To love is by no means necessarily to understand, and Kingston Darnley,
as Nature and life had moulded him, was a very different character from
Kingston Darnley as his mother’s vague mind imagined him. In point of
fact she, good woman, knew little of her son but his face, though,
with the splendid intrepidity of the benevolent stupid, she claimed
an intimate acquaintance with every detail of his being. Her complete
ignorance was due to no conscious process on either side; he as little
dreamt of concealing anything from her as she of ignoring any quality
in him. But time had taught Kingston that whether he confided in his
mother or not, she was just as wise after the revelation as before,
being totally devoid of any power to understand what she was shown, or,
indeed, to realize that she was being shown anything at all.
Kingston Darnley soon learned to lead his own life without reference
to his mother; to help by listening was her province; to help by
comprehending was beyond the capacities of her nature. So Lady Adela
was left to dwell serene in the world of her own happy little kindly
fancies, while the facts of life went by her in a roar, without ever
being able to capture her notice. She felt that never had mother
been more loving or more beloved; that never had son been more loyal
and devoted; her parental eye was fixed unerringly on her child,
and she knew his nature down to the uttermost convolutions of its
smallest eccentricity. Did she ever forget that he disliked the smell
of onions? Had she ever failed to notice and deplore his coldness
towards her favourite clergy? And had she not succeeded in the last,
noblest, highest ambition of a mother’s life--that of imposing upon
him a thoroughly nice and suitable bride? And he, for his part, had
never rebelled, never repined, never objected, not even to the bride.
Accordingly, Lady Adela felt proudly secure that she understood her
son in every fibre of his being. So she smiled upon him with perfect
unintelligence, and gave nightly thanks to the Powers that had so
gifted her with the perfect tact of motherhood.
Kingston Darnley at one-and-twenty had found himself a great deal
older than his years. His contemporaries were mere children. He had
lived the sheltered life at his mother’s side, until at last came the
belated time when she reluctantly permitted him to go to Oxford without
her shielding company. General opinion--even that of her son--seemed
opposed to Lady Adela’s plan of taking lodgings in Holywell Street, and
thence keeping a mother’s eye upon her child. And to popular opinion
Lady Adela accordingly yielded. She never made more than a mild and
flabby resistance, and could always be induced by opposition to give up
her most cherished plots with a smile. But until Kingston, alone and
undefended, set off one sad October evening from Paddington, he had
never been allowed outside the sphere of his mother’s presence--one can
hardly say of his mother’s influence--for any influence that Lady Adela
may ever have had must always have been merely that of kindly, null
proximity.
However, reared by carefully-selected tutors in the gentle but stifling
atmosphere of a widow’s house, the mind of Kingston Darnley had shot
into premature and unsuspected growth. Intelligence he would always
have had, but his training forced it into early development. And,
as the growing pains of the mind are always painful as those of the
body--especially if experienced too soon or too keenly--so Kingston
suffered from the unseasonable expansion of his thoughts, and his
discomfort was increased, no less than its cause, by the fact of his
essential loneliness. He had no one to speak to. On the first mention
of an idea, Lady Adela confidently diagnosed the need of pills; and any
perception of inequalities in this best of all possible worlds must be
treated by the purer air of Brighton or Bournemouth.
So Kingston was driven in upon himself, and, by the time he came of
age, had ardently discovered all the paradoxes that more fortunate
people come to in due time at twenty-five or so, and then are able to
take as platitudes. The injustice of wealth, the iniquities of sport,
of religion, of land-tenure--all these crimes Kingston Darnley felt to
be his own particular revelation, and they fermented in his mind until
he had few thoughts in common with his fellows. They, meanwhile, went
placidly on their way, and when Kingston arrived at Oxford, he found
himself a stranger and misplaced among the men of his own years. He
was filled at first with a gnawing, cavilling discontent that arose
as much from idleness and opulence as from too rapid and unhealthy
growth. They, for their part, were honest, jolly fellows, who looked on
discontent as an uncomfortable and ‘bad-form’ thing, to be strenuously
frowned and jeered out of their circle. To enjoy what came, without
analysis, was their scheme, and they resented being asked to inquire
into the reasonableness and the morality of their enjoyment. At
one-and-twenty no really sane creature wants to think. The time for
thought comes later, when the first ardours of action are passing.
