Читать книгу Moth and Rust; Together with Geoffrey's Wife and The Pitfall - Mary Cholmondeley - Страница 7

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"On peut choisir ses amitiés, mais on subit l'amour."

—Princess Karadja.

After luncheon George offered to take Janet round the gardens. Janet looked timidly at Mrs. Trefusis. She did not know whether she ought to accept or not. There might be etiquettes connected with afternoon walks of which she was not aware. For even since her arrival at Easthope yesterday it had been borne in upon her that there were many things of which she was not aware.

"Pray let my son show you the gardens," said Mrs. Trefusis, with impatient formality. "The roses are in great beauty just now."

Janet went to put on her hat, and Mrs. Trefusis lay down on the sofa in the drawing-room with a little groan. Anne sat down by her. The eyes of both women followed Janet's tall, magnificent figure as she joined George on the terrace.

"She dresses like a shop-girl," said Mrs. Trefusis. "And what a hat! Exactly what one sees on the top of omnibuses."

Anne did not defend the hat. It was beyond defence. She supposed, with a tinge of compassion, what was indeed the case, that Janet had made a special pilgrimage to Mudbury to acquire it, in order the better to meet the eyes of her future mother-in-law.

All Anne said was, "Very respectable people go on the top of omnibuses nowadays."

"I am not saying anything against her respectability," said poor Mrs. Trefusis. "Heaven knows if there had been anything against it I should have said so before now. It would have been my duty."

Anne smiled faintly. "A painful duty."

"I'm not so sure," said Mrs. Trefusis grimly. She never posed before Anne, nor, for that matter, did any one else. "But from all I can make out this girl is a model of middle-class respectability. Yet she comes of a bad stock. One can't tell how she will turn out. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh."

"There are worse things than middle-class respectability. George might have presented you with an actress with a past. Lord Lossiemouth married his daughter's maid last week."

"I don't know what I've done," said Mrs. Trefusis, "that my only son should marry a pretty horse-breaker."

"I thought it was her brother who was a horse-breaker."

"So he is, and so is she. It was riding to hounds that my poor boy first met her."

"She rides magnificently. I saw her out cub-hunting last autumn, and asked who she was."

"Her brother is disreputable. He was mixed up with that case of drugging some horse or other. I forget about it, but I know it was disgraceful. He is quite an impossible person, but I suppose we shall have to know him now. The place will be overrun with her relations, whom I have avoided for years. Things like that always happen to me."

This was a favourite expression of Mrs. Trefusis'. She invariably spoke as if a curse had hung over her since her birth.

"What does it matter who one knows?" said Anne.

Mrs. Trefusis did not answer. The knots in her face moved a little. She knew what country life and country society were better than Anne. She had all her life lived in the upper of the two sets which may be found in every country neighbourhood. She did what she considered to be her duty by the secondary set, but she belonged by birth and by inclination to the upper class. It was at first with bewildered surprise, and later on with cold anger, that she observed that her only son, bone of her bone, very son of herself and her kind dead husband, showed a natural tendency to gravitate towards the second-rate among their neighbours.

Why did he do it? Why did he bring strange, loud-voiced, vulgar men to Easthope, the kind of men whom Mr. Trefusis would not have tolerated? She might have known that her husband would die of pneumonia just when her son needed him most. She had not expected it, but she ought to have expected it. Did not everything in her lot go crooked, while the lives of all those around her went straight? What was the matter with her son, that he was more at ease with these undesirable companions than with the sons of his father's old friends? Why would he never accompany her on her annual pilgrimage to London?

George was one of those lethargic, vain men who say they hate London. Catch them going to London! Perhaps if efforts were made to catch them there, they might repair thither. But in London they are nobodies; consequently to London they do not go. And the same man who eschews London will generally be found to gravitate in the country to a society in which he is the chief personage. It had been so with George. Fred Black, the disreputable horse-breaker, and his companions, had sedulously paid court to him. George, who had a deep-rooted love of horse-flesh, was often at Fred's training stables. There he met Janet, and fell in love with her, as did most of Fred's associates. But unlike them, George had withdrawn. He knew he should "do" for himself with "the county" if he married Janet. And he could not face his mother. So he sulked like a fish under the bank, half suspicious that he is being angled for. So ignorant of his fellow-creatures was George that there actually had been a moment when he suspected Janet of trying to "land him," and he did not think any the worse of her.

Then, after months of sullen indecision, he suddenly rushed upon his fate. That was a week ago.

Anne left her chair as Mrs. Trefusis did not answer, and knelt down by the old woman.

"Dear Mrs. Trefusis," she said, "the girl is a nice girl, innocent and good, and without a vestige of conceit."

"She has nothing to be conceited about that I can see."

"Oh! yes. She might be conceited about marrying George. It is an amazing match for her. And she might be conceited about her beauty. I should be if I had that face."

