Belchamber

‘Look at grandmamma,’ he said; ‘wasn’t she beautiful?’

Cissy took the picture and stared at it with no answering smile. It seemed to have a curious fascination for her. ‘How like!’ she murmured. ‘How very like!’

‘Oh! come,’ said Sainty, glad to get her to talk about anything. ‘I can’t say I think her grace looks much like that nowadays.’

‘I didn’t mean that it was like the duchess,’ said Cissy with a hysterical gulp. ‘But don’t you see the extraordinary likeness to Cl—— to your cousin Mr. Morland?’

Sainty could not have explained why the sudden mention of Claude was displeasing to him.

‘He is thought like our grandmother,’ he said shortly, ‘but he is not nearly so good-looking; the duchess was a great beauty in her youth.’

Cissy did not discuss the question, but she kept the book absently in her lap, and when Sainty had returned to his reading, he could see her turning the pages.

As the long hours wore away, Belchamber became intolerably weary, and he suspected Cissy of being not less so; but when taxed with fatigue, she eagerly repudiated the idea, and professed a tremendous interest in her book. ‘I must see how it is going to come out,’ she said; ‘it’s awfully exciting.’

Sainty ached all over, but he could not insist. He returned to his own reading, which he found less stimulating than Cissy seemed to find hers. After a while he noticed that she had moved into a harder and more upright chair. She was struggling against sleep; in half an hour she had not turned a page of the work she found so enthralling. Finally, towards midnight, he saw the book waving to and fro, the fair head bowed almost down on it. He went softly over to her, and touched her. With a cry she started to her feet; the book fell on the floor with a bang.

‘You must go to bed, Cissy,’ Sainty said kindly; ‘you’re dropping with sleep.’

‘I’m not tired; I’m not sleepy,’ she cried. ‘I must finish this—it’s so interesting.’

‘Nonsense. I’ve been watching you; you haven’t read a page in half an hour; you can’t keep your eyes open.’

Her eyes were open enough now, wide and strange, like those of a hunted animal. She made a gesture with her hands as though to thrust him back. ‘I can’t—I won’t,’ she panted. ‘You shan’t make me. Keep away. Don’t touch me.’

‘My poor child,’ Sainty said, ‘what are you afraid of? Do you think I would do anything you don’t like? You can’t sit up all night. You are dead tired, and must have rest. I won’t come near you, if you don’t wish it.’

She looked at him but half reassured. ‘Do you mean it?’ she said doubtfully. ‘Can I trust you?’

‘I am not accustomed to lie,’ Sainty answered. ‘Do you think I would take advantage of you by a shabby trick?’

She sighed, and half turned away, then suddenly faced him again. ‘It is not enough,’ she cried. ‘It is not only to-night. You may as well know it first as last. You are odious to me—horrible. I can never—never——’

‘Hush, hush!’ Sainty interrupted her. ‘Take care what you say. You are tired, excited, overwrought. So am I. Go to bed now, in God’s name. You know you have nothing to fear. We will talk of this some other time, calmly if we can, but not to-night, not to-night.’

‘Yes, now, to-night,’ she insisted. ‘Why put it off? It’s got to be faced, and why not at once? I tell you you are repulsive to me. I can never be your wife in anything but name. I thought I could, but when it comes to the point, I can’t do it. It’s stronger than me. It’s no use.’ She spread her hands with the gesture of one who renounces a struggle. On her finger blazed the ring he had given her, and below it shone the plain gold hoop which he had placed there that morning, the outward and visible sign of the obligation she was repudiating.

Sainty staggered as though she had struck him in the face. ‘I don’t understand,’ he whispered. ‘If you feel like this towards me, if I am repulsive, loathsome to you, why did you marry me?’

‘Oh, it’s simple enough,’ she answered, with a little cruel laugh. ‘You had so many things that I have always wanted, money, position, rank, everything I have been brought up to think desirable. Since I can remember, not a girl has been married among our friends that the first question has not been, was she making a “good” marriage? which meant, was she getting a big enough share of all these things in exchange for herself? No one could say I wasn’t. I’ve made the match of the season. There isn’t a girl I know, or a mother, who isn’t green with envy of me. You can’t say it wasn’t a temptation.’ And she laughed again hysterically.

‘But feeling as you did about me, as you must before the end have known you felt, why in heaven’s name didn’t you turn back, when I gave you the chance, before it was too late?’

‘Do you think I was allowed a minute to think? Wasn’t my mother there every minute of the day? At the very time you speak of, wasn’t she listening at the door, and didn’t she come hurrying in before I’d time to answer? If for a moment I ever forgot the title, and the money, and the jewels, the big house, all the things I’d set my heart on, she was always ready to talk about them, to dangle them before me. If I ever wavered, she would tell me what a slur it was on a girl whose engagement was broken off, how no one would ever believe I had given up all these things of my own free will, how people would say there was something against me, and how I should never marry. There wasn’t an oldish poor girl we knew, losing her looks, and still tagging about to balls, and trying to pretend she was cheerful, that she didn’t remind me of. Never directly, mind you. They were just casually mentioned. O Lord! if I so much as suggested to her that she wanted me to marry for money, she was all virtuous indignation.’

‘How ghastly!’ Sainty whispered in horror. ‘I’ve read of such things, of mothers selling their daughters, bullying them into marrying men they couldn’t love for the sake of an establishment; but I’ve always thought it was exaggerated, not true to life. I didn’t think a mother could condemn her own child to lifelong misery.’

‘Oh, you mustn’t be too hard on mamma,’ Cissy said. ‘She thought she was doing the best thing for me. Remember she has the very highest opinion of you, and was quite sure you would make an excellent husband; and she knew how much I wanted all the other things. If marriage were nothing but that, nothing but living in the house with a person who was good-natured and never interfered with one, and provided all the good things of life for one, it would be well enough. That is what every one in England always talks to girls as if it were. Mamma would have thought it most indelicate to suggest there was another side. You are made to forget that as much as possible. Oh, of course I knew, because I’m not a fool, and girls are not such ninnies as people think them; but I tried to forget, and when I didn’t see you, I did forget. That was why, when I did see you, I was always so beastly to you; for I’m quite ready to admit I was beastly to you.’

As Cissy’s terror abated, her engaging frankness began to return to her. Sainty couldn’t help liking her for it. He began to be so full of sympathy with her point of view, so sorry for all she must have suffered, that he almost forgot the cruel wrong she had done him.

‘Mamma knew I should never be happy with a poor man,’ she went on. ‘She knew how I cared for all the things you could give me. She was quite right, I did want them; I wanted them awfully; I want them still as much as ever: only when it comes to the point I can’t give the price. I thought I could, but I can’t. Mamma was so far honester than me. She never supposed that once the bargain was made I should hesitate to pay. It’s so like me to want things dreadfully, and not to have the courage to do what’s necessary to get them.’

