Lucius Davoren; or, Publicans and sinners, vol. 3 — Edition Insights

HOW GEOFFREY ENJOYED THE GARDEN-PARTY.

While Lucius Davoren was thus occupied at the east end of London, Geoffrey Hossack was making the best of an existence which he had made up his mind to consider utterly joyless, so long as adverse fate denied him the one desire of his heart. For him in vain warm August skies were deeply blue, and the bosky dells and glades of the New Forest still untouched by autumn’s splendid decay. For him vainly ran the bright river between banks perfumed with wild flowers. He beheld these things from the lofty standpoint of discontent, and in his heart called Nature a poor creature.

‘I would rather be mewed up in Whitecross-street prison, or in the Venetian Piombi, with Janet for my wife, than enjoy all that earth can give of natural beauty or artificial splendour without her,’ he said to himself, when his cousins had bored him into a misanthropical mood by their insistence upon the charms of rural life, as exemplified at Hillersdon Grange.

‘I’m afraid you have no soul for Nature,’ said Belle, when she had kept Geoffrey on his feet for an hour in the cramped old-fashioned hot-houses, where she went in desperately for ferns and orchids, and imitated Lady Baker on a small scale.

‘I’m afraid not—for Nature in flower-pots,’ answered Geoffrey, with an unsympathetic yawn. ‘I daresay these Calopogons, and Gymnadenia, and what’s-its-names are very grand, but I’ve seen finer growing wild in the valleys on the southern side of the Rocky Mountains. You English people only get nature in miniature—a poor etiolated creature. You have no notion of the goddess Gea in her Titanic vigour, as she appears on “the other side.”

‘Meaning America?’ said Belle contemptuously, as if that western continent were something too vulgar for her serious consideration.

The sun shone upon Lady Baker’s fête as gaily as if fine weather had been a matter within her ladyship’s power of provision, like the luncheon from Gunter’s, or the costumes for the tableaux vivants. The lady herself was radiant as the sunlight. Everybody had come—everybody worth receiving, at any rate. She gave Geoffrey a smile of particular cordiality as she shook hands with him, and murmured the conventional ‘How good of you to come early!’

Belle and Jessie were speedily told off for croquet: a sport for which Geoffrey professed an unmitigated dislike, in a most churlish spirit, his cousins thought. Thus released from attendance on these fair ones, he roamed the vast gardens at large, finding solitudes in that spacious domain, even on such a day as this. In these secluded walks—where he only occasionally encountered a stray couple engaged in that sentimental converse which he slangily denominated ‘spooning’—Mr. Hossack indulged his own thoughts, which also were of a spooney character. Here, he thought, Janet Davoren had been happy in the brief summer-tide of her life; here she had felt the first joys and pains of an innocent girlish love; and here, alas, had given that peerless blossom of the soul, a girl’s first love, to a scoundrel. The thought of this filled him with a savage jealousy.

‘I wish I had fired that shot out yonder instead of Lucius,’ he said to himself. ‘Egad, I’d have made sure my ball went through him. There should have been no shilly-shally about my fire.’

Luncheon found Mr. Hossack more attentive to the various Rhine wines than to _pâté de foie gras_ or chicken-salad, or even the wants of the damsel who sat next him. He was out of humour with all the world. His artfully-worded advertisement had appeared several times, and had produced no response. He began to think the Fates were opposed to his happiness.

‘I suppose if a man is pretty well provided for in the way of three-per-cents he must hope for nothing else from Fortune,’ he thought, as he punished her ladyship’s cabinet hocks.

Luncheon over, Mr. Hossack conducted his damsel to the sunny greensward, where enthusiastic archers—seven-and-twenty ladies to five gentlemen—were stringing their Cupid bows for a grand match. Here he shunted her into the care of one of the five male archers, all of whom looked ineffably bored, and anon departed, whither he cared not—anywhere, anywhere out of this world of luncheons, croquet, flirtation, and frivolity.