by George Moore
“If we go to the Castle, we shall want more money to buy dresses,” said Olive.
“La mer a toujours son écume pour habiller ses déesses,” replied Milord, and he got into his carriage, amid pearly peals of laughter from Mrs. Barton, intermingled with a few high notes from Olive, who had already taken to mimicking her mother.
While candles were being lighted, further remarks concerning the rights of property were made. Then parents and children bid each other good night, and a few moments after the girls found themselves alone in their room. Giving way to a sudden burst of emotion, Olive threw herself into her sister’s arms:
“Oh! Alice, how glad I am to he at home again! and is it not delightful to think that we shall never have to return to that horrid convent, to those cross nuns, with their lecturing and their lessons? But what is the matter, dear? How cross you look! I never will say anything to you again. When I do, you always snub me. I can’t help being glad I am not going back to St. Leonards. I don’t want to spend my life learning lessons, if you do.”
“I am not cross, Olive, and I don’t see any harm in your being glad at being at home. I am a little tired, that’s all, and my head aches.”
“Tired, are you? I am not a bit — I could go to a ball now — ta ra, ta ra, ta re ra, ta ra ra ra, ta re ra,” she sang, as she waltzed round the room.
“Do you know that I think I look better in my stays than any other way? and I am glad of it, for I want to look well in a ball-dress. It must be a funny sensation to walk into a room half-undressed, before a lot of men; for, you know, we shall be just as undressed in our ball-dresses as we are now. I am quite anxious to see how we shall all look. May’s arms are too fat, and Violet’s are too thin; I think mine are about the best. I heard Lord Dungory saying something to mamma about ‘décolletée,’ but I could not quite make out what he said. He always talks half in French, which is very tiresome. I wish I knew the language like you. But what a nice man Lord Dungory is, and how he seems to admire mamma, and how complimentary he is to ladies! I suppose all nice men are. But I do wish I had understood what he said about seeing me ‘décolletée.’”
“Oh, Olive!” exclaimed Alice, “you should not talk in that way; it is not nice, and it must be very wrong.”
“Why, I don’t think I said anything really wrong, did I?
I am sure I didn’t mean to. I am going to say my prayers now; and you, Alice, you haven’t said your prayers, and that is far more sinful, I am sure. I should never be able to go to sleep, if I didn’t say my prayers.”
Alice lay very still. Her eyes were closed, but, in the darkness, the events and the ideas of the day blazed with a starlike intensity. It seemed to her that she was looking on a picture traced in lines of flame on a black background: every angle, every perspective was lucent and precise, but there was no blending of tints, there was no delightful distance. All was so clear and so complete, that the whole was inexplicable. The girl remembered everything, and she understood nothing.
She remembered seeing, as they drove up the avenue, the tea-table set beneath the ample chestnut-tree, and her mother’s hands waving as she talked to the stately old gentleman; again she saw her mother taking them upstairs, to show them their room, and the kind words she had used in explaining everything now splashed into the girl’s mind, as stones drop in a well.
But the dinner-table laughs and artificial compliments, what did they mean? and the dancing after dinner? Her thoughts clamoured with a sense of insult. She had not been home for years; everything appeared so strange. Who was this Lord Dungory? Why was he always at their house? And her dislike for her mother’s admirer grew momentarily more explicit in her mind.
Had he not a house, a great big castle! What did he want in their poor place?— “Has he not children of his own?” the girl wailed; “then why does he not care for them? Dear little Cecilia, he scarcely asked after her, but seemed quite satisfied when told she was all right, and he had thanked papa for the trouble he had in looking after her. Poor dear papa!” and as she thought of her father, Alice’s thoughts grew kinder, and she shut out the vision that arose; she would not see him dressed in his gaudy smoking-jacket, twanging his guitar, or bumping Lord Dungory and her sister all in a heap on the sofa, or chasing the embroidered slippers which had been sent skimming into different corners of the room. She preferred to imagine him as a great artist, painting noble pictures in his studio, and, fearing to mar her ideal, she refused to analyse the merits of those she had seen, but thought of them simply as beautiful conceptions. She saw him a blond-bearded dreamer, his head filled with pictorial fancies; and his wife, a pearly, laughing, world-loving woman, her mind never wandering further than the attainment of some social advantage. Then the figure of Lord Dungory again loomed in sight. Suspicion, dark, formless, and fragmentary, forced sleep from Alice’s eyes, and a ray from the setting moon illumined the chamber, liaising herself in bed, she allowed her weary eyes to wander.
