It was shortly after this episode that Heaven, bearing no malice, had thrown Lady Adela into the track of Lady Agnes Mortimer. Lady Agnes was a single woman of small means, and an eccentricity that passed all bounds. However, she was something of a personage, by virtue of her name as well as of her character, and the great-niece whom she was trying to marry might do very well for Kingston Darnley. So thought Lady Adela, pondering the many eligible qualities of the girl who would one day be daughter to a Duke of March and Brakelond, and who, besides, had so many qualities that endearingly resembled her own—at least, so far as kindness, devotion, sweetness, and piety went. She brought her son, accordingly, into contact with Miss Mortimer, and was surreptitiously overjoyed to find him obediently disposed. As for Lady Agnes, she contemplated with equanimity the introduction of the Darnley wealth into the impoverished House of Mortimer, and tried to soften down her asperities lest the match should be impeded.
The House of March and Brakelond no longer loomed so large in the public eye as once it had, and as Gundred still felt it should. The reigning Duke was an imbecile, uncomfortably poor and very aged. There was no Duchess, no near relations, nothing to give prominence or interest even to the daughter of the heir-apparent. Gundred Mortimer attracted little notice in London, keeping house parsimoniously for her father in Russell Square, and going out on the rather shabby arm of Lady Agnes. Lady Agnes was accepted because her eccentricities made her so incalculable as to be amusing; but Gundred was soon found to be almost depressingly normal and correct. There were scores of more naturally noticeable girls in London; Miss Mortimer, as Miss Mortimer, had no sort of personal importance, whatever power and dignity Fate might see fit to bestow at some later date on ‘Lady Gundred.’ Nicely mannered, nicely minded, nicely dressed, Miss Mortimer was an inconspicuous, if pleasant, figure in the crowd, and the elevation of her father to the dukedom seemed so remote that there was no according her any advance on her face-value. Had the prospect of finding her mistress and deputy Duchess at Brakelond only been more actual or imminent, then the world might have lent Miss Mortimer credit and respect on the reversion; but Mr. Mortimer and his daughter had been Mr. and Miss Mortimer for so many years now that no one found it easy to think of them as prospective ‘Duke of March and Brakelond’ and ‘Lady Gundred.’ Whenever anyone thought now of the Mortimers, it was always of the old—incredibly old—imbecile, dying eternally at Brakelond among his parrots.
Nor was Mr. Mortimer himself of a commanding character, fit to capture that popular interest which his daughter’s quiet neatness had been unable to attach. Mr. Mortimer, son of the late Lord Roger, and heir-apparent to his uncle, must always, whatever his position, have been a nonentity, not only from his poverty, but from his silliness. Mr. Mortimer was strangely, unbelievably silly. He was merely silly. He was silly in the wrong way. He neither shocked people nor amused them. Even his daughter realized that he was silly, and felt no grievance with the world for ignoring him. The world had, at one time, done its best to encourage a coming Duke. But the long delay in the succession, coupled with Mr. Mortimer’s overwhelming foolishness, had gradually worn off the patience of even the most far-sighted; and now his daughter went about inconspicuously with her great-aunt, while her father stayed unregretted at home, and presumed on his prospects in a placid, most-comfortable-chair-assuming way.
Gentle, neat, polite, Miss Mortimer, in her heart of hearts, resented the indifference with which the world seemed to treat the future mistress of Brakelond. And this resentment, demure and calm as it was, did not make her more attractive or approachable to the men from whom she would have liked to claim attention as her right. She stiffened herself into a rigid piety, and by contrast with the gay, attractive girls around her, made herself defiantly dull and godly in demeanour, pluming herself the while on her unfaltering maintenance of old-fashioned piety in degenerate days. And as soon as the men discovered that, in her way, she was mildly sulking at them for not making more of her, they ceased their efforts to make anything at all, and took refuge with the hundreds of other bright, pleasant girls who had twice Miss Mortimer’s charm and none of her prospects or pretensions.
