George Gissing
The Crown of Life
Irene! Irene! Was she brought nearer to him by her own experience of heart-trouble? That she had suffered, he could not doubt; impossible for her to have given her consent to marriage unless she believed herself in love with the man who wooed her. It could have been no trifling episode in her life, whatever the story; Irene was not of the women who yield their hands in jest, in pique, in lighthearted ignorance. The change visible in her was more, he fancied, than could be due to the mere lapse of time; during her silences, she had the look of one familiar with mental conflict, perhaps of one whose pride had suffered an injury. The one or two glances which he ventured whilst she was talking with the man who succeeded to his place beside her, perceived a graver countenance, a reserve such as she had not used with him; and of this insubstantial solace he made a sort of hope which winged the sleepless hours till daybreak.
He had permission to call upon Mrs. Borisoff at times alien to polite routine. Thus, when nearly a week had passed, he sought her company at midday, and found her idling over a book, her seat by a window which viewed the Thames and the broad Embankment with its plane trees, and London beyond the water, picturesque in squalid hugeness through summer haze and the sagging smoke of chimneys numberless. She gave a languid hand, pointed to a chair, gazed at him with embarrassing fixity.
"I don't know about the Castle," were her first words. "Perhaps I shall give it up."
"You are not serious?"
Piers spoke and looked in dismay; and still she kept her heavy eyes on him.
"What does it matter to you?" she asked carelessly.
"I counted on—on showing you the dales–"
Mrs. Borisoff nodded twice or thrice, and laughed, then pointed to the prospect through the window.
"This is more interesting. Imagine historians living a thousand years hence—what would they give to see what we see now!"
"Oh, one often has that thought. It's about the best way of making ordinary life endurable."
They watched the steamers and barges, silent for a minute or two.
"So you had rather I didn't give up the castle?"
"I should be horribly disappointed."
"Yes—no doubt you would. Why did you come to see me to-day? No, no, no! The real reason.
"I wanted to talk about Miss Derwent," Piers answered, bracing himself to frankness.
Mrs. Borisoff's lips contracted, in something which was not quite a smile, but which became a smile before she spoke.
"If you hadn't told the truth, Mr. Otway, I would have sent you about your business. Well, talk of her; I am ready."
"But certainly not if it wearies you–"
"Talk! talk!"
"I'll begin with a question. Does Miss Derwent go much into society?"
"No; not very much. And it's only the last few months that she has been seen at all in London—I mean, since the affair that people talked about."
"Did they talk—disagreeably?"
"Gossip—chatter—half malicious without malicious intention—don't you know the way of the sweet creatures? I would tell you more if I could. The simple truth is that Irene has never spoken to me about it—never once. When it happened, she came suddenly to Paris, to a hotel, and from there wrote me a letter, just saying that her marriage was off; no word of explanation. Of course I fetched her at once to my house, and from that moment to this I have heard not one reference from her to the matter. You would like to know something about the hero? He has been away a good deal—building up the Empire, as they say; which means, of course, looking after his own and other people's dividends."
"Thank you. Now let us talk about the Castle."
But Mrs. Borisoff was not in a good humour to-day, and Piers very soon took his leave. Her hand felt rather hot; he noticed this particularly, as she let it lie in his longer than usual—part of her absent-mindedness.
Piers had often resented, as a weakness, his susceptibility to the influence of others' moods; he did so to-day, when having gone to Mrs. Borisoff in an unusually cheerful frame of mind, he came away languid and despondent. But his scheme of life permitted no such idle brooding as used to waste his days; self-discipline sent him to his work, as usual, through the afternoon, and in the evening he walked ten miles.
The weather was brilliant. As he stood, far away in rural stillness, watching a noble sunset, he repeated to himself words which had of late become his motto, "Enjoy now! This moment will never come again." But the intellectual resolve was one thing, the moral aptitude another. He did not enjoy; how many hours in all his life had brought him real enjoyment? Idle to repeat and repeat that life was the passing minute, which must be seized, made the most of; he could not live in the present; life was to him for ever a thing postponed. "I will live—I will enjoy—some day!" As likely as not that day would never dawn.
Was it true, as admonishing reason sometimes whispered, that happiness cometh not by observation, that the only true content is in the moments which we pass without self-consciousness? Is all attainment followed by disillusion? A man aware of his health is on the verge of malady. Were he to possess his desire, to exclaim, "I am happy," would the Fates chastise his presumption?
That way lay asceticism, which his soul abhorred. On, rather, following the great illusion, if this it were! "The crown of life"—philosophise as he might, that word had still its meaning, still its inspiration. Let the present pass untasted; he preferred his dream of a day to come.