The room was a symbol of girlhood. By skilful arrangement, Mrs. Barton had created the idea of the playful purity and the daisy-like candour which we so willingly assume as representative of the mind of sweet seventeen. Innocence, piety, and gaiety went, it would appear, trippingly hand-inhand. Just under the ceiling, some ten feet apart, there were two bright brass crowns, and from them fell, in meek folds, the white curtains.
Above each pillow, entwined with a rosary, there was a font for holywater. The room was papered with a clear paper, covered with light blue spots, relieved with a border in darker blue, representing a sash. The two little hanging bookcases were filled with suitable volumes; half-a-dozen novels by writers acknowledged to understand the ways and usages of good society, a history, a few elegantly-bound books that looked like school-prizes, and a prayer-book or two. The wardrobes were in white-painted wood. Alice’s was next the door, Olive’s was at the opposite end of the room, facing the beds. There was but one toilet-table, but it was prettily adorned with flowing skirts, and furnished with tall wax-candles. It stood under the window next the marble wash-stand, with its double sets of basins, jugs and glasses. There were but two pictures. “Le Printemps” was represented by a laughing youth and a maiden, swinging amid budding trees and blossoming flowers. The other showed a loving girl, carving her sweetheart’s name on the grandest oak in her father’s domain.
Alice looked anxiously at her sister. The dark masses of hair lying on the pillows were touched with gold. In a beautiful abandonment of attitude the girl slept; delicate shadows veiled her face, and from her lips, fresh as fruit, seemed to rise the breath of a beautiful dream. The covertures floated away in folds, that were melodies; not a line was defined. Less human she was than a Titian, less precise than a Raphael; she was, perhaps, like a figure set by Phidias in a dream of eternal youth, or the nebulous birth of an angel, unfolding its loveliness beneath the suscitating smiles of a god. Olive had now all the beauty of inanimate Nature, and, unconscious of all things, save the sense of living that a rose may feel in the dew-time, she slept.
But in the beauty of perfect proportions no soul exists; the soul asserts itself in certain bodily imperfections of form, which, when understood, become irresistible charms. Let us look at the elder sister.
A thin girl, pale from want of rest; her pointed shoulders and long arms were not beautiful like Olive’s, and she had no thick tresses to scatter over the pillow; her brown hair was rolled, and pinned with one hairpin into a small knot. The forehead swept above the marked eyebrows in a wide, clear path; the hands, although well-shaped, were sinewy and strong. She had not a feature that was either regular or attractive; but her face was one of interest to the critical observer; for now, when the quick, uncertain thoughts swept across her mind, the eyes, like a grey lake in a sudden sun, were flooded with bright attractiveness, and the formless features gained, through expression, a precision not their own.
Both sisters had returned to a home they had not seen for years, both were going to enter a world of which they knew
nothing: unanxious, one slept, her brain tranquil as the lines of her own beautiful body; the other sat wakeful, watching the greying space of window, all her corporal imperfections illustrative of the keen, the yearning, the inquiring, the doubting mind, that burned within. And now as the white room grew whiter in the dawn, with the same thoughts still grinding, still burning in her head — thoughts of her mother, of Lord Dungory, of her father — amid the hoarse voices of shrilling cocks, and the metallic voices of chirping birds, the tired girl fell asleep.
CHAPTER III.
MR. BARTON, OR Arthur, as he was usually called, always retired to his studio immediately after breakfast, and, as Mrs. Barton had domestic duties to attend to, the girls were left to themselves.