Kingston Darnley, though he had far too much sense and geniality to
preach or impose his ideas on anyone, was felt to be always suggesting
questions, never to be accepting the joy of the moment, in a properly
acquiescent, youthful manner. And nothing is more annoying to the
hedonist, of whatever age, than the companionship of someone who seems
to be examining the sources of his joy. It may be that no joys can
stand the test of reason, and the hedonist’s dislike of the sceptic may
gain its intensity from the hedonist’s own unacknowledged realization
of the fact. Even when Kingston got drunk his tone of mind seemed
analytical, far removed from the frank, bellowing joyousness of the
more healthy enthusiasts round him. They sat about in the Quad and
howled, or beat baths beneath the windows of the junior Dean; Kingston,
anxious to please, howled and beat baths with the best. But, whereas
the ebullition was pure nature and joy of living with them, with him
it was always an assumption, a pose, no matter how carefully assumed
and disguised. And the consciousness of this was no less galling to
him than to them. All felt ill at ease, disconcerted, disillusioned
by his presence. His well-intentioned hilarity seemed somehow to turn
the gold of their pleasure to brass, to strike a jarring note in
the chorale of enjoyment they were playing so whole-heartedly. So,
though never unpopular, Kingston Darnley was isolated. His own set in
the college did not want to be bothered with the iniquitous why and
wherefore of the game-laws, or the manifest impossibility of miracles;
and the other sets to whom he would have brought these discoveries in
glad pride had grown accustomed to them long ago, and for many years
had looked on them as the buried foundation-stones of all reasoning. So
that Kingston fell between two stools, and must needs keep company with
his ideas until the passing of time should bring him level with the
contemporaries over whom his training had given him such an unhealthy
and fictitious advantage.
In any case it is hardly likely that he could ever have taken any
really intimate part in Oxford life. Training or no training, his
mind had that inquiring tone so fatal to unreflecting hilarity. He
was too much interested--in the wrong things, too, and in the wrong
way--in people, in causes, in problems. The men who should have been
his friends were concerned almost entirely with the joy of living and
the avoidance of all unnecessary work. And how is the son of a widow,
reared at home decorously, without other boys to riot and tumble
with--how is he to have any personal enthusiasm for the joy of living,
as understood by healthier, normal men of his own age? Nor is the
precocious cleverness of the unquiet mind any real test of ability. Few
of Kingston Darnley’s contemporaries but had as good an intelligence
as his. Their brains, however, developed naturally along the natural
path. In twenty years he had lived hurriedly through five-and-twenty
of feverish mental development; their five-and-twentieth year--of mind
no less than of body--still lay well ahead of them. By the time he
and they would be thirty they might all, perhaps, be contemporaries
together. The unhealthy, straggling shoots of his forced growth would
have been blighted down to a level with theirs, sturdy and natural;
and by the time they came to consider the game-laws and the gospels,
they would bring a ripe and genial intelligence to bear on such
points, neither thinking nor talking in excess, but letting profitless
points of doctrine slide, for the sake of hitting on a sane and decent
scheme of living, such as can best be attained by the average sensible
gentleman’s compromise between abstract justice and sound, everyday
behaviour.
And Kingston himself would find, in the course of years, that the rubs
and jars of life would bring his point of view to the same pitch as
theirs, and would perceive that thought is a frivolous and profitless
indulgence of the idle mind, as compared with the more fruitful
achievement of an honest man’s daily duty, along the lines of obvious,
rough-cast morality. Meanwhile, however, though without conscious
arrogance, he realized his isolation, and viewed it alternately with
pride and regret. On the whole, as self-satisfaction is the postulate
of all human life, the pride predominated, and he carried unconsciously
through Oxford the idea of being a chosen candlestick for spiritual
light.
Other feelings, too, contributed to his sense of loneliness. Birth and
wealth had given him caste; but custom had not yet trained him to it.
