CHAPTER XII
“MY dear!” said Lady Wilmot, as her motor-car stopped in Dover Street before her club. “Who’d have thought of seeing you?” The man opened the door, and she descended with a rustle of silks to shake hands with Rose Summers, who was passing. “What are you doing away from your country cottage? I thought you never left off holding your children’s hands for a minute. Come in and have some tea,” she exclaimed in one breath.
Rose hesitated. “I succumb to tea,” she said, after a second’s pause, “though I’ve enough shopping to do to last a week.”
They entered the club, and Lady Wilmot bore down upon the tea-room like a ship in full sail, Rose following in her wake with an expression of anticipated amusement. It was to the prospect of gossip she had succumbed, rather than to the offer of tea, with the prescience that to one who had fallen a little behind the times, half an hour with LadyWilmot would be a godsend. “I shall learn more than I could pick up in three months, otherwise,” was her smiling reflection as she settled herself opposite her hostess at one of the tables of colored marble, in the embrasure of a window.
“We’re early, or we shouldn’t get a table,” pursued Lady Wilmot. “Always a hideous crush here. Well, my dear, I hope the babies are better? What an untold nuisance children must be! Measles is part of them, I suppose? How do you like your cottage? And when is Jack coming home? Tea and cake and muffins”—this to the waiter, in parenthesis. “Do you see that woman coming in? The one with the painted gauze scarf—not the only paint about her, by the way. Well, remind me to tell you something in connection with her, presently. Quite amusing. And how long are you going to be in town, my dear? And where are you staying?”
Rose selected the last two questions to answer.
“I’m only up for the day,” she said. “I’m afraid to leave the children longer. They develop a fresh infectious disease the moment my eye is not upon them.” She laughed, drawing off her gloves. It was the laugh ofa woman contented with life, as for her it had resolved itself into the normal fate of motherhood, with its anxieties, its pleasures, its anticipations.
Seated in the angle of the window, the light falling on her sunburnt face, her erect figure well suited by a successfully cut cloth gown, she was not only pleasant to look at, but she struck a curiously different note from the majority of the other women who now began to crowd the tea-room—women whose distinctive feature was their aimlessness.
“You’ve improved a great deal, my dear!” remarked Lady Wilmot, after a critical stare. “I always said you were the type that improved with age. You’ll be a good-looking woman at forty, when all this sort of thing”—she included the room with a sweep of her hand—“is done for.”
Mrs. Summers laughed again. “How encouraging of you!”
“You’ve seen the Kingslakes, I suppose?” was Lady Wilmot’s next query.
“No, scarcely once since they got into their flat last November. Just as they came to town, I moved out, and the children have kept me bound hand and foot ever since.I’m going to rush in between five and six on my way to Victoria.”
“My dear, you won’t know Cecily!”
“Why not?” asked Rose, almost sharply.
“So pretty. So well dressed. Curious what a man can do, isn’t it? No wonder they’re vain.” Lady Wilmot smiled broadly as she raised a superfluously buttered muffin to her lips.
“What man?” asked Rose, brusquely.
“Mayne, my dear; Dick Mayne, The Uncommercial Traveller, or Patience Rewarded. It would make a nice little modern tract. But the result is admirable as far as Cecily is concerned. I saw her about eighteen months ago. She came up to a lunch-party with Robert. She was positively dowdy, and like the lady—who was it?—who had no more spirit in her. Never saw such a collapse in my life, and every one agreed with me. But now! As pretty as ever—prettier. There’s something different about her, too. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s a touch of dignity about my lady. No, it’s more than that. It’s something a little sphinx-like. Anyhow, it’s a most effective pose. Every one’s talking, of course; but, as I tell them, when the result is so admirable why inquiretoo closely about the means?” She chuckled a little. Rose looked at her calmly.
“Every one’s talking?” she said. “That means what you so aptly describe as ‘this sort of thing.’” She let her eyes wander round the room, which was now filled with chattering women. “Does it matter? Cecily’s friends know as well as you do that what you insinuate is a—is not true.”
Lady Wilmot’s expression wavered. She had crossed swords with Rose Summers before, and always found the exercise a little exhausting. Reluctantly she determined to be amicable, so with a laugh she shrugged her shoulders. “Of course, my dear. What a literal mind you have! You know Robert’s got a secretary?” she added, with apparent innocence.
“So I hear. Philippa Burton,” returned Rose, with composure.
Lady Wilmot’s eyes lit up. “Do you know her?”
“I met her long ago in Germany. She was a school-fellow of Cecily’s. I dare say you know that.”
There was a pause. Lady Wilmot determined on a new move.
“Cecily’s a fool,” she said, gravely,—“thatis, if she wants to keep her husband.” She glanced sharply at Rose, who was sipping her tea with exasperating indifference. “She had driven Robert to try reprisals, I suppose.” There was a slight pause, during which Rose took some more tea-cake. “That’s what every one imagines, anyhow,” continued Lady Wilmot, with a distinct access of sharpness. “It’s a dangerous game.” She shook her head as a virtuous matron might have done, and Rose struggled with a smile. “I’ve no patience with wives who allow attractive women to enter their homes under the pretext of work which they ought to be doing themselves,” she concluded, in an exasperated tone, as she glanced at her neighbor’s blank face. “Why on earth doesn’t Cecily act as secretary to her own husband?”
“Because she’s writing a novel of her own, and hasn’t time,” said Rose, speaking at last, to give, from Lady Wilmot’s point of view, an utterly valueless piece of information.
“Ridiculous!” she ejaculated. “I should have thought there was enough scribbling in the family. Why doesn’t she look after her husband, and be a companion and helpmeet to him, instead of allowing another woman to come in and give the sympathy whichonly a wife—and all that kind of thing?” she concluded, hastily, becoming suddenly conscious of her companion’s amused eyes. It was a triumph for Rose. She had actually driven Lady Wilmot, of all people, into the ridiculous position of defending the domestic hearth, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that no one felt her position more keenly.
She rose from the table, extending her hand with great cordiality.
“Thank you so much for your delicious tea,” she said. “And I’m sure you’ll forgive me for rushing off in this unceremonious way. My train goes at half-past seven, and Imustget Cecily in, as well as socks and shoes and sashes and things. No,don’tmove. There’s such a crush to get through, and I can find my way out—truly. Good-bye.” She was gone, threading her way between the tea-tables, and smiling back at Lady Wilmot, who instantly summoned a bewildered waiter, upon whom she made a vague attack for indefinite shortcomings.
Rose stepped into a hansom with a smile which already contained more bitterness than amusement. She was reviewing facts as interpreted by Lady Wilmot and company.