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.’
‘I quite see it isn’t any use. Though one spoke with the tongues of men and of angels—’
‘And had not charity,’ I continued for him. ‘Precisely. I won’t go on, but your quotation is very apt.’
‘I so bow down before her simplicity. It makes a wide and beautiful margin for the rest of her character. She is a girl Ruskin would have loved.’
‘I wonder,’ said I. ‘He did seem fond of the simple type, didn’t he?’
‘Her mind is so clear, so transparent. The motive spring of everything she says and does is so direct. Don’t you find you can most completely depend upon her?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said; ‘certainly. I nearly always know what she is going to say before she says it, and under given circumstances I can tell precisely what she will do.’
‘I fancy her sense of duty is very beautifully developed.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘There is hardly a day when I do not come in contact with it.’
‘Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of hers very restful.’
‘I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one young lady,’ I said, taking refuge in flippancy, ‘and to think that she should be my daughter!’
‘As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of destiny, Mrs. Farnham.’
‘Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You don’t seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations, like a tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and content. How determined you are to be sorry for her!’
Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the limited person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The first of them would be, I saw, that he had quite a different conception of Cecily, that it was illuminated by many trifles, nuances of feeling and expression, which he had noticed in his talks with her whenever they had skirted the subject of her adoption by her mother. He knew her, he was longing to say, better than I did; when it would have been natural to reply that one could not hope to compete in such a direction with an intelligent young man, and we should at once have been upon delicate and difficult ground. So it was as well perhaps that he kept silence until he said, as he had come prepared to say, ‘Well, I want to put that beyond a doubt—her happiness—if I’m good enough. I want her, please, and I only hope that she will be half as willing to come as you are likely to be to let her go.’
It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified to feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the instant in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole complete self again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was masquerading about in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from an exacting condition and an impossible ideal! ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, and my eyes positively filled. ‘You ARE good, Dacres, but I couldn’t let you do that.’
His undisguised stare brought me back to a sense of the proportion of things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had brought Mr. Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter consideration for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic. Inwardly I laughed at the egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it up, even for an instant, as a reason for gratitude. The situation was not so peculiar, not so interesting, as that. But I answered his stare with a smile; what I had said might very well stand.
‘Do you imagine,’ he said, seeing that I did not mean to amplify it, ‘that I want to marry her out of any sort of GOODness?’
‘Benevolence is your weakness, Dacres.’
‘I see. You think one’s motive is to withdraw her from a relation which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in her particular and painful case, the most equivocal.’
‘Well, come,’ I remonstrated. ‘You have dropped one or two things, you know, in the heat of your indignation, not badly calculated to give one that idea. The eloquent statement you have just made, for instance—it carries all the patness of old conviction. How often have you rehearsed it?’
I am a fairly long-suffering person, but I began to feel a little annoyed with my would-be son-in-law. If the relation were achieved it would give him no prescriptive right to bully me; and we were still in very early anticipation of that.
‘Ah!’ he said disarmingly. ‘Don’t let us quarrel. I’m sorry you think that; because it isn’t likely to bring your favour to my project, and I want you friendly and helpful. Oh, confound it!’ he exclaimed, with sudden temper. ‘You ought to be. I don’t understand this aloofness. I half suspect it’s pose. You undervalue Cecily—well, you have no business to undervalue me. You know me better than anybody in the world. Now are you going to help me to marry your daughter?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said slowly, after a moment’s silence, which he sat through like a mutinous schoolboy. ‘I might tell you that I don’t care a button whom you marry, but that would not be true. I do care more or less. As you say, I know you pretty well. I’d a little rather you didn’t make a mess of it; and if you must I should distinctly prefer not to have the spectacle under my nose for the rest of my life. I can’t hinder you, but I won’t help you.’
‘And what possesses you to imagine that in marrying Cecily I should make a mess of it? Shouldn’t your first consideration be whether SHE would?’