From the middle-class, staid traditions of Darnley-on-Downe he had
inherited several hereditary tendencies that not the most determined
efforts could eradicate. He was conscious of them; they annoyed him,
they disconcerted him by making him feel more than ever that he did
not match his surroundings, and this mortifying consciousness was
unsupported by any such heroic glamour as that which attended the
independence of his sceptical spirit. He knew that he was not careless
enough in the spending of money. Spend it he did, freely and eagerly;
but he always knew what it had bought, and his mind kept accounts
long after he had fiercely broken himself away from the spell of
pass-books and schedules. This was not as it should be. Money, to be
spent correctly, should be scattered loosely, and the spender should
have as little idea as possible of the way in which it has gone. Only
thus can a well-bred indifference to finance be attained. The ideal of
his contemporaries was to be perpetually in debt, and never to have
anything whatever to show for all that had been spent. On four hundred
or four hundred and fifty a year right-minded people might attain to
complete destitution, bare rooms, shabby clothes, and a perpetual
assumption of bankruptcy. One very popular man even achieved the result
on six hundred. This was a rare triumph of extravagance, however, and
a reasonable ambition would confine itself to a complete ignorance as
to all outgoings. And this Kingston Darnley could never acquire. The
ghost of his father stirred in him, demanding a solid recollection
of every purchase. He bought the best, bought it and lavished it
freely. But he never could rid himself of the knowledge that it was
the best, and thus a faint suspicion of ostentatiousness hovered over
all his entertainments, and the happy, slovenly wastefulness with
which his contemporaries ran into debt for atrocious port or uneatable
dinners could never be reached by a man with his finical instinct for
perfection. This lack of carelessness, either as to quantity of pounds
spent or quality of things purchased, stigmatized its owner for ever as
an outsider--not to mention the fact that he invariably paid money down
for all he bought. His wealth might as fairly have been blamed for this
vice, perhaps; nevertheless, a hatred for debt was one of Kingston’s
most inalienable legacies from Darnley-on-Downe, and, had he not been
able to pay cash for the best, he would certainly have remained content
to buy the worst. And this, again, was a suspicious trait in the eyes
of his contemporaries, who, though quite happy to buy the worst,
always made it their pride to run up bills for it that would have been
exorbitant had they been ordering the best.
These small hereditary feelings set James Darnley’s son apart from
his contemporaries, and it only required the remains of middle-class
prudishness to achieve his isolation. Kingston found it impossible, in
spite of habit and effort, to acquire the easy personal _sans-gêne_,
the tripping, untrammelled tongue of his contemporaries. He did his
best; listened genially, accumulated anecdotes and retailed them among
his friends; but always heavily, never as to the manner born. His
friends held the free, frank language only possible to the perfectly
cleanly mind, naked and unashamed; he, for his part, was always uneasy
in his nudity, and took his share in the talk with that consciousness
of impropriety that doubles impropriety. The Dadd respectability
still hampered its rebellious descendant, and prevented him from
ever entering into perfect harmony with that world where decency is
a matter of conduct, not by any means of language. On this point his
aunt Minne-Adélaïde had certainly the advantage. But the woman is
proverbially more adaptable than the man.
Still isolated, then, at home and abroad, Kingston came down at last
from Oxford at twenty-four, a character untried, unformed, unground by
any real contact with the mills of life. An inordinate sensitiveness to
impressions, an excessive personal daintiness, were the marks of his
nature at that time, so far as a friend could discern it. For the rest,
very pleasant of look and temper, friendly, honest, and no more selfish
than a good-looking young fellow of four-and-twenty has every right to
be. Lady Adela was delighted to receive him under her wing once more,
and noticed with joy the subsidence of some of his more tumultuous
ideas into tranquillity. She had a fearful notion that everyone left
Oxford ‘a roaring atheist,’ and it was a great joy to her that Kingston
completely disproved this fallacy, not only by accompanying her to
church, but also by carrying her hymn-book. She devoted herself to
exploiting her son, and he, not finding rebellion necessary for his
pleasure, allowed himself to be guided wherever his mother wished.
