CHAPTER III
To love is by no means necessarily to understand, and Kingston Darnley, as Nature and life had moulded him, was a very different character from Kingston Darnley as his mother’s vague mind imagined him. In point of fact she, good woman, knew little of her son but his face, though, with the splendid intrepidity of the benevolent stupid, she claimed an intimate acquaintance with every detail of his being. Her complete ignorance was due to no conscious process on either side; he as little dreamt of concealing anything from her as she of ignoring any quality in him. But time had taught Kingston that whether he confided in his mother or not, she was just as wise after the revelation as before, being totally devoid of any power to understand what she was shown, or, indeed, to realize that she was being shown anything at all.
Kingston Darnley soon learned to lead his own life without reference to his mother; to help by listeningwas her province; to help by comprehending was beyond the capacities of her nature. So Lady Adela was left to dwell serene in the world of her own happy little kindly fancies, while the facts of life went by her in a roar, without ever being able to capture her notice. She felt that never had mother been more loving or more beloved; that never had son been more loyal and devoted; her parental eye was fixed unerringly on her child, and she knew his nature down to the uttermost convolutions of its smallest eccentricity. Did she ever forget that he disliked the smell of onions? Had she ever failed to notice and deplore his coldness towards her favourite clergy? And had she not succeeded in the last, noblest, highest ambition of a mother’s life—that of imposing upon him a thoroughly nice and suitable bride? And he, for his part, had never rebelled, never repined, never objected, not even to the bride. Accordingly, Lady Adela felt proudly secure that she understood her son in every fibre of his being. So she smiled upon him with perfect unintelligence, and gave nightly thanks to the Powers that had so gifted her with the perfect tact of motherhood.
Kingston Darnley at one-and-twenty had found himself a great deal older than his years. His contemporaries were mere children. He had lived the sheltered life at his mother’s side, until at last came the belated time when she reluctantly permitted him to go to Oxford without her shielding company. General opinion—even that of her son—seemed opposed to Lady Adela’s plan of taking lodgings in Holywell Street, and thence keeping a mother’s eye upon her child. And to popular opinion Lady Adela accordingly yielded. She never made more than a mild and flabby resistance, and could always be induced by opposition to give up her most cherished plots with a smile. But until Kingston, alone and undefended, set off one sadOctober evening from Paddington, he had never been allowed outside the sphere of his mother’s presence—one can hardly say of his mother’s influence—for any influence that Lady Adela may ever have had must always have been merely that of kindly, null proximity.
However, reared by carefully-selected tutors in the gentle but stifling atmosphere of a widow’s house, the mind of Kingston Darnley had shot into premature and unsuspected growth. Intelligence he would always have had, but his training forced it into early development. And, as the growing pains of the mind are always painful as those of the body—especially if experienced too soon or too keenly—so Kingston suffered from the unseasonable expansion of his thoughts, and his discomfort was increased, no less than its cause, by the fact of his essential loneliness. He had no one to speak to. On the first mention of an idea, Lady Adela confidently diagnosed the need of pills; and any perception of inequalities in this best of all possible worlds must be treated by the purer air of Brighton or Bournemouth.
So Kingston was driven in upon himself, and, by the time he came of age, had ardently discovered all the paradoxes that more fortunate people come to in due time at twenty-five or so, and then are able to take as platitudes. The injustice of wealth, the iniquities of sport, of religion, of land-tenure—all these crimes Kingston Darnley felt to be his own particular revelation, and they fermented in his mind until he had few thoughts in common with his fellows. They, meanwhile, went placidly on their way, and when Kingston arrived at Oxford, he found himself a stranger and misplaced among the men of his own years. He was filled at first with a gnawing, cavilling discontent that arose as much from idleness and opulence as from toorapid and unhealthy growth. They, for their part, were honest, jolly fellows, who looked on discontent as an uncomfortable and ‘bad-form’ thing, to be strenuously frowned and jeered out of their circle. To enjoy what came, without analysis, was their scheme, and they resented being asked to inquire into the reasonableness and the morality of their enjoyment. At one-and-twenty no really sane creature wants to think. The time for thought comes later, when the first ardours of action are passing.