‘Perhaps it should, but, you see, it isn’t. Cecily would be happy with anybody who made her comfortable. You would ask a good deal more than that, you know.’
Dacres, at this, took me up promptly. Life, he said, the heart of life, had particularly little to say to temperament. By the heart of life I suppose he meant married love. He explained that its roots asked other sustenance, and that it throve best of all on simple elemental goodness. So long as a man sought in women mere casual companionship, perhaps the most exquisite thing to be experienced was the stimulus of some spiritual feminine counterpart; but when he desired of one woman that she should be always and intimately with him, the background of his life, the mother of his children, he was better advised to avoid nerves and sensibilities, and try for the repose of the common—the uncommon—domestic virtues. Ah, he said, they were sweet, like lavender. (Already, I told him, he smelled the housekeeper’s linen-chest.) But I did not interrupt him much; I couldn’t, he was too absorbed. To temperamental pairing, he declared, the century owed its breed of decadents. I asked him if he had ever really recognized one; and he retorted that if he hadn’t he didn’t wish to make a beginning in his own family. In a quarter of an hour he repudiated the theories of a lifetime, a gratifying triumph for simple elemental goodness. Having denied the value of the subtler pretensions to charm in woman as you marry her, he went artlessly on to endow Cecily with as many of them as could possibly be desirable. He actually persuaded himself to say that it was lovely to see the reflections of life in her tranquil spirit; and when I looked at him incredulously he grew angry, and hinted that Cecily’s sensitiveness to reflections and other things might be a trifle beyond her mother’s ken. ‘She responds instantly, intimately, to the beautiful everywhere,’ he declared.
‘Aren’t the opportunities of life on board ship rather limited to demonstrate that?’ I inquired. ‘I know—you mean sunsets. Cecily is very fond of sunsets. She is always asking me to come and look at them.’
‘I was thinking of last night’s sunset,’ he confessed. ‘We looked at it together.’
‘What did she say?’ I asked idly.
‘Nothing very much. That’s just the point. Another girl would have raved and gushed.’
‘Oh, well, Cecily never does that,’ I responded. ‘Nevertheless she is a very ordinary human instrument. I hope I shall have no temptation ten years hence to remind you that I warned you of her quality.’
‘I wish, not in the least for my own profit, for I am well convinced already, but simply to win your cordiality and your approval—never did an unexceptional wooer receive such niggard encouragement!—I wish there were some sort of test for her quality. I would be proud to stand by it, and you would be convinced. I can’t find words to describe my objection to your state of mind.’
The thing seemed to me to be a foregone conclusion. I saw it accomplished, with all its possibilities of disastrous commonplace. I saw all that I have here taken the trouble to foreshadow. So far as I was concerned, Dacres’s burden would add itself to my philosophies, voila tout. I should always be a little uncomfortable about it, because it had been taken from my back; but it would not be a matter for the wringing of hands. And yet—the hatefulness of the mistake! Dacres’s bold talk of a test made no suggestion. Should my invention be more fertile? I thought of something.
‘You have said nothing to her yet?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. I don’t think she suspects for a moment. She treats me as if no such fell design were possible. I’m none too confident, you know,’ he added, with longer face.
‘We go straight to Agra. Could you come to Agra?’
‘Ideal!’ he cried. ‘The memory of Mumtaz! The garden of the Taj! I’ve always wanted to love under the same moon as Shah Jehan. How thoughtful of you!’
‘You must spend a few days with us in Agra,’ I continued. ‘And as you say, it is the very place to shrine your happiness, if it comes to pass there.’
‘Well, I am glad to have extracted a word of kindness from you at last,’ said Dacres, as the stewards came to lay the table. ‘But I wish,’ he added regretfully, ‘you could have thought of a test.’
