A Change of Air

"It means, my dear fellow, that you took my name in vain, and I had to say so."

"I'm not thinking of myself, though it would have been more friendly to write to me first."

"Well, I was riled, and didn't think of that."

"But do you mean to deny your own words?"

"Really, Roberts, you seem to forget that I don't enjoy setting the place by the ears, although you seem to."

"You wrote that poem?"

"Of course I wrote the damned thing," said Dale peevishly.

"And now – Bannister, you're not going to – to throw us over?"

"Nonsense! I like to publish my views at my own time and place, that's all."

"A man like you belongs to his followers as much as to himself."

"More, it seems."

The Doctor looked at him almost scornfully. Dale did not like scorn from anyone.

"I was particularly anxious," he began apologetically, "not to get into a shindy here. I wanted to drop politics and so on, and be friendly – "

"Do you know what you're saying, or the meanness of it?"

"Meanness? What do you mean?"

"You know very well. All I want to know is if you wrote this thing?"

"Of course I wrote it."

"And you stand to it?"

"Yes. I think you ought to have asked me before you did it."

"The Squire is shocked, eh?" asked the Doctor, with a sneer.

"The Squire's views are nothing to me," answered Dale, flushing very red.

The Doctor laughed bitterly.

"Come, come, old fellow," said Dale, "don't let us quarrel."

"Quarrel? Well, we won't. Only look here, Bannister."

"Well?"

"If you throw us over now, you'll be – "

"There, don't abuse me any more."

"Oh, I wasn't going to abuse you. If you leave us, – you, the leader we trusted, – where are we, where are we?"

"Give me another chance," said Dale, holding out his hand.

"You won't withdraw this?"

"How the deuce can I now?"

The Doctor shook his hand, saying:

"Don't betray us, don't betray us;" and thus the very uncomfortable interview came to a desired end.

That night at dinner Dale was cross and in low spirits. His friends, perceiving it, forbore to express their views as to his last public utterance, and the repast dragged its weary length along amid intermittent conversation.

When the dessert was on the table, a note was brought for Dale. It was from the Squire.

Dear Bannister: I was very glad to see your letter in the Chronicle. Mrs. Delane joins me in hoping you will dine with us to-morrow en famille. Excuse short notice. The man waits for an answer – don't write one.

Yours truly,George Delane.

"Say I'll come with great pleasure," said Dale, his face growing brighter.

"Where will he go with great pleasure?" asked Philip of Nellie Fane.

"Where is it, Dale?"

"Oh, only to the Grange, to dinner to-morrow. I think I had better write a note, though – don't you think so, Phil? More – more attentive, you know."

"Write, my son," answered Philip, and, as Dale left the room, he looked round with a smile and exclaimed, "One!"

"One what, my dear?" asked Mrs. Hodge.

"Piece of silver, ma'am," replied Philip.

"You're sneering again," said Nellie in a warning tone. "Why shouldn't he like to dine at the Grange?" and she looked marvelously reasonable and indifferent.

"I was speaking with the voice of Doctor Roberts, Nellie, that's all. For my own part, I think a dinner is one of those things one may accept even from the enemy."

CHAPTER IX.

Dale's Own Opinion

If ever our own fortune would allow us to be perfectly happy, the consumation is prevented and spoiled by the obstinately intruding unhappiness of others. The reverend person who was of opinion that the bliss of the blessed would be increased and, so to say, vivified by the sight of the tortures of the damned, finds few supporters nowadays, perhaps because our tenderer feelings shrink from such a ruthless application of the doctrine that only by contemplating the worse can we enjoy the better; perhaps also because we are not so sure as he was that we should not be the onlooked rather than the onlookers if ever his picture came to be realized. So sensitive are we to the ills that others suffer that at times we feel almost a grudge against them for their persistence – however unwilling it be – in marring our perfect contentment; surely they could let us forget them for once in a way.

