Such a plea delivered Lethbury helpless to his daughter’s ministrations: and he found himself measuring the hours he spent with her by the amount of relief they must be affording her mother. There were even moments when he read a furtive gratitude in Mrs. Lethbury’s eye.
But Lethbury was no hero, and he had nearly reached the limit of vicarious endurance when something wonderful happened. They never quite knew afterward how it had come about, or who first perceived it; but Mrs. Lethbury one day gave tremulous voice to their inferences.
“Of course,” she said, “he comes here because of Elise.” The young lady in question, a friend of Jane’s, was possessed of attractions which had already been found to explain the presence of masculine visitors.
Lethbury risked a denial. “I don’t think he does,” he declared.
“But Elise is thought very pretty,” Mrs. Lethbury insisted.
“I can’t help that,” said Lethbury doggedly.
He saw a faint light in his wife’s eyes; but she remarked carelessly: “Mr. Budd would be a very good match for Elise.”
Lethbury could hardly repress a chuckle: he was so exquisitely aware that she was trying to propitiate the gods.
For a few weeks neither said a word; then Mrs. Lethbury once more reverted to the subject.
“It is a month since Elise went abroad,” she said.
“Is it?”
“And Mr. Budd seems to come here just as often—”
“Ah,” said Lethbury with heroic indifference; and his wife hastily changed the subject.
Mr. Winstanley Budd was a young man who suffered from an excess of manner. Politeness gushed from him in the driest seasons. He was always performing feats of drawing-room chivalry, and the approach of the most unobtrusive female threw him into attitudes which endangered the furniture. His features, being of the cherubic order, did not lend themselves to this role; but there were moments when he appeared to dominate them, to force them into compliance with an aquiline ideal. The range of Mr. Budd’s social benevolence made its object hard to distinguish. He spread his cloak so indiscriminately that one could not always interpret the gesture, and Jane’s impassive manner had the effect of increasing his demonstrations: she threw him into paroxysms of politeness.
At first he filled the house with his amenities; but gradually it became apparent that his most dazzling effects were directed exclusively to Jane. Lethbury and his wife held their breath and looked away from each other. They pretended not to notice the frequency of Mr. Budd’s visits, they struggled against an imprudent inclination to leave the young people too much alone. Their conclusions were the result of indirect observation, for neither of them dared to be caught watching Mr. Budd: they behaved like naturalists on the trail of a rare butterfly.
In his efforts not to notice Mr. Budd, Lethbury centred his attentions on Jane; and Jane, at this crucial moment, wrung from him a reluctant admiration. While her parents went about dissembling their emotions, she seemed to have none to conceal. She betrayed neither eagerness nor surprise; so complete was her unconcern that there were moments when Lethbury feared it was obtuseness, when he could hardly help whispering to her that now was the moment to lower the net.
Meanwhile the velocity of Mr. Budd’s gyrations increased with the ardor of courtship: his politeness became incandescent, and Jane found herself the centre of a pyrotechnical display culminating in the “set piece” of an offer of marriage.
Mrs. Lethbury imparted the news to her husband one evening after their daughter had gone to bed. The announcement was made and received with an air of detachment, as though both feared to be betrayed into unseemly exultation; but Lethbury, as his wife ended, could not repress the inquiry, “Have they decided on a day?”
Mrs. Lethbury’s superior command of her features enabled her to look shocked. “What can you be thinking of? He only offered himself at five!”
“Of course—of course—” stammered Lethbury—“but nowadays people marry after such short engagements—”
“Engagement!” said his wife solemnly. “There is no engagement.”
Lethbury dropped his cigar. “What on earth do you mean?”
“Jane is thinking it over.”
“Thinking it over?” “She has asked for a month before deciding.”
Lethbury sank back with a gasp. Was it genius or was it madness? He felt incompetent to decide; and Mrs. Lethbury’s next words showed that she shared his difficulty.
“Of course I don’t want to hurry Jane—”
“Of course not,” he acquiesced.
“But I pointed out to her that a young man of Mr. Budd’s impulsive temperament might—might be easily discouraged—”
“Yes; and what did she say?”
“She said that if she was worth winning she was worth waiting for.”
VI
The period of Mr. Budd’s probation could scarcely have cost him as much mental anguish as it caused his would-be parents-in-law.
Mrs. Lethbury, by various ruses, tried to shorten the ordeal, but Jane remained inexorable; and each morning Lethbury came down to breakfast with the certainty of finding a letter of withdrawal from her discouraged suitor.
When at length the decisive day came, and Mrs. Lethbury, at its close, stole into the library with an air of chastened joy, they stood for a moment without speaking; then Mrs. Lethbury paid a fitting tribute to the proprieties by faltering out: “It will be dreadful to have to give her up—”
Lethbury could not repress a warning gesture; but even as it escaped him, he realized that his wife’s grief was genuine.
“Of course, of course,” he said, vainly sounding his own emotional shallows for an answering regret. And yet it was his wife who had suffered most from Jane!
He had fancied that these sufferings would be effaced by the milder atmosphere of their last weeks together; but felicity did not soften Jane. Not for a moment did she relax her dominion: she simply widened it to include a new subject. Mr. Budd found himself under orders with the others; and a new fear assailed Lethbury as he saw Jane assume prenuptial control of her betrothed. Lethbury had never felt any strong personal interest in Mr. Budd; but, as Jane’s prospective husband, the young man excited his sympathy. To his surprise, he found that Mrs. Lethbury shared the feeling.
“I’m afraid he may find Jane a little exacting,” she said, after an evening dedicated to a stormy discussion of the wedding arrangements. “She really ought to make some concessions. If he wants to be married in a black frock-coat instead of a dark gray one—” She paused and looked doubtfully at Lethbury.
“What can I do about it?” he said.
“You might explain to him—tell him that Jane isn’t always—”
Lethbury made an impatient gesture. “What are you afraid of? His finding her out or his not finding her out?”
Mrs. Lethbury flushed. “You put it so dreadfully!”
Her husband mused for a moment; then he said with an air of cheerful hypocrisy: “After all, Budd is old enough to take care of himself.”
But the next day Mrs. Lethbury surprised him. Late in the afternoon she entered the library, so breathless and inarticulate that he scented a catastrophe.
“I’ve done it!” she cried.
“Done what?”
“Told him.” She nodded toward the door. “He’s just gone. Jane is out, and I had a chance to talk to him alone.”
Lethbury pushed a chair forward and she sank into it.
“What did you tell him? That she is not always—”
Mrs. Lethbury lifted a tragic eye. “No; I told him that she always is—”
“Always is—?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause. Lethbury made a call on his hoarded philosophy. He saw Jane suddenly reinstated in her evening seat by the library fire; but an answering chord in him thrilled at his wife’s heroism.