Part 3 (1/2)

”Well, to return to Mr. Warner. Will you all meet him when I ask him to my sitting-room up-stairs? Will you spread the news of his coming among the other guests? Hint that he has reformed? Excite in them a desire to meet the great man?”

She did not speak in a tone of appeal, and there was a mounting fire in her eye.

Lady Constance shrugged her shoulders. ”You mean that you will cut us if we don't. I never quarrel in the tropics. Besides, I have buried too many of my old friends! I don't approve, but I shall be interested, and my morals are as pure and solid as my new teeth. If you can marry him to Mary Denbigh and leave her on the island----”

”And you, Emily?”

None had had more experience in yielding gracefully to social tyrants than Mrs. Nunn. She thought Maria Hunsdon mad to take up with a drunken poet, and could only be thankful that her charge was a sensible, commonplace girl with no romantic notions in her head. ”I never think in the tropics, my dear Maria, and now that you are here to think for me, and provide a little variety, so much the better.

What is your programme?”

”To ask him first for tea in my sitting-room, then for dinner; then to organise picnics, and take him with us on excursions. I shall frequently pick him up when I drive--in short before a fortnight has pa.s.sed he will be a respectable member of society, and accepted as a matter of course.”

”And what if he gets drunk?”

”That is what I purpose he shall not do. As soon as I know him well enough I shall talk to him like a mother.”

”Better let Miss Percy talk to him like a sister. Well, regulate the universe to suit yourself. I hope you will not forget to order Nevis to have no earthquakes this winter, particularly while we are cooking our gouty old limbs in the hot springs. By the way, whom have you decreed James shall marry?”

”I should not think of interfering in such a matter.” Lady Hunsdon spoke with her usual bland emphasis, but darted a keen glance at Anne.

It was not disapproving, for Miss Percy's descent was long, she liked the splendid vitality of the girl, and Hunsdon had riches of his own.

But, far cleverer than Mrs. Nunn, she suspected depths which might have little in common with her son, and a will which might make a mother-in-law hate her. Lady Hunsdon loved peace, and wondered that anyone should question her rigid rules for enforcing it. But of Anne as a valuable coadjutor in the present instance there could be no doubt, and, to do her justice, she antic.i.p.ated no danger in the meeting of a fine girl, full of eager interest in life, and the demoralised being her son so pathetically described. She was quite sincere in her desire to lift the gifted young man from his moral quagmire, but this new opportunity to exercise her power, almost moribund since her party was no longer in Opposition, was a stronger motive still.

When Anne was alone in her room she sat down and stared through the half-closed jalousies until the luncheon bell rang at two o'clock, forgetting to change her frock. But she could make little of the ferment in her mind, except that her mental companion, that arbitrary creation she had called Byam Warner, was gone forever. Even did she return to her northern home and dwell alone, his image would never return. She could not even now recall the lineaments of that immortal lover. The life of the imagination was past. Realities multiplied; no doubt she was converging swiftly upon one so hideous as to make her wish she had never been born. Any day she might be formally introduced over a dish of tea to a degraded, broken creature whom all the world despised as a man, and who she would be forced to remind herself was the author of the poems of Byam Warner. Byron, at least, had never been a common drunkard. Picturesque in even his dissipations, he had been a superb romantic figure to the last. But this man! She could hear the struggle and rattle of romance as it died within her. Oh, that she had never seen Nevis, that her father had lived, that she could have gone on----! Then a peremptory thought a.s.serted itself. The time was come for her to live. To dream for twenty-two years was enough. She must take up her part in life, grasp its realities, help others if she could. She could not love this poor outcast, but were she offered a share in his redemption she should embrace the circ.u.mstance as a sacred duty.

In time, perhaps, she might even marry. That dreadful old woman was right, no doubt, it was her manifest destiny. Certainly she should like to have children and a fine establishment of her own. Lord Hunsdon was unacceptable, but doubtless a prepossessing suitor would arrive before long, and when he did she would marry him gladly and live rationally and dream no more. And when she reached this decision she wept, and could not go down to luncheon; but she did not retire from the mental step she had taken.

CHAPTER VI

Her mind had time to recover its balance.

It was a fortnight and more before she met Byam Warner. Lady Hunsdon, to her secret wrath and amazement, met defeat with the poet himself.

