Such intimations are most often given when they are ineffectual—not when they might guide the mind to a choice which would secure its happiness, but after all such possibilities are over and that happy choice can never be made. When he had gone away Effie slid out of sight too, and sought the shelter of her room, that little sanctuary which had hid so many agitations within the last few weeks, but none so tremendous as this. The discovery seemed to stun her. She could only sit still and look at it, her bosom heaving, her heart beating loudly, painfully like a funeral toll against her breast.
So, she said to herself, that might have been; and this was. No, she did not say it to herself: such discoveries are not made by any rational and independent action of mind. It was put before her by that visionary second which is always with us in all our mental operations, the spectator, “qui me resemblait comme mon frère,” whom the poet saw in every crisis of his career. That spiritual spectator who is so seldom a counsellor, whose office is to show the might-have-beens of life and to confound the helpless, unwarned sufferer with the sight of his mistakes when they are past, set this swiftly and silently before her with the force of a conviction. This might have been the real hero, this was the true companion, the mate congenial, the one in the world for Effie. But in the moment of beholding she knew that it was never to be.
And this was not her fault—which made it the more confusing, the more miserable. When it is ourselves who have made the mistake that spoils our lives, we have, at least, had something for it, the gratification of having had our own way, the pleasure of going wrong. But Effie had not even secured this pleasure. She would be the sufferer for other people’s miscalculations and mistakes. All this that concerned her so deeply she had never known. She faced the future with all the more dismay that it thus appeared to her to be spoiled for no end, destroyed at once for herself and Ronald and Fred. For what advantage could it be to Fred to have a wife who felt that he was not her chief good, that her happiness was with another? Something doubly poignant was in the feeling with which the poor girl perceived this.
Fred even, poor Fred, whom she approved and liked and sympathized with and did all but love—Fred would be none the better. He would be wronged even in having his heart’s desire conceded to him, whereas—it all came before Effie with another flash of realization—Fred would never have thought of her in that way had she been pledged to Ronald. They would have been friends—oh! such good friends. She would have been able to appreciate all his good qualities, the excellence that was in him, and no close and inappropriate relationship could have been formed between the two who were not made for each other.
But now all was wrong! It was Fred and she, who might have been such excellent friends, who were destined to work through life together, badly matched, not right, not right, whatever might happen. If trouble came she would not know how to comfort him, as she would have known how to comfort Ronald. She would not know how to help him. How was it she had not thought of that before? They belonged to different worlds, not to the same world as she and Ronald did, and when the first superficial charm was over, and different habits, different associations, life, which was altogether pitched upon a different key, began to tell!
Alarm seized upon Effie, and dismay. She had been frightened before at the setting up of a new life which she felt no wish for, no impulse to embrace; but she had not thought how different was the life of Allonby from that of Gilston, and her modest notions of rustic gentility from the luxury and show to which the rich man’s son had been accustomed. Doris and Phyllis and their ways of thought, and their habits of existence, came before her in a moment as part of the strange shifting panorama which encompassed her about. How was she to get to think as they did, to accustom herself to their ways of living? She had wondered and smiled, and in her heart unconsciously criticised these ways: but that was Fred’s way as well as theirs. And how was she with her country prejudices, her Scotch education, her limitations, her different standard, how was she to fit into it? But with Ronald she would have dwelt among her own people—oh, the different life! Oh, the things that might have been!
Poor Ronald went his way sadly from the same meeting with a consciousness that was sharp and confusing and terrible. After the first miserable shock of disappointment which he had felt on hearing of Effie’s engagement, he had conversed much with himself. He had said to himself that she was little more than a child when he had set his boyish heart upon her, that since then a long time had passed, momentous years: that he had changed in many ways, and that she too must have changed—that the mere fact of her engagement must have made a great difference—that she had bound herself to another kind of existence, not anything he knew, and that it was not possible that the betrothed of another man could be any longer the little Effie of his dreams.
But he had looked at her, and he had felt that he was mistaken. She was his Effie, not that other man’s: there was nothing changed in her, only perfected and made more sweet. Very few were the words that passed between them—few looks even, for they were afraid to look at each other—but even that unnatural reluctance said more than words. He it was who was her mate, not the stranger, the Englishman, the millionaire, whose ways and the ways of his people were not as her ways.
And yet it was too late! He could neither say anything nor do anything to show to Effie that she had made a mistake, that it was he, Ronald, whom Heaven had intended for her. The young man, we may be sure, saw nothing ludicrous in this conviction that was in his mind; but he could not plead it. He went home to the old-fashioned homely house, which he said to himself no wife of his should ever make bright, in which he would settle down, no doubt, like his old uncle, and grow into an old misanthrope, a crotchety original, as his predecessor had done. Poor old uncle David! what was it that had made him so? perhaps a fatal mistake, occurring somehow by no fault of his—perhaps a little Effie, thrown away upon a stranger, too—
“What made you ask him to his dinner, though I made you signs to the contrary?” said Mrs. Ogilvie to her husband, as soon as, each in a different direction, the two young people had disappeared. “You might have seen I was not wanting him to his dinner; but when was there ever a man that could tell the meaning of a look? I might have spared my pains.”