Rich and handsome in high degree, he began to find London a
very pleasant and companionable place, without the ostentatious
thoughtlessness of Oxford, or the frank intellectual apathy of his
home. In point of fact, London began to do for him what neither home
nor Oxford had succeeded in doing. Gradually he grew down to his own
level, his edges were rubbed off, his generous, exaggerated ideas
dwindled to their proper place in the perspective of life. He realized
that to live well and beautifully it is not necessary to be for ever
examining the foundations of action; that life is simple and enjoyable
for those who prefer living it to discussing it; that justice,
while august and unattainable in the abstract, and astonishingly
contradictory in its precepts, is yet, in the concrete, very easily
discerned and followed in this workaday sphere by plain-minded people
whose eyes are fixed, not on the stars in high heaven, but on their
reflection in the muddy ways of the world. He ceased to nourish
fantastic theories against the hanging of murderesses, conceived the
possibility of good in vivisection, and began at last to contemplate
a Piccadilly midnight with the not unkindly stoicism of a man of the
world. Inwardly, as he often told himself, his ideas remained the same,
but their outward manifestation grew calmer and more ordinary. When he
met his Oxford friends he found that he was much more in sympathy with
their way of taking life as a matter of course.
Meanwhile Lady Adela was bent on seeing him safely married. This, she
considered, was the easiest and most desirable way of protecting him
against all the wicked possibilities that lie in wait for a young man.
To save him from the contamination of many women by tying him tight
to one, before he had had time to look about and make his choice,
seemed to her a very prudent, not to say holy, course. So she paraded
desirable damsels before him, and held amicable counsel with mothers
not at all averse from an alliance with Kingston Darnley’s wealth.
The mothers and Lady Adela worked and manœuvred with Machiavellian
cunning; needless to say, their designs would have been plain to a
sucking child; and, equally needless to say, Kingston, pleased and
flattered, lent himself more or less amiably to their strategy, with a
guilelessness that quite reassured them as to his ignorance of their
purposes.
But that very blamelessness of her son’s which Lady Adela wished
to safeguard was the ruin of her plan. For, as a matter of fact,
Lady Adela, by an accident of fate, rather than by any perspicacity
of intellect, was right in holding the mother’s usual superstition
of her son’s purity. Kingston Darnley, emotional and fastidious of
temperament, impressionable rather than passionate, curious and
idealistic, had hitherto not gone the way of all flesh. He had avoided
‘experiences’; and experiences had never sought him out. The sense
of personal decency remained strong upon him, and its strength was
reinforced by his old theories of morality, and by his strong tendency
towards mental, rather than physical passion. So he remained a
spectator in the great sexual battle of life.
And this onlooker attitude is not endearing even to the most holy and
maidenly of women. Women require to feel that a man is a man--that is,
they require to feel the thrill of his virility in the deep fibres of
their consciousness--to have their interest caught and held by the
proximity of the dominating male. It is only to the depraved woman
that the saint is of personal interest; and, even then, her interest
is depraved as her nature. The normal girl--though she has not the
faintest understanding what her wishes mean--needs to feel the possible
conqueror in the man she is talking to--at least, if he is to rouse her
curiosity and grow in her acquaintance. And this mysterious thrill,
of the man triumphant, Kingston was utterly unable to communicate.
Therefore his friendships with women were almost wholly impersonal. He
had none of that love-making power which experiences confer; had no
idea of how the blood is stirred and defiance stimulated; no gift for
that bold expression of physical approval which is so dear to even the
best of women. Women had to ask him if their frocks were pretty, and
if he liked their hats; even then his answers never went the fervent
lengths that their questions had been meant to open up.
His flirtations were abstract, platonic, unearthly--all that a mother
considers most unprofitable, though perilous. The artist, indeed,
can be a sensualist; but the artistic spirit and the sensual have no
real relationship. What attracts the one repels the other, and it is
only within the fierce energetic soul of genius that the two can be
reconciled. Kingston Darnley, without genius, had the artist spirit.
And the artist spirit was for ever showing him fresh superficial
blemishes in the offered maidens--blemishes whose deterrent force his
animalism was not powerful enough to overcome. This one had hands that
didn’t match; that one perpetually wore lace mittens; a third had a
nose that perspired at dances; or an irritating cackle that revealed
a golden tooth. One and all, he liked them--even loved them--in so
far as their minds were clear, pleasant, friendly, lovable. But to be
loved for her mind is the last thing that a well-looking young woman
requires. And when he thought of marrying them, when he considered the
prospect of living for ever with a perspiring nose or a mittened hand,
Kingston revolted at the idea, no matter how precious the soul that
owned the nose or the mitten.
