Isabel blushed. Was she pretty? Oh, she wanted so much to be pretty!
“And I think George may congratulate himself upon having secured the dearest little wife in all Midlandshire.”
Mrs. Gilbert blushed a deeper red; but the happy smile died away on her lips. Something, a very vague something as yet, was lurking in what Mr. Raymond would have called her “inner consciousness;” and she thought, perhaps, George had not such very great reason for self-gratulation.
“I always do as he tells me,”’ she said naïvely; “and he’s kinder than mamma used to be, and doesn’t mind my reading at meals. You know how ma used to go on about it. And I mend his socks — sometimes.” She drew open a drawer, where there were some little bundles of grey woollen stuff, and balls of worsted with big needles stuck across them. “And, oh, Sigismund,” she exclaimed, rather inconsecutively, “we’ve been to Mordred — to Mordred Priory — to a luncheon; quite a grand luncheon — pine-apple and ices, and nearly half-a-dozen different kinds of glasses for each person.”
She could talk to Sigismund about Mordred and the master of Mordred. He was not like George, and he would sympathize with her enthusiasm about that earthly paradise.
“Do you know Mordred?” she asked. She felt a kind of pleasure in calling the mansion “Mordred,” all short, as he called it.
“I know the village of Mordred well enough,” Mr. Smith answered, “and I ought to know the Priory precious well. The last Mr. Lansdell gave my father a good deal of business; and when Roland Lansdell was being coached-up in the Classics by a private tutor, I used to go up to the Priory and read with him. The governor was very glad to get such a chance for me; but I can’t say I intensely appreciated the advantage myself, on hot summer afternoons, when there was cricketing on Warncliffe meads.”
“You knew him — you knew Mr. Roland Lansdell when he was a boy?” said Isabel, with a little gasp.
“I certainly did, my dear Izzie; but I don’t think there’s anything wonderful in that. You couldn’t open your eyes much wider if I’d said I’d known Eugene Aram when he was a boy. I remember Roland Lansdell,” continued Mr. Smith, slapping his breakfast-napkin across his dusty boots, “and a very jolly young fellow he was; a regular young swell, with a chimney-pot hat and dandy boots, and a gold hunter in his waistcoat-pocket, and no end of pencil-cases, and cricket-bats, and drawing-portfolios, and single-sticks, and fishing-tackle. He taught me fencing,” added Sigismund, throwing himself suddenly into a position that covered one entire side of the little parlour, and making a postman’s knock upon the carpet with the sole of his foot.
“Come, Mrs. Gilbert,” he said, presently, “put on your bonnet, and come out for a walk. I suppose there’s no chance of our seeing George till dinner-time.”
Isabel was pleased to go out. All the world seemed astir upon this bright September morning; and out of doors there was always just a chance of meeting him. She put on her hat, the broad-leaved straw that cast such soft shadows upon her face, and she took up the big green parasol, and was ready to accompany her old friend in a minute.
“I don’t want the greetings in the market-place,” Mr. Smith said, as they went out into the lane, where it was always very dusty in dry weather, and very muddy when there was rain. “I know almost everybody in Graybridge; and there’ll be a round of stereotyped questions and answers to go through as to how I’m getting on ‘oop in London.’ I can’t tell those people that I earn my bread by writing ‘The Demon of the Galleys,’ or ‘The Mystery of Mowbray Manor.’ Take me for a country walk, Izzie; a regular rustic ramble.”
Mrs. Gilbert blushed. That habit of blushing when she spoke or was spoken to had grown upon her lately. Then, after a little pause, she said, shyly:
“Thurston’s Crag is a pretty place; shall we go there?”
“Suppose we do. That’s quite a brilliant thought of yours, Izzie. Thurston’s Crag is a pretty place, a nice, drowsy, lazy old place, where one always goes to sleep, and wishes one had bottled beer. It reminds one of bottled beer, you know, the waterfall, — bottled beer in a rampant state of effervescence.”
Isabel’s face was all lighted up with smiles.
“I am so glad you have come to see us, Sigismund,” she said.