Four days later we were in Agra. A time there was when the name would have been the key of dreams to me; now it stood for John’s headquarters. I was rejoiced to think I would look again upon the Taj; and the prospect of living with it was a real enchantment; but I pondered most the kind of house that would be provided for the General Commanding the District, how many the dining-room would seat, and whether it would have a roof of thatch or of corrugated iron—I prayed against corrugated iron. I confess these my preoccupations. I was forty, and at forty the practical considerations of life hold their own even against domes of marble, world-renowned, and set about with gardens where the bulbul sings to the rose. I smiled across the years at the raptures of my first vision of the place at twenty-one, just Cecily’s age. Would I now sit under Arjamand’s cypresses till two o’clock in the morning to see the wonder of her tomb at a particular angle of the moon? Would I climb one of her tall white ministering minarets to see anything whatever? I very greatly feared that I would not. Alas for the aging of sentiment, of interest! Keep your touch with life and your seat in the saddle as long as you will, the world is no new toy at forty. But Cecily was twenty-one, Cecily who sat stolidly finishing her lunch while Dacres Tottenham talked about Akbar and his philosophy. ‘The sort of man,’ he said, ‘that Carlyle might have smoked a pipe with.’
‘But surely,’ said Cecily reflectively, ‘tobacco was not discovered in England then. Akbar came to the throne in 1526.’
‘Nor Carlyle either for that matter,’ I hastened to observe. ‘Nevertheless, I think Mr. Tottenham’s proposition must stand.’
‘Thanks, Mrs. Farnham,’ said Dacres. ‘But imagine Miss Farnham’s remembering Akbar’s date! I’m sure you didn’t!’
‘Let us hope she doesn’t know too much about him,’ I cried gaily, ‘or there will be nothing to tell!’
‘Oh, really and truly very little!’ said Cecily, ‘but as soon as we heard papa would be stationed here Aunt Emma made me read up about those old Moguls and people. I think I remember the dynasty. Baber, wasn’t he the first? And then Humayon, and after him Akbar, and then Jehangir, and then Shah Jehan. But I’ve forgotten every date but Akbar’s.’
She smiled her smile of brilliant health and even spirits as she made the damaging admission, and she was so good to look at, sitting there simple and wholesome and fresh, peeling her banana with her well-shaped fingers, that we swallowed the dynasty as it were whole, and smiled back upon her. John, I may say, was extremely pleased with Cecily; he said she was a very satisfactory human accomplishment. One would have thought, positively, the way he plumed himself over his handsome daughter, that he alone was responsible for her. But John, having received his family, straightway set off with his Staff on a tour of inspection, and thereby takes himself out of this history. I sometimes think that if he had stayed—but there has never been the lightest recrimination between us about it, and I am not going to hint one now.
‘Did you read,’ asked Dacres, ‘what he and the Court poet wrote over the entrance gate to the big mosque at Fattehpur-Sikri? It’s rather nice. “The world is a looking-glass, wherein the image has come and is gone—take as thine own nothing more than what thou lookest upon.”’
My daughter’s thoughtful gaze was, of course, fixed upon the speaker, and in his own glance I saw a sudden ray of consciousness; but Cecily transferred her eyes to the opposite wall, deeply considering, and while Dacres and I smiled across the table, I saw that she had perceived no reason for blushing. It was a singularly narrow escape.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t; what a curious proverb for an emperor to make! He couldn’t possibly have been able to see all his possessions at once.’
