“That will not be necessary, I hope,” said Waring, somewhat coldly. He thought of Frances with a sigh, who never bothered him, who was contented with everything! and carried on her own little thoughts, whatever they might be, her little drawings, her little life, so tranquilly, knowing nothing better. What was he to do, with the responsibility upon his hands of this other creature? whom all the same he could not shake off, nor even—as a gentleman, if not as a father—allow to perceive what an embarrassment she was. “Without going so far,” he said, “we must consult what is best to be done, since you feel it so keenly. My ordinary habits even of villeggiatura would not please you any better than staying at home, I fear. We used to go up to Dolceacqua, Frances and I; or to Eza; or to Porto Fino, on the opposite coast,—at no one of which places was there a soul—as you reckon souls—to be seen.”
“That is a great pity,” said Constance; “for even Frances, though she may have been a Stoic born, must have wanted to see a human creature who spoke English now and then.”
“A Stoic! It never occurred to me that she was a Stoic,” said Waring, with astonishment, and a sudden sense of offence. The idea that his little Frances was not perfectly happy, that she had anything to put up with, anything to forgive, was intolerable to him; and it was a new idea. He reflected that she had consented to go away with an ease which surprised him at the time. Was it possible? This suggestion disturbed him much in his certainty that his was absolutely the right way.
“If all these expedients are unsatisfactory,” he said, sharply, “perhaps you will come to my assistance, and tell me where you would be satisfied to go.”
“Papa,” said Constance, “I am going to make a suggestion which is a very bold one; perhaps you will be angry—but I don’t do it to make you angry; and, please, don’t answer me till you have thought a moment. It is just this—Why shouldn’t we go home?”
“Go home!” The words flew from him in the shock and wonder. He grew pale as he stared at her, too much thunderstruck to be angry, as she said.
Constance put up her hand to stop him. “I said, please don’t answer till you have thought.”
And then they sat for a minute or more looking at each other from opposite sides of the table—in that pause which comes when a new and strange thought has been thrown into the midst of a turmoil which it has power to excite or to allay. Waring went through a great many phases of feeling while he looked at his young daughter sitting undaunted opposite to him, not afraid of him, treating him as no one else had done for years—as an equal, as a reasonable being, whose wishes were not to be deferred to superstitiously, but whose reasons for what he did and said were to be put to the test, as in the case of other men. And he knew that he could not beat down this cool and self-possessed girl, as fathers can usually crush the young creatures whom they have had it in their power to reprove and correct from their cradles. Constance was an independent intelligence. She was a gentlewoman, to whom he could not be rude any more than to the Queen. This hushed at once the indignant outcry on his lips. He said at last, calmly enough, with only a little sneer piercing through his forced smile, “We must take care, like other debaters, to define what we mean exactly by the phrases we use. Home, for example. What do you mean by home? My home, in the ordinary sense of the word, is here.”
“My dear father,” said Constance, with the air, somewhat exasperated by his folly, of a philosopher with a neophyte, “I wish you would put the right names to things. Yes, it is quite necessary to define, as you say. How can an Englishman, with all his duties in his own country, deriving his income from it, with houses belonging to him, and relations, and everything that makes up life—how can he, I ask you, say that home, in the ordinary sense of the word, is here? What is the ordinary sense of the word?” she said, after a pause—looking at him with the indignant frown of good sense, and that little air of repressed exasperation, as of the wiser towards the foolisher, which made Waring, in the midst of his own just anger and equally just discomfiture, feel a certain amusement too. He kept his temper with the greatest pains and care. Domenico had left the room when the discussion began, and the lamp which hung over the table lighted impartially the girl’s animated countenance, pressing forward in the strength of a position which she felt to be invulnerable, and the father’s clouded and withdrawing face,—for he had taken his eyes from her, with unconscious cowardice, when she fixed him with that unwavering gaze.
“I will allow that you put the position very strongly—as well as a little undutifully,” he said.