CHAPTER XX
‘But you will come to my ball,’ said the duchess with decision. The ‘but’ was in answer to Sainty’s assertion that he did not go to balls. ‘Vous vous faites ridicule, mon enfant. That you shouldn’t accompany your wife everywhere, that I can see; it would be silly; but equally it is not right never to be seen at all. People ask if anything is wrong with you that you can’t appear, if you are half-witted or have fits.’
‘It is very kind of them to occupy themselves with my affairs,’ said Sainty. ‘I shouldn’t have supposed that most people remembered that I exist.’
‘But it is perhaps as well they should remember it sometimes,’ said his grandmother, with a significant glance at Cissy.
‘I should have thought the one form of entertainment from which a lame man might have been held excused was a dance,’ Sainty persisted.
‘Ah! there are dances and dances,’ replied the duchess. ‘This is not a dance où l’on dansera, it is a serious entertainment. I don’t say it will be amusing; I don’t give this kind of thing for my own amusement or for other people’s; there will be ministers, public men, royalties; enfin a solemn thing, and you are of the family. You must come, mustn’t he, Cissy?’
‘Oh, certainly, if you wish it, dear,’ Cissy answered lightly. ‘I should think it would just suit him. He will find people to whom he can talk about the housing of the working classes. You know how I always love coming to Sunborough House, but not to this kind of thing; you have said yourself how it bores you.’
Sainty smiled at his wife’s complete assumption of equality with his grandmother, both in age and position. He couldn’t help reflecting how enchanted Lady Eccleston’s daughter would have been a short year ago at the prospect of attending the function of which she now spoke so slightingly as being for the uninitiated.
‘Well, you will both come, like good children,’ said the duchess easily. ‘We don’t live only to amuse ourselves, you know.’
And so it came about that Belchamber found himself attending the ball in question, and very much lost in that glittering throng. At first he had been amused by the show, as he might have been by a scene in a pantomime. The pompous men, bearers of great names or high positions, stuck about with orders, the indecent bejewelled women, the lights, the flowers, the music: it all made an effect of some gorgeousness, with the really stately beautiful house as a background. But after an hour or so he became aware of a sense of intolerable weariness. He had taken it for granted that he and Cissy would be entirely independent of each other, and that after he had shown himself to his grandmother and the duke, and amused himself for a little while with the pageant, he would be free to depart whenever it pleased him; but to his astonishment Cissy had remarked that she had no intention of staying late and she would be very much obliged if he would take her home in his brougham. ‘I want Gibson early to-morrow morning,’ she explained, ‘so I don’t want to take him out to-night, and I haven’t been in bed before three one night this week. We can just show ourselves, and then slope.’
Once at the ball, however, she seemed to find it less dull than she had anticipated, for Sainty several times caught sight of her dancing, which she had announced that she certainly should not do, and had quite failed in his endeavour to get speech of her to tell her that he would walk home and leave the carriage for her. The night was fine and his own house not five minutes away. Any one but Sainty would simply have gone and left his wife to find it out. But this was a course which his invincible conscientiousness forbade his taking. As he hung forlornly about, hustled by the people who crowded in and out of the rooms, he thought that surely no sound in nature was so ugly as that of a quantity of human voices all talking at once and endeavouring to dominate each other. He came presently on Mrs. de Lissac, who always soothed his exasperated nerves; but after all he need not go to a ball to see her. ‘We could have had a much pleasanter talk in your house or mine, without having to try and outshout a hundred other people,’ he said.
‘I never can quite get over the strangeness of being here at all,’ Alice answered. ‘It always seems rather like a fairy story to me, when I think of my very simple bringing-up at the rectory, that I should come to rub shoulders with all these grandees.’
‘It is a fairy story in which you have certainly been the good fairy,’ said Sainty warmly. ‘I can’t tell you the difference it has made to me having you in London to come and talk to sometimes.’
‘It is dear of you to say that. I like to think that to you I am not the rich woman and possible subscriber or hostess, but just your old govey that you loved when you were a little boy. Sometimes, dear,’ she added, with a timid look of great tenderness, ‘I fancy you are not much happier now than you were then.’
Sainty passed the back of his hand wearily across his eyes. ‘Happy,’ he said; ‘is anyone happy? Think of the lives that are being led within a mile of us to-night; can any one be happy with the cry of those millions in his ears? Certainly not these people with their eternal desperate pursuit of amusement who are afraid of being left for five minutes in company with their own thoughts.’
‘Poor boy! you certainly are not happy or you would not be so bitter. It is dreadful to think of those poor people. I often wonder if we have a right to be so rich when there are so many starving; but my dear husband says this is Socialism, and if we weren’t rich we couldn’t give away so much, and certainly he is very generous; and he says that all these things that I feel as if it was wrong to spend so much on give employment to lots of poor people to make, who would be out of work if there were no rich people to buy things.’ She brought out this time-honoured piece of argument with such a triumphant pride in her spouse’s wisdom that Sainty thought of nothing less than combating it.
‘There is one form of happiness that you ought to enjoy in perfection,’ he said, ‘that of being and doing good.’
Alice blushed. ‘Oh, you mustn’t call me good,’ she said; ‘but I was going to say, if there is a lot of misery and poverty, I’m sure there has never been so much done towards relieving it as nowadays.’
‘The “World’s Bazaar,” for instance,’ said Sainty.
‘Well—yes, dear—that and other things. And I’m sure if, as you say, being and doing good makes us happy, you ought to know it too.’
‘I!’ cried Sainty. ‘Whom do I make happy?’
‘Oh, you are always doing kind things for people, and see how happy you make your wife.’
‘My wife’s happiness is very much independent of me; indeed, I am rather the principal drawback to it.’ The words slipped out almost before he was aware. Even to this kind old friend he had never spoken of his relations with his wife, and this seemed neither the time nor the place he would have chosen to do so. Mrs. de Lissac looked pained, but she took advantage of his little outbreak to say, ‘I have sometimes wanted to speak to you about your wife, but have not quite liked to. I think you and she should be more together. You leave her too much to herself. She is very young and pretty to be so independent, and perhaps a little thoughtless.’
‘Talking of Cissy,’ Sainty interrupted, ‘can you tell me where she is? As a beginning of acting on your advice, you see we have come into the world together to-night, and I am actually waiting to go home till she is ready.’
A sinuous young lady, clad in a sheath of some glittering, shimmering blackness, turned at the words and held out her hand. ‘How d’ye do, Lord Belchamber?’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you remember me. Are you asking for Lady Belchamber? I saw her not five minutes ago with Mr. Morland.’
With a start Sainty recognised Amy Winston. The unrelieved black of her dress, and of a long pair of gloves that were pulled up to her elbows, lent a baleful pallor to her face and neck, and above her brow there shone in her dusky tresses a single diamond star which, if real, was a very remarkable ornament to belong to a single woman said mainly to support herself by the manufacture of magazine tales and occasional verse. At sight of this siren good Mrs. de Lissac fell back into the crowd, while the young man to whom Miss Winston was talking, after a half glance at Sainty, made off not less hastily, so that they were left facing one another.
