A Princess of Thule

UNEXPECTED circumstances had detained Mrs. Kavanagh and her daughter in London long after everybody else had left, but at length they were ready to start for their projected trip into Switzerland. On the day before their departure Ingram dined with them – on his own invitation. He had got into the habit of letting them know when it would suit him to devote an evening to their instruction; and it was difficult indeed to say which of the two ladies submitted the more readily and meekly to the dictatorial enunciation of his opinions. Mrs. Kavanagh, it is true, sometimes dissented in so far as a smile indicated dissent, but her daughter scarcely reserved to herself so much liberty. Mr. Ingram had taken her in hand, and expected of her the obedience and respect due his superior age.

And yet, somehow or other, he occasionally found himself indirectly soliciting the advice of this gentle, clear-eyed and clear-headed young person, more especially as regarded the difficulties surrounding Sheila; and sometimes a chance remark of hers, uttered in a timid or careless or even mocking fashion, would astonish him by the rapid light it threw on these dark troubles. On this evening – the last evening they were spending in London – it was his own affairs which he proposed to mention to Mrs. Lorraine, and he had no more hesitation in doing so than if she had been his oldest friend. He wanted to ask her what he should do about the money Mrs. Lavender had left him; and he intended to be a good deal more frank with Mrs. Lorraine than with any of the others to whom he had spoken about the matter. For he was well aware that Mrs. Lavender had at first resolved that he should have at least a considerable portion of her wealth, or why should she have asked him how he would like to be a rich man?

“I do not think,” said Mrs. Lorraine, quietly, “that there is any use in your asking me what you should do, for I know what you will do, whether it accords with any one’s opinion or no. And yet you would find a great advantage in having money.”

“Oh, I know that,” he said readily, “I should like to be rich beyond anything that ever happened in a drama; and I should take my chance of all the evil influences that money is supposed to exert. Do you know, I think you rich people are very unfairly treated.”

“But we are not rich,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, passing at the time. “Cecilia and I find ourselves very poor sometimes.”

“But I quite agree with Mr. Ingram, mamma,” said Cecilia – as if any one had had the courage to disagree with Mr. Ingram! – “rich people are shamefully ill-treated. If you go to a theatre now you find that all the virtues are on the side of the poor, and if there are a few vices, you get a thousand excuses for them. No one takes account of the temptations of the rich. You have people educated from their infancy to imagine that the whole world was made for them, every wish they have gratified, every day showing them people dependent on them and grateful for favors; and no allowance is made for such a temptation to become haughty, self-willed and overbearing. But of course it stands to reason that the rich never have justice done them in plays and stories, for the people who write are poor.”

“Not all of them.”

“But enough to strike an average of injustice. And it is very hard. For it is the rich who buy books and who take boxes at the theaters, and then they find themselves grossly abused; whereas the humble peasant, who can scarcely read at all, and who never pays more than sixpence for a seat in the gallery, is flattered and coaxed and caressed until one wonders whether the source of virtue is the drinking of sour ale. Mr. Ingram, you do it yourself. You impress mamma and me with the belief that we are miserable sinners if we are not continually doing some act of charity. Well, that is all very pleasant and necessary, in moderation; but you don’t find the poor folks so very anxious to live for other people. They don’t care much what becomes of us. They take your port wine and flannels as if they were conferring a favor on you, but as for your condition and prospect in this world and the next, they don’t trouble much about that. Now, mamma, just wait a moment.”

“I will not. You are a bad girl,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, severely. “Here has Mr. Ingram been teaching you and making you better for ever so long back, and you pretend to accept his counsel and reform yourself; and then all at once you break out and throw down the tablets of the law and conduct yourself like a heathen.”

“Because I want him to explain, mamma. I suppose he considers it wicked for us to start for Switzerland to-morrow. The money we shall expend in traveling might have dispatched a cargo of muskets to some missionary station, so that – ”

“Cecilia!”

“Oh, no,” Ingram said carelessly, and nursing his knee with both his hands as usual, “traveling is not wicked; it is only unreasonable. A traveler, you know, is a person who has a house in one town, and who goes to live in a house in another town, in order to have the pleasure of paying for both.”

“Mr. Ingram,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, “will you talk seriously for one minute, and tell me whether we are to expect to see you in the Tyrol?”

