13. THE LODGE (continued)—THE COPSE BEHIND

‘This is indeed a surprise; I—am glad to see you!’ Christopher stammered, with a wire-drawn, radically different smile from the one he had intended—a smile not without a tinge of ghastliness.

‘Yes—I am home for the holidays,’ said the blushing maiden; and, after a critical pause, she added, ‘If you wish to speak to my sister, she is in the plantation with the children.’

‘O no—no, thank you—not necessary at all,’ said Christopher, in haste.  ‘I only wish for an interview with a lady called Mrs. Petherwin.’

‘Yes; Mrs Petherwin—my sister,’ said Picotee.  ‘She is in the plantation.  That little path will take you to her in five minutes.’

The amazed Christopher persuaded himself that this discovery was very delightful, and went on persuading so long that at last he felt it to be so.  Unable, like many other people, to enjoy being satirized in words because of the irritation it caused him as aimed-at victim, he sometimes had philosophy enough to appreciate a satire of circumstance, because nobody intended it.  Pursuing the path indicated, he found himself in a thicket of scrubby undergrowth, which covered an area enclosed from the park proper by a decaying fence.  The boughs were so tangled that he was obliged to screen his face with his hands, to escape the risk of having his eyes filliped out by the twigs that impeded his progress.  Thus slowly advancing, his ear caught, between the rustles, the tones of a voice in earnest declamation; and, pushing round in that direction, he beheld through some beech boughs an open space about ten yards in diameter, floored at the bottom with deep beds of curled old leaves, and cushions of furry moss.  In the middle of this natural theatre was the stump of a tree that had been felled by a saw, and upon the flat stool thus formed stood Ethelberta, whom Christopher had not beheld since the ball at Wyndway House.

Round her, leaning against branches or prostrate on the ground, were five or six individuals.  Two were young mechanics—one of them evidently a carpenter.  Then there was a boy about thirteen, and two or three younger children.  Ethelberta’s appearance answered as fully as ever to that of an English lady skilfully perfected in manner, carriage, look, and accent; and the incongruity of her present position among lives which had had many of Nature’s beauties stamped out of them, and few of the beauties of Art stamped in, brought him, as a second feeling, a pride in her that almost equalled his first sentiment of surprise.  Christopher’s attention was meanwhile attracted from the constitution of the group to the words of the speaker in the centre of it—words to which her auditors were listening with still attention.

It appeared to Christopher that Ethelberta had lately been undergoing some very extraordinary experiences.  What the beginning of them had been he could not in the least understand, but the portion she was describing came distinctly to his ears, and he wondered more and more.

‘He came forward till he, like myself, was about twenty yards from the edge.  I instinctively grasped my useless stiletto.  How I longed for the assistance which a little earlier I had so much despised!  Reaching the block or boulder upon which I had been sitting, he clasped his arms around from behind; his hands closed upon the empty seat, and he jumped up with an oath.  This method of attack told me a new thing with wretched distinctness; he had, as I suppose, discovered my sex, male attire was to serve my turn no longer.  The next instant, indeed, made it clear, for he exclaimed, “You don’t escape me, masquerading madam,” or some such words, and came on.  My only hope was that in his excitement he might forget to notice where the grass terminated near the edge of the cliff, though this could be easily felt by a careful walker: to make my own feeling more distinct on this point I hastily bared my feet.’

The listeners moistened their lips, Ethelberta took breath, and then went on to describe the scene that ensued, ‘A dreadful variation on the game of Blindman’s buff,’ being the words by which she characterized it.

Ethelberta’s manner had become so impassioned at this point that the lips of her audience parted, the children clung to their elders, and Christopher could control himself no longer.  He thrust aside the boughs, and broke in upon the group.

‘For Heaven’s sake, Ethelberta,’ he exclaimed with great excitement, ‘where did you meet with such a terrible experience as that?’

The children shrieked, as if they thought that the interruption was in some way the catastrophe of the events in course of narration.  Every one started up; the two young mechanics stared, and one of them inquired, in return, ‘What’s the matter, friend?’

Christopher had not yet made reply when Ethelberta stepped from her pedestal down upon the crackling carpet of deep leaves.

‘Mr. Julian!’ said she, in a serene voice, turning upon him eyes of such a disputable stage of colour, between brown and grey, as would have commended itself to a gallant duellist of the last century as a point on which it was absolutely necessary to take some friend’s life or other.  But the calmness was artificially done, and the astonishment that did not appear in Ethelberta’s tones was expressed by her gaze.  Christopher was not in a mood to draw fine distinctions between recognized and unrecognized organs of speech.  He replied to the eyes.

‘I own that your surprise is natural,’ he said, with an anxious look into her face, as if he wished to get beyond this interpolated scene to something more congenial and understood.  ‘But my concern at such a history of yourself since I last saw you is even more natural than your surprise at my manner of breaking in.’

‘That history would justify any conduct in one who hears it—’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘If it were true,’ added Ethelberta, smiling.  ‘But it is as false as—’  She could name nothing notoriously false without raising an image of what was disagreeable, and she continued in a better manner: ‘The story I was telling is entirely a fiction, which I am getting up for a particular purpose—very different from what appears at present.’

‘I am sorry there was such a misunderstanding,’ Christopher stammered, looking upon the ground uncertain and ashamed.  ‘Yet I am not, either, for I am very glad you have not undergone such trials, of course.  But the fact is, I—being in the neighbourhood—I ventured to call on a matter of business, relating to a poem which I had the pleasure of setting to music at the beginning of the year.’

Ethelberta was only a little less ill at ease than Christopher showed himself to be by this way of talking.

‘Will you walk slowly on?’ she said gently to the two young men, ‘and take the children with you; this gentleman wishes to speak to me on business.’

The biggest young man caught up a little one under his arm, and plunged amid the boughs; another little one lingered behind for a few moments to look shyly at Christopher, with an oblique manner of hiding her mouth against her shoulder and her eyes behind her pinafore.  Then she vanished, the boy and the second young man followed, and Ethelberta and Christopher stood within the wood-bound circle alone.

‘I hope I have caused no inconvenience by interrupting the proceedings,’ said Christopher softly; ‘but I so very much wished to see you!’

‘Did you, indeed—really wish to see me?’ she said gladly.  ‘Never mind inconvenience then; it is a word which seems shallow in meaning under the circumstances.  I surely must say that a visit is to my advantage, must I not?  I am not as I was, you see, and may receive as advantages what I used to consider as troubles.’

‘Has your life really changed so much?’

‘It has changed.  But what I first meant was that an interesting visitor at a wrong time is better than a stupid one at a right time.’

‘I had been behind the trees for some minutes, looking at you, and thinking of you; but what you were doing rather interrupted my first meditation.  I had thought of a meeting in which we should continue our intercourse at the point at which it was broken off years ago, as if the omitted part had not existed at all; but something, I cannot tell what, has upset all that feeling, and—’

‘I can soon tell you the meaning of my extraordinary performance,’ Ethelberta broke in quickly, and with a little trepidation.  ‘My mother-in-law, Lady Petherwin, is dead; and she has left me nothing but her house and furniture in London—more than I deserve, but less than she had distinctly led me to expect; and so I am somewhat in a corner.’

‘It is always so.’

‘Not always, I think.  But this is how it happened.  Lady Petherwin was very capricious; when she was not foolishly kind she was unjustly harsh.  A great many are like it, never thinking what a good thing it would be, instead of going on tacking from side to side between favour and cruelty, to keep to a mean line of common justice.  And so we quarrelled, and she, being absolute mistress of all her wealth, destroyed her will that was in my favour, and made another, leaving me nothing but the fag-end of the lease of the town-house and the furniture in it.  Then, when we were abroad, she turned to me again, forgave everything, and, becoming ill afterwards, wrote a letter to the brother, to whom she had left the bulk of her property, stating that I was to have twenty-thousand of the one-hundred-thousand pounds she had bequeathed to him—as in the original will—doing this by letter in case anything should happen to her before a new will could be considered, drawn, and signed, and trusting to his honour quite that he would obey her expressed wish should she die abroad.  Well, she did die, in the full persuasion that I was provided for; but her brother (as I secretly expected all the time) refused to be morally bound by a document which had no legal value, and the result is that he has everything, except, of course, the furniture and the lease.  It would have been enough to break the heart of a person who had calculated upon getting a fortune, which I never did; for I felt always like an intruder and a bondswoman, and had wished myself out of the Petherwin family a hundred times, with my crust of bread and liberty.  For one thing, I was always forbidden to see my relatives, and it pained me much.  Now I am going to move for myself, and consider that I have a good chance of success in what I may undertake, because of an indifference I feel about succeeding which gives the necessary coolness that any great task requires.’

‘I presume you mean to write more poems?’

‘I cannot—that is, I can write no more that satisfy me.  To blossom into rhyme on the sparkling pleasures of life, you must be under the influence of those pleasures, and I am at present quite removed from them—surrounded by gaunt realities of a very different description.’

‘Then try the mournful.  Trade upon your sufferings: many do, and thrive.’

‘It is no use to say that—no use at all.  I cannot write a line of verse.  And yet the others flowed from my heart like a stream.  But nothing is so easy as to seem clever when you have money.’

‘Except to seem stupid when you have none,’ said Christopher, looking at the dead leaves.

Ethelberta allowed herself to linger on that thought for a few seconds; and continued, ‘Then the question arose, what was I to do?  I felt that to write prose would be an uncongenial occupation, and altogether a poor prospect for a woman like me.  Finally I have decided to appear in public.’

‘Not on the stage?’

‘Certainly not on the stage.  There is no novelty in a poor lady turning actress, and novelty is what I want.  Ordinary powers exhibited in a new way effect as much as extraordinary powers exhibited in an old way.’

‘Yes—so they do.  And extraordinary powers, and a new way too, would be irresistible.’

‘I don’t calculate upon both.  I had written a prose story by request, when it was found that I had grown utterly inane over verse.  It was written in the first person, and the style was modelled after De Foe’s.  The night before sending it off, when I had already packed it up, I was reading about the professional story-tellers of Eastern countries, who devoted their lives to the telling of tales.  I unfastened the manuscript and retained it, convinced that I should do better by telling the story.’

‘Well thought of!’ exclaimed Christopher, looking into her face.  ‘There is a way for everybody to live, if they can only find it out.’

‘It occurred to me,’ she continued, blushing slightly, ‘that tales of the weird kind were made to be told, not written.  The action of a teller is wanted to give due effect to all stories of incident; and I hope that a time will come when, as of old, instead of an unsocial reading of fiction at home alone, people will meet together cordially, and sit at the feet of a professed romancer.  I am going to tell my tales before a London public.  As a child, I had a considerable power in arresting the attention of other children by recounting adventures which had never happened; and men and women are but children enlarged a little.  Look at this.’

She drew from her pocket a folded paper, shook it abroad, and disclosed a rough draft of an announcement to the effect that Mrs. Petherwin, Professed Story-teller, would devote an evening to that ancient form of the romancer’s art, at a well-known fashionable hall in London.  ‘Now you see,’ she continued, ‘the meaning of what you observed going on here.  That you heard was one of three tales I am preparing, with a view of selecting the best.  As a reserved one, I have the tale of my own life—to be played as a last card.  It was a private rehearsal before my brothers and sisters—not with any view of obtaining their criticism, but that I might become accustomed to my own voice in the presence of listeners.’

‘If I only had had half your enterprise, what I might have done in the world!’

‘Now did you ever consider what a power De Foe’s manner would have if practised by word of mouth?  Indeed, it is a style which suits itself infinitely better to telling than to writing, abounding as it does in colloquialisms that are somewhat out of place on paper in these days, but have a wonderful power in making a narrative seem real.  And so, in short, I am going to talk De Foe on a subject of my own.  Well?’

The last word had been given tenderly, with a long-drawn sweetness, and was caused by a look that Christopher was bending upon her at the moment, in which he revealed that he was thinking less of the subject she was so eagerly and hopefully descanting upon than upon her aspect in explaining it.  It is a fault of manner particularly common among men newly imported into the society of bright and beautiful women; and we will hope that, springing as it does from no unworthy source, it is as soon forgiven in the general world as it was here.

‘I was only following a thought,’ said Christopher:—‘a thought of how I used to know you, and then lost sight of you, and then discovered you famous, and how we are here under these sad autumn trees, and nobody in sight.’

‘I think it must be tea-time,’ she said suddenly.  ‘Tea is a great meal with us here—you will join us, will you not?’  And Ethelberta began to make for herself a passage through the boughs.  Another rustle was heard a little way off, and one of the children appeared.

‘Emmeline wants to know, please, if the gentleman that come to see ’ee will stay to tea; because, if so, she’s agoing to put in another spoonful for him and a bit of best green.’

‘O Georgina—how candid!  Yes, put in some best green.’

Before Christopher could say any more to her, they were emerging by the corner of the cottage, and one of the brothers drew near them.  ‘Mr. Julian, you’ll bide and have a cup of tea wi’ us?’ he inquired of Christopher.  ‘An old friend of yours, is he not, Mrs. Petherwin?  Dan and I be going back to Sandbourne to-night, and we can walk with ’ee as far as the station.’

‘I shall be delighted,’ said Christopher; and they all entered the cottage.  The evening had grown clearer by this time; the sun was peeping out just previous to departure, and sent gold wires of light across the glades and into the windows, throwing a pattern of the diamond quarries, and outlines of the geraniums in pots, against the opposite wall.  One end of the room was polygonal, such a shape being dictated by the exterior design; in this part the windows were placed, as at the east end of continental churches.  Thus, from the combined effects of the ecclesiastical lancet lights and the apsidal shape of the room, it occurred to Christopher that the sisters were all a delightful set of pretty saints, exhibiting themselves in a lady chapel, and backed up by unkempt major prophets, as represented by the forms of their big brothers.

Christopher sat down to tea as invited, squeezing himself in between two children whose names were almost as long as their persons, and whose tin cups discoursed primitive music by means of spoons rattled inside them until they were filled.  The tea proceeded pleasantly, notwithstanding that the cake, being a little burnt, tasted on the outside like the latter plums in snapdragon.  Christopher never could meet the eye of Picotee, who continued in a wild state of flushing all the time, fixing her looks upon the sugar-basin, except when she glanced out of the window to see how the evening was going on, and speaking no word at all unless it was to correct a small sister of somewhat crude manners as regards filling the mouth, which Picotee did in a whisper, and a gentle inclination of her mouth to the little one’s ear, and a still deeper blush than before.

Their visitor next noticed that an additional cup-and-saucer and plate made their appearance occasionally at the table, were silently replenished, and then carried off by one of the children to an inner apartment.

‘Our mother is bedridden,’ said Ethelberta, noticing Christopher’s look at the proceeding.  ‘Emmeline attends to the household, except when Picotee is at home, and Joey attends to the gate; but our mother’s affliction is a very unfortunate thing for the poor children.  We are thinking of a plan of living which will, I hope, be more convenient than this is; but we have not yet decided what to do.’  At this minute a carriage and pair of horses became visible through one of the angular windows of the apse, in the act of turning in from the highway towards the park gate.  The boy who answered to the name of Joey sprang up from the table with the promptness of a Jack-in-the-box, and ran out at the door.  Everybody turned as the carriage passed through the gate, which Joey held open, putting his other hand where the brim of his hat would have been if he had worn one, and lapsing into a careless boy again the instant that the vehicle had gone by.

‘There’s a tremendous large dinner-party at the House to-night,’ said Emmeline methodically, looking at the equipage over the edge of her teacup, without leaving off sipping.  ‘That was Lord Mountclere.  He’s a wicked old man, they say.’

‘Lord Mountclere?’ said Ethelberta musingly.  ‘I used to know some friends of his.  In what way is he wicked?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Emmeline, with simplicity.  ‘I suppose it is because he breaks the commandments.  But I wonder how a big rich lord can want to steal anything.’  Emmeline’s thoughts of breaking commandments instinctively fell upon the eighth, as being in her ideas the only case wherein the gain could be considered as at all worth the hazard.

Ethelberta said nothing; but Christopher thought that a shade of depression passed over her.

‘Hook back the gate, Joey,’ shouted Emmeline, when the carriage had proceeded up the drive.  ‘There’s more to come.’

Joey did as ordered, and by the time he got indoors another carriage turned in from the public road—a one-horse brougham this time.

‘I know who that is: that’s Mr. Ladywell,’ said Emmeline, in the same matter-of-fact tone.  ‘He’s been here afore: he’s a distant relation of the squire’s, and he once gave me sixpence for picking up his gloves.’

‘What shall I live to see?’ murmured the poetess, under her breath, nearly dropping her teacup in an involuntary trepidation, from which she made it a point of dignity to recover in a moment.  Christopher’s eyes, at that exhibition from Ethelberta, entered her own like a pair of lances.  Picotee, seeing Christopher’s quick look of jealousy, became involved in her turn, and grew pale as a lily in her endeavours to conceal the complications to which it gave birth in her poor little breast likewise.

‘You judge me very wrongly,’ said Ethelberta, in answer to Christopher’s hasty look of resentment.

‘In supposing Mr. Ladywell to be a great friend of yours?’ said Christopher, who had in some indescribable way suddenly assumed a right to Ethelberta as his old property.

‘Yes: for I hardly know him, and certainly do not value him.’

After this there was something in the mutual look of the two, though their words had been private, which did not tend to remove the anguish of fragile Picotee.  Christopher, assured that Ethelberta’s embarrassment had been caused by nothing more than the sense of her odd social subsidence, recovered more bliss than he had lost, and regarded calmly the profile of young Ladywell between the two windows of his brougham as it passed the open cottage door, bearing him along unconscious as the dead of the nearness of his beloved one, and of the sad buffoonery that fate, fortune, and the guardian angels had been playing with Ethelberta of late.  He recognized the face as that of the young man whom he had encountered when watching Ethelberta’s window from Rookington Park.

‘Perhaps you remember seeing him at the Christmas dance at Wyndway?’ she inquired.  ‘He is a good-natured fellow.  Afterwards he sent me that portfolio of sketches you see in the corner.  He might possibly do something in the world as a painter if he were obliged to work at the art for his bread, which he is not.’  She added with bitter pleasantry: ‘In bare mercy to his self-respect I must remain unseen here.’

It impressed Christopher to perceive how, under the estrangement which arose from differences of education, surroundings, experience, and talent, the sympathies of close relationship were perceptible in Ethelberta’s bearing towards her brothers and sisters.  At a remark upon some simple pleasure wherein she had not participated because absent and occupied by far more comprehensive interests, a gloom as of banishment would cross her face and dim it for awhile, showing that the free habits and enthusiasms of country life had still their charm with her, in the face of the subtler gratifications of abridged bodices, candlelight, and no feelings in particular, which prevailed in town.  Perhaps the one condition which could work up into a permanent feeling the passing revival of his fancy for a woman whose chief attribute he had supposed to be sprightliness was added now by the romantic ubiquity of station that attached to her.  A discovery which might have grated on the senses of a man wedded to conventionality was a positive pleasure to one whose faith in society had departed with his own social ruin.

