Half-an-hour after dinner they were all scattered upon the hills.
Reginald, who cherished a secret passion for Ida, which was considerably in advance of his years, and who had calculated upon being her guide, philosopher, and friend all through the day, found himself ousted by the West End physician, who took complete possession of Miss Palliser, under the pretence of explaining the history — altogether speculative — of the spot. He discoursed eloquently about the Druids, expatiated upon the City of Winchester, dozing in the sunshine yonder, among its fat water meadows. He talked of the Saxons and the Normans, of William of Wykeham, and his successors, until poor Ida felt sick and faint from very weariness. It was all very delightful talk, no doubt — the polished utterance of a man who read his Saturday Review and Athenaeum diligently, saw an occasional number of Fors Clavigera, and even skimmed the more aesthetic papers in the Architect; but to Ida this expression of modern culture was all weariness. She would rather have been racing those wild young Wendovers down the slippery hill-side, on which they were perilling their necks; she would rather have been lying beside the lake in Kingthorpe Park, reading her well-thumbed Tennyson, or her shabby little Keats.
Her thoughts had wandered ever so far away when she was called back to the work-a-day world by finding that Dr. Rylance’s conversation had suddenly slipped from archaeology into a more personal tone.
‘Are you really going away to-morrow?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ answered Ida, sadly, looking at one of the last of the butterflies, whose brief summertide of existence was wearing to its close, like her own.
‘You are going back to Mauleverer Manor?’
‘Yes. I have another half-year of bondage, I am going back to drudgery and self-contempt, to be brow-beaten by Miss Pew, and looked down upon by most of her pupils. The girls in my own class are very fond of me, but I’m afraid their fondness is half pity. The grown-up girls with happy homes and rich fathers despise me. I hardly wonder at it. Genteel poverty certainly is contemptible. There is nothing debasing in a smock-frock or a fustian jacket. The labourers I see about Kingthorpe have a glorious air of independence, and I daresay are as proud, in their way, as if they were dukes. But shabby finery — genteel gowns worn threadbare: there is a deep degradation in those.’
‘Not for you,’ answered Dr. Rylance, earnestly, with an admiring look in his blue-gray eyes. They were somewhat handsome eyes when they did not put on their cruel expression. ‘Not for you. Nothing could degrade, nothing could exalt you. You are superior to the accident of your surroundings.’
‘It’s very kind of you to say that; but it’s a fallacy, all the same,’ said Ida. ‘Do you think Napoleon at St. Helena, squabbling with Sir Hudson Lowe, is as dignified a figure as Napoleon at the Tuileries, in the zenith of his power? But I ought not to be grumbling at fate. I have been happy for six sunshiny weeks. If I were to live to be a century old, I could never forget how good people at Kingthorpe have been to me. I will go back to my old slavery, and live upon the memory of that happiness.’
‘Why should you go back to slavery?’ asked Dr. Rylance, taking her hand in his and holding it with so strong a grasp that she could hardly have withdrawn it without violence. ‘There is a home at Kingthorpe ready to receive you. If you have been happy there in the last few weeks, why not try if you can be happy there always? There is a house in Cavendish Square whose master would be proud to make you its mistress. Ida, we have seen very little of each other, and I may be precipitate in hazarding this offer; but I am as fond of you as if I had known you half a lifetime, and I believe that I could make your life happy.’
Ida Palliser’s heart thrilled with a chill sense of horror and aversion. She had talked recklessly enough of her willingness to marry for money, and, lo! here was a prosperous man laying two handsomely furnished houses at her feet — a man of gentlemanlike bearing, good-looking, well-informed, well-spoken, with no signs of age in his well-preserved face and figure; a man whom any woman, friendless, portionless, a mere waif upon earth’s surface, at the mercy of all the winds that blow, ought proudly and gladly to accept for her husband.
No, too bold had been her challenge to fate. She had said that she would marry any honest man who would lift her out of the quagmire of poverty: but she was not prepared to accept Dr. Rylance’s offer, generous as it sounded. She would rather go back to the old treadmill, and her old fights with Miss Pew, than reign supreme over the dainty cottage at Kingthorpe and the house in Cavendish Square. Her time had not come.
