CHAPTER XX

The autumn is throwing down its red and amber tributes before other feet

besides Margaret's; before Betty's, before Talbot's. It does not,

however, rain the same shower on both. Betty's famed chestnuts supply no

leaf for Talbot's tread. For the first time for five years Harborough

Castle gets no share in John Talbot's autumn holiday. This is more

through his misfortune than his fault, as Betty, though with angry,

thwarted tears, is compelled to allow. From the visit to which after

leaving the Manor he had betaken himself, he had been recalled to London

with peremptory prematureness by a telegram. A crisis in public

affairs--an unlooked-for and unpleasant turn in foreign politics has

reft his chief--to that great man's unaffected disgust--from his thymy

forest and his amethyst moor back to the barren solitudes of Downing

Street. It has kept, if not the big, at least the lesser man bound hand

and foot there until the opening of the autumn session, which in any

case, even if he had not been defrauded of his legitimate playtime,

would have summoned him back to harness. So that Talbot sees no red

leaves except those which St. James's Park can show him. To a

country-hearted man you would think that this would be a great

privation; but this year John is glad of it. To him the country must

henceforth mean Harborough. If he has no holiday, he need not, he cannot

go to Harborough; and in his heart he says that the loss is well bought

by the gain. It is true that Betty has, on various pretexts, run up

several times to see him; that he has had to take her to the play; to

give his opinion upon her new clothes; to sit on the old low seat beside

the old sofa, in the old obscurity of the boudoir, without the old

heart. She has even, contrary to his advice, and very much against his

wishes, insisted on coming to tea with him in his rooms in Bury Street;

and, as a matter of course, has expected him to see her off at

Paddington. But on the whole he feels, as he speeds back in a

hansom--this last duty punctually done--drawing an unintentional sigh of

relief as he does so, that he has got through it pretty well. He has

provoked not much anger, and, thank God, no tears. Thank God a hundred

times more, too, that he has been miraculously spared any fleers at that

other woman, towards whom, perhaps, the completeness of his lady's

victory may have rendered her magnanimous. And that other woman! Well,

he lets her image tease him as little as he can help it. Whether that is

much or little, he himself scarcely knows. Sometimes again he does know,

knows that it is infinitely much. But that is only now and then, when

some trifling accident has given him a tiny momentary glimpse, such as

outsiders often catch, at some keen happiness _a deux_; some two happy

souls together blent,

'As the rose

Blendeth in odour with the violet;

Solution sweet.'

Then, indeed, he catches his breath with the sharpness of the pain that

runs through his lonely heart, saying to himself, before his will can

arrest and strangle the lovely, useless thought, 'That might have been

Peggy and I.' But this, as I have said, is only now and again. As a

matter of fact, his life is too full of genuine continuous hard work,

too throbbing with great excitements, too full of the large fever of

to-day's hot politics, to have much space for the cherishing of any

merely personal ache. Sometimes for a whole day together he keeps his

heart's door triumphantly barred against her. For a day--yes; but at

night, willy-nilly, she lifts the latch, and cool and tall walks in. In

the night she has her revenge. In the day he may think of nations

clashing, of party invectives, of discordant Cabinets, and Utopian

Reforms; but at night he thinks of Mink, and of the little finches

swinging and twittering on _his_ ladder; of the mowing-machine's whir,

and the pallid sweet lavender bush.

As the winter nears, and such considerable and growing portion of the

world as spend some part at least of the cold season in London, refill

their houses, he goes a good deal into society, and when there he seems

to enjoy himself. How can each woman to whom he offers his pleasant,

easy civilities know that he is saying to his own heart as he looks at

her:

'Your skin is not nearly so fine grained as Peggy's; your ear is double

the size of hers; your smile comes twice as often, but it is not nearly

so worth having when it does come'?

And so he seems to enjoy himself, and to a certain extent really does

so. It is quite possible not only to do a great deal of good and

thorough work, but to have a very tolerable amount of real, if surface

pleasure, with a dull ache going on in the back of your heart all the

time. He has as little nourishment on which to feed his remembrance of

her as she has hers of him; nay, less, for he has about him no

persistent little Harborough voices to ask him whether he would not like

Peggy to come and live with him always. Sometimes it strikes him with an

irrational surprise that no one should ever mention her name to him;

though a moment later reason points out to him that it would be far more

strange if they did, since her very existence is absolutely unknown to

all those who compose his surroundings. Of no one were Wordsworth's

lines ever truer than of her:

'A maid whom there were none to praise,

And very few to love.'

