Part 23

It was an hour before the dinner-bell rang. Then he came down cold and calm, particularly brilliant in conversation, more courteous, perhaps, to her than ever, but the frost had gathered round him that the sunny atmosphere of the Beeches had melted; and Fay, though she tried to tease, and to coax, and to win him, could not dissipate it. She felt him an immeasurable distance from her again. He was a learned, haughty, grave philosopher, and she a little naughty child.

As Keane went up-stairs that night, he heard Sydie talking in the hall.

"Yes, my worshipped Fay, I shall be intensely and utterly miserable away from the light of your eyes; but, nevertheless, I must go and see Kingslake from John's next Tuesday, because I've promised; and let one idolize your divine self ever so much, one can't give up one's larks, you know."

Keane ground his teeth with a bitter sigh and a fierce oath.

"Little Fay, I would have loved you more tenderly than that!"

He went in and threw himself on his bed, not to sleep. For the first time for many years he could not summon sleep at his will. He had gone on petting her and amusing himself, thinking of her only as a winning, wayward child. Now he woke with a shock to discover, too late, that she had stolen from him unawares the heart he had so long refused to any woman. With his high intellect and calm philosophy, after his years spent in severe science and cold solitude, the hot well-springs of passion had broken loose again. He longed to take her bright life into his own grave and cheerless one; he longed to feel her warm young heart beat with his own, icebound for so many years; but Little Fay was never to be his.

In the bedroom next to him the General sat, with his feet in his slippers and his dressing-gown round him, smoking his last cheroot before a roaring fire, chuckling complacently over his own thoughts.

"To be sure, we'll have a very gay wedding, such as the county hasn't seen in all its blessed days," he muttered, with supreme satisfaction. "Sydie shall have this place. What do I want with a great town of a house like this, big enough for a barrack? I'll take that shooting-box that's to let four miles off; that'll be plenty large enough for me and my old chums to smoke in and chat over bygone times, and it will do our hearts good--freshen us up a bit to see those young things enjoying themselves. My Little Fay will be the prettiest bride that ever was seen. Silly young things to suppose I don't see through them. Trust an old soldier! However, love is blind, they say. How could they have helped falling in love with one another? and who'd have the heart to part 'em, I should like to know!"

Keane stayed that day; the next, receiving a letter which afforded a true though a slight excuse to return to Cambridge, he went, the General, Fay, and Sydie believing him gone only for a few days, he knowing that he would never set foot in the Beeches again. He went back to his rooms, whose dark monastic gloom in the dull October day seemed to close round him like an iron shroud. Here, with his books, his papers, his treasures of intellect, science and art, his "mind a kingdom" to him, he had spent many a happy day, with his brain growing only clearer and clearer as he followed out a close reasoning or clenched a subtle analysis. Now, for the sake of a mischievous child but half his age, he shuddered as he entered.

"Well, my dear boy," began the General one day after dinner, "I've seen your game, though you thought I didn't. How do you know, you young dog, that I shall give my consent?"

"Oh, bother, governor, I know you will," cried Sydie, aghast; "because, you see, if you let me have a few cool hundreds I can give the men such slap-up wines--and it's my last year, General."

"You sly dog!" chuckled the governor, "I'm not talking of your wine-merchant, and you know I'm not, Master Sydie. It's no good playing hide-and-seek with me; I can always see through a milestone when Cupid is behind it; and there's no need to beat round the bush with me, my boy. I never gave my assent to anything with greater delight in my life; I've always meant you to marry Fay, and----"

"Marry Fay!" shouted Sydie. "Good Heavens! governor, what next?" And the Cantab threw himself back and laughed till he cried, and Snowdrop and her pups barked furiously in a concert of excited sympathy.

"Why, sir, why?--why, because--devil take you, Sydie--I don't know what you are laughing at, do you?" cried the General, starting out of his chair.

"Yes, I do, governor; you're laboring under a most delicious delusion."

"Delusion!--eh?--what? Why, bless my soul, I don't think you know what you are saying, Sydie," stormed the General.

