Читать книгу The Ivory Gate, a new edition - Walter Besant - Страница 7

Checkley held the door of the office wide open, and invited Elsie to enter. The aspect of the room, solid of furniture, severe in its fittings, with its vast table covered with papers, struck her with a kind of terror. At the table sat her guardian, austere of countenance.

All the way along she had been imagining a dialogue. He would begin with certain words. She would reply, firmly but respectfully, with certain other words. He would go on. She would again reply. And so on. Everybody knows the consolations of imagination in framing dialogues at times of trouble. They never come off. The beginning is never what is expected, and the sequel, therefore, has to be changed on the spot. The conditions of the interview had not been realised by Elsie. Also the beginning was not what she expected. For her guardian, instead of frowning with a brow of corrugated iron, and holding up a finger of warning, received her more pleasantly than she had imagined it possible for him, bade her sit down, and leaned back, looking at her kindly.

'And so,' he said, 'you are twenty-one – twenty-one – to-day. I am no longer your guardian. You are twenty-one. Everything that is past seems to have happened yesterday. So that it is needless to say that you were a baby only yesterday.'

'Yes; I am really twenty-one.'

'I congratulate you. To be twenty-one is, I believe, for a young lady at least, a pleasant time of life. For my own part, I have almost forgotten the memory of youth. Perhaps I never had the time to be young. Certainly I have never understood why some men regret their youth so passionately. As for your sex, Elsie, I know very little of it except in the way of business. In that way, which does not admit of romance, I must say that I have sometimes found ladies importunate, tenacious, exacting, persistent, and even revengeful.'

'Oh!' said Elsie, with a little winning smile of conciliation. This was only a beginning – a prelude – before the unpleasantness.

'That, Elsie, is my unfortunate experience of women – always in the way of business, which of course may bring out the worst qualities. In society, of which I have little experience, they are doubtless – charming – charming.' He repeated the word, as if he had found an adjective of whose meaning he was not quite clear. 'An old bachelor is not expected, at the age of seventy-five, to know much about such a subject. The point before us is that you have this day arrived at the mature age of twenty-one. That is the first thing, and I congratulate you. The first thing.'

'I wonder,' thought Elsie timidly, 'when he will begin upon the next thing – the real thing.'

There lay upon the table before him a paper with notes upon it. He took it up, looked at it, and laid it down again. Then he turned to Elsie and smiled – he actually smiled – he unmistakably smiled. 'At twenty-one,' he said, 'some young ladies who are heiresses come into their property – '

'Those who are heiresses. Unhappily, I am not.'

'Come into their property – their property. It must be a beautiful thing for a girl to come into property, unexpectedly, at twenty-one. For a man, a temptation to do nothing and to make no more money. Bad! Bad! But for a girl already engaged, a girl who wants money, a girl who is engaged – eh – to a penniless young solicitor – '

Elsie turned crimson. This was the thing she expected.

'Under such circumstances, I say, such a stroke of fortune would be providential and wonderful, would it not?'

She blushed and turned pale, and blushed again. She also felt a strong disposition to cry – but repressed that disposition.

'In your case, for instance, such a windfall would be most welcome. Your case is rather a singular case. You do not belong to a family which has generally disregarded money – quite the reverse – you should inherit the love of money – yet you propose to throw away what I believe are very good prospects, and – '

'My only prospect is to marry George Austin.'

'So you think. I have heard from your mother, and I have seen your sister Hilda. They object very strongly to the engagement.'

'I know, of course, what they would say.'

'Therefore, I need not repeat it,' replied Mr. Dering drily. 'I learn, then, that you are not only engaged to this young gentleman, but that you are also proposing to marry upon the small income which he now possesses.'

'Yes – we are prepared to begin the world upon that income.'

'Your mother asked me what chance he had in his profession. In this office he can never rise to a considerable salary as managing clerk. If he had money, he might buy a partnership. But he has none, and his friends have none. And the profession is congested. He may remain all his life in a position not much better than he now occupies. The prospect, Elsie, is not brilliant.'

