While she wrote, Tony strolled along, puffing his cigar or re-lighting it, for it was always going out, and dreaming away in his own misty fashion over things past, present, and future, till really the actual and the ideal became so thoroughly commingled he could not well distinguish one from the other. He thought—he knew, indeed, he ought to be very happy. All his anxieties as to a career and a livelihood ended, he felt that a very enjoyable existence might lie before him; but somehow,—he hoped he was not ungrateful,—but somehow he was not so perfectly happy as he supposed his good fortune should have made him.
“Perhaps it will come later on; perhaps when I am active and employed; perhaps when I shall have learned to interest myself in the things money brings around a man; perhaps, too, when I can forget,—ay, that was the lesson was hardest of all.” All these passing thoughts, a good deal dashed through each other, scarcely contributed to enlighten his faculties; and he rambled on over rocks and yellow strand, up hillsides, and through fern-clad valleys, not in the least mindful of whither he was going.
At last he suddenly halted, and saw he was in the shrubberies of Lyle Abbey, his steps having out of old habit taken the one same path they had followed for many a year. The place was just as he had seen it last. Trees make no marvellous progress in the north of Ireland, and a longer absence than Tony's would leave them just as they were before. All was neat, orderly, and well kept; and the heaps of dried leaves and brushwood ready to be wheeled away, stood there as he saw them when he last walked that way with Alice. He was poor then, without a career, or almost a hope of one; and yet it was possible, could it be possible, that he was happier then than he now felt? Was it that love sufficed for all, and that the heart so filled had no room for other thoughts than those of her it worshipped? He certainly had loved her greatly. She,—she alone made up that world in which he had lived. Her smile, her step, her laugh, her voice,—ay, there they were, all before him. What a dream it was! Only a dream, after all; for she never cared for him. She had led him on to love her, half in caprice, half in a sort of compassionate interest for a poor boy,—boy she called him,—to whom a passion for one above him was certain to elevate and exalt him in his own esteem. “Very kind, doubtless,” muttered he, “but very cruel too. She might have remembered that this same dream was to have a very rough awaking. I had built nearly every hope upon one, and that one, she well knew, was never to be realized. It might not have been the most gracious way to do it, but I declare it would have been the most merciful, to have treated me as her mother did, who snubbed my pretensions at once. It was all right that I should recognize her superiority over me in a hundred ways; but perhaps she should not have kept it so continually in mind, as a sort of barrier against a warmer feeling for me. I suppose this is the fine-lady view of the matter. This is the theory that young fellows are to be civilized, as they call it, by a passion for a woman who is to amuse herself by their extravagances, and then ask their gratitude for having deceived them.
“I 'll be shot if I am grateful,” said he, as he threw his cigar into the pond. “I 'm astonished—amazed—now that it's all over” (here his voice shook a little), “that my stupid vanity could ever have led me to think of her, or that I ever mistook that patronizing way she had towards me for more than good-nature. But, I take it, there are scores of fellows who have had the selfsame experiences. Here's the seat I made for her,” muttered he, as he came in front of a rustic bench. For a moment a savage thought crossed him that he would break it in pieces, and throw the fragments into the lake,—a sort of jealous anger lest some day or other she might sit there with “another;” but he restrained himself, and said, “Better not; better let her see that her civilizing process has done something, and that though I have lost my game I can bear my defeat becomingly.”
He began to wish that she were there at that moment. Not that he might renew his vows of love, or repledge his affection; but to show her how calm and reasonable—ay, reasonable was her favorite word—he could be, how collectedly he could listen to her, and how composedly reply. He strolled up to the entrance door. It was open. The servants were busy in preparing for the arrival of their masters, who were expected within the week. All were delighted to see Master Tony again, and the words somehow rather grated on his ears. It was another reminder of that same “boyhood” he bore such a grudge against “I am going to have a look out of the small drawing-room window, Mrs. Hayles,” said he to the housekeeper, cutting short her congratulations, and hurrying upstairs.
It was true he went up for a view; but not of the coastline to Fairhead, fine as it was. It was of a full-length portrait of Alice, life-size, by Grant. She was standing beside her horse,—the Arab Tony trained for her. A braid of her hair had fallen, and she was in the act of arranging it, while one hand held up her drooping riding-dress. There was that in the air and attitude that bespoke a certain embarrassment with a sense of humorous enjoyment of the dilemma. A sketch from life, in fact, had given the idea of the picture, and the reality of the incident was unquestionable.
Tony blushed a deep crimson as he looked, and muttered, “The very smile she had on when she said good-bye. I wonder I never knew her till now.”
A favorite myrtle of hers stood in the window; he broke off a sprig of it, and placed it in his button-hole, and then slowly passed down the stairs and out into the lawn. With very sombre thoughts and slow steps he retraced his way to the cottage. He went over to himself much of his past life, and saw it, as very young men will often in such retrospects, far less favorably as regarded himself than it really was. He ought to have done—Heaven knows what. He ought to have been—scores of things which he never was, perhaps never could be. At all events, there was one thing he never should have imagined, that Alice Lyle—she was Alice Lyle always to him—in her treatment of him was ever more closely drawn towards him than the others of her family. “It was simply the mingled kindness and caprice of her nature that made, the difference; and if I had n't been a vain fool, I 'd have seen it. I see it now, though; I can read it in the very smile she has in her picture. To be sure I have learned a good deal since I was here last; I have outgrown a good many illusions. I once imagined this dwarfed and stinted scrub to be a wood. I fancied the Abbey to be like a royal palace; and in Sicily a whole battalion of us have bivouacked in a hall that led to suites of rooms without number. If a mere glimpse of the world could reveal such astounding truths, what might not come of a more lengthened experience?”
“How tired and weary you look, Tony!” said his mother, as he threw himself into a chair; “have you overwalked yourself?”
“I suppose so,” said he, with a half smile. “In my poorer days I thought nothing of going to the Abbey and back twice—I have done it even thrice—in one day; but perhaps this weight of gold I carry now is too heavy for me.”