‘I remember you perfectly, Miss Winston,’ Sainty said, ‘although we have not met very lately. You were kind enough to say you had seen Lady Belchamber. I wish you would tell me where I should find her; she wanted to go home early to-night, and I think may be looking for me.’
‘She didn’t appear to be, ‘replied the young woman, with the faintest suspicion of insolence; ‘nor, I must say, did she seem in any particular hurry to get home. She was going into the garden with le beau cousin. Didn’t you know the garden was lit up? it is one of the great features of the Sunborough House parties. Let’s go and look for them.’
Sainty couldn’t well refuse. He was thinking how much more indecent a very low-necked bodice was on a thin woman than on a fat one.
‘Wasn’t that Ned Parsons who left you just now?’ he asked, as they made their way towards the staircase.
‘Yes. He has become very fashionable since his book was such a success; he goes everywhere now. By the way,’ she added, with a little laugh, ‘I suppose that’s why he bolted at sight of you; he thinks you haven’t forgiven him for the liberty he took with your coming-of-age party.’
‘I should have thought he had quite as much reason to fear my grandmother; yet I find him at her house.’
‘Oh, well—a great ball like this is hardly being at people’s house, you know; it doesn’t count. But as a matter of fact he and the duchess have quite made it up. They met at Lady Eva’s, and the duchess prepared to crush him. “I hear, Mr. Parsons,” said she, in her most regal manner, “that you have put me in a book.” “Who can have told you such a thing?” Ned asked, with touching innocence. “The duchess in my book is old and ridiculous; how could she be meant for you?”’
Sainty couldn’t help laughing. As they emerged into the cooler and less crowded garden, his guide waited for him to come up beside her. Hitherto she had preceded him, worming her way through the crowd with a deftness bred of long habit, at which Sainty marvelled, and talking lightly to him over her shoulder.
‘One doesn’t often see you at this sort of thing,’ she said.
‘It is only the second ball of my life,’ Sainty answered. ‘You were at my first too.’
‘Ah! the famous ball immortalised by Parsons. Is it possible that it can be three years ago?’
‘Nearly four now.’
‘Good heavens! so it is. How old we are all getting! Your wife was there too; it was the year she came out. How little any of us thought what was going to happen, except perhaps dear Lady Eccleston. I shouldn’t wonder if she had had an inkling even then.’
Sainty did not like his companion’s tone, but hardly knew how to resent it. He had hoped by a rather stiff silence to intimate his want of appreciation of her particular form of humour, but she continued to chatter quite unabashed by his unresponsiveness.
‘Cissy is quite a success,’ she continued; ‘it is astonishing how quickly she has caught on. I don’t know any one who has more admirers, unless perhaps it’s Mrs. Jack Purse, and she’s been much longer on the scene of battle.’
‘And who may she be?’ Sainty asked, hoping to divert the stream of Miss Winston’s malevolence from his own vegetable patch.
‘Lord Belchamber, where have you lived? I wish she could hear you; she’d die of it. Why, Mrs. Jack is smartest of the smart. She knows hardly any one but Jews and royalties. I was quite astonished to find her at the Suffords’ at Whitsuntide. Hylda Sufford said she couldn’t imagine why she came to her, but I think the Guggenheim’s party for the prince falling through had something to do with it.’
‘My wife didn’t tell me she met you at the Suffords’.’
‘Oh, I don’t know how I came to be asked, but I was.’
‘And did you amuse yourself?’
‘Oh, we had great fun. One night we all dressed up for dinner. Hylda was a harlequin and Ella Dalsany the columbine.’
‘Do you mean to say that Lady Sufford came down to dinner in tights before the footmen?’
‘Gracious, yes! And Gladys Purse was Mephistopheles and Lady Deans Marguerite; but we all thought Cissy had the best idea.’
‘And what was that?’ asked Sainty nervously. He had neither asked nor received any account of the Suffords’ country-house party.
‘Why, she just put on her best frock and all her diamonds, and said she was the Traviata.’
Sainty was not sure that this inspiration of his wife’s exactly appealed to him. He walked in gloomy silence.
‘Didn’t she tell you about it?’ asked Miss Winston. ‘She had a tremendous success. Mrs. Jack, with her red legs and cock’s feather, was nowhere. Cissy has one immense pull over Gladys Purse as far as the younger men are concerned. It’s terribly expensive to admire Mrs. Jack; whereas a charming but impecunious youth like Claude Morland gets many little advantages by the way from his devotion to his pretty cousin.’
In spite of an effort to keep her talk on the level of impartial ill-nature, Miss Winston could not quite help a touch of scornful bitterness in her mention of Claude.
Scattered images had been loosely grouping themselves in Sainty’s brain as she talked, half-forgotten incidents of his coming-of-age party, the softly opening door, his encounter with his cousin in the sleeping house, his examination of Claude as to his feelings for this same lady—it seemed to him that he began to detect a certain method in the apparently purposeless gossip with which she was favouring him. And then, blinding in its sudden illumination, there flashed across his mind the recollection of the anonymous letters. Here was the key to their authorship thrust suddenly into his mind. He felt the quick instinctive recoil of a man about to tread on something nasty, and then a sort of shuddering pity for what the creature at his side must have suffered. None knew better than he how they were wounded who put their trust in Claude Morland. He wanted to turn and hurry from her, or at least to find something that should stop the flicker of her evil tongue. He found nothing better to say in the shock of the moment than ‘Do you think you ought to talk to me so about my wife?’
Sunborough House has, for the heart of London, a relatively large garden, which being cunningly illumined with Chinese lanterns and little coloured lamps, the next day’s papers were already reporting that the effect was ‘fairy-like.’ Despite these beauties and the somewhat chilly allurements of an English summer night, only a few of the most flirtatiously inclined had been persuaded to drag their expensive skirts over the sooty London grass, and Sainty and his companion had the further end of the enclosure, which they had now reached, practically to themselves. As he made his feeble protestation, they came, round a tree, upon the glass doors of a sort of little summer-house which backed up against the high railing that divided the garden from the Park.
Miss Winston gave one glance into the lighted interior. ‘I think we are de trop here,’ she said, turning to Sainty, and, slipping nimbly from his side, she vanished in the soft shadows of the shrubbery. Almost at the same moment the door was opened from within with such suddenness that Sainty, who had not the agility of the fair Aimée, could only save himself from being struck by throwing himself back into the angle formed by the tree and the railing, and in this small space he now found himself made a close prisoner by the open door, which was firmly held in position by the broad back of a man, as he could see through the glass. He reflected that his position was not a dignified one, that as the inmates of the summer-house were evidently leaving it, he had only to stay quiet till they were gone, and then push the door and follow them at his leisure; and they need never know how nearly he had been tricked into playing the spy upon them. Miss Winston had evidently counted on finding her quarry there (perhaps from personal knowledge of his cousin’s habits), and had hoped that she could so excite his jealousy that he would not be able, once there, to resist the temptation of looking. He had no doubt as to whom he would have seen, even before he recognised Claude’s voice. He was relieved to hear that there was nothing lover-like in it. Morland spoke in brief business-like tones through which pierced a scarcely disguised note of annoyance. ‘Then you won’t see him?’ he said, pausing against the door, evidently continuing some discussion they had been having.