Dr. Rylance had not risen to eloquence in making his offer; and Ida’s reply was in plainest words.
‘I am very sorry,’ she faltered. ‘I feel that it is very good of you to make such a proposal; but I cannot accept it.’
‘There is some one else,’ said the doctor. ‘Your heart is given away already.’
‘No,’ she answered sadly; ‘my heart is like an empty sepulchre.’
‘Then why should I not hope to win you? I have been hasty, no doubt: but I want if possible to prevent your return to that odious school. If you would but make me happy by saying yes, you could stay with your kind friends at The Knoll till the day that makes you mistress of my house. We might be married in time to spend November in Italy. It is the nicest month for Rome. You have never seen Italy, perhaps?’
‘No. I have seen very little that is worth seeing.’
‘Ida, why will you not say yes? Do you doubt that I should try my uttermost to make you happy?’
‘No,’ she answered gravely, ‘but I doubt my own capacity for that kind of happiness.’
Dr. Rylance was deeply wounded. He had been petted and admired by women during the ten years of his widowhood, favoured and a favourite everywhere. He had made up his mind deliberately to marry this penniless girl. Looked at from a worldling’s point of view, it would seem, at the first glance, an utterly disadvantageous alliance: but Dr. Rylance had an eye that could sweep over horizons other than are revealed to the average gaze, and he told himself that so lovely a woman as Ida Palliser must inevitably become the fashion in that particular society which Dr. Rylance most affected: and a wife famed for her beauty and elegance Would assuredly be of more advantage to a fashionable physician than a common-place wife with a fortune. Dr. Rylance liked money; but he liked it only for what it could buy. He had no sons, and he was much too fond of himself to lead laborious days in order to leave a large fortune to his daughter. He had bought a lease of his London house, which would last his time; he had bought the freehold of the Kingthorpe cottage; and he was living up to his income. When he died there would be two houses of furniture, plate, pictures, horses and carriages, and the Kingthorpe cottage, to be realized for Urania. He estimated these roughly as worth between six and seven thousand pounds, and he considered seven thousand pounds an ample fortune for his only daughter. Urania was in happy ignorance of the modesty of his views. She imagined herself an heiress on a much larger scale.
To offer himself to a penniless girl of whose belongings he knew absolutely nothing, and to be peremptorily refused! Dr. Rylance could hardly believe such a thing possible. The girl must be trifling with him, playing her fish, with the fixed intention of landing him presently. It was in the nature of girls to do that kind of thing. ‘Why do you reject me?’ he asked seriously; ‘is it because I am old enough to be your father?’
‘No, I would marry a man old enough to be my grandfather if I loved him,’ answered Ida, with cruel candour.
‘And I am to understand that your refusal is irrevocable? he urged.
‘Quite irrevocable. But I hope you believe that I am grateful for the honour you have done me.’
‘That is the correct thing to say upon such occasions, answered Dr. Rylance, coldly; ‘I wonder the sentence is not written in your copy books, among those moral aphorisms which are of so little use in after life.’
‘The phrase may seem conventional, but in my case it means much more than usual,’ said Ida; ‘a girl who has neither money no
r friends has good reason to be grateful when a gentleman asks her to be his wife.’
‘I wish I could be grateful for your gratitude,’ said Dr. Rylance, ‘but I can’t. I want your love, and nothing else. Is it on Urania’s account that you reject me?’ he urged. ‘If you think that she would be a hindrance to your happiness, pray dismiss the thought. If she did not accommodate herself pleasantly to my choice her life would have to be spent apart from us. I would brook no rebellion.’
The cruel look had come into Dr. Rylance’s eyes. He was desperately angry. He was surprised, humiliated, indignant. Never had the possibility of rejection occurred to him. It had been for him to decide whether he would or would not take this girl for his wife; and after due consideration of her merits and all surrounding circumstances, he had decided that he would take her.
‘Is my daughter the stumbling-block?’ he urged.
‘No,’ she answered, ‘there is no stumbling-block. I would marry you to-morrow, if I felt that I could love you as a wife ought to love her husband. I said once — only a little while ago — that I would marry for money. I find that I am not so base as I thought myself.’
