'I shall fulfil all my engagements as if nothing had happened.'
'Much the best way,' she agreed, recognising a stolid courage in him which commanded some admiration. He was facing what he hated most in the world—ridicule; he was forced to realise one of the things that a man least likes to realise—that he has failed to manage a woman whom he has undertaken to manage. No eccentricities of sin or folly in her, no repeated failures to find anything amiss in himself, can take away the sting.
'I can't blame myself,' he said more than once to Mrs. Bonfill; but the conviction of his blamelessness yielded no comfort.
She understood his feeling, and argued against it; but it remained with him still, in spite of all she could say. He had always been satisfied with himself; he was very ill-satisfied now. Some malicious spirit in himself seemed to join in the chorus of ill-natured laughter from outside which his pride and sensitiveness conjured to his ears. Beaufort Chance had walked the streets once in fear of the whispers of passers-by saying that he had been proved a rogue. Mervyn walked them, and sat in his place in the House, imagining that the whispers said that he had been made a fool. But he faced all. Barslett bred courage, if not brilliancy; he faced even Beaufort Chance, who sat below the gangway, and screwed round on him a vicious smile the first time he appeared after the announcement.
On the whole he behaved well, but he had not even that glimmer of pity for Trix which had shone through his father's horrified pompousness. The movements of her mind remained an utter blank to him; why she had lied, an unsolved mystery. Amidst all his humiliation and his anger, he thanked heaven that such a woman would never now be mistress of Barslett; the affair constituted a terrible warning against experiments in marriage. If the question arose again—and in view of Barslett it must—he would follow the beaten track. In the bottom of his heart—though he confessed it to nobody, no, not to his parents nor to Mrs. Bonfill—he had something of the feeling of an ordinarily sober and strait-laced young man who has been beguiled into 'making a night of it' with rowdy companions, and in the morning hours undergoes the consequences of his unwonted outbreak: his head aches, he is exposed to irreverent comment, he is heartily determined to forswear such courses. Mervyn did not dream of seeking Trix, or of offering an amnesty. To his mind there was no alternative; he washed his hands of her, like Mrs. Bonfill.
Society took its cue from these authoritative examples, and was rather in a hurry to declare its attitude. It shows in such cases something of the timidity and prudery of people who are themselves not entirely proof against criticism, and are consequently much afraid of the noscitur a sociis test being applied to them. Even in moral matters it displays this readiness to take alarm, this anxiety to vindicate itself; much more so, of course, in the case of conduct which it terms, with vague but unmeasured reprobation, 'impossible.' Trix's behaviour had been 'impossible' in the highest degree, and there could be but one sentence. Yet, though society was eager to dissociate itself from such proceedings, it was not eager to stop talking about them; its curiosity and its desire to learn the whole truth were insatiable. Trix was banned; her particular friends became very popular. Lady Blixworth held levées of women who wanted to know. Peggy Ryle's appearances were greeted with enthusiasm. Where was Mrs. Trevalla? How was Mrs. Trevalla? Who (this was an after-thought, coming very late in the day, but demanded by the facts of the case) was Mrs. Trevalla after all? And, of course, the truth had yet to be told? Society held the cheerful conviction that it by no means knew the worst.
Any knowledge Lady Blixworth had, she professed to be at the disposal of her callers; she chose to give it in a form most calculated to puzzle and least likely to satisfy. 'There was a difference, but not amounting to a quarrel.' 'So far as we know, she has not left London.' 'She was certainly alone when she started from Barslett.' Utterances like these wasted the time of the inquirers and beguiled Lady Blixworth's. 'I'm going to stay with them soon,' she would add, 'but probably anything I may hear will be in confidence.' Such a remark as that was actively annoying. 'Oh, Audrey goes with me, yes,' might be a starting-point for conjecture as to the future, but threw no light on the elusive past. More than one lady was heard to declare that she considered Lady Blixworth an exasperating woman.
Peggy's serene silence served as well as these ingenious speeches. With an audacious truthfulness, which only her popularity with men made it safe to employ, she told the affronted world that she knew everything, but could say nothing. An assertion usually considered to be but a transparent and impudent mask of ignorance compelled unwilling belief when it came from her lips; but surely she could not persist in such an attitude? It cut at the roots of social intercourse. Peggy was incessantly abused and incessantly invited. She had frocks now to respond to every call, and at every call she came. She went even to houses which she had shown no anxiety to frequent before, and which seemed to offer the reward neither of pleasure nor of prestige for going.
'That child is up to something,' opined Lady Blixworth, after a week or two of this; and one day, at her own house, she kept Peggy back and took her firmly by the shoulders.
'What is it you want?' she asked squarely. 'Why have you been going to the Moresby-Jenkinses' and the Eli-Simpkinsons', and places of that sort?'