Kingston Darnley, though he had far too much sense and geniality to preach or impose his ideas on anyone, was felt to be always suggesting questions, never to be accepting the joy of the moment, in a properly acquiescent, youthful manner. And nothing is more annoying to the hedonist, of whatever age, than the companionship of someone who seems to be examining the sources of his joy. It may be that no joys can stand the test of reason, and the hedonist’s dislike of the sceptic may gain its intensity from the hedonist’s own unacknowledged realization of the fact. Even when Kingston got drunk his tone of mind seemed analytical, far removed from the frank, bellowing joyousness of the more healthy enthusiasts round him. They sat about in the Quad and howled, or beat baths beneath the windows of the junior Dean; Kingston, anxious to please, howled and beat baths with the best. But, whereas the ebullition was pure nature and joy of living with them, with him it was always an assumption, a pose, no matter how carefully assumed and disguised. And the consciousness of this was no less galling to him than to them. All felt ill at ease, disconcerted, disillusioned by his presence. His well-intentioned hilarity seemed somehow to turn the gold of their pleasure to brass, to strike a jarring note in the chorale of enjoyment they were playing so whole-heartedly.So, though never unpopular, Kingston Darnley was isolated. His own set in the college did not want to be bothered with the iniquitous why and wherefore of the game-laws, or the manifest impossibility of miracles; and the other sets to whom he would have brought these discoveries in glad pride had grown accustomed to them long ago, and for many years had looked on them as the buried foundation-stones of all reasoning. So that Kingston fell between two stools, and must needs keep company with his ideas until the passing of time should bring him level with the contemporaries over whom his training had given him such an unhealthy and fictitious advantage.
In any case it is hardly likely that he could ever have taken any really intimate part in Oxford life. Training or no training, his mind had that inquiring tone so fatal to unreflecting hilarity. He was too much interested—in the wrong things, too, and in the wrong way—in people, in causes, in problems. The men who should have been his friends were concerned almost entirely with the joy of living and the avoidance of all unnecessary work. And how is the son of a widow, reared at home decorously, without other boys to riot and tumble with—how is he to have any personal enthusiasm for the joy of living, as understood by healthier, normal men of his own age? Nor is the precocious cleverness of the unquiet mind any real test of ability. Few of Kingston Darnley’s contemporaries but had as good an intelligence as his. Their brains, however, developed naturally along the natural path. In twenty years he had lived hurriedly through five-and-twenty of feverish mental development; their five-and-twentieth year—of mind no less than of body—still lay well ahead of them. By the time he and they would be thirty they might all, perhaps, be contemporaries together. The unhealthy, stragglingshoots of his forced growth would have been blighted down to a level with theirs, sturdy and natural; and by the time they came to consider the game-laws and the gospels, they would bring a ripe and genial intelligence to bear on such points, neither thinking nor talking in excess, but letting profitless points of doctrine slide, for the sake of hitting on a sane and decent scheme of living, such as can best be attained by the average sensible gentleman’s compromise between abstract justice and sound, everyday behaviour.
And Kingston himself would find, in the course of years, that the rubs and jars of life would bring his point of view to the same pitch as theirs, and would perceive that thought is a frivolous and profitless indulgence of the idle mind, as compared with the more fruitful achievement of an honest man’s daily duty, along the lines of obvious, rough-cast morality. Meanwhile, however, though without conscious arrogance, he realized his isolation, and viewed it alternately with pride and regret. On the whole, as self-satisfaction is the postulate of all human life, the pride predominated, and he carried unconsciously through Oxford the idea of being a chosen candlestick for spiritual light.
