"Beautiful?" Maurice echoed.
"What shall I say? It's a peculiar charm! It's her spirit. One sees that
her life has been beautiful in spite of her sorrows!" Mrs. Crisford
added.
"What sorrows has she had?" Maurice coloured a little as soon as he had
spoken.
"Oh, lots of deaths. She has lost her husband; she has lost several
children."
"Ah, that's new to me. Was her marriage happy?"
"It must have been for Mr. Tregent. If it wasn't for her, no one ever
knew."
"But she has a son," said Maurice.
"Yes, the only one--such a dear. She thinks all the world of him."
At this moment a message was brought to Mrs. Crisford, and she asked to
be excused while she went to say a word to someone who was waiting.
Maurice Glanvil in this way was left alone for five minutes with the
intensity of the presence evoked by the artist. He found himself
agitated, excited by it: the face of the portrait was so intelligent and
conscious that as he stood there he felt as if some strange
communication had taken place between his being and Mrs. Tregent's. The
idea made him nervous: he moved about the room and ended by turning his
back. Mrs. Crisford reappeared, but he soon took leave of her; and when
he had got home (he had settled himself in South Kensington, in a little
undiscriminated house which he had hated from the first), he learned
from his daughter that she had had a visit from young Tregent. He had
asked first for Mr. Glanvil and then, in the second instance, for
herself, telling her when admitted, as if to attenuate his possible
indiscretion, that his mother had charged him to try to see her even if
he should not find her father. Vera had never before received a
gentleman alone, and the incident had left traces of emotion. "Poor
little thing!" Maurice said to himself: he always took a melancholy view
of any happiness of his daughter's, tending to believe, in his
pessimism, that it could only lead to some refinement of humiliation. He
encouraged her however to talk about young Tregent, who, according to
her account, had been extravagantly amusing. He had said moreover that
his mother was tremendously impatient to renew such an old acquaintance.
"Why in the world doesn't she, then?" Maurice asked himself; "why
doesn't she come and see Vera?" He reflected afterwards that such an
expectation was unreasonable, but it represented at the moment a kind of
rebellion of his conscience. Then, as he had begun to be a little
ashamed of his curiosity, he liked to think that Mrs. Tregent would have
quite as much. On the morrow he knocked at her door--she lived in a
"commodious" house in Manchester Square--and had the satisfaction, as he
had chosen his time carefully, of learning that she had just come in.
Upstairs, in a high, quiet, old-fashioned drawing-room, she was before
him. What he saw was a tall woman in black, in her bonnet, with a white
face, smiling intensely--smiling and smiling before she spoke. He
quickly perceived that she was agitated and was making an heroic effort,
which would presently be successful, not to show it. But it was above
all clear to him that she wasn't Fanny Knocker--was simply another
person altogether. She had nothing in common with Fanny Knocker--it was
impossible to meet her on the ground of any former acquaintance. What
acquaintance had he ever had with this graceful, harmonious, expressive
English matron, whose smile had a singular radiance? That rascal of a
Crisford had done her such perfect justice that he felt as if he had
before him the portrait of which the image in the studio had been the
original. There were nevertheless things to be said, and they said them
on either side, sinking together, with friendly exclamations and
exaggerated laughs, on the sofa, where her nearness seemed the span of
all the distance that separated her from the past. The phrase that
hummed through everything, to his sense, was his own inarticulate "How
could I have known? how could I have known?" How could he have foreseen
that time and life and happiness (it was probably more than anything
happiness), would transpose her into such a different key? Her whole
personality revealed itself from moment to moment as something so
agreeable that even after all these years he felt himself blushing for
the crass stupidity of his mistake. Yes, he was turning red, and she
could see it and would know why: a perception that could only constitute
for her a magnificent triumph, a revenge. All his natural and acquired
coolness, his experience of life, his habit of society, everything that
contributed to make him a man of the world, were of no avail to cover
his confusion. He took refuge from it almost angrily in trying to prove
to himself that she had on a second look a likeness to the ugly girl he
had not thought good enough--in trying to trace Fanny Knocker in her
fair, ripe bloom, the fine irregularity of her features. To put his
finger on the identity would make him feel better. Some of the facts of
the girl's crooked face were still there--conventional beauty was
absent; but the proportions and relations had changed, and the
expression and the spirit: she had accepted herself or ceased to
care--had found oblivion and activity and appreciation. What Maurice
mainly discovered however in this intenser observation was an attitude
of hospitality toward himself which immediately effaced the presumption
of "triumph." Vulgar vanity was far from her, and the grossness of
watching her effect upon him: she was watching only the lost vision that
had come back, the joy that, if for a single hour, she had found again.
She herself had no measure of the alteration that struck him, and there
was no substitution for her in the face that her deep eyes seemed to
brush with their hovering. Presently they were talking like old friends,
and before long each was in possession of the principal facts concerning
the other. Many things had come and gone and the common fate had pressed
them hard. Her parents were dead, and her husband and her first-born
children. He, on his side, had lost his mother and his wife. They
matched bereavements and compared bruises, and in the way she expressed
herself there was a charm which forced him, as he wondered, to remember
that Fanny Knocker had at least been intelligent.
"I wish I could have seen your wife--you must tell me all about her,"
she said. "Haven't you some portraits?"
"Some poor little photographs. I'll show them to you. She was very
pretty and very gentle; she was also very un-English. But she only lived
a year. She wasn't clever and accomplished--like you."
"Ah, me; you don't know _me!_"
"No, but I want to--oh particularly. I'm prepared to give a good deal of
time to the study."
"We must be friends," said Mrs. Tregent. "I shall take an extraordinary
interest in your daughter."
"She'll be grateful for it. She's a good little reasonable thing,
without a scrap of beauty."
"You care greatly for that," said Mrs. Tregent.