Part 5 (1/2)
”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 companions.h.i.+p. ”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.