Goring caught up with Mrs. Stewart in the gravel drive outside the house and walked through Kensington Gardens with her. It seemed to them both quite natural that they should be walking together, and their talk was in the vein of old friends who have met after a long separation rather than in that of new acquaintances. When he left her and turned to walk across Hyde Park towards Westminster, he examined his impressions and perceived that he was in a state of mind foreign to his nature, and therefore the butt of his ridicule; a state in which, if he and Mrs. Stewart had been unmarried persons, he would have said to himself, "That is the woman I shall marry." It would not have been a passion or an emotion that would have made him say that; it would have been a conviction. As it was, the thing was absurd. Cochrane had told him, half in jest, that Mrs. Stewart was a breaker of hearts, but had not hinted that her own was on the market. Her appearance made it surely an interesting question whether she had a heart at all.
And for himself? He hated to think of his marriage, because he recognized in it the fatal "little spot" in the yet ungarnered fruit of his life. He was only thirty, but he had been married seven years and had two children, both of them the image of all the Barthops that had ever been, except his own father. In moments of depression he saw himself through all the coming years being gradually broken, crushed under a weight of Barthops—father-in-law, wife and children—moulded into a thin semblance of a Marquis of Ipswich, a bastard Marquis. No one but himself knew the weakness of his character—explosive, audacious in alarums or excursions, but without the something, call it strength or hardness or stupidity, which enables the man or woman possessing it to resist constant domestic pressure—the unconscious pressure of radically opposed character. The crowd applauds the marriage of such opposites because their side almost always wins; partly by its own weight and partly by their weight behind. But the truth is that two beings opposed in emotional temperament and mental processes are only a few degrees more able to help and understand each other in the close union of marriage than the two personalities of Milly Stewart in the closer union of her body.
From one point of view it was Goring's fatal weakness to have a real affection for his father-in-law, who was a pattern of goodness and good-breeding. Consequently, that very morning he had promised Lord Ipswich to walk in the straightest way of the party, for one year at least; and if he must slap faces, to select them on the other side of the House. Nevertheless, if he really wished to give sincere gratification to Lord Ipswich and to dear Augusta, he must needs give up his capricious and offensive tactics altogether. These things might give him a temporary notoriety in the House and country, but they were not in the traditions of the Ipswich family, which had held a high place in politics for two hundred years. The Marquis said that he had always tried to make George feel that he was received as a true son of the family and heir of its best traditions, if not of its name. There had been a great deal of good faith on both sides. Yet now a solitary young man, looking well in the frock-coat and tall hat of convention, might have been observed stopping and striking the gravel viciously as he reflected on the political future which his father-in-law was mapping out for him.
CHAPTER XXVI
Sir James Carus, the well-known scientist, had for some time been employing Miss Timson in the capacity of assistant, and spoke highly of her talents. She began to have a reputation in scientific circles, and owing to her duties with Carus she could not come to the Stewarts' as often as she had formerly done. But she preserved her habit of dismissing the parlor-maid at the door and creeping up to the drawing-room like a thief in the night.
On the day following Sir Cyril Meres's luncheon-party she arrived in her usual fashion. The windows were shaded against the afternoon sun, but the sky was now overcast, and such a twilight reigned within that at first she could distinguish little, and the drawing-room seemed to her to be empty. But in a minute she discerned a white figure supine in a large arm-chair—Mildred, and asleep.
She had a writing-board on her knee, and a hand resting on it still held a stylograph. She must have dozed over her writing; yet she did not stir when her name was uttered. Tims noticed a peculiar stillness in her, a something almost inanimate in her attitude and countenance, which suggested that this was no ordinary siesta. The idea that Milly might even now be resurgent fluttered Tims's pulses with a mixed emotion.
"Good old Milly! Poor old girl!" she breathed to the white figure in the arm-chair. "Don't be in a hurry! You won't find it all beer and skittles when you're here."