‘Perhaps the temptation is not large enough,’ said Dr. Rylance. ‘If I had been Brian Wendover, and the owner of Kingthorpe Abbey, you would hardly have rejected me so lightly.’
Ida crimsoned to the roots of her hair. The shaft went home. It was as if Dr. Rylance had been inside her mind and knew all the foolish day-dreams she had dreamed in the idle summer afternoons, under the spreading cedar branches, or beside the lake in the Abbey grounds. Before she had time to express her resentment a cluster of young Wendovers came sweeping down the greensward at her side, and in the next minute Blanche was hanging upon her bodily, like a lusty parasite strangling a slim young tree.
‘Darling,’ cried Blanche gaspingly, ‘such news. Brian has come — cousin Brian — after all, though he thought he couldn’t. But he made a great effort, and he has come all the way as fast as he could tear to be here on Bessie’s birthday. Isn’t it too jolly?’
‘All the way from Norway?’ asked Ida.
‘Yes,’ said Urania, who had been carried down the hill with the torrent of Wendovers, ‘all the way from Norway. Isn’t it nice of him?’
Blanche’s frank face was brimming over with smiles. The boys were all laughing. How happy Brian’s coming had made them!
Ida looked at them wonderingly.
‘How pleased you all seem!’ she said. ‘I did not know you were so fond of your cousin. I thought it was the other you liked.’
‘Oh, we like them both,’ said Blanche, ‘and it is so nice of Brian to come on purpose for Bessie’s birthday. Do come and see him. He is on the top of the hill talking to Bess; and the kettle boils, and we are just going to have tea. We are all starving.’
‘After such a dinner!’ exclaimed Ida.
‘Such a dinner, indeed! — two or three legs of fowls and a plate or so of pie!’ ejaculated Reginald, contemptuously. ‘I began to be hungry a quarter of an hour afterwards. Come and see Brian.’
Ida looked round her wonderingly, feeling as if she was in a dream.
Dr. Rylance had disappeared. Urania was smiling at her sweetly, more sweetly than it was her wont to smile at Ida Palliser.
‘One would think she knew that I had refused her father,’ mused Ida.
They all climbed the hill, the children talking perpetually, Ida unusually silent. The smoke of a gipsy fire was going up from a hollow near the Druid altar, and two figures were standing beside the altar; one, a young man, with his arm resting on the granite slab, and his head bent as he talked, with seeming earnestness, to Bessie Wendover. He turned as the crowd approached, and Bessie introduced him to Miss Palliser. ‘My cousin Brian — my dearest friend Ida,’ she said.
‘She is desperately fond of the Abbey,’ said Blanche; ‘so I hope she will like you. “Love me, love my dog,” says the proverb, so I suppose one might say, “Love my house, love me.”’
Ida stood silent amidst her loquacious friends, looking at the stranger with a touch of wonder. No, this was not the image which she had pictured to herself. Mr. Wendover was very good-looking — interesting even; he had the kind of face which women call nice — a pale complexion, dreamy gray eyes, thin lips, a well-shaped nose, a fairly intellectual forehead. But the Brian of her fancies was a man of firmer mould, larger features, a more resolute air, an eye with more fire, a brow marked by stronger lines. For some unknown reason she had fancied the master of the Abbey like that Sir Tristram Wendover who had been so loyal a subject and so brave a soldier, and before whose portrait she had so often lingered in dreamy contemplation.
‘And you have really come all the way from Norway to be at Bessie’s picnic?’ she faltered at last, feeling that she was expected to say something.
‘I would have come a longer distance for the sake of such a pleasant meeting,’ he answered, smiling at her.
‘Bessie,’ cried Blanche, who had been grovelling on her knees before the gipsy fire, ‘the kettle will go off the boil if you don’t make tea instantly. If it were not your birthday I should make it myself.’
‘You may,’ said Bessie, ‘although it is my birthday.’
She had walked a little way apart with Urania, and they two were talking somewhat earnestly.
‘Those girls seem to be plotting something,’ said Reginald; ‘a charade for to-night, perhaps. It’s sure to be stupid if Urania’s in it.’
‘You mean that it will be too clever,’ said Horatio.
‘Yes, that kind of cleverness which is the essence of stupidity.’
