"You can call me St. George. Everybody does,--Mrs. Arles, the servants
will. We have always been the St. Georges and the Disbrowes, for
generations. Besides, if you had really been my cousin's child, you
would naturally have called me so."
"If I had really been your cousin's child, Sir," said Éloise, with a
flash, "I should not have been obliged to call you at all!"
This finished the business. Mr. St. George, who felt, that, in reality,
he had only got his right again, who would gladly have given her back
hers, who had only, in completest innocence and ignorance, made it
impossible for her, in pride and honor, to accept it, who, moreover,
very naturally considered his treatment of this handsome, disagreeable
girl rather generous, and who had sacrificed much of his usually
dictatorial manner in the conversation, felt also now that there was
nothing more to do till she chose her ice should melt; and so he
straightway let a frosty mood build itself up on his part into the very
counterpart of hers. The resolution which he had just made, boyishly to
abstract himself in secret, and leave her to fate and necessity and
duty, faded. She deserved to lose. A haughty, ungovernable hussy! He
would keep it in spite of her! How, under the sun, had his Cousin
Disbrowe got along with her? Nevertheless, the salary which Mr. St.
George had privately allotted to his accountant covered exactly one-half
of his yearly income, whatever that contingent fund might prove to be;
and, meantime, he did not intend to pay her a copper of it until they
should become so much better friends that it would be impossible for
her, with all her waywardness, to refuse it.
A bell sounded. Hazel came, and murmured something to Éloise. And
thereupon, in this sweet and cordial frame of mind, they entered the
breakfast-room, where Mrs. Arles awaited them behind a hissing urn,--and
a cheery meal they had of it!
Mr. St. George passed a week in finding firm footing upon all the
circumference of his property; by that time, clear and far-sighted as an
eagle, he had seized on every speck of error throughout its wide
mismanagement, and had initiated Éloise into a new way of performing old
duties, as coolly as if no indignant word or thought had ever passed
between them. And meanwhile, in place of their ancient warfare, but with
no later friendship, Éloise and Mrs. Arles had tacitly instituted an
offensive and defensive alliance against the common enemy. This the
common enemy soon perceived, laughed at it a little grimly at first,
then accepted it, as a kind of martyrdom expiatory of all previous sins,
that a man must have against his grain two hostile women in the house,
neither of whom had anything but the shadow of a claim upon him. Still,
Earl St. George had his own plans; and by degrees it dimly dawned on his
flattered intelligence that one of these women used her hostility merely
as a feint towards the other.
* * * * *