Alice was glad to be with her sister. The dark forebodings of the night were forgotten in the gaiety of the morning sunshine, and her thoughts were now but floating remembrances of home. For there are moments when intervening years render the past lucent, and she pictured the dead life of childhood as one looking through morning mists on a fair prospect — hills and hill-villages full of outline and colour — may picture the hopes and joys that are unfolding themselves there. The sweet girl by her side was her sister — the sister she had known since babyhood, and as they descended the stairs with their summer hats and sunshades, Alice stopped at the door of the schoolroom. It was here that, only a few years ago, she had interceded with the dear old governess, and aided Olive to master the difficulties against which the light brain could not contend singly — the hardships of striving to recall the number of continents the world possesses, the impossibility of learning to say definitely if seven times four made twenty-eight or thirty.
The map of the world still hung on the wall, but the furniture had been removed, and to turn over the dusty books and glance at the dog’s-eared pages that they would never again be called upon to study, left a blankness in the heart.
This room was placed at the further end of a long passage where the children used to play for hours, building strange houses out of boxes of bricks, or dressing dolls in fantastic costumes. Olive had forgotten, but Alice remembered, and her thoughts wandered lovingly through the land of toys. The box of bricks had come from an aunt that was now dead; the big doll, mother had brought from Dublin when she went to see the oculist about her eyes; and then there were other toys, that suggested nothing, and whose history was entirely forgotten. But the clock that stood in the passage was well remembered, and Alice thought how this old-fashioned timepiece used to be the regulator and confidant of all their joys and hopes. She saw herself again listening, amid her sums, for the welcome voice that would call her away; she saw herself again examining its grave face and striving to calculate, with childish eagerness, if she would have time to build another Tower of Babel or put another tack in the doll’s frock before the ruthless iron tongue struck the fatal hour.
“Oh, Olive! how can you pass here without waiting a moment to look at the dear old clock? Do you not remember how we used to listen to it when we were children?”
“You are a funny girl, Alice, you remember everything. Fancy thinking of that old clock! I hate it, for it brought me in to lessons when it struck eleven.”
“Yes, but it brought you out to play when it struck twelve. See! the hands are just on the hour; let us wait to hear it strike.”
“Oh! come on, come on, I want to get out in the garden. I can’t waste the whole day waiting for an old clock to strike. Besides, if it were going we should hear it ticking. How silly you are!”
The girls listened vainly for a sound; and Alice felt as if she had been apprised of the loss of a tried friend when one of the servants told them the clock had been broken some years ago. —
The kitchen-windows looked on a street made by a line of buildings parallel with the house. These were the stables and outhouses, and they formed one of the walls of the garden that lay behind. It was sheltered on the north side by a thin curtain of beeches, filled every evening with roosting rooks. Then, coming round to the front of the house, were the chestnut-trees, the verandah and the rosary, where a little fountain played when visitors were present; and further back, taking in the chestnut-trees, a wooden paling defended the pleasure-ground from the cows that grazed in the generous expanse of grass extending up to the trees of the Lawler domain.
Brookfield was, therefore, a small place, but, manifolded in dreams past and present, it extended indefinitely before Alice’s eyes, and, absorbed by the sad sweetness of retrospection, she played lovingly with the golden tassels of the laburnum-tree, or lingered over the weed-grown sun-dial, while Olive ran through the rosary from the stables and back again, calling to her sister, making the sunlight ring with her light laughter. Alice was disappointed to find that Olive could feel nothing of what she felt, and she reminded her vainly that it was here they used to play with Nell, the old setter, and that it was there they gave bread to the blind beggar. And when they met the coachman in the yard, it was of the old brown mare she inquired, with which they used to go for such delightful drives, not of the sleek carriage horses that had lately been bought to take them to balls and tennis parties.
Suddenly Mrs. Barton’s voice was heard calling. Milord had arrived, and they were to go into the garden and pick a few flowers to make a buttonhole for him. Olive darted off at once to execute the commission, and soon returned with a rose set round with some sprays of stephanotis. The old lord was seated in the dining-room, in an armchair which Mrs. Barton had drawn up to the window so that he might enjoy the air. She had placed a table by his side, and, with many little cajoleries, was pouring him out a glass of sherry, and complimenting him, with quite a flutter of words, on his good looks and general appearance. He bowed ceremoniously, smiled urbanely, and Alice, as she entered the room, heard him say: “Quand on aime on est toujours bien portant.”
