I
Unspeakable, unlikable, worse than all, unsketchable. A woman has no
more formidable rival than her idea in the head of an imaginative
young man, and Maurice Durant had been rash enough to fall in love
with Miss Tancred before sight.
He was rash in everything. When the Colonel asked him down to Coton
Manor for a fortnight, he accepted the invitation (with much
pleasure) by return, and lay awake half the night with joyous
anticipation. He was in the train steaming into the Midlands before
he realized that he knew nothing of his host beyond a vague family
tradition. He was his (Durant's) godfather; he was a retired Colonel
of militia; he had given him (Durant) a hideous silver cup; but this
was the first time he had given him an invitation. There was
something more, too. Durant had spent the last seven years exploring
every country but his own, and he was out of touch with family
tradition; but now he thought of it he had--he certainly had--a
distinct recollection of hearing his father say that of all his
numerous acquaintance that fellow Tancred was quite the most
intolerable bore.
He had been a little precipitate. Still, he said to himself, England
was England, and if there was any fishing on the Colonel's land, or
a decent mount in his stables, he thought he could pull through.
Mrs. Tancred was dead; he did not certainly know that there was a
Miss Tancred, but if there were he meant to flirt with her, and if
the worst came to the worst he could always sketch her (the
unsketchable!).
He had had plenty of time for anticipation during the slow journey
on the branch line from the junction. The train crawled and burrowed
into the wooded heart of the Midlands, passed a village, a hamlet, a
few scattered houses, puffed and panted through endless lengths of
arable and pasture land, drew up exhausted at the little wayside
station of Whithorn-in-Arden, and left him in that prosaic
wilderness a prey to the intolerable bore.
As ill-luck would have it, he had arrived at Coton Manor three hours
before dinner. At the first sight of his host he had made up his
mind that the Colonel would have nothing to say that could possibly
keep him going for more than three minutes, yet the Colonel had
talked for two hours. Durant had been counting the buttons on the
Colonel's waistcoat and the minutes on the drawing-room clock, and
wondering when it would be dinnertime. Once or twice he had caught
himself looking round the room for some sign or token of Miss
Tancred. He believed in her with a blind, unquestioning belief, but
beyond a work-basket, a grand piano, and some atrocious
water-colors, he could discover no authentic traces of her presence.
The room kept its own dull counsel. It was one of those curious
provincial interiors that seem somehow to be soulless and sexless in
their unfathomable reserve. It was more than comfortable, it was
opulent, luxurious; but the divine touch was wanting. It made Durant
wonder whether there really was a Miss Tancred, much as you might
doubt the existence of a God from the lapses in his creation. Still,
he believed in her because there was nothing else to believe in. He
had gathered from the Colonel's conversation that there was no
fishing on his land, and no animal in his stables but the
respectable and passionless pair that brought him from the station.
Could it be that there was no Miss Tancred?
Durant, already veering toward scepticism, had been about to plunge
into the depths of bottomless negation when the Colonel rose
punctually at the stroke of seven.
"My daughter," he had said, "my daughter will be delighted to make
your acquaintance."
And Durant had replied that he would be delighted to make Miss
Tancred's.
There was nothing else to be delighted about. He had divined pretty
clearly that Miss Tancred's society would be the only entertainment
offered to him during his stay, and the most outrageous flirtation
would be justifiable in the circumstances; he had seen himself
driven to it in sheer desperation and self-defense; he had longed
hopelessly, inexpressibly, for the return of the absconding deity;
he had looked on Miss Tancred as his hope, his angel, his deliverer.
That she had not been at home to receive him seemed a little odd,
but on second thoughts he had been glad of it. He would have
distrusted any advances on her part as arguing a certain poverty of
personal resource. Presumably Miss Tancred could afford a little
indifference, a touch of divine disdain. And if indeed she had used
absence as an art to stimulate his devotion, she was to be
congratulated on her success. His dream had been nourished on this
ambrosial uncertainty.
