'In my dream--only in my dream. Those who inherit riches are burdened with the weight of their wealth, which will not suffer them to enter into the arena; will not allow them to develop and to exercise their talents, and afflicts them with the mental and bodily diseases that belong to indolence. The poor, on the other hand, who live from day to day, sometimes out of work for weeks together, practise easily the simple virtues of brotherly love, charity, and mutual helpfulness. They have learned to combine for the good of all rather than to fight, one against another, for selfish gain. It is the only world where all are borrowing and lending, giving and helping.'

'Brother, this dream of yours is like a socialistic tract.'

'It may be. Yet you see how strongly it takes hold of me, that while I see the absurdity of the whole thing, it is not unpleasing to recall the recollection of it. Well--I do not know what set me talking about this dream.'

The smiles left his face: he became grave again: he ceased to talk: for the rest of the evening he was once more the old solicitor, weighed down with the affairs of other people.

'Checkley'--it was on the doorstep, and Sir Samuel waited while his wife said a few fond things to her sister--'what the devil came over my brother to-night?'

'I don't know indeed, Sir Samuel. I never heard him talk like that before. Doin' good to 'em? Servin' a writ upon 'em is more our line. I think he must be upset somewhere in his inside, and it's gone to his head.'

'Practical benevolence! Living for other people! Have you heard him complain of anything?'

'No, Sir Samuel. He never complains. Eats hearty, walks upright and strong, works like he always has worked.--Doin' good! And the blessedness of being pore! Seems most wonderful. Blessedness of being pore! Well, Sir Samuel, I've enjoyed that blessedness myself, and I know what it's like. Any or'nary preachin' chap might talk that nonsense; but for your eminent brother, Sir Samuel, such a lawyer as him--to be talking such stuff--if I may humbly so speak of my learned master's words--it is--Sir Samuel--it really is amazing!'

'He said it was a dream, remember. But I agree with you, Checkley.--It is amazing.'

'Humph! The blessedness of being pore! And over such a gla.s.s of port, too! I thought I should ha' rolled off my chair--I did, indeed.--Here's your good lady, Sir Samuel.'

'Elsie,' said Mrs. Arundel in the carriage, 'I think it was high time that Mr. Dering should take a partner. He to dream of practical benevolence! He to be diffusing happiness with open hands! Oh! most lamentable--I call it. However, the deeds are signed, and we are all right. In case of anything happening, it is a comfort to think that George's position would be only improved.'

CHAPTER IX

AT THE GATES OF PARADISE

Many women have advanced the doctrine that the happiest time of life is that of their engagement. Of course no man can possibly understand this theory; but from a woman's point of view it can be defended, because it is for some girls the most delightful thing in the world to be wooed; and until the church service is actually said and the ring is on the finger, the bride is Queen and Mistress; afterwards--not always. But the happiness of it depends upon its being a courtship without obstacles.

Now, in the case of the young couple whose fortunes we are following, there was plenty of love with excellent wooing; but the engagement had been opposed by the whole tribe of Arundels, so that every time she met her lover it was in open rebellion against her mother. To go home from a walk with him only to find the silence of resentment at home was not pleasant. Again, we have seen how they were looking forward to a life of poverty--even of privation. Dame Penury with her pinching ways and shrewish tongue was going to be their constant lodger. Then the young man could not choose but ask himself whether he was not a selfish beast to take a girl out of plenty into privation. And the girl could not choose but ask herself whether she was not selfish in laying this great burden upon the back of her lover. No one can be indifferent to such a prospect: no one can contemplate with pleasure the cheeseparings, the savings, the management of such a life: no one can like having to make a penny do the work of sixpence: no one can rejoice as one steps down, down, down the social ladder: no one can antic.i.p.ate with satisfaction the loss of gentlehood for the daughters, and the loss of an adequate education for the sons.

'You will make me happy,' said the lover, 'at the cost of everything that makes life happy for yourself.'

'If I make you happy,' said the girl, 'I ask for nothing more. But oh! I am laying a heavy burden upon you. Can you bear it? Will you never blame me if the burden is greater than you can bear?'

