Читать книгу The Duke's Sweetheart: A Romance - Dowling Richard - Страница 6

When the Duke of Long Acre got Edward Graham's letter, he immediately packed off the easel and colours. He liked Graham very much, and Graham loved him. Cheyne was one of those men who are always asked to do odd jobs for friends. He was good-humoured, of active habits, and liked to be busy always.

Although he was prompt about the commission he had received, he had no intention of doing the other thing Graham asked. No inducement of an ordinary kind could drag him out of London just now. He was moderately busy for the papers and magazines to which he contributed, and he was exceedingly busy with the affairs of his heart.

There was no happier lover in all London than Charles Augustus Cheyne. He loved his love, and his love loved him, and he envied no man's lot. She was as bright and dear a sweetheart as ever man had, and he loved her in a thoroughly comfortable common-sense way. He had written about romantic love, but he had never felt a pang of it in his private experience. Romance was a good thing in a book, for it amused one, but it was a poor stock-in-trade on which to begin matrimony. So he kept his romance for the public and his friends, and his straightforward manhood for his sweetheart. "Sweetheart" is the finest love-word we have in English, and she was his sweetheart-his sweetheart-his sweet heart.

He loved her simply, frankly, wholly, without any mental reservation. He never told her he wanted to die for her, or that she was blameless or perfect. He told her she was as good a girl as any man ever might hope to marry. He knew she was as well as he knew that two and two are four. He praised her face less than was reasonable. He told her she had most lovely eyes, which was a temperate and judicial way of putting the matter. He was quite sure of his girl. He did not want anyone to tell him anything about her. He did not want her to tell him anything about herself. The only thing he wanted was to make her happy, and he thought he could do that. If she were happy he should be happy for three reasons-first, because he had an excellent constitution and was not soured by ill-health; secondly, because he had a gay and cheerful nature; thirdly, because the very sight of her happiness could not fail to be a source of abiding joy to him.

When he put his arms round her he always felt glad he was big enough and strong enough to protect her. Once, while holding her a moment in his arms, he said:

"I could crush you to death now. May, if I liked."

"You great bear, don't frighten me to death first," she said.

"Or," he added, "I think I could kill any man who annoyed you; of course I mean who injured you desperately."

"Well," she said, "as I don't mean to be injured dreadfully by anyone, as I don't want to be frightened to death or crushed to death, I don't see why you should not let me go. Oh dear, men are such plagues."

Yes, Charles Augustus Cheyne was a very strong man physically; mentally he was by no means so strong. Notwithstanding the fact that he told lies by the thousand, no one ever dreamed of saying he was a dishonourable man. He made no earthly use of his lies. If he told a new acquaintance that he had the day before dined with the Marquis of Belgravia, and his listener then asked him to dinner next day, Cheyne would most certainly decline to go. If he lied he lied for his own pleasure, not for his profit, not for the injury of anyone. He never said a bad word of any man he knew, and he never said a bad word of any member of the aristocracy, for had he not broken the bread of every member of it?

But of all the weak points in Cheyne's mental equipment the weakest was a dread of an allusion to his family. Any allusion to his people always made him uncomfortable; and, where he could possibly manage to do so, he always changed the conversation as soon as possible. When asked point-blank who his father was, he replied in almost the same form of words: "My father was a poor gentleman who met many reverses of fortune." He never said anything about his mother, and those who knew him best had long ago made up their minds that he had no right to his father's name, and that Cheyne had been his mother's name, or an assumed one. Indeed most of his friends were convinced that neither his mother nor father had borne the name of Cheyne.

He did not know much more about himself than those around him. He did not remember his father or mother. His earliest recollection was of an elderly spinster who wore corkscrew curls, kept a day-school for young ladies, and took in a few boarders. He was one of these boarders, and now he always looked back on that part of his life with the deadliest hatred. Two facts connected with that establishment clung to his imagination with terrible tenacity. First, that he never got anything to eat there but bread steeped in boiled milk; secondly, that on frosty days his schoolmistress hit him on the knuckles with a lead-pencil because he did not hold his pen properly. Even now the smell of bread steeped in boiling milk made him ill.

