‘My dear,’ said her son abruptly, ‘what did my father and you talk about when you were engaged?’
Lady Adela, who had expected from her son the soothing accompaniment of another monologue to the music of her knitting, started at his abrupt question, lost count of her stitches, then looked vaguely up at last, her lips moving in a vain effort to recover her place in the row.
‘What did we talk about?’ she repeated. Then she blushed faintly. The distant past was transfigured with romance.
‘Dear boy,’ she resumed in hushed, reverent tones. ‘The engagement is the sweetest time in a woman’s life. The loveliest things your poor dear father gave me. We were at Naples, you know, and one gets the most charming corals there, and mosaics, and brooches carved out of lava. I have got them all. And then your poor dear father and I used to go out on to the terrace in the evening and look at the sunset and Vesuvius, and the steamers coming into the bay. He used to take my hand, and we stood there, saying nothing. There was nothing to say, dear. We both felt too much. One does not want to talk. And sometimes he--he would give me a kiss. And all the time--well, there was nothing else in the world, somehow, but just ourselves. We were quite alone. We should have been quite alone, even in a crowd.’
‘Ah, that is just exactly different with Gundred and me. We are never alone. We should not be alone in the wilderness. Gundred seems to live her life before an invisible audience of hundreds of people. That is why one can never get near her real self; there is always the consciousness of the audience restraining her.’
Lady Adela, however, was lost in roseate reminiscence.
‘So well I remember,’ she went on, ‘how the evening used to get darker and darker as we stood on the terrace, and the smell of dinner used to float up to us so deliciously from the ground-floor. Your poor dear father adored the Neapolitan cookery, and we used to talk of how we would have someone who could do _risotto_ when we were married and settled down. But none of our cooks ever could. Dear me, and the lights in the bay, and the warm, quiet darkness of it all, and just us two, alone in the world.’
The sweet and innocent sentimentality of Lady Adela had succeeded in draping the usual beautiful gauze of romance across an episode which, in its time, had been marked by plain and practical precision. As ivy, in the course of years, grows over the bare stone of a ruin, so does romance cover over the hard bare facts of a woman’s past. No matter how stark and cold it may have been, yet, if her nature be loving and soft, its softness will subdue and transfigure the roughnesses of many crude bygone days. By this time Lady Adela believed in her romantic marriage as firmly as she believed in her vicar and her Sovereign.