The Tragic Muse (London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890)/Volume 3/Chapter 7
VII.
The first thing Peter now did was to go and see Lady Agnes Dormer; it is not unworthy of note that he took on the other hand no step to make his promotion known to Miriam Rooth. To render it more probable he should find her he went at the luncheon-hour; and she was indeed on the point of sitting down to that repast with Grace. Biddy was not at home—Biddy was never at home now, her mother said: she was always at Nick's place, she spent her life there, she ate and drank there, she almost slept there. What she found to do there in so many hours, or what was the irresistible spell, Lady Agnes could not pretend that she had succeeded in discovering. She spoke of this baleful resort only as "Nick's place," and she spoke of it at first as little as possible. She thought it very probable however that Biddy would come in early that afternoon: there was something or other, some common social duty, that she had condescended to promise she would perform with Grace. Poor Lady Agnes, whom Sherringham found in a very grim yet very tremulous condition (she assured her visitor her nerves were all gone), almost abused her younger daughter for two minutes, having evidently a deep-seated need of abusing some one. I must add however that she didn't wait to meet Grace's eye before recovering, by a rapid gyration, her view of the possibilities of things—those possibilities from which she still might squeeze, as a mother, the drop that would sweeten her cup. "Dear child," she had the presence of mind to add, "her only fault is after all that she adores her brother. She has a capacity for adoration and must always take her gospel from some one."
Grace declared to Peter that her sister would have stayed at home if she had dreamed he was coming, and Lady Agnes let him know that she had heard all about the hour he had spent with the poor child at Nick's place and about his extraordinary good-nature in taking the two girls to the play. Peter lunched in Calcutta Gardens, spending an hour there which proved at first unexpectedly and, as it seemed to him, unfairly dismal. He knew from his own general perceptions, from what Biddy had told him and from what he had heard Nick say in Balaklava Place, that Lady Agnes would have been wounded by her son's apostasy; but it was not till he saw her that he appreciated the dark difference this young man's behaviour had made in the outlook of his family. Evidently that behaviour had, as he phrased it, pulled the bottom out of innumerable private calculations. These were things that no outsider could measure and they were none of an outsider's business; it was enough that Lady Agnes struck him really as a woman who had received her deathblow. She looked ten years older; she was white and haggard and tragic. Her eyes burned with a strange intermittent fire which made him say to himself that her children had better look out for her. When they were not filled with this unnatural flame they were suffused with comfortless tears; and altogether the afflicted lady was very bad—very bad indeed. It was because he had known she would be very bad that he had in his kindness called upon her in exactly this manner; but he recognized that to undertake to be kind to her in proportion to her need might carry one very far. He was glad he himself had not a wronged, mad mother, and he wondered how Nick Dormer could endure the home he had ruined. Apparently he didn't endure it very much, but had taken definitive and highly convenient refuge in Rosedale Road.
Peter's judgment of his young kinsman was considerably confused, and a sensible element in it was the consciousness that he was perhaps just now not in the best state of mind for judging him at all. At the same time, though he held in general that an intelligent man has a legible warrant for doing the particular thing he prefers, he could scarcely help asking himself whether in the exercise of a virile freedom it had been absolutely indispensable that Nick should work such domestic woe. He admitted indeed that this was an anomalous vision of Nick, as the worker of domestic woe. Then he saw that Lady Agnes's grievance (there came a moment, later, when she asserted as much) was not quite what Nick, in Balaklava Place, had represented it—with questionable taste perhaps—to a mocking actress; was not a mere shocked quarrel with his adoption of a "low" career, or a horror, the old-fashioned horror, of the strange licenses taken by artists under pretext of being conscientious: the day for this was past and English society thought the brush and the fiddle as good as anything else, with two or three exceptions. It was not what he had taken up but what he had put down that made the sorry difference, and the tragedy would have been equally great if he had become a wine-merchant or a horse-dealer. Peter had gathered at first that Lady Agnes would not trust herself to speak directly of her trouble, and he obeyed what he supposed to be the best discretion in making no allusion to it. But a few minutes before they rose from luncheon she broke out, and when he attempted to utter a word of mitigation there was something that went to his heart in the way she returned: "Oh, you don't know—you don't know!"