From this school he was sent to another, a private one kept by a clergyman in Cumberland. No one ever visited him, and he never left school for holidays. He did not know who paid for him at those houses. He had a small allowance of pocket-money. At school he had displayed some taste for literature. He always took first place in essay-writing. He assumed from this that the clergyman must have suggested he should in some way be linked to literature: for when he left school, at sixteen years of age, the clergyman told him a situation had been secured for him in a publisher's office in London. The clergyman came up to town with him, introduced him to his new master, handed him a ten-pound note, saying it came from his guardian, and then took leave of him.

From the day he left that old maid's school he had never seen or heard anything of her. From the day that clergyman handed him the that ten-pound note and bade him good-bye he had never seen or heard anything of him. At the date he first found himself in the publisher's office he was too young to set any inquiries on foot about himself; and as time went on and he began to know something of the world and its ways, he came to the conclusion he had no right to his father's name, and that the one he bore was his mother's. When he had grown to be a man he felt deeply the humiliation of his position, and made up his mind to look no further into the matter, lest what was now only matter of inference might become matter of certainty. "Let sleeping dogs lie" was the motto he adopted, and he had never departed from it. To Marion Durrant he had told all he absolutely knew of himself. He had not told her anything he inferred or suspected. He had been told by the clergyman who had looked after his education that both his father and mother were dead. He had told Marion that he had never known either his father or mother, that they were both dead, that he had no memory of his childhood and youth apart from those two schools, and that as far as he knew he had no relative alive. But he had said nothing to her of his misgivings or doubts.

From all this it will be seen that Graham's allusion to the story connected with Anerly and his name would be anything but an inducement for Cheyne to leave London for that Devonshire village.

Every day he found his way out to Knightsbridge, and every day he had long sweet hours with his May.

It was afternoon on the day he got Graham's letter before he could leave home, and four o'clock had struck before he knocked at the hall-door of the little house in Knightsbridge.

When he came into the room where Marion Durrant sat hemming an apron, she said:

"What! come again to-day! In the name of wonder, what brought you here now?'

"You know, May, the pressure of race is ever from east to west,"

"The pressure of race! What on earth are you talking about? Don't! that hurts my hand."

"I was slapping your hand to prevent you from fainting at the unexpected sight of your slave and master. I meant the pressure of the human race-or more accurately, the attraction of the inhuman race-meaning yourself, sweetheart."

"Do you know, Charlie, you always begin a conversation as if you wanted me to think you clever; and if there is one thing I hate it is cleverness in a man."

"Do you know, Miss Durrant, you never by any means allow me to begin a conversation. Before I am fully in the room you always fly at me with some question or other."

"But you are so slow, Charlie. You take up half an hour getting ready to say 'Howd'y'do'; and if there is one thing more odious in a man than cleverness it is slowness."

"But you must admit. Miss Durrant, that if, when we meet, I am slow of speech, I am not slow in other matters proper to our meeting."

"Go away, sir! How dare you? I will not let you do that again. Sometimes I think you a bear, and sometimes I think you an elephant, but I think I hate you always."

"If you say any more I'll get a divorce on the grounds of cruelty and desertion. May, let us drop this sort of thing. Run and bring me a glass of beer. I've been trotting about the whole morning, and am dying for a glass of beer."

"You deserve to be starved, and you deserve to be thirsty, and you deserve to be-"

"I admit it all. I deserve it all, and every other thing that's awful, except to be married to you. Marion Durrant, spinster, what would you do if I cut my throat?"

"Charlie!"

"Or if I put my head under the wheel of an omnibus laden with exceedingly fat people?"

"Charlie! Charlie!"

"Or if I threw myself over Westminster Bridge with a couple of forty-pound shot tied round my heels?"

"I'll run for the beer, Charlie."

"Ah, I thought I'd get you to move at last. You see you can't bear to leave me even for a minute."

"Conceited fellow!" and she tripped out of the room.

