HOW CHALLIS MET LIZARANN IN SOCIETY. OF A LECTURE THE RECTOR READ
CHALLIS, AND ITS EFFECT ON HIS IMAGE OF MARIANNE. HOW HE HADN'T BEEN
TO ASHCROFT. IT WAS AN UNSATISFACTORY LETTER THAT!
The persistent self-absorption and stunning monotonous clatter of one's
fellow-creatures, however execrable it may seem when one wants to
predominate over them by the legitimate employment of one's superior
gifts--without shouting, you know!--may be not unwelcome when one
longs for an excuse for silence, as Challis did after that unsettling
interview with Judith--silence, and a little time to think things over
before any further speech with the source of his disquiet. The more row
other people were making, the better! This feeling was quite consistent
with susceptibility to a magnetism which needed some device to veil
its nature. He would call it tea, for the nonce, anyhow. He made tea
the pretext to escape from his position of arbiter without rights of
speech, and left the disputants, promising to return forthwith, and
meaning to break his promise.
He made the most of the hundred yards to the tea-camp, nodding
remotely to casuals by the way. He looked for an excuse to avoid
joining the group at headquarters, who appeared at his distance off
to be discoursing brilliantly, interestedly, on absorbing topics,
with smiles. He knew they were talking nonsense about nothing
particular, and was glad to find his excuse in Athelstan Taylor and his
sister-in-law, who had joined the party, bringing with them their own
little girls and the small cockney waif in blue, whose aunt was Mrs.
Steptoe. That was how our Lizarann presented herself to Mr. Challis.
"I like you better than your aunt," said that gentleman candidly, when
Lizarann was introduced.
"So do I," replied Lizarann. But this answer, clear as its meaning
was to all sympathetic souls, was taken exception to by the Rector's
sister-in-law.
"What can the unintelligible child mean by that?" said she. "Because
you _are_ unintelligible, you know you are, Lizarann!"
"Yass, please!" said Lizarann. And then she felt when people laughed
that she was being treated like a child, which at her age was absurd.
Miss Caldecott, the sister-in-law, was one of those tiresome people
who are always forming grown-up Leagues against children, and making
it distinctly understood that these leagues, though ready to stoop to
the level of children's understanding, do so under protest, and with
reservations as to their own superiority. Miss Caldecott paraded hers,
greatly to Lizarann's umbrage, in the tone in which she said, "We do
not yet know, my dear, that Mr. Challis has an aunt"; into which tone
she contrived to infuse a suggestion of respect for Challis's family,
even if the previous generations consisted only of the direct line.
Challis refused to be taken into the League. To avoid it he stated
that he had more aunts than was really the case. He went further, and
ascribed to one of them attributes that have surely never belonged to
any person's aunt. She had, he said, a front, and lived on tea-leaves,
which came out on her person as a kind of stiff black net which he had
the impudence to say he believed was never removed at night.
Lizarann recalled a like experience which she thought would bear
repetition.
"Bridgetticks," she said, in a loud, outspoken way that commanded an
audience, "she's a hunkle comes out a Sundays and Schristmas Day, and
gold trimmings to his coat, and brarse buttons, and Bridgetticks, she
could count up eight and two behind."
"You must try to say 'uncle,' my dear, not 'hunkle,'" said Miss
Caldecott, which Lizarann did, meekly, with an impression that
perhaps she had claimed too much for Old Shakey, which was the old
man's bye-name in Tallack Street, where he appeared at intervals. She
had used the "h" to give an adventitious force of character to the
tremulous relic of better days she was referring to. She wished him to
be thought of as resolute, without presenting him in the aspect of a
swashbuckler.
"What do you make of _him_, Rector?" asked Challis.
"I know all about him. At least, Gus knows." Athelstan Taylor had
appropriated a camp stool, that he might accommodate Lizarann and his
younger daughter on his knees. He looked round at his sister-in-law.
"Don't you remember, my dear? Gus told us about him. A sort of old
pensioner chap!"
Miss Caldecott remembered him, primly. "Not very sober, I fear!" said
she.
