Lady Anne's nephew and heir, Lord Iniscrone, showed no friendly face to Mary. He came as soon as possible, and took possession of the premises. Lady Iniscrone was with him. She was a lady with a wide, flat, doughy face. Her eyes were little and pale and cold. Mary thought afterwards that if it had not been for Lady Iniscrone, Lord Iniscrone might have been kinder. She remembered that Lady Anne had detested Lady Iniscrone to the extent that she would never have her inside the house. She had an idea, which she could not put away, while she hated it, that Lady Iniscrone remembered that fact. She took possession of everything thoroughly, as though she revenged herself on the dead woman. In her cold speech she disparaged the things Lady Anne had held dear.
Their attitude towards Mary was as though she were a servant no longer necessary. She was not to eat at their table; she was to eat in her own room or in the servants' hall.
"Is it Miss Gray, my lady?" Saunders, the elderly parlourmaid, asked, aghast. "Her Ladyship thought the world of Miss Gray. She might have been her own child. And I will say, though we didn't hold with it at first, yet——"
Lady Iniscrone closed the discussion haughtily.
"Miss Gray will have her meals in the servants' hall, or in her own room if she prefers it, till after the funeral. We shall make other arrangements then, of course."
Saunders flounced out of the room. Although she was elderly and had lived in Lady Anne Hamilton's house since she was fourteen, when she had come as a between-maid, she had not forgotten how to flounce.
"Mark my words," she said in the kitchen, "she'll make a clean sweep of us, same as Miss Mary, as soon as ever the funeral is over. Supposing as howwegives the notice!"
And they did, to Lady Iniscrone's discomfiture, for she had intended to stay on at the Mall and to keep the staff as it stood till she had supplied its place. However, she showed her dismay only by her bad temper.
"I suppose you've all pretty well feathered your nests," she said acridly, "and can afford to retire."
Nor was her bitterness lessened by the fact that Lady Anne had left handsome legacies to each of the servants, annuities to the elder ones, sums of money to the younger. But the will, dated some years back, made no mention at all of Mary Gray.
"It seems clear to me," said Mr. Buckton, talking the matter over with Lord Iniscrone, her Ladyship being present, "that Lady Anne intended to make some provision for herprotégée. In fact, the letter which she had begun writing to me, which was found in her blotter after her death, plainly indicates that. She was, apparently, on her way to my house when the lamentable accident happened. Dr. Carruthers had seen her that afternoon, and had told her that her heart was in a bad way. I believe she grew alarmed about the unprovided state in which she would leave Miss Gray if she had a sudden seizure, and hurried off to me. In the circumstances——"
"Of course, we could not think of doing anything more for Miss Gray," Lady Iniscrone put in, anticipating her lord. "She has already been dealt with very handsomely out of the estate. She has had a most unsuitable education for a person in her rank of life. She has lived like a lady; been clothed like one. When I saw her she was wearing ornaments—a brooch of amethysts, with pearls around it, I remember, which, I am sure, ought to belong to the estate. I can't see that Lord Iniscrone is called upon to do anything more for the young person. What with those absurd legacies to the servants and the way Lady Anne lived—a big house and a staff of servants and carriages and horses for one old lady!—the estate has been impoverished."
"Lady Anne had a great sense of her own dignity," the lawyer put in. "And this house had been her home for more than fifty years."
"Everything needs replacing," Lady Iniscrone grumbled, with a disparaging look around. "Those curtains and carpets——"
"Your Lordship will, I am sure, feel that, in making some little provision for Miss Gray, you will be doing what Lady Anne wished and intended to do," Mr. Buckton said earnestly, turning from the lady to her husband.
Lord Iniscrone's eyes fluttered nervously. He was not a bad little man at heart, but he was entirely ruled by his wife.
"I don't think the estate will bear it, Mr. Buckton," he said in a peevish voice. "It is heavily burdened as it is. If a five-pound note would be of any use——"
"I can't see that we are called upon to do anything, Jarvis," his wife put in again. "In fact, Mr. Buckton, you may take it that we do not intend to do anything more for Miss Gray."
"Very well, Lady Iniscrone."
Mr. Buckton turned away and busied himself with his papers. He could not trust himself at the moment to speak lest he should forget his professional discretion.
But Mary had not waited for the result of his intercession on her behalf, of which, indeed, she knew nothing. Mary, who was sensitive to every breath of praise and blame, had fled out of the dear house, the atmosphere of which had become suddenly unfriendly. A good many friends would have been glad to have had her. Lady Agatha Chenevix was away, else she would have been by her friend's side to take her part with passionate generosity and indignation. She was away, but Jessie Baynes's little house on the edge of the sea, a bare little homely place, full of sunlight and the sea-wind, had its doors open to her. One could not imagine a better place for a sad and sorrowful heart than Jessie's little spare room, with its balcony opening like the deck of a ship on to the blue floor of the sea. Mildred Carruthers had come at once, in the first hour of the girl's grief, to carry her off to the big house, which was now amply justified by the size of the doctor's practice.
Only, where would Mary go to but home? In all those years in the great house on the Mall she had never come to find Wistaria Terrace too little and lowly for her. Indeed, there was a wonderful wholesomeness and sweetness to her mind about the little house. The transfiguring mists of her love lay rosily over even the drudgery of her childish days. To be sure, there had been hard work and short commons. She had been insufficiently clad in winter, too heavily clad in summer. Her people had gone without fires and many other things which some would have considered essential. But there had always been love. Looking back on those days, Mary saw with the eyes of the spirit which miss out immaterial material things.
She fled back home. She took nothing with her but what she stood up in. Only her friend, Simmons, while Lady Iniscrone was absent from the house, packed up all Mary's belongings, and conveyed them, with the assistance of the coachman, across the lane to Wistaria Terrace. The servants had made up their minds that Mary was not coming back.
Lady Iniscrone had hoped, in conversation with Lord Iniscrone, that Mary would not give them any trouble. Never was anyone less inclined to give trouble than Mary. Not for worlds would she have gone back to the house where the new cold rule was, to meet Lady Iniscrone's unfriendly eyes. Only while the body of her benefactress was yet above ground she had stolen across at quiet hours, in the absence of the enemy, to look for the last time on the quiet face. She had carried away little Fifine. Fifine was seventeen years old now, and shook incessantly and moaned in a lost way in her darkness. But she knew Mary's voice. Mary was the one that could comfort her. At Wistaria Terrace they went to the unheard-of extravagance of having a fire in Mary's room, day after day, so that Fifine might lie before it in a basket, and feel the warmth in her little bones, and hear Mary's voice.
The day of the funeral came. Mary stood by the graveside quietly, with a veil down over her face. Walter Gray was by her side. She had come in the doctor's carriage, and she had no leisure or thought for the insolence with which Lady Iniscrone stared at her, as though her presence there required explanation.
She was going to work, to begin at once. Her dear, kind old friend, who had meant to do so well by her, had at least equipped her for earning her own bread. The Lady Principal of Queen's College had found her work—temporary work, to be sure, but something to go on with till she could look about her. The Lady Principal and Dr. Carruthers were against her making any definite plans till Lady Agatha Chenevix should return—she was in America, arranging for a display of her industries at a forthcoming exhibition. They had an idea that Lady Agatha would expect to be consulted in any plan that affected her friend's future.
