Adela was so far right as that by the end of the week, though she remained certain, her father had still not made the announcement she dreaded. What convinced her was the sense of her changed relations with him--of there being between them something unexpressed, something she was aware of as she would have been of an open wound.
When she spoke of this to Godfrey he said the change was of her own making--also that she was cruelly unjust to the governor. She suffered even more from her brother's unexpected perversity; she had had so different a theory about him that her disappointment was almost an humiliation and she needed all her fortitude to pitch her faith lower. She wondered what had happened to him and why he so failed her. She would have trusted him to feel right about anything, above all about such a question. Their worship of their mother's memory, their recognition of her sacred place in their past, her exquisite influence in their father's life, his fortune, his career, in the whole history of the family and welfare of the house--accomplished clever gentle good beautiful and capable as she had been, a woman whose quiet distinction was universally admired, so that on her death one of the Princesses, the most august of her friends, had written Adela such a note about her as princesses were understood very seldom to write: their hushed tenderness over all this was like a religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall away from which was a form of treachery. This wasn't the way people usually felt in London, she knew; but strenuous ardent observant girl as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim originalities of attitude, she had already made up her mind that London was no treasure-house of delicacies. Remembrance there was hammered thin--to be faithful was to make society gape. The patient dead were sacrificed; they had no shrines, for people were literally ashamed of mourning. When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives they invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter. Adela said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the virtue it was her idea to practise for them. SHE was to be their mother, a direct deputy and representative. Before the vision of that other woman parading in such a character she felt capable of ingenuities, of deep diplomacies. The essence of these indeed was just tremulously to watch her father. Five days after they had dined together at Mrs. Churchley's he asked her if she had been to see that lady.
"No indeed, why should I?" Adela knew that he knew she hadn't been, since Mrs. Churchley would have told him.
"Don't you call on people after you dine with them?" said Colonel Chart.
"Yes, in the course of time. I don't rush off within the week."Her father looked at her, and his eyes were colder than she had ever seen them, which was probably, she reflected, just the way hers appeared to himself. "Then you'll please rush off to-morrow. She's to dine with us on the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come down."Adela stared. "To a dinner-party?"
"It's not to be a dinner-party. I want them to know Mrs. Churchley.""Is there to be nobody else?"
"Godfrey of course. A family party," he said with an assurance before which she turned cold.
The girl asked her brother that evening if THAT wasn't tantamount to an announcement. He looked at her queerly and then said: "I'VE been to see her.""What on earth did you do that for?"
"Father told me he wished it."
"Then he HAS told you?"
"Told me what?" Godfrey asked while her heart sank with the sense of his making difficulties for her.
"That they're engaged, of course. What else can all this mean?""He didn't tell me that, but I like her."
"LIKE her!" the girl shrieked.
"She's very kind, very good."
"To thrust herself upon us when we hate her? Is that what you call kind? Is that what you call decent?""Oh _I_ don't hate her"--and he turned away as if she bored him.
She called the next day on Mrs. Churchley, designing to break out somehow, to plead, to appeal--"Oh spare us! have mercy on us! let him alone! go away!" But that wasn't easy when they were face to face.
Mrs. Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have said--she was perpetually using the expression--into touch; but her good intentions were as depressing as a tailor's misfits. She could never understand that they had no place for her vulgar charity, that their life was filled with a fragrance of perfection for which she had no sense fine enough. She was as undomestic as a shop-front and as out of tune as a parrot. She would either make them live in the streets or bring the streets into their life--it was the same thing.
She had evidently never read a book, and she used intonations that Adela had never heard, as if she had been an Australian or an American. She understood everything in a vulgar sense; speaking of Godfrey's visit to her and praising him according to her idea, saying horrid things about him--that he was awfully good-looking, a perfect gentleman, the kind she liked. How could her father, who was after all in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her, who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead wife a perfect gentleman? What would he have been, pray? Much she knew about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted her to like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had come--the chance to plead with her and beg her off. But she presented such an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a message to a varnished door. She wasn't a woman, said Adela; she was an address.
When she dined in Seymour Street the "children," as the girl called the others, including Godfrey, liked her. Beatrice and Muriel stared shyly and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the air. They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they didn't know, any more than she did herself, how she patronised them.
