Ethel Churchill/Chapter 84
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FÊTE.
Not to the present is our hour confined,
The great and shadowy future is assigned
To be the glorious empire of the mind.
The past was once the future and it wrought
In the high presence of on-looking thought;
All that we have, was by its efforts brought.
To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree
Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we
Make for the future—certain is to be.
The superb banquet that had been laid out for the queen, was over. For once opinion had been unanimous even about an act of Sir Robert's. The royal party had dined in the greenhouse, the coup d'œil of which was as striking as it was new. Vast stands of the most costly exotics reached to the glass roof, which was partly covered by a luxuriant vine, or by a small scarlet creeper. Set in arches of the most beautiful flowers, but with colours that bore comparison even with those of nature, were hung pictures of the old masters. Sir Robert Walpole was, like Cardinal Mazarin, a great collector of paintings. In both, the love of art was the only glimpse of the ideal, the one single touch of the imaginative.
There never was a nature less allied to the poetical or to the picturesque than Sir Robert's. It never could have entered his head to clothe
"The palpable and the familiar
With the golden exhalations from the dawn."
His highest idea of inspiration was that—
"Pegase est un cheval
Qui mêne les grands hommes a l'hôpital."
His perceptions were cold, clear, and defined: he never went beyond the actual, though that he took in at a glance. His contempt for mankind grew out of never looking beyond what he saw: now the smallest of human motives are what lie on the surface. It encourages us to be thought a little better than what we are; but Sir Robert's system made no allowances,—it took a low view of the intellectual world, but a still lower of the moral. There was no excitement, no belief, no generous impulse about it. He would have erected no glorious monument to the past, to serve as oracle and incentive to the future. We can imagine his enjoying the pointed and polished satire of Pope; though we can also imagine him saying, "Of what use is it to tell men of their faults, they never mend them?" But how impossible it would be to suppose him entering, for one instant, into the wide and benevolent philosophy of Wordsworth, a philosophy founded on belief in good.
Yet the actual never quite suffices to the mind; and even with the shrewd, the practical Sir Robert, the imagination opened one sunny vista, in which he saw visions and dreamed dreams. To know what passed through his mind, what train of thoughts were conjured up while watching the quiet loveliness of a Claude, or the spiritual beauty of a Raphael, would be a curious study: but the guests he had now assembled were intent on no such curious speculations; they were quite content with the external, without examining into the interior, world.
It would have been difficult to have imagined a scene more like one in fairyland, than the scene as the guests again dispersed through the grounds. The sunset had been magnificent, and the Thames was floating in dark radiance; the waves wearing that transparent clearness, which gives more the idea of melted beryl, than aught else: every little circle in the water had that trembling light which characterises precious stones. The atmosphere was unusually clear, as if loath to part with the daylight; but the moon, like a round of lucid snow, had risen on the sky; and a pale, soft gleam, came from the lamps amid the foliage.
One device obtained great admiration: small lights were scattered on the ground, in some of the winding paths of turf, to emulate glow-worms. The principal band was placed in the great hall; which, splendidly lighted up, and hung with blue damask, whose festoons were fastened back with wreaths of flowers, was thrown open for the dancers. But strains of music came from every part of the grounds; and on the river was a boat, filled with wind instruments, whose soft aerial melody floated in at every pause.
The beauty of the evening had little attraction to Lord Marchmont, who was in the card-room, devoting all his energies to the whist-table. Lady Marchmont was wandering about the gardens with Sir George Kingston, and Lord Norbourne had taken charge of Miss Churchill.
Ethel was more than usually depressed; the gaiety around made her shrink into herself; she had no sympathy with it; it only made her think, more and more, how the spring of happiness was dead within her: she had no real enjoyment in any thing. The forced gaiety which society exacts as its false and weary tribute, only fatigued, without exciting her. She went out, in the vain hope that, leaving behind the solitude of home, she could leave, too, the perpetual presence which there haunted her. Ethel soon found that change of place was not change of thought, and the very effort fretted her with a feverish discontent. It was a constant labour to keep her attention to what was said; however, Lord Norbourne set down her silence to a graceful timidity, and only waited an opportunity to effect a change he had meditated from the first. It soon came: as they were on their way to a transparency of their majesties, not a little larger than life—with Bellona, in a very handsome helmet, on one side, and Peace, with a cornucopia and a full blown wreath of roses, on the other—the path was interrupted by a little knot of gentlemen.
"How very fortunate!" exclaimed Lord Norbourne. "Townshend, I have been wanting, all day, to say a few words to you! Miss Churchill, can you forgive my want of gallantry, if I transfer you to the charge of my nephew? Will you allow him to show you the transparency?"
Mr. Courtenaye stepped forward, eagerly; and, before she had time to think, Ethel found herself arm-in-arm, and walking on quietly with her former lover.