He replied politely to her ladys.h.i.+p's flattering notes, but only to remind her that he was very busy, that he had been a recluse for some years, that he was too much out of health to be fit for the society of ladies. The estimable Hunsdon, after one fruitless interview, invariably found the poet from home when he called. ”The ma.s.sa” was up in the hills. He was on St. Kitts. He was visiting relatives on Antigua. Had he been in London he could not more successfully have protected himself. Lord Hunsdon was a man of stubborn purpose, but he could not search the closed rooms along the gallery.

But the poet's indifference to social patronage at least accomplished one of the objects upon which Lady Hunsdon had set her heart. The guests of Bath House, vaguely curious, or properly scandalised, at the first, soon became quite feverish to meet the distinguished friend of Lord Hunsdon. So rapidly does a fas.h.i.+on, a fad, leap from bulb to blossom in idle minds, that before a fortnight was out even the young men were anxious to extend the hand of good fellows.h.i.+p, while as for the young ladies, they dreamed of placing his reformation to their own private account, learned his less subtle poems by heart, and began to write him anonymous notes.

Meanwhile, Anne, hoping that his purpose would prove of a consistency with his habits, and determined to dismiss him from her thoughts, found sufficient pleasure and distraction in her daily life. She made her short skirts--several hemmed strips gathered into a belt!--and walked about the island in the early morning. The negroes singing in the golden cane fields, the women walking along the white road with their swinging hips, immense baskets poised on their heads, pic'nees trotting behind, or clinging to their flanks, the lonely odorous, silent jungles in the high recesses, the cold fringe of forest close to the lost crater, the house in which Nelson courted and married his bride and the church in which the marriage certificate is still kept; she visited them all and alone. In the afternoon she drove with her aunt, their phaeton one of a gay procession, stopping sometimes at one of the Great Houses, where she was taken by the young people out to the mill to see the grinding and partake of ”sling;” home in the cool of the evening to dress for the long dinner and brilliant evening. She would not dance, but she made several friends among the young men, notably that accomplished lady-killer and _arbiter elegantiarum_, Mr.

Abergenny, so prosilient in the London of his day; and found herself in a fair way to be disliked thoroughly by all the other young women save Lady Mary Denbigh; who, somewhat to her embarra.s.sment, showed a distinct preference for her society, particularly when Lord Hunsdon was in attendance. The men she liked better than she had believed possible, estimating them by their suspiciously small waists, their pinched feet, and hair so carefully curled and puffed out at the side; but although Lord Hunsdon's attentions were now unmistakable, she liked him none the better that she esteemed him the more, and was glad of the refuge the admiration of the other men afforded her.

And then, without any preliminary sign of capitulation, Byam Warner wrote to Lady Hunsdon announcing that he now felt sufficiently recovered to pay his devoirs to one who had been so kind, apologised for any apparent discourtesy, and asked permission to drink a dish of tea with her on the following evening.

Lady Hunsdon was quite carried out of herself by this victory, for there was a Lady Toppington at Bath House, whose husband was in the present cabinet and a close friend of Peel. She had given the finest ball of the season to signalise the return of the Tories to power, and would have taken quick possession of the social reins had Lady Hunsdon laid them down for a moment. Politics enjoyed a rest on Nevis, but other interests loomed large in proportion, and the apparent defeat of the hitherto invulnerable leader of _ton_ excited both joy and hope in the breast of Lady Toppington and her little court. Now did Lady Hunsdon sweep rivals aside with her flexible eyebrows, and on the evening when she was able to announce her triumph, she was besieged in her stately chair, not unlike a throne.

But she was deaf to hints and bolder hopes. She would not thrust a shy young man, long a hermit, into a miscellaneous company when he had come merely to drink tea with herself and son and a few intimate friends. Later, of course, they should all meet him, but they must possess their souls in patience. To this dictum they submitted as gracefully as possible, but they were not so much in awe of Lady Hunsdon as to forbear to peep from windows and sequestered nooks on the following evening at nine o'clock, when Byam Warner emerged from the palm avenue, ran hurriedly up the long flights of steps between the terraces, and, escorted by Lord Hunsdon, who met him at the door, up to the suite of his hostess.

