“Kind!” he cried, as if the word were a profanation. “My mother is too happy to do—anything. But Miss Waring,” he added with a feeble smile, “has little need of—any one. She has so many resources—she is so far above——”
He got inarticulate here, and stumbled in his speech, growing very red. Frances watched him under her eyelids with a curious sensation of pain. He was very much in earnest, very sad, yet transported out of his langour and misery by Constance’s name. Now Frances had heard of George Gaunt for years, and had unconsciously allowed her thoughts to dwell upon him, as has been mentioned in another part of this history. His arrival, had it not happened in the midst of other excitements which preoccupied her, would have been one of the greatest excitements she had ever known. She remembered now that when it did happen, there had been a faint, almost imperceptible, touch of disappointment in it, in the fact that his whole attention was given to Constance, and that for herself, Frances, he had no eyes. But in the moment of seeing him again she had forgotten all that, and had gone back to her previous prepossession in his favour, and his mother’s certainty that Frances and her George would be “great friends.” Now she understood with instant divination the whole course of affairs. He had given his heart to Constance, and she had not prized the gift. The discovery gave her an acute, yet vague (if that could be), impression of pain. It was she, not Constance, that had been prepossessed in his favour. Had Constance not been there, no doubt she would have been thrown much into the society of George Gaunt—and—who could tell what might have happened? All this came before her like the sudden opening of a landscape hid by fog and mists. Her eyes swept over it, and then it was gone. And this was what never had been, and never would be.
“Poor Con,” said Lady Markham. “She never was thrown on her own resources before. Has she so many of them? It must be a curiously altered life for her, when she has to fall back upon what you call her resources. But you think she is happy?” she asked with a sigh.
How could he answer? The mere fact that she was Constance, seemed to Gaunt a sort of paradise. If she could make him happy by a look or a word, by permitting him to be near her, how was it possible that, being herself, she could be otherwise than blessed? He was well enough aware that there was a flaw in his logic somewhere, but his mind was not strong enough to perceive where that flaw was.
Markham came in in time to save him from the difficulty of an answer. Markham did not recollect the young man, whom he had only seen once; but he hailed him with great friendliness, and began to inquire into his occupations and engagements. “If you have nothing better to do, you must come and dine with me at my club,” he said in the kindest way, for which Frances was very grateful to her brother. And young Gaunt, for his part, began to gather himself together a little. The presence of a man roused him. There is something, no doubt, seductive and relaxing in the fact of being surrounded by sympathetic women, ready to divine and to console. He had not braced himself to bear the pain of their questions; but somehow had felt a certain luxury in letting his despondency, his languor, and displeasure with life appear. “I have to be here,” he had said to them, “to see people, I believe. My father thinks it necessary: and I could not stay; that is, my people are leaving Bordighera. It becomes too hot to hold one—they say.”
“But you would not feel that, coming from India?”
“I came to get braced up,” he said with a smile, as of self-ridicule, and made a little pause. “I have not succeeded very well in that,” he added presently. “They think England will do me more good. I go back to India in a year; so that, if I can be braced up, I should not lose any time.”
“You should go to Scotland, Captain Gaunt. I don’t mean at once, but as soon as you are tired of the season—that is the place to brace you up—or to Switzerland, if you like that better.”
“I do not much care,” he had said with another melancholy smile, “where I go.”
The ladies tried every way they could think of to console him, to give him a warmer interest in his life. They told him that when he was feeling stronger, his spirits would come back. “I know how one runs down when one feels out of sorts,” Lady Markham said. “You must let us try to amuse you a little, Captain Gaunt.”