Amethyst: The Story of a Beauty

“Don’t let the mother set you on to bully me about staying at home. I always meant to have a shot at a white bear some time – except once, for about three months. – And that’s quite over, for good and all. I’ve no more concern with it. So I must do something else, you know; and I like sport, and seeing new places.”

Lucian paused again, and Sylvester looked at him keenly, hardly knowing what to say in answer.

“I am convinced,” continued Lucian, with the same unmoved voice and face, “that I acted rightly. So we’ll say no more about it. What have you been about? The mother says you’re writing a poem.”

“Yes,” said Sylvester; “will you read it?”

“I’ll buy it,” said Lucian, gravely; “and, yes, I’ll read it, if you like, as it’s yours. I hope you’ll make Tennyson take a back seat.”

“Thank you,” said Sylvester, laughing. “I’ll be content to hang on behind his coach. But of course I’m rather full of it. I’ve had several things in reviews and magazines, and some men, whose word is worth something, like them. But it’s all luck. The public’s harder to hit than a tiger, Lucy.”

“I hope it won’t turn and rend you. Well, it’s jolly to see you again, after all. Come in, I’ve got some curiosities for you – art objects, don’t you call them? – to adorn your rooms at Cuthbert’s.”

“Thanks. And then come down and see Aunt Meg and the governor. They’ll be delighted.”

If Lucian had not known Sylvester from babyhood, he would have had little in common with him; but, as it was, whatever he had to say, he said to Sylvester; he took all his alien tastes for granted, and never supposed it possible to be so intimate with any one else. Absence, probably, neither made his heart grow fonder, nor the reverse; he would have given and expected exactly the same amount of regard, after an absence of five-and-twenty years instead of two.

Sylvester had other friends, and his notion of sympathetic intercourse included more than this, but he had a brotherly regard for “Miss Lucy,” as the pretty-faced, but manly little boy had been called in his early school-days, and liked his company. Lucian now took him into the house, and bestowed various Indian valuables on him, stating where and when they had been bought on purpose for him, and giving him many distinct pictures of places and people; for he was very observant, and had an accurate memory.

Then, as they walked down together to the Rectory, he asked after old friends, and neighbours, till they turned into the Rectory drive, opposite which, half open, were the great iron gates of Cleverley Hall.

“There’s Aunt Meg,” said Sylvester. “Who’s that girl? – Good heavens,” as Lucian suddenly stopped, and held him back; for there, not fifty feet from them, in the act of parting from Miss Riddell, stood Amethyst Haredale.

Retreat was for her impossible. As she turned and saw them, Lucian, without an instant’s pause, raised his hat, turned and went off up a side path into the garden.

Sylvester moved forward, blushing and confused, but with an eager light in his eyes. She came straight on towards him, stopped, and held out her hand.

“How do you do, Mr Riddell?” she said, in soft gracious tones, like Lady Haredale’s own. “I have come down for a few hours on business for my mother, and I came to see Miss Riddell. I am hurrying now to catch the London train. Good-bye.”

She did not speak hurriedly, she left time for Sylvester’s confused murmurs of reply between her sentences, but she had walked on and turned out of sight before Miss Riddell had time to come up to them.

“The hand of fate!” she exclaimed. “It is months since she was here, and now only for an hour or two.”

“I’ll find Lucian,” stammered Sylvester, turning into the garden, where Lucian came quickly to meet him.

“I was told they were away,” he said abruptly.

“So they are. She came down on business. She – she – ”

“Don’t talk about her,” said Lucian, sternly. “There’s the Rector, and Miss Riddell with him.”

He came up to them, shook hands cordially, presented his little offerings of Indian curios, and after a very short visit, took his leave, and went away by himself.

“Unlucky!” exclaimed Miss Riddell. “I wish it had not occurred.”

“But, Aunt Meg, are they coming down here?” said Sylvester, hurriedly.

“No, they are to be in London for the season, Amethyst is to be presented. I suppose their affairs are looking up. They have been abroad, you know, for some time, and visiting-about; but Amethyst was in town last year for a very short time, with their cousin, Lady Molyneux, at the end of the season. You heard that? She was only there long enough to show that she would make a sensation. R, the new artist, asked to paint her, the picture is to be in the Academy this year. She will have every chance now. She looks well, and has not lost her sweet manner, but her girlishness has all gone, and she is more the grand lady than her mother.”

