Belchamber

At first the pertinacity of their two mothers in attributing miraculous offspring to Cissy and himself had seemed only a peculiarly galling mystification. Sainty never knew at just what moment a horrible solution of the puzzle had begun to suggest itself to him as possible. Had he fought against the conviction from the first, or did it come to him slowly and insidiously as his mother marshalled the reasons for her belief against his repeated denials? He could put his finger on no point in time when the suspicion had flashed into his brain; but by the time he reached his own door again, it seemed to him that there had been no hour of his unhappy married life when this terror had not sat grinning behind every trivial incident. He determined to see his wife, to know the worst at once. He asked for her, but learned she was out. ‘Her ladyship had gone driving late, after tea, and had not come in yet.’ He had no chance of speech with her through the evening, but when at last she went to her room, he followed boldly, hardly waiting for the answer to his knock before entering the room.

Cissy had thrown herself on the sofa, and the loose sides of the tea-gown she had worn at dinner had a little fallen back. At the sound of the opening door she started up, and drew her draperies so swiftly about her that Sainty could not be sure if he had noticed or only imagined a slight change in her figure.

‘You!’ she cried.

‘Yes,’ he said, in as steady a voice as he could. ‘I want to speak to you, and I could find no other chance of seeing you alone.’

Their glances crossed and he read in her eyes a confirmation of his worst suspicions. Still he must be sure, must hear it from herself. She had looked startled, almost frightened, as she faced him, then her face took on a dogged sulky expression.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘I went to see my mother this afternoon,’ Sainty began.

‘Your mother,’ Cissy broke in. ‘Oh! she’s been making mischief.’

‘On the contrary, she was all amiability and delight, ready to make it up with you, to forgive everything “at this moment,” as she said.’

‘That’s very kind of her; but why?’

‘She was bursting with congratulations and excitement; she had had a letter from your mother.’

Lady Belchamber muttered something very unfilial about her parent. ‘And what did you say?’ she inquired.

‘I? What could I say? I said they were both mistaken. That you had told me it was not true; and of course it isn’t—it can’t be; I don’t need to be told that.’

He was pleading against his own certainty; from the time he came into the room, he knew what he should hear before he left it. Yet with his whole heart he was begging her still, if it were possible, to deny the shame that had come upon his house. He stood mute and suppliant before her, and she looked at him almost pityingly. Then with a little discouraged gesture she turned away and sat down again on the sofa.

‘It is true,’ she said quietly. ‘You may as well know it first as last. In any case I couldn’t conceal it much longer; and now that mamma has guessed it, she will have told it to at least fifty people already. She little knows what she’s doing,’ she added, with a hard laugh that jarred on Sainty’s overstretched nerves.

He had been sure of it, had known it. Yet now that the words were spoken, that the fact confronted him, admitted, undeniable, irrevocable, he staggered with the blow.

‘You are going to have a child?’ he gasped.

She nodded, and for all answer threw back the covering she had pulled across herself.

‘But it is not mine.’

‘Yours!’ impatiently. ‘How should it be?’

‘Good God!’

There was a silence. Sainty moved restlessly about, as agitated as though it were he who was making the confession. Cissy was far the more self-possessed of the two. She sat upon her sofa watching his agonised motions with a faintly inquisitive distaste, as a person of imperfect sympathies might observe the contortions of some creature he had unwittingly injured.

‘I suppose,’ she said presently, ‘you want to know whose it is?’

‘No, no!’ cried Sainty shudderingly. ‘That least of all. For God’s sake don’t tell me!’ and he made a step towards her, as though he would have choked back the name he feared to hear.

Cissy stared. ‘Queer!’ she ejaculated.

There was another pause. A clock struck midnight, and was echoed loudly or faintly by others near or distant. Sainty counted the strokes, and was conscious of irritation when one began before another finished and embroiled his counting.

It was again the woman who spoke first, and the question was characteristic, severely practical.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I don’t know—I can’t think. Give me time—give me time to think.’

Cissy looked at him with undisguised contempt. ‘I should know what to do,’ she said. After a while she added, ‘Of course I can’t stay here now.’

‘I don’t know—I don’t know,’ Sainty kept repeating. ‘We must do nothing in a hurry. Think of all it means, all the consequences.’

Cissy shrugged her shoulders. ‘It seems rather late for that,’ she remarked. ‘Besides, we can’t keep it to ourselves indefinitely, you know.’

‘At least give me to-night to get my ideas into some sort of order,’ Sainty pleaded. ‘You can’t be surprised if this is rather a shock to me, can you?’ he added, almost apologetically.

Cissy laughed. ‘I wonder if any man ever took this announcement in just the same way?’ she said.

CHAPTER XXIII

To Sainty, sitting alone in his old room in the western pavilion, it seemed that there was no bitterness left untasted. Far into the night he sat, his elbows on the table, his head buried in his hands. At first all seemed mere chaos and horror; he was stunned and could not think. But for the haunting consciousness of misery, he could almost have fancied that he had slept. Gradually, however, definite images began to emerge from the bewildered trouble of his brain.