She stopped abruptly, and Mrs. Barton, who already suspected her of secret criticism, whispered, as she glided across the room:
“Now, you awkward girl, don’t stand there looking foolish; go and talk to Milord and learn to make yourself agreeable.”
The girl felt she was incapable of this, and it pained her to listen to her sister’s facile hilarity, and her mother’s coaxing observations. Milord did not, however, neglect her; he made suitable remarks concerning her school successes, and asked appropriate questions anent her little play of “King Cophetua.” But whatever interest the subject possessed was found in the fact that Olive had taken the part of the Princess; and, rearranging the story a little, Mrs. Barton declared, with a shower of little laughs, and many waves of the white hands, that “my lady there had refused a king; a nice beginning, indeed, and a pleasant future for her chaperon.”
The few books the house possessed lay on the drawingroom table, or were piled, in dusty confusion, in the bookcase in Mr. Barton’s studio; and, thinking of them, Alice determined she would go and see her father. The thought brought a glow of warmth to the girl’s chilling heart, and, full of expectation, she knocked at the door.
Instantly the loud baritone voice ceased singing “Il balen,” and answered in a high falsetto, “Come in!”
Under the window, a small rickety easel seemed to totter under the weight of an enormous canvas. Thereon was a blonde Titaness, who gathered to her bosom one of the doves the winged boy by her side had just shot in the green trees above her. Arthur was rushing backwards and forwards streaking crimson along the thighs of his lady, but, when he saw his daughter, he hurriedly turned the picture to the wall.
“Oh! I beg your pardon, papa; I’m afraid I am interrupting you.”
“Not at all — not at all, I assure you; come in. I will have a cigarette; there is nothing like reconsidering your work through the smoke of a cigarette. The most beautiful pictures I have ever seen I have seen in the smoke of a cigarette; nothing can beat those, particularly if you are lying back looking up at a dirty ceiling.”
These remarks were not a little disconcerting to Alice, and for some
moments she looked round the walls in silent wonder. There, each picture demonstrated how a something less or a something more would have made of a disordered intelligence a genius of the first class. War and women were the two poles of Arthur’s mind. “Cain shielding his wife from wild beasts” had often been painted, numberless “Bridals of Triermain”; and, as for the “Rape of the Sabines,” it seemed as if it could never be sufficiently accomplished. Opposite the door was a huge design representing Samson and Delilah; opposite the fireplace, “Julius Caesar overturning the Altars of the Druids” occupied nearly the entire wall. Nymphs and tigers were scattered in between; canvases were also propped against almost, every piece of furniture.
At last Alice’s eyes were suddenly caught by a picture representing three women bathing. It was a very rough sketch, but, before she had time to examine it, Arthur turned it against the wall. Why he hid two pictures from her she could not help wondering. It could not be for propriety’s sake for there were nudities on every side of her.
Then, lying upon the sofa, he explained how so-and-so had told him, when he was a boy in London, that no one since Michael Angelo bad been able to design as he could; how he had modelled a colossal statue of Lucifer before he was sixteen, how he had painted a picture of the battle of Arbela, forty feet by twenty, before he was eighteen; but that was of no use, the world nowadays only cared for execution, and he could not wait until he had got the bit of ribbon in Delilah’s hair to look exactly like silk.
Alice listened. Her heart was as full of tenderness as her eyes were of admiration, as she watched the blonde, expressionless face — so like Olive’s in its pseudo-Greek proportions. Nor did the similitude cease there; and it was easy to see that, from the imaginative but constantly unhinging intelligence of the father, the next step downwards was the weak, feather-brained daughter. In what secret source, lost far back in the night of generations, was this human river polluted? Will the pure waters of some tributary again make it clean, or will it grow more and more tainted until finally lost in a shrieking sea of madness whose tumult is beard in the far distance answering prophetically the boasts of civilisation? These are the terrible questions that an examination of the history of families propounds, and to which the scientist can as yet make no answer. Yet, how absolutely consequent are these laws of heredity.