Isabel Clarendon, Vol. I (of II)

Kingcote gripped the arm of his chair and uttered a low moan.

“Ha, well met!” exclaimed the rector, as, after divesting himself of a wet overcoat, he entered, flicking his black trousers with his handkerchief and dubiously regarding his boots. His cheeks, as always, were aglow with health and spirits; on his whiskers gleamed drops of rain. He stood with his back to the fire, and passed his finger round between collar and neck, a habit of his which always seemed to give him ease. “I have a message for you–”

The servant entered with a tray of savoury viands. The rector broke off in his speech to regard the goods which the gods were providing; he did so with a critical, yet a satisfied, eye.

“A message for me?” Kingcote asked indifferently.

“Ha, yes!” Mr. Vissian had been led off into a different train of thought, it seemed.

“Mrs. Clarendon wants you to go to see her.”

“Indeed!”

“Where did you meet her, dear?” Mrs. Vissian inquired, as she bundled away her work in preparation for the meal.

“She’s going to sit through the night with Mrs. Stigard. I shall be surprised if the poor old woman lives till morning; ten to one I shall be sent for. Lucy,” he added, as if a semi-conscious process of reflection had just come to clear issue in his mind, “that parcel for the binder is still lying upstairs. I saw it this morning with amazement; thought it had gone a week ago.”

“I’ll see to it, dear,” replied his wife, without looking up from the bread she was cutting. “Pity it has been forgotten.”

“Forgotten! And you, who never forget anything!”

Then, turning to Kingcote, he declaimed, with humorous gesture and emphasis:

“Brother Cosroe, I find myself aggrieved,Yet insufficient to express the same,For it requires a great and thundering speech!”

“By-the-bye,” he continued, as he poured out a glass of ale from the foam-capped jug, “it’s beyond all doubt that Grubb is wrong in his calculation. He says, you remember, that the proportion of unstopt lines in the ‘Two Gentlemen’ is one in eleven. Now I make it one in nine decimal fifteen, and I’ve been over it twice with the utmost care. This is a point of considerable importance. Take that chair, Kingcote.”

“Thank you,” Kingcote said, “I shall not eat.”

“Why not? There’s pippins and cheese to come. Then, at least, as Claudius said to the chickens, drink.”

Kingcote declined, in spite of much hospitable pressure, and kept his arm-chair. Mr. Vissian applying himself to his supper, talked in intervals of mastication.

“Mrs. Clarendon wishes you to call tomorrow or next day; pray do so. I can’t quite make out that mistake of Grubb’s; he must have calculated from an edition in which the lines are differently arranged. I shall communicate with him. Lucy, my love, I beg of you to see that those books are dispatched the first thing to-morrow; the dilatory scoundrel always keeps me waiting, and there’s a ‘Cursor Mundi’ I want to work at.”

Kingcote suddenly rose and stepped to Mrs. Vissian to bid her good night.

“Going, what?” exclaimed the rector, turning round, with an end of his napkin in each hand. “But I wanted to ask your opinion about– You don’t look well, my dear fellow; what is it?”

“Nothing, nothing. I’ve tired myself with walking. I’ll get home.”

“You have an umbrella? Then you must take one of mine. But, I tell you, you must; it’s raining like a waterspout. Shall I walk with you?”

Kingcote had gone off into the darkness with inaudible replies.

“What is the matter with him?” asked the rector, standing in surprise. “Is he going to be ill? An awkward look-out in that cottage, with not a soul near.”

“He was very strange when he came,” Mrs. Vissian remarked. “He said he’d been walking, and yet wasn’t aware that it had rained.”

“Wasn’t aware? Curious fellow, Kingcote.”

“Don’t you think, Walter, there’s something about him we don’t understand—something in the circumstances of his life, I mean?”

“A good deal. But he’s a thoroughly good fellow; I must look in at Wood End the first thing in the morning.”

They resumed their seats.

“Lucy,” observed the rector, “you are blooming to-night! Upon my word, every year makes you younger and more beautiful.”

“What makes you think of such a thing just now?” asked the other, laughing as she shook her head.

“I don’t know. I suppose half the joy of happiness comes of contrast with others’ less fortunate lot.”

“Oh, I don’t like to think that, Walter,” protested the wife rather sadly.

