by George Moore
“I know none of the young men who come to my house. All I know of them is that they come from the Southdown Road.”
“Don’t be so silly, James, put up that handkerchief. Of course, the Southdown Road is one of the great disadvantages of the place. Those villa residences have brought into Southwick a host of people that a man living in a big place like the Manor House cannot know — little people who have—”
“Not two hundred pounds invested — no, nor yet a hundred.”
“Well, I don’t wish to offend them, I’ll say small incomes. They are all devoured with envy, and all they think of is what goes on at the Manor House.”
“A lot of penniless young jackanapeses. Every morning I see them at the station watching me over the tops of their newspapers.”
“You must understand, Hester, poor James up in London, toiling, not knowing what is going on in his own home; feasting and pleasure going on morning, noon, and, I may say, night, for when James returned home unexpectedly about ten o’clock at night, he found them — how many were there?”
“About a dozen, the others had gone.”
“Feasting, drinking his champagne — his very best.”
“The last few bottles of ‘34 port were drunk; the peaches, that the gardener has been forcing so carefully for months past, were all eaten. I returned home unexpectedly; I had intended to spend the night in London — you know I went there to see about starting Willy on the Stock Exchange; he has drawn three thousand more out of the distillery; I hope he won’t lose it. Well, I met Berkins in Pall Mall, and he said if I would return by the late train that he would spend the night here, and we would go up to town together in the morning. I suspected nothing; I went into my dining-room, and there I found them all at supper. Had it not been for Berkins it wouldn’t have mattered. He was indignant when he saw one of those jackanapeses with his arm round the back of Grace’s chair; he says that such company is not fit for the lady that is going to be his wife; and he now insists on fixing the day, the settlements, and everything, or of breaking off the match.”
“Then why don’t you fix the day and the settlements?”
“Grace is not willing; she is quite undecided. She says she doesn’t know whether she will have him or not. Sally tries to set her against him; she laughs at him, says he is pompous, and imitates him. Of course, it is quite true that he thinks everything he has is betterthan anybody else’s. She says he is old, and says that kissing him would be like rubbing your face in a mattress.”
“The fact is,” said Aunt Mary, “Sally ought to have been a man; had she been a man, it would have been all right.”
Aunt Hester, who had spent her life in a vicarage, glanced uneasily at her sister, and fidgeted with the papers in her satchel.
“I suppose it will be all the same a hundred years hence.”
“No, James, it will not,” replied Aunt Hester, with unusual determination.
The conversation dropped, and the speakers stared at each other at a loss how to proceed.
“She is a very difficult girl to manage. If it were not for her we could get on very well; it is she who upsets everything. She can’t agree with Maggie; they are always quarrelling. The day after the party she threatened to knock her down if she interfered with her young man.”
“Is it possible! Did she say that? Well, when it comes to young ladies knocking each other down! Young ladies were very different in my young days. It only proves what I said about Sally — she ought to have been a man, she really ought to have been a man. I see it all; I have only to give one look round to take it all in one glance. When she came to meet me in Brighton I understood it all at once; I saw she could not restrain herself, no powers of self-restraint. Her eyes fixed on every man as if she couldn’t see enough of him; her black eyes flashing. I wanted no telling — I saw it all; the moment a young man went by her eyes flashed. Here she was— ‘Aunt Mary, Aunt Mary, there’s Meason, there’s Meason, Aunt Mary, Meason, Meason, Aunt Mary.’ It is not right, it can’t be right; and to my thinking Maggie is just as bad — a little more sly perhaps.”
“No, not dear Maggie.”
“I say it is not right; girls in good health could not go on like that. If I were you, James, I would take them up to a first-rate London physician, the very best that can be had for money. Those girls are highly organised, highly sensitive; their nerves are highly strung. They want something to bring them down,” said Aunt Mary; but catching at that moment sight of her sister’s face, she laughed consumedly, and, speaking through her laughter, said, “So-and-so, a first-rate man, I can’t think of his name — he will give you the very best advice.”
“I think if our dear nieces could be brought to understand the sinfulness of their disobedience. I have here one or two little books which I think it would be advisable for them to read.”
“Later on, my dear Hester; the best thing that James can do is to see to their health. No girls in good health could act as they do; it is radically impossible.”