Other feelings, too, contributed to his sense of loneliness. Birth and wealth had given him caste; but custom had not yet trained him to it. From the middle-class, staid traditions of Darnley-on-Downe he had inherited several hereditary tendencies that not the most determined efforts could eradicate. He was conscious of them; they annoyed him, they disconcerted him by making him feel more than ever that he did not match his surroundings, and this mortifying consciousness was unsupported by any such heroic glamour as that which attended the independence of his sceptical spirit. He knew that he was not careless enough in the spending of money. Spend it hedid, freely and eagerly; but he always knew what it had bought, and his mind kept accounts long after he had fiercely broken himself away from the spell of pass-books and schedules. This was not as it should be. Money, to be spent correctly, should be scattered loosely, and the spender should have as little idea as possible of the way in which it has gone. Only thus can a well-bred indifference to finance be attained. The ideal of his contemporaries was to be perpetually in debt, and never to have anything whatever to show for all that had been spent. On four hundred or four hundred and fifty a year right-minded people might attain to complete destitution, bare rooms, shabby clothes, and a perpetual assumption of bankruptcy. One very popular man even achieved the result on six hundred. This was a rare triumph of extravagance, however, and a reasonable ambition would confine itself to a complete ignorance as to all outgoings. And this Kingston Darnley could never acquire. The ghost of his father stirred in him, demanding a solid recollection of every purchase. He bought the best, bought it and lavished it freely. But he never could rid himself of the knowledge that it was the best, and thus a faint suspicion of ostentatiousness hovered over all his entertainments, and the happy, slovenly wastefulness with which his contemporaries ran into debt for atrocious port or uneatable dinners could never be reached by a man with his finical instinct for perfection. This lack of carelessness, either as to quantity of pounds spent or quality of things purchased, stigmatized its owner for ever as an outsider—not to mention the fact that he invariably paid money down for all he bought. His wealth might as fairly have been blamed for this vice, perhaps; nevertheless, a hatred for debt was one of Kingston’s most inalienable legacies from Darnley-on-Downe, and, had he not beenable to pay cash for the best, he would certainly have remained content to buy the worst. And this, again, was a suspicious trait in the eyes of his contemporaries, who, though quite happy to buy the worst, always made it their pride to run up bills for it that would have been exorbitant had they been ordering the best.
These small hereditary feelings set James Darnley’s son apart from his contemporaries, and it only required the remains of middle-class prudishness to achieve his isolation. Kingston found it impossible, in spite of habit and effort, to acquire the easy personalsans-gêne, the tripping, untrammelled tongue of his contemporaries. He did his best; listened genially, accumulated anecdotes and retailed them among his friends; but always heavily, never as to the manner born. His friends held the free, frank language only possible to the perfectly cleanly mind, naked and unashamed; he, for his part, was always uneasy in his nudity, and took his share in the talk with that consciousness of impropriety that doubles impropriety. The Dadd respectability still hampered its rebellious descendant, and prevented him from ever entering into perfect harmony with that world where decency is a matter of conduct, not by any means of language. On this point his aunt Minne-Adélaïde had certainly the advantage. But the woman is proverbially more adaptable than the man.
Still isolated, then, at home and abroad, Kingston came down at last from Oxford at twenty-four, a character untried, unformed, unground by any real contact with the mills of life. An inordinate sensitiveness to impressions, an excessive personal daintiness, were the marks of his nature at that time, so far as a friend could discern it. For the rest, very pleasant of look and temper, friendly, honest, and no more selfish than a good-looking young fellow of four-and-twentyhas every right to be. Lady Adela was delighted to receive him under her wing once more, and noticed with joy the subsidence of some of his more tumultuous ideas into tranquillity. She had a fearful notion that everyone left Oxford ‘a roaring atheist,’ and it was a great joy to her that Kingston completely disproved this fallacy, not only by accompanying her to church, but also by carrying her hymn-book. She devoted herself to exploiting her son, and he, not finding rebellion necessary for his pleasure, allowed himself to be guided wherever his mother wished.
