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World

II

She put her stick to the ground firmly, and waited.

“Victoria,” — his face paled a little, — “just, as it’s good-bye, may I kiss you ? only once, I swear it”

Her brows contracted quickly.

“ Oh, no, Jerry. Don’t be silly and boyish.”

“ It would do you no harm,” he pleaded.

“ It would do me no good, nor you either. My dear boy, do come on ; we shall be perfectly late for tea.”

He walked up to the house without another word.

But just in the portico he said once more, —

“ Look here, Victoria ; remember, if at any time you should think better of it, or chuck up Art, or anything , just let me know. I’ll do anything you wish, and I’ll never change.”

She only smiled and nodded and ran off.

“Man,” reflected the young lady, as she took off her hat, and carefully studied the re-arrangement of her hair in the looking-glass, “ man is still a primitive creature ; he has not yet got over the conviction that woman is created only to be made love to.”

Her hair being satisfactory, she went down to tea.

Chapter II

Tea during the autumn was always in the inner hall. The latter was also known as the “ Gibbons Room,” because of some apocryphal carved wainscoting attributed to Grinling Gibbons, — although, as the master of the house always said, Grinling Gibbons had no more to do with carving it than he had. The master of the house was standing now by the fireplace. He was talking to the man from whom his daughter Victoria had lately parted in the portico. Nobody looking in this man’s face would have gathered from it that the hopes of years had for him just been finally extinguished.

FitzGerald Annesley, or, as his friends called him, Jerry Annesley, did not wear his feelings on his sleeve, or in his face, for kind friends to analyse.

He was talking now — to be more accurate he was listening while Victoria’s father talked — about the value of mangold-wurzel as reliable dietary for fed beasts. Victoria came in just at this moment, and her father glanced across at her. His eyes met her dark ones with the glance of one to another between whom there is a good deal of confidence. The likeness between father and daughter was sufficiently marked to be noticeable. But the man’s personality had not, in anything like an equal degree, the energy or strenuousness which distinguished that of his daughter. People said of the Right Hon. George

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Leathley, M.P., that he might have been a great man in his own line — which was politics — only that he was too lazy and too good-humoured to take the trouble. His appearance perhaps in no small measure bore this out. In appearance, indeed, this prominent politician — for such he was in spite of laziness and good-humour — bore an acknowledged resemblance to one of the most admired and most admirable actors of the present day : a resemblance to which, perhaps, a certain humorous twist about his wellcut lips not a little contributed. As he continued the mangold-wurzel discussion his eyes followed his youngest daughter's movements. The younger man's eyes avoided her.

Victoria steered her way to the tea-table, at which her eldest brother's wife was presiding. She got a cup of tea and a little chunk of hot buttered toast, and she proceeded to drink her tea and eat her toast in comparative solitude and complete silence, poised alone on a corner of the oak settle. A magnificent black cat, who wore a red leather collar, rose from a long-haired rug, stretched his lordly length in refreshing abandon , and seated himself presently close against her feet.

William the Conqueror was the cat's name. He was also known in the family as “ Victoria's familiar spirit."

Victoria's eyes looked misty and serious and abstracted. Nor was she apparently conscious that William the Conqueror had started elaborate toilet operations in his comfortable retreat against her skirts.

Two people, who were watching her from a far corner of the hall, concluded that she was enjoying

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one of the flights of mental fancy or imagination to which persons of artistic inclinations are supposed to be prone at odd moments. As a matter of fact, she was thinking that the hot buttered toast was not hot but cold, and wondering vaguely how long her sister-in-law would be likely to submit to that sort of thing.

“ Look at Victoria and William the Conqueror,” said one of the two people who were watching her. The speaker was a young man, and the person addressed was a very young girl with fair crinkly hair. The owner of the crinkly hair laughed a little.

“ How funny it sounds, doesn't it — Victoria and William the Conqueror?”

“Eh? Oh, by Jove, yes, I suppose it does. I wonder if that was why they called him William the Conqueror.”

His companion did not seem to hear.

“ How distraite your cousin looks.”

The young man put up his eyeglass.

“ Music hath charms, you know,” he said, with rather an indulgent smile. He spoke to his companion as if he thought her young. She did not appear to resent it, although she was young — in every respect.

“ The artistic temperament,” he resumed, “ is not understanded of the people. It demands too much, and your ordinary people of the world, especially of our world, don’t like any demand which exceeds what they are willing to give. Now no ordinary world, constructed on the principles of this one, could satisfy the true artistic temperament, and the true artistic temperament takes jolly good care to let the world

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know as much. And the world is like the old fairy godmother of the fables : accept her gifts, and she loads you with more or less valuable or valueless continuance of her goodwill ; but refuse and despise her, and she soon makes her castigation felt. The world is the real fairy godmother, capricious, imperious, good-natured to a certain degree, but intolerant of any question of her absolute supremacy.”