‘I daren’t,’ Cissy answered. ‘I’m sure it would kill me.’
‘Then you must do the other thing; there are not two ways about it; and the sooner the better. If you’re right, you’ve no time to lose. But are you quite sure?’
‘Oh yes, quite. I wasn’t at first, but I am now.’
‘It’s cursedly unfortunate——’
They spoke low, and as they moved off he could hear no more.
Sainty pushed the door, and stepped out from his temporary prison. Of the fragment of dialogue that he had overheard he did not understand a word; indeed, he did not pay it any particular attention at the time; he supposed it to refer to some of the many plans the two were always discussing. He was accustomed to Cissy’s use of needlessly strong language. ‘I should simply die of it’ was a common phrase with her for expressing dislike of the most trivial things. It was not till months after they were spoken that the words came back to him with a new significance.
He followed the retreating figures up the garden, his feeling one of relief at the failure of an ill-natured plot of which he had been meant to be the victim. Miss Winston’s motive was not difficult to guess. It all seemed like something in a novel or a play, curiously theatrical and unlike life; but at least the dénouement had been essentially undramatic.
When he reached the front hall, he found Cissy already cloaked among the group of people who were waiting for their carriages.
‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I told you I wanted to go home early. I thought you must have gone.’
‘I was looking for you,’ Sainty answered. ‘I was told you had gone into the garden, so I went there after you; but we must just have missed.’
In the brief transit to their own door neither spoke. Sainty was wondering if he ought to say anything to Cissy of the ill-will that was dogging her footsteps, to put her on her guard against evil tongues. A woman in her exceptional position could not be too careful to furnish no weapons to scandal. Yet it was not only Miss Winston’s vengeful jealousy that had warned him to look after his wife. Had not kind little Mrs. de Lissac tried to suggest that he left her dangerously unguarded? Even the duchess had hinted the advisability of his being more with Cissy. It was evident that she was being talked about. Cissy herself seemed to provide him with just the necessary opportunity for speech, so difficult to find in their divided lives. To his surprise, instead of going immediately upstairs on arriving at home, she followed him into his rooms on the ground-floor. His study, though of Spartan simplicity compared to the rest of the house, had the indefinable pleasant air of rooms much lived and worked in. Everything in it was meant for use, and daily used. Books seemed to accumulate round Sainty like some natural growth. The one lamp with its plain green shade lighted the comfortable litter on the big, serviceable writing-table, and on another table near it was the humble appliance by help of which, as in his college days, he sometimes refreshed himself with a midnight cup of tea if he was working late.
‘How cosy you are in here,’ Cissy said, looking about her. ‘I must have spent five times as much on my boudoir, but with all its silk walls and cushions and frills and furbelows it doesn’t look as homey as this.’
‘You’re never in the house for long enough to do more than scratch off a dozen notes,’ said Sainty, ‘unless you have people with you. Nothing ever looks like a home in which people don’t live.’
‘I think it’s the books,’ Cissy went on. ‘They are wonderful furniture. I really must get some.’
She lingered, wandering about the room looking at one thing and another. ‘What’s this for?’ she asked, coming to the old kettle with its lamp.
‘Sometimes I like a cup of tea if I’m working. It’s a bad habit I got into at Cambridge.’
‘How shocking for the nerves, my dear,’ cried Cissy, with a lifelike imitation of old Lady Firth. ‘Well, you might have a decent-looking kettle and teapot. I shall have to give you one. Do you mean you could make a cup of tea now, this minute? What fun! Do make me one. I’m cold and famished. It will be lovely.’
Sainty obediently set about lighting the spirit-lamp and preparing the demanded refreshment. He was not a little puzzled by this latest caprice of his wife.
Cissy went to the door, and called the butler. ‘You needn’t sit up,’ she said. ‘Give me a candle, and then put out the lights and go to bed.’ She came back, and flung herself into an armchair, her summer wrap of satin and lace billowing foamlike round her.
Sainty, as he made the tea, was wondering how he could introduce the subject on which he wanted to speak. It was not once in six months he would have such an opportunity. He must not let it slip. And yet he was unwilling to sermonise when for once she was in so friendly a mood. He brought the cup of tea to her, and stood looking down at her as she gulped little teaspoonfuls of the hot liquid.
‘You have never told me anything about your visit to the Suffords’,’ he said.
Cissy looked up suddenly. ‘What about it?’ she asked distrustfully.
‘I mean about the dressing up for dinner and all that. Was it amusing?’
‘Oh, that!’ said Cissy indifferently, but with an air of relief. ‘I didn’t suppose it would amuse you to hear about such nonsense. Who told you?’ she asked, with a return of suspicion.
‘Miss Winston. I met her to-night. I hadn’t seen her for years.’
‘That’s a nasty cat,’ Cissy remarked with conviction. ‘She hates me.’
‘Oh, you know it?’
‘Know it? Of course I know it. Why——’ She seemed to think better of what she was going to say, and checked herself. ‘What did she say about me?’ she asked.
‘She spoke in a way I didn’t like,’ Sainty answered. ‘For some reason that woman is your enemy, and I wanted to tell you to be on your guard against her.’
‘Oh, thanks, that’s all right. I’m not afraid of Aimée Winston,’ and she smiled a little cold smile at her own thoughts.
‘Don’t you think,’ said Sainty, with some hesitation, ‘that you are a little imprudent sometimes? a little careless of appearances? that, in fact, you rather give a horrid woman like Miss Winston occasion to take away your character?’
‘Oh, my character!’ said Cissy lightly. She had set down her tea-cup, and was pulling off her long gloves, and rubbing her round white arms softly over each other.
‘I think, you know,’ Sainty went on, ‘you are beginning to be talked about a little. It was not only Miss Winston, but some one else, a nice woman, who——’
‘Mrs. de Lissac, for a fiver!’ interjected Cissy. ‘There’s another woman who don’t love me, though not for the same reason.’
‘Well, it was Alice, as it happens,’ Sainty admitted; ‘but she only said the kindest things, that you were too young and pretty to be left so much to yourself. You know even the duchess implied that I ought to be seen with you sometimes.’
‘Well,’ said Cissy imperturbably, ‘why aren’t you? It seems to me that it is you who are failing in your duties, according to all these ladies, not me.’
The coolness of the retort took Sainty’s breath away for the moment.
‘But you know,’ he stammered, ‘that there is nothing you would like less. I have never pretended to any right to control your actions. You know you are free to amuse yourself as you like. All I ask is that you won’t compromise yourself, won’t get talked about, and—and all that.’ He ended rather lamely. He half expected an outburst. To his surprise she leaned towards him, and laid her hand very gently on his.
