# The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave/The Wheel of Time/Chapter 6

VI
He soared on these high thoughts till, towards the end of July (Mrs. Tregent stayed late in town—she was awaiting her son's return), he made the discovery that to some persons, perhaps indeed to many, he had all the air of being in love. This image ​was flashed back to him from the irreverent lips of a lady who knew and admired Mrs. Tregent, and who professed amusement at his surprise, at his artless declaration that he had no idea he had made himself conspicuous. She assured him that every one was talking about him—though people after all had a tenderness for elderly romance; and she left him divided between the acute sense that he was comical (he had a horror of that) and the pale perception of something that he could "help" still less. At the end of a few hours of reflection he had sacrificed the penalty to the privilege, he was about to be fifty, and he knew Fanny Knocker's age—no one better, but he cared no straw for vulgar judgments, and moreover could think of plenty of examples of unions admired even after longer delays. For three days he enjoyed the luxury of admitting to himself without reserve how indispensable she had become to him; as the third drew to a close he was more nervous than really he had ever been in his life, for this was the evening on which, after many hinderances, Mrs. Tregent had agreed to ​dine with him. He had planned the occasion for a month—he wanted to show her how well he had learned from her how to live on his income. Her occupations had always interposed—she was teaching him new lessons; but at last she gave him the joy of sitting at his table. At the evening's end he begged her to remain after the others, and he asked one of the ladies who had been present, and who was going to a pair of parties, to be so good as to take Vera away. This, indeed, had been arranged in advance, and when, in the discomposed drawing-room, of which the windows stood open to the summer night, he was alone with his old friend, he saw in her face that she knew it had been arranged. He saw more than this—that she knew what he was waiting to say, and that if, after a visible reluctance, she had consented to come, it was in order to meet him, with whatever effort, on the ground he had chosen—meet him once, and then leave it forever. This was why, without interrupting him, but before he had finished, putting out her hand to his own, with a strange clasp of refusal, ​she was ready to show him, in a woful but beautiful headshake to which nothing could add, that it was impossible at this time of day for them to marry. She stayed only a moment, but in that moment he had to accept the knowledge that by as much as it might have been of old, by so much might it never be again. After she had gone he walked up and down the drawing-room half the night. He sent the servants to bed, he blew out the candles; the forsaken place was lighted only by the lamps in the street. He gave himself the motive of waiting for Vera to come back, but in reality he threshed about in the darkness because his cheeks had begun to burn. There was a sting for him in Mrs. Tregent's refusal, and this sting was sharper even than the disappointment of his desire. It was a reproach to his delicacy; it made him feel as if he had been an ass for the second time. When she was young and free his faith had been too poor and his perceptions too dense; he had waited to show her that he only bargained for certainties and only recognized success. He dropped into a chair at last and sat ​there a long time, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, trying to cover up his humiliation, waiting for it to ebb. As the sounds of the night died away, it began to come back to him that she had given him a promise to which a rich meaning could be attached. What was it that, before going away, she had said about Vera, in words he had been at the moment too disconcerted to take in? Little by little he reconstructed these words with comfort; finally, when after hearing a carriage stop at the door he hastily pulled himself together and went down to admit his daughter, the sight of the child on his threshold, as the brougham that had restored her drove away, brought them all back in their generosity.
"Have you danced?" he asked.
She hesitated. "A little, papa."
He knew what that meant—she had danced once. He followed her up-stairs in silence; she had not wasted her time—she had had her humiliation. Ah, clearly she was too short! Yet on the landing above, where her bedroom candle stood, she tried to be gay with him, asking him about his own ​party, and whether the people had stayed late.
"Mrs. Tregent stayed after the others. She spoke very kindly of you."
The girl looked at her father with an anxiety that showed through her smile. "What did she say?"
He hesitated, as Vera had done a moment before. "That you must be our compensation."
His daughter's eyes, still wondering, turned away. "What did she mean?"
"That it's all right, darling!" And he supplied the deficiencies of this explanation with a long kiss for goodnight. The next day he went to see Mrs. Tregent, who wore the air of being glad to have something at once positive and pleasant to say. She announced immediately that Arthur was coming back.
"I congratulate you." Then, as they exchanged one of their looks of unreserved recognition, Maurice added: "Now it's for Vera and me to go."
