"Your mother's quite right to be broken-hearted," Miriam declared, "and I can imagine exactly what she has been through. I should like to talk with her--I should like to see her." Nick showed on this easy amus.e.m.e.nt, reminding her she had talked to him while she sat for her portrait in quite the opposite sense, most helpfully and inspiringly; and Nash explained that she was studying the part of a political d.u.c.h.ess and wished to take observations for it, to work herself into the character.

The girl might in fact have been a political d.u.c.h.ess as she sat, her head erect and her gloved hands folded, smiling with aristocratic dimness at Nick. She shook her head with stately sadness; she might have been trying some effect for Mary Stuart in Schiller's play. "I've changed since that. I want you to be the grandest thing there is--the counsellor of kings."

Peter wondered if it possibly weren't since she had met his sister in Nick's studio that she had changed, if perhaps she hadn't seen how it might give Julia the sense of being more effectually routed to know that the woman who had thrown the bomb was one who also tried to keep Nick in the straight path. This indeed would involve an a.s.sumption that Julia might know, whereas it was perfectly possible she mightn't and more than possible that if she should she wouldn't care. Miriam's essential fondness for trying different ways was always there as an adequate reason for any particular way; a truth which, however, sometimes only half-prevented the particular way from being vexatious to a particular observer.

"Yet after all who's more esthetic than you and who goes in more for the beautiful?" Nick asked. "You're never so beautiful as when you pitch into it."

"Oh, I'm an inferior creature, of an inferior s.e.x, and I've to earn my bread as I can. I'd give it all up in a moment, my odious trade--for an inducement."

"And pray what do you mean by an inducement?" Nick demanded.

"My dear fellow, she means you--if you'll give her a permanent engagement to sit for you!" Gabriel volunteered. "What singularly crude questions you ask!"

"I like the way she talks," Mr. Dashwood derisively said, "when I gave up the most brilliant prospects, of very much the same kind as Mr.

Dormer's, expressly to go on the stage."

"You're an inferior creature too," Miriam promptly p.r.o.nounced.

"Miss Rooth's very hard to satisfy," Peter observed at this. "A man of distinction, slightly bald, in evening dress, with orders, in the corner of her _loge_--she has such a personage ready made to her hand and she doesn't so much as look at him. Am _I_ not an inducement? Haven't I offered you a permanent engagement?"

"Your orders--where are your orders?" she returned with a sweet smile, getting up.

"I shall be a minister next year and an amba.s.sador before you know it.

Then I shall stick on everything that can be had."

"And they call _us_ mountebanks!" cried the girl. "I've been so glad to see you again--do you want another sitting?" she went on to Nick as if to take leave of him.

"As many as you'll give me--I shall be grateful for all," he made answer. "I should like to do you as you are at present. You're totally different from the woman I painted--you're wonderful."

"The Comic Muse!" she laughed. "Well, you must wait till our first nights are over--I'm _sur les dents_ till then. There's everything to do and I've to do it all. That fellow's good for nothing, for nothing but domestic life"--and she glanced at Basil Dashwood. "He hasn't an idea--not one you'd willingly tell of him, though he's rather useful for the stables. We've got stables now--or we try to look as if we had: Dashwood's ideas are _de cette force_. In ten days I shall have more time."

"The Comic Muse? Never, never," Peter protested. "You're not to go smirking through the age and down to posterity--I'd rather see you as Medusa crowned with serpents. That's what you look like when you look best."

"That's consoling--when I've just bought a lovely new bonnet, all red roses and bows. I forgot to tell you just now that when you're an amba.s.sador you may propose anything you like," Miriam went on. "But forgive me if I make that condition. Seriously speaking, come to me glittering with orders and I shall probably succ.u.mb. I can't resist stars and garters. Only you must, as you say, have them all. I _don't_ like to hear Mr. Dormer talk the slang of the studio--like that phrase just now: it _is_ a fall to a lower state. However, when one's low one must crawl, and I'm crawling down to the Strand. Dashwood, see if mamma's ready. If she isn't I decline to wait; you must bring her in a hansom. I'll take Mr. Dormer in the brougham; I want to talk with Mr.