Lizarann joined in the conversation. "Wunst you get him inside of the
bust," she said, "the sconductor keeps his eye upon him. Yass!--All
the way to Stockwell." Lizarann's confidence that her hearers knew the
world had something very pretty and touching about it.
But Miss Caldecott, as the exponent of the League--which no one had
asked her to form--checkmated Bridgetticks's relative. "We won't talk
any more about him now, my dear," she said. The smallest shade passed
over the Rector's face. However, it didn't matter for him. He could
tickle Lizarann slightly, thanks to his position of vantage, and thus
avoid being misunderstood.
With Challis it was otherwise. The effect upon his mind of the action
of the League was that he now felt that Bridget's disreputable uncle
was absolutely the only topic of conversation possible. He tried in
vain to remember that anything else existed in the Universe.
"Mayn't we hear more about Miss Hicks's family?" said he, with some
sense of proposing a compromise--not to run counter to the feeling of
the League, as it were. Miss Caldecott said something confidentially to
Space about not encouraging the child too much.
But she did not understand the earnestness and good faith of the said
child. Lizarann had no suspicion that the gentleman's anxiety to know
about her friend's connection was sheer affectation, and hastened to
supply particulars. She proceeded to sketch the Hicks family, laying
stress as much as possible on the excellence of its motives and the
sobriety of its demeanour.
"Bridgetticks," she said, "she spinched her finger in the jam of the
door, and felt it a week after in her shoulder-j'int. Yass--she _did_!
And Mr. 'Icks, he don't take nothing till after gone twelve o'clock,
and then mostly at meals. And Mrs. 'Icks, she never touches anything.
Only then she never has scarcely no rheumatic pains to speak of."
"You see that point, Challis?" said the Rector parenthetically, in a
quick undertone, over the heads of the two young ladies. "What Mr.
'Icks does touch is part of a course of treatment for rheumatism."
Challis nodded the completeness of his understanding, and then the
little girl Phoebe, who was listening with gravity, leaning on the
shoulder of her father, said, "And then say why!"
Lizarann, prompted, continued, "Yass--she hasn't! Because of the nature
of the suds. Because she's over her elbers all day, and can't roll
nothin' up high enough, not to keep dry. And Dr. Ferris, he puts it
down to the lump soda." An inquiring look of Challis's produced the
additional information. "Yass!--you can buy it at the oilshop just
acrost the road from the Robin Hood. Only it comes to less by the
quarter-hundredweight." All this did the greatest credit to Lizarann's
power of storing information.
But the League had been tolerating this sort of thing too long, and
its Secretary or Solicitor--whichever Miss Caldecott was--struck in
with, "Perhaps we've talked _qui-ite_ enough now about Bridget Hicks
and her family, my dear! We mustn't trespass too much on Mr. Challis's
good-nature." Suspicion of the sinister intentions of the League
gleamed in Lizarann's eye; for she disbelieved in its representative,
while admitting her goodness. She might have ignored her intrusion
if it had not been that the extraordinary sensitiveness of childhood
to impressions that never penetrate the thick hide of manhood made
her detect in Challis's disclaimer an understanding between himself
and the League--one that civility had dictated reference to on his
part, but that he would have preferred to conceal. Now Lizarann might
have fallen back disconcerted on silence, even on tears, had it not
been for Athelstan Taylor's keen understanding of children, and the
supreme necessity for not letting them know allowances are being made
for them. He said, with great presence of mind and an appearance of
absolute sincerity: "Old Mrs. Fox sells it--where your Daddy lives,
Lizarann. She'll let you have twopenny-worth if you say it's for me.
So mind you bring it on with you when you come home." For Lizarann
was to call on her Daddy on her way back from this visit. The Rector
added that he should like old Christopher to try it, and this confirmed
Lizarann's belief in his _bona fides_. She would not have believed his
sister-in-law, who, with the best intentions, had been unfortunate
enough to incur unpopularity by throwing doubt on the Flying Dutchman.
This was her chief offence; but she had also questioned the accuracy
of the surgical reports of the boy Frederick Hawkins, and other minor
matters. So that Lizarann, while she acknowledged her kindness, took a
low view--but secretly--of her intelligence.
When the children had gone away dutifully to play, discussing by
the way such things as might be played at with advantage, the Rev.
