35. THE HOTEL (continued), AND THE QUAY IN FRONT
Ethelberta, having arrived there some time earlier, had gone
straight to her aunt, whom she found sitting behind a large ledger
in the office, making up the accounts with her husband, a well-
framed reflective man with a grey beard. M. Moulin bustled, waited
for her remarks and replies, and made much of her in a general way,
when Ethelberta said, what she had wanted to say instantly, 'Has a
gentleman called Mr. Neigh been here?'
'O yes--I think it is Neigh--there's a card upstairs,' replied her
aunt. 'I told him you were alone at the cathedral, and I believe he
walked that way. Besides that one, another has come for you--a Mr.
Ladywell, and he is waiting.'
'Not for me?'
'Yes, indeed. I thought he seemed so anxious, under a sort of
assumed calmness, that I recommended him to remain till you came
in.'
'Goodness, aunt; why did you?' Ethelberta said, and thought how much
her mother's sister resembled her mother in doings of that sort.
'I thought he had some good reason for seeing you. Are these men
intruders, then?'
'O no--a woman who attempts a public career must expect to be
treated as public property: what would be an intrusion on a
domiciled gentlewoman is a tribute to me. You cannot have celebrity
and sex-privilege both.' Thus Ethelberta laughed off the awkward
conjuncture, inwardly deploring the unconscionable maternal meddling
which had led to this, though not resentfully, for she had too much
staunchness of heart to decry a parent's misdirected zeal. Had the
clanship feeling been universally as strong as in the Chickerel
family, the fable of the well-bonded fagot might have remained
unwritten.
Ladywell had sent her a letter about getting his picture of herself
engraved for an illustrated paper, and she had not replied,
considering that she had nothing to do with the matter, her form and
feature having been given in the painting as no portrait at all, but
as those of an ideal. To see him now would be vexatious; and yet it
was chilly and formal to an ungenerous degree to keep aloof from
him, sitting lonely in the same house. 'A few weeks hence,' she
thought, 'when Menlove's disclosures make me ridiculous, he may
slight me as a lackey's girl, an upstart, an adventuress, and hardly
return my bow in the street. Then I may wish I had given him no
personal cause for additional bitterness.' So, putting off the fine
lady, Ethelberta thought she would see Ladywell at once.
Ladywell was unaffectedly glad to meet her; so glad, that Ethelberta
wished heartily, for his sake, there could be warm friendship
between herself and him, as well as all her lovers, without that
insistent courtship-and-marriage question, which sent them all
scattering like leaves in a pestilent blast, at enmity with one
another. She was less pleased when she found that Ladywell, after
saying all there was to say about his painting, gently signified
that he had been misinformed, as he believed, concerning her future
intentions, which had led to his absenting himself entirely from
her; the remark being of course, a natural product of her mother's
injudicious message to him.
She cut him short with terse candour. 'Yes,' she said, 'a false
report is in circulation. I am not yet engaged to be married to any
one, if that is your meaning.'
Ladywell looked cheerful at this frank answer, and said tentatively,
'Am I forgotten?'
'No; you are exactly as you always were in my mind.'
'Then I have been cruelly deceived. I was guided too much by
appearances, and they were very delusive. I am beyond measure glad
I came here to-day. I called at your house and learnt that you were
here; and as I was going out of town, in any indefinite direction, I
settled then to come this way. What a happy idea it was! To think
of you now--and I may be permitted to--'
'Assuredly you may not. How many times I have told you that!'
'But I do not wish for any formal engagement,' said Ladywell
quickly, fearing she might commit herself to some expression of
positive denial, which he could never surmount. 'I'll wait--I'll
wait any length of time. Remember, you have never absolutely
forbidden my--friendship. Will you delay your answer till some time
hence, when you have thoroughly considered; since I fear it may be a
hasty one now?'
'Yes, indeed; it may be hasty.'
'You will delay it?'
'Yes.'
'When shall it be?'
'Say a month hence. I suggest that, because by that time you will
have found an answer in your own mind: strange things may happen
before then. "She shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not
overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them;
then shall she say, I will go and return to my first"--however,
that's no matter.'
'What--did you--?' Ladywell began, altogether bewildered by this.