What was this thing that had come on him, through no fault of his own? He had done no wrong, snatched no forbidden pleasure; it was those other two who had sinned and enjoyed. Why must he be pilloried with them, share the scandal and the punishment? He, with his morbid shrinking from publicity, to have his private life turned inside out to the scorn and laughter of the vulgar! He knew well enough how little sympathy he had to expect; in all times and countries had not the betrayed husband been a butt for mirth? He wondered why. It seemed hard to him that of the three characters in the eternal drama of adultery, it should always be the one innocent person that was selected for satire. Surely it was the most elementary justice that punishment should fall on him who injures his fellow, not upon the injured. Yet of they three, who would suffer most? He, without a doubt, who had the greatest capacity for suffering. He saw, as in a dream, the dingy scene of the divorce-court, the headlines in the papers, his name dragged in the dirt. He pictured to himself the long martyrdom of cross examination, the bar pathos, the bar wit; he knew how he should flinch and writhe at the stake.

In his case, moreover, the situation was complicated by the coming child. He had not only to proclaim his dishonour to the world, but must lay bare to every grinning idiot the grotesque story of his married life. If the husband whose rights had been invaded was absurd, what of him who had not even been able to obtain those rights. And he must stand up in open court and tell this thing of himself, he who felt the mere idea of marriage too sacred for spoken words! The cruel irony of it all! Was there no other issue but through that horrible sordid ordeal? What did men do in his position? What was the beau rôle for the injured husband? He thought of Dumas’s ‘Tue-la!’ and wondered how it would have advanced matters if he had murdered Cissy, supposing he had the strength and courage to do it. It was only to shift the scene; another court, an added horror, but the same publicity, the same scandal, the same story to tell, the same agony to undergo.

He almost regretted the foolish old fantastic code of honour which would have made it incumbent on him to challenge the seducer, and as likely as not be killed by him. Death might have been a solution, but there was no such easy way out of the situation as that. The hand that had done him so much wrong would not render him that supremest service.

Hitherto he had succeeded almost without conscious effort in keeping the inevitable third in this grim trio almost an abstraction. Yet he remembered how passionately he had refused to know, when his wife had offered him the name of her lover. Now the figure was beginning to take shape against his will; a tall figure with a false air of slenderness, a figure that by the languid grace of its movements counteracted the slight tendency to heaviness in the hips and shoulders. How well he knew that back, the sinuous curves of the waist, the sidelong persuasive droop of the head; he had seen it walking away beside Cissy on the afternoon of their very first meeting. It had been pressed against the glass door that held him an unwilling witness on the night of the ball at Sunborough House. How clearly the impressions came back to him, the dusky garden speckled leopard-wise with lanterns, the lithe, shimmering blackness of the figure at his side trying to instil the doubts he would not harbour, the swift swing back of the door, the words so clearly overheard, that then had held no meaning for him. Still it was only a back, he had not seen the face, the gentle, kindly, sly, mocking face. He pressed his icy fingers tight against his hard straining eyeballs as if he could shut it out, that face he would not see. Not he! not he of all men! Had not his mother mentioned other men with whom her imprudence was compromising Cissy? Oh! but that back was unmistakable. And then the voice! low and soft, but so distinct; he could hear it, could hear the words, counselling the horrible meanness of which he had so nearly been the dupe. He understood now the secret of her mysterious behaviour in the library that night. Surely such baseness was unbelievable; even Cissy had recoiled from carrying out the scheme.

For one brief moment he wished she could have done it—that he might have been deceived. ‘I need never have known!’ he cried, and his voice speaking aloud in the silence of the night startled him like the cry of a creature that is being killed.

He raised his head and looked about him. The candle he had brought had burnt almost to the socket; he rose and lighted two others from it, and blew it out. The chill of the tireless summer night made him shiver, but there was that which lay so cold about his heart that he welcomed the physical discomfort as almost a relief. He moved about the room for a little, but soon tiring, went and sat down again.

The same procession of black thoughts kept up their weary circle through his head; round and round he followed them, yet came no nearer any light, nor any decision of what it behoved him to do under the circumstances. Was this the end of all his dreams, all his sacrifices, all his endeavour for others, all he had hoped to accomplish? Was everything to go down in this whirlpool of a disgrace greater even than that which Arthur’s marriage had brought upon them? It was Arthur’s marriage that had been the origin of all his troubles. Oh yes, he saw it clearly enough now; however he had deceived himself at the time, he had married, had taken on himself the most sacred obligations, for no object but the mean one of excluding his brother. Perhaps this was his punishment.

He saw what a puppet he had been in the hands of two strong-willed women, an instrument to satisfy the vulgar ambitions of the one, the angry revenge of the other. What a failure, what a dreary failure he had been all through! For years he had had but one thought, one object in life, to steer Arthur past the rocks and quicksands of youth, and anchor him safe in the harbour of property and responsibility, and with what result? What had come of all his plans, his careful tact, his delicate manipulation of his mother and brother? Arthur’s marriage afforded a comment of grimmest irony on his efforts in that direction. Since then, as ardently as he had once longed to renounce his birthright in favour of his brother, he had striven to preserve it from that contaminating touch, to keep that brother’s wife from sitting in their mother’s place; and, once more, with what result? To instal in the innermost shrine of all he held most sacred a woman no less wanton than her sister-in-law, only without her redeeming qualities and the excuses of her early training, one who would make his home a wilderness, his name a by-word! Shame, then, shame either way, and nothing accomplished!

