It remained in my mind, that little thing that Dacres had taken the
trouble to tell my daughter; I thought about it a good deal. It seemed
to me the most serious and convincing circumstances that had yet offered
itself to my consideration. Dacres was no longer content to bring solace
and support to the more appealing figure of the situation; he must set
to work, bless him! to improve the situation itself. He must try to
induce Miss Farnham, by telling her everything he could remember to
my credit, to think as well of her mother as possible, in spite of the
strange and secret blows which that mother might be supposed to sit
up at night to deliver to her. Cecily thought very well of me already;
indeed, with private reservations as to my manners and--no, NOT my
morals, I believe I exceeded her expectations of what a perfectly new
and untrained mother would be likely to prove. It was my theory that she
found me all she could understand me to be. The maternal virtues of the
outside were certainly mine; I put them on with care every morning and
wore them with patience all day. Dacres, I assured myself, must have
allowed his preconception to lead him absurdly by the nose not to see
that the girl was satisfied, that my impatience, my impotence, did
not at all make her miserable. Evidently, however, he had created
our relations differently; evidently he had set himself to their
amelioration. There was portent in it; things seemed to be closing in. I
bit off a quarter of an inch of wooden pen-handle in considering whether
or not I should mention it in my letter to John, and decided that it
would be better just perhaps to drop a hint. Though I could not expect
John to receive it with any sort of perturbation. Men are different; he
would probably think Tottenham well enough able to look after himself.
I had embarked on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of the
saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very conscious
and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my mood that he had
nothing less than the crisis of his life in his pocket, and was looking
for me. As he advanced towards me between the long tables doubt left me
and alarm assailed me. ‘I’m glad to find you in a quiet corner,’ said
he, seating himself, and confirmed my worst anticipations.
‘I’m writing to John,’ I said, and again applied myself to my
pen-handle. It is a trick Cecily has since done her best in vain to cure
me of.
‘I am going to interrupt you,’ he said. ‘I have not had an opportunity
of talking to you for some time.’
‘I like that!’ I exclaimed derisively.
‘And I want to tell you that I am very much charmed with Cecily.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I am not going to gratify you by saying anything
against her.’
‘You don’t deserve her, you know.’
‘I won’t dispute that. But, if you don’t mind--I’m not sure that I’ll
stand being abused, dear boy.’
‘I quite see it isn’t any use. Though one spoke with the tongues of men
and of angels--’
‘And had not charity,’ I continued for him. ‘Precisely. I won’t go on,
but your quotation is very apt.’
‘I so bow down before her simplicity. It makes a wide and beautiful
margin for the rest of her character. She is a girl Ruskin would have
loved.’
‘I wonder,’ said I. ‘He did seem fond of the simple type, didn’t he?’
‘Her mind is so clear, so transparent. The motive spring of everything
she says and does is so direct. Don’t you find you can most completely
depend upon her?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said; ‘certainly. I nearly always know what she is going
to say before she says it, and under given circumstances I can tell
precisely what she will do.’
‘I fancy her sense of duty is very beautifully developed.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘There is hardly a day when I do not come in contact
with it.’
‘Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of hers
very restful.’
‘I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one
young lady,’ I said, taking refuge in flippancy, ‘and to think that she
should be my daughter!’
‘As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of
destiny, Mrs. Farnham.’
‘Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You
don’t seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations, like a
tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and content. How
determined you are to be sorry for her!’
Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he
sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the limited
person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The first of them
would be, I saw, that he had quite a different conception of Cecily,
that it was illuminated by many trifles, nuances of feeling and
expression, which he had noticed in his talks with her whenever they had
skirted the subject of her adoption by her mother. He knew her, he was
longing to say, better than I did; when it would have been natural to
reply that one could not hope to compete in such a direction with an
intelligent young man, and we should at once have been upon delicate and
difficult ground. So it was as well perhaps that he kept silence until
he said, as he had come prepared to say, ‘Well, I want to put that
beyond a doubt--her happiness--if I’m good enough. I want her, please,
and I only hope that she will be half as willing to come as you are
likely to be to let her go.’
It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified to
feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the instant
in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole complete self
again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was masquerading about
in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from an exacting condition
and an impossible ideal! ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, and my eyes positively
filled. ‘You ARE good, Dacres, but I couldn’t let you do that.’
His undisguised stare brought me back to a sense of the proportion of
things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had brought Mr.
Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter consideration
for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic. Inwardly I laughed at the
egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it up, even for an instant, as
a reason for gratitude. The situation was not so peculiar, not so
interesting, as that. But I answered his stare with a smile; what I had
said might very well stand.
‘Do you imagine,’ he said, seeing that I did not mean to amplify it,
‘that I want to marry her out of any sort of GOODness?’
‘Benevolence is your weakness, Dacres.’
‘I see. You think one’s motive is to withdraw her from a relation
which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in her
particular and painful case, the most equivocal.’
‘Well, come,’ I remonstrated. ‘You have dropped one or two things, you
know, in the heat of your indignation, not badly calculated to give one
that idea. The eloquent statement you have just made, for instance--it
carries all the patness of old conviction. How often have you rehearsed
it?’