Athelstan said, "Now I must be getting home, or I shall be late for
Mrs. Silverton." Said Mr. Challis: "Then I'll walk with you, Rector; I
don't want any tea." Said the Rector: "Then I'll wait till you've had
it," and waited. Presently they were walking through the long grass,
overfield, having said little till the Rector spoke, as one who resumes
conversation in earnest:
"What was all the interesting discussion about?"
"As far as I could gather--because they all spoke at once--they agreed
in condemning the measure now before the House. But that may have been
merely the common form of political discussion. There must be agreement
about something to establish cordiality."
"Didn't they agree about anything else?"
"I think not--as far as I recollect. But really, in listening
to discussions of this sort, I find myself handicapped by not
understanding any of the terms in use. I am convinced I shall die in
ignorance of what Secondary Education is, and though I talk confidently
of University Extension, I am painfully conscious that the meaning I
attach to it is founded, not on information of any sort, but on a washy
inference that it can't mean anything else. So it's quite possible our
friends were agreeing about something, and I didn't catch them at it."
"What had the M.P. to say?" asked the Rector.
"What M.P.'s generally do say. Things lay in nutshells, and called
aloud for decisive handling, which there was but little reason to
anticipate from a venal Press and an apathetic electorate. He would
not presume to arraign the judgment of any fellow-mortal, but he would
venture to call our attention to several things, and to lay before
us a great variety of alternatives with which it would, sooner or
later, be our bounden duty to grapple. He dwelt once more, at the
risk of wearying his hearers, on the necessity for dealing with each
political problem, as it arose, in a truly Imperial Spirit. I believe
he did touch upon some aspects of the question of religious education,
but then he also said he would not dwell upon them, and proceeded to
consider everything else. I have a very vague idea of his views, but I
understand they were luminous."
Athelstan Taylor thought he could detect in his friend to-day rather
more than usual of his spirit of careless perversity. Something was
the matter. But he made no attempt to find out what, and pursued the
conversation.
"It would be interesting to know what he thought."
"It would--in view of the difficulty of inferring it from what he says.
Mr. Brownrigg was more intelligible."
"What did _he_ say?"
"Brownrigg pointed out. Of course! He pointed out that the subject
had been exhaustively dealt with by Graubosch in his twenty-ninth
volume. The forty-eighth chapter of that volume--one of its most
brilliant passages--indicates the means by which all the objects of
moral and religious education can be attained, without involving the
instructor of youth in the solution of a single difficult problem.
Strictly speaking, all such problems will at once disappear with the
abolition of Morality, Religion, and Education--changes which form a
fundamental feature of the scheme of Graubosch. But each of these will
be more than replaced. The Great Doctrine of Retributive Inconvenience
will result, as an inevitable consequence, in the Theory of the
Avoidance of Retributive Inconvenience, which will attain all the
ends Morality proposes to itself, but falls very short of. Religion
will cease to be a necessity to a race of beings to whom it has been
pointed out in their babyhood that they will do well to comply with the
Apparent Aims of the Metaphysical Check, who will supply more fully
the place the human imagination has hitherto supplied with Deities so
unsatisfactorily that even now monotheism is not quite agreed about
their number...."
"Never mind me!" said the Rector, who thought Challis hesitated. "Go
ahead!"
"Well--it was Brownrigg, you know; it wasn't me."
"It's all quite right, my dear fellow! I want to know now about the
Education. Suppose a member of the human race refuses to pay any
attention to the Apparent Aims of the Metaphysical Check...."
"He will come into collision, clearly, with the Doctrine of Retributive
Inconvenience. In the case of young persons, on whom a certain amount
of Inconvenience can be inflicted without overtaxing the Salaried
Suggesters who will take the place of the so-called Educational
Classes, an exact system might be formulated. Brownrigg gave as
an example the case of a child refusing to comply with the System
of Hypothetical Notification, under which it would be required to
address propitiatory sentiments, or requests for personal benefit, to
an unseen Metaphysical Check, whose hearing of the Application the
Salaried Suggester might hold himself at liberty to guarantee. He might
also--this was Brownrigg's point--endorse his suggestion, in the case
of a child refusing to Notify, by the infliction of a certain amount
of Inconvenience, tending to produce, if not an actual belief in the
existence of the Metaphysical Check, at any rate a readiness to confess
it, which would be for working purposes exactly the same."
