Chapter 1.IV.
It remained in my mind, that little thing that Dacres had taken the trouble to tell my daughter; I thought about it a good deal. It seemed to me the most serious and convincing circumstances that had yet offered itself to my consideration. Dacres was no longer content to bring solace and support to the more appealing figure of the situation; he must set to work, bless him! to improve the situation itself. He must try to induce Miss Farnham, by telling her everything he could remember to my credit, to think as well of her mother as possible, in spite of the strange and secret blows which that mother might be supposed to sit up at night to deliver to her. Cecily thought very well of me already; indeed, with private reservations as to my manners and—no, NOT my morals, I believe I exceeded her expectations of what a perfectly new and untrained mother would be likely to prove. It was my theory that she found me all she could understand me to be. The maternal virtues of the outside were certainly mine; I put them on with care every morning and wore them with patience all day. Dacres, I assured myself, must have allowed his preconception to lead him absurdly by the nose not to see that the girl was satisfied, that my impatience, my impotence, did not at all make her miserable. Evidently, however, he had created our relations differently; evidently he had set himself to their amelioration. There was portent in it; things seemed to be closing in. I bit off a quarter of an inch of wooden pen-handle in considering whether or not I should mention it in my letter to John, and decided that it would be better just perhaps to drop a hint. Though I could not expect John to receive it with any sort of perturbation. Men are different; he would probably think Tottenham well enough able to look after himself.
I had embarked on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of the saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very conscious and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my mood that he had nothing less than the crisis of his life in his pocket, and was looking for me. As he advanced towards me between the long tables doubt left me and alarm assailed me. ‘I’m glad to find you in a quiet corner,’ said he, seating himself, and confirmed my worst anticipations.
‘I’m writing to John,’ I said, and again applied myself to my pen-handle. It is a trick Cecily has since done her best in vain to cure me of.
‘I am going to interrupt you,’ he said. ‘I have not had an opportunity of talking to you for some time.’
‘I like that!’ I exclaimed derisively.
‘And I want to tell you that I am very much charmed with Cecily.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I am not going to gratify you by saying anything against her.’
‘You don’t deserve her, you know.’
‘I won’t dispute that. But, if you don’t mind—I’m not sure that I’ll stand being abused, dear boy.’