"Your freedom? What freedom is there in being poor?" Lady Agnes fiercely demanded. "Talk of that when Julia puts everything she possesses at your feet!"

"I can't talk of it, mother--it's too terrible an idea. And I can't talk of _her_, nor of what I think of her. You must leave that to me. I do her perfect justice."

"You don't or you'd marry her to-morrow," she pa.s.sionately argued.

"You'd feel the opportunity so beautifully rare, with everything in the world to make it perfect. Your father would have valued it for you beyond everything. Think a little what would have given _him_ pleasure.

That's what I meant when I spoke just now of us all. It wasn't of Grace and Biddy I was thinking--fancy!--it was of him. He's with you always; he takes with you, at your side, every step you take yourself. He'd bless devoutly your marriage to Julia; he'd feel what it would be for you and for us all. I ask for no sacrifice and he'd ask for none. We only ask that you don't commit the crime----!"

Nick Dormer stopped her with another kiss; he murmured "Mother, mother, mother!" as he bent over her. He wished her not to go on, to let him off; but the deep deprecation in his voice didn't prevent her saying:

"You know it--you know it perfectly. All and more than all that I can tell you you know." He drew her closer, kissed her again, held her as he would have held a child in a paroxysm, soothing her silently till it could abate. Her vehemence had brought with it tears; she dried them as she disengaged herself. The next moment, however, she resumed, attacking him again: "For a public man she'd be the perfect companion. She's made for public life--she's made to shine, to be concerned in great things, to occupy a high position and to help him on. She'd back you up in everything as she has backed you in this. Together there's nothing you couldn't do. You can have the first house in England--yes, the very first! What freedom _is_ there in being poor? How can you do anything without money, and what money can you make for yourself--what money will ever come to you? That's the crime--to throw away such an instrument of power, such a blessed instrument of good."

"It isn't everything to be rich, mother," said Nick, looking at the floor with a particular patience--that is with a provisional docility and his hands in his pockets. "And it isn't so fearful to be poor."

"It's vile--it's abject. Don't I know?"

"Are you in such acute want?" he smiled.

"Ah don't make me explain what you've only to look at to see!" his mother returned as if with a richness of allusion to dark elements in her fate.

"Besides," he easily went on, "there's other money in the world than Julia's. I might come by some of that."

"Do you mean Mr. Carteret's?" The question made him laugh as her feeble reference five minutes before to the House of Lords had done. But she pursued, too full of her idea to take account of such a poor subst.i.tute for an answer: "Let me tell you one thing, for I've known Charles Carteret much longer than you and I understand him better. There's nothing you could do that would do you more good with him than to marry Julia. I know the way he looks at things and I know exactly how that would strike him. It would please him, it would charm him; it would be the thing that would most prove to him that you're in earnest. You need, you know, to do something of that sort," she said as for plain speaking.

"Haven't I come in for Harsh?" asked Nick.

"Oh he's very canny. He likes to see people rich. _Then_ he believes in them--then he's likely to believe more. He's kind to you because you're your father's son; but I'm sure your being poor takes just so much off."

"He can remedy that so easily," said Nick, smiling still. "Is my being kept by Julia what you call my making an effort for myself?"

Lady Agnes hesitated; then "You needn't insult Julia!" she replied.

"Moreover, if I've _her_ money I shan't want his," Nick unheedingly remarked.

Again his mother waited before answering; after which she produced: "And pray wouldn't you wish to be independent?"

"You're delightful, dear mother--you're very delightful! I particularly like your conception of independence. Doesn't it occur to you that at a pinch I might improve my fortune by some other means than by making a mercenary marriage or by currying favour with a rich old gentleman?

Doesn't it occur to you that I might work?"

"Work at politics? How does that make money, honourably?"

"I don't mean at politics."

"What do you mean then?"--and she seemed to challenge him to phrase it if he dared. This demonstration of her face and voice might have affected him, for he remained silent and she continued: "Are you elected or not?"

"It seems a dream," he rather flatly returned.

"If you are, act accordingly and don't mix up things that are as wide asunder as the poles!" She spoke with sternness and his silence appeared again to represent an admission that her sternness counted for him.

