Читать книгу Within the Precincts - Mrs. Oliphant - Страница 5

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The bells began to ring for evensong soon after the bridal party dispersed. Some of them, indeed, stayed for the beautiful service, which was a thing that visitors from a distance thought a great deal of, and there were a number of fine bonnets and dresses in the stalls when Lottie went in. The daily service was part of the daily life of the dwellers in the Abbey. There were those who went for devotion, and those who went for the music, and those who went because they had nothing else to do. It was an occupation and an amusement at the same time, and some people thought it a duty. To listen to the service more or less critically, to note if any of the boys’ voices were breaking, and whether Rowley sniffed as usual, or Bowler, the great bass, was hoarse; to observe how the minor canons sang, if they were in too great a hurry to get through the service, and who it was that read the lessons; to look at any notable persons that might be there; visitors to the Deanery, or other persons of distinction; to walk in the nave while the Signor played the voluntary; and finally to pause and talk to one’s friends before going home to tea, was the established rule of St. Michael’s. The old Chevaliers mixed with the ladies, here and there one. They were obliged to go in the morning, and they seldom repeated their church going in the afternoon; but still there were always two or three, and very interesting to strangers were the old soldiers, with their old moustaches and upright bearing. Some of them might have been veteran generals well entitled to command an army, and, indeed, there was valour enough among them, and such achievement as personal bravery is still capable of—enough to equip a dozen generals; but fortune had not been on the side of these noble old soldiers; and you may be sure there were no prosperous commanders among them. They stood about on the terrace in front of the Lodges and talked for five minutes or so before they went in to tea. But Lottie, when she came out of chapel and saw the last of the fine people streaming away in their light dresses through the aisle, did not feel much disposed to go indoors to Law and the bread and butter. They could wait. She went and leaned on the low wall close to the library and gazed out upon the landscape below. At the foot of the slope was the street of the little old town, a sweep of steep masonry, with old-fashioned red houses, like trees in autumn, on the other side; and beyond these the river meandered between its leafy banks in endless windings, and the great breadth of champaign swept away towards the horizon. At this time of the year it was rich and cloudy with foliage: the trees arranging themselves in every kind of way, singly and in clumps, and groves, and long hedgerows, and surrounding every house and every village and every church spire as far as you could see. The billowy greenness thus spreading far into the silvery-grey of the distance; the sky of a pale blue, faint with summer heat and long drought: stretched out like a map before the gazer from that mount of vision. The mottled clouds were floating together and rolling into masses as if with the intention of putting a stop to this long reign of brightness, and the level lines of the landscape and the great vault of the sky dropped together into a haze which also spoke of rain. Lottie leaned disconsolately over the wall, spreading abroad her thoughts over this vast breadth of space and silence. She let them go like a flock of birds flying to all the winds. Thoughts! they were not thoughts but feelings, vague movements of the mind, half sentiment, half-personal sensation. Why she should have been so deeply affected by this marriage she could not have told anyone. She did not herself know. It seemed to penetrate through and through her system of life, unsettling everything. After the disappointments of her beginning at St. Michael’s, this connection with the Deanery had seemed a thread of promise, a clue to something better; not a very splendid promise indeed, but still something; a little link of ambition which looked finer and more noble after it was snapped than it had ever done before. It was not very noble in itself. Lottie felt vaguely that to have so strong a desire for admission within that charmed circle was not a very lofty thing. The people she had seen within it had not satisfied her ideal. Except that they dressed better (some of them at least), they had been very much like the humbler classes with which she was acquainted; and to wish for a footing among them only because they were better off and more highly thought of than her own neighbours, was not an elevating sentiment. In the perpetual disappointments to which she had been subject, the slights she had been obliged to put up with, Lottie had felt a great many pangs of shame mingled with the stings of humiliation. She had felt that it was the poorest of ambitions which had taken possession of her. And now that it was over, this sense of unworthiness still mingled with her consciousness of failure and exclusion. But though it might not be a door into heaven, still to feel that it was shut, to be obliged to turn away, and to see no other door at which she could enter, was hard. Her heart sank down into painful depths of abandonment, and tears came to her eyes in spite of herself. She had nothing to cry about, but her lips quivered and two big tears rose and hung suspended under her long eyelashes, so filling up the whole space before her, that Lottie saw nothing but a waving greenness and blueness, a blurred shadow of earth and sky.

It was just at this moment, while she was still uncertain whether she could get these tears swallowed or whether they must fall, betraying her, that she was aware of some one at her elbow. “I think we shall have rain, Miss Despard,” said a deliberate voice; “do you not think we shall have rain? The summer has been so fine that we have no right to grumble. You were the one lady in all St. Michael’s whom I most wanted to see.”

“I, Signor? I do not know what you should want with me,” said Lottie, forced by circumstances into rudeness. She did not want to be rude, but the shock of his sudden address had brought down that shower, falling like drops of a thunderstorm, and she would not turn round to show him her wet eyes. He smiled a little to himself at this petulance, and that was all. He was used to waywardness in young ladies. He was a spare, olive-coloured man, not tall, but wiry and close-knit. He had all the aspect of an Italian and the name; but he was not really an Italian, being an Englishman born, a good Tory and a good Churchman, and all that the organist of St. Michael’s ought to be. But he was not disinclined to keep up a mystery on this score, having a little love of mystery by nature, and feeling, musically, that his foreign name and looks were in his favour. How far back the Signor had to go for his claim to be considered an Italian, nobody knew, but everybody (except the perverse and disagreeable, who would occasionally say Mr. Rossinetti to annoy him) called the musician the Signor. His complexion, his moustache, the wonderful dark eyes, which were the chief feature in his face, were all of Southern origin; and he spoke with a curious deliberation and clear pronunciation of every syllable, which almost looked as if, at one time, there had been difficulties about the language, and as if he had not courage even yet to take any liberties with it. But his accent was as good English as could be desired; and in respect to this as well as to all other questions about his origin the community of St. Michael’s were entirely in the dark, as he intended them to be.