She was very glad. She might go to Thurston’s Crag now as often as she could beguile Sigismund thitherward, and that haunting sense of something wrong would no longer perplex her in the midst of her unutterable joy. It was unutterable! She had tried to write poetry about it, and had failed dismally, though her heart was making poetry all day long, as wildly, vaguely beautiful as Solomon’s Song. She had tried to set her joy to music; but there were no notes on the harpsichord that could express such wondrous melody; though there was indeed one little simple theme, an old-fashioned air, arranged as a waltz, “‘Twere vain to tell thee all I feel,” which Isabel would play slowly, again and again, for an hour together, dragging the melody out in lingering legato notes, and listening to its talk about Roland Lansdell.
But all this was very wicked, of course. To-day she could go to Thurston’s Crag with a serene front, an unburdened conscience. What could be more intensely proper than this country walk with her mother’s late partial boarder?
They turned into the meadows presently, and as they drew nearer and nearer to the grassy hollow under the cliff, where the miller’s cottage and the waterfall were nestled together like jewels in a casket of emerald velvet, the ground seemed to grow unsubstantial under her feet, as if Thurston’s Crag had been a phantasmal region suspended in mid air. Would he be there? Her heart was perpetually beating out the four syllables of that simple sentence: Would he be there? It was the 1st of September, and he would be away shooting partridges, perhaps. Oh, was there even the remotest chance that he would be there?
Sigismund handed her across the stile in the last meadow, and then there was only a little bit of smooth verdure between them and the waterfall; but the overhanging branches of the trees intervened, and Isabel could not see yet whether there was any one on the bridge.
But presently the narrow winding path brought them to a break in the foliage. Isabel’s heart gave a tremendous bound, and then the colour, which had come and gone so often on her face, faded away altogether. He was there: leaning with his back against the big knotted trunk of the oak, and making a picture of himself, with one arm above his head, plucking the oak-leaves and dropping them into the water. He looked down at the glancing water and the hurrying leaves with a moody dissatisfied scowl. Had he been anything less than a hero, one might have thought that he looked sulky.
But when the light footsteps came rustling through the long grass, accompanied by the faint fluttering of a woman’s garments, his face brightened as suddenly as if the dense foliage above his head had been swept away by a Titan’s axe, and all the sunshine let in upon him. That very expressive face darkened a little when Mr. Lansdell saw Sigismund behind the Doctor’s Wife; but the cloud was transient. The jealous delusions of a monomaniac could scarcely have transformed Mr. Smith into a Cassio. Desdemona might have pleaded for him all day long, and might have supplied him with any number of pocket-handkerchiefs hemmed and marked by her own fair hands, without causing the Moor a single apprehensive pang.
Mr. Lansdell did not recognize the youthful acquaintance who had stumbled a little way in the thorny path of knowledge by his side; but he saw that Sigismund was a harmless creature; and after he had bared his handsome head before Isabel, he gave Mr. Smith a friendly little nod of general application.
“I have let the keepers shoot the first of the partridges,” he said, dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he bent over Mrs. Gilbert, “and I have been here ever since ten o’clock.”
It was past one now. He had been there three hours, Isabel thought, waiting for her.
Yes, it had gone so far as this already. But he was to go away at the end of October. He was to go away, it would all be over, and the world come to an end by the 1st of November.
T
here was a little pile of books upon the seat under the tree. Mr. Lansdell pushed them off the bench, and tumbled them ignominiously among the long grass and weeds beneath it. Isabel saw them fall; and uttered a little exclamation of surprise.
“You have brought me—” she began; but to her astonishment Roland checked her with a frown, and began to talk about the waterfall, and the trout that were to be caught in the season lower down in the stream. Mr. Lansdell was more worldly wise than the Doctor’s Wife, and he knew that the books brought there for her might seem slightly suggestive of an appointment. There had been no appointment, of course; but there was always a chance of finding Isabel under Lord Thurston’s oak. Had she not gone there constantly, long ago, when Mr. Lansdell was lounging in Grecian Islands, and eating ices under, the colonnades of Venice? and was it strange that she should go there now?
