"I always talk; it relieves me. You have no idea how nice she is; so frail, so white—a white blonde, a Seraphita. But you haven't read Balzac; you do not know those white women of the North. 'Plus blanche que la blanche hermine,' etc. So pure is she that I cannot think of kissing her without sensations of sacrilege. My lips are not pure enough for hers. I would I were chaste. I never was chaste."
Mike laughed and chattered of everything. Words came from him like flour from a mill.
The Pilgrim was published on Wednesday. Wednesday was the day, therefore, for walking in the Park; for lunching out; for driving in hansoms. Like a fish on the crest of a wave he surveyed London—multitudinous London, circulating about him; and he smiled with pleasure when he caught sight of trees spreading their summer green upon the curling whiteness of the clouds. He loved the Park. The Park had always been his friend; it had given him society when no door was open to him; it had been the inspiration of all his ambitions; it was the Park that had first showed him ladies and gentlemen in all the gaud and charm of town leisure. There he had seen for the first time the panorama of slanting sunshades, patent leather shoes, horses cantering in the dusty sunlight, or proudly grouped, the riders flicking the flies away with gold-headed whips. He loved the androgynous attire of the horsewomen—collars, silk hats, and cravats. The Park appealed to him intensely and strangely as nothing else did. He loved the Park for the great pasture it afforded to his vanity. It was in the Park he saw the fashionable procuress driving—she who would not allow him to pay even for champagne in her house; it was in the Park he met the little actress who looked so beseechingly in his face; it was in the Park he met fashionable ladies who asked him to dinner and took him to the theatre; it was in the Park he had found life and fortune, and, saturated with happiness, with health, tingling with consciousness of his happiness, Mike passed among the various crowd, which in its listlessness seemed to balance and air itself like a many-petalled flower. But much as the crowd amused and pleased him, he was more amused and pleased with the present vision of his own personality, which in a long train of images and stories passed within him. He loved to dream of himself; in dreams he entered his soul like a temple, seeing himself in various environment, and acting in manifold circumstances.
"Here am I—a poor boy from the bogs of Ireland—poor people" (the reflection was an unpleasant one, and he escaped from it); "at all events a poor boy without money or friends. I have made myself what I am…. I get the best of everything—women, eating, clothes; I live in beautiful rooms surrounded with pretty things. True, they are not mine, but what does that matter?—I haven't the bother of looking after them…. If I could only get rid of that cursed accent, but I haven't much; Escott has nearly as much, and he was brought up at an English school. How pleasant it is to have money! Heigho! How pleasant it is to have money! Six pounds a week from the paper, and I could make easily another four if I chose. Sometimes I don't get any presents; women seem as if they were going to chuck it up, and then they send all things—money, jewelry, and comestibles. I am sure it was Ida who sent that hundred pounds. What should I do if it ever came out? But there's nothing to come out. I believe I am suspected, but nothing can be proved against me.
"Why do they love me? I always treat them badly. Often I don't even pretend to love them, but it makes no difference. Pious women, wicked women, stupid women, clever women, high-class women, low-class women, it is all the same—all love me. That little girl I picked up in the Strand liked me before she had been talking to me five minutes. And what sudden fancies! I come into a room, and every feminine eye fills with sudden emotion. I wonder what it is. My nose is broken, and my chin sticks out like a handle. And men like me just as much as women do. It is inexplicable. True, I never say disagreeable things; and it is so natural to me to wheedle. I twist myself about them like a twining plant about a window. Women forgive me everything, and are glad to see me after years. But they are never wildly jealous. Perhaps I have never been really loved…. I don't know though—Lady Seeley loved me. There was an old lady at Margate, sixty if she was a day (of course there was nothing improper), and she worshipped me. How nicely she used to smile when she said, 'Come round here that I may look at you!'—and her husband was quite as bad; he'd run all over the place after me. So-and-so was quite offended because I didn't rush to see him; he'd put me up for six months…. Servants hate Frank; for me they'd do anything. I never was in a lodging-house in my life that the slavey didn't fall in love with me. People dislike me; I speak to them for five minutes, and henceforth they run after me. I make friends everywhere.
"Those Americans wanted me to come and stay six months with them in New York. How she did press me to come! … The Brookes, they want me to come and stay in the country with them; they'd give me horses to ride, guns to shoot, and I'd get the girls besides. They looked rather greedily at me just now. How jealous poor old Emily is of them! She says I'd 'go to the end of the earth for them'—and would not raise a little finger for her. Dear old Emily, she wasn't a bit cross the other night when I wouldn't go home with her. I must go and see her. She says she loved me—really loved me! … She used to lie and dream of pulling me out of burning houses. I wonder why I am liked! How intangible, and yet how real! What a wonderful character I would make in a novel!"
At that moment he saw Mrs. Byril in the crowd; but notwithstanding his kind thoughts of her, he prayed she might pass without seeing him. Perceiving Lady Helen walking with her husband and Harding, he followed her slim figure with his eyes, remembering what Seymour's good looks had brought him, for he envied all love, desiring to be himself all that women desire. Then his thoughts wandered. The decoration of the Park absorbed him—the nobility of a group of horses, the attractiveness of some dresses; and amid all this elegance and parade he dreamed of tragedy—of some queen blowing her brains out for him—and he saw the fashionable dress and the blood oozing from the temple, trickling slowly through the sand. Then Lords Muchross and Snowdown passed, and they passed without acknowledging him!
"Cads, cads, damn them!" His face changed expression. "I may rise to any height, queens may fall down and worship me, but I may never undo my birth. Not to have been born a gentleman! That is to say, of a long line—a family with a history. Not to be able to whisper, 'I may lose everything, all troubles may be mine, but the fact remains that I was born a gentleman!' Those two men who cut me are lords. What a delight in one's life to have a name all to one's self!" And then Mike lost himself in a maze of little dreams. A gleam of mail; escutcheons and castles; a hawk flew from fingers fair; a lady clasped her hands when the lances shivered in the tourney; and Mike was the hero that persisted in the course of this shifting little dream.
The Brookes—Sally and Maggie—stopped to speak to him, and he went to lunch with them. His interest in all they did and said was unbounded, and that he might not be able to reproach himself with waste of time, he contrived by hint and allusion to lay the foundation for a future intrigue with one of the girls.
Lily Young, however, had never been forgotten; she had been as constantly present in his mind as this sense of the sunshine and his own happy condition. She had been parcel of and one with these but now; as he drove to see her, he separated her from the morning phenomena of his life, and began to think definitely of her.