Next morning, very unexpectedly, he received a note from Mrs. Borisoff inviting him to dine with her a few days hence. About her company she said nothing, and Piers went, uncertain whether it was a dinner tete-a-tete or with other guests. When he entered the room, the first face he beheld was Irene's.
It was a very small party, and the hostess wore her gayest countenance. A delightful evening, from the social point of view; for Piers Otway a time of self-forgetfulness in the pleasures of sight and hearing. He could have little private talk with Irene; she did not talk much with anyone; but he saw her, he heard her voice, he lived in the glory of her presence. Moreover, she consented to play. Of her skill as a pianist, Otway could not judge; what he heard was Music, music absolute, the very music of the spheres. When it ceased, Mrs. Borisoff chanced to look at him; he was startlingly pale, his eyes wide as if in vision more than mortal.
"I leave town to-morrow," said his hostess, as he took leave. "Some friends are going with me. You shall hear how we get on at the Castle."
Perhaps her look was meant to supplement this bare news. It seemed to offer reassurance. Did she understand his look of entreaty in reply?
Music breathed about him in the lonely hours. It exalted his passion, lulled the pains of desire, held the flesh subservient to spirit. What is love, says the physiologist, but ravening sex? If so, in Piers Otway's breast the primal instinct had undergone strange transformation. How wrought?—he asked himself. To what destiny did it correspond, this winged love soaring into the infinite? This rapture of devotion, this utter humbling of self, this ardour of the poet soul singing a fellow-creature to the heaven of heavens—by what alchemy comes it forth from blood and tissue? Nature has no need of such lyric life her purpose is well achieved by humbler instrumentality. Romantic lovers are not the ancestry of noblest lines.
And if—as might well be—his love were defeated, fruitless, what end in the vast maze of things would his anguish serve?
CHAPTER XXXIV
After his day's work, he had spent an hour among the pictures at Burlington House. He was lingering before an exquisite landscape, unwilling to change this atmosphere of calm for the roaring street, when a voice timidly addressed him:
"Mr. Otway!"
How altered! The face was much, much older, and in some indeterminable way had lost its finer suggestions. At her best, Olga Hannaford had a distinction of feature, a singularity of emotional expression, which made her beautiful in Olga Florio the lines of visage were far less subtle, and classed her under an inferior type. Transition from maidenhood to what is called the matronly had been too rapid; it was emphasised by her costume, which cried aloud in its excess of modish splendour.
"How glad I am to see you again!" she sighed tremorously, pressing his hand with fervour, gazing at him with furtive directness. "Are you living in England now?"
Piers gave an account of himself. He was a little embarrassed but quite unagitated. A sense of pity averted his eyes after the first wondering look.
"Will you—may I venture—can you spare the time to come and have tea with me? My carriage is waiting—I am quite alone—I only looked in for a few minutes, to rest my mind after a lunch with, oh, such tiresome people!"
His impulse was to refuse, at all costs to refuse. The voice, the glance, the phrases jarred upon him, shocked him. Already he had begun "I am afraid"—when a hurried, vehement whisper broke upon his excuse.
"Don't be unkind to me! I beg you to come! I entreat you!"
"I will come with pleasure," he said in a loud voice of ordinary civility.
At once she turned, and he followed. Without speaking, they descended the great staircase; a brougham drove up; they rolled away westward. Never had Piers felt such thorough moral discomfort; the heavily perfumed air of the carriage depressed and all but nauseated him; the inevitable touch of Olga's garments made him shrink. She had begun to talk, and talked incessantly throughout the homeward drive; not much of herself, or of him, but about the pleasures and excitements of the idle-busy world. It was meant, he supposed, to convey to him an idea of her prosperous and fashionable life. Her husband, she let fall, was for the moment in Italy; affairs of importance sometimes required his presence there; but they both preferred England. The intellectual atmosphere of London—where else could one live on so high a level?
The carriage stopped in a street beyond Edgware Road, at a house of more modest appearance than Otway had looked for. Just as they alighted, a nursemaid with a perambulator was approaching the door; Piers caught sight of a very pale little face shadowed by the hood, but his companion, without heeding, ran up the steps, and knocked violently. They entered.
Still the oppressive atmosphere of perfumes. Left for a few minutes in a little drawing-room, or boudoir, Piers stood marvelling at the ingenuity which had packed so much furniture and bric-tate-brac, so many pictures, so much drapery, into so small a space. He longed to throw open the window; he could not sit still in this odour-laden hothouse, where the very flowers were burdensome by excess. When Olga reappeared, she was gorgeous in flowing tea-gown; her tawny hair hung low in artful profusion; her neck and arms were bare, her feet brilliantly slippered.
"Ah! How good, how good, it is to sit down and talk to you once more!—Do you like my room?"
"You have made yourself very comfortable," replied Otway, striking a note as much as possible in contrast to that of his hostess. "Some of these drawings are your own work, no doubt?"
