"There now!" said Widow Thrale. "There will be good hearing for Keziah when she comes nigh by us next, maybe this very day. For old Stephen he's just gone near to breaking his heart over it, taking all the fault to himself." Keziah was Keziah Solmes, Stephen Solmes's old wife, whose sentimentalism would have saved Adrian Torrens's eyesight if she had not had such an obstinate husband. Stephen was a connection of the departed saddler, the speaker's husband.
Said Sister Nora as they rose to rejoin the carriage:--"Now remember!--you're not to fuss over Dave, Mrs. Thrale. _We'll_ see that he comes to no harm." The ogress did not seem so uneasy about the child, saying:--"It's the picture of the man running from the Police Granny goes by, and 'tis no more than any boy might draw." Whereat Sister Nora said, laughing: "You needn't get scared about Mickey, if that's it. He's just a young monkey." But the old woman seemed still to be concealing disquiet, saying only:--"I had no thought of the boy." She had formed some misapprehension of Dave's surrounding influences, which seemed hard to clear up.
Riding home Gwen turned suddenly to her cousin, after reflective silence, saying:--"What makes the old Goody so ferocious against the little boy's Mrs. Picture?" To which the reply was:--"Jealousy, I suppose. What a beautiful sunset! That means wind." But Sister Nora was talking rather at random, and there may have been no jealousy of old Maisie in the heart of old Phoebe.
Moreover, Gwen's was not an inquiry-question demanding an answer. It was interrogative chat. She was thinking all the while how amused Adrian would have been with Dave's letter and the escaped prisoner. Then her thought was derailed by one of the sudden jerks that crossed the line so often in these days. Chat with herself must needs turn on the mistakes she had made in not borrowing that letter to enclose with her next one to Adrian, for him to ... to _what_? There came the jerk! What could he see? Indeed, one of the sorest trials of this separation from him was the way her correspondence--for she had insisted on freedom in this respect--was handicapped by his inability to read it. How could she allow all she longed to say to pass under the eyes even of Irene, dear friend though she had become? She would have given worlds for an automaton that could read aloud, whose speech would repeat all its eyes saw, without passing the meaning of it through an impertinent mind.
Sister Nora was quite in her confidence about her love-affair; in fact, she had seen Adrian for a moment, her arrival at the Towers on her way from Scotland after her father's death having overlapped his departure--which had been delayed a few days by pretexts of a shallow nature--just long enough to admit of the introduction. She inclined to partisanship with the Countess. Why--see how mad the whole thing was!
The girl had fancied herself in love with him after seeing him barely once, for five minutes. It never could last. She was, however, quite prepared to back Gwen if it did show signs of being, or becoming, a _grande passion_. Meanwhile, evidently the kindest thing was to turn her mind in another direction, and the inoculation of an Earl's daughter with the virus of an enthusiasm which has been since called _slumming_ presented itself to her in the light of an effort-worthy end.
Sister Nora was far ahead of her time; it should have fallen twenty years later.
But she was not going to imperil her chances of success by using too strong a _virus_ at the first injection. Caution was everything. This projected visit to Sapps Court was a perfect stepping-stone to a stronger regimen, such as an incursion into the purlieus of Drury Lane.
Tom-all-alone's might overtax the nervous system of a neophyte. The full-blown horrors which civilisation creates wholesale, and remedies retail, were not to be grappled with by untrained hands. A time might come for that; meanwhile--Sapps Court, clearly!
The two ladies had a quiet drive back to the Towers. How very quiet the latter end of a drive often is, as far as talk goes! Does the Ozymandian silence on the box react upon the rank and file of the expedition, or is it the hypnotic effect of hoof-monotony? Lady Gwen and Miss Grahame scarcely exchanged a word until, within a mile of the house, they identified two pedestrians. Of whom their conversation was precisely what follows, not one word more or less:--
"There they are, Cousin Chloe, exactly as I prophesied."
"Well--why shouldn't they be?"
"I didn't say anything about shoulds and shouldn't. I merely referred to facts.... Come--_say_ you think it ridiculous!"
"I can't see why. Their demeanour appears to me unexceptionable, and perfectly dignified. Everything one would expect, knowing the parties...."
"Are they going to walk about like that to all eternity, being unexceptionable? That's what I want to know?"
"You are too impatient, dear!"
"They have been going on for months like that; at least, it _seems_ months. And never getting any nearer! And then when you talk to them about each other, they speak of each other _respectfully_! They really do. He says she is a shrewd observer of human nature, and she says he appears to have had most interesting experiences. Indeed, I'm not exaggerating."
