Prince Fortunatus by William Black (ebook reader with highlighter TXT) 📖

is that your fashionable friends--whose positions and occupations you admire--would care nothing more about you. You are interesting to them now because you are a favorite of the public, because you play the chief part at the New Theatre. What would you be as a briefless barrister? Who would provide you with salmon-fishing and deer-stalking then? If you aspired to marry one of those dames of high degree, what would be your claims and qualifications? You say you would almost rather be a gillie in charge of dogs and ponies. A gillie in charge of dogs and ponies doesn't enjoy many conversations with his young mistress; and if he made bold to demand any closer alliance Pauline would pretty soon have that Claude kicked off the premises--and serve him right. If you had come to me and said, 'I am too well off; I am being spoiled and petted to death; the simplicity and dignity of life is being wholly lost in all this fashionable flattery, this public notoriety and applause; and to recover myself a little--as a kind of purification--I am going to put aside my trappings; I will go and work as a hod-carrier for three months or six months; I will live on the plainest fare; I will bear patiently the cursing the master of the gang will undoubtedly hurl at me; I will sleep on a straw mattress'--then I could have understood that. But what is it you renounce?--and why? You think you would recommend yourself better to your swell friends if you dropped the theatre altogether--"

"Don't you want to hire a hall?" said Lionel, gloomily.

"Oh, nobody likes being preached at less than I do myself," Mangan said, with perfect equanimity, "but you see I think I ought to tell you, when you ask me, how I regard the situation. And, mind you, there is something very heroic--very impracticably heroic, but magnanimous all the same--in your idea that you might abandon all the popularity and position you have won as a mere matter of sentiment. Of course you won't do it. You couldn't bring yourself to become a mere nobody--as would happen if you went into chambers and began reading up law-books. And you wouldn't be any nearer to salmon-fishing and deer-forests that way, or to the people who possess these by birth and inheritance. The trouble with you, Linn, my boy, as with most of us, is that you weren't born in the purple. It is quite true that if you were called to the bar you could properly claim the title of esquire, and you would find yourself not further down than the hundred and fiftieth or hundred and sixtieth section in the tables of precedence; but if you went with this qualification to those fine friends of yours, they would admit its validity, and let you know at the same time you were no longer interesting to them. Harry Thornhill, of the New Theatre, has a free passport everywhere; Mr. Lionel Moore, of the Middle Temple, wouldn't be wanted anywhere."

"You are very worldly-wise to-night, Maurice."

"I don't want to see you make a sacrifice that wouldn't bring you what you expect to gain by it," Mangan said. "But, as I say, you won't make any such sacrifice. You have had your brain turned by a pretty pair of eyes--perhaps by an elegant figure--and you have been troubled and dissatisfied and dreaming dreams."

"If that is your conclusion and summing-up of the whole matter," Lionel said, with studied indifference, "perhaps you will offer me a drink, and I'll have a cigarette, and we can talk about something on which we are likely to agree."

"I'm sure I beg your pardon," Mangan said, with a laugh; and he went and brought forth what modest stores he had, and he was quite willing that the conversation should flow into another channel.

And little did Lionel know that at this very moment there was something awaiting him at his own rooms that would (far more effectually than any reasoning and plain speaking) banish from his mind, for the moment at least, all those restless aspirations and vague regrets. When eventually he arrived in Piccadilly and went up-stairs, he was not expecting any letters, this being Sunday; and as there was on the table only a small parcel, he would probably have left that unheeded till the morning (no doubt it was a pair of worked slippers, or a couple of ivory-backed brushes, or something of the kind) but that in passing he happened to glance at the note on the top of it, and he observed that the handwriting was foreign. He took it up carelessly and opened it; his carelessness soon vanished. The message was from Mlle. Girond, and it was in French:

"DEAR MR. MOORE,--To-day Mrs. Grey and I have called twice at your
apartments, but in vain, and now I leave this letter for you. It is
frightful, what has happened. Nina has gone, no one knows where; we
can hear nothing of her. This morning when I came down to her room
she was gone; there was a letter for me, one for Mr. Lehmann, one
for Miss Constance, asking her to be ready to sing to-morrow night,
another for Mrs. Grey, with money for the apartments until the end
of the month, and also there was this little packet for you. In her
letter to me she asks me to see them all delivered. During the
night she must have made these arrangements; in the morning she is
gone! I am in despair; I know not what to do. Will you have the
goodness to come down to-morrow as soon as possible?

