Slowly making his way upwards from the shore, Wantley turned aside, and lingered a few moments on the second of the three terraces. Here, in this still, remote place, on this natural ledge of the cliff, guarded by a stone balustrade which terminated at intervals with fantastic urns, now gay with geranium blossoms, gaining intensity of colour by the background of blue sky and bluer waters, he had only the day before, for a delicious hour, read aloud to Cecily Wake.
From his father Wantley had inherited, and as a boy acquired, an exceptional love and knowledge of old English poetry, and, giving but grudging and unwilling praise to modern verse, he had been whimsically pleased to discover that to the girl Chaucer and La Fontaine were more familiar names than Browning and Tennyson, of whose works, indeed, she had been ignorant till she went to the Settlement, where, however, Philip Hammond had soon made her feel terribly ashamed of her ignorance.
Standing there, his thoughts of Cecily, of Downing, of Persian mysticism, chasing one another through his mind, Wantley suddenly remembered Miss Theresa Wake, doubtless still sitting solitary in her hooded chair.
II
Cecily's aunt, whom he himself already secretly regarded with the not altogether uncritical eye of a relation, was to Wantley a new and amusing variety of old lady. Miss Theresa Wake had the appearance, common to so many women of her generation, of having been petrified in early middle age. A brown hair front lent spurious youth to the thin, delicate face, and her slight, elegant figure was only now becoming bent. It was impossible to imagine her young, but equally difficult to believe that she would ever grow really old.
The young man who aspired to the honour of becoming in due course her kinsman, found a constant source of amusement in the fact that her sincere, unaffected piety was joined to a keen, almost morbid, interest in any worldly matter affecting her acquaintances. When with Miss Wake it was positively difficult for a sympathetic person to keep from mentioning people, and so, 'I think we shall have David Winfrith here in a few minutes,' he said, when, having sought her out, he was anxious to make amends for his neglect. 'Penelope and your niece will probably bring him back. My cousin is very anxious that he should meet Sir George Downing, who is leaving soon.'
'Leaving soon? He will be greatly missed.'
The remark was uttered primly, and yet, as Wantley felt, with some significance. The phrase diverted him, it seemed so absurdly inappropriate; for Downing had stood, and that to a singular degree, apart from the ordinary life of the villa.
But the old spinster lady was pursuing her own line of thought. 'I suppose,' she said hesitatingly, 'that the Settlement would not be affected should Penelope marry again? Of course, I am interested in the matter on account of my niece.'
Wantley looked at her, surprised. 'I don't see why it should make the slightest difference, the more so that David Winfrith has of late years taken a great part in the management of the Melancthon Settlement—in fact, the place has been the great tie between them. I should not care myself to spend the money of a man to whom my wife had once been married, but I am sure Winfrith will feel no such scruple, and the possession of the Robinson fortune might make years of difference to him in attaining what is, I suppose, his supreme ambition. After all, and of course you must not think that I am for a moment comparing the two men, where would Dizzy have been without Mrs. Lewis?'