Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (430 page)

“That could make no difference to a man in his position,” said
Gwendolen, rather contemptuously,

“It would to some men,” said Mrs. Davilow. “They would not like to take a wife from a family in a state of beggary almost, as we are. Here we are at Offendene with a great shell over us, as usual. But just imagine his finding us at Sawyer’s Cottage. Most men are afraid of being bored or taxed by a wife’s family. If Mr. Grandcourt did know, I think it a strong proof of his attachment to you.”

Mrs. Davilow spoke with unusual emphasis: it was the first time she had ventured to say anything about Grandcourt which would necessarily seem intended as an argument in favor of him, her habitual impression being that such arguments would certainly be useless and might be worse. The effect of her words now was stronger than she could imagine. They raised a new set of possibilities in Gwendolen’s mind — a vision of what Grandcourt might do for her mother if she, Gwendolen, did — what she was not going to do. She was so moved by a new rush of ideas that, like one conscious of being urgently called away, she felt that the immediate task must be hastened: the letter must be written, else it might be endlessly deferred. After all, she acted in a hurry, as she had wished to do. To act in a hurry was to have a reason for keeping away from an absolute decision, and to leave open as many issues as possible.

She wrote: “Miss Harleth presents her compliments to Mr. Grandcourt.
She will be at home after two o’clock to-morrow.”

Before addressing the note she said, “Pray ring the bell, mamma, if there is any one to answer it.” She really did not know who did the work of the house.

It was not till after the letter had been taken away and Gwendolen had risen again, stretching out one arm and then resting it on her head, with a low moan which had a sound of relief in it, that Mrs. Davilow ventured to ask —

“What did you say, Gwen?”

“I said that I should be at home,” answered Gwendolen, rather loftily. Then after a pause, “You must not expect, because Mr. Grandcourt is coming, that anything is going to happen, mamma.”

“I don’t allow myself to expect anything, dear. I desire you to follow your own feeling. You have never told me what that was.”

“What is the use of telling?” said Gwendolen, hearing a reproach in that true statement. “When I have anything pleasant to tell, you may be sure I will tell you.”

“But Mr. Grandcourt will consider that you have already accepted him, in allowing him to come. His note tells you plainly enough that he is coming to make you an offer.”

“Very well; and I wish to have the pleasure of refusing him.”

Mrs. Davilow looked up in wonderment, but Gwendolen implied her wish not to be questioned further by saying —

“Put down that detestable needle-work, and let us walk in the avenue. I am stifled.”

CHAPTER XXVII
.

  Desire has trimmed the sails, and Circumstance
  Brings but the breeze to fill them.

While Grandcourt on his beautiful black Yarico, the groom behind him on
Criterion, was taking the pleasant ride from Diplow to Offendene,
Gwendolen was seated before the mirror while her mother gathered up the
lengthy mass of light-brown hair which she had been carefully brushing.

“Only gather it up easily and make a coil, mamma,” said Gwendolen.

“Let me bring you some ear-rings, Gwen,” said Mrs. Davilow, when the hair was adjusted, and they were both looking at the reflection in the glass. It was impossible for them not to notice that the eyes looked brighter than they had done of late, that there seemed to be a shadow lifted from the face, leaving all the lines once more in their placid youthfulness. The mother drew some inference that made her voice rather cheerful. “You do want your earrings?”

“No, mamma; I shall not wear any ornaments, and I shall put on my black silk. Black is the only wear when one is going to refuse an offer,” said Gwendolen, with one of her old smiles at her mother, while she rose to throw off her dressing-gown.

“Suppose the offer is not made after all,” said Mrs. Davilow, not without a sly intention.

“Then that will be because I refuse it beforehand,” said Gwendolen. “It comes to the same thing.”

There was a proud little toss of the head as she said this; and when she walked down-stairs in her long black robes, there was just that firm poise of head and elasticity of form which had lately been missing, as in a parched plant. Her mother thought, “She is quite herself again. It must be pleasure in his coming. Can her mind be really made up against him?”