Sainty was appalled by her cynicism, even while he admired her straightforwardness. What became of his dreams of romance, of the eye that had seen beneath his unattractive exterior, and loved him for the beauties of his soul? The blue eyes had seen nothing but the sparkling of diamonds. In her vision of married life he had been only the necessary evil, the odious, inevitable condition to which she must submit, if she would have his name and money, as the princess in the story had to kiss the swineherd to get possession of the toys she coveted. Still the princess had kissed the herd, and even after all that she had said he thought he would make one last appeal to her. If she realised how much he felt for her, how entirely he understood her unwillingness, how patient, how gentle he was ready to be, perhaps she might be touched, might learn to think of him with something less of horror. To him who had all his life wished for nothing but to make other people happy, it was intolerable to think of himself as the brutal gaoler, the tyrant before whom this young thing paled with terror.

In the eagerness of her explanation, Cissy had come nearer to him. They were standing quite close together, face to face. ‘Cissy,’ he said gently, ‘is it quite, quite impossible? Do you think that if we lived together for a long time, you might in the end get used to me, even come to care for me a little?’ But at that she sprang back from him again with an unmistakable gesture of repugnance that said more than words. ‘No, no, no—never,’ she cried hurriedly. ‘I’ve told you it’s no good. I can’t help it, my mind’s made up. I’d rather give up everything, face anything, for of course I can’t expect you to keep me. You can send me back to my mother. Life’ll be hell upon earth, but it’ll be better than that.’

With all his desire to be fair to her, Sainty could not but be struck by her intense egotism, her inability to appreciate any point of view but her own. She was evidently unaware of the brutality of her attitude towards him. To his morbid self-depreciation her undisguised horror of him appeared only too natural. Still, no one likes to be told these things quite so bluntly.

‘You have nothing to fear,’ he said a little loftily. ‘After what you have said, you may be sure I shall never ask the smallest thing of you. It is a little unfortunate that you didn’t make up your mind rather earlier, as you have made it up so irrevocably now. Had you but been as sure of your feelings a month, a week, even twenty-four hours ago, you might have saved us both from what I hardly dare look forward to.’

‘I can go home; I had better go home,’ Cissy whimpered. Of course the sight of distress melted Sainty at once.

‘Don’t you see,’ he said, ‘that to go home now would make just five hundred times the talk and scandal that you felt you couldn’t face if you had broken off your engagement?’

‘It can’t be helped,’ Cissy sobbed.

‘You have brought us both into a horrible situation,’ Sainty answered, ‘and I frankly don’t see just now what is best to be done; but I’m sure that further talk will do no good just now. It is long past twelve o’clock, and we are both tired out; you can’t go back to Chester Square to-night, if you want to ever so much. If I were you I shouldn’t get up to breakfast. Good-night.’

Some compunction seemed to seize Cissy as she got to the door. She turned. ‘I’m awfully sorry, you know,’ she said. ‘I suppose, when you come to think of it, I haven’t treated you any too well; and—and—of course what I said wasn’t very civil, but I thought it best to be honest——’

‘All right, all right,’ Sainty answered hastily; ‘please don’t say any more about it.’

As he lay sleepless and uncomfortable on his lonely bed, he wished that the necessity for honest dealing had impressed itself on his wife a little sooner. He thought of the night three years before, when he had lain awake (as he lay now) listening to the sounds that celebrated his coming of age. Somehow the great festal days of his life did not seem to bring him personally much enjoyment.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Belchambers took possession of their new town-house just in time for the opening of Parliament in the ensuing year. It was only partially furnished as yet, and most uncomfortable; but, as Lady Eccleston remarked with great originality, ‘the only way to get the workmen out of a house was to move in yourself.’ The first-floor rooms still echoed with shouts and hammerings, but the upper part of the house was more or less ready, and so were the dining-room and some back rooms on the ground-floor, which Cissy had reluctantly decided should eventually be given up to Sainty. It was astonishing how swiftly she had

except the vulgar and obvious one which she would have shared with the humblest of wives. Having once made it quite clear that she was to receive everything and give nothing, she soon ceased to talk of returning to her mother, and Sainty was amazed at the ease with which she adapted herself to the awkwardness of the situation. In her place, he felt sure, he would not have rung a bell, or asked for a postage stamp, but it never seemed to occur to Cissy that there was anything curious in the arrangement; she annexed all her husband’s possessions without scruple or hesitation as soon as she discovered that no embarrassing condition attached to doing so.

In spite of her son’s entreaties that she would stay with them, Lady Charmington had retired to the dower-house immediately after the marriage, and they had barely returned from their brief and dismal honeymoon in the duke’s villa before Cissy began to dispose of everything at Belchamber as if it had all been hers from earliest childhood. There had been some talk of a wedding-journey on the Continent, but Cissy had no desire to prolong the tête-à-tête with Sainty, which she did not enjoy. It was England, which she knew and understood, that was to be the scene of her triumphs; and the sight of strange lands had no charms for her compared to the fun of swooping down as mistress on the great house, where she had been an unconsidered little guest, settling which should be her own rooms, having them redecorated according to the taste of the latest fashionable upholsterer, and moving into them whatever took her fancy in other parts of the house.

She was so happily busy that she almost forgot to regret the Season, and gave up Ascot without a sigh, contenting herself with Cowes and Goodwood, which she did with great éclat from a friend’s yacht, while Sainty enjoyed a fortnight of peace and seclusion.

Congenial as she found the task of establishing herself in her husband’s ancestral home, it was nothing to the delirious enjoyment of selecting, decorating, and furnishing a big London house, regardless of expense; and all the time she could spare from entertaining shooting parties in the autumn was devoted to the feverish prosecution of this new delight.

Of course every one agreed that they must have a town-house. The duke and Lord Firth were not less convinced of its necessity than the large circle of acquaintances who hoped to be entertained in it. Even Lady Charmington, while she winced at the recklessness of the expenditure, was partly consoled by the sight of her son taking what she considered ‘his proper position in the world.’ She consoled herself with the thought that it was her long years of careful management that made all this profusion possible. Sainty must attend the debates in the House of Lords, and though she was rather scandalised by his Radicalism, she reflected that the limited number of peers on that side, since the Home Rule split, made some small office not improbable for him, when the Liberals came in again.

