Brooke's Daughter Part 17

The young doctor sprang to his feet. "I a stranger!" he said. "I, who have known and appreciated and worked with Caspar Brooke for the last half dozen years--I to be called a stranger by his daughter? I don't think that's fair: I don't indeed."

He paused and put his tea-cup down upon the table. "If you'll only think for a minute, Miss Brooke," he said, entreatingly, with such a sudden softening of voice and manner that Lesley sat amazed, "I cannot believe but that you'll pardon me. I owe so much to your father--he has been a guide, a helper, almost a prophet to me, ever since I came across him when I was a medical student at King's College Hospital, and I only want everybody to see him with my eyes--loving and reverent eyes, I can tell you, though I wouldn't say so to everybody, seeing that love and reverence seem to have gone out of fas.h.i.+on! But to his daughter----"

"His daughter surely does not need to be taught how to think of him by another, whether he be an old friend or a comparative stranger," said Lesley. "She can learn to know him for herself."

"But _can_ she?"--Maurice Kenyon's Irish strain, which always led him to be more eager and explicit in speech than if he had been entirely of Anglo-Saxon nationality, was running away with him. "Are you sure that she can? Look here, Miss Brooke: you come to your father's house straight from a French convent, I believe. What _can_ you know of English life? of the strife of political parties, of literary parties, of faiths and theories and pa.s.sions? You are plunged into the midst of a new world--it can't help but be strange to you at first, and you must feel a trifle forlorn and miserable--at least I should think so----"

Lesley was in a dilemma. Kenyon's words were so true, so apt, that they brought involuntary tears to her eyes. She could get rid of the lump in her throat only by working herself up into a rage: she could dissipate the tears only by making her eyes flash with anger. The melting mood was not to her taste. She chose the more hostile tone.

"Mr. Kenyon, excuse me, but you have no right at all to talk about my being miserable. You may know my father: you do not know me."

"But knowing your father so well----"

"That has nothing to do with it. Am I not a separate human being? What have you to do with me and my feelings? You say that I do not know English ways--is it an English way," cried Lesley, indignantly, "to try to thrust yourself into a girl's confidence, and intrude where you have not been asked to enter? Then English ways are not those that I approve."

Maurice Kenyon felt that his cause was lost. He had gone rather white about the lips as he listened to Lesley's protest. Of course, he had offended her by his abominable want of tact, he told himself--his intrusive proffer of unneeded sympathy and help. But it was not in his nature to acknowledge himself beaten, and to take his leave without a word. His ardor impelled him to speak.

"Miss Brooke, I most sincerely beg your pardon," he said, in tones of deep humility. "I see that I have made a mistake--but I a.s.sure you that it was from the purest motives. I don't"--forgetting his apologetic att.i.tude for a moment--"I _don't_ think that you realize what a truly great man your father is--how good, as well as great. I _don't_ think you understand him. But I beg your pardon for seeming to think that I could enlighten you. Of course, it must seem like impertinent interference to you. But if you knew"--with a tremor of disappointment in his voice--"what your father has been to me, you would not perhaps be so surprised at my wanting his daughter to sympathize with me in my feelings. I had no idea"--this was intended to be a Parthian shot--"that my admiration would be thought insulting."

He bowed very low, and turned to depart, vowing to himself that nothing would induce him ever to enter that drawing-room again; but Lesley, pale and wide-eyed, called him back.

"Stay, Mr. Kenyon," she said, rising from her seat.

He halted, his hat in one hand, his fingers still on the k.n.o.b of the door.

"I never meant to say," said Lesley, confronting him, "that I was incapable of sympathy with you in admiration for my father. With my feeling towards him you have nothing to do--that is all. I am not angry because you express your own sentiments, but because----"

She stopped and bit her lip.

"----Because I dared divine what yours might be?" asked Maurice, boldly, and with an accent of reproach. "Is it possible that yours _can_ be like mine? and am I to blame for saying so? How can you estimate the worth of his work? You, a girl fresh from school! I know it is very rude to say so, but I cannot help it. If you were more of a woman, Miss Brooke, if you had had a wider experience of life and mankind, you would acknowledge that you could not possibly know very much of what your father had done, and you would be glad of the opportunity of learning!"

This was just the speech calculated to make Lesley furiously angry, and it was with great difficulty that she restrained the words that rose impetuously to her lips. She stood motionless and silent, and Maurice mistook her silence for that of stupid obstinacy, when it was the silence of wounded feeling and pa.s.sionate resentment. He went on hotly, for he began to feel himself once more in the right.

"Of course you _may_ know all about him: you may know as much as I who have lived and worked at his side, so to speak, for the last six years!

