The Daughters of Danaus Part 27

Temperley purposely misunderstood her to say "imaginary meals," and hoped that next time she came, Hadria would not have an oratorio in course of composition. Miss Du Prel expressed a fiery interest in the oratorio.

"I judge the presence of oratorio by the absence of food," Temperley explained suavely.

Hadria watched the encounter with a mingled sense of amus.e.m.e.nt and discomfort.

Valeria was in no danger. To be morally crushed by an adversary, it is necessary that one should be at least aware that the adversary is engaged in crushing one: a consciousness that was plainly denied to Miss Du Prel. Many a man far less able than Hubert had power to interest her, while he could not even hold her attention. She used to complain to Professor Fortescue that Temperley's ideas never seemed to have originated in his own brain: they had been imported ready-made. Hubert was among the many who shrink and harden into mental furrows as time pa.s.ses. What he had thought at twenty, at thirty-five had acquired sanct.i.ty and certainty, from having been the opinion of Hubert Temperley for all those favoured years. He had no suspicion that the views which he cherished in so dainty and scholarly a fashion were simply an _edition de luxe_ of the views of everybody else. But his wife had made that discovery long ago. He smiled at the views of everybody else: his own were put forth as something choice and superior. He had the happy knack of being _bourgeois_ with the air of an artist. If one could picture one's grocer weighing out sugar in a Spanish cloak and brigand's hat, it would afford an excellent symbol of his spiritual estate. To be perfectly commonplace in a brilliantly original way, is to be notable after all.

Mr. Fleming seemed puzzled by Miss Du Prel, at whom he glanced uneasily from time to time, wondering what she would say next. At Craddock Dene, ladies usually listened with a more or less breathless deference when Temperley spoke. This new-comer seemed recklessly independent.

Mrs. Temperley endeavoured to lead the conversation in ways of peace, but Valeria was evidently on the war-path. Temperley was polite and ironical, with under-meanings for Hadria's benefit.

"If one asks impossible things of life, one is apt to be disappointed, I fear," he said serenely. "Ask for the possible and natural harvest of a woman's career, and see if you don't get it."

"Let a canary plead for its cage, in short, and its commendable prayer will be answered!"

"If you like to put it thus ungraciously. I should say that one who makes the most of his opportunities, as they stand, fares better than he who sighs for other worlds to conquer."

"I suppose that is what his relatives said to Columbus," observed Miss Du Prel.

"And how do you know they were not right?" he retorted.

Mrs. Temperley gave the signal to rise. "Let's go for a walk," she suggested, "the afternoon invites us. Look at it."

The brilliant sunshine and the exercise brought about a more genial mood. Only once was there anything approaching friction, and then it was Hadria herself who caused it.

"Yes, we all flatter ourselves that we are observing life, when we are merely noting the occasions when some musty old notion of ours happens, by chance, to get fulfilled."

Hubert Temperley at once roused Miss Du Prel's interest by the large stores of information that he had to pour forth on the history of the district, from its earliest times to the present. He recalled the days when these lands that looked so smooth and tended had been mere wastes of marsh and forest.

How quickly these great changes were accomplished! Valeria stood on the brow of a wide corn-field, looking out over the sleeping country. A century, after all, was not much more than one person's lifetime, yet in scarcely nine of these--nine little troubled lifetimes--what incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come about?

"Not a.s.suredly," Valeria remarked with sudden malice, "by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before my eyes at this moment?"

"You would not have been here to see," said Hadria, lazily rolling stones down the hill with her foot. "We should all of us have been dancing round some huge log-fire on the borders of a primeval forest, and instead of browsing on salads, as we did to-day, we should be sustaining ourselves on the unholy nourishment of boiled parent or grilled aunt."

Mr. Temperley's refined appearance and manner seemed to raise an incarnate protest against this revolting picture. For some occult reason, the imagination of all was at work especially and exclusively on the figure of that polished gentleman in war-paint and feathers, sporting round the cauldron that contained the boiled earthly remains of his relations.

