A MORNING WALK.
And e'en while fashion's brightest arts decoy,
The heart, distrusting, asks if this be joy.
Goldsmith.
A bright May morning, cold, it is true, and with a biting wind from the east—as indeed our English May mornings generally are—but sunny and cloudless as the heart can desire. On such a morning people do their best to pretend that it is summer. Crowds turn out into the park, and sit about recklessly on the iron chairs, or lounge idly by the railings; and the women-folk, with that fine disregard of what is, when it is antagonistic of what they wish it to be, don their white cottons and muslins, and put up their parasols against the sun's rays, and, shivering inwardly, poor things, openly brave the terrors of rheumatism and lumbago, and make up their minds that it shall be summer.
The sunblinds are drawn all along the front windows of a house in Park Lane, and though the gay geraniums and calceolarias in the flower-boxes, which were planted only yesterday, look already nipped and shrivelled up with the cold, the house, nevertheless, presents from the exterior a bright and well-cared-for appearance.
Within the drawing-room are two ladies. One, the mistress of the house, is seated at the writing-table with her back to the room, scribbling off invitations for dear life, cards for an afternoon "at-home," at the rate of six per minute; the other sits idle in a low basket-chair doing nothing.
There is no sound but the scratching of the quill pen as it flies over the paper, and the chirping of a bullfinch in a cage in the bow-window.
"What time is it, Vera?"
"A quarter to twelve."
"Almost time to dress; I've only ten more cards to fill up. What are you going to wear—white?"
Vera shivers. "Look how the dust is flying—it must be dreadfully cold out—I should like to put on a fur jacket."
"Do," says the elder lady, energetically. "It will be original, and attract attention. Not that you could well be more stared at than you are."
Vera smiles, and does not answer.
Mrs. Hazeldine goes on with her task.
"There! that's done!" she cries, at last, getting up from the table, and piling her notes up in a heap on one side of it. "Now, I am at your orders."
She comes forward into the room—a pretty, dark-eyed, oval-faced woman, with a figure in which her dressmaker has understood how to supplement all that nature has but imperfectly carried out. A woman with restless movements and an ever-ready tongue—a thorough daughter of the London world she lives in.
Vera leans her head back in her chair, and looks at her. "Cissy," she says, "I must really go home, I have been with you a month to-day."
"Go home! certainly not, my dear. Don't you know that I have sworn to find you a husband before the season is out? I must really get you married, Vera. I have half a mind," she adds, reflectively, as she smooths down her shining brown hair at the glass, and contemplates, not ill satisfied, her image there—"I have really half a mind to let you have the boy if I could manage to spare him."
"Do you think he would make a devoted husband?" asks Vera, with a lazy smile.
"My dear child, don't be a fool. What is the use of devotion in a husband? All one wants is a good fellow, who will let one alone. After all, the boy might not answer. I am afraid, Vera," turning round suddenly upon her, "I am very much afraid that boy is in love with you; it's horrid of you to take him from me, because he is so useful, and I really can't well do without him. I am going to pay him out to-night though: he is to sit opposite you at dinner; he will only be able to gaze at you."
"That is hard upon us both."
"Pooh! don't waste your time upon him. I shall do better than that for you; he is an eldest son, it is true, but Sir Charles looks as young as his son, and is quite as likely to live as long. It is only married women who can afford the luxury of ineligibles. Go and dress, child."
Half-an-hour later Mrs. Hazeldine and Miss Nevill are to be found upon two chairs on the broad and shady side of the Row, where a small crowd of men is already gathered around them.
Vera, coming up a stranger, and self-invited to the house of her old acquaintance a few weeks ago, had already created a sensation in London. Her rare beauty, the strange charm of her quiet, listless manner, the shade of melancholy which had of late imperceptibly crept over her, aroused a keen admiration and interest in her, even in that city, which more than all others is satiated with its manifold types of beautiful women.
There was a rush to get introduced to her; a furore to see her. As she went through a crowd people whispered her name and made way for her to pass, staring at her after a fashion which is totally modern and detestably ill-bred; and yet which, sad token of the decadence of things in these later days, is not beneath the dignity or the manners of persons whose breeding is supposed to be beyond dispute.
Already the "new beauty" had been favourably contrasted with the well-known reigning favourites; and it was the loudly expressed opinion of more than one-half of the jeunesse dorée of the day that not one of the others could "hold a candle to her, by Jove!"
Mrs. Hazeldine was delighted. It was she to whom belonged the honour of bringing this new star into notice; the credit of launching her upon London society was her own. She found herself courted and flattered and made up to in a wholly new and delightful manner. The men besieged her for invitations to her house; the women pressed her to come to theirs. It was all for Miss Nevill's sake, of course, but, even so, it was very pleasant, and Mrs. Hazeldine dearly loved the importance of her position.
It came to pass that, whereas she had been somewhat put out at the letter of her old Roman acquaintance, offering to come and stay with her, and had been disposed to resent the advent of her self-invited guest as an infliction, which a few needlessly gushing words in the past had brought upon herself, she had, in a very short time, discovered that she could not possibly exist without her darling Vera, and that she would not and could not let her go back again to her country vicarage.
