"How can you know that?"
"Because you said it would not be any use talking to me about it. Just before you stopped looking out of the window, and said you might as well go."
Driven to bay, the Countess had a sudden _acces_ of argumentative power.
"Is there nothing it would be no use to talk to you about except this mad love-affair of yours?"
"Nothing so big. This is the big one. Besides, you know you did mean Adrian." As her ladyship did, she held her tongue.
Presently, having in the meantime resumed her seat, thereby admitting that her daughter was substantially right, she went on to what might be considered official publication.
"Your father and I, my dear, have had a good deal of talk about this unfortunate affair...."
"What unfortunate affair?"
"This unfortunate ... love-affair."
"Cousin Percy and Aunt Constance?"
"My dear! How can you be so ridiculous? Of course I am referring to you and Mr. Torrens."
"To me and Adrian. Precisely what I said, mamma dear! So now we can go on." The young lady managed somehow to express, by seating herself negligently on a chair with its back to her mother, that she meant to pay no attention whatever to any maternal precept. She could look at her over it, to comply with her duties as a respectful listener. But not to overdo them, she could play the treble of Haydn's Gipsy Rondo on the chair back with fingers that would have put a finishing touch on the exasperation of Helen of Troy.
Her ladyship continued:--"We are speaking of the same thing. Your father and I have had several conversations about it. As I was saying when you interrupted me--pray do not do so again!--he agrees with me _entirely_.
In fact, he told me of his own accord that he wished you to come away with me for six months.... Yes--six! Three's ridiculous.... And that it should be quite distinctly understood that no binding engagement exists between Mr. Torrens and yourself."
"All right. I've no objection to anything being distinctly understood, so long as it is also distinctly understood that it doesn't make a particle of difference to either of us.... Yes--come in! Put them on the writing-table." This was to Miss Lutwyche, who came in, bearing letters.
"To either of you! You answer for Mr. Torrens, my dear, with a good deal of confidence. Now, do consider that the circumstances are peculiar.
Suppose he were to recover his eyesight!"
"You mean he wouldn't be able to bear the shock of finding out what he'd got to marry...." She was interrupted by her mother exhibiting consciousness of the presence of Lutwyche, whose exit was overdue. A very trustworthy young woman, no doubt; but a line had to be drawn.
"What are you fiddling with my letters for, Lutwyche?" said Gwen. "Do please get done and go!"
"Yes, my lady." Discreet retirement of Miss Lutwyche.
"She didn't hear, mamma. You needn't fuss."
"I was not fussing, my dear, but it's as well to.... Yes, go on with what you were saying." Because Lutwyche, being extinct, might be forgotten.
Gwen was looking round at the mirror. If Helen of Troy had seen herself in a mirror, all else being alike, what would her verdict have been?
Gwen seemed fairly satisfied. "You meant Adrian might be disgusted?"
said she.
The mother could not resist the pleasure of a satisfied glance at her daughter's reflection, which was not looking at _her_. "I meant nothing of the sort," she said. "But your father agreed with me--indeed, I am repeating his own words--that Mr. Torrens may have a false impression, having only really seen you once, under very peculiar circumstances. It is only human nature, and one has to make allowance for human nature.
Now all that I am saying, and all that your father is saying, is that the circumstances _are_ peculiar. Without some sort of reasonable guarantee that Mr. Torrens cannot recover his eyesight, I do contend that it would be in the highest degree rash to take an irrevocable step, and to condemn one--perhaps both, for I assure you I am thinking of Mr.
Torrens's welfare as well as your own--to a lifetime of repentance."
"Mamma dear, don't be a humbug! You are only putting in Adrian's welfare for the sake of appearances. Much better let it alone!"
"My dear, it is not the point. If you choose to think me inhumane, you must do so. Only I must say this, that apart from the fact that I have nothing whatever against Mr. Torrens personally--except his religious views, which are lamentable--that his parents...."
"I thought you said you never knew his mother."
"No--perhaps not his mother." Her ladyship intensified the parenthetical character of this lady by putting her into smaller type and omitting punctuation:--"I can't say I ever really knew his mother and indeed hardly anything about her except that she was a Miss Abercrombie and goes plaguing on about negroes. But"--here she became normal again--"as for his father...."
"As for his father?"
"He was a constant visitor at my mother's, and I remember him very well.
So there is no feeling on my part against him or his family." Her ladyship felt she had come very cleverly out of a bramble-bush she had got entangled in unawares, but she wanted to leave it behind on the road, and pushed on, speaking more earnestly:--"Indeed, my dearest child, it is of you and your happiness that I am thinking--although I know you won't believe me, and it's no use my saying anything...." At this point feelings were threatened; and Gwen, between whom and her mother there was plenty of affection, of a sort, hastened to allay--or perhaps avert--them. She shifted her seat to the sofa beside her mother, which made daughterliness more possible. A short episode of mutual extenuations followed; for had not a flavour of battle--not tigerish, but contentious--pervaded the interview?
"Very well, then, dear mother of mine," said Gwen, when this episode had come to an end. "Suppose we consider it settled that way! I'm to be tractability itself, on the distinct understanding that it commits me to nothing whatever. As for the six months' penal servitude, you and papa shall have it your own way. Only play fair--make a fair start, I mean! I like method. You have only to say when--any time after Christmas--and Adrian and I will tear ourselves asunder for six months. And then I'll accompany my mamma to Vienna, because I know that's what she wants. Only mind--honour bright!--as soon as I have dutifully forgotten Adrian for six whole months, there's to be an end of the nonsense, and I'm to marry Adrian ... and _vice versa_, of course! Oh no--he shan't be a cipher--I won't allow it...."
