"What did he say the dog meant? Can you remember?" Miss Dickenson was settling down to chat, perceptibly.
"Pretty well. Achilles had wished to say that he personally, so far from finding fault with Mr. Solmes for trying to shoot him, fully recognised that he drew trigger under a contract to do so, given circumstances which had actually come about. He would not endeavour to extenuate his own conduct, but submitted that he was entitled to a lenient judgment, on the ground that a hare, the pursuit of which was the indirect cause of the whole mishap, had jumped up from behind a stone.... Well--I suppose I oughtn't to repeat all a profane poet thinks fit to say...."
"Please do! Never mind the profanity!" It really was a stimulus to the lady's curiosity.
Mr. Pellew repeated the apology which the collie's master had ascribed to him. Achilles had only acted in obedience to Instincts which had been Implanted in him in circumstances for which he was not responsible, and which might, for anything he knew, have been conceived in a spirit of mischief by the Author of all Good. This levity was stopped by a shocked expression on the lady's face. "Well," said the gentleman, "you mustn't blow _me_ up, Miss Dickenson. I am only repeating, as desired, the words of a profane poet. He had apologized, he told me, for what he said, when his sister boxed his ears."
"Serve him right. But what was his apology?"
"That he owed it to Achilles, who was unable to speak for himself, to lay stress on what he conceived to be the dog's Manichaean views, which he had been most unwillingly forced to infer from his practice of suddenly barking indignantly at the Universe, in what certainly seemed an unprayerful spirit."
"It was only Mr. Torrens's nonsense. He wanted to blaspheme a little, and jumped at the opportunity. They are all alike, Poets. Look at Byron and Shelley!"
Mr. Pellew, for his own purposes no doubt, managed here to insinuate that he himself was not without a reverent side to his character. These fillahs were no doubt the victims of their own genius, and presumably Mr. Torrens was a bird of the same feather. He himself was a stupid old-fashioned sort of fillah, and couldn't always follow this sort of thing. It was as delicate a claim as he could make to sometimes going to Church on Sunday, as was absolutely consistent with Truth.
To his great relief, Miss Dickenson did not catechize him closely about his religious views. She only remarked, reflectively and vaguely:--"One hardly knows what to think. Anyone would have said my father was a religious man, and what does he do but marry a widow, less than three years after my mother's death!"
Certainly the coherency of this speech was not on its surface. But Mr.
Pellew accepted it contentedly enough. At least, it clothed him with some portion of the garb of a family friend; say shoes or gloves, not the whole suit. Whichever it was, he pulled them on, and felt they fitted. He began to speak, and stopped; was asked what he was going to say, and went on, encouraged:--"I was going to say, only I pulled up because it felt impertinent...."
"Not to me! Please tell me exactly!"
"I was going to ask, how old is your father? Is he older than me?"
"Why, of course he is! I'm thirty-six. How old are you? Tell the truth!"
At this exact moment a funny thing happened. The _passee_ elderly young lady vanished--she who had been so often weighed, found wanting, and been put back in the balance for reconsideration. She vanished, and a desirable _alter ego_--Mr. Pellew's, as he hoped--was looking across at him from the sofa by the window, swinging the tassel of the red blind that kept the sun in check, and hushed it down to a fiery glow on the sofa's occupant waiting to know how old he was.
"I thought I had told you. Nearly forty-six."
"Very well, then! My father is five-and-twenty years your senior."
"If you had to say exactly _why_ you dislike your father's having married again, do you think you could?"
"Oh dear, no! I'm quite sure I couldn't. But I think it detestable for all that."
"I'm not sure that you're right. You may be, though! Are you sure it hasn't something to do with the ... with the party he's married?"
"Not at all sure." Dryly.
"Can't understand objecting to a match on its own account. It's always something to do with the outsider that comes in--the one one knows least of."
"You wouldn't like this one." It may seem inexplicable, that these words should be the cause of the person addressed taking the nearest chair to the speaker, having previously been a nomad with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. Close analysis may connect the action with an extension of the family-friendship wardrobe, which it may have recognised--a neckcloth, perhaps--and may be able to explain why it seemed doubtful form to the Hon. Percival to keep his thumbs in those waistcoat-loops. To us, it is perfectly easy to understand--without any analysis at all--why, at this juncture, Miss Dickenson said:--"I suppose you know you may smoke a cigarette, if you like?"
In those days you might have looked in tobacconist's shopwindows all day and never seen a cigarette. It was a foreign fashion at which sound smokers looked askance. Mossoos might smoke it, but good, solid John Bull suspected it of being a kick-shaw not unconnected with Atheism. He stuck to his pipe chiefly. Nevertheless, it was always open to skill to fabricate its own cigarettes, and Mr. Pellew's aptitude in the art was known to Miss Dickenson. The one he screwed up on receipt of this licence was epoch-making. The interview had been one that was going to last a quarter of an hour. This cigarette made its duration indeterminate. Because a cigarette is not a cigar. The latter is like a chapter in a book, the former like a paragraph. At the chapter's end vacant space insists on a pause for thought, for approval or condemnation of its contents. But every paragraph is as it were kindled from the last sentence of its predecessor; as soon as each ends the next is ready. The reader aloud is on all fours with the cigarette-smoker. He doesn't always enjoy himself so much, but that is neither here nor there.
It was not during the first cigarette that Mr. Pellew said to Aunt Constance:--"Where is it they have gone to-day, do you know?" That first one heard, if it listened, all about the lady's home in Dorsetshire and her obnoxious stepmother. It may have wondered, if it was an observant cigarette, at the unreserve with which the narrator took its smoker into the bosom of her confidence, and the lively interest her story provoked.
