Reveals How the True Heroine of Romance Comes Finally to Her, Time of Triumph
The shutting of her house-door closed for Dacier that woman’s history in connection with himself. He set his mind on the consequences of the act of folly—the trusting a secret to a woman. All were possibly not so bad: none should be trusted.
The air of the street fanned him agreeably as he revolved the horrible project of confession to the man who had put faith in him. Particulars might be asked. She would be unnamed, but an imagination of the effect of naming her placarded a notorious woman in fresh paint: two members of the same family her victims!
And last night, no later than last night, he had swung round at this very corner of the street to give her the fullest proof of his affection. He beheld a dupe trotting into a carefully-laid pitfall. She had him by the generosity of his confidence in her. Moreover, the recollection of her recent feeble phrasing, when she stood convicted of the treachery, when a really clever woman would have developed her resources, led him to doubt her being so finely gifted. She was just clever enough to hoodwink. He attributed the dupery to a trick of imposing the idea of her virtue upon men. Attracted by her good looks and sparkle, they entered the circle of her charm, became delightfully intimate, suffered a rebuff, and were from that time prepared to serve her purpose. How many other wretched dupes had she dangling? He spied at Westlake, spied at Redworth, at old Lord Larrian, at Lord Dannisburgh, at Arthur Rhodes, dozens. Old and young were alike to her if she saw an end to be gained by keeping them hooked. Tonans too, and Whitmonby. Newspaper editors were especially serviceable. Perhaps ‘a young Minister of State’ held the foremost rank in that respect: if completely duped and squeezeable, he produced more substantial stuff.
The background of ice in Dacier’s composition was brought to the front by his righteous contempt of her treachery. No explanation of it would have appeased him. She was guilty, and he condemned her. She stood condemned by all the evil likely to ensue from her misdeed. Scarcely had he left her house last night when she was away to betray him!—He shook her from him without a pang. Crediting her with the one merit she had—that of not imploring for mercy—he the more easily shook her off. Treacherous, she had not proved theatrical. So there was no fuss in putting out her light, and it was done. He was justified by the brute facts. Honourable, courteous, kindly gentleman, highly civilized, an excellent citizen and a patriot, he was icy at an outrage to his principles, and in the dominion of Love a sultan of the bow-string and chopper period, sovereignly endowed to stretch a finger for the scimitared Mesrour to make the erring woman head and trunk with one blow: and away with those remnants! This internally he did. Enough that the brute facts justified him.
St. James’s park was crossed, and the grass of the Green park, to avoid inquisitive friends. He was obliged to walk; exercise, action of any sort, was imperative, and but for some engagement he would have gone to his fencing-rooms for a bout with the master. He remembered his engagement and grew doubly embittered. He had absurdly pledged himself to lunch with Quintin Manx; that was, to pretend to eat while submitting to be questioned by a political dullard strong on his present right to overhaul and rail at his superiors. The house was one of a block along the North–Western line of Hyde park. He kicked at the subjection to go there, but a promise was binding, though he gave it when stunned. He could have silenced Mr. Manx with the posing interrogation: Why have I so long consented to put myself at the mercy of a bore? For him, he could not answer it, though Manx, as leader of the Shipping interest, was influential. The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics.
Dacier did not once think of the great ship-owner’s niece till Miss Constance Asper stepped into her drawing-room to welcome him. She was an image of repose to his mind. The calm pure outline of her white features refreshed him as the Alps the Londoner newly alighted at Berne; smoke, wrangle, the wrestling city’s wickedness, behind him.
‘My uncle is very disturbed,’ she said. ‘Is the news—if I am not very indiscreet in inquiring?’
‘I have a practice of never paying attention to newspaper articles,’ Dacier replied.
‘I am only affected by living with one who does,’ Miss Asper observed, and the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral attractiveness in addition to physical beauty. Her water-colour sketches were on her uncle’s walls: the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed her. She dressed with a pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque of the nunnery. She looked indeed a high-born young lady-abbess.
‘It’s a dusty game for ladies,’ Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled by it.
And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a pathos in a man’s discovery of the fair young creature undefiled by any interest in public affairs, virginal amid her bower’s environments.
The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person captivated him, by contrast. His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and tangles of the women on high seas, notably the married: who, by the way, contrive to ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from their traffic with the masculine world: often—if we did but know!—a parrot-repetition of the last male visitor’s remarks. But that which the fair maiden speaks, though it may be simple, is her own.
She too is her own: or vowed but to one. She is on all sides impressive in purity. The world worships her as its perfect pearl: and we are brought refreshfully to acknowledge that the world is right.
By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distinguished Constance Asper celestially. As he was well aware, she had long preferred him—the reserved among many pleading pressing suitors. Her steady faithfulness had fed on the poorest crumbs.
He ventured to express the hope that she was well.
‘Yes,’ she answered, with eyelids lifted softly to thank him for his concern in so humble a person.
‘You look a little pale,’ he said.
She coloured like a sea-water shell. ‘I am inclined to paleness by nature.’
Her uncle disturbed them. Lunch was ready. He apologized for the absence of Mrs. Markland, a maternal aunt of Constance, who kept house for them. Quintin Manx fell upon the meats, and then upon the Minister. Dacier found himself happily surprised by the accession of an appetite. He mentioned it, to escape from the worrying of his host, as unusual with him at midday: and Miss Asper, supporting him in that effort, said benevolently: ‘Gentlemen should eat; they have so many fatigues and troubles.’ She herself did not like to be seen eating in public. Her lips opened to the morsels, as with a bird’s bill, though with none of the pecking eagerness we complacently observe in poultry.
‘But now, I say, positively, how about that article?’ said Quintin.
Dacier visibly winced, and Constance immediately said ‘Oh! spare us politics, dear uncle.’
Her intercession was without avail, but by contrast with the woman implicated in the horrible article, it was a carol of the seraphs.
‘Come, you can say whether there’s anything in it,’ Dacier’s host pushed him.
‘I should not say it if I could,’ he replied.
The mild sweetness of Miss Asper’s look encouraged him.
He was touched to the quick by hearing her say: ‘You ask for Cabinet secrets, uncle. All secrets are holy, but secrets of State are under a seal next to divine.’
Next to divine! She was the mouthpiece of his ruling principle.
‘I ‘m not, prying into secrets,’ Quintin persisted; ‘all I want to know is, whether there ‘s any foundation for that article—all London’s boiling about it, I can tell you—or it’s only newspaper’s humbug.’
‘Clearly the oracle for you is the Editor’s office,’ rejoined Dacier.
‘A pretty sort of answer I should get.’
‘It would at least be complimentary.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The net was cast for you—and the sight of a fish in it!’
Miss Asper almost laughed. ‘Have you heard the choir at St. Catherine’s?’ she asked.
Dacier had not. He repented of his worldliness, and drinking persuasive claret, said he would go to hear it next Sunday.
‘Do,’ she murmured.
‘Well, you seem to be a pair against me,’ her uncle grumbled. ‘Anyhow I think it’s important. People have been talking for some time, and I don’t want to be taken unawares; I won’t be a yoked ox, mind you.’