Gwendolen would have been rather angry if that thought had been uttered; perhaps all the more because through the last twenty hours, with a brief interruption of sleep, she had been so occupied with perpetually alternating images and arguments for and against the possibility of her marrying Grandcourt, that the conclusion which she had determined on beforehand ceased to have any hold on her consciousness: the alternate dip of counterbalancing thoughts begotten of counterbalancing desires had brought her into a state in which no conclusion could look fixed to her. She would have expressed her resolve as before; but it was a form out of which the blood had been sucked — no more a part of quivering life than the “God’s will be done” of one who is eagerly watching chances. She did not mean to accept Grandcourt; from the first moment of receiving his letter she had meant to refuse him; still, that could not but prompt her to look the unwelcome reasons full in the face until she had a little less awe of them, could not hinder her imagination from filling out her knowledge in various ways, some of which seemed to change the aspect of what she knew. By dint of looking at a dubious object with a constructive imagination, who can give it twenty different shapes. Her indistinct grounds of hesitation before the interview at the Whispering Stones, at present counted for nothing; they were all merged in the final repulsion. If it had not been for that day in Cardell Chase, she said to herself now, there would have been no obstacle to her marrying Grandcourt. On that day and after it, she had not reasoned and balanced; she had acted with a force of impulse against which all questioning was no more than a voice against a torrent. The impulse had come — not only from her maidenly pride and jealousy, not only from the shock of another woman’s calamity thrust close on her vision, but — from her dread of wrong-doing, which was vague, it was true, and aloof from the daily details of her life, but not the less strong. Whatever was accepted as consistent with being a lady she had no scruple about; but from the dim region of what was called disgraceful, wrong, guilty, she shrunk with mingled pride and terror; and even apart from shame, her feeling would have made her place any deliberate injury of another in the region of guilt.

But now — did she know exactly what was the state of the case with regard to Mrs. Glasher and her children? She had given a sort of promise — had said, “I will not interfere with your wishes.” But would another woman who married Grandcourt be in fact the decisive obstacle to her wishes, or be doing her and her boy any real injury? Might it not be just as well, nay better, that Grandcourt should marry? For what could not a woman do when she was married, if she knew how to assert herself? Here all was constructive imagination. Gwendolen had about as accurate a conception of marriage — that is to say, of the mutual influences, demands, duties of man and woman in the state of matrimony — as she had of magnetic currents and the law of storms.

“Mamma managed baldly,” was her way of summing up what she had seen of her mother’s experience: she herself would manage quite differently. And the trials of matrimony were the last theme into which Mrs. Davilow could choose to enter fully with this daughter.

“I wonder what mamma and my uncle would say if they knew about Mrs. Glasher!” thought Gwendolen in her inward debating; not that she could imagine herself telling them, even if she had not felt bound to silence. “I wonder what anybody would say; or what they would say to Mr. Grandcourt’s marrying some one else and having other children!” To consider what “anybody” would say, was to be released from the difficulty of judging where everything was obscure to her when feeling had ceased to be decisive. She had only to collect her memories, which proved to her that “anybody” regarded the illegitimate children as more rightfully to be looked shy on and deprived of social advantages than illegitimate fathers. The verdict of “anybody” seemed to be that she had no reason to concern herself greatly on behalf of Mrs. Glasher and her children.

But there was another way in which they had caused her concern. What others might think, could not do away with a feeling which in the first instance would hardly be too strongly described as indignation and loathing that she should have been expected to unite herself with an outworn life, full of backward secrets which must have been more keenly felt than any association with
her
. True, the question of love on her own part had occupied her scarcely at all in relation to Grandcourt. The desirability of marriage for her had always seemed due to other feeling than love; and to be enamored was the part of the man, on whom the advances depended. Gwendolen had found no objection to Grandcourt’s way of being enamored before she had had that glimpse of his past, which she resented as if it had been a deliberate offense against her. His advances to
her
were deliberate, and she felt a retrospective disgust for them. Perhaps other men’s lives were of the same kind — full of secrets which made the ignorant suppositions of the women they wanted to marry a farce at which they were laughing in their sleeves.

These feelings of disgust and indignation had sunk deep; and though other troublous experience in the last weeks had dulled them from passion into remembrance, it was chiefly their reverberating activity which kept her firm to the understanding with herself, that she was not going to accept Grandcourt. She had never meant to form a new determination; she had only been considering what might be thought or said. If anything could have induced her to change, it would have been the prospect of making all things easy for “poor mamma:” that, she admitted, was a temptation. But no! she was going to refuse him. Meanwhile, the thought that he was coming to be refused was inspiriting: she had the white reins in her hands again; there was a new current in her frame, reviving her from the beaten-down consciousness in which she had been left by the interview with Klesmer. She was not now going to crave an opinion of her capabilities; she was going to exercise her power.