Returning home after the funeral Mary found that all her attention would be required for a short time for Fifine. The little dog had had a fit or something of the kind, and had rallied wonderfully, considering her great age. She had missed her one friend during that hour of absence. Dr. Carruthers came in and looked at the dog, stooping to examine it with as much tender care as though it had been human and a paying patient. "Keep her warm," he said. "There isn't much else possible. There is nothing the matter, only old age. She seems to know you, Mary. She is positively wagging her tail."
"She is miserable without me," Mary said, wondering what she was to do about Fifine when she took up that temporary work which the Lady Principal of Queen's College had found for her. Meanwhile she devoted herself to the little creature. But about three days after Lady Anne's funeral Fifine solved all difficulties concerning her by dying quietly in the night.
Mary slipped in stealthily to the garden of the old house when the new owners were not likely to be about, and placed the little rigid body in the grave Jennings had dug for it, lined with a few flowers that had come up in the beds, snowdrops and wallflowers and little pale mauve double primroses. She wept a few bitter tears above the grave. The death of the little dog was like her last link with her dear old friend. The day had the bright, clear, strong sunshine of March. There were yet drifts of snow in the valleys among the hills, but spring was coming, and the bare boughs would soon be thick with the buds of leafage. She took one look at the sunny, green place and the old house which had harboured her so kindly. Then she went away with a drooping head.
That very afternoon Lady Agatha came. She rushed in on Mary like the March wind, big and beautiful, in her long cloak of orange-tawny velvet, breathing fire and fury over the unkindness to Mary. She had interviewed Lady Iniscrone, and had gathered from her what had been happening.
"In one way I am selfishly glad, Mary, because you will belong so much more to me. I am going to take possession of you. For the first time for many years Chenevix House is to be opened this season. I am going to be among the political hostesses. I shall do all sorts of things. I have found a dear old lady to live with us, my father's twenty-second cousin, Mrs. Morres. She will make it possible for me to do the things I want without running tilt against all the windmills of prejudice. I shall respect your mourning. You will have your own room to which you can retire. Chenevix House looks over a quiet, green square. You shall see the spring come even there. Afterwards, when the season is at an end, we shall bury ourselves in the green country."
She paused for breath, and Mary smiled at her. She was so big and bonny and generous it was impossible not to smile at her.
"Where do I come in?" she asked. "I want to earn my bread."
"And so you shall. You shall earn it hard. You are to be my secretary, Mary. I am going to be a leading Radical lady. They want hostesses. There are things a woman can do for a cause much better than a man. I consider my wealth, at least, my comparative wealth, my rank and youth and energy and brains, and my splendid health, as so many weapons given to me by God so that I may help the right."
"You forget your charm," Mary reminded her. "It is the most potent of all."
Lady Agatha suddenly blushed. It was the first time Mary had seen her blush.
"Charm—oh, come, Mary! Why not beauty if you are inclined to flatter?"
"Yes, indeed; why not beauty?" Mary repeated, looking at her with loving eyes of admiration.
"A big, black, bounding beggar!" Lady Agatha quoted against herself merrily.
But Mary was not inclined to make any further excursions from home. The soul in her was chilled by her recent experiences. In her hurt and unhappy state the little house at Wistaria Terrace seemed most desirable. It gave her satisfaction to note the discomforting things about her—the bare floor, the windows that shook and rattled, the ill-fitting doors, the ugliness of the painted dressing-table from which the paint had long departed, the chipped jug and basin that did not match each other. She liked it all, even the carelessness about meals, for there was love with it. Her younger sisters growing up had a kind of worship for Mary. They served her out of pure love. She was not allowed to do anything for herself. Yes, for the present, at least, home was best. She could go out and earn money and bring it home to them. She would stay henceforth in the world into which she had been born. She would make no more excursions.
However, these thoughts of hers were rendered vain by the fact that Walter Gray positively took Lady Agatha's part against her. There was no room for Mary in the cramped life of Wistaria Terrace. She had brains and beauty and sympathy. The opportunity to make use of these gifts was given her. She must not reject it.
The thing was put on a business basis. Mary was to be Lady Agatha's secretary, with a handsome salary. "I shall work you till you cry out," her Ladyship promised, and it seemed like enough to be true. She was talking already of writing a novel when they should retire to the country. Her energy overflowed. She was perpetually seeking new outlets for it. Her secretary was not likely to enjoy a sinecure.
"No one but you could have sent me from you again," Mary said to her father, in tender reproach.
"It is for your good, Moll. You have outgrown Wistaria Terrace. We could not long have contented you."
But Mary shook her head. She thought she would have been very well content at home. She could have got plenty of teaching to do. She thought of the little house as of a resting place from which she was to be debarred. But she would not dispute her father's will for her. He rallied her, saying that if they kept her her head and shoulders would presently be pushing themselves above the slates.
"It was big enough for you," she said indignantly, "and your mind rises to greater heights than mine ever will. You cramped yourself into it, if it were a question of cramping. Why should not I?"
"Sometimes it was not big enough, Moll," he answered. "Sometimes it was sore cramping, and at other times it was big enough to contain the heaven and all the stars. Perhaps the ambition I flung away for myself I keep for you. I would not have you at microscopic work all your days."
So it was settled. For a little while longer Mary stayed on at home. Then, when the leaves were just opening out in pale green silk, and all the world was fragrant and full of the joy of birds, she went, unwillingly, and turning back many times to make her sorrowful farewells.
"I don't want you to stay till you begin to feel cramped," Walter Gray had said. "I had rather you went away with your illusions."
She did carry away her illusions. It was a happy and blessed thing for her that she could make illusions about common things all the days she was to live. Yet somewhere, in her hidden heart, she knew her father was right.
Mary was established, high up in Chenevix House. She was amazed at the spaciousness of the rooms, the feeling in them as though the streets were far away. The square was a wonder of waving and tossing green, across which Mary looked from her window and saw other stately old houses like the one she was in. At first she was never tired of admiring the miracle of spring in London. She realised that no country greenness is equal to the glory of the new leaf against the dingy house-fronts, the green freshness about the black stems and boughs and branches.
Lady Agatha was in a perpetual whirl of affairs and gaiety. All her days, and her nights into the small hours, seemed to be filled. At this time Mary had a great deal of her time to herself. In the morning she wrote her Ladyship's letters, and selected from the newspapers such things as her Ladyship ought to read. By-and-by she would be much busier. She was taking lessons in short-hand and type-writing in the afternoons. Her Ladyship would come in only in time to dress for dinner. She had been driving in the park, she had been calling, she had been at a concert, or a matinée, or an "At Home." She had been attending this or that meeting. She was never in bed before the summer dawn, yet she would be at the breakfast-table as fresh as a milkmaid, smiling at Mary and telling her this and that bit of news or event of the time since they had met.
Mrs. Morres, who had to accompany her to many places, slept every hour of the day she could. She confessed to Mary in her dry way, that did not ask for pity, that she found her Ladyship's energy superhuman. Sometimes there was an interesting debate in the House of Commons, and Lady Agatha must drop in after dinner to sit for an hour behind the gilded grille. Afterwards she would go on to a political reception. Later to a ball, where she would dance as though there had been nothing in all the long day to tire her.