'It is a passage in Hosea which came to my mind, as possibly
applicable to myself some day,' she answered. 'It was mere
impulse.'
'Ha-ha!--a jest--one of your romances broken loose. There is no law
for impulse: that is why I am here.'
Thus fancifully they conversed till the interview concluded.
Getting her to promise that she would see him again, Ladywell
retired to a sitting-room on the same landing, in which he had been
writing letters before she came up. Immediately upon this her aunt,
who began to suspect that something peculiar was in the wind, came
to tell her that Mr. Neigh had been inquiring for her again.
'Send him in,' said Ethelberta.
Neigh's footsteps approached, and the well-known figure entered.
Ethelberta received him smilingly, for she was getting so used to
awkward juxtapositions that she treated them quite as a natural
situation. She merely hoped that Ladywell would not hear them
talking through the partition.
Neigh scarcely said anything as a beginning: she knew his errand
perfectly; and unaccountable as it was to her, the strange and
unceremonious relationship between them, that had originated in the
peculiar conditions of their first close meeting, was continued now
as usual.
'Have you been able to bestow a thought on the question between us?
I hope so,' said Neigh.
'It is no use,' said Ethelberta. 'Wait a month, and you will not
require an answer. You will not mind speaking low, because of a
person in the next room?'
'Not at all.--Why will that be?'
'I might say; but let us speak of something else.'
'I don't see how we can,' said Neigh brusquely. 'I had no other
reason on earth for calling here. I wished to get the matter
settled, and I could not be satisfied without seeing you. I hate
writing on matters of this sort. In fact I can't do it, and that's
why I am here.'
He was still speaking when an attendant entered with a note.
'Will you excuse me one moment?' said Ethelberta, stepping to the
window and opening the missive. It contained these words only, in a
scrawl so full of deformities that she could hardly piece its
meaning together:--
'I must see you again to-day unless you absolutely deny yourself to
me, which I shall take as a refusal to meet me any more. I will
arrive, punctually, five minutes after you receive this note. Do
pray be alone if you can, and eternally gratify,--Yours,
'MOUNTCLERE.'
'If anything has happened I shall be pleased to wait,' said Neigh,
seeing her concern when she had closed the note.
'O no, it is nothing,' said Ethelberta precipitately. 'Yet I think
I will ask you to wait,' she added, not liking to dismiss Neigh in a
hurry; for she was not insensible to his perseverance in seeking her
over all these miles of sea and land; and secondly, she feared that
if he were to leave on the instant he might run into the arms of
Lord Mountclere and Ladywell.
'I shall be only too happy to stay till you are at leisure,' said
Neigh, in the unimpassioned delivery he used whether his meaning
were a trite compliment or the expression of his most earnest
feeling.
'I may be rather a long time,' said Ethelberta dubiously.
'My time is yours.'
Ethelberta left the room and hurried to her aunt, exclaiming, 'O,
Aunt Charlotte, I hope you have rooms enough to spare for my
visitors, for they are like the fox, the goose, and the corn, in the
riddle; I cannot leave them together, and I can only be with one at
a time. I want the nicest drawing-room you have for an interview of
a bare two minutes with an old gentleman. I am so sorry this has
happened, but it is not altogether my fault! I only arranged to see
one of them; but the other was sent to me by mother, in a mistake,
and the third met with me on my journey: that's the explanation.
There's the oldest of them just come.'
She looked through the glass partition, and under the arch of the
court-gate, as the wheels of the viscount's carriage were heard
outside. Ethelberta ascended to a room on the first floor, Lord
Mountclere was shown up, and the door closed upon them.
At this time Neigh was very comfortably lounging in an arm-chair in
Ethelberta's room on the second floor. This was a pleasant enough
way of passing the minutes with such a tender interview in prospect;
and as he leant he looked with languid and luxurious interest
through the open casement at the spars and rigging of some luggers
on the Seine, the pillars of the suspension bridge, and the scenery
of the Faubourg St. Sever on the other side of the river. How
languid his interest might ultimately have become there is no
knowing; but there soon arose upon his ear the accents of Ethelberta
in low distinctness from somewhere outside the room.
