Chapter 26

Sehnsucht.

Graham had numberless engagements in London, and except at breakfast, or at lunch perhaps, little was seen of him at his aunt's house during the first days after his arrival in town. One evening, however, coming home earlier than usual, he found the two ladies still in the drawing-room, and joining them at the fireside, he first made Madelon sing to him, and then, beginning to talk, the conversation went on till long after midnight, as he sat relating his travels and adventures. Presently he brought out his journal, and read extracts from it, filling up the brief, hurried notes with fuller details as he went on, and describing to them the plan of his book, some chapters of which were already written, and which he hoped to bring out before the season was over. Mrs. Treherne was a perfect listener; she was sufficiently well informed to make it worth while to tell her more, and she knew how to put intelligent questions just at the right moment. As for Madelon, she had been busily engaged on some piece of embroidery when he first began talking, but gradually her hands had dropped into her lap, and with her eyes fixed on him in the frankest unconsciousness, she had become utterly absorbed in what he was saying. Graham's whole heart was in his work, past and present, and this rapt naïve interest on the part of the girl at once flattered and encouraged him.

"I can trust you two," he said, putting away his papers at last, "and I am not forestalling my public too much in letting you hear all this; but you are my first auditors, and my first critics. You won't betray me, Madelon?" he added, turning to her with a smile.

She shook her head, smiling back at him without speaking; and then, rising, began to fold up her work, while Mrs. Treherne said,--

"I should have thought you would have found your first audience at Ashurst."

"I did try it one evening," he said, "but one of the children began to scream, and Georgie had to go and attend to it; and the Doctor went to sleep, and Maria, who had been all the afternoon in a stuffy school-room, looking after a school- feast or something of the sort, told me not to mind her, and presently went to sleep too; so I gave it up, after that."

"It was certainly not encouraging," said Mrs. Treherne; "but you must surely have fallen upon an unfortunate moment; they do not go to sleep every evening, I presume?"

He did not answer; he was looking at Madelon, his eyes following her as she moved here and there about the room, putting away her work, closing the piano, setting things in order for the night. It was a habit he had taken up, this of watching her whenever they were in the room together, wondering perhaps how his little Madelon had grown into one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. Indeed she was little Madelon no longer--and yet not wholly altered after all. She was tall now, above the middle height, and her hair was a shade darker, and fastened up in long plaits at the back of her head; but her cheeks were pale as in old days, and a slight accent, an occasional idiom, something exceptional in style, and gesture, and manner, showed at once and unmistakably, her foreign birth and breeding. As Mrs. Treherne had once said, she had not, and never would have, an English air and complexion; but her beauty was not the less refined and rare that the clear, fair cheeks were without a tinge of colour, that one had to seek it in the pure red lips, the soft brown hair, the slight eyebrows and dark lashes, the lovely eyes that had learnt to express the thought they had once only suggested, but still retained something of the old, childish, wistful look. And yet Graham watched her with a vague sense of disappointment.

"What do you think of Madeleine?" Mrs. Treherne said to him the following afternoon; he had come in early, and they were together alone in the drawing-room. "Do you not find her grown and improved? Do you think her pretty? She is perhaps rather pale, but----"

"She has certainly grown, Aunt Barbara, but this is not astonishing--young ladies generally do grow between the ages of thirteen and eighteen: and I think her the prettiest girl I ever saw--not at all too pale. As for being improved--well--I suppose she is. She wears very nice dresses, I observe, and holds herself straight, and I daresay knows more geography and history than when we last parted."

"You are disappointed in her," said Mrs. Treherne. "Do you know I suspected as much, Horace, from the way in which you look at her and speak to her. Tell me in what way--why you are not satisfied?"

"But I am satisfied," cried Graham; "why should I not be? Madelon appears to me to have every accomplishment a young lady should have; she sings to perfection, I daresay, dances equally well, and I have no doubt that on examination she would prove equally proficient in all the ologies. I am perfectly satisfied, so far as it is any concern of mine, but I don't see what right I have to be sitting in judgment one way or the other."

"You have every right, Horace; I have always looked upon you as the child's guardian in a way, and in all my plans concerning her education I have considered myself, to a certain extent, responsible to you."

"It was very good of you, Aunt Barbara, to consider me in the matter. I thought my responsibility had ceased from the moment you took charge of her; but for her father's sake--does Madelon ever speak of him, by-the-by?"

