She was beyond his whimsies. “You may be thankful that you do. This appears to me disgusting. Have we used him so ill that he should slap our faces?”
The Rector indulged his eyebrows again. “Diana!” he said.
She did not defend that dead lady, but even another Lady Diana seemed more tolerable to Mrs. James. Pecca fortiter, she could have said, had she had a head for tags. Lady Diana, sinning de race, would have been intelligible, say, to the Cantacutes. But here was no sin, but merely a squalid enchantment. A doting gentleman, a peering little nobody in muslin—How should this be put, say, to the Cantacutes? Aberration? Chivalry? Romance? Never Romance, precisely because that was just what it was—pitiful romance. James had hit it off exactly; it was the washy, facile romance of a sixpenny valentine, of a thing that housemaids drink with their eyes. Saponaceous—Heavens and earth! Mrs. James lifted her hands, and let them fall to her lap. “I simply cannot hold up my head in the village,” she said. “James think of the Cantacutes.”
“Why on earth should I think of the Cantacutes?” He was testy under his trouble. “I have my brother to think of. He’s been hasty over this—which is most unlike him—and secret as well. I had no notion any such thing was going on, not the least in the world.”
It was Mrs. James’s duty to confess that some notion ought to have been hers. And she did confess. “It so happens that I was speaking to him of this girl the night we dined at the Park. He told me that he was interesting himself in her and I asked him to say something about Tristram.”
“About Tristram?” says the Rector sharply. “What about Tristram, pray?”
She could not but remember former warnings. “I think you will do me the justice, James. You have been told that Tristram has chosen to amuse himself with her. Who has not? I remember telling you about it, when, as usual, you laughed at me. I begged John to influence the girl—to induce her to respect herself—and with this result!” The Rector pushed his chair away.
“You speak more truly than you know,” he said, rose and took a turn about the room. “Now I understand the haste. He had been hovering, poor, foolish fellow—singeing his grey wings; but it was you, Constantia, drove him to plunge. Take my word for it. Dear, dear, dear, this is really a great bore. I don’t know what to do, upon my word I don’t.”
“I shall speak to the girl, of course,” said Mrs. James, gathering up letters and keys. It is doubtful if her husband heard her. He had stepped through the window into the garden before she had risen. “The Rector’s Walk,” a pleached alley of nut trees, received him; for more than an hour he might have been observed pacing it, with lowered head and hands behind his back. But Mrs. Germain went about her duties of the day with tight lips and eyes aglitter. At intervals her anguish betrayed itself in cries. “Monstrous! Monstrous!”
To her it was monstrous, for she saw the girl without glamour, standing amid the wreckage of a fair realm—a little governess, wickedly demure. The Germain banner was rent, the Germain character blotted; that carefully contrived dual empire which she shared with the Cantacutes was threatened; her authority as a county lady, as Rector’s wife, toppling, her throne wanting a leg. She saw herself pitied, her husband’s family the object of lifted brows. And she had been a loyal wife, and knew it, because she had honestly admired the marks of race in the Germains. Herself a Telfer, she was of that famous Norman house which lost first blood at Hastings; and she never forgot it, least of all when she had married into the Germains, who were county and good blood, but not noble. She remembered, she always remembered that—but she was a loyal wife. Without and within, he and she were a strong contrast—he frosty, dry, and deliberate, she fiery, impulsive, storm-driven, not above the aid of tears; he lean and pale, she a plump woman and a pink. His instinct was to approve at first blush, hers to disapprove. They were good friends, and had never been more; there were no children. That had been a grievance of hers until she got into the way of saying that the Germains were a dwindling race, and—“look at poor John Germain!” I wish the reader to note the subtle change from complaint to complacency in Mrs. James’s outlook. It marks her character. To be a barren wife through no fault of your own and to take comfort in saying that your husband comes of a dwindling stock shows that you have an eye for outline in a family. It is rather like excusing your Black Wyandottes, which give you no breakfast eggs—“Yes, but that’s the mark of the breed.” So here—“either I have children, or my husband is no Germain.” Here was strong character exhibited; and all may be forgiven to strength. But weakness—mere dotage—mere desire; a landed gentleman of fifty and a girl in muslin—“Monstrous! Monstrous!” cried Mrs. James in her bitterness.