“Many things are true, my dear, which we don’t like to think.”

Lucy moved to reach something, and took the occasion to kiss her husband’s forehead.

And Kingcote, plodding through the lane’s mud, reached his door. The old oak-stump in front of the cottage stood like a night-fear; the copse behind, all but stripped of leaves, gave forth dismal whisperings; rain beat hard upon the roof-thatch. The tenant took the key from his pocket and entered the cold room; he could not see his hands. Without seeking any light he felt his way up the crazy stairs, and lay down to such rest as he might find.

It rained till noon of the following day, then began to clear. When a couple of hours of pale sunshine had half dried the hedges, Kingcote set forth to walk to Knightswell. Mr. Vissian had been as good as his word in calling.

“Oh, nothing; a headache,” was the answer he received to his anxious inquiries. “I hope I wasn’t more than usually ill-mannered; pray ask Mrs. Vissian to try and tolerate me.”

“You’re getting a little low, it strikes me; too much solitude. By-the-bye, you’ll look in at Knightswell this afternoon?”

“I suppose Mrs. Clarendon feels obliged to ask me; I dare say she’d rather I kept away.”

“My dear sir, these are outcomes of the black humour; you are not yourself. Mrs. Clarendon will be very glad indeed to see you; so she assured me. I pray you, fight against this tendency to melancholia.”

It was difficult to reach the gates without having previously collected considerably more mud than one cares to convey into a lady’s drawing-room. Kingcote endeavoured to remove some of this superfluous earth as he walked up the drive by rubbing his boots in the wet grass; the result was not inspiriting.

“Pooh!” he exclaimed impatiently. “If she really cares to see me, she won’t regard the state of my boots; any one who accepts such as I am, must take mud and all.”

The thought appeared to amuse him, he walked on with a laugh.

As he entered the garden, he met the trap just driving away from the house. A gentleman was seated in it. He had rather the look of a man of business, and was reading a letter. He scanned Kingcote, then resumed his reading.

Disturbed with the thought that there might be other visitors in the house, Kingcote hesitated, doubted whether to go on. He made up his mind to do so, however, not without sundry fresh communings with himself of a bitter kind. On inquiry he found that Mrs. Clarendon was at home, and, after a moment in the hall, he was led to the dining-room. Mrs. Clarendon was writing letters at a table by the window; as she rose, he thought he detected annoyance on her face.

“I fear I disturb you,” he said coldly.

“You don’t at all; or rather, you will not, if you’ll let me treat you as a friend. I have just one letter I am obliged to write; I asked the servant to bring you here, thinking you might like to look at the pictures till I have done. One or two are thought good, I believe—that Veronese, and that Ruysdael, and the Greuze yonder. May I?”

It was hard not to smile in reply to her voice and look as she spoke the last two little words, the more so that it was clear she had something just now to trouble her quite other than the inopportune arrival of a visitor. Kingcote walked to the picture she had indicated as a Veronese, and, affecting to view it, let his eyes wander to Isabel at the writing-table. She was thinking, previous to commencing her letter. Her left arm rested on the desk, and the thumb and middle finger of the hand pressed her forehead; with the end of the penholder she tapped her chin. He noticed how beautiful was the outline of her head, relieved against the bright window; noticed, too, the grace of her neck when she bent forward to write. The scratching of her pen—she wrote very rapidly—was the only sound in the room.

Kingcote went from picture to picture, his mind not quite tuned to judge and enjoy their merits. One, however, held him. When lunching here, he had sat with his back to the wall of which this canvas was the central ornament, so had not observed it. It was a portrait of Mrs. Clarendon, painted probably at the time of her marriage, an excellent picture. As he gazed at it, Isabel came forward.

“Do you recognise it?” she asked, tapping on one hand with the letter she held in the other.

“Without doubt.”

“And moralise? But,” she added quickly, “I want you to look at this child’s head. Isn’t it exquisitely sweet?”

His eyes wandered back to the portrait, and, on their way to the door, he again paused before it.

“Did I show you my ferns the last time you were here?” Isabel asked. “Will you walk so far?”

