Shortly after her marriage the father and mother died, within eighteen months of each other, and Eustace found his lot in life radically changed. He had been his father's secretary after leaving college, which prevented his making any serious efforts to succeed at the bar, and in consequence his interest, both of head and heart, had been more concentrated than is often the case with a young man within the walls of his home. He had admired his father sincerely, and the worth of his mother's loquacious and sometimes meddlesome tenderness he never realised fully till he had lost it. When he was finally alone, it became necessary for him to choose a line in life. His sister and he divided his father's money between them, and Eustace found himself with a fortune such as in the eyes of most of his friends constituted a leading of Providence towards two things—marriage and a seat in Parliament. However, fortunately, his sister, the only person to whom he applied for advice, was in no hurry to press a decision in either case upon him. She saw that without the stimulus of the father's presence, Eustace's interest in politics was less real than his interest in letters, nor did the times seem to her propitious to that philosophic conservatism which might be said to represent the family type of mind. So she stirred him up to return to some of the projects of his college days when he and she were first bitten with a passion for that great, that fascinating French literature which absorbs, generation after generation, the interests of two-thirds of those who are sensitive to the things of letters. She suggested a book to him which took his fancy, and in planning it something of the old zest of life returned to him. Moreover, it was a book which required him to spend a part of every year in Paris, and the neighbourhood of his sister was now more delightful to him than ever.
So, after a time, he settled down contentedly in his London chambers with his books about him, and presently found that glow of labour stealing over him which is at once the stimulus and the reward of every true son of knowledge. His book reconciled him to life again, and soon he was as often seen in the common haunts of London society as before. He dined out, he went to the theatre, he frequented his club like other men, and every year he spent three of the winter months in Paris, living in the best French world, talking as he never talked in London, and cultivating, whether in the theatre or in the salons of his sister's friends or in the studios of some of the more eminent of French artists, a fastidious critical temper, which was rapidly becoming more and more exacting, more and more master of the man.
Now, on this May afternoon, as he settled himself down to his work, it would have given any of those who liked Eustace Kendal—and they were many—pleasure to see how the look of fatigue with which he had returned from his round of the Academy faded away, how he shook back the tumbling gray locks from his eyes with the zest and the eagerness of one setting forth to battle, and how, as time passed on and the shadows deepened on the white spire opposite, the contentment of successful labour showed itself in the slow unconscious caress which fell upon the back of the sleeping cat curled up in the chair beside him, or in the absent but still kindly smile with which he greeted the punctual entrance of the servant, who at five o'clock came to put tea and the evening paper beside him and to make up the fire, which crackled on with cheery companionable sounds through the lamp-lit evening and far into the night.
CHAPTER II
Two or three days afterwards, Kendal, in looking over his engagement-book, in which the entries were methodically kept, noticed 'Afternoon tea, Mrs. Stuart's, Friday,' and at once sent off a note to Edward Wallace, suggesting that they should go to the theatre together on Thursday evening to see Miss Bretherton, 'for, as you will see,' he wrote, 'it will be impossible for me to meet her with a good conscience unless I have done my duty beforehand by going to see her perform.' To this the American replied by a counter proposal. 'Miss Bretherton,' he wrote, 'offers my sister and myself a box for Friday night; it will hold four or five; you must certainly be of the party, and I shall ask Forbes.'
Kendal felt himself a little entrapped, and would have preferred to see the actress under conditions more favourable to an independent judgment, but he was conscious that a refusal would be ungracious, so he accepted, and prepared himself to meet the beauty in as sympathetic a frame of mind as possible.
On Friday afternoon, after a long and fruitful day's work, he found himself driving westward towards the old-fashioned Kensington house of which Mrs. Stuart, with her bright, bird-like, American ways, had succeeded in making a considerable social centre. His mind was still full of his work, phrases of Joubert or of Stendhal seemed to be still floating about him, and certain subtleties of artistic and critical speculation were still vaguely arguing themselves out within him as he sped westward, drawing in the pleasant influences of the spring sunshine, and delighting his eyes in the May green which was triumphing more and more every day over the grayness of London, and would soon have reached that lovely short-lived pause of victory which is all that summer can hope to win amid the dust and crowd of a great city.
Kendal was in that condition which is proper to men possessed of the true literary temperament, when the first fervour of youth for mere living is gone, when the first crude difficulties of accumulation are over, and when the mind, admitted to regions of an ampler ether and diviner air than any she has inhabited before, feels the full charm and spell of man's vast birthright of knowledge, and is seized with subtler curiosities and further-reaching desires than anything she has yet been conscious of. The world of fact and of idea is open, and the explorer's instruments are as perfect as they can be made. The intoxication of entrance is full upon him, and the lassitude which is the inevitable Nemesis of an unending task, and the chill which sooner or later descends upon every human hope, are as yet mere names and shadows, counting for nothing in the tranquil vista of his life, which seems to lie spread out before him. It is a rare state, for not many men are capable of the apprenticeship which leads to it, and a breath of hostile circumstance may put an end to it; but in its own manner and degree, and while it lasts, it is one of the golden states of consciousness, and a man enjoying it feels this mysterious gift of existence to have been a kindly boon from some beneficent power.
Arrived at Mrs. Stuart's, Kendal found a large gathering already filling the pleasant low rooms looking out upon trees at either end, upon which Mrs. Stuart had impressed throughout the stamp of her own keen little personality. She was competent in all things—competent in her criticism of a book, and more than competent in all that pertained to the niceties of house management. Her dinner-parties, of which each was built up from foundation to climax with the most delicate skill and unity of plan; her pretty dresses, in which she trailed about her soft-coloured rooms; her energy, her kindliness, and even the evident but quite innocent pursuit of social perfection in which she delighted—all made her popular; and it was not difficult for her to gather together whom she would when she wished to launch a social novelty. On the present occasion she was very much in her element. All around her were people more or less distinguished in the London world; here was an editor, there an artist; a junior member of the Government chatted over his tea with a foreign Minister, and a flow of the usual London chatter of a superior kind was rippling through