And Sainty, though he cared for none of these things, had no heart to refuse them to the girl whom he had married. The fact was that the more he thought about the matter the sorrier he felt for his wife. For his part, he told himself, he was not made for love, had never expected it to play any part in his life, and was no worse off than he was before. The disadvantage of taking a consistently humble view of one’s own attractions is not without its compensations; thus the wound to his self-love, of which a vain man would almost have bled to death, was to Sainty, who had no vanity and very little self-love, only in the nature of those scratches which smart and feel sore, but rob us of no drop of heart’s blood. Life was not perceptibly more unpleasant to him than it had been before, and he had still the same substitutes for a more active happiness with which he had been accustomed to fill it, his studies, his schemes of beneficence, the management of his property. But this poor child, so well fitted by nature to love and be loved, whose one chance of rising above the empty frivolity of her surroundings might have lain in the ennobling influence of a great passion, for something how much less satisfying than a mess of pottage had she bartered her birthright, a handful of tin counters, a paper crown! In spite of what he considered her generosity in taking the blame on herself, he was more and more inclined to regard her as the victim of her mother’s worldliness, enmeshed like himself in the toils of that careful schemer. It was not in nature that a creature so young and fresh should be so greatly influenced by considerations of wealth or rank; he could not think it. These things had been dangled before her eyes till she had been dazzled by their false lustre. She was too innocent, he reflected, to realise to what extent she had sacrificed all chances of woman’s best happiness to gain them. The question was how to shield her from the consequences of her own act, to save her from the bitter repentance only too likely to follow. To do so might not be permanently in his power; but meanwhile, if she so keenly desired the undesirable as to be ready to risk the ruin of her life for it, what was simpler than to give it to her? Jewels, clothes, a house in town, the means to feed the thankless rich, the power to walk out of the room before older women—if these things could make her happy, as far as they were his to give, let her take them in full measure. They were freely hers. He had no particular use for them himself.

Perhaps the spectacle of the ease and gusto with which she flung herself into her new rôle of the great lady was not without a certain satiric amusement for him.

One day he would find her on the pavement before the house, attended by Algy Montgomery and a grave professional gentleman who looked the ideal of a racing duke, while a pair of high-stepping bays were driven up and down for her inspection. ‘Haven’t we more horses than we know what to do with?’ Sainty would ask.

‘My dear boy!’ Cissy cried, ‘a parcel of old screws. Jane Rugby was saying only the other day that we hadn’t a decent pair o’ horses in the stable.’

On another, she would be busy comparing designs for carriages. ‘Those old bathing-machines at Belchamber,’ she remarked loftily, ‘are all very well for the country; but in my position it would be too grotesque for me to be seen driving about London in them. The duchess has been awfully kind about advising me. It was her idea to send for the old chariot and see if it can’t be done up for drawing-rooms. She says unless it has got dry-rot or anything, that a couple of hundreds spent on it ought to make it as good as new; and of course I don’t want to waste money on a tiresome thing one would never use on other occasions, if by spending a little on the old one it can be made to do. But I must have a decent brougham and open carriage at once; you must see yourself there are no two ways about it. And, come to think of it, you ought to have a brougham of your own. We are sure to clash and want it at the same time, if we try and do with one.’

‘Perhaps one of the bathing-machines from Belchamber might do for me,’ suggested Sainty, not without malice.

‘Well,’ said Cissy quite gravely, ‘I don’t know that it mightn’t.’

‘Who told you of these people?’ Sainty asked, examining the neatly painted little pictures.

‘Oh, they make all the duke’s carriages, and they are always smartly turned out. Your cousin Claude told them to send me these sketches, and he has promised to go with me to Longacre to see what they have in the shop.’

Since she married, Cissy had ceased to mention Claude as ‘Mr. Morland,’ and the prefix ‘your cousin’ was bridging the narrow chasm between that and calling him ‘Claude.’ Morland was able to be uncommonly useful to the pretty new cousin; not only at the coachbuilder’s were his taste and knowledge invaluable, but at the upholsterer’s, the bric-à-brac shops, the sales at Christy’s, and he had even been called on to give his views (and very sound views too) in the more intimate province of the modiste and the dressmaker. Sainty was obviously of no assistance. What could be more natural, if the lady needed counsel in such matters, than to turn to a near kinsman of her husband, and one so well qualified to help? It is true that Lady Eccleston was more than ready to assist her daughter in mounting her establishment on a suitable scale, and would very willingly have accompanied her to the shops, not, perhaps, without a hope of gleaning a few scattered ears on her own account from the harvest Cecilia was reaping with so large a hook; but that unnatural young person seemed to prefer almost any advice or companionship to her mamma’s. Ill as he thought of her, for the manœuvres with which she had compassed his union with her daughter, Sainty could not help a secret sympathy with the poor lady, who bore her pitiless relegation to a back place with a smiling stoicism worthy of a Red Indian. The old fiction of the perfect confidence and sisterlike relation between herself and her daughter was still gallantly maintained even to him, and when he reflected what potentialities of tearful complainings she had heroically foregone, he came near to feeling actual gratitude. But he need have been under no apprehension of plaintive confidences; anything natural or direct had long ceased to be possible to Lady Eccleston.

‘I cannot have mamma dropping in to lunch whenever it suits her,’ Cissy remarked ruthlessly. ‘I have told her she must not come more than once a week, unless she’s asked.’

‘But I thought you said you meant to let people know you were always at home for lunch?’

‘So I do; it is a very convenient way of seeing my friends. That’s just why I’ve had to speak to mamma. I should have her here every day if I didn’t. And it would bore a lot of younger women, who don’t know her particularly well, like Vere Deans or Ella Dalsany, to find her here perpetually—not to speak of the men.’

Sainty did not retort that Lady Deans and Lady Dalsany were not so very much younger that Lady Eccleston. It was no affair of his; and it soon became evident that Cissy’s mother was not the only relation whom it bored her friends to meet at her luncheon-table. Sainty had been brought up in a certain old-fashioned code of manners. His mother, seeing that he was shy and awkward in company, and being not less so herself, had insisted rather unduly on the ceremonial side of social life. He had been taught that hospitality demanded that he should receive and take leave of guests with some form, accompanying them to their carriages, and putting on their cloaks, which the groom of the chambers, who was much taller and unencumbered with a stick, would have done much better. But he was not long in discovering that these attentions were by no means demanded by the ladies of the set into which the duchess and Claude had made haste to introduce his wife.