One day he meets Freddy at Boodle's, and rushes at him with a warmth of

affectionate delight that surprises that easy-going young gentleman.

However, as Freddy is himself always delighted to see everybody, he is

delighted to see Talbot now; and immediately gives him a perfectly

sincere, even if the next moment utterly forgotten, invitation to spend

Christmas at the Manor. He has forgotten it, as I have said, next

half-hour; he does not in the least perceive the lameness of his

friend's stuttered excuses, and he would be thunderstruck were he to

conjecture the tempest of revolt, misery, and starved longing that his

few careless words, 'Could not you run down to us for Christmas? no

party, only ourselves and the Lambtons,' have awoke in that unhappy

friend's breast.

Christmas! yes, Christmas is drawing near--Christmas, the great feast

that looses every galley-slave from his oar. With how sinking a heart

does one galley-slave watch its approach! How much he prefers pulling at

his oar, with all the labour and sweat it entails, to the far worse

bondage to which his emancipation from it will consign him! There will

be no shirking it this time. To all humanity Christmas brings its three

or four days of liberation; and these three or four days he must--unless

the earth open or the heaven fall between this and then to save

him--spend at Harborough. He will have to decorate Betty's church; light

the candles on Betty's Christmas-tree; have Betty's children hanging

about his neck, and Betty's husband reproaching him for his long

absence.

Betty herself accepting his present, thanking him for it, manoeuvring

to get him alone. Her present! He must be thinking about it. He has not

yet bought it. He will have to make time to go and choose it. He yawns.

When you are in the habit of giving a person a great many presents, it

is extremely difficult to vary them judiciously. If it were a first gift

now, how much simpler it would be! Certainly quite without his consent,

the thought darts across him that he has never given Peggy a present.

How easy, how delightful, how enthralling it would be to make her some

little offering! something slight and comparatively valueless that it

would not hurt her pride to accept, but that yet would be worth thanking

him for. He feels sure that Peggy has not received many presents in her

life. He hears her--his sweetheart--thanking him for that ungiven,

never-to-be-given fairing; and at the same moment his eye, falling

accidentally upon Betty's last letter lying on the table before him,

recalls to his mind that it is not Margaret whom it is now a question of

endowing with a Christmas gift. His yawn is exchanged for a sigh. Poor

Betty! He undoubtedly does not grudge her her present; but how very much

it would simplify matters if she could be induced to choose it for

herself. So reflecting he takes his hat, and repairing to the great

jewellers', turns over Hunt and Roskell's newest trinkets in dubious

half-hearted efforts at selection.

Betty is not altogether of the mind of those present-receivers who hold

that the cost of the gift is as nothing; the giver's intention

everything. Betty likes both; she likes something rather valuable, but

that yet has a sentiment attached to it--something that tells of love,

and thought, and love's cunning.

To Talbot, a year, still more two years ago, nothing had seemed easier

than this combination. To-day, more than two hours elapse before he can

cudgel out of his dull heart and fagged brain something that may, if not

too closely scanned, bear the semblance of a fond invention. Christmas

is now but a week off; but a week, as eager schoolboys, and pale clerks,

and worn seamstresses tell themselves. Perhaps it may be because she

knows that they will soon meet, that Betty's daily letter to Talbot has

now for two whole days been intermitted. It is a lapse that has never

before occurred, so far as he can recall, in the whole five years of

their connection; her billets appearing as regularly as the milkman. Is

it possible that she may have conceived some occult offence against him?

That he may have unwittingly committed some mysterious sin against

love's code? This thought darts across his mind, presenting itself first

as a hope, and then as a dread. When it comes as a hope, it suggests

that in the case of her having taken umbrage at any of his doings, or

non-doings, she may show her resentment by excluding him from her

Christmas gaieties; but this idea does not live beyond a moment. It is

not much sooner conceived than it is transmogrified into a fear.