It is not to be supposed that he thought these things out for himself, coldly, sententiously, in order, as, for the sake of the reader, they have to be written down. They were the residuum of all sorts of wild and whirling fancies, flung up at him, as it were, out of a seething cauldron of black wretchedness, which was rather sensation than thought. Not once, moreover, but a thousand times, did each and all of them appear and vanish in a kind of witches’ dance to his weary brain, without perceptible sequence or connection. He seemed somehow to be outside his own consciousness, to sit and watch these images, as, one by one, some demon held them up for his tormenting, yet all the while every nerve in him tingled with the apprehension of how intimately they were part of himself.

As he sat gazing stonily at despair, there came a soft stirring of the stillness, a murmur, a breath; then from without, a faint chirping.

‘... as in dark summer dawns,’

he quoted mechanically, and was aware of a vague irritation that he could not remember the beginning of the line.

He looked. The chintz curtains that veiled the windows were growing ghostly and transparent. It was the dawn.

All through the night he had sat with his trouble, yet the morning found him as helpless and undecided as ever.

‘To dying ears, when unto dying eyes,’ he repeated dully. ‘Ah! if it were but that! Death! how easy to die! What a rest, what an escape!’ It was life, not death, life with its hideous decisions and responsibilities that he had got to face.

The candle flames became more spectral as the light slowly broadened, the light of a new day, the day in which he would have to make up his mind, to take a line, to act. There was no way out—none. Once more he was confronted with the inevitable, the pitiless future coming every moment nearer, with all it held of suffering and shame, the fruitlessness of all his efforts, all in vain, in vain!

Then suddenly, as if some voice had spoken, came the question ‘Why?’ Why need it be in vain? The solution, after all, lay ready to his hand. He had only to hold his tongue. It was all so simple. ‘Their strength is to sit still,’ he thought. Why, among all that had passed through his wretched head, had this never struck him? He had wished for a child to bar his brother and his brother’s sons from the succession. Well! here was the child, his wife’s child, born in wedlock, legally, lawfully his. Who could ever say it was not? No one but they two, and of their silence he could be tolerably sure.

At first he put the idea from him with horror. It was a cheat, a fraud. He, with his fastidiously high standard of conduct, to cozen his brother out of his inheritance by a shabby trick. Impossible! The thing was impossible.

He got up, and put back the curtain, and stood looking out into the silence of the growing morning. Over opposite to him, the grey sky was beginning to flush with palest rose, in which the last stars were growing dim; but as yet the great quadrangle lay all in black shadow, out of which the restored statues stood vaguely up like shapes of evil menacing the eastern glory. No, no, no. Better the talk, the scandal, the publicity of the divorce court, than to stand convicted before the tribunal of his own conscience. Whatever else went down in the shipwreck of his life, let him at least keep his self-respect. ‘What did it profit a man to gain the world, and lose his own soul?’ Yet how often in the old days, in his talk with Newby, had he inveighed against the selfishness of the Puritan idea, which would make the saving of one’s soul the object of conduct. Surely the only rational motive was the consideration of how one’s acts affected others. In the present instance who would be the worse for his silence? No one would be hurt or disappointed. These people did not expect to succeed; they had given up all hopes of it when he married. Had they not told him so themselves? On the other hand, there was his mother, his mother who had done so much for him. He remembered how he had found her, when she had first learned the truth about Arthur, and terror mixed with his grief at the mere conjecture of what she might say and do with the marriages of both her sons thus ending in shame. Their talk that afternoon had shown him how much her hopes were centred in the birth of an heir to Belchamber. The mere prospect had blotted out the very recollection of her quarrel with Cissy, and Lady Charmington was not a forgiving woman. His fear of her had always gone hand in hand with his love of her, and both made him wince at the thought of her disappointment. Had he the right to bring this fresh blow upon her, who had suffered so much, merely to salve his own conscience? After all, had he any self-respect to sacrifice? Was it possible for him to have a meaner opinion of himself than he had always entertained?

At that moment the sun topped the mass of the eastern wing, flooding with light the broad spaces of grass and gravel at his feet, and casting a long ray over the tall, stately façade of the beautiful house. And at the thought of all that was symbolised by that pomp of hewn and fretted stone, the aristocrat that lurked so deep within him, so overlaid with fine theories of brotherhood and equality that he was unconscious of his very existence, stirred and claimed his own. ‘For the credit of my house,’ he murmured uneasily, as he turned away from the window.

He did not yield at once, or without a struggle, but he knew from the first that it would come to that. From the moment the idea leaped full-grown like Athene from his brain, it was fully armed to meet every point that had distressed him. He feared scandal. There need be no scandal. He shrank from the ignominy of a divorce case. There need be none. Did the thought of unveiling to the public eye the bitter humiliation of his married life revolt him? Here was a means not only of secrecy, but actual disproof. Did it break his heart to think of inflicting such a blow upon his mother? He had only to be silent to crown her dearest wishes, and make her the happiest woman in England. Had he married, enduring all that marriage had brought him, that he might keep his sister-in-law and her children from the heritage of his name and home? Here, too, was the one thing necessary for that end. And to attain all these desired objects there was nothing to do, no word to say, no lie to tell. He had only to let things take their course. It was the line of least resistance, so easy, so fatally easy!