Dormer; he must drive with me to the theatre. His situation's full of interest." Miriam led the way out of the room as she continued to chatter, and when she reached the house-door with the four men in her train the carriage had just drawn up at the garden-gate. It appeared that Mrs. Rooth was not ready, and the girl, in spite of a remonstrance from Nick, who had a sense of usurping the old lady's place, repeated her injunction that she should be brought on in a cab. Miriam's gentlemen hung about her at the gate, and she insisted on Nick's taking his seat in the brougham and taking it first. Before she entered she put her hand out to Peter and, looking up at him, held his own kindly. "Dear old master, aren't you coming to-night? I miss you when you're not there."

"Don't go--don't go--it's too much," Nash freely declared.

"She is wonderful," said Mr. Dashwood, all expert admiration; "she _has_ gone into the rehearsals tooth and nail. But nothing takes it out of her."

"Nothing puts it into you, my dear!" Miriam returned. Then she pursued to Peter: "You're the faithful one--you're the one I count on." He was not looking at her; his eyes travelled into the carriage, where they rested on Nick Dormer, established on the farther seat with his face turned toward the farther window. He was the one, faithful or no, counted on or no, whom a charming woman had preferred to carry off, and there was clear triumph for him in that fact. Yet it pleased, it somewhat relieved, his kinsman to see his pa.s.sivity as not a little foolish. Miriam noted something of this in Peter's eyes, for she exclaimed abruptly, "Don't kill him--he doesn't care for me!" With which she pa.s.sed into the carriage and let it roll away.

Peter stood watching it till he heard Dashwood again beside him. "You wouldn't believe what I make him do the whole thing for--a little rascal I know."

"Good-bye; take good care of Mrs. Rooth," said Gabriel Nash, waving a bland farewell to the young actor. He gave a smiling survey of the heavens and remarked to Sherringham that the rain had stopped. Was he walking, was he driving, should they be going in the same direction?

Peter cared little about his direction and had little account of it to give; he simply moved away in silence and with Gabriel at his side. This converser was partly an affliction to him; indeed the fact that he couldn't only make light of him added to the oppression. It was just to him nevertheless to note that he could hold his peace occasionally: he had for instance this afternoon taken little part in the talk at Balaklava Place. Peter greatly disliked to speak to him of Miriam, but he liked Nash himself to make free with her, and even liked him to say such things as might be a little viciously and unguardedly contradicted.

He was not, however, moved to gainsay something dropped by his companion, disconnectedly, at the end of a few minutes; a word to the effect that she was after all the best-natured soul alive. All the same, Nash added, it wouldn't do for her to take possession of a nice life like Nick's; and he repeated that for his part he would never allow it.

It would be on his conscience to interfere. To which Peter returned disingenuously that they might all do as they liked--it didn't matter a b.u.t.ton to _him_. And with an effort to carry off that comedy he changed the subject.

x.x.xVIII

He wouldn't for a moment have admitted that he was jealous of his old comrade, but would almost have liked to be accused of it: for this would have given him a chance he rather lacked and missed, the right occasion to declare with plausibility that motives he couldn't avow had no application to his case. How could a man be jealous when he was not a suitor? how could he pretend to guard a property which was neither his own nor destined to become his own? There could be no question of loss when one had nothing at stake, and no question of envy when the responsibility of possession was exactly what one prayed to be delivered from. The measure of one's susceptibility was one's pretensions, and Peter was not only ready to declare over and over again that, thank G.o.d, he had none: his spiritual detachment was still more complete--he literally suffered from the fact that n.o.body appeared to care to hear him say it. He connected an idea of virtue and honour with his att.i.tude, since surely it was a high case of conduct to have quenched a personal pa.s.sion for the good of the public service. He had gone over the whole question at odd, irrepressible hours; he had returned, spiritually speaking, the buffet administered to him all at once, that day in Rosedale Road, by the spectacle of the _cranerie_ with which Nick could let worldly glories slide. Resolution for resolution he preferred after all another sort, and his own _cranerie_ would be shown in the way he should stick to his profession and stand up for British interests. If Nick had leaped over a wall he would leap over a river. The course of his river was already traced and his loins were already girded. Thus he was justified in holding that the measure of a man's susceptibility was a man's att.i.tude: that was the only thing he was bound to give an account of.

