CHAPTER XVI. AT THE OPERA
On arriving in London, George Haldane was driven straight to the house of an old friend at Chelsea, where he always stayed during his visits to the Metropolis. This friend was Lovell Blakiston, as eccentric a being in his own way as Haldane himself was in his. He had been, since boyhood, in the India Office, where he still put in an appearance several hours a day, and whence he still drew a large income, with the immediate right to a retiring pension whenever he choose to take it. He was a great student, especially of the pagan poets and philosophers; and the greater part of his days and nights were spent in his-old-fashioned library, opening with folding doors on to a quiet lawn, which led in its turn to the very river-side. He had two pet aversions – modern progress, in the shape of railroads, electricity, geology; all the new business of science and modern religion, especially in its connection with Christian theology. He was, in short, a pagan pure and simple, fond of old books, old wine, old meditations, and old gods. However he might differ with Haldane on such subjects’ as the nebular hypothesis, which he hated with all his heart, he agreed with him sufficiently on the subject of Christianity. Both had a cordial dislike for church ceremonies and church bells.
The two gentlemen had another taste in common. This was the opera, which both enjoyed hugely, though Blakiston never ceased to regret the disappearance of that old operatic institution, the ballet, which, like a rich dessert wine, used to bring the feast of music to a delightfully sensuous conclusion. Haldane was too young a man to remember such visions of loveliness as Cerito, whom his old friend had often gone to see in company with Horne Took.
So it happened that two or three days after his arrival, Haldane accompanied his host to the opera house, where Patti was to appear in “Traviata.”
Seated comfortably in the stalls, he was glancing quietly round the house between the acts, when his attention was attracted to a face in one of the private boxes. A pale, Madonna-like, yet girlish face, set in golden hair, with soft blue eyes, and an expression so forlorn, so wistful, so ill at ease, that it was almost painful to behold.
Haldane started in surprise.
“What is the matter?” said his friend; “Have you recognized anybody?”
“I am not certain,” returned Haldane, raising his opera-glass and surveying the face through them. Then, after a long look, he added’ as if to himself, “I am almost sure it is the same.”
“Do you mean that young lady in black, seated in the second tier?”
“Yes. Oblige me by looking at her, and tell me what you think of her.” Blakiston raised his opera-glass, and took a long look.
“Well?” asked Haldane.
“She reminds me of one of your detestable pre-Raphaelistic drawings, shockheaded and vacuous. She is pretty, I grant you, but she has no expression.”
“I should say, on the contrary, a very marked expression of deep pain.”
“Tight lacing,” grunted Blakiston. “Your modern women have no shape, since Cerito.”
Here Haldane rose from his seat. Looking up again, he had met the young lady’s eyes, and had perceived at once that she recognized him.
“I am going to speak to her,” he explained. “She is a neighbour of ours, and a friend of my wife.”
He made his way to the second tier, and finding the door of the box open, he looked in, and saw the person he sought, seated in company with an elderly lady and a young man.
“Miss Dove!” he said, advancing into the box. “Although we have only met twice, I thought I could not be mistaken.” Edith (for it was she) turned quickly and took his outstretched hand..
“How strange to find you here!” she exclaimed. “Is Mrs. Haldane with you?
“No, indeed. I left her to the pious duties of the parish, which she is fulfilling daily, I expect, in company with your seraphic friend the minister.”
Edith looked at him with strange surprise, but said nothing.
“When did you come to town?” he asked. “I thought you were quite a country young lady, and never ventured into the giddy world of London.”
“I was not very well,” replied Edith, “and my aunt invited me to stop with her a few weeks. This is my aunt, Mrs. Hetherington; and this gentleman is my cousin Walter.” Here Edith went somewhat nervously through the ceremony of introduction. She added, with a slight flush, “My cousin insisted on bringing us here to-night. I did not wish to come.”
“Why not?” demanded Haldane, noticing her uneasiness.
“Because I did not think it right; and I have been thinking all the evening what the vicar will say when I tell him I have been to such a place.”
Here the old lady shook her head ominously, and gave a slight groan.
“Is the place so terrible,” asked Haldane, smiling, “now you have seen it?”
“No, it is very pretty; and of course the singing is beautiful. But Mr. Santley does not approve of the theatre, and I am sorry I came.”
“Nonsense, Edith,” said young Hetherington, with a laugh. “You know you wanted to see the ‘Traviata,’ The fact is,” he continued, turning to Haldane, “my mother and my cousin are both terribly old-fashioned. My mother here is Scotch, and believes in the kirk, the whole kirk, and nothing but the kirk; and as for Edith, she is entirely, as they say in Scotland, under the minister’s ‘thoomb.’ I thought they would have enjoyed themselves, but they have been doing penance all the evening.”