‘Don’t you think,’ she said, and her voice was kind, ‘that you are rather to blame perhaps? If I am talked about, isn’t it partly your fault? Can I help it if other men admire me?’ She had unclasped her cloak, as the tea warmed her, and now, as she rose, it slipped from her and fell into the chair. She was standing very close to him, a beautiful woman, her beauty enhanced by everything that dress could do for it. Her breath was on his cheek, the faint heady fragrance of her garments troubled his nostrils, the dazzling fairness of her bare shoulders was close under his eyes. He drew back a little, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand,’ he murmured. ‘I have tried not to annoy you. You remember what you said. After that I naturally could not trouble you.’
Cissy sprang suddenly away, and caught up her cloak. There was in her movement something of the recoil of a spring that has been forced too far in one direction and has suddenly escaped.
‘Ah, no,’ he heard her whisper, ‘I can’t——’ and then aloud, with a sudden scornful flash, ‘No, of course you can’t understand,’ she said. ‘Heavens! it’s nearly three ... and I, who meant to go to bed early. There’s a fate against it. Give me my candle. Good night—or what’s left of it.’ She hurried past him, almost snatching the candle from his hand. The feeble flicker of it had vanished from the great well of the staircase, while he still stood in the doorway dumbly wondering.
What had she meant? Was it possible that she repented of her cruelty, that she wished——For a moment it had seemed so. Yet he could not believe it. Vividly he recalled the night of their wedding, her agonised repetitions that she never could be his. And yet her following him to his room, her words, still more her looks. He stood there long irresolute, wondering if he were losing a great opportunity. Once he started to go and seek her. He looked up at the skylight far above, where the first faint coming of morning was making a pale twilight. He listened, but in all the silent greyness of the big house he could hear no sound but the innumerable ticking of clocks. A breath of chill discouragement seemed to steal down to him where he stood. He had a vision of the grotesque figure he should cut, misled by his own fatuity, and meeting closed doors, or the half concealed impertinence of a waiting-maid, and slowly he turned back into his own rooms and shut the door.
CHAPTER XXI
From the time of their coming to London it had required no effort on their part for the Belchambers to be very little together, but after the ball at Sunborough House, Sainty was aware that they avoided each other. On the rare occasions when they met, he was conscious in his wife’s manner of a more thinly veiled contempt, while on his side he felt a shyness with her which was the beginning of dislike.
There was something almost frightening to him in the absolute quality of her egotism. In the scene of which he had been a horrified witness between her and his mother, Lady Charmington had by no means displayed a conciliatory courtesy, but if she had been rude she had at least lost her temper in a thoroughly human manner—she had cared. Had Cissy shown heat in return, he could easily have understood it. What revolted him in her attitude was the complete indifference as to what her mother-in-law thought of her, or whether they were on good terms or ill. The way in which, when she wanted nothing more of them, people simply ceased to exist for her, seemed to him monstrous. She had summarily declined to make any overtures towards peace, alleging, not without justice, that she was the injured party. ‘Lady Charmington had insulted and abused her in her own house, and she had taken it with the meekness of a lamb. She really could not see what there was for her to apologise about; she was quite ready to accept an apology if her mother-in-law wished to make one’; but that lady, oddly enough, showed no signs of any such desire. She had departed next day without so much as seeing Cissy again, merely mentioning to her son before she left that he would probably suffer the curse of childlessness, as a punishment for his wife’s behaviour and his own inability to guide and chasten her.
So the young couple drifted more and more apart, Sainty realising with a terrified fatalism the extent to which this creature, at once so hard and so capricious, who bore his name and spent his money, yet had never been his wife and had become almost a stranger to him, had it in her power to injure him irretrievably.
After the duchess’s ball he received no more anonymous letters, which confirmed him in his theory of their authorship. Miss Winston, having played her trump card in the disclosure she thought she had made to him, evidently judged it useless to continue the letters which were meant to lead up to it. One day, however, the post brought him an envelope which, at first sight, he made sure was the beginning of a new series. He was on the point of destroying it, unopened, when he was aware of his own coat-of-arms and crest gorgeously emblazoned on the back, and a closer inspection proved that the illiterateness of the handwriting was not feigned but perfectly genuine. It was from Lady Arthur, and contained the unwelcome news that his brother had been ill, more seriously than she had at first imagined, and a request that he would come and see him. ‘He won’t make the sign,’ she wrote, ‘and I expect he’d be very angry with me if he knew I was writing, but all the same I know it would be a comfort to him to see you. He’s worrying about money matters. You see, being so ill has made him think if he was to die what would become of me and the children.’ It was put rather crudely, but Sainty admitted that it was a legitimate cause for solicitude, and hailed this proof that Arthur was taking thought for others. Even if it were the others who were taking thought for themselves, a poor woman could not be blamed for wishing to secure the future of her helpless offspring. He decided that he must go down and see his brother. He was sorry Arthur had been so ill; he never remembered him ill in his life, since the measles and chicken-pox of early childhood.
Sainty did not judge it necessary to say anything to Cissy about his expedition; it required no diplomacy on his part to conceal any of his movements; if he should be absent for a week, she would neither know nor care, and he found by consultation of Bradshaw that he could go and return in the long summer day. It was a relief to him that he need not spend a night in the house of kinsfolk whom he did not receive in his own. The situation was awkward and unpleasant, and when he thought of all that Arthur’s marriage had made him do and suffer, it must be confessed that he approached his brother’s home and wife with invincible repugnance.
The Chamberses had taken up their abode (of course in a hunting country) in an old vicarage from which a victim of shrunken tithes had been glad to move into a smaller house. Arthur had added new and magnificent stables that had cost Sainty a pretty penny before they were completed. The house itself might have been transplanted bodily from the heart of Belgravia. It was of such commonplace and uncharacteristic architecture that even the process known to Lady Arthur as ‘Smartenin’ the old place up a bit’ had failed materially to disfigure it. It was approached through all the dignity of a lodge gate and ‘carriage sweep,’ which swept round a mound of damp laurels opposite the front door, and deposited Sainty at a small Ionic portico of stucco pillars. Having confided his name and business to a dingy man in a shiny dress-coat who opened the door to him, Belchamber was told ‘’is lordship was expecting of ‘im, and would ‘is lordship please to walk this way,’ and followed the butler upstairs to Arthur’s room. He smiled to see how exactly the interior of the house corresponded with his anticipations: everything was modern, ugly, expensive, and already shabby. A great litter of caps, gloves, sticks, and hunting-crops encumbered the hall, together with a female garden-hat ornamented with huge red bows and faded muslin poppies. A strong smell of cooking pervaded the staircase, and from some of the many open doors came the sound of women’s voices in dispute, and high above all else the shrill wailing of a baby.
It was with a conflict of feelings that Sainty found himself once more face to face with Arthur, whom he had not seen since his fruitless attempt to detach him from the woman who was now his wife. They had parted as boys, they met again as married men, and with no particularly happy experiences behind them. Sainty noted with pained surprise how much of his brother’s good looks had been what the French call ‘the devil’s beauty.’ That boyish freshness was gone for ever, and the face had gained nothing of manly dignity in its place.