I should become very wearisome, were I to transcribe all that was said that morning. It was a very happy morning, — a long, idle sunshiny pause in the business of life. Roland recognized an old acquaintance in Sigismund Smith presently, and the two young men talked gaily of those juvenile days at Mordred. They talked pleasantly of all manner of things. Mr. Lansdell must have been quite ardently attached to Sigismund in those early days, if one might judge of the past by the present; for he greeted his old acquaintance with absolute effusion, and sketched out quite a little royal progress of rustic enjoyment for the week Sigismund was to stay at Graybridge.
“We’ll have a picnic,” he said: “you remember we talked about a picnic, Mrs. Gilbert. We’ll have a picnic at Waverly Castle; there isn’t a more delightfully inconvenient place for a picnic in all Midlandshire. One can dine on the top of the western tower, in actual danger of one’s life. You can write to your uncle Raymond, Smith, and ask him to join us, with the two nieces, who are really most amiable children; so estimably unintellectual, and no more in the way than a little extra furniture: you mayn’t want it; but if you’ve space enough for it in your rooms, it doesn’t in the least inconvenience you. This is Thursday; shall we say Saturday for my picnic? I mean it to be my picnic, you know; a bachelor’s picnic, with all the most obviously necessary items forgotten, I dare say. I think the salad-dressing and the champagne-nippers are the legitimate things to forget, are they not? Do you think Saturday will suit you and the Doctor, Mrs. Gilbert? I should like it to be Saturday, because you must all dine with me at Mordred on Sunday, in order that we may drink success and a dozen editions to the — what’s the name of your novel, Smith? Shall it be Saturday, Mrs. Gilbert?”
Isabel only answered by deepening blushes and a confused murmur of undistinguishable syllables. But her face lighted up with a look of rapture that was wont to illuminate it now and then, and which, Mr. Lansdell thought was the most beautiful expression of the human countenance that he had ever seen, out of a picture or in one. Sigismund answered for the Doctor’s Wife. Yes, he was sure Saturday would do capitally. He would settle it all with George, and he would answer for his uncle Raymond and the orphans; and he would answer for the weather even, for the matter of that. He further accepted the invitation to dine at Mordred on Sunday, for himself and his host and hostess.
“You know you can, Izzie,” he said, in answer to Mrs. Gilbert’s deprecating murmur; “it’s mere nonsense talking about prior engagements in a place like Graybridge, where nobody ever does go out to dinner, and a tea-party on a Sunday is looked upon as wickedness. Lansdell always was a jolly good fellow, and I’m not a bit surprised to find that he’s a jolly good fellow still; because if you train up a twig in the way it’s inclined, the tree will not depart from it, as the philosopher has observed. I want to see Mordred again, most particularly; for, to tell you the truth, Lansdell,” said Mr. Smith, with a gush of candour, “I was thinking of taking the Priory for the scene of my next novel. There’s a mossy kind of gloom about the eastern side of the house and the old square garden, that I think would take with the general public; and with regard to the cellarage,” cried Sigismund, kindling with sudden enthusiasm, “I’ve been through it with a lantern, and I’m sure there’s accommodation for a perfect regiment of bodies, which would be a consideration if I was going to do the story in penny numbers; for in penny numbers one body always leads on to another, and you never know, when you begin, how far you may be obliged to go. However, my present idea is three volumes. What do you think now, Lansdell, of the eastern side of the Priory; deepening the gloom, you know, and letting the gardens all run to seed, with rank grass and a blasted cedar or so, and introducing rats behind the panelling, and a general rottenness, and perhaps a ghostly footstep in the corridor, or a periodical rustling behind the tapestry? What do you say, now, to Mordred, taken in connection with twin brothers hating each other from infancy, and both in love with the same woman, and one of them — the darkest twin, with a scar on his forehead — walling up the young female in a deserted room, while the more amiable twin without a scar devotes his life to searching for her in foreign climes, accompanied by a detective officer and a bloodhound? It’s only a rough idea at present,” concluded Mr. Smith, modestly; “but I shall work it out in railway trains and pedestrian exercise. There’s nothing like railway travelling or pedestrian exercise for working out an idea of that kind.”
