Robert Falconer Part 82

This was the severest blow he had yet received. He left the room, 'swearing at large.'

Falconer followed him; but what came of it n.o.body ever heard.

Major and Miss Hamilton were married within three months, and went out to India together, taking Nancy Kennedy with them.

CHAPTER X. A NEOPHYTE.

Before many months had pa.s.sed, without the slightest approach to any formal recognition, I found myself one of the church of labour of which Falconer was clearly the bishop. As he is the subject, or rather object of my book, I will now record a fact which may serve to set forth his views more clearly. I gained a knowledge of some of the circ.u.mstances, not merely from the friendly confidences of Miss St. John and Falconer, but from being a kind of a Scotch cousin of Lady Janet Gordon, whom I had taken an opportunity of acquainting with the relation. She was old-fas.h.i.+oned enough to acknowledge it even with some eagerness. The ancient clan-feeling is good in this, that it opens a channel whose very existence is a justification for the flow of simply human feelings along all possible levels of social position. And I would there were more of it. Only something better is coming instead of it--a recognition of the infinite brotherhood in Christ. All other relations, all attempts by churches, by a.s.sociations, by secret societies--of Freemasons and others, are good merely as they tend to destroy themselves in the wider truth; as they teach men to be dissatisfied with their limitations. But I wander; for I mentioned Lady Janet now, merely to account for some of the information I possess concerning Lady Georgina Betterton.

I met her once at my so-called cousin's, whom she patronized as a dear old thing. To my mind, she was worth twenty of her, though she was wrinkled and Scottishly sententious. 'A sweet old bat,' was another epithet of Lady Georgina's. But she came to see her, notwithstanding, and did not refuse to share in her nice little dinners, and least of all, when Falconer was of the party, who had been so much taken with Lady Janet's behaviour to the Marquis of Boarshead, just recorded, that he positively cultivated her acquaintance thereafter.

Lady Georgina was of an old family--an aged family, indeed; so old, in fact, that some envious people professed to think it decrepit with age.

This, however, may well be questioned if any argument bearing on the point may be drawn from the person of Lady Georgina. She was at least as tall as Mary St. John, and very handsome--only with somewhat masculine features and expression. She had very sloping shoulders and a long neck, which took its finest curves when she was talking to inferiors: condescension was her forte. Of the admiration of the men, she had had more than enough, although either they were afraid to go farther, or she was hard to please.

She had never contemplated anything admirable long enough to comprehend it; she had never looked up to man or woman with anything like reverence; she saw too quickly and too keenly into the foibles of all who came near her to care to look farther for their virtues. If she had ever been humbled, and thence taught to look up, she might by this time have been a grand woman, worthy of a great man's wors.h.i.+p. She patronized Miss St. John, considerably to her amus.e.m.e.nt, and nothing to her indignation. Of course she could not understand her. She had a vague notion of how she spent her time; and believing a certain amount of fanaticism essential to religion, wondered how so sensible and ladylike a person as Miss St. John could go in for it.

Meeting Falconer at Lady Janet's, she was taken with him. Possibly she recognized in him a strength that would have made him her master, if he had cared for such a distinction; but nothing she could say attracted more than a pa.s.sing attention on his part. Falconer was out of her sphere, and her influences were powerless to reach him.

At length she began to have a glimmering of the relation of labour between Miss St. John and him, and applied to the former for some enlightenment. But Miss St. John was far from explicit, for she had no desire for such a.s.sistance as Lady Georgina's. What motives next led her to seek the interview I am now about to record, I cannot satisfactorily explain, but I will hazard a conjecture or two, although I doubt if she understood them thoroughly herself.

She was, if not blasee, at least ennuyee, and began to miss excitement, and feel blindly about her for something to make life interesting. She was gifted with far more capacity than had ever been exercised, and was of a large enough nature to have grown sooner weary of trifles than most women of her cla.s.s. She might have been an artist, but she drew like a young lady; she might have been a prophetess, and Byron was her greatest poet. It is no wonder that she wanted something she had not got.

Since she had been foiled in her attempt on Miss St. John, which she attributed to jealousy, she had, in quite another circle, heard strange, wonderful, even romantic stories about Falconer and his doings among the poor. A new world seemed to open before her longing gaze--a world, or a calenture, a mirage? for would she cross the 'wandering fields of barren foam,' to reach the green gra.s.s that did wave on the far sh.o.r.e? the dewless desert to reach the fair water that did lie leagues beyond its pictured sweetness? But I think, mingled with whatever motives she may have had, there must have been some desire to be a n.o.bler, that is a more useful woman than she had been.

She had not any superabundance of feminine delicacy, though she had plenty of good-breeding, and she trusted to her position in society to cover the eccentricity of her present undertaking.

One morning after breakfast she called upon Falconer; and accustomed to visits from all sorts of people, Mrs. Ashton showed her into his sitting-room without even asking her name. She found him at his piano, apologized, in her fas.h.i.+onable drawl, for interrupting his music, and accepted his offer of a chair without a shade of embarra.s.sment. Falconer seated himself and sat waiting.