If Cissy’s friends found Sainty tiresome, it must be admitted that he found them no less so. The repulsion was certainly mutual. He wondered sometimes what had become of all the people she had known and liked, and from whom she had received kindness, during the three or four seasons that had preceded her marriage; they seemed to have vanished like smoke. She was absorbed in a little knot of married women, for the most part considerably her seniors, much in the world’s eye, and none of them exactly qualified for the rôle of Cæsar’s wife. Their conversation was extremely esoteric, and the minute fragments of it which were intelligible to him shocked him profoundly. Occasional paragraphs in the papers assured him that ‘young Lady Belchamber,’ or ‘pretty little Lady Belchamber, who was among the most attractive of last season’s brides,’ was ‘very smart’ or ‘quite in the innermost set’; from which he was fain to derive such comfort as he might. He once ventured to ask Cissy why she never saw anything of the de Lissacs; he had hoped something for her from Alice’s influence. ‘I thought you and the girls were very intimate,’ he said.

‘Oh! girls bore me,’ she answered; ‘and besides, they are not the least in it; they wouldn’t have anything in common with the people they’d meet here. Of course with their money they might have done anything, but poor dear Mrs. de Lissac has no flair, don’t you know; she simply doesn’t take any trouble. I’ll ask them, if you like, some day when I’m having a duty dinner.’ And she did.

‘Why do we never see anything of you?’ Sainty asked of his old friend on that occasion. ‘I had hoped that when we came to town we should be much together.’

‘Well—here we are!’ said Alice, with rather frosty playfulness. ‘And you know,’ she added more gently, ‘how welcome you always are in Grosvenor Square.’

‘Cissy is always at home at lunch, you know,’ Sainty persisted. ‘Why don’t you come in sometimes?’

‘Lady Belchamber has never told either the girls or me that she was at home at lunch,’ said Alice, freezing again, and went on hurriedly to praise the beauty of the house and the taste of its mistress. Sainty looked round him. ‘Cissy has a genius for spending money,’ he said gloomily. ‘Wait till you see the drawing-rooms; these rooms are nothing to the plunges she is making upstairs.’ Before Mrs. de Lissac could answer, they were swooped upon by Lady Eccleston bringing Lady Deans with her.

‘Dear Alice,’ she cried, ‘Lady Deans fears you don’t remember her; you met at Belchamber. She is going to have a stall at the World’s Bazaar, and this is such an opportunity to have a little quiet talk about it. I have been telling Lady Deans that you are one of our very kindest helpers, and that you have given the most superb things; a few really good things that can be raffled for are such a help, and one can always raffle the same things two or three times over—no one ever knows.’

‘Why shouldn’t we have a lottery?’ asked Lady Deans. ‘I mean a real lottery, not for sofa-cushions and things, but for money prizes like they have abroad. I’m sure it’ld catch on.’

‘But I thought lotteries were illegal,’ Sainty objected.

‘Oh! not at bazaars, or for a charity,’ cried Lady Eccleston. ‘I know dear Father Stephen of St. Rhadegund’s, Houndsditch, told me they had a most successful one for their parish room and made heaps of money. I think Lady Deans’s is a lovely idea.’

‘Well—it’s gambling, you know,’ said Sainty. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t allow a roulette table——’

‘Why don’t you have a Derby sweep while you’re about it?’ suggested Algy Montgomery. ‘You could sell the tickets at the bazaar, and as the Derby won’t be for a good couple o’ months later you could forget to draw it at all. People would only suppose some other fellow had won, don’t yer know.’

Lady Eccleston was enchanted with the notion. ‘Dear Lord Algy! Could you work it for us?’ But Mrs. de Lissac, inured as she was to bazaar morality, was, as a clergyman’s daughter, a little alarmed at any connection with the turf. ‘How are you getting on with the people for the Café Chantant?’ she asked, to change the subject.

Lady Eccleston rattled off a list that seemed to contain every one of any celebrity in the theatrical or musical world.

‘And have you got them all?’ asked Lady Deans.

‘Well, I’ve written to a good many of them, and one or two have answered,’ said Lady Eccleston; ‘but I shall pop them all down—their names will look splendid on the programme.’

‘But will they come?’ asked Sainty.

‘Oh dear no, they won’t come; very few of them will come. But some will; I shall make sure of one or two, and we can get some really good amateurs; and every now and then some one can get up and say that Ellen Terry regrets she couldn’t manage it at the last moment, or something. We shall let people in for ten minutes at a time in batches; they’ll think they just missed some of the best people——’

‘Seems to me you will “let ’em in,”’ chuckled Lord Algy.

‘Do you think,’ asked Lady Deans, ‘there would be any chance of getting Lady Arthur to sing or dance, or anything? I suppose, Lord Belchamber, you couldn’t ask her for us?’

‘But she never could sing or dance, or do anything,’ interposed Lord Algernon.

‘Oh! that wouldn’t matter, as long as she would appear. You see, all the story of her marriage and everything made her a celebrity.’

‘But it was all two years ago,’ Lady Eccleston interrupted. ‘People have forgotten all about it,’ and she deftly piloted the discussion to other projects, so that Sainty was spared the necessity of making any answer to this astounding proposition.

The bazaar in connection with which so many happy suggestions had been offered was one of Society’s periodic sacrifices to philanthropy. Certain fair ones, to whom no form of self-advertisement came amiss, were ready to dress up in the cause of charity and display themselves to a wider public than that which usually had the opportunity of admiring them, on the understanding that none of the trouble of organisation should fall upon them, and that the date should be fixed for before Easter, when there wasn’t much else going on. On these conditions, Lady Eccleston and a little band of zealous fellow-workers had secured a most imposing list of stall-holders. It was calculated that the suburbs and the Stock Exchange would come in their thousands to see and converse with the ladies whose names and doings Lady Eva Morland made weekly familiar to them in the pages of ‘Maidie’s Tea Table’ in the Looking-glass. The proceeds were to be handed to a charity in which a very great personage was interested, and the bazaar was to be opened on at least two of its three days by different members of the royal family. Lady Eccleston was in her element, and running the whole concern. If it was not she who had the brilliant inspiration of making the various stalls represent the countries of the earth and dressing the fair vendors in national costume, at least she took the credit for it. In spite of his mother-in-law’s repeated injunctions to him to attend the opening, Sainty had not the slightest intention of doing so. Indeed, he had hoped, by liberal contributions, to get off altogether, but Alice de Lissac had reinforced Lady Eccleston with gentle persistence.

‘I think you should put in an appearance,’ she said, ‘just to support your wife, you know; it will look queer if you don’t, when she and her mother are so much interested. I should have thought you would come to the opening’; and finally Sainty was fain to buy immunity from being present at this ceremony with a promise to visit his wife’s stall in the course of one afternoon. It was not till somewhat late on the last day of the three that he brought himself to redeem his given word.

