Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

Fay and I had many excursions into this modern fairyland, as the chatelaine thereof was an old friend of ours who loved to share with others the joy of her Garden of Dreams; so we went there often. But one special excursion stands out in my memory above all the rest.

It was on a Saturday afternoon, and Fay and I had been having tea in the Garden of Dreams. It was glorious weather, and there were many interesting people there—as indeed there usually were: choice spirits flourished in the Garden of Dreams as well as choice flowers. We were all grouped about near the sky-paved fountain after tea, holding sweet converse with friends new and old, when a man and a woman came round the corner of the house to greet our hostess. They were by no means young; on the sunny side of fifty, I should say, by which, as an old Bishop once explained, he meant the side nearest heaven. Fay would consider them quite old, I felt sure: but I saw the old youth in them, which I had known when I was little more than a boy and they in the full zenith of their successful career, and so they would never seem old to me.

The man had a worn, tired face, and the woman was plump and cheerful and well dressed. But the sight of them carried me back to the time when he was a rising star in the political firmament, and she an equally brilliant planet in the constellation of society: and when I lived in London, and read for the Bar, and waited for the briefs that never came.

His name in those days had been Paul Seaton, and his success had been brilliant and rapid. He was a nobody when he entered Parliament; but his marked talents and undoubted ability soon made him a name in the House of Commons, while his marriage to a woman of position and fortune and considerable charm assured his position in society. He was one of those brilliant young politicians who start life with the intention of setting the Thames on fire and the world in order, and exchanging old lamps for new, wherever they have the chance; but although he succeeded in attaining a place in the Government, and then a seat in the Cabinet, the Thames remained too damp to ignite, the world became increasingly out of order, and the new lamps lost infinitely more in magical properties than they gained in additional candle-power.

It would be untrue to say that Paul Seaton's vaulting ambition "o'er-leaped itself and tumbled down on t'other." It did nothing of the kind. It raised him to the respected elevation of the high-table, and bade him feast and make merry above the salt; but as to those rose-tinted mountain-tops, which he had beheld in the light of dawn, and which he had then fondly imagined he was going to scale—well, they were practically as far above the high-table as they were above the ground.

The tide which Paul Seaton had taken at the flood and which had therefore led him on to fortune, in due season began to ebb: the reforms, on which he had spent his enthusiastic youth, had either materialised into the impedimenta of practical politics, or else had faded into the mist of forgotten dreams: younger men with newer schemes hurried past him along the road which seemed to lead to the mountain-tops; and he sat still and watched them go by, wishing them God-speed with all his heart, since he also had passed that way: yet knowing all the time that they too, in their turn, would watch the rose-colour fade from those peaks which were inaccessible to the foot of man.

So he who had marched to battle with the vanguard stayed at home by the stuff, and occupied himself in safeguarding those institutions which he had once fondly hoped to sweep away. From a dangerously daring pioneer he had developed into a steady and unswerving follower. He was therefore chosen as one of the new peers whose creation lends glory to a Coronation; and he strove as conscientiously to keep back his Party in the Lords as he had once striven to urge it forward in the Commons.

As for his wife, I could not judge her as dispassionately as I judged him, since I knew her so much better. She was considerably older than I, and I adored her in the days when she was a grown-up young lady, and I a shy and awkward schoolboy. She was an orphan and lived with her uncle, Sir Benjamin Farley: and Sir Benjamin and my father were old and fast friends. When I was about fourteen I made up my mind that when I grew up I would marry the exact counterpart of Isabel Carnaby, as Mrs. Paul Seaton was called in that prehistoric time: and after I became a man and she a married woman, she still ranked among my most admired friends. Of late years I had not seen much of her, she being a busy woman and I an idle man; but we kept a book-marker in the volume of our friendship, and always began again exactly where we left off. She changed outwardly very little, and inwardly not at all. She was the same woman as Mrs. Seaton that she had been as Isabel Carnaby, and the same as Lady Chayford that she had been as Mrs. Seaton.

Life had not shattered her illusions as it had those of her husband, because—even in her young days—she had so few to shatter. She had always been one of those clear-sighted people who see things pretty much as they are. But she too had her disappointments and her unsatisfied yearnings. The Coronation peerage was ordained by an inscrutable Providence to remain merely a life-peerage. There were no children to fill their mother's large heart, and (incidentally) to carry on their father's well-earned honours.

As soon as Isabel had greeted her hostess, she came straight across the paved court to me with outstretched hands. "My dear Reggie, how delightful to see you again! I had no idea you were here. And you've been and got married and done no end of foolish things since I saw you last, and I know you are dying to tell me all about them, just as I am dying to hear."