Mr. Waddington of Wyck | Page 8

I'll say good night."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
He had risen as she rose and went to open the door for her. He escorted
her through the smoke-room and stood there at the further door,
holding out his hand, benignant and superbly solemn.
"Good night, then," he said.
She told herself that she was wrong, quite wrong about his poor old
face. There was nothing in it, nothing but that grave and unadventurous
benignity. His mood had been, she judged, purely paternal. Paternal
and childlike, too; pathetic, if you came to think of it, in his clinging to
her presence, her companionship. "It must have been my little evil
mind," she thought.
3
As she went along the corridor she remembered she had left her
knitting in the drawing-room. She turned to fetch it and found Fanny
still there, wide awake with her feet on the fender, and reading
"Tono-Bungay."
"Oh, Mrs. Waddington, I thought you'd gone to bed."
"So did I, dear. But I changed my mind when I found myself alone with
Wells. He's too heavenly for words."
Barbara saw it in a flash, then. She knew what she, the companion and
secretary, was there for. She was there to keep him off her, so that
Fanny might have more time to find herself alone in.
She saw it all.
"'Tono-Bungay,'" she said. "Was that what you sent me out with Mr.
Bevan for?"

"It was. How clever of you, Barbara."

IV
1
Mr. Waddington closed the door on Miss Madden slowly and gently so
that the action should not strike her as dismissive. He then turned on
the lights by the chimneypiece and stood there, looking at himself in
the glass. He wanted to know exactly how his face had presented itself
to Miss Madden. It would not be altogether as it appeared to himself;
for the glass, unlike the young girl's clear eyes, was an exaggerating
and distorting medium; he had noticed that his wife's face in the
smoke-room glass looked a good ten years older than the face he knew;
he calculated, therefore, that this faint greenish tint, this slightly
lop-sided elderly grimace were not truthful renderings of his
complexion and his smile. And as (in spite of these defects, which you
could put down to the account of the glass) the face Mr. Waddington
saw was still the face of a handsome man, he formed a very favourable
opinion of the face Miss Madden had seen. Handsome, and if not in his
first youth, then still in his second. Experience is itself a fascination,
and if a man has any charm at all his second youth should be more
charming, more irresistibly fascinating than his first.
And the child had been conscious of him. She had betrayed uneasiness,
a sense of danger, when she had found herself alone with him. He
recalled her first tentative flight, her hesitation. He would have liked to
have kept her there with him a little longer, to have talked to her about
his League, to have tested by a few shrewd questions her ability.
Better not. Better not. The child was wise and right. Her wisdom and
rectitude were delicious to Mr. Waddington, still more so was the
thought that she had felt him to be dangerous.
He went back into his library and sat again in his chair and meditated:
This experiment of Fanny's now; he wondered how it would turn out,

especially if Fanny really wanted to adopt the girl, Frank Madden's
daughter. That impudent social comedian had been so offensive to Mr.
Waddington in his life-time that there was something alluring in the
idea of keeping his daughter now that he was dead, seeing the exquisite
little thing dependent on him for everything, for food and frocks and
pocket-money. But no doubt they had been wise in giving her the
secretaryship before committing themselves to the irrecoverable step;
thus testing her in a relation that could be easily terminated if by any
chance it proved embarrassing.
But the relation in itself was, as Mr. Waddington put it to himself, a
little difficult and delicate. It involved an intimacy, a closer intimacy
than adoption: having her there in his library at all hours to work with
him; and always that little uneasy consciousness of hers.
Well, well, he had set the tone to-night for all their future intercourse;
he had in the most delicate way possible let her see. It seemed to him,
looking back on it, that he had exercised a perfect tact, parting from her
with that air of gaiety and light badinage which his own instinct of
self-preservation so happily suggested. Yet he smiled when he recalled
her look as she went from him, backing, backing, to the door; it made
him feel very tender and