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Towardsthe middle of December, Mrs. Carfax became possessed with the idea of going to London.
Various circumstances had combined to render her projected visit pleasurably fraught with interest.
There was shopping to be done, of course. There was also Sylvia to embrace;—Sylvia whose holidays were so short that she herself had suggested the advisability of staying in town for Christmas, in order not to interrupt her work.
Naturally Mrs. Carfax was anxious to see her child. Naturally also she looked forward to staying with the Lovells, who were old friends, and had a comfortable house in Bayswater.
Then too, she had been deeply interested to hear that the niece who was visiting Mrs. Lovell, was none other than the Madame Didier who had invited Mrs. Dakin to Paris.
Mrs. Dakin had not yet returned toDymfield, and it was natural and neighbourly of Mrs. Carfax to feel as much interest in her protracted absence, as that which palpitated in every Dymfield breast. In a few days she would be in the position of knowing all that Madame Didier knew about her late guest. And then there was Sylvia of course, and the shopping, and the delight of meeting her dear friends the Lovells. Mrs. Carfax was quite determined to go.
“I shall take the three o’clock train this afternoon,” she announced to the Vicar at breakfast time, “and send a telegram to Laura. She is quite ready for me, and urges me to come at once.”
“Very well, my dear,” agreed the Vicar. “Please yourself of course, though I scarcely think it necessary. You were in town only three months ago.”
“You don’t think it necessary to see Sylvia, who is not coming home for Christmas?” demanded his wife. “Well, I do. I have the feelings of a mother after all, and I think it’s cruel to leave the poor child up there, with never the sight of a home face.”
“Please yourself, my dear, as I have already said. There seems to be a spirit of great unrest working amongst us,” he went on, stirring his second cup of coffee irritably.“There’s Miss Page abroad, and Sylvia away, and Mrs. Dakin not yet returned. And now you——”
“Children, go upstairs if you’ve finished your breakfast,” interrupted their mother. “Johnny, say grace. Now all of you go and get your lessons ready for Miss Hope. She’ll be here in a minute.”
There was a stampede to the door, and when it closed on the last child, Mrs. Carfax turned to her husband.
“It’s most extraordinary about Mrs. Dakin, isn’t it?” she exclaimed. “And such a strange thing that this Madame Didier should be Major Lovell’s niece. I heard something once about a niece of his having married a Frenchman, but I never knew her name. I shall probably hear all about Mrs. Dakin from her.”
“Then my dear Mary, if you do, I hope you will be discreet.”
“Discreet, George? What do you mean? Am I not always discreet?”
The Vicar prudently disregarded the question.
“What I wish to point out, is this,” he returned. “The duty of taking broad and charitable views. There is a reasonable explanation of Mrs. Dakin’s absence. I metDakin yesterday, and he told me it was a question of his wife’s health. She’s seeing some doctor in Paris, and going through a course of treatment.”
Mrs. Carfax sniffed. “With her own husband a doctor!”
“My dear, you know as well as I do that doctors seldom attend their wives.”
“You annoy me, George. You speak as though I should be glad to hear that there was any other reason. I’m sure I hope with all my heart it’s the true one. But everybody is talking about it, and I must say I think the poor man looks very unhappy.”
“Broad views,” returned the Vicar, clearing his throat, “are those which in Christian charity we should always endeavour to assume with regard to our fellows. Let us remember also, that we have neither part nor lot in this matter.”
“Why don’t you tell me straight out to mind my own business?” asked Mrs. Carfax angrily. “It’s what you mean. And we’re not in church, so you needn’t beat about the bush. You only take ‘broad views’ as you call them, when you want to be annoying and put me in the wrong. You know as well as I do that it’s not right for a wife to stay months away from her husband. Dr. Dakin must be a fool to allow it. At the same time,you know how delighted I should be if itisall right. And yet you pretend to think that in a spirit of vulgar curiosity I’m going up to town on purpose to gossip and try to find out things which don’t concern me! My object in going, as you know, is to see Sylvia——”
“And to do some shopping. Yes, my dear. Yes. You’ve said so many times,” interrupted her husband, rising. “You’d better tell Mark to bring the trap round at half-past two.”
The Vicar closed the breakfast-room door with a slightly firm touch.
“Is mamma going to London to-day?” shouted Johnny, who regardless of lesson books, was sliding down the banisters outside.
“I believe so. I trust it may do her good,” answered his father piously. “Go upstairs, at once, and get ready for Miss Hope.”
