He paused a moment; on which, as quite vague, she appealed. "That I 'do know' what?"

"That I've a consuming pa.s.sion for you and that it's impossible."

"Oh impossible, my friend!" she sighed, but with a quickness in her a.s.sent.

"Very good; it interferes, the gratification of it would interfere fatally, with the ambition of each of us. Our ambitions are inferior and odious, but we're tied fast to them."

"Ah why ain't we simple?" she quavered as if all touched by it. "Why ain't we of the people--_comme tout le monde_--just a man and a girl liking each other?"

He waited a little--she was so tenderly mocking, so sweetly ambiguous.

"Because we're precious a.s.ses! However, I'm simple enough, after all, to care for you as I've never cared for any human creature. You have, as it happens, a personal charm for me that no one has ever approached, and from the top of your splendid head to the sole of your theatrical shoe (I could go down on my face--there, abjectly--and kiss it!) every inch of you is dear and delightful to me. Therefore good-bye."

She took this in with wider eyes: he had put the matter in a way that struck her. For a moment, all the same, he was afraid she would reply as on the confessed experience of so many such tributes, handsome as this one was. But she was too much moved--the pure colour that had risen to her face showed it--to have recourse to this particular facility. She was moved even to the glimmer of tears, though she gave him her hand with a smile. "I'm so glad you've said all that, for from you I know what it means. Certainly it's better for you to go away. Of course it's all wrong, isn't it?--but that's the only thing it can be: therefore it's all right, isn't it? Some day when we're both great people we'll talk these things over; then we shall be quiet, we shall be rich, we shall be at peace--let us hope so at least--and better friends than others about us will know." She paused, smiling still, and then said while he held her hand: "Don't, _don't_ come to-morrow night."

With this she attempted to draw her hand away, as if everything were settled and over; but the effect of her movement was that, as he held her tight, he was simply drawn toward her and close to her. The effect of this, in turn, was that, releasing her only to possess her the more completely, he seized her in his arms and, breathing deeply "I love you, you know," clasped her in a long embrace. His demonstration and her conscious sufferance, almost equally liberal, so sustained themselves that the door of the room had time to open slowly before either had taken notice. Mrs. Rooth, who had not peeped in before, peeped in now, becoming in this manner witness of an incident she could scarce have counted on. The unexpected indeed had for Mrs. Rooth never been an insuperable element in things; it was her position in general to be too acquainted with all the pa.s.sions for any crude surprise. As the others turned round they saw her stand there and smile, and heard her e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e with wise indulgence: "Oh you extravagant children!"

Miriam brushed off her tears, quickly but unconfusedly. "He's going away, the wretch; he's bidding us farewell."

Peter--it was perhaps a result of his acute agitation--laughed out at the "us" (he had already laughed at the charge of puerility), and Mrs.

Rooth went on: "Going away? Ah then I must have one too!" She held out both her hands, and Sherringham, stepping forward to take them, kissed her respectfully on each cheek, in the foreign manner, while she continued: "Our dear old friend--our kind, gallant gentleman!"

"The gallant gentleman has been promoted to a great post--the proper reward of his gallantry," Miriam said. "He's going out as minister to some impossible place--where is it?"

"As minister--how very charming! We _are_ getting on." And their companion languished up at him with a world of approval.

"Oh well enough. One must take what one can get," he answered.

"You'll get everything now, I'm sure, shan't you?" Mrs. Rooth asked with an inflexion that called back to him comically--the source of the sound was so different--the very vibrations he had heard the day before from Lady Agnes.

"He's going to glory and he'll forget all about us--forget he has ever known such low people. So we shall never see him again, and it's better so. Good-bye, good-bye," Miriam repeated; "the brougham must be there, but I won't take you. I want to talk to mother about you, and we shall say things not fit for you to hear. Oh I'll let you know what we lose--don't be afraid," she added to Mrs. Rooth. "He's the rising star of diplomacy."

"I knew it from the first--I know how things turn out for such people as you!" cried the old woman, gazing fondly at Sherringham. "But you don't mean to say you're not coming to-morrow night?"

"Don't--don't; it's great folly," Miriam interposed; "and it's quite needless, since you saw me to-day."

Peter turned from the mother to the daughter, the former of whom broke out to the latter: "Oh you dear rogue, to say one has _seen_ you yet!

You know how you'll come up to it--you'll be beyond everything."

