“After all,” said Mr. Ayrton, “what is marriage?”
“Ah!” sighed Phyllis. She knew that her father had become possessed of a phrase, and that he was anxious to flutter it before her to see how it went. He was a connoisseur in the bric-a-brac of phrases.
“Marriage means all your eggs in one basket,” said he.
“Ah!” sighed Phyllis once more. She wondered if her father really thought that she would be comforted in her great grief by a phrase. She did not want to know how marriage might be defined. She knew that all definitions are indefinite. She knew that in the case of marriage everything depends upon the definer and the occasion.
“So you see there is no immediate cause to grieve, my dear,” resumed her father.
She did not quite see that this was the logical conclusion of the whole matter; but that was possibly because she was born a woman, and felt that marriage is to a woman what a keel is to a ship.
“I think there is a very good cause to grieve when we find a man like George Holland turning deliberately round from truth to falsehood,” said Phyllis sternly.
“And what’s worse, running a very good chance of losing his living,” remarked the father. “Of course it will have to be proved that Moses and Abraham and David and the rest of them were not what he says they were; and it strikes me that all the bench of bishops, and a royal commissioner or two thrown in, would have considerable difficulty in doing that nowadays.”
“What! You take his part, papa?” she cried, starting up. “You take his part? You think I was wrong to tell him—what I did tell him?”
“I don’t take his part, my dear,” said Mr. Ayrton. “I think that he’s a bit of a fool to run his head into a hornet’s nest because he has come to the conclusion that Abraham’s code of morality was a trifle shaky, and that Samson was a shameless libertine. Great Heavens! has the man got no notion of the perspective of history?”
“Perspective? History? It’s the Bible, papa!”
Indignation was in Phyllis’ eyes, but there was a reverential tone in her voice. Her father looked at her—listened to her. In the pause he thought:
“Good Heavens! What sort of a man is George Holland, who is ready to relinquish the love and loveliness of that girl, simply because he thinks poorly of the patriarchs?”
“He attacks the Bible, papa,” resumed Phyllis gravely. “What horrible things he said about Ruth!”
“Ah, yes, Ruth—the heroine of the harvest festival,” said her father. “Ah, he might have left us our Ruth. Besides, she was a woman. Heavens above! is there no chivalry remaining among men?”
“Ah, if it was only chivalry! But—the Bible!”
“Quite so—the—yes, to be sure. But don’t you think you may take the Bible too seriously, Phyllis?”
“Oh, papa! too seriously?”
“Why not? That’s George Holland’s mistake, I fear. Why should he work himself to a fury over the peccadillos of the patriarchs? The principle of the statute of limitations should be applied to such cases. If the world, and the colleges of theology, have dealt lightly with Samson and David and Abraham and Jacob and the rest of them for some thousands of years, why should George Holland rake up things against them, and that, too, on very doubtful evidence? But I should be the last person in the world to complain of the course which he has seen fit to adopt, since it has left you with me a little longer, my dearest child. I did not, of course, oppose your engagement, but I have often asked myself what I should do without you? How should I ever work up my facts, or, what is more important, my quotations, in your absence, Phyllis? On some questions, my dear, you are a veritable Blue-book—yes, an edition de luxe of a Blue-book.”
“And I meant to be so useful to him as well,” said Phyllis, taking her father’s praises more demurely than she had taken his phrases. “I meant to help him in his work.”
“Ah, what a fool the man is! How could any man in his senses give up a thing of flesh and blood like you, for the sake of proving or trying to prove, that some people who lived five or six thousand years ago—if they ever lived at all—would have rendered themselves liable to imprisonment, without the option of a fine, if they lived in England since the passing of certain laws—recent laws, too, we must remember!”
“Papa!”
“Anyhow, you have done with him, my dear. A man who can’t see that crime is really a question of temperament, and sin invariably a question of geography—well, we’ll say no more about it. At what hour did you say he was coming?”
“Four. I don’t think I shall break down.”
“Break down? Why on earth should you break down? You have a mind to know, and you know your own mind. That’s everything. But of course you’ve had no experience of matters of this sort. He was your first real lover?”
Phyllis’ face became crimson. She retained sufficient presence of mind, however, to make a little fuss with the window-blind before letting it down. Her father stared at her for a moment, and there was rather a long pause before he laughed.
“I said ‘real lover,’ my dear,” he remarked. “The real lover is the one who talks definitely about dates and the house agent’s commission. As a rule the real lover does not make love. True love is born, not made. But you—Heavens above! perhaps I did an injustice to you—to you and to the men. Maybe you’re not such a tyro after all, Phyllis.”
Phyllis gave a very pretty little laugh—such a laugh as would have convinced any man but a father—perhaps, indeed, some fathers—that she was not without experience. Suddenly she became grave. Her father never loved her so dearly as when that little laugh was flying over her face, leaving its living footprints at the corners of her eyes, at the exquisite curve of her mouth. It relieved her from the suspicion of priggishness to which, now and again, her grave moods and appropriate words laid her open. She was not so proper, after all, her father now felt; she was a girl with the experiences of a girl who has tempted men and seen what came of it.
She spoke:
“It is a very serious thing, giving a man your promise and then——”
“Then finding that your duty to him—to him, mind—forces you to tell him that you cannot carry out that promise,” said her father. “Yes, it is a very serious thing, but not so serious as carrying out that promise would be if you had even the least little feeling that at the end of three months he was not a better man than you suspected he was at the beginning. There’s a bright side to everything, even a honeymoon; but the reason that a honeymoon is so frequently a failure is because the man is bound to be found out by his wife inside the month. It is better that you found out now, than later on, that you could not possibly be happy with a man who spoke slightingly of the patriarchs and their wives. Now I’ll leave you, with confidence that you will be able to explain matters to Mr. Holland.”
“What! you won’t be here?”
Dismay was in the girl’s face as she spoke. She had clearly looked for the moral support of her father’s presence while she would be making her explanation to the man whom she had, a few months before, promised to marry, but whom she had found it necessary to dismiss by letter, owing to her want of sympathy in some of his recent utterances.
“You won’t be here?”
“No; I have unfortunately an engagement just at that hour, Phyllis,” replied Mr. Ayrton. “But do you really think there is any need for me to be here? Personally, I fancy that my presence would only tend to complicate matters. Your own feeling, your own woman’s instinct, will enable you to explain—well, all that needs explanation. I have more confidence in your capacity to explain since you gave that pretty little laugh just now. Experience—ah, the experience of a girl such as you are, suggests an astronomer without a telescope. Still, there were astronomers before there were telescopes; and so I leave you, my beloved child—ah, my own child once again! No cold hand of a lover is now between us.”
It was not until he was some distance down Piccadilly that it occurred to him that he should have pictured the lover with a warm hand; and that omission on his part caused him a greater amount of irritation than anyone who was unaware of his skill in phrase-making could have thought possible to arise from a lapse apparently so trifling.
It was not until he had reached the Acropolis and had referred, in the hearing of the most eminently dull of the many distinguished members of that club, to the possibility of a girl’s experiences of man being likened to an astronomer without a telescope, that he felt himself again.
The dull distinguished man had smiled.
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