But Ingram was not in a mood for talking seriously, and he waited to hear Mrs. Lorraine strike in with some calmly audacious invitation. She did not, however, and he turned around from her mother to question her. He was surprised to find that her eyes were fixed on the ground and that something like a tinge of color was in her face. He turned rapidly away again. “Well, Mrs. Kavanagh,” he said, with a fine air of indifference, “the last time we spoke about that I was not in the difficulty I am in at present. How could I go traveling just now, without knowing how to regulate my daily expenses? Am I to travel with six white horses and silver bells, or trudge on foot with a wallet?”

“You know quite well,” said Mrs. Lorraine, warmly, “you know you will not touch that money that Mrs. Lavender has left you.”

“Oh, pardon me,” he said: “I should rejoice to have it if it did not properly belong to some one else. And the difficulty is, that Mr. Mackenzie is obviously very anxious that neither Mr. Lavender nor Sheila should have it. If Sheila gets it, of course she will give it to her husband. Now, if it is not to be given to her, do you think I should regard the money with any particular horror and refuse to touch it? That would be very romantic, perhaps, but I should be sorry, you know, to give my friends the most disquieting doubts about my sanity. Romance goes out of a man’s head when the hair gets gray.”

“Until a man has gray hair,” Mrs. Lorraine said, still with some unnecessary fervor, “he does not know that there are things much more valuable than money. You wouldn’t touch that money just now, and all the thinking and reasoning in the world will never get you to touch it.”

“What am I to do with it?” he said, meekly.

“Give it to Mr. Mackenzie in trust for his daughter,” Mrs. Lorraine said promptly; and then, seeing that her mother had gone to the end of the drawing-room to fetch something or other, she added quickly, “I should be more sorry than I can tell you to find you accepting this money. You do not wish to have it. You do not need it. And if you did take it, it would prove a source of continual embarrassment and regret to you, and no assurances on the part of Mr. Mackenzie would be able to convince you that you had acted rightly by his daughter. Now, if you simply hand over your responsibilities to him, he cannot refuse them, for the sake of his own child, and you are left with the sense of having acted nobly and generously. I hope there are many men who would do what I ask you to do, but I have not met many to whom I could make such an appeal with any hope. But, after all, that is only advice. I have no right to ask you to do anything like that. You asked me for my opinion about it. Well, that is it. But I should not have asked you to act on it.”

“But I will,” he said, in a low voice; and then he went to the other end of the room, for Mrs. Kavanagh was calling him to help her in finding something she had lost.

Before he had left that evening Mrs. Lorraine said to him, “We go by the night mail to Paris to-morrow night, and we shall dine here at five. Would you have the courage to come up and join us in that melancholy ceremony?”

“Oh, yes,” he said; “if I may go down to the station to see you away afterward.”

“I think if we got you so far we should persuade you to go with us,” Mrs. Kavanagh said, with a smile.

He sat silent for a minute. Of course she could not seriously mean such a thing. But, at all events, she would not be displeased if he crossed their path while they were actually abroad.

“It is getting too late in the year to go to Scotland now,” he said, with some hesitation.

“Oh, most certainly,” Mrs. Lorraine said.

“I don’t know where the man in whose yacht I was to have gone may be now. I might spend half my holiday in trying to catch him.”

“And during that time you would be alone,” Mrs. Lorraine said.

“I suppose the Tyrol is a very nice place,” he suggested.

“Oh, most delightful!” she exclaimed. “You know, we should go around by Switzerland, and go up by Luzerne and Zurich to the end of the Lake of Constance. Bregenz, mamma, isn’t that the place where we hired that good-natured man the year before last?”

“Yes, child.”

“Now, you see, Mr. Ingram, if you had less time than we – if you could not start with us to-morrow – you might come straight down by Schaffhausen and the steamer, and catch us up there, and then mamma would become your guide. I am sure we should have some pleasant days together till you got tired of us, and then you could go off on a walking tour if you pleased. And then, you know, there would be no difficulty about our meeting at Bregenz, for mamma and I have plenty of time, and we should wait there for a few days, so as to make sure.”

“Cecilia,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, “you must not persuade Mr. Ingram against his will. He may have other duties – other friends to see, perhaps.”

