“I have stayed here because I love your daughter.”
IV
Lady Selina gasped as she sat rigid in her chair, but of the three she was the first to recover self-possession. Cicely, absolutely unprepared, remained tremblingly silent. Grimshaw was too moved to say more. After an interminable pause, he heard the autocrat’s soft, derisive voice:
“My son, Brian, warned me against that possibility, and I laughed at him—I laughed at him.”
Grimshaw spoke less calmly.
“I am not ashamed of loving her, but I am ashamed of trying to win a wife by playing the humbug and hypocrite.”
Lady Selina tried in vain to assimilate this. He loved Cicely; did she love him? The girl was now, apparently, in one of her absurd trances, looking exactly like her father. The mother was familiar with these curious seizures, but Grimshaw knew nothing of them. Cicely seemed to be turned into stone. She looked cold as marble. Beneath this impassive surface a battle was raging, as before, between the two Cicelys. The body remained aloof and inert. To the old Cicely Grimshaw’s declaration seemed brutally inopportune. Without consulting her, he had sunk all the little boats, a tiny fleet, which carried her plans and hopes. She felt that she was swamped with them, foundering helplessly in mid-channel with the farther shore almost within sight. With so much at stake, why had he acted so precipitately? At such moment, odd phrases obsess the mind. She kept on repeating to herself a French sentence learnt at school, an exercise in articulation:
“Je me précipite,
“Tu te précipites,
“Il se précipite.”