“You talk of her as if she were the most shallow-brained of women,” he exclaimed, with his back to the family group, looking out with gloomy eyes into the old-fashioned street, the narrow circumscribed view which he had hated of late with a deadly hatred.
“I don’t think she is very deep,” answered Sophia. “She never could appreciate Darwin. She told me once that she wondered what I could find to interest me in earthworms.”
“A woman must, indeed, be shallow who feels no interest in that thrilling subject,” sneered Theodore.
“Upon my word, now,” said his father, “Darwin’s book interested me, though I’m not a scientific man. And I never see a worm wriggling off the gardener’s spade without feeling that I ought to be grateful to him as a factor in the landed interest. Perhaps,” continued Mr. Dalbrook, musingly, “my own practice in the conveyancing line owes something of its substantial character to earthworms. If it were not for them there might be no land to convey.”
The conversation drifted lightly away from Juanita and her sorrow, but her image still filled Theodore’s mind, and he left the drawing-room and the frivolous talk and the clinking of teacups and teaspoons, and went out in the declining light to walk in the avenue of sycamores on the edge of the old city.
He had not called upon his cousin in her new home; he shrank from the very idea of meeting her while her sorrow was still new, while her thoughts and feelings were concentrated upon that one subject, while he could only be to her as an unwelcome intruder from that outside world she loathed, as grief loathes all but its own sad memories.
Had the calamity which had desolated her life brought her any nearer to him who had loved her so long and so unselfishly? Alas, no; he told himself that if she ever loved again, it would be to a stranger that her reawakening heart would open rather than to the rejected lover of the past, the man whom her memory would couple with the husband she had lost, and whom she would compare disadvantageously with that chosen one.
No, he told himself, there was little more chance for him in the future than there had been in the past. She liked him and trusted him, with a sisterly affection which nothing short of a miracle could warm into love. Passion does not grow out of such placid beginnings.
In her very dawn of girlhood she had been in love with Godfrey: had blushed at his coming: had quarrelled with him, and wept stormy tears: had suffered all those alternations of joy and grief, pride and self-abasement, which accompany love in an impassioned nature. Theodore remembered her treatment of the fifth-form Etonian, of the undergraduate, remembered the passionate drama perpetually being acted in those two young lives, a drama which he had watched with aching heart; and he felt that he could never be as that first lover had been. He was associated with the commonplace of her life. She had laughed often at his dry-as-dust talk with her father—the dull discussions about leases and bills of dilapidation. A solicitor living from year’s end to year’s end in a country town—what a dreary person he must needs appear beside the brilliant young Patrician, full of the gladness of the life that knows neither labour nor care. He sickened at the thought of that contrast.
He had served his father faithfully hitherto, and the bond between father and son had been one of strong affection as well as duty; but for the last year there had been growing upon him an inexpressible weariness of the house in which he was born, and the city in which he had lived the chief part of his uneventful life. He had struggled against the disgust of familiar things, telling himself that it was an unworthy feeling, and that he would be a snob if he indulged it. Yet the disgust grew into absolute loathing; the monotonous days, the repetitive work, oppressed him like a nightmare. Since Juanita’s marriage the burden had become more and more intolerable. To be so near her, yet so far. To be letting life creep away in dull drudgery which could never bring him nearer her social level; to feel that all his pursuits and associations were beneath the woman he loved, and could never arouse the faintest interest in her mind. This was almost too bitter to be borne, and he had for some time past been meditating some way of escape, some manner of release from these old fetters into the wider arena of the outer world.