by Ouida
Wherewith the General bolted from his chair, darted through the window, upsetting three dogs, two kittens, and a stand of flowers in his exit, and bolted breathlessly across the park with the poker in his hand.
“Bless his old heart! Ain’t he a brick?” shouted Sydie. “Do excuse me, Fay, I must go and hear him blow up that boy sky-high, and give him a shilling for tuck afterwards; it will be so rich.”
The Cantab made his exit, and Fay busied herself calming the kittens’ minds, and restoring the dethroned geraniums. Keane read his Times for ten minutes, then looked up.
“Miss Morton, where is your tongue? I have not heard it for a quarter of an hour, a miracle that has never happened in the two months I have been at the Beeches.”
“You do not want to hear it.”
“What! am I in mauvais odeur again?” smiled Keane. “I thought we were good friends. Have you found the Q. E. D. to the problem I gave you?”
“To be sure!” cried Fay, exultantly. And kneeling down by him, she went through the whole thing in exceeding triumph.
“You are a good child,” said her tutor, smiling, in himself amazed at this volatile little thing’s capacity for mathematics. “I think you will be able to take your degree, if you like. Come, do you hate me now, Fay?”
“No,” said Fay, a little shyly. “I never hated you, I always admired you; but I was afraid of you, though I would never confess it to Sydie.”
“Never be afraid of me,” said Keane, putting his hand on hers as it lay on the arm of his chair. “You have no cause. You can do things few girls can; but they are pretty in you, where they might be — not so pretty in others. I like them at the least. You are very fond of your cousin, are you not?”
“Of Sydie? Oh, I love him dearly!”
Keane took his hand away, and rose, as the General trotted in:
“God bless my soul, Keane, how warm it is! Confoundedly hot without one’s hat, I can tell you. Had my walk all for nothing, too. That cursed little idiot wasn’t trespassing after all. Stephen had set him to spud out the daisies, and I’d thrashed the boy before I’d listen to him. Devil take him!”
August went out and September came in, and Keane stayed on at the Beeches. They were pleasant days to them all, knocking over the partridges right and left, enjoying a cold luncheon under the luxuriant hedges, and going home for a dinner, full of laughter, and talk, and good cookery; and Fay’s songs afterwards, as wild and sweet in their way as a goldfinch’s on a hawthorn spray.
“You like Little Fay, don’t you, Keane?” said the General, as they went home one evening.
Keane looked startled for a second.
“Of course,” he said, rather haughtily. “That Miss Morton is very charming every one must admit.”
“Bless her little heart! She’s a wild little filly, Keane, but she’ll go better and truer than your quiet broken-in ones, who wear the harness so respectably, and are so wicked and vicious in their own minds. And what do you think of my boy?” asked the General, pointing to Sydie, who was in front. “How does he stand at Cambridge?”
“Sydie? Oh, he’s a nice young fellow. He is a great favorite there, and he is — the best things he can be — generous, sweet-tempered, and honorable — —”
“To be sure,” echoed the General, rubbing his hands. “He’s a dear boy — a very dear boy. They’re both exactly all I wished them to be, dear children; and I must say I am delighted to see ’em carrying out the plan I had always made for ’em from their childhood.”
“Being what, General, may I ask?”
“Why, any one can see, as plain as a pikestaff, that they’re in love with each other,” said the General, glowing with satisfaction; “and I mean them to be married and happy. They dote on each other, Keane, and I sha’n’t put any obstacles in their way. Youth’s short enough, Heaven knows; let ’em enjoy it, say I, it don’t come back again. Don’t say anything to him about it; I want to have some fun with him. They’ve settled it all, of course, long ago; but he hasn’t confided in me, the sly dog. Trust an old campaigner, though, for twigging an affaire de c[oe]ur. Bless them both, they make me feel a boy again. We’ll have a gay wedding, Keane; mind you come down for it. I dare say it’ll be at Christmas.”
Keane walked along, drawing his cap over his eyes. The sun was setting full in his face.
“Well, what sport?” cried Fay, running up to them.
“Pretty fair,” said Keane, coldly, as he passed her.
