Drummond peered down into the eyes. Yes, there was a slight film upon the pupil of one.
"Cataract," said Walter Gray cheerfully. "I shall never be fit for my work any more, even if an operation should be successful. Marcella knows. Good girl, she has kept her own counsel. I have not been working for some time at the watches. Mr. Gordon, kind soul, continues my salary. I have been learning type-writing against the days that are to come. I confess I have a desire to write a book. I have saved nothing, Sir Robin Drummond. How is it possible, with fifty shillings a week and eight children? I have no pride about accepting your offer. If my scrip is empty and yours is full I don't object to receiving from a fellow-pilgrim what I should give if our cases were reversed."
"Ah! that is right," said Robin Drummond. "As for cataract, in its early stages it is easily curable. Sir George Osborne——"
"I will do whatever you and Mary wish. But I anticipate blindness. I shall not mind very much if I have the light within. There will be the book to solace my age; and after a time I shall not be so helpless."
The Dowager came round after all sooner than was expected. The reconciliation was hastened by a letter she received from Mrs. Ilbert congratulating her on her prospective daughter-in-law. "My poor Maurice," she wrote. "I don't mind telling you, dear Lady Drummond, that Maurice was head-over-ears in love with your charming and distinguished daughter-in-law that is to be. The boy takes it very well, says that the better man has won, which is exactly like Maurice. Since your son has chosen a political career I congratulate him on having such a woman as Miss Gray by his side. She will be a force in political life, so says Maurice. And she will be the noblest inspiration. Though I am grieved that she is to be your son's Egeria and not mine yet I offer you and Sir Robin my heartiest congratulations. I may add that I also congratulate the party to which your son belongs."
Lady Drummond had rubbed her eyes over this letter. Congratulate her—was it possible?—on being the prospective mother-in-law of Mary Gray, the daughter of a man who worked for his living at repairing the insides of watches! She, the widow of a hero, a rich woman of social importance! Congratulate her and Robin and Robin's party! And not one word of congratulating Mary Gray! Was Caroline Ilbert mad?
However, the thing impressed her. It worked by slow degrees into her mind. She had listened often to such foolish heresies as that which declared brains more important than rank or wealth. In a general way she had not dissented. Brains were very important. Gerald had thought a good deal of brains. If he had lived he had meditated a book on Napoleon's Wars. She had often met writing and painting and musical people in her friends' drawing-rooms. They had not appealed to her nor she to them. But she had grown accustomed to their presence there and to meeting them on an equality to which in her heart she had never subscribed.
However, she had the wisdom to see that there was no use in holding out against her son and to console herself with the idea that Mary was going to be a personage, even apart from the incredible social promotion of marrying Sir Robin Drummond. So she actually reached the point of coming in person to Wistaria Terrace to make a formal recantation of her opposition to the marriage, and to take Mary to her imposing, black-bugled breast.
To be sure the little house had almost driven her back from its threshold. She filled the small shabby hall, she fell over the brushes left by the general servant who had been scrubbing the oilcloth, not expecting her ladyship; she sat uncomfortably on the green rep chairs of the drawing-room staring at a Berlin-wool banner-screen which represented a poodle with beads for his eyes, at the silver shavings in the grate, and the school drawings, finished by the nuns, of the younger Misses Gray. There were certain aspects of that drawing-room dear to Mrs. Gray which Mary had been too tenderhearted to try to alter.
There Mary had found her and had been moved in her innermost humorous sense; but she had been glad to be friends with Robin's mother, and so had done her best to advance the reconciliation.