"Yes, some of them," she answered languidly. "Do you remember that pastel? Ah, surely you do—from the old days at Ewell!"
"Of course!—That is a portrait of your husband?" he added, indicating a head on a little easel.
"Yes—idealised!"
She laughed and put the subject away. Then tea was brought in, and after pouring it, Olga grew silent. Resolute to talk, Piers had the utmost difficulty in finding topics, but he kept up an everyday sort of chat, postponing as long as possible the conversation foreboded by his companion's face. When he was weary, Olga's opportunity came.
"There is something I must say to you–"
Her arms hung lax, her head drooped forward, she looked at him from under her brows.
"I have suffered so much—oh, I have suffered! I have longed for this moment. Will you say—that you forgive me?"
"My dear Mrs. Florio"—Piers began with good-natured expostulation, a sort of forced bluffness; but she would not hear him.
"Not that name! Not from you. There's no harm; you won't—you can't misunderstand me, such old friends as we are. I want you to call me by my own name, and to make me feel that we are friends still—that you can really forgive me."
"There is nothing in the world to forgive," he insisted, in the same tone. "Of course we are friends! How could we be anything else?"
"I behaved infamously to you! I can't think how I had the heart to do it!"
Piers was tortured with nervousness. Had her voice and manner declared insincerity, posing, anything of that kind, he would have found the situation much more endurable; but Olga had tears in her eyes, and not the tears of an actress; her tones had recovered something of their old quality, and reminded him painfully of the time when Mrs. Hannaford was dying. She held a hand to him, her pale face besought his compassion.
"Come now, let us talk in the old way, as you wish," he said, just pressing her fingers. "Of course I felt it—but then I was myself altogether to blame. I importuned you for what you couldn't give. Remembering that, wasn't your action the most sensible, and really the kindest?"
"I don't know," Olga murmured, in a voice just audible.
"Of course it was! There now, we've done with all that. Tell me more about your life this last year or two. You are such a brilliant person. I felt rather overcome–"
"Nonsense!" But Olga brightened a little. "What of your own brilliancy? I read somewhere that you are a famous man in Russia–"
Piers laughed, spontaneously this time, and, finding it a way of escape, gossiped about his own achievements with mirthful exaggeration.
"Do you see the Derwents?" Mrs. Florio asked of a sudden, with a sidelong look.
So vexed was Otway at the embarrassment he could not wholly hide, and which delayed his answer, that he spoke the truth with excessive bluntness.
"I have met Miss Derwent in society."
"I don't often see them," said Olga, in a tone of weariness. "I suppose we belong to different worlds."
At the earliest possible moment, Piers rose with decision. He felt that he had not pleased Mrs. Florio, that perhaps he had offended her, and in leaving her he tried to atone for involuntary unkindness.
"But we shall see each other again, of course!" she exclaimed, retaining his hand. "You will come again soon?"
"Certainly I will."
"And your address—let me have your address–"
He breathed deeply in the open air. Glancing back at the house when he had crossed the street, he saw a white hand waved to him at a window; it hurried his step.
On the following day, Mrs. Florio visited her friend Miss Bonnicastle, who had some time since exchanged the old quarters in Great Portland Street for a house in Pimlico, where there was a larger studio (workshop, as she preferred to call it), hung about with her own and other people's designs. The artist of the poster was full as ever of vitality and of good-nature, but her humour had not quite the old spice; a stickler for decorum would have said that she was decidedly improved, that she had grown more womanly; and something of this change appeared also in her work, which tended now to the graceful rather than the grotesque. She received her fashionable visitant with off-hand friendliness, not altogether with cordiality.
"Oh, I've something to show you. Do you know that name?"
Olga took a business-card, and read upon it: "Alexander Otway, Dramatic & Musical Agent."
"It's his brother," she said, in a voice of quiet surprise.
"I thought so. The man called yesterday—wants a fetching thing to boom an Irish girl at the halls. There's her photo."
It represented a piquant person in short skirts; a face neither very pretty nor very young, but likely to be deemed attractive by the public in question. They amused themselves over it for a moment.
"He used to be a journalist," said Olga. "Does he seem to be doing well?"
"Couldn't say. A great talker, and a furious Jingo."
"Jingo?"
"This woman is to sing a song of his composition, all about the Empire. Not the hall; the British. Glorifies the Flag, that blessed rag—a rhyme I suggested to him, and asked him to pay me for. It's a taking tune, and we shall have it everywhere, no doubt. He sang a verse—I wish you could have heard him. A queer fish!"
Olga walked about, seeming to inspect the pictures, but in reality much occupied with her thoughts.
"Well," she said presently, "I only looked in, dear, to say how-do-you-do."