Was this what made her heart palpitate annoyingly when she heard the horse’s footsteps on the gravel? — when Miss Merry, who opened the door to Grandcourt, came to tell her that he was in the drawing-room? The hours of preparation and the triumph of the situation were apparently of no use: she might as well have seen Grandcourt coming suddenly on her in the midst of her despondency. While walking into the drawing-room, she had to concentrate all her energy in that self-control, which made her appear gravely gracious — as she gave her hand to him, and answered his hope that she was quite well in a voice as low and languid as his own. A moment afterward, when they were both of them seated on two of the wreath-painted chairs — Gwendolen upright with downcast eyelids, Grandcourt about two yards distant, leaning one arm over the back of his chair and looking at her, while he held his hat in his left hand — any one seeing them as a picture would have concluded that they were in some stage of love-making suspense. And certainly the love-making had begun: she already felt herself being wooed by this silent man seated at an agreeable distance, with the subtlest atmosphere of attar of roses and an attention bent wholly on her. And he also considered himself to be wooing: he was not a man to suppose that his presence carried no consequences; and he was exactly the man to feel the utmost piquancy in a girl whom he had not found quite calculable.

“I was disappointed not to find you at Leubronn,” he began, his usual broken drawl having just a shade of amorous languor in it. “The place was intolerable without you. A mere kennel of a place. Don’t you think so?”

“I can’t judge what it would be without myself,” said Gwendolen, turning her eyes on him, with some recovered sense of mischief. “
With
myself I like it well enough to have stayed longer, if I could. But I was obliged to come home on account of family troubles.”

“It was very cruel of you to go to Leubronn,” said Grandcourt, taking no notice of the troubles, on which Gwendolen — she hardly knew why — wished that there should be a clear understanding at once. “You must have known that it would spoil everything: you knew you were the heart and soul of everything that went on. Are you quite reckless about me?”

It would be impossible to say “yes” in a tone that would be taken seriously; equally impossible to say “no;” but what else could she say? In her difficulty, she turned down her eyelids again and blushed over face and neck. Grandcourt saw her in a new phase, and believed that she was showing her inclination. But he was determined that she should show it more decidedly.

“Perhaps there is some deeper interest? Some attraction — some engagement — which it would have been only fair to make me aware of? Is there any man who stands between us?”

Inwardly the answer framed itself. “No; but there is a woman.” Yet how could she utter this? Even if she had not promised that woman to be silent, it would have been impossible for her to enter on the subject with Grandcourt. But how could she arrest his wooing by beginning to make a formal speech — “I perceive your intention — it is most flattering, etc.”? A fish honestly invited to come and be eaten has a clear course in declining, but how if it finds itself swimming against a net? And apart from the network, would she have dared at once to say anything decisive? Gwendolen had not time to be clear on that point. As it was, she felt compelled to silence, and after a pause, Grandcourt said —

“Am I to understand that some one else is preferred?”

Gwendolen, now impatient of her own embarrassment, determined to rush at the difficulty and free herself. She raised her eyes again and said with something of her former clearness and defiance, “No” — wishing him to understand, “What then? I may not be ready to take
you
.” There was nothing that Grandcourt could not understand which he perceived likely to affect his
amour propre
.

“The last thing I would do, is to importune you. I should not hope to win you by making myself a bore. If there were no hope for me, I would ask you to tell me so at once, that I might just ride away to — no matter where.”

Almost to her own astonishment, Gwendolen felt a sudden alarm at the image of Grandcourt finally riding away. What would be left her then? Nothing but the former dreariness. She liked him to be there. She snatched at the subject that would defer any decisive answer.

“I fear you are not aware of what has happened to us. I have lately had to think so much of my mamma’s troubles, that other subjects have been quite thrown into the background. She has lost all her fortune, and we are going to leave this place. I must ask you to excuse my seeming preoccupied.”

In eluding a direct appeal Gwendolen recovered some of her self-possession. She spoke with dignity and looked straight at Grandcourt, whose long, narrow, impenetrable eyes met hers, and mysteriously arrested them: mysteriously; for the subtly-varied drama between man and woman is often such as can hardly be rendered in words put together like dominoes, according to obvious fixed marks. The word of all work, Love, will no more express the myriad modes of mutual attraction, than the word Thought can inform you what is passing through your neighbor’s mind. It would be hard to tell on which side — Gwendolen’s or Grandcourt’s — the influence was more mixed. At that moment his strongest wish was to be completely master of this creature — this piquant combination of maidenliness and mischief: that she knew things which had made her start away from him, spurred him to triumph over that repugnance; and he was believing that he should triumph. And she — ah, piteous equality in the need to dominate! — she was overcome like the thirsty one who is drawn toward the seeming water in the desert, overcome by the suffused sense that here in this man’s homage to her lay the rescue from helpless subjection to an oppressive lot.