My dear Daughter,—Your letter came to me as a great surprise. Firstly, I should like to express to your Aunt Caroline the deep sense of obligation we all feel under in regard to her, not only in the matter of her very great kindness to you personally, but also for the great kindness and consideration she extended to Elizabeth during her month’s sojourn at Pen-y-Gros Castle. Elizabeth cannot find enough to say in her praise.
Now in regard to yourself, my dear Araminta, while I recognize to the full the dazzling nature of your prospects, and I do not know in what manner to thank your Aunt for her princely suggestion, I want you to believe, and I want her to believe also, that I have no other thought and no other desire than that whatever line of action you embark upon shall lead to your ultimate and permanent happiness. That above everything is what I desire. I have refrained from attaching my signature to the deed of settlement which your Aunt has been so kind as to send to me, for while recognizing to the full her large-hearted generosity and her really princely munificence, I shall like to have your own assurance, my dear Daughter, that you are consulting your own highest welfare and happiness irrespective of that of anyone else. I trust your Aunt will not consider me lacking in gratitude or in practical common sense. Please write to me again upon the subject, and believe me to remain your affectionate father,
Aloysius Perry.
Aunt Caroline snorted a good deal when she read this letter. She declared it was so like a parson to say a great deal more than he need in order to express a great deal less than he ought. However, she was perfectly ruthless upon the subject. Araminta was ordered to allay the scruples of her father; and this the unhappy Goose Girl did, with many private tears, to her aunt’s dictation.
In due course the document was returned with her father’s signature. Then she felt that indeed her doom was sealed. She was a most docile and duteous creature, and even Aunt Caroline admitted it; but her appetite declined, her laughter lost its gayety, her youth its cheerful irresponsibility, and life became for her a heavy and listless routine.
Poor Jim Lascelles had his bad time too. He returned to the Acacias with his mother, fully determined to maintain his tripartite rôle of a Lascelles, a hero, and a gentleman. He determined to take the superhuman course of acting as though the Goose Girl had no place in his life whatever.
Alas for the vanity of human resolves! The first thing he did upon his return home was to take the key of his studio off the sitting-room chimney-piece in order to bestow a few final touches upon a work which by now was hardly in need of them. He deluded himself with the idea that the task was imposed in cold blood in order that he might prove to himself how strong he was, and that by the mere exercise of the will the image of the peerless original could be cut away from the living tissue of his thoughts.
Alas! it could not be done. Jim Lascelles failed dismally to assert the mind’s dominion. A strange excitement overtook him, and for several days he worked in quite a frenzy of enthusiasm, modifying this, painting out that, enhancing the other. It was a dangerous kind of solace. He performed surprising feats, it is true; his color grew more and more audacious, only to be harmonized marvelously, but he could not sleep at night. He came down to breakfast haggard and wild-eyed, and looking a degree more unstable than when he had retired in the small hours of the morning.
He had determined to withhold from his mother the true state of the case. But he had hopelessly underrated the flair of the genus. Very soon she had the truth out of him; and, without letting Jim see her concern, she grew alarmed for him. Yet she could confess to no surprise. From the first she had foreseen that this was a turn the thing must take almost inevitably. Had it not been Lord Cheriton, it must have been another. For the Goose, notwithstanding her limited capacity, was an absurdly regal creature; one of those oddly compounded, solemn, unaspiring masterpieces designed by nature for a gorgeous frame, who by a kind of inalienable right command a splendid destiny.
Jim’s mother blamed herself, as mothers are so apt to do, although she really had no part in Jim’s misfortune. She had merely lent a kind of whimsical countenance to the young fellow’s ambitions, in order primarily to give him a zest in his work. The consequences entailed by the acquisition of that zest bade fair to become melancholy; but in any case the responsibility for laying the mine was not hers, any more than it was Cheriton’s for applying the match.