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CHAPTER XXIV. THE DRAWING-ROOM

He opened a door into one of the smaller compartments of the drawing-room, looked, crept in, and closed the door behind him.

Lufa was there—alone! He durst not approach her, but if he seated himself in a certain corner, he could see her and she him! He did not, however, apprehend that the corner he had chosen was entirely in shadow, or reflect that the globe of a lamp was almost straight between them. He thought she saw him, but she did not.

The room seemed to fold him round with softness as he entered from the dreary night; and he could not help being pervaded by the warmth, and weakened by the bodily comfort. He sat and gazed at his goddess—a mere idol, seeming, not being, until he hardly knew whether she was actually before him, or only present to his thought. She was indeed a little pale—but that she always was when quiet; no sorrow, not a shadow was on her face. She seemed brooding, but over nothing painful. At length she smiled.

“She is pleased to think that I love her!” thought Walter. “She leans to me a little! When the gray hair comes and the wrinkles, it will be a gracious memory that she was so loved by one who had but his life to give her! ‘He was poor,’ she will say, ‘but I have not found the riches he would have given me! I have been greatly loved!’”

I believe myself, she was ruminating a verse that had come to her in the summer-house, while Walter was weeping by her side.

A door opened, and Sefton came in.

“Have you seen the ‘Onlooker’?” he said—a journal at the time in much favor with the more educated populace. “There is a review in it that would amuse you.”

“Of what?” she asked, listlessly.

“I didn’t notice the name of the book, but it is a poem, and just your sort, I should say. The article is in the ‘Onlooker’s’ best style.”

“Pray let me see it!” she answered, holding out her hand.

“I will read it to you, if I may.”

She did not object. He sat down a little way from her, and read.

He had not gone far before Walter knew, although its name had not occurred as Sefton read, that the book was his own. The discovery enraged him: how had the reviewer got hold of it when he himself had seen no copy except Lufa’s? It was a puzzle he never got at the root of. Probably some one he had offended had contrived to see as much of it, at the printer’s or binder’s, as had enabled him to forestall its appearance with the most stinging, mocking, playfully insolent paper that had ever rejoiced the readers of the “Onlooker.” But he had more to complain of than rudeness, a thing of which I doubt if any reviewer is ever aware. For he soon found that, by the blunder of reviewer or printer, the best of the verses quoted were misquoted, and so rendered worthy of the epithet attached to them. This unpleasant discovery was presently followed by another—that the rudest and most contemptuous personal remark was founded on an ignorant misapprehension of the reviewer’s own; while in ridicule of a mere misprint which happened to carry a comic suggestion on the face of it, the reviewer surpassed himself.

As Sefton read, Lufa laughed often and heartily: the thing was gamesomely, cleverly, almost brilliantly written. Annoyed as he was, Walter did not fail to note, however, that Sefton did not stop to let Lufa laugh, but read quietly on. Suddenly she caught the paper from his hand, for she was as quick as a kitten, saying:

“I must see who the author of the precious book is!”

Her cousin did not interfere, but sat watching her—almost solemnly.

“Ah, I thought so!” she cried, with a shriek of laughter. “I thought so! I could hardly be mistaken! What will the poor fellow say to it! It will kill him!” She laughed immoderately. “I hope it will give him a lesson, however!” she went on. “It is most amusing to see how much he thinks of his own verses! He worships them! And then makes up for the idolatry by handling without mercy those of other people! It was he who so maltreated my poor first! I never saw anything so unfair in my life!”

Sefton said nothing, but looked grim.

“You should see—I will show it you—the gorgeous copy of this same comical stuff he gave me to-day! I am so glad he is going: he won’t be able to ask me how I like it, and I sha’n’t have to tell a story! I’m sorry for him, though—truly! He is a very nice sort of boy, though rather presuming. I must find out who the writer of that review is, and get mamma to invite him! He is a host in himself! I don’t think I ever read anything so clever—or more just!”

“Oh, then, you have read the book?” spoke her cousin at length.

“No; but ain’t those extracts enough? Don’t they speak for themselves—for their silliness and sentimentality?”

“How would you like of a book of yours judged by scraps chopped off anywhere, Lufa!—or chosen for the look they would have in the humorous frame of the critic’s remarks! It is less than fair! I do not feel that I know in the least what sort of book this is. I only know that again and again, having happened to come afterward upon the book itself, I have set down the reviewer as a knave, who for ends of his own did not scruple to make fools of his readers. I am ashamed, Lufa, that you should so accept everything as gospel against a man who believes you his friend!”

