FOR a moment Gita felt more angry than astonished, and half rose. Then she settled back with a laugh. “Someone’s mother is the very last—— Was she any relation of the Carterets?”
“Not that I know of, but types are not confined to families.”
“I don’t at all like being told I belong to a type.”
“But everyone does, my dear child.” Bylant smiled indulgently as he took out his pipe. “It is the common lot, although nothing distresses the ego more than to be reminded of it. But it is type accentuated, raised to the nth degree, that makes the individual. You are like my mother in certain respects, in others not at all, and yet you are the only person I have ever met who reminded me of her. If you had been brought up here at Carteret Manor the resemblance would be more striking still, but the plus and the minus make you yourself and no one else. Don’t writhe under the apprehension that your exact counterpart exists anywhere else in the world! . . . On the other hand, if the conditions had been reversed, I don’t doubt that my mother would have been, at your age, almost precisely what you are today.”
Gita had been introduced to a new sensation. Titillated vanity conquered pique. She had heard of the none too subtle methods of the American male and eyed Bylant warily, then concluded he was harmless, and smiled encouragingly. “I suppose, on the whole, I should be flattered,” she said. “And your mother seems to have been one of the individuals. How was she brought up?”
“In the most orthodox manner possible. A beautiful high-spirited intelligent girl, she was educated partly in France, partly in New York, and came out inevitably at eighteen. She had a winter of intoxicating belledom and then married my father, who was her complement in looks, being even lighter than I am, had that air of intense reserve that suggests unfathomable depths, and the most charming manners. It was blind surrender to the race-urge with the mental accompaniment of an infant rooting in the proper place for nourishment. All the old-timers are horrified at this new license of young people, but at least they will avoid one mistake of their forerunners. They know exactly what is the matter with them.
“The marriage was not a happy one. My father was dull, stubborn, and had ideas as orthodox as himself on the subject of home rule. He was thrown from his horse and killed when I was seven. After that she devoted herself entirely to me—her parents died soon after she married—and recovered all her old buoyancy and joy of life. Of course she had other offers of marriage, and many friends; but although she liked society and was too sane to hate an entire sex because one man had failed her, she was too happy in her freedom and her child to be tempted for a moment. She entertained enough to give the atmosphere of my home a certain gayety and to initiate me into the ways of the minor world. I went to boarding-school when the proper time came, for she was too wise to run the risk of feminizing me, but I spent my vacations with her—we traveled a good deal—and when I left Harvard and returned home with the intention of adopting the profession of letters, she became my constant companion and spoiled me for anyone else. She had a wide range of interests, in life as well as in books—in which she had taken refuge during my father’s régime—and magnificent spirits——”
“Well, those I haven’t got, at all events. I’ve felt blue or cross most of my life.”
“I saw you dancing in the woods. You looked sixteen—no, ageless. . . . Your spirits were in constant conflict with your luck and boiled over into the wrong channels. If you had been commonplace your unhappy experience would have made little impression on you.”
“Well, it made a lot, and if you care to hear it I’ll tell you something about my own mother.”
He leaned over and emptied the ashes of his pipe into the lake. When he turned to her his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed, but his expression betrayed nothing more than kindly interest. “Please do,” he said warmly. “One confidence deserves another. I’ve heard scraps—you are a much-discussed young person, you know—and I’m keen to hear the story at first hand.”
“You’ll not put me in a book!” There was a very faint note of alarm in her voice, and she experienced another titillation at the possibility.
“If you really do not want to be ‘put in a book’ you are even more original than you look. But suppose we defer introducing anything so extraneous to the moment as fiction? I certainly should not take such a liberty without your consent after you had given me your confidence. Just now I am only interested in discovering what has made you so different from Bladina.”
This subtle touch completed the conquest of Gita’s jealous reserve. To her increasing amazement she found herself unburdening her soul of the poisonous accumulations of her twenty-two years. She told the chronicle from the beginning, omitting no detail, extrinsic or subjective. If she paused to remind herself that she was breaking the habit of a lifetime and turning herself inside out—to a man! Of all things!—she concluded that an author was much the same as a father confessor, but more appreciative of high-lights; she knew that she was telling an interesting story and telling it well.
Bylant, overwhelmingly interested in her both as a man and an ardent psychologist, was quite aware of her attitude toward himself, and although the man in him rebelled, for he was more in love with her every moment, he consoled himself with the pregnant certainty that he was her first confidant; and, whether she resented the act later or not, she was creating an indissoluble bond. It was a long first step and he knew the virtue of patience.
But Gita’s indifference to anything below the intellectual dome of her new friend was complete. She felt buoyant and released, as if she had suddenly been hauled out of a dungeon and introduced to light and freedom, and she felt grateful and quite willing to take him on as a doctor. He had certainly purged her soul. To talk about herself after all these years of repression had been almost ecstatic and she knew she had committed the wisest act of her life. But she concluded on a light note.
“There, you’ve had it all! Not a pretty story, is it? And you must be thankful I’m not your mother.”
“If you hadn’t been her psychological—and physiological—twin your story would have been very different and you wouldn’t have told it.”