To a man of his character and disposition, what a temptation, what a terrible temptation! He was weakened by his long vigil, the little stock of vitality that he could ever call to his assistance, worn almost to a thread with watching and misery. He knew he should give in. To all the arguments in favour of it, what had he to oppose but one poor little scruple of personal honour?

He wondered if his wife had known what he would do before he had thought of it himself? Had she traded on her certainty of his cowardice? At such a suspicion, he almost grew strong again; but no—she had seemed to entertain no doubt that he would repudiate her. He fancied she had even felt a certain relief at the prospect of being rid of the semblance of a connection with himself, and the freedom to claim openly the protection of the man whom, in her way, she loved. If so, here was another argument in favour of silence. By it he could thwart and punish her.

He wandered into his brother’s old room, next his own. Here the drawn blinds made still a glimmering twilight, and lent an unreality to the familiar objects. He went and looked at the old school photographs. There was one of Arthur in a group of the cricket eleven, which had always been his special favourite. The figure stood squarely on its legs, the brawny arms bare to the elbow and crossed upon the chest, a boyish grin lighting the handsome face, from which the cap was pushed back by the strong upward spring of the hair above the brow. It was the image of youth, and life, and happiness. Long he stood motionless before it, and then he bent forward and pressed his poor pale lips to the cold glass. ‘Arthur,’ he whispered. ‘My little Arthur, you are dead, and so is your miserable brother who loved you so. You are no more that brutal, querulous egoist that I saw the other day, than he is the wretch who can stoop to crime to rob you.’

Distant sounds showed him that the household was beginning to be astir. Before his man came to wake him he must have removed the signs of his long vigil. He returned hurriedly to his own room, once more drew the curtain across the window, extinguished the lights, and, hastily undressing himself, crept into bed. Already the sense of having something to hide stung him with a terrible self-contempt. He had caught sight of his drawn, haggard face as he passed the mirror. It was the face of a coward.

He did not leave the pavilion all day. He sent word he was ill. That at least was true enough, but late in the evening, as he was lying on the sofa in his study, there came a knock at the door, and Cissy entered. Though perhaps a shade paler than usual, nothing in her appearance suggested a guilty wife come to hear her sentence.

‘I have come to return your visit of last night,’ she said, as she stood looking down on him.

Sainty groaned and hid his face. At sight of her, the desire to brand her as what she was almost conquered, where conscience and sense of honour had failed—almost, but not quite.

Cissy kept her indifferent pose, playing with the ornaments she wore.

‘Well?’ she asked at last. ‘Have you made up your mind yet?’

‘Yes.’ His voice came muffled and strange.

Lady Belchamber started. ‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded, with slightly quickened interest.

‘Nothing.’

There was a pause.

‘Do you mean to say,’ she asked at last, ‘that you are going to acknowledge the child?’

‘Yes.’

She turned away from him with a half-stifled exclamation. Was it relief or disappointment? he could not tell. After a time she flung a word over her shoulder: ‘Why?’

‘Because it happens to suit me,’ he said doggedly.

The silence was broken by the little laugh he hated.

‘I suppose I ought to be very grateful to you,’ she sneered.

Sainty sprang from the couch. ‘I have ceased to expect gratitude or any other kindly feeling from you,’ he blazed out at her; but his wrath fell as quickly as it had flared.

Her puny disdain was powerless to hurt him, merged in the measureless ocean of his self-contempt. There would be lies enough, acted, looked, and lived, if not spoken. At least to her there need be no pretence of an attitude; if not with an accomplice, with whom may one permit himself the luxury of being honest?

‘After all, why should I scold at you?’ he said wearily. ‘You have nothing to thank me for. Don’t suppose, if I stoop to this incomparable baseness, that it is with any thought of pleasing you.’

Cissy stared at him, cowed by the dim apprehension of a tragedy she was incapable of understanding; and it was not without a certain satisfaction that he saw in her eyes the vague terror of the incomprehensible beginning to permeate her habitual scorn of him.

CHAPTER XXIV

Though the birth of an heir to the house of Belchamber might naturally be supposed a festive occasion, it brought little satisfaction to those principally concerned. It is true that Lady Charmington talked broad lowland for weeks; nor was Lady Eccleston, who kept a supply of conventional sentiment always on tap, likely to be wanting at such a time; but in spite of every grandmotherly effort to impart a correct sense of rejoicing, a certain flatness attended what should have been such an auspicious event. Cissy, entirely preoccupied by terror of physical suffering, insisted that her confinement should take place in London, where she would be within reach of the best professional aid, to the extreme disgust of her mother-in-law, who had decided that Belchamber was the appropriate scene on which the newcomer’s eyes should first open. Sainty, being appealed to, expressed the most complete indifference on the subject; he said he didn’t suppose it mattered to the baby where it was born, or that it would be likely to retain the smallest recollection of the event. ‘It will be a great disappointment to everybody,’ Lady Charmington remarked. ‘Besides, it will mean your not being here at Christmas. How do you expect your people to rejoice in the birth of an heir, if you slink away and let it happen in London, like anybody else’s child?’