He perceived Grace's eyes fixed upon him at this instant with a look of supplication, and he was uncertain as to what she wanted—that he should say something more to console her mother or should hurry away from the subject. Grace looked old and plain and (he had thought, on coming in) rather cross, but she evidently wanted something. "You don't know," Lady Agnes repeated, with a trembling voice—"you don't know." She had pushed her chair a little away from the table; she held her pocket-handkerchief pressed hard to her mouth, almost stuffed into it, and her eyes were fixed on the floor. She made him feel as if he did know—knew what towering piles of confidence and hope had been dashed to the earth. Then Lady Agnes finished her sentence unexpectedly: "You don't know what my life with my husband was." Here, on the other hand, Peter was slightly at fault—he didn't exactly see what her life with her husband had to do with it. What was clear to him however was that they literally had looked for the very greatest things from Nick. It was not quite easy to see why this had been the case—it had not been precisely Sherringham's own prefigurement. Nick appeared to have had the faculty of communicating that sort of faith to women; he had originally given Julia a tremendous dose of it, though she had since shaken off the effects.
"Do you really think he would have done such great things, politically speaking?" Peter inquired. "Do you consider that the root of the matter was in him?"
Lady Agnes hesitated a moment, looking rather hard at her visitor. "I only think what all his friends—all his father's friends—have thought. He was his father's son, after all. No young man ever had a finer training, and he gave, from the first, repeated proof of having the highest sort of ability, the highest sort of ambition. See how he got in everywhere. Look at his first seat—look at his second," Lady Agnes continued. "Look at what every one says at this moment."
"Look at all the papers!" said Grace. "Did you ever hear him speak?" she asked. And when Peter reminded her that he had spent his life in foreign lands she went on: "Well, you lost something."
"It was very charming," said Lady Agnes quietly.
"Of course he's charming, whatever he does," Peter conceded. "He'll be a charming artist."
"Oh, heaven!" groaned Lady Agnes, rising quickly.
"He won't—that's the worst," Grace amended. "It isn't as if he'd do things people would like. I've been to his place and I never saw such a horrid lot of things—not at all clever or pretty."
"You know nothing whatever about the matter!" Lady Agnes exclaimed, with unexpected asperity. Then she added, to Peter, that, as it happened, her children did have a good deal of artistic taste: Grace was the only one who was totally deficient in it. Biddy was very clever—Biddy really might learn to do pretty things. And anything the poor child could learn was now no more than her duty—there was so little knowing what the future had in store for them all.
"You think too much of the future—you take terribly gloomy views," said Peter, looking for his hat.
"What other views can one take, when one's son has deliberately thrown away a fortune?"
"Thrown one away? Do you mean through not marrying—?"
"I mean through killing by his perversity the best friend he ever had."
Sherringham stared a moment; then with laughter: "Ah, but Julia isn't dead of it?"
"I'm not talking of Julia," said Lady Agnes, with a good deal of majesty. "Nick isn't mercenary, and I'm not complaining of that."
"She means Mr. Carteret," Grace explained. "He would have done anything if Nick had stayed in the House."
"But he's not dead?"
"Charles Carteret is dying," said Lady Agnes—"his end is very, very near. He has been a sort of providence to us—he was Sir Nicholas's second self. But he won't stand such nonsense, and that chapter's closed."
"You mean he has dropped Nick out of his will?"
"Cut him off utterly. He has given him notice."
"The old scoundrel! But Nick will work the better for that—he'll depend on himself."
"Yes, and whom shall we depend on?" Grace demanded.
"Don't be vulgar, for God's sake!" her mother ejaculated with a certain inconsequence.
"Oh, leave Nick alone—he'll make a lot of money," Peter declared cheerfully, following his two companions into the hall.
