"Did you ever know it? Did you ever suspect it?"
She hesitated and, for the first time since he had been in the room,
ceased for an instant to look straight at him. She only answered, still
laughing however: "Poor dears--they were altogether too deep!"
She evidently wished to convey that she had never known. Maurice was a
little disappointed: at present he would have preferred her knowledge.
But as he walked home across the park, through Kensington Gardens, he
felt it impossible to believe in her ignorance.
V
At the end of a month he broke out to her. "I can't get over it, it's so
extraordinary--the difference between your youth and your maturity!"
"Did you expect me to be an eternal child?" Mrs. Tregent asked
composedly.
"No, it isn't that." He stopped--it would be difficult to explain.
"What is it then?" she inquired, with her systematic refusal to
acknowledge a complication. There was always, to Maurice Glanvil's ear,
in her impenetrability to allusion, the faintest, softest glee, and it
gave her on this occasion the appearance of recognising his difficulty
and being amused at it. She would be excusable to be a little
cold-blooded. He really knew however that the penalty was all in his own
reflections, for it had not taken him even a month to perceive that she
was supremely, almost strangely indulgent. There was nothing he was
ready to say that she might not hear, and her absence of coquetry was a
remarkable rest to him.
"It isn't what I expected--it's what I didn't expect. To say exactly
what I mean, it's the way you've improved."
"I've improved? I'm so glad!"
"Surely you've been aware of it--you've been conscious of the
transformation."
"As an improvement? I don't know. I've been conscious of changes
enough--of all the stages and strains and lessons of life. I've been
aware of growing old, and I hold, in dissent from the usual belief, that
there's no fool like a young fool. One is never, I suppose, such a fool
as one _has_ been, and that may count perhaps as amelioration. But I
can't flatter myself that I've had two different identities. I've had to
make one, such as it is, do for everything. I think I've been happier
than I originally supposed I should be--and yet I had my happiness too
as a girl. At all events if you were to scratch me, as they say, you'd
still find----" She paused a moment, and he really hung upon her lips:
there was such a charm of tone in whatever she said. "You'd still find,
underneath, the blowsy girl----" With this she again checked herself
and, slightly to his surprise, gave a nervous laugh.
"The blowsy girl?" he repeated, with an artlessness of interrogation
that made her laugh again.
"Whom you went with that hot day to see the princess give the prizes."
"Oh yes--that dreadful day!" he answered gravely, musingly, with the
whole scene pictured by her words and without contesting the manner in
which she qualified herself. It was the nearest allusion that had passed
between them to that crudest conception of his boyhood, his flight from
Ennismore Gardens. Almost every day for a month he had come to see her,
and they had talked of a thousand things; never yet however had they
made any explicit mention of this remote instance of premature wisdom.
Moreover if he now felt the need of going back it was not to be
apologetic, to do penance; he had nothing to explain, for his behaviour,
as he considered it, still struck him, given the circumstances, as
natural. It was to himself indeed that explanations were owing, for he
had been the one who had been most deceived. He liked Mrs. Tregent
better than he had ever liked a woman--that is he liked her for more
reasons. He had liked his poor little wife only for one, which was after
all no reason at all: he had been in love with her. In spite of the
charm that the renewal of acquaintance with his old friend had so
unexpectedly added to his life there was a vague torment in his relation
with her, the sense of a revenge (oh a very kind one!) to take, a
haunting idea that he couldn't pacify. He could still feel sore at the
trick that had been played him. Even after a month the curiosity with
which he had approached her was not assuaged; in a manner indeed it had
only borrowed force from all she had insisted on doing for him. She was
literally doing everything now; gently, gaily, with a touch so familiar
that protestations on his part would have been pedantic, she had taken
his life in hand. Rich as she was she had known how to give him lessons
in economy; she had taught him how to manage in London on his means. A
month ago his servants had been horrid--to-day they were the best he had
ever known. For Vera she was plainly a providence--her behaviour to Vera
was transcendent.
He had privately made up his mind that Vera had in truth had her _coup
de foudre_--that if she had had a chance she would have laid down her
little life for Arthur Tregent; yet two circumstances, he could
perceive, had helped to postpone, to attenuate even somewhat, her full
consciousness of what had befallen her. One of these influences had been
the prompt departure of the young man from London; the other was simply
the diversion produced by Mrs. Tregent's encompassing art. It had had
immediate consequences for the child: it was like a drama in perpetual
climaxes. This surprising benefactress rejoiced in her society, took her
"out," treated her as if there were mysterious injustices to repair.