‘How do you know it will be an heir?’ Sainty said. ‘Why shouldn’t it be a girl?’

His mother disdained to notice such a preposterous suggestion.

‘It ought to be here,’ she kept repeating.

‘I wasn’t born here,’ Sainty said.

‘That was quite different; Belchamber wasn’t our home in those days. Your father and I hardly ever came here in the old lord’s time; for that matter, they weren’t here much themselves. Besides, I wanted to be with my mother; there is nothing to prevent Cissy having her mother with her here; things are very different for her from what I had to put up with. I should like to have seen my mother-in-law allowing me to be confined in her house! but your poor father felt it very much.’

‘Well,’ Sainty said at last, ‘you can settle it with Cissy; if you can persuade her, you’re welcome to; I never can, and in the present case I don’t care to.’

Every allusion to the coming event was the turning of a sword in his heart. His mother’s restrained eagerness was not less terrible to him than Lady Eccleston’s loud jubilation.

He never knew if Lady Charmington availed herself of his suggestion that she should appeal to Cissy. Certainly, if she did, it was with no success, for long before there was any possibility of the child making its appearance, Lady Belchamber removed to London, taking her parent with her. Cissy, as usual, when frightened or needing help, turned to her mother, for whom, as we know, she cherished no very profound respect at other times; and Lady Eccleston was not even permitted to return to her own house in Chester Square, but must take up her abode with her daughter, who considered it a great concession if she allowed her to go out for an hour’s shopping. It is not to be wondered at if mamma became a little important under the circumstances, and gave herself airs in writing to the other dowager, who must have hated having to stay and eat her heart out at Belchamber, with no hand in what touched her so nearly.

Poor Lady Charmington abounded in strange recondite lore, and gave much advice which was a little out of date at the stage proceedings had reached. ‘On no account let her mother coddle your wife,’ she wrote to Sainty. ‘If she wants a son, make her take exercise and not be too luxurious or over-eat herself.’

Every day the letters came, advocating a Spartan régime; but the messages never reached their destination. Sainty would have cut his tongue out sooner than address a word to Cissy on the subject, who, none the less, produced in due course an infant of the desired sex.

Lady Charmington hurried up to Roehampton, and actually dragged poor old Lady Firth into London to visit her great-grandson. The old lady, who had become nearly blind, and now hardly ever left her own fireside, peered curiously at the baby through two pairs of spectacles.

‘I don’t know who he is like,’ she said. ‘You have a look of your father, Sainty, but you are more like our family; this little lamb isn’t like either. No, certainly not a bit like you, nor yet like your wife, who is so fair. I don’t know, I’m sure, who he takes after.’

‘Does it matter much, grandmamma,’ Sainty asked, ‘as long as he is strong and healthy?’

His mother turned on him promptly. ‘Oh! you never think anything matters. Can’t you even take an interest in your own first-born son?’

‘Come, mother, it doesn’t follow that I take no interest because I don’t think it matters who he looks like,’ Sainty protested meekly.

He had several occasions to curse the propensity common to the whole female sex, when brought into the presence of a newborn babe, to hunt down and fix a likeness for it to some one or other of its kinsfolk. It seemed as though the one important thing to do for the little Lord Charmington was to determine this vexed question of resemblance. The child was of a marked type, too, with long-lashed dark eyes, and an unusual quantity of very black hair, as far removed from Sainty’s sandy insignificance as from the delicate fairness of his wife.

At last the matter was set at rest quite unexpectedly, and Sainty breathed more freely. The duchess, who had come to town for a little Christmas shopping, called to inquire after Cissy, and requested to be shown the baby.

‘Eh bien! vous voilà père!’ she remarked, looking rather quizzically at her grandson, as he piloted her upstairs. ‘My compliments! And how is Monsieur Bébé? Is he pretty, at least? brown or blond, a Chambers, a Bigorr, or,’ with the faintest pause of indescribable insolence, ‘an Eccleston?’

Belchamber took dexterous advantage of opening doors, giving warning of steps, and such small attentions, to avoid giving any direct answer, but he might have saved himself the trouble. The eternal topic was at once brought up by the monthly nurse, as she proudly displayed her charge.

‘We can’t think who he is like, your grace,’ she said, folding the flannel back from the tiny face. ‘Just look at his beautiful great eyes, and did ever you see such a head of hair on a babe?’

Sainty could have throttled her. ‘That’s the one thing every one seems to think of,’ he said rather testily.

‘Like?’ said the duchess. ‘There can be no question; he’s like me. You know the miniature of me as a little girl—the child is the image of it.’

Sainty started; he had so entirely forgotten that her grace was ever dark, that the resemblance had escaped him, but once pointed out it was salient. He felt like a criminal who discovers that the detective he has been dodging is on the track of some one else. After all, she was his grandmother too!

‘Of course!’ he cried, ‘how stupid every one has been not to think of it.’ And the next time the unwelcome subject was mentioned in his presence (by his mother, who had been showing the precious infant to Alice de Lissac), he said quite naturally, ‘Oh, we’ve settled that question. He’s just like the miniature at Sunborough House of the duchess when she was a child.’

