Chapter II: Looking Back

I HAD grown-up, a penniless little orphan, in my uncle's quiet country cottage, and when he died, I knew not where to look for another home. He had commended me to the care of his oldest friend, the rector of the parish, and had left me all that he had to leave—a thousand pounds and his blessing. The rector was a good man and a wise; he invested my small fortune to the best advantage, and sent me up to town to be the protégée and companion of his widowed sister, Lady Waterville.

It had seemed to me a hard thing that nurse, who had been my loving tyrant from baby-hood, should have left me just twelve months before my uncle's death. After years of comfortable widowhood, she had yielded to the prayers of an old admirer, whose liking for her comely, rustic face had survived through many chances and changes. And so, with tears, she had taken leave of my uncle and me, and had gone off with her husband to his London home, little thinking how soon I was destined to follow her.

Lady Waterville was very stout, very amiable, and indescribably lazy. I have said "indescribably," because no word in any language would ever completely express that wonderful indolence of hers. Many people are sufficiently ashamed of their idleness to veil it under pretty shams of work; but Lady Waterville never was ashamed in the least. She was uncompromisingly honest, and would plainly admit that anything in the shape of an occupation was hateful to her. The world was far too busy, she declared; as for herself, it had not pleased a kind Providence to give her a vocation, and she did not mean to thwart its designs by trying to find employment.

"Here I sit," she would say, "with my idle hands before me, and even Satan himself has never found any mischief for them to do. So Dr. Watts is not infallible, my dear."

In one of his stories, Mr. Wilkie Collins has introduced us to a lady who sat through life, and she must certainly have borne a strong resemblance to Lady Waterville. Strange as it may seem, this sitting existence appeared to agree with her extremely well; and, despite her obesity, she was a pretty old woman, with an open, good-tempered face, and soft hair which was a mixture of silver and gold. I have heard Ronald say that she always reminded him of an immense doll, smiling fatuously upon you through its glass window, untouched by any human ills, unaltered by the lapse of time. But although she was not blessed (or cursed) with any deep feelings, she was very comfortable to live with, and unvarying in her kindness to me.

Her husband, Sir Clement Waterville, had been knighted for his services in India; and, having done with the army, he had settled himself in an old house in George Street, Hanover Square. There his widow was still living when I came up to town to be her companion, and there she continued to live to the end of her days.

The house was let on a long lease at two hundred and sixty pounds a year, and was the property of Ronald Hepburne. It was the only property that he possessed, and it had been left to him by his aunt, Inez Greystock, who had perished in the Indian Mutiny.

Sir Clement Waterville and Colonel Greystock (the husband of Inez) had been intimate friends in India; and so it came to pass that Ronald became acquainted with the Watervilles, and continued to visit the widow after Sir Clement's death.

Lady Waterville did not receive many visitors, as she hated the trouble of entertaining; but any one who had been liked by her husband was welcomed to her house; and there were two young men in whom Sir Clement had taken an especial interest. These two were William Greystock and Ronald Hepburne.

Colonel Greystock had survived his wife many years; he had never had any children, and William, his nephew, had taken the place of a son. Through his influence, William had obtained a Government appointment in India, and had inherited all that his uncle had to leave. When I came to live with Lady Waterville, the colonel had been dead some time; and William, a single man, was living comfortably on his means.

"William Greystock would be a good match for you, Louie," said Lady Waterville one day.

How well I remember that day! It was May time; the drawing-room was sweet with flowers, and through the open windows came the first warm breath of summer. We sat with a little tea-table between us; the clocks were just striking four, and the sunshine lay brightly on the old street and square. I had been in town three months, and my ears had grown accustomed to the ceaseless roll of wheels; the noises that had seemed deafening at first were pleasant now, and I had already begun to love that loud hum of unresting life which is still dear to me.

Not being in the least in awe of Lady Waterville, I never hesitated to speak my mind.

"I don't like Mr. Greystock much," I said, frankly.

"You might like him better, if he were to pay you particular attentions, my dear."

"I don't think I should. I liked our curate very much indeed until he became particularly attentive, and then I turned against him in the most extraordinary way. If I could have married him I would, just to please my uncle and the rector."

"So you are not quite such 'an unlesson'd girl' as I supposed," said Lady Waterville, surveying me with a benign smile. "You have had a lover; but as he didn't succeed, I think he must have played his cards very badly."

"He played them well enough, I believe," I replied, smiling at the remembrance of sundry proofs of devotion.

"I don't mean that he was not in earnest." The widow was still smiling at me across her teacup. "But he must have been terribly deficient in tact. You were in the dullest of country places; you saw nobody, and went nowhere. Under such circumstances, I don't see how any decent man could have failed to win you. My brother used to be rather fastidious about curates, so I suppose your admirer was presentable."

"Decidedly presentable and good-looking; but I got tired of him and his face."

"What was the matter with his face?"

"Nothing; but it was a face that had no story in it."

Lady Waterville held out her cup for more cream, and then looked at me with a slight shake of the head.

"I know you now," she said. "Louie, you are just the kind of girl who will marry badly or not marry at all."

I laughed gaily.

"What an awful prophecy, Lady Waterville!" I cried.

"Do you know what it is that writes the story on a man's face?" she went on. "I will tell you—folly, extravagance, sin, and bitter repentance."