“Who proposed it, mamma?” said the daughter, calmly.

“I did, as a mere joke. But of course, if Mr. Ingram thinks of going to the Tyrol, we should be most pleased to see him there.”

“Oh, I have no other friends whom I am bound to see,” Ingram said, with some hesitation, “and I should like to go to the Tyrol. But – the fact is – I am afraid – ”

“May I interrupt you?” said Mrs. Lorraine. “You do not like to leave London so long as your friend Sheila is in trouble. Is not that the case? And yet she has her father to look after her. And it is clear you cannot do much for her when you do not even know where Mr. Lavender is. On the whole, I think you should consider yourself a little bit now, and not get cheated out of your holidays for the year.”

“Very well,” Ingram said, “I shall be able to tell you to-morrow.”

To be so phlegmatic and matter-of-fact a person, Mr. Ingram was sorely disturbed on going home that evening, nor did he sleep much during the night. For the more that he speculated on all the possibilities that might arise from his meeting these people in the Tyrol, the more pertinaciously did this refrain follow these excursive fancies: “If I go to the Tyrol I shall fall in love with that girl, and ask her to marry me. And if I do so, what position should I hold, with regard to her, as a penniless man with a rich wife?”

He did not look at the question in such a light as the opinion of the world might throw on it. The difficulty was that she herself might afterwards come to think of their mutual relations. True it was that no one could be more gentle and submissive to him than she appeared to be. In matters of opinion and discussion he already ruled with an autocratic authority which he fully perceived himself, and exercised, too, with some sort of notion that it was good for this clear-headed young woman to have to submit to control. But of what avail would this moral authority be as against the consciousness she would have that it was her fortune that was supplying both with the means of living?

He went down to his office in the morning with no plans formed. The forenoon passed, and he had decided on nothing. At mid-day he suddenly bethought him that it would be very pleasant if Sheila would go and see Mrs. Lorraine; and forthwith he did that which would have driven Frank Lavender out of his senses – he telegraphed to Mrs. Lorraine to bring Sheila and her father to dinner at five. He certainly knew that such a request was a trifle cool, but he had discovered that Mrs. Lorraine was not easily shocked by such audacious experiments on her good nature. When he received the telegram in reply he knew it granted what he had asked. The words were merely, “Certainly, by all means, but not later than five.”

Then he hastened down to the house in which Sheila lived, and found that she and her father had just returned from visiting some exhibition. Mr. Mackenzie was not in the room.

“Sheila,” Ingram said, “what would you think of my getting married?”

Sheila looked up with a bright smile and said: “It would please me very much – it would be a great pleasure to me; and I have expected it for some time.”

“You have expected it?” he repeated, with a stare.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Then you fancy you know – ” he said, or rather stammered, in great embarrassment, when she interrupted him by saying,

“Oh yes, I think I know. When you came down every evening to tell me all the praises of Mrs. Lorraine, and how clever she was, and kind, I expected you would come some day with another message; and now I am very glad to hear it. You have changed all my opinions about her, and – ”

Then she rose and took both his hands, and looked frankly into his face.

“And I do hope most sincerely you will be happy, my dear friend.”

Ingram was fairly taken aback at the consequences of his own imprudence. He had never dreamed for a moment that any one would have suspected such a thing; and he had thrown out the suggestion to Sheila almost as a jest, believing, of course, that it compromised no one. And here, before he had spoken a word to Mrs. Lorraine on the subject, he was being congratulated on his approaching marriage.

“Oh, Sheila,” he said, “this is all a mistake. It was a joke of mine. If I had known you would think of Mrs. Lorraine, I would not have said a word about it.”

“But it is Mrs. Lorraine?” Sheila said.

“Well, but I have never mentioned such a thing to her – never hinted it in the remotest manner. I dare say if I had she might laugh the matter aside as too absurd.”

“She will not do that,” Sheila said. “If you ask her to marry you, she will marry you; I am sure of that from what I have heard, and she would be very foolish if she was not proud and glad to do that. And you – what doubt can you have, after all that you have been saying of late?”