I am a fairly long-suffering person, but I began to feel a little
annoyed with my would-be son-in-law. If the relation were achieved it
would give him no prescriptive right to bully me; and we were still in
very early anticipation of that.
‘Ah!’ he said disarmingly. ‘Don’t let us quarrel. I’m sorry you think
that; because it isn’t likely to bring your favour to my project, and
I want you friendly and helpful. Oh, confound it!’ he exclaimed, with
sudden temper. ‘You ought to be. I don’t understand this aloofness.
I half suspect it’s pose. You undervalue Cecily--well, you have no
business to undervalue me. You know me better than anybody in the world.
Now are you going to help me to marry your daughter?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said slowly, after a moment’s silence, which he
sat through like a mutinous schoolboy. ‘I might tell you that I don’t
care a button whom you marry, but that would not be true. I do care more
or less. As you say, I know you pretty well. I’d a little rather you
didn’t make a mess of it; and if you must I should distinctly prefer
not to have the spectacle under my nose for the rest of my life. I can’t
hinder you, but I won’t help you.’
‘And what possesses you to imagine that in marrying Cecily I should make
a mess of it? Shouldn’t your first consideration be whether SHE would?’
‘Perhaps it should, but, you see, it isn’t. Cecily would be happy with
anybody who made her comfortable. You would ask a good deal more than
that, you know.’
Dacres, at this, took me up promptly. Life, he said, the heart of life,
had particularly little to say to temperament. By the heart of life I
suppose he meant married love. He explained that its roots asked other
sustenance, and that it throve best of all on simple elemental goodness.
So long as a man sought in women mere casual companionship, perhaps
the most exquisite thing to be experienced was the stimulus of some
spiritual feminine counterpart; but when he desired of one woman that
she should be always and intimately with him, the background of his
life, the mother of his children, he was better advised to avoid
nerves and sensibilities, and try for the repose of the common--the
uncommon--domestic virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender.
(Already, I told him, he smelled the housekeeper’s linen-chest.) But
I did not interrupt him much; I couldn’t, he was too absorbed. To
temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of
decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he
retorted that if he hadn’t he didn’t wish to make a beginning in his
own family. In a quarter of an hour he repudiated the theories of a
lifetime, a gratifying triumph for simple elemental goodness. Having
denied the value of the subtler pretensions to charm in woman as you
marry her, he went artlessly on to endow Cecily with as many of them as
could possibly be desirable. He actually persuaded himself to say that
it was lovely to see the reflections of life in her tranquil spirit;
and when I looked at him incredulously he grew angry, and hinted that
Cecily’s sensitiveness to reflections and other things might be a trifle
beyond her mother’s ken. ‘She responds instantly, intimately, to the
beautiful everywhere,’ he declared.
‘Aren’t the opportunities of life on board ship rather limited to
demonstrate that?’ I inquired. ‘I know--you mean sunsets. Cecily is very
fond of sunsets. She is always asking me to come and look at them.’
‘I was thinking of last night’s sunset,’ he confessed. ‘We looked at it
together.’
‘What did she say?’ I asked idly.
‘Nothing very much. That’s just the point. Another girl would have raved
and gushed.’
‘Oh, well, Cecily never does that,’ I responded. ‘Nevertheless she is
a very ordinary human instrument. I hope I shall have no temptation ten
years hence to remind you that I warned you of her quality.’
‘I wish, not in the least for my own profit, for I am well convinced
already, but simply to win your cordiality and your approval--never did
an unexceptional wooer receive such niggard encouragement!--I wish there
were some sort of test for her quality. I would be proud to stand by it,
and you would be convinced. I can’t find words to describe my objection
to your state of mind.’
The thing seemed to me to be a foregone conclusion. I saw it
accomplished, with all its possibilities of disastrous commonplace. I
saw all that I have here taken the trouble to foreshadow. So far as
I was concerned, Dacres’s burden would add itself to my philosophies,
voila tout. I should always be a little uncomfortable about it, because
it had been taken from my back; but it would not be a matter for the
wringing of hands. And yet--the hatefulness of the mistake! Dacres’s
bold talk of a test made no suggestion. Should my invention be more
fertile? I thought of something.
‘You have said nothing to her yet?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. I don’t think she suspects for a moment. She treats me as if
no such fell design were possible. I’m none too confident, you know,’ he
added, with longer face.
‘We go straight to Agra. Could you come to Agra?’
‘Ideal!’ he cried. ‘The memory of Mumtaz! The garden of the Taj! I’ve
always wanted to love under the same moon as Shah Jehan. How thoughtful
of you!’
‘You must spend a few days with us in Agra,’ I continued. ‘And as you
say, it is the very place to shrine your happiness, if it comes to pass
there.’
‘Well, I am glad to have extracted a word of kindness from you at last,’
said Dacres, as the stewards came to lay the table. ‘But I wish,’ he
added regretfully, ‘you could have thought of a test.’