Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (429 page)

“Don’t lie to me, if you please,” said Grandcourt, in his lowest audible tone. “It’s not amusing, and it answers no other purpose.”

“What do you mean?” said Lush, more nettled than was common with him — the prospect before him being more than commonly disturbing.

“Just tell me the truth, will you?”

“It’s no invention of mine. I have heard the story from several — Bazley, Brackenshaw’s man, for one. He is getting a new tenant for Offendene.”

“I don’t mean that. Is Miss Harleth there, or is she not?” said
Grandcourt, in his former tone.

“Upon my soul, I can’t tell,” said Lush, rather sulkily. “She may have left yesterday. I heard she had taken a situation as governess; she may be gone to it for what I know. But if you wanted to see her no doubt the mother would send for her back.” This sneer slipped off his tongue without strict intention.

“Send Hutchins to inquire whether she will be there tomorrow.” Lush did not move. Like many persons who have thought over beforehand what they shall say in given cases, he was impelled by an unexpected irritation to say some of those prearranged things before the cases were given. Grandcourt, in fact, was likely to get into a scrape so tremendous that it was impossible to let him take the first step toward it without remonstrance. Lush retained enough caution to use a tone of rational friendliness, still he felt his own value to his patron, and was prepared to be daring.

“It would be as well for you to remember, Grandcourt, that you are coming under closer fire now. There can be none of the ordinary flirting done, which may mean everything or nothing. You must make up your mind whether you wish to be accepted; and more than that, how you would like being refused. Either one or the other. You can’t be philandering after her again for six weeks.”

Grandcourt said nothing, but pressed the newspaper down on his knees and began to light another cigar. Lush took this as a sign that he was willing to listen, and was the more bent on using the opportunity; he wanted, if possible, to find out which would be the more potent cause of hesitation — probable acceptance or probable refusal.

“Everything has a more serious look now than it had before. There is her family to be provided for. You could not let your wife’s mother live in beggary. It will be a confoundedly hampering affair. Marriage will pin you down in a way you haven’t been used to; and in point of money you have not too much elbow-room. And after all, what will you get by it? You are master over your estates, present or future, as far as choosing your heir goes; it’s a pity to go on encumbering them for a mere whim, which you may repent of in a twelvemonth. I should be sorry to see you making a mess of your life in that way. If there were anything solid to be gained by the marriage, that would be a different affair.”

Lush’s tone had gradually become more and more unctuous in its friendliness of remonstrance, and he was almost in danger of forgetting that he was merely gambling in argument. When he left off, Grandcourt took his cigar out of his mouth, and looking steadily at the moist end while he adjusted the leaf with his delicate finger-tips, said —

“I knew before that you had an objection to my marrying Miss Harleth.” Here he made a little pause before he continued. “But I never considered that a reason against it.”

“I never supposed you did,” answered Lush, not unctuously but dryly. “It was not
that
I urged as a reason. I should have thought it might have been a reason against it, after all your experience, that you would be acting like the hero of a ballad, and making yourself absurd — and all for what? You know you couldn’t make up your mind before. It’s impossible you can care much about her. And as for the tricks she is likely to play, you may judge of that from what you heard at Leubronn. However, what I wished to point out to you was, that there can be no shilly-shally now.”

“Perfectly,” said Grandcourt, looking round at Lush and fixing him with narrow eyes; “I don’t intend that there should be. I dare say it’s disagreeable to you. But if you suppose I care a damn for that you are most stupendously mistaken.”

“Oh, well,” said Lush, rising with his hands in his pockets, and feeling some latent venom still within him, “if you have made up your mind! — only there’s another aspect of the affair. I have been speaking on the supposition that it was absolutely certain she would accept you, and that destitution would have no choice. But I am not so sure that the young lady is to be counted on. She is kittle cattle to shoe, I think. And she had her reasons for running away before.” Lush had moved a step or two till he stood nearly in front of Grandcourt, though at some distance from him. He did not feel himself much restrained by consequences, being aware that the only strong hold he had on his present position was his serviceableness; and even after a quarrel the want of him was likely sooner or later to recur. He foresaw that Gwendolen would cause him to be ousted for a time, and his temper at this moment urged him to risk a quarrel.

“She had her reasons,” he repeated more significantly.

“I had come to that conclusion before,” said Grandcourt, with contemptuous irony.

