1
Mr. Waddington was sitting up in his armchair before the bedroom fire.
By turning his head a little to the right he could command a perfect
view of himself in the long glass by the window. To get up and look at
himself in that glass had been the first act of his convalescence. He
had hardly dared to think what alterations his illness might have made
in him. He remembered the horrible sight that Corbett had presented
after _his_ influenza last year.
Looking earnestly at himself in the glass, he had found that his
appearance was, if anything, improved. Outlines that he had missed for
the last ten years were showing up again. The Postlethwaite nose was
cleaner cut. He was almost slender, and not half so weak as Fanny said
he ought to have been. Immobility in bed, his spiritual attitude of
complacent acquiescence, and the release of his whole organism from the
strain of a restless intellect had set him up more than his influenza
had pulled him down; and it was a distinctly more refined and youthful
Waddington that Barbara found sitting in the armchair, wearing a royal
blue wadded silk dressing-gown and Fanny's motor-scarf, with a grey
mohair shawl over his knees.
Mr. Waddington's convalescence was altogether delightful to him,
admitting, as it did, of sustained companionship with Barbara. As soon
as it reached the armchair stage she sat with him for hours together.
She had finished the Ramblings, and at his request she read them aloud
to him all over again from beginning to end. Mr. Waddington was much
gratified by the impression they made recited in Barbara's charming
voice; the voice that trembled a little now and then with an emotion
that did her credit.
"'Come with me into the little sheltered valley of the Speed. Let us
follow the brown trout stream that goes purling through the lush green
grass of the meadows--'"
"I'd no idea," said Mr. Waddington, "it was anything like so good as it
is. We may congratulate ourselves on having got rid of Ralph Bevan."
And in February, when the frost broke and the spring weather came, and
the green and pink and purple fields showed up again through the mist on
the hillsides, he went out driving with Barbara in his car. He wanted
to look again at the places of his _Ramblings_, and he wanted Barbara to
look at them with him. It was the reward he had promised her for what he
called her dreary, mechanical job of copying and copying.
Barbara noticed the curious, exalted expression of his face as he sat up
beside her in the car, looking noble. She put it down partly to that
everlasting self-satisfaction that made his inward happiness, and partly
to sheer physical exhilaration induced by speed. She felt something like
it herself as they tore switchbacking up and down the hills: an
excitement whipped up on the top of the deep happiness that came from
thinking about Ralph. And there was hardly a moment when she didn't
think about him. It made her eyes shine and her mouth quiver with a
peculiarly blissful smile.
And Mr. Waddington looked at Barbara where she sat tucked up beside him.
He noticed the shining and the quivering, and he thought--what he always
had thought of Barbara. Only now he was certain.
The child loved him. She had been fascinated and frightened, frightened
and fascinated by him from the first hour that she had known him. But
she was not afraid of him any more. She had left off struggling. She was
giving herself up like a child to this feeling, the nature of which, in
her child's innocence, she did not yet know. But he knew. He had always
known it.
So much one half of Mr. Waddington's mind admitted, while the other half
denied that he had known it with any certainty. It went on saying to
itself: "Blind. Blind. Yet I might have known it," as if he hadn't.
He had, of course, kept it before him as a possibility (no part of him
denied that). And he had used tact. He had handled a delicate situation
with a consummate delicacy. He had done everything an honourable man
could do. But there it was. There it had been from the day that he had
come into the house and found her there. And the thing was too strong
for Barbara. Poor child, he might have known it would be. And it was too
strong for Mr. Waddington. It wasn't his fault. It was Fanny's fault,
having the girl there and forcing them to that dangerous intimacy.
Before his illness Mr. Waddington had resisted successfully any little
inclination he might have had to take advantage of the situation. He
conceived his inner life for the last nine months as consisting of a
series of resistances. He conceived the episode of Elise as a safety
valve, natural but unpleasant, for the emotions caused by Barbara: the
substitution of a permissible for an impermissible lapse. It had been
incredible to him that he should make love to Barbara.
But one effect of his influenza was apparent. It had lowered his
resistance, and, lowering it, had altered his whole moral perspective
and his scale of values, till one morning in April, walking with Barbara
in the garden that smelt of wallflowers and violets, he became aware
that Barbara was as necessary to him as he was to Barbara.
Her easel stood in a corner of the lawn with an unfinished water-colour
drawing of the house on it. He paused before it, smiling his tender,
sentimental smile.
"There's one thing I regret, Barbara--that I didn't have your drawings
for my Cotswold book."
The _Ramblings_, thanks to unproclaimed activities of Ralph Bevan, were
at that moment in the press.
"Why should you," she said, "if you didn't care about them?"
"It's inconceivable that I shouldn't have cared. ... I was blind. Blind.
... Well, some day, if we ever have an _édition de luxe_, they shall
appear in that."
"Some day!"
She hadn't the heart to tell him that the drawings had another
destination, for as yet the existence of Ralph's took was a secret.
They had agreed that nothing should disturb Mr. Waddington's pleasure in
the publication of his Ramblings--his poor Ramblings.
"One has to pay for blindness in this world," he said.
"A lot of people'll be let in at that rate. I don't suppose five will
care a rap about my drawings."
"I wasn't thinking only of your drawings, my dear." He pondered. ...
"Fanny tells me you're going to have a birthday. You're quite a little
April girl, aren't you?"
2
It was Barbara's twenty-fourth birthday, and the day of her adoption. It
had begun, unpropitiously, with something very like a dispute between
Horatio and Fanny.
Mr. Waddington had gone up to London the day before, and had returned
with a pearl pendant for Fanny, and a green jade necklace for Barbara
(not yet presented) and a canary yellow waistcoat for himself.