From One Generation to Another | Page 4

of the
lives of others which did not fail, in the course of time, to bring him in
a harvest of honours and rewards. Neither did he put his candle under a
bushel, but set it in the very highest candlestick available.
But, as has been previously stated, he could not foresee everything. He
did not know, for instance, that his cheroot-smoking subaltern--a youth
as guileless as he was indiscreet, for the two usually go
together--possessed a memory like a dry-plate. He did not foresee that a
passing conversation in an Indian bungalow might perchance
photograph itself on the somewhat sparsely covered tablets of a man's
mind, to be reproduced at the wrong moment with a result lying

twenty-six years ahead in the womb of time.

CHAPTER II
SUBURBAN
_L'amour fait tout excuser, mais il faut être bien sûr qu'il y a de i
amour._
Miss Anna Hethbridge loved Seymour Michael with as great a love as
her nature could compass.
When the news of his death reached her, at the profusely laden
breakfast-table at Jaggery House, Clapham Common, her first feeling
was one of scornful anger towards a Providence which could be so
careless. Life had always been prosperous for her, in a bourgeois,
solidly wealthy way, entirely suited to her turn of mind. She had always
had servants at her beck and call, whom she could abuse illogically and
treat with an utter inconsequence inherent in her nature. She had been
the spoilt child of a ponderous, thick-skinned father and a very
suburban mother, who, out of her unexpected prosperity, could deny
her daughter nothing.
Three months after the receipt of the news Anna Hethbridge went down
into Hertfordshire, where, in the course of a visit at Stagholme Rectory,
she met and became engaged to the Squire of Stagholme, James
Edward Agar.
A month later she became the second wife of the simple-minded old
country gentleman. It would be hard to say what motives prompted her
to this apparently heartless action. Some women are heartless--we
know that. But Anna Hethbridge was too impulsive, too excitable, and
too much given to pleasure to be devoid of heart. Behind her action
there must have been some strange, illogical, feminine motive, for there
was a deliberation in every move--one of those motives which are quite
beyond the masculine comprehension. One notices that when a woman

takes action in this incomprehensible way her lady friends are never
surprised; they seem to have some subtle sympathy with her. It is only
the men who look puzzled, as if the ground beneath their feet were
unstable. Therefore there must be some influence at work, probably the
same influence, under different forms, which urges women to those
strange, inconsequent actions by which their lives are rendered
miserable. Men have not found it out yet.
Anna Hethbridge was at this time twenty-four years of age, rather
pretty, with a vivacity of manner which only seemed frivolous to the
more thoughtful of her acquaintances. The idea of her marrying old
Squire Agar within six months of the untimely death of her clever lover,
Seymour Michael, seemed so preposterous that her hostess, good,
sentimental Mrs. Glynde, never dreamt of such a possibility until, in the
form of a fact, it was confided to her by Miss Hethbridge, one
afternoon soon after her arrival at the rectory.
"Confound it, Maria," exclaimed the Rector testily, when the
information was passed on to him later in the evening. "Why could you
not have foreseen such an absurd event?"
Poor Mrs. Glynde looked distressed. She was a thin little woman, with
an unsteady head, physically and morally speaking; full of kindness of
heart, sentimentality, high-flown principles, and other bygone ladylike
commodities. Her small, eager face, of a ruddy and weather-worn
complexion--as if she had, at some early period of her existence, been
left out all night in an east wind--was puckered up with a sense of her
own negligence.
She tried hard, poor little woman, to take a deep and Christian interest
in the welfare of her neighbours; but all the while she was conscious of
failure. She knew that even at that moment, when she was sitting in her
small arm-chair with clasped, guilty hands, her whole heart and soul
were absorbed beyond retrieval in a small bundle of white flannel and
pink humanity in a cradle upstairs.
The Rector had dropped his weekly review upon his knees and was
staring at her angrily.

"I really can't tell," he continued, "what you can have been thinking
about to let such a ridiculous thing come to pass. What are you thinking
about now?"
"Well, dear," confessed the little woman shamedly, "I was thinking of
Baby--of Dora."
"Thought so," he snapped, with a little laugh, returning to his paper
with a keen interest. But he