Walter’s heart had been as water, now it had turned to ice, and with the coldness came strength: he could bear anything except this desert of a woman. The moment Sefton had thus spoken, he rose and came forward—not so much, I imagine, to Sefton’s surprise as Lufa’s and said,

“Thank you, Mr. Sefton, for undeceiving me. I owe you, Lady Lufa, the debt of a deep distrust hereafter of poetic ladies.”

“They will hardly be annihilated by it, Mr. Colman!” returned Lufa. “But, indeed, I did not know you were in the room; and perhaps you did not know that in our circle it is counted bad manners to listen!”

“I was foolishly paralyzed for a moment,” said Walter, “as well as unprepared for the part you would take.”

“I am very glad, Mr. Colman,” said Sefton, “that you have had the opportunity of discovering the truth! My cousin well deserves the pillory in which I know you will not place her!”

“Lady Lufa needs fear nothing from me. I have some regard left for the idea of her—the thing she is not! If you will be kind, come and help me out of the house.”

“There is no train to-night.”

“I will wait at the station for the slow train.”

“I can not press you to stay an hour where you have been so treated, but—”

“It is high time I went!” said Walter—not without the dignity that endurance gives. “May I ask you to do one thing for me, Mr. Sefton?”

“Twenty things, if I can.”

“Then please send my portmanteau after me.”

With that he left the room, and went to his own, far on the way of cure, though not quite so far as he imagined. The blood, however, was surging healthily through his veins: he had been made a fool of, but he would be a wiser man for it!

He had hardly closed his door when Sefton appeared.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“To pack my portmanteau? Did you ever pack your own?”

“Oftener than you, I suspect! I never had but one orderly I could bear about me, and he’s dead, poor fellow! I shall see him again, though, I do trust, let believers in dirt say what they will! Never till I myself think no more, will I cease hoping to see my old Archie again! Fellows must learn something through the Lufas, or they would make raving maniacs of us! God be thanked, he has her in his great idiot-cage, and will do something with her yet! May you and I be there to see when she comes out in her right mind!”

“Amen!” said Walter.

“And now, my dear fellow,” said Sefton, “if you will listen to me, you will not go till to-morrow morning. No, I don’t want you to stay to breakfast! You shall go by the early train as any other visitor might. The least scrap of a note to Lady Tremaine, and all will go without remark.”

He waited in silence. Walter went on putting up his things.

“I dare say you are right!” he said at length. “I will stay till the morning. But you will not ask me to go down again?”

“It would be a victory if you could.”

“Very well, I will. I am a fool, but this much less of a fool, that I know I am one.”

Somehow Walter had a sense of relief. He began to dress, and spent some pains on the process. He felt sure Sefton would take care the “Onlooker” should not be seen—before his departure anyhow. During dinner he talked almost brilliantly, making Lufa open her eyes without knowing she did.

He retired at length to his room with very mingled feelings. There was the closing paragraph of the most interesting chapter of his life yet constructed! What was to follow?

 
  Into the gulf of an empty heart
    Something must always come.
  “What will it be?” I think with a start,
    And a fear that makes me dumb.
 
 
  I can not sit at my outer gate
    And call what shall soothe my grief;
  I can not unlock to a king in state,
    Can not bar a wind-swept leaf!
 
 
  Hopeless were I if a loving Care
    Sat not at the spring of my thought—
  At the birth of my history, blank and bare.
    Of the thing I have not wrought.
 
 
  If God were not, this hollow need.
    All that I now call me,
  Might wallow with demons of hate and greed
    In a lawless and shoreless sea!
 
 
  Watch the door of this sepulcher,
    Sit, my Lord, on the stone,
  Till the life within it rise and stir.
    And walk forth to claim its own.
 

This was how Walter felt and wrote some twelve months after, when he had come to understand a little of the process that had been conducted in him; when he knew that the life he had been living was a mere life in death, a being not worth being.

But the knowledge of this process had not yet begun. A thousand subtle influences, wrapped in the tattered cloak of dull old Time, had to come into secret, potent play, ere he would be able to write thus.

And even this paragraph was not yet quite at an end.

CHAPTER XXV. A MIDNIGHT INTERVIEW

Walter drew his table near the fire, and sat down to concoct a brief note of thanks and farewell to his hostess, informing her that he was compelled to leave in haste. He found it rather difficult, though what Lufa might tell her mother he neither thought nor cared, if only he had his back to the house, and his soul out of it. It was now the one place on the earth which he would sink in the abyss of forgetfulness.