Anne was standing in the deep embrasure of the window when he entered the sitting-room, where she, in common with Lady Constance Mortlake, Lady Mary Denbigh, Mrs. Nunn, and Miss Bargarny, who was a favourite of Lady Hunsdon and would take no denial, had been bidden to do honour to the poet. She heard Lady Hunsdon's dulcet icy tones greet him and present him to her guests, the ceremonious responses of the ladies--but not a syllable from Warner--before she steeled herself to turn and walk forward. But the ordeal she had antic.i.p.ated was still to face. Warner did not raise his eyes as her name was p.r.o.nounced. He merely bowed mechanically and had the appearance of not having removed his gaze from the floor since he entered the room. He was deathly pale, and his lips were closely pressed as if to preserve their firmness. Anne, emboldened by a shyness greater than her own, and relieved of the immediate prospect of meeting his eyes, examined him curiously after he had taken a chair and the others were amiably covering his silence with their chatter. He had dressed himself in an old but immaculate white linen suit with a high collar and small necktie. It was evident that he had always been very thin, for his clothes, una.s.sisted by stays, fitted without a wrinkle, although his shoulders were perhaps more bowed than when his tailor had measured him. His hair was properly cut and parted, but although he was still young, its black was bright with silver. His head and brow were n.o.bly formed, his set features fine and sensitive, but his thin face was lined and gray. It was unmistakably the face of a dissipated man, but oddly enough the chin was not noticeably weak, and the ideality of the brow, and the delicacy of the nostril and upper lip were unaltered.

Nevertheless, and in spite of the suggestion of ease which still lingered about his tall figure, there was something so abject about his whole appearance, his painful self-consciousness at finding himself once more among people that had justly cast him out was so apparent, that Anne longed for an excuse to bid him go forth and hide himself once more. But to dismiss him was the part of Lady Hunsdon, who had no intention of doing anything of the sort. It is doubtful if either she or any of the others saw aught in his bearing but the natural embarra.s.sment of a shy man at finding himself once more within the enchanted circle. Lady Hunsdon expatiated upon the beauty of Nevis, long familiar to her through his works, vowed that she had come to the island only to see for herself how much he had exaggerated, but was quite vanquished and speechless. Not to have met her son's most valued friend would have blurred and flawed the wonderful experience.

Warner bowed gravely once or twice, but did not raise his eyes, to Anne's continued relief: she dreaded what she must meet in them. If the rest of his face was a ruin, what sinks of iniquity, what wells of horror, must be those recording features? There were lines about them and not from laughter! He looked as if he had never smiled. She pitied him so deeply that she could have wept, for she had never seen an unhappier mortal; but she had no desire to approach him further.

Miss Bargarny poured the tea, and when she pa.s.sed his cup, roguishly quoted a couplet from one of his poems; lines that had no reference to tea--G.o.d knows, he had never written about tea--but which tripped from her tongue so gracefully that they had the effect of sounding apropos.

He blushed slightly and bowed again; and shortly after, when all the cups had been handed about and he had drained his own, seemed to recover his poise, for he addressed a few remarks to Lady Hunsdon, at whose right he sat. Anne, who was seated some distance from the table could not even hear his voice, but Lady Hunsdon received such as he ventured upon with so much _empress.e.m.e.nt_, that he manifestly rose in courage; in a few moments he was extending his attention to Lady Mary Denbigh, who leaned forward with an exalted expression shaded by ringlets, raising her imperceptible bosom with an eloquent sigh. By this time Lord Hunsdon was talking into Anne's ear and she could hear nothing of the conversation opposite, although now and again she caught a syllable from a low toneless voice. But his first agony was pa.s.sed as well as her own, and she endeavoured to forget him in her swain's comments upon the political news arrived with the packet that afternoon. When tea was over and Miss Bargarny, who cultivated liveliness of manner, had engaged the poet in a discussion upon the relative merits of Sh.e.l.ley and Nathaniel P. Willis--astonis.h.i.+ngly original on her part, mild to the outposts of indifference on his--Anne followed Hunsdon to the other side of the room to look over an alb.u.m of his mother's, just unpacked. It contained calotypes of the most distinguished men and women of the day, and Anne, who had barely seen a daguerreotype before, and never a presentment of the famous people of her time, became so absorbed that she forgot the poet to whose spirit hers had been wedded these five years, and whose visible part had sickened the very depths of her being. Lord Hunsdon had the pleasure of watching her kindling eyes as he told her personal details of each of his friends, and when Anne cried out that she was living in a bit of contemporary history, he too flushed, and felt that his suit prospered. But Anne was thinking as little of him as of Warner, and so intent was she upon the ugly striking physiognomy of the author of ”Venetia,” with his Byronic curls and flowing collar, that she was hardly aware that Lord Hunsdon's attentions had been claimed by his mother; who skilfully transferred him to the side of Lady Mary.