The Rector shook his head doubtfully. "At present," said he, "the
practice in this village is to threaten rebellious youth with the
wicked fire. Would Brownrigg's substitute be as effectual?"
"You remember what he said in September--that Graubosch meant to retain
the Personal Devil until the new System had had time to settle down?
Just as people keep the gas on till the electric light is a certainty!"
The Rector laughed. "You'll make me as bad as yourself, Challis, before
you've done." Then he became more serious. "I would give a good deal,"
said he, "to know what you _really_ think on matters of this sort."
But Challis was persuading a pipe to light inside his hat, and no
immediate answer came. One vesta had perished in the attempt. The
second made a lurid flash on his face, in the shadow of the protecting
hat, his invariable grey felt. As Athelstan Taylor looked at him, he
saw again, more clearly than before, that the face was inconsistent
with its owner's levity of tone two minutes since. He negatived his own
impulse to ask questions, and waited. Perhaps it was part of a growing
interest in his companion that made him mix with this curiosity, about
what was going on inside that head, a wish to see the hat back on it.
For the sun was still fierce at the end of a hot June day, and the soft
brown hair the wind blew about so easily seemed to have little shelter
in it for the somewhat delicate skin the blue veins made so much show
on below, on the forehead.
"You would give a good deal," said Challis, when the pipe was well
alight, "to know what I think about the religious education of
children? So would I!" It was a disappointing ending. His hearer had
expected something better.
"What have you done about your own boy?" said he, with a kind of
magnanimous impatience. "Come! That's the point."
"Nothing. At least, I have sent him to Rugby, where he will be brought
up a member of the Church of England."
"But before?"
"I left him to his mother--at least, his aunt.... I told you...."
"I know."
"So you observe that with respect to Master Bob I have pursued a policy
of well-considered devolution of responsibility. Perhaps I should
say of evasion. However, I think I may lay claim to having given my
son every reasonable opportunity of believing the creeds that will
best advance his interests in the world. He has had the advantage of
imbibing them from a lady who enjoys the privilege of being able to
believe what she chooses, and has inherited or selected the tenets of
the well-to-do. He has been till lately at a preparatory Academy, where
every one of the masters is in orders, and every other boy the son of
a Bishop. And now he's gone to Rugby! What can a human father do more,
in the name of respectability?"
"My dear Challis, if you want to make your son's education a text for a
sermon against worldliness and hypocrisy, do so by all means. We have
weak joints enough in our armour, God knows, for you to shoot your
arrows into. But let me finish finding fault with you first."
Challis slipped his arm into the Rector's. "Go on finding fault," he
said. "Don't finish too soon."
"I won't. It seems to me, my dear friend, that under cover of a
complete confession you have contrived to raise issues which have
nothing to do with the question before the House, which I take to
be--what is a father's conscientious duty towards the child for whose
existence he is partly responsible? I want to keep you to the point."
"I'm a slippery customer, I know. Go on."
"Do you, or do you not, think a parent is bound to supply a child
with a religious faith? Failing the parent, is it the duty of the
guardian--of the State? That seems to me to lie at the root of all
questions of religious education. But our question is about the
parent's duty when one exists. _Exempli gratiâ_, yourself and Master
Bob! It seems to me that your policy was one of evasion, and that the
devolution of responsibility upon your wife was a rather cowardly
evasion. Especially as her responsibility could only be for her own
children!"
Challis's hand pressed the arm he held a little more warmly. There was
certainly no offence. "You are perfectly right, Rector," said he. "I
took a mean advantage of a little local patch of obscurantism to get
my boy inoculated in his youth with a popular form of Christianity, in
order that his father's heretical ideas should not stand in the way of
his advancement. But I lay this unction to my soul; that if ever he
sees his way to a bishopric, nothing I have ever said to him need stand
in his way.... Oh no!--there is no idea at present of his entering
the Church. The Army is engaging his attention at this moment--and
phonographs.... But go on pitching into me about cowardly evasions."
