It requires the beaux restes of a veritable passion, the perennial charm of an undying sympathy, to make the most loyal of lovers accept without flinching so conspicuous and questionable a position.
To her, it is triumph as to the master builder when the gilded vane crowns the giddy height of the steeple. She shows that she has kept her man well in hand, and ridden him with science to the finish. Beside, the shyest of women always likes what compromises and compliments her.
But the masculine mind is differently constituted; it sincerely dislikes being talked about, it still more dislikes to be laughed at, and when it is English, it is, on matters of the affections, uncommonly shy.
The necessity of broaching this delicate matter weighed heavily on Brancepeth’s spirits; he did not know how to set about it, and he felt that it was at once ungracious to her to delay and unfeeling to poor buried Cocky to hasten the necessary avowal. He was always thankful when he found other people with her, and equally thankful that her respect for appearances had caused her to relax her demands on his attendance and affection ever since her return from the interments at Staghurst. One day, however, some six weeks after Cocky’s disappearance from a world of poker and pick-me-ups, Brancepeth found himself alone with the fair mourner to whom crape was so infinitely becoming.
To this poor fellow, in whose breast the primitive feelings of human nature were planted too deeply for the ways of his world to have uprooted them, the idea of having the children with him, in his own house, seeing them every day and watching them grow up, was one which consoled him for being forced to sacrifice his liberty. Of course, they would always be Cocky’s children to the world and in “Burke,” but if he were their mother’s husband nobody would think it odd if he made much of them, and took them to ride in the Row, or went with them to see a pantomime, or hired a houseboat for them, and taught them how to scull; simple joys which smiled at him from the future. Their mother would always be what she always had been. He had no illusions about her; he would have to give her her head whether he liked it or not; but the children—Harry saw himself living very properly, as a married man, in a little house off the Park, and getting every now and then “a day out” with Jack on the river. He would leave the Guards, he reflected, and pull himself together; he had next to nothing of his own left, but some day or other he would be Lord Inversay, and then, though it would always be a beggarly business, for the estates were mortgaged to their last sod of grass, he would try to make things run as straight as he could for sake of these merry little men who were Cocky’s children. Occupied with such innocent and purifying thoughts, he had arrived in Stanhope Street.
It was a soft grey day in early May, and her room was a bower of lilac, heliotrope, and tea-roses. The Blenheims were quiet, for Cocky annoyed them no more. The tempered light fell through silk blinds on to the charming figure of their lady, as she lay back on a long low chair, her black robes falling softly about her as if she were some Blessed Damozel, or Lady of Tears, of Rossetti’s or Burne-Jones’s. Only between her lips was a cigarette and on her knee was a volume of Gyp’s. Harry, good soul, was not awake to the incongruity; he only thought how awfully fetching she was, and yet he groaned in spirit. But after a few preliminary nothings, with much the same desperate and unpleasant resolve as that with which he had gone up to be birched at Eton, he opened his lips and spoke.
“I say,” he murmured with timidity—“I say, dear, I have wanted to ask you ever since—I suppose—I mean, of course, I understand, now you are free you will want me to—wish me to—I mean we shall have to get married, shan’t we, when the year’s out?”
When these words had escaped him he was sensible that they were not complimentary, that they were not at all what he ought to have said, and a vague sensation of fright stole over him and he felt himself turn pale.
Into the blue eyes of Mouse that terrible lightning flashed which had withered up his courage very often as flame licks up dry grass. Then her sense of humor was stronger than her sense of offence; she took her cigarette out of her mouth and laughed with a genuine peal of musical laughter which was not affected. He stared at her, relieved, but in his turn offended. After all, he thought, it was not every man who would have ridden so straight up to the fence of duty and taken it so gallantly.
“My dear Harry,” she said, rather slightingly, when her mirth had subsided, “I have had to listen to many declarations in my time, but—but I never had one so eloquent, so delicate, so opportune as yours. Pray will you tell me why I should be supposed to want to marry you, as you chivalrously express it?”