"She seems a witty old lady," he said. "Her daughter-in-law can't be dull with her."
"She's witty, but I always feel her a little spiteful, too," said Gwendolen. "We never get on, she and I. I hate hearing my neighbours scored off, and she has such an eye for people's foibles. I don't think that Cicely always quite likes it, either; but they are devoted to each other. If it weren't for old Mrs. Waterlow, I'd try to see a great deal more of Cicely; I'm really fond of her."
He did not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Gwendolen asked him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time of all others when Gwendolen and her ministrations would have been most acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influences, feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The thought of Gwendolen and of her possible place in his life must be adjourned—adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he was able to meet it more impartially.
He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms, the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the real one. The sight of her brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwendolen had all the ethical advantages and even, if it came to that, all the æsthetic ones; yet, ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged Gwendolen's virtues and Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that he could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Gwendolen, when he must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friendship with her, tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that Gwendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could not be combined.
Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote to her in November and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours' wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.
He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the spacious windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow. This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led for a second time into the drawing-room.
He had been obliged on the former visit to conceal astonishment; but now he found himself alone, and no concealment was needed. And the former astonishment was slight compared with this one. He felt almost giddy as he gazed about him. Nothing was the same. Everything was fantastically, incredibly different, except—his eye caught it with a sharpened pang of wonder—the white pagoda; for there, in the centre of the room, upon a round, mahogany table, with heavily bowed and richly carven legs, the white pagoda stood, and under it an old bead mat,—a mat of faded, old blue beads,—his eyes were riveted on the pagoda and its setting,—of white and gray and blue beads dotted with pink rosebuds. At regular intervals, raying out from the centre, books were placed upon the table—small, sober books bound in calf.
So the pagoda stood, the pivot of an incredible room; yet, inconceivable as it seemed, as right there, all its exquisite absurdity revealed, as it had been right in the other. It was the one link that joined them, the one thread in the labyrinth of his astonishment; and it seemed, with its ambiguous, fantastic smile, to symbolize its absent owner. Was it an exquisite, extravagant, elaborate joke that she and the pagoda were having together?
For the whole room was now a joke. It was furnished with a suite of black satin—sofas, easy-chairs, little chairs with carved, excruciating backs, all densely buttoned and richly fringed. Over the backs of the easy-chairs were laid antimacassars of finely crocheted white lace. Upon two tall pieces of mahogany, ranged up and down with knobbed drawers and recalling in their decorous solidity the buttoned bodices of mid-Victorian matrons, stood high-handled, white marble urns. An oval gilt mirror hung above the mantelpiece, and upon it stood two lustres ringed with prisms of glass and a little clock of gilt and marble, ornamented with two marble doves hovering over a gilt nest wherein lay marble eggs. Between the clock and the lustres, on either side, was a vase of Bohemian glass, each holding a small nosegay of red and white roses. Mahogany footstools with bead-worked tops stood before the fire, and upon the walls hung, exquisite in their absurdity, like the pagoda, a whole botanical series of flat, feeble old flower-pieces, neatly coloured drawings, as accurate and as lifeless as vigilant, uninspired labour could make them.