When she came down to breakfast (after every one had left the table except Mrs. Davilow) there were letters on her plate. One of them she read with a gathering smile, and then handed it to her mamma, who, on returning it, smiled also, finding new cheerfulness in the good spirits her daughter had shown ever since waking, and said—
“You don’t feel inclined to go a thousand miles away?”
“Not exactly so far.”
“It was a sad omission not to have written again before this. Can’t you write how—before we set out this morning?”
“It is not so pressing. To-morrow will do. You see they leave town to-day. I must write to Dover. They will be there till Monday.”
“Shall I write for you, dear—if it teases you?”
Gwendolen did not speak immediately, but after sipping her coffee, answered brusquely, “Oh no, let it be; I will write to-morrow.” Then, feeling a touch of compunction, she looked up and said with playful tenderness, “Dear, old, beautiful mamma!”
“Old, child, truly.”
“Please don’t, mamma! I meant old for darling. You are hardly twenty-five years older than I am. When you talk in that way my life shrivels up before me.”
“One can have a great deal of happiness in twenty-five years, my dear.”
“I must lose no time in beginning,” said Gwendolen, merrily. “The sooner I get my palaces and coaches the better.”
“And a good husband who adores you, Gwen,” said Mrs. Davilow, encouragingly.
Gwendolen put out her lips saucily and said nothing.
It was a slight drawback on her pleasure in starting that the rector was detained by magistrate’s business, and would probably not be able to get to Cardell Chase at all that day. She cared little that Mrs. Gascoigne and Anna chose not to go without him, but her uncle’s presence would have seemed to make it a matter of course that the decision taken would be acted on. For decision in itself began to be formidable. Having come close to accepting Grandcourt, Gwendolen felt this lot of unhoped-for fullness rounding itself too definitely. When we take to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion. Still there was the reassuring thought that marriage would be the gate into a larger freedom.
The place of meeting was a grassy spot called Green Arbor, where a bit of hanging wood made a sheltering amphitheatre. It was here that the coachful of servants with provisions had to prepare the picnic meal; and the warden of the Chase was to guide the roving archers so as to keep them within the due distance from this centre, and hinder them from wandering beyond the limit which had been fixed on—a curve that might be drawn through certain well-known points, such as the double Oak, the Whispering Stones, and the High Cross. The plan was to take only a preliminary stroll before luncheon, keeping the main roving expedition for the more exquisite lights of the afternoon. The muster was rapid enough to save every one from dull moments of waiting, and when the groups began to scatter themselves through the light and shadow made here by closely neighboring beeches and there by rarer oaks, one may suppose that a painter would have been glad to look on. This roving archery was far prettier than the stationary game, but success in shooting at variable marks were less favored by practice, and the hits were distributed among the volunteer archers otherwise than they would have been in target-shooting. From this cause, perhaps, as well as from the twofold distraction of being preoccupied and wishing not to betray her preoccupation, Gwendolen did not greatly distinguish herself in these first experiments, unless it were by the lively grace with which she took her comparative failure. She was in white and green as on the day of the former meeting, when it made an epoch for her that she was introduced to Grandcourt; he was continually by her side now, yet it would have been hard to tell from mere looks and manners that their relation to each other had at all changed since their first conversation. Still there were other grounds that made most persons conclude them to be, if not engaged already, on the eve of being so. And she believed this herself. As they were all returning toward Green Arbor in divergent groups, not thinking at all of taking aim but merely chattering, words passed which seemed really the beginning of that end—the beginning of her acceptance. Grandcourt said, “Do you know how long it is since I first saw you in this dress?”
“The archery meeting was on the 25th, and this is the 13th,” said Gwendolen, laughingly. “I am not good at calculating, but I will venture to say that it must be nearly three weeks.”
A little pause, and then he said, “That is a great loss of time.”
“That your knowing me has caused you? Pray don’t be uncomplimentary; I don’t like it.”
Pause again. “It is because of the gain that I feel the loss.”
Here Gwendolen herself let a pause. She was thinking, “He is really very ingenious. He never speaks stupidly.” Her silence was so unusual that it seemed the strongest of favorable answers, and he continued:
“The gain of knowing you makes me feel the time I lose in uncertainty. Do you like uncertainty?”
“I think I do, rather,” said Gwendolen, suddenly beaming on him with a playful smile. “There is more in it.”
Grandcourt met her laughing eyes with a slow, steady look right into them, which seemed like vision in the abstract, and then said, “Do you mean more torment for me?”
There was something so strange to Gwendolen in this moment that she was quite shaken out of her usual self-consciousness. Blushing and turning away her eyes, she said, “No, that would make me sorry.”
Grandcourt would have followed up this answer, which the change in her manner made apparently decisive of her favorable intention; but he was not in any way overcome so as to be unaware that they were now, within sight of everybody, descending the space into Green Arbor, and descending it at an ill-chosen point where it began to be inconveniently steep. This was a reason for offering his hand in the literal sense to help her; she took it, and they came down in silence, much observed by those already on the level—among others by Mrs. Arrowpoint, who happened to be standing with Mrs. Davilow. That lady had now made up her mind that Grandcourt’s merits were not such as would have induced Catherine to accept him, Catherine having so high a standard as to have refused Lord Slogan. Hence she looked at the tenant of Diplow with dispassionate eyes.
“Mr. Grandcourt is not equal as a man to his uncle, Sir Hugo Mallinger—too languid. To be sure, Mr. Grandcourt is a much younger man, but I shouldn’t wonder if Sir Hugo were to outlive him, notwithstanding the difference of years. It is ill calculating on successions,” concluded Mrs. Arrowpoint, rather too loudly.
“It is indeed,” said Mrs. Davilow, able to assent with quiet cheerfulness, for she was so well satisfied with the actual situation of affairs that her habitual melancholy in their general unsatisfactoriness was altogether in abeyance.
I am not concerned to tell of the food that was eaten in that green refectory, or even to dwell on the stories of the forest scenery that spread themselves out beyond the level front of the hollow; being just now bound to tell a story of life at a stage when the blissful beauty of earth and sky entered only by narrow and oblique inlets into the consciousness, which was busy with a small social drama almost as little penetrated by a feeling of wider relations as if it had been a puppet-show. It will be understood that the food and champagne were of the best—the talk and laughter too, in the sense of belonging to the best society, where no one makes an invidious display of anything in particular, and the advantages of the world are taken with that high-bred depreciation which follows from being accustomed to them. Some of the gentlemen strolled a little and indulged in a cigar, there being a sufficient interval before, four o’clock—the time for beginning to rove again. Among these, strange to say, was Grandcourt; but not Mr. Lush, who seemed to be taking his pleasure quite generously to-day by making himself particularly serviceable, ordering everything for everybody, and by this activity becoming more than ever a blot on the scene to Gwendolen, though he kept himself amiably