The room began to darken, whereupon Christopher arose to leave; and the brothers Sol and Dan offered to accompany him.

14. A TURNPIKE ROAD

‘We be thinking of coming to London ourselves soon,’ said Sol, a carpenter and joiner by trade, as he walked along at Christopher’s left hand.  ‘There’s so much more chance for a man up the country.  Now, if you was me, how should you set about getting a job, sir?’

‘What can you do?’ said Christopher.

‘Well, I am a very good staircase hand; and I have been called neat at sash-frames; and I can knock together doors and shutters very well; and I can do a little at the cabinet-making.  I don’t mind framing a roof, neither, if the rest be busy; and I am always ready to fill up my time at planing floor-boards by the foot.’

‘And I can mix and lay flat tints,’ said Dan, who was a house painter, ‘and pick out mouldings, and grain in every kind of wood you can mention—oak, maple, walnut, satinwood, cherry-tree—’

‘You can both do too much to stand the least chance of being allowed to do anything in a city, where limitation is all the rule in labour.  To have any success, Sol, you must be a man who can thoroughly look at a door to see what ought to be done to it, but as to looking at a window, that’s not your line; or a person who, to the remotest particular, understands turning a screw, but who does not profess any knowledge of how to drive a nail.  Dan must know how to paint blue to a marvel, but must be quite in the dark about painting green.  If you stick to some such principle of specialty as this, you may get employment in London.’

‘Ha-ha-ha!’ said Dan, striking at a stone in the road with the stout green hazel he carried.  ‘A wink is as good as a nod: thank’ee—we’ll mind all that now.’

‘If we do come,’ said Sol, ‘we shall not mix up with Mrs. Petherwin at all.’

‘O indeed!’

‘O no.  (Perhaps you think it odd that we call her “Mrs. Petherwin,” but that’s by agreement as safer and better than Berta, because we be such rough chaps you see, and she’s so lofty.)  ’Twould demean her to claim kin wi’ her in London—two journeymen like we, that know nothing besides our trades.’

‘Not at all,’ said Christopher, by way of chiming in in the friendliest manner.  ‘She would be pleased to see any straightforward honest man and brother, I should think, notwithstanding that she has moved in other society for a time.’

‘Ah, you don’t know Berta!’ said Dan, looking as if he did.

‘How—in what way do you mean?’ said Christopher uneasily.

‘So lofty—so very lofty!  Isn’t she, Sol?  Why she’ll never stir out from mother’s till after dark, and then her day begins; and she’ll traipse about under the trees, and never go into the high-road, so that nobody in the way of gentle-people shall run up against her and know her living in such a little small hut after biding in a big mansion-place.  There, we don’t find fault wi’ her about it: we like her just the same, though she don’t speak to us in the street; for a feller must be a fool to make a piece of work about a woman’s pride, when ’tis his own sister, and hang upon her and bother her when he knows ’tis for her good that he should not.  Yes, her life has been quare enough.  I hope she enjoys it, but for my part I like plain sailing.  None of your ups and downs for me.  There, I suppose ’twas her nater to want to look into the world a bit.’

‘Father and mother kept Berta to school, you understand, sir,’ explained the more thoughtful Sol, ‘because she was such a quick child, and they always had a notion of making a governess of her.  Sums?  If you said to that child, “Berta, ’levenpence-three-farthings a day, how much a year?” she would tell ’ee in three seconds out of her own little head.  And that hard sum about the herrings she had done afore she was nine.’

‘True, she had,’ said Dan.  ‘And we all know that to do that is to do something that’s no nonsense.’

‘What is the sum?’ Christopher inquired.

‘What—not know the sum about the herrings?’ said Dan, spreading his gaze all over Christopher in amazement.

‘Never heard of it,’ said Christopher.

‘Why down in these parts just as you try a man’s soul by the Ten Commandments, you try his head by that there sum—hey, Sol?’

‘Ay, that we do.’

‘A herring and a half for three-halfpence, how many can ye get for ’levenpence: that’s the feller; and a mortal teaser he is, I assure ’ee.  Our parson, who’s not altogether without sense o’ week days, said one afternoon, “If cunning can be found in the multiplication table at all, Chickerel, ’tis in connection with that sum.”  Well, Berta was so clever in arithmetic that she was asked to teach summing at Miss Courtley’s, and there she got to like foreign tongues more than ciphering, and at last she hated ciphering, and took to books entirely.  Mother and we were very proud of her at that time: not that we be stuck-up people at all—be we, Sol?’

‘Not at all; nobody can say that we be that, though there’s more of it in the country than there should be by all account.’

‘You’d be surprised to see how vain the girls about here be getting.  Little rascals, why they won’t curtsey to the loftiest lady in the land; no, not if you were to pay ’em to do it.  Now, the men be different.  Any man will touch his hat for a pint of beer.  But then, of course, there’s some difference between the two.  Touching your hat is a good deal less to do than bending your knees, as Berta used to say, when she was blowed up for not doing it.  She was always one of the independent sort—you never seed such a maid as she was!  Now, Picotee was quite the other way.’

‘Has Picotee left Sandbourne entirely?’

‘O no; she is home for the holidays.  Well, Mr. Julian, our road parts from yours just here, unless you walk into the next town along with us.  But I suppose you get across to this station and go by rail?’

‘I am obliged to go that way for my portmanteau,’ said Christopher, ‘or I should have been pleased to walk further.  Shall I see you in Sandbourne to-morrow?  I hope so.’

‘Well, no.  ’Tis hardly likely that you will see us—hardly.  We know how unpleasant it is for a high sort of man to have rough chaps like us hailing him, so we think it best not to meet you—thank you all the same.  So if you should run up against us in the street, we should be just as well pleased by your taking no notice, if you wouldn’t mind.  ’Twill save so much awkwardness—being in our working clothes.  ’Tis always the plan that Mrs. Petherwin and we agree to act upon, and we find it best for both.  I hope you take our meaning right, and as no offence, Mr. Julian.’

‘And do you do the same with Picotee?’

‘O Lord, no—’tisn’t a bit of use to try.  That’s the worst of Picotee—there’s no getting rid of her.  The more in the rough we be the more she’ll stick to us; and if we say she shan’t come, she’ll bide and fret about it till we be forced to let her.’

Christopher laughed, and promised, on condition that they would retract the statement about their not being proud; and then he wished his friends good-night.

15. AN INNER ROOM AT THE LODGE

At the Lodge at this time a discussion of some importance was in progress.  The scene was Mrs. Chickerel’s bedroom, to which, unfortunately, she was confined by some spinal complaint; and here she now appeared as an interesting woman of five-and-forty, properly dressed as far as visible, and propped up in a bed covered with a quilt which presented a field of little squares in many tints, looking altogether like a bird’s-eye view of a market garden.

Mrs. Chickerel had been nurse in a nobleman’s family until her marriage, and after that she played the part of wife and mother, upon the whole, affectionately and well.  Among her minor differences with her husband had been one about the naming of the children; a matter that was at last compromised by an agreement under which the choice of the girls’ names became her prerogative, and that of the boys’ her husband’s, who limited his field of selection to strict historical precedent as a set-off to Mrs. Chickerel’s tendency to stray into the regions of romance.

The only grown-up daughters at home, Ethelberta and Picotee, with their brother Joey, were sitting near her; the two youngest children, Georgina and Myrtle, who had been strutting in and out of the room, and otherwise endeavouring to walk, talk, and speak like the gentleman just gone away, were packed off to bed.  Emmeline, of that transitional age which causes its exponent to look wistfully at the sitters when romping and at the rompers when sitting, uncertain whether her position in the household is that of child or woman, was idling in a corner.  The two absent brothers and two absent sisters—eldest members of the family—completed the round ten whom Mrs. Chickerel with thoughtless readiness had presented to a crowded world, to cost Ethelberta many wakeful hours at night while she revolved schemes how they might be decently maintained.

‘I still think,’ Ethelberta was saying, ‘that the plan I first proposed is the best.  I am convinced that it will not do to attempt to keep on the Lodge.  If we are all together in town, I can look after you much better than when you are far away from me down here.’

‘Shall we not interfere with you—your plans for keeping up your connections?’ inquired her mother, glancing up towards Ethelberta by lifting the flesh of her forehead, instead of troubling to raise her face altogether.

‘Not nearly so much as by staying here.’

‘But,’ said Picotee, ‘if you let lodgings, won’t the gentlemen and ladies know it?’

‘I have thought of that,’ said Ethelberta, ‘and this is how I shall manage.  In the first place, if mother is there, the lodgings can be let in her name, all bills will be receipted by her, and all tradesmen’s orders will be given as from herself.  Then, we will take no English lodgers at all; we will advertise the rooms only in Continental newspapers, as suitable for a French or German gentleman or two, and by this means there will be little danger of my acquaintance discovering that my house is not entirely a private one, or of any lodger being a friend of my acquaintance.  I have thought over every possible way of combining the dignified social position I must maintain to make my story-telling attractive, with my absolute lack of money, and I can see no better one.’

‘Then if Gwendoline is to be your cook, she must soon give notice at her present place?’

‘Yes.  Everything depends upon Gwendoline and Cornelia.  But there is time enough for them to give notice—Christmas will be soon enough.  If they cannot or will not come as cook and housemaid, I am afraid the plan will break down.  A vital condition is that I do not have a soul in the house (beyond the lodgers) who is not one of my own relations.  When we have put Joey into buttons, he will do very well to attend to the door.’

‘But s’pose,’ said Joey, after a glassy look at his future appearance in the position alluded to, ‘that any of your gentle-people come to see ye, and when I opens the door and lets ’em in a swinging big lodger stalks downstairs.  What will ’em think?  Up will go their eye-glasses at one another till they glares each other into holes.  My gracious!’

‘The one who calls will only think that another visitor is leaving, Joey.  But I shall have no visitors, or very few.  I shall let it be well known among my late friends that my mother is an invalid, and that on this account we receive none but the most intimate friends.  These intimate friends not existing, we receive nobody at all.’

‘Except Sol and Dan, if they get a job in London?  They’ll have to call upon us at the back door, won’t they, Berta?’ said Joey.

‘They must go down the area steps.  But they will not mind that; they like the idea.’

‘And father, too, must he go down the steps?’

‘He may come whichever way he likes.  He will be glad enough to have us near at any price.  I know that he is not at all happy at leaving you down here, and he away in London.  You remember that he has only taken the situation at Mr. Doncastle’s on the supposition that you all come to town as soon as he can see an opening for getting you there; and as nothing of the sort has offered itself to him, this will be the very thing.  Of course, if I succeed wonderfully well in my schemes for story-tellings, readings of my ballads and poems, lectures on the art of versification, and what not, we need have no lodgers; and then we shall all be living a happy family—all taking our share in keeping the establishment going.’

‘Except poor me!’ sighed the mother.

‘My dear mother, you will be necessary as a steadying power—a flywheel, in short, to the concern.  I wish that father could live there, too.’

‘He’ll never give up his present way of life—it has grown to be a part of his nature.  Poor man, he never feels at home except in somebody else’s house, and is nervous and quite a stranger in his own.  Sich is the fatal effects of service!’

‘O mother, don’t!’ said Ethelberta tenderly, but with her teeth on edge; and Picotee curled up her toes, fearing that her mother was going to moralize.

‘Well, what I mean is, that your father would not like to live upon your earnings, and so forth.  But in town we shall be near him—that’s one comfort, certainly.’

‘And I shall not be wanted at all,’ said Picotee, in a melancholy tone.

‘It is much better to stay where you are,’ her mother said.  ‘You will come and spend the holidays with us, of course, as you do now.’

‘I should like to live in London best,’ murmured Picotee, her head sinking mournfully to one side.  ‘I HATE being in Sandbourne now!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Ethelberta severely.  ‘We are all contriving how to live most comfortably, and it is by far the best thing for you to stay at the school.  You used to be happy enough there.’

Picotee sighed, and said no more.

16. A LARGE PUBLIC HALL

It was the second week in February, Parliament had just met, and Ethelberta appeared for the first time before an audience in London.

There was some novelty in the species of entertainment that the active young woman had proposed to herself, and this doubtless had due effect in collecting the body of strangers that greeted her entry, over and above those friends who came to listen to her as a matter of course.  Men and women who had become totally indifferent to new actresses, new readers, and new singers, once more felt the freshness of curiosity as they considered the promise of the announcement.  But the chief inducement to attend lay in the fact that here was to be seen in the flesh a woman with whom the tongue of rumour had been busy in many romantic ways—a woman who, whatever else might be doubted, had certainly produced a volume of verses which had been the talk of the many who had read them, and of the many more who had not, for several consecutive weeks.

What was her story to be?  Persons interested in the inquiry—a small proportion, it may be owned, of the whole London public, and chiefly young men—answered this question for themselves by assuming that it would take the form of some pungent and gratifying revelation of the innermost events of her own life, from which her gushing lines had sprung as an inevitable consequence, and which being once known, would cause such musical poesy to appear no longer wonderful.

The front part of the room was well filled, rows of listeners showing themselves like a drilled-in crop of which not a seed has failed.  They were listeners of the right sort, a majority having noses of the prominent and dignified type, which when viewed in oblique perspective ranged as regularly as bow-windows at a watering place.  Ethelberta’s plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair—as if she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends.  By this touch of domesticity a great appearance of truth and naturalness was given, though really the attitude was at first more difficult to maintain satisfactorily than any one wherein stricter formality should be observed.  She gently began her subject, as if scarcely knowing whether a throng were near her or not, and, in her fear of seeming artificial, spoke too low.  This defect, however, she soon corrected, and ultimately went on in a charmingly colloquial manner.  What Ethelberta relied upon soon became evident.  It was not upon the intrinsic merits of her story as a piece of construction, but upon her method of telling it.  Whatever defects the tale possessed—and they were not a few—it had, as delivered by her, the one pre-eminent merit of seeming like truth.  A modern critic has well observed of De Foe that he had the most amazing talent on record for telling lies; and Ethelberta, in wishing her fiction to appear like a real narrative of personal adventure, did wisely to make De Foe her model.  His is a style even better adapted for speaking than for writing, and the peculiarities of diction which he adopts to give verisimilitude to his narratives acquired enormous additional force when exhibited as viva-voce mannerisms.  And although these artifices were not, perhaps, slavishly copied from that master of feigning, they would undoubtedly have reminded her hearers of him, had they not mostly been drawn from an easeful section in society which is especially characterized by the mental condition of knowing nothing about any author a week after they have read him.  The few there who did remember De Foe were impressed by a fancy that his words greeted them anew in a winged auricular form, instead of by the weaker channels of print and eyesight.  The reader may imagine what an effect this well-studied method must have produced when intensified by a clear, living voice, animated action, and the brilliant and expressive eye of a handsome woman—attributes which of themselves almost compelled belief.  When she reached the most telling passages, instead of adding exaggerated action and sound, Ethelberta would lapse to a whisper and a sustained stillness, which were more striking than gesticulation.  All that could be done by art was there, and if inspiration was wanting nobody missed it.

It was in performing this feat that Ethelberta seemed first to discover in herself the full power of that self-command which further onward in her career more and more impressed her as a singular possession, until at last she was tempted to make of it many fantastic uses, leading to results that affected more households than her own.  A talent for demureness under difficulties without the cold-bloodedness which renders such a bearing natural and easy, a face and hand reigning unmoved outside a heart by nature turbulent as a wave, is a constitutional arrangement much to be desired by people in general; yet, had Ethelberta been framed with less of that gift in her, her life might have been more comfortable as an experience, and brighter as an example, though perhaps duller as a story.

‘Ladywell, how came this Mrs. Petherwin to think of such a queer trick as telling romances, after doing so well as a poet?’ said a man in the stalls to his friend, who had been gazing at the Story-teller with a rapt face.

‘What—don’t you know?—everybody did, I thought,’ said the painter.

‘A mistake.  Indeed, I should not have come here at all had I not heard the subject mentioned by accident yesterday at Grey’s; and then I remembered her to be the same woman I had met at some place—Belmaine’s I think it was—last year, when I thought her just getting on for handsome and clever, not to put it too strongly.’

‘Ah! naturally you would not know much,’ replied Ladywell, in an eager whisper.  ‘Perhaps I am judging others by myself a little more than—but, as you have heard, she is an acquaintance of mine.  I know her very well, and, in fact, I originally suggested the scheme to her as a pleasant way of adding to her fame.  “Depend upon it, dear Mrs. Petherwin,” I said, during a pause in one of our dances together some time ago, “any public appearance of yours would be successful beyond description.”’

‘O, I had no idea that you knew her so well!  Then it is quite through you that she has adopted this course?’

‘Well, not entirely—I could not say entirely.  She said that some day, perhaps, she might do such a thing; and, in short, I reduced her vague ideas to form.’

‘I should not mind knowing her better—I must get you to throw us together in some way,’ said Neigh, with some interest.  ‘I had no idea that you were such an old friend.  You could do it, I suppose?’

‘Really, I am afraid—hah-hah—may not have the opportunity of obliging you.  I met her at Wyndway, you know, where she was visiting with Lady Petherwin.  It was some time ago, and I cannot say that I have ever met her since.’

‘Or before?’ said Neigh.

‘Well—no; I never did.’

‘Ladywell, if I had half your power of going to your imagination for facts, I would be the greatest painter in England.’

‘Now Neigh—that’s too bad—but with regard to this matter, I do speak with some interest,’ said Ladywell, with a pleased sense of himself.

‘In love with her?—Smitten down?—Done for?’

‘Now, now!  However, several other fellows chaff me about her.  It was only yesterday that Jones said—’

‘Do you know why she cares to do this sort of thing?’

‘Merely a desire for fame, I suppose.’

‘I should think she has fame enough already.’

‘That I can express no opinion upon.  I am thinking of getting her permission to use her face in a subject I am preparing.  It is a fine face for canvas.  Glorious contour—glorious.  Ah, here she is again, for the second part.’

‘Dream on, young fellow.  You’ll make a rare couple!’ said Neigh, with a flavour of superciliousness unheeded by his occupied companion.

Further back in the room were a pair of faces whose keen interest in the performance contrasted much with the languidly permissive air of those in front.  When the ten minutes’ break occurred, Christopher was the first of the two to speak.  ‘Well, what do you think of her, Faith?’ he said, shifting restlessly on his seat.