“I suppose that is what I must do; I don’t know if I shall succeed, but I will try to get them to come up to London and have medical advice. Since the death of poor Julia I have been all alone; my position is a very hard one. I have no one to talk to, to assist me, to take my place in any way. I am obliged to go to London every day, and I assure you my heart is all of a flutter in the morning when I take the train, for I don’t know what may happen before I return. The girls can do what they like; they are mistresses of this big house, they take the carriage into Brighton when they like, Sally takes the cart. I have thought of getting rid of that cart.”
Although passionately fond of talking, Aunt Mary would with patience, and even with pleasure, cross her hands and settle herself down to listen to one of Uncle James’s interminable lamentations, but Aunt Hester, a nervous and timid creature who talked but little, not only declared that she could not bear to hear the same stories over and over again, but interrupted her brother with firmness and determination. Indeed, it was only on occasion of Uncle James’s soliloquies that she had ever shown any strength of will.
“We know very well, James, that your position is a trying one — that since the death of poor Julia you have no one whom you can look to. There is no use in telling us this over again; it is mere waste of time. What we have to do now is by all means in our power to convince dear Sally of the sinfulness of her conduct, and so strive to bring her back to a state of grace.”
“Her spirit must be broken, she must be subdued,” interjected Aunt Mary.
“Christ is the real healer, prayer is the true medicine, and by it alone is the troubled spirit soothed.”
It being impossible to contravene these opinions, the conversation came to a pause, which was at length interrupted by Mr. Brookes, who through the folds of his handkerchief declared again that it would be all the same a hundred years hence. Even Aunt Mary’s realism did not offend Aunt Hester as did this un-Christian philosophy; she gathered her strength for a grave reproof, but was cut short by her sister’s laughter. All the teeth were glittering now, and peal after peal of laughter came. Aunt Hester’s courage died, and her long, freckled face drooped like a sad flower.
“Now let us hear something about Grace. What about this marriage? Is Berkins as amorous as ever? That man does amuse me — his waistcoat buttons are better than any other man’s.”
“Mary, Mary, I beg of you to remember Mr. Berkins is a man of eight thousand a-year.”
“He may make eight thousand a-year, but he has very little money invested,” said Aunt Mary.
“That is true,” Mr. Brookes replied reflectively, and he was about to rush off into a long financial statement when his sister, who already regretted her joke, checked him with an abrupt question.
“My dear James, is this marriage to be or not to be? That is what I want to know.”
“I really can’t say, Mary; Sally has contrived to upset her sister; she would have been, I feel sure, glad to marry Mr. Berkins if she had no
t been upset by Sally.”
“Upset by Sally, what do you mean?”
“I told you that Sally tries to turn Berkins into ridicule, laughs at his beard among other things.”
“I must see Grace about this,” said Aunt Mary; “you must excuse my laughing, but Sally is often very droll.”
Choosing the first occasion when Maggie and Sally were absent from the room, Aunt Mary said, “Come, Gracie, dear, tell me about this marriage. I hear that your mind is not made up — that you are not at all decided. This is not acting fairly towards your father. You are placing him in a very false position.”
“I don’t think so, aunty. No one, so far as I can make out, is either decided or satisfied. Mr. Berkins is not satisfied with the society we see.”
“The Southdown Road you mean,” interrupted Mr. Brookes, “and very properly, too.”
“And father and he cannot agree upon money matters, and I don’t like a beard—”
“You never objected to a beard until Sally put you against it.”
“Yes, I did, father; I always told you—”
“Never mind the beard, tell me about the money matters that your father and Mr. Berkins can’t agree upon.”
“Mr. Berkins has offered to settle twelve thousand pounds upon me if father will settle the same amount. But father won’t agree to this; he wants Mr. Berkins to settle twelve, but does not want to settle more than seven himself upon me.”
“Is this so, James?” asked Aunt Mary.
Mr. Brookes avoided answering the question, and entered into a long and garrulous statement concerning himself and his money: he had made it all himself! he spoke of his investments with pride, and pathetically declared that he would not marry again because he would not deprive his dear children of anything. Aunt Mary crossed her hands over her shawl, and set herself to listen to the old gentleman’s rigmarole. Aunt Hester tried several times to cut him short, but this time he would not be silenced.
