Tristram of Blent Part 33

"And you kept it dark? I didn't know you were as deep as that, Neeld."

He looked at the old gentleman with great amazement.

"Neeld was in an exceedingly difficult position," said Iver. "I've come to see that." He paused, looking at Southend with an amused air. "You introduced us to one another," he reminded him with a smile.

"Bless my soul, so I did! I'd forgotten. Well, it seems my fate too to be mixed up in the affair." Just at present, however, he was a.s.sisting fate rather actively.

"It's everybody's. The Blent's on fire from Mingham to the sea."

"I've seen Harry Tristram."

"Ah, how is he?" asked Neeld.

"Never saw a young man more composed in all my life. And he couldn't be better satisfied with himself if he'd turned out to be a duke."

"We know Harry's airs," Iver said, smiling indulgently. "But there's stuff in him." A note of regret came into his voice. "He treated me very badly--I know Neeld won't admit it, but he did. Still I like him and I'd help him if I could."

"Well, he atoned for anything wrong by owning up in the end," remarked Southend.

"That wasn't for my sake or for---- Well, it had nothing to do with us.

As far as we were concerned he'd be at Blent to-day. It was Cecily Gainsborough who did it."

"Yes. I wonder----"

Iver rose decisively. "Look here, Southend, if you're going to do exactly what all my friends and neighbors, beginning with Miss Swinkerton, are doing, I shall go and write letters." With a nod he walked into the next room, leaving Neeld alone with his inquisitive friend. Southend lost no time.

"What's happened about Janie Iver? There was some talk----"

"It's all over," whispered Neeld with needless caution. "He released her, and she accepted the release."

"What, on the ground that----?"

"Really I don't know any more. But it's finally over; you may depend upon that."

Southend lit a cigar with a satisfied air. On the whole he was glad to hear the news.

"Staying much longer in town?" he asked.

"No, I'm going down to Iver's again in August."

"You want to see the end of it? Come, I know that's it!" He laughed as he walked away.

Meanwhile Harry Tristram, unconscious of the efforts which were being made to arrange his future, and paying as little attention as he could to the buzz of gossip about his past, had settled down in quiet rooms and was looking at the world from a new point of view. He was in seclusion like his cousin; the mourning they shared for Addie Tristram was sufficient excuse; and he found his chief pleasure in wandering about the streets. The season was not over yet, and he liked to go out about eight in the evening and watch the great city starting forth to enjoy itself. Then he could feel its life in all the rush and the gayety of it. Somehow now he seemed more part of it and more at home in it than when he used to run up for a few days from his country home. Then Blent had been the centre of his life, and in town he was but a stranger and a sojourner. Blent was gone; and London is home to homeless men. There was a suggestion for him in the air of it, an impulse that was gradually but strongly urging him to action, telling him that he must begin to do. For the moment he was notorious, but the talk and the staring would be over soon--the sooner the better, he added most sincerely. Then he must do something if he wished still to be, or ever again to be, anybody.

Otherwise he could expect no more than to be pointed out now and then to the curious as the man who had once been Tristram of Blent and had ceased to be such in a puzzling manner.

As he looked back, he seemed to himself to have lived hitherto on the banks of the river of life as well as of the river Blent; there had been no need of swimming. But he was in the current now; he must swim or sink. This idea took shape as he watched the carriages, the lines of scampering hansoms, the crowds waiting at theatre doors. Every man and every vehicle, every dandy and every urchin, represented some effort, if it were only at one end of the scale to be magnificent, at the other not to be hungry. No such notions had been fostered by days spent on the banks of the Blent. "What shall I do? What shall I do?" The question hummed in his brain as he walked about. There were such infinite varieties of things to do, such a mult.i.tude of people doing them. To some men this reflection brings despair or bewilderment; to Harry (as indeed Lord Southend would have expected from his observation of him) it was a t.i.tillating evidence of great opportunities, stirring his mind to a busy consideration of chances. Thus then it seemed as though Blent might fall into the background, his loved Blent. Perhaps his not thinking of it had begun in wilfulness, or even in fear; but he found the rule he had made far easier to keep than he had ever expected. There had been a sort of release for his mind; he had not foreseen this as a possible result of his great sacrifice. He even felt rather richer; which seemed a strange paradox, till he reflected that the owners of Blent had seldom been able to lay hands readily on a fluid sum of fifteen thousand pounds, subject to no claims for houses to be repaired, buildings to be maintained, cottages to be built, wages to be paid, and the dozen other ways in which money disperses itself over the surface of a landed estate. He had fifteen thousand pounds in form as good as cash.

