"Oh dear, how slow men are!" The lady passes through a short phase of collapse from despair over man's faculties, then returns to a difficult task crisply and incisively. "Well, at any rate, you can see _this_? The girl's got it into her head that the accident was _our_ fault, and that it's _her_ duty to make it up to him."
"But, then, she's not really in love with him, if it's a self-denying ordinance."
The Countess is getting used to despair, so she only shrugs a submissive shoulder and remarks with forbearance:--"It is _no_ use trying to make you understand. Of course, it's _because_ she is in love with him that she is going in for ... what did you call it?..."
"A self-denying ordinance."
"_I_ call it heroics. If she wasn't in love with him, do you suppose she would want to fling herself away?"
"Then it isn't a self-denying ordinance at all. I confess I _don't_ understand. I must talk to Gwen herself."
"Oh, talk to her by all means. But don't expect to make any impression on her. I know what she is when she gets the bit in her teeth. Certainly talk to her. I really must go and dress now...."
"Stop one minute, Philippa...."
"Well--what?"
"Apart from the blindness--poor fellow!--is there anything about this young man to object to? There's nothing about his family. Why!--his father's Hamilton Torrens, that was George's great friend at Christ Church. And his mother was an Abercrombie...."
"I can't go into that now." Her ladyship cuts Adrian's family very short. Consider her memories of bygones! No wonder she became acutely alive to her duties as a hostess. She had created a precedent in this matter, though really her husband scarcely knew anything about her _affaire de coeur_ with Adrian's father thirty years ago. It was not a hanging matter, but she could not object to the young man's family after such a definite attitude towards his father.
Here ends the second short colloquy, which was the one that caused the Earl to be so more than usually absent that evening. It had the opposite effect on her ladyship, who felt better after it; braced up again to company-manners after the first one. Gwen, as mentioned before, was dazzling; superb; what is apt to be called a cynosure, owing to something Milton said. Nevertheless, the Shrewd Observer, who happened in this case to be Aunt Constance, noticed that at intervals the young lady let her right-hand neighbour talk, and died away into preoccupation, with a vital undercurrent of rippled lip and thoughtful eye. Another of her shrewd observations was that when the Hon. Percival, referring to Mr. Torrens, still an absentee by choice, said:--"I tried again to persuade him to come down at feeding-time, but it was no go,"
Gwen came suddenly out of one dream of this sort to say from her end of the table, miles off:--"He really prefers dining by himself, I know,"
and went in again.
It was this that Aunt Constance referred to in conversation with Mr.
Pellew, at about half-past ten o'clock in that same shrubbery walk. They had cultivated each other's absence carefully in the drawing-room, and had convinced themselves that neither was necessary to the other. That clause having been carried nem. con., they were entitled to five minutes' chat, without prejudice. Neither remembered, perhaps, the convert to temperance who decided that passing a public-house door _a contre-coeur_ entitled him to half-a-pint.
"How did you get on with little Di Accrington?" the lady had said. And the gentleman had answered:--"First-rate. Talked to her about _your_ partner all the time. How did you hit it off with him?" A sympathetic laugh over the response: "Capitally--he talked about _her_, of course!"
quite undid the fiction woven with so much pains indoors, and also as it were lighted a little collateral fire they might warm their fingers at, or burn them. However, a parade of their well-worn seniority, their old experience of life, would keep them safe from _that_. Only it wouldn't do to neglect it.
Mr. Pellew recognised the obligation first. "Offly amusin'!--young people," said he, claiming, as the countryman of Shakespeare, his share of insight into Romeo and Juliet.
"Same old story, over and over again!" said Aunt Constance. They posed as types of elderliness that had no personal concern in love-affairs, and could afford to smile at juvenile flirtations. Mr. Pellew felt interested in Miss Dickenson's bygone romances, implied in the slight shade of sentiment in her voice--wondered in fact how the doose this woman had missed her market; this was the expression his internal soliloquy used. She for her part was on the whole glad that an intensely Platonic friendship didn't admit of catechism, as she was better pleased to leave the customers in that market to the uninformed imagination of others, than to be compelled to draw upon her own.
The fact was that, in spite of its thinness and slightness, this Platonic friendship with a mature bachelor whose past--while she acquitted him of atrocities--she felt was safest kept out of sight, had already gone quite as near to becoming a love-affair as anything her memory could discover among her own rather barren antecedents. So there was a certain sort of affectation in Aunt Constance's suggestion of familiarity with Romeo and Juliet. She wished, without telling lies, to convey the idea that the spinsterhood four very married sisters did not scruple to taunt her with, was either of her own choosing or due to some tragic event of early life. She did not relish the opposite pole of human experience to her companion's. Of course, he was a bachelor nominally unattached--she appreciated that--just as she was a spinster very actually unattached. But all men of his type she had understood were alike; only some--this one certainly--were much better than others.
Honestly she was quite unconscious of any personal reason for assigning to him a first-class record.