‘I like the quiet parts of the tale best, I think,’ replied the sister; ‘but, of course, I am not a good judge of these things.  How still the people are at times!  I continually take my eyes from her to look at the listeners.  Did you notice the fat old lady in the second row, with her cloak a little thrown back?  She was absolutely unconscious, and stayed with her face up and lips parted like a little child of six.’

‘She well may! the thing is a triumph.  That fellow Ladywell is here, I believe—yes, it is he, busily talking to the man on his right.  If I were a woman I would rather go donkey-driving than stick myself up there, for gaping fops to quiz and say what they like about!  But she had no choice, poor thing; for it was that or nothing with her.’

Faith, who had secret doubts about the absolute necessity of Ethelberta’s appearance in public, said, with remote meanings, ‘Perhaps it is not altogether a severe punishment to her to be looked at by well-dressed men.  Suppose she feels it as a blessing, instead of an affliction?’

‘She is a different sort of woman, Faith, and so you would say if you knew her.  Of course, it is natural for you to criticize her severely just now, and I don’t wish to defend her.’

‘I think you do a little, Kit.’

‘No; I am indifferent about it all.  Perhaps it would have been better for me if I had never seen her; and possibly it might have been better for her if she had never seen me.  She has a heart, and the heart is a troublesome encumbrance when great things have to be done.  I wish you knew her: I am sure you would like each other.’

‘O yes,’ said Faith, in a voice of rather weak conviction.  ‘But, as we live in such a plain way, it would be hardly desirable at present.’

* * * * *

Ethelberta being regarded, in common with the latest conjurer, spirit-medium, aeronaut, giant, dwarf or monarch, as a new sensation, she was duly criticized in the morning papers, and even obtained a notice in some of the weekly reviews.

‘A handsome woman,’ said one of these, ‘may have her own reasons for causing the flesh of the London public to creep upon its bones by her undoubtedly remarkable narrative powers; but we question if much good can result from such a form of entertainment.  Nevertheless, some praise is due.  We have had the novel-writer among us for some time, and the novel-reader has occasionally appeared on our platforms; but we believe that this is the first instance on record of a Novel-teller—one, that is to say, who relates professedly as fiction a romantic tale which has never been printed—the whole owing its chief interest to the method whereby the teller identifies herself with the leading character in the story.’

Another observed: ‘When once we get away from the magic influence of the story-teller’s eye and tongue, we perceive how improbable, even impossible, is the tissue of events to which we have been listening with so great a sense of reality, and we feel almost angry with ourselves at having been the victims of such utter illusion.’

‘Mrs. Petherwin’s personal appearance is decidedly in her favour,’ said another.  ‘She affects no unconsciousness of the fact that form and feature are no mean vehicles of persuasion, and she uses the powers of each to the utmost.  There spreads upon her face when in repose an air of innocence which is charmingly belied by the subtlety we discover beneath it when she begins her tale; and this amusing discrepancy between her physical presentment and the inner woman is further illustrated by the misgiving, which seizes us on her entrance, that so impressionable a lady will never bear up in the face of so trying an audience. . . .  The combinations of incident which Mrs. Petherwin persuades her hearers that she has passed through are not a little marvellous; and if what is rumoured be true, that the tales are to a great extent based upon her own experiences, she has proved herself to be no less daring in adventure than facile in her power of describing it.’

17. ETHELBERTA’S HOUSE

After such successes as these, Christopher could not forego the seductive intention of calling upon the poetess and romancer, at her now established town residence in Exonbury Crescent.  One wintry afternoon he reached the door—now for the third time—and gave a knock which had in it every tender refinement that could be thrown into the somewhat antagonistic vehicle of noise.  Turning his face down the street he waited restlessly on the step.  There was a strange light in the atmosphere: the glass of the street-lamps, the varnished back of a passing cab, a milk-woman’s cans, and a row of church-windows glared in his eyes like new-rubbed copper; and on looking the other way he beheld a bloody sun hanging among the chimneys at the upper end, as a danger-lamp to warn him off.

By this time the door was opened, and before him stood Ethelberta’s young brother Joey, thickly populated with little buttons, the remainder of him consisting of invisible green.

‘Ah, Joseph,’ said Christopher, instantly recognizing the boy.  ‘What, are you here in office?  Is your—’

Joey lifted his forefinger and spread his mouth in a genial manner, as if to signify particular friendliness mingled with general caution.

‘Yes, sir, Mrs. Petherwin is my mistress.  I’ll see if she is at home, sir,’ he replied, raising his shoulders and winking a wink of strategic meanings by way of finish—all which signs showed, if evidence were wanted, how effectually this pleasant young page understood, though quite fresh from Wessex, the duties of his peculiar position.  Mr. Julian was shown to the drawing-room, and there he found Ethelberta alone.

She gave him a hand so cool and still that Christopher, much as he desired the contact, was literally ashamed to let her see and feel his own, trembling with unmanageable excess of feeling.  It was always so, always had been so, always would be so, at these meetings of theirs: she was immeasurably the strongest; and the deep-eyed young man fancied, in the chagrin which the perception of this difference always bred in him, that she triumphed in her superior control.  Yet it was only in little things that their sexes were thus reversed: Christopher would receive quite a shock if a little dog barked at his heels, and be totally unmoved when in danger of his life.

Certainly the most self-possessed woman in the world, under pressure of the incongruity between their last meeting and the present one, might have shown more embarrassment than Ethelberta showed on greeting him to-day.  Christopher was only a man in believing that the shyness which she did evince was chiefly the result of personal interest.  She might or might not have been said to blush—perhaps the stealthy change upon her face was too slow an operation to deserve that name: but, though pale when he called, the end of ten minutes saw her colour high and wide.  She soon set him at his ease, and seemed to relax a long-sustained tension as she talked to him of her arrangements, hopes, and fears.

‘And how do you like London society?’ said Ethelberta.

‘Pretty well, as far as I have seen it: to the surface of its front door.’

‘You will find nothing to be alarmed at if you get inside.’

‘O no—of course not—except my own shortcomings,’ said the modest musician.  ‘London society is made up of much more refined people than society anywhere else.’

‘That’s a very prevalent opinion; and it is nowhere half so prevalent as in London society itself.  However, come and see my house—unless you think it a trouble to look over a house?’

‘No; I should like it very much.’

The decorations tended towards the artistic gymnastics prevalent in some quarters at the present day.  Upon a general flat tint of duck’s-egg green appeared quaint patterns of conventional foliage, and birds, done in bright auburn, several shades nearer to redbreast-red than was Ethelberta’s hair, which was thus thrust further towards brown by such juxtaposition—a possible reason for the choice of tint.  Upon the glazed tiles within the chimney-piece were the forms of owls, bats, snakes, frogs, mice, spiders in their webs, moles, and other objects of aversion and darkness, shaped in black and burnt in after the approved fashion.

‘My brothers Sol and Dan did most of the actual work,’ said Ethelberta, ‘though I drew the outlines, and designed the tiles round the fire.  The flowers, mice, and spiders are done very simply, you know: you only press a real flower, mouse, or spider out flat under a piece of glass, and then copy it, adding a little more emaciation and angularity at pleasure.’

‘In that “at pleasure” is where all the art lies,’ said he.

‘Well, yes—that is the case,’ said Ethelberta thoughtfully; and preceding him upstairs, she threw open a door on one of the floors, disclosing Dan in person, engaged upon a similar treatment of this floor also.  Sol appeared bulging from the door of a closet, a little further on, where he was fixing some shelves; and both wore workmen’s blouses.  At once coming down from the short ladder he was standing upon, Dan shook Christopher’s hand with some velocity.

‘We do a little at a time, you see,’ he said, ‘because Colonel down below, and Mrs. Petherwin’s visitors, shan’t smell the turpentine.’

‘We be pushing on to-day to get it out of the way,’ said Sol, also coming forward and greeting their visitor, but more reluctantly than his brother had done.  ‘Now I’ll tell ye what—you two,’ he added, after an uneasy pause, turning from Christopher to Ethelberta and back again in great earnestness; ‘you’d better not bide here, talking to we rough ones, you know, for folks might find out that there’s something closer between us than workmen and employer and employer’s friend.  So Berta and Mr. Julian, if you’ll go on and take no more notice o’ us, in case of visitors, it would be wiser—else, perhaps, if we should be found out intimate with ye, and bring down your gentility, you’ll blame us for it.  I get as nervous as a cat when I think I may be the cause of any disgrace to ye.’

‘Don’t be so silly, Sol,’ said Ethelberta, laughing.

‘Ah, that’s all very well,’ said Sol, with an unbelieving smile; ‘but if we bain’t company for you out of doors, you bain’t company for we within—not that I find fault with ye or mind it, and shan’t take anything for painting your house, nor will Dan neither, any more for that—no, not a penny; in fact, we are glad to do it for ’ee.  At the same time, you keep to your class, and we’ll keep to ours.  And so, good afternoon, Berta, when you like to go, and the same to you, Mr. Julian.  Dan, is that your mind?’

‘I can but own it,’ said Dan.

The two brothers then turned their backs upon their visitors, and went on working, and Ethelberta and her lover left the room.  ‘My brothers, you perceive,’ said she, ‘represent the respectable British workman in his entirety, and a touchy individual he is, I assure you, on points of dignity, after imbibing a few town ideas from his leaders.  They are painfully off-hand with me, absolutely refusing to be intimate, from a mistaken notion that I am ashamed of their dress and manners; which, of course, is absurd.’

‘Which, of course, is absurd,’ said Christopher.

‘Of course it is absurd!’ she repeated with warmth, and looking keenly at him.  But, finding no harm in his face, she continued as before: ‘Yet, all the time, they will do anything under the sun that they think will advance my interests.  In our hearts we are one.  All they ask me to do is to leave them to themselves, and therefore I do so.  Now, would you like to see some more of your acquaintance?’

She introduced him to a large attic; where he found himself in the society of two or three persons considerably below the middle height, whose manners were of that gushing kind sometimes called Continental, their ages ranging from five years to eight.  These were the youngest children, presided over by Emmeline, as professor of letters, capital and small.

‘I am giving them the rudiments of education here,’ said Ethelberta; ‘but I foresee several difficulties in the way of keeping them here, which I must get over as best I can.  One trouble is, that they don’t get enough air and exercise.’

‘Is Mrs. Chickerel living here as well?’ Christopher ventured to inquire, when they were downstairs again.

‘Yes; but confined to her room as usual, I regret to say.  Two more sisters of mine, whom you have never seen at all, are also here.  They are older than any of the rest of us, and had, broadly speaking, no education at all, poor girls.  The eldest, Gwendoline, is my cook, and Cornelia is my housemaid.  I suffer much sadness, and almost misery sometimes, in reflecting that here are we, ten brothers and sisters, born of one father and mother, who might have mixed together and shared all in the same scenes, and been properly happy, if it were not for the strange accidents that have split us up into sections as you see, cutting me off from them without the compensation of joining me to any others.  They are all true as steel in keeping the secret of our kin, certainly; but that brings little joy, though some satisfaction perhaps.’

‘You might be less despondent, I think.  The tale-telling has been one of the successes of the season.’

‘Yes, I might; but I may observe that you scarcely set the example of blitheness.’

‘Ah—that’s not because I don’t recognize the pleasure of being here.  It is from a more general cause: simply an underfeeling I have that at the most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man’s spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to his insight.

   “As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
   Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.”’

Ethelberta bowed uncertainly; the remark might refer to her past conduct or it might not.  ‘My great cause of uneasiness is the children,’ she presently said, as a new page of matter.  ‘It is my duty, at all risk and all sacrifice of sentiment, to educate and provide for them.  The grown-up ones, older than myself, I cannot help much, but the little ones I can.  I keep my two French lodgers for the sake of them.’

‘The lodgers, of course, don’t know the relationship between yourself and the rest of the people in the house?’

‘O no!—nor will they ever.  My mother is supposed to let the ground and first floors to me—a strange lady—as she does the second and third floors to them.  Still, I may be discovered.’

‘Well—if you are?’

‘Let me be.  Life is a battle, they say; but it is only so in the sense that a game of chess is a battle—there is no seriousness in it; it may be put an end to at any inconvenient moment by owning yourself beaten, with a careless “Ha-ha!” and sweeping your pieces into the box.  Experimentally, I care to succeed in society; but at the bottom of my heart, I don’t care.’

‘For that very reason you are likely to do it.  My idea is, make ambition your business and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, and you will succeed.  So impish are the ways of the gods.’

‘I hope that you at any rate will succeed,’ she said, at the end of a silence.

‘I never can—if success means getting what one wants.’

‘Why should you not get that?’

‘It has been forbidden to me.’

Her complexion changed just enough to show that she knew what he meant.  ‘If you were as bold as you are subtle, you would take a more cheerful view of the matter,’ she said, with a look signifying innermost things.

‘I will instantly!  Shall I test the truth of my cheerful view by a word of question?’

‘I deny that you are capable of taking that view, and until you prove that you are, no question is allowed,’ she said, laughing, and still warmer in the face and neck.  ‘Nothing but melancholy, gentle melancholy, now as in old times when there was nothing to cause it.’

‘Ah—you only tease.’

‘You will not throw aside that bitter medicine of distrust, for the world.  You have grown so used to it, that you take it as food, as some invalids do their mixtures.’

‘Ethelberta, you have my heart—my whole heart.  You have had it ever since I first saw you.  Now you understand me, and no pretending that you don’t, mind, this second time.’

‘I understood you long ago; you have not understood me.’

‘You are mysterious,’ he said lightly; ‘and perhaps if I disentangle your mystery I shall find it to cover—indifference.  I hope it does—for your sake.’

‘How can you say so!’ she exclaimed reproachfully.  ‘Yet I wish it did too—I wish it did cover indifference—for yours.  But you have all of me that you care to have, and may keep it for life if you wish to.  Listen, surely there was a knock at the door?  Let us go inside the room: I am always uneasy when anybody comes, lest any awkward discovery should be made by a visitor of my miserable contrivances for keeping up the establishment.’

Joey met them before they had left the landing.

‘Please, Berta,’ he whispered, ‘Mr. Ladywell has called, and I’ve showed him into the liberry.  You know, Berta, this is how it was, you know: I thought you and Mr. Julian were in the drawing-room, and wouldn’t want him to see ye together, and so I asked him to step into the liberry a minute.’

‘You must improve your way of speaking,’ she said, with quick embarrassment, whether at the mention of Ladywell’s name before Julian, or at the way Joey coupled herself with Christopher, was quite uncertain.  ‘Will you excuse me for a few moments?’ she said, turning to Christopher.  ‘Pray sit down; I shall not be long.’  And she glided downstairs.

They had been standing just by the drawing-room door, and Christopher turned back into the room with no very satisfactory countenance.  It was very odd, he thought, that she should go down to Ladywell in that mysterious manner, when he might have been admitted to where they were talking without any trouble at all.  What could Ladywell have to say, as an acquaintance calling upon her for a few minutes, that he was not to hear?  Indeed, if it came to that, what right had Ladywell to call upon her at all, even though she were a widow, and to some extent chartered to live in a way which might be considered a trifle free if indulged in by other young women.  This was the first time that he himself had ventured into her house on that very account—a doubt whether it was quite proper to call, considering her youth, and the fertility of her position as ground for scandal.  But no sooner did he arrive than here was Ladywell blundering in, and, since this conjunction had occurred on his first visit, the chances were that Ladywell came very often.

Julian walked up and down the room, every moment expanding itself to a minute in his impatience at the delay and vexation at the cause.  After scrutinizing for the fifth time every object on the walls as if afflicted with microscopic closeness of sight, his hands under his coat-tails, and his person jigging up and down upon his toes, he heard her coming up the stairs.  When she entered the apartment her appearance was decidedly that of a person subsiding after some little excitement.

‘I did not calculate upon being so long,’ she said sweetly, at the same time throwing back her face and smiling.  ‘But I—was longer than I expected.’

‘It seemed rather long,’ said Christopher gloomily, ‘but I don’t mind it.’

‘I am glad of that,’ said Ethelberta.

‘As you asked me to stay, I was very pleased to do so, and always should be; but I think that now I will wish you good-bye.’

‘You are not vexed with me?’ she said, looking quite into his face.  ‘Mr. Ladywell is nobody, you know.’

‘Nobody?’

‘Well, he is not much, I mean.  The case is, that I am sitting to him for a subject in which my face is to be used—otherwise than as a portrait—and he called about it.’

‘May I say,’ said Christopher, ‘that if you want yourself painted, you are ill-advised not to let it be done by a man who knows how to use the brush a little?’

‘O, he can paint!’ said Ethelberta, rather warmly.  ‘His last picture was excellent, I think.  It was greatly talked about.’

‘I imagined you to say that he was a mere nobody!’

‘Yes, but—how provoking you are!—nobody, I mean, to talk to.  He is a true artist, nevertheless.’

Christopher made no reply.  The warm understanding between them had quite ended now, and there was no fanning it up again.  Sudden tiffs had been the constant misfortune of their courtship in days gone by, had been the remote cause of her marriage to another; and the familiar shadows seemed to be rising again to cloud them with the same persistency as ever.  Christopher went downstairs with well-behaved moodiness, and left the house forthwith.  The postman came to the door at the same time.

Ethelberta opened a letter from Picotee—now at Sandbourne again; and, stooping to the fire-light, she began to read:—

‘MY DEAR ETHELBERTA,—I have tried to like staying at Sandbourne because you wished it, but I can’t endure the town at all, dear Berta; everything is so wretched and dull!  O, I only wish you knew how dismal it is here, and how much I would give to come to London!  I cannot help thinking that I could do better in town.  You see, I should be close to you, and should have the benefit of your experience.  I would not mind what I did for a living could I be there where you all are.  It is so like banishment to be here.  If I could not get a pupil-teachership in some London school (and I believe I could by advertising) I could stay with you, and be governess to Georgina and Myrtle, for I am sure you cannot spare time enough to teach them as they ought to be taught, and Emmeline is not old enough to have any command over them.  I could also assist at your dressmaking, and you must require a great deal of that to be done if you continue to appear in public.  Mr. Long read in the papers the account of your first evening, and afterwards I heard two ladies of our committee talking about it; but of course not one of them knew my personal interest in the discussion.  Now will you, Ethelberta, think if I may not come: Do, there’s a dear sister!  I will do anything you set me about if I may only come.—Your ever affectionate,                    PICOTEE.’

