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Updated: May 15, 2025
The truth was, perhaps, as Geoffrey had expressed it to Helena, that many of the younger men who had been brought into close official or business contact with him felt a real affection for him. Buntingford would have thought it strange that they should do so, and never for one moment assumed it. After its languid morning, Beechmark revived with the afternoon.
She could only ask herself the breathless question that French had already asked: "How far has it gone with her? How deep is the wound?" Cynthia and Georgina Welwyn were dining at Beechmark on the eventful evening.
But in truth the sisters suited each other very fairly, and Lady Georgina found a good deal more tongue when she was alone with Cynthia than at other times. To the lively account that Cynthia had been giving her of the evening at Beechmark, and the behaviour of Helena Pitstone, Lady Georgina had listened in a sardonic silence; and at the end of it she said "What ever made the man such a fool?"
It was evident that they had never got on during her mother's lifetime, and that his habitual bantering or sarcastic tone towards her while she was still in the school-room had roused an answering resentment in her. Hence the aggressive mood in which, after two or three months of that half-mad whirl of gaiety into which London had plunged after the Armistice, she had come down to Beechmark.
But he now rode whenever he was at Beechmark, to show Helena the country; and they both looked so well on horseback that it was a pleasure of which Lucy Friend never tired to watch them go and to welcome them home. Then the fact that he was a trained artist, which most of his friends had forgotten, became significant again for Helena's benefit.
And when Helena first arrived at Beechmark, it had hurt him to realize how bitterly she remembered such things, how grossly she had exaggerated them. The change indicated in her present manner, soothed his tired, nervous mood. His smile answered her. "Yes, I was there with you two or three days. Do you remember the wild tulips we gathered at Settignano?"
The man of middle-age, accomplished, cynical and witty, suddenly confronted with a responsibility which challenged both his heart and his conscience and that a responsibility towards an attractive young girl whom he could neither court nor command, towards whom his only instrument was the honesty and delicacy of his own purpose: there was something in this famous, historical situation which seemed to throw a light on the humbler situation at Beechmark.
The light was still good, and he saw her clearly. He stopped indeed to watch her, puzzled to know what a stranger could be doing in the park, and on that path at ten o'clock at night. He was aware indeed that there were gay doings at Beechmark.
A letter had reached her, however; by the morning's post, from Miss Alcott, giving an account of the situation at Beechmark, of the removal of the boy to his father's house, and of the progress that had been made in awakening his intelligence and fortifying his bodily health. "It is wonderful to see the progress he has made so far, entirely through imitation and handwork.
Through and behind a much gentler manner, the girl's familiar self was to be felt by Lucy at least as clearly as before. She was neither to be held nor bound. Attempt to lay any fetter upon her of hours, or habit and she was gone; into the heart of the mountains where no one could follow her. Lucy would often compare with it the eager docility of those last weeks at Beechmark.
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