3
In the sensations of that morning the last thing that troubled Jeremy was to find himself carrying on a familiar conversation with a prince. He accepted it as natural that his accident should have made him important; and he conducted himself without discomfort in an interview which might otherwise have embarrassed and puzzled him—for he was self-conscious and awkward in the presence of those who might expect deference from him. He was first recalled to the strangeness of the position by the Speaker’s eager informality.
It was true that he was unacquainted with the habits of courts in any century. And yet should not the Speaker have called a servant or perhaps even a high official, instead of thus laying his own hand on the door and beckoning his guest to follow? Jeremy failed for a moment to obey the gesture, standing legs apart, considering with a frown the old man before him. It was nothing but an elderly Jew, by turns arrogant and supplicating, moved perhaps a little over the edge of sanity by his great age and by disappointed ambitions.
Then he started, recovered his wits and followed the crooked finger. They went out into the passage together. As they came into the gloom the old man suddenly put his arm round Jeremy’s shoulders and, stooping a little to his ear, murmured in a manner and with an accent more than ever plainly of the East:
“My son, my son, be my friend and I will be yours. And you must be a little respectful to the Lady Burney, my wife. She will think it strange that I bring you to her without ceremony. She is younger than I am, and different from me, different from you. She is like the rest. But I do nothing without reason....”
Jeremy stiffened involuntarily under the almost fawning caress and muttered what he supposed to be a sufficient answer. The old man withdrew his arm and straightened his bent back; and they continued their way together in silence.
Presently they came into a broader and lighter corridor, the windows of which opened on to a garden. Jeremy recognized it as the garden he had seen from his room the evening before, and, looking aside as they passed, he caught a glimpse of a party of young men, busy at some game with balls and mallets—a kind of croquet, he imagined. They went on a few paces, and a servant, springing up from a chair in a niche, stood in a respectful attitude until they had gone by. At last the Speaker led the way into a small room where a girl sat at a table, languidly playing with a piece of needlework.
She, too, sprang to her feet when she saw who it was that had entered; and Jeremy looked at her keenly. This was the first woman he had seen at close quarters since his awakening, and he was curious to find he hardly knew what change or difference. She was short and slender and apparently very young. Her dress was simple in line, a straight garment which left the neck bare, but came up close to it and fell thence directly to her heels, hardly gathered in at all by a belt at the waist. Its gray linen was covered from the collar to the belt by an intricate and rather displeasing design of embroidery, while broad bands of the same pattern continued downward to the hem of the long skirt. Her hair was plaited and coiled, tightly and severely, round her head. Her attitude was one of submission, almost of humility, with eyes ostentatiously cast down; but Jeremy fancied that he could see a trace of slyness at the corners of her mouth.
“Is your mistress up, my child?” the Speaker asked in a tone of indifferent benevolence.
“I believe so, sir,” the girl answered.
“Then tell her that I wish to present to her the stranger of whom she has heard.”
She bowed and turned, not replying, to a further door; but as she turned she raised her eyes and fixed them on Jeremy with a frank, almost insolent stare. Then, without pausing, she was gone. The Speaker slipped into the chair she had left and drummed absently with his fingers on the table. When the girl returned he paid hardly any attention to her message that the Lady Burney was ready to receive them. A fit of abstraction seemed to have settled down on him; and he impatiently waved her on one side, while he drew Jeremy in his train.
Jeremy was doubtful how he ought to show his respect to the stout and ugly woman who sat on her couch in this room with an air of bovine dissatisfaction. He bowed very low and did not, apparently, increase her displeasure. She held out two fingers to him, a perplexing action; but it seemed from the stiffness of her arm that she did not expect him to kiss them. He shook and dropped them awkwardly and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he was able to examine the first lady of England and her surroundings, while, with much less interest and an expression of stupid aloofness, she examined him.
She was dressed in the same manner as the girl who waited in the ante-room, though her gown seemed to be of silk, and was much more richly as well as more garishly embroidered. It struck Jeremy that she harmonized well with the room in which she sat. It was filled with ornaments, cushions, mats and woven hangings of a coarse and gaudy vulgarity; and the woodwork on the walls was carved and gilded in the style of a florid picture-frame. The occupant of this tawdry magnificence was stout, and her unwieldy figure was disagreeably displayed by what seemed to be the prevailing fashion of dress. Her cheeks were at once puffy and lined and were too brilliantly painted; and the lashes of her dull, heavy eyes were extravagantly blackened. Jeremy hoped that his attitude, while he noted all these details, was sufficiently respectful.
