“I am not surprised,” Captain Saltonhall commented.
“No; but that’s not relevant, Bevis; because one doesn’t expect one’s mother-in-law to like one, however charming one may be. What I felt about it was that Cicely had starved her, just as she starved Cicely. Neither could give the other anything except absolute trust. Cicely was the fonder, I think, for old Mrs. Wellwood was cold as well as shy, cold to every one but Malcolm; even with me she was cold; and even with Malcolm she was, always, shy.”
“Dismal it sounds, for all of them.”
“No; it wasn’t that. Cheerful and serene rather. But all the same Cicely is pathetic. And the more I think of her, the more I admire her. She’s so individual, yet so impersonal, if one can make the distinction. There’s no appeal of any sort; no demand. She never seems to need anything or to ask anything; perhaps that is why she doesn’t gain devotion; the more self-absorbed and demanding people are, the more devotion they get, I’m afraid. At all events, she’s absolutely devoted; absolutely selfless and straight.”
“What did they do with themselves, she and Mrs. Wellwood, when Malcolm wasn’t here to give them an object? I never saw his mother. He said she hated coming to town.”
“Oh, it was miserable to see them in town, as I did once; forlorn, caged birds. Malcolm was their object, you see, even when he wasn’t here. And they lived together just as Cicely lives now alone. There are country neighbours—Mrs. Wellwood was scrupulously sociable—and the village, and the garden. Cicely still goes to read to old bed-ridden women and to take them soup. I thought, in my London ignorance, that the lady-bountiful was a figure of fun to every one nowadays, flouted from the cottage door, and all the rest of it. But I’ve found out that there’s nothing the cottage really loves so well. Independence and committees bore them dreadfully; they have all that here; there’s an energetic vicar’s wife, and she got even poor Mrs. Wellwood on her committee; it bores the village people, but it frightened her. Cicely never would. I can’t imagine Cicely on a committee. She’d have nothing to say, though it wouldn’t frighten her.”
He had always savoured Antonia’s vagrant impressionism. “Did they read?” he asked.
“I should rather think so!” she laughed a little. “They were great on reading. All the biographies in two volumes and all the travels, and French mémoires—translated and expurgated. Cicely has the most ingenuous ideas about the court of Louis the Fourteenth. Novels, too; but they contrived always to miss the good ones. I don’t suppose they ever attempted a Henry James or heard of Anatole France.”
“And never danced a tango, à plus forte raison, or saw a Russian ballet.”
“They did see a Russian ballet, that once they were up. Malcolm and I took them. I think it bewildered Mrs. Wellwood, and Cicely was very dry about it. And they saw me dance the tango; I did it for them, here,” said Antonia, and involuntarily she sighed, although she did not look up at her companion. She and Bevis, adepts of the dance, had, before the war, danced together continually. “They liked seeing me do it,” she said. “They liked my differences and what they felt to be my audacities. But they’d have liked anything Malcolm did.” And then she came back to his first question. “As far as that goes, my remarrying, if I ever did, as long as it wasn’t too quickly, and some one Malcolm liked, I don’t for a moment think she’d mind.”