"My dear, you are twenty times as good-looking, because you look what you are—a lady. She looks what she is—a——" Something in Anne's steady eyes disconcerted Mrs. Trefusis, and she did not finish the sentence. She twitched her hands restlessly, and then went on: "And she can't come into a room. She sticks in the door. And she always calls you 'Lady Varney.' She hasn't called a girl a 'gurl' yet, but I know she will. I had thought my son's wife might make up to me a little for all I've gone through—might be a comfort to me—and then I am asked to put up with a vulgarian."

Anne went on in a level voice: "Janet is not in the least vulgar, because she is unpretentious. Middle-class she may be, and is: so was my grandmother; but vulgar she is not. And she is absolutely devoted to George. He is in love with her, but she really loves him."

"So she ought. He is making a great sacrifice for her, and, as I constantly tell him, one he will regret to his dying day."

"On the contrary, he is only sacrificing his own pride and yours to—himself. He is considering only himself. He is marrying only to please himself, not——" Anne hesitated—"not to please Janet."

"Now you are talking nonsense."

"Yes, I think I am. It felt like sense, but by the time I had put it into words, it turned into nonsense. The little things you notice in Janet's dress and manner can be mitigated, if she is willing to learn."

"She won't be," said Mrs. Trefusis, with decision. "Because she is stupid. She will be offended directly she is spoken to. All stupid people are. Now come, Anne! Don't try and make black white. It doesn't help matters. You must admit the girl is stupid."

Anne's gentle, limpid eyes looked deprecatingly into the elder woman's hard, miserable ones.

"I am afraid she is," she said at last, and she coloured painfully.

"And obstinate."

"Are not stupid people always obstinate?"

"No," said Mrs. Trefusis. "I am obstinate, but no one could call me stupid."

"It does not prevent stupid people being always obstinate, because obstinate people are not always stupid."

"You think me very obstinate, Anne?" There were tears in the stern old eyes.

"I think, dear, you have got to give way, and as you must, I want you to do it with a good grace, before you estrange George from you, and before that unsuspecting girl has found out that you loathe the marriage."

"If she were not as dense as a rhinoceros, she would see that now."

"How fortunate, in that case, that she is dense. It gives you a better chance with her. Make her like you. You can, you know. She is worth liking."

"All my life," said Mrs. Trefusis, "be they who they may, I have hated stupid people."

"Oh! no. That is an hallucination. You don't hate George."

Mrs. Trefusis shot a lightning glance at her companion, and then smiled grimly. "You are the only person who would dare to say such a thing to me."

"Besides," continued Anne meditatively, "is it so certain that Janet is stupid? She appears so because she is unformed, ignorant, and because she has never reflected, or been thrown with educated people. She has not come to herself. She will never learn anything by imagination or perception, for she seems quite devoid of them. But I think she might learn by trouble or happiness, or both. She can feel. Strong feeling would be the turning-point with her, if she has sufficient ability to take advantage of it. Perhaps she has not, and happiness or trouble may leave her as they found her. But she gives me the impression that she might alter considerably if she were once thoroughly aroused."

"I can't rouse her. I was not sent into the world to rouse pretty horse-breakers."

If Anne was doubtful as to what Mrs. Trefusis had been sent into this imperfect world for, she did not show it.

"I don't want you to rouse her. All I want is that you should be kind to her." Anne took Mrs. Trefusis' ringed, claw-like hand between both hers. "I do want that very much."

"Well," said Mrs. Trefusis, blinking her eyes, "I won't say I won't try. You can always get round me, Anne. Oh! my dear, dear child, if it might only have been you. But of course, just because I had set my heart upon it, I was not to have it. That has been my life from first to last. If I might only have had you. You think me a cross, bitter old woman, and so I am: God knows I have had enough to make me so. But I should not have been so to you."

"You never are so to me. But you see my affections are—is not that the correct expression?—engaged."

"But you are not."

"No. I am as free as air. That is where the difficulty comes in."

"Where is the creature now?"

"In Paris. The World chronicles his movements. That is why I take in the World. If he had been in London this week, I should not—be here at this moment."

"I suppose he is enormously run after?"

"Oh yes! By others as well as by me; by tons of others younger and better looking than I am."

"Now, Anne, I am absolutely certain that you have never run a yard after him."

"I have never appeared to do so," said Anne, with her faint, enigmatical smile. "The proprieties have been observed. At least by me they have. But I have covered a good deal of ground, nevertheless."

"I don't know what he is made of."

"Well, he is made of money for one thing, and I have not a shilling. He knows that."

"He ought to be only too honoured by your being willing to think of him. In my young days a man of his class would not have had a chance."

"Millionaires get their chance nowadays."

"Then why doesn't he take it?"

"Because," said Anne, her lip quivering, "he thinks I like him for his money. He has got that firmly screwed into his head."

"As if a woman like you would do such a thing."

"Women extremely like me are doing such things all the time. How is he to know I am different?"

"He must be a fool."

"He does not look like one."

"No," said Mrs. Trefusis meditatively, "I must own he does not. He has a bullet head. I saw him once at the Duchess of Dundee's last summer. He was pointed out to me as the biggest thing in millionaires since Barnato. But I must confess he was the very last person in the world whom I should have thought you would have looked at—for himself, I mean."

"That is what he thinks."