Lady Charmington, who loved her mother-in-law no better than Cissy did hers, was most unwilling to admit the likeness, but could not deny it; and there being no doubt that baby derived his appearance from the member of the family she least wished him to resemble, was in future as averse as her son could desire to all discussion of what had occupied her so much.

Lady Eccleston, on the contrary, who loved all great people, was enchanted to point out the likeness to every member of her huge acquaintance. ‘Isn’t he like the dear duchess?’ she would cry. ‘It is so clever of him to have picked out the most beautiful of all his relations to take after, bless him!’

As time went on, the shortlived interest in the hope of the Chamberses rapidly waned. The bonfires in his honour had hardly burnt themselves out before this poor little scion of a noble house found himself in as much danger of being altogether neglected as if he had been of quite humble birth. Lady Charmington returned to the country, and Lady Eccleston, having provided a grand nurse and nursery-maid with unimpeachable testimonials out of one of the most aristocratic nurseries in the land, gradually allowed herself to be reabsorbed by her numerous avocations, social and philanthropic.

Cissy has been most inadequately represented if it need be stated that the very last person to trouble her head about the poor little thing was its mother. She was entirely at one with the fashionable accoucheur who attended her, in his opinion that to nurse the child would be far too great a strain on her constitution. After the briefest period of seclusion which the same authority could be got to say was sufficient for her own restoration, and a flying visit to the seaside, she seemed to have but one object in life, to make up by extra assiduity for the weeks she had been compelled to sacrifice from the engrossing occupation of amusing herself. If before she had been much out of her own house, she was now hardly ever in it. The only limit to the number of her engagements was the fear lest she should be betrayed into doing something that was not ‘smart’; and even with this important restriction, they were far too numerous to admit of her having any time to bestow upon her son.

As for Sainty, he hardly ever saw her. In so large a house, with a perfectly mutual desire to keep apart, it was not difficult to avoid meeting. He had had one necessary interview with her after the birth of the boy, in which he had told her some very plain truths.

‘You may as well understand the situation quite clearly,’ he said. ‘In return for the various things you enjoy as a result of being believed to be my wife, I have hitherto asked nothing of you; after what has happened, I would not take it if you offered it on your knees. I made just one condition, which you have not thought fit to observe, that there should be no scandal; to avoid it, I have sacrificed my last shred of self-respect. Don’t, therefore, think that you can count on a like cowardice on my part in the future. I pretend to no sort of control over your actions. What you do is of no consequence to me; but on just this one thing I insist: I must never hear you talked about, and, above all, there must be no repetition of this—this occurrence.’

‘I see,’ said Cissy. ‘Having by hook or by crook got the heir for which you and your mother were so anxious, you have no further use for me, and will seize the next opportunity to get rid of me.’

Sainty looked at her a moment, so antagonistic, so hard, so insolent in her youth and beauty, to which her late recovery lent a character almost ethereal. Bitter as her taunt was, he could not deny its substantial truth.

‘Precisely,’ he said, and left her without another word.

While Cissy immersed herself in social frivolities, Sainty was trying to find in work forgetfulness of the child he was ashamed to remember. He devoted long hours to humble toil and study, of which the only result would be a paragraph in the report of some learned society, read by no one but its own members. He attended the debates in the House of Lords with unparalleled assiduity, and came to be a familiar figure in the gallery on important nights in the other House. The scarcity of Radical peers gave him an extrinsic value for the leaders of his party, while his patience, powers of work, and known interest in all schemes of beneficence, marked him as specially designed by Providence to serve on Parliamentary Committees.

There was one important point of difference between the couple. While Cissy’s absorption in her favourite pursuits was quite natural and genuine, and she found no difficulty whatever in forgetting her maternal duties, it was only by consistent effort that Sainty succeeded in shutting out the recollection of his shame. The image of the baby, with its tell-tale dark eyes, was perpetually between him and the page he was writing or the pamphlet on which he was trying to fix his attention.

As we know, his rooms were on the ground-floor of the London house, while the nurseries were up three flights of stairs; it seemed impossible that any echo should penetrate from them to his study, yet he was always fancying that he detected faint sounds of crying from the upper regions of the house. Sometimes he would stop in his work and listen, and then, convinced that his imagination had played him a trick, turn again to his reading or writing, only to be haunted by this illusive wailing as before.

One day in the early spring, the child being then some three months old, this impression was more than usually persistent. At last, exasperated by his inability to fix his mind on what he was doing, Sainty pushed away his papers and went out upon the back stairs to listen. This time there was no question of imagination. Perhaps some door usually closed had been left open, but whatever the explanation, there was no doubt that a most real and material lamentation, such as the human infant alone is capable of producing, was echoing through the house. He returned to his table and sat down again. ‘I suppose babies of that age always yell,’ he said to himself, and he recalled Arthur’s complaint of that tendency in his own offspring. Why, of all people in the world, need the baby’s crying make him think of his brother? The recollection of that stucco rectory in the shires, where the birth of the little Lord Charmington must have aroused anything but enthusiasm, made him start and tremble like a felon.

For a moment he fancied the noise had ceased, but a second visit to the landing convinced him such was not the case. He looked at the clock. It was almost time for him to go down to Westminster; he would go out and walk a little first—sometimes he thought he did not have enough fresh air—it would do him good. He put away his papers, gathered together some loose sheets of notes that he wanted, and left the room.