You may be familiar with his writings: you may have seen the _Tribune_ every week, and you may know that wonderful book of his--'The Unexplored' I mean, not the essays--by heart; there may be nothing that I can tell you, even about his gallant fight for one of the hospitals last year, or the splendid work he has set going at the Macclesfield Buildings in North London, or the way in which his name is blessed by hundreds--yes hundreds--of men and women and children whom he has helped to lead a better life! You may know all about these things, and plenty more, but you _can't_ know--coming here without having seen him since you were a baby--you _can't_ know the beauty of his character, or the depths of his sympathy for the erring, or the tremendous efforts that he has made, and is still making, for the laboring poor. You can't know this, or else I'd tell you, Miss Brooke, what you would be doing! You would be working heart and soul to lighten his burdens and relieve him of the incessant drudgery that interferes with his higher work, instead of sitting here day after day reading yellow-backed novels in a drawing-room."

And then, in a white heat of indignation, Mr. Maurice Kenyon took his leave. But he did not know the consternation that he had created in Lesley's mind. She was positively frightened by his vehemence. But she had never seen an angry man before--never been spoken to in strong masculine tones of reprobation and disgust, such as it seemed to her that Maurice Kenyon had used. And for what? She did not know. She was not aware that she had behaved in an unfilial manner to her father. She did not realize that her cold demeanor, her puzzled and bewildered looks, had told Mr. Kenyon far more than she would have cared to confess about the state of her feelings. For the rest, Ethel's words and Maurice's vivid imagination were to blame. And, angry as Lesley was, she felt with a thrill of dismay that Mr. Kenyon's discourteous words were perfectly true. She did not appreciate her father; she did not know anything about him. All that she had hitherto surmised was bad. And here came a young man, apparently sane, certainly handsome and clever, although disagreeable--to tell her that Caspar Brooke was a hero, a man among ten thousand, an intellectual giant, an uncrowned king. It was too ridiculous; and Lesley laughed aloud--although as she laughed she found that her eyes were wet with tears.

CHAPTER XII.

"THE UNEXPLORED."

Lesley retained for some time a feeling of distinct anger against Maurice Kenyon, even while she came to acknowledge the truth of divers of his words. But their truth, she told herself indignantly, was no justification of his brutality. He was horribly rude and meddlesome and intrusive. What business was it of his whether she gave her father or not the meed of praise that he deserved? Why should she be lectured for it by a stranger? Maurice Kenyon's conduct--Maurice Kenyon himself--was intolerable, and she should hate him all the days of her life.

And in good sooth, Maurice's behavior is somewhat hard to excuse. He certainly had no business at all to attack Lesley on the subject of her feelings about her father, and his mode of attack was almost ludicrously wanting in judgment and discrimination. But that which tact and judgment might perhaps have failed to effect, Maurice's sledge-hammer blows brought home to Lesley's understanding. He was to blame; but he did some good, nevertheless. When the first shock was over, Lesley began to reflect that her own world had been a narrow one, and that possibly there were others equally good. And this was a great step to a girl who had been educated in a French convent school.

Part of Lesley's inheritance from her father, and a part of which she was quite unconscious, was a singularly fair mind. She could judge and balance and discriminate with an impartiality which was far beyond the power of the ordinary woman. Being young her impartiality was now and then disturbed by little gusts of pa.s.sion and prejudice; but the faculty was there to be strengthened by every opportunity of exercising it. This faculty had been stirred within her when Lady Alice first told her of her father's existence; but she had tried to stifle it as an accursed thing. She held it wicked to be anything but a partizan. And now it had revived within her, and was urging her to form no rash conclusions, to be careful in her thoughts about her new acquaintances, to weigh her opinions before expressing them. And all this in spite of a native fire and vivacity of temperament which might have led her into difficulties but for the counterbalancing power of judgment which she had inherited from the father whom she had been taught to despise.

So although she raged with all her young heart and strength against Mr.

Kenyon's construction of her feelings and motives, she had the good sense to ask herself whether there had not been some truth in what he said. After all, what did she know of this strange father of hers, whose every action she judged so harshly? She had heard her mother's story, which certainly placed him in a very unamiable light. But many years had gone by since Lady Alice left her husband, and a man's character might be modified in a dozen years or so. Lesley was willing to go so far. He might even be repentant for the past. Then Sister Rose's words came back to her. She, Lesley, might become the instrument of reconciliation between two who had been long divided!

The color flashed into her face and slowly faded away. What chance had she of gaining her father's ear? True, she could descant by the hour together, if she had the opportunity, on Lady Alice's sweetness and goodness; but when could she get the opportunity of speaking about them to him? He looked on her with an eye of mistrust, almost of contempt.