"My dear Gwen, what _do_ you expect?"
"Oh--_you_ know! You're only making believe. Why, when I said to him that she had been a strikingly pretty girl in her young days, and had refused no end of offers of marriage, he ... _What_ do you say?"
"I said 'not no end.'"
"Well--of course not! But I thought it as well to say so."
"And what did he say to that?"
"He got his eyeglass right to look at her, as if he had never seen her before, and came to a critical decision:--'Ye-es, yes, yes--so I should have imagined. Quite so!' It amounted to acquiescing in her having gone off, and was distinctly rude. She's better than that when I speak to her about him certainly. This morning she said he smoked too many cigars."
"How absurd you are, Gwen! Why was that better?"
"H'm--it's a little difficult to say! But it _is_ better, distinctly.
There--they've heard us coming!"
"Why?"
"Because they both jumped farther off. They were far enough already, goodness knows!... Good evening, Percy! Good evening, Aunt Constance!
We've had such a lovely drive home from Chorlton. I suppose the others are on in front." And so forth. Every _modus vivendi_, at arm's length, between any and every single lady and gentleman, was to be fooled to the top of its bent, in their service.
The carriage was aware it was _de trop_, but was also alive to the necessity of pretending it was not. So it interested itself for a moment in some palpable falsehoods about the cause of the pedestrians figuring as derelicts; and then, representing itself as hungering for the society of their vanguard, started professedly to overtake it. It was really absolutely indifferent on the subject.
"I suppose," said Miss Grahame enigmatically, as soon as inaudibility became a certainty, "I suppose that's why you wanted Miss Smith-Dickenson to come to Cavendish Square?"
Gwen did not treat this as a riddle; but said, equally inexplicably:--"He could call." And very little light was thrown on the mystery by the reply:--"Very well, Gwen dear, go your own way." Perhaps a little more, though not much, by Gwen's marginal comment:--"You know Aunt Constance lives at an outlandish place in the country?"
"Do you know, Gwen dear," said Miss Grahame, after reflection, "I really think we ought to have offered them a lift up to the house. Stop, Blencorn!" Blencorn stopped, without emotion. Gwen said:--"What nonsense, Cousin Chloe! They're perfectly happy. Do leave them alone. Go on, Blencorn!" Who, utterly unmoved, went on. But Sister Nora said:--"No, Gwen dear, we really ought! Because I know Mr. Pellew has to catch his train, and he'll be late. Don't go on, Blencorn!" Gwen appearing to assent reluctantly, the arrangement stood; as did the horses, gently conversing with each other's noses about the caprices of the carriage.
CHAPTER XXIV
HOW IT CAME ABOUT THAT THE LADY AND GENTLEMAN COULD JUMP FARTHER OFF. WHAT MISS DICKENSON WANTED TO SAY AND DIDN'T, AND THE REPLY MR. PELLEW DIDN'T MAKE, IN FULL. OF A SPLIT PATHWAY, AND THE SHREWDNESS OF RABBITS. BUT THERE WAS NO RABBIT, AND WHEN BLENCORN STOPPED AGAIN, THEY OVERTOOK THE CARRIAGE. THEIR FAREWELL, AND HOW MR. PELLEW RAN AGAINST THE EARL
The Hon. Percival was called away to town that evening, and was to catch the late train at Grantley Thorpe, where it stopped by signal. There was no need to hurry, as he belonged to the class of persons that catch trains. This class, when it spends a holiday at a country-house, dares to leave its packing-up, when it comes away, to its valet or lady's-maid _pro tem._, and knows to a nicety how low it is both liberal and righteous to assess their services.
If this gentleman had not belonged to this class, it is, of course, possible that he would still have joined the party that had walked over, that afternoon, to see the Roman Villa at Ticksey, the ancient Coenobantium, in company with sundry Antiquaries who had lunched at the Towers, and had all talked at once in the most interesting possible way on the most interesting possible subjects. It was the presence of these gentlemen that, by implication, supplied a reason why Gwen and Sister Nora should prefer the others, on in front, to the less pretentious stragglers whom they had overtaken.
Archaic Research has an interest short of the welfare of Romeo and Juliet; or, perhaps, murders. But neither of these topics lend themselves, at least until they too become ancient history, to discussion by a Society, or entry on its minutes. Perhaps it was the accidental occurrence of the former one, just as the party started to walk back to the Towers, that had caused Mr. Percival and Aunt Constance to lag so far behind it, and substitute their own interest in a contemporary drama for the one they had been professing, not very sincerely, in hypocausts and mosaics and terra-cottas.