He paused and smiled. The rounding off of that sentence pleased him. He thought of how well it would look in print. At the present time his thoughts generally tended towards print. It also pleased him to see that the young girl, to whom he was, in his own opinion, good-naturedly devoting his pearls of wisdom and epigram, was regarding him with quite evident admiration and respect. As he paused, it struck her that it was required of her to say something, but a certain haziness of perception as to the remark or remarks needful kept her silent, no less than the fear of seeming ridiculous in the eyes of her companion.

“ I simply won’t make a fool of myself,” she said inwardly.

It might have consoled her had she known that her companion was not at all inclined to despise her. On the contrary, his opinion of her perceptive powers was rising higher. She evidently appreciated him, and, now that he looked at it, her crinkly hair was really very pretty, and admirably dressed. He began again to scatter more jewels of wisdom and epigram, but with a sudden change of outlook which added to his companion’s mystification.

“ But I tell you what, the tyranny of the artistic temperament is a distinct bore. Upon my word, it is i6

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one of the most distinct bores just now. Every little Tom, Dick, or Harry, Dolly or Kate, who likes listening to classical music, or enjoys the Lyceum Theatre, or goes to Switzerland in the Long Vacation and comes home raving of the Riffel Alp, or even gets sentimental when there’s a full moon, and tells one that everything ‘jars/ and they don’t think there can be much hope for this world, and no hope at all of any other, — all these little boys and girls ” (the speaker was barely thirty) “pose and zmpose their ‘artistic temperament * for the benefit of suffering society.”

He paused again, because as he uttered the last two words it flashed upon him that they would look admirably effective at the top of a column — “ Suffering Society,” neat and alliterative, he said to himself.

“Ye — es,” said his auditor tentatively; but her well-meant expression of due and comprehensive interest was not necessary, because the speaker needed only free scope for the full flow of his paragraphs. They were indeed only spoken paragraphs. Already his mind’s eye had set them in type. The obedient admiration which sat in silence beside him was all that was wanted. The obedient admiration was a good deal mystified, but perhaps that was no great drawback, for, from the beginning of time, and in all probability to the end of time too, mystification will always convey to the ordinary mind a sense of vague power behind it.

“ The fact is, one sees a lot of the other side of the artistic temperament, the shady side, in my trade.” His voice when he said “my trade” would have made any of his friends smile. For he was very

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1 7 much in love with his “ trade.” Perhaps that was one reason why, although he had been several days in the same house with his present companion, he had only just perceived the charm of her crinkly hair.

“ Oh,” struck in the latter, who now began to see daylight, “ it must be so nice to be a journalist, and see all sorts of people, and know everything, especially to hear everything long before anybody else.”

He smiled beamingly, and dropped his eye-glass. A more adroit speech could scarcely have been uttered, for in spite of epigrams he was an ingenuous boy, and he longed with an exceeding great longing for somebody to tell him that he was a man of note. As a matter of fact, he was a peer's son, but he believed himself to be a journalist, and the dream of his life, so far, was one day to edit a big London “ Daily.” The dreams of one's life do not as a rule make themselves realities, but his dream at any rate did him no harm, but rather good, since it kept him a good deal out of the mischief which peers' sons of nine-and-twenty find generally ready to hand.

“Well, you know,” he said, leaning his elbows on his knees and looking up at her with quite an affectionate smile, “ I'm only at the start, — at least, I mean I only belong to one branch, — subleaders, you know, and some sorts of political articles and literary articles, and whipped-up social sketches and studies. The chief seems to catch on to these, he says I have a turn that way ; but of course it's only, as I say, one branch. Still, they pay me, you know, two guineas a column, — regular thing, you know, and that's not bad at the start.”

He always took care to mention the payment, i8

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because he considered that that showed the dingdong reality of his pretensions. It cleared him from the suspicions of amateurishness. Nothing hurt him so deeply as to be for a moment looked upon as an amateur.

“ How nice ! ” said his companion, with a nod of her fair head.

“ Well, it’s a pretty hard grind. Specially the shorthand. Shorthand is the most beastly stuff to get round. But you’re quite out of it without shorthand. Besides, I should never get a ‘ special/ you see, unless I can report.”