‘If you have finished,’ Dacres addressed her, ‘do let me show you what your plain and immediate duty is to the garden. The garden waits for you—all the roses expectant—’
‘Why, there isn’t one!’ cried Cecily, pinning on her hat. It was pleasing, and just a trifle pathetic, the way he hurried her out of the scope of any little dart; he would not have her even within range of amused observation. Would he continue, I wondered vaguely, as, with my elbows on the table, I tore into strips the lemon-leaf that floated in my finger-bowl—would he continue, through life, to shelter her from his other clever friends as now he attempted to shelter her from her mother? In that case he would have to domicile her, poor dear, behind the curtain, like the native ladies—a good price to pay for a protection of which, bless her heart! she would be all unaware. I had quite stopped bemoaning the affair; perhaps the comments of my husband, who treated it with broad approval and satisfaction, did something to soothe my sensibilities. At all events, I had gradually come to occupy a high fatalistic ground towards the pair. If it was written upon their foreheads that they should marry, the inscription was none of mine; and, of course, it was true, as John had indignantly stated, that Dacres might do very much worse. One’s interest in Dacres Tottenham’s problematical future had in no way diminished; but the young man was so positive, so full of intention, so disinclined to discussion—he had not reopened the subject since that morning in the saloon of the Caledonia—that one’s feeling about it rather took the attenuated form of a shrug. I am afraid, too, that the pleasurable excitement of such an impending event had a little supervened; even at forty there is no disallowing the natural interests of one’s sex. As I sat there pulling my lemon-leaf to pieces, I should not have been surprised or in the least put about if the two had returned radiant from the lawn to demand my blessing. As to the test of quality that I had obligingly invented for Dacres on the spur of the moment without his knowledge or connivance, it had some time ago faded into what he apprehended it to be—a mere idyllic opportunity, a charming background, a frame for his project, of prettier sentiment than the funnels and the hand-rails of a ship.
Mr. Tottenham had ten days to spend with us. He knew the place well; it belonged to the province to whose service he was dedicated, and he claimed with impressive authority the privilege of showing it to Cecily by degrees—the Hall of Audience today, the Jessamine Tower tomorrow, the tomb of Akbar another, and the Deserted City yet another day. We arranged the expeditions in conference, Dacres insisting only upon the order of them, which I saw was to be cumulative, with the Taj at the very end, on the night precisely of the full of the moon, with a better chance of roses. I had no special views, but Cecily contributed some; that we should do the Hall of Audience in the morning, so as not to interfere with the club tennis in the afternoon, that we should bicycle to Akbar’s tomb and take a cold luncheon—if we were sure there would be no snakes—to the Deserted City, to all of which Dacres gave loyal assent. I endorsed everything; I was the encouraging chorus, only stipulating that my number should be swelled from day to day by the addition of such persons as I should approve. Cecily, for instance, wanted to invite the Bakewells because we had come out in the same ship with them; but I could not endure the Bakewells, and it seemed to me that our having made the voyage with them was the best possible reason for declining to lay eyes on them for the rest of our natural lives. ‘Mamma has such strong prejudices,’ Cecily remarked, as she reluctantly gave up the idea; and I waited to see whether the graceless Tottenham would unmurmuringly take down the Bakewells. How strong must be the sentiment that turns a man into a boa-constrictor without a pang of transmigration! But no, this time he was faithful to the principles of his pre-Cecilian existence. ‘They are rather Boojums,’ he declared. ‘You would think so, too, if you knew them better. It is that kind of excellent person that makes the real burden of India.’ I could have patted him on the back.
Thanks to the rest of the chorus, which proved abundantly available, I was no immediate witness to Cecily’s introduction to the glorious fragments which sustain in Agra the memory of the moguls. I may as well say that I arranged with care that if anybody must be standing by when Dacres disclosed them, it should not be I. If Cecily had squinted, I should have been sorry, but I would have found in it no personal humiliation. There were other imperfections of vision, however, for which I felt responsible and ashamed; and with Dacres, though the situation, Heaven knows, was none of my seeking, I had a little the feeling of a dealer who offers a defective bibelot to a connoisseur. My charming daughter—I was fifty times congratulated upon her appearance and her manners—had many excellent qualities and capacities which she never inherited from me; but she could see no more than the bulk, no further than the perspective; she could register exactly as much as a camera.