It was an hour before the dinner-bell rang. Then he came down cold and calm, particularly brilliant in conversation, more courteous, perhaps, to her than ever, but the frost had gathered round him that the sunny atmosphere of the Beeches had melted; and Fay, though she tried to tease, and to coax, and to win him, could not dissipate it. She felt him an immeasurable distance from her again. He was a learned, haughty, grave philosopher, and she a little naughty child.
As Keane went up-stairs that night, he heard Sydie talking in the hall.
“Yes, my worshipped Fay, I shall be intensely and utterly miserable away from the light of your eyes; but, nevertheless, I must go and see Kingslake from John’s next Tuesday, because I’ve promised; and let one idolize your divine self ever so much, one can’t give up one’s larks, you know.”
Keane ground his teeth with a bitter sigh and a fierce oath.
“Little Fay, I would have loved you more tenderly than that!”
He went in and threw himself on his bed, not to sleep. For the first time for many years he could not summon sleep at his will. He had gone on petting her and amusing himself, thinking of her only as a winning, wayward child. Now he woke with a shock to discover, too late, that she had stolen from him unawares the heart he had so long refused to any woman. With his high intellect and calm philosophy, after his years spent in severe science and cold solitude, the hot well-springs of passion had broken loose again. He longed to take her bright life into his own grave and cheerless one; he longed to feel her warm young heart beat with his own, icebound for so many years; but Little Fay was never to be his.
In the bedroom next to him the General sat, with his feet in his slippers and his dressing-gown round him, smoking his last cheroot before a roaring fire, chuckling complacently over his own thoughts.
“To be sure, we’ll have a very gay wedding, such as the county hasn’t seen in all its blessed days,” he muttered, with supreme satisfaction. “Sydie shall have this place. What do I want with a great town of a house like this, big enough for a barrack? I’ll take that shooting-box that’s to let four miles off; that’ll be plenty large enough for me and my old chums to smoke in and chat over bygone times, and it will do our hearts good — freshen us up a bit to see those young things enjoying themselves. My Little Fay will be the prettiest bride that ever was seen. Silly young things to suppose I don’t see through them. Trust an old soldier! However, love is blind, they say. How could they have helped falling in love with one another? and who’d have the heart to part ’em, I should like to know!”
Keane stayed that day; the next, receiving a letter which afforded a true though a slight excuse to return to Cambridge, he went, the General, Fay, and Sydie believing him gone only for a few days, he knowing that he would never set foot in the Beeches again. He went back to his rooms, whose dark monastic gloom in the dull October day seemed to close round him like an iron shroud. Here, with his books, his papers, his treasures of intellect, science and art, his “mind a kingdom” to him, he had spent many a happy day, with his brain growing only clearer and clearer as he followed out a close reasoning or clenched a subtle analysis. Now, for the sake of a mischievous child but half his age, he shuddered as he entered.
“Well, my dear boy,” began the General one day after dinner, “I’ve seen your game, though you thought I didn’t. How do you know, you young dog, that I shall give my consent?”
“Oh, bother, governor, I know you will,” cried Sydie, aghast; “because, you see, if you let me have a few cool hundreds I can give
the men such slap-up wines — and it’s my last year, General.”
“You sly dog!” chuckled the governor, “I’m not talking of your wine-merchant, and you know I’m not, Master Sydie. It’s no good playing hide-and-seek with me; I can always see through a milestone when Cupid is behind it; and there’s no need to beat round the bush with me, my boy. I never gave my assent to anything with greater delight in my life; I’ve always meant you to marry Fay, and — —”
“Marry Fay!” shouted Sydie. “Good Heavens! governor, what next?” And the Cantab threw himself back and laughed till he cried, and Snowdrop and her pups barked furiously in a concert of excited sympathy.
“Why, sir, why? — why, because — devil take you, Sydie — I don’t know what you are laughing at, do you?” cried the General, starting out of his chair.
“Yes, I do, governor; you’re laboring under a most delicious delusion.”
“Delusion! — eh? — what? Why, bless my soul, I don’t think you know what you are saying, Sydie,” stormed the General.
