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"Well, my dear," said Miss Raeburn, shortly, as her guest entered the room, "I may as well tell you at once that Aldous's marriage is put off." "Put off!" exclaimed Lady Winterbourne, bewildered. "Why it was only Thursday that I was discussing it all with Marcella, and she told me everything was settled." "Thursday!
What was in Aldous's mind, as he stood with drawn brows looking out over the view which showed him most of his domain, was a sort of hot impatience of being made day by day, in a hundred foolish ways, to play at greatness. Yet, as we know, he was no democrat by conviction, had no comforting faith in what seemed to him the rule of a multitudinous ignorance.
To be spectator of the height of anything the best, the climax makes any mortal's pulses run. Beauty, success, happiness, for instance?" He paused smiling. She leant a thin hand on the mantelpiece and looked away; Aldous's pearls slipped backwards along her white arm. "Do you suppose to-night will be the height of happiness?" she said at last with a little scorn.
Aldous's eye travelled round the Mellor drawing-room. It was arrested by a chair beside him. On it lay an envelope addressed to Miss Boyce, of which the handwriting seemed to him familiar. A needle with some black silk hanging from it had been thrust into the stuffed arm of the chair; the cushion at the back still bore the imprint of the sitter.
Robins, "yellow autumn's nightingales," sang in the hedge to their right. In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their charm felt. Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging, wooing, defining. Aldous's heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve. Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and seeing his look she paled a little.
She sat with her hands round her knees lost in perplexities. The wedding, as originally fixed, was now three weeks and three days off. After it, she and Aldous were to have spent a short fortnight's honeymoon at a famous house in the north, lent them for the occasion by a Duke who was a cousin of Aldous's on the mother's side, and had more houses than he knew what to do with.
"I was not certain of myself till to-day. Besides it would have been presumption so far. She has shown me nothing but the merest friendliness." "What, you can suppose she would refuse you!" cried Lord Maxwell, and could not for the life of him keep the sarcastic intonation out of his voice. Aldous's look showed distress. "You have not seen her, grandfather," he said quietly.
When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough.
Wharton keeps me informed of everything. I enclose his last two letters, which will show you the line he means to take up with regard to some of the evidence." Aldous's reply cost him a prodigal amount of pain and difficulty. "I will do anything in the world to make these days less of a burden to you.
He constantly looks upon me as rash in the things I adopt and believe in. But for the contriving, unceasing effort of every day to make that part of the social machine in which a man finds himself work better and more equitably, I have never seen Aldous's equal for the steady passion, the persistence, of it." She looked up.
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