'Yes; the scene is pleasant to-day,' she said. 'I like a view over
a river.'
'I should think the steamboats are objectionable when they stop
here,' said another person.
Neigh's face closed in to an aspect of perplexity. 'Surely that
cannot be Lord Mountclere?' he muttered.
Had he been certain that Ethelberta was only talking to a stranger,
Neigh would probably have felt their conversation to be no business
of his, much as he might have been surprised to find her giving
audience to another man at such a place. But his impression that
the voice was that of his acquaintance, Lord Mountclere, coupled
with doubts as to its possibility, was enough to lead him to rise
from the chair and put his head out of the window.
Upon a balcony beneath him were the speakers, as he had suspected--
Ethelberta and the viscount.
Looking right and left, he saw projecting from the next window the
head of his friend Ladywell, gazing right and left likewise,
apparently just drawn out by the same voice which had attracted
himself.
'What--you, Neigh!--how strange,' came from Ladywell's lips before
he had time to recollect that great coolness existed between himself
and Neigh on Ethelberta's account, which had led to the reduction of
their intimacy to the most attenuated of nods and good-mornings ever
since the Harlequin-rose incident at Cripplegate.
'Yes; it is rather strange,' said Neigh, with saturnine evenness.
'Still a fellow must be somewhere.'
Each then looked over his window-sill downwards, upon the speakers
who had attracted them thither.
Lord Mountclere uttered something in a low tone which did not reach
the young men; to which Ethelberta replied, 'As I have said, Lord
Mountclere, I cannot give you an answer now. I must consider what
to do with Mr. Neigh and Mr. Ladywell. It is too sudden for me to
decide at once. I could not do so until I have got home to England,
when I will write you a letter, stating frankly my affairs and those
of my relatives. I shall not consider that you have addressed me on
the subject of marriage until, having received my letter, you--'
'Repeat my proposal,' said Lord Mountclere.
'Yes.'
'My dear Mrs. Petherwin, it is as good as repeated! But I have no
right to assume anything you don't wish me to assume, and I will
wait. How long is it that I am to suffer in this uncertainty?'
'A month. By that time I shall have grown weary of my other two
suitors.'
'A month! Really inflexible?'
Ethelberta had returned inside the window, and her answer was
inaudible. Ladywell and Neigh looked up, and their eyes met. Both
had been reluctant to remain where they stood, but they were too
fascinated to instantly retire. Neigh moved now, and Ladywell did
the same. Each saw that the face of his companion was flushed.
'Come in and see me,' said Ladywell quickly, before quite
withdrawing his head. 'I am staying in this room.'
'I will,' said Neigh; and taking his hat he left Ethelberta's
apartment forthwith.
On entering the quarters of his friend he found him seated at a
table whereon writing materials were strewn. They shook hands in
silence, but the meaning in their looks was enough.
'Just let me write a note, Ladywell, and I'm your man,' said Neigh
then, with the freedom of an old acquaintance.
'I was going to do the same thing,' said Ladywell.
Neigh then sat down, and for a minute or two nothing was to be heard
but the scratching of a pair of pens, ending on the one side with a
more boisterous scratch, as the writer shaped 'Eustace Ladywell,'
and on the other with slow firmness in the characters 'Alfred
Neigh.'
'There's for you, my fair one,' said Neigh, closing and directing
his letter.
'Yours is for Mrs. Petherwin? So is mine,' said Ladywell, grasping
the bell-pull. 'Shall I direct it to be put on her table with this
one?'
'Thanks.' And the two letters went off to Ethelberta's sitting-
room, which she had vacated to receive Lord Mountclere in an empty
one beneath. Neigh's letter was simply a pleading of a sudden call
away which prevented his waiting till she should return; Ladywell's,
though stating the same reason for leaving, was more of an
upbraiding nature, and might almost have told its reader, were she
to take the trouble to guess, that he knew of the business of Lord
Mountclere with her to-day.
'Now, let us get out of this place,' said Neigh. He proceeded at
once down the stairs, followed by Ladywell, who--settling his
account at the bureau without calling for a bill, and directing his
portmanteau to be sent to the Right-bank railway station--went with
Neigh into the street.
