Freke was a positive acquisition to him. Throckmorton had that sort of broad, masculine tolerance that can find excuses for everything a man may do except cheating at cards. Freke came constantly to Millenbeck, much oftener than Throckmorton went to Wareham.
Millenbeck, though, was a pleasant place to visit. Throckmorton had left the restoration and fitting up of the place to people who understood their business well; and consequently, when he arrived, he found he had one of the most comfortable, if not luxurious, country-houses that could be imagined. His fortune, which at the North would have been nothing more than a handsome competence, was a superb patrimony in the ruined Virginia, and with ready money and Sweeney anybody could be comfortable, Throckmorton thought. The Rev. Edmund Morford also gave him much of his (Morford’s) company, and obtained a vast number of household receipts and learned many contrivances for domestic comfort from Sweeney.
“Be jabers, the parson’s more of an ould woman than mesilf,” Sweeney would remark to his colored coadjutors. “He can make as good white gravy as any she-cook going, and counts his sheets and towels every week as reg’lar as the mother of him did, I warrant,” which was quite true. But the parson’s good heart outweighed his innocent conceit and his effeminate beauty with Throckmorton. Morford tried conscientiously to get Throckmorton into the church, but with ill success.
“Sink the parson, Morford,” Throckmorton would laugh. “Perhaps I’ll get married some day, and my wife will pray me into heaven, like most of the men who get there, I suspect.”
Nevertheless Throckmorton had a reverent soul, and, although he would have turned pale and have been constrained by an iron silence had he got up and tried to open his mouth on the subject of the inscrutable problems that Morford attacked with such glib self-sufficiency, he revered religion and did not scoff even at the callowest form of it.
Both Jack and himself got to going over to Barn Elms often; Throckmorton, however, being an old bird, exercised considerable wariness, so as not to collide with Jack at these times. Jack kept up a continual fire from ambush at his father, regarding which of the young women at Barn Elms the major would eventually capitulate to; but Throckmorton treated this with the dignified silence that was the only weapon against Jack’s sly rallying. As for General Temple, he regarded all of Throckmorton’s visits as particularly directed toward himself, for the purpose of acquiring military knowledge; and Throckmorton heard more of the theory of war from General Temple at this time than he ever heard in all his life before. While the general, who had all campaigns, modern and ancient, at his finger-ends, declaimed with sonorous confidence on the mistakes of Hannibal, Cæsar, Scipio, and other well-known military characters, Throckmorton listened meekly, seldom venturing an observation. General Temple indicated a faint surprise that Throckmorton, during his career, had never undergone any of the thrilling adventures which had actually happened to General Temple, who would have been a great soldier after the pattern of Brian de Bois Guilbert; nor could Throckmorton convince him that he, Throckmorton, conceived it his duty to stay with his men, and considered unnecessary seeking of danger as unsoldier-like in the highest degree. Throckmorton, however, did not argue the point. In place of General Temple’s innumerable and real hair-breadth escapes, and horses shot under him, Throckmorton could only say that the solitary physical injury he received during the war was a bad rheumaticky arm from sleeping in the wet, and a troublesome attack of measles caught by visiting his men in the hospital. But General Temple knew that Throckmorton had been mentioned half a dozen times in general orders, and had got several brevets, while General Temple had narrowly missed half a dozen courts-martial for being where he didn’t belong at a critical time. The fact that he was in imminent personal danger on all these occasions, General Temple considered not only an ample excuse, but quite a feather in his cap.
Occasionally, though (during the general’s disquisitions), Throckmorton’s eye would seek Judith’s as she sat under the lamp, with a piece of delicate embroidery in her hand, stitching demurely, and something like a smile would pass between them. Judith understood the joke. The mingled softness and archness of her glance was very beautiful to Throckmorton, but it had not the power over him of Jacqueline’s coquettish air. Throckmorton was rather vexed at the charm this kittenish young thing cast over him. He had always professed a great aversion to young fools, who invariably turn into old bores, but he could not deny that he was more drawn to sit near Jacqueline in her low chair, than to Judith sitting gracefully upright under the lamp. That Jacqueline was not far off from folly, he was forced to admit to himself every time he talked with her, but the admission brought with it a slight pang. Then he never lost sight of the disparity in their years; and this was painful because of the secret attraction he felt for her. Sometimes, walking home from Barn Elms, across the fields in autumn nights, he would find himself comparing the two women, and wishing that the older woman possessed for him the subtle charm of the younger one. Any man might love Judith Temple—she was so gentle, so unconscious of her own superiority to the average woman, so winning upon one’s reason and self-respect—and then Throckmorton would sigh, and stride faster along the path in the wintry darkness. Suppose—suppose he should seriously try to win Jacqueline? How long would he be happy? And what sort of a life would it be for her, with that childish restlessness and inability to depend for one moment on herself? And Throckmorton knew instinctively that, although he possessed great power in bending women to his will, it was not in him to adapt himself to any woman. He might love her, indulge her, adore her, but he could not change his fixed and immutable character one iota. It would be a peculiar madness for him to marry any woman who did not possess adaptability in a high degree; and this Throckmorton had known, ever since he had grown hair on his face, went only with a certain mental force and breadth in women. He had the whole theory mapped out, that the more intellectual a man was, the less adaptable he was, while with women the converse was strikingly true—the more intellectual a woman was, the more adaptable she was. He also knew perfectly well that in women the emotions and the intellect are so inextricably involved that a woman’s emotional range was exactly limited by her intellectual range; that there is nothing more commonplace in a commonplace woman than her emotions. Nay, more. He remembered Dr. Johnson’s thundering against female fools: “Sir, a man usually marries a fool, with the expectation of ruling her; but the fool, sir, invariably rules the man.” But all this went to pieces when he saw Jacqueline. She was to him as if a figure of Youth had stepped out of a white Greek frieze; and whenever he realized this charm of hers, he sighed to himself profoundly.
People are never too old or too sensible to commit follies, but people of sense and experience suffer the misery of knowing all about their follies when they do commit them.
To Freke, who was incomparably the keenest observer in all this little circle, the whole thing was a psychic study of great interest. He had the art in a singular degree of getting outside of his own emotions; and the fact that he had been guilty of the egregious folly of falling in love with Judith at first sight made him only keener in studying out the situation. He took an abstract pleasure in partly confiding his discoveries to Mrs. Sherrard, who was a bold woman, and had become an out-and-out partisan of his—the only one he could count on, except Jacqueline, under the rose. It was a subject of active concern why Freke ever bought Wareham in the beginning, and still more so why he should continue to stay there. When pressed on the subject by Mrs. Sherrard—they were sitting in the comfortable drawing-room at Turkey Thicket, the blazing wood-fire making the dull wintry afternoon, and the flat, monotonous landscape outside more dreary by contrast—Freke declared that he had settled in the country in order to cultivate the domestic virtues to advantage.
“Pooh!” said Mrs. Sherrard.