Part 30 (2/2)
She remembered Sir Francis's silent but unmistakable pride and pleasure in his engaged daughter, and Lady Isabel's additional display of affection, and even of deference to Alex' taste in choosing her frocks and hats, and her own sense of having at last atoned to them both for her unsatisfactory childhood and lack of any conspicuous social success, such as they had coveted for her.
Alex, cowering in her chair now, wondered how she could face them. Her only shred of comfort lay in the remembrance that Lady Isabel had said to her:
”My darlin', I'm so thankful to know you are marrying for love.”
Alex, in bitter bewilderment, remembered those words again and again in the days which followed.
No one reproached her, she heard hardly a word of blame, and the most severe censure spoken to her was in her mother's soft voice, far more distressed than angry.
”But, Alex, do you know what people say, about a girl who's behaved as you have? That she's a vulgar _jilt_, neither more nor less. To throw over a young man after being engaged to him for four weeks, with no reason except a capricious fit.... Oh, my darling, _why_ couldn't you have asked me first? To go and give him back that lovely ring, and hurt and insult him.... Of course, he'll never come back. Your father says how well he's behaved, poor boy.... Alex, Alex, what shall I do with you?”
Tears were running down her pretty face, so slightly lined even now.
Alex cried too, from pity for her mother and wretched, undefined remorse, and a growing conviction that in acting on her own distorted impulse she had once more involved herself, and, far worse, others, in far-reaching and disastrous consequences.
”Thank Heaven, we hadn't announced the engagement, but, of course, it will all get about--things always do. And there's nothing worse for a girl than to get that sort of reputation, especially when she's not--not tremendously sought after, or pretty or anything.”
Lady Isabel had never before come so near to an avowal that her eldest daughter's career had proved a disappointment to her, and Alex in the admission, rightly gauged the extent of her mother's dismay.
”Why did you do it, Alex?”
Alex tried haltingly to explain, but she could only say:
”I--I felt I didn't care for him enough.”
”But you hadn't had time to find out! You accepted him when he proposed, so you must have been quite ready to like him then, and you'd only been engaged for four weeks. How could you tell--a little thing like you?”
wailed Lady Isabel.
”Oh, Alex, if you'd only come to me about it first--I could have explained it all to you--girls often get fancies about being in love.”
”I thought you wanted me to marry for love. You said so,” sobbed Alex.
”Of course, I don't want you to marry without it. But it's the love that comes _after_ marriage that really counts--and a boy you'd known all your life, practically--that we all liked--you could have been ideally happy, Alex.” Lady Isabel looked at her almost resentfully.
”I don't know what will happen to you, my darling, I don't indeed. I sometimes think you are just as headstrong and exaggerated as when you were a little girl. And, Alex, I don't like even to say such a thing to you--but--there's never been any one _but_ Noel, and I'm afraid this isn't the sort of thing that makes any man.... Nothing puts them off more--and no wonder.”
Alex thought momentarily of Queenie, but she knew that was different. In the supreme object of woman, to attract, Queenie stood in a cla.s.s apart.
Nothing that Queenie could ever do would ever rob her of the devotion that was hers, wherever she chose to claim it, by mysterious right of attraction.
From her father, Alex heard very little. She was left, in her abnormal sensitiveness, to measure his disappointment and mortification by his very silence.
Feeling again like the naughty little girl who had been responsible for Barbara's fall from the bal.u.s.ters, and had been sent to Sir Francis for sentence, she listened, in a silence that was broken only by the sobs that she could hardly control, to his few, measured utterances.
”You are old enough to know your own mind.” Sir Francis paused, swinging his gla.s.ses lightly to and fro in his hand. Then he deliberately put them across his nose and looked at her.
”At least,” he added carefully, ”I suppose you are. Your mother tells me that you appear to have been--er--rather suddenly overwhelmed by a fear of marrying without love. I don't wish to say, Alex, that such a sentiment was not more or less proper and natural, but to act upon it so hastily, and with such a heartless lack of consideration, appears to me to be the action, my dear child”--Sir Francis paused, and then added calmly--”of a fool. The word is not a pretty one, but I prefer it to the only other alternative that I can see, for describing your conduct.”
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