第20章

Dora had been out three seasons when these things happened.Iremember sharing Edward Harris's anxiety in no slight degree as to how the situation would resolve itself when she came, the situation consisting so considerably in his eyes of the second Mrs.Harris, who had complicated it further with three little red-cheeked boys, all of the age to be led about the station on very small ponies, and not under any circumstances to be allowed in the drawing-room when one went to tea with their mother.No one, except perhaps poor Ted himself, was more interested than I to observe how the situation did resolve itself, in the decision of Mrs.Harris that the boys, the two eldest at least, must positively begin the race for the competitive examinations of the future without further delay, and that she must as positively be domiciled in England 'to be near'

them, at all events until they had well made the start.I should have been glad to see them ride their ponies up and down the Mall a bit longer, poor little chaps; they were still very cherubic to be invited to take a view of competitive examinations, however distant;but Mrs.Harris's conviction was not to be overcome.So they went home to begin, and she went with them, leaving Dora in possession of her father, her father's house, his pay, his precedence, and all that was his.Not that I would suggest any friction; I am convinced that there was nothing like that--at least, nothing that met the eye, or the ear.Dora adored the three little boys and was extremely kind to their mother.She regarded this lady, I have reason to believe, with the greatest indulgence, and behaved towards her with the greatest consideration; I mean she had unerring intuitions as to just when, on afternoons when Mrs.Harris was at home from dusk till dinner, she should be dying for a walk.One could imagine her looking with her grey eyes at dear mamma's horizon and deciding that papa was certainly not enough to fill it by himself, deciding at the same time that he was never likely to be ousted there, only accompanied, in a less important and entirely innocent degree.It may be surprising that any one should fly from so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party lasted a bare three months.I think Mrs.Harris had a perception--she was the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct conclusions--that she was contributing to her step-daughter's amusement in a manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated, and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that indefinitely, perhaps increasingly.Besides, it was in the natural order of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs.Harris doubtless foresaw a comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or two, when the usual promising junior in 'the Department' should gild his own prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring its head for a father-in-law.Things always worked out if you gave them time.How much time you ought to give them was doubtless by now a pretty constant query with the little lady in her foggy exile;for two years had already passed and Dora had found no connection with any young man of the Department more permanent than those prescribed at dinners and at dances.It is doubtful, indeed, if she had had the opportunity.There was no absolute means of knowing;but if offers were made they never transpired, and Mrs.Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty that they never were made.

Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected.It depended upon Mrs.Harris's humour whether this was Dora's misfortune or her crime.She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust to be paralyzed.On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there.It hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young man in Harris's department.I had a department of my own; and Dora, though she frisked with me gloriously and bullied continually, must ever have been aware of the formidable fact that I joined the Service two years before Edward Harris did.The daughter of three generations of bureaucrats was not likely to forget that at one time her father had been junior to me in the same office, though in the course of time and the march of opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodded to each other on the Mall with an equal sense of the divine right of secretaries.It may seem irrelevant, but I feel compelled to explain here that I had remained a bachelor while Harris had married twice, and that I had kept up my cricket, while Harris had let his figure take all the soft curves of middle age.Nevertheless the fact remained.

Sometimes I fancied it gave a certain piquancy to my relations with his daughter, but I could never believe that the laugh was on my side.

If we met at dinner-parties, it would be sometimes Edward Harris and sometimes myself who would take the dullest and stoutest woman down.