"I am afraid you are incorrigible, Challis. I can't help laughing
sometimes. But for all that, I think you were wrong. You were wrong
towards your wife, because, instead of helping her, you made her task
difficult. What can be harder than to turn a child's mind into any
channel with a strong counter-influence, as a father's must needs be,
constantly at work against one's efforts?"
Challis smiled in his turn. "It was Marianne, you see," he said. "I
can't express it. The position was harder to deal with than you think."
He then went on to tell one or two incidents connected with Bob's early
indoctrinations of the Scriptures. How, for instance, when Marianne
once crushed him under, "You know perfectly well, Titus, what the
words of Our Lord were," and followed it up with a quotation, he had
remarked in the presence of Master Bob that at any rate Jesus Christ
didn't speak English; and then she had flounced out of the room white
with anger, and not spoken to him for two days; and when she did at
last, it was to declare that if there was to be any more blasphemy and
impiety before the boy, she should go straight away to Tulse Hill, and
not come back. Also, when he once innocently remarked that he believed
there was now a tram-line from Joppa to Jerusalem, she had become very
violent, and accused him of speaking of Jerusalem as if it was a place
in Bradshaw.
The Rector considered, and then said: "I was just going to say Mrs.
Challis must be unusually ill-informed, when I happened to recollect
what a number of very good people are exactly like her. In fact, a very
dear old friend of mine"--he was thinking of the Rev. Mr. Fossett--"is
rather shocked when he hears Our Lord spoken of as a real person; and
with him it isn't exactly ignorance, because he's a priest in orders.
It's a phase of mind that seems to have its source in a belief that
nothing can be both Good and Actual." He stopped abruptly, as one who
changes a subject. "By-the-bye, should _you_ have said the little
person looked delicate--that little Lizarann, I mean?"
Challis had stopped to think. "N-no!" he said. "On the contrary,
I thought she had such a good colour." On which the Rector said,
"Ah--well!" and then more cheerfully, "Well--well!--I suppose it's all
right. However, we must keep our eyes open."
"Isn't the child strong? She's a funny little party."
"Why, no!--they say she isn't. Isn't strong, I mean. Never mind! What
were we talking about?"
"People and Scripture, don't you know. Things being actual...."
"I know. I was just going to tell you what dear old Gus--my
friend--won't forgive me for. I'll risk it. Only don't you make copy
of it.... Very well!--mind you don't.... It was this. Some years ago I
was urging him to marry, and he pleaded in extenuation of his celibacy
that he wished to model his life on Our Lord's in every point within
his power. 'It's all very fine,' I said. 'But why do you suppose the
Apostles did not model their lives on Our Lord's? Do you mean that they
all led celibate lives?' Gus said this was almost an insinuation that
Our Lord was or had been married. I'm sorry to say I couldn't help
saying, 'Can you produce a single particle of direct evidence that Our
Lord was not a widower when John baptized Him?' Gus hardly spoke to
me all that day. But what hurt him was the realism of the expression
'widower.' The case was exactly on all fours with your wife's."
They were just in sight of the Rectory, and Challis had to get back in
time for dinner. So he shook hands with his friend, remarking: "You
will go on blowing me up another time." Athelstan Taylor replied with
a cordial handshake. "You deserve it, you know!" and pulled out his
watch. "I shall be in time for Mrs. Silverton," said he. But who and
what that lady was this story knoweth not, neither whence she came nor
whither she went. But she occurs in the text for all that.
* * * * *
Challis wandered back, having intentionally allowed himself time to do
so, keeping out of the direct path to avoid meeting people. He liked
his own company best.
His talk with Athelstan Taylor, which else could claim little place in
the story, had had a curious effect on him. It had brought back vividly
his early days with his wife. As he sauntered on with his eyes on the
ground, choosing rather destructively special whitey-green heads of
new young fern to crush down, or cutting here and there an inoffensive
flower with his stick, his ears heard nothing of the wind-music in
the trees, his eyes saw nothing of the evening rabbits, popping away
and vanishing one by one--for which of them could say he had no gun,
off hand?--as he approached. The small village maiden who stopped and
stood still through a blank bar, and dropped a semiquaver curtsey
in the middle and then went on _andante capriccioso_, might almost
as well not have been there for any notice Challis took of her. His
thoughts were back in Great Coram Street, in the dingy London home this
Marianne--yes! this very Marianne--made cheerful, more than cheerful,
to the industrious accountant of ten years since; who parted from
her each morning looking forward to the return each evening brought
to the grubby domicile he associated with so many blackbeetles in
the impenetrable basement, such smells of mice in spite of such much
stronger smells of cats, and the wails and choral conclusions of these
last in the backyard they held against all comers, in the small hours
of so many foggy mornings.