The young man was sitting propped with pillows in a big easy-chair, arrayed in a gorgeous silk dressing-gown. His recent illness had given him a pinched bluish-white look about the nose, but the colour had set and hardened on the cheek bones, and the eyes had a tired shifty look. The beautiful curls were already worn a little thin at the temples, and an absurd little fair moustache seemed to be ineffectually trying with its waxed points to conceal the two lines that ill-temper had traced beside the nostrils.
‘Very good of you to come,’ he said, as he held out his hand.
‘I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been ill. What was it?’ Sainty asked, as he sat down beside him, struggling with a lump that would rise in his throat.
‘I fancy I’ve been pretty bad,’ Arthur answered. ‘Some superior form of mulligrubs. I don’t believe the damn fool of a doctor knows quite what was the matter. I think he was frightened himself. He gets into corners with Topsy and whispers, till I want to break his head. I’ve pulled through all right, but, of course, another time I mightn’t, you know, and that’s what I wanted to see you about.’
There was no suggestion that he wanted to see him for any other reason. They met after two years of absence and estrangement, and after what seemed a very fair chance that they might never meet again. The elder brother was husky with emotion, the younger as unmoved by any thought of their common past as though it were his solicitor whom he had summoned to the discussion of a matter of business.
His coldness reacted on Sainty, and helped him to steady his voice as he answered, ‘Your wife intimated in her letter that you were troubled about money matters.’
‘That’s it. You see, as long as I live I’ve got this cursed pittance. A fellow can’t live like a gentleman on it, but at least we don’t starve. But as the missus pointed out to me, if I was to hop the twig, there’d be just nothing for her and the kids; so I made her write and tell you I was ill; I thought I owed it to her. She grumbles a good deal, and she’s a damn bad manager, and we have our rows, but she’s not a bad sort of an old girl. Last winter she went without a pony for her shay, so as I could keep another hunter. Now that was rather decent of her. I’m not very partial to the kids myself; it’s unbelievable how they yell; but I shouldn’t like ’em to be left in the gutter, you know.’
‘Do you know me so little, Arthur, that you could suppose, if anything happened to you, I shouldn’t provide for your wife and children?’
‘Well, you were never a particularly free parter, you know, old man, and then you didn’t approve of the connection. How was I to know?’
‘Of course, in case of your death, I should continue the same allowance to your widow.’
‘Would you now? Well, that’s all right. But I say, suppose you were to kick? you’re not so remarkably strong, you know, yourself.’
‘In that case, your boy comes in for the whole thing, and of course the trustees would make a suitable provision for his mother.’
‘Oh, gammon! we don’t count on that, you know. What’s to prevent your having children yourself? By the way, isn’t Lady Belchamber showing any signs yet?’
‘Er—no; as a matter of fact—not——’
‘Well, she’d better look sharp, or we shall begin to indulge unholy hopes. But, bar chaff, you couldn’t put it in writing, could you, about the allowance going on in case we were both to what the papers call “join the majority”?’
‘If it will be any comfort to you I can, but I should think you could trust me; and in case I should ever have an heir, I promise at once to add a codicil to my will, providing for your children.’
‘Well, let’s have that in writing too; then there can’t be any mistake about it, and Topsy’ll let me alone. She’s got her damned old mother with her (she’s an old vulgarian, I tell you), and the two of ’em have nagged my life out of me about this. I never will have old Mother Mug here, but I was going to town for a lar—on business, if I hadn’t been taken ill, and so I said she could have her to keep her company while I was away, and I’m blowed if the old devil didn’t turn up, just the same.’
‘How do you like this place on the whole?’ Sainty asked.
‘It isn’t bad in the winter; just between two packs, you know; and one or two of the people round have given me some shooting. But at this time o’ year it’s simply infernal; not one blessed thing to do. As I told you, if it hadn’t been for this cursed illness, I was going to town for a bit; if I didn’t get away now and then I should rot and burst.’
‘Is there nobody you see or like in the neighbourhood?’
Arthur winced. ‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘most of the huntin’ lot go away in the summer, and the regular county sort of set ain’t particularly lively; and then the women jib a bit at Topsy. One or two of ’em have called, but not many. Our parson and his wife toady her freely; they ain’t particular as long as she’s my lady, and will give ’em money for the school treat. I assure you she’s becoming quite the charitable religious lady; nothing else to do, poor girl. But most of these county women are a damned stiff-backed lot; they ain’t like Londoners.’
At this point in the conversation the dingy butler, who looked like the ‘heavy father’ of a not very prosperous travelling company, came to say that ‘lunching was served, and Lady Harthur Chambers ‘oped Lord Belchamber would do ’er the honour to come down.’ He also brought Arthur’s meal on a tray, over which the invalid let fly a volley of curses: ‘the napkin was dirty, the soup was cold, the bread was stale; he could take it back to the damn cook and tell her,—— her, if she couldn’t send up a decent basin of broth to a sick man,—— her, and—— her, she’d better—— well go.’
To this rolling accompaniment, Sainty got himself out of the room, saying he would come up again after lunch, and was conducted by the seedy retainer into the presence of his sister-in-law, who received him with much state.
The three years that had elapsed since their last meeting had not treated Lady Arthur more kindly than her husband. They were in her case three years considerably nearer to the term of youth. In the days of the supper at the Hotel Fritz she had been a decidedly handsome young woman, if a little over-florid. In the interval she had grown more florid and less handsome, and suggested an impression of having run to seed. A growing tendency to corpulence was resisted by violent compression, with disastrous results to the complexion, imperfectly corrected by a plentiful application of blanc de perle. Her attire was gorgeous beyond the needs of the occasion, but left somewhat to be desired in the matter of tidiness, and exhaled a heavy scent of musk that made Sainty feel sick. She presented him to her mother, a terrible warning of what she was on the highroad to become. This lady was a shorter and twenty years’ older edition of Lady Arthur, more coarsely painted, more frankly vulgar, more consentingly fat, and she wore an olive green wig of Brutus curls.
‘Do you like the country, Mrs. de Vere?’ Sainty asked, as they sat at meat together in heavy silence.
‘Muggins,’ the lady corrected, with a giggle. ‘De Vere was Maria’s—I mean Cynthy’s—stage name.’
‘My Nong de Tayarter,’ said her daughter, with a warning look at the dingy man, who was handing the potatoes with an air of forced abstraction.
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Muggins, ‘I was connected with the profession myself when I was young; there’s nothing to be ashamed of in it. It’s an art, and nowadays very highly considered. But you was askin’, my lord, if I liked the country. For a little visit like this, I don’t say, but to live in, year in, year out—no thank you. It may be all very well for them that were born to it, but give me London. I like to see my fellow-creeturs. I should think Cynthia’d die of the mopes in this place. I should, I know, if I was her.’
‘It isn’t very lively,’ assented her daughter.
