The Lady Evelyn Part 16

This, then, was the estimate which one strong personality formed of another; the man saying to himself, "I would read this woman's heart!"

the woman asking herself if she must talk architecture until the Earl came to her a.s.sistance. Breaking the ice with a common observation, she remarked that she had seen him galloping across the park and regretted the dilatory habit which kept her in bed.

"Getting up is a foreign art," she said. "It lives in kitchens and places where they scrub. The doctors positively forbid it nowadays.

And, of course, life is too short to disobey the doctors."

Gavin looked at her with the air of a man who has too much common sense to deal in frivolities and rarely troubled to say the thing which was not.

"They talk nonsense," he said quietly; "the profession is becoming far too commercial. It lives and thrives upon the credulity of fools.

Just consider--man is the only animal which does not glory in the Creator's gift, the dawning day and all its wonders. For what do we change it! For the electric light and the champagne which disagrees with us? We borrow of the night and then grumble because we have nothing to offer the day. If men could get up at five o'clock and go to bed at ten, they would begin to understand the realities of living."

Evelyn, much amused at his earnestness and quite understanding that some pleasant originality of character dictated the outburst, looked at him a little mischievously from beneath her long lashes while she said:

"In winter--surely not five o'clock then, Mr. Ord?"

"Not at all," was the quick reply; "we are expected to use our common sense in the matter. A winter's dawn is distinctly unpleasant; have nothing to do with it. A true benefactor of mankind would help us to hibernate. Imagine how splendid it would be to sleep from the twenty-sixth day of December until the first day of April. Those are the months of the income tax--of no interest to you, Lady Evelyn, but of great importance to poor people who are unable to help the Government to throw hay into the sea from the sh.o.r.es of South Africa.

Blot out the winter, by all means; but leave us the summer, and do not expect us to spend the best hours of it in bed."

"Am I, then, personally guilty in the matter? Frankly, you will never convert me. I am hateful before ten o'clock, and if I go riding before that time, the very horses tremble. Consider what going to bed at ten o'clock would mean to us in the season?"

"I have considered it often. We should be spared a large number of very indifferent plays; a great many falsehoods would not be told to our acquaintances; old gentlemen would not, under such circ.u.mstances, need to go to Carlsbad to be scrubbed. You would save vast quant.i.ties of good food; learn what the country is to those who really know it; and, perhaps, discover that strange personality, yourself. Why should we be so frightened of such an excellent companion? Men and women tell you that they do not like to be alone. Is not that to say that they desire to keep self at a distance. The fellow would be troublesome, ask questions, and that sort of thing. But let others always be shouting in our ears (and modern society has excellent lungs), then we keep the stranger out and are glad to be quit of him. Some achieve the same end by work. I am one of them. When my work gets hold of me I cannot answer a common question decently. Sometimes I wake up suddenly and say, 'My dear Gavin, how are you getting on and what have you been doing all this time?' I become solicitous for the fellow and want to peep into his private books. That is often at dawn, Lady Evelyn, just when the sun is shooting up over the horizon. Then a man may not be ashamed to meet himself. For the rest of the time he is often play-acting."

A faint blush came to her cheeks and she turned away her head.

"Why not if play-acting amuses us? Perhaps we are not all contented with that amiable stranger, ourselves. Some other figure of the present or the past may seem more desirable as a friend. Is there any law of Nature which compels us to take one personality rather than another? Cannot you imagine a man or a woman living years of make-believe--play-acting always, if by play-acting they can discover a world more desirable than the one they live in? We speak of imagination as a rare gift. I doubt if it is so. Even little children have their dream-worlds, and they are more remarkable than any books.

I would say that your outlook is too limited. You see one side of life, Mr. Ord, and quarrel with those who can look tolerantly upon both."

Gavin was honest enough to admit that it might be so.

"Yes," he said, "I grant you that the world is sometimes better for make-believe. If we did not deceive ourselves, some of us would commit suicide. The age is to blame for the necessity. We have not color enough in our lives, and even our devotions are often entirely selfish.

Witness the case of a modern millionaire who is proud of being called 'a hustler.' This rogue tells his friends that he has no time for ordinary social intercourse. My answer is that he ought to be hanged out of hand. Such a fellow never comes face to face with himself once in twenty years. Men envy him and yet despise him. Take the meanest hero of mediaeval fiction and place him side by side with a Gould or a Vanderbilt. What a very monarch he becomes! Total up the riches of a trust and remember Mozart died of starvation. Vulgarity everywhere--none of us is free from it. Our very ambitions are advertised."

"And we have not even the courage to hide ourselves in nunneries."

"They would come here with cameras and photograph our habits. No, we must accept the position frankly and make the best of it. That carries me round the circle. By getting up with the sun we see something of ourselves sometimes. Our work is not then the whole occupation of the day."

