The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/Maud-Evelyn/Chapter 1
I
'Then why on earth don't you take him?' I asked. I think that was the way that, one day when she was about twenty—before some of you perhaps were born—the affair, for me, must have begun. I put the question because I knew she had had a chance, though I didn't know how great a mistake her failure to embrace it was to prove. I took an interest because I liked them both—you see how I like young people still—and because, as they had originally met at my house, I had in a manner to answer to each for the other. I'm afraid I'm thrown baldly back on the fact that if the girl was the daughter of my earliest, almost my only governess, to whom I had remained much attached and who, after leaving me, had married—for a governess—'well,' Marmaduke (it isn't his real name!) was the son of one of the clever men who had—I was charming then, I assure you I was—wanted, years before, and this one as a widower, to marry me. I hadn't cared, somehow, for widowers, but even after I had taken somebody else I was conscious of a pleasant link with the boy whose stepmother it had been open to me to become and to whom it was perhaps a little a matter of vanity with me to show that I should have been for him one of the kindest. This was what the woman his father eventually did marry was not, and that threw him upon me the more.
Lavinia was one of nine, and her brothers and sisters, who had never done anything for her, help, actually, in different countries and on something, I believe of that same scale, to people the globe. There were mixed in her then, in a puzzling way, two qualities that mostly exclude each other,—an extreme timidity and, as the smallest fault that could qualify a harmless creature for a world of wickedness, a self-complacency hard in tiny, unexpected spots, for which I used sometimes to take her up, but which, I subsequently saw, would have done something for the flatness of her life had they not evaporated with everything else. She was at any rate one of those persons as to whom you don't know whether they might have been attractive if they had been happy, or might have been happy if they had been attractive. If I was a trifle vexed at her not jumping at Marmaduke, it was probably rather less because I expected wonders of him than because I thought she took her own prospect too much for granted. She had made a mistake and, before long, admitted it; yet I remember that when she expressed to me a conviction that he would ask her again, I also thought this highly probable, for in the meantime I had spoken to him. 'She does care for you,' I declared; and I can see at this moment, long ago though it be, his handsome empty young face look, on the words, as if, in spite of itself for a little, it really thought. I didn't press the matter, for he had, after all, no great things to offer; yet my conscience was easier, later on, for having not said less. He had three hundred and fifty a year from his mother, and one of his uncles had promised him something—I don't mean an allowance, but a place, if I recollect, in a business. He assured me that he loved as a man loves—a man of twenty-two!—but once. He said it, at all events, as a man says it but once.
'Well, then,' I replied, 'your course is clear.'
'To speak to her again, you mean?'
'Yes—try it.'
He seemed to try it a moment in imagination; after which, a little to my surprise, he asked: 'Would it be very awful if she should speak to me?'
I stared. 'Do you mean pursue you—overtake you? Ah, if you're running away———'
'I'm not running away!'—he was positive as to that, 'But when a fellow has gone so far———'
'He can't go any further? Perhaps,' I replied drily. 'But in that case he shouldn't talk of "caring."'
'Oh, but I do, I do.'
I shook my head. 'Not if you're too proud!' On which I turned away, looking round at him again, however, after he had surprised me by a silence that seemed to accept my judgment. Then I saw he had not accepted it; I perceived it indeed to be essentially absurd. He expressed more, on this, than I had yet seen him do—had the queerest, frankest, and, for a young man of his conditions, saddest smile.
'I'm not proud. It isn't in me. If you're not, you're not, you know. I don't think I'm proud enough.'
It came over me that this was, after all, probable; yet somehow I didn't at the moment like him the less for it, though I spoke with some sharpness. 'Then what's the matter with you?'
He took a turn or two about the room, as if what he had just said had made him a little happier. 'Well, how can a man say more?' Then, just as I was on the point of assuring him that I didn't know what he had said, he went on: 'I swore to her that I would never marry. Oughtn't that to be enough?'
'To make her come after you?'
'No—I suppose scarcely that; but to make her feel sure of me—to make her wait.'
'Wait for what?'
'Well, till I come back.'
'Back from where?'
'From Switzerland—haven't I told you? I go there next month with my aunt and my cousin.'
He was quite right about not being proud—this was an alternative distinctly humble.