“Oh, Miss Lance, I told you he was not there, don’t you remember? He has never been anywhere all this time. He has had typhoid fever, and on Thursday Bee was sent for, and found him still ill, but mending. And when he heard you were in town he would give her no peace till she wrote and asked you to come and see him. And she did not know your address so she wrote to me. I went to tell papa first, and then I came on here. Oh, will you come and see Charlie? Bee said he wanted to get into a hansom and come to you as soon as he heard you were here.”
“What induced them to talk of me, and why did she tell him I was here?” Miss Lance cried, with a momentary cloud upon her face, such as Betty had never seen there before. She sat down suddenly in a chair, with a pat of her foot upon the carpet, which was almost a stamp of impatience, and then she read Colonel Kingsward’s note for the second time, with her brows drawn together and a blackness about her eyes which filled Betty with alarm and dismay. She looked up, however, next minute with her countenance cleared. “Your father says I am to use my own discretion,” she said, with a half laugh; “that is not much help to me, is it, in deciding what is best to do? So he has been ill—and not in Scotland at all?”
“I told you he was not in Scotland,” cried Betty, a little impatient in her turn. “Oh, Miss Lance, he has been ill, he is still ill, and won’t you come and see him when he wants you so? Oh, come and see him, please! He looks so ill and wretched, Bee says, and weak, and cannot get back his strength; and he thinks if he could see you——”
“Poor boy—silly boy!” said Miss Lance; “why does he think it will do him good to see me? I doubt if it would do him any good; and your father says I am to use my discretion. I would do anything for any of you, Betty, but perhaps I should do him harm instead of good. Have you got your sister’s letter?”
“I left it with papa—that is, he threw it into the waste paper basket,” said the too truthful Betty, growing red.
“I understand,” said Miss Lance, “it was not a letter to show me. Bee has her prejudices, and perhaps she is right. I cannot expect that all the family should be as nice to me as you. Have they taken him to Kingswarden? Or where is he, poor boy?”
“He is at No. 1000, Curzon Street,” Betty said.
“What!” said Miss Lance. “Where?” Her brow curved over her eyes, her face grew dark as if the light had gone out of the morning, and she spoke the two monosyllables in a sharp imperative tone, so that they seemed to cut like a knife.
“At No. 1000; Curzon Street,” Betty repeated with great alarm, not knowing what to think.
Miss Lance rose quickly, as if there had been something that stung her in the innocent words. She looked as if she were about to pace the room from end to end, as Colonel Kingsward did when he was disturbed. But either she did not mean this, or she restrained herself, for what she did was to walk to her writing-table and put Colonel Kingsward’s note away in a drawer, and then she went to the window and looked out, and said it was a fine morning but dusty for walking—and then she returned to her chair and sat down again and looked at Betty. She was pale, and there were lines in her face that had not been there before. Her eyes were almost piteous as she looked at the surprised girl.
“I am in a very strait place,” she said, “and I don’t know what to do.” Something like moisture seemed to come up into her eyes. “This is always how it happens to me,” she said, “just at the moment, just at the moment! What am I to do?”
Beehad passed the whole day with Charlie, the Friday of the dinner party at Portman Square. She had resisted as long as she could writing the letter which had brought so much excitement to Betty, and the passion with which he had insisted upon this—the struggle between them, the vehemence with which he had declared that he cared for nothing in the world but to see Laura once again, to thank her for having pleaded for him with his father, to ask her forgiveness for his follies—had been bad for Charlie, who lay for the rest of the day upon the sofa, tossing from him one after the other the novels that were provided for his amusement, declaring them to be “rot” or “rubbish,” growling at his sister when she continued to speak to him, and reducing poor Bee to that state of wounded imbecility which is the lot of those who endeavour to please an unpleasable invalid, with the conviction that all the time they are doing more harm than good.
Bee was not maladroit by nature, and she had the warmest desire to be serviceable to her brother, but it appeared that she always did the wrong thing, not only in the eyes of Charlie, but in those of the nurse, who came in from time to time with swift movements, bringing subordination and quiet where there had been nothing but irritation and resistance. And in this house, where she had been brought entirely for the service of Charlie, Bee did not know what to do. She was afraid to leave the rooms that had been given up to him lest she should meet someone on the stairs, or be seen only to be avoided, as if her presence there was that of a ghost or an enemy. Poor Bee—wearing out the long hours of the spring afternoon with poor attempts to be useful to the invalid, to watch his looks—which he resented by frequent adjurations not to watch him as a cat watches a mouse—to anticipate his wishes—which immediately became the last thing in the world he wanted as soon as she found out the drink or got the paper for which he was looking, heard or thought she heard steps coming to the street door, subdued voices in the hall, comings and goings half stealthily, noises subdued lest she should hear. What did it matter whether she heard or not? Why should the master of the house be banished that she, so ineffectual as she had proved, should be brought to her brother’s side? She had not done, and could not do, any good to Charlie. All that she had done had been to remind him of Miss Lance, to be the medium of calling that disastrous person, who had done all the harm, back into Charlie’s life—nay, of bringing her back to this house, the inmates of which she had already harmed to the utmost of her power.
That was all that had been done by Bee, and now her presence kept at a distance the one individual in the world who had the best right to be here. He came almost secretly, she felt sure, to the door in the dusk to inquire after his patient, or to get his letters; or stole in, subduing his step, that she might not be disturbed.
Poor Bee! It was very bitter to her to think that Aubrey Leigh should leave his own house because she was there. Sometimes she wondered whether it was some remnant of old, almost-extinguished feeling in his breast which had made him think that the sight of Bee would do Charlie good—the sight of Bee, for which her brother did not care at all, not at all; which was an annoyance and a fatigue to him, except when she had betrayed what was the last thing in the world she should have betrayed, the possibility of seeing again that woman who had harmed them all. If Aubrey had thought so, with some remnant of the old romance, how mistaken he had been! And it was intolerable for the girl to think that for the sake of this unsuccessful experiment he had been sent away from his own house. She placed herself in the corner of the room in which Charlie (to whom she was supposed to do good and bring pleasure) could see her least, and bitterness filled her heart. There were times in which she thought of stealing away, leaving a word for Mrs. Leigh to the effect that she was doing Charlie no good, and that Betty, who would come to-morrow, might perhaps be of more use—and returning forlorn to Kingswarden to renew the life, where perhaps nobody wanted her very much, but where, at least, there were so many things which she and no one else was there to do.
She was still in this depressed state when Mrs. Leigh (who had evidently gone away that the brother and sister might be alone and happy together) came back, looking into Charlie’s room to ask how he was on her way upstairs to dress for dinner.
“Better,” the nurse said, with her eyebrows. “Peevish—young lady mustn’t cross him—must be humoured—things not gone quite so well to-day.”