For this lady had then remarked that, for her part, she thought the Ancient Romans were too far removed from our own daily life for any but Antiquarians to enter sympathetically into theirs. She herself doted on History, but was inclined to draw the line at Queen Ann. It would be mere affectation in her to pretend to sympathize with Oliver Cromwell or the Stuarts, and as for Henry the Eighth he was simply impossible. But the Recent Past touched a chord. Give her the four Georges. This was just as she and the Hon. Percival began to let the others go on in front, and the others began to use their opportunity to do so.
Three months ago the gentleman might have decided that the lady was talking rot. Her position now struck him as original, forcible, and new.
But he was so keenly alive to the fact that he was not in the least in love with her, that it is very difficult to account for his leniency towards this rot. It showed itself as even more than leniency, if he meant what he said in reply:--"By Jove, Miss Dickenson, I shouldn't wonder if you were right. I never thought of it that way before!"
"I'm not quite sure I ever did," she answered; telling the truth; and not seeming any the worse, in personality, for doing so. "At least, until I got rather bored by having to listen. I really hate speeches and lectures and papers and things. But what I said is rather true, for all that. I'm sure I shall be more interested in the house the Prince Regent was drunk in, where I'm going to stay in town, than in any number of atriums. It _does_ go home to one more--now, doesn't it?"
Mr. Pellew did not answer the question. He got his eyeglass right, and looked round--he had contracted a habit of doing this--to see if Aunt Constance was justifying the tradition of her youth, reported by her adopted niece. He admitted that she was. Stimulated by this conviction, he decided on:--"Are you going to stay in town? Where?"
"At Clotilda's--Sister Nora, you know. In Cavendish Square. I hope it's like what she says. Scarcely anything has been moved since her mother died, when she was a baby, and for years before that the drawing-rooms were shut up. Why did you ask?" This was a perfectly natural question, arising out of the subject before the house.
Nevertheless it frightened the gentleman into modifying what he meant to say next, which was:--"May I call on you there?" He gave it up, as too warm on the whole, considering the context, and said instead:--"I could leave your book." Something depended on the lady's answer to this. So she paused, and worded it:--"By all means bring it, if you prefer doing so," instead of:--"You needn't take any trouble about returning the book."
Only the closest analysis can be even with the contingencies of some stages in the relativities of grown-ups, however easily one sees through the common human girl and boy. Miss Dickenson's selected answer just saved the situation by the skin of its teeth. For there certainly was a situation of a sort. Nobody was falling in love with anybody, that saw itself; but for all that a fatality dictated that Mr. Pellew and Aunt Constance were in each other's pockets more often than not. Neither had any wish to come out, and popular observation supplied the language the story has borrowed to describe the fact.
The occupant of Mr. Pellew's pocket was, however, dissatisfied with her answer about the book. Her tenancy might easily become precarious. She felt that the maintenance of Cavendish Square, as a subject of conversation, would soften asperities and dispel misunderstandings, if any. So, instead of truncating the subject of the book-return, she interwove it with the interesting mansion of Sister Nora's family, referring especially to the causes of her own visit to it. "Gwen and Cousin Clo, as she calls her, very kindly asked me to go there if I came to London; and I suppose I shall, if my sister Georgie and her husband are not at Roehampton. Anyway, even if I am not there, I am sure they will be delighted to see you.... Oh no!--Roehampton's much too far to come with it, and I can easily call for it." This was most ingenious, for it requested Mr. Pellew to make his call a definite visit, while depersonalising that visit by a hint at her own possible absence. This uncertainty also gave latitude of speech, her hypothetical presence warranting an attitude which would almost have implied too warm a welcome from a certainty. She even could go so far as to add:--"However, I should like to show you the Prince's drawing-room--they call it so because he got drunk there; it's such an honour, you see!--so I hope I shall be there."
"Doosid int'ristin'--shall certainly come! Gwen's to go to London to get poor Torrens out of her head--that's the game, isn't it?"
"That sort of thing, I believe. Change of scene and so on." Miss Dickenson spoke as one saturated with experience of refractory lovers, not without a suggestion of having in her youth played a leading part in some such drama.
"Well--I'm on his side. P'r'aps that's not the right way to put it; I suppose I ought to say _their_ side. Meaning, the young people's, of course! Yes, exactly."
"One always takes part against the stern parent." The humour of this received a tributary laugh. "But do you really think Philippa wrong, Mr. Pellew? I must say she seems to me only reasonable. The whole thing was so absurdly sudden."