Probation

The scene once again the drawing-room of Mr. Blisset’s house; its occupants, Myles and Adrienne: he just arrived; she smiling to receive him, and he smiling in answer, as one might smile on suddenly finding a flower peeping up through the snow.

‘I rather hoped you would come to-night, to do some German,’ said she, ‘but I did not think you would come so early.’

‘We are working half-time. We began to-day,’ said Myles.

‘Half-time already? I thought there was such an enormous supply of cotton somewhere in the country.’

‘So there is, somewhere; but it will have to be bought with a price before it can be got at. Lots of other places have begun half-time to-day. And it’s not only that cotton is dear; there must have come a reaction after last year’s over-production. It was tremendous. There is a bad time coming for the workers; but those who can afford to wait, and who know how to use their chances, will make some big fortunes.’

‘Some others will lose them, I think.’

‘Naturally. The one goes with the other.’

‘But how will you all manage when the hard time comes?’

‘We shall pull through,’ said poor short-sighted Myles, little dreaming of the depths of misery, and what he, and such as he—proud, honest, self-dependent men—considered deepest degradation, which lay in the not far-distant future. ‘We shall pull through. If it is only half-wage we get, we shall have to do with half-doings; pinch a bit, and clem a bit, and put on a good face.’

‘But,’ said she gravely, ‘my uncle and Canon Ponsonby were saying the other night that the time must most likely come when there would be no work and no wages.’

‘If the war lasts a long time, or the ports are very well blockaded, it may come to that,’ said Myles, calmly. ‘But we, and a good many others besides us, have money laid by. We must live on that till better times come.’

In six months from that time, thousands of working homes were stripped of every stick of furniture that could possibly be done without. Many a savings bank had collapsed. Many a stout-hearted toiler had to bend his proud, unwilling feet towards the relief committee, or the guardians, and, with burning face, and bursting heart and down-drooped head, tell his tale, and ask for ‘charity.’ Not yet had the ‘Lancashire Lad’ sent to the Times that pathetic account of the shame-faced girls who stopped him to ask him, ‘Con yo help us a bit?’ that appeal which brought the tears to thousands of eyes of readers in every end of the earth. None of this had happened yet. The great ‘panic’ had not come swooping down upon the land; but it was not long before the cry of the distressed must go up.

Myles Heywood, after this his first half-day’s enforced idleness, perhaps not ill-pleased to be freed for a few hours, on a fine afternoon, from his toil, said he had no fears for the future. He felt himself strong: felt that a little pinching and ‘clemming’ would do him no material harm, and smiled at the storm-cloud hurrying across the Atlantic.

They went on talking upon different topics; but while she questioned or answered, his jealous eyes detected some change in her. She was not cold to him; there was the same genial grace and cordiality, and yet there was a change. In a pause which presently ensued, a footstep passed on the flags outside. She raised her head quickly and looked up, with parted lips and a startled expression.

‘Do you expect some one?’ asked Myles; and so much were the words a part of the thought, that he scarcely knew he had spoken them, until she answered,

‘I—oh no! Why should I? But shall we not read some more of “Iphigenia”? Here is the book.’

She did not look at him. There was a sudden constrained expression upon her face as she opened the book, and he as suddenly felt his heart sink with a reasonless, aimless, lover’s pang. He said nothing, however, but obediently began to read. But neither his heart nor her’s was in the work, as usual. She had told him that he was an apt scholar; his intelligence was ready, and his ear quick, and attuned to the Lancashire gutturals, and its broad ‘a’s’ and ‘u’s’ found little difficulty with the corresponding German sounds. Myles, for his part, had treasured up that hour that she devoted to him once or twice a week, as if it had been some precious coin or gem. Then she was all attention to him; then she was thinking of nothing else but him and his lesson, and the idea was heavenly. But this very evening, for the first time, he was obliged to let himself understand that her attention wandered, that she sometimes scarcely heard what he said, and his anxiety and foreboding increased every moment. He was no favoured lover; he had striven assiduously to conceal every sign of his devotion, for fear it should annoy her, or repel her. He had no right to ask her why her attention strayed, what made her absent and distraite, and that very fact made him the more sensitive to the change in her manner.

