Lady Connie Part 56

The moment came. Wife and children gathered, breathless. Chaumart turned on the current, released the machinery.

"_Ecoutez, mes enfants! Ecoutez, Henriette_!"

They listened--with ears, with eyes, with every faculty strained to its utmost. And nothing happened!--positively nothing--beyond a few wheezing or creaking sounds. The haggard inventor in despair chased everybody out of the room, and sat looking at the thing, wondering whether to smash it, or kill himself. Then an idea struck him. In feverish haste he took the whole mechanism to pieces again, sitting up all night. And as the morning sun rose, he discovered in the very heart of the creature, to which by now he attributed an uncanny and independent life, the most elementary blunder--a vital connection missed between the power-supplying mechanism and the cylinders containing the records. He set it right; and nearly dead with fatigue and excitement, unlocked his door, and called his family back. Then what triumph! What falling on each other's necks--and what a _dejeuner_ in the Palais Royal--children and all--paid for by the inventor's last napoleon!

All this Falloden told, and told well.

Connie could not restrain her pleasure as he came to the end of his tale. She clapped her hands in delight.

"And when--when will it come!"

"I think Christmas will see it here. I've only told you half--and the lesser half. It's you that have done most--far the most."

And he took out a little note-book, running through the list of visits he had paid to her friends and correspondents in Paris, among whom the rolls were being collected, under Chaumart's direction. The Orpheus already had a large musical library of its own--renderings by some of the finest artists of some of the n.o.blest music. Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann--all Otto's favourite things, as far as Connie had been able to discover them, were in the catalogue.

Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She put down the note-book, and spoke in a low voice, as though her girlish joy in their common secret had suddenly dropped.

"It must give him some pleasure--it must!" she said, slowly, but as though she asked a question.

Falloden did not reply immediately. He rose from his seat. Nora, under a quick impulse, gathered up a letter she had been writing, and slipped out of the room.

"At least"--he looked away from her, straight out of the window--"I suppose it will please him--that we tried to do something."

"How is he--really?"

He shrugged his shoulders. Connie was standing, looking down, one hand on her chair. The afternoon had darkened; he could see only her white brow, and the wealth of her hair which the small head carried so lightly. Her childishness, her nearness, made his heart beat. Suddenly she lifted her eyes.

"Do you know"--it seemed to him her voice choked a little--"how much--you matter to him? Mrs. Mulholland and I couldn't keep him cheerful while you were away."

He laughed.

"Well, I have only just escaped a catastrophe to-day."

She looked alarmed.

"How?"

"I offended Bateson, and he gave notice!" Connie's "Oh!" was a sound of consternation. Bateson, the ex-scout had become a most efficient and comfortable valet, and Otto depended greatly upon him.

"It's all right," said Falloden quickly. "I grovelled. I ate all the humble-pie I could think of. It was of course impossible to let him go.

Otto can't do without him. I seem somehow to have offended his dignity."

"They have so much!" said Connie, laughing, but rather unsteadily.

"One lives and learns." The tone of the words was serious--a little anxious. Then the speaker took up his hat. "But I'm not good at managing touchy people. Good night."

Her hand pa.s.sed into his. The little fingers were cold; he could not help enclosing them in a warm, clinging grasp. The firelit room, the dark street outside, and the footsteps of the pa.s.sers-by--they all melted from consciousness. They only saw and heard each other.

In another minute the outer door had closed behind them. Connie was left still in the same att.i.tude, one hand on the chair, her head drooping, her heart in a dream.

Falloden ran through the streets, choosing the by-ways rather than the thoroughfares. The air was frosty, the December sky clear and starlit, above the blue or purple haze, pierced with lights, that filled the lower air; through which the college fronts, the distant spires and domes showed vaguely--as beautiful "suggestions"--"notes"--from which all detail had disappeared. He was soon on Folly Bridge, and hurrying up the hill he pushed straight on over the brow to the Berks.h.i.+re side, leaving the cottage to his right. Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk. It was the English winter at its loveliest--still, patient, expectant--rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of. But Falloden was blind to it. His pulses were full of riot. She had been so near to him--and yet so far away--so sweet, yet so defensive. His whole nature cried out fiercely for her. "I want her!--_I want her!_ And I believe she wants me. She's not afraid of me now--she turns to me. What keeps us apart? Nothing that ought to weigh for a moment against our double happiness!"

He turned and walked stormily homewards. Then as he saw the roof and white walls of the cottage through the trees his mood wavered--and fell.

There was a life there which he had injured--a life that now depended on him. He knew that, more intimately than Connie knew it, often as he had denied it to her. And he was more convinced than Otto himself--though never by word or manner had he ever admitted it for a moment--that the boy was doomed--not immediately, but after one of those pitiful struggles which have their lulls and pauses, but tend all the same inevitably to one end.

