Two Years Ago Volume Ii Part 23

"And so has he to Queen Whims."

So Scoutbush sent Bowie for "John Jones Clerk," the fisherman (may his days be as many as his salmon, and as good as his flies!), and the four stayed at home, and talked over the Aberalva tragedies, till, as it befell, both Lucia and Campbell left the room awhile.

Immediately Frank rose, and walking across to Valencia, laid the fatal ring on the arm of her chair, and returned to his seat without a word.

"You are very--. I hope that it--," stammered Valencia.

"You hope that it was a comfort to me? It was; and I shall be always grateful to you for it."

Valencia heard an emphasis on the "was." It checked the impulse (foolish enough) which rose in her, to bid him keep the ring.

So, prim and dignified, she slipped it into its place on her finger, and went on with her work; merely saying,--

"I need not say that I am happy that anything which I could do should have been of use to you in such a fearful time."

"It was a fearful time! but for myself, I cannot be too glad of it. G.o.d grant that it may have been as useful to others as to me! It cured me of a great folly. Now I look back, I am astonished at my own absurdity, rudeness, presumption.--You must let me say it!--I do not know how to thank you enough, I cannot trust myself with the fit words, they would be so strong: but I owe this confession to you, and to your exceeding goodness and kindness, when you would have been justified in treating me as a madman. I was mad, I believe: but I am in my right mind now, I a.s.sure you," said he gaily. "Had I not been, I need hardly say you would not have seen me here. What a prospect this is!" And he rose and looked out of the window.

Valencia had heard all this with downcast eyes and unmoved face. Was she pleased at it? Not in the least, the naughty child that she was; and more, she grew quite angry with herself, ashamed of herself, for having thought and felt so much about him the night before. "How silly of me!

He is very well, and does not care for me. And who is he, pray, that I should even look at him?"

And, as if in order to put her words into practice, she looked at him there and then. He was gazing out of the window, leaning gracefully and yet feebly against the shutter, with the full glory of the forenoon sun upon his sharp-cut profile and rich chestnut locks; and after all, having looked at him once, she could not help looking at him again. He was certainly a most gentleman-like man, elegant from head to foot; there was not an ungraceful line about him, to his very boots, and the white nails of his slender fingers; even the defects of his figure--the too great length of the neck and slope of the shoulders--increased his likeness to those saintly pictures with which he had been mixed up in her mind the night before. He was at one extreme pole of the different types of manhood, and that burly doctor who had saved his life at the other: but her Saint Pere alone perfectly combined the two. There was n.o.body like him, after all. Perhaps her wisest plan, as Headley had forgotten his fancy, was to confess all to the Saint Pere (as she usually did her little sins), and get some sort of absolution from him.

However, she must say something in answer--

"Yes, it is a very lovely view; but really I must say one more word about this matter. I have to thank you, you know, for the good faith which you have kept with me."

He looked round, seemingly amused. "_Cela va sans dire_!" and he bowed; "pray do not say any more about the matter;" and he looked at her with such humble and thankful eyes, that Valencia was sorry not to hear more from him than--

"Pray tell me--for of course you know--the name of this exquisite valley up which I am looking."

"Gwynnant. You must go up it when you are well enough; and see the lakes; they are the only ones in Snowdon from the banks of which the primaeval forest has not disappeared."

"Indeed? I must make shift to go there this very afternoon, for--do not laugh at me--but I never saw a lake in my life."

"Never saw a lake?"

"No. I am a true Lowlander: born and bred among bleak Norfolk sands and fens--so much the worse for this chest of mine; and this is my first sight of mountains. It is all like a dream to me, and a dream which I never expected to be realised."

"Ah, you should see our Irish lakes and mountains--you should see Killarney!"

"I am content with these; I suppose it is as wrong to break the tenth commandment about scenery, as about anything else."

"Ah, but it seems so hard that you, who I am sure would appreciate fine scenery, should have been debarred from it, while hundreds of stupid people run over the Alps and Italy every summer, and come home, as far as I can see, rather more stupid than they went; having made confusion worse confounded by filling their poor brains with hard names out of Murray."