By the time he arrived, the whole show, though brilliantly lighted and to his perception still disagreeably crowded, had become a little the worse for wear. The stalls were denuded of half their contents, the air had a vitiated second-hand taste, and a fine impalpable dust, raised by the passing of so many feet, hung like a light haze over everything. Tired dishevelled girls, looking curiously sham in their fancy dresses by the side of people in everyday garb, and flushed under the rouge that had been thought a necessary part of their costume, moved among the crowd making a last effort to dispose of the remainder of their wares, excited by competition to perilous lengths of flirtation with unknown and rather common young men, with whom on no other occasion they would have thought of exchanging a word.

Sainty was patiently elbowing his way like Parsifal among the flower-maidens, and meditating on the mystery of what was and was not permitted to the London girl, when he was suddenly confronted by Mr. Austin Pryor. Every buttonhole of the young stockbroker’s neat frock-coat was decorated with faded vegetation and his arms loaded with a number of quite useless purchases.

‘Well, Belchamber,’ he began, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with your wife; too bad of her, I call it. I’d an awful good time here yesterday with her, and she made me promise to come again to-day and bring a lot of our fellows from the city. I told ’em all how ripping she looked in her Polish get-up, and now they’ve all come and she isn’t here; she’s gone and given us all the slip. Most unprincipled of her, I call it.’

Sainty, while expressing suitable distress at the faithless behaviour of his spouse, was secretly not sorry to be spared her encounter with the gallant Lotharios of Throgmorton Street, when he thought of the fragments of conversation he had already overheard in passing.

‘I don’t know what has happened to her, I’m sure,’ he said politely; ‘I expected to find her here myself.’

When at last he arrived at the lath and canvas pavillion, much bedraped with liberty muslin and flags, across the front of which a scroll displayed the legend, ‘Poland—Marchioness of Belchamber,’ he found only the de Lissac girls and another maiden, clad in little hussar caps and dolmans hung coquettishly on one shoulder, resentfully eyeing the ebbing tide of custom, while Alice and Lady Eccleston, aided by her obedient son Thomas, were feverishly tying parcels in the background.

‘Have you written on that one, Tommy,’ Lady Eccleston was saying, ‘Mrs. Brown, Elm Lodge, Streatham? Oh dear, which parcel is the big yellow cushion? I am sure that was the one she bought. Well, never mind, this is a cushion anyway, it feels soft; that’ll do. Ah, Sainty, you’ve come a little late, dear. Everything is over.’

‘What’s become of Cissy?’ Sainty inquired.

The young ladies were evidently not in the best of tempers, and this innocent question served to open the floodgates of their wrath.

‘Cissy’s gone,’ Norah de Lissac said crossly, ‘and left us in the lurch. She said she was tired, but I think she was only bored. When it got dull and shabby and all the nice people had gone it didn’t amuse her any more.’

‘It puts us in such a foolish position,’ Gemma chimed in. ‘People naturally come here to see her, and when they don’t find her they are not best pleased. One man asked me if I was Lady Belchamber, and when I said I wasn’t, he said, “Then which of you is?” Of course I had to say we none of us were, and then he was quite rude and said, “Then you’ve no business to put her name up over the stall.” It wasn’t at all pleasant.’

Norah took up her parable again. ‘She didn’t even take the trouble to put on her costume to-day, just came in her ordinary clothes, and of course we looked like dressed-up fools beside her. If she had just sent us word she wasn’t going to we wouldn’t have put ours on either.’

‘Oh, dears, it would have been a great pity,’ said Lady Eccleston, emerging from a pile of brown paper with her mouth full of pins. ‘You look charming in your dresses; they really suit you better than Cissy; and it would have been so flat if none of you had been in costume, for there really isn’t much in the stall itself to suggest Poland, I must admit I think Cissy really was tired, you know; she has had a hard two days of it.’

‘Well, we were tired too,’ said the implacable Norah. ‘She’s not the only person who has had a hard two days. Can’t we go home now, at least, and get off these ridiculous clothes?’ she asked, turning to her step-mother. Alice looked distressed and murmured something about ‘not deserting Lady Eccleston.’

‘Oh, don’t think of me,’ cried that lady. ‘You and the dear girls go. Tommy and I can soon finish what’s left to do. The people are thinning fast, and we’ve done very well. I can’t thank you enough for all your splendid help’; and she embraced the whole party with a last galvanic effort at cheerful enthusiasm.

Sainty saw the de Lissac party to their gorgeous equipage, and was just turning away from the door when a small voice at his elbow demanded, ‘Shall I please to call the kerridge, m’lord?’ and looking down he had a vision of two large appealing eyes and a white kid forefinger pressed tightly to a curly hatbrim. He recognised the diminutive boy who decorated Cissy’s coach-box when she rode abroad.

‘Yes,’ he said; ‘if the brougham is here, I may as well take it. Lady Belchamber has gone home.’

In the course of the drive he wondered why he had taken the trouble to come to the bazaar, and who had been benefited or pleased by his visit.

He had hardly got to his room and sat down to his book by the fire, with a sigh of relief, when a servant came to him.

‘If you please, my lord, Gibson wants to know if there are any more orders for the carriage.’

‘Not for me,’ Sainty answered, his mind on what he was reading. ‘Ask her ladyship.’

The man looked surprised and still lingered doubtfully.

‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘what is it?’

‘If you please, my lord, my lady hasn’t come in yet.’

‘Oh, I think she must have——’ Sainty was beginning but stopped himself. He saw no reason for discussing Cissy’s movements with the servants. ‘Then you must wait for orders till she does,’ he said.

He wondered a little why, if she left the bazaar because she was tired, she had not come home. But after all, Norah’s explanation was probably the correct one. She was bored with the whole thing and took the shortest cut for freedom; it was not Cissy’s way to allow herself to be bored. ‘In any case it is no affair of mine,’ he thought, as he turned again to his book.

CHAPTER XIX

After Easter, when Cissy had a morning-room and a boudoir, and the drawing-rooms were practically finished, Sainty entered into undisputed possession of his two back rooms, and spent more and more of his time in them. Only faint echoes of the turmoil in which Lady Belchamber had her being penetrated to that peaceful seclusion. Evening after evening Cissy would dine out with a few of her special cronies and their attendant swains, and go to the theatre or the opera till it was time to begin the round of balls or parties, from which she returned in grey summer dawns, far too tired for there to be any question of her coming down to breakfast next morning. Sometimes Sainty did not set eyes on her for days together. Gradually he slipped back into his old studious life, snatching sketchy little meals from trays, when he remembered to eat anything, and as little a part of the life of the house as if he were in lodgings round the corner.

In May, Lady Charmington came to town, to attend the meetings of the ‘Ladies’ No Popery League,’ of which she was a leading member.

‘My mother writes me she is coming to London,’ Sainty said. ‘Of course she will come to us.’