This last was Dale Bannister's frame of mind as he lay, idly and yet not peacefully, on his sofa next morning. This Doctor, with his unflinching logic and unrestrained zeal, was a nuisance. His devotion had not been sought, and certainly, if it entailed scenes like yesterday's, was not desired. Dale never asked him to ruin his practice, as Philip Hume said he was doing, in order to uphold Dale's principles; Dale did not want a starving family to his account, whose hungry looks should press him to a close questioning of his conscience. Any man with an ounce of common sense would understand that there was a time for everything, and a place. It was one thing to publish your views in a book, addressed to the world of thinkers and intelligent readers; it was quite another to brandish them in the face of your neighbors, and explode them, like shells, in the innocent streets of Denborough. And yet, because he recognized this obvious distinction, because he had some sense of what was suitable and reasonable, and because he refused to make enemies of people simply because they were well off, the Doctor stormed at him as if he were a traitor and a snob. And Philip Hume had taken to smiling in an aggravating way when the Grange was mentioned; and even Nellie – But Dale, alert as he was in his present mood to discover matter of complaint, found none against Nellie, unless it might be some falling off in her old cheerfulness and buoyancy.

Dale lit his pipe and set himself to consider with impartiality whether Roberts had in fact any grievance against him. He wanted to satisfy himself that there was no basis for the Doctor's indignation; his self-esteem demanded that the accusation should be disproved. But really it was too plain. What had he done? Refused to acquiesce in being made a fool of, refused to meet civility with incivility, to play the churl, to shut his eyes to intelligence and culture and attractiveness because they happened to be found among people who did not think as he did or as Roberts was pleased to think. He knew what those sneers meant, but he would go his own way. Things had come to a pretty pass if a man might not be civil and seek to avoid wholly unnecessary causes of offense without being treated as a renegade to all his convictions. That was not his idea of breadth of mind or toleration, or of good feeling either. It was simple bigotry, as narrow as – aye, narrower than – anything he at least had found on the other side.

Dale disposed of this question, but he still lay on the sofa and thought. It had been a gain to him, he said to himself, to see this new side of life; the expedition to Littlehill was well justified. It is good for a man to take a flag of truce and go talk with the enemy in the gate. He may not change his own views, – Dale was conscious of no change in his, – but he comes to see how other people may hold different ones, and the reason, or anyhow the naturalness, of theirs. A man of Roberts' fierce Puritan temper could not feel nor appreciate what appealed to him so strongly in such a life as they lived, for instance, at the Grange. It had a beauty so its own, that unquestioned superiority, not grasped as a prize or valued as an opportunity, but gravely accepted as the parent of duties – the unbroken family life, grasping through many hands the torch undimmed from reverend antiquity – the very house, which seemed to enshrine honorable traditions, at which he could not bring himself to sneer. The sweetness of it all broke back baffled from the wall of the Doctor's stern conviction and iron determination. Yet how sweet it all was! And these people welcomed into their circle any man who had a claim to welcome, freely, ungrudgingly, cordially. All they asked was a little gentleness to their – he supposed they were prejudices, a little deference to their prepossessions, a little smoothing off of the rougher edges of difference. It was not much to ask. Was he churlishly to deny the small concession, to refuse to meet them any part of the way, to intrench himself in the dogmatic intolerance of his most vehement utterances, to shut his mind off from this new source of inspiration? That was what Roberts wanted. Well, then – Roberts be hanged!

The course of these reflections produced in Dale a return to his usual equanimity. It was plainly impossible to please everybody. He must act as seemed right to himself, neglecting the frowns of unreasonable grumblers. No doubt Roberts was devoted to him, and Arthur Angell too. Yet Roberts abused him, and Arthur bothered him with imploring letters, which warned him against the subtle temptations of his new life. It was a curious sort of devotion which showed itself mainly in criticism and disapproval; it was very flattering of these good friends to set him on a pedestal and require him to live up to the position; only, unfortunately, the pedestal was of their choosing, not his. All he asked was to be allowed to live a quiet life and work out his own ideas in his own way. If they could not put up with that, why – Dale refilled his pipe and opened a story by Maupassant.

It may be asserted that every man is the victim of a particular sort of follies, the follies engendered by his particular sort of surroundings; they make a fool's circle within which each of us has a foot planted; for the rest, we may be, and no doubt generally are, very sensible people. If we set aside Squire Delane's special and indigenous illusions, he was very far indeed from a fool, and after dinner that evening he treated his distinguished guest with no small tact. The young man was beyond question a force; was it outside of ingenuity to turn him in a better direction?