He read on, and translated, mechanically, dreamily, till he came to the words:

‘“And future deeds,”’ he slowly translated, while the sense of discord and oppression grew every moment stronger; ‘“and future deeds pressed about us, out of the night, countless as the stars.”’

She had not heard a word. He looked at her, with eyes that dared not be reproachful, and said nothing. There was pain, there was embarrassment, in her expression. Then she suddenly said,

‘I want to speak to you. Let us put away this book. I want to tell you something that I ought to have told you before.’

At once his face changed; the cloud fled; he turned to her with a smile.

‘Something you ought to have told me——’ he began.

The door was opened. Just outside they heard the voice of Brandon, Mr. Blisset’s old servant, saying,

‘I will see whether Mr. Blisset is at liberty, sir, if you will step in here.’

Then he threw the door wide open and announced,

‘Mr. Mallory.’

Sebastian came into the room, and Adrienne rose, feeling like one in a dream, looking like a person who has received overwhelming news of some kind. She saw Sebastian: she felt that Myles was there—felt it in every fibre of her being, and while Sebastian spoke to her, she was only intensely conscious that Myles was gazing at them both; and she wondered, with an intensity that amounted to pain, what he was thinking of her.

She gazed at Sebastian, as he came up to her, looking as if he saw no one but her, with extended hand, and she heard him as he said,

‘Miss Blisset, I little thought before Saturday, that I should have the happiness of meeting you again—in Thanshope!’

With that their hands closed, and her voice said (with a vibration),

‘It is certainly long since we met. I am glad to see you again.’

Myles had risen with a swift, almost unconscious impulse, and was now in the window, leaning against it, and looking into the night, which was now falling fast. He closed his eyes. He felt his own emotion to be almost grotesque in its intensity, but it was so—he could not help it. The devil jealousy had seized his very heart-strings on the instant, and clutched them relentlessly. There was one thing, and one only, that he could do—having no right to call her to account, he could suffer in silence, and speak gently to her—after all, he reminded himself, she had been exquisitely kind to him, and he had no sort of claim upon such kindness.

While Myles fought this silent, desperate battle with the feelings which urged him to rush out of the room, and leave those two together, Sebastian was saying,

‘I came to see Mr. Blisset on some business, and his servant asked me to come in here. I fear I disturb you.’

‘Not at all. May I introduce—but Mr. Heywood tells me he knows you already.’

She turned to Myles, who also turned. His very emotion made him rise to the occasion. Pride and self-esteem, respect and regard for Adrienne, modesty as to his own merits, all urged him to put on an outwardly calm demeanour; and Sebastian, whatever astonishment he might feel, was of course far too civilised to betray it.

‘We have met already to-day, earlier,’ remarked Mr. Mallory, courteously bowing towards the young man, who, on his part, bowed his head gravely and proudly, and wished his employer good evening. If Adrienne had not flushed up, and looked with such startled, conscious eyes, and such a half-excited smile, around her, he could have done even more—he might have been able to force a smile too, but under the circumstances it was physically impossible.

Adrienne, turning aside, as if to push forward a chair, looked at him, but in his then state of mind he could not understand the glance; all he could do was to answer it with another, of bitter, clouded, miserable feeling; sorrow, pain, and a sort of premonitory despair.