Once or twice she had a quiet dinner-party, to which Mary came down in her frock of filmy black, which made a delightful setting for her fair paleness. At these dinners she encountered famous men and women, and looked at them from afar off with wistful interest. In the drawing-room afterwards she saw Lady Agatha the centre of a brilliant group. Someone said of her that she was likely to be the spoilt child of politics, since she could be audacious with even the greatest, and move them to speak when no one else could. The great men shook their heads at her and smiled. They warned her that she went too fast for them, that impulsiveness, charming as it was in a woman, was not to be permitted in politics. "If you would but learn diplomacy, my dear lady!" Sir Michael Auberon sighed. But diplomacy seemed likely to be the last thing Lady Agatha Chenevix would learn.
Mary used to sit under Mrs. Morres's wing, and listen, through her witty and wise talk, to the utterances of the great. She felt very shy of these companies of distinguished men and women. Lady Agatha made one or two attempts to draw her closer. Then, perceiving that she was happier in her corner, she let her be.
In her corner Mary listened. She listened with all her ears. Her cheeks would flush and her eyes shine as she listened. There was a younger school of politicians which was well represented at Lady Agatha's parties. Their theories had the generosity of youth. Sir Michael Auberon would listen to them, nodding his head, his fine, beautiful old face lit up with as great a generosity as warmed theirs. He was very fond of his "boys." If he must show them what was impracticable in their views he did it gently. He rallied them with tenderness. He had none of the mockery which is so searing and blighting a thing to hot youth.
One night Mary, looking down the dinner-table, saw a face she remembered. The owner of the face—a tall, loosely-built, plain-looking young man—glanced her way at the moment, and stared—stared and looked away again with a baffled air. Mary knew him at once for the boy she had met seven or eight years before at the Court. He had aged considerably. Men like him have a way of falling into their manhood all at once. His hair was even a little thin on top—with that and his lean, hatchet face he might have been thirty-five.
Afterwards in the drawing-room he was one of those who stood nearest to Sir Michael. Some of the others laughed at him, calling him Don Quixote, and she heard Sir Michael say that the young man's theories were those of the Gironde. "The Revolution devours her own children," he said, with his fine old ironic smile. "And a good many of us have to eat our own professions before we're forty. The great thing would be if we could keep our youthful generosity with the wisdom of our prime."
Looking towards Mary, he caught the flame of enthusiasm in her eyes, and again he smiled. But this time it was a smile without irony, rather an understanding and, one might have said, a grateful smile. All the world knew that Sir Michael's private sorrows were heavy ones, and that he leant the more on the alleviations and consolations his public life brought him.
Afterwards he asked to be introduced to Mary and talked with her for a little while, making her the envy of the room.
"She has a clear mind as well as a sound heart," he said. "She is on fire with the passion for humanity. Take her about with you"—this to Lady Agatha. "Let her see how the people live—what serfs we have under our free banner. There is fine material in her. She should do good work."
Meanwhile Mrs. Morres sat by Mary, doing crochet, with a quiet smile. Her tongue dripped cold water on all the enthusiasms.
"Believe me, my dear, they will do nothing," she said placidly in Mary's ear. That placidity of hers gave her the air of being as relentless as a Fate. "Parties are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Let Sir Michael get into office and he'll do nothing. Those fine young gentlemen over there will be the office-holders of twenty years to come, the fat sinecurists and pluralists. The people were better off when, like the lower animals, they had no souls. They were protected by their betters. Now they are at war with them and they are more soulless than before. Dear me, how much fine talk I have heard that never came to anything!"
She would go on till the company had departed, and Lady Agatha would come to her side, laughing, and ask her what horrible feudal theories she had been propounding. The two differed on every point but one, and that was in the mere matter of loving each other. Lady Agatha delighted in her cousin's conservatism; and always said she would not have it otherwise if she could. It was asauce piquanteto the dish of their daily lives.
"You shan't lead Mary astray," she would say with pretended indignation. "If she knew the things Sir Michael has been saying about her!"
"My dear Agatha, don'tyougo leading her astray. Politics are nométierfor a woman, or they should be subservient to something else. Go marry, Agatha, and bring children into the world, and when you have reared them you can set up a political salon and theorise about the regeneration of humanity. Let Miss Gray do likewise. You play with these things when you are young—later on you will find them dry bones."
"Dear me!" Lady Agatha said, with admiration. "What a pity she isn't with us, Mary! What a pity she is only a destructive critic! Don't listen to her, child!"
That first evening of their meeting Sir Robin Drummond had come to Mary's side and turned the page of her music while she sang. She had a fresh and sweet voice, although of no great range or compass, and she could sing, without music, song after song of the old English masters, of Arne and Purcell and Bishop, and their delightful school.
"She brings strawberries and cream to town," said someone who was not particularly imaginative.
Mary was conscious of the young man's scrutiny as he turned her pages, and it embarrassed her, but she made no sign.
Afterwards she met Sir Robin many times. He was at this time the adopted candidate for an East-End constituency, and was becoming well known as an advanced politician. He went further than his party, indeed, and somewhat offended even his particularclientèleby the breadth of his views. He and Lady Agatha were at this time engaged in the work of organising labour, especially amongst the girls and women of the worst-paid and most dangerous trades. It brought them often together amid forlorn habitations and hopeless humanity. One of the difficulties was the question of whether the alien women should be brought in. "They will join the Union and they will go on underselling all the same," said someone. But Sir Robin was of those who held that the alien should have equal rights with her English sister, and that it was possible to teach her to stand on her feet like one of the free-born. He was not chary of his denunciations of certain methods among the Trade Unions and the Trade Unionists, and therefore a crowd sometimes howled him down. But there was always a minority at least to stand by him, and the minority included the industrious and sober, the honest and thinking, among those he desired to help.
By-and-by he fell into a quiet friendliness with Mary Gray. He used to take charge of the ladies when they went into the East End. Lady Agatha used to say that he was a drag on the wheel, because he would not let her do imprudent things, because he would veto it when a question of their going into dangerous streets or houses or rooms, because he insisted on their leaving by a side door a meeting which was becoming turbulent, because he was always forbidding some extravagance or other of her Ladyship's.
"There is one thing about that young man," said Mrs. Morres, who was chary of praise of her Ladyship's party: "he has excellent common-sense, and I thank Heaven for it."
"Ah, yes; he has excellent common-sense," Lady Agatha echoed, with a ruefulness which made Mary laugh suddenly.
"You ought to marry him, my dear," Mrs. Morres went on, looping another stitch of the endless crochet.
"Marry Bob Drummond!" Lady Agatha repeated. "Marry Bob Drummond! Why, it is the last thing in the world I should dream of doing."
One evening, just at the end of the season, someone brought the latest lion to a small reception at Lady Agatha Chenevix's. He was a very modest and retiring lion, a quiet, very bronzed young man, who wore his arm in a sling. He had had his shoulder torn in an encounter with an African leopard. He had fought almost hand to hand with the beast over the body of a Kaffir servant, and had rescued the man at the cost of his own life, it seemed at first, later on of his right arm. It was doubtful whether the strength and vitality of it would ever be restored.