He entered his study, and with some disinclination, sat down to the sermon for which a more deferential hearing might possibly be anticipated than that accorded in the home circle.
Mrs. Carfax arrived at Rushworth Terrace just in time to dress for dinner. Madame Didier, to whom she was presented in the drawing-room just before the gong sounded, was a tall young woman of twenty-seven ortwenty-eight, with a sharp face and a thin pointed nose. Her fair hair was arranged neatly over her forehead, and her dress, though fashionable, was undistinguished.
“Helen doesn’t look a bit French, does she?” asked her aunt.
Mrs. Lovell was a fat comfortable woman with no figure, and less intelligence.
“I’m glad she’s kept so English. One would have thought that living in Paris so long would have made a Frenchwoman of her.”
“We should quarrel if it had!” declared the Major in a loud voice. “I don’t like foreigners. Can’t stand ’em. Beg your pardon, my dear. I forgot your husband!”
He laughed heartily. “But you must excuse me. I’ve never seen him, and I dare say you’ve made an Englishman of him. Hope so, I’m sure.”
“Oh, nothing would make an Englishman of Louis, I’m sorry to say,” answered Madame Didier. “He can’t bear England. We’re always fighting about it.”
“Well, come along! Dinner. Dinner. I’m famished,” declared the Major.
“Come along, Mrs. Carfax. How’s your husband? And the children? All well, eh? That’s right.”
“I’m so interested to hear that you know aneighbour of ours,” began Mrs. Carfax during the first favourable opportunity at dinner-time.
“Oh! Madge Dakin? Yes. Aunt Laura has been telling me that you are neighbours. She has been staying with us in Paris, as of course you know.”
“Yes. I’m so sorry to hear she is ill.”
Mrs. Carfax helped herself to bread sauce, and waited in suspense.
“Madge is never quite so ill as she thinks she is,” replied Madame Didier in her decisive voice. “It’s all a question of nerves with her. However, I suggested she should go to a doctor who did me a great deal of good some time ago. I’m arealsufferer from nerves. And as I couldn’t keep her any longer—I had visits to pay and so on,—she is boarding with some people in Paris to go on with the treatment.”
The explanation, delivered in Madame Didier’s high thin voice, seemed sufficiently reasonable. Yet Mrs. Carfax was conscious of an under-current.
Her hostess was silent, but the Major, always garrulous, broke in with one of his pet grievances which lasted till the end of the meal, and ended by proving anew, through many ramifications, that the country was going to the dogs.
In the drawing-room, when coffee wasserved after dinner, and her host had gone to the smoking-room, circumstances for Mrs. Carfax were more propitious.
Madame Didier took out her embroidery, and Mrs. Lovell lay back in an easy-chair, and warmed her feet at the fire.
“Helen has been telling me a good deal about this Mrs. Dakin,” she began.
Her tone suggested that further confidences might be expected from Mrs. Dakin’s friend, and Mrs. Carfax sat upright in her chair, and leant forward a little.
“Oh, but if Mrs. Carfax is a friend——” objected Madame Didier.
“Well, dear, so are you,” put in Mrs. Lovell, who,as Mrs. Carfax suddenly decided,was really quite stupid.
Madame Didier’s offended expression might portend anything—even silence.
Innocent of psychology, Mrs. Carfax could not be expected to know that on this score, at least, she need have no apprehension.
“Of course I am Madge’s friend,” said Madame Didier, stitching very fast, “and that’s why I am so distressed at her foolish behaviour.”
“What has she——?” Mrs. Carfax paused. It was perhaps safer not to interrupt.
“Oh only that she rather annoyed me byflirting outrageously with a man who sometimes comes to our house. A man I don’t like. But he’s a friend of Louis’s, and so I have to put up with him. A Monsieur Fontenelle.”
“Why, I met him last spring, at a dinner-party!” interrupted Mrs. Carfax in surprise.
“So I heard.”
The brief words were enigmatic in tone, and Mrs. Carfax gave an uncomprehending gasp.
“He’s a celebrated man, as of course you know. He was made President of the International Art Congress this summer, here in London. And he’s naturally a splendid painter. But he’s not a nice man. Few Frenchmen are.”
Madame Didier shut her thin lips, and bent over her embroidery.
“You mean——?” began Mrs. Carfax timidly.
“If he were an Englishman, he would have a very bad reputation. But in Paris—well!” Madame Didier shrugged her shoulders. “There’s no such thing as morality. I need not tell you thatIhave never grown accustomed to it. I still keep my English ideas as to right and wrong.”
