Lord Kilgobbin. Lever Charles James
trustful, affectionate father, restricting himself in scores of ways to give me my education among the highest class of my contemporaries. I was largely supplied with means, indulged in every way, and if I turned my steps towards home, welcomed with love and affection.’
‘And fearfully spoiled by all the petting he met with,’ said a soft voice leaning over his shoulder, while a pair of very liquid grey eyes gazed into his own.
‘What, Nina! – Mademoiselle Nina, I mean,’ said he, ‘have you been long there?’
‘Long enough to hear you make a very pitiful lamentation over a condition that I, in my ignorance, used to believe was only a little short of Paradise.’
‘You fancied that, did you?’
‘Yes, I did so fancy it.’
‘Might I be bold enough to ask from what circumstance, though? I entreat you to tell me, what belongings of mine, what resources of luxury or pleasure, what incident of my daily life, suggested this impression of yours?’
‘Perhaps, as a matter of strict reasoning, I have little to show for my conviction, but if you ask me why I thought as I did, it was simply from contrasting your condition with my own, and seeing that in everything where my lot has gloom and darkness, if not worse, yours, my ungrateful cousin, was all sunshine.’
‘Let us see a little of this sunshine, Cousin Nina. Sit down here beside me, and show me, I pray, some of those bright tints that I am longing to gaze on.’
‘There’s not room for both of us on that bench.’
‘Ample room; we shall sit the closer.’
‘No, Cousin Dick; give me your arm and we’ll take a stroll together.’
‘Which way shall it be?’
‘You shall choose, cousin.’
‘If I have the choice, then, I’ll carry you off, Nina, for I’m thinking of bidding good-bye to the old house and all within it.’
‘I don’t think I’ll consent that far,’ said she, smiling. ‘I have had my experience of what it is to be without a home, or something very nearly that. I’ll not willingly recall the sensation. But what has put such gloomy thoughts in your head? What, or rather who is driving you to this?’
‘My father, Nina, my father!’
‘This is past my comprehending.’
‘I’ll make it very intelligible. My father, by way of curbing my extravagance, tells me I must give up all pretension to the life of a gentleman, and go into an office as a clerk. I refuse. He insists, and tells me, moreover, a number of little pleasant traits of my unfitness to do anything, so that I interrupt him by hinting that I might possibly break stones on the highway. He seizes the project with avidity, and offers to supply me with a hammer for my work. All fact, on my honour! I am neither adding to nor concealing. I am relating what occurred little more than an hour ago, and I have forgotten nothing of the interview. He, as I said, offers to give me a stone-hammer. And now I ask you, is it for me to accept this generous offer, or would it be better to wander over that bog yonder, and take my chance of a deep pool, or the bleak world where immersion and death are just as sure, though a little slower in coming?’
‘Have you told Kate of this?’
‘No, I have not seen her. I don’t know, if I had seen her, that I should have told her. Kate has so grown to believe all my father’s caprices to be absolute wisdom, that even his sudden gusts of passion seem to her like flashes of a bright intelligence, too quick and too brilliant for mere reason. She could give me no comfort nor counsel either.’
‘I am not of your mind,’ said she slowly. ‘She has the great gift of what people so mistakingly call common sense.’
‘And she’d recommend me, perhaps, not to quarrel with my father, and to go and break the stones.’
‘Were you ever in love, Cousin Dick?’ asked she, in a tone every accent of which betokened earnestness and even gravity.
‘Perhaps I might say never. I have spooned or flirted or whatever the name of it might be, but I was never seriously attached to one girl, and unable to think of anything but her. But what has your question to do with this?’
‘Everything. If you really loved a girl – that is, if she filled every corner of your heart, if she was first in every plan and project of your life, not alone her wishes and her likings, but her very words and the sound of her voice – if you saw her in everything that was beautiful, and heard her in every tone that delighted you – if to be moving in the air she breathed was ecstasy, and that heaven itself without her was cheerless – if – ’
‘Oh, don’t go on, Nina. None of these ecstasies could ever be mine. I have no nature to be moved or moulded in this fashion. I might be very fond of a girl, but she’d never drive me mad if she left me for another.’
‘I hope she may, then, if it be with such false money you would buy her,’ said she fiercely. ‘Do you know,’ added she, after a pause, ‘I was almost on the verge of saying, go and break the stones; the métier is not much beneath you, after all!’
‘This is scarcely civil, mademoiselle; see what my candour has brought upon me!’
‘Be as candid as you like upon the faults of your nature. Tell every wickedness that you have done or dreamed of, but don’t own to cold-heartedness. For that there is no sympathy!’
‘Let us go back a bit, then,’ said he, ‘and let us suppose that I did love in the same fervent and insane manner you spoke of, what and how would it help me here?’
‘Of course it would. Of all the ingenuity that plotters talk of, of all the imagination that poets dream, there is nothing to compare with love. To gain a plodding subsistence a man will do much. To win the girl he loves, to make her his own, he will do everything: he will strive, and strain, and even starve to win her. Poverty will have nothing mean if confronted for her, hardship have no suffering if endured for her sake. With her before him, all the world shows but one goal; without her, life is a mere dreary task, and himself a hired labourer.’
‘I confess, after all this, that I don’t see how breaking stones would be more palatable to me because some pretty girl that I was fond of saw me hammering away at my limestone!’
‘If you could have loved as I would wish you to love, your career had never fallen to this. The heart that loved would have stimulated the head that thought. Don’t fancy that people are only better because they are in love, but they are greater, bolder, brighter, more daring in danger, and more ready in every emergency. So wonder-working is the real passion that even in the base mockery of Love men have risen to genius. Look what it made Petrarch, and I might say Byron too, though he never loved worthy of the name.’
‘And how came you to know all this, cousin mine? I’m really curious to know that.’
‘I was reared in Italy, Cousin Dick, and I have made a deep study of nature through French novels.’
Now there was a laughing devilry in her eye as she said this that terribly puzzled the young fellow, for just at the very moment her enthusiasm had begun to stir his breast, her merry mockery wafted it away as with a storm-wind.
‘I wish I knew if you were serious,’ said he gravely.
‘Just as serious as you were when you spoke of being ruined.’
‘I was so, I pledge my honour. The conversation I reported to you really took place; and when you joined me, I was gravely deliberating with myself whether I should take a header into a deep pool or enlist as a soldier.’
‘Fie, fie! how ignoble all that is. You don’t know the hundreds of thousands of things one can do in life. Do you speak French or Italian?’
‘I can read them, but not freely; but how are they to help me?’
‘You shall see: first of all, let me be your tutor. We shall take two hours, three if you like, every morning. Are you free now from all your college studies?’
‘I