‘Well, she can, if you wish it,’ Cissy answered; ‘but I warn you you’re preparing trouble for yourself. She won’t like the way we live, and when she doesn’t like a thing, she is not always silent and accommodating. She’ll expect a family breakfast at 9.15, with prayers at 9. I don’t suppose she ever breakfasted in her room in her life. I don’t know where you breakfast, but I certainly shan’t come down.’

‘I suppose you couldn’t, just for the time she’s here?’ Sainty suggested.

‘I’m not such a humbug as to alter my way of life to please her. She may as well find out first as last that I am not cut on her pattern.’

‘I think she has pretty well made that discovery already,’ Sainty retorted.

‘Well,’ said Cissy, ‘she can come if she likes, and if you want her, but she must take us as she finds us. I told you she wouldn’t like it. She’d be a great deal happier at Roehampton with Lady Firth. She could come in to her meetings, and if she wanted to lunch here any particular day, I could always tell people to keep out of the way.’

‘You can’t say I interfere with you much, or often ask you to do anything to please me,’ said Sainty earnestly; ‘but when we have a great house here, and my own mother wants to come up, I do think it would look strange for us not to take her in.’

‘Well, please yourself. After all, I was only thinking of you. I can generally hold my own, but if your mother gets her back up, as she inevitably will, you’ll have the devil of a time of it.’

Sainty had presently occasion to prove the accuracy of his wife’s forecast. Acting on Cissy’s hint, he dutifully appeared each morning to give Lady Charmington her breakfast. The first day, she lingered before sitting down, as though she were waiting for something.

‘Won’t you make the tea for me, mother?’ Sainty asked. ‘It’s like old times, you and I having breakfast together.’

‘You don’t have prayers, I see,’ Lady Charmington remarked, as she took her seat. ‘Or were they earlier? I can quite well come down sooner, if you wish it.’

‘Well, you see, Cissy never comes down to breakfast, and, as you know, I am not a great eater, so when we are alone, I generally have a cup of tea and an egg in the study.’

‘Why doesn’t your wife come to breakfast? is she ill?’

‘Oh no, she’s well enough. But she’s out late at parties and things every night, and I’m glad she does rest a little in the mornings; it’s the only time she does.’

‘I confess I’m a little disappointed in Cissy,’ Lady Charmington remarked, after contemplating the toast-rack judicially for a time in silence. ‘I never thought her a very deep or earnest nature, but I did not expect to find her so entirely given up to worldly pursuits.’

‘Cissy’s young and pretty, and people make a great deal of her. After all, it’s natural at her age that she should like to enjoy herself.’

Lady Charmington sniffed. ‘Enjoyment! People nowadays seem to think of nothing but enjoyment. We were not put into the world to enjoy ourselves.’

‘Well, most of us fulfil the object of our being pretty thoroughly then,’ Sainty said, ‘and yet every one seems to want to be happy; and it is a good deal to expect of the few who have it in their power that they should voluntarily forego what most people fail to obtain.’

‘I don’t like to hear you talk like that, my boy; you don’t seem to have a proper sense of your blessings. You have very much to be thankful for.’

Lady Charmington saw nothing incongruous in finding fault with some acrimony if things were not to her liking, but she was always swift to rebuke a complaining spirit in others.

‘Her poor mother, who, if a little too fond of society, has a very sincerely religious side to her, must be sadly distressed at her daughter’s light-mindedness.’

The thought of Lady Eccleston as a pious matron wounded by her child’s care for earthly matters was too much for Sainty.

‘Why, Lady Eccleston goes wherever a candle’s lighted,’ he said; ‘or if she doesn’t, it’s because she’s failed to get an invitation.’

‘Censorious, censorious!’ replied his mother. ‘Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? You should watch against that spirit; it’ll grow on you.’

Sainty was only too glad to have diverted the precious balms to his own head, which had been accustomed to that form of unction for too many years to be easily broken. He saw his mother off to the first of her meetings before there was the smallest chance of her encountering her daughter-in-law, and then betook himself to his own rooms to read the papers. As he drew near to the fire that his languid blood demanded in this uncertain season, his eye fell on the letters he had not as yet thought of opening. As a rule his correspondence was not exciting. It consisted mainly of advertisements and begging letters. The first that he took up this morning had such a family look of these last, that he opened it with a weary certainty of his correspondent’s need for £3, 5s. 6d. to prevent the bed being taken from under his sick child; but though it was written on cheap paper in a hand carefully made to appear illiterate, its contents were far other than he had expected.

‘Ask your wife where she was on the third afternoon of the World’s Bazaar. A friend.’

Sainty had never in his life received an anonymous letter, and the experience was distinctly unpleasant. He shook it off into the fire as St. Paul did the other venomous thing, but failed to get the poison out of his system so cheaply. In case it should not work, his nameless ‘friend’ took care to repeat the dose, and several other communications of a like tenor followed the first, but none of them produced in him the unpleasant sensations of that chilly May morning, when he stood watching the sparks run along the blackened paper and the gray ash writhe and twist for its final flight up the chimney. After a time he came to regard them as more or less in the natural order of things, and even ceased to read them; but the writer showed such skill in varying the address, that in no case was he able to detect one without opening it. Some contained but a single sentence, others were much longer, but all suggested doubts of his wife’s conduct, and recommended a surveillance of which the very notion was repugnant to him. Of course he could take no notice of such things. He wondered if he ought to speak to Cissy about them, only to dismiss the idea as impossible. Still less could he mention them to any one else. Eventually he decided that there was but one way to treat an anonymous letter, which was to behave as if it had not been received. None the less they stirred in him a vague uneasiness. The feeling that somewhere about one an unknown enemy is watching for a chance to hurt, fills life with an unpleasant sense of ambush. He could think of no one who had cause to wish him ill. The enmity, then, must be to Cissy. A disappointed rival? He needed no reminder of the extreme unlikelihood of any one’s grudging her the possession of his affections. But how if the rivalry were for the possession of some one else’s affections? That possibility was not without its sting. For him there could be no question of jealousy, in the ordinary sense of the word; but he began to apprehend the possibilities of scandal, to understand that his acceptance of the anomalous part which his wife had thrust upon him by no means exhausted her power of injuring his happiness or his honour; in short, that he was saddled with an obligation to guard what he did not possess.