"Never."

"Never alludes to her past life?"

"Never--we never speak of it; I have carefully avoided doing so, in the hope that with time, and a settled home, and new interests, she could cease to think of it altogether; and I trust I have succeeded. The memory of it can only be painful to her now, poor child, for, though I have never referred to the subject in any way, I feel convinced she must have learnt by this time to see her father's character in its true light."

"It is possible," said Graham. "Well, as I was saying; Aunt Barbara, for the sake of the promise I made her father on his death-bed, if for no other reason, I shall and must always take an interest in Madelon."

"And I for her mother's sake," replied Mrs. Treherne, stiffly. "If you have no other interest in Madelon than----however, it is useless to discuss that. I want to know how we have disappointed you--Madelon and I--for you are disappointed; tell me, Horace--I am really anxious to know."

"Dear Aunt Barbara, I am not at all disappointed; or, if I am, it is not your fault or hers--quite the reverse. Nothing but the perversity of human nature. Shall I own the truth? All these years I have kept in my mind a dear little girl in a shabby old frock which she had outgrown--a dear, affectionate little soul, with so few ideas on people and things, that she actually took me for one of the best and wisest of human beings. See how much vanity there is in it all! I come back, and find a demure, well-drilled, fashionable young lady. I might have known how it would be, but it gave me a sort of shock, I own--my little wild Madelon gone for ever and a day, and this proper young lady in her place."

"You are unreasonable, Horace," said Mrs. Treherne, half laughing, half vexed; "and ungrateful too, when Madeleine has been working so hard, with the hope, I know, of pleasing and astonishing you with her doings."

"But I am pleased," said Graham. "Astonished? No, I cannot be astonished that Madelon, with you to help her, should accomplish anything; but I am delighted, charmed. What more shall I say? So much so, Aunt Barbara, that when I am married-- as I mean to be shortly, and set up a house of my own--you and Madelon will have to pay me visits of any length. I _shall_ always feel that I have a sort of property in her, through early associations."

"Are you going to be married shortly?" said Mrs. Treherne; "have you anything definite to do? Where are you going to settle?"

"Do you not know?" he answered. "Dr. Vavasour has offered me a partnership."

"And you have accepted it?"

"Not yet. He has given me six months to think it over; so I need not hurry my decision; and, in the meantime, I have plenty to do with my book. In fact, I need the rest."

"It seems a pity--" began Mrs. Treherne.

"What seems a pity, Aunt Barbara?"

"That with your talents you should settle down for life in a country village. You could surely do something better."

"I don't know," he answered with a sigh. "There is nothing else very obvious at present, and I cannot be a rover all my life. For one thing, my health would not allow of my taking up that sort of thing again just at present; and then there is Maria to be considered. She hates the idea of leaving Ashurst, and it has been her dream for years that this partnership should be offered me, and that I should accept it. I owe it to her to settle down into steady married life before long."

He rose, as he said these last words, and walked to the window. Mrs. Treherne was called away at the same moment, and he stood gazing out at the strip of garden before the house, the Birdcage Walk beyond, the trees in the Park blowing about against the dull sky. His thoughts were not there; they had wandered away to the tropics, to the glowing skies, the strange lands, the wild, free life in which his soul delighted. He was glad to find himself in England once more, amongst kindred and friends, but he loathed the thought of being henceforth tied down to a life from which all freedom would be banished, which must be spent in the dull routine of a country parish. Graham was not now the lad who had once looked on the world as lying at his feet, on all possibilities as being within his grasp; he had long ceased to be a hero in his own eyes; he had learnt one of life's sternest lessons, he had touched the limits of his own powers. But in thus gaining the knowledge of what he could not do, he had also proved what he could be--he had recognised the bent of his genius, and he knew that of all the mistakes of his life he had committed none more grievous than that of binding himself to a woman who neither sympathised nor pretended to sympathise with him and his pursuits; and in compliance with whose wishes he was preparing to take up the life for which, of all others within the limits of his profession, he felt himself the least suited. And she? Did she care for him?--did she love him enough to make it worth the sacrifice?--was there the least chance of their ever being happy together? Ah! what lovers' meeting had that been that had passed between them at his sister's house! What half-concealed indifference on her side, what embarrassment on his, what silence falling between them, what vain efforts to shake off an ever-increasing coldness and constraint! It was five years since they had parted--was it only years and distance that had estranged them, or had they been unsuited to each other from the beginning? Not even now would Graham acknowledge to himself that it was so, but it was a conviction he had been struggling against for years.