'No – we are fully aware of that. And yet – '

'Allow me, my dear child. You are yourself – we will say for the moment – without any means of your own.'

'I have nothing.'

'Or any expectations, except from your mother, who is not yet sixty.'

'I could not count upon my mother's death. Besides, she says that, if I persist, she will not leave me anything at all.'

'So much I understand from herself. Her present intention is to remove your name from her will, in case you go on with this proposed marriage.'

'My mother will do what she pleases with her property,' said Elsie. 'If she thinks that I will give way to a threat of this kind, she does not know me.'

'Do not let us speak of threats. I am laying before you facts. Here they are plainly. Young Austin has a very small income: he has very little prospect of getting a substantial income: you, so far as you know, have nothing; and, also so far as you know, you have no prospect of anything. These are the facts, are they not?'

'Yes – I suppose these are the facts. We shall be quite poor – very likely, quite poor always.' The tears rose to her eyes. But this was not a place for crying.

'I want you to understand these facts very clearly,' Mr. Dering insisted. 'Believe me, I do not wish to give you pain.'

'All this,' said Elsie, with the beginnings of the family obstinacy in her eyes, 'I clearly understand. I have had them put before me too often.'

'I also learn from your sister, Lady Dering, that if you abandon this marriage she is ready to do anything for you that she can. Her house, her carriage, her servants – you can command them all, if you please. This you know. Have you considered the meaning of what you propose? Can you consider it calmly?'

'I believe we have.'

'On the one side poverty – not what is called a small income. Many people live very well on what is called a small income – but grinding, hard poverty, which exacts real privations and burdens you with unexpected loads. My dear young lady, you have been brought up to a certain amount of plenty and ease, if not to luxury. Do you think you can get along without plenty and ease?'

'If George can, I can.'

'Can you become a servant – cook, housemaid, lady's-maid – as well as a wife – a nurse as well as a mother?'

'If George is made happier by my becoming anything – anything, it will only make me happier. Mr. Dering, I am sure you wish me well – you are my father's old friend – you have always advised my mother in her troubles – my brother was articled to you – but – ' She paused, remembering that he had not been her brother's best friend.

'I mean the best possible for you. Meantime, you are quite fixed in your own mind: you are set upon this thing. That is clear. There is one other way of looking at it. You yourself seem chiefly desirous, I think, to make the man you love happy. So much the better for him. – Are you quite satisfied that the other party to the agreement, your lover, will remain happy while he sees you slaving for him, while he feels his own helplessness, and while he gets no relief from the grinding poverty of his household – while – lastly – he sees his sons taking their place on a lower level, and his daughters taking a place below the rank of gentlewoman?'

'I reply by another question. – You have had George in your office as articled clerk and managing clerk for eight years. Is he, or is he not, steadfast, clear-headed, one who knows his own mind, and one who can be trusted in all things?'

'Perhaps,' said Mr. Dering, inclining his head. 'How does that advance him?'

'Then, if you trust him, why should not I trust him? I trust George altogether – altogether. If he does not get on, it will be through no fault of his. We shall bear our burden bravely, believe me, Mr. Dering. You will not hear him – or me – complain. Besides, I am full of hope. Oh! it can never be in this country that a man who is a good workman should not be able to get on. Then I can paint a little – not very well, perhaps. But I have thought – you will not laugh at me – that I might paint portraits and get a little money that way.'

'It is quite possible that he may succeed, and that you may increase the family income. Everything is possible. But, remember, you are building on possibilities, and I on facts. Plans very beautiful and easy at the outset often prove most difficult in the carrying out. My experience of marriages is learned by fifty years of work, not imaginative, but practical. I have learned that without adequate means no marriage can be happy. That is to say, I have never come across any case of wedded poverty where the husband or the wife, or both, did not regret the day when they faced poverty together instead of separately. That, I say, is my experience of such marriages. It is so easy to say that hand in hand evils may be met and endured which would be intolerable if one was alone. It isn't only hand in hand, Elsie. The hands are wanted for the baby, and the evils will fall on the children yet unborn.'