It was strange that Gundred, delightfully pretty in her cool way, serene, beautifully mannered, could exert no compelling force on her surroundings. That she wished to claim attention was the sign of her weakness; for those who can command attention never take the trouble of asking for it. But Gundred’s mind was always secluded, self-centred, reserved. She never gave out any light or warmth. She accepted, absorbed, received with gracious dignity; she never had the power of radiating any return of friendly feeling, any comforting geniality of human sympathy. As a talker she was gently frigid, sweetly insipid in her way of avoiding all topics of general interest, and, while restricting the conversation to her own concerns, of restricting it entirely to such of those as were most obvious and least interesting to the world at large. The weather, as it affected her plans; the visits that she paid, the churches she attended, and the cooks that she engaged; such were the subjects on which she pellucidly discoursed in the prettiest of voices, with the most pleasant of smiles; to the unutterable weariness of some partner who wanted a little more vitality in the conversation.
Nor was she more successful as a listener. Even during the most thrilling recitals her eye might be seen wandering towards the next comer, or her mind guessed to be wondering whether she had not accorded the speaker enough of her attention. Men soon ceased to tell her anything of value, and followed her own example of talking amiably but saying nothing. Lady Agnes was beginning to despair of her great-niece’s prospects when Kingston Darnley was ushered into the lists by his mother.
He came, he saw, he conquered. Idle-looking, tall and fair, beautiful in build and feature, he could not but command personal admiration; while in mind, keenly active, riotously fanciful, he was the last man in the world to conciliate Miss Mortimer’s approval, and, therefore, the first to captivate her attention. To her prim and maidenly habits of thought he was seductive in his lazy twinkling moods, seductive in his moments of emotion, seductive in those ebullitions of ridiculous gaiety that Gundred knew to be so disorderly and unconventional, yet reluctantly felt to be so delightful. Hitherto men had either bored her or been bored by her, had always failed to penetrate the closed garden of her attention; Kingston Darnley now came swinging carelessly into the sacred enclosure, and paid her the compelling compliment of making her believe herself brilliant and amusing.
Often it happens that the staid and decorous, hard as iron in their disapproval of all frivolity, are suddenly and completely melted by someone frivolous beyond their uttermost possibilities of disapproval. One is liable to love one’s opposites, if those opposites be sufficiently opposed. Only a little less different herself, and Gundred might have disliked Kingston Darnley; but he was so madly divergent from all her ideals that the very sharpness of the contrast drove her to capitulate rapidly and completely. She even ceased to claim his attention; she began to beg for it.
Her training had collaborated with her nature in guarding her from self-betrayal. Her manners continued gentle, guarded, suavely frigid as before. But Lady Adela, with the eye of a hopeful mother, pierced the disguise of Gundred’s feelings, and lost no time in proclaiming the discovery to her son. Kingston Darnley, for his part, was strongly attracted by Gundred. To his fastidious temperament she never offered a jarring note. She was always crisp and cool; always deliberate and graceful; her hair was never disordered, nor her hat crooked, nor her stockings ill-gartered. At all points she was unalterably serene, impeccable and satisfying. Emotionally, too, she gave him what he wanted. He needed no ardent, unbalanced temper in his wife. He needed just that gracious acquiescence which Miss Mortimer supplied. She was restful in all her ways, her mind was thoroughly well-mannered, and her smiling calm assured him of a sympathetic nature. As he laid his ideas before her he was enraptured to see how sweetly, how reasonably she listened, and found full agreement in her cool grey-blue eyes, behind which, in reality, her inattentive brain was admiring the tact of his tie. But, whatever her secret thoughts, she never revealed them, and those cool, grey-blue eyes had been trained to express decorous attention; therefore Kingston Darnley soon realized that in Miss Mortimer he had found that perfect conjunction of ideal soul with ideal body in the quest for which his five-and-twenty years had hitherto been vainly spent.
That his feeling was not a great passion he sometimes felt—that it was not even commensurate with the passion which he had sometimes found himself forced half-incredulously to divine behind the chill fires of Gundred’s eyes. But his experience with the lady of the downy nose had daunted him and disillusioned him; with the knowledge of wide experience he now knew that a great passion falls to the lot of very few, and that it is well to take the good the gods provide. Failing the Supramundane Mate to whom all idealists look with longing, he would compromise with a woman in every respect charming, alluring, delightful—a woman of temperate mood, a woman of neat and faultless style in body and mind, a woman, in short, who could be trusted never to clash with any of life’s harmonies or discords.