"Yes I do; you've an idea--how you got it into your head Heaven knows, but there it is--you've an idea that Fay and I are in love with one another; and I assure you you were never more mistaken in your life."

Seeing the General standing bolt upright staring at him, and looking decidedly apocleptic, Sydie made the matter a little clearer.

"Fay and I would do a good deal to oblige you, my beloved governor, if we could get up the steam a little, but I'm afraid we really _cannot_. Love ain't in one's own hands, you see, but a skittish mare, that gets her head, and takes the bit between her teeth, and bolts off with you wherever she likes. Is it possible that two people who broke each other's toys, and teased each other's lives out, and caught the measles of each other, from their cradle upwards, should fall in love with each other when they grow up? Besides, I don't intend to marry for the next twenty years, if I can help it. I couldn't afford a milliner's bill to my tailor's, and I should be ruined for life if I merged my bright particular star of a self into a respectable, lark-shunning, bill-paying, shabby-hatted, family man. Good Heavens, what a train of horrors comes with the bare idea!"

"Do you mean to say, sir, you won't marry your cousin?" shouted the General.

"Bless your dear old heart, _no_, governor--ten times over, _no_! I wouldn't marry anybody, not for half the universe."

"Then I've done with you, sir--I wash my hands of you!" shouted the General, tearing up and down the room in a quick march, more beneficial to his feelings than his carpet. "You are an ungrateful, unprincipled, shameless young man, and are no more worthy of the affection and the interest I've been fool enough to waste on you than a tom-cat. You're an abominably selfish, ungrateful, unnatural boy; and though you _are_ poor Phil's son, I will tell you my mind, sir; and I must say I think your conduct with your cousin, making love to her--desperate love to her--winning her affections, poor unhappy child, and then making a jest of her and treating it with a laugh, is disgraceful, sir--_disgraceful_, do you hear?"

"Yes, I hear, General," cried Sydie, convulsed with laughter; "but Fay cares no more for me than for those geraniums. We are fond of one another, in a cool, cousinly sort of way, but----"

"Hold your tongue!" stormed the General. "Don't dare to say another word to me about it. You know well enough that it has been the one delight of my life, and if you'd had any respect or right feeling in you, you'd marry her to-morrow."

"She wouldn't be a party to that. Few women _are_ blind to my manifold attractions; but Fay's one of 'em. Look here, governor," said Sydie, laying his hand affectionately on the General's shoulder, "did it never occur to you that though the pretty castle's knocked down, there may be much nicer bricks left to build a new one? Can't you see that Fay doesn't care two buttons about me, but cares a good many diamond studs about somebody else?"

"Nothing has occurred to me but that you and she are two heartless, selfish, ungrateful chits. Hold your tongue, sir!"

"But, General----"

"Hold your tongue, sir; don't talk to me, I tell you. In love with somebody else? I should like to see him show his face here. Somebody she's talked to for five minutes at a race-ball, and proposed to her in a corner, thinking to get some of my money. Some swindler, or Italian refugee, or blackleg, I'll be bound--taken her in, made her think him an angel, and will persuade her to run away with him. I'll set the police round the house--I'll send her to school in Paris. What fools men are to have anything to do with women at all! You seem in their confidence; who's the fellow?"

"A man very like a swindler or a blackleg--Keane!"

"Keane!" shouted the General, pausing in the middle of his frantic march.

"Keane," responded Sydie.

"Keane!" shouted the General again. "God bless my soul, she might as well have fallen in love with the man in the moon. Why couldn't she like the person I'd chosen for her?"

"If one can't guide the mare one's self, 'tisn't likely the governors can for one," muttered Sydie.