She had been brought up in a school of thought which he despised. How far away from her now, by the by, seemed the old life with which she had been familiar for so many years! the life of simple duties, of easy routine, of praise and tenderness and placid contentment. She was out in the world now, as other girls were who had once shared with her the convent life near Paris. Where were they now--Aglae and Marthe and Lucile and Anastasie? Did they all find life in the world as difficult as Lesley found it?

No, there was little chance, she decided, of acting as a mediatrix between her parents. Her father would not listen to any word she might say. And she was quite sure that she could never speak of his private affairs to him. They had been divided so many years; they were strangers now, not father and daughter, as they ought to be.

Curious to relate, a feeling of resentment against the decree that had so long severed her from him rose up in Lesley's heart. It was not exactly a feeling of resentment against her mother. Rather it was a protest against fate--the fate that had made that father a sealed book to her, although known and read of all the world beside. If there _were_ admirable things in his nature, why had she been kept in ignorance of them?--why told the one ugly fact of his life which seemed to throw all the rest into shadow? It was not fair, Lesley very characteristically remarked to herself: it certainly was not fair.

If he was so distinguished a man in literature as Maurice Kenyon represented him to be, why had she never been allowed to read his books?

She wanted, for the first time, to read something that he had written.

She supposed she might; for there was no one now to choose her books for her. Only a day or two before she had dutifully asked her Aunt Sophia if she might read a book that Ethel had lent her (it was the yellow-backed novel, the sight of which had made Maurice so angry), and she had said, with her horrid little laugh--oh, how Lesley hated Aunt Sophy's laugh!----

"Good heavens, child, read what you like! You're old enough!"

And Lesley had felt crushed, but resolved to avail herself of the permission. But where should she find her father's works? She would cut out her tongue before she asked Aunt Sophy for them, or her father, or the Kenyons, or Mrs. Romaine.

She set to work to search the library shelves, and was soon rewarded by the discovery of a set of _Tribunes_, a weekly paper in which she knew that her father wrote. She turned over the leaves, with a dazed feeling of bewilderment. None of the articles were signed. And she had no clue to those that were written by her father or anybody else.

She returned the volumes to their places with a heavy sigh, and continued to look through the shelves--especially through the rows of ponderous quartos and octavos, where she thought that her father's works would probably be found. Simple Lesley! It was quite a shock to her when at last--after she had relinquished her search in heartsick disappointment--she suddenly came across a little paper volume bearing this legend:--

"The Unexplored. By Caspar Brooke. Price One s.h.i.+lling. Tenth Edition."

She took the book in her hand and gazed at it curiously. This was the "wonderful book" of which Maurice Kenyon had spoken. This little s.h.i.+lling pamphlet--really it was little more than a pamphlet! It seemed an extraordinary thing to her that her father should write _s.h.i.+lling books_. "A s.h.i.+lling shocker" was a name that Lesley happened to know, and a thing that she heartily despised. Her taste had been formed on the best models, and Lady Alice had encouraged her in a critical disparagement of cheap literature. Still--if Caspar Brooke had written it, and Maurice Kenyon had recommended it, Lesley felt, with flus.h.i.+ng cheek and suspicious eyes, that it was a thing which she ought to read.

Holding it gingerly, as if it were a dangerous combustible which might explode at any moment, she hurried away with it to her own room, turned the key in the lock, and sat down to read.

At the risk of fatiguing my readers, I must say a word or two about Caspar Brooke's romance "The Unexplored." It had obtained a wonderful popularity in all English-speaking countries, and was well known in every quarter of the globe. Even Lady Alice must have seen it advertised and reviewed and quoted a hundred times. Possibly she had refused to read it, or closed her eyes to its merits. Possibly what a man wrote seemed to her of little importance compared to that which a man showed himself in his daily life. At any rate, she had never mentioned the book to her daughter Lesley. She certainly moved in a circle which was slightly deaf to the echoes of literary fame.