If it had--which is not likely, considering the extent of its experience--a shrewd perception of the philosophy of reciprocity, probably it wondered less. It heard to the end of the topic, and Mr.
Pellew asked the question above stated, as he screwed up its successor, and exacted the death-duty of an ignition from it.
"They ought to be coming back soon," was the answer. "I told them I wouldn't have tea till they came. They're gone to see a _protegee_ of Clotilda's, who lives down a Court. It's not very far off; under a mile, I should think. We saw him in the street, coming from the railway-station. He looked a nice boy. That is to say, he would have looked nice, only he and his friends had all been blacking their faces with burnt cork."
"What a lark! Why didn't you go to the Court?... I'm jolly glad you didn't, you know, but you might have...." This was just warm enough for the position. With its slight extenuation of slang, it might rank as mere emphasized civility.
It was Miss Dickenson's turn to word something ambiguous to cover all contingencies. "Yes, I should have been very sorry if you had come to bring the book, and not found me here." This was clever, backed by a smile. She went on:--"They thought two would be quite enough, considering the size of the Court."
A spirit of accommodation prevailed. Oh yes--Mr. Pellew quite saw that.
Very sensible! "It don't do," said he, "to make too much of a descent on this sort of people. They never know what to make of it, and the thing don't wash!" But he was only saying what came to hand; because he was extremely glad Miss Dickenson had not gone with the expedition. How far he perceived that his own visit underlay its arrangements, who can say?
His perception fell short of being ignorant that he was aware of it.
Suppose we leave it at that!
Still, regrets--scarcely Jeremiads--that she had not been included would be becoming, all things considered. They could not be misinterpreted. "I was sorry not to go," she said. "His father was a prizefighter and seems interesting, according to Clotilda. Her idea is to get Gwen enthusiastic about people of this sort, or any of her charitable schemes, rather than dragging her off to Switzerland or Italy. Besides, she won't go!"
"That's a smasher! The idea, I suppose, is to get her away and let the Torrens business die a natural death. Well--it won't!"
"You think not?"
"No thinking about it! Sure of it! I've known my cousin Gwen from a child--so have you, for that matter!--and I know it's useless. If she will, she will, you may depend on't; and if she won't she won't, and there's an end on't. You'll see, she'll consent to go fiddling about for three months or six months to Wiesbaden or Ems or anywhere, but she'll end by fixing the day and ordering her trousseau, quite as a matter of course! As for _his_ changing--pooh!" Mr. Pellew laughed aloud. Miss Dickenson looked a very hesitating concurrence, which he felt would bear refreshing. He continued:--"Why, just look at the case! A man loses his eyesight and is half killed five minutes after seeing--for the first time, mind you, for the first time!--my cousin Gwen Rivers, under specially favourable circumstances. When he comes to himself he finds out in double quick time that she loves him? _He_ change? Not he!"
"Do tell me, Mr. Pellew.... I'm only asking, you know; not expressing any opinion myself.... Do tell me, don't you think it possible that it might be better for both of them--for Gwen certainly, if it ... if it never...."
"If it never came off? If you ask me, all I can say is, that I haven't an opinion. It is so absolutely their affair and nobody else's. That's my excuse for not having an opinion, and you see I jump at it."
"Of course it is entirely their affair, and one knows. But one can't help thinking. Just fancy Gwen the wife of a blind country Squire. It is heartbreaking to think of--now isn't it?"
But Mr. Pellew was not to be moved from his position. "It's their own look out," said he. "Nobody else's!" He suddenly perceived that this might be taken as censorious. "Not finding fault, you know! You're all right. Naturally, you think of Gwen."
"Whom ought I to think of? Oh, I see what you mean. It's true I don't know Mr. Torrens--have hardly seen him!"
"I saw him a fairish number of times--one time with another. He's a sort of fillah ... a sort of fillah you can't exactly describe. Very unusual sort of fillah!" Mr. Pellew held his cigarette a little way off to look at it thoughtfully, as though it were the usual sort of fellow, and he was considering how he could distinguish Mr. Torrens from it.
"You mean he's unusually clever?"
"Yes, he's that. But that's not exactly what I meant, either. He's clever, of course. Only he doesn't give you a chance of knowing it, because he turns everything to nonsense. What I wanted to say was, that whatever he says, one fancies one would have said it oneself, if one had had the time to think it out."
Miss Dickenson didn't really identify this as a practicable shade of character, but she pretended she did. In fact she said:--"Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I've known people like that," merely to lubricate the conversation. Then she asked: "Did you ever talk to the Earl about him?"
"Tim? Yes, a little. He doesn't disguise his liking for him, personally.
He's rather ... rather besotted about him, I should say."
"_She_ isn't." How Mr. Pellew knew who was meant is not clear, but he did.
"Her mother, you mean," said he. "Do you know, I doubt if Philippa dislikes him? I shouldn't put it that way. But I think she would be glad for the thing to die a natural death for all that. Eyes apart, you know." When people begin to make so very few words serve their purpose it shows that their circumferences have intersected--no mere tangents now. A portion of the area of each is common to both. Forgive geometry this intrusion on the story, and accept the metaphor.
"Yes, that's what it is," said Aunt Constance. And then in answer to a glance that, so to speak, asked for a confirmation of a telegram:--"Oh yes, I know we both mean the same thing. You were thinking of that old story--the old love-affair. I quite understand." She might have added "this time," because the last time she knew what Mr. Pellew meant she was stretching a point, and he was subconscious of it.
"That's the idea," said he. "I fancy Philippa's feelings must be rather difficult to define. So must his papa's, I should think."
"I can't fancy anything more embarrassing."