"I don't in the least care whether he does or not," said Lady Agnes. "You must come up-stairs again—I've lots to say to you yet," she went on, seeing that Peter had taken his hat. "You must arrange to come and dine with us immediately; it's only because I've been so steeped in misery that I didn't write to you the other day—directly after you called. We don't give parties, as you may imagine, but if you'll come just as we are, for old acquaintance' sake—"
"Just with Nick—if Nick will come—and dear Biddy," Grace interposed.
"Nick must certainly come, as well as dear Biddy, whom I hoped so much to find," Peter rejoined. "Because I'm going away—I don't know when I shall see them again."
"Wait with mamma. Biddy will come in at any moment," Grace urged.
"You're going away?" asked Lady Agnes, pausing at the foot of the stairs and turning her white face upon him. Something in the tone of her voice showed that she had been struck by his own tone.
"I have had promotion, and you must congratulate me. They are sending me out as minister to a little hot hole in Central America—five thousand miles away. I shall have to go rather soon."
"Oh, I'm so glad!" Lady Agnes breathed. Still she paused at the foot of the stair and still she gazed.
"How very delightful, because it will lead, straight off, to all sorts of other good things!" Grace exclaimed.
"Oh, I'm crawling up, and I'm an excellency," Peter laughed.
"Then if you dine with us your excellency must have great people to meet you."
"Nick and Biddy—they're great enough."
"Come up-stairs—come up-stairs," said Lady Agnes, turning quickly and beginning to ascend.
"Wait for Biddy—I'm going out," Grace continued, extending her hand to her kinsman. "I shall see you again—not that you care; but good-bye now. Wait for Biddy," the girl repeated in a lower tone, fastening her eyes on his with the same urgent, mystifying gleam that he thought he had perceived in them at luncheon.
"Oh, I'll go and see her in Rosedale Road," he answered.
"Do you mean to-day—now?"
"I don't know about to-day, but before I leave England."
"Well, she'll be in immediately," said Grace. "Good-bye to your excellency."
"Come up, Peter—please come up," called Lady Agnes, from the top of the stairs.
He mounted, and when he found himself in the drawing-room with her, with the door closed, she told him that she was exceedingly interested in his fine prospects, that she wished to hear all about his new position. She rang for coffee and indicated the seat he would find most comfortable: he had for a moment an apprehension that she would tell him he might if he liked light a cigar. For Peter Sherringham had suddenly become restless—too restless to occupy a comfortable chair; he seated 'himself in it only to jump up again, and he went to the window—while he communicated to his hostess the very little that he knew about his prospective post—on hearing a vehicle drive up to the door. A strong light had just been thrown into his mind, and it seemed to grow stronger when, looking out of the window, he saw Grace Dormer issue from the house in a bonnet and jacket which had all the air of having been assumed with extraordinary speed. Her jacket was unbuttoned, her gloves were dangling from her hand and she was tying her bonnet-strings. The vehicle into which she hastily sprang was a hansom-cab which had been summoned by the butler from the doorstep and which rolled away with her after she had given the cabman an address.
"Where is Grace going in such a hurry?" he asked of Lady Agnes; to which she replied that she had not the least idea—her children, at the pass they had all come to, knocked about as they liked.
Peter sat down again; he stayed a quarter of an hour and then he stayed longer, and during this time his appreciation of what Lady Agnes had in her mind gathered force. She showed him clearly enough what she had in her mind, although she showed it by no clumsy nor reprehensible overtures. It looked out of her sombre, conscious eyes and quavered in her preoccupied, perfunctory tones. She manifested an extravagant interest in his future proceedings, the probable succession of events in his career, the different honours he would be likely to come in for, the salary attached to his actual appointment, the salary attached to the appointments that would follow—they would be sure to, wouldn't they?—and what he might reasonably expect to save. Oh, he must save—Lady Agnes was an advocate of saving; and he must take tremendous pains and get on and be clever and ambitious: he must make himself indispensable and rise to the top. She was urgent and suggestive and sympathetic; she threw herself into the vision of his achievements and emoluments as if to satisfy a little the sore hunger with which Nick's treachery had left her. This was touching to Peter Sherringham, and he did not remain unmoved even at those more importunate moments when, as she fell into silence, fidgeting feverishly with a morsel of fancy-work that she had plucked from a table, her whole presence became an intense repressed appeal to him. What that appeal would have been had it been uttered was: "Oh, Peter, take little Biddy; oh, my dear young friend, understand your interests at the same time that you understand mine; be kind and reasonable and clever; save me all further anxiety and tribulation and accept my lovely, faultless child from my hands."
