Part 47

"Oh, Barty--my beloved little Barty--take me somewhere where we can sit down and talk. I've been thinking of you very much, Barty--I've lost my poor son--he died last Christmas! I was afraid you had forgotten my existence! I was thinking of you the very moment you spoke!"

The maid left them, and she took his arm and they found a seat.

She put up her veil and looked at him: there was a great likeness between them in spite of the difference of age. She had been his father's favorite sister (some ten years younger than Lord Runswick); and she was very handsome still, though about fifty-five.

"Oh, Barty, my darling--how things have gone wrong between us! Is it all my doing? Oh, I hope not!..." And she kissed him.

"How like, how like! And you're getting a little black and bulgy under the eyes--especially the left one--and so did he, at just about your age! And how thin you are!"

"I don't think anything need ever go wrong between us again, Aunt Caroline! I am a very altered person, and a very unlucky one!"

"Tell me, dear!"

And he told her all his story, from the fatal quarrel with her brother Lord Archibald--and the true history of that quarrel; and all that had happened since: he had nothing to keep back.

She frequently wept a little, for truth was in every tone of his voice; and when it came to the story of his lost eye, she wept very much indeed. And his need of affection, of female affection especially, and of kinship, was so immense that he clung to this most kind and loving woman as if she'd been his mother come back from the grave, or his dear Lady Archibald.

This meeting made a great difference to Barty in many ways--made amends! Lady Caroline meant to pass the winter at Malines, of all places in the world. The Archbishop was her friend, and she was friends also with one or two priests at the seminary there. She was by no means rich, having but an annuity of not quite three hundred a year; and it soon became the dearest wish of her heart that Barty should live with her for a while, and be nursed by her if he wanted nursing; and she thought he did. Besides, it would be convenient on account of his doctor, M. Noiret, of the University of Louvain, which was near Malines--half an hour by train.

And Barty was only too glad; this warm old love and devotion had suddenly dropped on to him by some happy enchantment out of the skies at a moment of sore need. And it was with a passion of gratitude that he accepted his aunt's proposals.

He well knew, also, how it was in him to brighten her lonely life, almost every hour of it--and promised himself that she should not be a loser by her kindness to Mr. Nobody of Nowhere. He remembered her love of fun, and pretty poetry, and little French songs, and droll chat--and nice cheerful meals tête-à-tête--and he was good at all these things. And how fond she was of reading out loud to him! The time might soon arrive when that would be a blessing indeed.

Indeed, a new interest had come into his life--not altogether a selfish interest either--but one well worth living for, though it was so unlike any interest that had ever filled his life before. He had been essentially a man's man hitherto, in spite of his gay light love for lovely woman; a good comrade par excellence, a frolicsome chum, a rollicking boon-companion, a jolly pal! He wanted quite desperately to love something staid and feminine and gainly and well bred, whatever its age! some kind soft warm thing in petticoats and thin shoes, with no hair on its face, and a voice that wasn't male!

Nor did her piety frighten him very much. He soon found that she was no longer the over-zealous proselytizing busybody of the Cross--but immensely a woman of the world, making immense allowances. All roads lead to Rome (dit-on!), except a few which converge in the opposite direction; but even Roman roads lead to this wide tolerance in the end--for those of a rich warm nature who have been well battered by life; and Lady Caroline had been very thoroughly battered indeed: a bad husband--a bad son, her only child! both dead, but deeply loved and lamented; and in her heart of hearts there lurked a sad suspicion that her piety (so deep and earnest and sincere) had not bettered their badness--on the contrary, perhaps! and had driven her Barty from her when he needed her most.

Now that his need of her was so great, greater than it had ever been before, she would take good care that no piety of hers should ever drive him away from her again; she felt almost penitent and apologetic for having done what she had known to be right--the woman in her had at last outgrown the nun.

She almost began to doubt whether she had not been led to selfishly overrate the paramount importance of the exclusive salvation of her own particular soul!

And then his frank, fresh look and manner, and honest boyish voice, so unmistakably sincere, and that mild and magnificent eye, so bright and humorous still, "so like--so like!" which couldn't even see her loving, anxious face.... Thank Heaven, there was still one eye left that she could appeal to with both her own!

And what a child he had been, poor dear--the very pearl of the Rohans! What Rohan of them all was ever a patch on this poor bastard of Antoinette Josselin's, either for beauty, pluck, or mother-wit--or even for honor, if it came to that? Why, a quixotic scruple of honor had ruined him, and she was Rohan enough to understand what the temptation had been the other way: she had seen the beautiful bad lady!

And, pure as her own life had been, she was no puritan, but of a church well versed in the deepest knowledge of our poor weak frail humanity; she has told me all about it, and I listened between the words.

So during the remainder of her stay at Blankenberghe he was very much with Lady Caroline, and rediscovered what a pleasant and lively companion she could be--especially at meals (she was fond of good food of a plain and wholesome kind, and took good care to get it).

She had her little narrownesses, to be sure, and was not hail-fellow-well-met with everybody, like him; and did not think very much of giddy little viscountesses with straddling loud-voiced Flemish husbands, nor of familiar facetious commercial millionaires, of whom Barty numbered two or three among his adorers; nor even of the "highly born" Irish wives of Belgian generals and all that. Madame de Clèves was an O'Brien.

These were old ingrained Rohan prejudices, and she was too old herself to alter.

But she loved the good fishermen whose picturesque boats made such a charming group on the sands at sunset, and also their wives and children; and here she and her nephew were "bien d'accord."

I fear her ladyship would not have appreciated very keenly the rising splendor of a certain not altogether unimportant modern house in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury--and here she would have been wrong. The Time has come when we throw the handkerchief at female Rohans, we Maurices and our like. I have not done so myself, it is true; but not from any rooted antipathy to any daughter of a hundred earls--nor yet from any particular diffidence on my own part.

Anyhow, Lady Caroline loved to hear all Barty had to say of his gay life among the beauty, rank, and fashion of Blankenberghe. She was very civil to the handsome Irish Madame de Clèves, née O'Brien, and listened politely to the family history of the O'Briens and that of the de Clèveses too: and learnt, without indecent surprise, or any emotion of any kind whatever, what she had never heard before--namely, that in the early part of the twelfth century a Rohan de Whitby had married an O'Brien of Ballywrotte; and other prehistoric facts of equal probability and importance.

She didn't believe much in people's twelfth--century reminiscences; she didn't even believe in those of her own family, who didn't believe in them either, or trouble about them in the least; and I dare say they were quite right.

Anyhow, when people solemnly talked about such things it made her rather sorry. But she bore up for Barty's sake, and the resigned, half-humorous courtesy with which she assented to these fables was really more humiliating to a sensitive, haughty soul than any mere supercilious disdain; not that she ever wished to humiliate, but she was easily bored, and thought that kind of conversation vulgar, futile, and rather grotesque.

Indeed, she grew quite fond of Madame de Clèves and the splendid young dragoon, and the sweet little black-haired daughter with lovely blue eyes, who sang so charmingly. For they were singularly charming people in every way, the de Clèveses; and that's a way Irish people often have--as well as of being proud of their ancient blood. There is no more innocent weakness. I have it very strongly--moi qui vous parle--on the maternal side. My mother was a Blake of Derrydown, a fact that nobody would have known unless she now and then accidentally happened to mention it herself, or else my father did. And so I take the opportunity of slipping it in here--just out of filial piety!