Upstairs in his bedroom mere emotional belief in Miss Tancred had
risen to rational conviction. The first aspect of the guest-chamber
had inspired him with a joyous credulity. It wooed him with its
large and welcoming light, its four walls were golden white and
warm, and in all its details he had found unmistakable evidences of
design. There was an overruling coquetry in the decorative effects,
in the minute little arrangements for his comfort. A finer hand than
any housemaid's must have heaped that blue china bowl with roses,
laid out that writing-table, and chosen the books in the shelf
beside the bed. A woman is known by her books as by her
acquaintance, and he had judged of the mind of this maiden, turning
over the pages with a thrill of sensuous curiosity. This charming
Providence had fitted his mood to perfection with these little
classics of the hour, by authors too graceful and urbane to bore a
poor mortal with their immortality. Adorable Miss Tancred! He was in
love with her before sight, at half-sight.
For at the sound of a punctual gong he had hurried out on to the
stairs, a door had opened on some unseen landing, he had heard a
woman's step on the flight below; he had listened, he had watched,
and as he caught the turn of her head, the rustle and gleam of her
gown, some divine and cloudy color, silver or lavender or airy blue,
he had been radiantly certain that his vision had passed before him.
Down there somewhere it was making itself incarnate in the unknown.
He felt already its reviving presence, the mysterious aura of its
womanhood.
Hitherto his imagination had been guided by a profound sense of the
justice that is in things. Destiny who had brought him to this
deceitful place owed him compensation for the fraud, and an apology
in person was really no more than his due. What if Miss Tancred were
she, the supremely feminine, Destiny herself?
Under the echoing gallery the drawing-room had opened and closed
upon her, and he had followed, his nerves tingling with the familiar
prophetic thrill.
And this was Miss Tancred?
To begin with, he had never seen a woman more execrably dressed. No
doubt it is the first duty of a woman's gown to clothe her, but
apparently Miss Tancred's gown had a Puritan conscience, an almost
morbid sense of its duty. It more than clothed her, it covered her
up as if she had been a guilty secret; there was concealment and
disguise in every crease of the awful garment. In its imperishable
prudery it refused to define her by ever so innocent a curve; all
its folds were implicated in a conspiracy against her sex. The
effect, though striking, was obviously unstudied and inevitable, and
he argued charitably that Miss Tancred was attired, not after her
own mysterious and perverse fancy, but according to some still more
mysterious and perverse doom. Happily she seemed unconscious of her
appearance, and this unconsciousness had saved her.
For Miss Tancred was plain; and the irritating thing about her
plainness was that it, at any rate, was not inevitable. She had had
a hair's-breadth escape of being handsome in a somewhat original and
eccentric way. And so her plainness was insistent; it would not let
you alone, but forced you to look at it, worrying you with perpetual
suggestions of the beauty it might have been. Her black hair grew
low on the center of her forehead, whence it rose describing a
semicircle above each temple; she had a short and salient Roman
nose, black eyes, and straight black brows laid like an accent on
the jutting eyebones. Her mouth--there might have been hope for her
in her mouth, but for its singular unreadiness to smile; there was
no hope for her in her sallow skin, the dull droop of her eyelids,
her whole insupportable air of secrecy and reserve. A woman has no
business to look like that.
There could be no hope for any woman whom Maurice Durant had
pronounced unsketchable. He was tolerant with the tolerance of a
clever young modern painter, trained to look for beauty (and find
it, too) in the most unlikely places. He could find no beauty in
Miss Tancred. She was useless for his purposes. Those lips had never
learned to flirt, to chatter, to sing, to do anything spontaneous
and natural and pleasing.
He shook hands with her in a paralytic manner, battering his brains
for a reply to her polite commonplaces. Inwardly he was furious. He
felt that he had been duped, tricked, infamously cheated of his
legitimate desire; and he hated the woman as if she, poor soul, had
been personally responsible.
