“Ah, yet I am often at home at this hour.”
The touch of surprised suspicion was gone; Mr. Merrick spoke with benignity.
“Ah, but it’s difficult, you see.” Angela’s smile gained at once in gaiety and plaintiveness. “I had so hoped to see more of you all; I hoped when your daughter came to London that as an old friend of her husband’s—he is like a brother to me—was, I perhaps should say—she would let me be her friend too. London is a big, ugly place for a fresh young creature. I know it so well. I should have liked to hold her hand as it were, while she made her first steps in the muddy, slippery world.”
Mr. Merrick looked now a trifle perplexed, and Angela felt that she had gone a little too fast as he said, “I have been with Felicia from almost the beginning of her London life; and since I fancy that I know the world better than any young woman can know it”—he inclined himself to Angela with a slight, paternal irony of manner—“she has had her hand held. I have watched over my young nestlings,” Mr. Merrick added, smiling kindly upon her.
“Yes, yes,” she hurried to say, “a man knows more, of course—can guard from anything obvious; but the things to be guarded against in our complex modern life are not the obvious things; they are breaths, whispers, vague touches in the dark. Dear Mr. Merrick,”—her gentle look had now its rallying touch of boldness—“men do not hear or feel the things I mean. And, again, you are a man of the world, but your daughter is not a woman of the world. I know what you have wished for her—to keep your rose-bud sheltered, the dew still upon it; so often the ideal of the father when he has seen life in all its dangerous reality. You have succeeded; she is a rose-bud with the dew on it. Dear Mr. Merrick, keep it dewy.” Her smile straight into his eyes was grave, steady. Maître Corbeau was flattered by her words, her look. The vague self-distrust that often fluttered in him, that fear of perhaps lacking what she so delightfully saw in him, was still. He had hardly grasped the significance of her allusions.
“You see,” Angela went on quietly,—she was by now quite sincerely in the very frame of mind her words fitted, warning, protective, benignant, exalted in his eyes so that the mood of that final “God bless you” was with her again, a mist that shut out flames,—“You see, your daughter is younger than I am. In one sense—it may sound odd, but I am very clear-sighted in all matters of sympathy—in one sense I doubt whether she could understand you as I do.”
Angela’s voice was as mild and smooth as milk and honey as she glided to another turn of her labyrinth. “There is an inevitable narrowness, intolerance, in youth; something cruel in the clearness of young minds, unable to see beyond their own acuteness. It didn’t surprise me that neither she nor Maurice appreciated your essay. I disagreed with it, but I saw the bigness of my opponent, saw all the thought and life and suffering that underlay every sentence; and when I realized that they saw only the little superficial things, that they laughed at the shrubs and thickets and didn’t even look up at the mountain, I felt all the strange situation, all the pain it must be to you; felt, forgive me if I say too much, your loneliness.”
Mr. Merrick was amazed, perhaps more amazed by this revelation of some unkind disloyalty in his children, than gratified by Angela’s sympathy. But though he could feel little gratitude he felt no distrust; and his injuries suddenly lowered, even larger than he had fancied. Maurice too! There was treachery then as well as disloyalty. The sudden grievance could not be kept down.
“I am surprised at Maurice. He urged me to publish, seemed to see nothing but the mountain,” he said.
Angela felt a hasty recoil from this false step; she had imagined the dissuasions both Felicia’s and Maurice’s.