If they have quarrelled they will have to make it up again. Perhaps even

his laboriously chosen love-gift will not be held a sufficient

peacemaker. Perhaps he will have to expend himself in those expletives

and asseverations that used once to come so trippingly, nay burningly,

from his tongue, but that now have to be driven by main force from his

lips, slow and cold and clogged.

A third morning has dawned. Again no letter. It is certainly very

strange.

Talbot walks to Downing Street, pondering gravely what can be the cause

of this unprecedented silence. Can it be that she is ill? She must be

ill indeed not to write to him! A flash of distorted remorse--distorted,

since it is for being unable better to return the tenderness of another

man's wife--crosses his mind at the thought of her great love for him.

No, if she had been ill, too ill to write, Harborough would certainly

have sent him word of it, since no one is ever half so anxious to give

him tidings of Betty, to further their meetings and impede their

partings, as Betty's worthy, blockhead husband. It is most unlikely

that the post, which indeed strangely seldom misbehaves itself, should

have erred three times running.

He has reached Downing Street before any solution of the problem has

occurred to him. In the course of the day he goes very nigh to

forgetting it in the absorption of his work. That work is, on this

particular day, specially pressing--specially monopolising. From morning

to night he has not a moment that he can call his own. He does not even

return home to dress for dinner, but snatches a hasty mouthful of food

at the House of Commons, whither he has to accompany his chief, who is

to speak on a subject at that moment engaging both House and nation's

most passionate attention. The House is thronged to hear the great man.

He is for three hours on his legs; and his speech is followed by a hot

debate, adorned by the usual accompaniments of senseless obstruction,

indecent clamour, and Irish Billingsgate.

It is half-past two in the morning before Talbot finds himself turning

the key in his Bury Street door. The whole household has apparently gone

to bed; but in his sitting-room the fire has been made up. A touch of

the poker upon the coals makes them leap into a blaze, and he sits down

in an arm-chair to finish his cigar, and cast an eye over the notes and

telegrams that have come for him during his absence. Of the former there

are several; of the latter only one. He looks at the addresses of the

letters first, to see whether any one of them may be in Lady Betty's

handwriting; but such not being the case, he lays them down, and tears

open the telegram. He does it without any special excitement. In all our

lives telegrams are daily, in his they are half-hourly, occurrences. But

not such telegrams as this one. He has been too lazy to light his

candles; and now reads it by the firelight that frolics redly over the

thin pink paper and the clerkly writing:

'_From_ | '_To_

|

LADY BETTY HARBOROUGH, | JOHN TALBOT,

Harborough Castle, | Bury Street,

----shire. | St. James's,

London, W.

'Come at once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.'

When the contents of a missive that we receive, or of a speech addressed

to us, diverge very widely from anything that we have been at all

expecting, it is some time before the meaning of the words, however

simple, succeeds in reaching our brain. Such is Talbot's case. He reads

the telegram three times before he fully grasps its signification; and

it is quite two minutes before it occurs to him to look at its date.

'Sent out at 11.10 A.M. Received at 11.35.' It has been lying waiting

for him for fourteen hours and more. He reads it a fourth time. 'Come at

once, and without a moment's delay, on receipt of this.' What does

it--what can it mean? To obey it now, in the sense in which it meant to

be obeyed, is as impossible as to 'call back yesterday out of the

treasures of God.' It is true that he can set off, without a moment's

delay, on the receipt of it. But as that receipt has been delayed

fourteen hours longer than its sender calculated upon, his obedience

will be a virtual disobedience. Why has she sent for him? In any case

she would have seen him in five days. What can she have to say to him of

such surpassing urgency as cannot brook that short delay? His eye rests

doubtfully on the vague yet pressing words. In the mouth and from the

hand of any one save Betty, they would certainly imply some grave

crisis--some imminent or already fallen catastrophe. In Betty's they

_may_ mean nothing. More than once before, during the past five years,

has she telegraphed for him with the same indefinite peremptoriness; and

when--always at great personal inconvenience, once gravely offending his

chief, and seriously imperilling his future prospects--he has made

shift to obey her summonses, he has discovered that it had been prompted

merely by some foolish whim. Once the broken-haired terrier, which he

had given her, had had a fit; once Mr. Harborough had spoken sharply to

her before the servants; once she had felt so low that she could not get

through the day without seeing him. These recollections combine together

to form his resolution.