He was living more or less as he had once meant to live in this one particular; he was living with a respectable if not a big check by him, ready for any emergency which might arise--an emergency not now of a danger to be warded off, but of an opportunity to be seized.

These new thoughts suited well with the visit which he paid to Lady Evenswood and gained fresh strength from it. His pride and independence had made him hesitate about going. Southend, amazed yet half admiring, had been obliged to plead, reminding him that it was not merely a woman nor merely a woman of rank who wished to make his acquaintance, but also a very old woman who had known his mother as a child. He further offered his own company, so that the interview might a.s.sume a less formal aspect. Harry declined the company but yielded to the plea. He was announced as Mr Tristram. He had just taken steps to obtain a Royal License to bear the name. Southend had chuckled again half admiringly over that.

Although the room was in deep shadow and very still, and the old white-haired lady the image of peace, for Harry there too the current ran strong. Though not great, she had known the great; if she had not done the things, she had seen them done; her talk revealed a matter-of-course knowledge of secrets, a natural intimacy with the inaccessible. It was like Harry to show no signs of being impressed; but very shrewd eyes were upon him, and his impa.s.sivity met with amused approval since it stopped short of inattention. She broke it down at last by speaking of Addie Tristram.

"The most fascinating creature in the world," she said. "I knew her as a little girl. I knew her up to the time of your birth almost. After that she hardly left Blent, did she? At least she never came to London. You travelled, I know."

"Were you ever at Blent?" he asked.

"No, Mr Tristram."

He frowned for a moment; it was odd not to be able to ask people there, just too as he was awaking to the number of people there were in the world worth asking.

"There never was anybody in the world like her, and there never will be," Lady Evenswood went on.

"I used to think that; but I was wrong." The smile that Mina Zabriska knew came on his face.

"You were wrong? Who's like her then?"

"Her successor. My cousin Cecily's very like her."

Lady Evenswood was more struck by the way he spoke than by the meaning of what he said. She wanted to say "Bravo," and to pat him on the back; he had avoided so entirely any hesitation or affectation in naming his cousin--Addie Tristram's successor who had superseded him.

"She talks and moves and sits and looks at you in the same way. I was amazed to see it." He had said not a word of this to anybody since he left Blent. Lady Evenswood, studying him very curiously, began to make conjectures about the history of the affair, also about what lay behind her visitor's composed face; there was a hint of things suppressed in his voice. But he had the bridle on himself again in a moment. "Very curious these likenesses are," he ended with a shrug.

She decided that he was remarkable, for a boy of his age, bred in the country, astonis.h.i.+ng. She had heard her father describe Pitt at twenty-one and Byron at eighteen. Without making absurd comparisons, there was, all the same, something of that precocity of manhood here, something also of the arrogance that the great men had exhibited. She was very glad that she had sent for him.

"I don't want to be impertinent," she said (she had not meant to make even this much apology), "but perhaps an old woman may tell you that she is very sorry for--for this turn in your fortunes, Mr Tristram."

"You're very kind. It was all my own doing, you know. n.o.body could have touched me."

"But that would have meant----?" she exclaimed, startled into candor.

"Oh, yes, I know. Still--but since things have turned out differently, I needn't trouble you with that."

She saw the truth, seeming to learn it from the set of his jaw. She enjoyed a man who was not afraid to defy things, and she had been heard to lament that everybody had a conscience nowadays--nay, insisted on bringing it even into politics. She wanted to hear more--much more now--about his surrender, and recognized as a new tribute to Harry the fact that she could not question him. Immediately she conceived the idea of inviting him to dinner to meet Mr Disney; but of course that must wait for a little while.

"Everything must seem rather strange to you?" she suggested.

"Yes, very," he answered thoughtfully. "I'm beginning to think that some day I shall look back on my boyhood with downright incredulity. I shan't seem to have been that boy in the least."

"What are you going to do in the meantime, to procure that feeling?" She was getting to the point she wished to arrive at, but very cautiously.

"I don't know yet. It's hard to choose."

"You certainly won't want for friends."

"Yes, that's pleasant, of course." He seemed to hint, however, that he did not regard it as very useful.

"Oh, and serviceable too," she corrected him, with a nod of wise experience. "Jobs are frowned at now, but many great men have started by means of them. Robert Disney himself came in for a pocket-borough."

"Well, I really don't know," he repeated thoughtfully, but with no sign of anxiety or fretting. "There's lots of time, Lady Evenswood."