Amber had come to the conclusion that it would be better for her to
be frank with her friend Josephine in regard to the _personnel_ of
her fellow-guests at The Weir for the Sunday. A month had passed since
Josephine had promised to keep herself disengaged for this particular
Sunday, but in the meantime a good many things had happened, the most
important being (as she fancied) the dinner at Ranelagh, which had given
a certain amount of prominence to Mr. Win-wood and had aroused a curious
prejudice against him in the estimation of Josephine. It was thus, she
thought, only fair to Josephine to tell her that Mr. Winwood had also
promised to go to The Weir for the Sunday, so that, if she felt that
another day spent in his company would be insupportable, she might have
a chance of concocting some excuse for remaining in town.
The daughter of a politician of eminence should be at no loss for a
plausible excuse to extricate herself from the consequences of a promise
of a month’s standing. She should have at her command--even though her
father did not actually belong to the Cabinet--a sufficiency of that
subtle element called (by the organs of the Opposition) tergiversation
to tide her over a shoal place.
It was this thoughtfulness on the part of Amber that impelled her to let
Josephine know that Mr. Winwood also had promised to go to The Weir,
and she felt greatly relieved to find that her friend did not make
any attempt to draw upon her imagination for an excuse to prevent her
joining the party at Sir Creighton’s riverside cottage.
She wondered if Josephine’s prejudice was abating already, or if she was
merely showing how polite she could be.
It was when she was trying to recover from the startling effects of the
return of Pierce Winwood to the drawing-room after the departure of Lord
Lull-worth, that her father came to her, saying something about Pierce
Winwood.
“I am very glad you asked him here,” he said. “Yes; he was able to
convince me of his identity.”
“So you remembered his father’s name after all,” said Amber.
“Yes--oh, yes. I remembered his father’s name.”
“It was the story that brought it back to you?”
“Yes--that singular story.”
“You were able to tell him the names of the people--the names that he
was so anxious to find out?”
“Oh, yes; I was able to--to satisfy him on this point. By the way, he
and Josephine had some chat together in the garden--I could see them
from my window.”
Amber shook her head and then said:
“Poor fellow!”
“Why poor fellow, pray?” asked her father raising his eyebrows.
“I am afraid that he--that is--I’m not quite sure that I should tell you
that----”
“Let me know what it is you are in doubt about, and I will give you my
best advice on this doubtful and delicate point,” said he.
“If you decide that I shouldn’t have told you will you let it be as if I
hadn’t told you?” she said, clasping her hands over his arm.
“Certainly I will,” he replied. “The terms are quite honourable.”
“Then I may tell you that an hour after leaving this room he returned.”
“For an umbrella--that’s what they do in plays: they always come back
for the umbrella which, with the most careful inadvertency they have
left behind them. But he didn’t come back to let you know that owing
to the distractions of lunch, he had forgotten to mention that he loved
you?”
“Worse--much worse. He came to ask me if I could tell him if Joe had
given her promise to marry someone.”
“Heavens above! And did he specify the some one?”
“Oh, dear, no; he had no one--that is to say, he had every one in his
mind’s eye. He could not understand how it was possible that so sweet
and lovely a girl should have reached the age of twenty-four without
having given her promise to marry some man.”
“It does seem a bit queer, doesn’t it? Well?”
“That’s all. I told him, of course, that Joe was quite free.”
“Of course. But that being so, where does your ‘poor fellow!’ come in.
Why not ‘lucky fellow’?”
Amber shook her head more sadly than she had shaken it before.
“The pity of it! the pity of it!” she murmured. “Poor Joe!”
“Poor yourself!” laughed Sir Creighton. “You cannot be ambitious enough
to wish to include all the world in your pity. Why ‘poor Josephine’?”
“She confessed to me that she hated him,” said Amber in a whisper--the
whisper of an aspen--tremulous rather than sibilant.
“What, hated him? I had no idea that she cared so much as that for him
already,” said her father. “Are you sure that she confessed to hating
him?”
Amber’s hands dropped from his arm, but her eyes did not drop from his
face.
“Do you mean--you cannot mean--that--that all may yet be well?” she
cried.
“My dear girl,” said he, smiling a smile which he had provisionally
patented since his daughter had made it a practice to consult him
on curious points of psychology and diction and deportment. “My dear
daughter, I have, as you well know, little time to devote to the study
of temperament or poetry or unpractical things of that sort, but I have
seen enough in the course of a busy but not wholly unobservant life, to
convince me that when a young woman goes so far as to confess that she
hates any particular young man, or old man, for that matter--she has
gone very far in the direction of saying that she loves that particular
man. I don’t say that Josephine----”
“She doesn’t. She doesn’t--at least--I don’t believe that she has
thought about him one way or another. She was, however, quite polite to
him today.”
“That’s rather a bad sign, isn’t it? When a girl is polite to a man whom
she hates, she makes one feel that his chances with her are reduced. But
of one thing you may be sure--yea, of two things you may be certain; the
first is that no girl hates a man of whom she has not been thinking a
great deal; the second is that no girl hates a man unless she knows that
he loves her.”
“How curious! How very curious! You are sure--quite sure?”
“There are variants,” said the man of science. “But one cannot study
the properties of the positive and negative currents of electricity for
forty years without learning something of the elementary principles of
attraction and repulsion. The air was, I think, strongly charged with
electricity when the first woman was born; and that being so, don’t you
think you might do worse than ask Winwood and Josephine to join us at
The Weir, some of these days?”
He was smoothing her hair very gently: the action was prettily paternal
but it was also strictly businesslike; for was he not the inventor of
that microelectrometer which is so marvellously sensitive that it is
capable of measuring the force of the current generated by the stroking
of a cat. He had experimented on his daughter years ago. No penalty
attached to his doing so, though had he tried his electrometer on the
cat he would have laid himself open to a criminal prosecution.
She was all unconscious of the escaping ohms; she was puzzling out
the hard saying that had come from her father. She was trying to see
daylight through the obstructions of his phrases and the obscuration of
his logic.
She shook her head--for the third time--saying: “I’m in a bit of a mist
just now. I should like to think it all out.”
“As if one can get out of a mist through much thinking,” said he.
“Dearest daughter of my house and heart, take my advice and think only
when you cannot help thinking; but remember that woman was not made to
think but to act. It is man, foolish man, who is so badly endowed of
nature that he is compelled to think out things. The woman who thinks
is about as womanly as the pantomine Old Mother Hubbard. Be a woman, my
dear, and assert your femininity by acting--yes, acting in accordance
with no principle of logic, but strictly in response to the prompting of
your instinct.”
He kissed her and looked at the timepiece.
“I’ll write to Mr. Winwood,” she said somewhat helplessly and
hopelessly. “Joe long ago promised to come to us at The Weir on Saturday
week. But I think I must tell her if he accepts the mater’s invitation.”
“Oh, certainly; that is the least you can do: she was so polite to him
to-day,” said her father from the door, smiling that registered smile of
his and making his escape before she could put the question to him which
that smile invariably prompted.
She felt that it was all very well for him to advise her not to think
out any matter; it was not so easy, however, for her to refrain from
thinking, seeing that he had led her into the perilous paths of thought
long ago. He had taught her the art of thinking long ago, and yet now he
could airily assure her that she was very foolish and--what was much the
same thing--very unwomanly to try to think herself out of a difficult
place.
Well, that showed that he was a man anyway--a man as illogical as the
most sapient _savant_ can be, and that is saying a good deal.
The suggestions made to her by her father had, however, considerably
widened the horizon of her consideration, so to speak. That is to say,
she had only been thinking how admirably Josephine had succeeded in
hiding beneath a mask of politeness her ill-founded prejudice against
Mr. Winwood; whereas now she was led to consider the possibility of that
mask of hers concealing a good deal more. She had been pitying, first,
Mr. Winwood for having been so impulsive as to fall in love with
Josephine; and, secondly, Josephine for having been so impulsive as
to conceive a prejudice that might interfere with her happiness in the
future.
But now, it seemed that she need not have pitied either of them--if her
father’s suggestions were worth anything.
And then she had given an exclamation of derision and had begun to think
of other matters. She meant this exclamation to bear upon the wisdom of
her father veiled (as so much wisdom may be if one is only wise) in a
fine lacework of phrases. Her father’s Valenciennes phrases were much
admired: they had a charming and delicate pattern of their own which
perhaps some people admired more than the wisdom whose features they
effectually concealed, and the design of his Point de Venise was so
striking that no one was in the least curious as to whether it concealed
any thought or not.