"ESTELLE."

And then mechanically he drew a chair to the table, and sat down and pulled the small package towards him; perhaps the contents might help to explain this extraordinary thing that had occurred. But the moment that he took the lid off the pasteboard box he was more bewildered than ever; for the first glimpse told him that Nina had returned to him all the little presents he had made to her in careless moments.

"Nina!" he said, under his voice, in a tone of indignant reproach.

Yes, here was every one of them, from the enclasped loving-cup to the chance trinkets he had purchased for her just as they happened to attract his eye. He took them all out; there was no letter, no message of any kind. And then he asked himself, almost angrily, what sort of mad freak was this. Had the wayward and petulant Nina--forgetting all the suave and gracious demeanor she had been teaching herself since she came to England--had she run away in a fit of temper, breaking her engagement at the theatre, and causing alarm and anxiety to her friends, all about nothing? For he and she had not quarrelled in any way whatsoever, as far as he knew. One fancy, at least, never occurred to him--or, if it occurred to him, it was dismissed in a moment--that Nina might have had a secret lover; that she had honestly wished to return these presents before making an elopement. It was quite possible that Nicolo Ciana, if he had heard of Nina's success in England, might have pursued her, and sought to marry so very eligible a helpmeet; but if the young man with the greasy hair and the sham jewelry and the falsetto voice had really come to England, Lionel knew who would have been the first to bid him return to his native shores and his zuccherelli. Had not Nina indignantly denied that he had ever dared to address her as "Nenna mia," or that his perpetual "Antoniella, Antonia," in any way referred to her? No; Lionel did not think that Nicolo Ciana had much to do with Nina's disappearance.

And then, as he regarded this little box of useless jewelry, another wild guess flashed through his brain, leaving him somewhat breathless, almost frightened. Was it possible that Nina had mistaken these gifts for love-gifts, had discovered her mistake, and, in a fit of wounded pride, had flung them back and fled forever from this England that had deceived her? He was not vain enough to think there could be anything more serious, that Nina might be breaking her heart over what had happened to her; but it was quite enough if he had unconsciously led her to believe that he was paying her attentions. He looked at that loving-cup with some pricking of conscience; he had to confess that such a gift was capable of misconstruction. It had never occurred to him that she might regard it as some kind of mute declaration--as a pledge of affection between him and her that necessitated no clearer understanding. He had seen the two tiny goblets in a window; he had been taken by the pretty silver-gilt ornamentation; he had been interested in the old-fashioned custom; and he had lightly imagined that Nina would be pleased--that was all. And now that he thought of it, he had to confess that he had been indiscreet. It is true he had given Nina those presents from time to time in a careless and haphazard fashion that ought not to have been misunderstood--only, as he had to remind himself, Nina must have perceived that he did not give similar presents to Miss Burgoyne, or Estelle Girond, or anybody else in the theatre. And was Nina now thinking that he had treated her badly?--Nina, who had been always his sympathizing friend, his gentle adviser, and kind companion. Was there any one in the world that he less wished to harm? He supposed she must have been angry when she returned these jewels and gew-gaws; clearly she was too proud to send him any other message. And now she would be away somewhere, where he could not get hold of her to pet her into a reconciliation again; no doubt there was some hurt feeling of injury in her heart--perhaps she was even crying.

"Poor Nina!" he said to himself, little dreaming of the true state of affairs. "I hope it isn't so? but if it is so, here have I, through mere thoughtlessness, wounded her pride, and, what is more, interfered with her professional career. I suppose she'll go right away back to old Pandiani; and they'll be precious glad to get her now at Malta, after her success in England. Perhaps some day we shall hear of her coming over here again, as a famous star in grand opera; that will be her revenge. But I never thought Nina would want to be revenged on me."

And yet he was uneasy; there was something in all this he did not understand. He began to long for the coming of the next day, that he might go away down to Sloane Street and hear what Miss Girond had to tell him. Why, for example, he asked himself, had Nina taken this step so abruptly--so entirely without warning? How and when had she made the discovery that she had mistaken the intention of those friendly little acts of kindness and his constant association with her? Then he tried to remember on what terms he had last parted from her. It was at the theatre, as he patiently summoned up each circumstance. It was at the theatre, on the preceding night. She had come to him in the wings, observing that he looked rather vexed, and she had given him comforting and cheerful words, as was her wont. Surely there was no anger in her mind against him then. But thereafter? Well, he had seen no more of Nina. When Miss Cunyngham had