Without paying attention to her cousin’s remarks, Edith was looking thoughtfully at Haldane.
“When do you return to Omberley?” she asked.
“I am not sure – in a fortnight, at the latest. I am going on to France.”
“And Mrs. Haldane will remain all that time alone?”
“Of course,” he replied. “Oh, she will not miss me. She has her household duties, her parish, her garden – to say nothing of her clergyman. And you, do you stay long in London?”
“I am not sure; I think not. I am tired of it already.”
Again that weary, wistful look, which sat so strangely on the young, almost childish face. She sighed, and gazed sadly around the crowded house. A minute later, Haldane took his leave, and rejoined his friend in the stalls. Looking up at the end of the next act, he saw that the box was empty.
The women had yielded to their consciences, and departed before the end of the performance.
That night, when Haldane went home to Chelsea, he found a letter from his wife. It was a long letter, but contained no news whatever, being chiefly occupied with self-reproaches that the writer had not accompanied her husband in his pilgrimage. This struck Haldane as rather peculiar, as in former communications Ellen had expressed no such dissatisfaction; but he was by nature and of set habit unsuspicious, and he set it down to some momentary ennui. The letter contained no mention whatever of Mr. Santley, but in the postscript, where ladies often put the most interesting part of their correspondence, there was a reference to the Spanish valet, Baptisto.
“As I told you,” wrote Ellen, “Baptisto seems in excellent health, though he is mysterious and unpleasant as usual. He comes and goes like a ghost, but if he made you believe that he was ill, he was imposing upon you. I do so wish you had taken him with you.”
Haldane folded up the letter with a smile.
“Poor Baptisto!” he thought, “I suppose it is as I suspected, and the little widow at the lodge is at the bottom of it all.”
After a few days’ sojourn at Chelsea, during which time he was much interested in certain spiritualistic investigations which were just then being conducted by the London savants, to the manifest confusion of the spirits and indignation of true believers, Haldane went to Paris, where he read his paper before the French Society to which he belonged. There we shall leave him for a little time, returning to the company of Miss Dove, with whom we have more immediate concern.
Mother and son lived in a pleasant house overlooking Clapham Common, a district famous for its religious edification, its young ladies’ seminaries, and its dissenting chapels. Mrs. Hethering-ton was the wealthy widow of a Glasgow merchant, long settled in London, and she set her face rigidly against modern thought, ecclesiastical vestments, and cooking on the sabbath. Curiously enough, her son Walter, who inherited a handsome competence, was a painter, and followed his heathen occupation with much talent, and more youthful enthusiasm. His landscapes, chiefly of Highland scenes, had been exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy. His mother, whose highest ideas of art were founded on a superficial acquaintance with the Scripture pieces of Noel Paton, and an occasional contemplation of biblical masterpieces in the Doré Gallery, would have preferred to have seen him following in his fathers footsteps, and even entering the true kirk as a preacher; but his sympathies were pagan, and a gloomy childish experience had not fitted him with the requisite enthusiasm for John Calvin and the sabbath.
Walter Hetherington was a fine fresh young fellow of three and twenty, and belonged to the clever set of Scotch painters, headed by Messrs. Pettie, Richardson, and Peter Graham. He was “cannie” painstaking, and rather sceptical, and, putting aside his art, which he really loved, he felt true enthusiasm for only one thing in the world – his cousin Edith, whom he hoped and longed to make his wife.
As a very young girl, Edith had seemed rather attached to him; but of late years, during which they saw each other only at long intervals, she seemed colder and colder to his advances. He noticed her indifference, and set it down somewhat angrily to girlish fanaticism, for he had little or no suspicion whatever that another man’s image might be filling her thoughts. Once or twice, it is true, when she sounded the praises of her Omberley pastor, his zeal, his goodness, his beauty of discourse, he asked himself if he could possibly have a rival there; but knowing something of the relinquent fancies of young vestals, he rejected the idea. To tell the truth, he rather pitied the Rev. Mr. Santley, whom he had never seen, as a hardheaded, dogmatic, elderly creature of the type greatly approved by his mother, and abundant even in Clapham. He had no idea of an Adonis in a clerical frock coat, with a beautiful profile, white hands, and a voice gentle and low – the latter an excellent thing in woman, but a dangerous thing in an unmarried preacher of the Word.
CHAPTER XVII. WALTER HETHERINGTON
When the party got home from the opera, it was only half-past ten. They sat down to a frugal supper in the dining-room.
“I am sorry you did not wait till the last act,” said the young man, after an awkward silence. “Patti’s death scene is magnificent.”
“I’m thinking we heard enough,” his mother replied. “I never cared much for play-acting, and I see little sense in screeching about in a foreign tongue. I’d rather have half an hour of the Reverend Mr. Mactavish’s discourses than a night of fooling like yon.”