She went herself with a jug into the little cellar under the front-door step, and drew the beer in a most elaborate and painstaking manner. She looked into three jugs before she was satisfied with one, although they were all as immaculate as human hands could make them. She looked at the glass as if it were a jewel she was thinking of buying, and the slightest flaw in it would render it valueless. She placed the jug and the tumbler and a plate of biscuits on an exceedingly slippery Japanese wooden tray, and declined to let the maid carry it up. She was proud of that polished jug, that polished glass, that polished tray. The jug and the glass and the tray were more to her that the condition of the beer. As a matter of fact, she never thought of the beer at all. It would be a pity if the beer was not in good condition; but it would be a disgrace if the jug, glass, and tray were not in perfect order.

When she came back to the room she was meek and penitential. We are always softened towards those to whom we have done ever so slight a service. When he had taken a draught of the ale and broken a biscuit, she said plaintively:

"Charlie!"

"Well, my fire-eating she-dragon, what bloodthirsty thing have you to say to your down-trodden slave now?"

"Only that you were right when you said-"

"When I spoke about cutting my throat?"

"No, no, no! When you said I did not like to go away from you even for a moment. Charlie, I hate going away from you, and I hate myself when you are away; for then I remember all the foolish things I have said to you, and-and I am always afraid-"

"Of my taking four pounds, apothecaries' weight, of solid opium?"

"No. Of your being angry with me some day, or of your not forgiving me."

She was pretty and very penitent, and he had had a long walk and a glass of beer, and he felt perfectly at rest and happy; so he put out his arms and took her into them for a moment, and when he let her go they both felt that, say what you like about love, it is the finest thing in all the world, and that there is nothing else which makes people so utterly unselfish.

"I had a letter from Graham this morning," said Charlie, after a pause.

"Where is he now?"

"In Devonshire still, sketching at some place called Anerly. He wrote me to send him some painting materials. He is going to begin a picture there, so I suppose we shall not see anything of him for some time. He has asked me to run down to him for a few days?"

"And will you go?"

"Not I. I am too busy just now."

"But you could do your work down there, and I am sure you want a run away and a little fresh air."

"Yes; I could write, no doubt. But then you see, May, I should not be able to come and read my MS. to you, and I should not get on very well. While I am at work at Long Acre I am in a hurry to be done, in order that I may get back to you, and I am too anxious to please you to do slovenly work; so the result is that I work longer and yet have more leisure, which is a paradox, and a paradox is particularly unsuited to the understanding of women."

"You are always saying nice and disagreeable things in the one breath; and I don't know whether to like you or to hate you."

"To cases of this kind an infrangible rule applies. It is, when I say nice things, hate me; when I say disagreeable things, love me. This is another paradox. Paradoxes, although they are not intelligible to women, are all the more dear to them on that very account. You never yet knew a woman who thoroughly understood a man care for him. I never did."

"But, Charlie, I think I understand you very well."

"Rank presumption. The rankest presumption I ever heard in all my life. Know me, May! Why, you don't even know who my father and mother were."

"You told me they were dead."

"Yes, they are dead. But you know nothing of them. You do not know if they were felons, or shopkeepers, or gentlefolk."

"I am sure, Charlie, they were gentlefolk."

"Ah, you do not know. And now, May," said he, taking her hand very tenderly and softly patting the back of it with the palm of his own, "I must tell you a secret I ought perhaps to have told you long ago, as it might influence you in your decision of accepting or not accepting me."

"Nothing you could have told me would have made the slightest difference in my decision, Charlie," she said, in a very faint voice.

He ceased patting her hand, and pressed it softly between his two palms. He spoke in a low voice:

"Well, May, the fact of it is I do not know who my father and mother were. It could do no good, dear, if this fact were made public, and I count on you for keeping it secret."

"You may," she whispered back, returning the pressure of his hands, and laying her disengaged hand upon the upper one of his. The action was slight and made without thought, yet he felt its import. He knew by that gesture she meant to convey to him that not only was the hand his own, but that all the faculties of her nature owed allegiance to him alone.