"Not quite so hard as that thousands, every day, who would enjoy a meat dinner, should have nothing but dry bread, and not enough of that. I fancy sometimes, that, in some mysterious way, that want will be made up to them in the next life; and so with all the beautiful things which travelled people talk of--I comfort myself with the fancy, that I see as much as is good for me here, and that if I make good use of that, I shall see the Alps and the Andes in the world to come, or something much more worth seeing. Tell me now, how far may that range of crags be from us? I am sure that I could walk there after luncheon, this mountain air is strengthening me so."

"Walk thither? I a.s.sure you they are at least four miles off."

"Four? And I thought them one! So clear and sharp as they stand out against the sky, one fancies that one could almost stretch out a hand and touch those knolls and slabs of rock, as distinct as in a photograph; and yet so soft and rich withal, dappled with pearly-grey stone and purple heath. Ah!--So it must be, I suppose. The first time that one sees a glorious thing, one's heart is lifted up towards it in love and awe, till it seems near to one--ground on which one may freely tread, because one appreciates and admires; and so one forgets the distance between its grandeur and one's own littleness."

The allusion was palpable: but did he intend it? Surely not, after what he had just said. And yet there was a sadness in the tone which made Valencia fancy that some feeling for her might still linger: but he evidently had been speaking to himself, forgetful, for the moment, of her presence; for he turned to her with a start and a blush--"But now--I have been troubling you too long with this stupid _tete-a-tete_ sentimentality of mine. I will make my bow, and find the Major. I am afraid, if it be possible for him to forget any one, he has forgotten me in some new moss or other."

He went out, and to Valencia's chagrin she saw him no more that day. He spent the forenoon in the garden, and the afternoon in lying down, and at night complained of fatigue, and stayed in his own room the whole evening, while Campbell read him to sleep. Next morning, however, he made his appearance at breakfast, well and cheerful.

"I must play at sick man no more, or I shall rob you, I see, of Major Campbell's company; and I owe you all for too much already."

"Unless you are better than you were last night, you must play at sick man," said the Major. "I cannot conceive what exhausted you so; unless you ladies are better nurses, I must let no one come near him but myself. If you had been scolding him the whole morning, instead of praising him as he deserves, he could not have been more tired last night."

"Pray do not!" cried Frank, evidently much pained; "I had such a delightful morning, and every one is so kind--you only make me wretched, when I feel all the trouble I am giving."

"My dear fellow," said Scoutbush _en grand serieux_, "after all that you have done for our people at Aberalva, I should be very much shocked if any of my family thought any service shown to you a trouble."

"Pray do not speak so," said Frank, "I am fallen among angels, when I least expected."

"Scoutbush as an angel!" shrieked Lucia, clapping her hands. "Elsley, don't you see the wings sprouting already, under his shooting jacket?"

"They are my braces, I suppose, of course," said Scoutbush, who never understood a joke about himself, though he liked one about other people; while Elsley, who hated all jokes, made no answer--at least none worth recording. In fact, as the reader may have discovered, Elsley, save _tete-a-tete_ with some one who took his fancy, was somewhat of a silent and morose animal, and, as little Scoutbush confided to Mellot, there was no getting a rise out of him. All which Lucia saw as keenly as any one, and tried to pa.s.s off by chattering nervously and fussily for him, as well as for herself; whereby she only made him the more cross, for he could not the least understand her argument--"Why, my dear, if you don't talk to people, I must!"

"But why should people be talked to?"

"Because they like it, and expect it!"

"The more foolish they. Much better to hold their tongues and think."

"Or read your poetry, I suppose?" And then would begin a squabble.

Meanwhile there was one, at least, of the party, who was watching Lucia with most deep and painful interest. Lord Scoutbush was too busy with his own comforts, especially with his fishing, to think much of this moroseness of Elsley's. "If he suited Lucia, very well. His taste and hers differed: but it was her concern, not his"--was a very easy way of freeing himself from all anxiety on the matter: but not so with Major Campbell. He saw all this; and knew enough of human nature to suspect that the self-seeking which showed as moroseness in company, might show as downright bad temper in private. Longing to know more of Elsley, if possible, to guide and help him, he tried to be intimate with him, as he had tried at Aberalva; paid him court, asked his opinion, talked to him on all subjects which he thought would interest him. His conclusion was more favourable to Elsley's head than to his heart. He saw that Elsley was vain, and liked his attentions; and that lowered him in his eyes: but he saw too that Elsley shrank from him; at first he thought it pride, but he soon found that it was fear; and that lowered him still more in his eyes.