“ But would you really like to go to places like — like those men one sees at tables taking down speeches and things ? They never look very nice, — I mean the men, — not quite clean, you know.”

“ Oh, but that sort of shorthand reporting is the lowest rung of the ladder.”

His companion had no knowledge of any of the rungs of the ladder in question, but she looked as if she quite believed it.

“ At the same time, some of the biggest swells have begun that way.”

“ No, really ? Have they ? But they aren’t really gentlemen, reporters, are they ? ”

“ Every one is a gentleman nowadays ; but — well, they are not the sort of men for you to get talking to — or anything like that. My object in learning shorthand is to get a big correspondency one of these days. That brings one to the front a lot, you know. Besides, it’s a simply ripping experience ; but then, one must be well up in shorthand.”

“ And how do you get up shorthand ? ”

“ Oh, I have a chap coaching me, a first-rate chap.

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He seems to think I’ve rather a turn for it Curiously enough, he himself, though he’s a nailer at shorthand, could no more write three consecutive lines of decent English than he could fly. Odd, isn’t it? Poor beggar ! he’ll never do more than earn a bare livelihood by reporting.”

“ I think,” said his companion, and she blushed a little, which made her look very pretty, “ I think it must be so awfully nice to be — clever and — and — all that. Now, your cousin, for instance, I think it is

perfectly wonderful of her to — to ”

“ To take up that line ? ”

She nodded, and he laughed slightly.

“ Well, I think it is even more perfectly wonderful that she should be allowed. Of course the world is coming on a good bit ; still, a man like my uncle doesn’t as a rule care to see his daughter going out to evening parties at ten pounds a night.”

“ But she won’t do that, surely ? ”

“ Well, no, not exactly,” and he laughed again at his companion’s widely-opened eyes ; “ but she’s going in for the whole business thoroughly, and if I know Victoria Leathley she’ll stick at nothing — nothing that will make her a big success.”

“ She will be famous, won’t she ? ”

“Well, I don’t know. Joachim thinks a lot of her playing, or says he does — I don’t. It’s a daring thing to say, of course, in the face of Joachim, but — we’ll see.”

“ I do admire her so immensely.” She just glanced over at Victoria as she spoke.

“ Hum ! well, she’s not pretty, you know, but she’s undeniably distinguished-looking, and she is enormously clever. Look here, you people don’t know how

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clever she is. As to her own people, her father is the only one who has the faintest glimmering of what Victoria really is. Of course the others are proud enough of her music and her talents, and her general power of picking herself out from the ruck, or at all events they pretend to be proud, but they no more understand her than they understand the other side of the moon’s surface.”

“ How strange !”

“ Do you think so ? Probably it would be stranger if they did,” added this young man, who occasionally had flashes of insight. “ Now — hullo ! shall I put down your cup ? ”

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Chapter III

“ Ada,” said Victoria to the girl with the fair crinkly hair, whose name was Ada Barclay, “ I am going upstairs now to practise. Do you think you would care to come too ? ”

“ Oh, yes ; I should , awfully.”

Victoria smiled.

“ Well, come along then,” she said quickly. She passed her hand as she said it through the other girl’s arm ; “ we sha’n’t have so very much time before dinner.”

Ada Barclay went off at once. She was a young person possessed as yet of considerable capacity for enthusiasm. At this time Victoria Leathley was awakening a good deal of the latter.

The two girls ran up the turret stairs very quickly to Victoria’s room.

Victoria and her father inhabited that portion of the house known as the turret. The latter was not a turret. It was a nondescript excrescence in bricks and mortar tacked on to the south-west angle of the house. It owed its existence to Victoria’s greatgrandfather, and embodied a style of architecture for which no known architect had ever been able to find a name. The word “ turret ” was, at all events, as applicable to it as any other. If the turret at Eastaston was an architectural monstrosity per se } no less than as an addition to a solid Jacobean

ax

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house, it had an excuse for its existence in the fact that it contained one or two of the most charming rooms in the house.

Victoria’s own beloved study, or music-room — for it was as much one as the other ; she called it the “ den ” herself — was a room which the architect, whoever he may have been, had possibly desired should be an> octagon in shape. It was not an octagon in fact, because it had only six decided sides to it, though there were two undecided ones to make the whole effect more peculiar than symmetrical. The peculiarity was further accentuated by the windows being set in the two undecided sides. The windows were heavily mullioned and somewhat embayed, thereby providing space for the cosy window-seats, whence the inhabitant could overlook a wide stretch of green, undulating pasture. The windows, and the ceiling, which was diapered, were the best features of the room.

