He did not reply, and his silence wounded Lady Lucy to the quick. Was it her fault if her husband, out of an eccentric distrust of the character of his son, and moved by a kind of old-fashioned and Spartan belief that a man must endure hardness before he is fit for luxury, had made her and not Oliver the arbiter and legatee of his wealth? But Oliver had never wanted for anything. He had only to ask. What right had she to thwart her husband's decision?
"Good-bye, mother," said Marsham again. "If you are writing to Isabel you will, I suppose, discuss the matter with her. She is not unlikely to side with you--not for your reason, however--but because of some silly nonsense about politics. If she does, I beg she will not write to me. It could only embitter matters."
"I will give her your message. Good-bye, Oliver." He left the room, with a gesture of farewell to Ferrier.
Ferrier came back toward the fire. As he did so he was struck--painfully struck--by a change in Lady Lucy. She was not pale, and her eyes were singularly bright. Yet age was, for the first time, written in a face from which Time had so far taken but his lightest toll. It moved him strangely; though, as to the matter in hand, his sympathies were all with Oliver. But through thirty years Lady Lucy had been the only woman for him. Since first, as a youth of twenty, he had seen her in her father's house, he had never wavered. She was his senior by five years, and their first acquaintance had been one of boy-adoration on his side and a charming elder-sisterliness on hers. Then he had declared himself, and she had refused him in order to marry Henry Marsham and Henry Marsham's fortune. It seemed to him then that he would soon forget her--soon find a warmer and more generous heart. But that was mere ignorance of himself. After awhile he became the intimate friend of her husband, herself, and her child. Something, indeed, had happened to his affection for her. He felt himself in no danger beside her, so far as passion was concerned; and he knew very well that she would have banished him forever at a moment's notice rather than give her husband an hour's uneasiness. But to be near her, to be in her world, consulted, trusted, and flattered by her, to slip daily into his accustomed chair, to feel year by year the strands of friendship and of intimacy woven more closely between him and her--between him and hers--these things gradually filled all the space in his life left by politics or by thought. They deprived him of any other home, and this home became a necessity.
Then Henry Marsham died. Once more Ferrier asked Lady Lucy to marry him, and again she refused. He acquiesced; their old friendship was resumed; but, once more, with a difference. In a sense he had no longer any illusions about her. He saw that while she believed herself to be acting under the influence of religion and other high matters, she was, in truth, a narrow and rather cold-hearted woman, with a strong element of worldliness, disguised in much placid moralizing. At the bottom of his soul he resented her treatment of him, and despised himself for submitting to it. But the old habit had become a tyranny not to be broken. Where else could he go for talk, for intimacy, for rest? And for all his disillusion there were still at her command occasional felicities of manner and strains of feeling--ethereally delicate and spiritual, like a stanza from the Christian Year--that moved him and pleased his taste as nothing else had power to move and please; steeped, as they were, in a far-off magic of youth and memory.
So he stayed by her, and she knew very well that he would stay by her to the end.
He sat down beside her and took her hand.
"You are tired."
"It has been a miserable day."