"To go?"
​"Without more delay. It's high time we should take ourselves off."
Mrs. Tregent was silent a moment. "Where shall you go?"
"To our old haunts—abroad. We must see some of our old friends. We shall spend six months away."
"Then what becomes of my months?"
"Your months?"
"Those it's all arranged she's to spend at Blankley." Blankley was Mrs. Tregent's house in Derbyshire, and she laughed as she went on: "Those that I spoke of last evening. Don't look as if we had never discussed it and settled it!"
"What shall I do without her?" Maurice Glanvil presently demanded.
"What will you do with her?" his hostess replied, with a world of triumphant meaning. He was not prepared to say, in the sense of her question, and he took refuge in remarking that he noted her avoidance of any suggestion that he, too, would be welcome in Derbyshire; which led her to continue, with unshrinking frankness, "Certainly, I don't want you a bit. Leave us alone."
​"Is it safe?"
"Of course I can't absolutely answer for anything, but at least it will be safer than with you," said Mrs. Tregent.
Maurice Glanvil turned this over. "Does he dislike me?"
"What an idea!"
But the question had brought the color to her face, and the sight of this, with her evasive answer, kindled in Maurice's heart a sudden relief, a delight almost, that was strange enough. Arthur was in opposition, plainly, and that was why he had so promptly quitted London; that was why Mrs. Tregent had refused Mr. Glanvil. The idea was an instant balm. "He'd be quite right, poor fellow!" Maurice declared. "I'll go abroad alone."
"Let me keep her six months," said Mrs. Tregent. "I'll try it—I'll try it!"
"I wouldn't interfere for the world."
"It's an immense responsibility; but I should like so to succeed."
"She's an angel!" Maurice said.
"That's what gives me courage."
"But she mustn't dream of any plot," he added.
​"For what do you take me?" Mrs. Tregent exclaimed, with a smile which lightened up for him intensely that far-away troubled past as to which she had originally baffled his inquiry.
The joy of perceiving in an aversion to himself a possible motive for Arthur's absence was so great in him that before he took leave of her he ventured to say to his old friend, "Does he like her at all?"
"He likes her very much."
Maurice remembered how much he had liked Fanny Knocker and been willing to admit it to his mother; but he presently observed, "Of course he can't think her in the least pretty."
"As you say, she's an angel," Mrs. Tregent rejoined.
"She would pass for one better if she were a few inches taller."
"It doesn't matter," said Mrs. Tregent.
"One must remember that in that respect, at her age, she won't change," Maurice pursued, wondering after he had spoken whether he had pressed upon the second pronoun.
"No, she won't change. But she's a ​darling!" Mrs. Tregent exclaimed; and it was in these meagre words, which were only half however of what passed between them, that an extraordinary offer was made and accepted. They were so ready to understand each other that no insistence and no professions now were necessary, and that Maurice Glanvil had not even broken into a murmur of gratitude at this quick revelation of his old friend's beautiful conception of a nobler remedy—the endeavor to place their union outside themselves, to make their children know the happiness they had missed. They had not needed to teach each other what they saw, what they guessed, what moved them with pity and hope, and there were transitions enough safely skipped in the simple conversation I have preserved. But what Mrs. Tregent was ready to do for him filled Maurice Glanvil, for days after this, with an even greater wonder, and it seemed to him that not till then had she fully shown him that she had forgiven him.
