It has done Emanuel a world of good to have you here,” said Kathleen, on the morning of Christian’s leave-taking. “Of course it has been a delight to us both—but he has had a personal benefit from it, too. He works too hard. He carries such a burden of details about in his mind—by day and by night, for he sleeps badly and is forever dreaming of his work—that companionship with some new and attractive mind is of the greatest rest and help to him. And he is very fond of you.”
Christian nodded gratified acknowledgment of the words and their spirit, with a glow in his dark eyes. In little more than an hour he would be on his way to London—that mighty, almost fabulous goal of his lifelong dreams. He was already dressed for the journey, in a traveling-suit of rough, fawn-colored cloth, and as he sat at ease in the breakfast-room with his cousin’s wife, his glance wandered very often from her face to a pleased contemplation of these garments. They were what he individually liked best in the wonderful collection of clothes for which a fashionable tailor had come from London to measure him, and which were this moment being packed by the man up-stairs in bags and portmanteaus equally new. The tweeds enabled him to feel more like an Englishman than he had succeeded in doing before.
He smiled diffidently at her. “I am so excited about going,” he said, his voice wavering between exuberance and appeal—“and yet I ought to be thinking of nothing but my sorrow in leaving you dear people. But that will come to me soon enough—in a storm of homesickness—when once I find myself really alone.”
“Oh, I’ll not deny we expect a little homesickness,” she replied to him, cheerfully—“but it must not be enough to at all take the edge off your spirits. Oh, you’ll be vastly entertained and interested by all you see and hear. Young Lord Lingfield—you’ll be seeing him to-night at dinner—he will be greatly pleased to take you about, and properly introduce you; He will do it better than any other we can think of. He is not by any means an intellectual gladiator, but he is good-looking and amiable and he goes everywhere.”
“He is my relation, too, I think Emanuel said?”
“Let’s work it out—his grandfather’s sister was your grandmother. Yes, that is it. She was the Lady Clarissa Poynes, the sister of the old earl of Chobham, who used to wear the blue coat and brass buttons to the end of his days. So she would be the aunt of the present earl, and the grand-aunt of young Lingfield. You stand in exactly the same relationship to Lord Lingfield that you would to a son of Emanuel’s—if he had one, poor man!”
Christian had long since become sensible of the pathos which colored these references to the childlessness of the house. A tender instinct impelled him to hasten a diversion.
“And how strange it is!” he cried. “They are as close to me, these people, in blood as Emanuel is—and yet I care nothing for them whatever. I shall meet them, and know them, and not feel that I am bound to them at all—whereas Emanuel is like a brother to me, whom I have been with and loved all my life. And you,” he added, with a smile in his eyes—“you are more than any sister to me.”
“Well, then, let me talk to you like a sister,” she rejoined.
He thought he had not seen her before in precisely the mood which was discernible in her face and tone this morning. Outwardly she was as gay and light-hearted as ever, and certainly she had not seemed on any previous day to come so near being beautiful as well. The sense of sheer pleasure in being where she was, in listening to her and looking’ at her, and holding her affectionately bright attention for his own thoughts, was peculiarly strong in him to-day. But there was also the consciousness of a new gravity in her attitude toward him—a kind of yearning apprehension of dangers threatening him. He saw again in her eyes when she looked at him that likeness to his mother’s glance—a wistfully sad glance as he most often recalled it. And yet Kathleen smiled merrily with it all, when occasion required.
“You are entering upon the great experience now,” she said to him: “I think it was very wise of Emanuel to show you first what we may call his ideal state of society. By all the rules, it ought to help you to understand in the right way what you will see of the society which—well, which isn’t in an ideal state. But there are certain things which get to be understood, not so much by brains, as by years. That is to say, the very cleverest youth may not be able to see, in this one respect, what is plain enough to most dull persons at forty. Emanuel tells me that he has talked with you about women in general.”
“He does not like them very much,” said Christian, laughingly.
She twisted the corners of her mouth in a droll little grimace, which seemed to express approval of his mirth, and something more besides.
“He takes them with tremendous seriousness,” she answered. “That is his way with everything. He makes all sorts of classifications—the bigger they are and the more complicated the better he likes them—and then he treats each one as a problem, and he worries at it with all his energy until he works out a satisfactory solution. It is only in that sense that he has a grievance against women. He has proceeded upon the theory that the sex is a unit, for philosophical purposes at least, and that he ought to be able to get at the rules which govern its actions. But we continue to baffle him,” she added, again with the playful curl of the lips.