It may be imagined, then, that, whatever his relations with older,
plainer women, settled in life, he was neither popular nor at ease
with the marriageable maidens provided by his mother. In vague
dissatisfaction with his home, he was even anxious to marry and settle
down with some sympathetic, adorable woman--but always that accursed
prosaic aspect of the case came uppermost, and repelled him in horror
from the plan.
Only once had he ever felt what he hoped might be the premonitory
thrill of a really great passion--a passion such as might tide him over
the more difficult questions involved. In this hope he had nurtured
young love; and as love in so many lucky people is a matter of habit
and determination, he had seemed soon to be in a fair way to success.
The girl, too, showed signs of approval, and everything appeared so
prosperous that Lady Adela gave hearty thanks and put half a crown
into the plate, feeling that Heaven had earned more than its customary
shilling. And then one day he had sat with the girl and her aunt in
Kensington Gardens. And the cruel glare of daylight had shown him a
fine colony of down on her nose, and the places whence and where her
maid had transferred a rosette to hide a stain on her gown. All was
over. The girl was everything delightful; but the idea of being bound
eternally to a potentially bearded nose was impossible. Kingston could
no longer bear the thought of marrying, and told his mother that his
hope had proved fallacious. Heaven only got sixpence the next Sunday;
and, even so, it was in coppers.
It was shortly after this episode that Heaven, bearing no malice, had
thrown Lady Adela into the track of Lady Agnes Mortimer. Lady Agnes
was a single woman of small means, and an eccentricity that passed all
bounds. However, she was something of a personage, by virtue of her
name as well as of her character, and the great-niece whom she was
trying to marry might do very well for Kingston Darnley. So thought
Lady Adela, pondering the many eligible qualities of the girl who
would one day be daughter to a Duke of March and Brakelond, and who,
besides, had so many qualities that endearingly resembled her own--at
least, so far as kindness, devotion, sweetness, and piety went. She
brought her son, accordingly, into contact with Miss Mortimer, and was
surreptitiously overjoyed to find him obediently disposed. As for Lady
Agnes, she contemplated with equanimity the introduction of the Darnley
wealth into the impoverished House of Mortimer, and tried to soften
down her asperities lest the match should be impeded.
The House of March and Brakelond no longer loomed so large in the
public eye as once it had, and as Gundred still felt it should. The
reigning Duke was an imbecile, uncomfortably poor and very aged. There
was no Duchess, no near relations, nothing to give prominence or
interest even to the daughter of the heir-apparent. Gundred Mortimer
attracted little notice in London, keeping house parsimoniously for her
father in Russell Square, and going out on the rather shabby arm of
Lady Agnes. Lady Agnes was accepted because her eccentricities made
her so incalculable as to be amusing; but Gundred was soon found to
be almost depressingly normal and correct. There were scores of more
naturally noticeable girls in London; Miss Mortimer, as Miss Mortimer,
had no sort of personal importance, whatever power and dignity
Fate might see fit to bestow at some later date on ‘Lady Gundred.’
Nicely mannered, nicely minded, nicely dressed, Miss Mortimer was an
inconspicuous, if pleasant, figure in the crowd, and the elevation of
her father to the dukedom seemed so remote that there was no according
her any advance on her face-value. Had the prospect of finding her
mistress and deputy Duchess at Brakelond only been more actual or
imminent, then the world might have lent Miss Mortimer credit and
respect on the reversion; but Mr. Mortimer and his daughter had been
Mr. and Miss Mortimer for so many years now that no one found it easy
to think of them as prospective ‘Duke of March and Brakelond’ and ‘Lady
Gundred.’ Whenever anyone thought now of the Mortimers, it was always
of the old--incredibly old--imbecile, dying eternally at Brakelond
among his parrots.
