“What am I to say, papa?”
“Say that you will obey me.”
Then she sat silent. “Do you not know that he is not fit to be your husband?”
“No, papa.”
“Then you cannot have thought much either of your position or of mine.”
“He is a gentleman, papa.”
“So is my private secretary. There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman. The curate of the parish is a gentleman, and the medical man who comes here from Bradstock. The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to you in thinking of such a matter.”
“I do not know any other way of dividing people,” said she, showing thereby that she had altogether made up her mind as to what ought to be serviceable to her.
“You are not called upon to divide people. That division requires so much experience that you are bound in this matter to rely upon those to whom your obedience is due. I cannot but think you must have known that you were not entitled to give your love to any man without being assured that the man would be approved of by—by—by me.” He was going to say, “your parents,” but was stopped by the remembrance of his wife’s imprudence.
She saw it all, and was too noble to plead her mother’s authority. But she was not too dutiful to cast a reproach upon him, when he was so stern to her. “You have been so little with me, papa.”
“That is true,” he said, after a pause. “That is true. It has been a fault, and I will mend it. It is a reason for forgiveness, and I will forgive you. But you must tell me that there shall be an end to this.”
“No, papa.”
“What do you mean?”
“That as I love Mr. Tregear, and as I have told him so, and as I have promised him, I will be true to him. I cannot let there be an end to it.”
“You do not suppose that you will be allowed to see him again?”
“I hope so.”
“Most assuredly not. Do you write to him?”
“No, papa.”
“Never?”
“Never since we have been back in England.”
“You must promise me that you will not write.”
She paused a moment before she answered him, and now she was looking him full in the face. “I shall not write to him. I do not think I shall write to him; but I will not promise.”
“Not promise me—your father!”
“No, papa. It might be that—that I should do it.”
“You would not wish me so to guard you that you should have no power of sending a letter but by permission?”
“I should not like that.”
“But it will have to be so.”
“If I do write I will tell you.”
“And show me what you write?”
“No, papa; not that; but I will tell you what I have written.”
Then it occurred to him that this bargaining was altogether derogatory to his parental authority, and by no means likely to impress upon her mind the conviction that Tregear must be completely banished from her thoughts. He began already to find how difficult it would be for him to have the charge of such a daughter—how impossible that he should conduct such a charge with sufficient firmness, and yet with sufficient tenderness! At present he had done no good. He had only been made more wretched than ever by her obstinacy. Surely he must pass her over to the charge of some lady—but of some lady who would be as determined as was he himself that she should not throw herself away by marrying Mr. Tregear.
“There shall be no writing,” he said, “no visiting, no communication of any kind. As you refuse to obey me now, you had better go to your room.”
IX
“In Medias Res”
Perhaps the method of rushing at once “in medias res” is, of all the ways of beginning a story, or a separate branch of a story, the least objectionable. The reader is made to think that the gold lies so near the surface that he will be required to take very little trouble in digging for it. And the writer is enabled—at any rate for a time, and till his neck has become, as it were, warm to the collar—to throw off from him the difficulties and dangers, the tedium and prolixity, of description. This rushing “in medias res” has doubtless the charm of ease. “Certainly, when I threw her from the garret window to the stony pavement below, I did not anticipate that she would fall so far without injury to life or limb.” When a story has been begun after this fashion, without any prelude, without description of the garret or of the pavement, or of the lady thrown, or of the speaker, a great amount of trouble seems to have been saved. The mind of the reader fills up the blanks—if erroneously, still satisfactorily. He knows, at least, that the heroine has encountered a terrible danger, and has escaped from it with almost incredible good fortune; that the demon of the piece is a bold demon, not ashamed to speak of his own iniquity, and that the heroine and the demon are so far united that they have been in a garret together. But there is the drawback on the system—that it is almost impossible to avoid the necessity of doing, sooner or later, that which would naturally be done at first. It answers, perhaps, for half-a-dozen chapters;—and to carry the reader pleasantly for half-a-dozen chapters is a great matter!—but after that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents. “Is all this going on in the country, or is it in town—or perhaps in the Colonies? How old was she? Was she tall? Is she fair? Is she heroine-like in her form and