He was not merely a brave man, however, this Mr. Jardine. He had gone to the Gold Coast, and from there into Central Africa, inspired, in the first place, by the desire of knowledge and love of adventure. But, amid the thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes, there had grown up in his heart the liveliest interest in and sympathy with the people he found himself amongst. He discovered that they had an ancient civilisation of their own. To be sure, what remained of it hung in shreds and patches on some of them; but there were others, civilised after a fashion, which was not the Western one. He discovered traditions, folk-lore, ancient poetry, laws, a wealth of customs. Understanding the people, he came to love them. They interested him profoundly. He was going back to them as soon as he could.
He stayed after the other guests, and was yet talking eagerly to his hostess when the dressing-bell rang.
"We dine alone," Lady Agatha said to the old friend who had brought Mr. Jardine. "And I go nowhere afterwards: I am fagged out. How glad I am that next week sees us at Hazels! If you and Mr. Jardine could dine, Colonel Brind?"
The old friend answered her wistful look.
"Our lodgings are not far off; we have only to jump into a hansom; we should be back before the dinner-bell rings. Only—this fellow has a host of engagements."
"Ah!"
Lady Agatha had hardly sighed when Jardine woke up as if from a dream.
"Have I engagements?" he asked. "I do not remember any. Anyhow, I am a convalescent, and the privileges of convalescence are mine. I vote for that hansom, Brind."
After dinner they sat around the fire and talked. Although it was June, it had been a sunless day of arid east wind, and Lady Agatha, who always snatched at the least excuse for a fire because it was so beautiful, had ordered one to be lit. The three long windows were open beyond the red leather screen that made a cosy corner of the fireplace, and the scent of flowers came in from the balcony.
Paul Jardine talked as much as they desired him to talk. He started on his hobby about those West African peoples, and rode it with spirit and energy. His friend laughed at him.
"Why, Jardine," he said, "I can never again call you the lion that will not roar."
"Am I horribly loquacious?" The hero smiled, but was not more silent. He had great things to tell, and he told them well and modestly. Lady Agatha sat with her cheek shaded by a peacock-feather fan. There was a deep glow in her eyes. Glancing across at her from the opposite corner, Mary thought it must be the reflection of the firelight.
She came to Mary's room after the guests had departed, when Mary was preparing for bed, and sat down in the chair by the open window.
"What do you think of him, Mary?" she asked.
"Of whom?" Mary said sleepily. They had met a good many people during the day, so the question was a pardonable one.
"Of whom! Why, of Mr. Jardine! Who else could it be?"
She lifted her arms about her head, and the loose white sleeves of her gown fell away from their roundness and softness.
"What a man!" she said, with a long sigh. "What a man! That is life, if you like. How tame the others seem beside him!"
"He roared very gently," said Mary, "but it was very exciting."
"Yes, wasn't it? That sail in the canoe down the river, with the jungle on each side of them alive with wild beasts and venomous reptiles, to say nothing of cannibals, and deadly sicknesses worse than any of those. He said so little about the danger. One got an impression of the extraordinary languorous beauty of the tropical vegetation; one smelt it, that African night, with its enormous moon beyond the mists. There was death on every side of him, in every breath he drew. He found what he went for, the antidote to the bite of the death's-head spider. Henceforth life in those latitudes will be robbed of one of its terrors. What a man!"
"It is a pity that we could not have heard him at the Royal Society," Mary said, with a little yawn—they had been keeping late hours. "If it had been a day or two earlier!"
"But I am going," said Lady Agatha. "Why, Mary, it is only to alter our arrangements by a day. Hazels—the dear place—will keep for a day longer."
At Hazels Mary found her duties more onerous than they had been in town. It was delightful to see Lady Agatha among her own people. She had made life easier for them. Mary marvelled at the prettiness of the red-brick farmhouses, with roses and honeysuckle to their eaves. She could never get over the feeling that it was only a picture. They would walk or drive to them, and the farmer's wife would come out and beg her Ladyship to come in for a glass of cowslip wine; and she and Mary would go in to a rather dark parlour—to be sure, the windows were smothered in jessamine and roses and honeysuckle—and sit down in chairs covered in flowery chintz, and sip the fragrant wine and eat the home-made cake, while the topics of interest between landlord and tenant were discussed. Then the farmer would come in himself, hat in hand, and his eyes would light up at the sight of the visitor, and there would be more pleasant homely talk of cattle and crops, and the harvest and the plans for the autumn sowing, and the state of fairs and markets.
There was Nuthatch Village, which seemed to have stepped out of Morland's pictures. It was all so pretty and peaceful, with its red gabled cottages sending up their blue spirals of smoke into the overhanging boughs of great trees. Mary cried out in delight at the quaint dormers, with their diamond panes, at the wooden fronts, at the gardens chockfull of the gayest and most old-fashioned flowers.
"As for prettiness," said Lady Agatha, "it isn't a patch on Highercombe, a mile away, and, what is more, I've done more than anyone else to spoil its prettiness. I've filled in the pond and driven the swan and the water-hen to other haunts. I've given them a new water-supply and done away with the most picturesque pump, which was sunk in 1770 by Dame Elizabeth Chenevix. I've put new grates and new floors into the houses, and I've seen to it that all windows open and shut. The pity of it is that I can't compel them to make use of their privilege of opening. Also, I've introduced cowls on the chimneys. My friend, Lionel Armytage, the painter, lifted his hands in horror at my doings. I'd have liked to get at the chimneys, but I'd have had to pull down every cottage in the place to rectify them. Oh, I've spoilt Nuthatch, there's not a doubt of it. You must see Highercombe."
"The children seem healthy," Mary said thoughtfully, "and the old people walk straighter than one sees them often."
"Ah, yes, that is it." Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie—a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. The whole place is as deadly in its way as those West African jungles of which Mr. Jardine told us."
They were to see Mr. Jardine later. At present he was on a round of visiting at the houses of the great. The names of the people who had elected to do honour to Paul Jardine would have been a list of pretty well the most illustrious persons in the kingdom. When Lady Agatha had suggested to him that he might give a week to Hazels before the summer was done, he had been eager about it, had even suggested dropping some of his other engagements. But that she would not hear of. She seemed to take an odd pride and pleasure in the way he had conquered the world best worth conquering.
"What!" she had said. "Drop Sir Richard Greville and Lord Overbury! Not for worlds! You may find it dull. Sir Richard lives the life of a hermit, and you won't get anything fit to eat at Lord Overbury's. He never knows what he's eating, and his cook has long given up trying to do credit to herself. I believe that only for his dining-out he'd be starved. Even as it is, he's been known to take mustard with his soup and red-currant jelly with his cheese. Still—he's Lord Overbury!"
They led a very quiet life at Hazels, seeing hardly anyone. Lady Agatha had declared that she was going to make up for her rackety life in town, as well as to prepare for the winter. She had looked as fresh as a rose through all the racketing, and when she talked about the need for rest she had smiled.
As a matter of fact, her energy was too overflowing to permit of her resting as other folk rested. A change of occupation was about as much as one could hope for. And now she was restless as she had not been before, for, energetic as she had always been, she had never driven others. Indeed, many people had found absolute restfulness in her Ladyship's big, wholesome presence.
