Moth and Rust | Page 6

room and kissed me, and cried, and said love was everything, and what did looks matter, and, for her part, if a man was a good man, she thought it was of no importance if he had not had a father. Think of mother's saying that, after marrying poor father? But she was quite sincere. Mother never minds contradicting herself. There is nothing petty about her. She cried, and I cried too. We seemed to be nearer to each other than we had been for years. I was the last daughter left at home, and she actually said she did not want to part with me. I think she felt it just for the moment, for she had had a good deal of worry with some of the sons-in-law, especially Harry. But after a little bit she came to herself, and she gave me such advice. Oh, such advice I Some of it was excellent--that was the worst of it --but it was all from the standpoint of the woman stalking the man. And she asked me several gimlet questions about Mr. Vanbrunt. She said I had not made any mistake so far, but that I must be very careful. She was like a tiger that has tasted blood. She said it was almost like marrying royalty--marrying such wealth as that. I believe he has a property in Africa rather larger than England. But she said that I was her dear child, and she thought it might be done. I implored her not to do anything--to leave him alone. But the truth is, mother had been so successful that she had got rather beyond herself, and she fancied she could do anything. Father had often prophesied that some day she would overreach herself. However, nothing would stop her. So she settled down to it. You know what mother's bowling is. It did for Harry--but this time it did for me."
"Mr. Vanbrunt saw through it?"
"From the first moment he saw he was being bunted down. He bore it at first, and then he withdrew. I can't prove it, but I am morally certain that mother cornered him and had a talk with him one day, and told him I cared for him, and thought him very handsome. Mother sticks at nothing. After that he went away."
"Poor man!"
"She asked him in May to stay with us in Scotland in September, but he has refused. I found she had given a little message from me which I never sent. Poor, poor mother, and poor me!"
"And poor millionaire! Surely if he has any sense he must see that it is your mother and not you who is hunting him."
"He is aware that Cecily did as she was told. He probably thinks I could be coerced into marrying him. He may know a great deal about finance, and stocks, and all those weary things, but he knows very little about women. He has not taken much account of them so far."
"His day will come," said Mrs. Trefusis. "What a nuisance men are! I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea."
"If they were," said Anne, with her rueful little smile, "mother would order a diving-bell at once."
Chapter 3
"O mighty love, O passion and desire, That bound the cord."
--THE HEPTAMERON
Janet's mother had died when Janet was a toddling child. It is observable in the natural history of heroines that their mothers almost invariably do die when the heroines to whom they have given birth are toddling children. Had Di Vernon a mother, or Evelina, or Jane Eyre, or Diana of the Crossways, or Aurora Leigh? Dear Elizabeth Bennett certainly had one whom we shall not quickly forget--but Elizabeth is an exception. She only proves the rule for the majority of heroines. Fathers they have sometimes, generally of a feeble or callous temperament, never of any use in extricating their daughters from the entanglements that early beset them. And occasionally they have chivalrous or disreputable brothers.
So it is with a modest confidence in the equipment of my heroine that I now present her to the reader denuded of both parents, and domiciled under the roof of a brother who was not only disreputable in the imagination of Mrs. Trefusis, but, as I hate half measures, was so in reality.
If Janet had been an introspective person, if she had ever asked herself whence she came and whither she was going, if the cruelty of life and nature had ever forced themselves upon her notice, if the apparent incompleteness of this pretty world had ever haunted her, I think she must have been a very unhappy woman. Her surroundings were vulgar, coarse, without a redeeming gleam of culture, even in its crudest forms, without a spark of refined affection. Nevertheless her life grew up white and clean