The Heavenly Twins (Victorian Feminist Novel). Grand Sarah
"She must suffer, yes; but I don't know about the rest. She may be a seventh wave, you know!"
"What is a seventh wave?"
"It is a superstition of the fisher-folks. They say that when the tide is coming in it pauses always, and remains stationary between every seventh wave, waiting for the next, and unable to rise any higher till it comes to carry it on; and it has always seemed to me that the tide of human progress is raised at intervals to higher levels at a bound in some such way. The seventh waves of humanity are men and women who, by the impulse of some one action which comes naturally to them but is new to the race, gather strength to come up to the last halting place of the tide, and to carry it on with them ever so far beyond." He stopped abruptly, and brushed his hand over his forehead. "Now that I have said that," he added, "it seems as old as the cathedral there, and as familiar, yet the moment before I spoke it appeared to have only just occurred to me. If it is an ill-digested reminiscence and you come across the original in some book, I am afraid you will lose your faith in me forever; but I pray you of your charity make due allowance. I must go."
"Oh, no, not yet a moment!" Mrs. Orton Beg exclaimed. "I want to ask you:
How are Lady Adeline and the twins?"
"I haven't seen Lady Adeline for a month," he answered, rising to go as he spoke. "But Dawne tells me that the twins are as awful as ever. It is a question of education now, and it seems that the twins have their own ideas on the subject, and are teaching their parents. But take care of your girlie out there," he added, his strong face softening as he took a last look at her. "Her body is not so robust as her brain, I should say, and it is late in the year to be sitting out of doors."
"Tell me, Dr. Galbraith," Mrs. Orton Beg began, detaining him, "you are a Scotchman, you should have the second sight; tell me the fate of my girlie out there. I am anxious about her."
"She will marry," he answered in his deliberate way, humouring her, "but not have many children, and her husband's name should be George."
"Oh, most oracular! a very oracle! a Delphic oracle, only to be interpreted by the event!"
"Just so!" he answered from the door, and then he was gone.
"Evadne, come in!" Mrs. Orton Beg called. "It is getting damp." Evadne roused herself and entered at once by the window.
"I have been hearing voices through my dim dreaming consciousness," she said. "Have you had a visitor?"
"Only the doctor," her aunt replied. "By the way, Evadne," she added, "what is Major Colquhoun's Christian name?"
"George," Evadne answered, surprised. "Why, auntie?"
"Nothing; I wanted to know."
CHAPTER XVI.
When breakfast was over at Fraylingay next morning, and the young people had left the table, Mrs. Frayling helped herself to another cup of coffee, and solemnly opened Evadne's last letter. The coffee was cold, for the poor lady had been waiting, not daring to take the last cup herself, because she knew that the moment she did so her husband would want more. The emptying of the urn was the signal which usually called up his appetite for another cup. He might refuse several times, and even leave the table amiably, so long as there was any left; but the knowledge or suspicion that there was none, set up a sense of injury, unmistakably expressed in his countenance, and not to be satisfied by having more made immediately, although he invariably ordered it just to mark his displeasure. He would get up and ring for it emphatically, and would even sit with it before him for some time after it came, but would finally go out without touching it, and be, as poor Mrs. Frayling mentally expressed it: "Oh, dear! quite upset for the rest of the day."
On this occasion, however, the pleasure of a wholly new grievance left no space in his fickle mind for the old-worn item of irritation, and he never even noticed that the coffee was done. "Dear George" sat beside Mrs. Frayling. She kept him there in order to be able to bestow a stray pat on his hand, or make him some other sign of that maternal tenderness of which she considered the poor dear fellow stood so much in need.
Mr. Frayling sat at the end of the table reading a local paper with one eye, as it were, and watching his wife for her news with the other. A severely critical expression sat singularly ill upon his broad face, which was like a baked apple, puffy, and wrinkled, and red, and there was about him a queerly pursed-up air of settled opposition to everything which did duty for both the real and spurious object of his attention.
Mrs. Frayling read the letter through to herself, and then she put it down on the table and raised her handkerchief to her eyes with a heavy sigh.
"Well, what does she say now," Mr. Frayling exclaimed, throwing down the local paper and giving way to his impatience openly.
"Dear George" was perfectly cool.
"She says," Mrs. Frayling enjoined between two sniffs, "that Major
Colquhoun isn't good enough, and she won't have him."
"Well, I understand that, at all events, better than anything else she has said," Major Colquhoun observed, almost as if a weight had been removed from his mind. "And I am quite inclined to come to terms with her, for I don't care much myself for a young lady who gets into hysterics about things that other women think nothing of."
"Oh, don't say think nothing of, George," Mrs. Frayling deprecated. "We lament and deplore, but we forgive and endure."
"It comes to the same thing," said Major Colquhoun.
A big dog which sat beside him, with its head on his knee, thumped his tail upon the ground here and whined sympathetically; and he laid one hand caressingly upon his head, while he twirled his big blond moustache with the other. He was fond of children and animals, and all creatures that fawned upon him and were not able to argue if they disagreed with him, or resent it if he kicked them, actually or metaphorically speaking; not that he was much given to that kind of thing. He was agreeable naturally as all pleasure-loving people are; only when he did lose his temper that was the way he showed it. He would cut a woman to the quick with a word, and knock a man down; but both ebullitions were momentary as a rule. It was really too much trouble to cherish anger.
And just then he was thinking quite as much about his moustache as about his wife. It had once been the pride of his life, but had come to be the cause of some misgivings; for "heavy moustaches" had gone out of fashion in polite society.
Mr. Frayling followed up the last remark. "This is very hard on you, Colquhoun, very hard," he declared, pushing his plate away from him; "and I may say that it is very hard on me too. But it just shows you what would come of the Higher Education of Women! Why, they'd raise some absurd standard of excellence, and want to import angels from Eden if we didn't come up to it."
Major Colquhoun looked depressed.
"Yes," Mrs, Frayling protested, shaking her head. "She says her husband must be a Christlike man. She says men have agreed to accept Christ as an example of what a man should be, and asserts that therefore they must feel in themselves that they could live up to his standard if they chose."
"There now!" Mr, Frayling exclaimed triumphantly. "That is just what I said. A Christlike man, indeed! What absurdity will women want next? I don't know what to advise, Colquhoun. I really don't."
"Can't you order her?" Mrs. Frayling suggested.
"Order her! How can I order her? She belongs to Major Colquhoun now," he retorted irritably, but with a fine conservative regard for the rights of property.
"And this is the way she keeps her vow of obedience," Major Colquhoun muttered.
"Oh, but you see—the poor misguided child considers that she made the vow under a misapprehension," Mrs. Frayling explained, her maternal instinct acting on the defensive when her offspring's integrity was