Nor was Mr. Mortimer himself of a commanding character, fit to capture
that popular interest which his daughter’s quiet neatness had been
unable to attach. Mr. Mortimer, son of the late Lord Roger, and
heir-apparent to his uncle, must always, whatever his position, have
been a nonentity, not only from his poverty, but from his silliness.
Mr. Mortimer was strangely, unbelievably silly. He was merely silly.
He was silly in the wrong way. He neither shocked people nor amused
them. Even his daughter realized that he was silly, and felt no
grievance with the world for ignoring him. The world had, at one time,
done its best to encourage a coming Duke. But the long delay in the
succession, coupled with Mr. Mortimer’s overwhelming foolishness, had
gradually worn off the patience of even the most far-sighted; and now
his daughter went about inconspicuously with her great-aunt, while her
father stayed unregretted at home, and presumed on his prospects in a
placid, most-comfortable-chair-assuming way.
Gentle, neat, polite, Miss Mortimer, in her heart of hearts, resented
the indifference with which the world seemed to treat the future
mistress of Brakelond. And this resentment, demure and calm as it
was, did not make her more attractive or approachable to the men
from whom she would have liked to claim attention as her right. She
stiffened herself into a rigid piety, and by contrast with the gay,
attractive girls around her, made herself defiantly dull and godly in
demeanour, pluming herself the while on her unfaltering maintenance
of old-fashioned piety in degenerate days. And as soon as the men
discovered that, in her way, she was mildly sulking at them for not
making more of her, they ceased their efforts to make anything at all,
and took refuge with the hundreds of other bright, pleasant girls
who had twice Miss Mortimer’s charm and none of her prospects or
pretensions.
It was strange that Gundred, delightfully pretty in her cool way,
serene, beautifully mannered, could exert no compelling force on her
surroundings. That she wished to claim attention was the sign of her
weakness; for those who can command attention never take the trouble of
asking for it. But Gundred’s mind was always secluded, self-centred,
reserved. She never gave out any light or warmth. She accepted,
absorbed, received with gracious dignity; she never had the power of
radiating any return of friendly feeling, any comforting geniality of
human sympathy. As a talker she was gently frigid, sweetly insipid
in her way of avoiding all topics of general interest, and, while
restricting the conversation to her own concerns, of restricting it
entirely to such of those as were most obvious and least interesting
to the world at large. The weather, as it affected her plans; the
visits that she paid, the churches she attended, and the cooks that
she engaged; such were the subjects on which she pellucidly discoursed
in the prettiest of voices, with the most pleasant of smiles; to the
unutterable weariness of some partner who wanted a little more vitality
in the conversation.
Nor was she more successful as a listener. Even during the most
thrilling recitals her eye might be seen wandering towards the next
comer, or her mind guessed to be wondering whether she had not
accorded the speaker enough of her attention. Men soon ceased to
tell her anything of value, and followed her own example of talking
amiably but saying nothing. Lady Agnes was beginning to despair of her
great-niece’s prospects when Kingston Darnley was ushered into the
lists by his mother.
He came, he saw, he conquered. Idle-looking, tall and fair, beautiful
in build and feature, he could not but command personal admiration;
while in mind, keenly active, riotously fanciful, he was the last man
in the world to conciliate Miss Mortimer’s approval, and, therefore,
the first to captivate her attention. To her prim and maidenly habits
of thought he was seductive in his lazy twinkling moods, seductive in
his moments of emotion, seductive in those ebullitions of ridiculous
gaiety that Gundred knew to be so disorderly and unconventional, yet
reluctantly felt to be so delightful. Hitherto men had either bored her
or been bored by her, had always failed to penetrate the closed garden
of her attention; Kingston Darnley now came swinging carelessly into
the sacred enclosure, and paid her the compelling compliment of making
her believe herself brilliant and amusing.
Often it happens that the staid and decorous, hard as iron in their
disapproval of all frivolity, are suddenly and completely melted by
someone frivolous beyond their uttermost possibilities of disapproval.
One is liable to love one’s opposites, if those opposites be
sufficiently opposed. Only a little less different herself, and Gundred
might have disliked Kingston Darnley; but he was so madly divergent
from all her ideals that the very sharpness of the contrast drove her
to capitulate rapidly and completely. She even ceased to claim his
attention; she began to beg for it.
