"Anywhere. I'll stay with you. Even here." She had taken off her gloves
and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.
Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way--hovered there as if, in
consequence of her words, looking for a pretext to back out easily: on
which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called,
what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him,
still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with
some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to
have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no
state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been
to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means
been to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a
straw for his embarrassment--feeling how little, on her own part, she
was moved by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many
attitudes that she could now deprive him quite without compunction of
the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone
as he said: "Oh my child, I can never consent to that!"
"What then are you going to do?"
"I'm turning it over," said Lionel Croy. "You may imagine if I'm not
thinking."
"Haven't you thought then," his daughter asked, "of what I speak of? I
mean of my being ready."
Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little
apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising
on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. "No. I
haven't. I couldn't. I wouldn't." It was so respectable, a show that
she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair
at home, how little his appearance ever by any chance told about him.
His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother's crosses;
inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that
was horrid--thank God they didn't really know!--that he had done. He
had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a
terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously
on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept
directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no
light thing for her to leave uncompanioned a parent with such a face
and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed
of, it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite
familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he
recognised his younger daughter's happy aspect as a sensible value, he
had from the first still more exactly appraised his own. The great
wonder was not that in spite of everything his own had helped him; the
great wonder was that it hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to
its old, eternal, recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop
into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.
She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you
really ask me to believe you've been making up your mind to that?"
She had to consider her own line. "I don't think I care, papa, what you
believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything;
hardly more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever think of you
as yourself believed. I don't know you, father, you see."
"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"
"Oh dear, no; not at all. That's no part of the question. If I haven't
understood you by this time, I never shall, and it doesn't matter. It
has seemed to me that you may be lived with, but not that you may be
understood. Of course I've not the least idea how you get on."
"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
His daughter took in the place again, and it might well have seemed odd
that in so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What
showed was the ugliness--so positive and palpable that it was somehow
sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all,
a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly put a point into her answer.
"Oh, I beg your pardon. You flourish."
"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly inquired, "that I've
not made away with myself?"
She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real
things. "You know how all our anxieties, under mamma's will, have come
out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don't know how we
lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for
me, but I give up a hundred to Marian."
"Oh, you weak thing!" her father kindly sighed.
"For you and me together," she went on, "the other hundred would do
something."
"And what would do the rest?"
"Can you yourself do nothing?" He gave her a look; then, slipping his
hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the
window she had left open. She said nothing more--she had placed him
there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by
the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild
March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room,
and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved
nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. "I don't see what has
so suddenly wound you up."
"I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell
you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a
condition. She wants to keep me."
"And what in the world else _could_ she possibly want?"
"Oh, I don't know--many things. I'm not so precious a capture," the
girl a little dryly explained. "No one has ever wanted to keep me
before."
Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more
surprised than interested. "You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if
that were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if indeed such an
admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high
spirit and general form.
"Not from rich relations. She's extremely kind to me, but it's time,
she says, that we should understand each other."
Mr. Croy fully assented. "Of course it is--high time; and I can quite
imagine what she means by it."
"Are you very sure?"
"Oh, perfectly. She means that she'll 'do' for you handsomely if you'll
break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her
condition's of course that."
"Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound me up. Here I am."
He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after
which, within a few seconds, he had, quite congruously, turned the
situation about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to justify
your throwing yourself upon me?"