The frost goes, but so does not St. John. He hunts all day, and all the long evenings lounges sedulously on the sofa beside Constance, trying to feel affectionate: trying to make her talk—trying, metaphorically, to pull the string at his fine wax-doll's side, to make her say "Pap-pa" and "Mam-ma" prettily. "Since I am to spend my life with this woman," he says to himself, heavily, "I must try and make the best of her."
And, alas! alas! the best is not very good. He is thirty now, and—the Gerards are a long-lived, tough race—he may live till ninety. He asks himself, now and then, in a sort of startled terror, is he to see opposite him at breakfast, every day for the next sixty years, this carven face, changeless as the stone saints on the walls of Felton Church? Of all the one-half of creation, is this unsuggestive, unresponsive, negative woman to be his sole portion? "It is her misfortune that she is not a woman of science," as Mr. Shandy mildly remarked of his wife, "but she might ask a question." Strive as he may against the conviction, the yoke that he has taken upon himself in careless apathy has already begun to gall his withers. And yet it was not (as you may imagine) pique that first made Gerard Miss Blessington's lover. It was partly that numb indifference as to anything that might happen to him, that always follows a great blow, partly sheer weariness of his father's importunities upon the subject of his marriage.
He is the last scion of a family that has come down in direct male line from a Norman robber: if it be tersely predicated of him on his tombstone that he died S. P., the Hall, and the lake, and the wide fat lands will go to some distant needy cousins, with whom Sir Thomas is at dagger's drawing, and for whom he cherishes a hatred livelier even than that which poachers, Irish beggars, and vulpecides inspire in his gentle breast. The fact of his responsibilities has been chimed into St. John's ears till he is rather weary of it: he has been hearing it for the last five-and-twenty years—ever since indeed, that solemn day when, petticoats being cast aside, he was invested with the virile dignity of round jacket and breeches.
"Why don't we cut off the entail?" he asks impatiently, one day, shortly after Esther's visit—a visit which has naturally given him a greater distaste for the subject than he had ever before experienced. "You and I together can do it, cannot we, Sir Thomas, and leave the property to the Foundling, or Hanwell, or to some hospital or penitentiary, where it would do a deal more good, I don't doubt, than it ever has in our hands?" But he does not mean it; his pride in the old house and the old name is as great, though not as offensively shown, as his father's.
"It's all your cursed selfishness," says his parent, strutting and fuming about, one morning, over the crimson and ash-coloured squares of the library carpet; puffing out his feathers, as it were, and beginning to gobble-obble. "You prefer your lazy, lounging club life, your French chef, and d——d sybarite habits, to everything else under heaven; you don't reflect that, when a man has been given such advantages as yours, he owes corresponding duties to his country and his estate, and—and—and his father——" concludes Sir Thomas, rather at a loss for a peroration.
St. John lifts his eyebrows almost imperceptibly at the last clause. "If you like to look out for a wife for me," he says, flinging himself indolently into an arm-chair, and speaking half-seriously, half-derisively, "and will engage to undertake all the bore of the preliminaries—love-making, dancing attendance, etc.—I have no objection to marrying, since the duty of continuing this illustrious race has been perverse enough to devolve on me, who, God knows, am not ambitious of perpetuating myself."
"Love-making!—pooh!" repeats Sir Thomas, contemptuously; "we need have none of that rubbish; respect and esteem are a deal the best basis to go upon; that's what your mother and I began life with——"
"And have continued undiminished up to the present day," says St. John, with a slight sneer. "Well" (yawning), "if you can find, amongst the wide range of your acquaintance, any young lady who is willing to respect and esteem me—which is not likely—or to respect and esteem Felton—which is more probable, and, after all, comes to much the same in the end—she may have the felicity of being your daughter-in-law, for all I shall do to hinder it: anything for a quiet life."
Sir Thomas turns his bright little fierce eyes sharply upon his offspring, prepared, at a moment's notice, to precipitate himself into one of his blustering, sputtering, God damning rages if he detect the slightest sign of mirth or derision on the young man's face. But none such is to be found; his downcast eyes are fixed with lazy interest upon his own substantial legs, stretched in black-and-crimson-ribbed stockings, straight before him. The ire of his parent's gaze is mitigated. "If you are in earnest," he says, surlily, "and not making a jest of this, as you mostly do of every serious subject, why—why—there's no use in going far afield for what one has ready to one's hand."
"Where?" asks St. John, thoroughly mystified by the Delphic obscurity of his papa's remark, looking vaguely round the room, out on the terrace, at the laughing, tumbling fountain, at the garden roller.