"Everybody approves of your letter," he said. "Roberts had no business to drag your name in."

"Of course one is exposed to that sort of thing."

"It's a penalty of greatness. But the case is peculiar when you're actually living in the place."

"That's exactly what I feel. It's making me a party in a local quarrel."

"That's what he wanted to do; he wanted to fight under your shield."

"I didn't come here to fight at all."

"I should think not; and you haven't found us thirsting for battle, have you?"

"I have found a kinder welcome than I had any right to expect."

"My dear fellow! Much as we differ, we're all proud of counting you as a Denshire man. And I don't suppose we shall quarrel much about Denshire affairs. Oh, I know you think the whole system of country life an iniquity. I don't go so deep myself. I say, there it is. Perhaps it might be changed, but, pending that, sensible men can work together to make the best of it. At any rate, they can avoid treading on one another's corns."

"I want to avoid everybody's corns, if they'll avoid mine."

"Well, we'll try. I dare say we shall pull together. At any rate, it's very pleasant dining together. Shall we go upstairs and ask Janet for a song?"

Mrs. Delane had evidently caught her cue from her husband, and she treated Dale not as a sinner who repenteth, – a mode of reception which, after all, requires great tact to make it acceptable, – but as one who had never been a sinner at all. She asked Dale if he had been overwhelmed by callers. He replied that he had not suffered much in that way.

"I knew it," she said. "You have frightened them, Mr. Bannister; they think you came in search of studious retirement."

"Oh, I hate both study and retirement, Mrs. Delane."

"Well, I shall tell people that – may I? Now, when I was at the Cransfords' yesterday, – he's our Lord Lieutenant, you know, – they were wondering whether they might call."

"I am delighted to see anyone."

"From the Mayor upward – or, I suppose, Hedger would think I ought to say downward. We heard what fun you made of the poor man."

"Mr. Bannister will be more respectful to the Lord Lieutenant," said Janet, smiling.

"I suppose I disapprove of Lord Lieutenants," remarked Dale, with a laugh.

"You'll like Lady Cransford very much, and she'll like you. She gives so many balls that a bachelor household is a godsend."

"Bannister hardly depends on that for a welcome, my dear," said the Squire from the hearthrug.

"Now I declare, meeting him just as a friend like this, I'm always forgetting that he's a famous man."

"Please go on, Mrs. Delane. It's a capital exchange. But when are you going to give me the pleasure of seeing you at Littlehill?"

Mrs. Delane paused for just a second.

"I should like to visit your hermit's cell. But I'm so busy just now, and I dare say you are. When your guests forsake you, perhaps we will come and relieve your solitude. Janet, will you give us some music?"

Dale followed Janet to the piano, with a little frown on his brow. Why wouldn't she come now? Was it – Janet's voice dispersed the frown and the reflection.

She sang a couple of songs, choosing them out of a book. As she turned over the leaves, Dale saw that some of the airs were set to words of his own writing. When Janet came to one of these, she turned the leaf hastily. The Squire had gone out, and Mrs. Delane, with the privilege of near relationship, was absorbed in a novel.

"Will you do me a great favor?" he said.

"What, Mr. Bannister?"

"I should like to hear you sing words of mine. See, here are two or three."

She glanced through them; then she shut the book and made as though to rise.

"You won't do it?"

Janet blushed and looked troubled.

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Bannister; but I can't sing those words. I – I don't like them."

"I am sorry they are so bad," he answered in an offended tone.

"Oh, of course, so far as power and – and beauty goes, everything in the book is trash compared to them. But I can't sing them."

"I won't press you."

"I know you are angry. Please don't be angry, Mr. Bannister. I can't do what I think wrong, can I?"

"Oh, I have no right to be angry."

"There, you wouldn't say that unless you were angry. People never do."

"You have such a wretchedly bad opinion of me, Miss Delane."

"Do you mind that?"

"You know I do."

"Then one would think you would try to change it."

"Ah, how can I?"

"Write something I should delight in singing."

"If I do, may I dedicate it to you?"

"I'm afraid that wouldn't be allowed."

"But if it were allowed, would you allow it?"