And now all the trouble vanished like a cloud from the morning sky--vanished so completely that there was not a trace of it left anywhere. The accusing figure of her mother was changed into a smiling face of pleased and satisfied maternity: reproaches were turned into words of endearment, angry looks to presents and caresses. And as for her sister, you might have thought that all this good fortune was actually achieved and conquered by Elsie--otherwise, how could one justify the praise and flattery that Hilda now lavished upon her? She gave a great dinner as a kind of official reception of the bridegroom into the family; she also gave a dance, at which she herself was the most beautiful woman--she stood in a conspicuous place all the evening, magnificently dressed, statuesque, wonderful: and Elsie was the prettiest girl at the party; but between the most beautiful woman and the prettiest girl was a difference! There is nothing like good fortune to bring out a girl's good qualities: Elsie had always had friends, now she might have numbered them by hundreds. Good fortune breeds friends as the sunshine creates the flowers. She was congratulated, caressed, and flattered enough to turn her head. Now, girls are so const.i.tuted that they love admiration, which is a kind of affection, even when it takes the form of flattery: and their heads may be easily turned; but they are as easily turned back again. And the house--the widow's house--which for so many years had been so dull and quiet a place, was transformed into a place of entertainment. It only wanted coloured lamps to make it another Vauxhall: it was crowded every night with the younger friends of bride and bridegroom. George had many friends. He was gregarious by nature: he was a rowing man on the athletic side: he had a healthy love and a light hand for things like billiards, shooting, and fishing: they are tastes which a.s.sist in the creation of friendships.

These friends--young fellows of like mind--came to the house in mult.i.tudes to rally round the man about to desert their ranks. Young men are forgiving: George would row no more among them: he would be lost to the billiard table, and to the club itself: yet they forgave him, and accepted his invitation and went to see the bride. They found her with the friends of her own age. Heavens! how the daring of one man in taking away a maiden from the band encourages others! There are six love stories at least, all rising out of these evenings, and all of surpa.s.sing interest, had one the time to write them. They are both grave and gay: there are tears in every one: the course of true love in no case ran smooth except in the Story of the Two Stupids. Love's enemies can never effect aught against a Stupid, and so these two Stupids became engaged without opposition, and were married with acclamations; but they are too Stupid--perhaps--to know their own happiness.

All this went on for three weeks. It was arranged that the happy pair should be married in the middle of August: they had resolved to spend their honeymoon in France, staying a few days in Paris, and then going on to see the towns and the country along the Loire, with the old city of Tours for their centre. They proposed to live entirely upon fruit and wine and kisses. No place in the world like Touraine for those who are so young, and so much in love, and so perfectly satisfied with so simple a diet. Even for those who take a cutlet with the fruit and the wine, there is no place equal to Touraine. Meantime, against the home-coming, a desirable flat was secured, not one of your little economical flats, all drawing-room with two or three rabbit-hutches for bedrooms, but a large and highly decorated flat with all the newest appliances, large rooms, and a lift and plenty of s.p.a.ce for the dinner-parties and receptions which Elsie would have to give. The servants were engaged.

The furniture was ordered, all in the advanced taste of the day--carpets, curtains, pictures, over-mantels, cabinets, screens. Elsie went every day to her new home and found something omitted, and sat down in it to wonder what it would be like--this new life she was entering upon. Oh! it was a busy time.--Then there was her trousseau--everybody knows the amount of thought and care required for a trousseau: this was approaching completion--everybody knows the happiness, peculiar, and unlike any other kind of happiness, with which a girl contemplates a heap of 'things,' all her own. I suppose that it is only at her wedding that she can enjoy this happiness, for afterwards, the 'things' are not her own, but the things of the family. The bride's dress, another thing of supreme importance, had been tried on, though as yet it was very, very far from being finished. The bridesmaids, two of George's sisters, had also already tried on their dresses. They came every day, two very sweet girls, who have both to do with those six love stories which will never, I fear, be told, to talk over the events and to see the presents.