"Thank you, darling; I know how good you are. Every day I see you I am more and more convinced of your goodness. But you see. May, that is my only great trouble, and day by day I am afraid I may find out something very, unpleasant, something disgraceful about my father and mother."

"But nothing you can find out will be disgraceful to you, Charlie."

"No, logically and morally not. But then you know the sins of the parent are visited on the children, not merely by Heaven, but by the world. You know very well that if a man's father had been a hangman, or a murderer, or a forger, his son would be looked on with suspicion and dislike by the majority of the world. A man in my position is of course more alive to the discomfort of any such discovery than a man who knows about his parents. He is continually fancying all manner of horrible surprises, until the mind becomes morbidly sensitive on the subject. I confess I am morbidly sensitive on the subject; and of one thing I am certain, that if I made any discovery of the kind I have been speaking of, I could not stand England-London. I'd emigrate. I'd go to the United States or Australia; some place where the English language is spoken, and where I might have a chance of making a living by my pen. I am telling you all this for a purpose, May. It is all only a preface to a question. And the question: In case anything of the kind arose, and I was about to leave for the United States or a colony, would you marry me and come with me?"

"Oh, how can you ask such a question? I'd go anywhere with you. What does it matter where I am so long as I am with you, Charlie?"

He thanked her and kissed her, and soon after took his leave; for he had work to do that evening.

As he walked home in the fresh bright air his step was elastic, and he carried his head thrown back. His happiness was now complete. The two great points he had reserved had been cleared up. May cared only for himself. Whatever time might unearth about his father and mother, she would not be altered by it; and if anything obliging him to leave the country did transpire, she would marry him and go with him all the same as if nothing had come to light. This was the most peaceful, contented and joyous day of his life.

When Cheyne arrived at the house in Long Acre, he found Mr. Whiteshaw, the carriage-builder, standing in his wareroom.

"Good afternoon, Cheyne," cried the builder cheerily.

"Good afternoon," said Cheyne, pausing and drawing near.

"What news?" asked the carriage-builder, rubbing his hands, as though news ever so dismal would be preferable to none.

"Not a word," said Cheyne, stepping into the wareroom.

"Heard anything of the Duke of Shropshire since?"

"No, no. Nothing particular. Except that the Duke of Dorsetshire, in a note I got from him a day or two ago, says his grace is awfully cut up by the way these rascally Radicals are behaving."

"If I were at the head of affairs now, I'd pass a law treating all Radicals as working-men out of situations, and I'd clap every man Jack of them into jail. That's what I'd do."

"You'd never get a bill like that through the Commons, although you might through the Lords."

"Ah, I suppose not; I suppose not, Cheyne. We live in a degenerate age. But you, if you were in the House, would you vote for such a measure?"

"I am afraid it is extreme," said Cheyne, with a good-humoured smile.

"But you, you ought to be dead against Radicals and demagogues. Your name alone-why, sir, your name alone shows you come of a great stock, the great house of Shropshire. (By-the-way, we weren't long putting that brougham right for his grace. There it is, you see; and a pretty job too.) But, as I was saying, you must be a member of that family. Why, look at how few there are of the name."

"No, no. I assure you, most sincerely, I am in no way connected with any great house. The name is common enough in England-common enough. Well, I must be off to work. I have a whole lot of stuff to get away by to-night's mail for the morning."

With these words Cheyne walked out of the wareroom and got to the hall-door, and mounted the stairs.

"I never can understand," thought the carriage-maker, "why this Cheyne, who lies right and left about noblemen, should have such a strong objection to thinking he was descended from a big swell."

When Cheyne reached his own room he sat down and thought a moment. Then he said to himself very gravely:

"I wish Whiteshaw would give up this connecting my name with that of the Duke of Shropshire. Supposing a person found a poor deserted child, would it be kinder to name it Fitzalan Howard or plain William Brown?"

And when he had put the question to himself, he fell to wondering very unpleasantly whether or not he had at one time been a poor deserted child, picked up by some passer-by, to whom had been given the high-sounding name of Charles Augustus Cheyne.

So the afternoon which had been the happiest of his life ended under a sombre cloud.