Six months, however, proved much more than sufficient for her attempt to test the plasticity of her son. Maurice Glanvil went ​abroad, but was nervous and restless, wandering from place to place, revisiting old scenes and old friends, reverting, with a conscious, an even amused incongruity, and yet with an effect that was momentarily soothing, to places at which he had stayed with his wife, but feeling all the while that he was really staking his child's happiness. It only half reassured him to feel that Vera would never know what poor Fanny Knocker had been condemned to know, for the daily contact was cruel from the moment the issue was uncertain; and it only half helped him to reflect that she was not so plain as Fanny, for had not Arthur Tregent given him the impression that the young man of the present was intrinsically even more difficult to please than the young man of the past? The letters he received from Blankley conveyed no information about Arthur beyond the fact that he was at home; only once Vera mentioned that he was "remarkably good" to her. Towards the end of November he found himself in Paris, submitting reluctantly to social accidents which put off from day to day his ​return to London, when, one morning in the Rue de Rivoli, he had to stop short to permit the passage of a vehicle which had emerged from the court of an hotel. It was an open cab—the day was mild and bright—with a small quantity of neat, leathery luggage, which Maurice vaguely recognized as English, stowed in the place beside the driver—luggage from which his eyes shifted straight to the occupant of the carriage, a young man with his face turned to the allurements of travel and the urbanity of farewell to bowing waiters still visible in it. The young man was so bright and so on his way, as it were, that Maurice, standing there to make room for him, felt for the instant that he, too, had taken a tip. The feeling became acute as he recognized that this humiliating obligation was to no less a person than Arthur Tregent. It was Arthur who was so much on his way—it was Arthur who was catching a train. He noticed his mother's friend as the cab passed into the street, and, with a quick demonstration, caused the driver to pull up. He jumped out, and under the arcade the two men met ​with every appearance of cordiality, but with conscious confusion. Each of them colored perceptibly, and Maurice was angry with himself for blushing before a boy. Long afterwards he remembered how cold, and even how hard, was the handsome clearness of the young eyes that met his own in an artificial smile.
"You here? I thought you were at Blankley."
"I left Blankley yesterday; I'm on my way to Spain."
"To Spain? How charming!"
"To join a friend there—just for a month or two."
"Interesting country—well worth seeing. Your mother's all right?"
"Oh, yes, all right. And Miss Glanvil—" Arthur Tregent went on, cheerfully.
"Vera's all right?" interrupted Maurice, with a still gayer tone.
"Every one, everything's all right!" Arthur laughed.
"Well, I mustn't keep you. Bon voyage!"
Maurice Glanvil, after the young man had ​driven on, flattered himself that in this brief interview he had suppressed every indication of surprise; but that evening he crossed the Channel, and on the morrow he went down to Blankley. "To Spain—to Spain!" the words kept repeating themselves in his ears. He, when he had taken flight in a similar conjunction, had only got, for the time, as far as Boulogne; and he was reminded afresh of the progress of the species. When he was introduced into the drawing-room at Blankley—a chintzy, flowery, friendly expanse—Mrs. Tregent rose before him alone and offered him a face that she had never shown before. She was white, and she looked scared; she faltered in her movement to meet him.
"I met Arthur in Paris, so I thought I might come."
Oh, yes; there was pain in her face, and a kind of fear of him that frightened him, but their hands found each other's hands while she replied: "He went off—I didn't know it."
"But you had a letter the next morning," Maurice said.
​She stared. "How did you know that?"
"Who should know better than I? He wrote from London, explaining."
"I did what I could—I believed in it!" said Mrs. Tregent. "He was charming, for a while."
"But he broke down. She's too short, eh?" Maurice asked.
"Don't laugh; she's ill."
"What's the matter with her?"
Mrs. Tregent gave the visitor a look in which there was almost a reproach for the question. "She has had a chill; she's in bed. You must see her."
She took him up-stairs and he saw his child. He remembered what his mother had told him of the grievous illness of Fanny Knocker. Poor little Vera lay there in the flush of a feverish cold, which had come on the evening before. She grew worse, from the effect of a complication, and for three days he was anxious about her; but even more than with his alarm he held his breath before the distress, the disappointment, the humility of his old friend. Up to this hour he had not fully measured the strength of ​her desire to do something for him, or the intensity of passion with which she had wished to do it in the particular way that had now broken down. She had counted on her influence with her son, on his affection, and on the maternal art, and there was anguish in her compunction for her failure, for her false estimate of the possible. Maurice Glanvil reminded her in vain of the consoling fact that Vera had known nothing of any plan, and he guessed, indeed, the reason why this theory had no comfort. No one could be better aware than Fanny Tregent of how much girls knew who knew nothing. It was doubtless this same sad wisdom that kept her sombre when he expressed a confidence that his child would promptly recover. She herself had had a terrible fight—and yet, with the physical victory, had she recovered? Her apprehension for Vera was justified, for the poor girl was destined finally to forfeit even the physical victory.
She got better, she got up, she quitted Blankley, she quitted England with her father; but her health had failed, and a ​year later it gave way. Overtaken in Rome by a second illness, she succumbed; unlike Fanny Knocker, she was never to have her revenge.