Mr. Lansdell declared that his house and grounds were entirely at the service of his young friend; and it was settled that the picnic should take place on Saturday, and the dinner-party on Sunday; and George Gilbert’s acquiescence in the two arrangements was guaranteed by his friend Sigismund. And then the conversation wandered away into more fanciful regions; and Roland and Mr. Smith talked of men and books, while Isabel listened, only chiming in now and then with little sentimental remarks, to which the master of Mordred Priory listened as intently as if the speaker had been a Madame de Staël. She may not have said anything very wonderful; but those were wonderful blushes that came and went upon her pale face as she spoke, fluttering and fitful as the shadow of a butterfly’s wing hovering above a white rose; and the golden light in her eyes was more wonderful than anything out of a fairy tale.
But he always listened to her, and he always looked at her from a certain position which he had elected for himself in relation to her. She was a beautiful child; and he, a man of the world, very much tired and worn out by the ordinary men and women of the world, was half amused, half interested, by her simplicity and sentimentality. He did no wrong, therefore, by cultivating her acquaintance when accident threw her, as had happened so often lately, in his way. There was no harm, so long as he held firmly to the position he had chosen for himself; so long as he contemplated this young gushing creature from across all the width of his own wasted youth and useless days; so long as he looked at her as a bright unapproachable being, as much divided from him by the difference in their natures, as by the fact that she was the lawful wife of Mr. George Gilbert of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne.
Mr. Lansdell tried his uttermost to hold firmly to this self-elected position with regard to Isabel. He was always alluding to his own age; an age not to be computed, as he explained to Mrs. Gilbert, by the actual number of years in which he had inhabited this lower world, but to be calculated rather by the waste of those wearisome years, and the general decadence that had fallen upon him thereby.
“I suppose, according to the calendar, I am only your senior by a decade,” he said to Izzie one day; “but when I hear you talk about your books and your heroes, I feel as if I had lived a century.”
He took the trouble to make little speeches of this kind very often, for Mrs. Gilbert’s edification; and there were times when the Doctor’s Wife was puzzled, and even wounded, by his talk and his manner, which were both subject to abrupt transitions, that were perplexing to a simple person. Mr. Lansdell was capricious and fitful in his moods, and would break off in the middle of some delicious little bit of sentiment, worthy of Ernest Maltravers or Eugene Aram himself, with a sneering remark about the absurdity of the style of conversation into which he had been
betrayed; and would sit moodily pulling his favourite retriever’s long ears for ten minutes or so, and then get up and wish Isabel an abrupt good morning. Mrs. Gilbert took these changes of manner very deeply to heart. It was her fault, no doubt; she had said something silly; or affected, perhaps. Had not her brother Horace been apt to jeer at her as a mass of affectation, because she preferred Byron to “Bell’s Life,” and was more interested in Edith Dombey than in the favourite for the Oaks? She had said something that had sounded affected, though uttered in all simplicity of heart; and Mr. Lansdell had been disgusted by her talk. Contempt from him — she always thought of him in italics — was very bitter! She would never, never go to Thurston’s Crag again. But then, after one of those abruptly-unpleasant “good mornings,” Mr. Lansdell was very apt to call at Graybridge. He wanted Mr. Gilbert to go and see one of the men on the home-farm, who seemed in a very bad way, poor fellow, and ought not to be allowed to go on any longer without medical advice. Mr. Lansdell was very fond of looking up cases for the Graybridge surgeon. How good he was! Isabel thought; he in whom goodness was in a manner a supererogatory attribute; since heroes who were dark, and pensive, and handsome, were not called upon to be otherwise virtuous. How good he was! he who was as scornfully depreciative of his own merits as if the bones of another Mr. Clarke had been bleaching in some distant cave in imperishable evidence of his guilt. How good he was! and he had not been offended or disgusted with her when he left her so suddenly; for to-day he was kinder to her than ever, and lingered for nearly an hour in the unshaded parlour, in the hope that the surgeon would come in.
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