‘I can’t think whatever you find to do all day,’ said the elder lady.
‘I have my children,’ said Cynthia, with the air of a Cornelia, ‘and I’m getting quite interested in the village and the poor people.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t amuse me,’ said her mother. ‘I call it cruel of your brother, my lord, to keep her mewed up in a place like this. Such a winter as she’s had. It’s all very well for him, ‘untin’ five days a week, and shootin’ with Squire this, that, and the other, but what fun does she get out of it, poor child? Their stuck-up wives don’t even come and see her, and the moment the ‘untin’ and shootin‘ ’s over, my lord was off to London and Newmarket, if he hadn’t been took ill. He was hardly here a week last summer. Does he offer to take her?—not him, not if he knows it.’
‘Three weeks at the sea was all the change I got last year,’ said Lady Arthur.
‘And that I had to make you insist upon, or you wouldn’t have got that,’ chimed in mamma.
‘It was more for baby’s sake than my own,’ said Cynthia; ‘the child needed sea air.’
‘Dear little Arthur was baby then,’ explained Mrs. Muggins; ‘the second little dear wasn’t even expected. Now there’s two of ’em they’ll want a change more than ever.’
‘You have two children?’ Sainty said. ‘Are they both boys?’
‘Both of ’em,’ assented Lady Arthur proudly. ‘Poor as we are, there’s many people would be glad of my two little boys, or even one of ’em,’ and she pointed this delicate allusion by a side glance at her mother, as who should say ‘I had him there.’
The ill-concealed hostility of these people, the way they abused his brother to him, his sister-in-law’s hint at the want of ease in their circumstances, all combined to make Sainty’s visit thoroughly uncomfortable.
‘What’s been the matter with Arthur?’ he asked, to change the subject.
‘Eating and drinking too much,’ responded Mrs. Muggins readily. ‘And so I told him. “Arthur, my boy,” I says to him, “you mark my words: you’re digging your grave with your teeth.”’
Lady Arthur simpered. ‘It’s rather awkward to talk about insides to gentlemen,’ she said; ‘but it was of that nature. The doctor said he had had a narrow squeak of—what was the word?—perrynaitis, or perrytaitis or something. I told him he couldn’t expect ladies to remember his long Latin names, but it was some kind of inflammation from what he said.’
‘What she don’t tell you,’ put in the irrepressible Mrs. Muggins, ‘was how she nursed him. Three nights she never went to bed nor had her clothes off her, and, as often as not, sworn at for her pains.’
‘I only did my duty,’ said Cynthia nobly; ‘but I hope I shan’t often have to do the same again.’
‘What she wants,’ said Mrs. Muggins, ‘after being shut up so much, and the anxiety and all, is a good change. Why don’t you come up and stop with me a bit, when I go back, and see the theatres and the shops? The spring fashions are very pretty: sunshades are very tasty this year, I must say.’
‘I do want a new sunshade,’ Lady Arthur admitted, ‘and for that matter, lots of things; but Arthur don’t care how I’m dressed, now,’ and she removed a discoloured tear with the untorn corner of an imitation lace handkerchief.
As they were leaving the dining-room, she detained Sainty a moment to whisper in his ear, ‘Has Arthur spoken to you about what I wrote?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sainty, ‘we have talked about it. I assured him that would be all right.’
Lady Arthur looked relieved. ‘What should I have?’ she asked.
‘Oh!—er—the same as now,’ Sainty gasped.
‘You’ll think me very mercenary, I fear,’ said his sister-in-law, with an attempt to climb back into the grand manner from which she had so swiftly descended. ‘I don’t care for myself, you know; I’ve worked for my living before, but a mother must think of her children; even a bear will fight for its cubs.’
The ‘cubs’ were presently produced, of course. The baby was a mere bundle of lace and ribbons; but the elder child, who appeared to be nearly two, and had been most carefully combed and starched and decorated for the occasion, was set upon two chubby legs within the door, and stared stolidly at his uncle. Sainty tried hard to see something of Arthur in the little boy who would probably be his heir, but the younger Arthur was a most unmistakable miniature edition of Mrs. Muggins, with the same prominent eyes and hanging lower lip, and even his ‘oiled and curled Assyrian locks’ suggested a sort of childish imitation of the Brutus wig. His grandmother was fully aware of the likeness, and evidently thought it must be a cause of unmixed gratification to Lord Belchamber.
‘He favours our side of the family,’ she said proudly, ‘and, though I say it that should not, a handsomer little picture of a cherub I don’t think you’ll easily find.’
‘Give uncle a sweet kiss, dearie,’ said the proud mother; but on Sainty’s stooping to receive the embrace, the amiable infant set up such a piteous howl, in which the baby promptly joined, that both children had to be conducted into retirement.
‘I think,’ said Sainty, ‘if you’ll let me, I’ll go up and see my brother again for a few minutes. I see I must be leaving in about half an hour, if I am to catch the afternoon train up. I told the fly to come back for me.’
‘Well, if you must go,’ said his sister-in-law, ‘there’s no good pressing you to stop. I’m afraid the lunch was not what you’re accustomed to. No doubt you have a French cook and every luxury, but we have to cut our coats according to the cloth, you know. I may not see you again before you go, I’m going to take mamma for a bit of an airing. I hope Lady Belchamber is well. She has no children, I think.’
‘Well,’ said Arthur, when Sainty returned to him, ‘what do you think of old Mother Mug? She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’
‘She seemed to think you were a little inconsiderate about your wife, that she needed a certain amount of change and amusement; and, indeed, that poor woman must have a dull life, so very different to everything she has been accustomed to.’
‘No doubt the pair of ’em have been abusing me finely, and, of course, you take their part. What the devil’s she got to complain of, I should like to know? Haven’t I made an honest woman of her, and jolly well muckered my own life by doing it? I suppose she expects me to give up the little fun I do get, and take her to London and show her round. Don’t you marry your mistress, old man. You can take it from me, it isn’t good enough. But there!—you are married, and you haven’t got a mistress.’
Sainty did not escape without the usual demand for money, which Arthur irritated him by calling a loan.
‘What’s the good of talking like that?’ Sainty said. ‘You know you haven’t the slightest intention of repaying it. As you are always rubbing it into me that you can’t live on what I give you, is it likely that next quarter, or next year, you will be able to save the amount you require out of the same insufficient allowance?’
‘You don’t suppose I enjoy having to ask you for every dirty penny I want?’ retorted the invalid sullenly.
‘Then why don’t you try to live within your income, and then you wouldn’t have to?’
‘I must say you always make it as unpleasant as possible.’
‘Well, don’t let’s wrangle about money; I give it just the same. I’ll send you a cheque. Good-bye, and I hope you’ll soon be better.’