How many escapes from the fog without to the firelight within could he
recall, in those days when he rose from his office-desk without a dream
of what he could have used his brain for, instead of those interminable
figures! How many a shock of trivial disappointment to find that
Missis wasn't home yet!--how many an insignificant reviving thrill of
contentment when Missis's knock followed near upon his own arrival and
his thwarted expectation! For now and again it must happen to a man
that some woman he has no passionate love for, pedantically speaking,
shall grow round his heart and make the comfort of his life. That was
the sort of thing that had come to pass in the case of Marianne and
Alfred Challis. And now, as he--the flattered guest of folk he then had
never thought to sit at meat with--passed up the great beech-avenue to
the house, respectfully saluted by a great game-keeper, a Being who, in
those older years, would simply have spurned him, his thoughts had all
gone back to the rosy, if rather short-tempered girl who then seemed
plenty for his life, and might surely have remained so, only ... only
Challis couldn't finish the sentence. Now, why was he, in his own mind,
commenting a moment after on the inappropriateness of two lines of
Browning that had come into it:
"... Strange, that very way
Love begun! I as little understand
Love's decay."
He resented their intrusion. Who would dare to say his affection for
Marianne was not what it had always been? It was--he would swear
it!--and that in spite of the fact that Marianne, look you, was not now
what she was in those days.
How and when had the change come over things? He was on the alert to
keep Judith out of the answer to this question. He must see to that, or
Unfairness, that was in the air, would twist awry the admiration of her
beauty that was all mankind's--womankind's, for that matter, jealousy
apart!--and put a misconstruction on his simplest actions, his most
obvious feelings. He could have held his head up better, true enough,
over this passage of his analytical self-torment, if only it had not
been for that unhappy revelation of unspoken suspicion, by the river
there, not two hours since. But be fair!--be fair! It _was_ unspoken,
at least! Who had said anything? As he asked the question of himself,
Challis wiped from his brow perspiration he ascribed to the weather!
Did he not know of old how often he had deceived himself? Might not all
this be self-delusion, too? At least, he had as good a vantage-ground
as the man to whom some woman may often say, truly: "You have looked
love, and there has been love in the pressure of your hand, in the
tone of your voice. But I cannot indite you. Live safe behind your
equivocations." Nay, he was safer than such a one! For in his case the
more he could ignore love, the better he would discharge his duty to
Judith. The other man would be the greater sneak, the more he did so.
But the question--the question! It was still unanswered. When did the
change come over Marianne? Oh, he knew perfectly well! It was from
the day when he began, to all seeming at her request, to go out into
this accursed Society without her. Very well, then!--it was all mere
glamour, the whole thing. Let him do now what he should have done at
first--insist on her being his companion, among his kind as well as in
his home. Then would the old Marianne come back, and all would be well.
So by the time he was two-thirds through the avenue, his thoughts had
worked back into his old existence, and taken him with them. If only
his knowledge of his surroundings in his daily life at home would bear
him out, and help him to keep at bay this image of Judith that forced
itself upon him now--this image of her as she stood in the sunset light
last September, just on this very spot!
* * * * *
What he recognized at once as the nose of a large grey boarhound
touched him gently, and he turned. There stood Saladin, satisfied to
all seeming that what he had smelt was in order, but content to take
no further steps. Challis glanced round, expecting to see the dog's
mistress; in a sense rather afraid to do so. She was near at hand, a
few paces from the pathway, and her perfect self-possession reassured
him.
"I never told Saladin to disturb your reverie, Mr. Challis," she said,
quite easily, and with deliberation. "The darling acted on his own
responsibility." Saladin, hearing his own name, seemed to think he had
leave to go, and trotted on, giving attention to tree-trunks and the
like. Challis had to say something.