“But you don’t marry a woman merely because you admire her cleverness and kindness,” he said; and then he added suddenly: “Sheila, would you do me a great favor? Mrs. Lorraine and her mother are leaving for the Continent to-night. They dine at five, and I am commissioned to ask you and your papa if you would go up with me and have some dinner with them, you know, before they start. Won’t you do that, Sheila?”

The girl shook her head, without answering. She had not gone to any friend’s house since her husband had left London, and that house, above all others, was calculated to awaken in her bitter recollections.

“Won’t you, Sheila?” he said. “You used to go there. I know they like you very much. I have seen you very well pleased and comfortable there, and I thought you were enjoying yourself.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Sheila; and then she looked up with a strange sort of smile on her lips. “But ‘what made the assembly shine?’ ”

That forced smile did not last long; the girl suddenly burst into tears, and rose and went away to the window. Mackenzie came into the room: he did not see his daughter was crying. “Well, Mr. Ingram, and are you coming with us to the Lewis? We cannot be staying in London, for there will be many things wanting the looking after in Borva, as you will know ferry well. And yet Sheila she will not go back; and Mairi, too, she will be forgetting the ferry sight of her own people; but if you wass coming with us, Mr. Ingram, Sheila she would come too, and it would be ferry good for her whatever.”

“I have brought you another proposal. Will you take Sheila to see the Tyrol, and I will go with you?”

“The Tyrol?” said Mr. Mackenzie. “Ay, it is a ferry long way away, but if Sheila will care to go to the Tyrol – oh, yes, I will go to the Tyrol or anywhere if she will go out of London, for it is not good for a young girl to be always in the one house, and no company and no variety; and I was saying to Sheila what good will she do sitting by the window and thinking over things, and crying sometimes. By Kott, it is a foolish thing for a young girl and I will hef no more of it!”

In other circumstances Ingram would have laughed at this dreadful threat. Despite the frown on the old man’s face, the sudden stamp of his foot, and the vehemence of his words, Ingram knew that if Sheila had turned around and said that she wished to be shut up in a dark room for the rest of her life, the old King of Borva would have said: “Ferry well, Sheila,” in the meekest way, and would have been satisfied if only he could share her imprisonment with her.

“But first of all, Mr. Mackenzie, I have another proposal to make to you,” Ingram said, and then he urged upon Sheila’s father to accept Mrs. Lorraine’s invitation.

Mr. Mackenzie was nothing loth. Sheila was living by far too monotonous a life. He went over to the window to her and said, “Sheila, my lass, you was going nowhere else this evening; and it would be ferry convenient to go with Mr. Ingram, and he would see his friends away, and we could go to a theatre then. And it is no new thing for you to go to fine houses and see other people; but it is new to me, and you wass saying what a beautiful house it wass many a time, and I hef wished to see it. And the people are ferry kind, Sheila, to send me an invitation; and if they wass to come to the Lewis, what would you think if you asked them to come to your house and they paid no heed to it? Now, it is after four, Sheila, and if you wass to get ready now – ”

“Yes, I will go and get ready, papa,” she said.

Ingram had a vague consciousness that he was taking Sheila up to introduce to her Mrs. Lorraine in a new character. Would Sheila look at the woman she used to fear and dislike in a wholly different fashion, and be prepared to adorn her with all the graces which he had so often described to her? Ingram hoped that Sheila would get to like Mrs. Lorraine, and that by-and-by a better acquaintance between them might lead to a warm and friendly intimacy. Somehow, he felt that if Sheila would betray such a liking – if she would come to him and say honestly that she was rejoiced he meant to marry – all his doubts would be cleared away. Sheila had already said pretty nearly as much as that, but then it followed what she understood to be an announcement of his approaching marriage, and, of course, the girl’s kindly nature at once suggested a few pretty speeches. Sheila now knew that nothing was settled; after looking at Mrs. Lorraine in the light of these new possibilities, would she come to him and counsel him to go on and challenge a decision?

Mr. Mackenzie received with a grave dignity and politeness the more than friendly welcome given him by both Mrs. Kavanagh and her daughter, and in view of their approaching tour he gave them to understand that he had himself established somewhat familiar relations with foreign countries by reason of his meeting with the ships and sailors hailing from those distant shores. He displayed a profound knowledge of the habits and customs and of the natural products of many remote lands, which were much farther afield than a little bit of inland Germany. He represented the island of Borva, indeed, as a sort of lighthouse from which you could survey pretty nearly all the countries of the world, and broadly hinted that, so far as insular prejudice being the fruit of living in such a place, a general intercourse with diverse peoples tended to widen the understanding and throw light on the various social experiments that had been made by the lawgivers, the philanthropists, the philosophers of the world.