This was a curious thing, perhaps, to displease my maternal vanity, but it did; I had really rather she squinted; and when there was anything to look at I kept out of the way. I can not tell precisely, therefore, what the incidents were that contributed to make Mr. Tottenham, on our return from these expeditions, so thoughtful, with a thoughtfulness which increased, towards the end of them, to a positive gravity. This would disappear during dinner under the influence of food and drink. He would talk nightly with new enthusiasm and fresh hope—or did I imagine it?—of the loveliness he had arranged to reveal on the following day. If again my imagination did not lead me astray, I fancied this occurred later and later in the course of the meal as the week went on; as if his state required more stimulus as time progressed. One evening, when I expected it to flag altogether, I had a whim to order champagne and observe the effect; but I am glad to say that I reproved myself, and refrained.
Cecily, meanwhile, was conducting herself in a manner which left nothing to be desired. If, as I sometimes thought, she took Dacres very much for granted, she took him calmly for granted; she seemed a prey to none of those fluttering uncertainties, those suspended judgments and elaborate indifferences which translate themselves so plainly in a young lady receiving addresses. She turned herself out very freshly and very well; she was always ready for everything, and I am sure that no glance of Dacres Tottenham’s found aught but direct and decorous response. His society on these occasions gave her solid pleasure; so did the drive and the lunch; the satisfactions were apparently upon the same plane. She was aware of the plum, if I may be permitted a brusque but irresistible simile; and with her mouth open, her eyes modestly closed, and her head in a convenient position, she waited, placidly, until it should fall in. The Farnham ladies would have been delighted with the result of their labours in the sweet reason and eminent propriety of this attitude. Thinking of my idiotic sufferings when John began to fix himself upon my horizon, I pondered profoundly the power of nature in differentiation.
One evening, the last, I think, but one, I had occasion to go to my daughter’s room, and found her writing in her commonplace-book. She had a commonplace-book, as well as a Where Is It? an engagement-book, an account-book, a diary, a Daily Sunshine, and others with purposes too various to remember. ‘Dearest mamma,’ she said, as I was departing, ‘there is only one “p” in “opulence”, isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, with my hand on the door-handle, and added curiously, for it was an odd word in Cecily’s mouth, ‘Why?’
She hardly hesitated. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I am just writing down one or two things Mr. Tottenham said about Agra before I forget them. They seemed so true.’
‘He has a descriptive touch,’ I remarked.
‘I think he describes beautifully. Would you like to hear what he said today?’
‘I would,’ I replied, sincerely.
‘“Agra,”’ read this astonishing young lady, ‘“is India’s one pure idyll. Elsewhere she offers other things, foolish opulence, tawdry pageant, treachery of eunuchs and jealousies of harems, thefts of kings’ jewels and barbaric retributions; but they are all actual, visualized, or part of a past that shows to the backward glance hardly more relief and vitality than a Persian painting”—I should like to see a Persian painting—“but here the immortal tombs and pleasure-houses rise out of colour delicate and subtle; the vision holds across three hundred years; the print of the court is still in the dust of the city.”’
‘Did you really let him go on like that?’ I exclaimed. ‘It has the license of a lecture!’
‘I encouraged him to. Of course he didn’t say it straight off. He said it naturally; he stopped now and then to cough. I didn’t understand it all; but I think I have remembered every word.’
‘You have a remarkable memory. I’m glad he stopped to cough. Is there any more?’
‘One little bit. “Here the moguls wrought their passions into marble, and held them up with great refrains from their religion, and set them about with gardens; and here they stand in the twilight of the glory of those kings and the noonday splendour of their own.”’
‘How clever of you!’ I exclaimed. ‘How wonderfully clever of you to remember!’
‘I had to ask him to repeat one or two sentences. He didn’t like that. But this is nothing. I used to learn pages letter-perfect for Aunt Emma. She was very particular. I think it is worth preserving, don’t you?’
‘Dear Cecily,’ I responded, ‘you have a frugal mind.’
There was nothing else to respond. I could not tell her just how practical I thought her, or how pathetic her little book.