Rich and handsome in high degree, he began to find London a very pleasant and companionable place, without the ostentatious thoughtlessness of Oxford, or the frank intellectual apathy of his home. In point of fact, London began to do for him what neither home nor Oxford had succeeded in doing. Gradually he grew down to his own level, his edges were rubbed off, his generous, exaggerated ideas dwindled to their proper place in the perspective of life. He realized that to live well and beautifully it is not necessary to be for ever examining the foundations of action; that life is simple and enjoyable for those who prefer living it to discussing it; that justice, while august and unattainable in the abstract, and astonishingly contradictory in its precepts, is yet, in the concrete, very easily discerned and followed in this workaday sphere by plain-minded people whose eyes are fixed, not on the stars in high heaven, but on their reflection in the muddy ways of the world. He ceased to nourish fantastic theories against the hanging of murderesses, conceived the possibility of good in vivisection, and began at last to contemplate a Piccadilly midnight with the not unkindly stoicism of a man of the world. Inwardly, as he often told himself, his ideas remained the same, but their outward manifestation grew calmerand more ordinary. When he met his Oxford friends he found that he was much more in sympathy with their way of taking life as a matter of course.
Meanwhile Lady Adela was bent on seeing him safely married. This, she considered, was the easiest and most desirable way of protecting him against all the wicked possibilities that lie in wait for a young man. To save him from the contamination of many women by tying him tight to one, before he had had time to look about and make his choice, seemed to her a very prudent, not to say holy, course. So she paraded desirable damsels before him, and held amicable counsel with mothers not at all averse from an alliance with Kingston Darnley’s wealth. The mothers and Lady Adela worked and manœuvred with Machiavellian cunning; needless to say, their designs would have been plain to a sucking child; and, equally needless to say, Kingston, pleased and flattered, lent himself more or less amiably to their strategy, with a guilelessness that quite reassured them as to his ignorance of their purposes.
But that very blamelessness of her son’s which Lady Adela wished to safeguard was the ruin of her plan. For, as a matter of fact, Lady Adela, by an accident of fate, rather than by any perspicacity of intellect, was right in holding the mother’s usual superstition of her son’s purity. Kingston Darnley, emotional and fastidious of temperament, impressionable rather than passionate, curious and idealistic, had hitherto not gone the way of all flesh. He had avoided ‘experiences’; and experiences had never sought him out. The sense of personal decency remained strong upon him, and its strength was reinforced by his old theories of morality, and by his strong tendency towards mental, rather than physical passion. So he remained a spectator in the great sexual battle of life.
And this onlooker attitude is not endearing even to the most holy and maidenly of women. Women require to feel that a man is a man—that is, they require to feel the thrill of his virility in the deep fibres of their consciousness—to have their interest caught and held by the proximity of the dominating male. It is only to the depraved woman that the saint is of personal interest; and, even then, her interest is depraved as her nature. The normal girl—though she has not the faintest understanding what her wishes mean—needs to feel the possible conqueror in the man she is talking to—at least, if he is to rouse her curiosity and grow in her acquaintance. And this mysterious thrill, of the man triumphant, Kingston was utterly unable to communicate. Therefore his friendships with women were almost wholly impersonal. He had none of that love-making power which experiences confer; had no idea of how the blood is stirred and defiance stimulated; no gift for that bold expression of physical approval which is so dear to even the best of women. Women had to ask him if their frocks were pretty, and if he liked their hats; even then his answers never went the fervent lengths that their questions had been meant to open up.
His flirtations were abstract, platonic, unearthly—all that a mother considers most unprofitable, though perilous. The artist, indeed, can be a sensualist; but the artistic spirit and the sensual have no real relationship. What attracts the one repels the other, and it is only within the fierce energetic soul of genius that the two can be reconciled. Kingston Darnley, without genius, had the artist spirit. And the artist spirit was for ever showing him fresh superficial blemishes in the offered maidens—blemishes whose deterrent force his animalism was not powerful enough to overcome. This one had hands that didn’t match;that one perpetually wore lace mittens; a third had a nose that perspired at dances; or an irritating cackle that revealed a golden tooth. One and all, he liked them—even loved them—in so far as their minds were clear, pleasant, friendly, lovable. But to be loved for her mind is the last thing that a well-looking young woman requires. And when he thought of marrying them, when he considered the prospect of living for ever with a perspiring nose or a mittened hand, Kingston revolted at the idea, no matter how precious the soul that owned the nose or the mitten.