Vera was agitated not a little by such a change in her life; she had
English kindred enough, uncles and aunts and cousins; but she had felt
herself lost in her father's family and was principally aware, among
them, of their strangeness and their indifference. They affected her
mainly as mere number and stature. Mrs. Tregent's was a performance
unpromised and uninterrupted, and the girl desired to know if all
English people took so generous a view of friendship. Maurice laughed at
this question and, without meeting his daughter's eyes, answered in the
negative. Vera guessed so many things that he didn't know what she would
be guessing next. He saw her caught up to the blue like Ganymede, and
surrendered her contentedly. She had been the occupation of his life,
yet to Mrs. Tregent he was willing to part with her; this lady was the
only person of whom he would not have been jealous. Even in the young
man's absence moreover Vera lived with the son of the house and breathed
his air; Manchester Square was full of him, his photograph was on every
table. How often she spoke of him to his mother Maurice had no means of
knowing, nor whether Mrs. Tregent encouraged such a topic; he had reason
to believe indeed that there were reserves on either side, and he felt
that he could trust his old friend's prudence as much as her liberality.
The attitude of forbearance from rash allusions, which was Maurice's
own, could not at any rate keep Arthur from being a presence in the
little drama which had begun for them all, as the older man was more and
more to recognise with nervous prefigurements, on that occasion at the
Crisfords'.
Arthur Tregent had gone to Ireland to spend a few weeks with an old
university friend--the gentleman indeed, at Cambridge, had been his
tutor--who had lately, in a district classified as "disturbed," come
into a bewildering heritage. He had chosen in short for a study of the
agrarian question on the spot the moment of the year when London was
most absorbing. Maurice Glanvil made no remark to his mother on this
anomaly, and she offered him no explanation of it; they talked in fact
of almost everything except Arthur. Mrs. Tregent had to her constant
visitor the air of feeling that she owed him in relation to her son an
apology which she had not the materials for making. It was certainly a
high standard of courtesy that would suggest to her that he ought to
have put himself out for these social specimens; but it was obvious that
her standard was high. Maurice Glanvil smiled when he thought to what
bare civility the young man would have deemed himself held had he known
of a certain passage of private history. But he knew nothing--Maurice
was sure of that; his reason for going away had been quite another
matter. That Vera's brooding parent should have had such an insight into
the young man's motives is a proof of the amount of reflection that he
devoted to him. He had not seen much of him and in truth he found him
provoking, but he was haunted by the odd analogy of which he had had a
glimpse on their first encounter. The late Mr. Tregent had had
"interests in the north," and the care of them had naturally devolved
upon his son, who by the mother's account had shown an admirable
capacity for business. The late Mr. Tregent had also been actively
political, and it was fondly hoped, in Manchester Square at least, that
the day was not distant when his heir would, in turn and as a
representative of the same respectabilities, speak reported words in
debate. Maurice himself, vague about the House of Commons, had nothing
to say against his making a figure there. Accordingly if these natural
gifts continued to remind him of his own fastidiously clever youth, it
was with the difference that Arthur Tregent's cleverness struck him as
much the greater of the two. If the changes in England were marked this
indeed was in general one of them, that the sharp young men were still
sharper than of yore. When they had ability at any rate they showed it
all; Maurice would never have pretended that he had shown all his. He
had not cared whether anyone knew it. It was not however this superior
intensity which provoked him, and poor young Tregent could not be held
responsible for his irritation. If the circumstance in which they most
resembled each other was the disposition to escape from plain girls who
aspired to them, such a characteristic, as embodied in the object of
Vera's admiration, was purely interesting, was even amusing, to Vera's
father; but it would have gratified him to be able to ascertain from
Mrs. Tregent whether, to her knowledge, her son thought his child really
repulsive, and what annoyed him was the fact that such an inquiry was
practically impossible. Arthur was provoking in short because he had an
advantage--an advantage residing in the fact that his mother's friend
couldn't ask questions about him without appearing to indulge in hints
and overtures. The idea of this officiousness was odious to Maurice
Glanvil; so that he confined himself to meditating in silence on the
happiness it would be for poor Vera to marry a beautiful young man with
a fortune and a future.
Though the opportunity for this recreation--it engaged much of his
time--should be counted as one of the pleasant results of his intimacy
with Mrs. Tregent, yet the sense, perverse enough, that he had a ground
of complaint against her subsisted even to the point of finally
steadying him while he expressed his grievance. This happened in the
course of one of those afternoon hours that had now become indispensable
to him--hours of belated tea and egotistical talk in the long summer
light and the chastened roar of London.
"No, it wasn't fair," he said, "and I wasn't well used--a hundred years
ago. I'm sore about it now; you ought to have notified me, to have
instructed me. Why didn't you, in common honesty? Why didn't my poor
mother, who was so eager and shrewd? Why didn't yours? She used to talk
to me. Heaven forgive me for saying it, but our mothers weren't up to
the mark! You may tell me they didn't know; to which I reply that mine
was universally supposed, and by me in particular, to know everything
that could be known. No, it wasn't well managed, and the consequence has
been this odious discovery, an awful shock to a man of my time of life
and under the effect of which I now speak to you, that for a quarter of
a century I've been a fool."