“You will tell me about it at dinner,” said Mrs. Leigh, and Bee went downstairs with a heavy heart to be questioned. Aubrey’s mother looked cheerful enough; she did not seem to be unhappy about his absence or to dislike the society of the girl who had driven him away. And she was very considerate even in her questions about the patient.
“We must expect these fluctuations,” she said; “you must not be cast down if you are not quite so triumphantly successful to-day.”
“Oh, Mrs. Leigh, I am deceiving you. I have never been successful at all. He did not want me—he doesn’t care for me, and to stay here is dreadful, upsetting the house—doing no good.”
“My dear, this is a strange statement to make, and you must not expect me to believe you in the face of facts. He was much better after seeing you last night.”
“Doing no good,” said Bee, shaking her head, “but harm, oh, real harm! It was not I that did him good, it was telling him of someone, of a lady. Oh, Mrs. Leigh, how am I to tell you?”
“My dear child, anything that you yourself know can surely be told to me. We were afraid that something about a woman was at the bottom of it, but then that is always the thing that is said, and typhoid, you know, means bad drains and not a troubled mind—though the one may make you susceptible to the other. Don’t be so distressed, my dear. It seems more to your inexperience than it is in reality. He will get over that.”
“Mrs. Leigh,” said Bee, very pale, “he has made me write to ask her to come and see him here.”
It was now Mrs. Leigh’s turn to change colour. She grew red, looking astonished in the girl’s despairing face.
“A woman to come and see him, here! But your brother would never insult the house and you—— I am talking nonsense,” she said, suddenly stopping herself, “and misconstruing him altogether. It is some lady who has jilted him—or something of that kind.”
Bee had not understood what Mrs. Leigh’s first idea was, and she did not see any cause for relief in the second.
“I don’t know what she did to him, or what she has done to them all,” the girl said, mournfully. “They are all the same. Papa, even, who does not care very much for ladies, generally—— But Charlie, poor Charlie! Oh, I believe he is in love with her still, though she is twice as old as he is and has almost broken his heart.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Leigh, “this must be something very different to what we thought. We thought he had got into some very dreadful trouble about a—an altogether inferior person. But as it seems to be a lady, and one that is known to the family, and who can be asked to come here—if you can tell me a little more clearly what the story is, I shall be more able to give you my advice.”
Bee looked at her questioner helpless, half distracted, not knowing how to speak, and yet the story must be told. She had written that fatal invitation, and it could not be concealed who this possible visitor was. She began with a great deal of hesitation to talk of the lady whom Charlie had raved about at Oxford, and how he was to work to please her; and how he did not work, but failed in every way, and fled from Oxford; and how her father went to inquire into the story; and how the lady had come to Colonel Kingsward at the hotel, to explain to him, to excuse Charlie, to beg his father to forgive him.
“But, my dear, she can’t be so very bad,” said Mrs. Leigh, soothingly. “You must not judge her hardly; if she thought she had been to blame in the matter, that was really the right thing to do.”
“And since then,” resumed Bee, “I think papa has thought of nobody else; he writes to her and tells her everything. He goes to see her; he forgets about Charlie and all of us; he has taken Betty there, and Betty adores her too. And to-night,” cried Bee, the angry tears coming into her eyes, “she is dining in Portman Square, dining with the Lyons as a great friend of ours—in Portman Square.”
Mrs. Leigh drew Bee to her and gave her a kiss of consolation. I think it was partly that the girl in her misery should not see the smile, which Mrs. Leigh, thinking that she now saw through this not uncommon mystery, could not otherwise conceal.
“My poor child,” she said, “my dear girl! This is hard upon you since you dislike her so much, but I am afraid it is quite natural, and a thing that could not have been guarded against. And then you must consider that your father may probably be a better judge than yourself. I don’t see any harm this lady has done, except that perhaps it is not quite good taste to make herself so agreeable both to the father and son; but perhaps in Charlie’s case that was not her fault. And I see no reason, my dear—really and sincerely as your friend, Bee—why you should be so prejudiced against a poor woman whose only fault is that everybody else likes her. Now isn’t it a little unreasonable when you think of it calmly yourself?”
“Oh, Mrs. Leigh!” Bee cried. The situation was so intolerable, the passion of injury and misconception so strong in her that she could only gasp in insupportable anger and dismay.
“Bee! Bee! this feeling is natural but you must not let it carry you away. Have you seen her? Let me come in when she is here and give my opinion.”
“I have seen her three times,” said Bee, solemnly, “once at the Baths, and once at the Academy, and once at Oxford;” and then once more excitement mastered the girl. “Oh, when you know who she is! Don’t smile, don’t smile, but listen! She is Miss Lance.”
“Miss Lance!” Mrs. Leigh repeated the name with surprise, looking into Bee’s face. “You must compose yourself,” she said, “you must compose yourself. Miss——? My dear, you have got over excited, you have mixed things up.”
“No, I am not over-excited! I am telling you only the truth. It is Miss Lance, and they all believe in her as if she were an angel, and she is coming here.”
Mrs. Leigh was very much startled, but yet she would not believe her ears. She had heard Charlie delirious in his fever not so long ago. Her mind gave a little leap to the alarming thought that there might be madness in the family, and that Bee had been seized like her brother. That what she said was actual fact seemed to her too impossible to be true. She soothed the excited girl with all her power. “Whoever it is, my dear, you shall not take any harm. There is nothing to be frightened about. I will take care of you, whoever it is.”
“I do not think you believe me,” said Bee. “I am not out of my mind, as you think. It is Miss Lance—Miss Laura Lance—the same, the very same, that—and I have written, and she will be coming here.”
“This is very strange,” said Mrs. Leigh. “It does not seem possible to believe it. The same—who came between Aubrey and you? Oh, I never meant to name him, I was never to name him; but how can I help it? Laura, who was the trouble of his house—who would not leave him—who went to your father? And now your father! I cannot understand it. I cannot believe that it is true.”
“It is true,” said Bee. “But, Mrs. Leigh, you forget that no one cared then, except myself; they have forgotten all that now, they have forgotten what happened. It was only my business, it was not their business. All that has gone from papa; he remembers nothing about it. And she is a witch, she is a magician, she is a devil—oh, please forgive me, forgive me—I don’t know what I am saying. It has all been growing, one thing after another—first me—and then Charlie—and then papa—and then Betty. And now, after bringing him almost to death and destruction, here is Charlie, in this house, calling for her, raging with me till I wrote to call her—me!” cried Bee, with a sort of indignant eloquence. “Me! Could it go further than that? Could anything be more than that? Me!—and in this house.”
“My dear child,” said Mrs. Leigh, “I don’t wonder, I don’t wonder—it is like something in a tragedy. Oh, Bee! Forgive me for what is first in my thoughts. Was she the reason, the only reason, for your breach with my poor Aubrey? For at first you stood by him—and then you turned upon him.”
“Do not ask me any more questions, please. I am not able to answer anything. Isn’t it enough that all these things have happened through this woman, and that she is coming here?”