While Bessie and Miss Rylance conversed apart, and all the younger Wendovers devoted their energies to the preparation of a tremendous meal, Ida and Brian Wendover stood face to face upon the breezy hill-top, the girl sorely embarrassed, the young man gazing at her as if he had never seen anything so lovely in his life.
‘I have heard so much about you from Bessie,’ he said after a silence which seemed long to both. ‘Her letters for the last twelve months have been a perpetual paean — like one of the Homeric hymns, with you for the heroine. I had quite a dread of meeting you, feeling that, after having my expectations strung up to such a pitch, I must be disappointed. Nothing human could justify Bessie’s enthusiasm.’
‘Please don’t talk about it. Bessie’s one weak point is her affection for me. I am very grateful. I love her dearly, but she does her best to make me ridiculous.’
‘I am beginning to think Bessie a very sensible girl,’ said Brian, longing to say much more, so deeply was he impressed by this goddess in a holland gown, with glorious eyes shining upon him under the shadow of a coarse straw hat.
‘Have you come back to Hampshire for good?’ asked Ida, as they strolled towards Bessie and Urania.
‘For good! No, I never stay long.’
‘What a pity that lovely old Abbey should be deserted!’
‘Yes, it is rather a shame, is it not? But then no one could expect a young man to live there except in the hunting season — or for the sake of the shooting.’
‘Could anyone ever grow tired of such a place?’ asked Ida.
She was wondering at the young man’s indifferent air, as if that solemn abbey, those romantic gardens, were of no account to him. She supposed that this was in the nature of things. A man born lord of such an elysium would set little value upon his paradise. Was it not Eve’s weariness of Eden which inclined her ear to the serpent?
And now the banquet was spread upon the short smooth turf, and everybody was ordered to sit down. They made a merry circle, with the tea-kettle in the centre, piles of cake, and bread and butter, and jam-pots surrounding it. Blanche and Horatio were the chief officiators, and were tremendously busy ministering to the wants of others, while they satisfied their own hunger and thirst hurriedly between whiles. The damsel sat on the grass with a big crockery teapot in her lap, while her brother watched and managed the kettle, and ran to and fro with cups and sauc
ers. Bessie, as the guest of honour, was commanded to sit still and look on.
‘Dreadfully babyish, isn’t it?’ said Urania, smiling with her superior air at Brian, who had helped himself to a crust of home-made bread, and a liberal supply of gooseberry jam.
‘Uncommonly jolly,’ he answered gaily. ‘I confess to a weakness for bread and jam. I wish people always gave it at afternoon teas.’
‘Has it not a slight flavour of the nursery?’
‘Of course it has. But a nursery picnic is ever so much better than a swell garden-party, and bread and jam is a great deal more wholesome than salmon-mayonaise and Strasbourg pie. You may despise me as much as you like, Miss Rylance. I came here determined to enjoy myself.’
‘That is the right spirit for a picnic,’ said Ida, ‘People with grand ideas are not wanted.’
‘And I suppose in the evening you will join in the dumb charades, and play hide-and-seek in the garden, all among spiders and cockchafers.’
‘I will do anything I am told to do,’ answered Brian, cheerily. ‘But I think the season of the cockchafer is over.’
‘What has become of Dr. Rylance?’ asked Bessie, looking about her as if she had only that moment missed him.
‘I think he went back to the farm for his horse,’ said Urania. ‘I suppose he found our juvenile sports rather depressing.’
‘Well, he paid us a compliment in coming at all,’ answered Bessie, ‘so we must forgive him for getting tired of us.’
The drive home was very merry, albeit Bessie and her friend were to part next morning — Ida to go back to slavery. They were both young enough to be able to enjoy the present hour, even on the edge of darkness.
Bessie clasped her friend’s hand as they sat side by side in the landau.
‘You must come to us at Christmas,’ she whispered: ‘I shall ask mother to invite you.’
Brian was full of talk and gaiety as they drove home through the dusk. He was very different from that ideal Brian of Ida’s girlish fancy — the Brian who embodied all her favourite attributes, and had all the finest qualities of the hero of romance. But he was an agreeable, well-bred young man, bringing with him that knowledge of life and the active world which made his talk seem new and enlightening after the strictly local and domestic intellects of the good people with whom she had been living.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 796