He was perpetually giving an account of it to his own soul in default of other listeners. He was quite angry at having tasted a sweetness in Miriam's a.s.surance at the carriage--door, bestowed indeed with very little solemnity, that Nick didn't care for her. Wherein did it concern him that Nick cared for her or that Nick didn't? Wherein did it signify to him that Gabriel Nash should have taken upon himself to disapprove of a union between the young actress and the young painter and to frustrate an accident that might perhaps prove fortunate? For those had also been cooling words at the hour, though Peter blushed on the morrow to think that he felt in them anything but Nash's personal sublimity. He was ashamed of having been refreshed, and refreshed by so sickly a draught--it being all his theory that he was not in a fever. As for keeping an eye on Nick, it would soon become clear to that young man and that young man's charming friend that he had quite other uses for his eyes. The pair, with Nash to help, might straighten out their complications according to their light. He would never speak to Nick of Miriam; he felt indeed just now as if he should never speak to Nick of anything. He had traced the course of his river, as I say, and the real proof would be in the way he should, clearing the air, land on the opposite bank. It was a case for action--for vigorous, unmistakable action. He had done very little since his arrival in London but moon round a _fille de theatre_ who was taken up partly, though she bluffed it off, with another man, and partly with arranging new petticoats for a beastly old "poetic drama"; but this little waste of time should instantly be made up. He had given himself a definite rope, and he had danced to the end of his rope, and now he would dance back. That was all right--so right that Peter could only express to himself how right it was by whistling with extravagance.

He whistled as he went to dine with a great personage the day after his meeting with Nick in Balaklava Place; a great personage to whom he had originally paid his respects--it was high time--the day before that meeting, the previous Monday. The sense of omissions to repair, of a superior line to take, perhaps made him study with more zeal to please the personage, who gave him ten minutes and asked him five questions. A great many doors were successively opened before any palpitating pilgrim who was about to enter the presence of this distinguished man; but they were discreetly closed again behind Sherringham, and I must ask the reader to pause with me at the nearer end of the momentary vista. This particular pilgrim fortunately felt he could count on recognition not only as a faithful if obscure official in the great hierarchy, but as a clever young man who happened to be connected by blood with people his lordship had intimately known. No doubt it was simply as the clever young man that Peter received the next morning, from the dispenser of his lordship's hospitality, a note asking him to dine on the morrow.

Such cards had come to him before, and he had always obeyed their call; he did so at present, however, with a sense of unusual intention. In due course his intention was translated into words; before the gentlemen left the dining-room he respectfully asked his n.o.ble host for some further brief and benevolent hearing.

"What is it you want? Tell me now," the master of his fate replied, motioning to the rest of the company to pa.s.s out and detaining him where they stood.

Peter's excellent training covered every contingency: he could always be as concise or as diffuse as the occasion required. Even he himself, however, was surprised at the quick felicity of the terms in which he was conscious of conveying that, were it compatible with higher conveniences, he should extremely like to be transferred to duties in a more distant quarter of the globe. Indeed, fond as he was of thinking himself a man of emotions controlled by civility, it is not impossible that a greater candour than he knew glimmered through Peter's expression and trembled through his tone as he presented this pet.i.tion. He had aimed at a good manner in presenting it, but perhaps the best of the effect produced for his interlocutor was just where it failed, where it confessed a secret that the highest diplomacy would have guarded.

Sherringham remarked to the minister that he didn't care in the least where the place might be, nor how little coveted a post; the further away the better, and the climate didn't matter. He would only prefer of course that there should be really something to do, though he would make the best of it even if there were not. He stopped in time, or at least thought he did, not to betray his covertly seeking relief from minding his having been jilted in a flight to lat.i.tudes unfavourable to human life. His august patron gave him a sharp look which for a moment seemed the precursor of a sharper question; but the moment elapsed and the question failed to come. This considerate omission, characteristic of a true man of the world and representing quick guesses and still quicker indifferences, made our gentleman from that moment his lordship's ardent partisan. What did come was a good-natured laugh and the exclamation: "You know there are plenty of swamps and jungles, if you want that sort of thing," Peter replied that it was very much that sort of thing he did want; whereupon his chief continued: "I'll see--I'll see. If anything turns up you shall hear."