Mrs. Leigh made no further question. She saw that the girl’s excitement was almost beyond her control, and that her young mind was strained to its utmost. She said, half to herself, “I must think. I cannot tell in a moment what to do. I must send for Aubrey. It is his duty and mine to let it go no further. You must try to compose yourself, my dear, and trust us. Oh, Bee,” there were tears in her eyes as she came up to the girl and kissed her, “if you could but have trusted us—in all things! I don’t think you ever would have repented.”
But Bee did not make any response. Her hands were cold and her head hot. She was wrapt in a strange passion and confusion of human chaos and bewilderment—everything gone wrong—all the elements of life twisted the perverse way; nothing open, nothing clear. She was incapable of any simple, unmingled feeling in that confusion and medley of everything going wrong.
Mrs. Leigh, a little disappointed, went into the inner room, the little library, to write a letter—no doubt to consult or summon her son—from which she was interrupted a few minutes later by a faint call, and Bee’s white face in the doorway.
“Mrs. Leigh, papa will come to-morrow, and he will take us away; at least he will take me away. I—I shan’t be any longer in anyone’s way. Oh, don’t keep him apart from you—don’t send anyone out of the house because of me!”
Therewas a great deal of commotion next morning in the house in Mayfair.
Bee was startled by having a tray brought to her bedroom with her breakfast when she was almost ready to go downstairs. “Mrs. Leigh thought, Miss, as you had been so tired last night, you might like to rest a little longer,” said the maid; and Bee divined with a sharp pang through all the trouble and confusion of her mind that she was not wanted—that probably Aubrey was coming to consult with his mother what was to be done. It may be imagined with what scrupulousness she kept within her room, her pride all up in arms though her heart she thought was broken. Though the precaution was so natural, though it was taken at what was supposed to be her desire, at what was really her desire—the only one she would have expressed—yet she resented it, in the contradiction and ferment of her being. If Mrs. Leigh supposed that she wanted to see Aubrey! He was nothing to her, he had no part in her life. When she had been brought here, against her will, it had been expressly explained that it was not for Aubrey, that he would rather go away to the end of the world than disturb her. And she had herself appealed to his mother—her last action on the previous night—to bring him back, not to banish him on account of the girl who was nothing to him, and whose part it was, not his, to go away. All this, however, did not make it seem less keen a wound to Bee that she should be, so to speak, imprisoned in her own room, because Aubrey was expected downstairs. She had never, she declared to herself vehemently, felt at ease under the roof that was his; nothing but Charlie’s supposed want of her would have induced her to subject herself to the chances of meeting him, and the still more appalling chance of being supposed to wish to meet him. And now this insult of imprisonment in her bedroom, lest she should by any chance come under his observation, offend his eye!—Bee was contradictory enough at all times, a rosebud set about with wilful thorns; but everything was in tumult about her, and all her conditions nothing but contradictions now.
Thus it happened that while Betty was setting out with much excitement, but that all pleasurable, walking lightly among undiscovered dangers, Bee was suddenly arrested, as she felt, imprisoned in the little room looking out upon roofs and backs of houses, thrust aside into a corner that she might not be seen or her presence known—imperceptibly the force of the description grew as she went on piling up agony upon agony. It was some time before, in the commotion of her feelings, she could bring herself to swallow her tea, and then she walked about the room, gazed out of the window from which, as it was at the back of the house, she saw nothing, and found the position more and more intolerable every minute. A prisoner! she who had been brought here against her will, on pretence that her presence might save her brother’s life, or something equally grandiose and impossible—save her brother’s life, bring him back from despair by the sight of some one that he loved. These were the sort of words that Mrs. Leigh had said. As if it mattered to Charlie one way or the other what Bee might think or do! As if he were to be consoled by her, or stimulated, or brought back to life! She had affected him involuntarily, undesirably, by her betrayal of the vicinity of that woman, that witch, who had warped his heart and being. But as for influencing in her own person her brother’s mind or life, Bee knew she was as little capable as baby, the little tyrant of the nursery. Oh! how foolish she had been to come at all, to yield to what was said, the flattering suggestion that she could do so much, when she knew all along in her inmost consciousness that she could do nothing! The only thing for her to do now was to go back to the dull life of which in her impatient foolishness she had grown so weary, the dull life in which she was indeed of some use after all, where it was clearly her duty to get the upper hand of baby, to preserve the discipline of the nursery, to train the little ones, and keep the big boys in order. These were the elder sister’s duties, with which nobody could interfere—not any ridiculous, sentimental, exaggerated idea, as Charlie had said, of what a woman’s ministrations could do. “Oh, woman, in our hours of ease!” that sort of foolish, foolish, intolerable, ludicrous kind of thing, which it used to be considered right to say, though people knew better now. Bee felt bitterly that to say of her that she was a ministering angel would be irony, contumely, the sort of thing people said when they laughed at women and their old-fashioned sham pretences. She had never made any such pretence. She had said from the beginning that Charlie would care for none of her ministrations. She had been brought here against her judgment, against her will, and now she was shut up as in a prison in order that Aubrey might not be embarrassed by the sight of her! As if she had wished to see Aubrey! As if it had not been on the assurance that she was not to see Aubrey that she had been beguiled here!
When a message came to her that she was to go to her brother, Bee did not know what to do. It seemed to her that Aubrey might be lurking somewhere on the stairs, that he might be behind Charlie’s sofa, or lying in wait on the other side of the curtain, notwithstanding her offence at the quite contradictory idea that she was imprisoned in her room to be kept out of his way. These two things were entirely contrary from each other, yet it was quite possible to entertain and be disturbed by both in the tumult and confusion of a perverse young mind. She stepped out of her room as if she were about to fall into an ambush, notwithstanding that she had been thrilling in every irritated nerve with the idea of being imprisoned there.
Charlie had insisted on getting up much earlier than usual. He had not waited for the doctor’s visit. He was better; well, he said, stimulated into nervous strength and capability, though his gaunt limbs tottered under him and his thin hand trembled. When he got into his sitting-room he flung away all his cushions and wrappings as soon as his nurse left him and went to the mirror over the mantel-piece and gazed at himself in the glass, smoothing down and stroking into their right place those irregular soft tufts growing here and there upon his chin, which he thought were the beginnings of a beard.
Would she think it was a beard, that sign of manhood? They were too downy, fluffy, unenergetic, a foolish kind of growth, like a colt’s, some long, some short, yet Charlie could not help being proud of them. He felt that they would come to something in time, and remembered that he had often heard it said that a beard which never had been shaved became the finest—in time. Would she think so? or would she laugh and tell him that this would not do, that he must get himself shaved?
He would not mind that she should laugh. She might do anything, all she did was delightful to poor Charlie, and there would be a compliment even in being told that he must get shaved. Charlie had stroked his upper lip occasionally with a razor, but it had never been necessary to suggest to him that he should get shaved before.
