He continued to tell himself that he was satisfied if his wife was
happy; and it was not till the child's tenth year that he felt a doubt
of her happiness.
Jane had been a preternaturally good child. During the eight years of
her adoption she had caused her foster-parents no anxiety beyond those
connected with the usual succession of youthful diseases. But her
unknown progenitors had given her a robust constitution, and she passed
unperturbed through measles, chicken-pox and whooping-cough. If there
was any suffering it was endured vicariously by Mrs. Lethbury, whose
temperature rose and fell with the patient's, and who could not hear
Jane sneeze without visions of a marble angel weeping over a broken
column. But though Jane's prompt recoveries continued to belie such
premonitions, though her existence continued to move forward on an even
keel of good health and good conduct, Mrs. Lethbury's satisfaction
showed no corresponding advance. Lethbury, at first, was disposed to
add her disappointment to the long list of feminine inconsistencies
with which the sententious observer of life builds up his favorite
induction; but circumstances presently led him to take a kindlier view
of the case.
Hitherto his wife had regarded him as a negligible factor in Jane's
evolution. Beyond providing for his adopted daughter, and effacing
himself before her, he was not expected to contribute to her
well-being. But as time passed he appeared to his wife in a new light.
It was he who was to educate Jane. In matters of the intellect, Mrs.
Lethbury was the first to declare her deficiencies--to proclaim them,
even, with a certain virtuous superiority. She said she did not pretend
to be clever, and there was no denying the truth of the assertion. Now,
however, she seemed less ready, not to own her limitations, but to
glory in them. Confronted with the problem of Jane's instruction, she
stood in awe of the child.
"I have always been stupid, you know," she said to Lethbury with a new
humility, "and I'm afraid I sha'n't know what is best for Jane. I'm
sure she has a wonderfully good mind, and I should reproach myself if I
didn't give her every opportunity." She looked at him helplessly. "You
must tell me what ought to be done."
Lethbury was not unwilling to oblige her. Somewhere in his mental
lumber-room there rusted a theory of education such as usually lingers
among the impedimenta of the childless. He brought this out,
refurbished it, and applied it to Jane. At first he thought his wife
had not overrated the quality of the child's mind. Jane seemed
extraordinarily intelligent. Her precocious definiteness of mind was
encouraging to her inexperienced preceptor. She had no difficulty in
fixing her attention, and he felt that every fact he imparted was being
etched in metal. He helped his wife to engage the best teachers, and
for a while continued to take an ex-official interest in his adopted
daughter's studies. But gradually his interest waned. Jane's ideas did
not increase with her acquisitions. Her young mind remained a mere
receptacle for facts: a kind of cold-storage from which anything that
had been put there could be taken out at a moment's notice, intact but
congealed. She developed, moreover, an inordinate pride in the capacity
of her mental storehouse, and a tendency to pelt her public with its
contents. She was overheard to jeer at her nurse for not knowing when
the Saxon Heptarchy had fallen, and she alternately dazzled and
depressed Mrs. Lethbury by the wealth of her chronological allusions.
She showed no interest in the significance of the facts she amassed:
she simply collected dates as another child might have collected stamps
or marbles. To her foster-mother she seemed a prodigy of wisdom; but
Lethbury saw, with a secret movement of sympathy, how the aptitudes in
which Mrs. Lethbury gloried were slowly estranging her from their
possessor.
"She is getting too clever for me," his wife said to him, after one of
Jane's historical flights, "but I am so glad that she will be a
companion to you."
Lethbury groaned in spirit. He did not look forward to Jane's
companionship. She was still a good little girl: but there was
something automatic and formal in her goodness, as though it were a
kind of moral calisthenics that she went through for the sake of
showing her agility. An early consciousness of virtue had moreover
constituted her the natural guardian and adviser of her elders. Before
she was fifteen she had set about reforming the household. She took
Mrs. Lethbury in hand first; then she extended her efforts to the
servants, with consequences more disastrous to the domestic harmony;
and lastly she applied herself to Lethbury. She proved to him by
statistics that he smoked too much, and that it was injurious to the
optic nerve to read in bed. She took him to task for not going to
church more regularly, and pointed out to him the evils of desultory
reading. She suggested that a regular course of study encourages mental
concentration, and hinted that inconsecutiveness of thought is a sign
of approaching age.