"And as long as he lives, I shall look after him," he thought, feeling that strange compulsion on him again, and yielding to it with mingled eagerness and despair.

For how could he saddle Connie's life with such a charge--or darken it with such a tragedy?

Impossible! But that was only one of many reasons why he should not take advantage of her through their common pity for Otto. In his own eyes he was a ruined man, and having resolutely refused to live upon his mother, his pride was little more inclined to live upon a wife, common, and generally applauded, though the practice might be. About five thousand pounds had been saved for himself out of the wreck; of which he would certainly spend a thousand, before all was done, on the Orpheus.

The rest would just suffice to launch him as a barrister. His mother would provide for the younger children. Her best jewels indeed had been already sold and invested as a dowry for Nelly, who showed signs of engaging herself to a Scotch laird. But Falloden was joint guardian of Trix and Roger, and must keep a watchful eye on them, now that his mother's soft incompetence had been more plainly revealed than ever by her widow-hood. He chafed under the duties imposed, and yet fulfilled them--anxiously and well--to the amazement of his relations.

In addition he had his way to make in the world.

But Constance had only to be a little more seen and known in English society to make the most brilliant match that any scheming chaperon could desire, Falloden was aware through every pulse of her fast developing beauty. And although no great heiress, as heiresses now go, she would ultimately inherit a large amount of scattered money, in addition to what she already possessed. The Langmoors would certainly have her out of Oxford at the earliest possible moment--and small blame to them.

In all this he reasoned as a man of his cla.s.s and antecedents was likely to reason--only with a bias against himself. To capture Connie, through Otto, before she had had any other chances of marriage, seemed to him a mean and dishonorable thing.

If he had only time--time to make his career!

But there would be no time given him. As soon as her Risborough relations got hold of her, Constance would marry directly.

He went back to the cottage in a sombre mood. Then, as Otto proved to be in the same condition, Falloden had to shake off his own depression as quickly as possible, and spend the evening in amusing and distracting the invalid.

But Fortune, which had no doubt enjoyed the nips she had inflicted on so tempting a victim, was as determined as before to take her own capricious way.

By this time it was the last week of term, and a sharp frost had set in over the Thames Valley. The floods were out north and south of the city, and a bright winter sun shone all day over the glistening ice-plains, and the throng of skaters.

At the beginning of the frost came the news of Otto's success in his musical examination; and at a Convocation, held shortly after it, he put on his gown as Bachelor of Music. The Convocation House was crowded to see him admitted to his degree; and the impression produced, as he made his way through the throng towards the Vice-Chancellor, by the frail, boyish figure, the startling red-gold hair, the black sling, and the haunting eyes, was long remembered in Oxford. Then Sorell claimed him, and hurried him up to London for doctors and consultations since the effort of the examination had left him much exhausted.

Meanwhile the frost held, and all Oxford went skating. Constance performed indifferently, and both Nora and Uncle Ewen were bent upon improving her. But there were plenty of cavaliers to attend her, whenever she appeared, either on Port Meadow or the Magdalen flood water; and her sound youth delighted physically in the exercise, in the play of the brisk air about her face, and the alternations of the bright winter day--from the pale blue of its morning skies, hung behind the snow-sprinkled towers and spires of Oxford, down to the red of sunset, and the rise of those twilight mists which drew the fair city gently back into the bosom of the moonlit dark.

But all the time the pa.s.sionate sense in her watched and waited. The "mere living" was good--"yet was there better than it!"

And on the second afternoon, out of the distance of Magdalen meadow, a man came flying towards her as it seemed on the wings of the wind.

Falloden drew up beside her, hovering on his skates, a splendid vision in the dusk, ease and power in every look and movement.

"Let me take you a run with the wind," he said, holding out his hand.

"You shan't come to any harm."

Her eyes and her happy flush betrayed her. She put her hand in his, and away they flew, up the course of the Cherwell, through the flooded meadows. It seemed the very motion of G.o.ds; the world fell away. Then, coming back, they saw Magdalen Tower, all silver and ebony under the rising moon, and the n.o.ble arch of the bridge. The world was all trans.m.u.ted. Connie's only hold on the kind, common earth seemed to lie in this strong hand to which she clung; and yet in that touch, that hold, lay the magic that was making life anew.

But soon the wind had risen gustily, and was beating in her face, catching at her breath.

"This is too cold for you!" said Falloden abruptly; and wheeling round, he had soon guided her into a more sheltered place, and there, easily gliding up and down, soul and sense fused in one delight, they pa.s.sed one of those hours for which there is no measure in our dull human time.

They would not think of the past; they shrank from imagining the future.

There were shadows and ghosts behind them, and ahead of them; but the sheer present mastered them.