‘Great powers above—what worries do beset me!’ cried Ethelberta, jumping up.  ‘What can possess the child so suddenly?—she used to like Sandbourne well enough!’  She sat down, and hastily scribbled the following reply:—

‘MY DEAR PICOTEE—There is only a little time to spare before the post goes, but I will try to answer your letter at once.  Whatever is the reason of this extraordinary dislike to Sandbourne?  It is a nice healthy place, and you are likely to do much better than either of our elder sisters, if you follow straight on in the path you have chosen.  Of course, if such good fortune should attend me that I get rich by my contrivances of public story-telling and so on, I shall share everything with you and the rest of us, in which case you shall not work at all.  But (although I have been unexpectedly successful so far) this is problematical; and it would be rash to calculate upon all of us being able to live, or even us seven girls only, upon the fortune I am going to make that way.  So, though I don’t mean to be harsh, I must impress upon you the necessity of going on as you are going just at present.  I know the place must be dull, but we must all put up with dulness sometimes.  You, being next to me in age, must aid me as well as you can in doing something for the younger ones; and if anybody at all comes and lives here otherwise than as a servant, it must be our father—who will not, however, at present hear of such a thing when I mention it to him.  Do think of all this, Picotee, and bear up!  Perhaps we shall all be happy and united some day.  Joey is waiting to run to the post-office with this at once.  All are well.  Sol and Dan have nearly finished the repairs and decorations of my house—but I will tell you of that another time.—Your affectionate sister,                 BERTA.’

18. NEAR SANDBOURNE—LONDON STREETS—ETHELBERTA’S

When this letter reached its destination the next morning, Picotee, in her over-anxiety, could not bring herself to read it in anybody’s presence, and put it in her pocket till she was on her walk across the moor.  She still lived at the cottage out of the town, though at some inconvenience to herself, in order to teach at a small village night-school whilst still carrying on her larger occupation of pupil-teacher in Sandbourne.

So she walked and read, and was soon in tears.  Moreover, when she thought of what Ethelberta would have replied had that keen sister known the wildness of her true reason in wishing to go, she shuddered with misery.  To wish to get near a man only because he had been kind to her, and had admired her pretty face, and had given her flowers, to nourish a passion all the more because of its hopeless impracticability, were things to dream of, not to tell.  Picotee was quite an unreasoning animal.  Her sister arranged situations for her, told her how to conduct herself in them, how to make up anew, in unobtrusive shapes, the valuable wearing apparel she sent from time to time—so as to provoke neither exasperation in the little gentry, nor superciliousness in the great.  Ethelberta did everything for her, in short; and Picotee obeyed orders with the abstracted ease of mind which people show who have their thinking done for them, and put out their troubles as they do their washing.  She was quite willing not to be clever herself, since it was unnecessary while she had a much-admired sister, who was clever enough for two people and to spare.

This arrangement, by which she gained an untroubled existence in exchange for freedom of will, had worked very pleasantly for Picotee until the anomaly of falling in love on her own account created a jar in the machinery.  Then she began to know how wearing were miserable days, and how much more wearing were miserable nights.  She pictured Christopher in London calling upon her dignified sister (for Ethelberta innocently mentioned his name sometimes in writing) and imagined over and over again the mutual signs of warm feeling between them.  And now Picotee resolved upon a noble course.  Like Juliet, she had been troubled with a consciousness that perhaps her love for Christopher was a trifle forward and unmaidenly, even though she had determined never to let him or anybody in the whole world know of it.  To set herself to pray that she might have strength to see him without a pang the lover of her sister, who deserved him so much more than herself, would be a grand penance and corrective.

After uttering petitions to this effect for several days, she still felt very bad; indeed, in the psychological difficulty of striving for what in her soul she did not desire, rather worse, if anything.  At last, weary of walking the old road and never meeting him, and blank in a general powerlessness, she wrote the letter to Ethelberta, which was only the last one of a series that had previously been written and torn up.

Now this hope had been whirled away like thistledown, and the case was grievous enough to distract a greater stoic than Picotee.  The end of it was that she left the school on insufficient notice, gave up her cottage home on the plea—true in the letter—that she was going to join a relative in London, and went off thither by a morning train, leaving her things packed ready to be sent on when she should write for them.

Picotee arrived in town late on a cold February afternoon, bearing a small bag in her hand.  She crossed Westminster Bridge on foot, just after dusk, and saw a luminous haze hanging over each well-lighted street as it withdrew into distance behind the nearer houses, showing its direction as a train of morning mist shows the course of a distant stream when the stream itself is hidden.  The lights along the riverside towards Charing Cross sent an inverted palisade of gleaming swords down into the shaking water, and the pavement ticked to the touch of pedestrians’ feet, most of whom tripped along as if walking only to practise a favourite quick step, and held handkerchiefs to their mouths to strain off the river mist from their lungs.  She inquired her way to Exonbury Crescent, and between five and six o’clock reached her sister’s door.

Two or three minutes were passed in accumulating resolution sufficient to ring the bell, which when at last she did, was not performed in a way at all calculated to make the young man Joey hasten to the door.  After the lapse of a certain time he did, however, find leisure to stroll and see what the caller might want, out of curiosity to know who there could be in London afraid to ring a bell twice.

Joey’s delight exceeded even his surprise, the ruling maxim of his life being the more the merrier, under all circumstances.  The beaming young man was about to run off and announce her upstairs and downstairs, left and right, when Picotee called him hastily to her.  In the hall her quick young eye had caught sight of an umbrella with a peculiar horn handle—an umbrella she had been accustomed to meet on Sandbourne Moor on many happy afternoons.  Christopher was evidently in the house.

‘Joey,’ she said, as if she were ready to faint, ‘don’t tell Berta I am come.  She has company, has she not?’

‘O no—only Mr. Julian!’ said the brother.  ‘He’s quite one of the family!’

‘Never mind—can’t I go down into the kitchen with you?’ she inquired.  There had been bliss and misery mingled in those tidings, and she scarcely knew for a moment which way they affected her.  What she did know was that she had run her dear fox to earth, and a sense of satisfaction at that feat prevented her just now from counting the cost of the performance.

‘Does Mr. Julian come to see her very often?’ said she.

‘O yes—he’s always a-coming—a regular bore to me.’

‘A regular what?’

‘Bore!—Ah, I forgot, you don’t know our town words.  However, come along.’

They passed by the doors on tiptoe, and their mother upstairs being, according to Joey’s account, in the midst of a nap, Picotee was unwilling to disturb her; so they went down at once to the kitchen, when forward rushed Gwendoline the cook, flourishing her floury hands, and Cornelia the housemaid, dancing over her brush; and these having welcomed and made Picotee comfortable, who should ring the area-bell, and be admitted down the steps, but Sol and Dan.  The workman-brothers, their day’s duties being over, had called to see their relations, first, as usual, going home to their lodgings in Marylebone and making themselves as spruce as bridegrooms, according to the rules of their newly-acquired town experience.  For the London mechanic is only nine hours a mechanic, though the country mechanic works, eats, drinks, and sleeps a mechanic throughout the whole twenty-four.

‘God bless my soul—Picotee!’ said Dan, standing fixed.  ‘Well—I say, this is splendid! ha-ha!’

‘Picotee—what brought you here?’ said Sol, expanding the circumference of his face in satisfaction.  ‘Well, come along—never mind so long as you be here.’

Picotee explained circumstances as well as she could without stating them, and, after a general conversation of a few minutes, Sol interrupted with—‘Anybody upstairs with Mrs. Petherwin?’

‘Mr. Julian was there just now,’ said Joey; ‘but he may be gone.  Berta always lets him slip out how he can, the form of ringing me up not being necessary with him.  Wait a minute—I’ll see.’

Joseph vanished up the stairs; and, the question whether Christopher were gone or not being an uninteresting one to the majority, the talking went on upon other matters.  When Joey crept down again a minute later, Picotee was sitting aloof and silent, and he accordingly singled her out to speak to.

‘Such a lark, Picotee!’ he whispered.  ‘Berta’s a-courting of her young man.  Would you like to see how they carries on a bit?’

‘Dearly I should!’ said Picotee, the pupils of her eyes dilating.

Joey conducted her to the top of the basement stairs, and told her to listen.  Within a few yards of them was the morning-room door, now standing ajar; and an intermittent flirtation in soft male and female tones could be heard going on inside.  Picotee’s lips parted at thus learning the condition of things, and she leant against the stair-newel.

‘My?  What’s the matter?’ said Joey.

‘If this is London, I don’t like it at all!’ moaned Picotee.

‘Well—I never see such a girl—fainting all over the stairs for nothing in the world.’

‘O—it will soon be gone—it is—it is only indigestion.’

‘Indigestion?  Much you simple country people can know about that!  You should see what devils of indigestions we get in high life—eating ’normous great dinners and suppers that require clever physicians to carry ’em off, or else they’d carry us off with gout next day; and waking in the morning with such a splitting headache, and dry throat, and inward cusses about human nature, that you feel all the world like some great lord.  However, now let’s go down again.’

‘No, no, no!’ said the unhappy maiden imploringly.  ‘Hark!’

They listened again.  The voices of the musician and poetess had changed: there was a decided frigidity in their tone—then came a louder expression—then a silence.

‘You needn’t be afeard,’ said Joey.  ‘They won’t fight; bless you, they busts out quarrelling like this times and times when they’ve been over-friendly, but it soon gets straight with ’em again.’

There was now a quick walk across the room, and Joey and his sister drew down their heads out of sight.  Then the room door was slammed, quick footsteps went along the hall, the front door closed just as loudly, and Christopher’s tread passed into nothing along the pavement.

‘That’s rather a wuss one than they mostly have; but Lord, ’tis nothing at all.’

‘I don’t much like biding here listening!’ said Picotee.

‘O, ’tis how we do all over the West End,’ said Joey.  ‘’Tis yer ignorance of town life that makes it seem a good deal to ’ee.’

‘You can’t make much boast about town life; for you haven’t left off talking just as they do down in Wessex.’

‘Well, I own to that—what’s fair is fair, and ’tis a true charge; but if I talk the Wessex way ’tisn’t for want of knowing better; ’tis because my staunch nater makes me bide faithful to our old ancient institutions.  You’d soon own ’twasn’t ignorance in me, if you knowed what large quantities of noblemen I gets mixed up with every day.  In fact ’tis thoughted here and there that I shall do very well in the world.’

‘Well, let us go down,’ said Picotee.  ‘Everything seems so overpowering here.’

‘O, you’ll get broke in soon enough.  I felt just the same when I first entered into society.’

‘Do you think Berta will be angry with me?  How does she treat you?’

‘Well, I can’t complain.  You see she’s my own flesh and blood, and what can I say?  But, in secret truth, the wages is terrible low, and barely pays for the tobacco I consooms.’

‘O Joey, you wicked boy!  If mother only knew that you smoked!’

‘I don’t mind the wickedness so much as the smell.  And Mrs. Petherwin has got such a nose for a fellow’s clothes.  ’Tis one of the greatest knots in service—the smoke question.  ’Tis thoughted that we shall make a great stir about it in the mansions of the nobility soon.’

‘How much more you know of life than I do—you only fourteen and me seventeen!’

‘Yes, that’s true.  You see, age is nothing—’tis opportunity.  And even I can’t boast, for many a younger man knows more.’

‘But don’t smoke, Joey—there’s a dear!’

‘What can I do?  Society hev its rules, and if a person wishes to keep himself up, he must do as the world do.  We be all Fashion’s slave—as much a slave as the meanest in the land!’

They got downstairs again; and when the dinner of the French lady and gentleman had been sent up and cleared away, and also Ethelberta’s evening tea (which she formed into a genuine meal, making a dinner of luncheon, when nobody was there, to give less trouble to her servant-sisters), they all sat round the fire.  Then the rustle of a dress was heard on the staircase, and squirrel-haired Ethelberta appeared in person.  It was her custom thus to come down every spare evening, to teach Joey and her sisters something or other—mostly French, which she spoke fluently; but the cook and housemaid showed more ambition than intelligence in acquiring that tongue, though Joey learnt it readily enough.

There was consternation in the camp for a moment or two, on account of poor Picotee, Ethelberta being not without firmness in matters of discipline.  Her eye instantly lighted upon her disobedient sister, now looking twice as disobedient as she really was.

‘O, you are here, Picotee?  I am glad to see you,’ said the mistress of the house quietly.

This was altogether to Picotee’s surprise, for she had expected a round rating at least, in her freshness hardly being aware that this reserve of feeling was an acquired habit of Ethelberta’s, and that civility stood in town for as much vexation as a tantrum represented in Wessex.

Picotee lamely explained her outward reasons for coming, and soon began to find that Ethelberta’s opinions on the matter would not be known by the tones of her voice.  But innocent Picotee was as wily as a religionist in sly elusions of the letter whilst infringing the spirit of a dictum; and by talking very softly and earnestly about the wondrous good she could do by remaining in the house as governess to the children, and playing the part of lady’s-maid to her sister at show times, she so far coaxed Ethelberta out of her intentions that she almost accepted the plan as a good one.  It was agreed that for the present, at any rate, Picotee should remain.  Then a visit was made to Mrs. Chickerel’s room, where the remainder of the evening was passed; and harmony reigned in the household.

19. ETHELBERTA’S DRAWING-ROOM

Picotee’s heart was fitfully glad.  She was near the man who had enlarged her capacity from girl’s to woman’s, a little note or two of young feeling to a whole diapason; and though nearness was perhaps not in itself a great reason for felicity when viewed beside the complete realization of all that a woman can desire in such circumstances, it was much in comparison with the outer darkness of the previous time.

It became evident to all the family that some misunderstanding had arisen between Ethelberta and Mr. Julian.  What Picotee hoped in the centre of her heart as to the issue of the affair it would be too complex a thing to say.  If Christopher became cold towards her sister he would not come to the house; if he continued to come it would really be as Ethelberta’s lover—altogether, a pretty game of perpetual check for Picotee.

He did not make his appearance for several days.  Picotee, being a presentable girl, and decidedly finer-natured than her sisters below stairs, was allowed to sit occasionally with Ethelberta in the afternoon, when the teaching of the little ones had been done for the day; and thus she had an opportunity of observing Ethelberta’s emotional condition with reference to Christopher, which Picotee did with an interest that the elder sister was very far from suspecting.

At first Ethelberta seemed blithe enough without him.  One more day went, and he did not come, and then her manner was that of apathy.  Another day passed, and from fanciful elevations of the eyebrow, and long breathings, it became apparent that Ethelberta had decidedly passed the indifferent stage, and was getting seriously out of sorts about him.  Next morning she looked all hope.  He did not come that day either, and Ethelberta began to look pale with fear.

‘Why don’t you go out?’ said Picotee timidly.

‘I can hardly tell: I have been expecting some one.’

‘When she comes I must run up to mother at once, must I not?’ said clever Picotee.

‘It is not a lady,’ said Ethelberta blandly.  She came then and stood by Picotee, and looked musingly out of the window.  ‘I may as well tell you, perhaps,’ she continued.  ‘It is Mr. Julian.  He is—I suppose—my lover, in plain English.’

‘Ah!’ said Picotee.

‘Whom I am not going to marry until he gets rich.’

‘Ah—how strange!  If I had him—such a lover, I mean—I would marry him if he continued poor.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Picotee; just as you come to London without caring about consequences, or would do any other crazy thing and not mind in the least what came of it.  But somebody in the family must take a practical view of affairs, or we should all go to the dogs.’

Picotee recovered from the snubbing which she felt that she deserved, and charged gallantly by saying, with delicate showings of indifference, ‘Do you love this Mr. What’s-his-name of yours?’

‘Mr. Julian?  O, he’s a very gentlemanly man.  That is, except when he is rude, and ill-uses me, and will not come and apologize!’

‘If I had him—a lover, I would ask him to come if I wanted him to.’

Ethelberta did not give her mind to this remark; but, drawing a long breath, said, with a pouting laugh, which presaged unreality, ‘The idea of his getting indifferent now!  I have been intending to keep him on until I got tired of his attentions, and then put an end to them by marrying him; but here is he, before he has hardly declared himself, forgetting my existence as much as if he had vowed to love and cherish me for life.  ’Tis an unnatural inversion of the manners of society.’

‘When did you first get to care for him, dear Berta?’

‘O—when I had seen him once or twice.’

‘Goodness—how quick you were!’

‘Yes—if I am in the mind for loving I am not to be hindered by shortness of acquaintanceship.’

‘Nor I neither!’ sighed Picotee.

‘Nor any other woman.  We don’t need to know a man well in order to love him.  That’s only necessary when we want to leave off.’

‘O Berta—you don’t believe that!’

‘If a woman did not invariably form an opinion of her choice before she has half seen him, and love him before she has half formed an opinion, there would be no tears and pining in the whole feminine world, and poets would starve for want of a topic.  I don’t believe it, do you say?  Ah, well, we shall see.’

Picotee did not know what to say to this; and Ethelberta left the room to see about her duties as public story-teller, in which capacity she had undertaken to appear again this very evening.

20. THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE HALL—THE ROAD HOME

London was illuminated by the broad full moon.  The pavements looked white as if mantled with snow; ordinary houses were sublimated to the rank of public buildings, public buildings to palaces, and the faces of women walking the streets to those of calendared saints and guardian-angels, by the pure bleaching light from the sky.

In the quiet little street where opened the private door of the Hall chosen by Ethelberta for her story-telling, a brougham was waiting.  The time was about eleven o’clock; and presently a lady came out from the building, the moonbeams forthwith flooding her face, which they showed to be that of the Story-teller herself.  She hastened across to the carriage, when a second thought arrested her motion: telling the man-servant and a woman inside the brougham to wait for her, she wrapped up her features and glided round to the front of the house, where she paused to observe the carriages and cabs driving up to receive the fashionable crowd stepping down from the doors.  Standing here in the throng which her own talent and ingenuity had drawn together, she appeared to enjoy herself by listening for a minute or two to the names of several persons of more or less distinction as they were called out, and then regarded attentively the faces of others of lesser degree: to scrutinize the latter was, as the event proved, the real object of the journey from round the corner.  When nearly every one had left the doors, she turned back disappointed.  Ethelberta had been fancying that her alienated lover Christopher was in the back rows to-night, but, as far as could now be observed, the hopeful supposition was a false one.

When she got round to the back again, a man came forward.  It was Ladywell, whom she had spoken to already that evening.  ‘Allow me to bring you your note-book, Mrs. Petherwin: I think you had forgotten it,’ he said.  ‘I assure you that nobody has handled it but myself.’

Ethelberta thanked him, and took the book.  ‘I use it to look into between the parts, in case my memory should fail me,’ she explained.  ‘I remember that I did lay it down, now you remind me.’

Ladywell had apparently more to say, and moved by her side towards the carriage; but she declined the arm he offered, and said not another word till he went on, haltingly:

‘Your triumph to-night was very great, and it was as much a triumph to me as to you; I cannot express my feeling—I cannot say half that I would.  If I might only—’

‘Thank you much,’ said Ethelberta, with dignity.  ‘Thank you for bringing my book, but I must go home now.  I know that you will see that it is not necessary for us to be talking here.’

