Lucius Davoren; or, Publicans and sinners, vol. 3

HOW GEOFFREY ENJOYED THE GARDEN-PARTY.

While Lucius Davoren was thus occupied at the east end of London, Geoffrey Hossack was making the best of an existence which he had made up his mind to consider utterly joyless, so long as adverse fate denied him the one desire of his heart. For him in vain warm August skies were deeply blue, and the bosky dells and glades of the New Forest still untouched by autumn’s splendid decay. For him vainly ran the bright river between banks perfumed with wild flowers. He beheld these things from the lofty standpoint of discontent, and in his heart called Nature a poor creature.

‘I would rather be mewed up in Whitecross-street prison, or in the Venetian Piombi, with Janet for my wife, than enjoy all that earth can give of natural beauty or artificial splendour without her,’ he said to himself, when his cousins had bored him into a misanthropical mood by their insistence upon the charms of rural life, as exemplified at Hillersdon Grange.

‘I’m afraid you have no soul for Nature,’ said Belle, when she had kept Geoffrey on his feet for an hour in the cramped old-fashioned hot-houses, where she went in desperately for ferns and orchids, and imitated Lady Baker on a small scale.

‘I’m afraid not—for Nature in flower-pots,’ answered Geoffrey, with an unsympathetic yawn. ‘I daresay these Calopogons, and Gymnadenia, and what’s-its-names are very grand, but I’ve seen finer growing wild in the valleys on the southern side of the Rocky Mountains. You English people only get nature in miniature—a poor etiolated creature. You have no notion of the goddess Gea in her Titanic vigour, as she appears on “the other side.”

‘Meaning America?’ said Belle contemptuously, as if that western continent were something too vulgar for her serious consideration.

The sun shone upon Lady Baker’s fête as gaily as if fine weather had been a matter within her ladyship’s power of provision, like the luncheon from Gunter’s, or the costumes for the tableaux vivants. The lady herself was radiant as the sunlight. Everybody had come—everybody worth receiving, at any rate. She gave Geoffrey a smile of particular cordiality as she shook hands with him, and murmured the conventional ‘How good of you to come early!’

Belle and Jessie were speedily told off for croquet: a sport for which Geoffrey professed an unmitigated dislike, in a most churlish spirit, his cousins thought. Thus released from attendance on these fair ones, he roamed the vast gardens at large, finding solitudes in that spacious domain, even on such a day as this. In these secluded walks—where he only occasionally encountered a stray couple engaged in that sentimental converse which he slangily denominated ‘spooning’—Mr. Hossack indulged his own thoughts, which also were of a spooney character. Here, he thought, Janet Davoren had been happy in the brief summer-tide of her life; here she had felt the first joys and pains of an innocent girlish love; and here, alas, had given that peerless blossom of the soul, a girl’s first love, to a scoundrel. The thought of this filled him with a savage jealousy.

‘I wish I had fired that shot out yonder instead of Lucius,’ he said to himself. ‘Egad, I’d have made sure my ball went through him. There should have been no shilly-shally about my fire.’

Luncheon found Mr. Hossack more attentive to the various Rhine wines than to pâté de foie gras or chicken-salad, or even the wants of the damsel who sat next him. He was out of humour with all the world. His artfully-worded advertisement had appeared several times, and had produced no response. He began to think the Fates were opposed to his happiness.

‘I suppose if a man is pretty well provided for in the way of three-per-cents he must hope for nothing else from Fortune,’ he thought, as he punished her ladyship’s cabinet hocks.

Luncheon over, Mr. Hossack conducted his damsel to the sunny greensward, where enthusiastic archers—seven-and-twenty ladies to five gentlemen—were stringing their Cupid bows for a grand match. Here he shunted her into the care of one of the five male archers, all of whom looked ineffably bored, and anon departed, whither he cared not—anywhere, anywhere out of this world of luncheons, croquet, flirtation, and frivolity.

Wandering at random, he came by and by to an obscure outskirt of the Mardenholme grounds, given over to the cultivation of huge rhododendrons, where there was a little wicket-gate opening into a green lane. He made his escape from Mardenholme altogether by this gate, glad to get away from the polite world, as represented by the croquet-players and toxopholites, and above all by those exacting first cousins of his, Belle and Jessie.

The green lane was rustic and secluded, well sheltered from the westward sloping sun by spreading boughs of chestnut and sycamore, with here and there the grander bulk of an oak, making an oasis of deep shadow in the afternoon sunlight. Altogether a pleasant lane, even for the indulgence of saddest thoughts.

It was on the side of a hill. Right and left of him stretched undulating meadow-land, small enclosures between those straggling unkempt hedges which make the glory of English landscape, and below, almost at his feet as it were, lay a little village nestling in a cup-shaped valley, so snugly sheltered by those gently-sloping meads, so fenced from north and east by those tall screens of foliage, that one might fancy the bleak winds of winter must roll high above those modest roofs, ruffling no leaf in those simple gardens; that hails and snows and frosts must waste their fury on the encircling hills, and leave this chosen nook unassailed; that even the tax-gatherer must forget its existence.

