Apparently Mrs. Fanshawe was taking a rest from thinking about Elizabeth all the evening. She seemed to realize this and hurried back to her subject.
"And if it is sad for me, how much more sad it must be for you, darling, for you used to enjoy yourself so in India with your horses and dogs. I am sure you used to laugh fifty times a day out there, for once that I hear you laugh now. But it is not only of your loss of gaiety that I have been thinking so much. There are things more important than that, especially while you are young. The loss of your father's care and thought for you makes such a dreadful blank, and I, weighed down with all the petty cares and economies which we have to practise, cannot look after you as constantly as I used. My days are so full with the care of the house, and with writing your dear father's Memoir, which all these weeks has been to me nothing less than a sacred duty. And even if I was quite free, it would be impossible for me, a little weak, silly, helpless woman, to supervise your growing up with the wisdom and large grasp of a man. I have been doing my best, I think I can say that, but I know how feeble and wanting my best has been."
There had been no opportunity, so continuous had been the prattle of this monologue, for Elizabeth to speak at all. For this she was grateful, for she would have found it difficult enough to frame any sincere reply to this endless tissue of insincerities that were only half-conscious of themselves. Mrs. Fanshawe had been so long accustomed to look upon the utterly inaccurate picture of herself, of which she was the artist, so long unaccustomed to look on the actual origin of it, that she really had got to confuse the two, or, rather, to obliterate the one in favour of the imaginary portrait. But to-night Elizabeth did not feel the smallest resentment at this imposture; she regarded her mother as she would have regarded some charade-acting child, and was willing to encourage its belief in the reality of its acting. For Mrs. Fanshawe, as for a child, this dressing-up was real. And Elizabeth could almost see her father listening with a smile that for all its tenderness did not lack humour. He would have been amused, surely, at it all. For all his own simplicity and sincerity, he had never wanted to improve and edify others. At the most he only encouraged them, like the beloved plants in his garden, to grow and blossom. Besides, he had loved his wife (for the life of her Elizabeth had never been able to guess why), and that simple fact—a fact which no one should try to explain away—took precedence of everything else.
There was a pause for a few gentle applications of a very small lace handkerchief, and it became incumbent on Elizabeth to say something. She knew, of course, perfectly well what her stepmother was leading up to, and since she appeared to find it difficult to come to the point, Elizabeth decided to help her.
"And so you and Sir Henry——" she began.
That was quite enough. Mrs. Fanshawe rose swiftly from her chair, bent over her, and kissed her.
"My darling, yes," she said. "And I am so glad you have guessed. I was so afraid it would come as a shock to you, that I only promised Henry that I would tell you to-night, if I could. I said he must trust to my instinct, as to whether I should not only begin to prepare you for it. I told him that he could not know, as I knew, how deeply you loved your father, and that I must judge whether to tell you at once or not. I said I would not wound my dear little Elizabeth's heart for anything. But now you have guessed, how nice that is! And, oh, what a true and wise friend and second father you will find in him, Elizabeth! Do you wonder now, my darling, that I said how much I had been thinking of you all this evening!"
Suddenly it was borne in upon the girl that this play-acting was really going too far. It seemed impermissible to allow even a child to take its inventions quite so seriously. It was as if the child insisted on having real solid food and real champagne provided for its pasteboard banquet. Yet, yet—was there any gain to any one in saying, "Remember, you are only acting?" She knew well there was not. Detection and exposure of even such abominable insincerities as these never yet did any good to the—the criminal. It only made her resent the cruel perspicacity of their exposer, or possibly exercise a little more ingenuity in their inventions. She would be wiser to enter into the spirit of these imaginative flights. But it was like seeing somebody waving his arms, saying, "See, I am a bird; how high I fly!" and pretending to look upwards and be dazzled and made giddy by this reckless feat of aviation.
"It was sweet of you to think of me as well," was as much as could humanly be expected of the best intentions.