"You know how proud any girl would be of it – of course you know."

"You don't do justice to my humility."

"Do justice to yourself first, Mr. Bannister."

"What sort of songs do you like?"

"Oh, anything honest, and manly, and patriotic, and – and nice in feeling."

"A catholic taste – and yet none of mine satisfy it."

"I will not be quarreled with," declared Janet.

"My only wish is to propitiate you."

"Then you know now how to do it."

It must be allowed that conversations of this nature have a pleasantness of their own, and Dale left the Grange with a delightful feeling of having been treated as he ought to be treated. He found Philip Hume writing and smoking in the study.

"Well, been stroked the right way, old man?" asked Philip, throwing down his pen.

Dale helped himself to whisky and soda water, without replying.

"I've been having a talk with Nellie," pursued Philip.

"What's wrong with Nellie?"

"She's got some notion in her head that she and her mother ought to go."

Dale was lighting a cigar.

"Of course I told her it was all nonsense, and that you meant them to stay as long as they liked. She's got some maggot in her head about propriety – all nonsense, when her mother's here."

"I don't want them to go, if they like staying," said Dale.

"Well, we should be slow without Nellie, shouldn't we? You must blow her up for thinking of it. She only wants to be persuaded."

"She can do as she likes."

"You don't seem very enthusiastic about it, one way or the other."

"Well, my dear Phil, I can't be expected to cry at the idea of little Nellie Fane leaving us."

"Yet you made rather a point of her coming – but that was two months ago."

"Really, you might leave Nellie and me to settle it."

"What I told her was right, I suppose?"

"Well, you don't suppose I wanted you to tell her to pack up?"

"I don't know what you want, old man," said Philip; "and I doubt if you do."

CHAPTER X.

A Prejudiced Verdict

It has been contumeliously said by insolent Englishmen – a part of our population which may sometimes seem to foreign eyes as large as the whole – that you might put any other of the world's capitals, say Paris or New York, down in London, and your cabman would not be able to find it. However this may be, – and there is no need in this place either for assertions or admissions, – it is certain that you might unload a wagonful of talents in Piccadilly, and they would speedily be absorbed and leave little obvious trace of the new ingredient. Hence the advantage, for a man who does not dislike the digito monstrari et dicier "hic est," of dwelling in small places, and hence, a cynic might suggest, the craving for quieter quarters displayed by some of our less conspicuous celebrities. It is better, says a certain authority, to reign in hell than serve in heaven; and a man may grow weary of walking unrecognized down the Strand, when he has only, to be the beheld of all beholders, to take up his residence in – perhaps it will be more prudent to say Market Denborough, and not point the finger of printed scorn at any better known resort.

This very ungenerous explanation was the one which Miss Victoria Smith chose to adopt as accounting for Dale Bannister's coming to Littlehill. Such an idea had never crossed her mind at first, but it became evident that a man who could leave his friend in the lurch and palter with his principles, as Dale's letter to the Chronicle showed him to be doing, could only be credited with any discoverable motive less bad and contemptible than the worst through mere hastiness and ill-considered good nature. For her part, she liked a man to stick to his colors and to his friends, and not be ashamed before the tea tables of Denshire. No, she had never read his poems, she had no time, but papa had, and agreed with every word of them.

"Gad! does he?" said Sir Harry Fulmer, to whom these views were expressed. "Well played the Colonel!"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, some of them made me sit up rather," remarked Sir Harry.

"Oh, anything would make you 'sit up,' as you call it. I don't consider you a Radical."

"I voted for your friend the Doctor anyhow."

"Yes, that was good of you. You were the only one with an elementary sense of justice."

Sir Harry's sense of justice, elementary or other, had had very little to do with his vote, but he said with honest pride:

"Somebody ought to stand by a fellow when he's down."

"Especially when he's in the right."

"Well, I don't quite see, Miss Smith, what business it was of Roberts' to cut up the Vicar's sermon. Naturally the Vicar don't like it."

"So he takes his medicine from Dr. Spink!"

"Rather awkward for him to have Roberts about the place."

"Oh, of course you defend him."

"The Vicar's a very good fellow, though he's a Tory."

"You seem to think all Tories good fellows."

"So they are, most of them."