“I – I hardly remember what a beauty she was,” said Sylvester, rather nervously. “And that fellow, Fowler, he married the heiress, didn’t he?”

“Yes. They live in London. Haven’t you ever met them at Loseby? The marriage turned out very well. There is something very engaging about Amethyst, and she spoke nicely of her sister Una, who is very delicate, she tells me. But, dear me, it was a bad business for Lucian. I don’t know when he will settle down. His mother longs for him to marry and live at Toppings.”

“He had much better see the world first,” said Sylvester.

“One doesn’t quite see the end of it for him,” said Mr Riddell, thoughtfully. “But, Syl, I thought I was to see the magnum opus. I like to know what you young men are doing.”

Sylvester recalled himself with a start, to what had been an hour before an important ordeal to him. Now, part of the poem seemed to have come to life, and the picture faded before the original.

That same brief three months, which had turned Lucian Leigh’s outward life away from the course that had seemed marked out for it, had given a colour to all Sylvester Riddell’s inward existence. When he began to add another to the many poetical versions of a youth in search of an ideal, that ideal was, for him, embodied in his memory of Amethyst Haredale. He might call her Art, Truth, Womanhood, Beauty, anything he would, she looked at him from the deep grave eyes, and smiled the enchanting smile which had filled his imagination at first sight. To Lucian, every thought of Amethyst was painful, never, if possible, to be recalled; to Sylvester, she was a dream of beauty and delight, and, as he had never seen her since the fatal summer, there was a certain dreaminess in his feelings with regard to her.

But when, encouraged by various successes in the way of criticism and of occasional verses, and having a good deal of leisure on his hands, he began to write a long poem, he had no doubt as to the source of his inspiration.

He had called his poem ‘Iris,’ and the subject was that of a youth pursuing an ideal love. The hero was a minnesinger of the early middle ages, and the story was related in sections of narrative interspersed with suitable lyrics. The subject was not new, and he could only hope that the treatment was. He had not yet decided whether Iris should be for ever unattainable, a rainbow of promise, melt mystically into his hero’s being in some ineffable manner, as a final reward, or identify herself with the maiden who had been his childish friend.

But the sight of the real Amethyst had dimmed this ideal Iris, and he hardly knew whether it was as lover or author, that he blushed and hesitated as his father settled himself in his study to listen. He was so nervous that he read hurriedly and badly, and his father told him that he was not doing himself justice, and made him read a passage over again, in which Amelot, as the minstrel boy was called, played and sang to himself in the sunset, his heart full of longing to express itself in song, till, with the sweetest strains that he had ever uttered, the soft and amethystine colours of sun and air took shape and form, and the lovely eyes of Iris shone upon him, amid rainbow hues and gleaming mists, beckoning him ever onward and upward to more strenuous efforts to attain her.

“Of course,” said Sylvester, hurriedly, as he paused, “I suppose he never did reach her – I think she was always the end of the rainbow.”

Mr Riddell did not appear deeply interested in this question. It did not, he said, affect the intrinsic merit of the poem.

But he pounced on the song with which Iris had inspired Amelot, and after declaring it to be smooth, and not without sweetness, tore it to pieces in its author’s sight, proclaimed one epithet commonplace and another redundant, and finally told him, that he should aim at simplicity of sentiment and perfection of expression.

“What all the world can feel, my dear boy, and only you can say, – that’s poetry.”

“I – I am afraid,” said Sylvester, “that Amelot’s devotion to Iris is rather unusual – the lot of the few. Dante is of course the eternal model, after which one can only labour.”

“A case in point, Syl,” said Mr Riddell, briskly. “Thousands of young men have fallen in love, like Dante, with unattainable young women. He knew how to tell the world of it. Besides, Dante was a prophet; he had another function to fulfil. But the simplest things are the greatest.”

Sylvester did not agree, he was not at all prepared to consider that the devotion of Amelot to Iris was usual; quite the contrary. It was an exceptional grace bestowed on such as could receive it.

The point was, however, rather too personal for comfortable argument. Besides, he did not know yet what his father thought about the poem.