"The Unexplored" was one of those powerful romances of an ideal society with which recent days have made us all familiar. But Caspar's book was the forerunner of the shoal which the last ten years have cast upon our sh.o.r.es. He was one of the first to follow in the steps of Sir Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney, and picture life as it should be rather than as it is. His hero, an Englishman of our own time, puzzled and distressed at the social misery and discord surrounding him, leaves England and joins an exploring expedition. In the unexplored recesses of the new world he comes across a colony founded in ancient days by a people who have preserved an idyllic purity of heart and manners, together with a fuller artistic life and truer civilization than our own. To these people he brings his stories of London as it is to-day, and fills their gentle hearts with amazement and dismay. A slender thread of love-making gives the book its romantic charm. He gains the affections of the king's daughter, a beautiful maiden, who has been attracted to him from the very first; and with her he hopes to realize all that has been unknown to him of n.o.ble life in his own country. But the book does not end with its hero and heroine lapped in slothful content. For the heart of the maiden burns with sorrow for the toiling poor of the great European cities of which he has told her: to her this region has also the charm of "The Unexplored," and the book ends with a hint that she and her husband are about to wend their way, with a new gospel in their hand, to the very city of which he had shaken the dust from his shoes in disgust before he found an unexplored Arcadia.

There was not much novelty in the plot--the charm of the book lay in the way the story was told, in the beauty of the language; and also--last but not least--the burning earnestness of the author's tone as he contrasted the hopeless, heartless misery of the poor in our great cities with the ideal life of man. His pictures of London life, drawn from the street, the hospital, the workhouse, were touched in with merciless fidelity: his satire on the modern benevolence and modern civilization which allows such evils to flourish side by side with lecture-rooms, churches, intellectual culture, and refined luxury was keen and scathing. It was a book which had startled people, but had also brought many new truths to their minds. And although no one could be more startled, yet no one could be more avid for the truth than the author's own daughter, of whom he had never thought in the very least when he wrote the book.

Lesley rose from her perusal of it with burning cheeks and humid eyes.

She herself, without knowing it, was in much the same position as the heroine of her father's book. Like the girl Ione, in "The Unexplored,"

she had lived in a charmed seclusion, far from the roar of modern civilization, far from the great cities which are the abomination of desolation in our time. Knowledge had come to her filtered through the minds of those who closed their eyes to evil and their ears to tales of sin. She did not know how the poor lived: she had only the vaguest and haziest possible notions concerning misery and want and disease. She was not only pure and innocent, but she was ignorant. She had scarcely ever seen a newspaper. She had read very few novels. She had lived almost all her life with women, and she had imbibed the notion that her marriage was a matter which her mother would arrange without particularly consulting her (Lesley's) inclinations.

To a girl brought up in this way there was much to shock and repel in Caspar Brooke's romance. More than once, indeed, she put it down indignantly: more than once she cried out, in the silence of her room, "Oh, but it can't be true!" Nevertheless, she knew in her heart of hearts that the strong and burning words which she was reading could not have been written were they not sincerely felt. And as for facts, she could easily put them to the test. She could ask other people to tell her whether they were true. Were there really so many criminals in London; so many people "without visible means of subsistence?" so many children going out in a morning to their Board Schools without breakfast? But surely something ought to be done! How could people sit down and allow these things to be? How could her father himself, who wrote about such things, live in comfort, even (compared with the wretchedly poor) in modest luxury, without lifting a finger to help them?

But there Lesley caught herself up. What had Mr. Kenyon said? Had he not spoken of the things that Caspar Brooke had done? For almost the first time Lesley began to wonder what made her father so busy. She had never heard a word concerning the pursuits that Mr. Kenyon had mentioned as so engrossing. "The splendid work at Macclesfield Buildings:" what was that? The people whom he had helped: what people? Whom could she ask?

Not her father himself--that was out of the question. He never spoke to her except on trivial subjects. She remembered with a sudden and painful flash of insight, that conversations between him and his sister were sometimes broken off when she came into the room, or carried on in half-phrases and under-tones. Of course she _had_ heard of Macclesfield Buildings; and of a club and an inst.i.tute and a hospital, and what not; but the words had gone over her head, being dest.i.tute of meaning and of interest for her. She had been blind and deaf, it seemed to her now, ever since she came into the house; but Maurice Kenyon and her father's book had opened her eyes to the reality of things.

Later on in the day her maid came to help her to dress for dinner.

Lesley looked at her with new interest. For was she not one of the great, poor, struggling ma.s.s of human beings whom her father called "the People?" Not the happy peasant-cla.s.s, as depicted in sentimental storybooks: whether that existed or not, Lesley was not learned enough to say: it certainly did not exist in London. She looked at the woman who waited on her with keenly observant eyes. Her name was Mary Kingston, and Lesley knew that she was not one of the prosperous, self-satisfied, over-dressed type, so common amongst ladies' maids; for she had been "out of a situation" for some time, and had fallen into dire straits of poverty. It would not have been like Miss Brooke to hire a common-place, conventional ladies' maid; she really preferred a servant "with a history." Lesley remembered that she had heard of Mary Kingston's past difficulties without noting them.

"Kingston," she said, gently, "do you know much about the poor?"