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

roar--a somewhat affected roar--of scornful laughter.

"Well, of all the phenomena of the day, that is the most ludicrous," he cried, "--the so-called aristocracy thinking that they can produce anything in the shape of art or literature. The aristocracy--the most exhausted of all our exhausted social strata--what can be expected from it? Why, we haven't anywhere nowadays either art or literature or drama that is worthy of the name--not anywhere--it is all a ghastly, spurious make-believe--a mechanical manufactory of paintings and books and plays without a spark of life in them--"

Lionel Moore resentfully thought to himself that if Mr. Quirk had been able to do anything in any one of these directions he might have held less despairing views; but, of course, he did not interrupt this feebly tempestuous monologue.

"--We are all played out, that is the fact--the soil is exhausted--we want a great national upheaval--a new condition of things--a social revolution, in short. And we're going to get it" he continued, in a sort of triumphant way; "there's no mistake about that; the social revolution is in the air, it is under our feet, it is pressing in upon us from every side; and yet at the very moment that the aristocracy have got notice to quit their deer-forests and their salmon-rivers and grouse-moors, they so far mistake the signs of the times that they think they should be devoting themselves to art and going on the stage! Was there ever such incomprehensible madness?"

"I hope they won't sweep away deer-forests and grouse-moors just all at once," the young baritone said, modestly, "for I am asked to go to the Highlands at the beginning of next August."

"Make haste, then, and see the last of these doomed institutions" observed Mr. Quirk, with dark significance, as he looked up from his steak and onions. "I tell you deer-forests are doomed; grouse-moors are doomed; salmon-rivers are doomed. They are a survival of feudal rights and privileges which the new democracy--the new ruling power--will make short work of. The time has gone by for all these absurd restrictions and reservations! There is no defence for them; there never was; they were conceived in an iniquity of logic which modern common-sense will no longer suffer. Bona vacantia can't belong to anybody--therefore they belong to the king; that's a pretty piece of reasoning, isn't it? And if the crofter or the laborer says, 'Bona vacantia can't belong to anybody--therefore they belong to me'--isn't the reasoning as good? But it is not merely game-laws that must be abolished, it is game itself."

"If you abolish the one, you'll soon get rid of the other," Maurice Mangan said, with a kind of half-contemptuous indifference; he was examining this person in a curious way, as he might have looked through the wires of a cage in the Zoological Gardens.

"Both must be abolished," Mr. Octavius Quirk continued, with windy vehemence. "The very distinction that takes any animal ferae naturae and constitutes it game is a relic of class privilege and must go--"

"Then Irish landlords will no longer be considered ferae naturae?" Mangan asked, incidentally.

"We must be free from these feudal tyrannies, these mediaeval chains and manacles that the Norman kings imposed on a conquered people. We must be as free as the United States of America--"

"America!" Mangan said; and he was rude enough to laugh. "The State of New York has more stringent game-laws than any European country that I know of; and why not? They wanted to preserve certain wild animals, for the general good; and they took the only possible way."

Quirk was disconcerted only for a moment; presently he had resumed, in his reckless, mouton-enrage fashion,

"That may be; but the Democracy of Great Britain has pronounced against game; and game must go; there is no disputing the fact. Hunting in any civilized community is a relic of barbarism; it is worse in this country--it is an infringement of the natural rights of the tiller of the soil. What is the use of talking about it?--the whole thing is doomed; if you're going to Scotland this autumn, Mr. Moore, if you are to be shown all those exclusive pastimes of the rich and privileged classes, well, I'd advise you to keep your eyes open, and write as clear an account of what you see as you can; and, by Jove, twenty years hence your book will be read with amazement by the new generation!"

Here the pot of foaming stout claimed his attention; he buried his head in it; and thereafter, sitting back in his chair, sighed forth his satisfaction. The time was come for a large cigar.

And how, in the face of this fierce denunciation of the wealthy classes and all their ways, could Lionel Moore put in a word for Lady Adela's poor little literary infant? It would be shrivelled into nothing by a blast of this simulated simoom. It would be trodden under foot by the log-roller's elephantine jocosity. In a sort of despair he turned to Maurice Mangan, and would have entered into conversation with him but that Mangan now rose and said he must be going, nor could he be prevailed on to stay. Lionel accompanied him into the hall.

"That Jabberwock makes me sick; he's such an ugly devil," Mangan said, as he put on his hat; and surely that was strange language coming from a grave philosopher who was about to publish a volume on the "Fundamental Fallacies of M. Comte."

"But what am I to do, Maurice?" Lionel said, as his friend was leaving. "It's no use asking for his intervention at present; he's simply running amuck."

"If your friend--Lady What's-her-name--is as clever as you say, she'll just twist that fellow round her finger," the other observed, briefly. "Good-night, Linn."

