But with Baltazar it was different. She disliked him cordially and, with her dislike, there mingled a considerable element of quite definite fear. The precise nature of this fear she was unable to gauge. In a measure it sprang from his unfailing urbanity and the almost effusive manner in which he talked to her and rallied her with little witticisms whenever they met. Nance’s own turn of mind was singularly direct and simple and she could not avoid a perpetual suspicion in dealing with Mr. Stork that the man was covertly mocking at her and seeking to make her betray herself in some way. There was something about his whole personality which baffled and perplexed her. His languid and effeminate manner seemed to conceal some hard and inflexible attitude towards life which, like a steel blade in a velvet scabbard, was continually on the point of revealing its true nature and yet never actually did. She completely distrusted his influence over Sorio and indeed carried her suspicion of him to the extreme point of even doubting his affection for his old-time friend. Nothing about him seemed to her genuine or natural. When he spoke of art, as he often did, or uttered vague, cynical commentaries upon life in general, she felt towards him just as a girl feels towards another girl whose devices to attract attention seem to be infringing the legitimate limit of recognized rivalry. It was not only that she suspected him of every sort of hypocritical diplomacy or that every attitude he adopted seemed a deliberate pose; it was that in some indescribably subtle way he seemed to make her feel as if her own gestures and speeches were false. He troubled and agitated her to such an extent that she was driven sometimes into a mood of such desperate self-consciousness that she did actually become insincere or at any rate felt herself saying and doing things which failed to express what she really had in her mind. This was especially the case when he was present at her encounters with Sorio. She found herself on such occasions uttering sometimes the wildest speeches, speeches quite far from her natural character, and even when she tried passionately to be herself she was half-conscious all the while that Baltazar was watching her and, so to speak, clapping his hands encouragingly and urging her on. It was just as if she heard him whispering in her ear and saying, “That’s a pretty speech, that’s an effective turn of the head, that’s a happily timed smile, that’s an appealing little silence!”
His presence seemed to perplex and bewilder the very basis and foundation of her confidence in herself. What was natural he made unnatural and what was spontaneous he made premeditated. He seemed to dive down into the very depths of her soul and stir up and make muddy and clouded what was clearest and simplest there. The little childish impulses and all the impetuous girlish movements of her mind became silly and forced when he was present, became something that might have been different had she willed them to be different, something that she was deliberately using to bewitch Adrian.
The misery of it was that she couldn’t be otherwise, that she couldn’t look and talk and laugh and be silent, in any other manner. And yet he made her feel as if this were not only possible but easy. He was diabolically and mercilessly clever in his malign clairvoyance. Nance was not so simple as not to recognize that there are a hundred occasions when a girl quite legitimately and naturally “makes the best” of her passing moods and feelings. She was not so stupid as not to know that the very diffusion of a woman’s emotions, through every fibre and nerve of her being, lends itself to innumerable little exaggerations and impulsive underscorings, so to speak, of the precise truth. But it was just these very basic or, if the phrase may be permitted, these “organic” characteristics of her self-expression, that Baltazar’s unnatural watchfulness was continually pouncing on. In some curious way he succeeded, though himself a man, in betraying the very essence of her sex-dignity. He threw her, in fact, into a position of embarrassed self-defence over what were really the inevitable accompaniments of her being a woman at all.
The unfairness of the thing was constantly being accentuated and made worse by the fact of her having so often to listen to bitter and sarcastic diatribes from both Adrian and his friend, directed towards her sex in general. A sort of motiveless jibing against women seemed indeed one of the favourite pastimes of the two men and Nance’s presence, when this topic came forward, appeared rather to enhance than mitigate their hostility.
On one or two occasions of this kind, Dr. Raughty had happened to be present and Nance felt she would never forget her gratitude to this excellent man for the genial and ironical way he reduced them to silence.
“I’m glad you have invented,” he would say to them, “so free and inexpensive a way of getting born. You’ve only to give us a little more independence and death will be equally satisfactory.”
On this particular afternoon, however, Baltazar was not encouraging Sorio in any misogynistic railings. On the contrary he was endeavouring to soothe his friend who at that moment was in one of his worst moods.
“Why doesn’t she come?” he kept jerking out. “She knows perfectly how I hate waiting in the street.”
“Come and sit down under the trees,” suggested Baltazar. “She’s sure to come out on the green to look for you and we can see her from there.”
They moved off accordingly and sat down, side by side, with a group of village people under the ancient sycamores. Above them the nameless Admiral looked steadily sea-wards and in the shadow thrown by the trees several ragged little girls were playing sleepily on the burnt-up grass.