Greville Fane | Page 7

for any one else; yet who would be inspired
to clamber over that bristling barrier? What flower of tenderness or of
intimacy would such an adventurer conceive as his reward?
This was for Sir Baldwin Luard to say; but he naturally never confided
to me the secret. He was a joyless, jokeless young man, with the air of
having other secrets as well, and a determination to get on politically
that was indicated by his never having been known to commit
himself--as regards any proposition whatever--beyond an exclamatory
"Oh!" His wife and he must have conversed mainly in prim ejaculations,
but they understood sufficiently that they were kindred spirits. I
remember being angry with Greville Fane when she announced these
nuptials to me as magnificent; I remember asking her what splendour
there was in the union of the daughter of a woman of genius with an
irredeemable mediocrity. "Oh! he's awfully clever," she said; but she
blushed for the maternal fib. What she meant was that though Sir
Baldwin's estates were not vast (he had a dreary house in South
Kensington and a still drearier "Hall" somewhere in Essex, which was
let), the connection was a "smarter" one than a child of hers could have
aspired to form. In spite of the social bravery of her novels she took a

very humble and dingy view of herself, so that of all her productions
"my daughter Lady Luard" was quite the one she was proudest of. That
personage thought her mother very vulgar and was distressed and
perplexed by the occasional license of her pen, but had a complicated
attitude in regard to this indirect connection with literature. So far as it
was lucrative her ladyship approved of it, and could compound with the
inferiority of the pursuit by doing practical justice to some of its
advantages. I had reason to know (my reason was simply that poor Mrs.
Stormer told me) that she suffered the inky fingers to press an
occasional bank- note into her palm. On the other hand she deplored the
"peculiar style" to which Greville Fane had devoted herself, and
wondered where an author who had the convenience of so lady-like a
daughter could have picked up such views about the best society. "She
might know better, with Leolin and me," Lady Luard had been known
to remark; but it appeared that some of Greville Fane's superstitions
were incurable. She didn't live in Lady Luard's society, and the best
was not good enough for her--she must make it still better.
I could see that this necessity grew upon her during the years she spent
abroad, when I had glimpses of her in the shifting sojourns that lay in
the path of my annual ramble. She betook herself from Germany to
Switzerland and from Switzerland to Italy; she favoured cheap places
and set up her desk in the smaller capitals. I took a look at her
whenever I could, and I always asked how Leolin was getting on. She
gave me beautiful accounts of him, and whenever it was possible the
boy was produced for my edification. I had entered from the first into
the joke of his career--I pretended to regard him as a consecrated child.
It had been a joke for Mrs. Stormer at first, but the boy himself had
been shrewd enough to make the matter serious. If his mother accepted
the principle that the intending novelist cannot begin too early to see
life, Leolin was not interested in hanging back from the application of
it. He was eager to qualify himself, and took to cigarettes at ten, on the
highest literary grounds. His poor mother gazed at him with
extravagant envy and, like Desdemona, wished heaven had made HER
such a man. She explained to me more than once that in her profession
she had found her sex a dreadful drawback. She loved the story of
Madame George Sand's early rebellion against this hindrance, and
believed that if she had worn trousers she could have written as well as

that lady. Leolin had for the career at least the qualification of trousers,
and as he grew older he recognised its importance by laying in an
immense assortment. He grew up in gorgeous apparel, which was his
way of interpreting his mother's system. Whenever I met her I found
her still under the impression that she was carrying this system out and
that Leolin's training was bearing fruit. She was giving him experience,
she was giving him impressions, she was putting a gagnepain into his
hand. It was another name for spoiling him with the best conscience in
the world. The queerest pictures come back to me of this period of the
good lady's life and of the extraordinarily virtuous, muddled,
bewildering tenor of it. She had