Mrs. Hardy, however, relented in a sudden and unexpected manner. She received a consignment of furniture and bric-à-brac from her travelling daughter, together with most interesting and bewildering advices.
Laura wrote to say that the Toorak House, if it had any respect for itself, must immediately get rid of its pierglasses, its whitewash, and its aniline colours; and poor Mrs. Hardy, who had ever walked with the complacent dignity of a priestess and oracle in the sacred regions of household art, was too much excited and disturbed by the humiliating discovery that she was old-fashioned and behind the times, and by her agonising desire to recover her proper position, to pay the customary attention even to Rachel's business.
While she was absorbed in beginning the mighty task of re-adjusting her ideas of taste and the details of her domestic environment, which, after a few years of painful struggle with the impracticabilities of Eastlake mediævalism, was to result in the existing combination of Chippendale and the Japanesque, she felt that it would be a relief to divest herself of superfluous cares.
So she laid her daughter under solemn obligations to protect Rachel's interests and the honour of the family, and allowed her to take the invalid away with her for a week or two, that so she might give her undivided attention to the choice of new coverings for the drawing-room furniture, and the question what should be done to the ceiling.
The two young women were very grateful for the chance which set them free to follow their own devices. Mrs. Reade brought her new brougham—a propitiatory offering from Ned after he had scandalously disgraced himself by going to a public dinner and coming home in a dishevelled condition at noon next day—and conveyed her charge to South Yarra in a nest of soft cushions, and laid her on a pillowy sofa in the brightest of homely boudoirs, where they discussed the situation and afternoon tea with much content and cheerfulness.
Rachel was strangely peaceful and amiable at this time. She puzzled her companion excessively. She had, indeed, a sort of exalted transcendentalism about her that was almost aggravating to that practical and most unsentimental person. Her way of moralising upon love and lovers, after such an experience as she had had, was very naïve and touching, but eminently preposterous, Mrs. Reade considered—and she did not at all mind saying so.
"A lover who is unfaithful does the deadliest dishonour that is possible to love, in my opinion," said she, with her customary air of decision. "To break any pledge is bad enough, but to break that pledge ought to disqualify a man from ever again calling himself a man."
"I do not think there should be any pledges in love, either given or asked for," said Rachel softly. "Love is not a thing to be tied and bound. Fancy a man feeling that he had to keep a promise if he did not wish to do it! And, oh! fancy a woman letting him—being deceived into letting him make a sacrifice for her! It would be an outrage and a degradation to both of them. I think Roden—Mr. Dalrymple—is above that, Beatrice."
From all she had heard, Mrs. Reade was decidedly disposed to think so too.
"He says that they are a curse upon people's lives—those engagements that are kept," continued Rachel, looking solemnly out of the window with her pensive eyes.