Again he paused, and again Jerome waited. He had not the faintest, most conjectural idea of the subject upon which his father desired to speak to him. He was beginning now to wonder vaguely what it could be. They had no confidences, this father and son. Their tastes, habits, and dispositions had always been utterly dissimilar. The elder Wellfield had gone his own way, had led his life of aimless travel from place to place, generally from one fashionable foreign invalid colony to another, accompanied by his daughter and her maid, and by his own manservant. His son had enjoyed the fullest liberty to do the same; to live exactly as seemed good in his own eyes, only receiving long ago the curt recommendation to remember who he was, and that there were some things that a gentleman could never do. ‘No need to tell a gentleman what these things are,’ he had further been informed. ‘If he be a gentleman, he will very soon learn them for himself; if not, scorpions could not whip the knowledge into him.’
Furnished with such a formula, or creed, as the basis of his ethical system, Jerome Wellfield had been left to his own devices. Three times since his father’s second marriage, Jerome had met and stayed with that father. The first time Avice had been a baby, on the other occasions she had been visiting friends unknown to her brother. Jerome and his father had always agreed together perfectly well. Each was conscious that the other had tastes and habits and views of life which to himself would have been most distasteful. Each had had civilisation and savoir vivre enough to ignore that altogether during their brief glimpses of one another. They had never quarrelled—they had never been friends. Mr. Wellfield had enjoyed his life of idle valetudinarianism—his lazy days, his evenings at cards, or in reading-rooms, or lighted gardens. Jerome had enjoyed his life—his pleasant search after the harmonious and the beautiful in life, in art, in nature. He had gradually shut himself up in his own reserve; in his over-refined cultivation and fastidiousness; he had ‘built his soul a lordly pleasure-house, wherein at ease for aye to dwell,’ till now what was ugly and coarse made him shudder, and gave him pain that was almost physical. All this refinement, he often told himself, was not essential to him; he could do without it; poverty would not be anything to dread, for one could have simplicity therewith; the real bane of existence was common, rampant, triumphant philistinism. Wherever he went, he had been well received, and generally flattered: his beauty, his voice, the charm of his manner alone, would have made him the despair of prudent mothers, even as a detrimental; but when to those advantages was added the primary one, that he was an only son, heir to a fine estate, of unimpeachably good and ancient name and lineage, an impartial judge must confess that it was a great thing that Jerome Wellfield had come out of the ordeal, at least outwardly, unscathed, calm, unperturbed, unvulgarised.
Open admiration and adulation had revolted his fastidious soul. Till he met Sara Ford, he had never gone further than a mild flirtation with any girl, for he was hard to please. But, having met her, all was changed. Her beauty, her pride, her indifference, calm and smiling, to what other women so eagerly sought after—the fact that she was no easy prize, despite her loneliness and her poverty, had fired him. He had loved with a rapidity and a passion which showed the strange blending of north and south, of Italy and England, that was in him, and that made him what he was. And he, as little as anyone, knew what he was. In him there were two natures; he only knew one, for up to now his mother’s side alone had grown and flourished; he little knew the modifications of southern character which he inherited from that man beside whose bed he sat, waiting for the disclosure which he struggled to utter.
Born beneath southern skies, brought up in his very early childhood in Italian cities, these influences engraved themselves deeply, indelibly upon his nature. The mother’s blood streaked every thought, every impulse, with a mixture of passion and indolence, fire and superstition. That mother had been the beautiful daughter of an old, impoverished Sicilian house—a house which had never before married out of its own nation and its own sphere. To her son she bequeathed her own hereditary tendencies—she had had much of the indolence, all the superstition of that glorious, yet degraded race of Magna Græcia.
In after-days, when Jerome looked up into the murky skies of Lancashire—those skies which gloomed over the grey walls of his father’s house—those deep, unspeakably blue heavens whose glory bathed the marbles of Venice, the quays of Naples, the ruins of Rome, the pictures of Florence, whose glamour lent itself to the whispering, rustling grey of the olives on Mediterranean coast terraces, and made the yellow sand more yellow, the blue sea more deeply violet, the white sail more dazzling—this remembered heaven used to rush to his recollection with a light that was almost lurid, and scattered tones of a speech that was music seemed to ring melodiously in his ears. Italy had faded, yet her finger-mark remained ineffaceable upon his innermost heart, as his mother’s beauty remained upon earth, stamped in the beauty of his own face and the melody of his voice, which, so long as voice or feature remained, should visibly and audibly attest the presence upon earth of a land where skies are warmer, where love is fiercer, where passions run more quickly into white-hot rages than in this humid isle of ours.
Another influence had been almost as strong as that of Italy—as strong as any influence which is not already in a man’s natural tendencies can be—and that influence was Germany. After a brief stay in England, during which his father’s second marriage had taken place, he had been sent to the gymnasium of ——, where he had gone through all the courses, and, besides the regular school-training, had been trained also in the school of music.
In that land his voice and his musical powers formed a passport. By degrees, the Italian ditties, with their oily sweetness, slipped away, as they have the trick of doing, from his tongue, and the rougher, deeper songs of the Fatherland grew at home there. Casting himself with eagerness into the art, he grew more and more devoted to it, and but for one thing he often felt as if he would never care to leave this Deutschland, this home of mighty harmonies, this adopted country. That one thing was the remembrance of his home itself—of the weird, ancient Abbey, with its dark, quaint gardens, its cloisters beside the river; and the still more ancient church which he dimly remembered.
Since his love for Sara Ford had arisen, he had thought and dreamed still oftener of this ancient place. Now he knew—he had thought of it when he spoke to Avice that morning—that with her by his side there was no place he would so gladly go to, and stay there. What a life they might lead—she with her art, and he with his—and with their love! He felt a thrill—felt the blood course quickly on, as he pictured her—it was the first time he had seen the picture clearly—with him at Wellfield—his wife.
‘Perhaps, when you know, you may blame me; and yet—where would you have been all these years if I had acted differently? Did you know that Wellfield had ever been entailed?’
‘I think I have heard something about it,’ said Jerome, surprised at the abruptness of the question, and roused from his dream.