“I won’t rest till I have got you away from that man,” he would murmur to her after long periods of contemplation. We know from Powell how he used to sit on the skylight near the long deck-chair on which Flora was reclining, gazing into her face from above with an air of guardianship and investigation at the same time.
It is almost impossible to say if he ever had considered the event rationally. The avatar of de Barral into Mr. Smith had not been effected without a shock—that much one must recognize. It may be that it drove all practical considerations out of his mind, making room for awful and precise visions which nothing could dislodge afterwards.
And it might have been the tenacity, the unintelligent tenacity, of the man who had persisted in throwing millions of other people’s thrift into the Lone Valley Railway, the Labrador Docks, the Spotted Leopard Copper Mine, and other grotesque speculations exposed during the famous de Barral trial, amongst murmurs of astonishment mingled with bursts of laughter. For it is in the Courts of Law that Comedy finds its last refuge in our deadly serious world. As to tears and lamentations, these were not heard in the august precincts of comedy, because they were indulged in privately in several thousand homes, where, with a fine dramatic effect, hunger had taken the place of Thrift.
But there was one at least who did not laugh in court. That person was the accused. The notorious de Barral did not laugh because he was indignant. He was impervious to words, to facts, to inferences. It would have been impossible to make him see his guilt or his folly—either by evidence or argument—if anybody had tried to argue.
Neither did his daughter Flora try to argue with him. The cruelty of her position was so great, its complications so thorny, if I may express myself so, that a passive attitude was yet her best refuge—as it had been before her of so many women.
For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply stupid. But she is never dense. She’s never made of wood through and through as some men are. There is in woman always, somewhere, a spring. Whatever men don’t know about women (and it may be a lot or it may be very little) men and even fathers do know that much. And that is why so many men are afraid of them.
Mr. Smith I believe was afraid of his daughter’s quietness though of course he interpreted it in his own way.
He would, as Mr. Powell depicts, sit on the skylight and bend over the reclining girl, wondering what there was behind the lost gaze under the darkened eyelids in the still eyes. He would look and look and then he would say, whisper rather, it didn’t take much for his voice to drop to a mere breath—he would declare, transferring his faded stare to the horizon, that he would never rest till he had “got her away from that man.”
“You don’t know what you are saying, papa.”
She would try not to show her weariness, the nervous strain of these two men’s antagonism around her person which was the cause of her languid attitudes. For as a matter of fact the sea agreed with her.