“Yes, but I hardly think you know what her reasons were.”

“You do, apparently,” said Grandcourt, not betraying by so much as an eyelash that he cared for the reasons.

“Yes, and you had better know too, that you may judge of the influence you have over her if she swallows her reasons and accepts you. For my own part I would take odds against it. She saw Lydia in Cardell Chase and heard the whole story.”

Grandcourt made no immediate answer, and only went on smoking. He was so long before he spoke that Lush moved about and looked out of the windows, unwilling to go away without seeing some effect of his daring move. He had expected that Grandcourt would tax him with having contrived the affair, since Mrs. Glasher was then living at Gadsmere, a hundred miles off, and he was prepared to admit the fact: what he cared about was that Grandcourt should be staggered by the sense that his intended advances must be made to a girl who had that knowledge in her mind and had been scared by it. At length Grandcourt, seeing Lush turn toward him, looked at him again and said, contemptuously, “What follows?”

Here certainly was a “mate” in answer to Lush’s “check:” and though his exasperation with Grandcourt was perhaps stronger than it had ever been before, it would have been idiocy to act as if any further move could be useful. He gave a slight shrug with one shoulder, and was going to walk away, when Grandcourt, turning on his seat toward the table, said, as quietly as if nothing had occurred, “Oblige me by pushing that pen and paper here, will you?”

No thunderous, bullying superior could have exercised the imperious spell that Grandcourt did. Why, instead of being obeyed, he had never been told to go to a warmer place, was perhaps a mystery to those who found themselves obeying him. The pen and paper were pushed to him, and as he took them he said, “Just wait for this letter.”

He scrawled with ease, and the brief note was quickly addressed. “Let Hutchins go with it at once, will you?” said Grandcourt, pushing the letter away from him.

As Lush had expected, it was addressed to Miss Harleth, Offendene. When his irritation had cooled down he was glad there had been no explosive quarrel; but he felt sure that there was a notch made against him, and that somehow or other he was intended to pay. It was also clear to him that the immediate effect of his revelation had been to harden Grandcourt’s previous determination. But as to the particular movements that made this process in his baffling mind, Lush could only toss up his chin in despair of a theory.

CHAPTER XXVI
.

  He brings white asses laden with the freight
  Of Tyrian vessels, purple, gold and balm,
  To bribe my will: I’ll bid them chase him forth,
  Nor let him breathe the taint of his surmise
  On my secure resolve.
                         Ay, ‘tis secure:
  And therefore let him come to spread his freight.
  For firmness hath its appetite and craves
  The stronger lure, more strongly to resist;
  Would know the touch of gold to fling it off;
  Scent wine to feel its lip the soberer;
  Behold soft byssus, ivory, and plumes
  To say, “They’re fair, but I will none of them,”
  And flout Enticement in the very face.

Mr. Gascoigne one day came to Offendene with what he felt to be the satisfactory news that Mrs. Mompert had fixed Tuesday in the following week for her interview with Gwendolen at Wanchester. He said nothing of his having incidentally heard that Mr. Grandcourt had returned to Diplow; knowing no more than she did that Leubronn had been the goal of her admirer’s journeying, and feeling that it would be unkind uselessly to revive the memory of a brilliant prospect under the present reverses. In his secret soul he thought of his niece’s unintelligible caprice with regret, but he vindicated her to himself by considering that Grandcourt had been the first to behave oddly, in suddenly walking away when there had the best opportunity for crowning his marked attentions. The rector’s practical judgment told him that his chief duty to his niece now was to encourage her resolutely to face the change in her lot, since there was no manifest promise of any event that would avert it.

“You will find an interest in varied experience, my dear, and I have no doubt you will be a more valuable woman for having sustained such a part as you are called to.”

“I cannot pretend to believe that I shall like it,” said Gwendolen, for the first time showing her uncle some petulance. “But I am quite aware that I am obliged to bear it.”

She remembered having submitted to his admonition on a different occasion when she was expected to like a very different prospect.

“And your good sense will teach you to behave suitably under it,” said Mr. Gascoigne, with a shade more gravity. “I feel sure that Mrs. Mompert will be pleased with you. You will know how to conduct yourself to a woman who holds in all senses the relation of a superior to you. This trouble has come on you young, but that makes it in some respects easier, and there is a benefit in all chastisement if we adjust our minds to it.”