"Poor dear child! fallen in love with a man who don't care a button for her, eh? Humph!--that's always the way with women--lose the good chances, and fling themselves at a man's feet who cares no more for their tom-foolery of worship than he cares for the blacking on his boots. Devil take young people, what a torment they are! The ungrateful little jade, how dare she go and smash all my plans like that? and if I ever set my heart on anything, I set it on that match. Keane! he'll no more love anybody than the stone cherubs on the terrace. He's a splendid head, but his heart's every atom as cold as granite. Love her? Not a bit of it. When I told him you were going to marry her (I thought you would, and so you will, too, if you've the slightest particle of gratitude or common sense in either of you), he listened as quietly and as calmly as if he had been one of the men in armor in the hall. Love, indeed! To the devil with love, say I! It's the head and root of everything that's mischievous and bad."

"Wait a bit, uncle," cried Sydie; "you told him all about your previous match-making, eh? And didn't he go off like a shot two days after, when we meant him to stay on a month longer? Can't you put two and two together, my once wide-awake governor? 'Tisn't such a difficult operation."

"No, I can't," shouted the General: "I don't know anything, I don't see anything, I don't believe in anything, I hate everybody and everything, I tell you; and I'm a great fool for having ever set my heart on any plan that wanted a woman's concurrence--

For if she will she will, you may depend on't, And if she won't she won't, and there's an end on't."

Wherewith the General stuck his wide-awake on fiercely, and darted out of the bay-window to cool himself. Half way across the lawn, he turned sharp round, and came back again.

"Sydie, do you fancy Keane cares a straw for that child?"

"I can't say. It's possible."

"Humph! Well, can't you go and see? That's come of those mathematical lessons. What a fool I was to allow her to be so much with him!" growled the General, with many grunts and half-audible oaths, swinging round again, and trotting through the window as hot and peppery as his own idolized curry.

Keane was sitting writing in his rooms at King's some few days after. The backs looked dismal with their leafless, sepia-colored trees; the streets were full of sloppy mud and dripping under-grads' umbrellas; his own room looked sombre and dark, without any sunshine on its heavy oak bookcases, and massive library-table, and dark bronzes. His pen moved quickly, his head was bent over the paper, his mouth sternly set, and his forehead paler and more severe than ever. The gloom in his chambers had gathered round him himself, when his door was burst open, and Sydie dashed in and threw himself down in a green leather arm-chair.

"Well, sir, here am I back again. Just met the V. P. in the quad, and he was so enchanted at seeing me, that he kissed me on both cheeks, flung off his gown, tossed up his cap, and performed a _pas d'extase_ on the spot. Isn't it delightful to be so beloved? Granta looks very delicious to-day, I must say--about as refreshing and lively as an acidulated spinster going district-visiting in a snow-storm. And how are you, most noble lord?"

"Pretty well."

"Only that? Thought you were all muscle and iron. I say. What _do_ you think the governor has been saying to me?"

"How can I tell?"

"Tell! No, I should not have guessed it if I'd tried for a hundred years! By George! nothing less than that I should marry Fay. What do you think of that, sir?"

Keane traced Greek unconsciously on the margin of his _Times_. For the life of him, with all his self-command, he could not have answered.

"Marry Fay! _I!_" shouted Sydie. "Ye gods, what an idea! I never was so astonished in all my days. Marry Little Fay!--the governor must be mad, you know."

"You will not marry your cousin?" asked Keane, tranquilly, though the rapid glance and involuntary start did not escape Sydie's quick eyes.

"Marry! I! By George, no! She wouldn't have me, and I'm sure I wouldn't have her. She is a dear little monkey, and I'm very fond of her, but I wouldn't put the halter round my neck for any woman going. I don't like vexing the General, but it would be really too great a sacrifice merely to oblige him."

"She cares nothing for you, then?"

"Nothing? Well, I don't know. Yes, in a measure, she does. If I should be taken home on a hurdle one fine morning, she'd shed some cousinly tears over my inanimate body; but as for _the other thing_, not one bit of it. 'Tisn't likely. We're a great deal too like one another, too full of devilry and carelessness, to assimilate. Isn't it the delicious contrast and fiz of the sparkling acid of divine lemons with the contrariety of the fiery spirit of beloved rum that makes the delectable union known and worshipped in our symposia under the blissful name of PUNCH? Marry Little Fay! By Jove, if all the governor's match-making was founded on no better reasons for success, it is a small marvel that he's a bachelor now! By George, it's time for hall!"