Then Aunt Mary started the story of a girl whom she had known intimately in early life, which she no doubt thought would help Grace to a better comprehension of her difficulties; but the dear lady lost herself in the domestic entanglement of many families, on the subject of which she contributed much curious information, without, however, elucidating the matter in hand. She wandered so far that at length all hope of return became impossible, and she was obliged to pull up suddenly and ask what she had been talking about.
“What was I talking about, James; you have been listening to me — what was I talking about?”
Mr. Brookes made no attempt to give the information necessary for the blending of her many narratives, and she was forced to seek unaided for the lost thread. Soon after the girls came in with their gin and water. They drank their grog, kissed their relations, and retired to bed.
And the next evening, and the next, and the next, so long as Aunt Mary and Aunt Hester remained at the Manor House, the evenings passed in a similar fashion; and, notwithstanding the doleful faces they occasionally assumed, they found pleasure in lamenting the follies of the young people. The same stories were told, almost the same words were uttered. The only malcontent was Willy. He had no interest in his sisters, and the hours after dinner in the billiard-room when his sisters were in the drawing-room were those he devoted to looking through his letters and filling up his diary; so when Sally’s name was mentioned he caught at his short crisp hair and gnashed his teeth.
VI
“MY DEAR FELLOW, just as I’m settling down to do some work, Aunt Mary comes along the passage; I know her step so well. And then it begins, the old story that I have heard twenty times before, all over again. You have no idea how worrying it is.”
Frank laughed, and talked of something else. These discussions of Sally’s character and general behaviour did not appeal to him in either a comic or serious light, and the havoc they made of Willy’s business hours did not perceptibly move him; he was full of his good looks, his clothes, his affections, his bull-dog, and the fact that his youth was going by, as it should go by, among girls, in an old English village, in a garden by the sea.
Aunt Mary was a woman that a rarer young man would have been attracted by; indeed the delicacy of a young man may be tested by the sympathy he may feel for women when age has drawn a veil over, and put sexual promptings aside. Her bright teeth and eyes, the winsome little face, so glad, would have at once charmed and led any young man not so brutally young as Frank Escott. It would have pleased another to watch her, to wait on her, to listen to her rambling stories all so full of laughter and the sunshine of kindness and homely wit; it would have pleased him to note that she was gratified by the admiration of a young man; it would please him to hear himself called by his Christian name, while he must address her as Mrs. So-and-so, and in maintaining this difference they would both become conscious of pleasing restraint.
His comprehension of life was invariably a sentimental one, so the aunts were to him merely middle-aged women — uninteresting, and useful only so far as their efforts contributed to render the lives of young people easy and pleasurable. In abrupt and passing impressions he concluded that Aunt Mary was bright and pleasant, but tediously voluble, given to wasting that time which he would have liked to spend talking to the young ladies of poetry and Italy.
He scorned poor Aunt Hester. She shrank from him, frightened by his harsh, blunt manners; she was afraid he led a sinful life in London. Aunt Mary had few doubts on the subject, and her comments made her sister tremble. She spoke of him as a most desirable husband for Maggie. “He will be a peer, my dear James. Lord Mount Rorke will never marry again. He is the acknowledged heir to the title and estates.”
And the young man went as he came — full of himself, his clothes, his good looks; bumptious and arrogant, effusive in his love of his friends, and yet sincere. He looked out of the railway carriage window to seize a last look of the green, with its horse pond and its downs, and the cricketers all in white, running to and fro (young Meason had just made a three, and Sally was applauding). The porches of the Southdown Road he could just see over the fields, and Mr. Brooke’s glass glittered amid the summer foliage. At that moment he loved the ugly little village, with its barren downs and all its anomalous aspects of town and country. He thought of his friends there, and his life appeared to be theirs, and theirs his, and he wished it might flow on for ever in this quiet place. He seemed to understand it all so well, and to love it all so dearly. He accepted it all, even its vulgarest aspects. Even pompous Berkins appeared to him under a tenderer light — the light of orange-flowers and married love. For Aunt Mary had smoothed away all difficulties, hirsute and monetary, and the wedding had been fixed for the autumn. The gaiety of the day he had spent with the girls, its feasting and its flirtation, arose, memorised in a soft halo of imagination — a day of fruit, wine, and light words, and the dear General, with his St James’s politics and his only desire— “a little something to do — something to bring me out, you know.” The pugs, the mangy mastiff, the hospitable house always open, its ready welcome, and, above all, the air which it held of the lives of its occupants; its pictures of white arab horses, and elephants richly caparisoned; the wonderful goats in the field, and the tropical birds and animals in the back garden! Above all, the walks on the green with the chemist’s wife, and the annoyance such familiarity caused Mr. Brookes — how funny, how charming, how amusing! He was smiling through the tears that rose to his eyes when the train rolled into Brighton.
