Theodore Carden got up from the breakfast table and walked over to a circular bay-window which commanded charming views of the wide, sloping garden, interspersed with the streams and tiny ponds which gave the house its name of Watermead, and which enabled old Mr. Carden to indulge himself with especial ease in his hobby of water gardening.
Standing there, the young man began wondering what he should do with himself this early spring day. His fiancée had just left the quiet lodgings which she and her mother, a clergyman’s widow, had occupied in Birmingham during the last few weeks, to pay visits to relatives in the South. The thought of going to any of the neighbouring houses, where he knew himself to be sure of a warm welcome, and where the news of his engagement would be received with 447 boisterous congratulations, tempered in some cases with an underlying touch of regret and astonishment, filled him with repugnance. The girl he had chosen to be his wife was absolutely different from the women who had hitherto attracted him; he reverenced as well as loved her, and hitherto Theodore Carden had never found reverence to be in any sense a corollary of passion.
The last few days had brought a great change in his life, and one which he meant should be permanent; and yet, in spite or perhaps because of this, as he stood staring with absent eyes into his father’s charming garden, he found his mind dwelling persistently on the only one of his many amorous adventures which had left a deep, an enduring, and, it must be admitted, a most delightful mark on the tablets of his memory.
The whole thing was still so vivid to him that half-involuntarily he turned round and looked down the long room to where his old father was sitting. How amazed, above all, how shocked and indignant the man for whom he had so great an affection and respect would feel, if he knew the picture which was now floating before his son’s retrospective vision!
What had happened had been briefly this: One day in the previous October, Carden had taken his seat in the afternoon express which stops at Birmingham on its way from the north to Euston, or rather, having taken a leisurely survey of the train, which was, as he quickly noted, agreeably empty, he had indicated to the porter carrying his bag a carriage in which sat, alone, a singularly pretty woman.
As he afterwards had the delight of telling her, and, as he now reminded himself with a retrospective thrill of feeling, he had experienced, when his eyes first met those of the fair traveller, that incommunicable sensation, part physical, part mental, which your genuine Lothario, if an intelligent man, always welcomes with quickening pulse as the foretaste of special zest to be attached to a coming pursuit.
Carden’s instinct as to such delicate questions had seldom played him false; never less so than on this occasion, for, within an hour, he and the lovely stranger had reached that delightful stage of intimacy in which each feels that he and she, while still having much to learn about the other, are on the verge of a complete understanding.
During the journey of between two and three hours, his travelling companion had told him a great deal more about herself than he had chosen to reveal concerning his own life and affairs; he learned, for instance, that she was the young wife of an old man, and that the old man was exceedingly jealous. Further, that she found the life she was compelled to lead “horribly boring,” and that a widowed cousin, who lived near London, and from whom she had “expectations,” formed a convenient excuse for occasional absences from home.
Concerning three matters of fact, however, she completely withheld her confidence, both then, in those first delicious hours of their acquaintance, and even later, when their friendship—well, why not say friendship? for Carden had felt a very strong liking as well as an over-mastering attraction toward this Undine-like creature—had become much closer. The first and second facts which she kept closely hidden, for reasons which should perhaps have been obvious, were her surname—she confided to him that her Christian name was Pansy—and her husband’s profession. The third, about which she might surely have been less reticent, was the name of the town where she lived and from which she appeared to be travelling that day.