BACK FROM THE DEAD.
HE Clare Stanley who studied Bakounin and quoted Matthew Arnold was a very different girl from the Clare Stanley who had in the autumn entertained the reprehensible idea of bringing to her feet the interesting stranger at Morley's Hotel. In looking back on that time, which she did with hot cheeks and uncomfortable self-condemnation, it really seemed to her that she had changed into another being—development, when it is rapid, being always bewildering. It would be interesting to know with what emotions the rose remembers being a green bud. Pleasanter ones perhaps than those of the woman whose new earnest sense of the intense seriousness of life leads her to look back—not with indulgent eyes—on the follies of her unawakened girlhood. The story of the sleeping beauty is an allegory with a very real meaning. Every woman's mind has its time of slumber, when the creed of the day is truth and the convention of the day is morality. The fairy prince's awakening kiss may come in the pages of a book, in the words of a speaker, through love, through suffering, through sorrow, through a thousand things glad or sad, and to some it never comes, and that is the saddest thing of all. Clare had slept, and now was well awake, and it was no word of Count Litvinoff's that had broken the slumbrous spell.
Sometimes she almost wished it had been, for she could not conceal from herself the fact that she had succeeded in doing what she had desired to do, and that Count Litvinoff was at her feet. The position became him, certainly, but she felt a perverse objection to being placed on a pedestal, and a new conviction that she would rather look up to a lover than down at one. And yet why should she look down on him? He was cleverer than she, with a larger knowledge of life—had done incomparably more for the cause she had espoused. He was brave, handsome, and, to some extent, a martyr, and he loved her, or she thought so, which came to the same thing. Verily, a man with all these qualifications was hardly the sort of lover for a girl under the twenties to look down upon. But could she help looking down on him, for was he not at her feet? And that was not the place, she thought, for a man who had drawn the sword in such a war as she and he had entered upon. What right had a man who had taken up arms in that cause to lay them down, even at her feet? No, no. Her lover, if she had one, must be at her side—not there.
This reaction to the Count's detriment had set in on New Year's Day, when he had told her that he held no cause sacred enough to give her even inconvenience for the sake of it, and the tide was still ebbing. Litvinoff appeared quite unconscious of that fact though, for he continued to call on Mrs Quaid with a persistence which quite justified all Cora's animadversions. Miss Quaid's penetration was at fault, but the Count's was not. He was perfectly conscious of the change in her state of mind, and knew that his chance of being master of the Stanley money-bags was far less than he had thought shortly after their late master's death.
Suspense was the one thing Count Litvinoff could not bear—at least, he could bear it when the balance of probabilities was in his favour; but when the chances did not seem to be on his side—no. He knew perfectly well that it is hardly 'correct' to ask a girl to marry one three months after her father's death; but he was not an enthusiastic devotee of 'correctness.' He habitually posed as a despiser of conventions, and this attitude very often stood him in good stead, even with people who preferred the stereotyped rôles of life for themselves. Avowed unconventionality serves as a splendid excuse for doing all sorts of pleasant things which conventional people daren't do; hence perhaps its growing popularity.
'He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch,
To gain or lose it all.'
The lines ran in Count Litvinoff's head persistently one spring morning while he sat at his late breakfast. As he despatched his last mouthful of grilled sardine and looked round for the marmalade, the servant came in with a letter.
'It really is time I struck for fortune. I do hope this is not a bill,' he said to himself as he took it. 'I retrench and retrench, and still they come.'