction that they still occupied their accustomed place--so now and here, though to his knowledge he had never before ridden across this piece of exposed and but half-reclaimed common-land, or seen the great view under its existing aspect,--he instinctively gazed seaward in search of that which should support his half-awakened memory, and complete the scene to his satisfaction. For surely--yes, surely--bowling up Channel, under crowded canvas, before the freshening breeze, he should behold a fleet of some eight or ten square-rigged East Indiamen, their carven p.o.o.ps standing high out of the water,--vessels of about a thousand tons' burden, laden with tea and spices, bales of delicate muslins and silks, flasks of utter, porcelain, ivory fans, bright-hued parrots, and unseemly, little apes.

And as convoy of these rich cargoes, to secure them, their merchant captains and bronzed and st.u.r.dy crews, against the rapacity of privateers sweeping out from St. Malo and other ports of Northern France, he should behold--yes, surely he should--a couple of smart English frigates, square-rigged too, whose clean scrubbed decks and the black mouths of whose port holes displayed grim argument of cannon, ready for action should occasion so demand. The ships, hugging the land for greater safety from alert and hungry foes, seemed--while the wind filled the bellying sails, straining their tall masts, as they heeled upon that uneasy, blue-grey sea--like some flight of huge, golden-plumage birds; for all the saffron glory now streaming from beneath the gathering storm-clouds in the west must lie full on them.

For such gallant sight Laurence watched, singularly moved, and with a singular eagerness. And so clear was the vision to his mind, so necessary to the completion of the scene upon which his eyes rested, that for some moments he failed to distinguish where actuality ended and hallucination began. He contemplated the creation of his own brain in absorbed interest; then turned and looked at the rough road and dilapidated turnpike house, and then again out to sea. Only a black-hulled, ocean-going tramp, her deckhouses piled up amidships close against her reeking funnel, laboured slowly down channel in the teeth of the gusty breeze. This was all; and then the young man understood, not without amazement, that the gallant show had been a thing of the imagination only,--at most a thing remembered, but how and whence remembered he could not tell. For how, upon any reasonable hypothesis, could the memory of a man like himself of but just over thirty, put back the clock by close upon a century, and disport itself with incidents belonging by rights to, at least, two generations ago? It was all most exceedingly strange. It amounted to being disquieting. Really he did not half like it. Yet the imagined spectacle had been very inspiring all the same. It had made his blood tingle, and had effectually (or disastrously) exorcised that spirit of indolence and _laisser aller_ which he had solicited to take up its abode with him. He sent his horse forward at a sharp trot, while once again he proceeded to revise the situation.

For the idea presented itself that perhaps he had been over self-confident, arrogating to himself a far greater freedom of will than he, in point of fact, possessed. It was all very fine to foreswear adventure, but what if adventure refused to be foresworn? He might easily propose to decline upon modernity, mediocrity, and the Commonplace; but what if these, as seemed just now highly probable, a.s.serted in unmistakable language their determination to have none of him? He reflected that temperament may const.i.tute your genius or your fate, your opportunity or your ruin, as you have the wit to deal with it; but that temperament is indestructible, and that escape from it,--however inconvenient and contrary to your desire that temperament may be,--is obviously and inherently impossible.

As he meditated thus, the road he followed dipped slightly, leaving the bare upland and pa.s.sing along the under side of a thick belt of wood, which cut off the seaward view. On the left, between the inters.p.a.ces of the hedgerow trees, the inland country now lay disclosed for many miles.