"I suppose you think Mr. Bannister's right too?"

"I shouldn't be so down on him as you are."

"You like people who lead their friends on and then forsake them?"

"Bannister never asked him to write the letter."

"Well, it's not my idea of friendship. I wouldn't have a friend who thought that conduct right."

"Then I think it deuced wrong," said Sir Harry promptly.

"It's no compliment to a woman to treat her like a baby," remarked Tora with dignity.

Sir Harry perceived that it would be to his advantage to change the subject.

"Are you going skating?" he asked. "There's nothing else to do in this beastly frost."

"Does the ice bear?"

"Yes, they're skating on the Grange lake. I met Hume, Bannister's friend, and he told me Bannister was there."

"Wasn't he going? I rather like him."

"No, he was walking with Miss Fane. I believe I rather put my foot in it by asking her if she wasn't going."

"Why shouldn't you?"

"She said she didn't know Mrs. Delane, and looked confused, don't you know."

"Hasn't Mrs. Delane called?"

"It seems not," said Sir Harry.

"I wonder how long they are going to stay at Littlehill?"

"Forever, apparently. Shall you come to the lake?"

"Perhaps in the afternoon."

Tora returned to the house, still wondering. She was very angry with Dale, and prepared to think no good of him. Was it possible that she and the Colonel had been hasty in stretching out the hand of welcome to Mrs. Hodge and her daughter? For all her independence, Tora liked to have Mrs. Delane's imprimatur on the women of her acquaintance. She thought she would have a word with the Colonel, and went to seek him in his study. He was not there, but it chanced that there lay on the table a copy of Dale's first published volume, "The Clarion." Three-quarters of the little book were occupied with verses on matters of a more or less public description – beliefs past and future, revolutions effected and prayed for, and so forth; the leaves bore marks of use, and evidently were often turned by the Colonel. But bound up with them was a little sheaf of verses of an amatory character: where these began, the Colonel's interest appeared to cease, for the pages were uncut; he had only got as far as the title. It was not so with his daughter. Having an idle hour and some interest in the matters and affairs of love, she took a paper-knife and sat down to read. Poets are, by ancient privilege, legibus soluti, and Dale certainly reveled in his freedom. Still, perhaps, the verses were not in reality so very, very atrocious as they unhappily appeared to the young lady who now read them. Tora was accustomed to consider herself almost a revolutionary spirit, and her neighbors, half in earnest, half in joke, encouraged the idea; but her revolutions were to be very strictly confined, and the limits of her free-thought were marked out by most unyielding metes and bounds – bounds that stopped very short at the church door and on the domestic threshold. This frame of mind is too common to excite comment, and it had been intensified in her by the social surroundings against which she was in mock revolt. Dale's freedom knew no trammels, or had known none when he wrote "The Clarion"; nothing was sacred to him except truth, everything as nothing beside reason, reason the handmaid of passion, wherein the spirit and individuality of each man found their rightful expression. This theory, embodied in a poet's fancy and enlivened by a young man's ardor, made fine verses, but verses which startled Tora Smith. She read for half an hour, and then, flinging the book down and drawing a long breath, exclaimed: "I can believe anything of him now!"

And she had had this man to dinner! And that girl! Who was that girl?

The Colonel came home to luncheon in very good spirits. He had just succeeded, in the interests of freedom, in stirring up a spirit of active revolt in Alderman Johnstone. The Alderman had hitherto, like his father before him, occupied his extensive premises on a weekly tenancy; he had never been threatened with molestation or eviction; but he felt that he existed on sufferance, and the consciousness of his precarious position had been irksome to him. A moment had come when the demand for houses was slack, when two or three were empty, and when the building trade itself was nearly at a standstill. The Colonel had incited Johnstone to seize the opportunity to ask from the Squire a lease, and Johnstone had promised to take nothing less than "seven, fourteen, or twenty-one." If refused, he declared he would surrender the premises and build for himself on some land of the Colonel's just outside the town.

"Delane must grant it," said the Colonel, rubbing his hands, "and then we shall have one house anyhow where our bills can be put up. Bannister will be delighted. By the way, Tora, he wants us to go in to tea to-day, after skating. I suppose you're going to skate?"