And the Cantab took himself off, congratulating himself on the adroit manner in which he had cut the Gordian knot that the General had muddled up so inexplicably in his unpropitious match-making.

Keane lay back in his chair some minutes, very still; then he rose to dine in hall, pushing away his books and papers, as if throwing aside with them a dull and heavy weight. The robins sang in the leafless backs, the sun shone out on the sloppy streets; the youth he thought gone for ever was come back to him. Oh, strange stale story of Hercules and Omphale, old as the hills, and as eternal! Hercules goes on in his strength slaying his hydra and his Laomedon for many years, but he comes at last, whether he like it or not, to his Omphale, at whose feet he is content to sit and spin long golden threads of pleasure and of passion, while his lion's skin is motheaten and his club rots away.

Little Fay sat curled up on the study hearth-rug, reading a book her late guest had left behind him--a very light and entertaining volume, being Delolme "On the Constitution," but which she preferred, I suppose, to "What Will He Do With It?" or the "Feuilles d'Automne," for the sake of that clear autograph, "Gerald Keane, King's Coll.," on its fly-leaf. A pretty picture she made, with her handsome spaniels; and she was so intent on what she was reading--the fly-leaf, by the way--that she never heard the opening of the door, till a hand drew away her book. Then Fay started up, oversetting the puppies one over another, radiant and breathless.

Keane took her hands and drew her near him.

"You do not hate me now, then?"

Fay put her head on one side with her old wilfulness.

"Yes, I do--when you go away without any notice, and hardly bid me good-bye. You would not have left one of your men pupils so unceremoniously."

Keane smiled involuntarily, and drew her closer.

"If you do not hate me, will you go a step farther--and love me? Little Fay, my own darling, will you come and brighten my life? It has been a saddened and a stern one, but it shall never throw a shade on yours."

The wild little filly was conquered--at last, she came to hand docile and subdued, and acknowledged her master. She loved him, and told him so with that frankness and fondness which would have covered faults far more glaring and weighty than Little Fay's.

"But you must never be afraid of me," whispered Keane, some time after.

"Oh, no!"

"And you do not wish Sydie had never brought me here to make you all uncomfortable?"

"Oh, please don't!" cried Fay, plaintively. "I was a child then, and I did not know what I said."

"'Then,' being three months ago, may I ask what you are now?"

"A child still in knowledge, but _your_ child," whispered Fay, lifting her face to his, "to be petted and spoiled, and never found fault with, remember!"

"My little darling, who would have the heart to find fault with you, whatever your sins?"

"God bless my soul, what's this?" cried a voice in the doorway.

There stood the General in wide-awake and shooting-coat, with a spade in one hand and a watering-pot in the other, too astonished to keep his amazement to himself. Fay would fain have turned and fled, but Keane smiled, kept one arm round her, and stretched out his hand to the governor.

"General, I came once uninvited, and I am come again. Will you forgive me? I have a great deal to say to you, but I must ask you one question first of all. Will you give me your treasure?"

"Eh! humph! What? Well--I suppose--yes," ejaculated the General, breathless from the combined effects of amazement and excessive and vehement gardening. "But, bless my soul, Keane, I should as soon have thought of one of the stone cherubs, or that bronze Milton. Never mind, one lives and learns. Mind? Devil take me, what am I talking about? I don't mind at all; I'm very happy, only I'd set my heart on--you know what. More fool I. Fay, you little imp, come here. Are you fairly broken in by Keane, then?"

"Yes," said Miss Fay, with her old mischief, but a new blush, "as he has promised never to use the curb."

"God bless you, then, my little pet," cried the General, kissing her some fifty times. Then he laughed till he cried, and dried his eyes and laughed again, and grunted, and growled, and shook both Keane's hands vehemently. "I was a great fool, sir, and I dare say you've managed much better. I _did_ set my heart on the boy, you know, but it can't be helped now, and I don't wish it should. Be kind to her, that's all; for though she mayn't bear the curb, the whip from anybody she cares about would break her heart. She's a dear child, Keane--a very dear child. Be kind to her, that's all."

