Читать книгу The Golden Butterfly - Walter Besant - Страница 13

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"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear."

Joseph Jagenal and his charge were the last arrivals at Mrs. Cassilis's dinner. It was not a large party. There were two ladies of the conventional type, well dressed, well looking, and not particularly interesting; with them their two husbands, young men of an almost preternatural solemnity—such solemnity as sometimes results from a too concentrated attention to the Money Market. They were there as friends of Mr. Cassilis, whom they regarded with the reverence justly due to success. They longed to speak to him privately on investments, but did not dare. There were also two lions, newly captured. Ladds, the "Dragoon" of the joint literary venture—"The Little Sphere, by the Dragoon and the Younger Son"—is standing in that contemplative attitude by which hungry men, awaiting the announcement of dinner, veil an indecent eagerness to begin. The other, the "Younger Son," is talking to Mr. Cassilis.

Phillis remarked that the room was furnished in a manner quite beyond anything she knew. Where would be the dingy old chairs, sofas, and tables of Mr. Dyson's, or the solid splendour of Joseph Jagenal's drawing-room, compared with the glories of decorative art which Mrs. Cassilis had called to her aid? She had no time to make more than a general survey as she went to greet her hostess.

Mrs. Cassilis, for her part, observed that Phillis was dressed carefully, and was looking her best. She had on a simple white dress of that soft stuff called, I think, Indian muslin, which falls in graceful folds. A pale lavender sash relieved the monotony of the white, and set off her shapely figure. Her hair, done up in the simplest fashion, was adorned with a single white rose. Her cheeks were a little flushed with excitement, but her eyes were steady.

Phillis stole a glance at the other ladies. They were dressed, she was glad to observe, in the same style as herself, but not better. That naturally raised her spirits.

Then Mrs. Cassilis introduced her husband.

When Phillis next day attempted to reproduce her impressions of the evening, she had no difficulty in recording the likeness of Mr. Gabriel Cassilis with great fidelity. He was exactly like old Time.

The long lean limbs, the pronounced features, the stooping figure, the forelock which our enemy will not allow us to take, the head, bald save for that single ornamental curl and a fringe of gray hair over the ears—all the attributes of Time were there except the scythe. Perhaps he kept that at his office.

He was a very rich man. His house was in Kensington Palace Gardens, a fact which speaks volumes; its furnishing was a miracle of modern art; his paintings were undoubted; his portfolios of water-colours were worth many thousands; and his horses were perfect.

He was a director of many companies—but you cannot live in Kensington Palace Garden by directing companies and he had an office in the City which consisted of three rooms. In the first were four or five clerks, always writing; in the second was the secretary, always writing; in the third was Mr. Gabriel Cassilis himself, always giving audience.

He married at sixty-three, because he wanted an establishment in his old age. He was too old to expect love from a woman, and too young to fall in love with a girl. He did not marry in order to make a pet of his wife—indeed, he might as well have tried stroking a statue of Minerva as petting Victoria Pengelley; and he made no secret of his motive in proposing for the young lady. As delicately as possible he urged that, though her family was good, her income was small; that it is better to be rich and married than poor and single; and he offered, if she consented to become his wife, to give her all that she could wish for or ask on the material and artistic side of life.

Victoria Pengelley, on receipt of the offer, which was communicated by a third person, her cousin, behaved very strangely. She first refused absolutely; then she declared that she would have taken the man, but that it was now impossible; then she retracted the last statement, and, after a week of agitation, accepted the offer.

"And I must say, Victoria," said her cousin, "that you have made a strange fuss about accepting an offer from one of the richest men in London. He is elderly, it is true; but the difference between eight and twenty and sixty lies mostly in the imagination. I will write to Mr. Cassilis to-night."

Which she did, and they were married.

She trembled a great deal during the marriage ceremony. Mr. Cassilis was pleased at this appearance of emotion, which he attributed to causes quite remote from any thought in the lady's mind. "Calm to all outward seeming," he said to himself, "Victoria is capable of the deepest passion."

They had now been married between two and three years. They had one child—a boy.

It is only to be added that Mr. Cassilis settled the sum of fifteen thousand pounds upon the wedding-day on his wife, and that they lived together in that perfect happiness which is to be expected from well-bred people who marry without pretending to love each other.

