WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged from
the house, Margaret Ransom remained seated in her bedroom, addressing
herself anew to the difficult process of self-collection. As an aid to
this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the window,
following Ransom's figure as it receded down the elm-shaded street. He
moved almost alone between the prim flowerless grass-plots, the white
porches, the protrusion of irrelevant shingled gables, which stamped
the empty street as part of an American college town. She had always
been proud of living in Hill Street, where the university people
congregated, proud to associate her husband's retreating back, as he
walked daily to his office, with backs literary and pedagogic, backs of
which it was whispered, for the edification of duly-impressed visitors:
"Wait till that old boy turns--that's so-and-so."
This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience, but
filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction, of being not as
those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of living at
Wentworth, pursued elsewhere careers foredoomed to futility by that
very fact.
And now--!
She rose and turned to her work-table where she had dropped, on
entering, the handful of photographs that Guy Dawnish had left with
her. While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had hardly
taken in the details; but now, on the full tones of his low young
voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness. This was Guise
Abbey, his uncle's place in Wiltshire, where, under his grandfather's
rule, Guy's own boyhood had been spent: a long gabled Jacobean facade,
many-chimneyed, ivy-draped, overhung (she felt sure) by the boughs of a
venerable rookery. And in this other picture--the walled garden at
Guise--that was his uncle, Lord Askern, a hale gouty-looking figure,
planted robustly on the terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a couple of
setters at his feet. And here was the river below the park, with Guy
"punting" a girl in a flapping hat--how Margaret hated the flap that
hid the girl's face! And here was the tennis-court, with Guy among a
jolly cross-legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about
the tea-table under the big lime: in the centre the curate handing
bread and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching with
more cups.
Margaret raised this picture closer to her eyes, puzzling, in the
diminished light, over the face of the girl nearest to Guy
Dawnish--bent above him in profile, while he laughingly lifted his
head. No hat hid this profile, which stood out clearly against the
foliage behind it.
"And who is that handsome girl?" Margaret had said, detaining the
photograph as he pushed it aside, and struck by the fact that, of the
whole group, he had left only this member unnamed.
"Oh, only Gwendolen Matcher--I've always known her--. Look at this: the
almshouses at Guise. Aren't they jolly?"
And then--without her having had the courage to ask if the girl in the
punt were also Gwendolen Matcher--they passed on to photographs of his
rooms at Oxford, of a cousin's studio in London--one of Lord Askern's
grandsons was "artistic"--of the rose-hung cottage in Wales to which,
on the old Earl's death, his daughter-in-law, Guy's mother, had retired.
Every one of the photographs opened a window on the life Margaret had
been trying to picture since she had known him--a life so rich, so
romantic, so packed--in the mere casual vocabulary of daily life--with
historic reference and poetic allusion, that she felt almost oppressed
by this distant whiff of its air. The very words he used fascinated and
bewildered her. He seemed to have been born into all sorts of
connections, political, historical, official, that made the Ransom
situation at Wentworth as featureless as the top shelf of a dark
closet. Some one in the family had "asked for the Chiltern
Hundreds"--one uncle was an Elder Brother of the Trinity House--some
one else was the Master of a College--some one was in command at
Devonport--the Army, the Navy, the House of Commons, the House of
Lords, the most venerable seats of learning, were all woven into the
dense background of this young man's light unconscious talk. For the
unconsciousness was unmistakable. Margaret was not without experience
of the transatlantic visitor who sounds loud names and evokes
reverberating connections. The poetry of Guy Dawnish's situation lay in
the fact that it was so completely a part of early associations and
accepted facts. Life was like that in England--in Wentworth of course
(where he had been sent, through his uncle's influence, for two years'
training in the neighbouring electrical works at Smedden)--in
Wentworth, though "immensely jolly," it was different. The fact that he
was qualifying to be an electrical engineer--with the hope of a
secretaryship at the London end of the great Smedden Company--that, at
best, he was returning home to a life of industrial "grind," this fact,
though avowedly a bore, did not disconnect him from that brilliant
pinnacled past, that many-faceted life in which the brightest episodes
of the whole body of English fiction seemed collectively reflected. Of
course he would have to work--younger sons' sons almost always had
to--but his uncle Askern (like Wentworth) was "immensely jolly," and
Guise always open to him, and his other uncle, the Master, a capital
old boy too--and in town he could always put up with his clever aunt,
Lady Caroline Duckett, who had made a "beastly marriage" and was
horribly poor, but who knew everybody jolly and amusing, and had always
been particularly kind to him.
It was not--and Margaret had not, even in her own thoughts, to defend
herself from the imputation--it was not what Wentworth would have
called the "material side" of her friend's situation that captivated
her. She was austerely proof against such appeals: her enthusiasms were
all of the imaginative order. What subjugated her was the unexampled
prodigality with which he poured for her the same draught of tradition
of which Wentworth held out its little teacupful. He besieged her with
a million Wentworths in one--saying, as it were: "All these are mine
for the asking--and I choose you instead!"
For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came to--the
summing-up toward which her conscientious efforts at self-collection
had been gradually pushing her: with all this in reach, Guy Dawnish was
leaving Wentworth reluctantly.
"I _was_ a bit lonely here at first--but _now!_" And again: "It will be
jolly, of course, to see them all again--but there are some things one
doesn't easily give up...."
If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough
that he should have chosen her out of all Wentworth--but to have known
that other life, and to set her in the balance against it--poor
Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of weight but
her years! Ah, it might well produce, in nerves and brain, and poor
unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation, the rush of a great
wave of life, under which memory struggled in vain to reassert itself,
to particularize again just what his last words--the very last--had
been....
When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective assault,
it pushed Margaret Ransom--feeling herself a mere leaf in the
blast--toward the writing-table from which her innocent and voluminous
correspondence habitually flowed. She had a letter to write now--much
shorter but more difficult than any she had ever been called on to
indite.
"Dear Mr. Dawnish," she began, "since telephoning you just now I have
decided not--"
Maria's voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library: "And
I s'pose it's the brown silk you'll wear to the speaking?"
In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress's toilet was
performed unassisted; and the mere enquiry--at once friendly and
deferential--projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the importance
of the occasion. That she should answer: "But I am not going," when the
going was so manifestly part of a household solemnity about which the
thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud participation; that in face of
such participation she should utter a word implying indifference or
hesitation--nay, revealing herself the transposed, uprooted thing she
had been on the verge of becoming; to do this was--well! infinitely
harder than to perform the alternative act of tearing up the sheet of
note-paper under her reluctant pen.
Yes, she said, she would wear the brown silk....