She looked me through and through again with her X-ray scrutiny.
"I don"t think Mr. Tillington is quite the sort that falls a prey to adventuresses," I answered, boldly.
"Ah, but there are f.a.ggots and f.a.ggots," the old lady said, wagging her head with profound meaning. "Never mind, though; _I"d_ like to see an adventuress marry off Harold without my leave! _I"d_ lead her a life!
I"d turn her black hair gray for her!"
"I should think," I a.s.sented, "you could do it, Lady Georgina, if you gave your attention seriously to it."
From that moment forth, I was aware that my Cantankerous Old Lady"s malign eye was inexorably fixed upon me every time I went within speaking distance of Mr. Tillington. She watched him like a lynx. She watched _me_ like a dozen lynxes. Wherever we went, Lady Georgina was sure to turn up in the neighbourhood. She was perfectly ubiquitous: she seemed to possess a world-wide circulation. I don"t know whether it was this constant suggestion of hers that I was stalking her nephew which roused my latent human feeling of opposition; but in the end, I began to be aware that I rather liked the supercilious _attache_ than otherwise.
He evidently liked me, and he tried to meet me. Whenever he spoke to me, indeed, it was without the superciliousness which marked his manner towards others; in point of fact, it was with graceful deference. He watched for me on the stairs, in the garden, by the terrace; whenever he got a chance, he sidled over and talked to me. Sometimes he stopped in to read me Heine: he also introduced me to select portions of Gabriele d"Annunzio. It is feminine to be touched by such obvious attention; I confess, before long, I grew to like Mr. Harold Tillington.
The closer he followed me up, the more did I perceive that Lady Georgina threw out acrid hints with increasing spleen about the ways of adventuresses. They were hints of that acrimonious generalised kind, too, which one cannot answer back without seeming to admit that the cap has fitted. It was atrocious how middle-cla.s.s young women nowadays ran after young men of birth and fortune. A girl would stoop to anything in order to catch five hundred thousand. Guileless youths should be thrown among their natural equals. It was a mistake to let them see too much of people of a lower rank who consider themselves good-looking. And the clever ones were the worst: they pretended to go in for intellectual companionship.
I also noticed that though at first Lady Georgina had expressed the strongest disinclination to my leaving her after the time originally proposed, she now began to take for granted that I would go at the end of my week, as arranged in London, and she even went on to some overt steps towards securing the help of the blameless Gretchen.
We had arrived at Schlangenbad on Tuesday. I was to stop with the Cantankerous Old Lady till the corresponding day of the following week.
On the Sunday, I wandered out on the wooded hillside behind the village; and as I mounted the path I was dimly aware by a sort of instinct that Harold Tillington was following me.
He came up with me at last near a ledge of rock. "How fast you walk!" he exclaimed. "I gave you only a few minutes" start, and yet even my long legs have had hard work to overtake you."
"I am a fairly good climber," I answered, sitting down on a little wooden bench. "You see, at Cambridge, I went on the river a great deal-- I canoed and sculled: and then, besides, I"ve done a lot of bicycling."
"What a splendid birthright it is," he cried, "to be a wholesome athletic English girl! You can"t think how one admires English girls after living a year or two in Italy--where women are dolls, except for a brief period of intrigue, before they settle down to be contented frumps with an outline like a barrel."
"A little muscle and a little mind are no doubt advisable adjuncts for a housewife," I admitted.
"You shall not say that word," he cried, seating himself at my side. "It is a word for Germans, "housewife." Our English ideal is something immeasurably higher and better. A companion, a complement! Do you know, Miss Cayley, it always sickens me when I hear German students sentimentalising over their _madchen_: their beautiful, pure, insipid, yellow-haired, blue-eyed _madchen_; her, so fair, so innocent, so unapproachably vacuous--so like a wax doll--and then think of how they design her in days to come to cook sausages for their dinner, and knit them endless stockings through a placid middle age, till the needles drop from her paralysed fingers, and she retires into frilled caps and Teutonic senility."
"You seem to have almost as low an opinion of foreigners as your respected aunt!" I exclaimed, looking quizzically at him.
He drew back, surprised. "Oh, no; I"m not narrow-minded, like my aunt, I hope," he answered. "I am a good cosmopolitan. I allow Continental nations all their own good points, and each has many. But their women, Miss Cayley--and their point of view of their women--you will admit that there they can"t hold a candle to English women."
I drew a circle in the dust with the tip of my parasol.
"On that issue, I may not be a wholly unprejudiced observer," I answered. "The fact of my being myself an Englishwoman may possibly to some extent influence my judgment."
"You are sarcastic," he cried, drawing away.
"Not at all," I answered, making a wider circle. "I spoke a simple fact.
But what is _your_ ideal, then, as opposed to the German one?"