“This event,” said the Signor, in his clear slow voice, “will bring our little societies, our practisings, to an end, Miss Despard. We were getting on very well. I am sorry to come to an end of anything, and of these above all.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Lottie, drearily. “Will it, do you think? She had not very much of a voice.”

“No; but there are other things besides voice. You have a very beautiful voice, Miss Despard.”

“But I have nothing else,” said Lottie, forgetting her precautions and turning quickly upon him; “that is what you mean to say? And you never even allowed before that I had a voice.”

“No, not much else,” said the deliberate organist; “you have no science, no method. You don’t know how to manage what you have got. It is a fine organ by nature, but you cannot produce it as you ought, because you do not know how. To have so much and to do so little is a great pity. It is a waste of a great gift, it is——”

“How dare you tell me all this to my face?” said Lottie, transported with vivid anger. She would have taken it more quietly if she had not been weakened in spirit by the discouragement into which she had fallen before. Her fierce, sudden glance was even still unwillingly softened by the wetness of her eyes. But the Signor did not flinch. There was a kind of smile in his own as he met her look. He was not afraid of her. He looked, indeed, amiably, genially at Lottie—as she had never seen him look before—and as she turned round she became aware that he was not alone. Over his shoulder, with an alarmed, indignant aspect, which half amused while it consoled her, was another face with which Lottie was very well acquainted. It was the face of his favourite pupil, a young man who followed the Signor about like his shadow, always a few steps behind him, always in devout contemplation of him. But young Purcell was not of this mind to-day; he was looking at his beloved master with a mixture of rage and pathos very droll in their combination. Lottie was easily moved, and almost before the words of defiance had left her lips a laugh forced itself after them. She had to turn round again to conceal the conflict of sudden mirth in her face.

“Would you rather I said it to others than to you? No, because that would do you no good——”

“And do you really think that I—I——” Why should she laugh? Young Purcell’s face brightened slightly, but took a still more curious look of bewildered inquiry. As for the Signor, he thought she had become hysterical, which he believed was a common weakness with womankind in general, and he was alarmed.

“I beg you a thousand pardons if I have seemed rude,” he said. “All that I wanted was to begin the conversation; for I have—a little proposal to make.”

“Do you call that beginning a conversation to tell me I am quite ignorant, and cannot sing, and waste my voice?” said Lottie, recovering her indignation. “It is not a very civil way.”

“Miss Despard, I think you will miss the society’s singing, and I want to tell you it was not good for you. These people were dazzled by your voice,” said the organist, with unintentional confusion of metaphor, “and they made use of it. All these fine people, they make use of us, and often forget to say ‘thank you.’ I was sorry that you should suffer, too; so was Purcell; he knows what it is—a little. And you have had no teaching, you have not had a thorough professional training as he has——”

Lottie turned upon him with flashing eyes; and this time she did not laugh at the young man who, over the Signor’s shoulder, followed every movement of hers with such eager attention. His look of wonder and fear was not less comic than the other changes which had come over his countenance, but she took no notice of it. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, “by professional training. What do I want with professional training? What has Mr. Purcell to do with it? What do you mean, or how should I suffer? If they thank me, or if they don’t thank me, what is that to me?”

The Signor cast a glance round at young Purcell, who answered with a look of despair. “If you would but confide in us, we thought we could help you. Indeed, Miss Despard, it is no presumption on Purcell’s part, only a fellow-feeling——”

“Only a feeling—of respect!” This Purcell timidly gasped out, with alarm painted on every feature. Lottie, turning her back to the wall and confronting the two musicians, solemnly made them a very awful curtsey. It was an art she had learned (though the teacher was unaware of the fact) from Lady Caroline; and therefore it was of the very finest and most imposing kind.

“The puzzle is,” she said grandly, in a voice not unlike Lady Caroline’s, “what the link between us may be.”

They were both silenced by this speech, and by her imposing aspect generally; for Lottie was very handsome, and this defiant grandeur suited her. Purcell felt disposed to sink into the earth, and showed it; but as for the Signor, he was less alarmed, and, indeed, a little amused—he had seen a great number of heroines, both in public and private life.

“It is always wrong to beat about the bush,” he said. “Perhaps I have made a mistake; I thought you probably intended to sing, Miss Despard, as a profession.”

“I!” Lottie’s voice broke into a half shriek. “I!” The suggestion gave her a shock which it was hard to get over. She felt a trembling of giddiness and insecurity, as if the ground had suddenly been cut from under her; she could have cried for mortification, injured pride, horrible humbling and downfall. She who had been mourning this change as taking from her all chance of ascent into the society she had a right to, the society she really belonged to, and they thought it was professional work, a profession that she was thinking of! She drew back unconsciously to the support of the wall, and propped herself by it. She could have cried, but pride would not let her. “You are mistaken, altogether mistaken,” she said. “I don’t suppose that you mean to insult me; but you forget that I am a gentleman’s daughter.”

Here the ghost of a smile flitted across the Signor’s olive-coloured face. It was as momentary as the passing of a shadow, but yet Lottie saw it, and it stung her as nothing else could have done; she was angry before, but this excited her to passion. She could have flown at him and strangled him for this smile; she understood it well enough. “You smile!” she said. “You think, perhaps, that a poor Chevalier, a soldier who is not rich, is not a gentleman. You think it is only money that makes a gentleman. There are many people who are of that opinion; but,” said Lottie with a smile, “you will perhaps not be surprised if I think differently. I will bid you good evening, please, now.”