It had bored him to listen to the Colonel, and he was sure it would
bore him still more to talk to Miss Tancred; but for ten minutes he
did his best to sustain a miraculous flow of sparkling monologue. If
Miss Tancred was going to bore him, at any rate it would not be by
her conversation. Some plain women he had known who had overcome
plainness by vivacity and charm. Not so Miss Tancred. Being plainer
than most she was bound to make a more than ordinary effort, yet she
had adopted the ways of a consummately pretty woman who knows that
nothing further is required of her. Did she think that he would go
on forever battering his brains to create conversation out of
nothing, when she clearly intimated that it was not worth her while
to help him? Never in his life had he met a woman who inspired him
with such invincible repugnance. He found himself talking to her at
random like a man in a dream, and so indifferent to her opinion that
he was not in the least distressed at his own imbecility; and Miss
Tancred, like a lady in a dream, seemed to find his attitude
entirely natural; perhaps she had read a similar antagonism in the
faces of other men. (As it happened, repugnance was an emotion that
Durant had frequently felt before, and certain emphatic lines about
his nose and mouth had apparently been drawn there on purpose to
express it.) Anyhow, Miss Tancred made no attempt to engage his
attention, but turned her dull eyes to the Colonel, as if appealing
to him to take the burden of Durant's entertainment on his own
shoulders.
This the Colonel was perfectly prepared to do. It was evidently an
understood thing that Miss Tancred should sit there, in that
depressing attitude, while her father monopolized their guest.
Durant hastily classified his host and hostess as the bore active
and the bore passive. If Miss Tancred had ever had any interest or
property in life she seemed to have made it over to the Colonel,
together with a considerable portion of her youth. The Colonel wore
his sixty years well out of sight, like an undergarment; you even
felt that there might be something slightly indecorous in the
suggestion that he wore them at all. He was alive to the
finger-tips, alive in every feature of his aristocratic little face.
He seemed at first rather uncertain how to take Durant, and looked
him up and down as if in search of a convenient button-hole; he
smiled innocently on the young man (Durant soon learned to know and
dread that smile); nothing could have been more delicate and
tentative than his approach. He had been silent for the last few
minutes, lying low behind a number of the _Nineteenth Century_, for
if he were a bore he had the dangerous power of masking his deadly
qualities in an unreal absorption. At the signal that followed
Durant's last desperate remark the Colonel's tongue leaped as from
an ambush.
His first conversational maneuver was a feint. He inquired, with a
certain affected indifference, what sort of weather Durant had met
with on the journey down, and what sort he had left behind him in
London; and then he seemed inclined to let the weather drop. But
before Durant could get a word in edgeways he had taken it up again
and was handling it like a master. Now he was playing with it,
hovering round it lightly, with a tantalizing approach and flight;
now he had gripped it tight, there was no more wandering from the
point than may be seen in the vacillations of a well-behaved
barometer; the slender topic seemed to grow under his touch, to take
on the proportions of his own enormous egotism; he spoke of last
autumn and the next parish as if he were dealing with immensities of
time and space. And now the Colonel was merged and lost in his
theme; he was whirled along with the stream of things, with moons
and meteors, winds and tides, never for an instant compromising his
character as a well-behaved barometer.
Never for an instant forgetting that he was a Tancred, with a
pedigree dating from the days of feudalism. And after all he looked
such a gentle little fellow that Durant could almost have forgiven
him. He was so beautifully finished off. You could only say of him
that he was fastidious, he had the prejudices of his class. He
scorned to make conversation a sordid traffic in ideas. At any rate,
Durant felt himself released from all obligation to contribute his
share.
He had given it up, and was wondering how on earth they were to get
through the evening. Various dreadful possibilities occurred to him;
music (Miss Tancred and Beethoven on the grand piano); family
prayers; cards; in some places they sat up half the night playing
whist, a game that bored him to extinction. Thank heaven, as there
were but three of them, it would not be whist. Meanwhile it was past
eight and no dinner bell.
As if in answer to his thoughts the Colonel turned sharply to his
daughter.
"Frida, are you sure that you wrote to Mrs. Fazakerly?"
"Quite sure."
"And are you equally certain that she is coming?"
"Quite certain. Unless she has been taken ill."
"What did you say? Taken ill? Taken ill?"
"I did not say she was taken ill, papa; I said nothing but illness
would keep her from coming."
"Ah, a very different thing." He turned to Durant, blushing and
bridling in his stiff collar as if the important distinction had
been a subtlety of his own.
He curled himself up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to
himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the
prospect of another victim?
Who the devil, he wondered, is Mrs. Fazakerly?