He had to be put back upon his sofa when nurse re-appeared, but he only remained there for the time, promising no permanent obedience. When Laura came he certainly should not receive her there.
“When did your letter go? When would Betty receive it?” he said, when Bee, breathless and pale, at last, under nurse’s escort, was brought downstairs.
“She must have got it last night. But there was a dinner party,” said Bee, after a pause, “last night at Portman Square.”
“What do I care for their dinner parties? I suppose the postman would go all the same.”
“But Betty could not do anything till this morning.”
“No,” said Charlie, “I suppose not. She would be too much taken up with her ridiculous dress and what she was to wear”—the knowledge of a young man who had sisters, pierced through even his indignation—“or with some nonsense about Gerald Lyon—that fellow! And to think,” he said, in an outburst of high, moral indignation “that one’s fate should be at the mercy of a little thing like Betty, or what she might say or do!”
“Betty is not so much younger than we are; to be sure,” said Bee, with reflective sadness, “she has never had anything to make her think of all the troubles that are in the world.”
Charlie turned upon her with scorn.
“And what have you had to make you think, and what do you suppose you know? A girl, always protected by everybody, kept out of the battle, never allowed to feel the air on your cheek! I must tell you, Bee, that your setting yourself up for knowing things is the most ridiculous exhibition in the world.”
Bee’s wounded soul could not find any words. She kept out of the battle! She setting up for knowing things! And what was his knowledge in comparison with hers? He had but been deluded like the rest by a woman whom Bee had always seen through, and never, never put any faith in; whereas she had lost what was most dear, all her individual hopes and prospects, and been obliged to sacrifice what she knew would be the only love of her life.
She looked at Charlie with eyes that were full of unutterable things. He was reckless with hope and expectation, self-deceived, thinking that all was coming right again; whereas Bee knew that things would never more be right with her. And yet he presumed to say that she knew nothing, and that to think she had suffered was a mere pretence! “How little, how little,” Bee thought, “other people know.”
The house seemed full that morning of sounds and commotions, unlike ordinary times. There were sounds of ringing bells, of doors opened and shut, of voices downstairs. Once both Charlie and Bee held their breath, thinking the moment had come, for a carriage stopped at the door, there was the sound of a noisy summons, and then steps coming upstairs.
Alas! it was nothing but the doctor, who came in, ushered by nurse, but not until she had held a private conference with him, keeping them both in the most tremendous suspense in the bedroom. It is true this was a thing which happened every morning, but they had both forgotten that in the tension of highly-wrought feeling.
And when the doctor came he shook his head. “There has been too much going on here,” he said. “You have been doing too much or talking too much. Miss Kingsward, you helped us greatly with our patient yesterday, but I am afraid you have been going too far, you have hurried him too much. We dare not press recovery at railway speed after so serious an illness as this.”
“Oh, I have not wished to do so,” said Bee. “It is some friends that we are expecting.”
“Friends? I never said he was to see friends,” the doctor said.
“Come doctor,” said Charlie, “you must not be too hard upon me. It’s—it’s my father and sister that are coming.”
“Your father and sister are different, but not too much even of them. Recollect, nurse, what I say, not too much even of the nearest and dearest. The machinery has been too much out of gear to come round all in a moment. And, Miss Kingsward, you are pale, too. You had better go out a little and take the air. There must not be too much conversation, not too much reading either. I must have quiet, perfect quiet.”
“Am I to do nothing but think?” said Charlie. “Is that the best thing for a fellow to do that has missed his schools and lost his time?”
“Be thankful that you are at a time of life when the loss of a few weeks doesn’t matter, and don’t think,” said the doctor, “or we shall have to stop even the father and sister, and send you to bed again. Be reasonable, be reasonable. A few days’ quiet and you will be out of my hands.”
“Oh, Charlie, then you have given up seeing anyone else,” said Bee, with a cry of relief as the doctor, attended by the nurse, went downstairs.
“I have done nothing of the kind,” he cried, jumping up from the sofa and going to the window. “And you had better tell that woman to go out for a walk and that you will look after me. Do you think when Laura comes that I will not see her if fifty doctors were to interfere? But if you want to save me a little you will send that woman out of the way. It is the worry and being contradicted that does me harm.”
“How can I, Charlie—oh, how can I, in the face of what the doctor said?”
He turned back upon her flaming with feverish rage and excitement.
“If you don’t I’ll go out. I’ll have a cab called, and get away from this prison,” he cried. “I don’t care what happens to me, but I shall see her if I die for it.”
“Perhaps,” said Bee to herself, trembling, “she will not come. Oh! perhaps she will not come!” But she felt that this was a very forlorn hope, and when the nurse came back the poor girl, faltering and ill at ease, obeyed the peremptory signs and frowns of Charlie, once more established on the sofa and seeming to take no part in the negotiation.
“Nurse, I have been thinking,” said Bee, with that talent for the circumstantial which women have, even when acting against their will, “that you have far more need of a walk and a little fresh air than I have, who have only been here for a day, and that if you will tell me exactly what to do, I could take care of him while you go out a little.”
“Shouldn’t think of leaving him,” said nurse, with her eyebrows working as usual and a mocking smile about her lips. “Too much talk; doctor not pleased.”
“But if I promise not to talk? I shall not talk. You don’t want to talk, do you, Charlie?”
Charlie launched a missile at her in his ingratitude, over his shoulder. “Not with you,” he said.
“You hear?” cried Bee, now intent upon gaining her point, and terrified lest other visitors might arrive before this matter were decided; “we shall not talk, and I will do all you tell me. Oh, only tell me what I am to do.”
“Nothing to do,” said the nurse, “not for the next hour; nothing, but keep him quiet. Well, if you think you can undertake that, just for half an hour—”
“I will—I will—for as long as you please,” cried Bee. It was better, indeed, if there must be this interview with Laura, that there should be as few spectators as possible. She hurried the woman away with eagerness, though she had been alarmed at the first suggestion. But when she was alone with him, and nobody to stand by her, thinking at every sound she heard that this was the dreaded arrival, Bee crept close to him with a sudden panic of terror and dismay.
“Oh, Charlie, don’t listen to her, don’t believe her; oh, don’t be led astray by her again! I have done what you told me, but I oughtn’t to have done it. Oh, Charlie, stand fast, whatever she says, and don’t be led astray by her again.”
The only sign of Charlie’s gratitude that Bee received was to be hastily pushed away by his shoulder. “You little fool, what do you know about it?” her brother said.
Butthe nurse went out for her walk and came in again and nothing happened, and Charlie had his invalid dinner, which in his excitement he could not eat, and Bee was called downstairs to luncheon, and yet nobody came. The luncheon was a terrible ordeal for Bee. She attempted to eat, with an eye on the window, to watch for the arrival of the visitors, and an ear upon the subdued sounds of the house, through which she seemed to hear the distant step, the distant voice of someone whose presence was not acknowledged. She repeated with eagerness her little speech of the night before. “Something must have detained papa,” she said, “I cannot understand it, but he is sure to come, and he will take me away.”