It may be imagined, then, that, whatever his relations with older, plainer women, settled in life, he was neither popular nor at ease with the marriageable maidens provided by his mother. In vague dissatisfaction with his home, he was even anxious to marry and settle down with some sympathetic, adorable woman—but always that accursed prosaic aspect of the case came uppermost, and repelled him in horror from the plan.
Only once had he ever felt what he hoped might be the premonitory thrill of a really great passion—a passion such as might tide him over the more difficult questions involved. In this hope he had nurtured young love; and as love in so many lucky people is a matter of habit and determination, he had seemed soon to be in a fair way to success. The girl, too, showed signs of approval, and everything appeared so prosperous that Lady Adela gave hearty thanks and put half a crown into the plate, feeling that Heaven had earned more than its customary shilling. And then one day he had sat with the girl and her aunt in Kensington Gardens. And the cruel glare of daylight had shown him a fine colony of down on her nose, and the places whence and where her maid had transferred a rosette to hide a stain on her gown. All wasover. The girl was everything delightful; but the idea of being bound eternally to a potentially bearded nose was impossible. Kingston could no longer bear the thought of marrying, and told his mother that his hope had proved fallacious. Heaven only got sixpence the next Sunday; and, even so, it was in coppers.
It was shortly after this episode that Heaven, bearing no malice, had thrown Lady Adela into the track of Lady Agnes Mortimer. Lady Agnes was a single woman of small means, and an eccentricity that passed all bounds. However, she was something of a personage, by virtue of her name as well as of her character, and the great-niece whom she was trying to marry might do very well for Kingston Darnley. So thought Lady Adela, pondering the many eligible qualities of the girl who would one day be daughter to a Duke of March and Brakelond, and who, besides, had so many qualities that endearingly resembled her own—at least, so far as kindness, devotion, sweetness, and piety went. She brought her son, accordingly, into contact with Miss Mortimer, and was surreptitiously overjoyed to find him obediently disposed. As for Lady Agnes, she contemplated with equanimity the introduction of the Darnley wealth into the impoverished House of Mortimer, and tried to soften down her asperities lest the match should be impeded.
The House of March and Brakelond no longer loomed so large in the public eye as once it had, and as Gundred still felt it should. The reigning Duke was an imbecile, uncomfortably poor and very aged. There was no Duchess, no near relations, nothing to give prominence or interest even to the daughter of the heir-apparent. Gundred Mortimer attracted little notice in London, keeping house parsimoniously for her father in Russell Square, and going out on the rather shabby arm of Lady Agnes. Lady Agnes wasaccepted because her eccentricities made her so incalculable as to be amusing; but Gundred was soon found to be almost depressingly normal and correct. There were scores of more naturally noticeable girls in London; Miss Mortimer, as Miss Mortimer, had no sort of personal importance, whatever power and dignity Fate might see fit to bestow at some later date on ‘Lady Gundred.’ Nicely mannered, nicely minded, nicely dressed, Miss Mortimer was an inconspicuous, if pleasant, figure in the crowd, and the elevation of her father to the dukedom seemed so remote that there was no according her any advance on her face-value. Had the prospect of finding her mistress and deputy Duchess at Brakelond only been more actual or imminent, then the world might have lent Miss Mortimer credit and respect on the reversion; but Mr. Mortimer and his daughter had been Mr. and Miss Mortimer for so many years now that no one found it easy to think of them as prospective ‘Duke of March and Brakelond’ and ‘Lady Gundred.’ Whenever anyone thought now of the Mortimers, it was always of the old—incredibly old—imbecile, dying eternally at Brakelond among his parrots.