It seemed to Sheila, as she sat and listened, that the pale, calm and clear-eyed young lady opposite her was not quite so self-possessed as usual. She seemed shy and a little self-conscious. Did she suspect that she was being observed, Sheila wondered? and the reason? When dinner was announced she took Sheila’s arm, and allowed Mr. Ingram to follow them, protesting, into the other room, but there was much more of embarrassment and timidity than of an audacious mischief in her look. She was very kind indeed to Sheila, but she had wholly abandoned that air of maternal patronage which she used to assume toward the girl. She seemed to wish to be more friendly and confidential with her, and indeed scarcely spoke a word to Ingram during dinner, so persistently did she talk to Sheila, who sat next her.

Ingram got vexed. “Mrs. Lorraine,” he said, “you seem to forget that this is a solemn occasion. You ask us to a farewell banquet, but instead of observing the proper ceremonies, you pass the time in talking about fancy work and music, and other ordinary, everyday trifles.”

“What are the ceremonies?” she said.

“Well,” he answered, “you need not occupy the time with crochet – ”

“Mrs. Lavender and I are very well pleased to talk about trifles.”

“But I am not,” he said bluntly, “and I am not going to be shut out by a conspiracy. Come, let us talk about your journey.”

“Will my lord give his commands as to the point at which we shall start the conversation!”

“You may skip the Channel.”

“I wish I could,” she remarked, with a sigh.

“We shall land you in Paris. How are we to know that you have arrived safely?”

She looked embarrassed for a moment, and then said: “If it is of any consequence for you to know, I shall be writing in any case to Mrs. Lavender about some little private matter.”

Ingram did not receive this promise with any great show of delight. “You see,” he said, somewhat glumly, “if I am to meet you anywhere, I should like to know the various stages of your route, so that I could guard against our missing each other.”

“You have decided to go, then?”

Ingram, not looking at her, but looking at Sheila, said: “Yes;” and Sheila, despite all her efforts, could not help glancing up with a brief smile and blush of pleasure that were quite visible to everybody.

Mrs. Lorraine struck in with a sort of nervous haste: “Oh, that will be very pleasant for mamma, for she gets rather tired of me at times when we are traveling. Two women who always read the same sort of books and have the same opinions about the people they meet, and have precisely the same tastes in everything, are not very amusing companions for each other. You want a little discussion thrown in.”

“And if we meet Mr. Ingram we are sure to have that,” Mrs. Kavanagh said, benignly.

“And you want somebody to give you new opinions and put things differently, you know. I am sure mamma will be most kind to you if you can make it convenient to spend a few days with us, Mr. Ingram.”

“Oh, that will be delightful!” Mrs. Lorraine cried, suddenly taking Sheila’s hand. “You will come, won’t you? We should have such a pleasant party. I am sure your papa will be most interested: and we are not tied to any route: we should go wherever you pleased.”

She would have gone on beseeching and advising, but she saw something in Sheila’s face which told her that all her efforts would be unavailing.

“It is very kind of you,” Sheila said, “but I do not think I can go to the Tyrol.”

“Then you shall go back to the Lewis, Sheila,” her father said.

“I cannot go back to the Lewis, papa,” she said simply; and at this point Ingram, perceiving how painful the discussion was for the girl, suddenly called attention to the hour, and asked Mrs. Kavanagh if all her portmanteaus were strapped up.

They drove in a body down to the station, and Mr. Ingram was most assiduous in supplying the two travelers with an abundance of everything they could not possibly want. He got them a reading-lamp, though both of them declared they never read in a train. He got them some eau-de-cologne, though they had plenty in their traveling-case. He purchased for them an amount of miscellaneous literature that would have been of benefit to a hospital, provided the patients were strong enough to bear it. And then he bade them good-bye at least half a dozen times as the train was slowly moving out of the station, and made the most solemn vows about meeting them at Bregenz.