She led to the rear of the hall, thence, by a glass door, into a short glass-roofed passage, the door at the end of which opened into the conservatory. The first section was a small rotunda, twenty feet in diameter and twelve feet high. The floor was of unglazed tiles, the ceiling of ornamental stucco; round the wall was a broad cushioned seat, above which, commencing at a height of some four feet from the ground, were windows of richly coloured glass, pictured with leaves and flowers and fruit. A stand for plants occupied the centre, but at present the shelves were almost bare.

Mrs. Clarendon threw back one of the windows.

“There is a good view from here,” she said. “A tree used to intercept it, but we had it cut down in the spring to clear a piece of ground for tennis.”

From the hill, on which the house was built, a broad stretch of green park led the eye to a considerable distance in the direction of Salcot. The roof of the cottage at Wood End was just visible. Kingcote drew attention to it.

“I don’t see any smoke from the chimney,” Mrs. Clarendon remarked, with a pleasant glance. “It is to be hoped you keep good fires this damp weather. Is the place rainproof? These last two days will have tested it.”

“It seems to be sound.”

“And you still find it your ideal?”

“The cottage? I did not choose it as an ideal abode.”

“But the quietness, the retirement, I mean. In that, at all events, you have not been disappointed.”

“Certainly not.”

Isabel shuddered.

“How you live there I can’t understand. But I suppose you find it best for your studies.”

“I don’t study,” returned Kingcote, rather vacantly, looking at the pictured glass of the window.

Isabel closed the window and passed to the next door.

“I am so sorry Miss Warren is not at home,” she said. “I quite thought she would be, but at the last moment she decided to go to London to see something in the South Kensington Museum—oh, Schliemann’s discoveries!”

“Does Miss Warren read Greek and Latin?”

“Latin she does, and is just beginning Greek. She’s a wonderfully clever girl, but it’s difficult to get her to talk. I am sure you will find her interesting when you have had opportunities of talking with her.”

They were now in an ordinary hot-house. Isabel pointed out the plants which interested her.

“I have just had a visit from my lawyer,” she said, as she plucked away some dead leaves. “What tedious people lawyers are, and so dreadfully indispensable.”

“I suppose I passed him on the drive.”

“No doubt. But I mustn’t speak ill of the good man; he came all the way from London to save me a journey.”

They moved about for a few moments in silence.

“There’s nothing here to look at, really,” Mrs. Clarendon said. “If I could afford it I should have the place kept in good order; but I can’t.”

She did not appear to notice the look of surprise which Kingcote was for a moment unable to suppress. Leading the way back to the rotunda, she placed a loose cushion and seated herself. The warmth here was temperate, not more than the season required for comfort.

“So you don’t study?” she began, with friendly abruptness, when she had pointed to a place for her companion. “What, then, do you do? I am rude, you see, but—I wish to know.”

“I wish I could satisfactorily account for my days. I read a little, walk a good deal, see the Vissians now and then–”

“And cultivate ennui—-isn’t it so? A most unprofitable kind of gardening. I believe you are thoroughly miserable; in fact, you are not at much pains to hide it.”

“Scarcely as much as courtesy requires, you would say. I wish I could be more amusing, Mrs. Clarendon.”

“I don’t ask you to be amusing—only to show yourself a little amused at my impertinent curiosity. Why should you have so forgotten the habit of cheerfulness?”

“The habit?”

“Certainly. Is it not a habit, as long as we are in health?”

“In people happily endowed, I suppose. Temperament and circumstances may enable one to keep a bright view of life.”

“Rather, a reasonable effort of the will, I should say. I am often tempted to be dreary, but I refuse to give way.”

Kingcote smiled, almost laughed.

“You think I have nothing to be dreary about?” she asked, gazing at him as if trying to read his thoughts. “That is a mistake; I don’t speak idly. It would be excusable enough if I lost my cheerfulness. But with me it is a habit. Under any circumstances there’s a great deal of entertainment to be got out of life. Of course, if one puts oneself under the most unfavourable conditions—goes to live in a remote hermitage, shuts oneself from social comforts, reads doleful books about funeral urns–”

She caught his eye, and broke off with bright laughter.

“You don’t care for Sir Thomas Browne?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t be honest if I said I did. I am afraid that kind of reading is beyond me. Ada—Miss Warren—enjoys it; but she is intellectual, and I cannot pretend to be.”

“What do you read, Mrs. Clarendon?”

“The newspapers, and now and then a novel—voilà tout!”

“There are better things than books,” observed Kingcote.