That was what Lady Agnes had always meant, more or less, that was what Grace had meant, and they meant it with singular lucidity on the present occasion. Lady Agnes meant it so much that from one moment to another Peter scarcely knew what she might do; and Grace meant it so much that she had rushed away in a hansom to fetch her sister from the studio. Grace, however, was a fool, for Biddy certainly wouldn't come. The news of his promotion had set them off, adding brightness to their idea of his being an excellent match; bringing home to them sharply the sense that if he were going away to strange countries he must take Biddy with him—that something at all events must be settled about Biddy before he went. They had suddenly began to throb with the conviction that they had no time to lose.
Strangely enough, the perception of all this had not the effect of throwing Peter on the defensive, or at least of making him wish to bolt. When once he had discovered what was in the air he recognized a propriety, a real felicity in it; could not deny that he was in certain ways a good match, since it was quite probable he would go far; and was even generous enough (as he had no fear of being dragged to the altar) to enter into the conception that he might offer some balm to a mother who had had a horrid disappointment. The feasibility of marrying Biddy was not exactly augmented by the idea that his doing so would be a great offset to what Nick had made Lady Agnes suffer; but at any rate Peter did not dislike his strenuous companion so much as to wish to punish her for being strenuous. He was not afraid of her, whatever she might do; and though he was unable to grasp the practical relevancy of Biddy's being produced on the instant he was willing to linger for half an hour on the chance of her turning up.
There was a certain contagion in Lady Agnes's appeal—it made him appeal sensibly to himself. For indeed, as it is time to say, the glass of our young man's spirit had been polished for that reflection. It was only at this moment that he became really candid with himself. When he made up his mind that his only safety was in flight and took the strong measure of asking for assistance to flee, he was very conscious that another and probably still more effectual safeguard (especially if the two should be conjoined) lay in the hollow of his hand. Julia Dallow's words in Paris had come back to him and had seemed much wiser than when they were spoken: "She'll save you disappointments; you would know the worst that can happen to you, and it wouldn't be bad." Julia had put it into a nutshell—Biddy would probably save him disappointments. And then she was—well, she was Biddy. Peter knew better what that was since the hour he had spent with her in Rosedale Road. But he had brushed away the sense of it, though he was aware that in doing so he took only half measures, was even guilty of a sort of fraud upon himself. If he was sincere in wishing to put a gulf between his future and that portion of his past and present which was associated with Miriam Rooth, there was a very simple way to do so. He had dodged that way, dishonestly fixing upon another which, taken alone, was far from being so good; but Lady Agnes brought him back to it. She held him in magnanimous contemplation of it, during which the safety, as Julia had called it, of the remedy became fascinating to his mind, especially as that safety appeared not to exclude a concomitant sweetness. It would be simple and it would swallow up his problems; it would put an end to all alternatives, which, as alternatives were otherwise putting an end to him, would be an excellent thing. It would settle the whole question of his future, and it was high time this should be settled.
Peter took two cups of coffee while he made out his future with Lady Agnes, but though he drank them slowly he had finished them before Biddy turned up. He stayed three-quarters of an hour, saying to himself that she wouldn't come—why should she come? Lady Agnes said nothing about this; she really, in vulgar vocables, said nothing about any part of the business. But she made him fix the next day but one for coming to dinner, and her repeated declaration that there would be no one else, not another creature but themselves, had almost the force of a legal paper. In giving his word that he would come without fail and not write the next day to throw them over for some function that he should choose to dub obligatory, Peter felt quite as if he were putting his name to such a document. He went away at half-past three; Biddy of course hadn't come, and he had been certain she wouldn't. He couldn't imagine what Grace's idea had been, nor what pretext she had put forward to her sister. Whatever it had been, Biddy had seen through it and hated such machinations. Peter could only like her the better for that.