She was no nearer sleep after looking matters calmly in the face, that way, for a full hour. Similar trials to dramatize a probable future all ended on the same lines, and each time Gwen was indignant with herself for her own folly. What was this man to her, whom she had seen twice? Little enough!—she pledged herself to it in the Court of Conscience! What was she to him, who had spoken with her twice certainly; but seen her—oh, how little! Why, she had seen him more, of the two, if one came to close quarters with Time. See how long he was stooping over that unfortunate dog-chain!
Sitting up in bed in the dim July dawn, wild-eyed in an unshepherded flock of golden locks, this young lady was certainly surpassingly beautiful. She was revolving in her poor, aching head a contingency she had not fully allowed for. Suppose—merely to look other things in the face, you see!—suppose there were no dummy! What chance would the poor fellow have then of winning the love of any woman, with those blind eyes in his head? Gwen got up restlessly and went to the casement, meeting a stream of level sunlight that the swallows outside in the ivy were making the subject of comment, and stood looking out over the leagues of the ancient domain of her forefathers. "Gwen o' the Towers"—that was her name. It seemed to join chorus with her own answer to the last question, to her satisfaction.
To offer the consolation of her love, to give all she had to give, to this man as compensation for the great curse that had fallen on him through the fault of her belongings, seemed to her in her excited state easy and nowise strange—mere difficulty of the negotiation apart. She elected to shut her eyes to a fact we and the story can guess—we are so shrewd, you see!—and to make a parade in her own eyes of a self-renunciation approaching that of Marcus Curtius. If only the gulf would open to receive her she would fling herself in. She ignored the dissimilarities of detail in the two cases, especially the conceivable promised land at the bottom of her gulf. The Roman Eques had nothing but death and darkness to look forward to.
The difficulties of the scheme shot across her fevered conception of it. How if, though he was not affianced to the dummy, or any other lay figure she might provide, his was a widowed heart left barren by the hand of Death? How if some other disappointment had marred his life?—some passion for a woman who had rashly accepted somebody else before meeting him? This happens we know; so did Gwen, and was sorry. How if some minx—Lutwyche's expression—had bewitched him and slighted him? He might nurse a false ideal of her till Doomsday. Men did sometimes, coeteris paribus. But how could she—how could she?... Anyhow, Gwen might have seen her way through that difficulty with a fair chance. But—to be invisible!
The morning sun had been at variance with some flames, hard to believe clouds, and had just dispersed them so successfully that their place in the heavens knew them no more. His rays, unveiled, bore hard upon the blue eyes, sore with watching, of the girl a hundred million miles off, and drove her from her casement. Gwen of the Towers fell back into the room, all the flowing lawn of the most luxurious robe-de-nuit France could provide turned to gold by the touch of Phoebus. She paused a moment before a mirror, to glance at her pallor in it, and to wonder at the sunlight in the wealth of its setting of ungroomed, uncontrollable locks. It was not vanity exactly that provoked the despairing thought:—"But he will never see me—never!" A girl would have been a hypocrite indeed who could shut her eyes to what Gwen saw in that looking-glass. She knew all about it—had done so from babyhood.
Some relaxation of the mind gave Morpheus an opportunity, and he took such advantage of a willing victim that Lutwyche, coming three hours later, scarcely knew how to deal with the case, and might have been uneasy at such an intensive cultivation of sleep if she had been a nervous person. But she was prosaic and phlegmatic, and held to the general opinion that nothing unusual ever happened. So she was content to make a little extra noise; and, when nothing came of it, to go away till rung for. That was how Gwen came to be so late at breakfast that morning.
CHAPTER XX
HOW THE HON. PERCIVAL GAVE MISS DICKENSON HIS ACCOUNT OF THE BLIND MAN. HOW THAT ANY YOUNG MAN SOEVER IS GLAD THAT ANY YOUNG LADY SOEVER ISN'T FIANCEE, EXCEPT SHE BE UGLY. MISS DICKENSON'S EFFRONTERY. HOW MR. PELLEW SAID "POOH!" IRENE'S ABSENCE, VISITING. EVERYONE'S ELSE ABSENCE, EXCEPT THE BLIND MAN'S, GWEN'S, AND MRS. BAILEY'S, WHO HAD A LETTER TO WRITE
The Hon. Percival Pellew had not been at the Towers continuously throughout the whole three weeks following the accident. The best club in London could not have spared him as long as that. He had returned to his place in the House a day or two later, had voted on the Expenses at Elections Bill, and had then gone to a by-election in Cornwall to help his candidate to keep his expenses at a minimum. His way back to the club did not lie near Ancester Towers, but he reconciled a renewal of his visit there to his conscience by the consideration that an unusually late Session was predicted. A little more country air would do him no harm, and the Towers was the best club in the country.