Mr. Fleming betrayed the common thought by remarking that it would be very becoming to him.

"Ah! I wish we _were_ all savages in feathers and war-paint, dancing on the edge of some wild forest, with nothing but the sea and the sky for limits!"

Miss Du Prel surprised her audience by this earnest aspiration.

"Do you feel inclined to revert?" Hadria enquired. "Because if so, I shall be glad to join you."

"I think there _is_ a slight touch of the savage about Mrs. Temperley,"

observed Fleming pensively. "I mean, don't you know--of course----."

"You are quite right!" cried Valeria. "I have often noticed a sort of wildness that crops up now and then through a very smooth surface.

Hadria may sigh for the woodlands, yet----!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

The first break in the unity of the Fullerton family had occurred on the occasion of Hadria's marriage. The short period that elapsed between that memorable New-Year's-Eve and the wedding had been a painful experience for Dunaghee. Hadria's conduct had shaken her brothers' faith in her and in all womankind. Ernest especially had suffered disillusion.

He had supposed her above the ordinary, pettier weaknesses of humanity.

Other fellows' sisters had seemed to him miserable travesties of their s.e.x compared with her. (There was one exception only, to this rule.) But now, what was he to think? She had shattered his faith. If she hadn't been "so c.o.c.ksure of herself," he wouldn't have minded so much; but after all she had professed, to go and marry, and marry a starched specimen like that!

Fred was equally emphatic. For a long time he had regarded it all as a joke. He shook his head knowingly, and said that sort of thing wouldn't go down. When he was at length convinced, he danced with rage. He became cynical. He had no patience with girls. They talked for talking's sake.

It meant nothing.

Algitha understood, better than her brothers could understand, how Hadria's emotional nature had been caught in some strange mood, how the eloquent a.s.surances of her lover might have half convinced her.

Algitha's own experience of proposals set her on the track of the mystery.

"It is most misleading," she pointed out, to her scoffing brothers. "One would suppose that marrying was the simplest thing in the world--nothing perilous, nothing to object to about it. A man proposes to you as if he were asking you for the sixth waltz, only his manner is perfervid. And my belief is that half the girls who accept don't realize that they are agreeing to anything much more serious."

"The more fools they!"

"True; but it really is most bewildering. Claims, obligations, all the ugly sides of the affair are hidden away; the man is at his best, full of refinement and courtesy and unselfishness. And if he persuades the girl that he really does care for her, how can she suppose that she cannot trust her future to him--if he loves her? And yet she can't!"

"How can a man suppose that one girl is going to be different from every other girl?" asked Fred.

"Different, you mean, from what he _supposes_ every other girl to be,"

Algitha corrected. "It's his own look-out if he's such a fool."

"I believe Hadria married because she was sick of being the family consolation," said Ernest.

"Well, of course, the hope of escape was very tempting. You boys don't know what she went through. We all regret her marriage to Hubert Temperley--though between ourselves, not more than _he_ regrets it, if I am not much mistaken--but it is very certain that she could not have gone on living at home much longer, as things were."

Fred said that she ought to have broken out after Algitha's fashion, if it was so bad as all that.

"I think mother would have died if she had," said the sister.

"Hadria _was_ awkwardly placed," Fred admitted.

"Do you remember that evening in the garret when we all told her what we thought?" asked Ernest.

n.o.body had forgotten that painful occasion.

"She said then that if the worst came to the worst, she would simply run away. What could prevent her?"

"That wretched sister of his!" cried Algitha. "If it hadn't been for her, the marriage would never have taken place. She got the ear of mother after the engagement, and I am certain it was through her influence that mother hurried the wedding on so. If only there had been a little more time, it could have been prevented. And Henriette knew that. She is as _knowing_----!"

"I wish we had strangled her."

"I shall never forget," Algitha went on, "that night when Hadria was taken with a fit of terror--it was nothing less--and wrote to break off the engagement, and that woman undertook to deliver the letter and lost it, _on purpose_ I am always convinced, and then the favourable moment was over."