"Yes, I shall be there--certainly," Peter said, at the door, to Mrs.

Rooth.

"Oh you dreadful goose!" Miriam called after him. But he went out without looking round at her.

BOOK SEVENTH

XLII

Nick Dormer had for the hour quite taken up his abode at his studio, where Biddy usually arrived after breakfast to give him news of the state of affairs in Calcutta Gardens and where many letters and telegrams were now addressed him. Among such missives, on the morning of the Sat.u.r.day on which Peter Sherringham had promised to dine at the other house, was a note from Miriam Rooth, informing Nick that if he shouldn't telegraph to put her off she would turn up about half-past eleven, probably with her mother, for just one more sitting. She added that it was a nervous day for her and that she couldn't keep still, so that it would really be very kind to let her come to him as a refuge.

She wished to stay away from the theatre, where everything was now settled--or so much the worse for the others if it wasn't--till the evening; in spite of which she should if left to herself be sure to go there. It would keep her quiet and soothe her to sit--he could keep her quiet (he was such a blessing that way!) at any time. Therefore she would give him two or three hours--or rather she would herself ask for them--if he didn't positively turn her from the door.

It had not been definite to Nick that he wanted another sitting at all for the slight work, as he held it to be, that Miriam had already helped him to achieve. He regarded this work as a mere light wind-fall of the shaken tree: he had made what he could of it and would have been embarra.s.sed to make more. If it was not finished this was because it was not finishable; at any rate he had said all he had to say in that particular phrase. The young man, in truth, was not just now in the highest spirits; his imagination had within two or three days become conscious of a check that he tried to explain by the idea of a natural reaction. Any decision or violent turn, any need of a new sharp choice in one's career, was upsetting, and, exaggerate that importance and one's own as little as one would, a deal of flurry couldn't help attending, especially in the face of so much scandal, the horrid act, odious to one's modesty at the best, of changing one's clothes in the marketplace. That made life not at all positively pleasant, yet decidedly thrilling, for the hour; and it was well enough till the thrill abated. When this occurred, as it inevitably would, the romance and the glow of the adventure were exchanged for the chill and the prose. It was to these latter elements he had waked up pretty wide on this particular morning; and the prospect was not appreciably fresher from the fact that he had warned himself in advance it would be dull. He had in fact known how dull it would be, but now he would have time to learn even better. A reaction was a reaction, but it was not after all a catastrophe. It would be a feature of his very freedom that he should ask himself if he hadn't made a great mistake; this privilege would doubtless even remain within the limits of its nature in exposing him to hours of intimate conviction of his madness. But he would live to retract his retractations--this was the first thing to bear in mind.

He was absorbed, even while he dressed, in the effort to achieve intelligibly to himself some such revolution when, by the first post, Miriam's note arrived. At first it did little to help his agility--it made him, seeing her esthetic faith as so much stronger and simpler than his own, wonder how he should keep with her at her high level. Ambition, in her, was always on the rush, and she was not a person to conceive that others might in bad moments listen for the trumpet in vain. It would never have occurred to her that only the day before he had spent a part of the afternoon quite at the bottom of the hill. He had in fact turned into the National Gallery and had wandered about there for more than an hour, and it was just while he did so that the immitigable recoil had begun perversely to make itself felt. The perversity was all the greater from the fact that if the experience was depressing this was not because he had been discouraged beyond measure by the sight of the grand things that had been done--things so much grander than any that would ever bear his signature. That variation he was duly acquainted with and should know in abundance again. What had happened to him, as he pa.s.sed on this occasion from t.i.tian to Rubens and from Gainsborough to Rembrandt, was that he found himself calling the whole exhibited art into question. What was it after all at the best and why had people given it so high a place? Its weakness, its limits broke upon him; tacitly blaspheming he looked with a l.u.s.treless eye at the palpable, polished, "toned" objects designed for suspension on hooks. That is, he blasphemed if it were blasphemy to feel that as bearing on the energies of man they were a poor and secondary show. The human force producing them was so far from one of the greatest; their place was a small place and their connexion with the heroic life casual and slight. They represented so little great ideas, and it was great ideas that kept the world from chaos. He had incontestably been in much closer relation with them a few months before than he was to-day: it made up a great deal for what was false and hollow, what was merely personal, in "politics"