‘Yes—you are quite right,’ said the repressed young painter, struck by her seriousness.  ‘Blame me; I ought to have known better.  But perhaps a man—well, I will say it—a lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.  Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.  I saw that, and hoped that I might speak without real harm.’

‘You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!’ she said, with the slightest accent of sarcasm.  ‘But pray do not attend me further—it is not at all necessary or desirable.  My maid is in the carriage.’  She bowed, turned, and entered the vehicle, seating herself beside Picotee.

‘It was harsh!’ said Ladywell to himself, as he looked after the retreating carriage.  ‘I was a fool; but it was harsh.  Yet what man on earth likes a woman to show too great a readiness at first?  She is right: she would be nothing without repulse!’  And he moved away in an opposite direction.

‘What man was that?’ said Picotee, as they drove along.

‘O—a mere Mr. Ladywell: a painter of good family, to whom I have been sitting for what he calls an Idealization.  He is a dreadful simpleton.’

‘Why did you choose him?’

‘I did not: he chose me.  But his silliness of behaviour is a hopeful sign for the picture.  I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.’

‘Your own skill is not like that, is it, Berta?’

‘In men—in men.  I don’t mean in women.  How childish you are!’

The slight depression at finding that Christopher was not present, which had followed Ethelberta’s public triumph that evening, was covered over, if not removed, by Ladywell’s declaration, and she reached home serene in spirit.  That she had not the slightest notion of accepting the impulsive painter made little difference; a lover’s arguments being apt to affect a lady’s mood as much by measure as by weight.  A useless declaration like a rare china teacup with a hole in it, has its ornamental value in enlarging a collection.

No sooner had they entered the house than Mr. Julian’s card was discovered; and Joey informed them that he had come particularly to speak with Ethelberta, quite forgetting that it was her evening for tale-telling.

This was real delight, for between her excitements Ethelberta had been seriously sick-hearted at the horrible possibility of his never calling again.  But alas! for Christopher.  There being nothing like a dead silence for getting one’s off-hand sweetheart into a corner, there is nothing like prematurely ending it for getting into that corner one’s self.

‘Now won’t I punish him for daring to stay away so long!’ she exclaimed as soon as she got upstairs.  ‘It is as bad to show constancy in your manners as fickleness in your heart at such a time as this.’

‘But I thought honesty was the best policy?’ said Picotee.

‘So it is, for the man’s purpose.  But don’t you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages.  Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs.’

She sat down, and rapidly wrote a line to Mr. Julian:—

‘EXONBURY CRESCENT.

‘I return from Mayfair Hall to find you have called.  You will, I know, be good enough to forgive my saying what seems an unfriendly thing, when I assure you that the circumstances of my peculiar situation make it desirable, if not necessary.  It is that I beg you not to give me the pleasure of a visit from you for some little time, for unhappily the frequency of your kind calls has been noticed; and I am now in fear that we may be talked about—invidiously—to the injury of us both.  The town, or a section of it, has turned its bull’s-eye upon me with a brightness which I did not in the least anticipate; and you will, I am sure, perceive how indispensable it is that I should be circumspect.—Yours sincerely,

E. PETHERWIN.’

21. A STREET—NEIGH’S ROOMS—CHRISTOPHER’S ROOMS

As soon as Ethelberta had driven off from the Hall, Ladywell turned back again; and, passing the front entrance, overtook his acquaintance Mr. Neigh, who had been one of the last to emerge.  The two were going in the same direction, and they walked a short distance together.

‘Has anything serious happened?’ said Neigh, noticing an abstraction in his companion.  ‘You don’t seem in your usual mood to-night.’

‘O, it is only that affair between us,’ said Ladywell.

‘Affair?  Between you and whom?’

‘Her and myself, of course.  It will be in every fellow’s mouth now, I suppose!’

‘But—not anything between yourself and Mrs. Petherwin?’

‘A mere nothing.  But surely you started, Neigh, when you suspected it just this moment?’

‘No—you merely fancied that.’

‘Did she not speak well to-night!  You were in the room, I believe?’

‘Yes, I just turned in for half-an-hour: it seems that everybody does, so I thought I must.  But I had no idea that you were feeble that way.’

‘It is very kind of you, Neigh—upon my word it is—very kind; and of course I appreciate the delicacy which—which—’

‘What’s kind?’

‘I mean your well-intentioned plan for making me believe that nothing is known of this.  But stories will of course get wind; and if our attachment has made more noise in the world than I intended it should, and causes any public interest, why—ha-ha!—it must.  There is some little romance in it perhaps, and people will talk of matters of that sort between individuals of any repute—little as that is with one of the pair.’

‘Of course they will—of course.  You are a rising man, remember, whom some day the world will delight to honour.’

‘Thank you for that, Neigh.  Thank you sincerely.’

‘Not at all.  It is merely justice to say it, and one must he generous to deserve thanks.’

‘Ha-ha!—that’s very nicely put, and undeserved I am sure.  And yet I need a word of that sort sometimes!’

‘Genius is proverbially modest.’

‘Pray don’t, Neigh—I don’t deserve it, indeed.  Of course it is well meant in you to recognize any slight powers, but I don’t deserve it.  Certainly, my self-assurance was never too great.  ’Tis the misfortune of all children of art that they should be so dependent upon any scraps of praise they can pick up to help them along.’

‘And when that child gets so deep in love that you can only see the whites of his eyes—’

‘Ah—now, Neigh—don’t, I say!’

‘But why did—’

‘Why did I love her?’

‘Yes, why did you love her?’

‘Ah, if I could only turn self-vivisector, and watch the operation of my heart, I should know!’

‘My dear fellow, you must be very bad indeed to talk like that.  A poet himself couldn’t be cleaner gone.’

‘Now, don’t chaff, Neigh; do anything, but don’t chaff.  You know that I am the easiest man in the world for taking it at most times.  But I can’t stand it now; I don’t feel up to it.  A glimpse of paradise, and then perdition.  What would you do, Neigh?’

‘She has refused you, then?’

‘Well—not positively refused me; but it is so near it that a dull man couldn’t tell the difference.  I hardly can myself.’

‘How do you really stand with her?’ said Neigh, with an anxiety ill-concealed.

‘Off and on—neither one thing nor the other.  I was determined to make an effort the last time she sat to me, and so I met her quite coolly, and spoke only of technicalities with a forced smile—you know that way of mine for drawing people out, eh, Neigh?’

‘Quite, quite.’

‘A forced smile, as much as to say, “I am obliged to entertain you, but as a mere model for art purposes.”  But the deuce a bit did she care.  And then I frequently looked to see what time it was, as the end of the sitting drew near—rather a rude thing to do, as a rule.’

‘Of course.  But that was your finesse.  Ha-ha!—capital!  Yet why not struggle against such slavery?  It is regularly pulling you down.  What’s a woman’s beauty, after all?’

‘Well you may say so!  A thing easier to feel than define,’ murmured Ladywell.  ‘But it’s no use, Neigh—I can’t help it as long as she repulses me so exquisitely!  If she would only care for me a little, I might get to trouble less about her.’

‘And love her no more than one ordinarily does a girl by the time one gets irrevocably engaged to her.  But I suppose she keeps you back so thoroughly that you carry on the old adoration with as much vigour as if it were a new fancy every time?’

‘Partly yes, and partly no!  It’s very true, and it’s not true!’

‘’Tis to be hoped she won’t hate you outright, for then you would absolutely die of idolizing her.’

‘Don’t, Neigh!—Still there’s some truth in it—such is the perversity of our hearts.  Fancy marrying such a woman!’

‘We should feel as eternally united to her after years and years of marriage as to a dear new angel met at last night’s dance.’

‘Exactly—just what I should have said.  But did I hear you say “We,” Neigh?  You didn’t say “WE should feel?”’

‘Say “we”?—yes—of course—putting myself in your place just in the way of speaking, you know.’

‘Of course, of course; but one is such a fool at these times that one seems to detect rivalry in every trumpery sound!  Were you never a little touched?’

‘Not I.  My heart is in the happy position of a country which has no history or debt.’

‘I suppose I should rejoice to hear it,’ said Ladywell.  ‘But the consciousness of a fellow-sufferer being in just such another hole is such a relief always, and softens the sense of one’s folly so very much.’

‘There’s less Christianity in that sentiment than in your confessing to it, old fellow.  I know the truth of it nevertheless, and that’s why married men advise others to marry.  Were all the world tied up, the pleasantly tied ones would be equivalent to those at present free.  But what if your fellow-sufferer is not only in another such a hole, but in the same one?’

‘No, Neigh—never!  Don’t trifle with a friend who—’

‘That is, refused like yourself, as well as in love.’

‘Ah, thanks, thanks!  It suddenly occurred to me that we might be dead against one another as rivals, and a friendship of many long—days be snapped like a—like a reed.’

‘No—no—only a jest,’ said Neigh, with a strangely accelerated speech.  ‘Love-making is an ornamental pursuit that matter-of-fact fellows like me are quite unfit for.  A man must have courted at least half-a-dozen women before he’s a match for one; and since triumph lies so far ahead, I shall keep out of the contest altogether.’

‘Your life would be pleasanter if you were engaged.  It is a nice thing, after all.’

‘It is.  The worst of it would be that, when the time came for breaking it off, a fellow might get into an action for breach—women are so fond of that sort of thing now; and I hate love-affairs that don’t end peaceably!’

‘But end it by peaceably marrying, my dear fellow!’

‘It would seem so singular.  Besides, I have a horror of antiquity: and you see, as long as a man keeps single, he belongs in a measure to the rising generation, however old he may be; but as soon as he marries and has children, he belongs to the last generation, however young he may be.  Old Jones’s son is a deal younger than young Brown’s father, though they are both the same age.’

‘At any rate, honest courtship cures a man of many evils he had no power to stem before.’

‘By substituting an incurable matrimony!’

‘Ah—two persons must have a mind for that before it can happen!’ said Ladywell, sorrowfully shaking his head.

‘I think you’ll find that if one has a mind for it, it will be quite sufficient.  But here we are at my rooms.  Come in for half-an-hour?’

‘Not to-night, thanks!’

They parted, and Neigh went in.  When he got upstairs he murmured in his deepest chest note, ‘O, lords, that I should come to this!  But I shall never be such a fool as to marry her!  What a flat that poor young devil was not to discover that we were tarred with the same brush.  O, the deuce, the deuce!’ he continued, walking about the room as if passionately stamping, but not quite doing it because another man had rooms below.

Neigh drew from his pocket-book an envelope embossed with the name of a fashionable photographer, and out of this pulled a portrait of the lady who had, in fact, enslaved his secret self equally with his frank young friend the painter.  After contemplating it awhile with a face of cynical adoration, he murmured, shaking his head, ‘Ah, my lady; if you only knew this, I should be snapped up like a snail!  Not a minute’s peace for me till I had married you.  I wonder if I shall!—I wonder.’

Neigh was a man of five-and-thirty—Ladywell’s senior by ten years; and, being of a phlegmatic temperament, he had glided thus far through the period of eligibility with impunity.  He knew as well as any man how far he could go with a woman and yet keep clear of having to meet her in church without her bonnet; but it is doubtful if his mind that night were less disturbed with the question how to guide himself out of the natural course which his passion for Ethelberta might tempt him into, than was Ladywell’s by his ardent wish to secure her.

* * * * *

About the time at which Neigh and Ladywell parted company, Christopher Julian was entering his little place in Bloomsbury.  The quaint figure of Faith, in her bonnet and cloak, was kneeling on the hearth-rug endeavouring to stir a dull fire into a bright one.

‘What—Faith! you have never been out alone?’ he said.

Faith’s soft, quick-shutting eyes looked unutterable things, and she replied, ‘I have been to hear Mrs. Petherwin’s story-telling again.’

‘And walked all the way home through the streets at this time of night, I suppose!’

‘Well, nobody molested me, either going or coming back.’

‘Faith, I gave you strict orders not to go into the streets after two o’clock in the day, and now here you are taking no notice of what I say at all!’

‘The truth is, Kit, I wanted to see with my spectacles what this woman was really like, and I went without them last time.  I slipped in behind, and nobody saw me.’

‘I don’t think much of her after what I have seen tonight,’ said Christopher, moodily recurring to a previous thought.

‘Why? What is the matter?’

‘I thought I would call on her this afternoon, but when I got there I found she had left early for the performance.  So in the evening, when I thought it would be all over, I went to the private door of the Hall to speak to her as she came out, and ask her flatly a question or two which I was fool enough to think I must ask her before I went to bed.  Just as I was drawing near she came out, and, instead of getting into the brougham that was waiting for her, she went round the corner.  When she came back a man met her and gave her something, and they stayed talking together two or three minutes.  The meeting may certainly not have been intentional on her part; but she has no business to be going on so coolly when—when—in fact, I have come to the conclusion that a woman’s affection is not worth having.  The only feeling which has any dignity or permanence or worth is family affection between close blood-relations.’

‘And yet you snub me sometimes, Mr. Kit.’

‘And, for the matter of that, you snub me.  Still, you know what I mean—there’s none of that off-and-on humbug between us.  If we grumble with one another we are united just the same: if we don’t write when we are parted, we are just the same when we meet—there has been some rational reason for silence; but as for lovers and sweethearts, there is nothing worth a rush in what they feel!’

Faith said nothing in reply to this.  The opinions she had formed upon the wisdom of her brother’s pursuit of Ethelberta would have come just then with an ill grace.  It must, however, have been evident to Christopher, had he not been too preoccupied for observation, that Faith’s impressions of Ethelberta were not quite favourable as regarded her womanhood, notwithstanding that she greatly admired her talents.

22. ETHELBERTA’S HOUSE

Ethelberta came indoors one day from the University boat-race, and sat down, without speaking, beside Picotee, as if lost in thought.

‘Did you enjoy the sight?’ said Picotee.

‘I scarcely know.  We couldn’t see at all from Mrs. Belmaine’s carriage, so two of us—very rashly—agreed to get out and be rowed across to the other side where the people were quite few.  But when the boatman had us in the middle of the river he declared he couldn’t land us on the other side because of the barges, so there we were in a dreadful state—tossed up and down like corks upon great waves made by steamers till I made up my mind for a drowning.  Well, at last we got back again, but couldn’t reach the carriage for the crowd; and I don’t know what we should have done if a gentleman hadn’t come—sent by Mrs. Belmaine, who was in a great fright about us; then he was introduced to me, and—I wonder how it will end!’

‘Was there anything so wonderful in the beginning, then?’

‘Yes.  One of the coolest and most practised men in London was ill-mannered towards me from sheer absence of mind—and could there be higher flattery?  When a man of that sort does not give you the politeness you deserve, it means that in his heart he is rebelling against another feeling which his pride suggests that you do not deserve.  O, I forgot to say that he is a Mr. Neigh, a nephew of Mr. Doncastle’s, who lives at ease about Piccadilly and Pall Mall, and has a few acres somewhere—but I don’t know much of him.  The worst of my position now is that I excite this superficial interest in many people and a deep friendship in nobody.  If what all my supporters feel could be collected into the hearts of two or three they would love me better than they love themselves; but now it pervades all and operates in none.’

‘But it must operate in this gentleman?’

‘Well, yes—just for the present.  But men in town have so many contrivances for getting out of love that you can’t calculate upon keeping them in for two days together.  However, it is all the same to me.  There’s only—but let that be.’

‘What is there only?’ said Picotee coaxingly.

‘Only one man,’ murmured Ethelberta, in much lower tones.  ‘I mean, whose wife I should care to be; and the very qualities I like in him will, I fear, prevent his ever being in a position to ask me.’

‘Is he the man you punished the week before last by forbidding him to come?’

‘Perhaps he is: but he does not want civility from me.  Where there’s much feeling there’s little ceremony.’

‘It certainly seems that he does not want civility from you to make him attentive to you,’ said Picotee, stifling a sigh; ‘for here is a letter in his handwriting, I believe.’

‘You might have given it to me at once,’ said Ethelberta, opening the envelope hastily.  It contained very few sentences: they were to the effect that Christopher had received her letter forbidding him to call; that he had therefore at first resolved not to call or even see her more, since he had become such a shadow in her path.  Still, as it was always best to do nothing hastily, he had on second thoughts decided to ask her to grant him a last special favour, and see him again just once, for a few minutes only that afternoon, in which he might at least say Farewell.  To avoid all possibility of compromising her in anybody’s eyes, he would call at half-past six, when other callers were likely to be gone, knowing that from the peculiar constitution of the household the hour would not interfere with her arrangements.  There being no time for an answer, he would assume that she would see him, and keep the engagement; the request being one which could not rationally be objected to.

‘There—read it!’ said Ethelberta, with glad displeasure.  ‘Did you ever hear such audacity?  Fixing a time so soon that I cannot reply, and thus making capital out of a pretended necessity, when it is really an arbitrary arrangement of his own.  That’s real rebellion—forcing himself into my house when I said strictly he was not to come; and then, that it cannot rationally be objected to—I don’t like his “rationally.”’

‘Where there’s much love there’s little ceremony, didn’t you say just now?’ observed innocent Picotee.

‘And where there’s little love, no ceremony at all.  These manners of his are dreadful, and I believe he will never improve.’

‘It makes you care not a bit about him, does it not, Berta?’ said Picotee hopefully.

‘I don’t answer for that,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘I feel, as many others do, that a want of ceremony which is produced by abstraction of mind is no defect in a poet or musician, fatal as it may be to an ordinary man.’

‘Mighty me! You soon forgive him.’

‘Picotee, don’t you be so quick to speak.  Before I have finished, how do you know what I am going to say?  I’ll never tell you anything again, if you take me up so.  Of course I am going to punish him at once, and make him remember that I am a lady, even if I do like him a little.’

‘How do you mean to punish him?’ said Picotee, with interest.

‘By writing and telling him that on no account is he to come.’

‘But there is not time for a letter—’

‘That doesn’t matter.  It will show him that I did not mean him to come.’

At hearing the very merciful nature of the punishment, Picotee sighed without replying; and Ethelberta despatched her note.  The hour of appointment drew near, and Ethelberta showed symptoms of unrest.  Six o’clock struck and passed.  She walked here and there for nothing, and it was plain that a dread was filling her: her letter might accidentally have had, in addition to the moral effect which she had intended, the practical effect which she did not intend, by arriving before, instead of after, his purposed visit to her, thereby stopping him in spite of all her care.

‘How long are letters going to Bloomsbury?’ she said suddenly.

‘Two hours, Joey tells me,’ replied Picotee, who had already inquired on her own private account.

‘There!’ exclaimed Ethelberta petulantly.  ‘How I dislike a man to misrepresent things!  He said there was not time for a reply!’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know,’ said Picotee, in angel tones; ‘and so it happens all right, and he has got it, and he will not come after all.’