A footstep was heard in the inner house.

“Is that you, Reuben?” the lady called, causing the gardener to put his head through the door with the admission, “It be me, ma’am.”

She exchanged words with him, then proposed to Kingcote that they should go to the drawing-room for tea. On their way she paused in the hall, with talk about the panelling. Pointing to a fox’s head:

“A trophy of last season. We killed, that day, a couple of fields behind Wood End.”

Tea appeared in a few minutes. As Isabel poured out two cups, her guest made a feint of closely examining a framed photograph of Knightswell, which stood on the table. He was less at his ease than on the tiled floor of the conservatory; the dried mud upon his boots showed brutally against the dark carpet, disposing him to savage humorousness. He became aware that the beverage was silently held out to him. Her own cup in hand, Mrs. Clarendon reclined in her chair, and gradually her eyes fixed themselves upon him. He was conscious of the look before he returned it, and, speaking at length, did so as if in reply to a question, though himself interrogative.

“Did you ever visit a London hospital?” Isabel manifested no surprise; her face had even a quiet smile of satisfaction.

“Yes,” she answered. “I once went to see a servant in St. Thomas’s.”

“Ah, I was studying there—let me see, six years ago. My father was a medical man, and determined that I should be the same. At his death I gave it up; I hadn’t finished my course.”

“It was not to your taste?”

“I loathed it. My bad dreams are still of hospital wards and dissecting-rooms. I cannot bear to see the word ‘hospital’ in print. The experience of those years has poisoned my life, as thoroughly as a slip of the lancet would have poisoned my blood.”

“Had you that dislike from the commencement?” Isabel asked, after putting down her empty cup, and crossing her hands on her lap with an air of attention.

“No, not in the same degree. I thought this profession would do as well as another. I believe I even had philanthropic glows now and then, and perhaps even a period of scientific interest. The latter did not survive the steps from theory to practice; the former–”

He made a motion with his hand, and smiled.

“The very last thing I should ever have associated with you,” remarked Isabel, with puzzled thoughtfulness.

“A philanthropic zeal?”

“I didn’t mean that, but I am not sure that I mayn’t include it. Please go on.”

Kingcote was resting his forehead on his palm; he resumed without raising his eyes.

“My father practised at Norwich—by-the-bye, our friend, Sir Thomas Browne’s city. When he died, I went to live with my mother for a while; my sister had just married and gone to London, and a sister of my fathers shared our house. I thought of all sorts of things—law, literature (of course), even commerce. For I had a small capital—some shares in a joint-stock bank; they gave me a sufficient income, and I could realise when I needed. For a year I made plans; then of a sudden I found myself in Paris. You know the Continent?”

“I was in the Riviera for a month, some years ago,” Isabel answered, without interest. “I can’t afford to go abroad now.”

It was the second time she had used this phrase. Kingcote watched her countenance.

“What took you to Paris?” she inquired, ignoring the diversion.

“Nothing. I was turning over an old Bradshaw, and details of the journey caught my eye. Next morning I left Norwich. I was abroad two years.”

“In France all the time?”

“No. France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy. Perhaps I saw the countries all the better for the necessity I was under of travelling very cheaply—so cheaply, indeed, I wonder how I did it. I walked oftener than rode, and dispensed with hotel dinners whenever possible. I have a diary of the two years’ travel.”

“You will let me read that?” Isabel asked quietly.

He hesitated; his eyes fixed absently on the windows.

“Yes, I will let you read it. It is foolish, boyish; I dare not read it myself.”

“For what reason?”

“Because there is nothing I hold more in horror than the ghost of my former self. I deny identity,” he added with sudden bitterness. “How can one be held responsible for the thoughts and acts of the being who bore his name years ago? The past is no part of our existing self; we are free of it, it is buried. That release is the pay Time owes us for doing his work.”

Isabel regarded him earnestly; her cheek gathered a warmer hue for a moment.

“You may read it if you care to,” he resumed, falling back to calmness. “There is no one else to whom I would show it.”

Isabel waited for him to continue. He sat, bent forward, his hands about one knee.

“And you returned to England with plans?” she asked at length, finding him persevere in silence.

“No, only with experience. I came back because I had news of my mothers illness. She was dead and buried before I got home.”