"Are we not late for dinner?" was what it came to.
"I believe we are, but it never matters. Did you get your letter?"
"No--I got no letter. What letter?"
"Haven't you been up at the house? It was there when I went back. I
thought it looked like your wife's handwriting. I hope it's to say we
shall see her on Saturday."
"I hope so, too." But Challis wasn't sanguine.
No pretence that no embarrassment exists between two people, however
determined, can do more than encourage a hope that a _modus vivendi_
may be found. These two persevered in theirs, because each hoped for
a working pretext that would carry Challis's visit through, without
further useless complications, and this one of Marianne was a good one
to make a parade of their detachment about. See how anxious we both
are to emphasize the perfect self-possession a friendship like ours
allows!--was what it seemed to say. Each knew it was a pretext, but
each was loyally ready to accept the other's belief in it as a reality.
So when Judith said those last words of hers, Challis went so cordially
through the form of believing her in earnest that he powerfully helped
the image he had set his mind to construct of a Marianne based on his
impressions--illusions, if you must have it so!--of ten years past.
Conversation that followed on the way to the house, artificial though
it might be, all tended towards a cheap local apotheosis of Marianne,
with a beneficial side-influence on her husband's disposition to
idealize her. Thus Judith: "Of course, a change would do her so much
good. Housekeeping is tiresome work."
"Yes," said Challis. "It's wearing! And if you understand what I mean,
it makes her unlike herself."
"Oh, I understand so exactly. Everyone would--every woman, I mean. It
has nothing to do with ill-temper."
"Nothing whatever!" Challis made the most of this. "There isn't a
better-tempered creature in the world than Polly Anne." He called her
a creature, though, to keep the position properly qualified. "And one
knows what children are."
"They are darling little people." Judith yawned slightly. "But they are
nicest when you know them as acquaintances. Too much intimacy palls.
Unless they are very nice children. I am sure yours are. But all the
same, Marianne would be the better for a change." And so on. But there
was very little life in this talk.
None the less, Challis was feeling good about his wife, when he reached
the house looking forward to finding Marianne's letter awaiting him,
and carried it up into his room to read it. He was more curious to
read it than to wait for the arrival of the motor, whose hoot had just
become audible from somewhere near the park-gate, a mile off. Saladin
immediately started at a gallop either to sanction or condemn it, and
Judith lingered, awaiting its arrival.
"I see Mr. Challis didn't go to Ashcroft," is what Sibyl says first to
her sister. It refers to a projected excursion a full day long, which
had been cancelled after the departure of the motor in the morning.
Judith looks ostentatiously indifferent. "No one went," she says. "It
was given up. But how came you to know?"
"That Mr. Challis didn't go? We saw you from the Links, walking
together in the avenue."
Judith turns with handsome languor to Lord Felixthorpe, the other
occupant of the motor. "Did she?" she says. "Did you? I mean." Sibyl
says: "Thank you for doubting my word! The avenue is visible from the
Links."
His lordship is deliberate, as usual. The answer to Judith's first
question is, he says, in the affirmative; to the second, in the
negative. Identification, even of eminent authors, at a distance in
an evening light, is difficult when a time-limit is fixed by the
rapid locomotion of the observer. Sibyl's comment, in an undertone,
Judith understands to be a caution against prosiness. But a respectful
reference by Elphinstone to the many minutes ago that the first gong
sounded causes a hurried flight to dress.
* * * * *
Challis felt good about his wife as he opened her letter; and the
feeling grew rather than lessened when he saw how short it was. She
must be coming, that was clear! But the satisfaction in his face died
out as his eye caught the "Yr: aff: wife" at its conclusion. He read
the two ill-covered pages twice and again before he threw it down with
an angry "Humph!" and set himself to make up for lost time with his
toilet.
He only just succeeded in scrambling into his coat in time for the
second, or heart-whole, dinner-bell. All right!--he would run,
directly. But it would only make him a minute late to glance once more
at that letter. Besides, he could do it as he went downstairs. He
did so, and ended by pocketing it just in time to appear last in the
drawing-room, apologetic.