CHAPTER IX.
ON the evening of the same day Durant told his tale to Lady Curtis. She and her daughter had come to London on hearing the news of Arthur’s “entanglement,” as many an alarmed mother and sister have done before them. Sir John either could not, or would not join them. He had less faith than women have in the efficacy of personal remonstrances, and indeed he had no great faith in the delinquency to start with, and gave his son credit for “more sense,” if less virtue, than they believed him capable of. To hear that Arthur was on the eve of marriage had stunned Sir John. He had written with indignant vehemence, and he had commissioned his “man of business” to go and see the “young fool;” and he had forbidden his wife to go to her son as she desired. “Get him to come to you if you can,” he had said; but he was afraid for the results of a visit from his wife with the possibility of an introduction of the girl, and a melting of my lady’s heart over her son’s love. Sir John gave his wife credit for much more sentiment than she possessed; and as for Lucy, she of course was sentimental enough to be sympathetic at once without any preliminaries. “You had better leave him to the lawyers,” Sir John said, having a strong confidence in people who could make themselves disagreeable; but he consented that the ladies should go to town to be near the spot, if the other functionaries managed to “unearth” the culprit. Once away from that temptation, once delivered from the syren who had “entangled” him, no doubt Arthur would be safer with his mother and sister than anywhere else. And Lady Curtis had acquiesced, though with reluctance, in this prohibition. She had felt that to go and see him might bring her into painful collision with the other people about him, and at the best would expose Arthur to what a young man likes least, the shame of being interfered with, and worried by his family in full sight of the world. Sir John, however, had nothing to do with the mission of Durant; he was the emissary of the ladies called by them to their aid in the emergency. No other messenger had seemed to them so suitable. His dearest friend, his ami de l’enfance, what more natural than that they should have recourse to his aid? And in these circumstances it may be supposed how hard it was for Durant to tell the story of his own defeat. He did it in the library in Berkeley Square in the waning afternoon, just before the evening fell. The room itself which seemed to him half as big as the whole town of Underhayes, was full of ghostly books, showing here and there in a streak of gilding, in a bit of white vellum, which caught the remains of the red October sunshine. The thinned trees waved slowly across the windows, and when a gust of wind came, a shower of falling leaves swept over the firmament outside. Lady Curtis sat between the fire and the nearest window, listening intently with her eyes fixed on his face. Lucy was in one of the window-seats, almost behind their visitor. She could not watch his face openly as her mother did; but she was not less anxious than her mother. When he turned round to her, as he did often, she shrank a little further back, preferring to watch him unobserved; for to Lucy, as to many other women, it seemed that half the story was told by the countenance of the teller. Lady Curtis had been a beautiful woman in her day, and had the beauty of her age now, as perfect an example of forty-five as could be desired. She was ample in form, but her head and face had retained all their delicacy and refinement; and if there was a slight hollow in the cheek, and a slight fulness about the throat, neither was sufficient to tell against her; and modified by youth, and by a somewhat softer disposition, Lucy’s face was as her mother’s. They were neither of them brilliant in colour. Lady Curtis had acquired something in this way with the matronly increase of her figure; but Lucy had no more than the rose tint which health gives, and her hair was soft light brown, a shade or two lighter than her eyes, hair which in her mother’s case was so daintily sprinkled with grey as to appear only lighter in tint than it had once been. Whoever desired to see Lady Curtis as she was at twenty had but to look at her daughter, and whoever wanted to make sure what Lucy would look like a quarter of a century hence could see it in Lady Curtis’s face. It gives an additional charm to both when this resemblance is carried out as it was in these two. It makes both youth and age more fair, bringing them together in a tender half mist of illusion, one face in two representations; the mother and the child both profited by it; Lady Curtis showing at her best in her darling’s brown eyes, and disclosing in her own how little there was to alarm the warmest admirer in that darling’s future. And they were proud of their resemblance, a little for the beauty’s sake, perhaps, but a great deal more for the love’s. Durant felt all around him a subtle air of witchery between the mother and the daughter. The very atmosphere was Lucy, sweet, soft, yet penetrating. And the two ladies seemed to look at each other through him as if he had been made of glass, and knew his inmost heart.
At present they were much cast down by what he said. He had described to them the Bates household, the little stuffy parlour, the rum and water, and Sarah Jane; and worst of all Arthur’s determined adherence to his love, and his promise. It seemed incredible to them that their son and brother should be satisfied in such a place. Some occult influence, something uncanny, seemed to be in the “infatuation” altogether. “And, Mr. Durant, do you really think nothing, nothing will make him give it up?”
“Indeed I do think so,” said Durant, “I cannot say otherwise, and I am sure you would not wish to hear anything less than the truth. He is—very much attached—to her.”
“And she—is just like the others,” said Lady Curtis faintly, “a little better you said, not so vulgar? Heaven help us! that I should speak so of my son’s—no, Mr. Durant, not yet, I cannot call her my son’s bride. Something may come in the way, something must be thought of—”
“I don’t think you will find anything. I have used every argument;—and to tell the truth I do not know that I am quite sure, in my own mind—of course I did not say this to Arthur—I am not quite convinced in my own thoughts—”
“Of what, Mr. Durant?” Lady Curtis said this anxiously in front of him, and Lucy breathed it half under her breath behind. He looked at the mother, but turned his chair a little so as to come nearer the daughter, who eluded him, gliding still a little further back.
“Well,” he said, “you may not be pleased, but I must speak according to my conscience. I would give a year of my life to get Arthur free, you know that—”
“What are you going to tell us?” cried Lady Curtis, clasping her white hands. Lucy did not say anything, but leant forward, so intent that when he again turned to her, she did not as usual withdraw.
“It is just this,” he said, sinking his voice; and the evening air seemed to make a visible droop towards the darkening to increase the alarming effect: “that I dare not on my honour say any more to Arthur on the subject. He is a gentleman; I cannot even to save him from misery bid him break his word.”