PAGE 11
Georgina’s Reasons
by
Mrs. Portico rose also, and, flushed with the agitation of unwonted knowledge,–it was as if she had discovered a skeleton in her favorite cupboard,–faced her young friend for a moment. Then her conflicting sentiments resolved themselves into an abrupt question, uttered,–for Mrs. Portico,–with much solemnity: “Georgina Gressie, were you really in love with him?”
The question suddenly dissipated the girl’s strange, studied, wilful coldness; she broke out, with a quick flash of passion,–a passion that, for the moment, was predominantly anger, “Why else, in Heaven’s name, should I have done what I have done? Why else should I have married him? What under the sun had I to gain?”
A certain quiver in Georgina’s voice, a light in her eye which seemed to Mrs. Portico more spontaneous, more human, as she uttered these words, caused them to affect her hostess rather less painfully than anything she had yet said. She took the girl’s hand and emitted indefinite, admonitory sounds. “Help me, my dear old friend, help me,” Georgina continued, in a low, pleading tone; and in a moment Mrs. Portico saw that the tears were in her eyes.
“You ‘re a queer mixture, my child,” she exclaimed. “Go straight home to your own mother, and tell her everything; that is your best help.”
“You are kinder than my mother. You must n’t judge her by yourself.”
“What can she do to you? How can she hurt you? We are not living in pagan times,” said Mrs. Portico, who was seldom so historical “Besides, you have no reason to speak of your mother–to think of her, even–so! She would have liked you to marry a man of some property; but she has always been a good mother to you.”
At this rebuke Georgina suddenly kindled again; she was, indeed, as Mrs. Portico had said, a queer mixture. Conscious, evidently, that she could not satisfactorily justify her present stiffness, she wheeled round upon a grievance which absolved her from self-defence. “Why, then, did he make that promise, if he loved me? No man who really loved me would have made it,–and no man that was a man, as I understand being a man! He might have seen that I only did it to test him,–to see if he wanted to take advantage of being left free himself. It is a proof that he does n’t love me,–not as he ought to have done; and in such a case as that a woman is n’t bound to make sacrifices!”
Mrs. Portico was not a person of a nimble intellect; her mind moved vigorously, but heavily; yet she sometimes made happy guesses. She saw that Georgia’s emotions were partly real and partly fictitious; that, as regards this last matter, especially, she was trying to “get up” a resentment, in order to excuse herself. The pretext was absurd, and the good lady was struck with its being heartless on the part of her young visitor to reproach poor Benyon with a concession on which she had insisted, and which could only be a proof of his devotion, inasmuch as he left her free while he bound himself. Altogether, Mrs. Portico was shocked and dismayed at such a want of simplicity in the behavior of a young person whom she had hitherto believed to be as candid as she was elegant, and her appreciation of this discovery expressed itself in the uncompromising remark: “You strike me as a very bad girl, my dear; you strike me as a very bad girl!”
PART II.
III.
It will doubtless seem to the reader very singular that, in spite of this reflection, which appeared to sum up her judgment of the matter, Mrs. Portico should, in the course of a very few days, have consented to everything that Georgina asked of her. I have thought it well to narrate at length the first conversation that took place between them, but I shall not trace further the details of the girl’s hard pleading, or the steps by which–in the face of a hundred robust and salutary convictions–the loud, kind, sharp, simple, sceptical, credulous woman took under her protection a damsel whose obstinacy she could not speak of without getting red with anger. It was the simple fact of Georgina’s personal condition that moved her; this young lady’s greatest eloquence was the seriousness of her predicament She might be bad, and she had a splendid, careless, insolent, fair-faced way of admitting it, which at moments, incoherently, inconsistently, and irresistibly, resolved the harsh confession into tears of weakness; but Mrs. Portico had known her from her rosiest years, and when Georgina declared that she could n’t go home, that she wished to be with her and not with her mother, that she could n’t expose herself,–how could she?–and that she must remain with her and her only till the day they should sail, the poor lady was forced to make that day a reality. She was overmastered, she was cajoled, she was, to a certain extent, fascinated. She had to accept Georgina’s rigidity (she had none of her own to oppose to it; she was only violent, she was not continuous), and once she did this, it was plain, after all, that to take her young friend to Europe was to help her, and to leave her alone was not to help her. Georgina literally frightened Mrs. Portico into compliance. She was evidently capable of strange things if thrown upon her own devices.