Without pausing to divest herself of her hat or her driving coat, she hurried into the parlour behind the dining-room, stripping off her gloves, and saying over her shoulder to the butler: “I shall be wanting Thomas almost immediately, to deliver a letter for me in Lansdown Crescent.”
She was affixing a wafer to an impetuous and wildly scrawled apology when she heard the knocker on the front door. A few moments later, she heard the Major’s voice saying: “You need not announce me!” and sprang to her feet just as he came quickly into the room.
He was looking pale, and anxious. He shut the door with a backward thrust of his hand, and spoke her name, in a tense way that showed him to be labouring under strong emotion.
“Oh, Hector, I have been writing to you!” she cried.
He seemed to grow paler. “Writing to me! Serena, I beg of you—only listen to me!”
She went towards him, saying penitently: “I was odious! a wretch! Oh, pray forgive me!”
“Forgive you!
“No, no, I used you monstrously. Do not you beg my pardon! If you wish me not to drive my phaeton in Bath, I won’t! There! Am I forgiven?”
But this, she found, would not do for him at all. His remorse for having presumed to remonstrate with his goddess would be soothed by nothing less than her promising to do exactly as she chose upon all occasions. An attempt to joke him out of his mood of exaggerated self-blame failed to draw a smile from him; and the quarrel ended with his passionately kissing Serena’s hands, and engaging himself to drive out with her in the phaeton on the very next day.
11
The Major, reconciled to his goddess, could not be satisfied with setting her back on the pedestal he had built for her: the idealistic trend of his mind demanded that he should convince himself that she had never slipped from it. To have parted with the romantic vision he had himself created would have been so repugnant to him that the instant his vexation had abated, which it very swiftly did, he had set himself to prove to his own satisfaction that not her judgement but his had been faulty. It was impossible that the lady of his dreams could err. What had seemed to him intractability was constancy of purpose; her flouting of convention sprang from loftiness of mind; the levity, which had more than once shocked him, was a social mask concealing more serious thoughts. Even her flashes of impatience, and the dagger-look he had twice seen in her eyes, could be excused. Neither rose from any fault of temper: the one was merely the sign of nerves disordered by the shock of her father’s death; the other had been provoked by his own unwarrantable interference.
Not every difference that existed between imagination and reality could be explained away. The Major’s character was responsible; he had been an excellent regimental officer, steady in command, always careful of the welfare of his men, and ready to help junior officers seeking his advice in any of the private difficulties besetting young gentlemen fresh from school. His instinct was to serve and to protect, and it could not be other than disconcerting to him to find that the one being above all others whom he wished to guide, comfort, serve, and protect showed as little disposition to lean on him as to confide her anxieties to him. So far from seeking guidance, she was much more prone to impose her will upon her entire entourage. She was as accustomed to command as he, and, from having been motherless from an early age, she had acquired an unusual degree of independence. This, joined as it was to a deep-seated reserve, made the very thought of disclosing grief to another repellent to her. When she felt most she was at her most flippant; any attempt to lavish sympathy upon her made her stiffen, and interpose the shield of her raillery. As for needing protection, it was her boast that she was very well able to take care of herself; and when it came to serving her the chances were that she would say, gratefully, but with decision: “Thank you! You are a great deal too good to me—but, you know, I always like to attend to such things myself!”
He had not known it. Fanny, understanding his perplexity, tried to explain Serena to him. “Serena has so much strength of mind, Major Kirkby,” she said gently. “I think her mind is as strong as her body, and that is very strong indeed. It used to amaze me that I never saw her exhausted by all the things she would do, for it is quite otherwise with me. But nothing is too much for her! It was the same with Lord Spenborough. Not the hardest day’s hunting ever made them anything but sleepy, and excessively hungry; and in London I have often marvelled how they could contrive not to be in the least tired by all the parties, and the noise, and the expeditions,” She smiled, and said apologetically: “I don’t know how it is, but if I am obliged to give a breakfast, perhaps, and to attend a ball as well, there is nothing for it but for me to rest all the afternoon.”
He looked as if he did not wonder at it. “But not Serena?” he asked.
“Oh, no! She never rests during the daytime. That is what makes it so particularly irksome to her to be leading this dawdling life. In London, she would ride in the Park before breakfast, and perhaps do some shopping as well. Then, very often we might give a breakfast, or attend one in the house of one of Lord Spenborough’s numerous acquaintances. Then there would be visits to pay, and perhaps a race-meeting, or a picnic, or some such thing. And, in general, a dinner-party in the evening, or the theatre, and three or four balls or assemblies to go to afterwards.”
“Was this your life?” he asked, rather appalled.
“Oh, no! I can’t keep it up, you see. I did try very hard to grow accustomed to it, because it was my duty to go with Serena, you know. But when she saw how tired I was, and how often I had the headache, she declared she would not drag me out, or permit my lord to do so either. You can have no notion how kind she has been to me. Major Kirkby! My best, my dearest friend!”
Her eyes filled with tears; he slightly pressed her hand, saying in a moved tone: “
“She has a heart of gold!” she told him earnestly. “If you knew what care she takes of me, how patient she is with me, you would be astonished!”
“Indeed, I should not!” he said, smiling. “I cannot conceive of anyone’s being out of patience with you!”
“Oh, yes!” she assured him. “Mama and my sisters were often so, for I am quite the stupidest of my family, besides being shy of strange persons, and not liking excessively to go to parties, and a great many other nonsensical things. But Serena, who does everything so well, was never vexed with me! Major Kirkby, if it had not been for her I don’t know what I should have done!”
He could readily believe that to such a child as she must have been at the time of her marriage life in the great Spenborough household must have been bewildering and alarming. He said sympathetically: “Was it very bad?”
Her reply was involuntary. “Oh, if I had not had Serena I could not have borne it!” The colour rushed up into her face; she said quickly: “I mean—I mean—having to entertain so many people—talk to them—be the mistress of that huge house! The political parties, too! They were the worst, for I have not the least understanding of politics, and if Serena had not taken care to tell me what was likely to be talked about at dinner I must have been all at sea! The dreadful way, too, the people of the highest ton have of always being related to one another, so that one is for ever getting into a scrape!”
He could not help laughing, but he said: “I know exactly what you mean!”
“Yes, but you see, Serena used to explain everybody to me, and so I was able to go on quite prosperously. And it was she who managed everything. She had always done so.” She paused, and then said diffidently: “When —when perhaps you might sometimes think her wilful, or—or over-confident, you must remember that she has been the mistress of her papa’s houses, and his hostess, and that he relied on her to attend to all the things which, in general, an unmarried lady knows nothing about.”
“Yes,” he said heavily “He must have been a strange man!” He caught himself up. “I beg pardon! I should not say that to you!”
“Well, I don’t think he was just in the common way,” she agreed. “He was very goodnatured, and easy-going, and so kind that it was no wonder everyone liked him. He was quite as kind to me as Serena, you know.”
“Oh! Yes, of—I mean, I’m sure he must have been,” he stammered, considerably taken aback.
She went on with her stitchery, in sweet unconsciousness of having said anything to make him think her
