it had, as Fredi funnily drawled, to express her sense of justice in depreciation, ‘good accommodation.’ Nataly was at home, he was sure. Time to be dressing: sun sets at six-forty, he said, and glanced at the stained West, with an accompanying vision of outspread primroses flooding banks of shadowy fields near Lakelands.
He crossed the road and rang.
Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs. His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.
CHAPTER VI. NATALY
He crossed arms, toning in similar recitative, with anguish, ‘Dove volare!’
They joined in half a dozen bars of operatic duet.
She flew to him, embraced and kissed.
‘I must have it, my papa! unlock. I’ve been spying the bird on its hedgerow nest so long! And this morning, my own dear cunning papa, weren’t you as bare as winter twigs? “Tomorrow perhaps we will have a day in the country.” To go and see the nest? Only, please, not a big one. A real nest; where mama and I can wear dairymaid’s hat and apron all day—the style you like; and strike roots. We’ve been torn away two or three times: twice, I know.’
‘Fixed, this time; nothing shall tear us up,’ said her father, moving on to the stairs, with an arm about her.
‘So, it is…?’
‘She’s amazed at her cleverness!’
‘A nest for three?’
‘We must have a friend or two.’
‘And pretty country?’
‘Trust her papa for that.’
‘Nice for walking and running over fields? No rich people?’
‘How escape that rabble in England! as Colney says. It’s a place for being quite independent of neighbours, free as air.’
‘Oh! bravo!’
‘And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi can have a swim every Summer morning.’
‘A swim?’ Her note was dubious. ‘A river?’
‘A good long stretch—fairish, fairish. Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the Naiad’s bower: pretty water to see.’
‘Ah. And has the house a name?’
‘Lakelands. I like the name.’
‘Papa gave it the name!’
‘There’s nothing he can conceal from his girl. Only now and then a little surprise.’
‘And his girl is off her head with astonishment. But tell me, who has been sharing the secret with you?’
‘Fredi strikes home! And it is true, you dear; I must have a confidant: Simeon Fenellan.’
‘Not Mr. Durance?’
He shook out a positive negative. ‘I leave Col to his guesses. He’d have been prophesying fire the works before the completion.’
‘Then it is not a dear old house, like Craye and Creckholt?’
‘Wait and see to-morrow.’
He spoke of the customary guests for concert practice; the music, instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling into his dressing-room.
Nesta signalled at her mother’s door for permission to enter. She slipped in, saw that the maid was absent, and said: ‘Yes, mama; and prepare, I feared it; I was sure.’
Her mother breathed a little moan: ‘Not a cottage?’
‘He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance.’
‘Why not?’
‘Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.’
‘My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking. You don’t know for certain yet?’
‘It’s a large estate, mama, and a big new house.’
Nataly’s bosom sank. ‘Ah me! here’s misery! I ought to have known. And too late now it has gone so far! But I never imagined he would be building.’
She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily. To be looking in that manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish. But Nesta’s divinations were target-arrows; they flew to the mark. Could it have been expected that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale? O the dear little lost lost cottage! She thought of it with a strain of the arms of womanhood’s longing in the unblessed wife for a babe. For the secluded modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with suspicions....
‘My child, you won’t possibly have time before the dinner-hour,’ she said to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and straining look out of the depths.
Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient dislike, when one’s own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be affectionate. We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves by a false position.
She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful position as women must. They have not the same to endure; the world gives them land to tread, where women are on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more than the pain of being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl was older, and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful directness would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come, necessarily to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother. But if it might be postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave understanding, with some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a case that could be pleaded!
He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have asked whether he was perfectly sane.
Who half so brilliantly!—Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the glittering armies of her enthusiasm. He had proved it; he proved it daily in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like hers: yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.
But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted rather than the good guidance of the man who was her breath of life! Whither he led, let her go, not only submissively, exultingly.
Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should therefore think it.
This was the prudent woman’s clear deduction from the state wherein she found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman. Her surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the river’s bank by swell