There were about half a dozen cottages, the perfection of rusticity—gardens running over with roses, beehives, honeysuckle; a village inn, so innocent and domestic of aspect that one would suppose nothing could be farther from the thoughts of its patrons than strong drink of any kind; a little high-shouldered old church, with a squat square tower and crumbly whitewashed wall; a green burial-ground, all ups and downs like the waves of the sea, overshadowed by two vast yews, whose never-withering foliage canopied those rustic graves from January to December.

There was a little patch of greensward in the midst of the scattered houses, and some feet below the churchyard, no two edifices in this village being on the same level. Here a meditative donkey cropped the soft herbage at leisure, and here on the bosom of a crystalline pool swam half a dozen geese, untroubled by forebodings of Michaelmas.

It was altogether a deliciously rustic picture, and Geoffrey, for the first time since his return to Hampshire, felt reconciled to Nature.

‘This is better than all the tigered orchids in Lady Baker’s collection,’ he mused, as he perched himself on a stile and took out his cigar-case for a quiet smoke. ‘Why do great ladies cultivate lady’s-slippers and pitcher-plants when for less money they might surround themselves with model villages and happy peasantry? Has the rôle of Lady Bountiful gone quite out of fashion, I wonder?’

He lighted his cigar and meditated upon life in general, dreamily contemplating the cottages and wondering about their inmates, as he had often wondered about the inhabitants of the dull old houses in the dull old country towns. These cottages seemed above the ordinary level, cleaner, brighter, more prosperous-looking. He could not fancy wife-beating or any other iniquity going on within those homely plastered walls. Those twinkling diamond-paned lattices seemed transparent as a good man’s conscience, and in most of these dwellings the outer door stood wide open, as if the inmates invited inspection. He could see an eight-day clock, a dresser decked with many-coloured crockeryware, a little round table spread for tea, a cradle, a snug arm-chair, a wicker birdcage, a row of geranium pots—all the furniture of home. He felt that he had alighted upon a small Arcadia.

While he sat thus musing, slowly smoking, very loth to go back to the civilised world, pert country cousins, and tableaux vivants, and tepid ices, and classical music, and general inanity, the door of that solitary cottage whose interior did not invite inspection was suddenly opened, and a child came skipping out—a child who wore a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, with long yellow tresses streaming beneath it, and a pretty holland pinafore, and displayed symmetrical legs clad in blue stockings—a child after the order of Mr. Millais.

Geoffrey made as if he would have fallen off the stile; the half-smoked cigar fell from his hand. For a few moments he sat transfixed and statue-like, and could only stare. Then, with a sudden rush, he darted across the little strip of green, and clasped this butterfly child in his arms.

‘Why, it’s my little Flossie!’ he cried rapturously, smothering the small face with kisses, which the little maiden received without a murmur. Had not Mr. Hossack endeared himself to her by all the arts of bribery and corruption, in the shape of costly French bonbons, éditions de luxe of popular fairy tales and German hobgoblin stories, and mechanical white mice that ran across the floor, and mechanical mail-coaches that, on being wound up, rushed off at breakneck speed to nowhere in particular, and came to grief after a few headlong journeys? ‘It’s my precious little Flossie! My darling, where’s mamma?’

‘Mamma, mamma!’ screamed the child, looking back towards the cottage. ‘Come out and see who’s come.’ And then, turning to Geoffrey again, she said with childhood’s candid selfishness, ‘Have you brought me some more French bonbons in a box with a picture on the lid, like the last?’

‘My sweet one, I ought to be provided with a box of that very description,’ replied Geoffrey, grasping the little maiden’s hand and dragging her to the cottage; ‘but how could I anticipate such bliss as to find you here in this O-for-ever-to-be-sanctified-village?’ cried the lover, coining a Germanic compound in his rapture. ‘Is mamma in there? O, take me to her, darling, take me!’

Tableaux vivants, pert cousins, Lady Baker, the claims of civilised society, all melted into thin air amidst the delight of this discovery. He was as unsophisticated as if he had been a Blackfoot, brought up in the pathless hunting-grounds of the West.

‘Take me to her, thou dearest child,’ he exclaimed; and the little one led him into the cottage garden, where the bees were humming in the sunset, the air sweet with roses and carnations, happy swallows twittering in the eves.

Here, on the threshold of the cottage door, framed like a picture by the stout black timbers, stood that one woman whom his soul worshipped, tall, slender, lovely, like a goddess who for a little while deigned to walk this lower earth.

She looked at Geoffrey with a tender gladness, a wild surprise, opposite feelings curiously blended in the expression of that eloquent face.

‘O, Janet,’ said he, ‘how could you be so cruel as to run away from me?’