Their dinners were beyond praise; the wine was incomparable; but their evenings were a little frigid. A sense of cold splendour filled the house—the child which belongs to new things and to new men.

The new man thirty years ago was loud, ostentatious, and vulgar. The new man now—there are a great many more of them—is very often quiet, unpretending, and well-bred. He understands art, and is a patron; he enjoys the advantages which his wealth affords him; he knows how to bear his riches with dignity and with reserve. The only objection to him is that he wants to go where other men, who were new in the last generation, go, and do what they do.

Mr. Cassilis welcomed Miss Fleming and Joseph Jagenal, and resumed his conversation with Jack Dunquerque. That young man looked much the same as when we saw him last on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. His tall figure had not filled out, but his slight moustache had just a little increased in size. And now he looked a good deal bored.

"I have never, I confess," his host was saying, wielding a double eye-glass instead of his scythe—"I have never been attracted by the manners and customs of uncivilised people. My sympathies cease, I fear, where Banks end."

"You are only interested in the country of Lombardy?"

"Yes; very good: precisely so."

"Outside the pale of Banks men certainly carry their money about with them——"

"Which prevents the accumulation of wealth, my dear sir. Civilisation was born when men learned to confide in each other. Modern history begins with the Fuggers, of whom you may have read."

"I assure you I never did," said Jack truthfully.

Then dinner was announced.

Phillis found herself on the right of Mr. Cassilis. Next to her sat Captain Ladds. Mr. Dunquerque was at the opposite corner of the table—he had given his arm to Mrs. Cassilis.

Mrs. Cassilis, Phillis saw, was watching her by occasional glances. The girl felt a little anxious, but she was not awkward. After all, she thought, the customs of society at a dinner-table cannot be very different from those observed and taught her by Mr. Dyson. Perhaps her manner of adjusting things was a little wanting in finish and delicacy—too downright. Also, Mrs. Cassilis observed she made no attempt to talk with Captain Ladds, her neighbour, but was, curiously enough, deeply interested in the conversation of Mr. Cassilis.

Ladds was too young for Phillis, despite his five and thirty years. Old men and greybeards she knew. Young men she did not know. She could form no guess what line of talk would be adopted by a young man—one who had a deep bass voice when he spoke, and attacked his dinner with a vigour past understanding. Phillis was interested in him, and a little afraid lest he should talk to her.

Others watched her too. Jack Dunquerque, his view a little intercepted by the épergne, lifted furtive glances at the bright and pretty girl at the other end of the table. Joseph Jagenal looked at her with honest pride in the beauty of his ward.

They talked politics, but not in the way to which she was accustomed. Mr. Dyson and his brother greybeards were like Cassandra, Elijah, Jeremiah, and a good many prophets of the present day, inasmuch as the more they discussed affairs the more they prophesied disaster. So that Phillis had learned from them to regard the dreadful future with terror. Every day seemed to make these sages more dismal. Phillis had not yet learned that the older we get the wiser we grow, and the wiser we grow the more we tremble; that those are most light-hearted who know the least. At this table, politics were talked in a very different manner; they laughed where the sages wagged their heads and groaned; they even discussed, with a familiarity which seemed to drive out anxiety, the favorite bugbear of her old politicians, the continental supremacy of Germany.

The two young City men, who were as solemn as a pair of Home Secretaries, listened to their host with an eager interest and deference which the other two, who were not careful about investments, did not imitate. Phillis observed the difference, and wondered what it meant. Then Mr. Cassilis, as if he had communicated as many ideas about Russia as he thought desirable, turned the conversation upon travelling, in the interests of the Dragoon and the younger son.

"I suppose," he said, addressing Jack, "that in your travels among the islanders you practised the primitive mode of Barter."

"We did; and they cheated us when they could. Which shows that they have improved upon the primitive man. I suppose he was honest."

"I should think not," said the host. "The most honest classes in the world are the richest. People who want to get things always have a tendency to be dishonest. England is the most honest nation, because it is the richest. France is the next. Germany, you see, which is a poor country, yielded to the temptations of poverty and took Sleswick-Holstein, Alsace and Lorraine. I believe that men began with dishonesty."