"The life in town has only stimulated me, Mary," she confessed; "just stimulated me and excited my brain. I must work it off somehow. Let us begin at the novel to-morrow."
They began at the novel. Lady Agatha dictated it, and Mary took it down in short-hand. They worked out of doors. Mary had her seat under the boughs of a splendid chestnut tree on a little green lawn. The lawn was at the side of the house, not over-looked, enclosed on three sides by a splendid yew hedge. The dogs would lie at Mary's feet. There were Roy the St. Bernard, and Brian the bull-dog, a toy Pomeranian, and a little Chow. The dogs always stayed at Hazels. "If I took them up to town," Lady Agatha said, "they would see more of me, to be sure, but then they would always be losing me, for, of course, I couldn't take them out in town. And they always know I'll come back—they're so wise. The parting is dreadful, but they know I'll come back."
Mary sometimes wondered how her Ladyship had found time to think out her novel. For it seemed all ready and prepared in her mind. She would sweep up and down the grass while she dictated. Mary used to say that it meant a ten-mile walk of a morning. The train of her white morning-dress lopped the daisies in their places; the incessant passage of her feet made a track in the grass. Sometimes she would pass out of her secretary's hearing and have to be recalled by Mary's laughing voice of remonstrance.
"Am I afflicting you, Mary?" she asked on one of these occasions. "Am I overwhelming you? It's a horrible flood, isn't it?"
"You are very fluent," Mary answered, looking down at the queer little dots and spirals on her paper. "I daresay we'll have to prune it before it's printed. But it is a good fluency, a rich fluency. To me it is irresistible—like a spring freshet, like the sap rushing madly through all the veins of spring."
"Ah, you feel it?—you feel it like that, Mary? I feel it so myself; I riot in it."
"It will have no sense of effort—it is vital. I hope we shall be able to keep it up."
"Why not, O Cassandra?"
She stood with one hand on the back of Mary's chair, and looked up into the tree.
"The book should have been written in spring," she went on. "I feel the spring in my blood. Why should I, Mary, now when it is full summer, and the trees are dark?"
"I don't know, unless that you were so busy in spring that you had not time to enjoy it. Come, let us get on; perhaps presently you will flag. We must get the book done before anyone comes to interrupt us."
"Never was there such a willing co-worker. You mustn't overdo it, Mary. How many words did I dictate to you yesterday?"
"Six thousand."
"And you gave them to me typewritten this morning."
"I wanted to see how they looked in type. It is all right, Agatha. Even you cannot go on for long, dictating six thousand words a day. We must take the tide at the flow."
"Afterwards I shall do a play—after I have given you a rest."
"More kingdoms to conquer," Mary laughed. "There is only one person like you—the Kaiser."
"I have an immense admiration for him."
Mrs. Morres meanwhile sat and smiled to herself. She had given up the crochet for point-lace, which, as it had more intricate stitches, necessitated the more care. Sometimes she knitted and read with a book in her lap. But when she was not reading, she smiled quietly to herself. It was a curious smile, half-satisfied as one whose prognostications have come true, half-dissatisfied as though there was no great cause for congratulation.
Once Mary was curious enough to ask her why she smiled. Lady Agatha at the piano was playing Wagner like a professional musician. Mrs. Morres's smile grew more inscrutable.
"It amuses me," she said, talking loudly, so that her words might reach Mary through the storm of the music, "to find that Agatha is just a woman, after all. It amuses me—and yet—it had been happier for you and me if she had contented herself with the unrealities of life a little longer."
Mary did not understand at the moment. She began to understand a little later when Mr. Jardine came. The novel, after all, had not been finished. For the last week or so before the visitor arrived her Ladyship had apparently lost interest in it.
"My brain has dried up, Mary," she said. "I should only spoil it if I went on. Put it away in a drawer, and when I feel like it we can go on again. You want a rest. I've over-tired you."
"I felt I couldn't rest till it was done," Mary said, with a little sigh. "I wanted to know what became of them all. And it is such an interesting point. Tell me, does Clotilde marry Mark, after all?"
"How should I know? I have nothing to do with what she does. Clotilde knows her own mind. I do not. Wait till we get back to it."
"Ah! you should finish it—you should finish it. You'll never get that young green world in it again. It was an inspiration. We should have held on to it like Jacob to the angel's robe."
But for the time Lady Agatha's literary energy was exhausted.
"I daresay there's a deal of fustian in it. There's sure to be," she said. "I don't think anything could be really good that was produced with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get your bicycle and I'll walk beside you. I've been cramped up too long."
This time it was a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile than ever.
At last he came. When the sound of his footstep and of his voice reached them where they stood in the drawing-room awaiting him, her Ladyship turned to Mary, and her face was full of an immense relief.
"I didn't really believe he'd come," she said. "I've been feeling quite sure that something would occur to prevent his coming."
"The weeks have been endless," Paul Jardine said, coming in and taking her Ladyship's two hands. "How could you put me off till September? I've had a heavy time. I don't like being made much of by other folk, so I am going out again after Christmas."
Then, to be sure, Mary knew. The pair leaped to each other as though they had been two halves of one whole separated long ago, and now drawn together in a magnetic rush. Mary had always known that when Lady Agatha attracted she attracted irresistibly; there was no half-way, no haltings, no looking back possible.
"We are out of it, Mary, we two," Mrs. Morres said, and the smile had become a trifle weak and wavering. "What do you suppose is going to become of us? Hazels is a pleasant place, and there has always been something of assurance and comfort about Agatha. I had a hard life, my dear, before I came here. Yet what would she do with us? She can't very well take us out to Africa. I, at least, should not know what to do in those places."
It was a wooing that was not long a-doing. Her Ladyship and Mr. Jardine came in one evening in time for afternoon tea. The days were closing in by this time, and a fire was welcome. There had been rain, and the fire sparkled on her Ladyship's black curls and her eyelashes as she stood by the fire, taking off the long cloak in which she wrapped herself when she went out walking in bad weather. Her eyes were at once bright and shy.
"Congratulate me," she said. "He has consented to take me with him. He held out for a long time, but I was determined to go. As though I should take the chances!"
"It is I who am to be congratulated," said Paul Jardine, and the happiness in his voice thrilled his listeners. "Of course, I wouldn't have listened to her if she wasn't so splendidly strong. It will be an odd place for a honeymoon. Do you think I ought not to have consented to take her, Mrs. Morres?"
"For how long?"
Mrs. Morres's voice shook. All the Sibylline quality was gone from it now.
"For a year. I must fulfil my engagements. Afterwards I must do my best for them over here. I never thought that I could do as I would as a married man. Do you think I ought not to have consented?"
"She would have gone without your consent."
Lady Agatha came over and put a hand on her shoulder, a kind, caressing hand.
"You are quite right," she said. "Oh, he has wriggled, but it had to be. It had to be, from the first minute we met."
"I knew it."
"You did, you wise woman. And you will keep house for me when I am gone? You will take care of the dogs for me? You will oscillate between Hazels and town? You will keep the places ready against our return? You are never to leave us."
Mrs. Morres's eyes overflowed.
"My dear," she said, "it would have broken my heart to have left you. And Mary—what is to become of Mary?"