"My dear Gwendolen, I wish I could persuade you to be more serious." But her ladyship, as she rose to depart, was congratulating herself on having scored. The idea of any young lady's love-fancies surviving six months of Viennese life! She knew that fascinating capital well, and she knew also what a powerful ally she would find in her elder daughter, the Ambassadress, who was glittering there all this while as a distinct constellation.
She might just as well have retired satisfied with this brilliant prospect; only that she had, like so many of us, the postscript vice.
This is the one that never will allow a conversation to be at an end.
She turned to Gwen, who was already opening a letter to read, to say:--"You used the expressions 'reconsidering' and 'jilting' just now, my dear, as if they were synonymous. I think you were forgetting that it is impossible to 'jilt'--if I understand that term rightly--any man until after you have become formally engaged to him, and therefore....
However, if your letter is so very important, I can go. We can talk another time." This rather stiffly, Gwen having opened the letter, and been caught and held, apparently, by something in a legible handwriting.
Whatever it was, Gwen put it down with reluctance, that she might show her sense of the importance of her mother's departure, whom she kissed and olive-branched, beyond what she accounted her lawful claims, in order to wind her up. She went with her as far as the landing, where cramped stairs ended and gradients became indulgent, and then got back as fast as she could to the reading of that letter.
It _was_ an important letter, there could be no doubt of that, as a thick one from Irene--practically from Adrian--lay unopened on the table while she read through something on many pages that made her face go paler at each new paragraph. On its late envelope, lying opened by Irene's, was the postmark "Chorlton-under-Bradbury." But it was in a handwriting Gwen was unfamiliar with. It was _not_ old Mrs. Picture's, which she knew quite well. For which reasons the thought had crossed her mind, when she first saw the envelope, that the old lady was seriously ill--perhaps suddenly dead. It was so very possible. Think of those delicate transparent hands, that frame whose old tenant had outstayed so many a notice to quit. Gwen's cousin, Percy Pellew, had said to her when he carried it upstairs in Cavendish Square, that it weighed absolutely nothing.
But this letter said nothing of death, nor of illness with danger of death. And yet Gwen was so disturbed by it that there was scarcely a brilliant visitor to her mother's that afternoon but said to some other brilliant visitor:--"What can be the matter with Gwen? She's not herself!" And then each corrected the other's false impression that it was the dangerous condition of her most intimate cousin and friend, Miss Clotilda Grahame; or screws loose and jammed bearings in the machinery of her love-affair, already the property of Rumour. And as each brilliant visitor was fain to seem better informed than his or her neighbour, a very large allowance of inaccuracy and misapprehension was added to the usual stock-in-trade of tittle-tattle on both these points.
There was only a short interregnum between the last departures of this brilliant throng, and the arrival of a quiet half-dozen to dinner; not a party, only a soothing half-dozen after all that noise and turmoil. So that Gwen got no chance of a talk with her father, which was what she felt very much in need of. That interregnum was only just enough to allow of a few minutes' rest before dressing for dinner. But the quiet half-dozen came, dined, and went away early; perhaps the earlier that their hostess's confessions of fatigue amounted to an appeal _ad misericordiam_; and Gwen was reserved and silent. When the last of the half-dozen had departed, Gwen got her opportunity. "Don't keep your father up too long, child," said the Countess, over the stair-rail. "It makes him sleep in the day, and it's bad for him." And vanished, with a well-bred yawn-noise, a trochee, the short syllable being the apology for the long one.
The Earl had allowed the quiet three, who remained with him at the dinner-table after their three quiet better-halves had retired with his wife and daughter, to do all the smoking, and had saved up for his own cigar by himself. It was his way. So Gwen knew she need not hurry through preliminaries. Of course he wanted to know about the Typhus patient, and she gave a good report, without stint. "_That's_ all right," said he, in the tone of rejoicing which implies a double satisfaction, one for the patient's sake, one for one's own, as it is no longer a duty to be anxious.
"Why are you glaring at me so, papa darling?" said his daughter. It was a most placid glare. She should have said "looking."
"Your mamma tells me," said he, without modifying the glare, "that she has persuaded you to go with her to Vienna for six months."
"She said you wished me to go."
"She wishes you to go herself, and I wish what she wishes." This was not mere submissiveness. It was just as much loyalty and chivalry. "Is it a very terrible trial, the Self-denying Ordinance?"
Gwen answered rather stonily. "It isn't pleasant, but if you and my mother think it necessary--why, what must be, must! I'm ready to go any time. Only I must go and wind up with Adrian first ... just to console him a little! It's worse for him than for me! Just fancy him left alone for six months and never seeing me!... Oh dear!--you know what I mean."
For she had made the slip that was so usual. She brushed it aside as a thing that could not be helped, and would even be sure to happen again, and continued:--"Irene has just written to me. I got her letter to-day."
"Well?"
"She makes what I think a very good suggestion--for me to go to Pensham to stay a week after Christmas, and then go in for.... What do you call it?... the Self-denying Ordinance in earnest afterwards. You don't mind?"
"Not in the least, as long as your mother agrees. Is that Miss Torrens's--Irene's--letter?"
"No. It's another one I want to speak to you about. Wait with patience!... I was going to say what exasperating parents I have inherited ... from somewhere!"
"From your grandparents, I suppose! But why?"