He got out of the room somehow, after shaking hands all round, and even in his deep trance of love he was conscious that the two youngest hands were sticky with traces of strawberry jam. There being no one else to show him out—for who could disturb Nancy, remote in the kitchen, with futile ringing of a ceremonial bell?—the whole bevy of sisters accompanied him to the outer door, the youngest carrying a tall candle, which threatened to topple over and sprinkle her with a shower of ozokerit. He had time to notice the rooms through which they went—one shabbily furnished as a dining-room, with an old harpsichord for sideboard; the other evidently the Colonel’s den for books, boots, and tobacco. He had time to note the porch or vestibule, where there hung much outer apparel, feminine and masculine, hats, scarves, fishing basket, sticks of all shapes and thicknesses, mostly from native woods and hedgerows. He had time to note everything during that lingering departure, protracted by idle talk about the roads and the weather: and yet while his eye took in the shabbiness and smallness of those two rooms, the rustiness of the Colonel’s overcoats, mind and eye both were filled with but one image—the figure of a tall, fair girl, whose fluffy head overtopped her sisters, and shone conspicuous among them all (as it would have shone, he thought, amidst a thousand), by its fresh and innocent beauty.
“And that is the girl I love; and that is the girl I mean to marry,” he said to himself, as he walked briskly along the footpath towards Blackdown.
After such dawdling in Armida’s parlour he would have to walk his fastest to be in time to dress for the eight o’clock dinner.
CHAPTER VI.
WHY SHOULD HE REFRAIN?
Why should he not marry Colonel Marchant’s daughter? Vansittart asked himself, in the quiet of those night watches which are said to bring counsel.
Why should he not marry Eve Marchant? asked Jack Vansittart of Counsellor Night. He was lord not only of himself but of a handsome income and a desirable estate. He had nobody to please but himself, and—well, yes, he wanted to please his mother, even in a matter so entirely personal as his choice of a wife. She had been so devoted a mother, and they had loved each other so dearly! In all his life he had kept only one secret from her—the secret of that night at Venice. In all his life he had only once told her a lie; when he told her he had not been in Venice during that last Italian tour. He wanted to please her, if it were possible, in this most serious question of his marriage. He knew that she loved him too unselfishly to be sorry that he should marry, albeit marriage must in some wise lessen their companionship as mother and son. The major half of his existence must needs belong to the woman he chose for his wife. His mother was resigned to take her lesser place in his life, she had often told him, provided that the wife were worthy.
“Pure as well as beautiful, sprung from an honourable race, reared by a good mother.”
These were the conditions she had laid upon his choice. What would she think of Colonel Marchant’s daughter, motherless, the child of a disreputable father, a girl reared under every social disadvantage; a girl who had dragged herself up anyhow, according to village gossips; a girl who had neither accomplishments nor education, and who had shown herself an audacious flirt, said the village—for Eve’s frank freedom of speech and manner was the rustic idea of audacity in flirtation? To talk easily with a man under forty was to be an outrageous flirt. The rustic idea of a well-conducted young woman was simpering silence.
What would his mother think of such a choice; his mother, who had been born and bred in just that stratum of English respectability which is narrowest in its sociology and strongest in its prejudices; his mother, who belonged to the county families, those deeply rooted children of the soil to whom the word trade is an abomination; who think that the Church and the Army were established for the maintenance of their younger sons, who consider they make a concession when they send a son to the Bar, and who shudder at the notion of a doctor or a solicitor issuing from their superior circles? What would Mrs. Vansittart think of an alliance with the daughter of a man whose name was dishonoured, who, albeit he too had been born of that elect race, and was indisputably “county,” had made himself a pauper and an outcast by his misconduct, and who had lived for the last nine years in a Bohemian and utterly intolerable manner, spending his time mysteriously in London, letting his daughters run wild, and having to be summoned for his rates and taxes?