“Oh, you—you are not in the problem,” protested Christian. “For you and his mother he has only the veneration one gives to one’s favorite saints.”
“His mother was a great woman,” said Kathleen, serious once more. “I never saw her, but she is my patron saint, as you put it, quite as much as his. I never permit myself to doubt that we should have loved each other deeply—and it is the sweetest thing any one can think of me, or say to me—to link us together. But even the saints have their specialties—and that implies limitations. I have a notion that Emanuel’s mother did not know many women, and so fell into a way of generalizing about them. Emanuel has that same tendency. I, who work among them daily, and make it my business to be teacher and mistress and mother and sister to some five hundred of them, young and old, foolish and wise—I come to believe that these generalizations are entirely mistaken. If a woman is brought up like a man, and circumstanced precisely like a man, and knows nothing of any conventions save those which control a man—why, then you can’t tell the difference between her opinions and actions and those of her brother. But you never get the chance to view a woman under those conditions.”
“But here we shall see them!” cried Christian, with premature enthusiasm. “You will change all that!”
“Oh, no, I shan’t,” she answered abruptly. “It is not being tried—it is not desirable. What I am doing proceeds quite on orthodox lines. We make a point of developing them in the way of usefulness—material usefulness, I mean. We teach them the useful accomplishments—spinning, weaving, sewing, dairy and poultry work, and above all things good cooking.”
“That I can well believe,” he declared. “I have never eaten so many good dishes in my life as here.”
“Yes, I have a talent in that direction,” she assented. “And I am prouder of it because it represents a triumph over my ancestral prejudices. You will get nothing good to eat in Ireland. The Irish have never respected food as a proper subject for serious human thought. It is the rarest thing to hear them mention it. There may be some fine spiritual quality in that—but at all events we cook well here, and I have worked a complete revolution in that respect on the estate. There are certainly no such cooks and housekeepers anywhere else in England as my women. But you see what I mean. There is no effort to take women away from the work they have always been doing, but only to make them do it better.”
“But that in itself is very much,” urged Christian. Somehow he had the feeling that he was defending the System against a critic.
“Undoubtedly,” she admitted. “And of course we do something more than that. In a good many cases, when it was not inconvenient, I have put young girls of aptitude forward to learn designing and other arts. Some of them have made me some very tolerable tapestry, and a few of them are as intelligent and valuable in the greenhouses as our best men. In the matter of music they really beat them. Emanuel insists on a choir of glee singers in each village—and at Christmas time we have a competition of ‘waits’ which will be worth your while coming to hear. For my part, I have a string orchestra of girls that I should not be ashamed to have play in London.”
The word seemed to bring them back, “You were going to speak to me,” Christian ventured, “about London. One thing—I shall see you there often, shall I not?”
She slowly shook her head. “No, we have outgrown London, I’m afraid. It can be proved, I believe, that it is the biggest town in the world—but to us it is too small for comfort. It is now more than a year since we have been up at all. Why should we go? We have the National Gallery by heart, and the year’s pictures are rather distressing than otherwise. The theaters are intellectually beneath notice. There is the opera of course, and the concerts, but the people annoy us by talking loudly, and besides, we have our own music, and occasionally we bring down a Paderewski or a Sarasate for our people to hear. At the houses where we would naturally go, the women talk about matters of which I know absolutely nothing, and Emanuel either quarrels with the men about what they call their politics, or chokes silently with rage and disgust. And then the spectacle of the people in the streets—the poor of London!—that fairly sickens our hearts. We have no joy of going at all. Occasionally we have guests down here, but it is not a very happy time they have of it. Everything is so strange to them that they are confused, and walk about with constraint, as if they were being shown around an asylum. So it happens that I see very few women of my own class—and really know less about them than most people. And yet,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye, “so naturally audacious a race are the Irish—it is precisely about ladies in London society that I am going to read you a lecture.”
Christian drew up his feet, and assumed an air of delighted anticipation.
“First of all, you are six and twenty, and you will be thinking of marrying. What is more, you are what is called a great match, and for every thought that you give to the subject of a wife, others will give ten thousand to the subject of you as a possible husband.”