“What do you say, Edith? I’m sure the music was very pretty.”
“Yes, it was beautiful; but not knowing much of Italian, I could not gather what it was all about.”
“It is an operatic version of a story of the younger Dumas,” explained Walter, with an uncomfortable sense of treading on dangerous ground. “The story is that of a beautiful woman who has lived an evil life, and is reformed through her affection for a young Frenchman. His friends think he is degrading himself by offering to marry her, and to cure him she pretends to be false and wicked. In the end, she dies in his arms, broken-hearted. It is a very touching subject, I think, though some people consider it immoral.”
Here the matron broke in with quiet severity.
“I wonder yon woman – Patti, you call her – doesn’t think shame to appear in such dresses. One of them was scarcely decent, and I was almost ashamed to look at her – the creature!”
“But her singing, mother, her singing; was it not divine?”
“It was meeddling loud; but I’ve heard far finer in the kirk. Edith, my bairn, you’re tired, I’m thinking. We’ll just read a chapter, and get to bed.”
So the chapter was read, and the ladies retired, while Walter walked off to his studio to have a quiet pipe. He was too used to his mother’s peculiarities to be much surprised at the failure of the evening’s entertainment; but he felt really amazed that Edith had not been more impressed.
The next morning, when they met at breakfast, Edith astonished both her aunt and cousin by expressing her wish to return to Omberley as soon as possible.
“Go away already!” cried the young man. ‘“Why, you’ve hardly been here a week, and you’ve seen nothing of town, and we’ve all the picture-galleries to visit yet.”
“And you have not heard Mr. Mactavish discoorse,” cried his mother. “No, no; you must bide awhile.”
But Edith shook her head, and they saw her mind was made up.
“I can come again at Christmas, but I would rather go now,” she said.
“But why have you changed your mind?” inquired her cousin eagerly.
“I think they want me at home; and there is a great deal of church work to be done in the village.”
Walter was not deceived by this excuse, and tried persuasion, but it was of no avail. The girl was determined to return home immediately. He little knew the real cause of her determination. Haldane’s presence in London had filled her, in spite of herself, with jealous alarm. Ellen Haldane was alone at the Manor, with no husband’s eyes to trouble her; and, despite the clergyman’s oath of fidelity, Edith could not trust him.
Yes, she would go home. It was time to put an end to it all, to remind Santley of his broken promises, and to claim their fulfilment. If he refused to do her justice, she would part from him for ever; not, however, without letting the other woman, her rival, know his true character.
It was arranged that she should leave by an early train next morning. For the greater part of the day she kept her room, engaged in preparations for the journey; but towards evening Walter found her alone in the drawing-room. The old lady, his mother, who earnestly wished him to marry his cousin, had contrived to be out of the way.
“I am so sorry you are going,” the young man said. “We see so little of each other now.”
Edith was seated with her back to the window, her face in deep shade. She knew by her cousin’s manner that he was more than usually agitated, and she dreaded what was coming – what had come, indeed, on several occasions before. She did not answer, but almost unconsciously heaved a deep sigh.
“Does that mean that you are sorry too?” asked Walter, leaning towards her to see her face.
“Of course I am sorry,” she replied, with a certain constraint.
“I wish I could believe that. Somehow or other, Edith, it seems to me that you would rather be anywhere than here. Well, you have some cause; for the house is dreary enough, and we are all dull people. But you and I used to be such friends! More like brother and sister than mere cousins. Is that all over? Are we to drift farther and farther apart as the years pass on? It seems to me as if it might come to that.”
“How absurd you are!” said Edith, trying to force a laugh, but failing lamentably. “You know I was always fond of you and – and – of your mother.” Walter winced under the sting of the last sentence, so unconsciously given.
“I don’t mean that at all,” he exclaimed. “Of course you liked us, as relations like each other; but am I never to be more to you than a mere cousin? You know I love you, that I have loved you ever since we were boy and girl; and once – ah, yes, I thought you cared for me a little. Edith, what does it mean? Why are you so changed?”
Edith was more deeply changed than ever her cousin could guess. Had he been able to see her face, he would have been wonder-stricken at its expression of mingled shame and despair. She tried to reply; but before she could do so her voice was choked, and her tears began to fall. In a moment he was close beside her, and bending over her, with one hand outstretched to clasp her.
“Now, you are crying. Edith, my darling, what is it?”
“Don’t touch me,” she sobbed, shrinking from him. “I can’t bear it.”
“Forgive me, if I have said anything to pain you; and oh, my darling! remember it is my love that carries me away. I do love you, Edith. I wish to God I could prove to you how much!”
He took her hand in his; but she drew it forcibly from him, and, shrinking still further away, entirely losing her self-control, sobbed silently.