Something turned up the very next day: our young man, taken at his word, found himself indebted to the postman for a note of concise intimation that the high position of minister to the smallest of Central American republics would be apportioned him. The republic, though small, was big enough to be "shaky," and the position, though high, not so exalted that there were not much greater alt.i.tudes above it to which it was a stepping-stone. Peter, quite ready to take one thing with another, rejoiced at his easy triumph, reflected that he must have been even more noticed at headquarters than he had hoped, and, on the spot, consulting n.o.body and waiting for nothing, signified his unqualified acceptance of the place. n.o.body with a grain of sense would have advised him to do anything else. It made him happier than he had supposed he should ever be again; it made him feel professionally in the train, as they said in Paris; it was serious, it was interesting, it was exciting, and his imagination, letting itself loose into the future, began once more to scale the crowning eminence. It was very simple to hold one's course if one really tried, and he blessed the variety of peoples. Further communications pa.s.sed, the last enjoining on him to return to Paris for a short interval a week later, after which he would be advised of the date for his proceeding to his remoter duties.

x.x.xIX

The next thing he meanwhile did was to call with his news on Lady Agnes Dormer; it is not unworthy of note that he took on the other hand no step to make his promotion known to Miriam Rooth. To render it probable he should find his aunt he went at the luncheon-hour; and she was indeed on the point of sitting down to that repast with Grace. Biddy was not at home--Biddy was never at home now, her mother said: she was always at Nick's place, she spent her life there, she ate and drank there, she almost slept there. What she contrived to do there for so many hours and what was the irresistible spell Lady Agnes couldn't pretend she had succeeded in discovering. She spoke of this baleful resort only as "Nick's place," and spoke of it at first as little as possible. She judged highly probable, however, that Biddy would come in early that afternoon: there was something or other, some common social duty, she had condescended to promise she would perform with Grace. Poor Lady Agnes, whom Peter found somehow at once grim and very prostrate--she a.s.sured her nephew her nerves were all gone--almost abused her younger daughter for two minutes, having evidently a deep-seated need of abusing some one. I must yet add that she didn't wait to meet Grace's eye before recovering, by a rapid gyration, her view of the possibilities of things--those possibilities from which she still might squeeze, as a parent almost in despair, the drop that would sweeten her cup. "Dear child," she had the presence of mind to subjoin, "her only fault is after all that she adores her brother. She has a capacity for adoration and must always take her gospel from some one."

Grace declared to Peter that her sister would have stayed at home if she had dreamed he was coming, and Lady Agnes let him know that she had heard all about the hour he had spent with the poor child at Nick's place and about his extraordinary good nature in taking the two girls to the play. Peter lunched in Calcutta Gardens, spending an hour there which proved at first unexpectedly and, as seemed to him, unfairly dismal. He knew from his own general perceptions, from what Biddy had told him and from what he had heard Nick say in Balaklava Place, that his aunt would have been wounded by her son's apostasy; but it was not till he saw her that he appreciated the dark difference this young man's behaviour had made in the outlook of his family. Evidently that behaviour had sprung a dreadful leak in the great vessel of their hopes.

These were things no outsider could measure, and they were none of an outsider's business; it was enough that Lady Agnes struck him really as a woman who had received her death-blow. She looked ten years older; she was white and haggard and tragic. Her eyes burned with a strange fitful fire that prompted one to conclude her children had better look out for her. When not filled with this unnatural flame they were suffused with comfortless tears; and altogether the afflicted lady was, as he viewed her, very bad, a case for anxiety. It was because he had known she would be very bad that he had, in his kindness, called on her exactly in this manner; but he recognised that to undertake to be kind to her in proportion to her need might carry one very far. He was glad he had not himself a wronged mad mother, and he wondered how Nick could bear the burden of the home he had ruined. Apparently he didn't bear it very far, but had taken final, convenient refuge in Rosedale Road.

