Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely playful.
“Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship’s sake,” he said, “rather than for Mrs. Merrick’s.” And Angela was unable to repress an assenting though superficial lightness.
CHAPTER VI
GEOFFREY and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an heiress of good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her greater intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under the wife’s guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate, a seat in Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the Government’s disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted in the extremest forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were at all veracious.
Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters all well-married, inherited the father’s heavy determination, the mother’s nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took their place among the more tawdry great names of England. They never distinguished the name, and after the first swift climb aspired to no further heights. They were wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what they had, and held it firmly.
Angela’s father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and sentimental. She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open scandal, and written a flimsy political novel interesting only from its thinly veiled personalities; she long posed as the typical femme incomprise, and just before her death she became fervently religious.
Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as possible, finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her mother’s character seemed absurdly to hold up to her.
Geoffrey’s strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against all manner of restrictions.
The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his wife’s tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley blood, possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal forms. The strain, in passing through the two or three generations of simple and dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears, had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high places, and when, with not unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity for self-advancement, she transferred her passionate and patient hopes to her son. For him she saved, slaved and battled. Geoffrey never learned, until shortly after his father’s death, that his own opportunities were won not only by his mother’s battlings, but by his father’s martyrdom.
John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense, had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of thinking about them—they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving the Church.