"Of course Tim has a mighty easy time of it, by comparison."
"Does he necessarily know anything about it?"
"He must have heard of it. It wasn't a secret, though it wasn't announced in the papers. These things get talked about. Besides, she would tell him."
"Tell him? Of course she would! She would tell him that that young Torrens was a 'great admirer' of hers."
"Yes--I suppose she _would_ make use of some expression of that sort.
Capital things, expressions!"
Aunt Constance seemed to think this phrase called for some sort of elucidation. "I always feel grateful," said she, "to that Frenchman--Voltaire or Talleyrand or Rochefoucauld or somebody--who said language was invented to conceal our thoughts. That was what you meant, wasn't it?"
"Precisely. I suppose Sir Torrens--this chap's papa--told the lady he married ..."
"She was a Miss Abercrombie, I believe."
"Yes--I believe she was.... Told her he was a great admirer of her ladyship once on a time--a boyish freak--that sort of thing! Pretends all the gilt is off the gingerbread now. Wish I had been there when Sir Hamilton turned up at the Towers, after the accident."
"I _was_ there."
"Well! And then?"
"Nothing and then. They were--just like anybody else. When I saw them was after his son had begun to pull round. Till then I fancy neither he nor the sister ..."
"Irene. ''Rene,' he calls her. Jolly sort of girl, and very handsome."
"Neither Irene nor her father came downstairs much. It was after you went away."
"And what did they say?--him and Philippa, I mean."
"Oh--say? What _did_ they say? Really I can't remember. Said what a long time it was since they met. Because I don't believe they _had_ met--not to shake hands--for five-and-twenty years!"
"What a rum sort of experience! Do you know?... only of course one can't say for certain about anything of this sort ..."
"Do I know? Go on."
"I was going to say that if I had been them, I should have burst out laughing and said what a couple of young asses we were!" The Hon.
Percival was very colloquial, but syntax was not of the essence of the contract, if any existed.
Aunt Constance was not in the mood to pooh-pooh the _tendresses_ of a youthful passion. She was, if you will have it so, sentimental. "Let me think if I should," said she, with a momentary action of closing her eyes, to keep inward thought free of the outer world. In a moment they were open again, and she was saying:--"No, I should not have done anything of the sort. One laughs at young people, I know, when they are so very inflammatory. But what do we think of them when they are not?"
She became quite warm and excited about it, or perhaps--so thought Mr.
Pellew as he threw his last cigarette-end away through that open window--the blaze of a sun that was forecasting its afterglow made her seem so. Mr. Pellew having thrown away that cigarette-end conscientiously, and made a pretence of seeing it safe into the front area, was hardly bound to go back to his chair. He dropped on the sofa, beside Miss Dickenson, with one hand over the back. He loomed over her, but she did not shy or flinch.
"What indeed!" said he seriously, answering her last words. "A young man that does not fall in love seldom comes to any good." He was really thinking to himself:--"Oh, the mistakes I should have been saved in life, if only this had happened to me in my twenties!" He was not making close calculation of what the lady's age would have been in those days.
She was dwelling on the abstract question:--"You know, say what one may, the whole of their lives is at stake. And we never think them young geese when the thing comes off, and they become couples."
"No. True enough. It's only when it goes off and they don't."
"And what is so creepy about it is that we never know whether the couple is the right couple."
"Never know anything at all about anything beforehand!" Mr. Pellew was really talking at random. Even the value of this trite remark was spoiled. For he added:--"Nor afterwards, for that matter!"
Miss Dickenson admitted that we could not lay too much stress on our own limitations. But she was not in the humour for platitudes. Her mind was running on a problem that might have worried Juliet Capulet had she never wedded her Romeo and taken a dose of hellebore, but lived on to find that County Paris had in him the makings of a lovable mate. Quite possible, you know! It was striking her that if a trothplight were nothing but a sort of civil contract--civil in the sense of courteous, polite, urbane, accommodating--an exchange of letters through a callous Post Office--a woman might be engaged a dozen times and meet the males implicated in after-life, without turning a hair. But even a hand-clasp, left to enjoy itself by its parents--not nipped in the bud--might poison their palms and recrudesce a little in Society, long years after! While, as for lips....
Something crossed her reflections, just on the crux of them--their most critical point of all. "There!" said she. "Did you hear that? I knew we should have thunder."
But Mr. Pellew had heard nothing and was incredulous. He verified his incredulity, going to the window to look out. "Blue sky all round!" said he. "Must have been a cart!" He went back to his seat, and the explanation passed muster.
Miss Dickenson picked up her problem, with that last perplexity hanging to it. No, it was no use!--- that equable deportment of Sir Hamilton and Philippa remained a mystery to her. She, however--mere single Miss Dickenson--could not of course guess how these two would see themselves, looking back, with all the years between of a growing Gwen and Adrian; to her, it was just the lapse of so much time, nothing more--a year or so over the time she had known Philippa. For Romeo and Juliet were metaphors out of date when she came on the scene, and Philippa was a Countess.