that, were the idea greater or smaller, they could at their best so directly deal with it. The love of it had really been much of the time at the bottom of his impulse to follow them up; though this was not what he had most talked of with his political friends or even with Julia. No, political as Julia was, he had not conferred with her much about the idea. However, this might have been his own fault quite as much as hers, and she in fact took such things, such enthusiasms, for granted--there was an immense deal in every way that she took for granted. On the other hand, he had often put forward this brighter side of the care for the public weal in his discussions with Gabriel Nash, to the end, it is true, of making that worthy scoff aloud at what he was pleased to term his hypocrisy. Gabriel maintained precisely that there were more ideas, more of those that man lived by, in a single room of the National Gallery than in all the statutes of Parliament. Nick had replied to this more than once that the determination of what man did live by was required; to which Nash had retorted (and it was very rarely that he quoted Scripture) that it was at any rate not by bread and beans alone.

The statutes of Parliament gave him bread and beans _tout au plus_.

Nick had at present no pretension of trying this question over again: he reminded himself that his ambiguity was subjective, as the philosophers said; the result of a mood which in due course would be at the mercy of another mood. It made him curse, and cursing, as a finality, lacked firmness--one had to drive in posts somewhere under. The greatest time to do one's work was when it didn't seem worth doing, for then one gave it a brilliant chance, that of resisting the stiffest test of all--the test of striking one as too bad. To do the most when there would be the least to be got by it was to be most in the spirit of high production.

One thing at any rate was certain, Nick reflected: nothing on earth would induce him to change back again--not even if this twilight of the soul should last for the rest of his days. He hardened himself in his posture with a good conscience which, had they had a glimpse of it, would have made him still more diverting to those who already thought him so; and now, by a happy chance, Miriam suddenly supplied the bridge correcting the gap in his continuity. If he had made his sketch it was a proof he had done her, and that he had done her flashed upon him as a sign that she would be still more feasible. Art was _doing_--it came back to that--which politics in most cases weren't. He thus, to pursue our image, planted his supports in the dimness beneath all cursing, and on the platform so improvised was able, in his relief, to dance. He sent out a telegram to Balaklava Place requesting his beautiful sitter by no manner of means to fail him. When his servant came back it was to usher into the studio Peter Sherringham, whom the man had apparently found at the door.

The hour was so early for general commerce that Nick immediately guessed his visitor had come on some rare errand; but this inference yielded to the reflexion that Peter might after all only wish to make up by present zeal for not having been near him before. He forgot that, as he had subsequently learned from Biddy, their foreign, or all but foreign, cousin had spent an hour in Rosedale Road, missing him there but pulling out Miriam's portrait, the day of his own last visit to Beauclere. These young men were not on a ceremonious footing and it was not in Nick's nature to keep a record of civilities rendered or omitted; nevertheless he had been vaguely conscious that during a stay in London elastic enough on Peter's part he and his kinsman had foregathered less than of yore. It was indeed an absorbing moment in the career of each, but even while recognising such a truth Nick judged it not impossible that Julia's brother might have taken upon himself to resent some suppositions failure of consideration for that lady; though this indeed would have been stupid and the newly appointed minister (to he had forgotten where) didn't often make mistakes. Nick held that as he had treated Julia with studious generosity she had nothing whatever to visit on him--wherefore Peter had still less. It was at any rate none of that gentleman's business. There were only two abatements to disposing in a few frank words of all this: one of them Nick's general hatred of talking of his private affairs (a reluctance in which he and Peter were well matched); and the other a truth involving more of a confession--the subtle truth that the most definite and even most soothing result of the collapse of his engagement was, as happened, an unprecedented consciousness of freedom. Nick's observation was of a different sort from his cousin's; he noted much less the signs of the hour and kept throughout a looser register of life; nevertheless, just as one of our young men had during these days in London found the air peopled with personal influences, the concussion of human atoms, so the other, though only asking to live without too many questions and work without too many rubs, to be glad and sorry in short on easy terms, had become aware of a certain social tightness, of the fact that life is crowded and pa.s.sion restless, accident and community inevitable. Everybody with whom one had relations had other relations too, and even indifference was a mixture and detachment a compromise. The only wisdom was to consent to the loss, if necessary, of everything but one's temper and to the ruin, if necessary, of everything but one's work. It must be added that Peter's relative took precautions against irritation perhaps in excess of the danger, as departing travellers about to whiz through foreign countries mouth in phrase-books combinations of words they will never use. He was at home in clear air and disliked to struggle either for breath or for light. He had a dim sense that Peter felt some discomfort from him and might have come now to tell him so; in which case he should be sorry for the sufferer in various ways. But as soon as that aspirant began to speak suspicion reverted to mere ancient kindness, and this in spite of the fact that his speech had a slightly exaggerated prompt.i.tude, like the prompt.i.tude of business, which might have denoted self-consciousness. To Nick it quickly appeared better to be glad than to be sorry: this simple argument was more than sufficient to make him glad Peter was there.