"Will you take some tea, Monsieur Horace?" said a voice behind him. He turned round. The grey daylight was fading into grey dusk, afternoon tea had been brought in, and Madelon was standing by him with a cup in her hand. "Aunt Barbara has gone out, and will not be home till dinner-time," she added, as she returned to the tea-table and fireside.

"Then you and I will drink tea together, Madelon," said Graham, seating himself in an arm-chair opposite to her. "Where have you been all this afternoon? Have you been out too?"

"I have been to a singing-class. I generally go twice a-week when we are in town."

"And do you like it?"

"Yes, I like it very much."

So much they said, and then a silence ensued. Madelon drank her tea, and Graham sat looking at her. Yes, a change had certainly come over her--this Madelon, who came and went so quietly, with a certain harmonious grace in every movement-- this Madelon, who sometimes smiled, but rarely laughed, who spoke little, and then with an air of vague weariness and indifference--this was not the little impetuous, warm-hearted Madelon he remembered, who had clung to him in her childish sorrow, who had turned from him in her childish anger, who in her very wilfulness, in her very abandonment to the passion of the moment, had been so winning and loveable. It was not merely that she was not gay--gaiety was an idea that he had never associated with Madelon; it had always been a sad little face that had come before him when he had thought of her; but in all her sadness, there had been an animation and spring, an eagerness and effusion in the child, that seemed wholly wanting in the girl. It was as if a subtle shadow had crept over her, toning down every characteristic light to its own grey monotonous tint.

Madelon had not the smallest suspicion of what was passing in her companion's mind. During all these years, in whatever other respects she might have altered, the attitude of her heart towards him had never changed. What he had always been to her, he was now; the time that had elapsed since they parted had but intensified and deepened her old feeling towards him--that was all. He had been in her thoughts day and night; in a thousand ways she had worked, she had striven, that he might find her improved when he came home, less ignorant, less unworthy, than the little girl he had parted with. His return had been the one point to which all her hopes had been directed; and, poor child, with a little unconscious egotism, she took it for granted that just then she occupied almost as large a share in Graham's mind as he did in hers. He had always been so good, so kind to her, he must surely be glad to see her again, almost as glad as she was to see him. She, on her side, was ready to go on just where they had left off; and yet now, when for the first time they were alone together, a sort of shyness had taken possession of her.

She was the first to break the silence, however. "Why do you look at me so?" she said, setting her tea-cup down, and turning to Horace with a sudden smile and blush.

"I am trying to adjust my ideas," he answered, smiling too; "I am trying to reconcile the little Madelon I used to know with this grand young lady I have found here."

"Ah, you will never see that little Madelon again," said the girl, shaking her head rather sorrowfully; "she is gone for ever."

"How is that?" said Graham. "You have grown tall, you wear long gowns, and plait up your hair, I see; but is that a reason----"

"Ah, how can one survive one's old life?" said Madelon, plaintively; "one ought not, ought one? All is so changed with me, things are so different, the old days are so utterly gone-- I try not to think of them any more; that is the best; and my old self is gone with them, I sometimes think--and that is best too."

She sat leaning forward, staring at the dull red coals; and Graham was silent for a moment.

"Then you have forgotten the old days altogether?" he said at last.

"I never speak of them," she answered slowly; "no, I have not forgotten--it is not in me to forget, I think--but I do not speak of them; of what use? It is like a dream now, that old time, and no one cares for one's dreams but oneself."

"Am I part of the dream too, Madelon? For I think I belong more to that old time you talk about, which is not so very remote, after all, than to the present. I had a little friend Madelon once, but I feel quite a stranger with this fashionable Miss Linders before me."

"You are laughing at me," said Madelon, opening her eyes wide. "I am not at all fashionable, I think. I don't know what you mean; what should make you think such a thing, Monsieur Horace?"

"Well, your general appearance," he answered. "It suggests balls, fêtes, concerts, operas----"

Madelon shook her head, laughing.

