The Story of a Governess

by Mrs. Oliphant

It was so dark that she could scarcely see his face, but he had twisted the long boa round his arm, so as to bring her nearer to him.

She stamped her foot again upon the ground, and began to loosen her boa.

“Answer me!” she said.

“Don’t put a poor fellow in a corner, Janet. I have to temporize like other people. You have almost made me lose my head; but I can’t afford it, don’t you know. I can’t throw things up like that: and there’s no hurry—we’re all young enough; let us wait and see what may turn up.”

“Is that all you have got to say?” said Janet, uncoiling the boa from her throat.

“What can any one say more? You women have the most confounded way of putting a fellow in a corner. There’s no need for any such desperate decision. Let us wait a bit and enjoy ourselves as much as we can in the meantime,” said Meredith, manipulating the boa on his side.

She left it suddenly in his hand, and quickly and noiselessly turned away, flying upstairs almost before he could call her back: and Meredith did not venture to call “Janet, Janet!” in more than a subdued tone. He dared not follow her, he did not want anybody to know of that colloquy in the hall, though he had risked it, and would have prolonged it, perhaps, to the very edge of discovery. When he felt the boa dropped upon his hands he laughed to himself, with amusement mingled with a certain discomfiture, to think how much in earnest these girls were—and he was not at all in earnest. He liked to take the goods the gods had provided, and get all the pleasure he could out of them; but to compromise his own future and bind himself forever was what he would not do for anyone: and perhaps he was half pleased to have got through the dangerous amusement of that interview, though it was he who had sought it and prolonged it, so easily upon the whole. He had not been made to commit himself to anything, and yet he flattered himself he had made no breach. Things were just as they had been before. He was not like a married man, or one who had come under solemn engagements; there was no reason that he should give up what was agreeable to him, yet, at least; but it amused him to see Janet’s high spirit, her impatience, and even those questions which it was ludicrous, yet a little confusing, to be asked by her—about “his intentions,” as he said. Even the sudden conclusion of the interview by which she betrayed her impatience, her displeasure was amusing to him. He felt all the more fond of her, amused and flattered by her anxiety to know what he meant, and pleased that she had not made much of her bold attempt.

“The little vixen!” he said to himself. He gathered up the boa, which was of a kind which slips through unused fingers, and laid it carefully upon the table. It escaped him once, as its mistress had done, and had to be caught again, and laid in soft, dark coils on the table, which was a thing that pleased him, and made him laugh again. Janet was in a great fright lest her conversation with him should be discovered, and she would by no means have liked it to be discovered, yet it gave him a pungent pleasure to linger and keep her there, and feel that she had fled on the very eve of detection, and get away himself to the shelter of his room, just as Gussy outside put her latch-key in the door.

He laughed as he heard her come in and call to Priscilla to light the lamps, and that the hall was so dark she could scarcely see her way upstairs. Janet had found her way upstairs like a bird a minute before. He chuckled at the thought that in another moment it might have been too late: and yet he had no desire at all that Gussy should find out that meeting in the dark.

As for Janet, she hurried to her room with hot indignation in her heart and the water in her eyes. Oh, it was not that she expected it to have ended in any other way! She had known exactly how it would be. He was not a man to behave like a man, to love one and no more. What he wanted was his own pleasure and advantage, not Gussy and not Janet. She despised him for it all, for the subdued tone in which he had attempted to call her back, for his way of putting off everything that was serious: and she half despised herself for having asked, as he said, “his intentions,” and allowed him to see that she cared.