“I’m not going to deny that there’s good in me. Why should I? If there wasn’t, I shouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have asked me to be your companion,” he added quickly, fearing lest she might put a wrong construction on his words. “When a good woman does a man the honour of admitting him to her intimate companionship, he knows he’s good—and it makes him feel better.”
Her left elbow rested on the parapet of the bridge, and her chin rested on the palm of her hand. Without looking at him she stretched out the other hand and touched him.
“Thank you for saying that, Tommy,” she said in a low voice.
Their mutual relations had modified considerably during the journey. The change, in the first place, had come instinctively from Tommy. Hitherto, Clementina had represented little to his ingenuous mind but the rough-and-ready comrade, the good sort, the stunning portrait-painter. With many of his men friends he was on practically the same terms. Quite unconsciously he patronised her ever so little, as the Prince Charmings of life’s fairy-tale are apt to patronise those who are not quite so charming or quite so princely as themselves. When he had dined with the proud and gorgeous he loved to strut before her aureoled in his reflected splendour; not for a moment remembering that had Clementina chosen to throw off her social nonconformity she could have sat in high places at the houses of such a proud and gorgeous hierarchy as he, Tommy Burgrave, could not hope, for many years, to consort with. Sometimes he treated her as an old family nurse, who spoiled him, sometimes as a bearded master; he teased her; chaffed her, laid traps to catch her sharp sayings; greeted her with “Hullo,” and parted from her with an airy wave of the hand. But as soon as they set off on their travels the subtle change took place, for which the fact of his being her guest could only, in small degree, account. Being in charge of all arrangements, and thus asserting his masculinity, he saw Clementina in a new light. For all her unloveliness she was a woman; for all her lack of convention she was a lady born and bred. She was as much under his protection as any dame or damsel of the proud and gorgeous to whom he might have had the honour to act as escort; and without a moment’s self-consciousness he began to treat Clementina with the same courteous solicitude as he would have treated such dame or damsel, or, for the matter of that, any other woman of his acquaintance. Whereas, a month or two before he would have tramped by her side for miles without the thought of her possible fatigue entering his honest head, now her inability to stroll about the streets of these little provincial towns, without physical exhaustion, caused him grave anxiety. He administered to her comfort in a thousand ways. He saw to the proper working of the shutters in her room, to the smooth opening of the drawers and presses; put the fear of God into the hearts of chamber-maids and valets through the medium of a terrific lingua franca of his own invention; supplied her with flowers; rose early every morning to scour the town for a New York Herald so that it could be taken up to Clementina’s room with her coffee, and petit croissant. His habit of speech, too, became more deferential, and his discourse gained in depth and sincerity what it lost in picturesque vernacular. To sum up the whole of the foregoing in a phrase, Tommy’s attitude towards Clementina grew to be that of an extremely nice boy towards an extremely nice maiden aunt.
This change of attitude acted very powerfully on Clementina. As she had remarked, it was a new sensation to be taken care of: one which she liked very much indeed. All the sternly repressed feminine in her—all that she called the silly fool woman—responded to the masculine strength and delicacy of touch. She, on her side, saw Tommy in a new light. He had developed from the boy into the man. He was responsible, practical, imperious in his frank, kindly, Anglo-Saxon way. It was a new joy for the woman, who, since girlhood, had fought single-handed for her place in the world, to sit still and do nothing while difficulties vanished before his bright presence just as the crests of alarming steeps vanished before the irresistible rush of the car.
Once when a loud report and the grinding of the wheels announced a puncture, she cried involuntarily.
“I’m so glad!”
Tommy laughed. “Well, of all the feminine reasons for gladness!”—Clementina basked in her femininity like a lizard in the sun. “I suppose it’s because you can sit in the shade and watch Johnson and me toiling and broiling like niggers on the road.”
She blushed beneath her swarthy skin. That was just it. She loved to see him throw off his coat and grapple like a young Hercules with the tyre. For Johnson’s much more efficient exertions she cared not a scrap.
Her heart was full of new delights. It was a new delight to feel essentially what she in her irony used to term a lady; to be addressed with deference and tenderness, to have her desires executed just that instant before specific formulation which gives charm and surprise. Every day she discovered a new and unsuspected quality in Tommy, and every evening she dwelt upon the sweetness, freshness, and strength of his nature. The lavender fragrance, the nice maiden-aunt-ity of her relations with Tommy, I am afraid she missed.