They waited and waited, but Christopher did not appear that night; the true case being that his declaration about insufficient time for a reply was merely an ingenious suggestion to her not to be so cruel as to forbid him.  He was far from suspecting when the letter of denial did reach him—about an hour before the time of appointment—that it was sent by a refinement of art, of which the real intention was futility, and that but for his own misstatement it would have been carefully delayed.

The next day another letter came from the musician, decidedly short and to the point.  The irate lover stated that he would not be made a fool of any longer: under any circumstances he meant to come that self-same afternoon, and should decidedly expect her to see him.

‘I will not see him!’ said Ethelberta.  ‘Why did he not call last night?’

‘Because you told him not to,’ said Picotee.

‘Good gracious, as if a woman’s words are to be translated as literally as Homer!  Surely he is aware that more often than not “No” is said to a man’s importunities because it is traditionally the correct modest reply, and for nothing else in the world.  If all men took words as superficially as he does, we should die of decorum in shoals.’

‘Ah, Berta! how could you write a letter that you did not mean should be obeyed?’

‘I did in a measure mean it, although I could have shown Christian forgiveness if it had not been.  Never mind; I will not see him.  I’ll plague my heart for the credit of my sex.’

To ensure the fulfilment of this resolve, Ethelberta determined to give way to a headache that she was beginning to be aware of, go to her room, disorganize her dress, and ruin her hair by lying down; so putting it out of her power to descend and meet Christopher on any momentary impulse.

Picotee sat in the room with her, reading, or pretending to read, and Ethelberta pretended to sleep.  Christopher’s knock came up the stairs, and with it the end of the farce.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Ethelberta in the prompt and broadly-awake tone of one who had been concentrated on the expectation of that sound for a length of time, ‘it was a mistake in me to do this!  Joey will be sure to make a muddle of it.’

Joey was heard coming up the stairs.  Picotee opened the door, and said, with an anxiety transcending Ethelberta’s, ‘Well?’

‘O, will you tell Mrs. Petherwin that Mr. Julian says he’ll wait.’

‘You were not to ask him to wait,’ said Ethelberta, within.

‘I know that,’ said Joey, ‘and I didn’t.  He’s doing that out of his own head.’

‘Then let Mr. Julian wait, by all means,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘Allow him to wait if he likes, but tell him it is uncertain if I shall be able to come down.’

Joey then retired, and the two sisters remained in silence.

‘I wonder if he’s gone,’ Ethelberta said, at the end of a long time.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ said Picotee.  ‘Shall we ask Joey?  I have not heard the door close.’

Joey was summoned, and after a leisurely ascent, interspersed by various gymnastic performances over the handrail here and there, appeared again.

‘He’s there jest the same: he don’t seem to be in no hurry at all,’ said Joey.

‘What is he doing?’ inquired Picotee solicitously.

‘O, only looking at his watch sometimes, and humming tunes, and playing rat-a-tat-tat upon the table.  He says he don’t mind waiting a bit.’

‘You must have made a mistake in the message,’ said Ethelberta, within.

‘Well, no.  I am correct as a jineral thing.  I jest said perhaps you would be engaged all the evening, and perhaps you wouldn’t.’

When Joey had again retired, and they had waited another ten minutes, Ethelberta said, ‘Picotee, do you go down and speak a few words to him.  I am determined he shall not see me.  You know him a little; you remember when he came to the Lodge?’

‘What must I say to him?’

Ethelberta paused before replying.  ‘Try to find out if—if he is much grieved at not seeing me, and say—give him to understand that I will forgive him, Picotee.’

‘Very well.’

‘And Picotee—’

‘Yes.’

‘If he says he must see me—I think I will get up.  But only if he says must: you remember that.’

Picotee departed on her errand.  She paused on the staircase trembling, and thinking between the thrills how very far would have been the conduct of her poor slighted self from proud recalcitration had Mr. Julian’s gentle request been addressed to her instead of to Ethelberta; and she went some way in the painful discovery of how much more tantalizing it was to watch an envied situation that was held by another than to be out of sight of it altogether.  Here was Christopher waiting to bestow love, and Ethelberta not going down to receive it: a commodity unequalled in value by any other in the whole wide world was being wantonly wasted within that very house.  If she could only have stood to-night as the beloved Ethelberta, and not as the despised Picotee, how different would be this going down!  Thus she went along, red and pale moving in her cheeks as in the Northern Lights at their strongest time.

Meanwhile Christopher had sat waiting minute by minute till the evening shades grew browner, and the fire sank low.  Joey, finding himself not particularly wanted upon the premises after the second inquiry, had slipped out to witness a nigger performance round the corner, and Julian began to think himself forgotten by all the household.  The perception gradually cooled his emotions and enabled him to hold his hat quite steadily.

When Picotee gently thrust open the door she was surprised to find the room in darkness, the fire gone completely out, and the form of Christopher only visible by a faint patch of light, which, coming from a lamp on the opposite side of the way and falling upon the mirror, was thrown as a pale nebulosity upon his shoulder.  Picotee was too flurried at sight of the familiar outline to know what to do, and, instead of going or calling for a light, she mechanically advanced into the room.  Christopher did not turn or move in any way, and then she perceived that he had begun to doze in his chair.

Instantly, with the precipitancy of the timorous, she said, ‘Mr. Julian!’ and touched him on the shoulder—murmuring then, ‘O, I beg pardon, I—I will get a light.’

Christopher’s consciousness returned, and his first act, before rising, was to exclaim, in a confused manner, ‘Ah—you have come—thank you, Berta!’ then impulsively to seize her hand, as it hung beside his head, and kiss it passionately.  He stood up, still holding her fingers.

Picotee gasped out something, but was completely deprived of articulate utterance, and in another moment being unable to control herself at this sort of first meeting with the man she had gone through fire and water to be near, and more particularly by the overpowering kiss upon her hand, burst into hysterical sobbing.  Julian, in his inability to imagine so much emotion—or at least the exhibition of it—in Ethelberta, gently drew Picotee further forward by the hand he held, and utilized the solitary spot of light from the mirror by making it fall upon her face.  Recognizing the childish features, he at once, with an exclamation, dropped her hand and started back.  Being in point of fact a complete bundle of nerves and nothing else, his thin figure shook like a harp-string in painful excitement at a contretemps which would scarcely have quickened the pulse of an ordinary man.

Poor Picotee, feeling herself in the wind of a civil d---, started back also, sobbing more than ever.  It was a little too much that the first result of his discovery of the mistake should be absolute repulse.  She leant against the mantelpiece, when Julian, much bewildered at her superfluity of emotion, assisted her to a seat in sheer humanity.  But Christopher was by no means pleased when he again thought round the circle of circumstances.

‘How could you allow such an absurd thing to happen?’ he said, in a stern, though trembling voice.  ‘You knew I might mistake.  I had no idea you were in the house: I thought you were miles away, at Sandbourne or somewhere!  But I see: it is just done for a joke, ha-ha!’

This made Picotee rather worse still.  ‘O-O-O-O!’ she replied, in the tone of pouring from a bottle.  ‘What shall I do-o-o-o!  It is—not done for a—joke at all-l-l-l!’

‘Not done for a joke?  Then never mind—don’t cry, Picotee.  What was it done for, I wonder?’

Picotee, mistaking the purport of his inquiry, imagined him to refer to her arrival in the house, quite forgetting, in her guilty sense of having come on his account, that he would have no right or thought of asking questions about a natural visit to a sister, and she said: ‘When you—went away from—Sandbourne, I—I—I didn’t know what to do, and then I ran away, and came here, and then Ethelberta—was angry with me; but she says I may stay; but she doesn’t know that I know you, and how we used to meet along the road every morning—and I am afraid to tell her—O, what shall I do!’

‘Never mind it,’ said Christopher, a sense of the true state of her case dawning upon him with unpleasant distinctness, and bringing some irritation at his awkward position; though it was impossible to be long angry with a girl who had not reasoning foresight enough to perceive that doubtful pleasure and certain pain must be the result of any meeting whilst hearts were at cross purposes in this way.

‘Where is your sister?’ he asked.

‘She wouldn’t come down, unless she MUST,’ said Picotee.  ‘You have vexed her, and she has a headache besides that, and I came instead.’

‘So that I mightn’t be wasted altogether.  Well, it’s a strange business between the three of us.  I have heard of one-sided love, and reciprocal love, and all sorts, but this is my first experience of a concatenated affection.  You follow me, I follow Ethelberta, and she follows—Heaven knows who!’

‘Mr. Ladywell!’ said the mortified Picotee.

‘Good God, if I didn’t think so!’ said Christopher, feeling to the soles of his feet like a man in a legitimate drama.

‘No, no, no!’ said the frightened girl hastily.  ‘I am not sure it is Mr. Ladywell.  That’s altogether a mistake of mine!’

‘Ah, yes, you want to screen her,’ said Christopher, with a withering smile at the spot of light.  ‘Very sisterly, doubtless; but none of that will do for me.  I am too old a bird by far—by very far!  Now are you sure she does not love Ladywell?’

‘Yes!’

‘Well, perhaps I blame her wrongly.  She may have some little good faith—a woman has, here and there.  How do you know she does not love Ladywell?’

‘Because she would prefer Mr. Neigh to him, any day.’

‘Ha!’

‘No, no—you mistake, sir—she doesn’t love either at all—Ethelberta doesn’t.  I meant that she cannot love Mr. Ladywell because he stands lower in her opinion than Mr. Neigh, and him she certainly does not care for.  She only loves you.  If you only knew how true she is you wouldn’t be so suspicious about her, and I wish I had not come here—yes, I do!’

‘I cannot tell what to think of it.  Perhaps I don’t know much of this world after all, or what girls will do.  But you don’t excuse her to me, Picotee.’

Before this time Picotee had been simulating haste in getting a light; but in her dread of appearing visibly to Christopher’s eyes, and showing him the precise condition of her tear-stained face, she put it off moment after moment, and stirred the fire, in hope that the faint illumination thus produced would be sufficient to save her from the charge of stupid conduct as entertainer.

Fluttering about on the horns of this dilemma, she was greatly relieved when Christopher, who read her difficulty, and the general painfulness of the situation, said that since Ethelberta was really suffering from a headache he would not wish to disturb her till to-morrow, and went off downstairs and into the street without further ceremony.

Meanwhile other things had happened upstairs.  No sooner had Picotee left her sister’s room, than Ethelberta thought it would after all have been much better if she had gone down herself to speak to this admirably persistent lover.  Was she not drifting somewhat into the character of coquette, even if her ground of offence—a word of Christopher’s about somebody else’s mean parentage, which was spoken in utter forgetfulness of her own position, but had wounded her to the quick nevertheless—was to some extent a tenable one?  She knew what facilities in suffering Christopher always showed; how a touch to other people was a blow to him, a blow to them his deep wound, although he took such pains to look stolid and unconcerned under those inflictions, and tried to smile as if he had no feelings whatever.  It would be more generous to go down to him, and be kind.  She jumped up with that alertness which comes so spontaneously at those sweet bright times when desire and duty run hand in hand.

She hastily set her hair and dress in order—not such matchless order as she could have wished them to be in, but time was precious—and descended the stairs.  When on the point of pushing open the drawing-room door, which wanted about an inch of being closed, she was astounded to discover that the room was in total darkness, and still more to hear Picotee sobbing inside.  To retreat again was the only action she was capable of at that moment: the clash between this picture and the anticipated scene of Picotee and Christopher sitting in frigid propriety at opposite sides of a well-lighted room was too great.  She flitted upstairs again with the least possible rustle, and flung herself down on the couch as before, panting with excitement at the new knowledge that had come to her.

There was only one possible construction to be put upon this in Ethelberta’s rapid mind, and that approximated to the true one.  She had known for some time that Picotee once had a lover, or something akin to it, and that he had disappointed her in a way which had never been told.  No stranger, save in the capacity of the one beloved, could wound a woman sufficiently to make her weep, and it followed that Christopher was the man of Picotee’s choice.  As Ethelberta recalled the conversations, conclusion after conclusion came like pulsations in an aching head.  ‘O, how did it happen, and who is to blame?’ she exclaimed.  ‘I cannot doubt his faith, and I cannot doubt hers; and yet how can I keep doubting them both?’

It was characteristic of Ethelberta’s jealous motherly guard over her young sisters that, amid these contending inquiries, her foremost feeling was less one of hope for her own love than of championship for Picotee’s.

23. ETHELBERTA’S HOUSE (continued)

Picotee was heard on the stairs: Ethelberta covered her face.

‘Is he waiting?’ she said faintly, on finding that Picotee did not begin to speak.

‘No; he is gone,’ said Picotee.

‘Ah, why is that?’ came quickly from under the handkerchief.  ‘He has forgotten me—that’s what it is!’

‘O no, he has not!’ said Picotee, just as bitterly.

Ethelberta had far too much heroism to let much in this strain escape her, though her sister was prepared to go any lengths in the same.  ‘I suppose,’ continued Ethelberta, in the quiet way of one who had only a headache the matter with her, ‘that he remembered you after the meeting at Anglebury?’

‘Yes, he remembered me.’

‘Did you tell me you had seen him before that time?’

‘I had seen him at Sandbourne.  I don’t think I told you.’

‘At whose house did you meet him?’

‘At nobody’s.  I only saw him sometimes,’ replied Picotee, in great distress.

Ethelberta, though of all women most miserable, was brimming with compassion for the throbbing girl so nearly related to her, in whom she continually saw her own weak points without the counterpoise of her strong ones.  But it was necessary to repress herself awhile: the intended ways of her life were blocked and broken up by this jar of interests, and she wanted time to ponder new plans.  ‘Picotee, I would rather be alone now, if you don’t mind,’ she said.  ‘You need not leave me any light; it makes my eyes ache, I think.’

Picotee left the room.  But Ethelberta had not long been alone and in darkness when somebody gently opened the door, and entered without a candle.

‘Berta,’ said the soft voice of Picotee again, ‘may I come in?’

‘O yes,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘Has everything gone right with the house this evening?’

‘Yes; and Gwendoline went out just now to buy a few things, and she is going to call round upon father when he has got his dinner cleared away.’

‘I hope she will not stay and talk to the other servants.  Some day she will let drop something or other before father can stop her.’

‘O Berta!’ said Picotee, close beside her.  She was kneeling in front of the couch, and now flinging her arm across Ethelberta’s shoulder and shaking violently, she pressed her forehead against her sister’s temple, and breathed out upon her cheek:

‘I came in again to tell you something which I ought to have told you just now, and I have come to say it at once because I am afraid I shan’t be able to to-morrow.  Mr. Julian was the young man I spoke to you of a long time ago, and I should have told you all about him, but you said he was your young man too, and—and I didn’t know what to do then, because I thought it was wrong in me to love your young man; and Berta, he didn’t mean me to love him at all, but I did it myself, though I did not want to do it, either; it would come to me!  And I didn’t know he belonged to you when I began it, or I would not have let him meet me at all; no I wouldn’t!’

‘Meet you? You don’t mean to say he used to meet you?’ whispered Ethelberta.

‘Yes,’ said Picotee; ‘but he could not help it.  We used to meet on the road, and there was no other road unless I had gone ever so far round.  But it is worse than that, Berta!  That was why I couldn’t bide in Sandbourne, and—and ran away to you up here; it was not because I wanted to see you, Berta, but because I—I wanted—’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Ethelberta hurriedly.

‘And then when I went downstairs he mistook me for you for a moment, and that caused—a confusion!’

‘O, well, it does not much matter,’ said Ethelberta, kissing Picotee soothingly.  ‘You ought not of course to have come to London in such a manner; but, since you have come, we will make the best of it.  Perhaps it may end happily for you and for him.  Who knows?’

‘Then don’t you want him, Berta?’

‘O no; not at all!’

‘What—and don’t you really want him, Berta?’ repeated Picotee, starting up.

‘I would much rather he paid his addresses to you.  He is not the sort of man I should wish to—think it best to marry, even if I were to marry, which I have no intention of doing at present.  He calls to see me because we are old friends, but his calls do not mean anything more than that he takes an interest in me.  It is not at all likely that I shall see him again! and I certainly never shall see him unless you are present.’

‘That will be very nice.’

‘Yes.  And you will be always distant towards him, and go to leave the room when he comes, when I will call you back; but suppose we continue this to-morrow?  I can tell you better then what to do.’

When Picotee had left her the second time, Ethelberta turned over upon her breast and shook in convulsive sobs which had little relationship with tears.  This abandonment ended as suddenly as it had begun—not lasting more than a minute and a half altogether—and she got up in an unconsidered and unusual impulse to seek relief from the stinging sarcasm of this event—the unhappy love of Picotee—by mentioning something of it to another member of the family, her eldest sister Gwendoline, who was a woman full of sympathy.

Ethelberta descended to the kitchen, it being now about ten o’clock.  The room was empty, Gwendoline not having yet returned, and Cornelia, being busy about her own affairs upstairs.  The French family had gone to the theatre, and the house on that account was very quiet to-night.  Ethelberta sat down in the dismal place without turning up the gas, and in a few minutes admitted Gwendoline.

The round-faced country cook floundered in, untying her bonnet as she came, laying it down on a chair, and talking at the same time.  ‘Such a place as this London is, to be sure!’ she exclaimed, turning on the gas till it whistled.  ‘I wish I was down in Wessex again.  Lord-a-mercy, Berta, I didn’t see it was you!  I thought it was Cornelia.  As I was saying, I thought that, after biding in this underground cellar all the week, making up messes for them French folk, and never pleasing ’em, and never shall, because I don’t understand that line, I thought I would go out and see father, you know.’

‘Is he very well?’ said Ethelberta.

‘Yes; and he is going to call round when he has time.  Well, as I was a-coming home-along I thought, “Please the Lord I’ll have some chippols for supper just for a plain trate,” and I went round to the late greengrocer’s for ’em; and do you know they sweared me down that they hadn’t got such things as chippols in the shop, and had never heard of ’em in their lives.  At last I said, “Why, how can you tell me such a brazen story?—here they be, heaps of ’em!”  It made me so vexed that I came away there and then, and wouldn’t have one—no, not at a gift.’

‘They call them young onions here,’ said Ethelberta quietly; ‘you must always remember that.  But, Gwendoline, I wanted—’

Ethelberta felt sick at heart, and stopped.  She had come down on the wings of an impulse to unfold her trouble about Picotee to her hard-headed and much older sister, less for advice than to get some heart-ease by interchange of words; but alas, she could proceed no further.  The wretched homeliness of Gwendoline’s mind seemed at this particular juncture to be absolutely intolerable, and Ethelberta was suddenly convinced that to involve Gwendoline in any such discussion would simply be increasing her own burden, and adding worse confusion to her sister’s already confused existence.

‘What were you going to say?’ said the honest and unsuspecting Gwendoline.