Meanwhile he found himself in the no less ironical position of having to champion her many doings, which in his heart he disliked, against his mother, with whom he secretly sympathised. Lady Charmington was far from having said all her say on that first morning at breakfast. Cissy’s prediction of her disapproval of their London life was amply verified. Occupied with the matters that had brought her to town, and going into a totally different world from her daughter-in-law’s, she was as ignorant as her son of the things that would most have stirred her wrath; but she found quite enough to rebuke in the house itself. Cissy’s idleness and dissipation, her late hours, her card-playing, her neglect of her household duties, and the consequent waste and profusion, her Sabbath-breaking, and the completeness with which she ignored her husband and her home (not to speak of her guest and mother-in-law) were each and severally the subjects of the elder lady’s severe animadversions to the offender herself when occasion offered, but far more often to the patient ears of poor Sainty, who had to defend the culprit as best he might.

Another fruitful topic of maternal discontent was Lady Belchamber’s failure to provide an heir to the property. This, it may well be supposed, was not an agreeable topic to Sainty, nor one on which he had any ready rejoinders at his command.

‘You have been married close on a year,’ said Lady Charmington, ‘and I see no signs or hope of a child. I said something to Cissy about it one day, and she laughed disagreeably, and said she was glad of it. I asked if she didn’t think she had any duty to the family in the matter. I am almost ashamed to tell you what she answered: that a baby was a great tie and a nuisance, and she hoped if she had to have one, it would be at a convenient time of year, when it didn’t interfere with things.’

‘I don’t suppose very young women ever want to have a baby,’ Sainty said doubtfully, feeling something was expected of him.

‘Cissy is not so young as all that. She must be two-or three-and-twenty. I can’t imagine any woman marrying and not wanting to have a child. I am sure when I married I prayed most fervently that I might give my husband a son.’

‘Well, you know, the answer to your prayer was not quite all you could have wished,’ suggested Sainty.

Lady Charmington ignored the interruption. ‘It is not as though she were not a perfectly normal healthy young woman,’ she said, ‘for I never was taken in for a minute by all that business of the shock to her nervous system at Belchamber. Constant dissipation, racketing about morning, noon, and night, and tight lacing are not the ways to go about having an heir. I only hope she mayn’t do anything else, if she’s so afraid that the duties of a wife and mother will cut her out of a party or two.’

‘O mother!’ Sainty expostulated.

‘If she is not going to have any children, what was the use of your marrying?’ continued his aggrieved parent. ‘We are just where we were with regard to that other woman. She has children fast enough! Cissy seems to think she has come into the family merely to have what she calls a good time, and spend the money that I pinched and scraped together for you for so many years. I have never seen such sinful waste as goes on in this house.’

Lady Charmington was only putting into words what her son had often, with some bitterness, asked himself. What was the use of his marrying? He had not perhaps quite so crudely admitted, even in his inner consciousness, how much he had been influenced in making up his mind to such a step by the thought of excluding the children of Lady Arthur from the succession to his name and estates, but it had none the less been a powerful motive with him. Had his brother passed his examinations, gone into the army, and in due course married some commonplace, unobjectionable young lady, it is more than doubtful if even Lady Eccleston would have succeeded in dragging Sainty into matrimony. For one thing, she would have had to reckon with Lady Charmington as an enemy instead of an ally, which would have put a quite different complexion on the affair. The young man reflected sometimes with dumb rage on how his life was turned topsy-turvy, haled from familiar field and woodland to this hated city, that a girl, who was really no more to him than any other, should junket from morning till night with a set of people he could not endure, and squander money, with which he might have benefited millions of his fellow-creatures, on her senseless, unoriginal pleasures. And all for what? Sooner or later the children of his undesirable sister-in-law would sit in his place, and inherit his patrimony as surely as if he had followed his natural bent, and led a peaceful, laborious life remote from all connection with Lady Deans and her play-fellows. And with it all Cissy had not even the common decency to avoid the tongue of scandal, as these odious anonymous letters showed him. He really did think she might have spared him that. Day after day he thought of saying something to her on the subject, and always he was prevented by lack of courage or opportunity, or else some unfortunate speech of his mother drove him back into the position of his wife’s involuntary champion.

‘Cissy tells me she is going away for Whitsuntide,’ Lady Charmington announced one day, with the sniff that indicated much more than met the ear in this apparently simple announcement.

‘Is she?’ said Sainty, anxious not to commit himself.

‘Has she not even deigned to let you know?’ inquired her ladyship scornfully.

‘I think she did say something about the Suffords having asked her there.’

‘Were you not included in the invitation?’

‘I really don’t know; I never asked. I didn’t want to go. I suppose Lady Sufford went through the form of asking me, but she probably knew I shouldn’t come. It would be too terrible if I were obliged to go wherever Cissy does.’

‘The arrangement seems to suit her perfectly,’ said Lady Charmington; ‘but I can’t see why you shouldn’t go.’

‘It would add to no one’s pleasure, and take away considerably from mine,’ said Sainty promptly.

‘Always pleasure!’ cried Lady Charmington. ‘The invariable argument! no thought of duty!’

‘If a thing which is purely a question of amusement doesn’t amuse one, why make a duty of it?’ argued her son.

‘Well, if it is not your duty to go about with your wife, I should have thought it was hers to stay at home with you. Of course I quite understood that she mentioned her plans to me with the delicate intention of letting me see that she could not keep me beyond next week; but she need not trouble; I had settled to go to mother on Tuesday in any case. She has failed very much lately, and I shall have to be with her more. By the way, I found she was rather hurt that Cissy had never once been to see her since she came to town in February, nor asked her to come in and see your new house.’

‘Dear me!’ said Sainty, ‘I ought to have thought of it. Of course we should have been only too delighted to see granny, if I had only thought she would care to see the house; but she seems always so absorbed in other things, it never occurred to me. It was very stupid of me. I’ve been several times to see her, but she always talks as if it was such a business to drive into London. I never dreamt of asking it of her. And she says her sight has got so bad, that I wasn’t sure how much she would see if she came.’

‘She would probably see a great deal that would shock her, as I have,’ said Lady Charmington. ‘Have you ever calculated at all what this house is going to cost you by the time it is finished?’

‘Oh, I’ve kept pretty good track of the expenses. I’ve paid for a good deal of the work as it went along. It has all been done much more extravagantly than I thought necessary. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, I shouldn’t care if we had no London house at all; but Uncle Cor seemed to think it indispensable, and he doesn’t consider that we have done much we need not. He is always afraid that, with my saving tendencies, I shall fail to do myself credit. He needn’t be uneasy as long as Cissy is on hand to provide the antidote.’

‘There is a great difference between having things suitable to your position and being foolishly and wickedly extravagant,’ remarked Lady Charmington.

‘Perhaps I have deliberately rather given Cissy her head about this house,’ Sainty answered, ‘to keep her hands off Belchamber; there was a great deal she was thinking of doing there, but I hope I have put a stop to that.’

