Mr. Dixon was very firm.
‘Ada could not do much better,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have wished a better husband for her: he’s strong, and he’s clever, and he knows what he is about. They trust him absolutely, his employers do. He’s making an uncommonly good thing out of those jute factories down the river, and if he isn’t a partner in the concern within a few years, my name is not Simon Dixon. I wouldn’t force the girl, but she tells me she wants him, and if so she shall have him; and thankful I am for her to do so well. So let’s hear no more about it.’
No more was said about it, openly; but Mrs. Dixon rebelled in secret. She knew Dixon too well to oppose him overtly, but she thought to herself that Ada and Roger were not married yet. She disliked him heartily: his awkward gait, his rough ways; his habit of laughing at her notions about gentility; the queer, rude things he said. And, above all, he galled her by insisting upon calling himself a working man, and telling Ada how she was going to be a working man’s wife.
‘As if I brought her up for that!’ the mother indignantly thought. He was just a bear, she felt, and about as fit as a bear to marry their Ada.
The engagement had now been going on for six months, and the marriage, it was thought, should not take place for another year. Roger did not rebel against this. Loving Ada with his whole soul, and as unselfishly as man could love, he yet saw very clearly that her love for him was not as his love for her. He was sure that gentleness, and kindness, and the educating influence of companionship and gradually growing sympathy, would teach her this love—as he had said to Michael, he had to educate her in some things (in the very art or nature of unselfish love, could he but have known it); and with a kind of sublime patience and sublime blindness, which might have been ridiculous if they had not been utterly pure of selfishness, he calmly set himself to wait out the year that had yet to elapse, and another after it, if necessary, and in that time to teach Ada to love him as he loved her. The process was not an exhilarating one; the effort was based upon the assumption of an impossibility—the assumption, namely, that such love can be taught. But Roger did not know this.
Just now he and Ada had found a pastime in which both had something in common. They were rehearsing songs for a concert at which the amateur talent of the neighbourhood was to display itself for the benefit of the church schools, and incidentally for the pride and delight of its own soul and the edification of the neighbourhood at large. This great event always took place in the month of December, and on this occasion Ada was for the first time to appear on the platform. She was to sing in a duet with her patroness, Miss Wynter, and Roger was to play the accompaniment for them.
Despite this congenial occupation, Roger and his betrothed this evening had several differences of opinion. Ada was excited about her visit to Balder Hall, related every incident that had occurred, and every word that had been spoken there after her own arrival upon the scene; dwelling upon them with persistency—describing minutely Miss Askam’s appearance, voice, and gestures, and especially her graciousness in coming and standing by her, Ada Dixon, while she sang. Also Magdalen’s dress, and Otho’s long conversation with her, and the new-fashioned table-covers which Miss Wynter had on her small tea-table. All this was inexpressibly galling to Roger, who hated what he called ‘that lot,’ with an uncompromising scorn. He would have had Ada stand as coolly aloof from them as he did himself, but she would not. Balder Hall and its inmates and visitors were to him the abode of a false woman, unworthy of consideration, and the rendezvous of her intimates. To Ada, on the contrary, Balder Hall was the fairy palace where, to speak metaphorically, the roofs were of gold and the windows of diamonds; the woman in it was her ideal of beauty, elegance, fashion, and superiority in general, and the woman’s friends and acquaintances were other bright apparitions belonging to the same enchanted sphere. She was very eloquent to-night, partly because she wished to provoke Roger, partly because her mind was quite filled with the afternoon’s entertainment. He could, as he said, get neither rhyme nor reason from her, and when he returned to the Red Gables, earlier than usual, there was a cloud on his brow.
CHAPTER XVIII
A WILD-GOOSE CHASE
It was nearly a fortnight later, and the dusk of evening crept over everything. From the window of her sitting-room, facing south, with a little inclination to west, Eleanor could catch a glimpse of the evening sky, but not of the setting sun itself, which came but little north of west at this time of the year. She could see the terraces, spreading downwards to the river-side, and she had a partial view of the stream itself, leaden in hue, but swift in the race. The tall, heavy trees stood motionless: one realised all the stateliness, and with it all the melancholy, of the place. For Thorsgarth had always been a melancholy house.
Eleanor sat in the embrasure of the window, with a half-open book in her lap. It had grown too dark to read any longer, and she raised her eyes from the page and looked out. As the gloaming fell, the firelight gleamed out more strongly, but it did not reach as far as where she sat, and the cold light of the departing day was all that fell upon her face. Perhaps this cold light lent something to the impression of sadness, and even of sternness, which had overcast her countenance since she had come home. Whether from that cause or from some other, it was quite certain that there was a slight expression of sternness upon her lips; the strength and resolution which lay beneath her ripe and gracious beauty had decidedly stepped to the front.