Elsie hung her head. Then she replied timidly: 'I have thought even of that. It only means that we go lower down in the social scale.'

'Only? Yet that is everything. People who are well up the ladder too often deride those who are fighting and struggling to get up higher. It is great folly or great ignorance to laugh. Social position, in such a country as ours, means independence, self-respect, dignity, all kinds of valuable things. You will throw these all away – yet your grandfathers won them for you by hard work. You are yourself a gentlewoman – why? Because they made their way up in the world, and placed their sons also in the way to climb. That is how families are made – by three generations at least of steady work uphill.'

Elsie shook her head sadly. 'We can only hope,' she murmured.

'One more word, and I will say no more. Remember, that love or no love, resignation or not, patience or not, physical comfort is the beginning and the foundation of all happiness. If you and your husband can satisfy the demands of physical comfort, you may be happy – or at least resigned. If not – Well, Elsie, that is all. I should not have said so much had I not promised your mother and your sister. I am touched, I confess, by your courage and your resolution.'

'We mean never to regret, never to look back, and always to work and hope,' said Elsie. 'You will remain our friend, Mr. Dering?'

'Surely, surely. – And now – '

'Now' – Elsie rose – 'I will not keep you any longer. You have said what you wished to say very kindly, and I thank you.'

'No. – Sit down again; I haven't done with you yet, child. Sit down again. No more about that young villain – George Austin.' He spoke so good-humouredly, that Elsie complied wondering, but no longer afraid. 'Nothing more about your engagement. Now, listen carefully, because this is most important. Three or four years ago a person wrote to me. That person informed me that he – for convenience we will call the person a man – wished to place a certain sum of money in my hands in trust – for you.'

'For me? Do you mean – in trust? What is Trust?'

'He gave me this sum of money to be given to you on your twenty-first birthday.'

'Oh!' Elsie sat up with open eyes. 'A sum of money? – and to me?'

'With a condition or two. The first condition was, that the interest should be invested as it came in: the next, that I was on no account – mind, on no account at all – to tell you or any one of the existence of the gift or the name of the donor. You are now twenty-one. I have been careful not to afford you the least suspicion of this happy windfall until the time should arrive. Neither your mother, nor your sister, nor your lover, knows or suspects anything about it.'

'Oh!' Elsie said once more. An interjection may be defined as a prolonged monosyllable, generally a vowel, uttered when no words can do justice to the subject.

'And here, my dear young lady' – Elsie cried 'Oh!' once more because – the most curious thing in the world – Mr. Dering's grave face suddenly relaxed and the lines assumed the very benevolence which she had the day before imparted to his portrait, and wished to see upon his face! – 'Here, my dear young lady' – he laid his hand upon a paper – 'is the list of the investments which I have made of that money. You have, in fact, money in Corporation bonds – Newcastle, Nottingham, Wolverhampton. You have water shares – you have gas shares – all good investments, yielding at the price of purchase an average of nearly three and two-thirds per cent.'

'Investments? Why – how much money was it, then? I was thinking when you spoke of a sum of money, of ten pounds, perhaps.'

'No, Elsie, not ten pounds. The money placed in my hands for your use was over twelve thousand pounds. With accumulations, there is now a little under thirteen thousand.'

'Oh!' cried Elsie for the third time and for the same reason. No words could express her astonishment.

'Yes; it will produce about four hundred and eighty pounds a year. Perhaps, as some of the stock has gone up, it might be sold out and placed to better advantage. We may get it up to five hundred pounds.'

'Do you mean, Mr. Dering, that I have actually got five hundred pounds a year – all my own?'

'That is certainly my meaning. You have nearly five hundred pounds a year all your own – entirely your own, without any conditions whatever – your own.'