To her adopted mother her suggestions were equally pertinent. She
instructed Mrs. Lethbury in an improved way of making beef stock, and
called her attention to the unhygienic qualities of carpets. She poured
out distracting facts about bacilli and vegetable mould, and
demonstrated that curtains and picture-frames are a hot-bed of animal
organisms. She learned by heart the nutritive ingredients of the
principal articles of diet, and revolutionized the cuisine by an
attempt to establish a scientific average between starch and
phosphates. Four cooks left during this experiment, and Lethbury fell
into the habit of dining at his club.
Once or twice, at the outset, he had tried to check Jane's ardor; but
his efforts resulted only in hurting his wife's feelings. Jane remained
impervious, and Mrs. Lethbury resented any attempt to protect her from
her daughter. Lethbury saw that she was consoled for the sense of her
own inferiority by the thought of what Jane's intellectual
companionship must be to him; and he tried to keep up the illusion by
enduring with what grace he might the blighting edification of Jane's
discourse.
V
As Jane grew up, he sometimes avenged himself by wondering if his wife
was still sorry that they had not called her Muriel. Jane was not ugly;
she developed, indeed, a kind of categorical prettiness that might have
been a projection of her mind. She had a creditable collection of
features, but one had to take an inventory of them to find out that she
was good-looking. The fusing grace had been omitted.
Mrs. Lethbury took a touching pride in her daughter's first steps in
the world. She expected Jane to take by her complexion those whom she
did not capture by her learning. But Jane's rosy freshness did not work
any perceptible ravages. Whether the young men guessed the axioms on
her lips and detected the encyclopaedia in her eye, or whether they
simply found no intrinsic interest in these features, certain it is,
that, in spite of her mother's heroic efforts, and of incessant calls
on Lethbury's purse, Jane, at the end of her first season, had dropped
hopelessly out of the running. A few duller girls found her
interesting, and one or two young men came to the house with the object
of meeting other young women; but she was rapidly becoming one of the
social supernumeraries who are asked out only because they are on
people's lists.
The blow was bitter to Mrs. Lethbury; but she consoled herself with the
idea that Jane had failed because she was too clever. Jane probably
shared this conviction; at all events she betrayed no consciousness of
failure. She had developed a pronounced taste for society, and went
out, unweariedly and obstinately, winter after winter, while Mrs.
Lethbury toiled in her wake, showering attentions on oblivious
hostesses. To Lethbury there was something at once tragic and
exasperating in the sight of their two figures, the one conciliatory,
the other dogged, both pursuing with unabated zeal the elusive prize of
popularity. He even began to feel a personal stake in the pursuit, not
as it concerned Jane, but as it affected his wife. He saw that the
latter was the victim of Jane's disappointment: that Jane was not above
the crude satisfaction of "taking it out" of her mother. Experience
checked the impulse to come to his wife's defence; and when his
resentment was at its height, Jane disarmed him by giving up the
struggle.
Nothing was said to mark her capitulation; but Lethbury noticed that
the visiting ceased, and that the dressmaker's bills diminished. At the
same time, Mrs. Lethbury made it known that Jane had taken up
charities; and before long Jane's conversation confirmed this
announcement. At first Lethbury congratulated himself on the change;
but Jane's domesticity soon began to weigh on him. During the day she
was sometimes absent on errands of mercy; but in the evening she was
always there. At first she and Mrs. Lethbury sat in the drawing-room
together, and Lethbury smoked in the library; but presently Jane formed
the habit of joining him there, and he began to suspect that he was
included among the objects of her philanthropy.