They had not walked fifty yards up the quay when two British
workmen, in holiday costume, who had just turned the corner of the
Rue Jeanne d'Arc, approached them. Seeing him to be an Englishman,
one of the two addressed Neigh, saying, 'Can you tell us the way,
sir, to the Hotel Bold Soldier?'
Neigh pointed out the place he had just come from to the tall young
men, and continued his walk with Ladywell.
Ladywell was the first to break silence. 'I have been considerably
misled, Neigh,' he said; 'and I imagine from what has just happened
that you have been misled too.'
'Just a little,' said Neigh, bringing abstracted lines of meditation
into his face. 'But it was my own fault: for I ought to have known
that these stage and platform women have what they are pleased to
call Bohemianism so thoroughly engrained with their natures that
they are no more constant to usage in their sentiments than they are
in their way of living. Good Lord, to think she has caught old
Mountclere! She is sure to have him if she does not dally with him
so long that he gets cool again.'
'A beautiful creature like her to think of marrying such an
infatuated idiot as he!'
'He can give her a title as well as younger men. It will not be the
first time that such matches have been made.'
'I can't believe it,' said Ladywell vehemently. 'She has too much
poetry in her--too much good sense; her nature is the essence of all
that's romantic. I can't help saying it, though she has treated me
cruelly.'
'She has good looks, certainly. I'll own to that. As for her
romance and good-feeling, that I leave to you. I think she has
treated you no more cruelly, as you call it, than she has me, come
to that.'
'She told me she would give me an answer in a month,' said Ladywell
emotionally.
'So she told me,' said Neigh.
'And so she told him,' said Ladywell.
'And I have no doubt she will keep her word to him in her usual
precise manner.'
'But see what she implied to me! I distinctly understood from her
that the answer would be favourable.'
'So did I.'
'So does he.'
'And he is sure to be the one who gets it, since only one of us can.
Well, I wouldn't marry her for love, money, nor--'
'Offspring.'
'Exactly: I would not. "I'll give you an answer in a month "--to
all three of us! For God's sake let's sit down here and have
something to drink.'
They drew up a couple of chairs to one of the tables of a wine-shop
close by, and shouted to the waiter with the vigour of persons going
to the dogs. Here, behind the horizontal-headed trees that dotted
this part of the quay, they sat over their bottles denouncing
womankind till the sun got low down upon the river, and the houses
on the further side began to be toned by a blue mist. At last they
rose from their seats and departed, Neigh to dine and consider his
route, and Ladywell to take the train for Dieppe.
While these incidents had been in progress the two workmen had found
their way into the hotel where Ethelberta was staying. Passing
through the entrance, they stood at gaze in the court, much
perplexed as to the door to be made for; the difficulty was solved
by the appearance of Cornelia, who in expectation of them had been
for the last half-hour leaning over the sill of her bed-room window,
which looked into the interior, amusing herself by watching the
movements to and fro in the court beneath.
After conversing awhile in undertones as if they had no real right
there at all, Cornelia told them she would call their sister, if an
old gentleman who had been to see her were gone again. Cornelia
then ran away, and Sol and Dan stood aloof, till they had seen the
old gentleman alluded to go to the door and drive off, shortly after
which Ethelberta ran down to meet them.
'Whatever have you got as your luggage?' she said, after hearing a
few words about their journey, and looking at a curious object like
a huge extended accordion with bellows of gorgeous-patterned
carpeting.
'Well, I thought to myself,' said Sol, ''tis a terrible bother about
carrying our things. So what did I do but turn to and make a
carpet-bag that would hold all mine and Dan's too. This, you see,
Berta, is a deal top and bottom out of three-quarter stuff, stained
and varnished. Well, then you see I've got carpet sides tacked on
with these brass nails, which make it look very handsome; and so
when my bag is empty 'twill shut up and be only a couple of boards
under yer arm, and when 'tis open it will hold a'most anything you
like to put in it. That portmantle didn't cost more than three
half-crowns altogether, and ten pound wouldn't ha' got anything so
strong from a portmantle maker, would it, Dan?'
'Well, no.'
