Leaving this fine outburst of indignation to vibrate through the room, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy turned upon her heel, and, grasping Lottie by the arm, took the pas from Augusta, and marched out with blazing eyes and countenance flushed with war. “Ye can bring the music,” she said to old Pick, who had been listening, and whose disappointment at Lottie’s break-down was great, “and there’ll be a shilling for you. I’d scorn to be beholden to one of them.” Rollo made an anxious attempt, but in vain, to catch Lottie’s eyes as she was swept past him. But Lottie would not return his glance. Augusta had done a great deal more execution with her subtle tactics than Polly with hers—which, perhaps, were not more brutal because they were so much less refined.
“What an odious woman!” Augusta cried; “walking out of the room before me. But, Rollo, she was quite right, though she was so impudent. You ought not to go there. Mamma says you want Lottie Despard for your new opera. She would never do. She has a voice, but she doesn’t know how to sing. A good audience would never put up with her.”
“That is all a mistake,” said Rollo; “it may be very well to know how to sing, but it is much better to have a voice.”
“I could not have supposed you were so old-fashioned; never say that in public if you want anyone to have any opinion of you. But even if you are so sure of her you should keep away; you should not interfere with her training. The fact is,” said Augusta, very seriously, “I am dreadfully afraid you have got into some entanglement even now.”
“You are very kind,” said Rollo, smiling, “to take such care of me.”
“I wish I could take a great deal more care. I am almost sure you have got into some entanglement, though, of course, you will say no. But, Rollo, you know, you might as well hang yourself at once. You could never hold up your head again. I don’t know what on earth would become of you. Uncle Courtland would wash his hands of you, and what could any of your friends do? It would be moral suicide,” said Augusta, with solemnity. “I told you about young Jonquil, and the state he was in. Rollo! that’s the most miserable thing that can happen to a man; other things may go wrong, and mend again; your people may interpose, or a hundred things may happen; but this sort of thing is without hope. Oh, Rollo, take it to heart! There are many things a man may do that don’t tell half so much against him. You would be poor, and everybody would give you up. For goodness’ sake, Rollo, think of what I say.”
He gave her an answer which was not civil; and, as he went along by her side to old Canon Skeffington’s, there suddenly gleamed across his mind a recollection of the elm-tree on the Slopes, and all the sweetness of the stolen hours which had passed there. And Lottie had said “No.” Why should she have said “No?” It seemed to him that he cared for nothing else so much as to know why for this first time she had refused to meet him. Had she began to understand his proposition? had she found out what it was he meant? Was she afraid of him, or indignant, or——? But she had not looked indignant. Of all things in the world, there was nothing he wanted so much as to know what Lottie meant by that refusal. Yet, notwithstanding, he did take to heart what Augusta said.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
ANOTHER CHANCE.
Mr. Ashford, the Minor Canon, had, anyone would have supposed, as tranquil yet as pleasantly occupied a life as a man could have. He had not very much of a clergyman’s work to do. There was no need for him to harass himself about the poor, who are generally a burden upon the shoulders or hung about the neck of the parish priest; he was free from that weight which he had found himself unable to bear. He had only the morning and evening prayers to think of, very rarely even a sermon. Most clergymen like that part of their duties; they like to have it in their power to instruct, to edify, or even to torture the community in general, with perfect safety from any reprisals; but Ernest Ashford in that, as in many other things, was an exception to the general rule in his profession. He was not fond of sermons, and consequently it was a very happy thing for him that so few were required of him. He was now and then tormented by his pupils, which brought his life within the ordinary conditions of humanity; otherwise, with his daily duty in the beautiful Abbey, which was a delight to him, and the leisure of his afternoons and evenings, and the landscape that lay under his window, and the antique grace of his little house, and all his books, no existence could have been more unruffled and happy. He was as far lifted above those painful problems of common life which he could not solve, and which had weighed upon him like personal burdens in the beginning of his career, as his window was above the lovely sweep of country at the foot of the hill. What had he to do but sing Handel, to read and to muse, and to be content? These were the natural conditions of his life.