"Adam, for example," said Ladds, "took what he ought not to have taken."

"O Captain Ladds!" this was one of two ladies, she who had read up the new book before coming to the dinner, and had so far an advantage over the other—"that is just like one of the wicked things, the delightfully wicked things, in the Little Sphere. Now we know which of the two did the wicked things."

"It was the other man," said Ladds.

"Is it fair to ask," the lady went on, "how you wrote the book?"

She was one of those who, could she get the chance, would ask Messieurs Erckmann and Chatrian themselves to furnish her with a list of the paragraphs and the ideas due to each in their last novel.

Ladds looked as if the question was beyond his comprehension.

At last he answered slowly—

"Steel pen. The other man had a gold pen."

"No—no; I mean did you write one chapter and your collaborateur the next, or how?"

"Let me think it over," replied Ladds, as if it were a conundrum.

Mrs. Cassilis came to the rescue.

"At all events," she said, "the great thing is that the book is a success. I have not read it, but I hear there are many clever and witty things in it. Also some wicked things. Of course, if you write wickedness you are sure of an audience. I don't think, Mr. Dunquerque," she added, with a smile, "that it is the business of gentlemen to attack existing institutions."

Jack shook his head.

"It was not my writing. It was the other man. I did what I could to tone him down."

"Have you read the immortal work?" Ladds asked his neighbour. He had not spoken to her yet, but he had eyes in his head, and he was gradually getting interested in the silent girl who sat beside him, and listened with such rapt interest to the conversation.

This great and manifest interest was the only sign to show that Phillis was not accustomed to dinners in society.

Ladds thought that she must be some shy maiden from the country—a little "rustical" perhaps. He noticed now that her eyes were large and bright, that her features were clear and delicate, that she was looking at himself with a curious pity, as if, which was indeed the case, she believed the statement about his having written the wicked things. And then he wondered how so bright a girl had been able to listen to the prosy dogmatics of Mr. Cassilis. Yet she had listened, and with pleasure.

Phillis was at that stage in her worldly education when she would have listened with pleasure to anybody—Mr. Moody, a lecture on astronomy, a penny-reading, an amateur dramatic performance, or an essay in the Edinburgh. For everything was new. She was like the blind man who received his sight and saw men, like trees, walking. Every new face was a new world; every fresh speaker was a new revelation. No one to her was stupid, was a bore, was insincere, was spiteful, was envious, or a humbug, because no one was known. To him who does not know, the inflated india-rubber toy is as solid as a cannon-ball.

"I never read anything," said Phillis, with a half blush. Not that she was ashamed of the fact, but she felt that it would have pleased Captain Ladds had she read his book. "You see, I have never learned to read."

"Oh!"

It was rather a facer to Ladds. Here was a young lady, not being a Spaniard, or a Sicilian, or a Levantine, or a Mexican, or a Paraguayan, or a Brazilian, or belonging to any country where such things are possible, who boldly confessed that she could not read. This in England; this in the year 1875; this in a country positively rendered unpleasant by reason of its multitudinous School Boards and the echoes of their wrangling!

Jack Dunquerque, in his place, heard the statement and looked up involuntarily as if to see what manner of young lady this could be—a gesture of surprise into which the incongruity of the thing startled him. He caught her full face as she leaned a little forward, and his glance rested for a moment on a cheek so fair that his spirits fell. Beauty disarms the youthful squire, and arms him who has won his spurs. I speak in an allegory.

Mrs. Cassilis heard it and was half amused, half angry.

Mr. Cassilis heard it, opened his mouth, as if to make some remark about Mr. Dyson's method of education, but thought better of it.

The two ladies heard it and glanced at her curiously. Then they looked at each other with the slightest uplifting of the eyebrow, which meant, "Who on earth can she be?"

Mrs. Cassilis noted that too, and rejoiced, because she was going to bring forward a girl who would make everybody jealous.

Ladds was the only one who spoke.

"That," he said feebly, "must be very jolly."

He began to wonder what could be the reason of this singular educational omission. Perhaps she had a crooked back; could not sit up to a desk, could not hold a book in her hand; but no, she was like Petruchio's Kate: