She threw herself upon the sofa in her boudoir and tried to face the
situation which presented itself to her. She tried to think what she
could do to escape from the toils which had been woven round her--woven
with the appropriate phrases that went to the declaring of a father’s
blessing, and the frivolous inconsequence of a mother’s acquiescence.
She felt for a moment as if she were a prisoner in a strong room, with
bars across the windows and bolts upon the door. She looked, as an
imprisoned girl might, first to the door then to the windows, as if she
had a hope that, by some accidental neglect of precaution on the part of
her gaoler a chance might be left for her of escape one way or another.
She threw back her head and stared at the ceiling. She felt that she had
no chance. The door had its bolts drawn and no one of the bars across
the window was defective. She was a prisoner without means of escape.
She felt hopeless facing such cleverness as that which Ernest Clifton
had shown her he had at his command. A fortnight ago he had given her to
understand that he considered it beyond the bounds of possibility that
he should obtain the consent of her father to their engagement--he had
certainly had no hope of winning her father’s consent for if he had had
such a hope he would only have required to tell her so when she had met
him at that garden party and had asked him to free her from her promise
made to him in the autumn. Yes, all he need have said was this:
“I am going to run the chance of getting your father’s consent, and if I
am not successful we can then talk as you are talking, of throwing over
our compact.”
That was all he need have said, if he had had any expectation of winning
over her father; but he had said nothing of the sort; and yet he had,
by his own cleverness--by some mystery of adroitness of which she was
ignorant--by some strange trick--she was sure it was a trick, though she
knew nothing about it--gained the acquiescence of her father in their
compact, and his cheerful forgiveness for the deception of the past.
What could she do in the face of such cleverness as this? How could she
hope to combat it? Would it not be ridiculous for such a girl as she
to strive against such a man as he? Would it not be better for her to
submit to the inevitable with good grace?
But had she not already submitted to it? She had been dumb in the
presence of her father, so overwhelmed as she was with surprise at the
first words of the announcement of his forgiveness; and she had thus
given him to understand that she was extremely grateful--grateful to
a point of complete extinction of the power of expressing her
gratitude--to him for his more than fatherly appreciation of her dearest
hopes. And as for her mother--she had allowed her mother to go so far as
to suggest that she was pretending to be tired in order to be at home if
her lover--her lover--were to call.
Well, she had made a fool of herself--so much was certain. That secret
engagement was an act of folly that had to be paid for. It seemed as if
no power was strong enough to show her how she could evade the supreme
penalty which that act carried with it. Yes, she had undoubtedly made a
fool of herself.
And then the thought came to her that she had not only made a fool of
herself, she had also made a fool of Pierce Winwood. This reflection was
too much for her. She turned her face to a pillow and wept silently into
its depths.
This was the second time she had been moved to tears since the morning,
and it was the memory of the incident of her first tears that caused her
to weep the more piteously now. By a strange inconsistency it was this
same memory that caused her to leap to her feet after an interval of
silent sobbing, and to toss away her second handkerchief just as she had
done her first and then to strike the palms of her hands together crying
aloud:
“I will face them all--I will face them all. I am not afraid of any of
them. I know my own mind now--now. I don’t care whether I have behaved
honourably or basely or idiotically, I love one man and that man I mean
to marry. That’s enough for me.”
It was in this spirit that she sat down in front of her _escritoire_
and flung the ink upon a sheet of paper to the effect that if Dear Mr.
Clifton would have the kindness to pay her a visit on the following
afternoon she would be glad. She thumped the scrawl when face downward
on the blotter, as good-natured people thump the back of a child that
has swallowed a fishbone. It was a great satisfaction to her to pound
away at it; and when she picked it up she saw that the blotting paper,
which had been spotless before was now black. The face of the letter was
also smudged, the absorbent not having been rapid enough in its action.
But she knew that not only would the lines be deciphered by the man to
whom they were addressed, he would also be made to understand something
of the mood she was in when she had made that cavalry charge upon the
paper using her broadest quill as a lance.
She gave a sigh of relief when she saw the envelope with the letter
inside, lying on the table beside her; and then she wrote the date on
another sheet of paper. The second letter, however, seemed to require
more careful composition than the first. She sat looking wistfully at
the blank paper for more than half an hour, without making sufficient
progress to write the name of the one whom the post office authorities
call the addressee. She leant back in her chair and bit at the feather
end of the pen for a long time. At last she tore up the sheet of paper
and dropped the fragments with great tenderness into the Dresden vase
that stood on a carved bracket on the wall.
“I will not spoil his day,” she said pathetically. “I may have a good
deal more to tell him by this time to-morrow. But I am not afraid to
face anything that may come to pass. I know my own mind now--now.”
Her maid came to enquire if she was at home, and if she would have tea
in her boudoir or in one of the drawing-rooms. She replied that she was
not at home and that she would like her tea brought to her at once.
This was done and she found herself greatly refreshed, and able to
enjoy an hour’s sleep before dinner, and to hear during that meal, her
mother’s account of the two entertainments at which she had assisted,
with a detailed description of some of the most innocuous of the dresses
worn by the heroines of the lady correspondents’ columns. A word or two
Lady Gwendolen threw in about the less interesting subject of the men
who had walked through the garden of the Hyde Park Gate house, with the
usual mournfulness of the men among five o’clock ices and angel-cakes,
failed to move Josephine.
“You should have been there, Joe,” said the mother when the servants had
left the dining-room, and the scent of fresh peeled peaches was in the
air. “I told you that it was quite unlikely that your Ernest would call
to-day, so you had your waiting at home for nothing. Amber was there
wearing that ancient thing with the little sprigs of violets--she must
have had that since May--but I think the hat was new--do you know it?--a
fearfully broad thing of white straw with a droop on both sides and
two ostrich feathers lying flat, one falling over the brim and coiling
underneath, and who is the latest victim to her theories of training, do
you think? Why, Lord Lully himself. She had ices with him, and held on
to him with grim determination for half an hour, though he told me last
week that he would be there and I saw that he was struggling hard to get
away from her, poor boy! But if she fancies that Lord Lully is such a
fool as the rest of them, she is going a little too far. I happen to
know that he has his eyes open just as wide as his father could
wish. Amber will make nothing of him, take my word for it. Theories!
Experiments! Fiddlestrings and fiddlesticks! And his mother was quite
civil to her too--almost gracious, only that we know that she never is
so except for three weeks during a General Election, and she takes
it out of her home circle when it’s all over and she need be civil no
longer. I hope your father will get into the Cabinet and so relieve
me from the General Election smile. I smiled him through three
General Elections, but I decline to face a fourth. Why should an Under
Secretary’s wife be supposed to make a Cheshire Cat of herself when the
wife of a Cabinet Minister need only be civil?”
This and several other social problems were formulated by Lady Gwendolen
for the consideration of her daughter while they ate their peaches, and
then they had an interval to themselves before dressing for a very Small
Dance at a very great house, following an Official Reception.
An Official Reception means a scuffle in a hall, a scramble on a
staircase and a scamper past a whiff of scent. That’s an Official
Reception.
Josephine danced eleven dances at the Small Dance and would have gone on
to the fifteenth only that she had the responsibility of chaperoning her
mother. She knew that her mother could not stand late hours, so she took
her home (reluctantly) at two.
At four o’clock the following afternoon Ernest Clifton made his call,
and Josephine received him alone.
“At last--at last!” he cried in a very creditable imitation of the
lover’s exaltation, when they were alone. He had approached her with
outstretched hands. His voice was tremulous.
She did not allow him to put even one arm around her. He was showing an
aspiration in regard to the employment of both.
“I wrote to you to come here to-day in order to tell you that--that--”
she paused. She did not know what she had to tell him. Was it that she
considered that he had tricked her into an acceptance of the terms
on which he had granted her petition for liberty? Was it that she had
merely changed her mind in regard to him? “I wish to tell you that--that
you must have misunderstood--I cannot tell how--the effect of the letter
which I wrote to you--of the explanation I made to you the last time we
met.”
“Good heavens! what can you possibly mean, my Josephine?” said he in
a maelstrom of astonishment; but she thought she could detect an
artificial gesture for all the swirl: the whirlpool was a machine made
one. “Good heavens! where was the possibility of a mistake?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I meant to be clear enough. I told you
that I wanted to be freed from the consequences of our engagement; you
freed me, and yet a few days later, you go to my father and tell him
that all we want is his sanction for our engagement--our engagement that
was annulled some time before.”
“What,” he cried, “can you forget that the only reason you put forward
for wishing to be free--nominally free--was that you felt uneasy at the
secrecy of our engagement? You said you felt as if you were guilty of
double-dealing because your father had not given his consent--you said
all this, my dearest, the last time we met, and your saying so--your
feeling so--filled me with remorse--the deepest remorse--the intensest
self-reproach. I had caused you to suffer, and what more natural than
that I make the attempt at the earliest possible moment to atone for
what I had done--to remove the one cause of your suffering? I made up
my mind that I would risk all to save you from further self-reproach. I
took my life in my hand, so to speak--I risked all on a simple cast
for your sake--I went to your father... well, by giving his consent he
withdrew the cause--the very reasonable cause, I admit of your--your
uneasiness. Surely you remember?”
“I remember everything,” she said. “I asked you to free me--to release
me from the promise I had made to you and you released me.”
“You place too great emphasis on my simple act,” said he. “What man
worthy of the name of man would have been less generous than I was?
Could I forget that you had suffered on my account? Oh, my Josephine,
I could not but release you from your promise--your promise of secrecy.
But I trusted you--I knew I could trust you.”
She perceived in a moment the position in which he meant to place her.
“But it was not from my promise of secrecy that I begged you to
free me,” she said; “it was from my engagement--I wished to be free
altogether, and you agreed. I was free when we parted. I did not
consider myself bound to you in any way.”
“What? ah, my dear Josephine, you are something of a sophist. Just think
for a moment and you will see how impossible it was for me to accept
what you said in the sense in which you now say you meant it. You told
me that the one reason--the sole reason you had for writing to me as
you wrote, and for appealing to me as you did, was the fact that the
secrecy--the secret--the secret that you shared with me was preying on
your mind. Well, that sole reason is now removed, therefore--oh, the
thing is simplicity itself.”
“That is perfectly plausible,” said she, after a long interval. She saw
without difficulty that he had logic and reason on his side. That made
her feel a greater antipathy to him than she had yet felt: a woman hates
the man who has proved himself to be in the right. “Yes, it is perfectly
plausible, but--but--you did not tell me that you intended coming to my
father.”
“And you did not know enough of my character to know that the first
step I should take after hearing from your lips that the fact of our
engagement being kept from him was causing you pain, would be to go to
your father?”
There was more than a suggestion of reproach in his voice: there was
pain.
“I did not know enough of your character,” she said. “And so I
considered myself free--altogether free. No engagement existed between
us when we parted last.”
“Although my last words to you were that I knew I could trust you? Did
not those words suggest to you that you had not made your meaning plain
to me--that I at least had no feeling that our engagement was at an
end?”
“I felt that--that you were setting me free with one phrase and trying
to bind me faster than before with another phrase,” she replied.
“But you made no protest. You tacitly admitted that I was entitled to
accept your meaning as I did.”
“You did not give me a chance. You turned away to speak to some one who
came up at that moment.”
“What would you have said to me if you had had the chance?” he asked her
slowly.
She hesitated.
“Oh, do not trouble yourself thinking for an answer,” he cried. “What is
the good of discussing in this way the--diplomatists call it the _status
quo ante?_ Such a discussion is quite profitless. Even if we were not
engaged then we are now. The obstacle has been removed.”
She felt overcome by the plausibility of it all, just as she had felt
overcome in the presence of her father by a sense of the inevitable.
It was not surprising that he accepted the long pause on her part as
indicating complete surrender to his reasoning. He went towards her with
a smile and outstretched hands.
“Do not come to me: I love another man and I mean to marry him--I shall
never marry you,” she said quietly.