She had watched him with eyes that gleamed from below her dropped eyelids. She said now, as she had done to Sir Thomas, “I should put no difficulties in the way, you may be sure.”
“It would be more respectable,” said Claude. “If getting old is good for anything, you know, it should make up quarrels; don’t you think so? It would be a great deal better in every way. And then Markham——”
“Markham,” she said, “you think, would then be free?”
“Well—then it wouldn’t matter particularly about Markham, what he did,” the young man said.
Lady Markham had borne a great many such assaults in her life as if she felt nothing: but as a matter of fact she did feel them deeply; and when a probable new combination was thus calmly set before her, her usual composure was put to a severe test. She smiled upon Claude, indeed, as long as he remained with her, and allowed him no glimpse of her real feelings; but when he was gone, felt for a moment her heart fail her. She had, even in the misfortunes which had crossed her life, secured always a great share of her own way. Many people do this even when they suffer most. Whether they get it cheerfully or painfully, they yet get it, which is always something. Waring, when, in his fastidious impatience and irritation, because he did not get his, he had flung forth into the unknown, and abandoned her and her life altogether, did still, though at the cost of pain and scandal, help his wife to this triumph, that she departed from none of her requirements, and remained mistress of the battlefield. She had her own way, though he would not yield to it. But as a woman grows older, and becomes less capable of that pertinacity which is the best means of securing her own way, and when the conflicting wills against hers are many instead of being only one, the state of the matter changes. Constance had turned against her, when she was on the eve of an arrangement which would have been so very much for Con’s good. And Frances, though so submissive in some points, would not be so, she felt instinctively, on others. And Markham—that was the most fundamental shock of all—Markham might possibly in the future have prospects and hopes independent altogether of his mother’s, in antagonism with all her arrangements. This, which she had not anticipated, went to her heart. And when she thought of what had been suggested to her with so much composure—the alteration of her whole life, the substitution of her husband, from whom she had been so long parted, who did not think as she did nor live as she did for her son, who, with all his faults, which she knew so well, was yet in sympathy with her in all she thought and wished and knew—this suggestion made her sick and faint. It had come, though not with any force, even from Markham himself. It had come from Sir Thomas, who was one of the oldest of her friends; and now Claude set it before her in all the forcible simplicity of commonplace: it would be more respectable! She laughed almost violently when he left her, but it was a laugh which was not far from tears.
“Claude has been complaining of you,” she said to Frances, recovering herself with an instantaneous effort when her daughter came into the room; “but I don’t object, my dear. Unless you had found that you could like him yourself, which would have been the best thing, perhaps—you were quite right in what you said. So far as Constance is concerned, it is all that I could wish.”
“Mamma,” said Frances, “you don’t want Constance—you would not let her—accept that?”
“Accept what? My love, you must not be so emphatic. Accept a life full of luxury, splendour even, if she likes—and every care forestalled. My dear little girl, you don’t know anything about the world.”
Frances pondered for some time before she replied. “Mamma,” she said again, “if such a case arose—you said that the best thing for me would have been to have liked—Mr Ramsay. There is no question of that. But if such a case arose——”
“Yes, my dear”—Lady Markham took her daughter’s hand in her own, and looked at her with a smile of pleasure—“I hope it will some day. And what then?”