These came in daily, and were laid out in a room by themselves, looking very splendid: their splendour proved the wealth and the position of the pair, because rich presents are only given to rich people.

In a word, everybody was heartily, loyally sympathetic, as if to make up for the previous harshness and coldness. For four weeks this happiness lasted! It was on Monday, June 29, that the golden shower descended upon them: it was on Monday, July 20, that the rain of gold ceased, and another kind of cloud came up which speedily changed into a driving storm of rain and sleet and hail and ice and snow.

Look at them on Sunday. Before the storm there is generally a brief time of sunshine, warm and fine: after the storm, the calm that follows is a time of dismay, speechless and tearless. Sunday was the day before the storm: it was a day of sunshine without and within. The lovers spent the whole day together, hand in hand. They went to church together: they sat side by side, they warbled off the same hymn book. The service proved, as the preacher used to say, a season of refreshment, for never doth religion so uplift the soul as when it is entirely happy: the voices of the choir chanting the psalms filled them with joy, and would have done so even if they had been penitential minors, and the lamentation of a sinner. Their hearts rose higher and higher as the preacher exhorted, and would have flown upwards just as much whether he had brandished the terrors of the law or held out the gracious promise of the Gospel. For you see, at such a time as this, whatever was said or done only led this faithful pair farther and deeper into the shady glades and fragrant lawns and flowery dells of Love's Paradise.

Every church, at every service, and especially in the evening, contains many such lovers. You may know them by certain infallible signs. They sit very close together: they sing off the same book: their faces betray by the rigidity of their att.i.tude, which is that of pretended attention, the far-away expression of their eyes, and the absence of any external sign of emotion or sympathy with the preacher, that their hands, beneath some folds of the feminine gabardine, are closely clasped. It has sometimes pleased the philosopher and relieved the tedium of a dull sermon to look round the congregation and to pick out the lovers--here a pair and there a pair. Even in the church, you see, Love is conqueror and king.

These lovers, therefore, went to church in a frame of mind truly heavenly: n.o.body in the whole congregation felt more deeply pious: every response was an Act of Praise: every prayer an Act of Grat.i.tude: every hymn a personal Thank-offering. But beneath those seemingly calm faces was flying and rushing a whirlwind of hopes, memories, plans, projects, and grat.i.tudes. He who looks back upon the days immediately before his wedding-day--most men no more remember their own emotions than a child remembers yesterday's earache--will wonder how he lived through that time of change, when all that he prayed for was granted, but on the condition of a turning upside down of all his habits, customs, and petted ways.

All round them sat the people, no doubt with minds wholly attuned to the service of Prayer and Praise. Well, the sheep in a flock to outward seeming are all alike, yet every animal has his own desires and small ambitions for himself. So I suppose with the congregation. As every man shuts the street door behind him and trudges along the way to church--the _Via Sacra_--with wife and children, he carries in his waistcoat pocket, close to his heart, a little packet of business cares to think upon during the sermon. And if all the thoughts of all the people could be collected after the sermon instead of the offertory, they would make a salutary oblation indeed.

'George,' said Elsie, as they came out, 'let us go into the Gardens and sit under a tree and talk. Let us get away from everybody for half an hour.'

Kensington Gardens were filled with the customary throng of those who, like themselves, had been to church. The carping philosopher says unkind things about Church, and Gardens, and Fashion. As if Church would ever keep like from congregating with like! There were shoals of beautiful girls, dressed as well as they knew or could afford: dozens of young fellows, and with them the no longer quite so young, the no longer young, the no longer young at all, the middle-aged, the elderly and the old, not to speak of the children. Elsie looked up and down the walk.

'We are never so much alone as in a crowd,' she said, with the air that some girls a.s.sume of saying an original thing which no woman ever did say yet, unless by accident. They joined the stream: presently George led the girl out of the road and across the gra.s.s to a place where two or three chairs were set under the trees. They sat down. Then occurred the miracle wrought in these gardens every day and all day long. Out of the ground sprang a man--for such he seemed, though doubtless a spirit-messenger--who demanded twopence. This paid, he vanished straightway. After this ceremony they talked.