‘I will put it off until to-morrow,’ Ethelberta murmured gloomily; ‘I have a bad headache, and I am afraid I cannot stay with you after all.’

As she ascended the stairs, Ethelberta ached with an added pain not much less than the primary one which had brought her down.  It was that old sense of disloyalty to her class and kin by feeling as she felt now which caused the pain, and there was no escaping it.  Gwendoline would have gone to the ends of the earth for her: she could not confide a thought to Gwendoline!

‘If she only knew of that unworthy feeling of mine, how she would grieve,’ said Ethelberta miserably.

She next went up to the servants’ bedrooms, and to where Cornelia slept.  On Ethelberta’s entrance Cornelia looked up from a perfect wonder of a bonnet, which she held in her hands.  At sight of Ethelberta the look of keen interest in her work changed to one of gaiety.

‘I am so glad—I was just coming down,’ Cornelia said in a whisper; whenever they spoke as relations in this house it was in whispers.  ‘Now, how do you think this bonnet will do?  May I come down, and see how I look in your big glass?’  She clapped the bonnet upon her head.  ‘Won’t it do beautiful for Sunday afternoon?’

‘It looks very attractive, as far as I can see by this light,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘But is it not rather too brilliant in colour—blue and red together, like that?  Remember, as I often tell you, people in town never wear such bright contrasts as they do in the country.’

‘O Berta!’ said Cornelia, in a deprecating tone; ‘don’t object.  If there’s one thing I do glory in it is a nice flare-up about my head o’ Sundays—of course if the family’s not in mourning, I mean.’  But, seeing that Ethelberta did not smile, she turned the subject, and added docilely: ‘Did you come up for me to do anything?  I will put off finishing my bonnet if I am wanted.’

‘I was going to talk to you about family matters, and Picotee,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘But, as you are busy, and I have a headache, I will put it off till to-morrow.’

Cornelia seemed decidedly relieved, for family matters were far from attractive at the best of times; and Ethelberta went down to the next floor, and entered her mother’s room.

After a short conversation Mrs. Chickerel said, ‘You say you want to ask me something?’

‘Yes: but nothing of importance, mother.  I was thinking about Picotee, and what would be the best thing to do—’

‘Ah, well you may, Berta.  I am so uneasy about this life you have led us into, and full of fear that your plans may break down; if they do, whatever will become of us?  I know you are doing your best; but I cannot help thinking that the coming to London and living with you was wild and rash, and not well weighed afore we set about it.  You should have counted the cost first, and not advised it.  If you break down, and we are all discovered living so queer and unnatural, right in the heart of the aristocracy, we should be the laughing-stock of the country: it would kill me, and ruin us all—utterly ruin us!’

‘O mother, I know all that so well!’ exclaimed Ethelberta, tears of anguish filling her eyes.  ‘Don’t depress me more than I depress myself by such fears, or you will bring about the very thing we strive to avoid!  My only chance is in keeping in good spirits, and why don’t you try to help me a little by taking a brighter view of things?’

‘I know I ought to, my dear girl, but I cannot.  I do so wish that I never let you tempt me and the children away from the Lodge.  I cannot think why I allowed myself to be so persuaded—cannot think!  You are not to blame—it is I.  I am much older than you, and ought to have known better than listen to such a scheme.  This undertaking seems too big—the bills frighten me.  I have never been used to such wild adventure, and I can’t sleep at night for fear that your tale-telling will go wrong, and we shall all be exposed and shamed.  A story-teller seems such an impossible castle-in-the-air sort of a trade for getting a living by—I cannot think how ever you came to dream of such an unheard-of thing.’

‘But it is not a castle in the air, and it does get a living!’ said Ethelberta, her lip quivering.

‘Well, yes, while it is just a new thing; but I am afraid it cannot last—that’s what I fear.  People will find you out as one of a family of servants, and their pride will be stung at having gone to hear your romancing; then they will go no more, and what will happen to us and the poor little ones?’

‘We must all scatter again!’

‘If we could get as we were once, I wouldn’t mind that.  But we shall have lost our character as simple country folk who know nothing, which are the only class of poor people that squires will give any help to; and I much doubt if the girls would get places after such a discovery—it would be so awkward and unheard-of.’

‘Well, all I can say is,’ replied Ethelberta, ‘that I will do my best.  All that I have is theirs and yours as much as mine, and these arrangements are simply on their account.  I don’t like my relations being my servants; but if they did not work for me, they would have to work for others, and my service is much lighter and pleasanter than any other lady’s would be for them, so the advantages are worth the risk.  If I stood alone, I would go and hide my head in any hole, and care no more about the world and its ways.  I wish I was well out of it, and at the bottom of a quiet grave—anybody might have the world for me then!  But don’t let me disturb you longer; it is getting late.’

Ethelberta then wished her mother good-night, and went away.  To attempt confidences on such an ethereal matter as love was now absurd; her hermit spirit was doomed to dwell apart as usual; and she applied herself to deep thinking without aid and alone.  Not only was there Picotee’s misery to disperse; it became imperative to consider how best to overpass a more general catastrophe.

24. ETHELBERTA’S HOUSE (continued)—THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Mrs. Chickerel, in deploring the risks of their present speculative mode of life, was far from imagining that signs of the foul future so much dreaded were actually apparent to Ethelberta at the time the lament was spoken.  Hence the daughter’s uncommon sensitiveness to prophecy.  It was as if a dead-reckoner poring over his chart should predict breakers ahead to one who already beheld them.

That her story-telling would prove so attractive Ethelberta had not ventured to expect for a moment; that having once proved attractive there should be any falling-off until such time had elapsed as would enable her to harvest some solid fruit was equally a surprise.  Future expectations are often based without hesitation upon one happy accident, when the only similar condition remaining to subsequent sets of circumstances is that the same person forms the centre of them.  Her situation was so peculiar, and so unlike that of most public people, that there was hardly an argument explaining this triumphant opening which could be used in forecasting the close; unless, indeed, more strategy were employed in the conduct of the campaign than Ethelberta seemed to show at present.

There was no denying that she commanded less attention than at first: the audience had lessened, and, judging by appearances, might soon be expected to be decidedly thin.  In excessive lowness of spirit, Ethelberta translated these signs with the bias that a lingering echo of her mother’s dismal words naturally induced, reading them as conclusive evidence that her adventure had been chimerical in its birth.  Yet it was very far less conclusive than she supposed.  Public interest might without doubt have been renewed after a due interval, some of the falling-off being only an accident of the season.  Her novelties had been hailed with pleasure, the rather that their freshness tickled than that their intrinsic merit was appreciated; and, like many inexperienced dispensers of a unique charm, Ethelberta, by bestowing too liberally and too frequently, was destroying the very element upon which its popularity depended.  Her entertainment had been good in its conception, and partly good in its execution; yet her success had but little to do with that goodness.  Indeed, what might be called its badness in a histrionic sense—that is, her look sometimes of being out of place, the sight of a beautiful woman on a platform, revealing tender airs of domesticity which showed her to belong by character to a quiet drawing-room—had been primarily an attractive feature.  But alas, custom was staling this by improving her up to the mark of an utter impersonator, thereby eradicating the pretty abashments of a poetess out of her sphere; and more than one well-wisher who observed Ethelberta from afar feared that it might some day come to be said of her that she had

‘Enfeoffed herself to popularity:
That, being daily swallowed by men’s eyes,
They surfeited with honey, and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.’

But this in its extremity was not quite yet.

We discover her one day, a little after this time, sitting before a table strewed with accounts and bills from different tradesmen of the neighbourhood, which she examined with a pale face, collecting their totals on a blank sheet.  Picotee came into the room, but Ethelberta took no notice whatever of her.  The younger sister, who subsisted on scraps of notice and favour, like a dependent animal, even if these were only an occasional glance of the eye, could not help saying at last, ‘Berta, how silent you are.  I don’t think you know I am in the room.’

‘I did not observe you,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘I am very much engaged: these bills have to be paid.’

‘What, and cannot we pay them?’ said Picotee, in vague alarm.

‘O yes, I can pay them.  The question is, how long shall I be able to do it?’

‘That is sad; and we are going on so nicely, too.  It is not true that you have really decided to leave off story-telling now the people don’t crowd to hear it as they did?’

‘I think I shall leave off.’

‘And begin again next year?’

‘That is very doubtful.’

‘I’ll tell you what you might do,’ said Picotee, her face kindling with a sense of great originality.  ‘You might travel about to country towns and tell your story splendidly.’

‘A man in my position might perhaps do it with impunity; but I could not without losing ground in other domains.  A woman may drive to Mayfair from her house in Exonbury Crescent, and speak from a platform there, and be supposed to do it as an original way of amusing herself; but when it comes to starring in the provinces she establishes herself as a woman of a different breed and habit.  I wish I were a man!  I would give up this house, advertise it to be let furnished, and sally forth with confidence.  But I am driven to think of other ways to manage than that.’

Picotee fell into a conjectural look, but could not guess.

‘The way of marriage,’ said Ethelberta.  ‘Otherwise perhaps the poetess may live to become what Dryden called himself when he got old and poor—a rent-charge on Providence. . . . .  Yes, I must try that way,’ she continued, with a sarcasm towards people out of hearing.  I must buy a “Peerage” for one thing, and a “Baronetage,” and a “House of Commons,” and a “Landed Gentry,” and learn what people are about me.  ‘I must go to Doctors’ Commons and read up wills of the parents of any likely gudgeons I may know.  I must get a Herald to invent an escutcheon of my family, and throw a genealogical tree into the bargain in consideration of my taking a few second-hand heirlooms of a pawnbroking friend of his.  I must get up sham ancestors, and find out some notorious name to start my pedigree from.  It does not matter what his character was; either villain or martyr will do, provided that he lived five hundred years ago.  It would be considered far more creditable to make good my descent from Satan in the age when he went to and fro on the earth than from a ministering angel under Victoria.’

‘But, Berta, you are not going to marry any stranger who may turn up?’ said Picotee, who had creeping sensations of dread when Ethelberta talked like this.

‘I had no such intention.  But, having once put my hand to the plough, how shall I turn back?’

‘You might marry Mr. Ladywell,’ said Picotee, who preferred to look at things in the concrete.

‘Yes, marry him villainously; in cold blood, without a moment to prepare himself.’

‘Ah, you won’t!’

‘I am not so sure about that.  I have brought mother and the children to town against her judgment and against my father’s; they gave way to my opinion as to one who from superior education has larger knowledge of the world than they.  I must prove my promises, even if Heaven should fall upon me for it, or what a miserable future will theirs be!  We must not be poor in London.  Poverty in the country is a sadness, but poverty in town is a horror.  There is something not without grandeur in the thought of starvation on an open mountain or in a wide wood, and your bones lying there to bleach in the pure sun and rain; but a back garret in a rookery, and the other starvers in the room insisting on keeping the window shut—anything to deliver us from that!’

‘How gloomy you can be, Berta!  It will never be so dreadful.  Why, I can take in plain sewing, and you can do translations, and mother can knit stockings, and so on.  How much longer will this house be yours?’

‘Two years.  If I keep it longer than that I shall have to pay rent at the rate of three hundred a year.  The Petherwin estate provides me with it till then, which will be the end of Lady Petherwin’s term.’

‘I see it; and you ought to marry before the house is gone, if you mean to marry high,’ murmured Picotee, in an inadequate voice, as one confronted by a world so tragic that any hope of her assisting therein was out of the question.

It was not long after this exposition of the family affairs that Christopher called upon them; but Picotee was not present, having gone to think of superhuman work on the spur of Ethelberta’s awakening talk.  There was something new in the way in which Ethelberta received the announcement of his name; passion had to do with it, so had circumspection; the latter most, for the first time since their reunion.

‘I am going to leave this part of England,’ said Christopher, after a few gentle preliminaries.  ‘I was one of the applicants for the post of assistant-organist at Melchester Cathedral when it became vacant, and I find I am likely to be chosen, through the interest of one of my father’s friends.’

‘I congratulate you.’

‘No, Ethelberta, it is not worth that.  I did not originally mean to follow this course at all; but events seemed to point to it in the absence of a better.’

‘I too am compelled to follow a course I did not originally mean to take.’  After saying no more for a few moments, she added, in a tone of sudden openness, a richer tincture creeping up her cheek, ‘I want to put a question to you boldly—not exactly a question—a thought.  Have you considered whether the relations between us which have lately prevailed are—are the best for you—and for me?’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Christopher, hastily anticipating all that she might be going to say; ‘and I am glad you have given me the opportunity of speaking upon that subject.  It has been very good and considerate in you to allow me to share your society so frequently as you have done since I have been in town, and to think of you as an object to exist for and strive for.  But I ought to have remembered that, since you have nobody at your side to look after your interests, it behoved me to be doubly careful.  In short, Ethelberta, I am not in a position to marry, nor can I discern when I shall be, and I feel it would be an injustice to ask you to be bound in any way to one lower and less talented than you.  You cannot, from what you say, think it desirable that the engagement should continue.  I have no right to ask you to be my betrothed, without having a near prospect of making you my wife.  I don’t mind saying this straight out—I have no fear that you will doubt my love; thank Heaven, you know what that is well enough!  However, as things are, I wish you to know that I cannot conscientiously put in a claim upon your attention.’

A second meaning was written in Christopher’s look, though he scarcely uttered it.  A woman so delicately poised upon the social globe could not in honour be asked to wait for a lover who was unable to set bounds to the waiting period.  Yet he had privily dreamed of an approach to that position—an unreserved, ideally perfect declaration from Ethelberta that time and practical issues were nothing to her; that she would stand as fast without material hopes as with them; that love was to be an end with her henceforth, having utterly ceased to be a means.  Therefore this surreptitious hope of his, founded on no reasonable expectation, was like a guilty thing surprised when Ethelberta answered, with a predominance of judgment over passion still greater than before:

‘It is unspeakably generous in you to put it all before me so nicely, Christopher.  I think infinitely more of you for being so unreserved, especially since I too have been thinking much on the indefiniteness of the days to come.  We are not numbered among the blest few who can afford to trifle with the time.  Yet to agree to anything like a positive parting will be quite unnecessary.  You did not mean that, did you? for it is harsh if you did.’  Ethelberta smiled kindly as she said this, as much as to say that she was far from really upbraiding him.  ‘Let it be only that we will see each other less.  We will bear one another in mind as deeply attached friends if not as definite lovers, and keep up friendly remembrances of a sort which, come what may, will never have to be ended by any painful process termed breaking off.  Different persons, different natures; and it may be that marriage would not be the most favourable atmosphere for our old affection to prolong itself in.  When do you leave London?’

The disconnected query seemed to be subjoined to disperse the crude effect of what had gone before.

‘I hardly know,’ murmured Christopher.  ‘I suppose I shall not call here again.’

Whilst they were silent somebody entered the room softly, and they turned to discover Picotee.

‘Come here, Picotee,’ said Ethelberta.

Picotee came with an abashed bearing to where the other two were standing, and looked down steadfastly.

‘Mr. Julian is going away,’ she continued, with determined firmness.  ‘He will not see us again for a long time.’  And Ethelberta added, in a lower tone, though still in the unflinching manner of one who had set herself to say a thing, and would say it—‘He is not to be definitely engaged to me any longer.  We are not thinking of marrying, you know, Picotee.  It is best that we should not.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ said Christopher hurriedly, taking up his hat.  ‘Let me now wish you good-bye; and, of course, you will always know where I am, and how to find me.’

It was a tender time.  He inclined forward that Ethelberta might give him her hand, which she did; whereupon their eyes met.  Mastered by an impelling instinct she had not reckoned with, Ethelberta presented her cheek.  Christopher kissed it faintly.  Tears were in Ethelberta’s eyes now, and she was heartfull of many emotions.  Placing her arm round Picotee’s waist, who had never lifted her eyes from the carpet, she drew the slight girl forward, and whispered quickly to him—‘Kiss her, too.  She is my sister, and I am yours.’

It seemed all right and natural to their respective moods and the tone of the moment that free old Wessex manners should prevail, and Christopher stooped and dropped upon Picotee’s cheek likewise such a farewell kiss as he had imprinted upon Ethelberta’s.

‘Care for us both equally!’ said Ethelberta.

‘I will,’ said Christopher, scarcely knowing what he said.

When he had reached the door of the room, he looked back and saw the two sisters standing as he had left them, and equally tearful.  Ethelberta at once said, in a last futile struggle against letting him go altogether, and with thoughts of her sister’s heart:

‘I think that Picotee might correspond with Faith; don’t you, Mr. Julian?’

‘My sister would much like to do so,’ said he.

‘And you would like it too, would you not, Picotee?’

‘O yes,’ she replied.  ‘And I can tell them all about you.’

‘Then it shall be so, if Miss Julian will.’  She spoke in a settled way, as if something intended had been set in train; and Christopher having promised for his sister, he went out of the house with a parting smile of misgiving.

He could scarcely believe as he walked along that those late words, yet hanging in his ears, had really been spoken, that still visible scene enacted.  He could not even recollect for a minute or two how the final result had been produced.  Did he himself first enter upon the long-looming theme, or did she?  Christopher had been so nervously alive to the urgency of setting before the hard-striving woman a clear outline of himself, his surroundings and his fears, that he fancied the main impulse to this consummation had been his, notwithstanding that a faint initiative had come from Ethelberta.  All had completed itself quickly, unceremoniously, and easily.  Ethelberta had let him go a second time; yet on foregoing mornings and evenings, when contemplating the necessity of some such explanation, it had seemed that nothing less than Atlantean force could overpower their mutual gravitation towards each other.

On his reaching home Faith was not in the house, and, in the restless state which demands something to talk at, the musician went off to find her, well knowing her haunt at this time of the day.  He entered the spiked and gilded gateway of the Museum hard by, turned to the wing devoted to sculptures, and descended to a particular basement room, which was lined with bas-reliefs from Nineveh.  The place was cool, silent, and soothing; it was empty, save of a little figure in black, that was standing with its face to the wall in an innermost nook.  This spot was Faith’s own temple; here, among these deserted antiques, Faith was always happy.  Christopher looked on at her for some time before she noticed him, and dimly perceived how vastly differed her homely suit and unstudied contour—painfully unstudied to fastidious eyes—from Ethelberta’s well-arranged draperies, even from Picotee’s clever bits of ribbon, by which she made herself look pretty out of nothing at all.  Yet this negligence was his sister’s essence; without it she would have been a spoilt product.  She had no outer world, and her rusty black was as appropriate to Faith’s unseen courses as were Ethelberta’s correct lights and shades to her more prominent career.