This was precisely what Gwendolen was unable to do; and after her uncle was gone, the bitter tears, which had rarely come during the late trouble, rose and fell slowly as she sat alone. Her heart denied that the trouble was easier because she was young. When was she to have any happiness, if it did not come while she was young? Not that her visions of possible happiness for herself were as unmixed with necessary evil as they used to be — not that she could still imagine herself plucking the fruits of life without suspicion of their core. But this general disenchantment with the world — nay, with herself, since it appeared that she was not made for easy pre-eminence — only intensified her sense of forlornness; it was a visibly sterile distance enclosing the dreary path at her feet, in which she had no courage to tread. She was in that first crisis of passionate youthful rebellion against what is not fitly called pain, but rather the absence of joy — that first rage of disappointment in life’s morning, which we whom the years have subdued are apt to remember but dimly as part of our own experience, and so to be intolerant of its self-enclosed unreasonableness and impiety. What passion seems more absurd, when we have got outside it and looked at calamity as a collective risk, than this amazed anguish that I and not Thou, He or She, should be just the smitten one? Yet perhaps some who have afterward made themselves a willing fence before the breast of another, and have carried their own heart-wound in heroic silence — some who have made their deeds great, nevertheless began with this angry amazement at their own smart, and on the mere denial of their fantastic desires raged as if under the sting of wasps which reduced the universe for them to an unjust infliction of pain. This was nearly poor Gwendolen’s condition. What though such a reverse as hers had often happened to other girls? The one point she had been all her life learning to care for was, that it had happened to
her
: it was what
she
felt under Klesmer’s demonstration that she was not remarkable enough to command fortune by force of will and merit; it was what
she
would feel under the rigors of Mrs. Mompert’s constant expectation, under the dull demand that she should be cheerful with three Miss Momperts, under the necessity of showing herself entirely submissive, and keeping her thoughts to herself. To be a queen disthroned is not so hard as some other down-stepping: imagine one who had been made to believe in his own divinity finding all homage withdrawn, and himself unable to perform a miracle that would recall the homage and restore his own confidence. Something akin to this illusion and this helplessness had befallen the poor spoiled child, with the lovely lips and eyes and the majestic figure — which seemed now to have no magic in them.

She rose from the low ottoman where she had been sitting purposeless, and walked up and down the drawing-room, resting her elbow on one palm while she leaned down her cheek on the other, and a slow tear fell. She thought, “I have always, ever since I was little, felt that mamma was not a happy woman; and now I dare say I shall be more unhappy than she has been.”

Her mind dwelt for a few moments on the picture of herself losing her youth and ceasing to enjoy — not minding whether she did this or that: but such picturing inevitably brought back the image of her mother.

“Poor mamma! it will be still worse for her now. I can get a little money for her — that is all I shall care about now.” And then with an entirely new movement of her imagination, she saw her mother getting quite old and white, and herself no longer young but faded, and their two faces meeting still with memory and love, and she knowing what was in her mother’s mind — “Poor Gwen too is sad and faded now” — and then, for the first time, she sobbed, not in anger, but with a sort of tender misery.

Her face was toward the door, and she saw her mother enter. She barely saw that; for her eyes were large with tears, and she pressed her handkerchief against them hurriedly. Before she took it away she felt her mother’s arms round her, and this sensation, which seemed a prolongation of her inward vision, overcame her will to be reticent; she sobbed anew in spite of herself, as they pressed their cheeks together.

Mrs. Davilow had brought something in her hand which had already caused her an agitating anxiety, and she dared not speak until her darling had become calmer. But Gwendolen, with whom weeping had always been a painful manifestation to be resisted, if possible, again pressed her handkerchief against her eyes, and, with a deep breath, drew her head backward and looked at her mother, who was pale and tremulous.

“It was nothing, mamma,” said Gwendolen, thinking that her mother had been moved in this way simply by finding her in distress. “It is all over now.”

But Mrs. Davilow had withdrawn her arms, and Gwendolen perceived a letter in her hand.

“What is that letter? — worse news still?” she asked, with a touch of bitterness.

“I don’t know what you will think it, dear,” said Mrs. Davilow, keeping the letter in her hand. “You will hardly guess where it comes from.”

“Don’t ask me to guess anything,” said Gwendolen, rather impatiently, as if a bruise were being pressed.

“It is addressed to you, dear.”

