What had attracted him to this girl so different from himself, so unacquainted with his world?
There was her beauty of course. But he had passed the period when mere beauty is enough. He was extremely captious and difficult to please where the ordinary pretty woman was concerned. Her arts left him now quite unmoved. Of self-conscious vanity and love of effect he had himself enough and to spare. He could not mend himself; but he was often weary of his own weaknesses, and detested them in other people. If Lucy Foster had been merely a beauty, aware of her own value, and bent upon making him aware of it also, he would probably have been as careless of her now in the eighth week of their acquaintance as he had been in the first.
But it was a beauty so innocent, so interfused with suggestion, with an enchanting thrill of prophecy! It was not only what she said and looked, but what a man might divine in her—the 'white fire' of a nature most pure, most passionate, that somehow flashed through her maiden life and aspect, fighting with the restraints imposed upon it, and constantly transforming what might otherwise have been a cold seemliness into a soft and delicate majesty.
In short, there was a mystery in Lucy, for all her simplicity;—a mystery of feeling, which piqued and held the fastidious taste of Manisty. It was this which made her loveliness tell. Her sincerity was so rich and full, that it became dramatic,—a thing to watch, for the mere joy of the fresh, unfolding spectacle. She was quite unconscious of this significance of hers. Rather she was clearly and always conscious of weakness, ignorance, inexperience. And it was this lingering childishness, compared with the rarity, the strength, the tenderness of the nature just emerging from the sheath of first youth, that made her at this moment so exquisitely attractive to Manisty.
In the presence of such a creature marriage began to look differently. Like many men with an aristocratic family tradition, who have lived for a time as though they despised it, there were in him deep stores of things inherited and conventional which re-emerged at the fitting moment. Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the rôle of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.
But now, as he walked up and down the balcony, plunged in meditation, he began to think with a new tolerance of the English cadre and the English life. He remembered all those illustrious or comely husbands and wives, his forebears, whose portraits hung on the walls of his neglected house. For the first time it thrilled him to imagine a new mistress of the house—young, graceful, noble—moving about below them. And even—for the first time—there gleamed from out the future the dim features of a son, and he did not recoil. He caressed the whole dream with a new and strange complacency. What if after all the beaten roads are best?
To the old paths, my soul!
Then he paused, in a sudden chill of realisation. His thoughts might rove as they please. But Lucy Foster had given them little warrant. To all her growing spell upon him, there was added indeed the charm of difficulty foreseen, and delighted in. He was perfectly aware that he puzzled and attracted her. And he was perfectly aware also of his own power with women, often cynically aware of it. But he could not flatter himself that so far he had any hold over the senses or the heart of Lucy Foster. He thought of her eager praise of his Palestine letters—of the Nemi tale. She was franker, more enthusiastic than an English girl would have been—and at the same time more remote, infinitely more incalculable!
His mind filled with a delicious mingling of desire and doubt. He foresaw the sweet approach of new emotions,—of spells to make 'the colours freshen on this threadbare world.' All his life he had been an epicurean, in search of pleasures beyond the ken of the crowd. It was pleasure of this kind that beckoned to him now,—in the wooing, the conquering, the developing of Lucy.
A voice struck on his ear. It was Eleanor calling to Lucy from the salon.