Mrs. Lethbury confirmed the suspicion. "Jane has grown very
serious-minded lately," she said. "She imagines that she used to
neglect you, and she is trying to make up for it. Don't discourage
her," she added innocently.
Such a plea delivered Lethbury helpless to his daughter's
ministrations: and he found himself measuring the hours he spent with
her by the amount of relief they must be affording her mother. There
were even moments when he read a furtive gratitude in Mrs. Lethbury's
eye.
But Lethbury was no hero, and he had nearly reached the limit of
vicarious endurance when something wonderful happened. They never quite
knew afterward how it had come about, or who first perceived it; but
Mrs. Lethbury one day gave tremulous voice to their inferences.
"Of course," she said, "he comes here because of Elise." The young lady
in question, a friend of Jane's, was possessed of attractions which had
already been found to explain the presence of masculine visitors.
Lethbury risked a denial. "I don't think he does," he declared.
"But Elise is thought very pretty," Mrs. Lethbury insisted.
"I can't help that," said Lethbury doggedly.
He saw a faint light in his wife's eyes; but she remarked carelessly:
"Mr. Budd would be a very good match for Elise."
Lethbury could hardly repress a chuckle: he was so exquisitely aware
that she was trying to propitiate the gods.
For a few weeks neither said a word; then Mrs. Lethbury once more
reverted to the subject.
"It is a month since Elise went abroad," she said.
"Is it?"
"And Mr. Budd seems to come here just as often--"
"Ah," said Lethbury with heroic indifference; and his wife hastily
changed the subject.
Mr. Winstanley Budd was a young man who suffered from an excess of
manner. Politeness gushed from him in the driest seasons. He was always
performing feats of drawing-room chivalry, and the approach of the most
unobtrusive female threw him into attitudes which endangered the
furniture. His features, being of the cherubic order, did not lend
themselves to this role; but there were moments when he appeared to
dominate them, to force them into compliance with an aquiline ideal.
The range of Mr. Budd's social benevolence made its object hard to
distinguish. He spread his cloak so indiscriminately that one could not
always interpret the gesture, and Jane's impassive manner had the
effect of increasing his demonstrations: she threw him into paroxysms
of politeness.
At first he filled the house with his amenities; but gradually it
became apparent that his most dazzling effects were directed
exclusively to Jane. Lethbury and his wife held their breath and looked
away from each other. They pretended not to notice the frequency of Mr.
Budd's visits, they struggled against an imprudent inclination to leave
the young people too much alone. Their conclusions were the result of
indirect observation, for neither of them dared to be caught watching
Mr. Budd: they behaved like naturalists on the trail of a rare
butterfly.
In his efforts not to notice Mr. Budd, Lethbury centred his attentions
on Jane; and Jane, at this crucial moment, wrung from him a reluctant
admiration. While her parents went about dissembling their emotions,
she seemed to have none to conceal. She betrayed neither eagerness nor
surprise; so complete was her unconcern that there were moments when
Lethbury feared it was obtuseness, when he could hardly help whispering
to her that now was the moment to lower the net.
Meanwhile the velocity of Mr. Budd's gyrations increased with the ardor
of courtship: his politeness became incandescent, and Jane found
herself the centre of a pyrotechnical display culminating in the "set
piece" of an offer of marriage.
Mrs. Lethbury imparted the news to her husband one evening after their
daughter had gone to bed. The announcement was made and received with
an air of detachment, as though both feared to be betrayed into
unseemly exultation; but Lethbury, as his wife ended, could not repress
the inquiry, "Have they decided on a day?"
Mrs. Lethbury's superior command of her features enabled her to look
shocked. "What can you be thinking of? He only offered himself at five!"
"Of course--of course--" stammered Lethbury--"but nowadays people marry
after such short engagements--"
"Engagement!" said his wife solemnly. "There is no engagement."