'George,' said the girl, 'every day now, wherever I am, even at church, I feel as if I should like to jump up and sing and dance. This morning I should have liked a service all to ourselves--you to read and I to sing: you to pray and I to praise. I kept wondering if there was any girl in the place so happy as myself--or so unhappy as I was three short weeks ago.'

'Elsie,' said George--a simple thing to say, but it had a thousand meanings.

'We have not deserved it. Indeed, indeed--we have not. Why are we singled out for such joy? We already had the greatest thing of all--we had love. That is happiness enough for some women. We only wanted a little more money, and now we have all this great fortune.'

'It is wonderful, Elsie!'

She laid her hand on his and spoke in her sweet low voice, gazing upwards. 'George! I am so happy, that I want everybody else to be happy as well. The angels, I am sure, must lose some of their joy in wishing that all were with them. I pity all those poor girls who have no lovers: all those poor married people who are lying in poverty: all those poor creatures who are trying for what they cannot get; all those who are weeping outside the gates of Heaven. George, it is a beautiful world, and it should be such a happy world: there should be nothing but joy all through life. There is such an abundance of happiness possible in it.

Sadness is only a pa.s.sing cloud: anxiety is only a touch of east wind: evil and pain are only fleeting shadows.'

She sighed and clasped her hands, and the tears rose to her eyes.

'We shall grow old together, George,' she went on, murmuring rather than speaking.--I omit her lover's interruptions and interjections.--'You will always love me, long after my beauty--you know you will call it beauty, George--is past and gone: even when I am a poor old crone doubled up in my arm-chair: you will always love me. My life will be full--full--full of love. Perhaps----' Here her face flushed, and she stopped. 'We shall have no trouble about money: we shall go on always learning more and more, growing wiser and wiser and wiser. You will be a wise and good man, thinking and working all your life for other people, just as Mr. Dering imagined--three weeks ago. Everybody will love and respect you. Then you will grow grey-headed, you poor, dear boy; and all the world will say how wise and strong you are; and I shall be prouder of my old husband than even I was of my young lover. The life that others have dreamed, we shall live. Every day shall come laden with its own joy, so that we would not, if we could help it, suffer it to go away.' She struck a deeper note, and her voice trembled and sank and her eyes filled with tears: 'Life shall be all happiness, as G.o.d intended for us. Even Death will be little sorrow, for the separation will be so short.' Once more she laid her hand on his.

Even to the most frivolous, the prospect of the wedded life awakens grave and solemn thoughts: for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear and brains to understand, there is no prospect so charged with chances and possibilities, where even life itself may become a Death in Life.

When George left her in the evening, he drove to see Athelstan.

'So,' he said, 'you have been courting all day, I suppose. You ought to have had enough of it. Sit down and have something--a pipe--a cigar.--Well--you are going to be very jolly, I suppose. Elsie's little fortune will help a bit, won't it?'

'I should think so, indeed.'

'Yes--I've been very glad, ever since you told me that the child had had this stroke of luck. I wonder who gave her the money? To be sure, there is plenty of money knocking about among the Arundels. Most of us have had a sort of instinct for making money. Put us down anywhere among a lot of men in a city, and we begin to transfer the contents of their pockets to our own.'

'Meanwhile, give up this old resentment. Come back to your own people.

Come to our wedding.'

'I cannot possibly, unless you will tell me who forged that cheque. How could I go back to people who still believe me guilty? When you are married, I will go and see Elsie, which I can do with a light heart. You have not told any one about my return?'

'Certainly not. No one suspects, and no one talks or thinks about you.'

Athelstan laughed a little. 'That is a doubtful piece of information. Am I to rejoice or to weep, because I am completely forgotten and out of mind? It is rather humiliating, isn't it?'

'You are not forgotten at all. That is a different thing. Only they do not speak of you.'

'Well, George, never mind that now. I am glad you came to-night, because I have some news for you. I have found the commissionaire who took the cheque to the Bank--actually found the man.'