"That is a very deceptive appearance," she said. "Aunt Barbara and I never go anywhere but to classes, and masters, and to a small tea-party occasionally, and to see pictures sometimes."

"But how is that?--does Aunt Barbara not approve of society?"

"Oh, yes, but she thinks I am not old enough," answered Madelon, demurely. "So I am not out yet, and I have not been to a ball since I was ten years old."

"And do you like that sort of thing? It does not sound at all lively," said Graham.

"It is rather dull," replied Madelon, "simply; but then I think everything in England is--is _triste_--I beg your pardon," she added, quickly, colouring, "I did not mean to complain."

"No, no, I understand. You need not mind what you say to me, Madelon; I want to know what you are doing, what sort of life you are leading, how you get on. So you find England _triste?_ In what way?"

"I don't know--not in one way or another--it is everything. There is no life, no movement, no colour, or sunshine--yes, the sun shines, of course, but it is different. Ah, Monsieur Horace, you who have just come back to it, do you not understand what I mean?"

"I think I do in a way; but then, you know, coming to England is coming home to me, Madelon, and that makes a great difference."

"Yes, that makes a great difference; England can never be home to me, I think. I will tell you, Monsieur Horace--yesterday at that Exhibition I went to with Aunt Barbara, you know, I saw a picture; it was an Italian scene, quite small, only a white wall with a vine growing over the top, and a bit of blue sky, and a beggar-boy asleep in the shade. One has seen the same thing a hundred times before, but this one looked so bright, so hot, so sunny, it gave me such a longing--such a longing----"

She started up, and walked once or twice up and down the room. In a moment she came back, and went on hurriedly:--

"You ask me if I have forgotten the past, Monsieur Horace. I think of it always--always. I cannot like England, and English life. Aunt Barbara will not let me speak of it, and I try to forget it when she is by, but I cannot. Aunt Barbara is very kind--kinder than you can imagine--it is not that; but I am weary of it all so. When we walk in the Park, or sit here in the evening, reading, I am thinking of all the beautiful places there are in the world; of all the great things to be done, of all that people are seeing, and doing, and enjoying. I wish I could get away; I wish I could go anywhere--if I could run away--I have a voice, I could sing, I could make money enough to live upon. I think I should have done so, Monsieur Horace, if I had not known you were coming home. Yes, if I could run away somewhere, where I could breathe--be free----"

"You must never do that," cried Graham hastily--he was standing opposite to her now, with his back to the fire; "you don't know what you are saying, Madelon. Promise me that you will not think of it even."

"I was talking nonsense, I don't suppose I meant it really," she answered; "I could not do it, you know; but I promise all the same, as you wish it."

"And you always keep your promises, I know," said Graham, smiling at her.

"Ah, do not," she cried, suddenly covering her face with her hands, "don't speak of that, Monsieur Horace--I know now--ah, yes, I understand what you must have thought--but I did not then; indeed I was only a child then, I did not know what I was doing."

"I don't think you are much more than a child now," said Graham, taking one of her hands in his; "you are not much altered, after all, Madelon."

"Am I not?" she said. "But I have tried to improve; I have worked very hard, I thought it would please you, and that you would be glad to find me different--and I am different," she added, with a sudden pathetic change in her voice. "I understand a great deal now that I never thought of before; I think of the old life, but it is not all with pleasure, and I know why Aunt Barbara--and yet I do love it so much, and you are a part of it, Monsieur Horace--when you speak your vice seems to bring it back; and you call me Madelon--no one else calls me Madelon--" Her voice broke down.

"You are not happy, my dear little girl," said Graham, in his old kind way, and trying to laugh off her emotion. "I shall have to prescribe for you. What shall it be?--a course of balls and theatres? What should Aunt Barbara say to that?"

"She would not employ you for a doctor again, I think," said Madelon, smiling. "No, I am not unhappy, Monsieur Horace--only dull sometimes; and Aunt Barbara would say, that is on account of my foreign education. I know she thinks all foreigners frivolous and ill educated; I have heard her say so."