"My dear fellow, it's an unpardonable hour, isn't it? I wasn't even sure you'd be up, yet had to risk it, because my hours are numbered. I'm going away to-morrow," Peter went on; "I've a thousand things to do.

I've had no talk with you this time such as we used to have of old (it's an irreparable loss, but it's your fault, you know), and as I've got to rush about all day I thought I'd just catch you before any one else does."

"Some one has already caught me, but there's plenty of time," Nick returned.

Peter all but asked a question--it fell short. "I see, I see. I'm sorry to say I've only a few minutes at best."

"Man of crushing responsibilities, you've come to humiliate me!" his companion cried. "I know all about it."

"It's more than I do then. That's not what I've come for, but I shall be delighted if I humiliate you a little by the way. I've two things in mind, and I'll mention the most difficult first. I came here the other day--the day after my arrival in town."

"Ah yes, so you did; it was very good of you"--Nick remembered. "I ought to have returned your visit or left a card or written my name--to have done something in Great Stanhope Street, oughtn't I? You hadn't got this new thing then, or I'd have 'called.'"

Peter eyed him a moment. "I say, what's the matter with you? Am I really unforgivable for having taken that liberty?"

"What liberty?" Nick looked now quite innocent of care, and indeed his visitor's allusion was not promptly clear. He was thinking for the instant all of Biddy, of whom and whose secret inclinations Grace had insisted on talking to him. They were none of his business, and if he wouldn't for the world have let the girl herself suspect he had violent lights on what was most screened and curtained in her, much less would he have made Peter a clumsy present of this knowledge. Grace had a queer theory that Peter treated Biddy badly--treated them all somehow badly; but Grace's zeal (she had plenty of it, though she affected all sorts of fine indifference) almost always took the form of her being unusually wrong. Nick wanted to do only what Biddy would thank him for, and he knew very well what she wouldn't. She wished him and Peter to be great friends, and the only obstacle to this was that Peter was too much of a diplomatist. Peter made him for an instant think of her and of the hour they had lately spent together in the studio in his absence--an hour of which Biddy had given him a history full of items and omissions; and this in turn brought Nick's imagination back to his visitor's own side of the matter. That general human complexity of which the sense had lately increased with him, and to which it was owing that any thread one might take hold of would probably be the extremely wrong end of something, was ill.u.s.trated by the fact that while poor Biddy was thinking of Peter it was ten to one poor Peter was thinking of Miriam Rooth. All of which danced before Nick's intellectual vision for a s.p.a.ce briefer than my too numerous words.

"I pitched into your treasures--I rummaged among your canvases," Peter said. "Biddy had nothing whatever to do with it--she maintained an att.i.tude of irreproachable reserve. It has been on my conscience all these days and I ought to have done penance before. I've been putting it off partly because I'm so ashamed of my indiscretion. _Que voulez-vous_, my dear chap? My provocation was great. I heard you had been painting Miss Rooth, so that I couldn't restrain my curiosity. I simply went into that corner and struck out there--a trifle wildly no doubt. I dragged the young lady to the light--your sister turned pale as she saw me. It was a good deal like breaking open one of your letters, wasn't it?

However, I a.s.sure you it's all right, for I congratulate you both on your style and on your correspondent."

"You're as clever, as witty, as humorous as ever, old boy," Nick p.r.o.nounced, going himself into the corner designated by his companion and laying his hands on the same canvas. "Your curiosity's the highest possible tribute to my little attempt and your sympathy sets me right with myself. There she is again," Nick went on, thrusting the picture into an empty frame; "you shall see her whether you wish to or not."

"Right with yourself? You don't mean to say you've been wrong!" Peter returned, standing opposite the portrait.

"Oh I don't know. I've been kicking up such a row. Anything's better than a row."

"She's awfully good--she's awfully true," said Peter. "You've done more to her since the other day. You've put in several things."

"Yes, but I've worked distractedly. I've not altogether conformed to the good rule about being off with the old love."