'Oh!' She sat in silence, her hands locked. Then the tears came into her eyes. 'Oh, George!' she murmured, 'you will not be so very poor after all.'

'That is all I have to say to you at present, Elsie,' said Mr. Dering. 'Now you may run away and leave me. Come to dinner this evening. Your mother and your sister are coming. I shall ask Austin as well. We may perhaps remove some of those objections. Dinner at seven sharp, Elsie. – And now you can leave me.'

'I said last night,' said Elsie, clasping her hands with feminine superstition, 'that something was going to happen. But I thought it was something horrid. Oh, Mr. Dering, if you only knew how happy you have made me! I don't know what to say. I feel stunned. Five hundred pounds a year! Oh! it is wonderful! What shall I say? What shall I say?'

'You will say nothing. Go away now. Come to dinner this evening. – Go away, my young heiress. Go and make plans how to live on your enlarged income. It will not prove too much.'

Elsie rose. Then she turned again. 'Oh, I had actually forgotten. Won't you tell the man – or the woman – who gave you that money for me, that I thank him from my very heart? It isn't that I think so much about money, but oh! the dreadful trouble that there has been at home because George has none – and this will do something to reconcile my mother. Don't you think it will make all the difference?'

'I hope that before the evening you will find that all opposition has been removed,' said her guardian cautiously.

She walked away in a dream. She found herself in Lincoln's Inn Fields: she walked all round that great square, also in a dream. The spectre of poverty had vanished. She was rich: she was rich: she had five hundred pounds a year. Between them they would have seven hundred pounds a year. It seemed enormous. Seven hundred pounds a year! Seven – seven – seven hundred pounds a year!

She got out into the street called Holborn, and she took the modest omnibus, this heiress of untold wealth. How much was it? Thirteen millions? or thirteen thousand? One seemed as much as the other. Twelve thousand: with accumulations: with accumulations – ations – ations. The wheels of the vehicle groaned out these musical words all the way. It was in the morning when the Bayswater omnibus is full of girls going home to lunch after shopping or looking at the shops. Elsie looked at these girls as they sat along the narrow benches. 'My dears,' she longed to say, but did not, 'I hope you have every one got a brave lover, and that you have all got twelve thousand pounds apiece – with accumulations – twelve thousand pounds – with accumulations – ations – ations – realising four hundred and eighty pounds a year, and perhaps a little more. With accumulations – ations – ations – accumulations.'

She ran into the house and up the stairs singing. At the sound of her voice her mother, engaged in calculations of the greatest difficulty, paused wondering. When she understood that it was the voice of her child and not an organ-grinder, she became angry. What right had the girl to run about singing? Was it insolent bravado?

Elsie opened the door of the drawing-room and ran in. Her mother's cold face repelled her. She was going to tell the joyful news – but she stopped.

'You have seen Mr. Dering?' asked her mother.

'Yes; I have seen him.'

'If he has brought you to reason – '

'Oh! He has – he has. I am entirely reasonable.'

Mrs. Arundel was astonished. The girl was flushed of face and bright of eye; her breath was thick; her lips were parted. She looked entirely happy.

'My dear mother,' she went on, 'I am to dine with him to-night. Hilda is to dine with him to-night. You are to dine with him to-night. It is to be a family party. He will bring us all to reason – to a bag full of reasons.'

'Elsie, this seems to me to be mirth misplaced.'

'No – no – in its right place – reasons all in a row and on three shelves, labelled and arranged and classified.'

'You talk in enigmas.'

'My dear mother' – yet that morning the dear mother would not speak to the dear daughter – 'I talk in enigmas and I sing in conundrums. I feel like an oracle or a Delphic old woman for dark sayings.'

She ran away, slamming the door after her. Her mother heard her singing in her studio all to herself. 'Can she be in her right mind?' she asked anxiously. 'To marry a Pauper – to receive the admonition of her guardian – and such a guardian – and to come home singing. 'Twould be better to lock her up than let her marry.'