It was, possibly, what Vera had counted upon. It was pretty certain to have been either one thing or the other. Either her beauty would arouse Mrs. Hazeldine's jealousy, and she would be glad to be rid of her as quickly as possible, or else she would be proud of her, and wish to retain her as an attraction to her house. Fortunately for Vera, Cissy Hazeldine, worldly, frivolous, pleasure-loving as she was, was, nevertheless, utterly devoid of the mean and petty spitefulness which goes far to disfigure many a better woman's character. She was not jealous of Vera; on the contrary, she was as unfeignedly proud of her as though she had created her. Besides, as she said to herself, "Our style is so different, we are not likely to clash."
When she found that in a month's time Vera's beauty had made her house the most popular one in London, and that people struggled for her invitation-cards and prayed to be introduced to her, Mrs. Hazeldine was at the zenith of her delight and self-importance. If only Vera herself had been a little more practicable!
"I don't despair of getting you introduced to royalty before the season is out," she would say, triumphantly.
"I don't want to be introduced to royalty," Vera would answer indifferently.
"Oh! Vera, how can you be so disloyal? And it's quite wicked too; almost against Scripture. Honour the King, you know it says somewhere; of course that means the Prince of Wales too."
"I can honour him very well without being introduced to him," said Vera, who, however, let me assure you, was filled with feelings of profound loyalty towards the reigning family.
"But only think what a triumph it would be over those other horrid women who think themselves at the top of the tree!" Mrs. Hazeldine would urge, with a curious conglomeration of ideas, sacred and profane.
But Vera was indifferent to the honour of becoming acquainted with his Royal Highness.
Another of Mrs. Hazeldine's troubles was that she absolutely refused to be photographed.
"Your portrait might be in every shop window if you chose!" Mrs. Hazeldine would exclaim, despairingly.
"I may be very depraved, Cissy," Vera would answer, indignantly, "but I have not yet sunk so low as to desire that every draper's assistant may have the privilege of buying my likeness for a shilling to stick up on his mantelshelf, with a tight-rope dancer on one side, and a burlesque actress on the other!"
"My dear, it is done by every one; and women who are beautiful as you are ought not to mind being admired."
"But I prefer being admired by my friends only, and by those of my own class. I have no ambition to expose myself, even in effigy, in a shop window for the edification of street boys and city clerks."
"Well, you can't help your name having been in Vanity Fair this week!"
"No, and I only wish I could get hold of the man who put it there!" cried Miss Nevill, viciously; and it is certain that unfortunate literary person would not have relished the interview.
A "beauty" with such strange and unnatural views was, it must be confessed, as much of a trial as a triumph to an anxious chaperon.
There was a certain amount of fashionable routine, the daily treadmill of pleasure, to which, however, Vera submitted readily enough, and even extracted a good deal of enjoyment out of it. There was the morning saunter into the Row, the afternoons spent at garden parties or "at-homes," the evenings filled up with dinner parties, to be followed almost invariably by balls lasting late into the night. All these things repeat themselves year after year: they are utter weariness to some of us, but to her they were still new, and Vera entered into the daily whirl of the London season with an amount of zest which was almost a surprise to herself.
Just at first there had been a daily terror upon her, that of meeting Sir John Kynaston or his brother; but London is a large place, and you may go out to different houses for many nights running without ever coming across the friend or the foe whom you desire or dread most to encounter.
After a little while, she forgot to glance hurriedly and fearfully around her every time she entered a ball-room, or to look up shudderingly each time the door was opened and a fresh guest announced at a dinner-party. She never met either of them, nor did the name of Kynaston ever strike upon her ear.
She told herself that she had forgotten the two brothers, whose fate had seemed at one time so intimately bound up with her own—the one as well as the other. They were nothing more to her now—they had passed away out of her life. Henceforth she had entered upon a new course, in which her beauty and her mother wit were to exact their full value, but in which her heart was to count for nothing more. It was to be smothered up within her. That, together with all the best, and sweetest, and truest part of her, once awakened for a brief space by the magic touch of love, was now to be extinguished within her as though they had never been.
Meanwhile Vera enjoys herself.
She looks happy enough now as she sits by her friend's side in the park, with a little knot of admirers about her; not taking very much trouble to talk to them, indeed, but smiling serenely from one to the other, letting herself be talked to and amused, with just a word here and there, to show them she is listening to what they say. It is, perhaps, the secret of her success that she is so thoroughly indifferent to it all. It matters so little to her whether they come or go; there is so little eagerness about her, so perfect an insouciance of manner. Other women lay themselves out to attract and to be admired; Vera only sits still, and waits with a certain queenliness of manner for the worship that is laid at her feet, and which she receives as her due.