"But yours, surely, is not work you despise, Mr. Ord?"

"So little that I fear it on that very account. Just imagine how this house is going to make a captive of me. I shall know every stone of it before a month has pa.s.sed. I will tell you then all its truths and all its fables. The dead will become my intimate friends. I shall reconstruct from the beginning. I must do it, for how shall I dare to touch the hallowed walls unless something of the builder's secret is known to me. In six months' time I will show the harvest of dreams.

In six months' time----"

"In six months' time! What an age to wait! I may not be in England then."

"You will return to be my critic."

"I may never return."

"Never return! my dear lady, you could not possibly desert Melbourne Hall. The very stones would cry out upon you."

"Oh," she said, looking straight into his face; "my husband may not like England, you know."

"I will believe it when he has the courage to tell me so."

"Men are generally courageous when it is a question of telling a woman what they do not like. I am to live in Bukharest, be it known. My summers will be spent in the Carpathians. I shall become a child of the primitive colors--the red, the blue, and the orange--which Menie Muriel Dowie tells us are an eternal delight to the eyes. I am promised glorious weeks on the Black Sea, and more glorious weeks on seas which are not black. The sun is always s.h.i.+ning there--why should one want to come back to England?"

Had anyone asked Evelyn why she spoke in this way to a stranger, a man of whose existence she had hardly been aware yesterday, she would certainly have been unable to give a satisfactory answer. To no other in all her life had she spoken so openly and so readily as to this fair-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, who did not appear to have one grain of humbug in all his body. Her surprise was not greater than her pleasure; she would not deny that it pleased her thus to confess intimate thoughts which she had not shared even with her own father.

Gavin, upon his part, a servant of candor always, observed nothing unusual in her freedom; but he could ask himself already if she were in love with the man to whom her future was pledged.

"We are forgetting how to be serious," he rejoined; "that is also one of the vices of the age. People chatter away as though words were enough and the truth of words nothing at all. You do not mean anything you say, and you expect me to listen to you in the same spirit. I decline to do so. If you go to Bukharest, you will come back again before the year is out. As for the blue, red and orange, well, I could as soon imagine you buying an early Victorian sideboard. That is my frank opinion. You must forgive me if it offends?"

He looked straight into her eyes and she did not turn away. Gavin Ord was unlike any man she had known--not by mere cleverness alone, but by that strength of will and character which could not fail to a.s.sert itself in any company, whatever its nature. Here sat one whom, were he to command her, she would certainly obey. Such a possibility of docility astonished Evelyn beyond measure--but it also encouraged her to put a question to him.

"Frank opinions need no forgiveness," she said. "I am longing for more, Mr. Ord. You told me last night that you believed you had met me in London. Please tell me where it was."

She asked the question with some pretty pretence of indifference which did not deceive him for an instant. It is better, he thought, that I should tell her, and so he said, without any affectation whatever:

"I am quite wrong, of course; but when I thought the matter over I remembered that a young actress, who made a great sensation at the Carlton Theatre in May, might have been named for your own sister.

That is what gave me the idea that I had seen you before."

"How strange! Do you also remember the lady's name?"

"Perfectly. All London went mad over her. She called herself Etta Romney, and the play showed just such a house as this. It was the old story of Di Vernon retold, Lady Evelyn."

"You were much taken with the play, it appears?"

"Not with the play at all. But I thought Etta Romney one of the cleverest women I have ever seen on the stage."

"Is she playing still, may I ask?"

"You know that she is not, Lady Evelyn."

"I know it--are you serious?"

"So serious that I shall forget the subject until you choose to speak of it again."

"But it interests me greatly," she pleaded, with that insistence which often attends the discussion of things better avoided. "If I am really so like somebody else, ought I not to be curious? You say----"

"Indeed, I say nothing," he exclaimed quickly, and then in a lower voice--"at least until the Earl has breakfasted."

She did not reply. The Earl entered the room and began at once to speak of Gavin's work and the arrangements which must be made for it.

CHAPTER XIX

FROM THE BELFRY TOWER

Gavin's little band of workmen ran up a light scaffold of ladders and boards for him against the belfry tower, and had it finished upon the morning of the conversation with the Lady Evelyn. To this height he climbed early in the day, when began an examination of the decaying fabric and set down the first lines of the report he had to make to the Earl. The old building was in a shocking state certainly; the plumb-line declared surprising departures from that stately grace of perpendicularity the text-books had taught him to esteem. Gavin should have taken the greatest interest in all this, but he did not. Had you spoken to him yesterday, he would have been ready to declare that nothing on earth could be more fascinating than the very task he now pretended to be engaged upon; but his habitual candor came to his rescue to-day and he now p.r.o.nounced the work to be almost distasteful.

For, in truth, he had discovered a secret as old as man, and the delight of that new knowledge surpa.s.sed the worker's dreams by far.