"I have a plan for Mary, unless she will stay here with you."
"I must earn my bread," said Mary.
"For all the bread you eat, I eat four times as much as you. Still, you have talents to be used for the many, as Sir Michael Auberon said. I have no right to keep you from them. You will talk to Robin Drummond about that. He is starting a bureau for purposes of organisation amongst the women. He has had his eye on you. I told him he could not have you. Now, it will fill a gap, perhaps. I shall need you again."
"The funny thing," said Mrs. Morres, and the amusement had come back in her voice—"is that Colonel St. Leger won't like your marriage at all. He has always wanted you to be married. But now—this African marriage—he will talk about it as though you were marrying a man of colour, Agatha, my dear. How his eyebrows will go out!"
"To think," said Mary, with a little sigh, "that the novel is unfinished, after all."
"A novel is so much more interesting," said Lady Agatha, "when you live it, Mary. Besides, it has troubled me that if I published the novel I must come into competition with the legitimate workers. They should form a Trades' Union against us, women of leisure and money, to keep us from poaching on their preserves. They really should. My dears, I have a presentiment that the novel never will be finished."
Oddly enough, seeing the General's feeling towards his sister-in-law, seeing, too, that he and Nelly had hardly ever had a thought or taste that was not in common, a certain affection grew up on Nelly's part for Lady Drummond. An acute observer would have said that the affection had something conscience-stricken about it. There were times when Nelly's eyes asked pardon of the Dowager for some offence committed against her, and this usually happened when the Dowager was making much of her, as of a daughter-in-law who would be dearly welcome when the time came. Something of the love Lady Drummond had borne for her husband had passed on to his niece. She was immensely proud, in her secret heart, of the deeds of the Drummonds. Despite her hectoring ways, she looked up to and admired the General, although he had been too simple to discern the fact and profit by it. Robin's divergence from his father's ways was, secretly, an acute disappointment to her. When she caressed Nelly with a warmth which none of her friends would have credited her with possessing, there was compunction with the tenderness. The child ought to have had the delight of marrying a soldier, a hero whom she could adore, as she herself had adored her Gerald. When she pressed the golden head to her angular bosom she was asking the girl's pardon for her son's shortcomings.
"I shall have heroic grandchildren," she said to herself. "Although Robin is a throwback to the Quaker, the grandsons of Gerald and Denis Drummond must be fighting men."
She pondered long over those grandchildren, and derived a grim pleasure from the thought of them. She even spoke of them to the General, when Nelly was out of hearing.
"It was a disappointment to both of us that Robin is a man of peace," she said, acknowledging the fact for the first time. "Not but that he is a good boy—a very good boy. The fighting strain will recur in the next generation. We shall have soldiers among our grandchildren."
"Grandchildren!" growled the General, turning very crimson in the face. "I call it indelicate to discuss such subjects. As for Nelly's marrying, why, she's only a child. I should feel very little obliged to the man who would want to take her from me at her age."
"Nelly is nineteen," the Dowager reminded him, "and the marriage can't be delayed much longer. It ought to be a source of satisfaction to us that the young people are so pleased with the arrangement. I know that Robin has never thought of anyone but his cousin, and I am sure it is just the same with the dear child."
The General grew red again—not this time with anger, but rather as though the Dowager's words had stirred some sense of guilt in his breast. He muttered something grumpily, and, discovering that his favourite pipe must have been left in his own den, he escaped from Lady Drummond for a while.
As a matter of fact, his mind had been plotting mischief. He did not care so much that it was against the Dowager, if it had not been that the memory of his dead brother came in to complicate things. And, after all, his plotting seemed to have come to naught. He had gone so far as to invite young Langrishe to dinner for a specific occasion, without result. The young man had written to say that he had effected his exchange into the —th Madras Light Infantry, and would be so very much occupied up to the time of his departure that he feared dining out was out of the question.
The General had known he was going away. He had known it before he received that letter, before he had seen it in the Gazette. He had known from the day the regiment had gone by without Captain Langrishe in his wonted place. He had felt with his arm about his girl's shoulders the sudden shock that had passed through her. So she had not known either. He had not prepared her. There was not an understanding between them. He saluted as light-heartedly as ever to all appearance, but he did not look at Nelly. Nor did he make any remark on the change in the regiment.
After that day the passing of his "boys" ceased to be the old joy to him. Something was gone out of the ceremonial. It took all hisesprit de corpsto pretend to himself as well as to others that he felt no difference. He felt the limpness and dejection in Nelly. He saw that her roses had faded, that she walked without the old joyous spring. He heard her no longer talking to the dogs, trilling to the canary. It was January now, and raw, cold weather. It seemed as though the sunshine had vanished from the house for good. The General had been wont to say that the cheerfulness of his house was within it, not without it. He had come home from London fog and rain with a happy sense of its bright fires and spaciousness, its carpets and furniture, not so new that a muddy foot or a stray shower of tobacco-ash was a thing to be feared—old friends every one of them. The love and loyalty within his doors were something that came out to welcome the General's home-coming like a sudden firelight streaming out into the black night.
Now his little girl was unhappy, and the shadow of her unhappiness was over his nights and days. It was when he felt this that he had written to Captain Langrishe, saying nothing to her about it, stealing out, in fact, at night to post the letter secretly, he whose correspondence, such as it was—he was no great penman—had always lain in the letter-basket on the hall table for the servants to scrutinise the addresses if they would before it was posted.
When the answer came he congratulated himself on his forethought. Luckily, that morning he was first at the breakfast-table. Of late Nelly, who had been wont to rise as cheerfully as a waking bird, was tardy occasionally. The General suspected broken sleep, and had bidden the servants tenderly not to call her, although the breakfast-table was not the same thing with no bright face and golden head opposite to him.
When he had read the letter he thrust it into an inner pocket. The servant, who was attending, went away at the moment, and the General got up quickly, and with a stealthy glance at the door, buried the letter in the heart of the fire, raked the coals over it, and was in his place before the servant returned.
"Confound the fellow!" he said under his breath.
Plainly, there was nothing more to be done. The child had to go through it. People had to endure such things. Yet he was miserable, watching furtively her dimmed roses and the circles about her eyes. His little Nell, who had lived in the sunshine all her days!
It was, perhaps, not to be wondered at that, in the perturbation of his mind, the pendulum should have swung towards Robin. "Confound the fellow!"—(meaning Captain Langrishe)—"What did he mean by making Nelly unhappy?" A still, small voice whispered to the General that the young man was acting on some foolish, overstrained, honourable scruple just as he would have done himself in his youth—nay, to-day, for the matter of that. But he would not listen to the voice. He fretted and fumed, puffed himself up into a great rage as men of his temperament will. Confound the fellow! He had gone half-way to meet him, for Nelly's sake, and the fellow had refused to budge. Confound him and be hanged to him! The General would have used much worse language if the simple piety which hid behind his blusterousness had not come in to restrain him.
He blamed himself—to be sure, he blamed himself. What a selfish old curmudgeon he had been, always thinking of himself and his own likes and dislikes! Where could his Nelly find greater security for happiness than in the keeping of Gerald's son? Everybody thought well of Robin. There had never been anything against him. Why, not a week ago, one of the finest soldiers in the army, a field-marshal, a household word in the homes of England, had button-holed the General to congratulate him on a speech of Robin's.
