Every one caught it and gathered instinctively that Mrs.Jekyll had been making mischief.She had certainly succeeded in her desire to break the aloofness.The presence of Alice at that moment, with Gilbert behaving like a madman, was calculated to set every imagination jumping.
"Um, this won't make G.P.any better tempered," thought Hosack, not without a certain sense of glee.
Mrs.Jekyll disclosed her nose and mouth, which, it seemed, were both there and in perfect condition."I was in town yesterday interviewing butlers,--that Swiss I told you about refused to be glared at by Edmond and left us on the verge of a dinner party, summing us all up in a burst of pure German,--and there was Alice having a lonely lunch at the Ritz, just back from her mother's convalescent chair.I persuaded her to come to me for a few days and what more natural than that she should want to see what this wonderful air has done for Gilbert--who has evidently become one of the permanent decorative objects of your beautiful house.""Cat," thought Mrs.Thatcher.
"And also for the pleasure of seeing so many old friends," said Alice."What a gorgeous stretch of sea!" She bent forward and whispered congratulations to the Major's bride.Her quiet courage in the face of what she knew perfectly well was a universal knowledge of the true state of Gilbert's infatuation was good to watch.With his one brief cold letter in her pocket and Mrs.Jekyll's innuendoes,--"all in the friendliest spirit,"--raking her heart, her self-control deserved all the admiration that it won from the members of the house party.To think that Joan, her friend and schoolfellow in whose loyalty she had had implicit faith should be the one to take Gilbert away from her.
With shrewd eyes, long accustomed to look below the surface of the thin veneer of civilization that lay upon his not very numerous set, Hosack observed and listened for the next half an hour, expecting at any moment to see Joan burst upon the group or Gilbert make his appearance, sour, immaculate and with raised eyebrows.He studied Mrs.Jekyll, with her brilliantly made-up face, her apparent lack of guile, and her ever-watchful eye.He paid tribute to his copious wife for her determined babble of generalities, well-knowing that she was bursting with suppressed excitement under the knowledge that Alice had come to try and patch up a lost cause.He chuckled at the feline manners of the little lady whom they had all known so long as Mrs.Edgar Lee Reeves, her purring voice, her frequent over-emphasis of exuberant adjectives, her accidental choice of the sort of verb that had the effect of smashed crockery, her receptiveness to the underlying drama of the situation and the cunning with which she managed to hide her anxiety to be "on" in the scene which must inevitably come.He examined his old friend, Thatcher, under whose perfect drawing-room manners, felicitous quips and ready laughter there was an almost feminine curiosity as to scandal and the inadvertent display of the family wash.And, having a certain amount of humor, he even turned an introspective eye inwards and owned up to more than a little excitement as to what was going to happen when Gilbert realized that Mrs.Jekyll had brought his wife over to rescue him.Conceive Gilbert being rescued! "All of us as near the primeval as most of us are to lunacy," he told himself."Education, wealth, leisure and all the shibboleths of caste and culture,--how easily they crack and gape before a touch of nature.Brooks Brothers and Lucile do their derndest to disguise us, but we're still Adam and Eve in a Turkish bath....Somehow I feel,--I can't quite say why,--that this comedy of youth in which the elements of tragedy have been dragged in by Gilbert, is coming to a head, and unless things run off at a sudden tangent I don't see how the curtain can fall on a happy ending for Joan and the husband who never shows himself and the gentle Alice.Spring has its storms and youth its penalties.I'm beginning to believe that safety is only to be found in the dull harbor of middle-age, curse it, and only then with a good stout anchor."It was at the exact moment that Joan and Harry went together up the incline towards Martin's cottage at Devon, eyed by Tootles through the screen door, that Gilbert came back to the veranda and drew up short at the sight of his wife.