We should flatter him in supposing Harry Boyce of a chivalrous delicacy. Whether the lady's fair fame might be the worse for him was a question of which he never thought. It is certain that he did not blame himself for using his place as Geoffrey's paid servant to damage Geoffrey in his affections. And indeed you will agree that he was innocent of any designed attack upon the lady. Yet Mr. Hadley succeeded in making him very uncomfortable.
What most troubled him, I conceive, was the fear of being ridiculous. The position of a poor tutor aspiring to the favours of the heiress destined for his master invites the unkind gibe. And Harry could not be sure that Alison herself was free from the desire to make him a figure of scorn. Such a suspicion might disconcert the most ardent of lovers. Harry Boyce, whatever his abilities in the profession, was not that yet. But the very fact that he had come to feel an ache of longing for Alison made him for once dread laughter. If he had been manoeuvring for what he could get by her, or if he had been merely taken by her good looks, he might have met jeering with a brazen face. But she had engaged his most private emotions, and to have them made ludicrous would be of all possible punishments most intolerable. The precise truth of what he felt for her then was, I suppose, that he wanted to make her his own—wanted to have all of her in his power; and a gentleman whom the world—and the lady—are laughing at for an aspiring menial cannot comfortably think about his right to possess her.
There was something else. He was not meticulously delicate, but he had a complete practical sanity. He saw very well that even if Alison, by the chance of circumstance, had some infatuation for him, she might soon repent: he saw that even if the affair went with romantic success—a thing hardly possible—his position and hers might be awkward enough. Her friends would be long in forgiving either of them, and find ways enough to hurt them both. Mr. Hadley, confound him, spoke the common sense of mankind.
There was one solution—that estimable father. By the time he came back to the house on Tether-down, Harry was resolved to enlist under the ambiguous banner of Colonel Boyce.
CHAPTER VII
GENEROSITY OF A FATHER
With grim irony Harry congratulated himself on his decision. When first he came into the house he heard Alison singing. There was indeed (as he told himself clearly) nothing wonderful about her voice—it resembled the divine only in being still and small. Yet he could not (he called himself still more clearly a fool) keep away from it, and so he slunk into Lady Waverton's drawing-room. Only duty and stated hours were wont to drag him there. Lady Waverton showed her appreciation of his unusual attendance by staring at him across the massed trifles of the room with sleepy and insolent amazement. But it was not the glassy eyes of Lady Waverton which convinced Harry that flight was the true wisdom. Over Alison at the harpsichord, Geoffrey hung tenderly: their shoulders touched, eyes answered eyes, and miss was radiant. She sang at him with a naughty archness that song of Mr. Congreve's:
"Thus to a ripe consenting maid,
Poor old repenting Delia said,
Would you long preserve your lover?
Would you still his goddess reign?
Never let him all discover,
Never let him much obtain.
Men will admire, adore and die
While wishing at your feet they lie;
But admitting their embraces
Wakes 'em from the golden dream:
Nothing's new besides our faces,
Every woman is the same."
She contorted her own face into smug folly by way of illustration. Then she and Geoffrey laughed together. "I vow you're the most deliciously wicked creature that ever was born a maid."