The young man looked into her kindly eyes with a sustained glance of awakening thought. This dazzling and princely position which she had thus outlined—sure enough, it was his! How extraordinary that this had not suggested itself to him before! Or had the perception of it not really lain dormant in his consciousness all the while? This question propounded itself to a mind which was engrossed in something else—for of a sudden there rose upon the blank background of his thoughts the luminous face of a lady, beautiful, distinguished, exquisitely sensitized, and as by the trick of a dream she first wore a large garden hat, and then was bare-headed, her fair hair gathered loosely back into a careless knot. The mental picture expanded, to show the full length of her queenly figure as she descended a broad staircase, with one lovely hand like a lily against the oak of the rail. Then it contracted, and underwent a strange metamorphosis, for it was another face which he saw, a pale, earnest, clever face, and instead of the great stairway, there was the laced tawdriness of a French railway compartment.
Then, with a start, and a backward movement of the head, he was free of dreamland, and blushingly conscious of having stared his cousin out of countenance. He laughed with awkward embarrassment. “I—I suppose it is true—what you say,” he remarked, stumblingly.
She had perhaps some clew to the character of his reverie. She smiled in a gently quizzical way, but went on soberly enough. “The thing of all things,” she said, “is to be clearly and profoundly convinced in your own mind that your marriage will be the most important event of your life—that it will indeed affect, for good or for bad, every conceivable element of your life. You have the kind of temperament which would be peculiarly susceptible to such intimate influences. There are great numbers of men—the vast majority—to whom it does not matter so much. They accommodate themselves to their burdens, and shuffle along somehow, with the patience of a cart-horse. But you—the wrong wife would wreck you and kill you. I am speaking frankly, laddie,”—she gave the novel word an intonation which made it music in his ears—“because you have no mother, and because you are going into a very trying and delicate situation with what I feel to be a pathetic lack of preparation.”
Christian drew his chair nearer to her, and crossed his knees, and leaned back in an attitude of intimate ease. The conversation appealed powerfully to him as having more of the atmosphere of domesticity and sweet home influences in it than any he had ever heard.
“I know almost nothing at all of women,” he said, quite simply. “The mothers of my pupils I saw sometimes and occasionally a sister, but they were not in any sense my friends. As to marriage—of course that has never been in my head. Until only the other day, the idea of a wife would have been absurd. But now—as you say—it is not any longer absurd.” He paused and gazed absently past her, as if in pursuit of the thoughts his own words had set in motion. “I wonder—I wonder”—he murmured, and then turned his bright eyes to her, full of wistful expectancy. “Have you, par exemple, some one in your mind for me?” he asked.
She laughed and shook her head. The implication in his tone, of entire readiness to accept the bride of her selection, had its amusing and its flattering sides; upon a second glance, however, it contained something else not so much to her liking. She frowned a little at this something.
“Oh, you must not approach the subject in that spirit,” she adjured him. “It is the one affair of all others on earth in which you must be guided absolutely by your own heart and your own mind. We speak of the heart and mind as distinct from each other; I don’t know that they are not one and the same. Perhaps I would put it this way—when your heart and your mind are completely agreed, when your personal liking and your deliberate judgment pull together in exactly the same direction—so that it seems to you that they are one and the same thing—then—then——-”
“Then what?” demanded Christian, bending forward.
“Oh, I am not fortunate in expressing myself to-day,” Kathleen declared, with a gesture of playful impatience. “But in general, this is what I wanted to say: Do not be betrayed into haste in this matter of deciding about a girl. You will see a large number of extremely attractive young ladies. They will certainly not be looking or behaving their worst for your benefit, and you on your side will be lacking the experience to tell precisely what it is all worth. So walk quietly along, with your wits about you, and see what there is to be seen for a time, and commit yourself to nothing. A year hence, for example, you will look back upon your present condition of mind with surprise. You will not seem to yourself at all the same person. I can’t promise that you’ll be happier,” she added, with a little smiling sigh, “but you will know a great deal more about what you want—or rather about making sure that you are getting what you want.”
“I know what I shall do,” he declared, after a moment’s reflection. “I shall come always to you, and beg your wise and good advice. You will tell me if I am making a bad choice.”
“You talk as if you were entering upon a lifelong series of experiments,” she laughed at him. “No, I’ll undertake no such responsibility as that, young man.” She explained, more gravely: “It is never quite pos............