Attempts to sift the human mind throw very little light upon it, and the dust gets in the eyes of the story. Perhaps that is why it cannot give Miss Dickenson's reason for not following up her last remark with:--"And will go on so, I suppose, to the end of time!" as she had half-intended to do, philosophically. Possibly she thought it would complicate the topic she was hankering after. It would be better to keep that provisionally clear of subjects made to the hand of writers of plays.
She would not go beyond hypnotic suggestion at present. She approached it with the air of one who dismisses a triviality.
"It seems Mr. Adrian Torrens is a musician as well as a poet."
"Had they been playing the piano?"
"Really, Mr. Pellew, how absurd you are! Where does 'they' come in?"
"Oh--well--a--of course--I thought you were referring to ..."
"_Whom_ did you suppose I was referring to?" Aggressive equanimity here that can wait weeks, if necessary.
"Torrens and my cousin Gwen! Be hanged if I can see why I shouldn't refer to them!"
"Do so by all means. I wasn't, myself; but it doesn't matter. It was Nurse Bailey told Lutwyche, whom I borrow from Gwen sometimes, that Mr.
Torrens was a great musician."
"How does Nurse Bailey know?"
"He was playing to her quite beautiful in the drawing-room just before her young ladyship came in. And then Mrs. Bailey went upstairs to write a letter because there was plenty of time before the post."
"Can't say I believe Nurse Bailey's much of a dab at music." Mr. Pellew was reflecting on the humorous background of Miss Dickenson's character, clear to his insight in her last speech. "But it was just post-time when we got back from the flower-show.... What then? Why, her young ladyship must have been there long enough for Mrs. Bailey to write a letter."
"Is that the way you gossip at your Club, Mr. Pellew?"
"Come, I say, Miss Dickenson, that's too bad! I merely remark that a lady and gentleman must have had plenty of time for music, and you call it 'gossip.'"
"Precisely."
"Well, I say it's a jolly shame!... You don't suppose there _is_ anything there, do you?" This came with a sudden efflux of seriousness.
Aunt Constance had landed her fish and was blameless. Nobody could say she had been indiscreet. She, too, could afford to be suddenly serious.
"I don't mind saying so to you, Mr. Pellew," she said, "because I know I can rely upon you. But did you notice at dinner-time, when you said you had tried to persuade Mr. Torrens to come down, that Gwen took upon herself to answer for him all the way down the table?"
"By Jove--so she did! I didn't notice it at the time. At least, I mean I did notice it at the time, but I didn't take much notice of it.
Well--you know what I mean!" As Miss Dickenson knows perfectly well, she tolerates technical flaws of speech with a nod, and allows Mr. Pellew to go on:--"But, I say, this will be an awful smash for the family. A blind man!" Then he becomes aware that a conclusion has been jumped at, and experiences relief. "But it may be all a mistake, you know." Aunt Constance's silence has the force of speech, and calls for further support of this surmise. "They haven't had the time. She has only known him since yesterday. At least he had never seen her but once--he told me so--that time just before the accident."
"Gwen is a very peculiar girl," says the lady. "A spark will fire a train. Did you notice nothing when we came in from the flower-show?"
"Nothing whatever. Did you?"
"Little things. However, as you say, it may be all a mistake. I don't think anything of the time, though. Some young people are volcanic. Gwen might be."
"I saw no sign of an eruption in him--no lunacy. He chatted quite reasonably about the division on Thursday, and the crops and the weather. Never mentioned Gwen!"
"My dear Mr. Pellew, you really are quite pastoral. Of course, Gwen is exactly what he would _not_ mention."
Mr. Pellew seems to concede that he is an outsider. "You think it was Love at first sight, and that sort of thing," he says. "Well--I hope it will wash. It don't always, you know."
"Indeed it does not." The speaker cannot resist the temptation to flavour philosophy with a suggestion of tender regrets--a hint of a life-drama in her own past. No questions need be answered, and will scarcely be asked. But it is candid and courageous to say as little as may be about it, and to favour a cheerful outlook on Life. She is bound to say that many of the happiest marriages she has known have been marriages of second--third--fourth--fifth--_n_th Love. She had better have let it stand at that if she wanted her indistinct admirer to screw up his courage then and there to sticking point. For the Hon. Percival had at least seen in her words a road of approach to a reasonably tender elderly avowal. But she must needs spoil it by adding--really quite unconsciously--that many such marriages had been between persons in quite mature years. Somehow this changed the nascent purpose kindled by a suggestion of _n_th love in Autumn to a sudden consciousness that the conversation was sailing very near the wind--some wind undefined--and made Mr. Pellew run away pusillanimously.
"By-the-by, did you ever see the Macganister More man that died the other day? Married the Earl's half-sister?"
"Never. Of course, I know Clotilda perfectly well."
"Let's see--oh yes!--she's Sister Nora. Oh yes, of course I know Clotilda. She's his heiress, I fancy--comes into all the property--no male heir. She'll go over to Rome, I suppose."
"Why?"
"Always do--with a lot of independent property. Unless some fillah cuts in and snaps her up."