‘Belchamber!’ cried out his mother in horror. ‘What could she want to do there? It was always kept in perfect repair; there wasn’t a door knob missing nor a tap out of order, and when you came of age there was an immense amount of money spent in cleaning and restoring. I always thought it quite unnecessary her doing up those rooms in that ridiculous way last summer. They looked to me more like an improper person’s apartments than like anything in an English lady’s house.’

‘Well, I can’t say I always admire Cissy’s taste, myself; there’s a little want of knowledge about it.’

Sainty did not judge it necessary to tell his mother how far reaching had been Cissy’s plans for the remodelling of Belchamber; he had surprised them by an accident, and had promptly and firmly opposed them. He could not bear the desecrating touch of fleeting fashion on anything so artistically and historically complete as the home of his childhood, and had been glad to purchase its immunity from the threatened changes by larger concessions in the matter of the London house. Perhaps, even so, Cissy would not have abandoned her projects without a struggle, but for the appearance of a most unlooked-for ally to her husband in the person of Claude Morland, who had supervened in the height of the discussion and thrown all the weight of his authority into the scale for the saving of Belchamber.

‘Sainty is perfectly right,’ he said, with his most pontifical air; ‘it would be vandalism. There isn’t a more beautiful specimen of its period in England than the great saloon or the Vandyke dining-hall; they are perfect. And the red, yellow, and green rooms, though they are later and not so pure, have a great cachet of their own, and are perfectly de l’époque as far as they go. No, no, my dear Cissy, it would be a sin. I am all for your using the rooms, and living in them; but, believe me, you mustn’t touch them. Do what you like here; you have a clean slate to work on; but don’t attempt to “improve” Belchamber.’

Sainty was astonished at the meekness with which Cissy abandoned her cherished schemes, but much too grateful to Claude for backing him up to resent this evidence of his cousin’s greater authority. He knew, too, that he owed it to him that the London house, if a little over-decorated and too obviously costly, was, on the whole, harmonious and in good taste.

By dint of unremitting vigilance and almost superhuman tact, the date of Lady Charmington’s departure had almost been reached without any more serious encounter than a few skirmishes between her and her daughter-in-law; but one afternoon, having heard his mother come in, and gone in search of her, Sainty saw at a glance that a battle royal was raging. Cissy was lolling exasperatingly calm and contemptuous among the piles of cushions she delighted to heap upon the furniture, while Lady Charmington sat stiffly erect, an ominous light in her eye, and a pink spot burning in the centre of each sallow cheek. Her son heard her voice as he entered, and quailed at the familiar tone of it.

‘I am well aware,’ she was saying, ‘that nothing I say will have the smallest influence on your behaviour, but none the less I feel it my solemn duty to protest, when I see things going on of which I entirely disapprove.’

‘Why trouble, if you are so sure that you will produce no effect?’ asked Cissy.

‘Because I have some consideration for my son’s honour, to which you and he seem to be equally indifferent.’

‘Oh! His honour!’ protested Cissy.

‘Yes; his honour,’ persisted Lady Charmington. ‘When I was first married, a young woman of your age, a young wife not a year married, who received men alone, sprawling about on sofas in that kind of indecent clothing, would have been considered to have lost her character.’

‘Mother!’ interposed Sainty.

‘Oh, it’s largely your fault for allowing such things,’ his mother flashed out at him. ‘If you were more of a man, your wife would never dare treat you as an absolute nonentity in your own house.’

‘But what’s it all about?’ asked Sainty. ‘What has Cissy been doing?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ answered Lady Belchamber. ‘You had better ask your mother.’

‘I came in just now,’ said Lady Charmington,’and found her with that flimsy rag she calls a tea-gown half off her back lolling about among the cushions there with Algy Montgomery. I don’t call it decent.’

‘Why, Algy’s a sort of relation, you know,’ answered Cissy; ‘his stepmother’s Sainty’s grandmother; it makes him a kind of uncle.’

‘Kind of fiddlestick! a good-for-nothing young rip in the Life Guards, of six-or seven-and-twenty at the outside.’

‘Do you suppose, if I were doing anything that wasn’t perfectly innocent, that I shouldn’t have taken jolly good care that you didn’t come spying in?’ inquired Cissy, with lofty scorn.

Lady Charmington choked. ‘It is not my habit to spy,’ she cried, ‘and I am not accusing you of actual misconduct; but it’s not only to-day that I object to. It’s your general mode of going on. Yesterday you were shut up for ever so long with that vulgar little Mr. Pryor, and you drive Claude all over London in your brougham. No honest woman should take any man in her brougham, no matter who it is, that isn’t her husband or her brother.’

‘Would her grandfather be admissible?’ asked Cissy sweetly. ‘I must say for a high-minded person who angrily repudiates the idea of spying, you seem to be strangely well informed as to all my movements.’

‘Cissy!’ expostulated Sainty.

‘Well, what is it?’ she asked, turning to him politely.

‘I have been deceived in you, very much deceived,’ Lady Charmington broke out. ‘When you wanted to marry my son, you were all sweetness and honey to me; now you’ve attained your object, you insult me. From the day I arrived here you have studied in every way to let me see I was unwelcome; there wasn’t an attention you could have paid me you didn’t pointedly omit, or a possible slight that you neglected to put upon me. I can well see that a mother-in-law in the house by no means suited your book.’

‘Even such a sweet affectionate one?’ interposed Cissy.

‘Mark my words,’ continued the exasperated dowager, ‘you will come to grief. You are playing a dangerous game, my lady. You have no conscience, no principle, no sense of duty to restrain or save you. If you forget God and go after your own vain amusements from morning till night, you will assuredly make shipwreck in the end.’

‘Well, at least you will have the satisfaction of thinking it was not for want of being warned.’

‘Your sarcasms will never prevent my speaking my mind. I have seen nothing in this house against which I do not think it incumbent on me, not only as the mother of your husband but as a Christian woman, to bear testimony—luxury, waste, riotous living, and indelicate behaviour. I am going away, and I know you will be glad to be rid of me, but I couldn’t have reconciled it to my conscience to go without speaking.’

‘I must say you have eased your conscience very thoroughly, and most agreeably. Is there anything else your sense of duty impels you to mention before you go?’

At this, Lady Charmington fairly lost her temper. She strode over to Cissy, and Sainty flung himself between them, afraid that she was going to strike her. ‘You little minx!’ she cried. ‘You little selfish, vulgar minx! You have lied and wheedled your way into this family, and grabbed all you could lay your hands upon, and what have you done in return? The one thing that was asked of you, to bear a child, and give the house an heir, you have most lamentably failed in doing.’

Cissy sprang to her feet, a curious evil look in her face, and for a moment the two women looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Oh! in the matter of a baby, take care I don’t astonish some of you yet,’ she cried.