"That young man will be a credit to you, Drummond," he had said. "Mark my words, that young man will be a credit to you."
And the General had been oddly impressed by the opinion, coming from his old comrade in arms, and one of the finest soldiers that ever stepped. And, to be sure, he had been trying to set Nelly against Robin all the days of her life.
When he had come to this point in his meditations he groaned aloud. A thought had come to him of how little Nelly would be really his, married to Robin Drummond. He would have no need for the house then. He would have to dismiss the servants, the old servants of whom he was fond, who adored him, and go into lodgings. He might keep Pat, perhaps. Even the dogs would go with Nelly. He would never have his girl any more. The Dowager would be always there. The Dowager would know better than anyone how to set up an invisible barrier between Nelly and her father. Why, since she had been their neighbour things had not been the same. She had carried Nelly hither and thither, to concerts and At Homes and picture-galleries and what-not. She talked of presenting her at Court, with an air of significance which the General loathed. The question in her eye and smile—the General called it a smirk—the very transparent question was as to whether it was not better to wait and present Nelly on her marriage.
When the Dowager was sly she made the General furious. Was his little girl to be married out of hand to Robin Drummond without being given the chance to see the world and other men? He asked the question hotly, pacing up and down the faded Persian rug in his den. Then a chill came on his heat. He had not been able to keep Nelly from choosing, and she had chosen unwisely. He had had a dream of himself and young Langrishe and Nelly and the babies in the big happy house. They would belong to him—no one would push him away from his girl. They would be together till they closed his eyes. The thought of it now was like a green oasis in the desert; but it was a mirage, only a mirage!
And Nelly must not suffer. Langrishe had rejected her—rejected that sweet thing, confound him! And there was her cousin Robin, patient and faithful, waiting to make her happy. He forgot that once upon a time he had been furious with Robin for his patience. Robin was a kind fellow, a good fellow. He seemed to be always at the beck and call of his mother and Nelly, always ready to escort them. Why, only yesterday Nelly had said that there was no one so comfortable as Robin to go about with, and then, in a fit of compunction, had flown to her father and hugged him hard.
"Never mind, Nell, never mind," the General had said. "I never took you about much, did I? We were great home-keepers, you and I. Never seemed to want to gad about, did we? I ought to have taken you about more. It was a dull life for a young girl—a dull life. I ought to be obliged to your aunt for showing me the error of my ways, for making life pleasanter for you."
He gulped over the end of the speech.
"It was a lovely life," cried Nelly wildly, and then burst into tears.
The General was terribly distressed. He had had no experience of Nelly in tears. She had never wept or fainted or done any of the interesting things young ladies were supposed to do in his time. She had been always the light of the house, always happy and healthy and gay.
While he looked at the bell uncertainly, being half of a mind to summon assistance, Nelly relieved him from his doubt by running away out of the room, and when they met again he did not remind her of the scene. That discretion of his went to her heart. It was so strange and pitiful for him to be discreet, so unlike him.
After that he began to praise Robin Drummond, not too suddenly nor too effusively at first, but by degrees, so as not to awaken Nelly's suspicions. He amazed Robin Drummond by his cordiality in those days, and the young fellow commented on it whimsically to Nelly herself.
"He has been telling me all my life that I am a poor creature," he said, "and here he is, to all intents and purposes, eating his own words. Just fancy his wading through that speech of mine on the estimates and pretending to be interested in it, even praising it, Nell. Seeing that the speech was all against our maintaining our big standing army, on a motion to cut down the expenditure, it is bewildering. Is it a mild joke, Nell dear?"
"You may call it a joke if you like," she said, her eyes filling with tears. "I call it heart-breaking, heart-breaking. If he would only abuse you as he used to do!"
"Dear Nell, what's up?" asked Robin, in great penitence. "I had no idea I was saying anything to hurt you. The dear old man! Why, I never resented his abuse. I'd rather he'd abuse me, like a dog, as they say—though I don't see why anyone should want to abuse a dog—if it made you happier."
Certainly, all Nelly's world was very good to her in those days. As for Robin Drummond, he thought of women with a chivalrous tenderness somewhat strange considering that the Dowager was his mother. To him they were something delicate, mysterious, inexplicable. If he had had a sister he would have adored her. Not having one, he lavished on Nelly the feeling he would have given a sister; and hitherto he had been content with the ardour of his feelings. What could a man wish for sweeter and prettier beside his hearth than little Nelly? He had fallen in love with that plan of his mother's for him and Nell with lazy contentment. He liked Nelly's society, and it did not occur to him that he would be just as well pleased with her daily companionship if he could have it without the tie between them becoming more than cousinly.
It might have been better for Nelly if her father had told her of those tentative advances to Captain Langrishe, for then her pride might have come to her aid. As it was, she had nothing to go upon but those looks of his, and his manner to her when they had met at the houses of friends. For they had met, and that was something the General did not know. More, Nelly had engineered, with the cleverness of a girl in love, an acquaintance with Captain Langrishe's sister, a Mrs. Rooke, who lived in one of the Bayswater squares. Mrs. Rooke was a vivacious little dark woman, with a cheek like a peach's rosy side. She was perfectly happy in her own married life, and she had the happily-married woman's desire to bring lovers together. She had taken a prodigious fancy to Nelly. While Captain Langrishe yet remained in England that house in the Bayswater square had an overwhelming attraction for Nelly.
She had gone there first under the Dowager's wing. Cyprian Rooke, K.C., belonged to an unexceptionable family, and even the proud Dowager could find no fault with Nelly's friendship for his wife.
In those days poor Nelly used to feel a perfect monster of deceit. For, first of all, she was deceiving her dear old father. The name of Rooke signified nothing one way or the other to him. Then there was the Dowager, who had proved the most patient and considerate of chaperons, sitting wide-eyed and cheerful till her charge had danced through the programme if it so pleased her; going hither and thither to crowded At Homes, attending first nights at the play—doing, in fact, everything to give Nelly a good time. To be sure, the Dowager attached no importance to the name of Langrishe any more than the General did to that of Rooke.
Mrs. Rooke gave a good many dances after Christmas, and Nelly was at them all. Sometimes Robin was there, sometimes that was not possible. And Robin was out of his element at such gatherings, since he did not dance and could find no conversation to his mind while he leant against the wall of the ball-room or hung about the doors. Life was so full of work for him that it seemed unreasonable to keep him where there was nothing he could do.
Captain Langrishe turned up at the dances as unfailingly as Nelly herself. He came in spite of many resolutions to the contrary, as the moth comes to singe its wings in the flame of the candle. He did not make Nelly conspicuous for the Dowager or anyone else to see. Sometimes he asked her for several dances. Again, he would be merely polite in asking her for one; and would yield her up coldly to her next partner and never come to her side again for the rest of the evening. Unlike Sir Robin, he danced conspicuously well. Nelly had thrilled to a speech of Robin's: "One cannot despise the art of dancing for a man when a fellow like that thinks it worth his while to excel in it."
One night, when the guests had departed, Mrs. Rooke had something to tell her husband.