Nor was Mr. Mortimer himself of a commanding character, fit to capture that popular interest which his daughter’s quiet neatness had been unable to attach. Mr. Mortimer, son of the late Lord Roger, and heir-apparent to his uncle, must always, whatever his position, have been a nonentity, not only from his poverty, but from his silliness. Mr. Mortimer was strangely, unbelievably silly. He was merely silly. He was silly in the wrong way. He neither shocked people nor amused them. Even his daughter realized that he was silly, and felt no grievance with the world for ignoring him. The world had, at one time, done its best to encourage a coming Duke. But the long delayin the succession, coupled with Mr. Mortimer’s overwhelming foolishness, had gradually worn off the patience of even the most far-sighted; and now his daughter went about inconspicuously with her great-aunt, while her father stayed unregretted at home, and presumed on his prospects in a placid, most-comfortable-chair-assuming way.
Gentle, neat, polite, Miss Mortimer, in her heart of hearts, resented the indifference with which the world seemed to treat the future mistress of Brakelond. And this resentment, demure and calm as it was, did not make her more attractive or approachable to the men from whom she would have liked to claim attention as her right. She stiffened herself into a rigid piety, and by contrast with the gay, attractive girls around her, made herself defiantly dull and godly in demeanour, pluming herself the while on her unfaltering maintenance of old-fashioned piety in degenerate days. And as soon as the men discovered that, in her way, she was mildly sulking at them for not making more of her, they ceased their efforts to make anything at all, and took refuge with the hundreds of other bright, pleasant girls who had twice Miss Mortimer’s charm and none of her prospects or pretensions.
It was strange that Gundred, delightfully pretty in her cool way, serene, beautifully mannered, could exert no compelling force on her surroundings. That she wished to claim attention was the sign of her weakness; for those who can command attention never take the trouble of asking for it. But Gundred’s mind was always secluded, self-centred, reserved. She never gave out any light or warmth. She accepted, absorbed, received with gracious dignity; she never had the power of radiating any return of friendly feeling, any comforting geniality of human sympathy. As a talker she was gently frigid, sweetly insipid in herway of avoiding all topics of general interest, and, while restricting the conversation to her own concerns, of restricting it entirely to such of those as were most obvious and least interesting to the world at large. The weather, as it affected her plans; the visits that she paid, the churches she attended, and the cooks that she engaged; such were the subjects on which she pellucidly discoursed in the prettiest of voices, with the most pleasant of smiles; to the unutterable weariness of some partner who wanted a little more vitality in the conversation.
Nor was she more successful as a listener. Even during the most thrilling recitals her eye might be seen wandering towards the next comer, or her mind guessed to be wondering whether she had not accorded the speaker enough of her attention. Men soon ceased to tell her anything of value, and followed her own example of talking amiably but saying nothing. Lady Agnes was beginning to despair of her great-niece’s prospects when Kingston Darnley was ushered into the lists by his mother.
He came, he saw, he conquered. Idle-looking, tall and fair, beautiful in build and feature, he could not but command personal admiration; while in mind, keenly active, riotously fanciful, he was the last man in the world to conciliate Miss Mortimer’s approval, and, therefore, the first to captivate her attention. To her prim and maidenly habits of thought he was seductive in his lazy twinkling moods, seductive in his moments of emotion, seductive in those ebullitions of ridiculous gaiety that Gundred knew to be so disorderly and unconventional, yet reluctantly felt to be so delightful. Hitherto men had either bored her or been bored by her, had always failed to penetrate the closed garden of her attention; Kingston Darnley now came swinging carelessly into the sacred enclosure, and paid her thecompelling compliment of making her believe herself brilliant and amusing.
Often it happens that the staid and decorous, hard as iron in their disapproval of all frivolity, are suddenly and completely melted by someone frivolous beyond their uttermost possibilities of disapproval. One is liable to love one’s opposites, if those opposites be sufficiently opposed. Only a little less different herself, and Gundred might have disliked Kingston Darnley; but he was so madly divergent from all her ideals that the very sharpness of the contrast drove her to capitulate rapidly and completely. She even ceased to claim his attention; she began to beg for it.