Perhaps Campbell was too hard on the poet: but his own purity itself told against Elsley. "Who am I, that any one should be afraid of me, unless they have done something wrong?" So, with his dark suspicions roused, he watched intently every word and every tone of Elsley's to his wife; and here he came to a more unpleasant conclusion still. He saw that they were, sometimes at least, not happy together; and from this he took for granted, too hastily, that they were never happy together; that Lucia was an utterly ill-used person; that Elsley was a bad fellow, who ill-treated her: and a black and awful indignation against the man grew up within him; all the more fierce because it seemed utterly righteous, and because, too, it had, under heavy penalties, to be utterly concealed beneath a courteous and genial manner: till many a time he felt inclined to knock Elsley down for little roughnesses to her, which were really the fruit of mere _gaucherie_; and then accused himself for a hypocrite, because he was keeping up the courtesies of life with such a man. For Campbell, like most men of his temperament, was over-stern, and sometimes a little cruel and unjust, in demanding of others the same lofty code which he had laid down for himself, and in demanding it, too, of some more than of others, by a very questionable exercise of private judgment. On the whole, he was right, no doubt, in being as indulgent as he dared to the publicans and sinners like Scoutbush; and in being as severe as he dared on all Pharisees, and pretentious persons whatsoever: but he was too much inclined to draw between the two cla.s.ses one of those strong lines of demarcation which exist only in the fancies of the human brain; for sins, like all diseased matters, are complicated and confused matters; many a seeming Pharisee is at heart a self-condemned publican, and ought to be comforted, and not cursed; while many a publican is, in the midst of all his foul sins, a thorough exclusive and self-complacent Pharisee, and needs not the right hand of mercy, but the strong arm of punishment.

Campbell, like other men, had his faults: and his were those of a man wrapped up in a pure and stately, but an austere and lonely creed, distrusted with the world in all its forms, and looking down upon men in general nearly as much as Thurnall did. So he set down Elsley for a bad man, to whom he was forced by hard circ.u.mstances to behave as if he were a good one.

The only way, therefore, in which he could vent his feeling, was by showing to Lucia that studied attention which sympathy and chivalry demand of a man toward an injured woman. Not that he dared, or wished, to conduct himself with her as he did with Valencia, even had she not been a married woman; he did not know her as intimately as he did her sister; but still he had a right to behave as the most intimate friend of her family, and he a.s.serted that right; and all the more determinedly because Elsley seemed now and then not to like it. "I will teach him how to behave to a charming woman," said he to himself; and perhaps he had been wiser if he had not said it: but every man has his weak point, and chivalry was Major Campbell's.

"What do you think of that poet, Mellot?" said he once, on returning from a pic-nic, during which Elsley had never noticed his wife; and, at last, finding Valencia engaged with Headley, had actually gone off, _pour pis aller_, to watch Lord Scoutbush fishing.

"Oh, clever enough, and to spare; and as well read a man as I know. One of the Sturm-und-drang party, of course:--the express locomotive school, scream-and-go-head: and thinks me, with my cla.s.sicism, a benighted pagan. Still, every man has a right to his opinion. Live and let live."

"I don't care about his taste," said the Major impatiently. "What sort of man is he?--man, Claude?"

"Ahem, humph! 'Irritabile genus poetarum.' But one is so accustomed to that among literary men, one never expects them to be like anybody else, and so takes their whims and oddities for granted."

"And their sins too, eh?"

"Sins? I know of none on his part."

"Don't you call temper a sin?"

"No; I call it a determination of blood to the head, or of animal spirits to the wrong place, or--my dear Major, I am no moralist. I take people, you know, as I find them. But he is a bore; and I should not wonder if that sweet little woman had found it out ere now."