OPINIONS AT LAFER HALL
Tremenheere was early at the station that night. The evenings were now short and the lamps were lit. He walked up and down the platform waiting, his gaze passing from the line whose distant curve was lost in the gloom, to the starlit sky that roofed it. He was a tall thin man, with a slight stoop from the shoulders. Out of doors he wore an Inverness cloak. His complexion was swarthy, his fine cut features were full of sensitive feeling. His head was scholarly, and he wore his slightly curly black hair rather long; his eyes were piercing, the rare smile was an illumination to his whole face. Every one on the platform knew him and his errand; and Wonston already knew also that Miss Marlowe was not going to marry him. The footman from the Hall, lounging in the booking-office, the coachman on his box, each had his knot of gossipers, eager to gather every morsel of the great news that had stirred Wonston to its depths.
And now the train was signalled. He heard the click of the semaphore as it dropped. A few moments more and a cloud of rosy smoke trailed above a dark speck on the line. The bell rang, there was a sudden bustle and wheeling about of trollies, and the train glided in. As it passed him, he saw Cynthia. The light in the carriage shone full upon her face and she was smiling. But she did not see him. He walked alongside of her and opened the door. In spite of endeavour and resolution, his face was aglow with feeling.
'Well, Cynthia!' he said.
Her glance lit upon him with surprise but without embarrassment. She looked delighted to see an old friend, nothing more. His heart sank. He knew then that in spite of himself he had still hoped. He believed all now. Her flying colour, her happy laugh, were not for him.
'You here, Anthony; how kind of you. All quite well at home, I hope?'
He gave her his hand and she jumped down. He hurried her outside. It seemed to him suddenly that he must be looking strange, unlike himself; at any rate every one was pressing forward to look at her. He put her into the carriage. She begged him to come too, they would go round by the Minster. But he preferred to walk. He stood silently with his arm on the door, listening to her account of the Kerrs, until the maid and luggage appeared. Then he leant forward and grasped her hand. He did not speak, he only looked at her—'No word, no gesture of reproach!' And Cynthia, throwing herself back in the corner of the carriage, suddenly trembled into tears. They flowed for 'the days that were no more,' for the faithfulness that had not won love, for Anthony left alone. Many a path of joy is dewy with such tears; they make it exhale incense.
A little later the Admiral was standing on the hearth-rug in the drawing-room at Lafer, fidgeting alternately with his watch and his white stock. He had dressed more quickly than usual, and instead of lingering in Mrs. Marlowe's room until the gong sounded, had come down in hopes of Cynthia being late after her journey. He wanted a few words with Mrs. Hennifer, who had preserved her calmness during the meeting, while he had been excited and Mrs. Marlowe emotional. Indeed Mrs. Marlowe was going to dine upstairs, but she had charged the Admiral to have private speech with Mrs. Hennifer, and hear what she thought of Cynthy.
The moment she came in he turned to her eagerly. He had fixed his eye-glass, and his face was puckered into the petulant expression consequent upon all its lines converging towards the vacant one. His own scrutiny thus always baffled that of others.
But in this instance Mrs. Hennifer knew scrutiny was superfluous. She had come to a clear conclusion, and felt the Admiral would have to bend to the same. The time they had spent together over the tea-table before Cynthia went to dress had convinced her that the new influence in her life was an absorbing one. Surely it could not be a bad one. She would not believe that disaster was before gay and guileless Cynthia Marlowe. Therefore it was certain that unless any inconceivably serious obstacle stood in the way, they must all bend to her wishes. She was determined to be sanguine that all was well.
She smiled as she crossed the room and sat down opposite the Admiral. The uprightness of her spare figure, on whose shoulders the fringed Oriental silk shawl she always wore seemed to sit with odd easiness, exercised its usual controlling effect upon his fidgetiness. He dropped his eye-glass and allowed a twinkle to eclipse anxiety.
'And now for the benefit of your opinion, my good Mrs. Hennifer.'
'She looks very well and very happy, Admiral.'
'She does, uncommonly, preposterously so.'
'She is scarcely our Cynthia now, I fear. She is what she was at seventeen, with a look in her eyes, a general indefinable air, that proves there is more of her elsewhere. I may say as much to you.'
'Good,' said the Admiral. 'My own impression precisely. Still we must not be carried away by the sentiment of the thing. We must be practical. He may be a pirate, you know. We must have his credentials, know who and what he is. And I shall not allow him to write me yet. We'll try whether Cynthy will cool down; nothing like tactics—sh! here she is!'
They both turned. Cynthia had just opened the door.
She looked radiantly lovely. The vestiges of the years intervening between childhood and womanhood that had chiefly been seamed by struggles to attain emotions such as came readily to other girls, and which she felt should, by duty, if not inclination, come to her, had vanished. Mrs. Hennifer, who alone knew what those struggles had been, and had marvelled at the simple and innocent earnestness with which she had striven to be like other girls, and to accept love and marriage as a matter of course, was alone able to realise the change in her. Before Cynthia went abroad it had become her opinion that she would not marry. She was convinced that she was more under the influence of Anthony Tremenheere than she knew, and also that he had now no hopes of winning her. She had looked jaded and perplexed sometimes, as though she understood neither others nor herself, but her general expression had been one of calm, amounting almost to exaltation. Without assuming any habits of unusual goodness, her air, manner, and actions had expressed a spirituality which was subtly diffusive, and seemed to rarify the moral atmosphere round her. Had she been a Roman Catholic, Mrs. Hennifer thought she would have found her vocation in a convent; but for her love of home and passionate attachment to old associations and familiar faces, and her strong sense of hereditary obligations as heiress and landowner, she might have become the brightest and blithest member of a Sisterhood. The groove of routine, the method of loving ministry uncharged by the responsibility of personal fervour, these seemed best adapted to her. Mrs. Hennifer ceased to imagine that any enthusiasm of feeling was in store for her. She would bless Lafer with her presence all her life, succeeding to the estates and dispensing hospitality and bounty to rich and poor; she would be happy in her loneliness, and in a certain dreaminess that would underlie all her practical energy and clear judgment; she would never feel the need of guidance and reliance on a stronger personality than her own; she would never long for a child, though loving all those with whom she came in contact; she would pass into ripe age and die. Much the same as this would be Anthony Tremenheere's lot; the two lives that might have been one, running apart, in parallel lines, held so by the forces of decorum and conventionality which Cynthia had forged, and then had vaguely and distrustfully chafed against as part of the perplexity of a life which was surely meant to be lucent to its depths.