"That little wretch, Nelly Drummond!" she said. "I thought she was as innocent and candid as a child. Would you believe it that all the time she has been engaged to that gawky cousin of hers?"
"My dear Belinda, all what time?"
"Well, for a lawyer, Cyprian——"
"I know I'm obtuse, but the law doesn't favour deductions. All what time?"
"Why, all the time poor Godfrey's been falling head over ears in love with her."
Mr. Rooke whistled. He was fond of his wife's brother.
"Are you sure, Bel? I noticed particularly that he was dancing with the wallflowers to-night. He's a good fellow, so that didn't surprise me. Now you mention it, I caught sight of the little girl dancing with Jack Menzies. She didn't look particularly happy."
"She hasn't been looking particularly happy. I have been imagining that Godfrey's poverty stood between them. He is so impracticable. And I have been making opportunities for them to meet. After all, she is Sir Denis Drummond's only child, and is sure to be sufficiently well off. And here, after all my trouble, I find she is engaged to her cousin. I wonder what she can see in that ugly stick to prefer him to Godfrey!"
"She may not prefer him, my dear. It may be a marriage of convenience. And Drummond is not a stick. That is your feminine prejudice. He is a very clever fellow, although he has got the Socialistic bee in his bonnet. However, he's young, and has time to mend his ways."
"I don't want to discuss him. How coldblooded you are, Cyprian! I can only think of my poor Godfrey going off to the ends of the earth, and his being deceived and hurt by that heartless girl."
"You will let him know?"
"I certainly shall. He ought to know. It may be the quickest way to make him forget her."
"Since he seems to have made up his mind to go away without speaking to her, I can't see that any great harm has been done," Mr. Rooke said, with his masculine common-sense.
"I shall never forgive her," Mrs. Rooke retorted, with true feminine inconsequence.
She took an early opportunity of telling her brother what the Dowager had told her. The occasion was in her own drawing-room at the afternoon-tea hour, and, since the room was only lit by firelight and a tall standard lamp, his face, where he stood by the mantel-shelf, was in shadow. There had been something portentous in the manner of the telling.
For a few seconds he kept silence. Then he spoke very quietly.
"I hope Miss Drummond may be happy," he said. He did not trouble to put on a pretence of indifference with Bel, just as he did not wish to talk about it. He went on to speak of ordinary topics. That evening he stayed to dinner. He had only a week more in England. Under the electric light at the dinner-table his haggardness was revealed.
"For once," said Cyprian Rooke afterwards, "your discovery wasn't a mare's nest, my dear Bel. Godfrey looks hard hit."
The week turned round quietly. Nelly had not heard definitely the date of Captain Langrishe's departure. For six days she kept away from the Rookes' house. On that last evening he had been icily cold. The poor girl was in torture. All the week she was calling pride to her aid. The sixth day it refused to bolster her up any longer. The sixth day she met at lunch a friend of hers and Belinda Rooke's. She asked a question about the Rookes with averted eyes.
"Poor girl," said the friend; "she is in grief over Godfrey Langrishe. He sails to-morrow."
The rest of that luncheon-party was a phantasmagoria of faces and voices to poor Nelly. He was going, and she would never see him again, although he had shown her by a thousand infallible signs that he loved her. Despite his occasional coldness, she was sure he loved her. Her pride was down with a vengeance. She felt nothing at the moment but a desire to see him before he should go—just to see him, to see the lighting up of his gloomy eyes, as they had lit up on seeing her suddenly before he could get his face under control. After that one meeting, the deluge! But she must see him—she must see him for the last time.
The kindly hostess insisted on her going home in a cab. When she had been driven some distance, Nelly pushed up the little trapdoor of the hansom and gave another address than Sherwood Square.
Having done it, she felt happier. However it ended, she was making a last attempt to see him. She could not have endured a passive acquiescence in her destiny, whatever was to be the end of it.
The luncheon-party had been prolonged, and the gas-lamps in the streets were lit. It was the close of the short winter's day. Night came prematurely between the high Bayswater houses. It was almost dark when she stood at last on Mrs. Rooke's doorstep, asking herself what she should do if Mrs. Rooke was away from home.
Mrs. Rooke was out, as it happened, but the maid-servant, who knew Nelly, and, like all servants, had been captivated by her pleasant, friendly ways, invited her in to await the lady's return. Mrs. Rooke was expected back to tea. With a smile on her lips she held the drawing-room door open for Nelly to enter.
Nelly passed through. There was a big French screen by the door. She had passed beyond it and out into the warm firelit room before she realised that there was another occupant. Someone stood up from the couch by the fireplace as she came towards it. Fate had been on her side for once. The person was Captain Langrishe.
"My sister will not be very long, Miss Drummond," he began, in a tone he tried in vain to make indifferent. "I hope you won't mind waiting in my company."
Mind waiting, indeed! To Nelly, as to himself, the seconds were precious ones. Mrs. Rooke was shopping on that particular afternoon. It was a kind fate that made it so difficult for her to find just the things she wanted, that sent half-a-dozen acquaintances and friends in her way.
He took Nelly's hand in his. It was quite cold and clammy, although it had come out of a satin-lined muff. The hand trembled.
"I heard you were going to-morrow," she said. "I'm so glad I am in time to wish youbon voyage."
"Won't you sit down?"
He set a chair for her in front of the fire. The flames lit up her golden hair, and revealed her charming face in its becoming setting of the sables she wore. He sat in his obscure corner, watching her with moody eyes. He said to himself that he would never see her again, yet he laboured to make ordinary everyday talk. He asked after the General, and regretted that the hurry of these latter days had prevented his calling at Sherwood Square.
"We miss you at the head of the squadron," said Nelly, innocently. "It isn't the same thing now that there is a stranger."
"Ah!" A flame leaped into his eyes. He leant forward a little. "That reminds me I ought not to go without making a confession." He was taking a pocket-book from his breastpocket. He opened it, and held it under Nelly's eyes. There was a piece of blue ribbon there. She recognised it with a great leap of her heart. It was her own ribbon which she had lost that spring day as she stood on the balcony looking down at the soldiers.
"You recognise it? It was yours. The wind blew it down close to my hand. I caught it. I have kept it ever since. May I keep it still? It can do no harm to anybody, my having it—may I keep it?"
She answered something under her breath, which he construed to be "Yes." She had been feeling the cruelty of it all, that their last hour together should be taken up by talking of commonplaces. At the sudden change in his tone—although it was unhappy, there was passion in it, and the chill seemed to pass away from her heart—the tears filled her eyes, overflowed them, ran warmly down her cheeks.
At the sight of those tears the young man forgot everything, except that she was lovely and he loved her and she was crying for him. He leaped to her side and dropped on his knees. He put both his arms about her and pressed her closely to him.
"Are you crying because I am going, my darling?" he said. "Good heavens! don't cry—I'm not worth it. And yet I shall remember, when the world is between us, that you cried because I was going, you angel of mercy."
An older woman than Nelly might have had the presence of mind to ask him why he was going. But she was silent. She felt it over-whelmingly sweet to be held so, to feel his hand smoothing her hair. The bunch of lilies of the valley she had been wearing was crushed between his breast and her breast. The sweetness of them rose up as something exquisite and forlorn. His hand moved tremblingly over her hair to her cheek.