Her training had collaborated with her nature in guarding her from self-betrayal. Her manners continued gentle, guarded, suavely frigid as before. But Lady Adela, with the eye of a hopeful mother, pierced the disguise of Gundred’s feelings, and lost no time in proclaiming the discovery to her son. Kingston Darnley, for his part, was strongly attracted by Gundred. To his fastidious temperament she never offered a jarring note. She was always crisp and cool; always deliberate and graceful; her hair was never disordered, nor her hat crooked, nor her stockings ill-gartered. At all points she was unalterably serene, impeccable and satisfying. Emotionally, too, she gave him what he wanted. He needed no ardent, unbalanced temper in his wife. He needed just that gracious acquiescence which Miss Mortimer supplied. She was restful in all her ways, her mind was thoroughly well-mannered, and her smiling calm assured him of a sympathetic nature. As he laid his ideas before her he was enraptured to see how sweetly, how reasonably she listened, and found full agreement in her cool grey-blue eyes, behind which, in reality, her inattentive brain was admiring the tact of his tie. But, whatever hersecret thoughts, she never revealed them, and those cool, grey-blue eyes had been trained to express decorous attention; therefore Kingston Darnley soon realized that in Miss Mortimer he had found that perfect conjunction of ideal soul with ideal body in the quest for which his five-and-twenty years had hitherto been vainly spent.
That his feeling was not a great passion he sometimes felt—that it was not even commensurate with the passion which he had sometimes found himself forced half-incredulously to divine behind the chill fires of Gundred’s eyes. But his experience with the lady of the downy nose had daunted him and disillusioned him; with the knowledge of wide experience he now knew that a great passion falls to the lot of very few, and that it is well to take the good the gods provide. Failing the Supramundane Mate to whom all idealists look with longing, he would compromise with a woman in every respect charming, alluring, delightful—a woman of temperate mood, a woman of neat and faultless style in body and mind, a woman, in short, who could be trusted never to clash with any of life’s harmonies or discords.
Her name, too, tragic and glorious, fired that curiosity of man to possess something rare and old and precious. Of Brakelond he only thought as a fit setting for Gundred’s mystic charm. For Gundred’s serene correctness, so prosaically pleasing in a London drawing-room, became ‘mystic charm’ when associated in the mind of her idealizing lover with the long oaken galleries of Brakelond. And Gundred, for her part, considered the possible glories of position and power only as gifts to confer on her radiant, ridiculous captor. She did what she decently could to please and captivate Kingston, deployed cunning little unsuspected wiles of dress and manner; brightened hergarments and her ways; achieved at last that miracle only possible to a first-rate woman, of being gay without becoming skittish. Little need had she of wiles. Her gentle flawlessness satisfied Kingston Darnley completely; and at his time of life, after his experience, he knew enough to be humbly content with satisfaction, asking no more of life, and expecting much less. What folly to let a plump chicken escape from the hand on the chance of a Phœnix flying out of the bush at some far-distant date! Better give thanks that the chicken is at least plump. Kingston Darnley gave thanks accordingly, and dawdled along the happy path that leads to proposal.
He could only see perfection everywhere. If Gundred was sometimes unresponsive, that was surely her cold and lovely maidenliness. If her acquiescent sweetness lacked salt at times, and seemed to promise biliousness, the criticism showed, in itself, a bilious bachelor for whose ailment that sweetness had been especially prescribed by Fate. If Gundred’s answers sometimes seemed remote, inadequate, half-hearted, that was but the effort of a loyal soul struggling to get into perfect stride with his, and neglecting the interests of the present for the sake of the future. As he looked and listened, her unruffled pleasantness destroyed for his emotions the grosser terrors of marriage, and yet gifted them with a strange, appealing fascination. Carried away by his approval, he proposed at last, and was placidly accepted by a heart resolutely dissembling its delight. Lady Adela heard the news with joy, and a pound was not too much for Heaven next Sunday.