“I gather,” he said, “that you think the sentiment of the poem rather too finespun.”

“Oh dear, no,” said Mr Riddell. “Not at all. I’ve often felt the sort of thing myself. I’m glad young men can still be honestly sentimental. Don’t get too mystical, and avoid unusual words – all sorts of aesthetic slang. The thing has a good deal of merit in its own way. I must go down and see old Tomkins.”

And while Sylvester hardly knew whether he was pleased or not, the Rector rammed on his shabby soft hat, stuck his walking-stick under his arm, and remarked —

“Glad you employ your leisure time so well Very pretty lines – many of them – excellent tone and feeling. Of course the genuine lilt of a perfect love-song only drops from the sky once in a generation.”

Sylvester had hardly expected that his father would tell him that, in Lucian’s language, he had made Tennyson take a back seat; but he felt ruffled and dissatisfied.

Sympathetic as Mr Riddell was, he did not quite know what his verdict was to his son. He had written many a smooth and graceful copy of verses in his own young days, reflecting more or less the style and taste of his generation, and he had long survived the discovery that they had not added much to what it had to tell the world. He had found quite enough to live for, without poetry.

Sylvester was of a more intense and less many-sided nature; worthy and sufficient objects in life did not seem to him so easy to find. He had secretly lived much for his poem, and he needed to find it worth living for.

Now, the thing most worth living for seemed to be the hope of seeing Amethyst again. Fate had kept them apart hitherto by a series of chances; but now, if the poem was finished, if it came out and was a success, if he met her in London, if she did not cherish any resentment against him – if she could ever know that Iris —

So Sylvester dreamed. But Lucian went up to London to meet the friend who shared his aspirations as to the bears of the Rocky Mountains, and made arrangements for an immediate start in pursuit of them.

Chapter Eighteen

Glimpses of Heaven

Miss Haredale’s pretty little drawing-room at Silverfold was gay with tulips and hyacinths, and bright with a cheery mingling of sun and firelight.

In the sunny bay-window sat Una Haredale, with a book in her lap, but with eyes eagerly gazing down the pleasant bit of country road, shaded with tall trees and edged with broad pieces of turf and freely growing hedges, that was visible from the window.

Una was now seventeen, a slender, limp creature, with languor and want of strength apparent in every gesture, and a look of extreme delicacy in her pale face and large eager eyes. Her expression had softened and sweetened, her hair was fastened up on the top of her head, though its thick coils still seemed as if they were too heavy for the long over-slender neck. As she caught sight of a figure approaching the garden gate, her face lighted up into a look of positive rapture. She sprang up, and flew out to the door.

“Amethyst, Amethyst! my darling, my darling! Here you are at last I’ll never, never let you go again!”

The last words were spoken as she clung round her sister’s neck, almost stifling Amethyst’s words of greeting.

“My darling, you won’t let me speak, or look at you! Where’s Aunt Anna, – not at home?”

“She has taken Carrie to have a singing lesson. Come in; I am to give you tea, and take care of you.”

Soon Amethyst was sitting in a low chair by the fire, with Una kneeling at her side, leaning against her, and clinging to her, as some one had once said, like bindweed round a lily, a comparison resented by Amethyst as derogatory to Una. She alone knew what this clinging, dependent creature had been to her ever since, for Una’s sake, she had tried to “make things better.”

“Are you quite well, dear? and do you like being here? Have you got on with Aunt Anna?” she asked, tenderly.

“Oh, as well as can be without you. I do like it. Oh! I have a great deal to tell you. Only first I want to hear how everything is settled. Is the house in Eaton Square nice?”

“Yes, there will be plenty of room for Auntie and Carrie Carisbrooke, and you know mother will let them be quite independent. And you are all to be there. Mother wouldn’t hear of sending even Kattern and Tory to Cleverley; and as for you, she insisted on your going to the Drawing-room, and coming out regularly.”

“I? I should be half-killed with an hour of a London party. What can my lady want me for?” said Una, with a startled look.

“She says she may never be able to give you so good a chance. I said I thought that London was bad for you, and that I was sure you could not do much. But she said that it was more amusing for you to do what you could, and she liked to have us all with her. So I must take great care of you, and we must see how it answers for you.”

Una gave a long sigh.

