"My wife tells me she has had a delightful time with you."
"I"ve had a delightful time with her."
"I"m glad. My wife is a very delightful woman; but, you know, you mustn"t take everything she says too seriously."
"I won"t. I"m not a very serious person myself."
"Don"t say that. Don"t say that."
"Very well. I think, if you don"t want me, I"ll say good night."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
He had risen as she rose and went to open the door for her. He escorted her through the smoke-room and stood there at the further door, holding out his hand, benignant and superbly solemn.
"Good night, then," he said.
She told herself that she was wrong, quite wrong about his poor old face. There was nothing in it, nothing but that grave and unadventurous benignity. His mood had been, she judged, purely paternal. Paternal and childlike, too; pathetic, if you came to think of it, in his clinging to her presence, her companionship. "It must have been my little evil mind," she thought.
3
As she went along the corridor she remembered she had left her knitting in the drawing-room. She turned to fetch it and found f.a.n.n.y still there, wide awake with her feet on the fender, and reading "Tono-Bungay."
"Oh, Mrs. Waddington, I thought you"d gone to bed."
"So did I, dear. But I changed my mind when I found myself alone with Wells. He"s too heavenly for words."
Barbara saw it in a flash, then. She knew what she, the companion and secretary, was there for. She was there to keep him off her, so that f.a.n.n.y might have more time to find herself alone in.
She saw it all.
""Tono-Bungay,"" she said. "Was _that_ what you sent me out with Mr.
Bevan for?"
"It was. How clever of you, Barbara."
IV
1
Mr. Waddington closed the door on Miss Madden slowly and gently so that the action should not strike her as dismissive. He then turned on the lights by the chimneypiece and stood there, looking at himself in the gla.s.s. He wanted to know exactly how his face had presented itself to Miss Madden. It would not be altogether as it appeared to himself; for the gla.s.s, unlike the young girl"s clear eyes, was an exaggerating and distorting medium; he had noticed that his wife"s face in the smoke-room gla.s.s looked a good ten years older than the face he knew; he calculated, therefore, that this faint greenish tint, this slightly lop-sided elderly grimace were not truthful renderings of his complexion and his smile. And as (in spite of these defects, which you could put down to the account of the gla.s.s) the face Mr. Waddington saw was still the face of a handsome man, he formed a very favourable opinion of the face Miss Madden had seen. Handsome, and if not in his first youth, then still in his second. Experience is itself a fascination, and if a man has any charm at all his second youth should be more charming, more irresistibly fascinating than his first.
And the child had been conscious of him. She had betrayed uneasiness, a sense of danger, when she had found herself alone with him. He recalled her first tentative flight, her hesitation. He would have liked to have kept her there with him a little longer, to have talked to her about his League, to have tested by a few shrewd questions her ability.
Better not. Better not. The child was wise and right. Her wisdom and rect.i.tude were delicious to Mr. Waddington, still more so was the thought that she had felt him to be dangerous.
He went back into his library and sat again in his chair and meditated: This experiment of f.a.n.n.y"s now; he wondered how it would turn out, especially if f.a.n.n.y really wanted to adopt the girl, Frank Madden"s daughter. That impudent social comedian had been so offensive to Mr.
Waddington in his life-time that there was something alluring in the idea of keeping his daughter now that he was dead, seeing the exquisite little thing dependent on him for everything, for food and frocks and pocket-money. But no doubt they had been wise in giving her the secretaryship before committing themselves to the irrecoverable step; thus testing her in a relation that could be easily terminated if by any chance it proved embarra.s.sing.
But the relation in itself was, as Mr. Waddington put it to himself, a little difficult and delicate. It involved an intimacy, a closer intimacy than adoption: having her there in his library at all hours to work with him; and always that little uneasy consciousness of hers.
Well, well, he had set the tone to-night for all their future intercourse; he had in the most delicate way possible let her see. It seemed to him, looking back on it, that he had exercised a perfect tact, parting from her with that air of gaiety and light badinage which his own instinct of self-preservation so happily suggested. Yet he smiled when he recalled her look as she went from him, backing, backing, to the door; it made him feel very tender and chivalrous; virtuous too, as if somehow he had overcome some unforeseen and ruinous impulse. And all the time he hadn"t had any impulse beyond the craving to talk to an intelligent and attractive stranger, to talk about his League.
Mr. Waddington went to bed thinking about it. He even woke his wife up out of her sleep with the request that she would remind him to call at Underwoods first thing in the morning.
2
As soon as he was awake he thought of Underwoods. Underwoods was important. He had to round up the county, and he couldn"t do that without first consulting Sir John Corbett, of Underwoods. As a matter of form, a mere matter of form, of course, he would have to consult him.
But the more he thought about it the less he liked the idea of consulting anybody. He was desperately afraid that, if he once began letting people into it, his scheme, his League, would be taken away from him; and that the proper thing, the graceful thing, the thing to which he would be impelled by all his instincts and traditions, would be to stand modestly back and see it go. Probably into Sir John Corbett"s hands. And he couldn"t. He couldn"t. Yet it was clear that the League, just because it was a League, must have members; even if he had been prepared to contribute all the funds himself and carry on the whole business of it single-handed, it couldn"t consist solely of Mr.
Waddington of Wyck. His problem was a subtle and difficult one: How to identify himself with the League, himself alone, in a unique and indissoluble manner, and yet draw to it the necessary supporters? How to control every detail of its intricate working (there would be endless wheels within wheels), and at the same time give proper powers to the inevitable Committee? If he did not put it quite so crudely as f.a.n.n.y in her disagreeable irony, his problem resolved itself into this: How to divide the work and yet rake in all the credit?
He was saved from its immediate pressure by the sight of the envelope that waited for him on the breakfast-table, addressed in a familiar hand.
"Mrs. Levitt--" His emotion betrayed itself to Barbara in a peculiar furtive yet triumphant smile.
"Again?" said f.a.n.n.y. (There was no end to the woman and her letters.)
Mrs. Levitt requested Mr. Waddington to call on her that morning at eleven. There was a matter on which she desired to consult him. The brevity of the note revealed her trust in his compliance, trust that implied again a certain intimacy. Mr. Waddington read it out loud to show how harmless and open was his communion with Mrs. Levitt.
"Is there any matter on which she has not consulted you?"
"There seems to have been one. And, as you see, she is repairing the omission."
A light air, a light air, to carry off Mrs. Levitt. The light air that had carried off Barbara, that had made Barbara carry herself off the night before. (It had done good. This morning the young girl was all ease and innocent unconsciousness again.)
"And I suppose you"re going?" f.a.n.n.y said.
"I suppose I shall have to go."
"Then I shall have Barbara to myself all morning?"
"You will have Barbara to yourself all day."
He tried thus jocosely to convey, for Barbara"s good, his indifference to having her. All the same, it gave him pleasure to say her name like that: "Barbara."
He was not sure that he wanted to go and see Mrs. Levitt with all this business of the League on hand. It meant putting off Sir John. You couldn"t do Sir John _and_ Mrs. Levitt in one morning. Besides, he thought he knew what Mrs. Levitt wanted, and he said to himself that this time he would be obliged, for once, to refuse her.
But it was not in him to refuse to go and see her. So he went.