Whether the elder lady was equally deceived by his ambiguous phrases, it was not so easy to declare. She had, at this time less than ever, the mode of persons who wear their hearts upon their sleeves; her mask of half-cynical good-humour was constantly up; and she met the girl's hinted interrogations—for directly the nature of their uneasiness, by a sort of tacit agreement, was not alluded to—with the same smiling indifference, the same air of bland reassurance which she brought to the discussion of a sauce or an entremet at one of those select little dinner-parties on which she piqued herself, and which latterly had been more incessant and more select than ever.
Only on Mary's sensitive ear something in the elaborately cheerful tone in which she mentioned their vanished friend would occasionally jar. It was too perfectly well done not to appear a little exaggerated; and though she could force a smile at Lady Garnett's persistent picture of the recalcitrant godson basking, with his pretext of ill-health, on the sunny terraces of Monte Carlo, she none the less cherished a suspicion that the picture was as little convincing to its author as to herself, that her aunt also had silent moments in which she credited the more depressing theory.
And the long silence simply deepened her conviction that, all the time they were imposing upon themselves with such vain conjectures, he was actually within their reach, sick and sorry and alone, in that terrible Blackpool, which she peopled, in her imagination of a young lady whose eastward wanderings had never extended beyond a flower show in the Temple Gardens, with a host of vague, inconceivable horrors.
From Bordighera, from Monaco, she argued, he would certainly have written, if it were only a line of reassurance, for there his isolation was impregnable. Only the fact that he had stayed on in London could account for the need of this second arm of silence, as well as of solitude, to enforce his complete withdrawal from the torment of tongues.
Certainly, wherever he might actually be, the girl had never realized more fully than just then what an irreparable gap estrangement from him made in her life.
There was, indeed, no pause in the stream of clever, cultivated, charming persons who rang daily at their discriminating door, who drank tea in their drawing-room, and talked felicitously for their entertainment.
It was a miscellaneous company, although the portal was difficult in a manner, and opened only on conditions of its own—conditions, it may be said, which, to the uninitiated, to the excluded, seemed fantastic enough.
One might be anything, Lady Garnett's constant practice seemed to enunciate, provided one was not a bore; one could represent anything—birth or wealth, or the conspicuous absence of these qualities—so long as one also effectively represented one's self. This was the somewhat democratic form which the old lady's aristocratic tradition assumed.
It was not, then, without a certain pang of self-reproach that Mary wondered one evening—it was at the conclusion of one of their most successful entertainments—that a company so brilliant, so distinguished, should have left her only with a nervous headache and a distinct sense of satisfaction that the last guest had gone.
Was she, then, after all an unworthy partaker of the feast which her aunt had so long and liberally spread for her delectation?