“It keeps me with you,” she said. “But oh, it tires me to think of it! and I shall want heaps of new clothes.”

“Mother says you had better have them when you can. She is delighted at getting the London house.”

“I dare say,” said Una. “You’ll see, Kattern and Tory will get everywhere, except to the Drawing-room and the stiff balls. Kat looks grown-up, and she’s getting rather sweet in her own way – pretty milk-maid style, you know. And she looks best in a straw hat and pink cotton – which is cheap.” Amethyst laughed.

“I don’t know about Kat,” she said, “but Tory declares she’s not going to spoil her chances by and by. She means to wear a sailor hat, and go to classes. She has found out some, and I do think she will, she is very clever.”

Una twisted herself round so as to look up into Amethyst’s face.

“There’ll be the rich heiress,” she said, “and the great beauty. There’s only the good girl left for me! Which will win, I wonder – you or Carrie? She ought to have a poor peer, and you a rich cotton-spinner. But you might pull caps for a duke.”

“He should fall to you, if you are to be the good girl,” said Amethyst. “But I don’t see him anywhere on the horizon at present.”

“No, but the cotton-spinner? Of course the Grattons are going to be in town? In Eaton Square too, perhaps?”

“Yes,” said Amethyst, “on the opposite side. Carrie is to ride with the girls.”

“And you?”

“Too expensive!” said Amethyst, with an odd slow smile. “There’ll be enough to contrive for without that.”

“Where is the money coming from? Is the house all Carrie’s?”

“Well, no. The fact is, father has made it up with Charles, and they have agreed to sell some farms in Derbyshire. We are to see Charles sometimes. He is going on better – ”

“And is meant for Carrie! I declare, Amethyst, that’s too bad!” said Una, sitting up. “And have you seen him?”

“No, and I can’t recollect him at all. Can you?”

“I can. Amethyst, he’s a horror! Even long ago we all hated him. I should hate him to come near you?”

“Well, Una,” said Amethyst, shrugging her shoulders. “We must just do the best we can. Least said, soonest mended – as we settled long ago.”

“Oh,” said Una, with tears in her eyes, “it’s awfully hard lines on us! I want to tell you – somehow I couldn’t write. I see everything differently – since I came here – ”

She broke off, and hid her face on Amethyst’s shoulder.

“What is it, dear? What do you mean? Has anything happened to you?” said Amethyst, anxiously.

“The greatest of all things, Amethyst. I know about religion now – I know about Him! The confirmation classes, and all Mr Ross has taught us – and his sermons – oh, it is all so beautiful. I longed, I wanted to be good. If one could go and live in a place like Saint Etheldred’s, out of the temptations of the world! But yesterday he talked to us separately, and I couldn’t help telling him a little, what a bad, wicked child I had been. And he said things. And somehow, last night, as I lay awake, there came the most wonderful feeling, and I knew it was all true, and that there is peace and rest I knew it. One can be happy without earthly love, and – and all the things people care for. It’s quite true, Amethyst, I – I saw Him right in my heart, and I know…”

She lifted her face, all transfigured and radiant, as she uttered the holiest of names in an awe-struck whisper.

Amethyst looked at her, with the dreaming, seeking, unsatisfied eyes which were in such curious contrast to the repose of her beautiful face.

“You knew always,” said Una. “That was what made you so different to us all, when first you came.”

Amethyst smiled a smile that would have been a little cynical, if it had not been so intensely sad.

“I’m not very good, darling,” she said. “Life’s rather a complicated business, as you know very well.”

“Yes,” said Una, “but I feel as if I should not mind anything very much, now. Now there is something to get back into, to hide oneself in. But it is all your doing, my jewel. What should I have been like but for you?”

Una believed, poor child, that the struggle of life was over for her, or at least robbed of all its hardness. These weeks at Silverfold had lifted her into a new world; and when, a day or two after Amethyst’s arrival, the confirmation for which she had been preparing took place, the fervour of her self-dedication seemed to shine through her, as, with a face white as her dress, but beautiful with peace and joy, she came down the little church amid the crowd of stolid white-capped country girls, experiencing a sense of ineffable rest and joy.

Was this but another and more dangerous phase of the varying emotions to which she was subject, a lifting up that was likely to end in a more violent fall?

