“Objection to Gerald Thurston!” repeated Mrs Dalrymple. “Of course not. I shall be very glad to see him. I only wish you had said at first whom you meant. You don’t mind, Eugenia?”
“I?” said Eugenia, looking up quickly. “Oh, dear no—I am very glad. I like Gerald Thurston very much. He is very kind and good.”
“And exceedingly clever, and uncommonly good-looking,” added Mr Dalrymple, warmly. “Take him for all in all, I don’t know where there is a finer fellow than Thurston.”
“So my father says,” agreed Eugenia. “Indeed I think every one that knows him thinks highly of him.”
She was anxious to be cordial, and really felt so towards Gerald. Of late she had come to like him much more than formerly, and the extreme consideration and delicacy which he had shown the evening her illness began, had increased this liking by a feeling of gratitude. Nevertheless there had grown up unconsciously in her a somewhat painful association with Gerald since that evening, and she had not seen enough of him to remove it. “He knows,” she said to herself, and she shrank from meeting him again.
But it was much pleasanter and easier than she had expected. Gerald, intensely alive to all she was feeling, behaved perfectly, and spared her in a thousand ways without appearing, even to her, to do so at all. The two days proved the pleasantest they had passed at Nunswell: Mr Thurston knew the neighbourhood well, and drove them to some charming nooks and points of view, somewhat out of the beaten guide-book track, which they had not hitherto discovered. Mrs Dalrymple openly expressed her gratification and surprise.
“I always knew Gerald Thurston was very clever and superior and all that sort of thing, you know,” she said to Eugenia, “but I had no idea he could make himself so agreeable.”
Eugenia herself was a little surprised. The truth was she had never before, since his return from India, seen Gerald to advantage: in her presence hitherto he had been always self-conscious and constrained, stern and moody, if not morose. Now it was different. A feeling of extreme pity, of almost brotherly anxiety for her happiness, had replaced the intenser feelings with which he had regarded her; he had nor longer any fears for himself or his own self-control in her presence—that was all over, past for ever like a dream in the night; he could venture now to be at ease, could devote himself unselfishly to cheer and interest her in any way that came into his power. And under this genial influence the bruised petals of the flower, not crushed so utterly as had seemed at first, began to revive and expand again, to feel conscious of the bright sunshine and gentle breezes still around it, though for a time all light and life had seemed to it to have deserted its world.
“I had no idea Gerald was so wonderfully understanding and sympathising,” thought Eugenia. “If I have a feeling or a question it is difficult to put in words, he seems to know what I mean by instinct;” and encouraged by this discovery, she allowed herself to talk to him, once or twice when they were alone together, of several things which had lately been floating in her mind.
Trouble and disappointment were doing their work with her; she was beginning to look for a meaning in many things that hitherto she had disregarded or accepted with youthful carelessness as matters-of-course with which she had no call to meddle. But now it was different: she had eaten of the fruit of the tree; she had ventured her all in a frail bark, and it had foundered; it had come home to her that life and love are often sad, and sometimes terrible facts, and her heart was beginning to swell with a great pity for her suffering-kind. It was all vague and misty to her as yet; it might result in nothing, as is too often the end of such crises in a growing character, but still the germ was there.