“It strikes me as curious,” he resumed rapidly, “that my childhood, boyhood in fact, has utterly gone from my memory. I suppose that is why I have such slight sympathy with children. I have often tried desperately to recover the consciousness of my young days: it has gone. My father, my mother, I cannot, recall their relations to me, nor mine to them. Nay, facts even have left my memory. I know scarcely anything before the beginning of my student years, and even those are vanishing, I find. I live only in the present.”

“But the future?”

“No, from looking forward I shrink as much as from looking back.”

There was another silence.

“But since you returned to England?” Isabel inquired, “have you never thought of another profession?”

Kingcote laughed.

“I had crazy projects for studying art. Gabriel put that into my head. But my zeal did not last. It is the same in everything; I lack persistence.”

“And you have–”

“Done nothing, you would say,” Kingcote supplied in the pause she made. “Literally nothing; wasted my time, lost my best years. The necessary consequence of being made up of wants, without the powers which could satisfy them. At present I am engaged in the first work I have done for years.”

“At last, then!” Isabel exclaimed.

“Yes, the work of resigning myself to being nothing, of casting off the last foolish flattery of self-conceit, of resolutely bidding myself understand that fate will bear any amount of idle fuming and remain unchanged. It is a task which has its difficulties; rather harder, on the whole, than the realisation of death. Did you ever force yourself to realise death, not to admit it in idle words, but to–”

Isabel motioned him to silence; her face was darkened with a look of pain, of fear.

“Forgive me,” he said in a lower voice; “to me it is such a familiar thought. I talk so seldom that I forget the difference between reflection and conversation.”

She spent a moment in clearing her mind of the disturbing thought—it seemed strangely disturbing, and at length banished it with the laugh occasioned by a new idea.

“I wonder,” she said, changing her attitude, “what you–”

“You were going to say–?”

“You spoke of having thought of commerce. Suppose you had become a man of business, and had made your fortune, what would your views of life be?”

“Who can say? To begin with, I should only have ruined myself; no fortune would ever have come in that way. Conceiving that it had, why I should not be the same person that I am. Circumstances are the mould which give shape to such metal as we happen to be made of. The metal is the same always, but it may be cast for mean or for noble uses.”

“I do not think,” Isabel said with gentle reassurance, “that Fate uses the nobler metals, for mean service; it has abundance of the poorer stuff at hand.”

“That is very well said; if I dared apply it to myself I might yet live awhile in the old fools paradise. But there is one gain which saves my past years from utter vanity—I have learnt to know myself.”

“Have you?”

Kingcote smiled.

“You say that sadly. Yes, you are quite right. Self-knowledge, in my case, is equivalent to disillusion, loss of hope.”

“I meant nothing of the kind,” she rejoined, after reflecting a moment on the intention of his words, which she had not at first quite caught. “I doubt whether you do know yourself. If you did, you would have more confidence.”

“That is the kindness natural to you. But,” he added, softening the words by his tone, “you do not know me.”

“No—not yet. It is not easy to know you. I cannot judge you by other people.” Kingcote rose and walked to the fireplace; Mrs. Clarendon watched him, but kept her seat.

“You know many people,” he said, speaking with his peculiar abruptness, which was quite different from the tone of mere familiarity, seemed indeed rather to accentuate the distance between them.

“Many,” Isabel returned, “in a way.”

“It must be strange to have so many acquaintances. It gives you the sense of belonging to the world; you do not stand on the outside and look on.”

“In a theatre—watching from an uncomfortable back seat? The stage is open to you.”

“And the parts? Even if I were cast, think of my poor memory. The words are so hard, so artificial. At most I could play the walking gentleman, and in truth I have no mind for that.”

Isabel smiled, as if involuntarily, and, after glancing round the room, quitted her seat.

“A friend is coming in a day or two to stay with me,” she said; “not a mere acquaintance, but really a friend. I should like you to meet her: you won’t refuse?”

He looked at her and hesitated.

“You can’t help liking Mrs. Stratton. She has been my nearest friend for years.”

“I may be gone,” Kingcote said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Gone? But you have no intention of leaving?”

“Yes, a half-intention.”

“To return to London?”

“I suppose so.”

She kept silence, and he added:

“My sister’s husband is ill. Circumstances might compel me to return.”

“But you are not summoned? You won’t leave your cottage unless there is a necessity?”