"Well," she said, "if you ain't coming, you can stop with your friends. I've had a deal of travelling one way and another, and I'll go on without you." And, turning quickly away, she told the driver in the same distinct high key to go on to Vandon, and got into the fly again.
The grinning man chucked at the horse's bridle, and the fly rattled heavily away.
No one spoke as it drove away. Charles glanced once at Ruth; but her set white face told him nothing. As the fly disappeared up the road, Dare moved a step forward. His face under his brown skin was ashen gray. He took off his cap, and extending it at arm's-length, not towards the sky, but, like a good churchman, towards the church, outside of which, as he knew, his Maker was not to be found, he said, solemnly, "I swear before God what she says is one—great—lie!"
CHAPTER XXIV.
If conformity to type is indeed the one great mark towards which humanity should press, Mrs. Thursby may honestly be said to have attained to it. Everything she said or did had been said or done before, or she would never have thought of saying or doing it. Her whole life was a feeble imitation of the imitative lives of others; in short, it was the life of the ordinary country gentlewoman, who lives on her husband's property, and who, as Augustus Hare says, "has never looked over the garden-wall."
We do not mean to insinuate for a moment that the utmost energy and culture are not occasionally to be met with in the female portion of that interesting mass of our fellow-creatures who swell the large volumes of the "Landed Gentry." Among their ranks are those who come boldly forward into the full glare of public life; and, conscious of a genius for enterprise, to which an unmarried condition perhaps affords ampler scope, and which a local paper is ready to immortalize, become secretaries of ladies' societies, patronesses of flower shows, breeders of choice poultry, or even associates of floral leagues of the highest political importance. That such women should and do exist among us, the conscious salt-cellars of otherwise flavorless communities, is a fact for which we cannot be too thankful; and if Mrs. Thursby was not one of these aspiring spirits, with a yearning after "the mystical better things," which one of the above pursuits alone can adequately satisfy, it was her misfortune and not her fault.
It was her nature, as we have said, servilely to copy others. Her conversation was all that she could remember of what she had heard from others, her present dinner-party, as regards food, was a cross between the two last dinner-parties she had been to. The dessert, however, conspicuous by its absence, conformed strictly to a type which she had seen in a London house in June.
Her dinner-party gave her complete satisfaction, which was fortunate, for to the greater number of the eighteen or twenty people who had been indiscriminately herded together to form it, it was (with the exception of Mrs. Alwynn) a dreary or at best an uninteresting ordeal; while to four people among the number, the four who had met last on the church steps, it was a period of slow torture, endured with varying degrees of patience by each, from the two soups in the beginning, to the peaches and grapes at the long-delayed and bitter end.
Ruth, whose self-possession never wholly deserted her, had reached a depth of exhausted stupor, in which the mind is perfectly oblivious of the impression it is producing on others. By an unceasing effort she listened and answered and smiled at intervals, and looked exceedingly distinguished in the pale red gown which she had put on to please her aunt; but the color of which only intensified the unnatural pallor of her complexion. The two men whom she sat between found her a disappointing companion, cold and formal in manner. At any other time she would have been humiliated and astonished to hear herself make such cut-and-dried remarks, such little trite observations. She was sitting opposite Charles, and she vaguely wondered once or twice, when she saw him making others laugh, and heard snatches of the flippant talk which was with him, as she knew now, a sort of defensive armor, how he could manage to produce it; while Charles, half wild with a mad surging hope that would not be kept down by any word of Dare's, looked across at her as often as he dared, and wondered in his turn at the tranquil dignity, the quiet ordered smile of the face which a few hours ago he had seen shaken with emotion.