CHAPTER XXXVII
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES
It was not till a good many hours later that the anticlimax of the recent situation struck Trix. Excitement had prevented her from realizing it at first. In the excitement of what the thing stood for, she had overlooked the utter triviality of the thing itself. When, later, the two separated themselves in a measure, and she looked at the thing as apart from what it indicated, the ludicrousness of it struck her with astounding force.
Nicholas Danver would give a tea-party.
And it was this, this small commonplace statement, which had kept the Duchessa, Miss Tibbutt, Doctor Hilary, and herself in solemn and amazed confabulation for at least two hours. It was infinitely more amazing even than the whole story of the past months, and Trix had given that in fairly detailed fashion, avoiding the Duchessa’s eyes, however, whenever she mentioned Antony’s name. Yes; it was what the tiny fact stood for that had astounded them; though now, with the fact in a measure separated from its meaning, Trix saw the almost absurdity of it.
Fifteen years of a living death to terminate in a tea-party!
It was an anticlimax which made her almost hysterical to contemplate. She felt that the affair ought to have wound up in some great movement, in some dignified action or fine speech, and it had descended to the merely ludicrous, or what, in view of those fifteen years, appeared the merely ludicrous. And she had been the instigator of it, and Doctor Hilary had called it a miracle. Which it truly was.
And yet, banishing the ludicrous from her mind, it was so entirely simple. There was not the faintest blare of trumpets, not a whisper even of an announcing voice, merely the fact that a solitary man would once more welcome friends beneath his roof.
The only real touch of excitement about the business would be when Antony Gray learnt the news, and he and the Duchessa met. And yet even that somehow lost its significance before the absorbing yet quiet fact of Nicholas’s own resurrection.