* * * * *

On the evening of January 13th, beginning the Lent Term, Mr. Sydenham Morton sat in his own rooms with half a dozen spirits like himself, a delicious aroma surrounding them of Maryland and rum-punch, and a rapid flow of talk making its way through the dense atmosphere.

"To think of Granite Keane being caught!" shouted one young fellow. "I should as soon have thought of the Pyramids walking over to the Sphinx, and marrying her."

"Poor devil! I pity him," sneered Henley of Trinity, aged nineteen.

"He don't require much pity, my dear fellow; I think he's pretty comfortable," rejoined Sydie. "He did, to be sure, when he was trying to beat sense into your brain-box, but that's over for the present."

"Come, tell us about the wedding," said Somerset of King's. "I was sorry I couldn't go down."

"Well," began Sydie, stretching his legs and putting down his pipe, "she--_the_ she was dressed in white tulle and----"

"Bother the dress. Go ahead!"

"The dress was no bother, it was the one subject in life to the women. You must listen to the dress, because I asked the prettiest girl there for the description of it to enlighten your minds, and it was harder to learn than six books of Horace. The bridesmaids wore tarlatane a la Princesse Stephanie, trois jupes bouillonnees, jupe desous de soie glacee, guirlandes couleur dea yeux imperiaux d'Eugenie, corsets decolletes garnis de ruches de ruban du----"

"For Heaven's sake, hold your tongue!" cried Somerset. "That jargon's worse than the Yahoos'. The dead languages are bad enough to learn, but women's living language of fashion is ten hundred times worse. The twelve girls were dressed in blue and white, and thought themselves angels--we understand. Cut along."

"Gunter was prime," continued Sydie, "and the governor was prime, too--splendid old buck; only when he gave her away he was very near saying, 'Devil take it!' which might have had a novel, but hardly a solemn, effect. Little Fay was delightful--for all the world like a bit of incarnated sunshine. Keane was granite all over, except his eyes, and they were lava; if we hadn't, for our own preservation, let him put her in a carriage and started 'em off, he might have become dangerous, after the manner of Etna, ice outside and red-hot coals within. The bridesmaids tears must have washed the church for a week, and made it rather a damp affair. One would scarcely think women were so anxious to marry, to judge from the amount of grief they get up at a friend's sacrifice. It looks uncommonly like envy; but it _isn't_, we're sure! The ball was like most other balls: alternate waltzing and flirtation, a vast lot of nonsense talked, and a vast lot of champagne drunk--Cupid running about in every direction, and a tremendous run on all the amatory poets--Browning and Tennyson being worked as hard as cab-horses, and used up pretty much as those quadrupeds--dandies suffering self-inflicted torture from tight boots, and saying, like Cranmer, when he held his hand in the fire, that it was rather agreeable than otherwise, considering it drew admiration--spurs getting entangled in ladies' dresses, and ladies making use thereof for a display of amiability, which the dragoons are very much mistaken if they fancied continued into private life--girls believing all the pretty things said to them--men going home and laughing at them all--wallflowers very black, women engaged ten deep very sunshiny--the governor very glorious, and my noble self very fascinating. And now," said Sydie, taking up his pipe, "pass the punch, old boy, and never say I can't talk!"

THE STORY OF A CRAYON-HEAD;

OR,

A DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN'S LIFE.

I was dining with a friend, in his house on the Lung' Arno (he fills, never mind what, post in the British Legation), where I was passing an autumn month. The night was oppressively hot; a still, sultry sky brooded over the city, and the stars shining out from a purple mist on to the Campanile near, and the slopes of Bellosguardo in the distance. It was intensely hot; not all the iced wines on his table could remove the oppressive warmth of the evening air, which made both him and me think of evenings we had spent together in the voluptuous lassitude of the East, in days gone by, when we had travelled there, fresh to life, to new impressions, to all that gives "greenness to the grass, and glory to the flower."