And indeed it was not of Octavius Little, nor yet of Lady Adela's novel, that Maurice Mangan was thinking as he carelessly walked away through the dark London thoroughfares, towards his rooms in Victoria Street. He was thinking of that quiet little Surrey village; and of two boys there who had a great belief in each other--and in themselves, too, for the matter of that; and of all the beautiful and wonderful dreams they dreamed while as yet the far-reaching future was veiled from them. And then he thought of Linn Moore's dressing-room at the theatre; and of the paints and powder and vulgar tinsel that had to fit him out for exhibition before the footlights; and of the feverish whirl of life and the bedazzlement of popularity and fashionable petting; and somehow or other the closing lines of Mrs. Browning's poem would come ever and anon into his head as a sort of unceasing refrain:


"The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,--
For the reed that grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river."



CHAPTER III.


NINA.

One morning Lionel was just about to go out (he had already been round to the gymnasium and got his fencing over) when the house-porter came up and said that a young lady wished to see him.

"What does she want?" he said, impatiently--for something had gone wrong with the clasp of his cigarette-case, and he could not get it right. "What's her name? Who is she?"

"She gave me her name, sir; but I did not quite catch it," said the factotum of the house.

"Oh, well, send her up," said he; no doubt this was some trembling debutante, accompanied by an ancient duenna and a roll of music. And then he went to the window, to try to get the impenitent clasp to shut.

But perhaps he would not have been so wholly engrossed with that trifling difficulty had he known who this was who had come softly up the stair and was now standing, irresolute, smiling, wondering, at the open door. She was a remarkably pretty, even handsome young lady, whose pale, clear, olive complexion and coal-black hair bespoke her Southern birth; while there was an eager and yet timid look in her lustrous, soft black eyes, and something about the mobile, half-parted mouth that seemed to say she hardly knew whether to cry or laugh over this meeting with an old friend. A very charming picture she presented there; for, besides her attractive personal appearance, she was very neatly, not to say coquettishly, dressed, her costume, which had a distinctly foreign air, being all of black, save for the smart little French-looking hat of deep crimson straw and velvet.

At last she said,

"Leo!"

He turned instantly, and had nearly dropped the cigarette-case in his amazement. And for a second he seemed paralyzed of speech--he was wholly bewildered--perhaps overcome by some swift sense of responsibility at finding Antonia Rossi in London, and alone.

"Che, Nina mia," he cried; "tu stai cca a Londra!--chesta mo, chi su credeva!--e senza manca scriverme nu viers' e lettere--Nina!--mi pare nu suonno!--"

She interrupted him; she came forward, smiling--and the parting of the pretty lips showed a sunny gleam of teeth; she held up her two hands, palm outwards, as if she would shut away from herself that old, familiar Neapolitanese.

"No, no, no, Leo," she said, rapidly, "I speak English now--I study, study, study, morning, day, night; and always I say, 'When I see Leo, he have much surprise that I speak English'--always I say, 'Some day I go to England, and when I see Leo'--"

The happy, eager smile suddenly died away from her face. She looked at him. A strange kind of trouble--of doubt and wonderment and pain--came into those soft, dark, expressive eyes.

"You--you not wish to see me, Leo?" she said, rather breathlessly--and as if she could hardly believe this thing. "I come to London--and you not glad to see me--"

Quick tears of wounded pride sprang to the long black lashes; but, with a dignified, even haughty inclination of the head, she turned from him and put her hand on the handle of the door. At the same instant he caught her arm.

"Why, Nina, you're just the spoiled child you always were! Ah, your English doesn't go so far as that; you don't know what a spoiled child is?--e la cianciosella, you Neapolitan girl! Why, of course I'm glad to see you--I am delighted to see you--but you frightened me, Nina--your coming like this, alone--"

"I frighten you, Leo?" she said, and a quick laugh shone brightly through her tears. "Ah, I see--it is that I have no chaperon? But I had no time--I wished to see you, Leo--I said, 'Leo will understand, and afterwards I get a chaperon all correctly.' Oh, yes, yes, I know--but where is the time?--yesterday I go through the streets--it is Leo, Leo everywhere in the windows--I see you in this costume, in the other costume--and your name so large, so very large, in the--in the--"

"The theatre-bills? Well, sit down, Nina, and tell me how you come to be in London."

She had by this time quite forgiven or forgotten his first dismay on finding her there; and now she took a chair with much quiet complaisance, and sat down, and put her black silk sunshade across her knees.

"It is simple," she said, and from time to time she regarded him in a very frank and pleased and even affectionate way, as if the old comradeship of the time when they were both studying in Naples was not to be interfered with by the natural timidity of a young and extremely pretty woman coming as a stranger into a strange town. "You remember Carmela, Leo? Carmela and