He lays down the paper. He will not go. Accident has made him

disobedient; intention shall make him further so. Had she known at what

an hour her message would reach him, even she could not have expected

compliance with it.

So thinking, his cigar being by this time finished, he rises, and

lighting his bedroom candle, turns to go to bed. Only, just as he is

leaving the room, some impulse prompts him to read the telegram yet a

fifth time. The words have certainly not changed since he last glanced

at them; and yet they seem to him to have a more compelling look. Why

can't he force them to be more explicit? He pauses; telegram in one hand

and candle in the other. What can she want with him? It is just within

the bounds of possibility that she may really need his presence; how or

why, he is unable to hazard the faintest conjecture. But it is just

within the limits of the possible that she may. Various suggestions of

what shape that possible may take flit across his puzzled brain. Can it

be that her husband has at length made the discovery of what for five

years has been the open secret of all his acquaintance? In that case, as

he, Talbot, has long known--known at first with leaping pulses, latterly

with the cold sweat of an unspeakable dread, she would not have waited

for him to come to her--she would have fled to him. It cannot, then, be

that. Various other conjectures suggest themselves, but are dismissed as

impracticable; but though they are dismissed, the fact remains that the

woman to whom he once swore--_once_, nay, millions of times swore a love

eternal, unalterable, exclusive--has sent him an imperative summons to

her side; and he is preparing entirely to neglect it.

He sets down the candlestick, and takes up an 'A B C' lying on the

table, as if officiously close at hand. He will just look to see if

there is a train that would take him to her. If there is not, that will

settle the matter. He turns to the name of the small station at which

travellers to Harborough get out. Of course not. Nothing stops at that

little wayside place before eleven o'clock. By that time he will be

installed in Downing Street for the day, with his chief's correspondence

before him.

He heaves a sigh of relief; and once more turns bedward. But before he

has reached the door another thought has arrested him. Though there is

no train which could take him to the little station close to her gate,

yet there may easily be one which would carry him to Oxford, only five

miles away from her.

Again he picks up the 'A B C,' and runs his finger and his eye down the

page from the Paddington that heads it. Paddington 5.30; arrives at

Oxford 7.40. Yes, there is one. It is, for the last ten miles of its

course, a slow crawler; but, if up to its time, reaches Oxford at 7.40.

A good hansom would convey him to Harborough in half an hour. He would

have twenty minutes in which to learn her will; a second half-hour's

drive would take him back to Oxford, to catch the nine o'clock up-train,

which would land him in London in time for his day's work. It is

possible, then--quite possible. The question is, shall he embrace that

bare possibility? Shall he pick out the one chance for, out of the

ninety-nine against, there being any real meaning in her message, to

build upon it this fool's errand. At all events, he has plenty of time

in which to think it over. It is only three o'clock. There are two good

hours before he need set off.

He sits down again in his arm-chair, replenishes the fire, and lights

another cigar. A year ago he would have gone without hesitation. Two

years ago he would have stood on his head with joy at having the chance

of going; but _this_ year---- Well, it is true that it is no longer the

voice of the passionately loved woman calling to him--a voice before

whose sound obstacles vanish, space shrivels, time contracts; but it may

be the voice of a fellow-creature in distress. _A fellow-creature in

distress!_ He laughs to himself at the flat pomposity of the phrase.

What kind of distress the fellow-creature's can be--a fellow-creature so

lapped in cotton-wool, so apparently beyond the reach of most of life's

ennuis--he is absolutely at a loss to conjecture! He spends two hours,

and smokes three cigars in conjecturing; and at the end, being as wise

as he was at the beginning, knocks up his servant, puts on his fur coat,

arms himself with as many wraps as he can muster, jumps into a hansom,

and through the murkiness--black as midnight--of a hideous December

morning, has himself driven to the Paddington Departure Platform; where,

for three minutes, he stamps about, telling himself that no such fool as

he walks, has ever walked, or, as far as he knows, will ever walk upon

God's earth; and is then whirled away.