‘Aunt Margaret has got a tea-party of school-teachers. She always has one about this time. Did you want to see papa?’
‘I am afraid I don’t quite know what I want,’ he answered, with a great sigh of exceeding weariness, as he rested his elbow on the mantelpiece, and looked at her with his sombre, mournful eyes. ‘I don’t think I do want to see your father–at least, I felt very glad when I saw you alone. I think I want to escape from myself and my thoughts, Nita.’
‘Why, do your thoughts trouble you?’ she asked, softly and timidly.
‘Sometimes they do, very much–to-night particularly. Will you let me sit with you a little while, or must I go back again to Monk’s Gate and solitude?’
‘Oh, Mr. Wellfield, you know that you are always welcome here, when it pleases you to come!’
‘That is a good hearing,’ he answered, and such was the odd mixture of the man’s nature, he felt that it was good. He felt that from Nita he would receive no blows or buffets, or rough words–nothing but (metaphorically speaking) tenderest caresses and softest whispers. To go back to solitude, and the harsh accusations of conscience, and the disagreeable anticipations for the future, was not in him; so he stayed.
‘Do you never feel restless?’ he went on. ‘Do you never feel as if you would like to set off on some indefinite journey, and without knowing where you were going–with a sort of “onwards–but whither?” feeling, that you would just like to go on and on, and for ever on, till life itself came to a stop? Have you never felt it?’
‘Yes, often,’ said Nita, in a low voice. She was standing opposite to him, on the other side of the fireplace. Her hands–soft, pretty, little white hands–were folded lightly one over the other. Jerome, in his idle sentimentalising, had time to notice that she had on very pretty black-lace mittens, and that the stones of some rings sparkled through them; that a gold bracelet was pushed tightly up the rounded arm. He scarcely observed her averted face–her eyes looking into the fire; her rapidly-heaving bosom; and he prosed on, because he liked talking to her–because it was easy to make himself out sad, and blighted and persecuted.
‘I felt sure you had,’ he said. ‘That is what I feel to-night. But for your father’s goodness to me–but for the stern mandate of reason and necessity and common sense, I would set off now, this moment; and leave Wellfield, never to return to it.’
He had spoken this time without rhyme or reason; without any arrière pensée–any calculation as to the effect his words might have upon her; and when he saw what it was, even he was startled.