Miss Bonnicastle was drawing; she turned, as if to shake hands, but looked her friend in the face with a peculiar expression, far more earnest than was commonly seen in her.
"You called on Kite yesterday morning."
Olga, with slight confusion, admitted that she had been to see the artist. For some weeks Kite had suffered from an ailment which confined him to the house; he could not walk, and indeed could do nothing but lie and read, or talk of what he would do, when he recovered his health. Cheap claret having lost its inspiring force, the poor fellow had turned to more potent beverages, and would ere now have sunk into inscrutable deeps but for Miss Bonnicastle, who interested herself in his welfare. Olga, after losing sight of him for nearly two years, by chance discovered his whereabouts and his circumstances, and twice in the past week had paid him a visit.
"I wanted to tell you," pursued Miss Bonnicastle, in a steady, matter-of-fact voice, "that he's going to have a room in this house, and be looked after."
"Indeed?"
There was a touch of malice in Olga's surprise. She held herself rather stiffly.
"It's just as well to be straightforward," continued the other. "I should like to say that it'll be very much better if you don't come to see him at all."
Olga was now very dignified indeed.
"Oh, pray say no more I quite understand—quite!"
"I shouldn't have said it at all," rejoined Miss Bonnicastle, "if I could have trusted your—discretion. The fact is, I found I couldn't."
"Really!" exclaimed Olga, red with anger. "You might spare me insults!"
"Come, come! We're not going to fly at each other, Olga. I intended no insult; but, whilst we're about it, do take advice from one who means it well. Sentiment is all right, but sentimentality is all wrong. Do get rid of it, there's a good girl. You're meant for something better."
Olga made a great sweep of the floor with her skirts, and vanished in a whirl of perfume.
She drove straight to the address which she had seen on Alexander Otway's card. It was in a decently sordid street south of the river; in a window on the ground floor hung an announcement of Alexander's name and business. As Olga stood at the door, there came out, showily dressed for walking, a person in whom she at once recognised the original of the portrait at Miss Bonnicastle's. It was no other than Mrs. Otway, the "Biddy" whose simple singing had so pleased her brother-in-law years ago.
"Is it the agent you want to see?" she asked, in her tongue of County Wexford. "The door to the right."
Alexander jumped up, all smiles at the sight of so grand a lady. He had grown very obese, and very red about the neck; his linen might have been considerably cleaner, and his coat better brushed. But he seemed in excellent spirits, and glowed when his visitor began by saying that she wished to speak in confidence of a delicate matter.
"Mr. Otway, you have an elder brother, his name Daniel."
The listener's countenance fell.
"Madam, I'm sorry to say I have."
"He has written to me, more than once, a begging letter. My name doesn't matter; I'll only say now that he used to know me slightly long ago. I wish to ask you whether he is really in want."
Alexander hesitated, with much screwing of the features.
"Well, he may be, now and then," was his reply at length. "I have helped him, but, to tell the truth, it's not much good. So far as I know, he has no regular supplies—but it's his own fault."
"Exactly." Olga evidently approached a point still more delicate. "I presume he has worn out the patience of both brothers?"
"Ah!" The agent shook his head, "I'm sorry to say that the other's patience—I see you know something of our family circumstances—never allowed itself to be tried. He's very well off, I believe, but he'll do nothing for poor Dan, and never would. I'm bound to admit Dan has his faults, but still–"
His brows expressed sorrow rather than anger on the subject of his hard-fisted relative.
"Do you happen to know anything," pursued Olga, lowering her voice, "of a transaction about certain—certain letters, which were given up by Daniel Otway?"
"Why—yes. I've heard something about that affair."
"Those letters, I always understood, were purchased from him at a considerable price."
"That's true," replied Alexander, smiling familiarly as he leaned across the table. "But the considerable price was never paid—not one penny of it."
Olga's face changed. She had a wondering lost, pained look.
"Mr. Otway, are you sure of that?"
"Well, pretty sure. Dan has talked of it more than once, and I don't think he could talk as he does if there wasn't a real grievance. I'm very much afraid he was cheated. Perhaps I oughtn't to use that word; I daresay Dan had no right to ask money for the letters at all. But there was a bargain, and I'm afraid it wasn't honourably kept on the other side."
Olga reflected for a moment, and rose, saying that she was obliged, that this ended her business. Alexander's curiosity sought to prolong the conversation, but in vain. He then threw out a word concerning his professional interests; would the lady permit him to bespeak her countenance for a new singer, an Irish girl of great talent, who would be coming out very shortly?
"She has a magnificent song, madam! The very spirit of Patriotism—stirring, stirring! Let me offer you one of her photos. Miss Ennis Corthy—you'll soon see the announcements."
Olga drove away in a troubled dream.