He could not get the note to his mind, falling constantly into thought that led nowhither, and at last threw himself back in his chair, wearied with the emotions of the day. Under the soothing influence of the heat and the lambent motions of the flames, he fell into a condition which was not sleep, and as little was waking. His childhood crept back to him, with all the delights of the sacred time when home was the universe, and father and mother the divinities that filled it. A something now vanished from his life, looked at him across a gulf of lapse, and said, “Am I likewise false? The present you desire to forget; you say, it were better it had never been: do you wish I too had never been? Why else have you left my soul in the grave of oblivion?” Thus talking with his past, he fell asleep.

It could have been but for a few minutes, though when he awoke it seemed a century had passed, he had dreamed of so much. But something had happened! What was it? The fire was blazing as before, but he was chilled to the marrow! A wind seemed blowing upon him, cold as if it issued from the jaws of the sepulcher! His imagination and memory together linked the time to the night of Sefton’s warning: was the ghost now really come? Had Sefton’s presence only saved him from her for the time? He sat bolt upright in his chair listening, the same horror upon him as then. It seemed minutes he thus sat motionless, but moments of fearful expectation are long drawn out; their nature is of centuries, not years. One thing was certain, and one only—that there was a wind, and a very cold one, blowing upon him. He stared at the door. It moved. It opened a little. A light tap followed. He could not speak. Then came a louder, and the spell was broken. He started to his feet, and with the courage of terror extreme, opened the door—not opened it a little, as if he feared an unwelcome human presence, but pulled it, with a sudden wide yawn, open as the grave!

There stood no bodiless soul, but soulless Lufa!

He stood aside, and invited her to enter. Little as he desired to see her, it was a relief that it was she, and not an elderly lady in brown silk, through whose person you might thrust your hand without injury or offense.

As a reward of his promptitude in opening the door, he caught sight of Lady Tremaine disappearing in the corridor.

Lady Lufa walked in without a word, and Walter followed her, leaving the door wide. She seated herself in the chair he had just left, and turned to him with a quiet, magisterial air, as if she sat on the seat of judgment.

“You had better shut the door,” she said.

“I thought Lady Tremaine might wish to hear,” answered Walter.

“Not at all. She only lighted me to the door.”

“As you please,” said Walter, and having done as she requested, returned, and stood before her.

“Will you not take a seat?” she said, in the tone of—“You may sit down.”

“Your ladyship will excuse me!” he answered.

She gave a condescending motion to her pretty neck, and said,

“I need hardly explain, Mr. Colman, why I have sought this interview. You must by this time be aware how peculiar, how unreasonable indeed, your behavior was!”

“Pardon me! I do not see the necessity for a word on the matter. I leave by the first train in the morning!”

“I will not dwell on the rudeness of listening—”

“—To a review of my own book read by a friend!” interrupted Walter, with indignation; “in a drawing-room where I sat right in front of you, and knew no reason why you should not see me! I did make a great mistake, but it was in trusting a lady who, an hour or two before, had offered to be my sister! How could I suspect she might speak of me in a way she would not like to hear!”

Lady Lufa was not quite prepared for the tone he took. She had expected to find him easy to cow. Her object was to bring him into humble acceptance of the treatment against which he had rebelled, lest he should afterward avenge himself! She sat a moment in silence.

“Such ignorance of the ways of the world,” she said, “is excusable in a poet—especially—”

“Such a poet!” supplemented Walter, who found it difficult to keep his temper in face of her arrogance.

“But the world is made up of those that laugh and those that are laughed at.”

“They change places, however, sometimes!” said Walter—which alarmed Lufa, though she did not show her anxiety.

“Certainly!” she replied. “Everybody laughs at everybody when he gets a chance! What is society but a club for mutual criticism! The business of its members is to pass judgment on each other! Why not take the accident, which seems so to annoy you, with the philosophy of a gentleman—like one of us! None of us think anything of what is said of us; we do not heed what we say of each other! Every one knows that all his friends pull him to pieces the moment he is out of sight—as heartily as they had just been assisting him to pull others to pieces. Every gathering is a temporary committee, composed of those who are present, and sitting upon those whose who are not present. Nobody dreams of courtesy extending beyond presence! when that is over, obligation is over. Any such imaginary restriction would render society impossible. It is only the most inexperienced person that could suppose things going on in his absence the same as in his presence! It is I who ought to be pitied, not you! I am the loser, not you!”

