On the evening that succeeded this apparently pointless encounter he had an interview more conclusive with Mrs.Bundy, for whose shrewd and philosophic view of life he had several times expressed, even to the good woman herself, a considerable relish.The situation at Jersey Villas (Mrs.Ryves had suddenly flown off to Dover) was such as to create in him a desire for moral support, and there was a kind of domestic determination in Mrs.Bundy which seemed, in general, to advertise it.He had asked for her on coming in, but had been told she was absent for the hour; upon which he had addressed himself mechanically to the task of doing up his dishonoured manuscript--the ingenious fiction about which Mr.Locket had been so stupid--for further adventures and not improbable defeats.He passed a restless, ineffective afternoon, asking himself if his genius were a horrid delusion, looking out of his window for something that didn't happen, something that seemed now to be the advent of a persuasive Mr.Locket and now the return, from an absence more disappointing even than Mrs.
Bundy's, of his interesting neighbour of the parlours.He was so nervous and so depressed that he was unable even to fix his mind on the composition of the note with which, on its next peregrination, it was necessary that his manuscript should be accompanied.He was too nervous to eat, and he forgot even to dine; he forgot to light his candles, he let his fire go out, and it was in the melancholy chill of the late dusk that Mrs.Bundy, arriving at last with his lamp, found him extended moodily upon his sofa.She had been informed that he wished to speak to her, and as she placed on the malodorous luminary an oily shade of green pasteboard she expressed the friendly hope that there was nothing wrong with his 'ealth.
The young man rose from his couch, pulling himself together sufficiently to reply that his health was well enough but that his spirits were down in his hoots.He had a strong disposition to "draw" his landlady on the subject of Mrs.Ryves, as well as a vivid conviction that she constituted a theme as to which Mrs.Bundy would require little pressure to tell him even more than she knew.At the same time he hated to appear to pry into the secrets of his absent friend; to discuss her with their bustling hostess resembled too much for his taste a gossip with a tattling servant about an unconscious employer.He left out of account however Mrs.Bundy's knowledge of the human heart, for it was this fine principle that broke down the barriers after he had reflected reassuringly that it was not meddling with Mrs.Ryves's affairs to try and find out if she struck such an observer as happy.Crudely, abruptly, even a little blushingly, he put the direct question to Mrs.Bundy, and this led tolerably straight to another question, which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy (they were indeed but different phases of the same), and which the good woman answered with expression when she ejaculated: "Think it a liberty for you to run down for a few hours? If she do, my dear sir, just send her to me to talk to!" As regards happiness indeed she warned Baron against imposing too high a standard on a young thing who had been through so much, and before he knew it he found himself, without the responsibility of choice, in submissive receipt of Mrs.
Bundy's version of this experience.It was an interesting picture, though it had its infirmities, one of them congenital and consisting of the fact that it had sprung essentially from the virginal brain of Miss Teagle.Amplified, edited, embellished by the richer genius of Mrs.Bundy, who had incorporated with it and now liberally introduced copious interleavings of Miss Teagle's own romance, it gave Peter Baron much food for meditation, at the same time that it only half relieved his curiosity about the causes of the charming woman's underlying strangeness.He sounded this note experimentally in Mrs.
Bundy's ear, but it was easy to see that it didn't reverberate in her fancy.She had no idea of the picture it would have been natural for him to desire that Mrs.Ryves should present to him, and she was therefore unable to estimate the points in respect to which his actual impression was irritating.She had indeed no adequate conception of the intellectual requirements of a young man in love.
She couldn't tell him why their faultless friend was so isolated, so unrelated, so nervously, shrinkingly proud.On the other hand she could tell him (he knew it already) that she had passed many years of her life in the acquisition of accomplishments at a seat of learning no less remote than Boulogne, and that Miss Teagle had been intimately acquainted with the late Mr.Everard Ryves, who was a "most rising" young man in the city, not making any year less than his clear twelve hundred."Now that he isn't there to make them, his mourning widow can't live as she had then, can she?" Mrs.Bundy asked.
Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thought of another way she might live as he sat, the next day, in the train which rattled him down to Dover.The place, as he approached it, seemed bright and breezy to him; his roamings had been neither far enough nor frequent enough to make the cockneyfied coast insipid.