“I don’t want you to be taken away, my dear,” said Mrs. Leigh. “I should not let you go if I could help it.”
“Oh, but I must, I must,” said Bee, trembling and agitated. She could not eat anything, any more than Charlie, and when the nurse came downstairs, indignantly carrying the tray from which scarcely anything had been taken, Bee could make no reply to her remonstrances. “The young lady had better not come upstairs again,” said nurse; “she has done him more harm than good, he will have a relapse if we don’t mind. It is as much as my character is worth.” She talked like other people when there was no patient present, and she was genuinely afraid.
“What are we to do?” said Mrs. Leigh. “If this lady comes he ought not to see her! But perhaps she will not come.”
“That is what I have hoped,” said Bee, “but if she doesn’t come he will go out, he will get to her somehow; he will kill himself with struggling——”
At the suggestion of going out the nurse gave a shriek and thrust her tray into the servant’s hands who was waiting. “He will have to kill me first,” she said, rushing away.
And immediately upon this scene came Betty, fresh and shining in her white frock, with a smile like a little sunbeam, who announced at once that Miss Lance was coming.
“How is Charlie?” said Betty. “Oh, Mrs. Leigh, how good you have been! Papa is coming himself to thank you. What a trouble it must have been to have him ill here all the time. Mrs. Lyon, whom I am staying with, thinks it so wonderful of you—so kind, so kind! And Bee,sheis coming, though it is rather a hard thing for her to do. She says you will not like to see her, Mrs. Leigh, and that it will be an intrusion upon you; but I said when you had been so good to poor Charlie all along, you would not be angry that she should come who is such a friend.”
“Any friend, of course, of Colonel Kingsward’s——” Mrs. Leigh said stiffly, while little Betty stared. She thought they all looked very strange; the old lady so stiff, and Bee turning red and turning white, and a general air as if something had gone wrong.
“Is Charlie worse?” she said, with an anxious look.
And then Bee was suddenly called upstairs. “Can’t manage him any longer,” the nurse said on the landing. “I wash my hands of it. Your fault if he has a relapse.”
“Who is that?” said Charlie, from within, “Who is it? I will see her! Nobody shall interfere, no one—doctor, or nurse, or—the devil himself. Bee!”
“It is only Betty,” said Bee, upon which Charlie ceased his raging and flung himself again on his sofa.
“You want to torment me; you want to wear me out; you want to kill me,” he said, with tears of keen disappointment in his eyes.
“Charlie,” said Bee, “she is coming. Betty is here to say so; she is coming in about an hour or so. If you will eat your dinner and lie quite quiet and compose yourself you will be allowed to see her, and nurse will not object.”
“Oh, Miss Kingsward, don’t answer for me. It is as much as his life is worth.”
“But not unless you eat your dinner and keep perfectly quiet.”
“Give us that old dinner,” said Charlie, with a loud, unsteady laugh, and the tray was brought back and he performed his duty upon the half-cold dishes with an expedition and exuberance that gave nurse new apprehensions.
“He’ll have indigestion,” she said, “if he gobbles like that,” speaking once more inaudibly over Charlie’s shoulder. But afterwards all was quiet till the fated moment came.
I do not think if these girls had known the feelings that were within Miss Lance’s breast that they would have been able to retain their respective feelings towards her—Betty of adoration or Bee of hostility. She had lived a life of adventure, and she had come already on various occasions to the very eve of such a settled condition of life as would have made further adventure unnecessary and impossible—but something had always come in the way. Something so often comes in the way of such a career. The stolid people who are incapable of any skilful combinations go on and prosper, while those who have wasted so much cleverness or much wit, so much trouble—and disturbed the lives of others and risked their own—fail just at the moment of success. I am sometimes very sorry for the poor adventurers. Miss Lance went to Curzon Street with all her wits painfully about her, knowing that she was about to stand for her life. It seemed the most extraordinary spite of fate that this should have happened in the house of Aubrey Leigh. She would have had in any case a disagreeable moment enough between Charlie Kingsward and his father, but it was too much to have the other brought in. The man whom she had so wronged, the family (for she knew that his mother was there also) who knew all about her, who could tell everything, and stop her on the very threshold of the new life—that new life in which there would be no equivocal circumstances, nothing that she could be reproached with, only duty and kindness. So often she seemed to have been just within sight of that halcyon spot where she would need to scheme no more, where duty and every virtuous thing would be natural and easy. Was the failure to come all over again?
She was little more than an adventuress, this troubled woman, and yet it was not without something of the exalted feeling of one who is about to stand for his life, for emancipation and freedom to do well and all that is best in existence, that she walked through the streets towards her fate. Truth alone was possible with the Leighs, who knew everything about her past, and could not be persuaded or turned from their certainty by any explanations. But poor Charlie! Bare truth was not possible with him, whom she had sacrificed lightly to the amusement of the moment, whom she could never have married or made the instrument of building up her fortune except in the way which, to do her justice she had not foreseen, through the access he had given her to his father. How was she to satisfy that foolish, hot-headed boy?—and how to stop the mouths of the others in the background?—and how to persuade Colonel Kingsward that circumstances alone were against her—that she herself was not to blame? She did not conceal from herself any of these difficulties, but she was too brave a woman to fly before them. She preferred to walk, and to walk alone, to this trial which awaited her, in order to subdue her nerves and get the aid of the fresh air and solitude to steady her being. She was going to stand for her life.
It seemed a good augury that she was allowed to enter the house without any interruption from the sitting-room below, where she had the conviction that her worst opponents were lying in wait. She thought even that she had been able to distinguish the white cap and shawl of Mrs. Leigh through the window, but it was Betty who met her in the hall—met her with a kiss and expression of delight.
“Oh, I am so glad you have come,” said Betty, “he is so eager to see you.” The people in ambush in the ground floor rooms must have heard the exclamation, but they made no sign. At the door upstairs they were met by the nurse, excited and laconic, speaking without any sound.
“No worry—don’t contradict. Much as life is worth,” she said, with emphatic, silent lips. Miss Lance, so composed, so perfect in her manner, so wound up to everything, laughed a little—she was so natural!—and nodded her head. And then she went in.
Charlie on the sofa was of course the chief figure. But he had jumped up, flinging his wrappings about, and stood in his gaunt and tremulous length, with his big hollow eyes and his ragged little beard, and his hands stretched out. “At last!” he said, “at last—— Laura!” stumbling in his weakness as he advanced to her. Bee was standing up straight against the window in the furthest corner of the room, not making a movement. How real, how natural, how completely herself and ready for any emergency this visitor was! She took Charlie’s hands in hers, supporting him with that firm hold, and put him back upon his couch.