But it would appear that these conditions are not fit for perverse humanity; for few indeed are the persons so happily exempt from ordinary troubles who do not take advantage of every opportunity to drag themselves into the arena and struggle like their neighbours. Mrs. Ashford did this in what may be called the most wanton and unprovoked way. What business had he to take any interest in Lottie Despard? She was out of his sphere; the Abbey stood between them, a substantial obstacle; and many things a great deal more important—social differences, circumstances that tended to separate rather than to bring together. And it was not even in the orthodox and regular way that he had permitted this girl to trouble his life. He might have fallen in love with her, seeing her so often in the Abbey (for Lottie’s looks were remarkable enough to attract any man), and nobody could have found fault. It is true, a great many people would have found fault, in all likelihood people who had nothing to do with it and no right to interfere, but who would, as a matter of course, have pitied the poor man who had been beguiled, and indignantly denounced the designing girl; but no one would have had any right to interfere. As a clergyman of the Church of England Mr. Ashford had absolute freedom to fall in love if he pleased, and to marry if he pleased, and nobody would have dared to say a word. But he had not done this: he had not fallen in love, and he did not think of marriage; but being himself too tranquil in his well-being, without family cares or anxieties, perhaps out of the very forlornness of his happiness, his attention had been fixed—was it upon the first person he had encountered in the midst of a moral struggle harder, and therefore nobler, than his own quiescent state? Perhaps this was all. He could never be sure whether it was the girl fighting to keep her father and brother out of the mire, fighting with them to make them as honest and brave herself, or whether it was simply Lottie that interested him. Possibly it was better not to enter into this question. She was the most interesting person within his range. His brethren the Canons, Minor and Major, were respectable or dignified clergymen, very much like the rest of the profession. Within the Abbey precincts there was nobody with any particular claim upon the sympathy of his fellows, or whose moral position demanded special interest. The Uxbridges were anxious about their son, who was a careless boy, not any better than Law; but then the father and mother were quite enough to support that anxiety, and kept it to themselves as much as possible. It was not a matter of life and death, as in Law’s case, who had neither father nor mother to care what became of him, but only Lottie—a creature who herself ought to have been cared for and removed far from all such anxieties. Even the deficiency in Lottie’s character—the pain with which she was brought to see that she must herself adopt the profession which was within her reach, and come out from the shelter of home and the menial work with which she was contented, to earn money and make an independence for herself—had given her a warmer hold upon the spectator, who, finding himself unable to struggle against the world and himself, had withdrawn from that combat, yet never could quite pardon himself for having withdrawn. She, poor child, could not withdraw; she was compelled to confront the thing she hated by sheer force of necessity, and had done so—compelled, indeed, but only as those who can are compelled. Would she have fled from the contemplation of want and pain as he had done? Would she have allowed herself incapable to bear the consequences of the duty set before her, whatever it might be? Sometimes Mr. Ashford would ask himself this question: though what could be more ridiculous than the idea that a girl of twenty could judge better than a man of five-and-thirty? But he was interested in her by very reason of her possession of qualities which he did not possess. He had given her good advice, and she had taken it; but even while he gave it and pressed it upon her he had been thinking what would she have said to his problems, how would she have decided for him? All this increased his interest in Lottie. He realised, almost more strongly than she did herself, all the new difficulties that surrounded her; he divined her love, which pained him not less than the other troublous circumstances in her lot, since he could not imagine it possible that any good could come out of such a connection. That Rollo Ridsdale would marry anyone but an heiress his superior knowledge of the world forced him to doubt; he could not believe in a real honest love, ending in a marriage, between the Chevalier’s daughter and Lady Caroline’s nephew. And accordingly this, which seemed to Lottie to turn her doubtful future into a certainty of happiness, seemed to Mr. Ashford the worst of all the dangers in her lot. It would be no amusement for her, as it would be for the other; and what was to become of the girl with her father’s wife in possession of her home and such a lover in possession of her heart? His spectatorship got almost more than he could bear at times; nobody seemed to see as he did, and he was the last person in the world who could interfere to save her. Could anyone save her? He could not tell; he knew no one who would take the office upon himself; but least of all could he do it. He watched with interest which had grown into the profoundest anxiety—an anxiety which in its turn was increased tenfold by the sense that there was nothing which he could do.