Behind her, with his hand on the back of her chair, stands a young fellow of about two or three and twenty; he does not speak to her much, nor join in the merry, empty chatter that is going on around her; but it is easy to see by the way he looks down at her, by the fashion in which he watches her slightest movement, that Vera exercises no ordinary influence over him.
He is a tall, slight-figured boy, with very fair yellow hair and delicate features; his blue eyes are frank and pleasant, but his mouth is a trifle weak and vacillating, and the lips are too sensitively cut for strength of character, whilst his chest is too narrow for strength of body. He is carefully dressed, and wears a white, heavy-scented flower in his coat, a flower which, five minutes ago, he had ineffectually attempted to transfer to Miss Nevill's dress; but Vera had only gently pushed back his hand. "My dear boy, pray keep your gardenia; a flower in one's dress is such a nuisance, it is always tumbling out."
Denis Wilde, "the boy," as Mrs. Hazeldine called him with a flush on his fair face, had put it back quietly in his button-hole, too well bred to show the pain he felt by flinging it, as he would have liked to do, over the railing, to be trampled under the feet of the horses.
The little group kept its place for some time, the two well-dressed and good-looking women sitting down, the two or three idlers who stood in front of them gossiping about nothing at all—last night's ball, to-day's plans, a little bit of scandal about one passer-by, somebody's rumoured engagement, somebody else's reported elopement. Denis Wilde stood behind Vera's chair and listened to it all, the well-known familiar chatter of a knot of London idlers. There was nothing new or interesting or entertaining about it. Only a string of names, some of which were strange to him, but most of which were familiar; and always some little story, ill-natured or harmless as the case might be, about each name that was mentioned. And Vera listened, smiling, assenting, but only half attentive, with her eyes dreamily fixed upon the long procession of riders passing ever ceaselessly to and fro along the ride.
Suddenly Denis Wilde felt a sudden movement of the chair beneath his hand. Vera had started violently.
"Here comes Sir John Kynaston," the man before her was saying to his companion. "What a time it is since he has shown himself; he looks as if he had had a bad illness."
"Some woman jilted him, I've heard," answered the other man: "some girl down in the country. People say, Miss Nevill, he is going to die of that old-fashioned complaint, which you certainly will not believe in, a broken heart! Poor old boy, he looks as if he had been buried, and had come up again for a breath of air!"
Vera followed the direction of their eyes. Sir John was walking slowly towards them; he was thin and careworn; he looked aged beyond all belief. He walked slowly, as though it were an effort to him, with his eyes upon the ground. He had not seen her yet; in another minute he would be within a couple of yards of her. It was next to impossible that he could avoid seeing her, the centre, as she was, of that noisy, chattering group.
A sort of despair seized her. How was she to meet him—this man whom she had so cruelly treated? She could not meet him; she felt that it was an impossibility. Like an imprisoned bird that seeks to escape, she looked about instinctively from side to side. What possible excuse could she frame? In what direction could she fly to avoid the glance of reproach that would smite her to the heart.
Suddenly Denis Wilde bent down over her.
"Miss Nevill, there goes a Dachshund, exactly like the one you wanted; come quickly, and we shall catch him up. He ran away down here."
She sprang up and turned after him; a path leading away from the crowded Row, towards the comparatively empty park at the back, opened out immediately behind her chair.
Young Wilde strode rapidly along it before her, and Vera followed him blindly and thankfully.
After a few minutes he stopped and turned round.
"Where is—the dog—wasn't it a dog, you said? Where is it?" She was white and trembling.
"There is no dog," he answered, not looking at her. "I—I saw you wanted to get away for a minute. You will forgive me, won't you?"
Vera looked at him with a sudden earnestness. The watchfulness which had seen her distress, the ready tact which had guessed at her desire to escape, and had so promptly suggested the manner of it, touched her suddenly. She put forth her hand gently and almost timidly.
"Thank you," she said, simply. "I did not imagine you were so clever—or so kind."
The boy blushed deeply with pleasure. He did not know her trouble, but the keen eye of love had guessed at its existence. It had been easy for him who watched her every look, who knew every shade and every line of her face, to tell that she was in distress, to interpret her pallor and her trembling terror aright.
"You don't want to go back?" he asked.
"Oh, no, I cannot go back! Besides, I am tired; it is time to go home."
"Stay here, then, and I will call Mrs. Hazeldine."
He left her standing alone upon the grass, and went back to the crowded path. Presently he returned with her friend.
"My dear Vera, what is the matter? The boy says you have such a headache! I am so sorry, and I wouldn't let any of those chattering fools come back to lunch. Why, you look quite pale, child! Will it be too much for you to have the boy, because we will send him away, too, if you like?"
But Vera turned round and smiled upon the boy.
"Oh, no, let him come, certainly; but let us go home, all three of us at once, if you don't mind."
The thoughtfulness that had kept her secret for her, even from the eyes of the woman who was supposed to be her intimate friend, surely deserved its reward.
They walked home slowly together across the park, and, when Vera came down to luncheon, a white gardenia had somehow or other found its way to the bosom of her dress.
That was Denis Wilde's reward.