"He is so very unattractive."

"He is an ugly, forbidding-looking man of forty," said Anne, who had become very pale.

"I should not go as far as that," said Mrs. Trefusis, somewhat disconcerted.

"Oh! I can for you!" said Anne, her quiet eyes flashing. "He is all these things. He is exactly what I would rather not have married. And I think he knows that instinctively, poor man! But in spite of all that, in spite of everything that repels me, I know that we belong to each other. He did not choose to like me, or I to like him. I never had any choice in the matter. When I first saw him I recognised him. I had known him all my life. I had been waiting for him always without knowing it. I never really understood anything till he came. I did not fall in love with him; at least, not in the way I see others do, and as I once did myself years ago. I am not attracted towards him. I am him. And he is me. One can't fall in love with oneself. He is my other self. We are one. We may live painfully apart as we are doing now—he may marry some one else: but the fact remains the same."

Mrs. Trefusis did not answer. Love is so rare that when we meet it we realise that we are on holy ground.

"You and he will marry some day," she said at last.

Her thoughts went back to her own youth, and its romantic love and marriage. There was no romance here as she understood it, nothing but a grim reality. But it almost seemed as if love could go deeper without romance.

"I do not see how a misunderstanding can hold together between you."

"You forget mother," said Anne.

Mrs. Trefusis had momentarily forgotten her closest friend, the Duchess of Quorn, that notorious match-making mother of a quartette of pretty, well-drilled daughters, all of whom were now advantageously married except Anne—the eldest. And if Anne was not at this moment wedded to George Trefusis it was not owing to want of zeal on the part of both mothers. Mrs. Trefusis was irrevocably behind the scenes in Anne's family.

"Mother ought by nature to have been a man and a cricketer," said Anne, "instead of the mother of many daughters. She is 'game' to the last, she is a hard hitter, and she will run till she drops on the chance of any catch. But her bowling is her strong point. Young men have not a chance with her. Her style may not be dignified, but her eye is extraordinary. Harry Lestrange did his silly, panic-stricken best, but—he is married to Cecily now."

"Did he really try to get out of it?"

"He did. He liked Cecily a little; he had certainly flirted with her when she came in his way, but he never made the least effort to meet her, and he did not want to marry her."

"And Cecily?"

"Cecily did not dislike him. She was only nineteen, and she had—so she told me—always hoped for curly hair; and of course Harry's is quite straight, what little there is of it. She shed a few tears about that, but she did as she was told. They are a nice-looking young couple. They write quite happily. I daresay it will do very well. But, you see, unfortunately, Harry was a friend of Mr. Vanbrunt's, and I know Harry consulted him as to how to get out of it. Well, directly mother's attention was off Harry, she found out about Mr. Vanbrunt; how I don't know, but she did. Poor mother! she has a heart somewhere. It is her sporting instincts which are too strong for her. When she found out, she came into my room and kissed me, and cried, and said love was everything, and what did looks matter, and, for her part, if a man was a good man, she thought it was of no importance if he had not had a father. Think of mother's saying that, after marrying poor father? But she was quite sincere. Mother never minds contradicting herself. There is nothing petty about her. She cried, and I cried too. We seemed to be nearer to each other than we had been for years. I was the last daughter left at home, and she actually said she did not want to part with me. I think she felt it just for the moment, for she had had a good deal of worry with some of the sons-in-law, especially Harry. But after a little bit she came to herself, and she gave me such advice. Oh, such advice! Some of it was excellent—that was the worst of it—but it was all from the standpoint of the woman stalking the man. And she asked me several gimlet questions about Mr. Vanbrunt. She said I had not made any mistake so far, but that I must be very careful. She was like a tiger that has tasted blood. She said it was almost like marrying royalty—marrying such wealth as that. I believe he has a property in Africa rather larger than England. But she said that I was her dear child, and she thought it might be done. I implored her not to do anything—to leave him alone. But the truth is, mother had been so successful that she had got rather beyond herself, and she fancied she could do anything. Father had often prophesied that some day she would overreach herself. However, nothing would stop her. So she settled down to it. You know what mother's bowling is. It did for Harry—but this time it did for me."

"Mr. Vanbrunt saw through it?"

"From the first moment. He saw he was being hunted down. He bore it at first, and then he withdrew. I can't prove it, but I am morally certain that mother cornered him and had a talk with him one day, and told him I cared for him, and thought him very handsome. Mother sticks at nothing. After that he went away."

"Poor man!"

"She asked him in May to stay with us in Scotland in September, but he has refused. I found she had given a little message from me which I never sent. Poor, poor mother, and poor me!"

"And poor millionaire! Surely if he has any sense he must see that it is your mother and not you who is hunting him."

"He is aware that Cecily did as she was told. He probably thinks I could be coerced into marrying him. He may know a great deal about finance, and stocks, and all those weary things, but he knows very little about women. He has not taken much account of them so far."

"His day will come," said Mrs. Trefusis. "What a nuisance men are! I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea."

"If they were," said Anne, with her rueful little smile, "mother would order a diving-bell at once."