He gazed at me and hesitated. His lips half parted. "My ideal?" he said, after a pause. "Well, _my_ ideal--do you happen to have such a thing as a pocket-mirror about you?"
I laughed in spite of myself. "Now, Mr. Tillington," I said severely, "if you"re going to pay compliments, I shall have to return. If you want to stop here with me, you must remember that I am only Lady Georgina Fawley"s temporary lady"s-maid. Besides, I didn"t mean that. I meant, what is your ideal of a man"s right relation to his _madchen_?"
"Don"t say _madchen_," he cried, petulantly. "It sounds as if you thought me one of those sentimental Germans. I hate sentiment."
"Then, towards the woman of his choice."
He glanced up through the trees at the light overhead, and spoke more slowly than ever. "I think," he said, fumbling his watch-chain nervously, "a man ought to wish the woman he loves to be a free agent, his equal in point of action, even as she is n.o.bler and better than he in all spiritual matters. I think he ought to desire for her a life as high as she is capable of leading, with full scope for every faculty of her intellect or her emotional nature. She should be beautiful, with a vigorous, wholesome, many-sided beauty, moral, intellectual, physical; yet with soul in her, too; and with the soul and the mind lighting up her eyes, as it lights up--well, that is immaterial. And if a man can discover such a woman as that, and can induce her to believe in him, to love him, to accept him--though how such a woman can be satisfied with any man at all is to me unfathomable--well, then, I think he should be happy in devoting his whole life to her, and should give himself up to repay her condescension in taking him."
"And you hate sentiment!" I put in, smiling.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MISS CAYLEY, HE SAID, YOU ARE PLAYING WITH ME.]
He brought his eyes back from the sky suddenly. "Miss Cayley," he said, "this is cruel. I was in earnest. You are playing with me."
"I believe the chief characteristic of the English girl is supposed to be common sense," I answered, calmly, "and I trust I possess it." But indeed, as he spoke, my heart was beginning to make its beat felt; for he was a charming young man; he had a soft voice and l.u.s.trous eyes; it was a summer"s day; and alone in the woods with one other person, where the sunlight falls mellow in spots like a leopard"s skin, one is apt to remember that we are all human.
That evening Lady Georgina managed to blurt out more malicious things than ever about the ways of adventuresses, and the duty of relations in saving young men from the clever clutches of designing creatures. She was ruthless in her rancour: her gibes stung me.
On Monday at breakfast I asked her casually if she had yet found a Gretchen.
"No," she answered, in a gloomy voice. "All slatterns, my dear; all slatterns! Brought up in pig-sties. I wouldn"t let one of them touch my hair for thousands."
"That"s unfortunate," I said, drily, "for you know I"m going to-morrow."
If I had dropped a bomb in their midst they couldn"t have looked more astonished. "To-morrow?" Lady Georgina gasped, clutching my arm. "You don"t mean it, child; you don"t mean it?"
I a.s.serted my Ego. "Certainly," I answered, with my coolest air. "I said I thought I could manage you for a week; and I have managed you."
She almost burst into tears. "But, my child, my child, what shall I do without you?"
"The unsophisticated Gretchen," I answered, trying not to look concerned; for in my heart of hearts, in spite of her innuendoes, I had really grown rather to like the Cantankerous Old Lady.
She rose hastily from the table, and darted up to her own room. "Lois,"
she said, as she rose, in a curious voice of mingled regret and suspicion, "I will talk to you about this later." I could see she was not quite satisfied in her own mind whether Harold Tillington and I had not arranged this _coup_ together.
I put on my hat and strolled off into the garden, and then along the mossy hill path. In a minute more, Harold Tillington was beside me.
He seated me, half against my will, on a rustic bench. "Look here, Miss Cayley," he said, with a very earnest face; "is this really true? Are you going to-morrow?"
My voice trembled a little. "Yes," I answered, biting my lip. "I am going. I see several reasons why I should go, Mr. Tillington."
"But so soon?"
"Yes, I think so; the sooner the better." My heart was racing now, and his eyes pleaded mutely.
"Then where are you going?"
I shrugged my shoulders, and pouted my lips a little. "I don"t know," I replied. "The world is all before me where to choose. I am an adventuress," I said it boldly, "and I am in quest of adventures. I really have not yet given a thought to my next place of sojourn."
"But you will let me know when you have decided?"
It was time to speak out. "No, Mr. Tillington," I said, with decision.
"I will _not_ let you know. One of my reasons for going is, that I think I had better see no more of you."
He flung himself on the bench at my side, and folded his hands in a helpless att.i.tude. "But, Miss Cayley," he cried, "this is so short a notice; you give a fellow no chance; I hoped I might have seen more of you--might have had some opportunity of--of letting you realise how deeply I admired and respected you--some opportunity of showing myself as I really am to you--before--before----" he paused, and looked hard at me.