第105章

'Still climbing trees in the Hesperides,' said Conway. 'Love does that, you know; but it is hard to climb the trees without the love. It seems to me that I have done my climbing--have clomb as high as I knew how, and that the boughs are breaking with me, and that I am likely to get a fall. Do you understand me?'

'I would rather not understand you.'

'That is no answer to my question. Do you understand that at this moment I am getting a fall which will break every bone in my skin and put any other climbing out of the question as far as I am concerned? Do you understand that?'

'No; I do not,' said Mrs Broughton, in a tremulous voice.

'Then I'll go and make love at once to Clara Van Siever. There's enough of pluck left in me to ask her to marry me, and I suppose I could manage to go through the ceremony if she accepted me.'

'But I want you to love her,' said Mrs Dobbs Broughton.

'I daresay I should love her well enough after a bit;--that is, if she didn't break my head or comb my hair. I suppose there will be no objection to my saying that you sent me when I ask her?'

'Conway, you will of course not mention my name to her. I have suggested to you a marriage which I think would tend to make you happy, and would give you a stability in life which you want. It is perhaps better that I should be explicit at once. As an unmarried man I cannot continue to know you. You have said words of late which have driven me to this conclusion. I have thought about it much--too much perhaps, and I know that I am right. Miss Van Siever has beauty and wealth and intellect, and I think that she would appreciate the love of such a man as you are. Now go.' And Mrs Dobbs Broughton, standing upright, pointed to the door. Conway Dalrymple slowly took his Spanish hat from of the marble slab on which he had laid it, and left the room without saying a word. The interview had been quite long enough, and there was nothing else which he knew how to say with effect.

Croquet is a pretty game out of doors, and chess is delightful in a drawing-room. Battledore and shuttlecock and hunt-the-slipper have also their attractions. Proverbs are good, and cross questions with crooked answers may be made very amusing. But none of these games are equal to the game of love-making--providing that the players can be quite sure that there shall be no heart in the matter. Any touch of heart not only destroys the pleasure of the game, but makes the player awkward and incapable and robs him of his skill. And thus it is that there are many people who cannot play the game at all. A deficiency of some needed internal physical strength prevents the owners of the heart from keeping a proper control over its valves, and thus emotion sets in, and the pulses are accelerated, and feeling supervenes. For such a one to attempt the game of love-making, is as though your friend with the gout should insist on playing croquet. A sense of the ridiculous, if nothing else, should in either case deter the afflicted one from the attempt.

There was no such absurdity with our friend Mrs Dobbs Broughton and Conway Dalrymple. Their valves and pulses were all right. They could play the game without the slightest danger of any inconvenient result;--of any inconvenient result, that is, as regarded their own feelings. Blind people cannot see and stupid people cannot understand--and it might be that Mr Dobbs Broughton, being both blind and stupid in such matters, might perceive something of the playing of the game and not know that it was only a game of skill.

When I say that as regarded these two lovers there was nothing of love between them, and that the game was therefore so far innocent, I would not be understood as asserting that these people had no hearts in their bosoms. Mrs Dobbs Broughton probably loved her husband in a sensible, humdrum way, feeling him to be a bore, knowing him to be vulgar, aware that he often took a good deal more wine than was good for him, and that he was almost as uneducated as a hog. Yet she loved him, and showed her love by taking care that he should have things for dinner which he liked to eat. But in this alone there were to be found none of the charms of a fevered existence, and therefore, Mrs Dobbs Broughton, requiring those charms for her comfort, played her little game with Conway Dalrymple.

And as regarded the artist himself let no reader presume him to have been heartless because he flirted with Mrs Dobbs Broughton. Doubtless he will marry some day, and will have a large family for which he will work hard, and will make a good husband to some stout lady who will be careful in looking after his linen. But on the present occasion he fell into some slight trouble in spite of the innocence of his game. As he quitted his friend's room he heard the hall-door slammed heavily; then there was a quick step on the stairs, and on the landing-place above the first flight he met the master of the house, somewhat flurried, as it seemed, and not looking comfortable, either as regarded his person or his temper. 'By George, he's been drinking!' Conway said to himself, after the first glance. Now it certainly was the case that Dobbs Broughton would sometimes drink at improper hours.

'What the devil are you doing here?' said Dobbs Broughton to his friend the artist. 'You're always here. You're here a doosed sight more than Ilike.' Husbands when they have been drinking are very apt to make mistakes as to the purport of the game.

'Why Dobbs,' said the painter, 'there's something wrong with you.'

'No, there ain't. There's nothing wrong; and if there was, what's that to you? I shan't ask you to pay anything for me, I suppose?'

'Well;--I hope not.'

'I won't have you here, and let that be an end of it. It's all very well when I choose to have a few friends to dinner, but my wife can do very well without your fal-lalling here all day. Will you remember that, if you please?'

Conway Dalrymple, knowing that he had better not argue any question with a drunken man, took himself out of the house, shrugging his shoulders as he thought of the misery of which his poor dear playfellow would now be called on to endure.