What made him turn to the stairs instead of the front door he never quite knew. Some occult power seemed to draw his feet. He couldn’t go out to do battle for the children of the poor with that lamentable wailing ringing in his ears, and make no inquiry into what ailed the child under his own roof.

He had not mounted to these upper floors since he had conducted the duchess thither, but if he had been in any doubt about the room, the cries, which seemed to redouble in force as he drew nearer, would have been a quite sufficient guide. Through the wide open door Sainty could see the interior of the nursery before he entered. Lady Eccleston had given the rein to her grandmotherly fancy in the provision of all things needful and luxurious for the young heir. He was at least sumptuously lodged; the walls were gay with sanitary illustrations of juvenile literature from Miss Greenaway’s charming designs; buttercups and daisies sprinkled the window hangings; everything streamed with pale blue satin ribbon, and the very powder-box, of choicest ivory, had the mystic word ‘Baby’ slanting in turquoises across the lid. But nothing was ranged, or ordered, or in its proper place. The costly little garments so lavishly provided were tossed about with careless profusion, damp cloths trailed over the floor, a common enamelled saucepan for heating the child’s food had been set down on a lace robe, and half-washed-out feeding-bottles mingled on the table with the materials from which the nurse had evidently been manufacturing a new hat for herself.

The room was bare of human presence save for the emitter of the howls, who was lying alone in his cot, roaring himself purple in the face. He had kicked himself free of his wrappings, and his poor little legs were quite cold to the touch. Without attempting to cope with the complication of integuments, Sainty loosely pulled the coverlet over the child, and then looked with horror and anxiety at the convulsed face. What was to be done? ‘Don’t!’ he said imploringly, in no particular expectation of being understood, but from a general instinct to say something. ‘Please don’t!’

Whether the sense of a human presence was of some comfort to the baby, or it was only startled by the sound of an unfamiliar voice, it is certain that it intermitted its screaming, and slowly unpuckering its face, allowed the hidden eyes to appear. They were all wet and shiny with tears, their long lashes glued into points like a series of tiny camel’s-hair paint brushes.

Sainty wondered if he dared wipe them. ‘It can’t be comfortable to have one’s face all slobbered over like that,’ he thought, and taking out his handkerchief began, as lightly and tenderly as he could, to remove some of the superfluous moisture that seemed to exude from every feature. The baby, far from being sensible of this attention, showed unmistakable signs of being about to resume its lament. Sainty swiftly desisted from his endeavours, and once more implored its forbearance.

The baby, with its face all made up for a fresh howl, paused suddenly when, so to speak, half-way there, and once more opened its eyes. It stared solemnly at Sainty and Sainty stared back at it. What dumb interchange of intelligence passed between them it would be hard to say, but presently a faint windy smile flickered across one side of the baby’s face leaving the other immutably grave.

Sainty was transported with gratitude; he nodded and smiled repeatedly at the baby and tried to think of pleasant noises to make to it. One of the little hands had broken loose from under the coverlet and was beating the air—sparring at life with the aimless hostility of infancy. Very gingerly Sainty laid his forefinger against the palm, and instantly the absurd fingers closed round it and held him prisoner.

Long he stood beside the cradle gently swaying the hand that held his own back and forth and contemplating the baby, which, soothed by the rhythmic movement, seemed inclined to sleep. Since it ceased crying, its face had become a touch pleasanter and more normal colour, and, as the suffusing crimson died away, Sainty could notice how the poor chin was chafed and red where it had rubbed on the wet unchanged bib; the tiny nails, too, were edged with black, and surely, he thought, a carefully tended baby ought not to smell as sour as this one did. It was being borne in upon him that the child was neglected, a thought which made him not less indignant that he could not feel wholly without blame in the matter. True, the child was not his, but by acknowledging it he had accepted responsibility; he knew far too well how little reason there was to expect that its mother would occupy herself with such matters to think of sheltering himself behind the plea that it was her business. It was monstrous that the sins of its parents should be visited on this helpless creature. The queer little claw still grasped his finger, and he was still swinging it and crooning gently, when the nurse hurried into the room and was visibly taken aback at sight of her master. At once she was voluble in explanation and excuse.

‘That was the worst of these girls, you never could trust ’em; her back wasn’t a minute turned that that Emma wasn’t off to her own affairs. She hadn’t but just stepped downstairs to give the orders herself about his lordship’s milk, which, it was surprising, with all these lazy servants in the house, never could be sent up at the right time, and had particularly told the girl not to leave the room for a second till she came back ...’ with much more to the same effect.

Sainty grimly eyed the artificial roses she was whisking out of sight with clumsy dexterity, in her attempt to bring order out of chaos, with one hand, while with the other she made playful passes at the baby, crying ‘Did he?’ and ‘Was he, then?’ and ‘Nana’s here, precious.’

Neither Sainty nor the baby was in the least taken in by this transparent comedy.

‘I think this child is not properly looked after,’ the former said sternly.