We drove together, after dinner, to the Taj. The moonlight lay in an empty splendour over the broad sandy road, with the acacias pricking up on each side of it and the gardens of the station bungalows stretching back into clusters of crisp shadows. It was an exquisite February night, very still. Nothing seemed abroad but two or three pariah dogs, upon vague and errant business, and the Executive Engineer going swiftly home from the club on his bicycle. Even the little shops of the bazaar were dark and empty; only here and there a light showed barred behind the carved balconies of the upper rooms, and there was hardly any tom-tomming. The last long slope of the road showed us the river curving to the left, through a silent white waste that stretched indefinitely into the moonlight on one side, and was crowned by Akbar’s fort on the other. His long high line of turrets and battlements still guarded a hint of their evening rose, and dim and exquisite above them hovered the three dome-bubbles of the Pearl Mosque. It was a night of perfect illusion, and the illusion was mysterious, delicate, and faint. I sat silent as we rolled along, twenty years nearer to the original joy of things when John and I drove through the same old dream.
Dacres, too, seemed preoccupied; only Cecily was, as they say, herself. Cecily was really more than herself, she exhibited an unusual flow of spirits. She talked continually, she pointed out this and that, she asked who lived here and who lived there. At regular intervals of about four minutes she demanded if it wasn’t simply too lovely. She sat straight up with her vigorous profile and her smart hat; and the silhouette of her personality sharply refused to mingle with the dust of any dynasty. She was a contrast, a protest; positively she was an indignity. ‘Do lean back, dear child,’ I exclaimed at last. ‘You interfere with the landscape.’
She leaned back, but she went on interfering with it in terms of sincerest enthusiasm.
When we stopped at the great archway of entrance I begged to be left in the carriage. What else could one do, when the golden moment had come, but sit in the carriage and measure it? They climbed the broad stone steps together and passed under the lofty gravures into the garden, and I waited. I waited and remembered. I am not, as perhaps by this time is evident, a person of overwhelming sentiment, but I think the smile upon my lips was gentle. So plainly I could see, beyond the massive archway and across a score of years, all that they saw at that moment—Arjamand’s garden, and the long straight tank of marble cleaving it full of sleeping water and the shadows of the marshaling cypresses; her wide dark garden of roses and of pomegranates, and at the end the Vision, marvellous, aerial, the soul of something—is it beauty? is it sorrow?—that great white pride of love in mourning such as only here in all the round of our little world lifts itself to the stars, the unpaintable, indescribable Taj Mahal. A gentle breath stole out with a scent of jessamine and such a memory! I closed my eyes and felt the warm luxury of a tear.
Thinking of the two in the garden, my mood was very kind, very conniving. How foolish after all were my cherry-stone theories of taste and temperament before that uncalculating thing which sways a world and builds a Taj Mahal! Was it probable that Arjamand and her Emperor had loved fastidiously, and yet how they had loved! I wandered away into consideration of the blind forces which move the world, in which comely young persons like my daughter Cecily had such a place; I speculated vaguely upon the value of the subtler gifts of sympathy and insight which seemed indeed, at that enveloping moment, to be mere flowers strewn upon the tide of deeper emotions. The garden sent me a fragrance of roses; the moon sailed higher and picked out the little kiosks set along the wall. It was a charming, charming thing to wait, there at the portal of the silvered, scented garden, for an idyll to come forth.
When they reappeared, Dacres and my daughter, they came with casual steps and cheerful voices. They might have been a couple of tourists. The moonlight fell full upon them on the platform under the arch. It showed Dacres measuring with his stick the length of the Sanskrit letters which declared the stately texts, and Cecily’s expression of polite, perfunctory interest. They looked up at the height above them; they looked back at the vision behind. Then they sauntered towards the carriage, he offering a formal hand to help her down the uncertain steps, she gracefully accepting it.