“Yes I do; you’ve an idea — how you got it into your head Heaven knows, but there it is — you’ve an idea that Fay and I are in love with one another; and I assure you you were never more mistaken in your life.”
Seeing the General standing bolt upright staring at him, and looking decidedly apocleptic, Sydie made the matter a little clearer.
“Fay and I would do a good deal to oblige you, my beloved governor, if we could get up the steam a little, but I’m afraid we really cannot. Love ain’t in one’s own hands, you see, but a skittish mare, that gets her head, and takes the bit between her teeth, and bolts off with you wherever she likes. Is it possible that two people who broke each other’s toys, and teased each other’s lives out, and caught the measles of each other, from their cradle upwards, should fall in love with each other when they grow up? Besides, I don’t intend to marry for the next twenty years, if I can help it. I couldn’t afford a milliner’s bill to my tailor’s, and I should be ruined for life if I merged my bright particular star of a self into a respectable, lark-shunning, bill-paying, shabby-hatted, family man. Good Heavens, what a train of horrors comes with the bare idea!”
“Do you mean to say, sir, you won’t marry your cousin?” shouted the General.
“Bless your dear old heart, no, governor — ten times over, no! I wouldn’t marry anybody, not for half the universe.”
“Then I’ve done with you, sir — I wash my hands of you!” shouted the General, tearing up and down the room in a quick march, more beneficial to his feelings than his carpet. “You are an ungrateful, unprincipled, shameless young man, and are no more worthy of the affection and the interest I’ve been fool enough to waste on you than a tom-cat. You’re an abominably selfish, ungrateful, unnatural boy; and though you are poor Phil’s son, I will tell you my mind, sir; and I must say I think your conduct with your cousin, making love to her — desperate love to her — winning her affections, poor unhappy child, and then making a jest of her and treating it with a laugh, is disgraceful, sir — disgraceful, do you hear?”
“Yes, I hear, General,” cried Sydie, convulsed with laughter; “but Fay cares no more for me than for those geraniums. We are fond of one another, in a cool, cousinly sort of way, but — —”
“Hold your tongue!” stormed the General. “Don’t dare to say another word to me about it. You know well enough that it has been the one delight of my life, and if you’d had any respect or right feeling in you, you’d marry her to-morrow.”
“She wouldn’t be a party to that. Few women are blind to my manifold attractions; but Fay’s one of ’em. Look here, governor,” said Sydie, laying his hand affectionately on the General’s shoulder, “did it never occur to you that though the pretty castle’s knocked down, there may be much nicer bricks left to build a new one? Can’t you see that Fay doesn’t care two buttons about me, but cares a good many diamond studs about somebody else?”
“Nothing has occurred to me but that you and she are two heartless, selfish, ungrateful chits. Hold your tongue, sir!”
“But, General — —”
“Hold your tongue, sir; don’t talk to me, I tell you. In love with somebody else? I should like to see him show his face here. Somebody she’s talked to for five minutes at a race-ball, and proposed to her in a corner, thinking to get some of my money. Some swindler, or Italian refugee, or blackleg, I’ll be bound — taken her in, made her think him an angel, and will persuade her to run away with him. I’ll set the police round the house — I’ll send her to school in Paris. What fools men are to have anything to do with women at all! You seem in their confidence; who’s the fellow?”
“A man very like a swindler or a blackleg — Keane!”
“Keane!” shouted the General, pausing in the middle of his frantic march.
“Keane,” responded Sydie.
“Keane!” shouted the General again. “God bless my soul, she might as well have fallen in love with the man in the moon. Why couldn’t she like the person I’d chosen for her?”
“If one can’t guide the mare one’s self, ’tisn’t likely the governors can for one,” muttered Sydie.
“Poor dear child! fallen in love with a man who don’t care a button for her, eh? Humph! — that’s always the way with women — lose the good chances, and fling themselves at a man’s feet who cares no more for their tom-foolery of worship than he cares for the blacking on his boots. Devil take young people, what a torment they are! The ungrateful little jade, how dare she go and smash all my plans like that? and if I ever set my heart on anything, I set it on that match. Keane! he’ll no more love anybody than the stone cherubs on the terrace. He’s a splendid head, but his heart’s every atom as cold as granite. Love her? Not a bit of it. When I told him you were going to marry her (I thought you would, and so you will, too, if you’ve the slightest particle of gratitude or common sense in either of you), he listened as quietly and as calmly as if he had been one of the men in armor in the hall. Love, indeed! To the devil with love, say I! It’s the head and root of everything that’s mischievous and bad.”
