“No, Jeanie,” said Mrs Palmer, emphatically, “that I certainly would not.”
Constancy, unable for once to come to the front, sat down at a little distance. She heard Jeanie, with a much readier, and more assured manner than of old, saying all the things to the Stauntons that might be expected from a young lady on her travels. She said that the mountains were perfectly sweet, and so were the cows and the peasants. Mother got into fusses sometimes, but it did not matter; she was quite happy when she could sit down. They had met charming people. Constancy felt a frightful conviction that, if she spoke, she should cry.
After the manner of her day, and of her kind, however, she got over her agitation for herself. She never could have supposed that the sight and sound of Jeanie would be so aggravating. No more than she could have guessed beforehand, that the one face that would flash before her mental vision in that supreme moment, when life and death had hung in the balance, would be Godfrey’s, angry and miserable, as it had looked at her from the doorway at Moorhead, or in the dim light of the Stauntons’ drawing-room. That had come to her, and that was all.
Constancy endured this self-revelation in silence. She had not, at any rate, revealed this to Guy, in the moment of impulsive confidence that had ensued. What had induced her to say so much? She remembered that, in one of the discussions in which she delighted, she had cheerfully asked him what he thought Tennyson had meant by “the abysmal deeps of personality,” and he had answered dryly—
“I haven’t quite sounded them—yet.”
It had passed for a jest; but as she recalled the short, unexpected sentences with which he had answered her, she felt that he had meant it for a statement of fact, and of very remarkable fact too. It was characteristic of her that she speculated about Guy even at this moment of personal emotion.
She gave herself a little mental shake, and turned to get ready for the table-d’hôte.
She had never been really unhappy in her life before. She had never really been beset by a thought that prevented her from thinking of what she wished to think of, and claimed her for its own.
Guy disliked the fatigue of the long dinner, and rarely attended it. He was sitting in his favourite corner, when a movement made him aware that people were coming out again, and Mrs Palmer, in much smarter clothes than of old, but with an unmistakable air of Ingleby and home, came and sat down by him.
“My dear Guy,” she said, “you’re one of the family, and I want to confide in you.”