“Now,” she said, “the conditions of my visit are these: perfect quiet and obedience, and no excitement. If you rebel in any way I shall go. I know what nursing is, and I know what common-sense is—and I came here to help you, not to harm you. Move a toe or finger more than you ought, and I shall go!”
“I will not move, not an eyelid if you tell me not. I want to do nothing but look at you. Laura! oh, Laura! I have been dead, and now I am alive again,” Charlie said.
“Ill or well,” said Miss Lance, arranging his cushions with great skill, “you are a foolish, absurd boy. Partly it belongs to your age and partly to your temperament. I should not have considered you like your father at the first glance, but you are like him. Now, perfect quiet. Consider that your grandmother has come to see you, and that it does not suit the old lady to have her mind disturbed.”
He had seized her hand and was kissing it over and over again. Miss Lance took those caresses very quietly, but after a minute she withdrew her hand. “Now, tell me all about it,” she said; “you went off in such a commotion—so angry with me—”
“Never angry,” he said, “but miserable, oh, more miserable—too miserable for words. I thought that you had cut me off for ever.”
“You were right so far as your foolish ideas of that moment went, but I hope you have learnt better since, and now tell me what did you do? I hoped you had gone home, and then that you had gone to Scotland, and then—. What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” said Charlie, “I can’t tell you. I suppose I must have been ill then. I came up to town, but I don’t know what I did. And I was brought here, and I’ve been ill ever since, and couldn’t seem to get better until I heard you had been speaking for me. You speaking for me, Laura! Thinking of me a little, trying to bring me back to life. I’ll come back to life, dear, for you—anything, Laura, for you!”
“My dear boy, it is a pity you should not have a better reason,” she said. The two girls had not gone away. Betty had retired to the corner where Bee was, and they stood close together holding each other, ashamed and scornful beyond expression of Charlie’s abandonment. Even Betty, who was almost as much in love with Miss Lance as Charlie was, was ashamed to hear him “going on” in this ridiculous way. What Miss Lance felt to have these words of devotion addressed to her in the presence of two such listeners I will not say. She was acutely sensible of their presence, and of what they were thinking, but she did not shrink from the ordeal. “And you must not call me Laura,” she said, “unless you can make it Aunt Laura, or Grandmother Laura, which are titles I shouldn’t object to. Anything else would be ridiculous between you and me.”
“Laura!” the young man said, raising himself quickly.
“Say Aunt Laura, my dear, and if you move another inch I will go away!”
“You are crushing me,” he cried, “you are driving me to despair!”
“Dear Charlie,” said Miss Lance, “all this, you know, is very great nonsense—between you and me; I have told you so all along. Now things have really become too serious to go on. I want to be kind to you, to help you to get well, and to see as much of you as possible; for you are a dear boy and I am fond of you. But this can’t be unless you will see things in their true light and acknowledge the real state of affairs. I am most willing and ready to be your friend, to be a mother to you. But anything else is ridiculous. Do you hear me, Charlie?—ridiculous! You don’t want to be laughed at, and you don’t want me to be laughed at, I suppose?” She took his hands with which he had covered his face and held them in hers. “Now, no nonsense, Charlie. Be a man! Will you have me for your friend, always ready to do anything for you, or will you have nothing to do with me? Come! I might be your mother, I have always told you so. And look here,” she said, with a tone of genuine passion in her voice and a half turn of her flexible figure towards the two girls, “I’m worth having for a mother; whatever you may think in your cruel youth, I am, I am!” Surely this was to them and not to him. The movement, the accent, was momentary. Her voice changed again into the softness of a caress. “Charlie, my dear boy, don’t make me ridiculous, don’t make people laugh at me. They call me an old witch, trying to entrap a young man. Will you let people—nay, will youmakepeople call me so?”
“Imake anyone call you—anything but what you are!” he cried. “Nobody would dare,” said the unfortunate fellow, “to do anything but revere you and admire you so long as I was there.”
“And then break out laughing the moment your back was turned,” she said. “ ‘What a hold the old hag has got upon him!’ is what they would say. And it would be quite true. Not that I am an old hag. No, I don’t think I am that, I am worse. I’m a very well preserved woman of my years. I’ve taken great care of myself to keep up what are called my personal advantages. I have never wished—I don’t wish now—to be thought older than I am, or ugly. I am just old enough—to be your mother, Charlie, if I had married young, as your mother did——”
He drew his hands out of her cool and firm grasp, and once more covered his face with them. “Don’t torture me,” he cried.
“No, my dear boy, I don’t want to torture you, but you must not make me, nor yourself—whom I am proud of—ridiculous. I am going probably—for nothing is certain till it happens,” she said, with a mournful tone in her voice, slightly shaking her head, “and you may perhaps help to balk me—I am probably going to make a match with a reasonable person suited to my age.”
Poor Charlie started up, his hands fell from his face, his large miserable eyes were fixed upon hers. “And you come—you come—to tell me this!” he cried.
“It will be partly for you—to show how impossible your folly is—but most for myself, to secure my own happiness.” She said these words very slowly, one by one—“To secure my own happiness. Have I not the right to do that, because a young man, who should have been my son, has taken it into his foolish head to form other ideas of me? You would rather make me ridiculous and wretched than consider my dignity, my welfare, my happiness—and this is what you call love!” she said.
The girls listened to this conversation with feelings impossible to put into words, not knowing what to think. One of them loved the woman and the other hated her; they were equally overwhelmed in their young and simple ideas. She seemed to be speaking a language new to them, and to have risen into a region which they had never known.
Sheleft Charlie’s room, having soothed him and reduced him to quiet in this inconceivable way, with a smile on her face and the look of one who was perfectly mistress of the situation. But when she had gone down half-a-dozen steps and reached the landing, she stood still and leaned against the wall, clasping her hands tight as if there was something in them to hold by. She had carried through this part of her ordeal with a high hand. She had made it look the kindest yet the most decisive interview in the world, crushing the foolish young heart, without remorse, yet tenderly, kindly, with such a force of sense and reason as could not be resisted—and all so naturally, with so much apparent ease, as if it cost her nothing. But she was after all, merely a woman, and she knew that only half, nay, not half, not the worst half of her trial was over. She lay back against the wall, having nothing else to rest upon, and closed her eyes for a moment. The two girls had followed her instinctively out of Charlie’s room, and stood on the stairs one above the other, gazing at her. The long lines of her figure seemed to relax, as if she might have fallen, and in their wonder and ignorance they might still have stood by and looked on letting her fall, without knowing what to do. But she did not do so. The corner of the walls supported her as if they had made a couch for her, and presently she opened her eyes with a vague smile at Betty, who was foremost. “I was tired,” she said, and then, “it isn’t easy”—drawing a long breath.
At this moment the trim figure of Mrs. Leigh’s maid appeared on the stairs below, so commonplace, so trim, so neat, the little apparition of ordinary life which glides through every tragedy, lifting its everyday voice in announcements of dinner, in inquiries about tea, in all the nothings of routine, in the midst of all tumults of misery and passion. “If you please, madam—my lady would be glad if you would step into the dining-room,” she said.