“Wait a bit, uncle,” cried Sydie; “you told him all about your previous match-making, eh? And didn’t he go off like a shot two days after, when we meant him to stay on a month longer? Can’t you put two and two together, my once wide-awake governor? ’Tisn’t such a difficult operation.”
“No, I can’t,” shouted the General: “I don’t know anything, I don’t see anything, I don’t believe in anything, I hate everybody and everything, I tell you; and I’m a great fool for having ever set my heart on any plan that wanted a woman’s concurrence —
For if she will she will, you may depend on’t,
And if she won’t she won’t, and there’s an end on’t.”
Wherewith the General stuck his wide-awake on fiercely, and darted out of the bay-window to cool himself. Half way across the lawn, he turned sharp round, and came back again.
“Sydie, do you fancy Keane cares a straw for that child?”
“I can’t say. It’s possible.”
“Humph! Well, can’t you go and see? That’s come of those mathematical lessons. What a fool I was to allow her to be so much with him!” growled the General, with many grunts and half-audible oaths, swinging round again, and trotting through the window as hot and peppery as his own idolized curry.
Keane was sitting writing in his rooms at King’s some few days after. The backs looked dismal with their leafless, sepia-colored trees; the streets were full of sloppy mud and dripping under-grads’ umbrellas; his own room looked sombre and dark, without any sunshine on its heavy oak bookcases, and massive library-table, and dark bronzes. His pen moved quickly, his head was bent over the paper, his mouth sternly set, and his forehead paler and more severe than ever. The gloom in his chambers had gathered round him himself, when his door was burst open, and Sydie dashed in and threw himself down in a green leather arm-chair.
“Well, sir, here am I back again. Ju
st met the V. P. in the quad, and he was so enchanted at seeing me, that he kissed me on both cheeks, flung off his gown, tossed up his cap, and performed a pas d’extase on the spot. Isn’t it delightful to be so beloved? Granta looks very delicious to-day, I must say — about as refreshing and lively as an acidulated spinster going district-visiting in a snow-storm. And how are you, most noble lord?”
“Pretty well.”
“Only that? Thought you were all muscle and iron. I say. What do you think the governor has been saying to me?”
“How can I tell?”
“Tell! No, I should not have guessed it if I’d tried for a hundred years! By George! nothing less than that I should marry Fay. What do you think of that, sir?”
Keane traced Greek unconsciously on the margin of his Times. For the life of him, with all his self-command, he could not have answered.
“Marry Fay! I!” shouted Sydie. “Ye gods, what an idea! I never was so astonished in all my days. Marry Little Fay! — the governor must be mad, you know.”
“You will not marry your cousin?” asked Keane, tranquilly, though the rapid glance and involuntary start did not escape Sydie’s quick eyes.
“Marry! I! By George, no! She wouldn’t have me, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have her. She is a dear little monkey, and I’m very fond of her, but I wouldn’t put the halter round my neck for any woman going. I don’t like vexing the General, but it would be really too great a sacrifice merely to oblige him.”
“She cares nothing for you, then?”
“Nothing? Well, I don’t know. Yes, in a measure, she does. If I should be taken home on a hurdle one fine morning, she’d shed some cousinly tears over my inanimate body; but as for the other thing, not one bit of it. ’Tisn’t likely. We’re a great deal too like one another, too full of devilry and carelessness, to assimilate. Isn’t it the delicious contrast and fiz of the sparkling acid of divine lemons with the contrariety of the fiery spirit of beloved rum that makes the delectable union known and worshipped in our symposia under the blissful name of PUNCH? Marry Little Fay! By Jove, if all the governor’s match-making was founded on no better reasons for success, it is a small marvel that he’s a bachelor now! By George, it’s time for hall!”