It must have satisfied the Lady Burney, for, after a long pause, she observed in a gracious manner:
“I was anxious to see you. Why do you look like every one else? I thought your clothes would have been different.”
Jeremy explained that he had been clothed anew so that he should not appear too conspicuous. She assented with a movement of her head and went on:
“It would have been more interesting to see you in your old clothes. Do you—do you——” She yawned widely and gazed round the room with vague eyes, as though looking for the rest of her question. “Do you find us much changed?” she finished at last.
“Very much changed, madam,” Jeremy replied with gravity. “So much changed that I should hardly know how to begin to tell you what the changes are.”
She inclined her head again, as though to indicate that her thirst for knowledge was satisfied. At this point the Speaker, who had been standing behind Jeremy, silent but tapping his foot on the ground, broke in abruptly.
“Where is Eva?” he said.
The lady looked at him with a corpulent parody of reserve. “She has just come in from riding. Shall I send for her?” The Speaker nodded, and then seemed to wave away a question in her eyes. She turned to Jeremy and murmured, “The bell is over there.”
Jeremy stared at her a moment, puzzled; then, following the direction of her finger, saw hanging on the wall an old-fashioned bell-pull. Recovering himself a little he went to it, tugged at it gingerly, and so summoned the girl who sat in the ante-room. When she came in he saw again on her face the same look of frank but unimpressed curiosity. But she received her orders still with downcast and submissive eyes and departed in silence.
Then a door at the other end of the room opened abruptly and gustily inwards. Jeremy looked towards it with interest, saw nothing but a hand still holding it, and, dimly, a figure in the opening turned away from it. He heard a fresh, cheerful voice giving some parting directions to an invisible person. The blood rose suddenly to his head and he began to be confused. He waited in almost an agony of suspense for the Speaker’s daughter to turn and enter the room.
He had indeed experienced disturbing premonitions of this sort before. Now and again it had happened in the life of his own lecture-rooms and of his friends studios, that, without reason, he wondered why he had been so immune from serious love-sickness. Now and again, like a child with a penny to spend, he would take his bachelor state out of some pocket in his thoughts, turn it over lovingly, and ask himself what he should do with it. He had indeed a great fear of spending it rashly; but often, after one of these moods, the mention of an unknown girl he was to meet would set his heart throbbing, or he would look at one of his pupils or one of his friends with a new and faintly pleasant speculation in his mind. Yet there had never been anything in it. He had had one flirtation over test-tubes and balances, ended by his timely discovery of the girl’s pretentious ignorance in the matter of physics. He would not have minded her being ignorant, but he was repelled when he thought that she had baited a trap for him with a show of knowledge. There had been another over canvases and brushes. But he had not been able to talk with enough warmth about the fashions of art; and, before he had made much progress, the girl had found another lover more glib than he—which was, he reflected, when he was better of his infatuation and considered the kind of picture she painted, something of a deliverance. Now his heart was absurdly beating at the approach of a princess—of a princess who was nearly two hundred years younger than himself!
She turned and came into the room, stopping a few paces inside and staring at him as frankly as he at her. She must have seen in him at that moment what we see in the house where a great man was born—a house that would be precisely like other houses if we knew nothing about it. Or did her defeated curiosity wake in her even then extraordinary thoughts about this ordinary young man? Jeremy’s mind had become too much a stage set for a great event for him to get any clear view of the reality. But he received an impression, ridiculously, as though the fine, blowing, temperate, sunshiny day he had seen through the windows had come suddenly into his presence. And, though this tall, straight-backed girl, with her wide, frank eyes and all the beauty of health and youth, had plainly her mother’s features, distinguished only by a long difference of years, he guessed somehow in her expression, in her pose, something of the father’s intelligence.
The pause in which they had regarded one another lasted hardly ten seconds. “I wanted so much to see you,” she cried impulsively. “My maids have told me all about you, and when I was out riding——” She stopped.