‘Look, Kit,’ said Faith, as soon as she knew who was approaching.  ‘This is a thing I never learnt before; this person is really Sennacherib, sitting on his throne; and these with fluted beards and hair like plough-furrows, and fingers with no bones in them, are his warriors—really carved at the time, you know.  Only just think that this is not imagined of Assyria, but done in Assyrian times by Assyrian hands.  Don’t you feel as if you were actually in Nineveh; that as we now walk between these slabs, so walked Ninevites between them once?’

‘Yes. . . .  Faith, it is all over.  Ethelberta and I have parted.’

‘Indeed.  And so my plan is to think of verses in the Bible about Sennacherib and his doings, which resemble these; this verse, for instance, I remember: “Now in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah did Sennacherib, King of Assyria, come up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took them.  And Hezekiah, King of Judah, sent to the King of Assyria to Lachish,” and so on.  Well, there it actually is, you see.  There’s Sennacherib, and there’s Lachish.  Is it not glorious to think that this is a picture done at the time of those very events?’

‘Yes.  We did not quarrel this time, Ethelberta and I.  If I may so put it, it is worse than quarrelling.  We felt it was no use going on any longer, and so—Come, Faith, hear what I say, or else tell me that you won’t hear, and that I may as well save my breath!’

‘Yes, I will really listen,’ she said, fluttering her eyelids in her concern at having been so abstracted, and excluding Sennacherib there and then from Christopher’s affairs by the first settlement of her features to a present-day aspect, and her eyes upon his face.  ‘You said you had seen Ethelberta.  Yes, and what did she say?’

‘Was there ever anybody so provoking!  Why, I have just told you!’

‘Yes, yes; I remember now.  You have parted.  The subject is too large for me to know all at once what I think of it, and you must give me time, Kit.  Speaking of Ethelberta reminds me of what I have done.  I just looked into the Academy this morning—I thought I would surprise you by telling you about it.  And what do you think I saw?  Ethelberta—in the picture painted by Mr. Ladywell.’

‘It is never hung?’ said he, feeling that they were at one as to a topic at last.

‘Yes.  And the subject is an Elizabethan knight parting from a lady of the same period—the words explaining the picture being—

“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate.”

The lady is Ethelberta, to the shade of a hair—her living face; and the knight is—’

‘Not Ladywell?’

‘I think so; I am not sure.’

‘No wonder I am dismissed!  And yet she hates him.  Well, come along, Faith.  Women allow strange liberties in these days.’

25. THE ROYAL ACADEMY—THE FARNFIELD ESTATE

Ethelberta was a firm believer in the kindly effects of artistic education upon the masses.  She held that defilement of mind often arose from ignorance of eye; and her philanthropy being, by the simple force of her situation, of that sort which lingers in the neighbourhood of home, she concentrated her efforts in this kind upon Sol and Dan.  Accordingly, the Academy exhibition having now just opened, she ordered the brothers to appear in their best clothes at the entrance to Burlington House just after noontide on the Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without ‘losing a half’ and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time.

When Ethelberta was set down in the quadrangle she perceived the faithful pair, big as the Zamzummims of old time, standing like sentinels in the particular corner that she had named to them: for Sol and Dan would as soon have attempted petty larceny as broken faith with their admired lady-sister Ethelberta.  They welcomed her with a painfully lavish exhibition of large new gloves, and chests covered with broad triangular areas of padded blue silk, occupying the position that the shirt-front had occupied in earlier days, and supposed to be lineally descended from the tie of a neckerchief.

The dress of their sister for to-day was exactly that of a respectable workman’s relative who had no particular ambition in the matter of fashion—a black stuff gown, a plain bonnet to match.  A veil she wore for obvious reasons: her face was getting well known in London, and it had already appeared at the private view in an uncovered state, when it was scrutinized more than the paintings around.  But now homely and useful labour was her purpose.

Catalogue in hand she took the two brothers through the galleries, teaching them in whispers as they walked, and occasionally correcting them—first, for too reverential a bearing towards the well-dressed crowd, among whom they persisted in walking with their hats in their hands and with the contrite bearing of meek people in church; and, secondly, for a tendency which they too often showed towards straying from the contemplation of the pictures as art to indulge in curious speculations on the intrinsic nature of the delineated subject, the gilding of the frames, the construction of the skylights overhead, or admiration for the bracelets, lockets, and lofty eloquence of persons around them.

‘Now,’ said Ethelberta, in a warning whisper, ‘we are coming near the picture which was partly painted from myself.  And, Dan, when you see it, don’t you exclaim “Hullo!” or “That’s Berta to a T,” or anything at all.  It would not matter were it not dangerous for me to be noticed here to-day.  I see several people who would recognize me on the least provocation.’

‘Not a word,’ said Dan.  ‘Don’t you be afeard about that.  I feel that I baint upon my own ground to-day; and wouldn’t do anything to cause an upset, drown me if I would.  Would you, Sol?’

In this temper they all pressed forward, and Ethelberta could not but be gratified at the reception of Ladywell’s picture, though it was accorded by critics not very profound.  It was an operation of some minutes to get exactly opposite, and when side by side the three stood there they overheard the immediate reason of the pressure.  ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’ had been lengthily discoursed upon that morning by the Coryphaeus of popular opinion; and the spirit having once been poured out sons and daughters could prophesy.  But, in truth, Ladywell’s work, if not emphatically original, was happily centred on a middle stratum of taste, and apart from this adventitious help commanded, and deserved to command, a wide area of appreciation.

While they were standing here in the very heart of the throng Ethelberta’s ears were arrested by two male voices behind her, whose words formed a novel contrast to those of the other speakers around.

‘Some men, you see, with extravagant expectations of themselves, coolly get them gratified, while others hope rationally and are disappointed.  Luck, that’s what it is.  And the more easily a man takes life the more persistently does luck follow him.’

‘Of course; because, if he’s industrious he does not want luck’s assistance.  Natural laws will help him instead.’

‘Well, if it is true that Ladywell has painted a good picture he has done it by an exhaustive process.  He has painted every possible bad one till nothing more of that sort is left for him.  You know what lady’s face served as the original to this, I suppose?’

‘Mrs. Petherwin’s, I hear.’

‘Yes, Mrs. Alfred Neigh that’s to be.’

‘What, that elusive fellow caught at last?’

‘So it appears; but she herself is hardly so well secured as yet, it seems, though he takes the uncertainty as coolly as possible.  I knew nothing about it till he introduced the subject as we were standing here on Monday, and said, in an off-hand way, “I mean to marry that lady.”  I asked him how.  “Easily,” he said; “I will have her if there are a hundred at her heels.”  You will understand that this was quite in confidence.’

‘Of course, of course.’  Then there was a slight laugh, and the companions proceeded to other gossip.

Ethelberta, calm and compressed in manner, sidled along to extricate herself, not daring to turn round, and Dan and Sol followed, till they were all clear of the spot.  The brothers, who had heard the words equally well with Ethelberta, made no remark to her upon them, assuming that they referred to some peculiar system of courtship adopted in high life, with which they had rightly no concern.

Ethelberta ostensibly continued her business of tutoring the young workmen just as before, though every emotion in her had been put on the alert by this discovery.  She had known that Neigh admired her; yet his presumption in uttering such a remark as he was reported to have uttered, confidentially or otherwise, nearly took away her breath.  Perhaps it was not altogether disagreeable to have her breath so taken away.

‘I mean to marry that lady.’  She whispered the words to herself twenty times in the course of the afternoon.  Sol and Dan were left considerably longer to their private perceptions of the false and true in art than they had been earlier in the day.

When she reached home Ethelberta was still far removed in her reflections; and it was noticed afterwards that about this time in her career her openness of manner entirely deserted her.  She mostly was silent as to her thoughts, and she wore an air of unusual stillness.  It was the silence and stillness of a starry sky, where all is force and motion.  This deep undecipherable habit sometimes suggested, though it did not reveal, Ethelberta’s busy brain to her sisters, and they said to one another, ‘I cannot think what’s coming to Berta: she is not so nice as she used to be.’

The evening under notice was passed desultorily enough after the discovery of Neigh’s self-assured statement.  Among other things that she did after dark, while still musingly examining the probabilities of the report turning out true, was to wander to the large attic where the children slept, a frequent habit of hers at night, to learn if they were snug and comfortable.  They were talking now from bed to bed, the person under discussion being herself.  Herself seemed everywhere to-day.

‘I know that she is a fairy,’ Myrtle was insisting, ‘because she must be, to have such pretty things in her house, and wear silk dresses such as mother and we and Picotee haven’t got, and have money to give us whenever we want it.’

‘Emmeline says perhaps she knows the fairy’s godmother, and is not a fairy herself, because Berta is too tall for a real fairy.’

‘She must be one; for when there was a notch burnt in the hem of my pretty blue frock she said it should be gone in the morning if I would go to bed and not cry; and in the morning it was gone, and all nice and straight as new.’

Ethelberta was recalling to mind how she had sat up and repaired the damage alluded to by cutting off half an inch of the skirt all round and hemming it anew, when the breathing of the children became regular, and they fell asleep.  Here were bright little minds ready for a training, which without money and influence she could never give them.  The wisdom which knowledge brings, and the power which wisdom may bring, she had always assumed would be theirs in her dreams for their social elevation.  By what means were these things to be ensured to them if her skill in bread-winning should fail her?  Would not a well-contrived marriage be of service?  She covered and tucked in one more closely, lifted another upon the pillow and straightened the soft limbs to an easy position; then sat down by the window and looked out at the flashing stars.  Thoughts of Neigh’s audacious statement returned again upon Ethelberta.  He had said that he meant to marry her.  Of what standing was the man who had uttered such an intention respecting one to whom a politic marriage had become almost a necessity of existence?

She had often heard Neigh speak indefinitely of some estate—‘my little place’ he had called it—which he had purchased no very long time ago.  All she knew was that its name was Farnfield, that it lay thirty or forty miles out of London in a south-westerly direction, a railway station in the district bearing the same name, so that there was probably a village or small town adjoining.  Whether the dignity of this landed property was that of domain, farmstead, allotment, or garden-plot, Ethelberta had not the slightest conception.  She was almost certain that Neigh never lived there, but that might signify nothing.  The exact size and value of the estate would, she mused, be curious, interesting, and almost necessary information to her who must become mistress of it were she to allow him to carry out his singularly cool and crude, if tender, intention.  Moreover, its importance would afford a very good random sample of his worldly substance throughout, from which alone, after all, could the true spirit and worth and seriousness of his words be apprehended.  Impecuniosity may revel in unqualified vows and brim over with confessions as blithely as a bird of May, but such careless pleasures are not for the solvent, whose very dreams are negotiable, and are expressed with due care accordingly.

That Neigh had used the words she had far more than primâ-facie appearances for believing.  Neigh’s own conduct towards her, though peculiar rather than devoted, found in these words alone a reasonable key.  But, supposing the estate to be such a verbal hallucination as, for instance, hers had been at Arrowthorne, when her poor, unprogressive, hopelessly impracticable Christopher came there to visit her, and was so wonderfully undeceived about her social standing: what a fiasco, and what a cuckoo-cry would his utterances about marriage seem then.  Christopher had often told her of his expectations from ‘Arrowthorne Lodge,’ and of the blunders that had resulted in consequence.  Had not Ethelberta’s affection for Christopher partaken less of lover’s passion than of old-established tutelary tenderness she might have been reminded by this reflection of the transcendent fidelity he had shown under that trial—as severe a trial, considering the abnormal, almost morbid, development of the passion for position in present-day society, as can be prepared for men who move in the ordinary, unheroic channels of life.

By the following evening the consideration of this possibility, that Neigh’s position might furnish scope for such a disillusive discovery by herself as hers had afforded to Christopher, decoyed Ethelberta into a curious little scheme.  She was piqued into a practical undertaking by the man who could say to his friend with such sangfroid, ‘I mean to marry that lady.’

Merely telling Picotee to prepare for an evening excursion, of which she was to talk to no one, Ethelberta made ready likewise, and they left the house in a cab about half-an-hour before sunset, and drove to the Waterloo Station.

With the decline and departure of the sun a fog gathered itself out of the low meadow-land that bordered the railway as they went along towards the west, stretching over it like a placid lake, till at the end of the journey, the mist became generally pervasive, though not dense.  Avoiding observation as much as they conveniently could, the two sisters walked from the long wooden shed which formed the station here, into the rheumy air and along the road to the open country.  Picotee occasionally questioned Ethelberta on the object of the strange journey: she did not question closely, being satisfied that in such sure hands as Ethelberta’s she was safe.

Deeming it unwise to make any inquiry just yet beyond the simple one of the way to Farnfield, Ethelberta led her companion along a newly-fenced road across a heath.  In due time they came to an ornamental gate with a curved sweep of wall on each side, signifying the entrance to some enclosed property or other.  Ethelberta, being quite free from any digested plan for encouraging Neigh in his resolve to wive, was startled to find a hope in her that this very respectable beginning before their eyes was the entrance to the Farnfield property: that she hoped it was nevertheless unquestionable.  Just beyond lay a turnpike-house, where was dimly visible a woman in the act of putting up a shutter to the front window.

Compelled by this time to come to special questions, Ethelberta instructed Picotee to ask of this person if the place they had just passed was the entrance to Farnfield Park.  The woman replied that it was.  Directly she had gone indoors Ethelberta turned back again towards the park gate.

‘What have we come for, Berta?’ said Picotee, as she turned also.

‘I’ll tell you some day,’ replied her sister.

It was now much past eight o’clock, and, from the nature of the evening, dusk.  The last stopping up-train was about ten, so that half-an-hour could well be afforded for looking round.  Ethelberta went to the gate, which was found to be fastened by a chain and padlock.

‘Ah, the London season,’ she murmured.

There was a wicket at the side, and they entered.  An avenue of young fir trees three or four feet in height extended from the gate into the mist, and down this they walked.  The drive was not in very good order, and the two women were frequently obliged to walk on the grass to avoid the rough stones in the carriage-way.  The double line of young firs now abruptly terminated, and the road swept lower, bending to the right, immediately in front being a large lake, calm and silent as a second sky.  They could hear from somewhere on the margin the purl of a weir, and around were clumps of shrubs, araucarias and deodars being the commonest.

Ethelberta could not resist being charmed with the repose of the spot, and hastened on with curiosity to reach the other side of the pool, where, by every law of manorial topography, the mansion would be situate.  The fog concealed all objects beyond a distance of twenty yards or thereabouts, but it was nearly full moon, and though the orb was hidden, a pale diffused light enabled them to see objects in the foreground.  Reaching the other side of the lake the drive enlarged itself most legitimately to a large oval, as for a sweep before a door, a pile of rockwork standing in the midst.

But where should have been the front door of a mansion was simply a rough rail fence, about four feet high.  They drew near and looked over.

In the enclosure, and on the site of the imaginary house, was an extraordinary group.  It consisted of numerous horses in the last stage of decrepitude, the animals being such mere skeletons that at first Ethelberta hardly recognized them to be horses at all; they seemed rather to be specimens of some attenuated heraldic animal, scarcely thick enough through the body to throw a shadow: or enlarged castings of the fire-dog of past times.  These poor creatures were endeavouring to make a meal from herbage so trodden and thin that scarcely a wholesome blade remained; the little that there was consisted of the sourer sorts common on such sandy soils, mingled with tufts of heather and sprouting ferns.

‘Why have we come here, dear Berta?’ said Picotee, shuddering.

‘I hardly know,’ said Ethelberta.

Adjoining this enclosure was another and smaller one, formed of high boarding, within which appeared to be some sheds and outhouses.  Ethelberta looked through the crevices, and saw that in the midst of the yard stood trunks of trees as if they were growing, with branches also extending, but these were sawn off at the points where they began to be flexible, no twigs or boughs remaining.  Each torso was not unlike a huge hat-stand, and suspended to the pegs and prongs were lumps of some substance which at first she did not recognize; they proved to be a chronological sequel to the previous scene.  Horses’ skulls, ribs, quarters, legs, and other joints were hung thereon, the whole forming a huge open-air larder emitting not too sweet a smell.

But what Stygian sound was this?  There had arisen at the moment upon the mute and sleepy air a varied howling from a hundred tongues.  It had burst from a spot close at hand—a low wooden building by a stream which fed the lake—and reverberated for miles.  No further explanation was required.

‘We are close to a kennel of hounds,’ said Ethelberta, as Picotee held tightly to her arm.  ‘They cannot get out, so you need not fear.  They have a horrid way of suddenly beginning thus at different hours of the night, for no apparent reason: though perhaps they hear us.  These poor horses are waiting to be killed for their food.’

The experience altogether, from its intense melancholy, was very depressing, almost appalling to the two lone young women, and they quickly retraced their footsteps.  The pleasant lake, the purl of the weir, the rudimentary lawns, shrubberies, and avenue, had changed their character quite.  Ethelberta fancied at that moment that she could not have married Neigh, even had she loved him, so horrid did his belongings appear to be.  But for many other reasons she had been gradually feeling within this hour that she would not go out of her way at a beck from a man whose interest was so unimpassioned.

Thinking no more of him as a possible husband she ceased to be afraid to make inquiries about the peculiarities of his possessions.  In the high-road they came on a local man, resting from wheeling a wheelbarrow, and Ethelberta asked him, with the air of a countrywoman, who owned the estate across the road.

‘The man owning that is one of the name of Neigh,’ said the native, wiping his face.  ‘’Tis a family that have made a very large fortune by the knacker business and tanning, though they be only sleeping partners in it now, and live like lords.  Mr. Neigh was going to pull down the old huts here, and improve the place and build a mansion—in short, he went so far as to have the grounds planted, and the roads marked out, and the fish-pond made, and the place christened Farnfield Park; but he did no more.  “I shall never have a wife,” he said, “so why should I want a house to put her in?”  He’s a terrible hater of women, I hear, particularly the lower class.’

‘Indeed!’

‘Yes, and since then he has let half the land to the Honourable Mr. Mountclere, a brother of Lord Mountclere’s.  Mr. Mountclere wanted the spot for a kennel, and as the land is too poor and sandy for cropping, Mr. Neigh let him have it.  ’Tis his hounds that you hear howling.’

They passed on.  ‘Berta, why did we come down here?’ said Picotee.

‘To see the nakedness of the land.  It was a whim only, and as it will end in nothing, it is not worth while for me to make further explanation.’

It was with a curious sense of renunciation that Ethelberta went homeward.  Neigh was handsome, grim-natured, rather wicked, and an indifferentist; and these attractions interested her as a woman.  But the news of this evening suggested to Ethelberta that herself and Neigh were too nearly cattle of one colour for a confession on the matter of lineage to be well received by him; and without confidence of every sort on the nature of her situation, she was determined to contract no union at all.  The sympathy of unlikeness might lead the scion of some family, hollow and fungous with antiquity, and as yet unmarked by a mesalliance, to be won over by her story; but the antipathy of resemblance would be ineradicable.