And here she was a new creature, illumined by the stir of ardent emotions, yet shy in her sense of self-surrender and her hope of perfect joys.
She was wearing a dress of glistening tussore silk, and had delicate safrano roses at her throat and in her waist-band. Her golden hair, rolled back from her brow, was gathered in a loose knot low in her neck. Her face sparkled with animation, her large hazel eyes had lost none of their transparent sincerity. She had a habit of allowing her glance to travel round a room before it fell on the persons occupying it; thus recognition was with her illumination. As she came forward with a buoyant step the old-fashioned harmony of the room enhanced her charm. The white velvet carpet, the faded delicacy of century-old brocade, the soft wax-lights reflected on ormolu and crystal, at once softened and heightened her loveliness.
And now she looked from the Admiral to Mrs. Hennifer with a smile of artlessly perfect confidence. When she reached them she clasped her hands over his arm as he leant against the mantelpiece and kissed him.
'If I did not know conspirators were not necessarily traitors, I should be afraid of this tête-à-tête,' she said.
He took hold of her hands and held her from him at arm's length, gazing at her long and tenderly.
'And so, Cynthy, you mean to have him in spite of us all?'
'Why in spite of you all? You are not going to be prejudiced against some one you do not know. Wait till you know him, grandpapa.'
'But how am I to know him?'
'You will ask him here, of course—at least surely you will?' she said, a look of alarm dawning in her eyes.
'But how can I ask him, as what?'
She blushed rosily.
'He will be writing to you. You want to know him, don't you—you and grandmamma, and you too?' she added, turning to Mrs. Hennifer.
'Cynthy, you are an innocent, a simpleton,' said the Admiral. 'Don't you see what a hocus-pocus you have made? I will ask no man here on the understanding that he may make love to you; no, by George! You haven't thought sufficient of yourself, you never did, and you never will. You have let this Danby make up to you as though you were an ordinary nobody, you've waived all ceremony. I may be old-fashioned in my notions, but he should have asked me before you, and to do that he'd have had to come to Lafer without an invitation, and that's what he'll have to do now. I'll make no promises until he acts like a man, and then I'll take time to consider if he's a gentleman; yes, by George!'
As he spoke she flushed scarlet, half in shame, half fear; but now her face cleared in an instant, and she laughed, clasping her hands, then flinging them apart, as she had a habit of doing when excited.
'Darling grandpapa,' she said, 'don't you know the north wind always gives me the shivers, it blusters so?'
He pulled one of her little ears.
'Minx, disarming puss, syren!' he said.
The gong had sounded. He gave Mrs. Hennifer his arm, and Cynthia went before them, glancing back over her shoulder as she talked, and giving them glimpses of the eyes whose brightness was again shadowed by that indefinable haze of happy abstraction which had startled them all the moment they saw her. It was so new, so significant, that it told more than she was likely to do by words.
Mrs. Hennifer, on her own part, hoped for enlightening confidences. Cynthia, however, said nothing. The Admiral had a long talk with her, and found her proudly resolute on the main point, but reticent as to details. To her the matter was simple, possessing only such rudimentary elements as a child might invest its joys with. She believed, she trusted, she loved. Somehow, as the Admiral listened, his memory recurred to the old Lindley Murray parsing days at Mrs. Marlowe's knee. Of course he was all they could wish—well, what was he? Had he family, or fortune, or irreproachable moral character? She did not know. But she was sure he had not known she was an heiress. The Kerrs had told him nothing—in fact Theo had told her he had asked nothing; she was dressing in the most simple fashion; she had had no idea he had been attracted until he proposed; he was very quiet—and here she broke off, turning her head aside to hide her blush, and murmuring something about 'contrasts, and she was such a chatterbox herself.'
The Admiral said little but that he did not wish to hear from Danby at once. He asked her not to receive letters or to write until he gave permission. She was amenable, but it rose from the docility of absolute confidence in another and knowledge of herself.
Then she returned to her old routine—driving with Mrs. Marlowe, riding with the Admiral, walking with her stag-hound. She had all her friends to see. Every one was curious to see her. She was so gay and bright that they scarcely believed her heart was not with them and their interests wholly, as of old. But she wore a ring, a cameo of a Greek head, which, though not significant of more than remembrance, was not a Marlowe heirloom. The Admiral noticed it, but did not venture to ask where she had bought it. And sometimes she would suddenly become silent, and her eyes dilated and became luminous with thought that hovered on the verge of happy dreams.
Once during a walk in Zante, when Danby joined them, she had been in so blithe a mood that at last she began to excuse herself. But he would not hear her.
'It is natural for a guileless heart to be gay; let love subdue it,' he said.
The words had delighted her in her ignorance; how much more now?