Her training had collaborated with her nature in guarding her from
self-betrayal. Her manners continued gentle, guarded, suavely frigid
as before. But Lady Adela, with the eye of a hopeful mother, pierced
the disguise of Gundred’s feelings, and lost no time in proclaiming
the discovery to her son. Kingston Darnley, for his part, was strongly
attracted by Gundred. To his fastidious temperament she never offered
a jarring note. She was always crisp and cool; always deliberate and
graceful; her hair was never disordered, nor her hat crooked, nor her
stockings ill-gartered. At all points she was unalterably serene,
impeccable and satisfying. Emotionally, too, she gave him what he
wanted. He needed no ardent, unbalanced temper in his wife. He needed
just that gracious acquiescence which Miss Mortimer supplied. She was
restful in all her ways, her mind was thoroughly well-mannered, and her
smiling calm assured him of a sympathetic nature. As he laid his ideas
before her he was enraptured to see how sweetly, how reasonably she
listened, and found full agreement in her cool grey-blue eyes, behind
which, in reality, her inattentive brain was admiring the tact of his
tie. But, whatever her secret thoughts, she never revealed them,
and those cool, grey-blue eyes had been trained to express decorous
attention; therefore Kingston Darnley soon realized that in Miss
Mortimer he had found that perfect conjunction of ideal soul with ideal
body in the quest for which his five-and-twenty years had hitherto been
vainly spent.
That his feeling was not a great passion he sometimes felt--that it
was not even commensurate with the passion which he had sometimes
found himself forced half-incredulously to divine behind the chill
fires of Gundred’s eyes. But his experience with the lady of the downy
nose had daunted him and disillusioned him; with the knowledge of wide
experience he now knew that a great passion falls to the lot of very
few, and that it is well to take the good the gods provide. Failing
the Supramundane Mate to whom all idealists look with longing, he
would compromise with a woman in every respect charming, alluring,
delightful--a woman of temperate mood, a woman of neat and faultless
style in body and mind, a woman, in short, who could be trusted never
to clash with any of life’s harmonies or discords.
Her name, too, tragic and glorious, fired that curiosity of man to
possess something rare and old and precious. Of Brakelond he only
thought as a fit setting for Gundred’s mystic charm. For Gundred’s
serene correctness, so prosaically pleasing in a London drawing-room,
became ‘mystic charm’ when associated in the mind of her idealizing
lover with the long oaken galleries of Brakelond. And Gundred, for
her part, considered the possible glories of position and power
only as gifts to confer on her radiant, ridiculous captor. She did
what she decently could to please and captivate Kingston, deployed
cunning little unsuspected wiles of dress and manner; brightened her
garments and her ways; achieved at last that miracle only possible to
a first-rate woman, of being gay without becoming skittish. Little
need had she of wiles. Her gentle flawlessness satisfied Kingston
Darnley completely; and at his time of life, after his experience, he
knew enough to be humbly content with satisfaction, asking no more of
life, and expecting much less. What folly to let a plump chicken escape
from the hand on the chance of a Phœnix flying out of the bush at some
far-distant date! Better give thanks that the chicken is at least
plump. Kingston Darnley gave thanks accordingly, and dawdled along the
happy path that leads to proposal.
He could only see perfection everywhere. If Gundred was sometimes
unresponsive, that was surely her cold and lovely maidenliness. If
her acquiescent sweetness lacked salt at times, and seemed to promise
biliousness, the criticism showed, in itself, a bilious bachelor
for whose ailment that sweetness had been especially prescribed by
Fate. If Gundred’s answers sometimes seemed remote, inadequate,
half-hearted, that was but the effort of a loyal soul struggling to
get into perfect stride with his, and neglecting the interests of the
present for the sake of the future. As he looked and listened, her
unruffled pleasantness destroyed for his emotions the grosser terrors
of marriage, and yet gifted them with a strange, appealing fascination.
Carried away by his approval, he proposed at last, and was placidly
accepted by a heart resolutely dissembling its delight. Lady Adela
heard the news with joy, and a pound was not too much for Heaven next
Sunday.