Walter bowed and was silent. He did not yet see her drift. If his regard had been worth anything, she certainly had lost a good deal, but, as it was, he did not understand how the loss could be of importance to her.

With sudden change of tone and expression, she broke out—

“Be generous, Walter! Forgive me. I will make any atonement you please, and never again speak of you as if you were not my own brother!”

“It is not of the least consequence how you speak of me now, Lady Lufa: I have had the good though painful fortune to learn your real feelings, and prefer the truth to the most agreeable deception. Your worst opinion of me I could have borne and loved you still; but there is nothing of you, no appearance of anything even, left to love! I know now that a woman may be sweet as Hybla honey, and false as an apple of Sodom!”

“Well, you are ungenerous! I hope there are not many in the world to whom one might confess a fault and not be forgiven. This is indeed humiliating!”

“I beg your pardon; I heard no confession!”

“I asked you to forgive me.”

“For what?”

“For talking of you as I did.’

“Which you justified as the custom of society!”

“I confess, then, that in your case I ought not to have done so.”

“Then I forgive you; and we part in peace.”

“Is that what you call forgiveness?”

“Is it not all that is required? Knowing now your true feeling toward me, I know that in this house I am a mistake. Nothing like a true relation exists, nothing more than the merest acquaintance can exist between us!”

“It is terrible to have such an enemy!”

“I do not understand you!”

“The match is not fair! Here stands poor me undefended, chained to the rock! There you lurk, behind the hedge, invisible, and taking every advantage! Do you think it fair?”

“I begin to understand! The objection did not seem to strike you while I was the person shot at! But still I fail to see your object. Please explain.”

“You must know perfectly what I mean, Walter! and I can not but believe you too just to allow a personal misunderstanding to influence your public judgment! You gave your real unbiased opinion of my last book, and you are bound by that!”

“Is it possible,” cried Walter, “that at last I understand you! That you should come to me on such an errand, Lady Lufa, reveals yet more your opinion of me! Could you believe me capable of such vileness as to take my revenge by abusing your work?”

“Ah, no! Promise me you will not.”

“If such a promise were necessary, how could it set you at your ease? The man who could do such a thing would break any promise!”

“Then whatever rudeness is offered me in your journal, I shall take as springing from your resentment.”

“If you do you will wrong me far worse than you have yet done. I shall not merely never review work of yours, I will never utter an opinion of it to any man.”

“Thank you. So we part friends!”

“Conventionally.”

She rose. He turned to the door and opened it. She passed him, her head thrown back, her eyes looking poisonous, and let a gaze of contemptuous doubt rest on him for a moment. His eyes did not quail before hers.

She had left a taper burning on a slab outside the door. Walter had but half closed it behind her when she reappeared with the taper in one hand and the volume he had given her in the other. He took the book without a word, and again she went; but he had hardly thrown it on the hot coals when once more she appeared. I believe she had herself blown her taper out.

“Let me have a light, please,” she said.

He took the taper from her hand, and turned to light it. She followed him into the room, and laid her hand on his arm.

“Walter,” she said, “it was all because of Sefton! He does not like you, and can’t bear me to like you! I am engaged to him. I ought to have told you!”

“I will congratulate him next time I see him!” said Walter.

“No, no!” she cried, looking at once angry and scared.

“I will not, then,” answered Walter; “but allow me to say I do not believe Sefton dislikes me. Anyhow, keep your mind at ease, pray. I shall certainly not in any way revenge myself.”

She looked up in his eyes with a momentary glimmer of her old sweetness, said “Thank you!” gently, and left the room. Her last glance left a faint, sad sting in Walter’s heart, and he began to think whether he had not been too hard upon her. In any case, the sooner he was out of the house the better! He must no more trifle with the girl than a dipsomaniac with the brandy bottle!

All the time of this last scene, the gorgeous book was frizzling and curling and cracking on the embers. Whether she saw it or not I can not say, but she was followed all along the corridor by the smell of the burning leather, which got on to some sleeping noses, and made their owners dream the house was on fire.

In the morning, Sefton woke him, helped him to dress, got him away in time, and went with him to the station. Not a word passed between them about Lufa. All the way to London, Walter pondered whether there could be any reality in what she had said about Sefton. Was it not possible that she might have imagined him jealous? Sefton’s dislike of her treatment of him might to her have seemed displeasure at her familiarity with him! “And indeed,” thought Walter, “there are few friends who care so much for any author, I suspect, as to be indignant with his reviewers!”