‘And these are the people who are to come after me!’ Sainty said to himself bitterly as the train took him back to London. He had a vision of Belchamber, his beloved Belchamber, overrun and ravaged by these barbarians; of Cynthia ‘smartenin’ the old place a bit,’ with the aid of Mrs. Muggins’s suggestions as to what would be ‘tastey’; of Arthur cutting down the trees and selling the books and pictures to buy more horses and lose bigger bets; of that unattractive child with its stiff curls and goggle eyes coming in turn to make final havoc of the ruin its parents had left. And it was for this end that he had given his name, his future, his honour, into the keeping of a beautiful parasitic creature without heart or conscience, who obeyed no law but her own imperious appetites!
CHAPTER XXII
Although Belchamber had become a very different place from the home of his childhood, it was still a relief to Sainty to get into the country. It must be confessed that the parties with which Cissy delighted to fill the house were extraordinarily unexacting in the attention they demanded from their host, so that he was able, as in London, to lead very much his own life, undisturbed by his wife or her guests. Except at dinner, or in occasional passage meetings, as he slunk from the library to his own sacred quarters in the western pavilion, he seldom met any of them.
Moreover, the young couple were, for the moment, nearly alone. Most of the society which Lady Belchamber specially affected was either at Cowes and Goodwood, or devoting a fortnight to the care of its property and the reception of its schoolboys before the annual round of Scottish visits. Sainty had been passingly surprised at Cissy’s decision to forego a very gay house-party in Sussex, and return quietly to Belchamber at the beginning of August. The young woman did not seem to be in her accustomed health; indeed, she admitted she was quite done up, and needed rest; there had even been a talk of ‘waters.’ She had begun to be not quite herself before they left London, and then there had been the curious incident of her fainting at her own party.
Quite early in May, before Lady Charmington’s unfortunate visit, Cissy had announced her intention of giving some kind of entertainment, but the difficulty of deciding on what form it should take, and the impossibility of finding an evening when it would not interfere with something else she wanted to do, had combined to defer the execution of the plan till nearly the end of the season. She found it so much easier to go to parties which other people had the trouble of arranging than to take the trouble to arrange one for herself, that Sainty had begun to hope the whole thing might fall through, when she suddenly fixed a date, called in Lady Eccleston to assist her, and telegraphed to Roumania to offer a fabulous sum to a celebrated violinist, who had not been heard in England that summer. By eking out this star with the only two expensive singers who had not yet left the opera, and rigorously excluding from her invitation-list any one to whom it could be a pleasure or excitement to be present, she managed to have a very brilliant and select little gathering indeed, which, but for the unfortunate contretemps above mentioned, would have been an unqualified success. The right dowagers were slumbering in the front row, the right younger people were jostling and chattering in the doorways, the talented performer was executing his most incredible calisthenics, when Sainty, jammed into a far corner of one of the big rooms, became aware of a bustle and commotion near the door of the boudoir. People moved and heaved and whispered, and ceased to bestow even a perfunctory attention on the music, which came rather abruptly to an end. He saw Claude Morland elbow through the crowd with a bottle and a glass, and some one near him said ‘Lady Belchamber has fainted.’
Among the many duties thrown unexpectedly on him by the catastrophe, appeasing the anxiety of the guests and soothing the susceptibilities of the artists, he was startled by the speech, accompanied by a meaning pressure of the hand, with which Alice de Lissac took leave of him. ‘I am so glad,’ she whispered; ‘now, I feel sure all will come right.’ Enlightenment as to her meaning came most unexpectedly from his mother-in-law next morning when he inquired of her after his wife’s health. Lady Eccleston, who had been the last to depart the night before, arrived at an amazingly early hour, and after a long visit to her daughter was still able to appear in Sainty’s apartments almost before he had finished his breakfast. She was evidently in high good-humour and began by embracing him tenderly.
‘How did you find Cissy?’ Sainty asked. ‘I haven’t sent to ask after her yet for fear of disturbing her. She seemed quite worn out last night; I think she has been doing much too much.’
‘She is not ill,’ said Lady Eccleston, with a world of meaning. ‘I will not allow that she is ill.’
‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Sainty. ‘I thought she looked very seedy last night, I must say.’
‘She will admit nothing,’ continued her ladyship. ‘I think I have told you how delicate and reticent she is on certain subjects. Even to me, her mother, and you know we have always been like sisters, she will tell nothing. Do you know what I think? she will tell no one till she has told you. That’s it; you may be sure that’s it. She will run no risk of your hearing it from any one but her. For heaven’s sake don’t let her know I have even hinted at anything——’
‘What do you mean, Lady Eccleston?’ Sainty gasped, a supposition of which only he knew the full grotesqueness beginning to dawn on him.
‘Dear, sweet, innocent Sainty!’ cried Lady Eccleston, in a transport of archness. ‘You and my girl are made for one another. You are like a pair of child-lovers in a fairy-tale. I have told nothing, remember that; I will tell nothing. I will not rob dear Cissy of the joy of announcing it herself. Besides, as I say, I can only conjecture; she has absolutely refused to admit it.’
‘Dear Lady Eccleston,’ cried Sainty, in great perturbation, ‘I can’t pretend to misunderstand you; but, believe me, I think you are wrong. I am sure—I am almost sure—it cannot be as you suspect.’
Lady Eccleston shook her head and pursed her lips mysteriously. ‘A mother is not deceived,’ she said. ‘But recollect I have told you nothing. Cissy would never forgive me. I will not even congratulate you till you tell me. Meanwhile I shan’t breathe a word, not a word. Trust me’; and she again folded her son-in-law to her heart. ‘It was the one thing wanting to our happiness,’ burst from her, as it were involuntarily, as she hurried away, leaving Sainty too much bewildered to protest.
Two days later they went into the country. Cissy was certainly not feeling well. She asked Sainty if he would mind going sooner than had been settled; she thought rest and country air would set her up. No, she wouldn’t see a doctor; there was nothing wrong with her. ‘I’m just knocked up with being on the go, morning, noon, and night, for months.’
‘Your mother suggested the weirdest explanation,’ said Sainty.
Cissy flushed crimson and then grew so pale that he feared she was going to repeat the performance of the night before.
‘Mamma really is a bigger fool than I thought,’ she said hotly. ‘I didn’t think she would have had the idiotcy to carry that nonsense to you. What did you say?’
‘What could I say? I told her it was impossible, but she would listen to nothing.’
‘Of course it’s impossible! no one should know that better than you.’
On the afternoon of his first day at Belchamber Sainty ordered his little cart and drove as in duty bound to pay his respects to his mother. He had not seen Lady Charmington since she had left his house in wrath, and though he had written to her several times he had received only the briefest and coldest answers. It was not, therefore, with any very pleasing anticipations of the coming interview that he set out to visit her.
It was one of those perfect, cool autumnal days which English people mistake for summer. The open spaces of the park were dappled with pleasant temperate sunlight like the flanks of the deer that fed there. Hundreds of rabbits squatted in the familiar glades or tilted themselves hastily into covert as he passed. Never had his home looked lovelier or more peaceful, or appealed more strongly to him. The woods and coppices called to him with a thousand voices, and his poor heart, starved of all human emotion, answered as only the lonely and despised among her children can answer to the great cry of Nature the universal mother.