Miss Lance raised herself in a moment from that half-recumbent position against the wall. She recovered herself, got back her colour and the brightness of her eyes, and that look of being perfectly natural, at her ease, unstrained, spontaneous, which she had shown throughout the interview with Charlie. “Certainly,” she said. There did not seem to be time for the twinkling of an eyelid between the one mood and the other. She required no preparation or interval to pull herself together. She looked at the two sisters as if to call them to follow her, and then walked quietly downstairs to be tried for her life—like a martyr—oh, no, for she was not a martyr, but a criminal. She had no confidence of innocence about her. She knew what indictment was about to be brought against her, and she knew it was true. This knowledge, however, gives a certain strength. It gives courage such as the innocent who do not know what charge may be brought against them or how to meet it, do not possess. She had rehearsed the scene. She knew what she was going to be accused of, and had thought over, and set in order, all the pleas. She knew exactly what she had done and what she had not, which was a tower of strength to her, and she knew that on her power of fighting it out depended her life. It is difficult altogether to deny our sympathy to a brave creature fighting for bare life. However guilty he may be, human nature takes sides with him, hopes in the face of all justice that there may be a loophole of escape. Even Bee, coming slowly downstairs after her, already thrown into a curious tumult of feeling by that scene in Charlie’s room, began to feel her breath quicken with excitement even in the hostility of her heart.
There was one thing that Miss Lance had not foreseen, and that burst upon her at once when the maid opened the door—Colonel Kingsward, standing with his arm upon the mantel-piece and his countenance as if turned to stone. The shock which this sight gave her was very difficult to overcome or conceal, it struck her with a sudden dart as of despair; her impulse was to fling down her arms, to acknowledge herself vanquished, and to retreat, a defeated and ruined adventuress, but she was too brave and unalterably by nature too sanguine to do this. She gave him a nod and a smile, to which he scarcely responded, as she went towards Mrs. Leigh.
“How strange,” she said, “when I come to see a new friend to find so old a friend! I wondered if it could be Mr. Leigh’s house, but I was not sure—of the number.”
“I am afraid I cannot say I am glad to see you, Laura,” said Mrs. Leigh.
“No? Perhaps it would have been too much to expect. We were, so to speak, on different sides. Poor Amy, I know, was never satisfactory to you, and I don’t wonder. Of course you only thought of me as her friend.”
“If that were all!” Mrs. Leigh said.
“Was there more than that? May I sit down? I have had a long walk, and rather an exhaustive interview—and I did not expect to be put on my trial. But it is always best to know what one is accused of. I think it quite natural—quite natural that you should not like me, Mrs. Leigh. I was Amy’s friend and she was trying to you. She put me in a very false position which I ought never to have accepted. But yet—I understand your attitude, and I submit to it with respect—but, pardon me—sincerely, I don’t know what there was more.”
Miss Lance had taken a chair, a perfectly upright one, on which few people could have sat gracefully. She made it evident that it was mere fatigue which made her subside upon it momentarily, and lifted her fine head and limpid eyes with so candid and respectful an air towards Mrs. Leigh’s comfortable, unheroic face, that no contrast of the oppressed and oppressor could have been more marked. If anyone had suffered in the matter between these two ladies, it certainly was not the one with the rosy countenance and round, well-filled-out figure; or so, at least, any impartial observer certainly would have felt.
Mrs. Leigh, for her part, was almost speechless with excitement and anger. She had intended to keep perfectly calm, but the look, the tone, the appearance of this personage altogether, brought before her overpoweringly many past scenes—scenes in which, to tell the truth, Miss Lance had not been always in the wrong, in which the other figure, now altogether disappeared, of Aubrey’s wife was the foremost, an immovable gentle-mannered fool, with whom all reason and argument were unavailing, whom everybody had believed to be inspired by the companion to whom she clung. All Amy’s faults had been bound upon Laura’s shoulders, but this was not altogether deserved, and Miss Lance did not shrink from anything that could be said on that subject. It required more courage to say, “Was there anything more?”
“More!” cried Mrs. Leigh, choking with the remembrance. “More! My boy’s house was made unsafe for him, it was made miserable to him, he was involved in every kind of danger and scandal, and she asks me if there was more?”
“Poor Amy,” said Miss Lance, with a little pause on the name, shaking her head gently in compassion and regret. “Poor Amy put me in a very false position. I have already said so, I ought not to have accepted it, I ought not to have promised; but it was so difficult to refuse a promise to the dying. Let Colonel Kingsward judge. She was very unwise, but she had been my friend from infancy and clung to me more, much more than I wished. She exacted a promise from me on her death-bed that I would never leave her child—which was folly, and, perhaps more than folly, so far, at least, as I was concerned. You may imagine, Colonel Kingsward,” she added, steadfastly regarding him. He had kept his head turned away, not looking at her, but this gaze compelled him against his will to shift his position, to turn towards the appellant who made him the judge. He still kept his eyes away, but his head turned by an attraction which he could not withstand. “You may imagine, Colonel Kingsward—that I was the person who suffered most,” Miss Lance said after that pause, “compelled to stay in a house where I had never been welcome, except to poor Amy, who was dead; a sort of guardian, a sort of nurse, and yet with none of their rights, held fast by a promise which I had given against my will, and which I never ceased to regret. You are a man, Colonel Kingsward, but you have more understanding of a woman’s feelings than any I know. My position was a false one, it was cruel—but I was bound by my word.”
“No one ought to have given such a promise,” he said, coldly, with averted eyes.
“You are always right, I ought not to have done so; but she was dying, and I was fond of her, poor girl, though she was foolish—it is not always the wisest people one loves most—fond of her, very fond of her, and of her poor little child.”
The tears came to Miss Lance’s eyes. She shook her head a little as if to shake them from her eyelashes. “Why should I cry? They have been so long happy, happier far than we——”
Mrs. Leigh, the prosecutor, the accuser, gave a gulp, a sob; the child was her grandchild, her only one—and besides anger in a woman is as prone to tears as sorrow. She gave a stifled cry, “I don’t deny you were good to the child; oh, Laura, I could have forgiven you everything! But not—not——”
“What?” Miss Lance said.
Mrs. Leigh seized upon Bee by the arm and drew her forward—Aubrey’s mother wanted words, she wanted eloquence, her arguments had to be pointed by fact. She took Bee, who had been standing in proud yet excited spectatorship, and held her by her own side. “Aubrey,” she said, almost inarticulately, and stopped to recover her breath—“Aubrey—whom you had driven from his home—found at last this dear girl, this nice, good girl, who would have made him a new life. But you interfered, you wrote to her father, you went—I don’t know what you did—and said you had a claim, a prior claim. If you appeal to Colonel Kingsward, he is the best judge. You went to him——”
“Not to me, I was not aware, I never even saw Miss Lance till long after; forgive me for interrupting you.”