On arriving in London he drove straight to the Temple. The creaking, disjointed staircases, with the lanterns of old time in the windows, jarred his thoughts, which were still of Southwick; and when he entered his rooms their loneliness struck him with a chill. He pictured Maggie sitting in the arm-chair waiting for him, and he imagined how she would lay her book aside and say, “Oh, here you are!” He sat down to read his letters. One was from Lord Mount Rorke, enclosing a cheque, another a daintily cut envelope, smelling daintily, came from Lady S
eveley.
“DEAR MR ESCOTT, — I have not seen anything of you for a very long time; you promised to lunch with me before you left town, but I suppose amid the general gaieties and friends of the season you were carried far away quite out of my reckoning. However, I hope when you return you will come and see me. I got your address from Mr. —— , but you need not tell him that I wrote to you; he is, as you know, a dreadful chatterbox, and somehow or other, without meaning it, contrives to make gossip and mischief out of everything.
“The weather here is delicious — perhaps a trifle too hot; and sometimes I envy you your cool sea-side resort. I wonder what the attraction is? It must be a very special one to keep you out of London in June.
“Should you be in town next Thursday, come and dine; I have a box for the theatre. And as an extra inducement I will tell you that I have two very nice girls staying with me, who will interest you. — Yours very truly, HELEN SEVELEY.”
Some men of thirty would have instantly understood Lady Seveley’s letter. But age gives us nothing we do not already possess, the years develop what is latent in us in youth, and it is certain that Frank at thirty would have understood the letter as vaguely and incompletely as he did to-day. We read our sympathies and antipathies in all we look upon, and Frank read in this letter an old woman with diamonds and dyed hair. He had met her twice. The first time was at a ball where he knew nobody; the second was at a dinner party. She had fixed her eyes upon him; she had prevented him from talking after dinner to a young girl whom he had admired across the table during dinner. He did not like her, and he thought now of the young girls he would meet if he accepted her invitation. Lady Seveley was a shadow; and when the shadow defined itself he saw the slight wrinkling of the skin about the eyes, the almost imperceptible looseness of the flesh about the chin; but, worse to him than these physical changes, were the hard measured phrases in which there is knowledge of the savour and worth of life. He unpacked his portmanteau, and, dallying with his resolutions, he wondered if he should go to Lady Seveley’s: conclusions and determinations were constitutionally abhorrent, self-deception natural to him. Were he asked if he intended to turn to the right or the left, although he were going nowhere and an answer would compromise him in nothing, he would certainly say he did not know; and if he were expostulated with, he would reply rudely, arrogantly. This is worthy of notice, for what was special in his character was the combination it afforded of degenerate weakness and pride, complicated with a towering sense of self-sufficiency. Youth’s illusions would not pass from him easily; in his eyes and heart the hawthorn would always be in bloom, young girls would always be beautiful, innocent, true to the lovers they had selected; nor was there of necessity degradation nor forced continuance in any state of vice. Love could raise and purify, love could restore, love could make whole; if one woman were faithless, another would be constant; if to-day were dark, to-morrow would be bright. Life had no deep truth for him, no underlying mysteries; it was not a problem capable of demonstration, capable of definition; it was not a thing of limitations and goals and ends; he could feel nothing of this — the philosophic temperament was absent in him. Life had no deep truth for him, no underlying mysteries; he did not dream of past times, and he placed few hopes in the future; life was a thing to be enjoyed in the moment of living, and the present moment was a very pleasant one. He leaned over the doors of the hansom resting his gloved hand upon his crutched stick. He was struck with the pride we feel when we are dressed for amusement and contemplate those in workaday garb; and in these sensations of pride he leaned forward, proud of his good looks, his shirt front, his shirt cuffs, his glazed shoes; he pleasured in the knowledge that many saw he was going to elegant company, to amusement. He was full of scorn for the women loitering, for the clerks hurrying, and especially for the crowds pressing about the entrances of the theatres.