Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm [100]
"I could but try," said Zuleika.
"'You could but try' are the very words Dr. Pusey used to me. I ventured to say that in such a matter effort itself was a stigma of unfitness. For all my moods of revulsion, I knew that my place was in the world. I stayed there."
"But suppose, grand-papa"—and, seeing in fancy the vast agitated flotilla of crinolines, she could not forbear a smile—"suppose all the young ladies of that period had drowned themselves for love of you?"
Her smile seemed to nettle the Warden. "I was greatly admired," he said. "Greatly," he repeated.
"And you liked that, grand-papa?"
"Yes, my dear. Yes, I am afraid I did. But I never encouraged it."
"Your own heart was never touched?"
"Never, until I met Laura Frith."
"Who was she?"
"She was my future wife."
"And how was it you singled her out from the rest? Was she very beautiful?"
"No. It cannot be said that she was beautiful. Indeed, she was accounted plain. I think it was her great dignity that attracted me. She did not smile archly at me, nor shake her ringlets. In those days it was the fashion for young ladies to embroider slippers for such men in holy orders as best pleased their fancy. I received hundreds—thousands—of such slippers. But never a pair from Laura Frith."
"She did not love you?" asked Zuleika, who had seated herself on the floor at her grandfather's feet.
I concluded that she did not. It interested me very greatly. It fired me.
"Was she incapable of love?"
"No, it was notorious in her circle that she had loved often, but loved in vain."
"Why did she marry you?"
"I think she was fatigued by my importunities. She was not very strong. But it may be that she married me out of pique. She never told me. I did not inquire."
"Yet you were very happy with her?"
"While she lived, I was ideally happy."
The young woman stretched out a hand, and laid it on the clasped hands of the old man. He sat gazing into the past. She was silent for a while; and in her eyes, still fixed intently on his face, there were tears.
"Grand-papa dear"—but there were tears in her voice, too.
"My child, you don't understand. If I had needed pity—"
"I do understand—so well. I wasn't pitying you, dear, I was envying you a little."
"Me?—an old man with only the remembrance of happiness?"
"You, who have had happiness granted to you. That isn't what made me cry, though. I cried because I was glad. You and I, with all this great span of years between us, and yet—so wonderfully alike! I had always thought of myself as a creature utterly apart."
"Ah, that is how all young people think of themselves. It wears off. Tell me about this wonderful resemblance of ours."
He sat attentive while she described her heart to him. But when, at the close of her confidences, she said, "So you see it's a case of sheer heredity, grand-papa," the word "Fiddlesticks!" would out.
"Forgive me, my dear," he said, patting her hand. "I was very much interested. But I do believe young people are even more staggered by themselves than they were in my day. And then, all these grand theories they fall back on! Heredity... as if there were something to baffle us in the fact of a young woman liking to be admired! And as if it were passing strange of her to reserve her heart for a man she can respect and look up to! And as if a man's indifference to her were not of all things the likeliest to give her a sense of inferiority to him! You and I, my dear, may in some respects be very queer people, but in the matter of the affections we are ordinary enough."
"Oh grand-papa, do you really mean that?" she cried eagerly.
"At my age, a man husbands his resources. He says nothing that he does not really mean. The indifference between you and other young women is that which lay also between me and other young men: a special attractiveness... Thousands of slippers, did I say? Tens of thousands. I had hoarded them with a fatuous pride. On the evening of my betrothal I made a bonfire of them, visible from three counties. I danced round it all night." And from his old eyes darted even now the reflections of those flames.