CHAPTER XVII.
Franklin was gone and Sir Charles was gone, and Lady Pickering soon followed, not in the least discomfited by the unexpected turn of events. Lady Pickering could hardly have borne to suspect that Gerald preferred to flirt with Miss Jakes rather than with herself; that he preferred to marry her was nothing of an affront. Althea herself was very soon to return to America for a month with Aunt Julia and the girls, settle business matters and see old friends before turning her face, this time for good, to the country that was now to be her home.
Franklin was gone, and Gerald and Helen were left, and all that Gerald more and more meant, all that was bright and alien too—the things of joy and the things of adjustment and of wonder—effaced poor Franklin while it emphasised those painful truths that he had seen and shown her and that she had only been able to protest against. The thought of Franklin came hardly at all, though the truths he had put before her lingered in a haunting sense of disappointment with herself; she had failed Franklin in deeper, more subtle ways than in the mere shattering of his hopes.
Althea had never been a good business woman; her affairs were taken care of for her in Boston by wise and careful cousins; but she found that Gerald, in spite of his air of irresponsibility, was a very good business man, and it was he who pointed out to her, with cheerful and affectionate frankness, that her fortune was not as large as she, with her heretofore unexacting demands on it, had imagined. It was only when Althea took for granted that it could suffice for much larger, new demands, that Gerald pointed out the facts of limitation; to himself, he made this clear and sweet, the facts were amply sufficient; there was more than enough for his sober wants. But Althea, sitting over the papers with him in the library, and looking rather vague and wistful, realised that if Gerald's wants were to be the chief consideration many of her own must, indeed, go unsatisfied. Gerald evidently took it perfectly for granted that her wants would be his. Looking up at the flat and faded portraits of bygone Digbys, while this last one, his charming eyes lifted so brightly and so intelligently upon her, made things clear, looking up, over his head, at these ancestors of her affianced, Althea saw in their aspect of happy composure that they, too, had always taken it for granted that their wives' wants were just that—just their own wants. She couldn't—not at first—lucidly articulate to herself any marked divergence between her wants and Gerald's; she, too, wanted to see Merriston House restored and made again into a home for Digbys; but Merriston House had been seen by her as a means, not as an end. She had seen it as a centre to a larger life; he saw it as a boundary beyond which they could not care to stray. After the golden bliss of the first days of her new life there, as Gerald's promised wife, there came for her a pause of rather perplexed reaction in this sense of limits, this sense of being placed in a position that she must keep, this strange sense of slow but sure metamorphosis into one of a succession of Mrs. Digbys whose wants were their husbands'.
'Yes, yes, I quite see, dear,' she said at intervals, while Gerald explained to her what it cost to keep up even such a small place. 'What a pity that those stocks of mine you were telling me about don't yield more. It isn't much we have, is it?'
'I think it's a great deal,' laughed Gerald. 'It's quite enough to be very happy on. And, first and foremost, when it's a question of happiness, and since you are so dear and generous, I shall be able to hunt at last and keep my own horses. I'm sick of being dependent on my friends for a mount now and then. Not that you'll have much sympathy with that particular form of happiness, I know,' he added, smiling, as he put his hand on her shoulder and scanned the next document.
Althea was silent for a moment. She hardly knew what the odd shock that went through her meant; then she recognised that it was fear. To see it as that gave her courage; at all events, love Gerald as she did, she would not be a coward for love of him. The effort was in her voice, making it tremulous, as she said: 'But, Gerald, you know I don't like hunting; you know I think it cruel.'
He looked at her; he smiled. 'So do I, you nice dear.'
'But you won't pain me by doing it—you will give it up?'