The Lady Burney frowned, and the Speaker asked in a slow, dragging voice, as though constraining himself to be gentle, “Whom did you meet when you were out riding?”
“Roger Vaile,” the girl answered, with a faint tone of annoyed defiance. “And he told me how he came to find this gentleman yesterday.”
“I am very much in his debt,” Jeremy said. “I suppose he saved my life.”
“You should not be too grateful to him,” the Speaker interposed, in a manner almost too suave. “Any man that found you must have done what he did. You are not to exaggerate your debt to him.”
The girl laughed, and suppressed her laughter, and again the Lady Burney frowned. Jeremy, scenting the approach of a family quarrel and unwilling to witness it, spoke quickly and at random in the hope of relieving the situation: “I hope, sir, you will allow me to be grateful to Mr. Vaile, who was, after all, my preserver, and treated me kindly.”
The girl laughed again, but with a different intention. “Mister?” she repeated. “What does that mean?”
Jeremy looked at her, puzzled. “Don’t you call people Mister now?” He addressed himself directly to her and abandoned his attempt to embrace in the conversation the Speaker, who was trying to conceal some mysteriously caused impatience, and the Lady Burney, who was not trying at all to conceal her petulant but flaccid displeasure.
“No,” said the girl, equally ignoring them. “We call Roger Vaile so because he is a gentleman. If he were a common man we should simply call him Vaile. Did you call gentlemen—what was it?—Mister, in your time?” Jeremy, studying her, admiring the poise with which she stood and noting that, though she wore the narrow, simply-cut gown of the rest, it was less tortured with embroidery, strove to find some way of carrying on the conversation and suddenly became aware that there was some silent but acute difference between the Speaker and his wife.
“Eva!” the Lady Burney broke in, disregarding her husband’s hand half raised in warning. “Eva,” she repeated with an air of corpulent and feeble stateliness, “I am fed up with your behavior!”
Jeremy started at the phrase as much as if the stupid, dignified woman had suddenly thrown a double somersault before him. But he could see no surprise on the faces of the others, only unconcealed annoyance and alarm.
“You may go, Eva,” the Speaker interposed with evident restraint. “Jeremy Tuft is to be our guest, and you will see him again. He has much to learn, and you must help us to teach him.”
The girl, as though some hidden circumstance had been brought into play, instantly composed her face and bowed deeply and ceremoniously to Jeremy. He returned the bow as well as he was able, and had hardly straightened himself again before she had left the room.
“I am fed up with our daughter’s behavior,” the Lady Burney repeated, rising. “I will go now and speak to her alone.” Then she too vanished, ignoring alike her husband’s half-begun remonstrance and Jeremy’s second bow.
It was with some amazement that Jeremy found himself alone again with the old man. His brain staggered under a multitude of impressions. The astonishing locution employed by the great lady had been hardly respectable in his own day, and it led him to consider the strange, pleasant accent which had struck him in Roger Vaile’s first speech and which was so general that already his ear accepted it as unremarkable. Was it, could it be, an amazing sublimation of the West Essex accent, which in an earlier time had been known as Cockney? Then his eye fell on the silent, now drooping figure of the Speaker, and recalled him to the odd under-currents of the family scene he had just beheld.
“My wife comes from the west,” said the Speaker in a quiet, tired voice, catching his glance, “and sometimes she uses old-fashioned expressions that maybe you would not understand ... or perhaps they are familiar to you.... But tell me, how would a father of your time have punished Eva for her behavior?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremy answered uncomfortably. “I don’t know what she did that was wrong.”
The Speaker smiled a little sadly. “Like me, she is ... is unusual. She should not have addressed you first or taken the lead so much in speaking to you. I fear any other parent would have her whipped. But I—” his voice grew a little louder, “but I have allowed her to be brought up differently. She can read and write. She is different from the rest, like me ... and like you. I have studied to let her be so ... though she hardly thinks it ... and I daresay I have not done all I should. I have been busy with other things and between the old and the young.... I was already old when she was born—but now you....” His voice trailed away into silence, and he considered Jeremy with full, expressionless eyes. At last he said, “Come with me and I will make arrangements for your reception here. In a few days I shall have something to show you and I shall ask your help.” Jeremy followed, his mind still busy. His absurd premonitions had been driven away by tangled speculations on all these changes in manners and language.