One of the wide latticed panes stood open when Victoria and Miss Barclay entered. Fresh air, Victoria said, was one of her manias ; she liked to live in a hurricane, was how her family put it. Now, however, Victoria shut the window and poked the fire.

Ada Barclay, meantime, stood looking out. She was watching the flush of the western sky, where the remains of a red sunset still lingered. The points of the firs in the new plantation stood up against the horizon like so many spearheads of burnished gold from the reflex of the dying sun.

Victoria came behind the younger girl.

“ What a glorious sky ! ” she said ; “ but how short

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the days are growing. I shall have to light the candles.’’

She turned away as she spoke and lighted the candles on either side of the violin stand. When this was done the effect in the room was curious. The struggle between the light within and the light from without flung strange shadows up and down. Victoria, with her violin under her left arm, stood in the oasis of candlelight arranging some music on the upright stand. Apart from the space lighted by the candles, the remainder of the room seemed dimmer by contrast, but not too dim to have shown an onlooker that it harmonised well with its owner. It had indeed grown with and around its owner, and expressed her convictions as to what a room of the kind should be.

Its decorative attributes expressed four component parts — books, pictures, music, and flowers ; upon these its decoration depended, not upon screens and hangings and rugs. Screens and hangings and rugs were not, in Victoria’s estimation, decoration, but furniture. They had their place accordingly, as such. In like manner, if the other pieces of furniture, the corner bookcases, for example, and Victoria’s writing-table, were beautiful bits of Sheraton’s work, they never for a moment conveyed to the mind any idea other than that they were there because of their usefulness. They were beautiful, certainly, because beauty is lovely everywhere ; and why have ugly furniture when that which is beautiful and appropriate is within reach ? Only they were furniture, nothing more. Victoria made you feel that. That was where the clearness of her artistic perception made itself apparent. Most people didn’t

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understand it : most people didn’t understand her ; but they did understand that somehow her room was different from every other person’s room. They were not quite sure if they liked it any more than many of them were quite sure if they liked her, especially if they happened to be persons who would have been glad to go and do likewise, if only they could manage to grasp how it was done. These people looked at Victoria’s room and thought it was very simple indeed. After all, Sheraton furniture is not unattainable if you have a moderate amount of money, and the imitations are really very good ; while a silver inkstand and blotter can be had any day. Old prints, too, can be got together and hung, as Victoria’s were hung, in straight rows. A Bechstein piano and shoals of photographs of places and people — principally people — are not unknown adjuncts of modern life ; nevertheless, all these tolerably familiar objects got together in Victoria’s little turret-room did not somehow look nearly so charming in the rooms of other persons — perhaps because Victoria made her room, as she made most things in life, answer to her purpose, while the other persons made their purpose answer to their rooms. Or perhaps because Victoria was Victoria, and not the other persons.

But when she used to boast, as she did frequently, that the den was a collection of odds and ends, that she never bought anything for it she could possibly help, and never, never, never bought anything because it happened to be “the fashion,” — well, the other persons didn’t believe her, that’s all ! Nevertheless it was true. And it was also true that, as she told everyone, everything in the room had a history

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attached to it. That perhaps was, partly, how it came to be such a home-y sort of abode. As to flowers, Victoria had them everywhere. Just now the room was full of white chrysanthemums. They stood about in pots, and jars, and glasses, on the writing-table and the mantelpiece, and in the corners, the soft, feathery petals showing here and there against red leaves of trailing Virginia creeper.

That was how the room looked, as the candlelight, and the red glow of the fire, and the fading mistiness of the twilight blended together in a sort of incongruous harmony. Any one who knew Victoria would have seen scraps of her special belongings cropping up. A treatise on “ violinbowing ” lay open on the writing-table, among the silver things which shone in the fire’s glow ; a score of violin music, fingered in pencil by the great Joachim himself, fluttered on the open piano ; across the wall, above the mantel-board, in a long line was a set of photographs of all the great composers, from Gluck to Wagner, with Beethoven in the centre of the line. As to other photographs, they stood about in every variety of frame, and some even without frames. In one corner, too, there were a couple of tennis rackets and a set of golf sticks — but these were dusty.

Victoria tuned her violin rapidly, and set to work at one of Bach’s solos. Ada Barclay curled herself up in a corner of the window-seat, her fair head silhouetting itself against the pale glow of the fading light, reflected on the lattice panes. The Bach solo had proceeded for about three bars, when, in the middle of a strong wailing note from the violin,

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an equally strong and wailing note mingled with it, coming in the direction of the door. Victoria lowered her violin and opened the door.