'And then you see, Berta,' Sol continued in the same earnest tone,
and further exhibiting the article, 'I've made this trap-door in the
top with hinges and padlock complete, so that--'
'I am afraid it is tiring you after your journey to explain all this
to me,' said Ethelberta gently, noticing that a few Gallic smilers
were gathering round. 'Aunt has found a nice room for you at the
top of the staircase in that corner--"Escalier D" you'll see painted
at the bottom--and when you have been up come across to me at number
thirty-four on this side, and we'll talk about everything.'
'Look here, Sol,' said Dan, who had left his brother and gone on to
the stairs. 'What a rum staircase--the treads all in little blocks,
and painted chocolate, as I am alive!'
'I am afraid I shall not be able to go on to Paris with you, after
all,' Ethelberta continued to Sol. 'Something has just happened
which makes it desirable for me to return at once to England. But I
will write a list of all you are to see, and where you are to go, so
that it will make little difference, I hope.'
Ten minutes before this time Ethelberta had been frankly and
earnestly asked by Lord Mountclere to become his bride; not only so,
but he pressed her to consent to have the ceremony performed before
they returned to England. Ethelberta had unquestionably been much
surprised; and, barring the fact that the viscount was somewhat
ancient in comparison with herself, the temptation to close with his
offer was strong, and would have been felt as such by any woman in
the position of Ethelberta, now a little reckless by stress of
circumstances, and tinged with a bitterness of spirit against
herself and the world generally. But she was experienced enough to
know what heaviness might result from a hasty marriage, entered into
with a mind full of concealments and suppressions which, if told,
were likely to stop the marriage altogether; and after trying to
bring herself to speak of her family and situation to Lord
Mountclere as he stood, a certain caution triumphed, and she
concluded that it would be better to postpone her reply till she
could consider which of two courses it would be advisable to adopt;
to write and explain to him, or to explain nothing and refuse him.
The third course, to explain nothing and hasten the wedding, she
rejected without hesitation. With a pervading sense of her own
obligations in forming this compact it did not occur to her to ask
if Lord Mountclere might not have duties of explanation equally with
herself, though bearing rather on the moral than the social aspects
of the case.
Her resolution not to go on to Paris was formed simply because Lord
Mountclere himself was proceeding in that direction, which might
lead to other unseemly rencounters with him had she, too, persevered
in her journey. She accordingly gave Sol and Dan directions for
their guidance to Paris and back, starting herself with Cornelia the
next day to return again to Knollsea, and to decide finally and for
ever what to do in the vexed question at present agitating her.
Never before in her life had she treated marriage in such a terribly
cool and cynical spirit as she had done that day; she was almost
frightened at herself in thinking of it. How far any known system
of ethics might excuse her on the score of those curious pressures
which had been brought to bear upon her life, or whether it could
excuse her at all, she had no spirit to inquire. English society
appeared a gloomy concretion enough to abide in as she contemplated
it on this journey home; yet, since its gloominess was less an
essential quality than an accident of her point of view, that point
of view she had determined to change.
There lay open to her two directions in which to move. She might
annex herself to the easy-going high by wedding an old nobleman, or
she might join for good and all the easy-going low, by plunging back
to the level of her family, giving up all her ambitions for them,
settling as the wife of a provincial music-master named Julian, with
a little shop of fiddles and flutes, a couple of old pianos, a few
sheets of stale music pinned to a string, and a narrow back parlour,
wherein she would wait for the phenomenon of a customer. And each
of these divergent grooves had its fascinations, till she reflected
with regard to the first that, even though she were a legal and
indisputable Lady Mountclere, she might be despised by my lord's
circle, and left lone and lorn. The intermediate path of accepting
Neigh or Ladywell had no more attractions for her taste than the
fact of disappointing them had qualms for her conscience; and how
few these were may be inferred from her opinion, true or false, that
two words about the spigot on her escutcheon would sweep her lovers'
affections to the antipodes. She had now and then imagined that her
previous intermarriage with the Petherwin family might efface much
besides her surname, but experience proved that the having been wife
for a few weeks to a minor who died in his father's lifetime, did
not weave such a tissue of glory about her course as would resist a
speedy undoing by startling confessions on her station before her
marriage, and her environments now.