I grew graver as I listened. Was she thinking of the very face that I was silently picturing at that moment? Despite her laziness, Lady Waterville possessed the faculty of observation; perhaps she saw all the more of life because she was wholly unoccupied. Her eyes were always at liberty; never being bent on crewelwork or patchwork, they studied human countenances in a leisurely fashion, and it is possible that they discovered a good many little secrets. I felt my cheeks beginning to burn.

"Give me another cup of tea, my dear," she said, speaking in quite a different tone. "The last was not sweet enough. How well those buttercups suit you!"

I had fastened a cluster of large water-buttercups into my bodice, and I thoroughly appreciated the widow's kindness in looking at them, and taking no notice of my blushes. She was talking on in a pleasant, rambling way, and I was gradually getting cool again, when the page threw open the door and announced Mr. Greystock.

William Greystock came in, dark, bland, inscrutable as he always was. He had black eyes, deep-set, and black hair, closely cropped, that lay in thick ripples over his head. As he wore no moustache, there was nothing to veil the hard outline of his thin lips and prominent chin; and I thought then (as I think now) that his was the strongest and most cruel profile I had ever seen in all my life.

He talked well and fluently; admired Lady Waterville's flowers, and even deigned to praise my humble buttercups. I told him that I had bought them of a little girl in the street, just because they reminded me of my old home; and then he asked me if I had not lately written some verses about the country.

My cheeks grew hot again. Lady Waterville looked with an amused glance from William Greystock's face to mine.

"I did not know that Miss Coverdale ever wrote poetry," she said to him. "Pray, how did you find it out?"

"Through Ronald," he replied, with one of his peculiar smiles. "I went into his room last night and found him as usual with his beloved guitar. He was setting some lines to music; I asked who had written them, and he told me."

"Does he always tell you everything?" I inquired, trying to speak playfully, and succeeding very badly.

"Yes," was the quiet answer.

"He has inherited his love of the guitar from his Aunt Inez," said Lady Waterville, not looking at me. "She had quite an unreasonable fondness for her guitar, poor woman! I used to see her sometimes when she was first married to Colonel Greystock, and I always thought her a most extraordinary person. Ronald's mother, her own sister, was not like her in the least."

"I have often looked at those two portraits in the dining-room," said I. "Mrs. Hepburne was not nearly as handsome as her sister, but I like her face better."

"Ronald is exactly like his aunt," Mr. Greystock remarked.

"As I was saying," went on Lady Waterville, "I always thought Inez a most extraordinary person. She expected too much happiness and never got any at all. Poor thing! She was a disappointed woman from beginning to end. Any one with a genius for scribbling might make a novel out of her history."

"I should like to hear it," I said.

Lady Waterville was rather fond of storytelling, and she had been, as I soon discovered, more than commonly interested in Inez Greystock.

"Inez and Estella Winton," she began, "were the daughters of Captain Winton, an English naval officer who had married a Spanish lady. The mother died when the children were young; the father was often at sea, and they were left a good deal to their own devices. Inez was beautiful, and had, of course, a train of admirers; but she cared for no one save a young soldier, who was known in those days as Lieutenant Greystock. He liked her well enough, Louie, but not half as well as she liked him. She lavished gold, you see, and got only silver in return."

"My uncle was a matter-of-fact man," put in William, in his quiet voice. "There never could have been an atom of romance in his nature."

"Just so," said Lady Waterville. "Inez was a fool to expect too much from him. He was not rich enough to marry, nor patient enough to bear with her exacting ways, and the affair ended, as such affairs often do, in a quarrel and a parting."

"What a pity," I cried, regretfully.

"I don't know that it was a pity, Louie. They would have gone wrangling through their youth together. But Inez, foolish girl, could never forget Greystock, although she married the richest man of her acquaintance, a Mr. Wendall. He was a diamond merchant, and after their marriage, he brought her to this very house, and invited Estella to come and live with them."

"He was a good husband, I believe," said William.

"He must have had the patience of Job," Lady Waterville replied. "After enduring his wife's irritable temper for seven years, he died, and left her handsomely provided for. And then, for two years more she lived here in peace and quietness with Estella and the guitar."

"No wonder that she chose to be painted playing on it," William Greystock remarked. "Her fondness for the thing must have amounted to a positive mania. It had belonged to her mother, had it not?"

"To her mother and grandmother. It was never far from her side, and she would compose airs and set words to them, just as Ronald does now-a-days. That portrait in the dining-room is Inez herself; there she sits as she did in life, her great Spanish eyes looking into space, and her guitar resting on her knees. It is a fine picture."

"It is beautiful," I said, "but very sad. And her second marriage—how did that come to pass?"

"It came to pass through Colonel Greystock's need of money," answered Lady Waterville, with her usual frankness. "William knows that I am telling an unvarnished tale. His uncle returned from India on leave, and sought out his old love, and Inez fancied, no doubt, that she had found her lost youth again. Captain Hepburne was Colonel Greystock's friend, and he happened to fall in love with Estella. On the same day the two sisters were married, very quietly, in St. George's Church, and the two husbands took their wives back with them to India."

"Then Inez was happy in her last days?" said I.

But Lady Waterville shook her head.