Gwendolen gave the slightest perceptible toss of the head.

“It comes from Diplow,” said Mrs. Davilow, giving her the letter.

She knew Grandcourt’s indistinct handwriting, and her mother was not surprised to see her blush deeply; but watching her as she read, and wondering much what was the purport of the letter, she saw the color die out. Gwendolen’s lips even were pale as she turned the open note toward her mother. The words were few and formal:

Mr. Grandcourt presents his compliments to Miss Harleth, and begs to know whether he may be permitted to call at Offendene tomorrow after two and to see her alone. Mr. Grandcourt has just returned from Leubronn, where he had hoped to find Miss Harleth.

Mrs. Davilow read, and then looked at her daughter inquiringly, leaving the note in her hand. Gwendolen let it fall to the floor, and turned away.

“It must be answered, darling,” said Mrs. Davilow, timidly. “The man waits.”

Gwendolen sank on the settee, clasped her hands, and looked straight before her, not at her mother. She had the expression of one who had been startled by a sound and was listening to know what would come of it. The sudden change of the situation was bewildering. A few minutes before she was looking along an inescapable path of repulsive monotony, with hopeless inward rebellion against the imperious lot which left her no choice: and lo, now, a moment of choice was come. Yet — was it triumph she felt most or terror? Impossible for Gwendolen not to feel some triumph in a tribute to her power at a time when she was first tasting the bitterness of insignificance: again she seemed to be getting a sort of empire over her own life. But how to use it? Here came the terror. Quick, quick, like pictures in a book beaten open with a sense of hurry, came back vividly, yet in fragments, all that she had gone through in relation to Grandcourt — the allurements, the vacillations, the resolve to accede, the final repulsion; the incisive face of that dark-eyed lady with the lovely boy: her own pledge (was it a pledge not to marry him?) — the new disbelief in the worth of men and things for which that scene of disclosure had become a symbol. That unalterable experience made a vision at which in the first agitated moment, before tempering reflections could suggest themselves, her native terror shrank.

Where was the good of choice coming again? What did she wish? Anything different? No! And yet in the dark seed-growths of consciousness a new wish was forming itself — “I wish I had never known it!” Something, anything she wished for that would have saved her from the dread to let Grandcourt come.

It was no long while — yet it seemed long to Mrs. Davilow, before she thought it well to say, gently —

“It will be necessary for you to write, dear. Or shall I write an answer for you — which you will dictate?”

“No, mamma,” said Gwendolen, drawing a deep breath. “But please lay me out the pen and paper.”

That was gaining time. Was she to decline Grandcourt’s visit — close the shutters — not even look out on what would happen? — though with the assurance that she should remain just where she was? The young activity within her made a warm current through her terror and stirred toward something that would be an event — toward an opportunity in which she could look and speak with the former effectiveness. The interest of the morrow was no longer at a deadlock.

“There is really no reason on earth why you should be so alarmed at the man’s waiting a few minutes, mamma,” said Gwendolen, remonstrantly, as Mrs. Davilow, having prepared the writing materials, looked toward her expectantly. “Servants expect nothing else than to wait. It is not to be supposed that I must write on the instant.”

“No, dear,” said Mrs. Davilow, in the tone of one corrected, turning to sit down and take up a bit of work that lay at hand; “he can wait another quarter of an hour, if you like.”

If was very simple speech and action on her part, but it was what might have been subtly calculated. Gwendolen felt a contradictory desire to be hastened: hurry would save her from deliberate choice.

“I did not mean him to wait long enough for that needlework to be finished,” she said, lifting her hands to stroke the backward curves of her hair, while she rose from her seat and stood still.

“But if you don’t feel able to decide?” said Mrs. Davilow, sympathizingly.

“I
must
decide,” said Gwendolen, walking to the writing-table and seating herself. All the while there was a busy undercurrent in her, like the thought of a man who keeps up a dialogue while he is considering how he can slip away. Why should she not let him come? It bound her to nothing. He had been to Leubronn after her: of course he meant a direct unmistakable renewal of the suit which before had been only implied. What then? She could reject him. Why was she to deny herself the freedom of doing this — which she would like to do?

“If Mr. Grandcourt has only just returned from Leubronn,” said Mrs. Davilow, observing that Gwendolen leaned back in her chair after taking the pen in her hand — “I wonder whether he has heard of our misfortunes?”