Possibly she was touched by it; after a few moments, at any rate, during which nothing more pa.s.sed between them, she appealed to him in a gentler and more anxious key, which had this virtue to touch him that he knew it was absolutely the first time in her life she had really begged for anything. She had never been obliged to beg; she had got on without it and most things had come to her. He might judge therefore in what a light she regarded this boon for which in her bereft old age she humbled herself to be a suitor. There was such a pride in her that he could feel what it cost her to go on her knees even to her son. He did judge how it was in his power to gratify her; and as he was generous and imaginative he was stirred and shaken as it came over him in a wave of figurative suggestion that he might make up to her for many things. He scarcely needed to hear her ask with a pleading wail that was almost tragic: "Don't you see how things have turned out for us? Don't you know how unhappy I am, don't you know what a bitterness----?" She stopped with a sob in her voice and he recognised vividly this last tribulation, the unhealed wound of her change of life and her lapse from eminence to flatness. "You know what Percival is and the comfort I have of him. You know the property and what he's doing with it and what comfort I get from _that_! Everything's dreary but what you can do for us.

Everything's odious, down to living in a hole with one's girls who don't marry. Grace is impossible--I don't know what's the matter with her; no one will look at her, and she's so conceited with it--sometimes I feel as if I could beat her! And Biddy will never marry, and we're three dismal women in a filthy house, and what are three dismal women, more or less, in London?"

So with an unexpected rage of self-exposure she poured out her disappointments and troubles, tore away the veil from her sadness and soreness. It almost scared him to see how she hated her life, though at another time it might have been amusing to note how she despised her gardenless house. Of course it wasn't a country-house, and she couldn't get used to that. Better than he could do--for it was the sort of thing into which in any case a woman enters more than a man--she felt what a lift into brighter air, what a regilding of his sisters' possibilities, his marriage to Julia would effect for them. He couldn't trace the difference, but his mother saw it all as a shining picture. She hung the bright vision before him now--she stood there like a poor woman crying for a kindness. What was filial in him, all the piety he owed, especially to the revived spirit of his father, more than ever present on a day of such public pledges, became from one moment to the other as the very handle to the door of the chamber of concessions. He had the impulse, so embarra.s.sing when it is a question of consistent action, to see in a touching, an interesting light any forcibly presented side of the life of another: such things effected a union with something in _his_ life, and in the recognition of them was no soreness of sacrifice and no consciousness of merit.

Rapidly, at present, this change of scene took place before his spiritual eye. He found himself believing, because his mother communicated the belief, that it depended but on his own conduct richly to alter the social outlook of the three women who clung to him and who declared themselves forlorn. This was not the highest kind of motive, but it contained a spring, it touched into life again old injunctions and appeals. Julia's wide kingdom opened out round him and seemed somehow to wear the face of his own possible future. His mother and sisters floated in the rosy element as if he had breathed it about them.

"The first house in England" she had called it; but it might be the first house in Europe, the first in the world, by the fine air and the high humanities that should fill it. Everything beautiful in his actual, his material view seemed to proclaim its value as never before; the house rose over his head as a museum of exquisite rewards, and the image of poor George Dallow hovered there obsequious, expressing that he had only been the modest, tasteful organiser, or even upholsterer, appointed to set it all in order and punctually retire. Lady Agnes's tone in fine penetrated further than it had done yet when she brought out with intensity: "Don't desert us--don't desert us."

"Don't desert you----?"

"Be great--be great. I'm old, I've lived, I've seen. Go in for a great material position. That will simplify everything else."

"I'll do what I can for you--anything, everything I can. Trust me--leave me alone," Nick went on.

"And you'll stay over--you'll spend the day with her?"

"I'll stay till she turns me out!"

His mother had hold of his hand again now: she raised it to her lips and kissed it. "My dearest son, my only joy!" Then: "I don't see how you can resist her," she added.

"No more do I!"

She looked about--there was so much to look at--with a deep exhalation.

"If you're so fond of art, what art is equal to all this? The joy of living in the midst of it--of seeing the finest works every day! You'll have everything the world can give."

"That's exactly what was just pa.s.sing in my own mind. It's too much,"

Nick reasoned.

"Don't be selfish!"

"Selfish?" he echoed.

"Unselfish then. You'll share it with us."

"And with Julia a little, I hope," he said.

"G.o.d bless you!" cried his mother, looking up at him. Her eyes were detained by the sudden sense of something in his own that was not clear to her; but before she could challenge it he asked abruptly:

"Why do you talk so of poor Biddy? Why won't she marry?"

"You had better ask Peter Sherringham," said Lady Agnes.

"What has he to do with it?"

"How odd of you not to know--when it's so plain how she thinks of him that it's a matter of common gossip."

"Yes, if you will--we've made it so, and she takes it as an angel. But Peter likes her."

"Does he? Then it's the more shame to him to behave as he does. He had better leave his wretched actresses alone. That's the love of art too!"

mocked Lady Agnes.