‘You—you have not been long,’ said I. ‘I hope you didn’t hurry on my account.’
‘Miss Farnham found the marble a little cold under foot,’ replied Dacres, putting Miss Farnham in.
‘You see,’ explained Cecily, ‘I stupidly forgot to change into thicker soles. I have only my slippers. But, mamma, how lovely it is! Do let us come again in the daytime. I am dying to make a sketch of it.’
Mr. Tottenham was to leave us on the following day. In the morning, after ‘little breakfast,’ as we say in India, he sought me in the room I had set aside to be particularly my own.
Again I was writing to John, but this time I waited for precisely his interruption. I had got no further than ‘My dearest husband,’ and my pen-handle was a fringe.
‘Another fine day,’ I said, as if the old, old Indian joke could give him ease, poor man!
‘Yes,’ said he, ‘we are having lovely weather.’
He had forgotten that it was a joke. Then he lapsed into silence while I renewed my attentions to my pen.
‘I say,’ he said at last, with so strained a look about his mouth that it was almost a contortion, ‘I haven’t done it, you know.’
‘No,’ I responded, cheerfully, ‘and you’re not going to. Is that it? Well!’
‘Frankly—’ said he.
‘Dear me, yes! Anything else between you and me would be grotesque,’ I interrupted, ‘after all these years.’
‘I don’t think it would be a success,’ he said, looking at me resolutely with his clear blue eyes, in which still lay, alas! the possibility of many delusions.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I never did, you know. But the prospect had begun to impose upon me.’
‘To say how right you were would seem, under the circumstances, the most hateful form of flattery.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I can dispense with your verbal endorsement.’ I felt a little bitter. It was, of course, better that the connoisseur should have discovered the flaw before concluding the transaction; but although I had pointed it out myself I was not entirely pleased to have the article returned.
‘I am infinitely ashamed that it should have taken me all these days—day after day and each contributory—to discover what you saw so easily and so completely.’
‘You forget that I am her mother,’ I could not resist the temptation of saying.
‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t jeer! Please be absolutely direct, and tell me if you have reason to believe that to the extent of a thought, of a breath—to any extent at all—she cares.’
He was, I could see, very deeply moved; he had not arrived at this point without trouble and disorder not lightly to be put on or off. Yet I did not hurry to his relief, I was still possessed by a vague feeling of offense. I reflected that any mother would be, and I quite plumed myself upon my annoyance. It was so satisfactory, when one had a daughter, to know the sensations of even any mother. Nor was it soothing to remember that the young man’s whole attitude towards Cecily had been based upon criticism of me, even though he sat before me whipped with his own lash. His temerity had been stupid and obstinate; I could not regret his punishment.
I kept him waiting long enough to think all this, and then I replied, ‘I have not the least means of knowing.’
I can not say what he expected, but he squared his shoulders as if he had received a blow and might receive another. Then he looked at me with a flash of the old indignation. ‘You are not near enough to her for that!’ he exclaimed.
‘I am not near enough to her for that.’
Silence fell between us. A crow perched upon an opened venetian and cawed lustily. For years afterward I never heard a crow caw without a sense of vain, distressing experiment. Dacres got up and began to walk about the room. I very soon put a stop to that. ‘I can’t talk to a pendulum,’ I said, but I could not persuade him to sit down again.
‘Candidly,’ he said at length, ‘do you think she would have me?’
‘I regret to say that I think she would. But you would not dream of asking her.’
‘Why not? She is a dear girl,’ he responded inconsequently.
‘You could not possibly stand it.’
Then Mr. Tottenham delivered himself of this remarkable phrase: ‘I could stand it,’ he said, ‘as well as you can.’