“Don’t!” she exclaimed. “For pity’s sake, be silent. You do not know what you are saying. I am not fit to become your wife.”
He moved a few steps from her, and waited until her wild, hysterical sobbing should have ceased. She commanded herself quickly, as it the wild outburst which she had not been able to control had terrified her. Then she rose, and would have left the room, but the young man stopped her.
“Edith,” he said, “surely you did not mean what you said just now, that you are not fit to become my wife?”
“Yes,” she replied quickly; “I did mean it.”
She was glad that her face, was turned from him, and that the room was in partial darkness. She was glad that she was able to steady her voice, and to give a direct reply.
He did not answer; she felt he was waiting for her to speak on.
“Even if two people love each other,” she said, trembling, “or only think they do, which is too often the case, they have no right to thoughtlessly contract that holy tie. There cannot be perfect happiness in this world without perfect spiritual communion. I know – I feel sure – that this does not exist between you and me.”
The young man flushed, and his brow contracted somewhat angrily.
“Take time to think it over,” he said quickly; “this is not your own heart that is speaking now. The seeds which that man, your clergyman, has been sowing in your heart have borne fruit. Religion is changing your whole nature. It is alienating you hopelessly from all to whom you are so dear; it is making you unjust, cruelly unkind, to yourself, but doubly so to others, under the shallow pretence that you are serving God!”
She did not interrupt him; but when he ceased, she put out her hand and said, quickly but firmly —
“Good night.”
“Good night,” he repeated. “It is so early, surely you are not going to-your room already? This is our last night together, remember.”
“I am so tired,” returned the girl, wearily. “I must get a good night’s rest, since I am to start early in the morning.”
“And you will not say another word?”
“I don’t know that there is anything more that I can say.”
“You are angry with me, Edith. Before you go, say at least that you forgive me.”
“I am not angry; indeed, I am glad you have spoken. I know now I should never have come here. I know I must never come again.”
So, without another word, they parted. Edith went up to her room. Walter sought his, and there he remained all the evening, sitting in the darkness, pondering over the unaccountable change which had taken place in the girl.
Yes, she was changed; but was it hopeless, and altogether unexpected? Might she not, with gentle care, be freed from this hateful influence of the Church? Walter believed that might be so. Already he seemed to see light through the cloud, and to trace the secret of this man’s influence over her. Edith was imaginative and highly fanatical; he had appealed to her imagination. Being a High Church clergyman, he had employed two powerful agents – colour and form. He had scattered the shrine at which she worshipped with soft and durable perfumes, and had set up sacred symbols; and he had said, “Kneel before these; cast down all your worldly wishes and earthly affections.” She, being intoxicated, as it were, had yielded to the spell. It was part of his plan, thought Walter, that she must neither marry nor form any other earthly tie; for was it not through her, and such as her, that his beloved Church was able to sustain its full prestige? The Church must reign supreme in her heart, as it had done in that of many another vestal; it was at the altar alone that her gifts of love and devotion must be burned. She must be sacrificed, as many others had been before her, and the Church would stand.
This was the young man’s true view of the case. He believed it, for he had learnt in his home to hate other worldliness; but though he fancied he saw the nature of the discord, he could not as yet perceive the directest means of cure.
The next morning, when Edith, looking very pale and weary, but still very pretty in her simple travelling costume, came down to breakfast, she was a little surprised to find Walter already there. His manner was kind and considerate, as it had always been, and he made no reference whatever to what had passed between them on the previous night. They sat and carried on a constrained but polite conversation; but both were glad when it was interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Hetherington. The old lady was filled with genuine regret at her niece’s sudden departure, and, while presiding at the breakfast-table, was so busy laying down plans for her speedy return that she did not notice that every morsel on Edith’s plate remained untouched, and that, while sipping her tea, her eyes wandered continually towards the window, as if anxiously watching for the cab which was to take her away. Walter noticed it with pain, and remained discreetly silent.
As soon as the cab arrived, he left the room, ostensibly to superintend the removal of Ediths luggage, but in reality to be absent at the leave-taking between his mother and his cousin.
He accompanied Edith to the station. It was merely an act of common courtesy, to which she could make no possible objection. On the way there was very little said on either side. She was silent from preoccupation, and he feared to tread on dangerous ground. But when they were near their parting, when Edith was comfortably seated in the train, and he stood by the open carriage door, he ventured in a covert manner to refer to what had passed.
“The house will be brighter in wintertime,” he said, “and we shall have more means of amusing you. You will come back at Christmas, Edith?”
She started, dropped his hand, and drew herself from him.
“No, I think not,” she said; “it is always a busy time with us at Christmas. There is much to be done in the church.”
This was their good-bye; for before he could say more the guard noisily closed the carriage doors, and whistled shrilly. Mechanically Walter took off his hat, and stood sadly watching the train as it moved away.