Robert Orange. John Oliver Hobbes
replied Hatchett, after a minute's hesitation. “Probably, Orange … in time.”
“Don't you like him?” said Penborough.
“Like him!” answered Hatchett, rolling up his eyes. “He's an angel!”
“He calls him an angel as though he wished he were one in reality,” said Bradwyn. “I know these generous rivals!”
Ullweather stood gnawing his upper lip.
“Orange,” he said, at last. “Oh, Orange has arrived. He will get no further. Of course, he won that election, but Dizzy managed that. Dizzy is the devil! And then, he is still devoted to Reckage, and, for a man of his supposed shrewdness, I call that a sign of evident weakness.”
At this, Charles Aumerle, who had been listening with the deepest attention to all that passed, looked straight at the speaker.
“You should respect,” said he, “that liberty, which we all have to deceive ourselves. Reckage has many good points.”
“But,” said Penborough, “he has no moral force, no imagination. He judges men by their manners, which is silly. He thinks that every one who is polite to him believes in him. He will have to send in his resignation before long.”
“You don't mean it,” said Aumerle.
“I mean more,” continued Penborough. “He could not choose a better moment than the present. In another month, on its present lines, the whole league will have foundered. Should he remain, he would have to sink with the ship. Now, however, it appears safe enough—people see only what you see—a good cargo of influential names on the committee and a clear horizon. He could plead ill-health, or his marriage—in fact, a dozen excellent reasons for momentary retirement. The world would praise his tact. As for the rest, those who have been disillusioned will lose their heads, those who were merely self-seekers will probably lose their places, but the trimmers always keep something. The thing, then, is to cultivate the art of trimming.”
“But you forget that Reckage is going to marry Miss Carillon,” said Aumerle. “Miss Carillon will always advise the safe course.”
“That's all very well,” said Bradwyn, “but there has been too much arrangement in that marriage! I can tell you how the engagement came about. She was intimate with his aunt. He acquired the habit of her society on all decorous occasions. Still, he never proposed. The aunt invited her to Almouth. She stayed two months. Still, not a word. Her papa grew impatient, ordered her home. The next day she came to the breakfast-table with red eyes, and announced her departure. The boxes were packed; she went to take a last look at the dear garden. Reckage followed, Fate accompanied him. He spoke. She sent a telegram to her papa: ‘Detained. Important. Will write.’ No, the real woman for him was Lady Sara de Treverell.”
Ullweather thrust his tongue into his cheek.
“Lady Sara has been called to higher destinies,” said he, “than the heavenly ‘sweet hand in hand!’ ”
“I see you know,” said Bradwyn, with a mysterious glance.
“Yes,” said Ullweather. “The friendship of the Duke of Marshire for Lady Sara increases every day, and the little fit of giddiness which seized him when he was dining with my Chief makes me think that admiration is developing into love. I am in great hopes that this match may come off.”
“As to that,” said Hatchett, “her father and the Duke were the night before last at Brooks's, but no conversation passed between them. This does not look as though a very near alliance were in contemplation.”
“There are prettier women than she in the world,” said Aumerle.
“I have never seen her,” said Penborough.
“Large eyes, a small head, and the devil of a temper,” said Bradwyn; “and sympathies—there never was a young woman with so many sympathies! There is an old proverb,” he added, with a sneer, “ ‘They are not all friends of the bridegroom who seem to be following the bride.’ ”
Ullweather was still absorbed in his own meditation.
“Marshire,” said he, “is the man for us. We might do something with Marshire.”
“Nevertheless,” said Penborough, “I have my eye on Orange.”
“I say,” exclaimed Bradwyn, “be careful. Here is Reckage again. How the dickens did he pass us?”
The men glanced up at a solitary figure which now appeared descending the broad staircase. In silence, and with a studied expression of contempt, without a look either to the right or to the left, the unpopular leader passed through the hall and out into the street.
“A lonely beggar, after all,” said Bradwyn.
CHAPTER IV
Reckage was dining at home that evening with Orange, whose marriage was to take place at the Alberian Embassy on the morrow. The young man was not in good spirits at his friend's step, for he himself was about to take a wife also, and much of the apprehension which he felt on his own account found its vent in dreary soliloquies on the risk, sacrifices, responsibilities, and trouble involved by the single act of saddling oneself for a lifetime with some one woman. Reckage, for his own part, had loved one lady very well, yet not so madly that he could resign himself to loving her only, to the exclusion of all others. He walked along toward Almouth House in a mood of many vexations, cursing the impudence of Bradwyn and Ullweather, wondering whether he had done wisely, after all, in engaging himself to the blameless Miss Carillon, sighing a little over a rumour which had reached him about Sara de Treverell and the Duke of Marshire, deploring the obstinacy of Robert Orange where Mrs. Parflete was concerned. He admitted that Mrs. Parflete was an exceedingly beautiful, young, and, as it happened, rich person. He owned her delightfulness for a man of Robert's dreamy, romantic, intense temperament. But marriage between two idealists so highly strung, and so passionately attached as these two beings were—what would happen? No doubt they would be able to endure the inevitable disillusions—(inevitable because Nature is before all things sensual and has no care for mental prejudices one way or the other)—the inevitable disillusions of family life. It was scarcely possible that the devotion of Robert and Mrs. Parflete would not waver or seem less exquisite under this discipline. Their dream of love would become unparadised. It would gain a sadness, a melancholy, a note of despair hard to endure and most difficult to repress. Reckage had no transcendentalism in his own philosophy: he divided men into two classes—those who read, and those who could not stand, Dante. He included himself among the latter with a frankness at once astonishing and welcome even to numbers who thought him, in most matters, a hypocrite. The hold of the world was growing daily stronger upon him. His ambitions were already sullied by many unworthy and deadening ideas. He dwelt a great deal on the fleetingness of life, and the wisdom of making the best of its few charming things. Food, and wine, and money, and fine houses, and amusements were subjects on which he expended a large amount of silent enthusiasm. But, for all this, he could still see much to admire—perhaps to envy—in Robert's more spiritual mind, and he dreaded—as men often do dread in such cases—the effect of a woman's companionship on so ascetic a character.
“He knows nothing about women—nothing,” he told himself. “He has no experience. He takes them too seriously.”
He was, while he admitted his own unreasonableness, a little shocked at the very notion of Orange with a wife and children. It went against the grain, and upset the ideals of austerity which he had carefully planned—not for himself, but for his friend. Robert, he urged, was born to be an example—an encouragement to those who were called, by the mercy of God, to less rigorous vocations. Reckage suffered many scruples of conscience on Robert's account; he surveyed him with a sense of disappointment; he had always supposed that he would ultimately turn Jesuit in sober earnest,