Sebastian did not see Adrienne’s look, but he did see this one of Myles’s, and it made him feel suddenly grave and doubtful. In an instant he understood how things were with Myles: as to Adrienne’s feelings he was utterly in the dark. He remembered one morning, when she, relieved through his efforts of great anxiety, had clasped his hand, and, looking up at him with brimming eyes, had said, ‘There is nothing I would not do for you.’ They had been almost the last words she had said to him. The day afterwards he had lost her. He knew nothing of what she thought of him now, but he realised immediately that the stiff-necked young workman, whose pride and reserve resisted all his efforts to break through them, was over head and ears in love with the woman of whom he had been thinking, when he spoke to Helena Spenceley of ‘the nicest girl I ever knew.’ It might be preposterous: it might be that young, handsome, and more than ordinarily high-spirited and ambitious young workman had no business to fall in love with young ladies in a superior position in life; but all that did not prevent the fact that such an occurrence had taken place before, and would take place again. Sebastian knew it, and, reasoning from the interest he himself took in Myles, did not underrate the importance of the discovery he had made.

‘Have you seen the evening edition of the Manchester paper?’ he asked Myles, as he seated himself.

‘To-night? No.’

‘The war news seems rather important. I hope our neutrality won’t be put in peril. It would be an everlasting disgrace to us if it were to be interrupted for a moment.’

‘Yes, it would,’ assented Myles, dimly conscious that it was a superior sophistication which was able to converse thus easily upon foreign affairs—under the circumstances.

‘I suppose you take a great interest in the war too?’ said Sebastian, turning to Adrienne.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Mr. Heywood and I have the audacity to dispute even with my uncle sometimes.’

‘Mr. Blisset is your uncle?’

‘Yes. Oh! I forgot you could not know; I live with him here. Have you known him before?’

‘Never. But I find he is my tenant I came to see him on a matter of business and——’

‘Will you step into the other room, sir?’ interrupted Brandon, coming in.

Sebastian rose.

‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked, stooping a little towards Adrienne, who looked up to him with the same distinct, though well-repressed, agitation or excitement of some kind in her face.

‘It will depend upon how long you stay; I do not know,’ said she; and her voice was not calm and deliberate as usual.

Myles sat still, his face composed, watching those two; realising her grace and beauty, and his charm of manner, and all those advantages in the background. No girl—he felt it keenly—need be ashamed of the fact that she had fallen captive to the wooing of Sebastian Mallory. His heart grew heavier and colder.

‘Then I will say good evening, in case I do not see you again,’ said Sebastian.

They shook hands, and Mallory followed the waiting Brandon.

Then they were left alone. Adrienne’s face had changed; the excitement had gone from it; it was pale; the glow had faded; her voice sounded tired when she spoke.

‘When Mr. Mallory came,’ she said, forcing a smile, ‘I was just going to explain to you that I knew him—or rather, had known him a few years ago. It was curious that he should call at that very moment.’

‘Yes,’ said Myles, in a voice colourless as her own.

‘Once he was very kind,’ she pursued, ‘when my father was in trouble. He saved me a great deal of anxiety and distress.’

‘Yes,’ again assented Myles. ‘I am sure he is very considerate, and means to do right.’

‘You think so! Then your opinion has changed?’

‘Yes, very much. He is not at all the kind of man I supposed him to be.’

‘I am glad you have discovered that. I am sure you and he will get on, now that the misunderstanding is cleared up.’

Myles rose, smiling rather a faint, miserable smile. He felt it impossible not to give one little thrust in the midst of the agony he was himself enduring.

‘You know I am hot-tempered, and, I am afraid, prejudiced,’ said he quietly; ‘but if you had mentioned to me that you knew Mr. Mallory, and that he was not the kind of man I supposed, I should—perhaps I might have behaved more rationally.’

Adrienne stood speechless. She made neither apology nor excuse. When he said good night, she put out her hand silently, and did not meet his eyes. His own manner was quite to coldness. Thus they parted. Myles, as he walked home, could not forget the verse from ‘Iphigenia,’ which he had laboriously translated:

In that moment he doubted bitterly whether any deeds, whether anything but woes, lay for him in the future.

Meanwhile Adrienne was left alone to reflect upon the situation, to think of Sebastian’s smile, and of Myles Heywood’s pale face and glowing eyes; and, after due reflection, either to congratulate or commiserate herself, as she thought most appropriate.