“ Come in,” she said, addressing someone outside. Apparently the invitation met with but a hesitating response, for —

“Come in and be quick about it,” said Victoria

again.

She was addressing William the Conqueror, who paused as she spoke — paused with superb unconcern. His sombre, amber-coloured eyes looked past her in contemplative disdain for a moment. Then he looked behind with deliberateness at the turret stairs, bringing his head after another moment round once more to face his mistress. After that he put one paw forward slowly, and moved his body in advance about the eighth of an inch.

Victoria stamped her foot.

" W ill you come in ? ” She raised her voice as she said it, and stooped to expedite his entrance.

Forthwith he skipped across her path with incontinent and elusive rapidity, landing himself in the middle of the room. There he stood still, and gazed at Miss Barclay, who laughed with considerable relish.

Victoria shut the door with a small bang, whereat Miss Barclay laughed still more.

“You are his slave,” she said, “and it is so lovely to think of its being you/'

“ I am a fool,” said Victoria, and then she too laughed.

“ I should not have thought you could be so weak,” pursued the other, and she smiled at Victoria as she said it, but it was a smile more of admiration than anything else.

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2 ?

“ I ! ” exclaimed Victoria, — “ I ! ” She gave the screw of her bow an impatient twist. “ My dear child, I’m the weakest creature living, now and then.”

The younger girl looked serenely incredulous.

Victoria lifted her fiddle to her shoulder once more, and the Bach solo began again.

William the Conqueror, after a yawn or two of ostentatious boredom, selected with care the most comfortable chair he could find, and, having rolled himself into a black ball, went to sleep on his head.

Twilight deepened into shadow, till the candlelight in the room had matters all its own way. Victoria worked hard, though, to the listener in the window, it seemed to be an easy task which lay beneath the player’s fingers. The clock had struck seven before Victoria once more lowered her violin and turned to her companion.

“ Ah !” she said, stretching out her right arm, “ Bach is as tough as nails ; but what a study after all ! You have been very patient, Ada, but I believe you have been asleep.”

But if Miss Barclay had been asleep, she was wide awake enough now to repel the assertion with indignant haste.

“ Indeed I have been nothing of the kind ! ” she exclaimed ; “ I have been quite enchanted.”

“ What a pretty speech ! Well, you shall have something for pleasure now — your pleasure and mine.”

She raised the fiddle again and drew the bow across the strings musingly, letting her fingers wander into a little roulade of notes in descending intervals. Almost imperceptibly they glided into distinct harmonies, until presently a fragment of

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Vieuxtemps’ began to make itself heard. The notes grew and strengthened softly until the whole “ Romance ” was complete in every part. Victoria played from memory, and her eyes were lifted upwards slightly, and looked darker even than their wont. At the close, after the strings under her hand had literally quivered into silence, she laid her violin in its case and went over to the window beside her friend. The latter turned her fair head towards Victoria and looked up in her face. Victoria put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and smiled down upon her, one of the rare smiles kept for very special people; but as the younger girl met it she flushed a little, even in the shadow.

“Why, what an impressionable child it is!” said Victoria, smiling more broadly.

Ada Barclay glanced down shyly.

“ I d — d — don’t know how you do it, for,” she stammered confusedly, “you seem t — to hate all that sort of thing.”

Victoria’s eyes twinkled.

“ What sort of thing ? ” she said ruthlessly.

“ Oh — sentiment, and — romance, and — all that sort of thing.” She laughed, but it was an apologetic laugh, and she kept her eyes fixed on the blind-cord, which she was twisting into hard knots.

Victoria looked still more amused.

“ Well, a good deal depends on what you mean by sentiment and romance, and — er — all that sort of thing,” she said coolly. “ If you mean by it that I get a decent tone out of the fiddle — well, perhaps I do, but then that is technique, my dear girl.”

The younger girl tossed her head back with an odd little gesture.

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" I don’t believe it,” she said intrepidly ; “ it isn't technique, at least not altogether. There’s something behind — there must , you know.”

“ There is” said Victoria quickly, “ only — one

can’t talk about it ” She stopped abruptly and

sat down on the window-seat beside her companion.

“ So I am a monster of coldness, Ada ? ” The tone of her voice changed as she spoke, and took a faint sarcastic inflexion, but she flung one arm round Ada Barclay’s shoulder, thinking as she did so how pretty the fair crinkly head was.

“No,” was the response, “no, no, but — oh! you know what I mean. I mean you don’t like anyone to care for you, or — or — that , you know.”

Victoria gave the speaker a little shake. The latter had, it was evident, covered herself with confusion in the utterance of this speech.