It might be so. But, only through the higher possibilities of her emotions could salvation come to so emotional a creature; she was one to whom all good must come at risk of fatal loss.

Amethyst had no answering experience. She was a strong and healthy creature, with vigorous spirits and growing energies, which one blow could not crush. In spite of many bitter hours, she had found interests and enjoyments. Vexatious as in many ways the long months abroad with her mother had been, uncongenial as were many of the visits which she had paid with her, she enjoyed seeing new places, she made new friends, took up new pursuits, thought new thoughts.

As for home, the veil had been torn from her eyes, and she never had an illusion again. She did not make herself miserable, but she had learned to expect nothing.

She knew, as far as the London season was concerned, and the career of which she had had last year a foretaste, both that she had claims to a very brilliant one, and also that she was heavily handicapped by poverty and by want of family good repute. She thought that romance and passion were over for her, and that she was free to do the best possible for herself in life; but she meant to be honourable, upright, and modest, there were bounds that she did not intend to pass. Truly, it was in her to be more a woman of the world than her mother, she had so much more forethought, and was so much less swayed by the pleasure and amusement of the moment.

The momentary sight of Lucian and Sylvester had brought back, not the love which she believed herself to have outlived, but a sudden realisation of what that love had been, and an intense resentment against the misjudgment that had destroyed it. She hated Sylvester, and yet felt that she would have died rather than let him guess that the sight of him gave her a moment’s pang.

Into her old place in her aunt’s household she had never again quite fitted. She had spent some time with her after her return from abroad, but she could not take up her former life; she went back to her school as a splendid visitor, and wondered how she could have pictured herself as one of its teachers. Miss Carisbrooke, too, had in some measure taken her place. The little heiress was a pleasant-looking, round-faced, rosy-cheeked girl, with simple tastes and a warm heart. She loved her chaperon heartily, and found life at Silverfold delightful, even while she looked forward eagerly to her London season. She had an enthusiasm for Amethyst’s grace and beauty, and scouted the idea that her own fortune could be a better passport to partners, a constant succession of whom was her idea of social triumph.

“You will be able to have a great many more pretty frocks than we shall, Carrie,” said Una, one day when the three girls were together.

“Ah, but if I was a partner, I shouldn’t think about Amethyst’s frock. I wish I was a man. I would fall in love with her, and give her the most lovely flowers, and when she said yes, I would take her to Ashfield Mount and live there. Don’t you think it’s a pretty place, Amethyst?”

“It is a very pretty place,” said Amethyst, coolly.

“You wouldn’t marry me for the sake of it?” laughed Carrie. “Nobody else shall! But I’m so glad I am going to be with you all in London. You don’t know how much happier I’ve been since I came to live with dear Miss Haredale. She’s much more like a relation than Uncle Oliver is.”

“Don’t you like your uncle?” asked Una.

“No,” said Carrie, with some emphasis, “I don’t, but there are a great many people who do. Don’t fall in love with him, Amethyst; he will with you, directly he sees you.”

Carrie laughed as she gave this warning; but it struck both the shrewd, observant Haredales, that she had made a point of uttering it.

“I shall take the dogs for a walk,” she said, without waiting for an answer. “Poor things, they will be very dull when we are in London.”

“You should go too, Amethyst,” said Una, as Carrie went out; “you are pale. If you did your duty, you would be considering exactly what amount of exercise would give the right shade of pink to your cheeks.”

“I shall consider nothing of the kind,” said Amethyst, crossly. “Even my lady wouldn’t plan and scheme in that way. At least she does things because she likes them.”

“Darling, I did not mean to vex you,” said Una, distressed, as Amethyst started up and went over to the window, with an impetuous movement, unlike her ordinary self-restraint.

“Oh, not you, Una. But every one plans and schemes; Aunt Annabel does. I know what all this talking about ‘poor Charles’ means very well. She would do anything, in spite of all her religion, to ‘support the title,’ as she calls it. I’d rather live honestly for my own pleasure. But, there – we all plan and scheme, as I say, and make up our lives. And we can never make them as they were once intended to be.”

Her breast heaved and her eyes filled, as the thought forced itself upon her, that, let her success in life be what it would, it could never give her anything better, anything nearly so good as one hour with Lucian in the woods at Cleverley.