Miss Lance turned towards him again with that full look of faith and confidence. “Always just!” she said. And this time for a tremulous moment their eyes met. He turned his away again hastily, but he had received that touch; an indefinable wavering came over his aspect of iron.
“Yes,” she said, “I do not deny it—it is quite true. Shall I now explain before every one who is here? I think,” she added, after a moment, “that my little Betty, who has nothing particular to do with it, may run away.”
“I!” said Betty, clinging to the back of a chair.
“Go,” said her father, impatiently, “go!”
“Yes, my dear, run away. Charlie must want some one. He will have got over me a little, and he will want some one. Dear little Betty, run away!”
Miss Lance rose from her seat—probably that too was a relief to her—and, with a smile and a kiss, turned Betty out of the room. She came back then and sat down again. It gained a little time, and she was at a crisis harder than she had ever faced before. She had gained a moment to think, but even now she was not sure what way there was out of this strait, the most momentous in which she had ever been. She looked round her at one after another with a look that seemed as secure and confident, as easy and natural, as before; but her brain was working at the most tremendous rate, looking for some clue, some indication. She looked round as with a pause of conscious power, and then her gaze fixed itself on Bee. Bee stood near Mrs. Leigh’s chair. She was standing firm but tremulous, a deeply concerned spectator, but there was on her face nothing of the eager attention with which a girl would listen to an explanation about her lover. She was not more interested than she had been before, not so much so as when Charlie was in question. When Mrs. Leigh, in her indictment, said, “You interfered,” Bee had made a faint, almost imperceptible movement of her head. The mind works very quickly when its fate hangs on the balance of a minute, and now, suddenly, the culprit arraigned before these terrible judges saw her way.
“I interfered,” Miss Lance said, slowly, “but not because of any prior claim;”—she paused again for a moment—“that would have been as absurd as in the case Colonel Kingsward knows of. I interfered—because I had other reasons for believing that Aubrey Leigh was not the man to marry a dear, good, nice girl.”
“You had—other reasons, Laura! Mind what you are saying—you will have to prove your words,” cried Mrs. Leigh, rising in her wrath, with an astonished and threatening face.
“I do not ask his mother to believe me. It is before Colonel Kingsward,” said Miss Lance, “that I stand or fall.”
“Colonel Kingsward, make her speak out! You know it was because she claimed my son—she, a woman twice his age; and now she pretends—— Make her speak out! How dare you? You said he had promised to marry you—that he was bound to you. Colonel Kingsward, make her speak out!”
“That was what I understood,” he said, looking out of the window, his head turned half towards the other speakers, but not venturing to look at them. “I did not see Miss Lance, but that was what I understood.”
Laura sat firm, as if she were made of marble, but almost as pale. Her nerves were so highly strung that if she had for a moment relaxed their tension, she would have fallen to the ground. She sat like a rock, holding herself together with the strong grasp of her clasped hands.
“You hear, you hear! You are convicted out of your own mouth. Oh, you are cruel, you are wicked, Laura Lance! If you have anything to say speak out, speak out!”
“I will say nothing,” said Miss Lance. “I will leave another, a better witness, to say it for me. Colonel Kingsward, ask your daughter if it was because of my prior claim, as his mother calls it, that she broke off her engagement with Aubrey Leigh.”
Colonel Kingsward turned, surprised, to his daughter, who, roused by the sound of her own name, looked up quickly—first at the seemingly composed and serious woman opposite to her, then at her father. He spoke to her angrily, abruptly.
“Do you hear? Answer the question that is put to you. Was it because of this lady, or any claim of hers, that you—how shall I say it?—a girl like you had no right to decide one way or the other—that you broke off—that your mind was changed towards Mr. Aubrey Leigh?”
It appeared to Bee suddenly as if she had become the culprit, and all eyes were fixed on her. She trembled, looking at them all. What had she done? She was surely unhappy enough, wretched enough, a clandestine visitor, keeping Aubrey out of his own house, and what had she to do with Aubrey? Nothing, nothing! Nor he with her—that her heart should now be snatched out of her bosom publicly in respect to him.
“That is long past,” she said, faltering, “it is an old story. Mr. Aubrey Leigh is—a stranger to me; it is of no consequence—now!”
“Bee,” her father thundered at her, “answer the question! Was it because of—this lady that you changed your mind?”
Colonel Kingsward had always the art, somehow, of kindling the blaze of opposition in the blue eyes which were so like his own. She looked at him almost fiercely in reply, fully roused.
“No!” she said, “no! It was not because of—that lady. It was another—reason of my own.”
“What was your reason?” cried Mrs. Leigh. “Oh, Bee, speak! What was it, what was it? Tell me, tell me, my dear, what was your reason? that I may prove to you it was not true.”
“Had it anything to do with—this lady?” asked Colonel Kingsward once more.
“I never spoke to that lady but once,” cried Bee, almost violently. “I don’t know her; I don’t want to know her. She has nothing to do with it. It was because of something quite different, something that we heard—I—and mamma.”
Miss Lance looked at him with a smile on her face, loosing the grip of her hands, spreading them out in demonstration of her acquittal. She rose up slowly, her beautiful eyes filled with tears. She allowed it to be seen for the first time how she was shaken with emotion.
“You have heard,” she said, “a witness you trust more than me—if I put myself into the breach to secure a pause, it was only such a piece of folly as I have done before. I hope now that you will let me withdraw. I am dreadfully tired, I am not fit for any more.”
She looked with that appeal upon her face, first at one of her judges, then at the other. “If you are satisfied, let me go.” It seemed as if she could not say a word more. They made no response, but she did not wait for that. “I take it for granted,” she added, “that by that child’s mouth I am cleared,” and then she turned towards the door.
Colonel Kingsward, with a little start, came from his place by the mantel-piece and opened it for her, as he would have done for any woman. She let it appear that this movement was unexpected, and went to her heart; she paused a moment looking up at him—her eyes swimming in tears, her mouth quivering.
“How kind you are!” she said, “even though you don’t believe in me any more! but I have done all I can. I am very tired, scarcely able to walk.” He stood rigid, and made no sign, and she, looking at him, softly shook her head—“Let me see you at least once,” she said, very low, in a pleading tone, “this evening, some time?”
Still he gave no answer, standing like a man of iron, holding the door open. She gave him another look, and then walked quietly, but with a slight quiver and half stumble, away. They all stood watching until her tall figure was seen to pass the window, disappearing in the street, which is the outer world.
“Colonel Kingsward—” said Mrs. Leigh.
He started at the sound of his name, as if he had but just awakened out of a dream, and began to smooth his hat, which all this time he had held in his hands.
“Excuse me,” he said, “excuse me, another time. I have some pressing business to see to now.”
And he, too, disappeared into that street which led both ways, into the monotony of London, which is the world.