Then, as he drove along the smooth green alleys, there came to him the recollection of his brother and of the woman his brother had married. Ever since his visit to them Sainty had thought much about his sister-in-law, and had striven in his own mind to do her justice; terrible as she was to him æsthetically, he was forced to admit that she was a better sort than her husband. She did think of her children and do her duty by them according to her lights, whereas Arthur thought of no one but himself. After all, were Cissy’s ideals in life, except superficially, much less vulgar than Lady Arthur’s? He sometimes wondered if it were not better to have been frankly improper before marriage and settle down into an irreproachable wife and mother, than to be a frivolous little worldling, refusing to live with her husband, and lending numberless occasions to the tongue of scandal.
Argue as he would, and rigidly impartial as he strove to make his mental attitude, the thought of his successors poisoned the beauty of the day for him and blotted out the sunshine. It was vain to tell himself that Cynthia’s standard of personal conduct was higher than Cecilia’s. Her ghastly veneer of gentility shocked his taste more than even her mother’s frank vulgarity or Arthur’s callous selfishness. To think of her and her shiny-faced babies at Belchamber was to profane his most sacred associations.
He soon found that he need not have doubted his mother’s welcome. She received him with what, for her, was almost cordiality. On the rare occasions when Lady Charmington assumed a staid and humorless jocosity, she was wont to affect a Scottish accent and manner of speech, and Sainty noted with surprise this mark of unusual hilarity. ‘Come ben the house, man,’ she remarked; ‘the sight of ye is good for sair een.’
‘How pretty you have made everything,’ said Sainty. ‘Your borders are lovely. There is no one like you for a garden, mother.’
Lady Charmington looked round her with a certain pride. ‘Yes, I think I’ve improved the place,’ she said. ‘Do ye know these late-flowering delphiniums? this is the only kind that blooms as late as this. I thought at one time my hollyhocks were going to have the disease, but I’ve brought them through it.’
‘They are lovely; and how beautiful these roses are.’
‘That’s the pink Ayrshire; it’s not so common as the white. You know the big bush in the corner of the west wing, I brought it from Scotland with me soon after I married; these are some cuttings from it I took a few years ago, and last autumn I moved them here; haven’t they grown?’ Thus talking on safe subjects, they entered the house, where Sainty’s admiration was claimed and freely given for various ingenious arrangements and improvements.
‘And how’s Cissy?’ asked Lady Charmington presently, a certain subdued excitement in her look and manner.
‘It is very good of you, mother, to ask after her so kindly,’ Sainty answered. ‘She doesn’t seem to me very well; she’s a little knocked up with all her gaieties, I think, but she won’t admit there’s anything wrong with her which a little rest and country air won’t set right.’
‘Wrong with her! certainly not; what should ail her?’ cried Lady Charmington, with the same curious air of meaning more than she said.
‘I hope,’ Sainty began awkwardly, ‘that you won’t remember her rudeness and bad behaviour to you last May; it would be terribly painful to me to have you on bad terms with one another. I quite admit she behaved shockingly to you, but I hope you will overlook it. I feel sure if you will come and see her you’ll find her ready to meet you more than half-way.’
‘I bear no malice,’ said Lady Charmington, with bewildering good-humour; ‘and indeed I could find it in my heart to forgive her at this moment worse things than a little incivility to myself.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Sainty said; ‘but why specially at this moment?’ He was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
Lady Charmington leaned forward and looked sharply in his face.
‘Is it possible you really don’t know?’ she said. ‘You are the queerest couple I ever came across. I made sure you had come here to announce it to me, and I didn’t want to take the wind out of your sails by letting you see that I knew it already.’
‘Know what? announce what?’ cried Sainty. He was beginning to divine his mother’s meaning; his mind reverted to his conversation with Lady Eccleston. Why did all these women persist in mocking him with congratulations on the impossible as though it were an accomplished fact? ‘Have you heard from Lady Eccleston?’ he asked, with apparent irrelevance.
Lady Charmington pounced on the implied admission.
‘Oho! So you are not quite as ignorant as you pretend! But why should you try to keep it from me, when you must know it is the bit of news which it would give me more pleasure to hear than anything in the world?’
‘Dear mother,’ said Sainty, ‘do you suppose if I had any such news to tell as you seem to imagine, that I shouldn’t have rushed to you with it? But it’s not so. It can’t be so.’
‘But why shouldn’t it be so?’ asked Lady Charmington.
‘Believe me, it’s impossible,’ Sainty was beginning, and then recollected that he couldn’t tell his mother why it was impossible. ‘I don’t know what’s come to everybody,’ he said lamely.
‘Why did you ask if I had heard from Lady Eccleston? It shows you guessed what I meant.’
‘Because she too has run away with the same idea, and when I told her that she must be mistaken, she only became more positive.’
‘You see,’ said Lady Charmington triumphantly, ‘her own mother thinks so, and she ought to know.’
‘But really, really, I feel sure you are all wrong. I don’t want you to build on this, mother, because I know what a disappointment it will be to you.’
‘Do you mean to say your wife is not going to have a baby?’
‘I certainly think not; she said herself her mother had been talking nonsense. Did she tell it to you as a fact, in so many words?’
‘Lady Eccleston’s style is sometimes a little involved, but I certainly took her letter to mean—— Oh yes—there’s not a doubt of it; she can’t have meant anything else.’ Lady Charmington turned over a pile of letters on her writing-table, and selecting one began to mumble through it. ‘Um, um, London emptying fast, just on the wing myself, cannot go till I’ve found some one to read to my dear blind ... um, um, um. Ah! here it is: “I cannot refrain from giving you a hint of the great news. I know how it will rejoice your heart. But don’t betray me till the dear children tell you themselves. I should not say a word about it, only they are both so absurdly reticent and sensitive; it is quite possible they may neither of them mention it. Dear Cissy was almost angry with me; she tried to make out I was mistaken, but a mother’s eye! you and I know when....” Well, we needn’t go into all that; but you see, her mother’s convinced.’
‘Well,’ said Sainty, ‘I can only set on the other side that Cissy denies it herself.’
‘How about her being taken ill at the party?’ It was evident that Lady Eccleston had gone into details.
‘People may faint without being in that condition,’ protested Sainty; ‘no one should know that better than I. Believe me, you are all building too much on that momentary loss of consciousness, which may as likely as not have come from tight lacing.’
Lady Charmington shook her head impatiently. ‘Her mother says she has never been known to faint before in her life; and any one can see with half an eye she has always laced....’
After this the conversation languished perceptibly. It was obviously futile to go on discussing the prospects of an heir, when the parties principally concerned agreed in denying that there were any prospects. Lady Charmington, ‘convinced against her will,’ was very much ‘of the same opinion still’; but balked of the topic on which she burned to dilate, she resolutely declined every other which her son brought forward. Sainty’s well-meant efforts to extract information on local or farming subjects were killed by the stony indifference she opposed to them, so that he presently took his leave, without obtaining more than a very qualified and doubtful agreement to his suggestion that she should come and see Cissy.