“I’m thankful you do, dear Helen,” murmured her aunt.
“I warned Madge,” pursued her friend. “I told her all I had heard about him. Louis was angry with me, but I thought it my duty.”
“But she hasn’t——? I mean there isn’t any danger of—of a divorce, or anything of that kind?”
Mrs. Carfax involuntarily lowered her voice to a horrified whisper.
“Oh no! no! Let us hope it won’t come to that. Mind, I’m not accusing Madge of anything but foolish flirting. She made a dead set at him, I must say that. I don’t believe that otherwise he would have taken any notice of her. But Madge is so vain. And then she has an idea she isn’t happy with her husband. Well! a wife must make the best of the man she marries. I make a point of getting on with Louis.”
“I’m sure you do, dear,” interrupted her aunt. “You’re so wise.”
“But you think she’s really staying on to——?”
“I fear that the excuse of her illness is only half true. She’s staying on I believe to—well, to go on with the flirtation, let us say.”
Madame Didier laughed a little, and took a fresh thread of silk.
“Madge is a nice little thing, of course,but she’s very flighty. I can’t help thinking that she must have fallen under some bad influence lately. She comes fromsucha good home. I used to stay with her at her father’s house just outside York, when we were schoolgirls. The Etheridges are county people, you know. Not very rich, but well connected, and in thenicestset. No fastness or anything horrid of that sort. The right sort of quiet county people. You know what I mean. We rather thought she might have done better than a country doctor.”
“Dr. Dakin isextremelywell connected,” put in Mrs. Carfax a little stiffly. He was a neighbour after all, and she felt that the slighting reflection might easily extend from the faculty, to the Church, of which her husband was so distinguished an ornament.
“Oh yes, I’m sure of it,” Madame Didier hastened to reply. “And a clever man, I hear.”
“Extremely clever. And devoted to his wife. This will be a terrible blow.”
Mrs. Carfax leant back in her chair, and wondered whether she should write to George, or wait till her return. She decided to wait. A verbal recitation would be more effective.
“Oh! let us hope she will recover her senses and return to her home. I feelterribly distressed about it, as it was in my house she met Monsieur Fontenelle.”
“No! She met him first at Miss Page’s,” corrected Mrs. Carfax. “Ithoughthe seemed very attentive that evening. He was talking to her a long time after dinner.”
Madame Didier looked up sharply from her work.
“Whoisthis Miss Page?” she asked. “How does she come to know Monsieur Fontenelle?”
“She’s a most charming woman. We are very proud of her at Dymfield. I suppose she met Monsieur Fontenelle abroad. She has travelled a great deal.”
“Ah!” Madame Didier took another thread of silk, and matched it carefully.
“I only wondered,” she went on, “because Madge was so reticent about her. Naturally, when I saw her becoming so very intimate with Monsieur Fontenelle, I inquired about the woman who was responsible for the first introduction. But I could gather nothing from Madge except that Miss Page was a beautiful woman, and apparently a paragon of all the virtues.”
Madame Didier sniffed slightly, and began to fold up her work.
“She’s certainly a striking looking woman,and most generous and charitable,” returned Mrs. Carfax. “My husband would not know what to do without her financial and other help, in the parish. Certainly we know very little about her life before she settled at Dymfield ten years ago,” she added rather uncertainly.
“Good works are the modern equivalent for the convent, aren’t they?” suggested Madame Didier.
“She’s a charming woman,” repeated Mrs. Carfax in a slightly dazed voice.
“No doubt. Yet I know one woman who doesn’t describe her in those terms. Did you ever meet a Mrs. Crosby? No? Well, she is firmly convinced that Miss Page robbed her of her inheritance.”
“If the doctor is at all wise, he will go and look after his wife,” suggested Aunt Laura, her remark making a timely but unconscious diversion.
“I’ll see what I can do,” observed Mrs. Carfax with significance.
Madame Didier looked a little alarmed. “Please don’t mention my name!” she begged. “Remember I have said nothing, and that, only in Madge’s interest.”
“Discretion is my strong point,” returned Mrs. Carfax with dignity. “I am no gossip,and the last thing in the world I should wish to do, is to make mischief.”
“You are always so wise, dear Mary,” murmured Mrs. Lovell.
The ladies talked till a late hour, and Mrs. Carfax went to bed full of an excitement which she was shocked to recognize as distinctly pleasurable.