When Madelon went to her room that night, she sat long over her fire, pondering, girl-fashion, on her talk with Horace Graham. The tones of his voice were still ringing in her ears; she seemed still to see his kind look, to feel the friendly grasp of his hand; and as she thought of him, her familiar little bed-room, with its white curtained bed, and pictured walls, and well-filled bookshelves, seemed to vanish, and she saw herself again, a desolate child, sitting at the window of the Paris hotel that hot August night her father died, weeping behind the convent grating, crouched on the damp earth in the dark avenues of the Promenade à Sept Heures. He had not changed in all these years, she thought; he had come back kind and good as ever, to be her friend and protector, as he had always been; and he had said she was not altered much either, and yet she was--ah! so altered from the unconscious, unthinking, ignorant child he had left. She began to pace up and down the room, where indeed she had spent many a wakeful night before now, thinking, reflecting, reasoning, trying to make out the clue to her old life--striving to reconcile it with the new life around her--not too successfully on the whole. How was it she had first discovered the want of harmony between them? How was it she had first learnt to appreciate the gulf that separated the experiences of her first years, from the pure, peaceful life she was leading now? She could hardly have told; no one had revealed it to her, no one had spoken of it; but in a thousand unconsidered ways--in talk, in books, in the unconscious influences of her every-day surroundings, she had come to understand the true meaning of her father's life, and to know that the memory of these early days, that she had found so bright and happy, was something never to be spoken of, to be hidden away--a disgrace to her, even, perhaps. Aunt Barbara never would let her talk of them, would have blotted them out, if possible; she had wondered why at first--she understood well enough now, and resented the enforced silence. She only cherished the thought of them, and of her father the more; she only clung to her old love for him the more desperately, because it must be in secret; and she longed at times, with a sad, inexpressible yearning, for something of the old brightness that had died out one mournful night nearly eight years ago, when she had talked with her father for the last time.

"I think I must be a hundred years old," the girl would say to herself sometimes, after returning from one of those little parties of which she had spoken to Graham, where she had spent the evening in the company of a dozen other young ladies of her own age, all white muslin and sash-ribbons. "These girls, how tiresome they all are!--how they chatter and laugh, and what silly jokes they make! How can it amuse them? But they are still in the school-room, as Aunt Barbara is always telling me; and before that, they were all in the nursery, I suppose; they do not know anything about life; their only experiences concern nurses and governesses; whilst I--I--ah! is it possible I am no older than they are?"

She would lean her arms on the window-sill, and look out on the midnight sky; the Abbey chimes would ring out over the great city, overhead the stars would be shining perhaps, but down below, between the trees in the Park, a great glare would show where a million lamps were keeping watch till dawn. Shall we blame our Madelon, if she sometimes looked away from the stars, and down upon the glare that brightened far up into the dark sky? All the young blood was throbbing and stirring in her veins with such energy and vigour; the world was so wide, so wide, the circle around her so narrow, and in that bright, misty past, which, after all, she only half understood, were to be found so many precedents for possibilities that might still be hidden in the future. Shall we blame her, if, in her youthful belief in happiness as the chief good, her youthful impatience of peace, and calm, and rest, she longed with a great longing for movement, change, excitement? Outside, as it seemed to her, in her vague young imagination, such a free, glorious life was going on--and she had no part in it! As she stood at her window, the distant, ceaseless roar of the street traffic would sound to her, in the stillness of the night, like the beat of the great waves of life that for ever broke and receded, before they could touch the weary spot where she stood spell-bound in isolation. And through it all she said to herself, "When Monsieur Horace comes home,"--and now Monsieur Horace had come, would he do anything to help her?

Graham, indeed, was willing enough to do what he could do for her; and before he went to bed that night he wrote the following letter to his sister, Mrs. Vavasour:

"My dear Georgie,

"The butter and eggs arrived in safety, and Aunt Barbara declared herself much pleased with your hamper of country produce; but you will, no doubt, have heard from her before this. She is looking wonderfully well, and not a day older than when I left England. As for Madeleine Linders, I hardly recognised her, she is so grown and so much improved. I find I have at least a fortnight's business in London, and then I will run down to you for another visit, if I may. Would it put you out very much if I brought Madeleine with me for a time? I should like you and her to know each other, and a change would do her good. Aunt Barbara seems to have been giving her a high-pressure education, with no fun to counterbalance it, and the poor child finds it horribly dull work; and no wonder--I know I should be sorry to go through it myself. A few weeks with you and the children would brighten her up, and do her all the good in the world. Let me know what you think of it.

"Ever yours,

"Horace Graham."