'I fear the step I have taken will appear strange to you, Mr. Falconer.

Indeed it appears strange to myself. I am afraid it may appear stranger still.'

'It is easy for me to leave all judgment in the matter to yourself, Miss--I beg your pardon; I know we have met; but for the moment I cannot recall your name.'

'Lady Georgina Betterton,' drawled the visitor carelessly, hiding whatever annoyance she may have felt.

Falconer bowed. Lady Georgina resumed.

'Of course it only affects myself; and I am willing to take the risk, notwithstanding the natural desire to stand well in the opinion of any one with whom even my boldness could venture such a step.'

A smile, intended to be playful, covered the retreat of the sentence.

Falconer bowed again. Lady Georgina had yet again to resume.

'From the little I have seen, and the much I have heard of you--excuse me, Mr. Falconer--I cannot help thinking that you know more of the secret of life than other people--if indeed it has any secret.'

'Life certainly is no burden to me,' returned Falconer. 'If that implies the possession of any secret which is not common property, I fear it also involves a natural doubt whether such secret be communicable.'

'Of course I mean only some secret everybody ought to know.'

'I do not misunderstand you.'

'I want to live. You know the world, Mr. Falconer. I need not tell you what kind of life a girl like myself leads. I am not old, but the gilding is worn off. Life looks bare, ugly, uninteresting. I ask you to tell me whether there is any reality in it or not; whether its past glow was only gilt; whether the best that can be done is to get through with it as fast as possible?'

'Surely your ladys.h.i.+p must know some persons whose very countenances prove that they have found a reality at the heart of life.'

'Yes. But none whose judgment I could trust. I cannot tell how soon they may find reason to change their minds on the subject. Their satisfaction may only be that they have not tried to rub the varnish off the gilding so much as I, and therefore the gilding itself still s.h.i.+nes a little in their eyes.'

'If it be only gilding, it is better it should be rubbed off.'

'But I am unwilling to think it is. I am not willing to sign a bond of farewell to hope. Life seemed good once. It is bad enough that it seems such no longer, without consenting that it must and shall be so. Allow me to add, for my own sake, that I speak from the bitterness of no chagrin. I have had all I ever cared--or condescended to wish for. I never had anything worth the name of a disappointment in my life.'

'I cannot congratulate you upon that,' said Falconer, seriously. 'But if there be a truth or a heart in life, a.s.surance of the fact can only spring from harmony with that truth. It is not to be known save by absolute contact with it; and the sole guide in the direction of it must be duty: I can imagine no other possible conductor. We must do before we can know.'

'Yes, yes,' replied Lady Georgina, hastily, in a tone that implied, 'Of course, of course: we know all about that.' But aware at once, with the fine instinct belonging to her mental organization, that she was thus shutting the door against all further communication, she added instantly: 'But what is one's duty? There is the question.'

'The thing that lies next you, of course. You are, and must remain, the sole judge of that. Another cannot help you.'

'But that is just what I do not know.'

I interrupt Lady Georgina to remark--for I too have been a pupil of Falconer--that I believe she must have suspected what her duty was, and would not look firmly at her own suspicion. She added:

'I want direction.'

But the same moment she proceeded to indicate the direction in which she wanted to be directed; for she went on:

'You know that now-a-days there are so many modes in which to employ one's time and money that one does not know which to choose. The lower strata of society, you know, Mr. Falconer--so many channels! I want the advice of a man of experience, as to the best investment, if I may use the expression: I do not mean of money only, but of time as well.'

'I am not fitted to give advice in such a matter.'

'Mr. Falconer!'

'I a.s.sure you I am not. I subscribe to no society myself--not one.'

'Excuse me, but I can hardly believe the rumours I hear of you--people will talk, you know--are all inventions. They say you are for ever burrowing amongst the poor. Excuse the phrase.'

'I excuse or accept it, whichever you please. Whatever I do, I am my own steward.'

'Then you are just the person to help me! I have a fortune, not very limited, at my own disposal: a gentleman who is his own steward, would find his labours merely facilitated by administering for another as well--such labours, I mean.'

'I must beg to be excused, Lady Georgina. I am accountable only for my own, and of that I have quite as much as I can properly manage. It is far more difficult to use money for others than to spend it for yourself.'

'Ah!' said Lady Georgina, thoughtfully, and cast an involuntary glance round the untidy room, with its horse-hair furniture, its ragged array of books on the wall, its side-table littered with pamphlets he never read, with papers he never printed, with pipes he smoked by chance turns. He saw the glance and understood it.

'I am accustomed,' he said, 'to be in such sad places for human beings to live in, that I sometimes think even this dingy old room an absolute palace of comfort.--But,' he added, checking himself, as it were, 'I do not see in the least how your proposal would facilitate an answer to your question.'

'You seem hardly inclined to do me justice,' said Lady Georgina, with, for the first time, a perceptible, though slight shadow crossing the disc of her resolution. 'I only meant it,' she went on, 'as a step towards a further proposal, which I think you will allow looks at least in the direction you have been indicating.'