Thus it was that Sir Creighton’s daughter found it necessary to make
use of a serious exclamation when she found that when she had looked for
wisdom from her father he had given her a phrase--the lace cerement of
wisdom.
And then she gave a more emphatic exclamation when she reflected upon
the possibility of Josephine’s polite demeanour being as opaque as her
father’s paradoxes. She had believed that the embroidered domino of
politeness--that makes a variation from the rather flimsy trope of
the lace--concealed within its folds only her friend’s dislike for the
presence of Mr. Winwood; but now it had been suggested to her that there
was a good deal below the billowy surface of the ornamented fabric that
she had never suspected to exist there.
She said “Psha!” also “Phu!” and “Phi,” and gave vent to all those
delicately modulated breathings with long-drawn sibilants which moments
of staccato derision suggest to those young women who have not trained
themselves to the more robust verbiage of condemnation--sounds like the
stamping of Alpine heels upon a solid pavement.
It was of course a great relief to the girl to give way to those
half tones of vituperation--those dainty slipper-taps as it were, of
impatience. But after all the real relief that she experienced was in
diverting her thoughts from the possible dissimulation of her father
and her friend to the plain and simple language made use of by Lord
Lullworth in her presence.
Lord Lullworth was, of course, a fellow with no pretensions to
brain-power--with no delicate appreciation of the subtleties of
language; but beyond a shadow of doubt Amber felt the greatest relief to
her mind through reflecting upon his extraordinary frankness. There at
any rate was a man who knew exactly what he meant and who was able to
communicate to another person exactly what he meant. To be sure what he
did mean was something too absurd to be entertained for a moment; still
it had been clearly defined and--yes, it was not without picturesqueness
and--yes, it was undeniably a relief to think about him.
Only an hour had passed since she had been lying back among her
cushions, reflecting, with the help of the Florentine mirror, upon the
situation of the moment. She had at that time been led, out of a feeling
that Lord Lullworth should have fair play, to think of him in active and
brutal contest with the other young men who had been drinking tea with
her; but now she found that, even judged from a lofty standpoint, he was
susceptible of being thought about with positive pleasure--well, if not
absolute pleasure certainly with satisfaction, the satisfaction which
comes from a sense of relief.
And then she found that really his frankness had not been unpicturesque
as a pose. She began to feel that a great misapprehension existed in the
minds of most people in regard to frankness. The impression undoubtedly
did prevail that frankness was only candour in hob-nailed boots. She
knew that the general feeling is that if candour is insolence in a
white surplice, frankness is rudeness in rags. That misapprehension was
allowed to exist simply because so many people who were really clever,
never found that it suited them to be frank. They had given all their
attention to the art of not being frank, just as some women give up all
their time to their dress, neglecting their bodies, to say nothing
of their souls, in order that they may appear well-dressed. She felt
convinced that if a really clever man were to study frankness as an art
he might be able to make a good thing out of it. At any rate it would be
a novelty.
Yes, Lord Lullworth had certainly struck out a path for himself, and had
made some progress--quite enough to impress her, and to cause her some
remorse when she reflected upon her having thought of him as a fool.
Lord Lullworth undoubtedly had made an appreciable amount of progress
when he had impelled the girl who had first thought of him only as a
young fool, to give herself over to the consideration of his position as
an athlete, then of his position as a relieving influence coming after
the distractions of intellectuality; and, finally, of his position as an
original thinker--the pioneer of a cult which might yet become a power
in a society where dissimulation, flourishes.
And what marked the extent of his progress the more vividly was the
fact that the result of her consideration of the young man from every
successive standpoint only strengthened his place in her esteem.
Then her mother wrote the invitation to Mr. Win-wood for Saturday week
and he accepted it in due course; and it was on the Wednesday next
before that Saturday that Amber met Josephine on the terrace of the
great historic house in Kensington, and reminded her that she had
engaged herself to go up the river to The Weir from Saturday to Monday.
That was not the only engagement of which Josephine was conscious.
Still she had been able to shoot a dart of pretty badinage with a barb
touched with sugar instead of gall, in the direction of Mr. Winwood at
that moment; and thus Amber had gone home more amazed than ever.
But not before she had been charmed by her gracious reception at the
hands of the Countess of Castlethorpe.
No young man with a mother so perfectly charming could be unworthy of
consideration, she felt.
And thus Lord Lullworth took another stride along the perilous path
upon which he had set his feet.