"What would you have wished us to do?" Mrs. Tregent asked as she gave
him another cup of tea.
"Why, to have said 'Wait, wait--at any price; have patience and hold
on!' They ought to have told me, _you_ ought to have told me, that your
conditions at that time were a temporary phase and that you would
infallibly break your shell. You ought to have warned me, they ought to
have warned me, that there would be wizardry in the case, that you were
to be the subject, at a given moment, of a transformation absolutely
miraculous. I couldn't know it by inspiration; I measured you by the
common law--how could I do anything else? But it wasn't kind to leave me
in error."
Maurice Glanvil treated himself without scruple to this fine ironic
flight, this sophistry which eased his nerves, because though it brought
him nearer than he had yet come to putting his finger, visibly to Mrs.
Tregent, on the fact that he had once tried to believe he could marry
her and had found her too ugly, their present relation was so
extraordinary and his present appreciation so liberal as to make almost
any freedom excusable, especially as his companion had the advantage of
being to all intents and purposes a different person from the one he
talked of, while he suffered the ignominy of being the same.
"There has been no miracle," said Mrs. Tregent after a moment. "I've
never known anything but the common, ah the very common, law, and
anything that I may have become only the common things have made me."
He shook his head. "You wore a disfiguring mask, a veil, a disguise. One
fine day you dropped them all and showed the world the real creature."
"It wasn't one fine day--it was little by little."
"Well, one fine day I saw the result; the process doesn't matter. To
arrive at a goal invisible from the starting-point is no doubt an
incident in the life of a certain number of women. But what is
absolutely unprecedented is to have traversed such a distance."
"Hadn't I a single redeeming point?" Mrs. Tregent demanded.
He hesitated a little, and while he hesitated she looked at him. Her
look was but of an instant, but it told him everything, told him, in one
misty moonbeam, all she had known of old. She had known perfectly--she
had been as conscious of the conditions of his experiment as of the
invincibility of his repugnance. Whether her mother had betrayed him
didn't matter; she had read everything clear and had had to accept the
cruel truth. He was touched as he had never been by that moment's
communication; he was, unexpectedly, almost awestruck, for there was
something still more in it than he had guessed. "I was letting my fancy
play just now," he answered, apologetically. "It was I who was
wanting--it was I who was the idiot!"
"Don't say that. You were so kind." And hereupon Mrs. Tregent startled
her visitor by bursting into tears.
She recovered herself indeed, and they forbore on that occasion, in the
interest of the decorum expected of persons of their age and in their
circumstances, to rake over these smouldering ashes; but such a
conversation had made a difference, and from that day onward Maurice
Glanvil was awake to the fact that he had been the passion of this
extraordinary woman's life. He felt humiliated for an hour, but after
that his pleasure was almost as great as his wonder. For wonder there
was plenty of room, but little by little he saw how things had come to
pass. She was not subjected to the ordeal of telling him or to the
abasement of any confession, but day by day he sounded, with a purity of
gratitude that renewed, in his spirit, the sources of youth, the depths
of everything that her behaviour implied. Of such a studied tenderness
as she showed him the roots could only be in some unspeakably sacred
past. She had not to explain, she had not to clear up inconsistencies,
she had only to let him be with her. She had striven, she had accepted,
she had conformed, but she had thought of him every day of her life. She
had taken up duties and performed them, she had banished every weakness
and practised every virtue, but the still, hidden flame had never been
quenched. His image had interposed, his reality had remained, and she
had never denied herself the sweetness of hoping that she should see him
again and that she should know him. She had never raised a little finger
for it, but fortune had answered her prayer. Women were capable of these
mysteries of sentiment, these intensities of fidelity and there were
moments in which Maurice Glanvil's heart beat strangely before a vision
really so sublime. He seemed to understand now by what miracle Fanny
Knocker had been beautified--the miracle of heroic docilities and
accepted pangs and vanquished egotisms. It had never come in a night,
but it had come by living for others. She was living for others still;
it was impossible for him to see anything else at last than that she was
living for him. The time of passion was over, but the time of service
was long. When all this became vivid to him he felt that he couldn't
recognise it enough and yet that recognition might only be tacit and, as
it were, circuitous. He couldn't say to her even humorously "It's very
kind of you to be in love with such a donkey," for these words would
have implied somehow that he had rights--an attitude from which his
renovated delicacy shrank. He bowed his head before such charity and
seemed to see moreover that Mrs. Tregent's desire to befriend him was a
feeling independent of any prospect of gain and indifferent to any
chance of reward. It would be described vulgarly, after so much had come
and gone, as the state of being "in love"--the state of the instinctive
and the simple, which they both had left far behind; so that there was a
certain sort of reciprocity which would almost constitute an insult to
it.