Peter's judgement of his perverse cousin was considerably confused, and not the less so for the consciousness that he was perhaps just now not in the best state of mind for judging him at all. At the same time, though he held in general that a man of sense has always warrant enough in his sense for doing the particular thing he prefers, he could scarcely help asking himself whether, in the exercise of a virile freedom, it had been absolutely indispensable Nick should work such domestic woe. He admitted indeed that that was an anomalous figure for Nick, the worker of domestic woe. Then he saw that his aunt's grievance--there came a moment, later, when she a.s.serted as much--was not quite what her recreant child, in Balaklava Place, had represented it--with questionable taste perhaps--to a mocking actress; was not a mere shocked quarrel with his adoption of a "low" career, or a horror, the old-fashioned horror, of the _louches_ licences taken by artists under pretext of being conscientious: the day for this was past, and English society thought the brush and the fiddle as good as anything else--with two or three exceptions. It was not what he had taken up but what he had put down that made the sorry difference, and the tragedy would have been equally great if he had become a wine-merchant or a horse-dealer. Peter had gathered at first that Lady Agnes wouldn't trust herself to speak directly of her trouble, and he had obeyed what he supposed the best discretion in making no allusion to it. But a few minutes before they rose from table she broke out, and when he attempted to utter a word of mitigation there was something that went to his heart in the way she returned: "Oh you don't know--you don't know!"

He felt Grace's eyes fixed on him at this instant in a mystery of supplication, and was uncertain as to what she wanted--that he should say something more to console her mother or should hurry away from the subject. Grace looked old and plain and--he had thought on coming in--rather cross, but she evidently wanted something. "You don't know,"

Lady Agnes repeated with a trembling voice, "you don't know." She had pushed her chair a little away from her place; she held her pocket-handkerchief pressed hard to her mouth, almost stuffed into it, and her eyes were fixed on the floor. She made him aware he did virtually know--know what towering piles of confidence and hope had been dashed to the earth. Then she finished her sentence unexpectedly--"You don't know what my life with my great husband was." Here on the other hand Peter was slightly at fault--he didn't exactly see what her life with her great husband had to do with it. What was clear to him, however, was that they literally had looked for things all in the very key of that greatness from Nick. It was not quite easy to see why this had been the case--it had not been precisely Peter's own prefigurement.

Nick appeared to have had the faculty of planting that sort of flattering faith in women; he had originally given Julia a tremendous dose of it, though she had since shaken off the effects.

"Do you really think he would have done such great things, politically speaking?" Peter risked. "Do you consider that the root of the matter was so essentially in him?"

His hostess had a pause, looking at him rather hard. "I only think what all his friends--all his father's friends--have thought. He was his father's son after all. No young man ever had a finer training, and he gave from the first repeated proof of the highest ability, the highest ambition. See how he got in everywhere. Look at his first seat--look at his second," Lady Agnes continued. "Look at what every one says at this moment."

"Look at all the papers!" said Grace. "Did you ever hear him speak?" she asked. And when Peter reminded her how he had spent his life in foreign lands, shut out from such pleasures, she went on: "Well, you lost something."

"It was very charming," said Lady Agnes quietly and poignantly.

"Of course he's charming, whatever he does," Peter returned. "He'll be a charming artist."

"Oh G.o.d help us!" the poor lady groaned, rising quickly.

"He won't--that's the worst," Grace amended. "It isn't as if he'd do things people would like, I've been to his place, and I never saw such a horrid lot of things--not at all clever or pretty."

Yet her mother, at this, turned upon her with sudden asperity. "You know nothing whatever about the matter!" Then she added for Peter that, as it happened, her children did have a good deal of artistic taste: Grace was the only one who was totally deficient in it. Biddy was very clever--Biddy really might learn to do pretty things. And anything the poor child could learn was now no more than her duty--there was so little knowing what the future had in store for them all.