"WALK, Jean?" asked Mr. Trevelyan, putting his head into the Rectory dining-room, one early October afternoon. He was not given to the use of superfluous words.
Jean had been alone for an hour, busily working and busily thinking. She had a good deal to occupy her mind just then. Jem and his mother were expected at Dutton Rectory next day; and Evelyn and Miss Moggridge had arrived three nights earlier at the Park; and Cyril was at the Brow, and moreover was very perplexing.
Perhaps the last-named topic claimed the larger share of her attention, for Jean was provoked with Cyril. She could not forgive him the ridiculous speech he had made in the Academy. As a mere joke it was nothing, but Cyril had looked self-conscious ever since, and his looking so made her feel the same. Jean detested to feel self-conscious. Besides, the whole thing, was absurd. That she should ever marry Cyril—Cyril, with his dainty tastes and fanciful ways!—Impossible!
Cyril was unlike his real self—the real self she had known—and Jean, in popular phraseology, could not tell what to be at with him. What she called being unlike himself, was actually being like his present self, and only unlike his former self. He had so long been her slave, that she did not know what to think of herself or of him, under the new position of affairs. When she had seen him last, he had been a mere unformed lad, submissive to her lightest wish. She had laughed at his bondage, and had told him to think for himself; yet now that the bondage existed no more, she found that she had valued it.
For the young man had ceased to watch Jean with wistful devotion, as the lad had done. He had sprung into a different being. He was pleasantly conscious of his title, his position, his age, his good looks, his gifts, his belongings; above all, of his Manhood. The manhood of twenty-one, though full of potentialities, since at that age, one can seldom guess where may lurk an embryo Shakespeare or an undeveloped Wellington, is such overpowering a matter to other people: but to the individual himself, it is often vast in possibilities.
One leading characteristic of early manhood is, not seldom, a disposition to worship womanhood—using the word "worship" in its conventionally poetic sense. But Jean did not represent Womanhood to Cyril. She was only Jean. He had run after her persistently from infantine days: he had always looked up to and leant upon Jean. Now he wanted somebody who should look up to and lean upon himself. And Jean was hopelessly capable of standing alone.
The idea of some day marrying Jean was an old idea, so familiar that it had slipped out, unexpectedly, at the Academy, surprising himself as much as Jean. Her reception of the speech had rather nettled Cyril: not so much at the moment as afterwards, when he recalled her look. He resolved no longer to trot meekly in her wake. It was time that Jean should learn who and what Sir Cyril Devereux of Ripley Brow really was.
As for marrying—there was plenty of time, and plenty of choice. Any number of nice girls might be glad to become Lady Devereux. Cyril was too modern a young man to be troubled by any morbid humility on the score of his own attractions. True, he did not much care for the ordinary run of "nice girls," since he prided himself on his fine discrimination of taste—whether exercised on sauces and stews, or on pictures and young ladies. But none the less, he was conscious of a wide field before him.
Jean was not ordinary, and therein lay her charm. Somebody else, whom he had come across, was also not ordinary, and therein lay Cyril's perplexity. For this somebody was by no means of so independent a temper as Jean. She had looked up to Cyril, had appealed to his judgment, had treated him in a pleasing manner as something superior to herself. Serious difficulties in that direction threatened to bar advances on the part of Cyril, beyond a certain point: but he was not disposed to deny himself present enjoyment, because of what might come after. The future could take care of itself.
Still, all his life he had been used to tell everything to Jean, and this habit of mind continued unchecked, even after fifteen months of separation. When at the Brow, he suffered from a haunting desire to wander incessantly towards the Rectory. Whether he would ever require Jean for his wife, he did not know. The only thing about which he felt absolutely sure, was that he did not wish Jean to marry anybody else.