She was irritated by the inability she felt to comment freely on these views of the position. It would have been easier--she saw this--to do so had Mr. Pellew gone back to his chair, instead of sitting down again beside her on the sofa. It was her own fault perhaps, because she could not have sworn this time that she had not seemed to make room. That unhappy sex--the female one--lives under orders to bristle with incessant safeguards against misinterpretation. Heaven only knows--or should we not rather say, Hell only knows?--what latitudes have claimed "encouragement" as their excuse! That lady in Browning's poem never should have looked at the gentleman so, had she meant he should not love her. So _he_ said! But suppose she saw a fly on his nose--how then?
Therefore it would never have done for Miss Dickenson to go into close analysis of the problems suggested by the meeting of two undoubted _fiances_ of years long past, and the inexplicable self-command with which they looked the present in the face. She had to be content with saying:--"Of course we know nothing of the intentions of Providence. But it's no use pretending that it would not feel very--queer." She had to clothe this word with a special emphasis, and backed it with an implied contortion due to teeth set on edge. She added:--"All I know is, I'm very glad it wasn't _me_." After which she was clearly not responsible if the topic continued.
Mr. Pellew took the responsibility on himself of saying with deep-seated intuition:--"I know precisely what you mean. You're perfectly right.
Perfectly!"
"A hundred little things," said the lady. The dragging in of ninety-nine of these, with the transparent object of slurring over the hundredth, which each knew the other was thinking of, merely added to its vividness. Aunt Constance might just as well have let it alone, and suddenly talked of something else. For instance, of the Sun God's abnormal radiance, now eloquent of what he meant to do for the metropolis when he got a few degrees lower, and went in for setting, in earnest. Or if she shrank from that, as not prosaic enough to dilute the conversation down to mere chat-point, the Ethiopian Serenaders who had just begun to be inexplicable in the Square below. But she left the first to assert its claim to authorship of the flush of rose colour that certainly made her tell to advantage, and the last to account for the animation which helped it. For the enigmatic character of South Carolina never interferes with a certain brisk exhilaration in its bones. She repeated in a vague way:--"A hundred things!" and shut her lips on particularisation.
"I don't know exactly how many," said Mr. Pellew gravely. He sat drawing one whisker through the hand whose elbow was on the sofa-back, with his eyes very much on the flush and the animation. "I was thinking of one in particular."
"Perhaps _I_ was. I don't know."
"I was thinking of the kissin'."
"Well--so was I, perhaps. I don't see any use in mincing matters." She had been the mincer-in-chief, however.
"Don't do the slightest good! When it gets to kissin'-point, it's all up. If I had been a lady, and broken a fillah off, I think I should have been rather grateful to him for getting out of the gangway. Should have made a point of getting out, myself."
The subject had got comfortably landed, and could be philosophically discussed. "I dare say everyone does not feel the point as strongly as I do," said Miss Dickenson. "I know my sister Georgie--Mrs. Amphlett Starfax--looks at it quite differently, and thinks me rather a ... prig.
Or perhaps _prig_ isn't exactly the word. I don't know how to put it...."
"Never mind. I know exactly what you mean."
"You see, the circumstances are so different. Georgie had been engaged six times before Octavius came on the scene. But, oh dear, how I _am_ telling tales out of school!..."
"Never mind Georgie and Octavius. They're not your sort. You were saying how you felt about it, and that's more interesting. Interests me more!"
Conceive that at this point the lady glanced at the speaker ever so slightly. Upon which he followed a slight pause with:--"Yes, why are you a _prig_, as she thought fit to put it?"
"Because I told her that if ever I found a young man who suited me--and _vice versa_--and it got to ... to what you called just now 'kissing-point,' I should not be so ready as she had been to pull him off like an old glove and throw him away. That was when I was very young, you know. It was just after she jilted Ludwig, who afterwards married my sister Lilian--Baroness Porchammer; my eldest sister...."
"Oh, _she_ jilted Ludwig, and _he_ married your sister Lilian, was that it?" Mr. Pellew, still stroking that right whisker thoughtfully, was preoccupied by something that diverted interest from this family history.
Aunt Constance did not seem to notice his abstraction, but talked on.
"Yes--and what is so funny about Georgie with Julius is that they don't seem to mind kissing now from a new standpoint. Georgie particularly. In fact, I've seen her kiss him on both sides and call him an old stupid.
However, as you say, the cases are not alike. Perhaps if Philippa's old love had married her sister--Lady Clancarrock of Garter, you know--instead of Uncle Cosmo, as they call him, they could have got used to it, by now. Only one must look at these things from one's own point of view, and by the light of one's experience." A ring on her right hand might have been one of the things, and the sun-ray through the blind-slip the light of her experience, as she sat accommodating the flash-light of the first to the gleam of the second.