There was far from being any joy in the irony with which I regarded him and under which I saw him gather up his resolution to go; nevertheless I did nothing to make it easy for him. I refrained from imparting my private conviction that Cecily would accept the first presentable substitute that appeared, although it was strong. I made no reference to my daughter’s large fund of philosophy and small balance of sentiment. I did not even—though this was reprehensible—confess the test, the test of quality in these ten days with the marble archives of the Moguls, which I had almost wantonly suggested, which he had so unconsciously accepted, so disastrously applied. I gave him quite fifteen minutes of his bad quarter of an hour, and when it was over I wrote truthfully but furiously to John....
That was ten years ago. We have since attained the shades of retirement, and our daughter is still with us when she is not with Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice—grandmamma has passed away. Mr. Tottenham’s dumb departure that day in February—it was the year John got his C.B.—was followed, I am thankful to say, by none of the symptoms of unrequited affection on Cecily’s part. Not for ten minutes, so far as I was aware, was she the maid forlorn. I think her self-respect was of too robust a character, thanks to the Misses Farnham. Still less, of course, had she any reproaches to serve upon her mother, although for a long time I thought I detected—or was it my guilty conscience?—a spark of shrewdness in the glance she bent upon me when the talk was of Mr. Tottenham and the probabilities of his return to Agra. So well did she sustain her experience, or so little did she feel it, that I believe the impression went abroad that Dacres had been sent disconsolate away. One astonishing conversation I had with her some six months later, which turned upon the point of a particularly desirable offer. She told me something then, without any sort of embarrassment, but quite lucidly and directly, that edified me much to hear. She said that while she was quite sure that Mr. Tottenham thought of her only as a friend—she had never had the least reason for any other impression—he had done her a service for which she could not thank him enough—in showing her what a husband might be. He had given her a standard; it might be high, but it was unalterable. She didn’t know whether she could describe it, but Mr. Tottenham was different from the kind of man you seemed to meet in India. He had his own ways of looking at things, and he talked so well. He had given her an ideal, and she intended to profit by it. To know that men like Mr. Tottenham existed, and to marry any other kind would be an act of folly which she did not intend to commit. No, Major the Hon. Hugh Taverel did not come near it—very far short, indeed! He had talked to her during the whole of dinner the night before about jackal-hunting with a bobbery pack—not at all an elevated mind. Yes, he might be a very good fellow, but as a companion for life she was sure he would not be at all suitable. She would wait.
And she has waited. I never thought she would, but she has. From time to time men have wished to take her from us, but the standard has been inexorable, and none of them have reached it. When Dacres married the charming American whom he caught like a butterfly upon her Eastern tour, Cecily sent them as a wedding present an alabaster model of the Taj, and I let her do it—the gift was so exquisitely appropriate. I suppose he never looks at it without being reminded that he didn’t marry Miss Farnham, and I hope that he remembers that he owes it to Miss Farnham’s mother. So much I think I might claim; it is really very little considering what it stands for. Cecily is permanently with us—I believe she considers herself an intimate. I am very reasonable about lending her to her aunts, but she takes no sort of advantage of my liberality; she says she knows her duty is at home. She is growing into a firm and solid English maiden lady, with a good colour and great decision of character. That she always had.
I point out to John, when she takes our crumpets away from us, that she gets it from him. I could never take away anybody’s crumpets, merely because they were indigestible, least of all my own parents’. She has acquired a distinct affection for us, by some means best known to herself; but I should have no objection to that if she would not rearrange my bonnet-strings. That is a fond liberty to which I take exception; but it is one thing to take exception and another to express it.
Our daughter is with us, permanently with us. She declares that she intends to be the prop of our declining years; she makes the statement often, and always as if it were humorous. Nevertheless I sometimes notice a spirit of inquiry, a note of investigation in her encounters with the opposite sex that suggests an expectation not yet extinct that another and perhaps a more appreciative Dacres Tottenham may flash across her field of vision—alas, how improbable! Myself I can not imagine why she should wish it; I have grown in my old age into a perfect horror of cultivated young men; but if such a person should by a miracle at any time appear, I think it is extremely improbable that I will interfere on his behalf.