When Belle Lorimer, the wealthy, merry, or at any rate not lachrymose,
widow of Vincent Lorimer (of Lorimer and Lorimer, the stockbrokers),
agreed to the Colonel's suggestion that together they should tie a
second knot, the Colonel was probably assuming that Ben's capable
control and intimate acquaintance with his needs and moods would still
be available. Never an imaginative man, he had probably given no
thought whatever to his daughter's temperament and character; enough
that she was his daughter and he her father, that she was solicitous,
remembering, and, above all, cheerful, and that she rarely provoked
even the semblance of a scene. There had been scenes with her mother
too often: the result less of mismanagement on Mrs. Staveley's part
than on the Colonel's tendency to indulge an exacting nature to the
full coupled with the advantage that the position of husband too
often confers. For husbands are not merely husbands: they are also
contemporaries; and as the predominant partners they have the great
pull of beginning right. Daughters are of another generation, with
fewer obligations, and the power actually to rebel, or, if it comes
to the worst, bolt. Wives have stood at the altar and made promises;
wives have brought money with them, and marriage settlements often
very adroitly drawn up in the widower's interest; wives are too old to
be influenced by detrimental new ideas. But daughters are different:
daughters have made no promises, possess no financial resources, and
are painfully susceptible to revolutionary notions. They are capable
even of asking such upheaving questions as, "Why do I owe any duty to a
father I didn't choose?"
The Colonel may have lacked imagination, but some self-protective
instinct had worked in him to give Ben an easier time than her
mother, poor woman, had ever had. But sweet as was Ben's nature, she
was modernly conscious of certain duties and loyalties to one's own
individuality, and, even before she came to talk to me about it, had
quite determined that now was her opportunity to strike out a line
for herself. And luckily she could to some extent afford it, for
in addition to a little nest-egg consisting of the accumulation of
interest in her minority, she now had, in common with her sisters
and brothers, an income of two hundred a year from her maternal
grandmother, the terms of that shrewd old lady's last will and
testament being the culmination of a long series of indignities which,
in the Colonel's opinion, she had put upon him. Surely a daughter
(named Mrs. Staveley), he had said, should come before grandchildren?
But the dead hand distributed more wisely.