‘Not looked after!’ Nurse was outraged in her finest feelings. ‘Not looked after! She didn’t know what his lordship meant. She was never away for a minute all day and often up half the night with the little darling; not that she grudged it, not she; she was well aware it was but her duty and what she was paid for, but it was hard after all to be told she didn’t look after the dear child, and she did think no one who hadn’t done it had any idea what it was to be with a young infant at night....’

And just then the peccant underling returning from her own private expedition in neglect of her duty, she made a diversion by falling on her and smiting her figuratively hip and thigh in a frenzy of righteous wrath.

The baby’s official guardians having for the time being returned to their posts, Sainty did not judge it necessary to remain and enter into details in which he might easily betray his ignorance. Having made his sweeping indictment and seen his heir restored to tranquillity by a bottle, he returned to his own neglected duties, feeling a little as if the Lord Chancellor might address to him some of the scathing reproaches he had just heard flung at the head of Emma.

He tried to immerse himself in his usual employments, but, do what he would, he was haunted for the rest of the day and far into the night by the vision of the piteous, dirty baby left to howl by itself in the midst of its luxurious surroundings, and felt the cold clasp of the tiny fingers growing gradually warm and moist upon his own.

CHAPTER XXV

The interview last recorded between Belchamber and his heir was to have momentous consequences for both of them. The principal gain was at first to the baby, as the immediate result was the dismissal of his neglectful attendants. Cissy, for her part, first delicately expressed surprise at Sainty’s interesting himself in the matter at all, and then adopted the simple plan of refusing to believe a word against the nurse, whom she eventually passed on to another young mother, with as strong a recommendation as she had received of her, adding in explanation: ‘My husband took a dislike to the woman, and so, of course, she had to go.’

Lady Eccleston was full of concern and astonishment. ‘I can’t understand it,’ she cried. ‘Lady Quivers gave her the very highest character, and before that, she was four years in the nursery at Branches, first as nursery-maid and then as under-nurse, and I went to see dear Lady Olave myself, who couldn’t say enough about her. I can’t think she would really neglect the darling.’

Sainty repeated his experience, and ‘Go and see for yourself,’ he said. ‘The child is ill-cared for; he isn’t even kept clean.’

Grandmamma went to inspect, and returned declaring the angel was as neat as a new pin. ‘You can’t, no matter how careful you are, prevent their dear little chinnywinnies from getting a wee bit chapped if they dribble much,’ she said.

‘No doubt he was clean enough after my unexpected visit,’ Sainty answered; ‘but I assure you I didn’t find him so; his hands were dirty and nothing about him was fresh. I don’t know much about babies, but I’m sure they ought not to smell so nasty. He was hungry and cold too, poor little chap! and left all alone to yell himself into a fit.’

‘Nurse declares she wasn’t gone five minutes; she was dreadfully distressed that you should have found the child alone. I feel sure one can trust that woman; I can always tell by people’s faces and the way they look at one; and Lady Quivers said she was so devoted to her last, and I know it was a very delicate little thing.’

For once, however, her son-in-law was inexorable. ‘The woman may have been all you say when she came,’ he said; ‘but it is not surprising if the best of nurses grows neglectful when the mother sets her the example.’

This was taking the matter to very unsafe ground, where Lady Eccleston felt that it behoved her to walk warily. ‘I can want nothing but the darling baby’s good,’ she said hastily. ‘I hold no brief for nurse, and if you are dissatisfied with her, dear Sainty, of course she had better go, though I don’t see what precautions we can take more than we did in getting this one.’

It was Alice de Lissac who finally discovered a successor to Lady Quivers’ treasure, and imported a pet lamb from her mother’s bible-class at Great Charmington to act as nursery-maid.

Once the treasure was gone, the other servants abounded in evidence, which more than justified her removal, though they would apparently have had no difficulty in reconciling their consciences to perpetual silence had she remained. It transpired that it was her frequent habit to administer narcotics to her unfortunate charge, in order that she might fulfil evening engagements of her own, from which she had sometimes not returned till the small hours of the morning; yet when Sainty felt it his duty to impart this information to her new employer, he was very civilly shown the door, with profuse thanks, but a polite intimation that his interference was not required; from which he was forced to conclude that Cissy was not as exceptional among fashionable mothers as he, in his ignorance, had imagined.

He carried the child off to Belchamber, where he knew that Lady Charmington would keep a lynx eye on the new nurse and her acolyte, and where, indeed, it soon began to improve visibly in condition.

Since its mother seemed to be without the common instincts of the animal kingdom, he imposed it on himself as a duty to see that the poor little creature was at least warmed and fed, and not poisoned with drugs. The duty was at first rather a painful one, involving as it did a constant recollection of what he would fain forget; but, as the months went by, like other things originally taken up from the sternest sense of responsibility, it came to have for him a decided interest.

It has been somewhat cynically said that to be under an obligation to a man is the beginning of dislike; be that as it may, there is no doubt that any one to whom, in a world of frustrated effort, we have been able to do a tangible service, establishes thereby a distinct claim on our gratitude. ‘This,’ we say to ourselves with a pardonable glow, ‘is our work; here is something accomplished, some one better or happier for our existence,’ And it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling towards the person who has procured us such a pleasing reflection.

Sainty found his mind constantly running on his small charge; he dwelt with pleasure on the prospect of seeing it; he even began to make excuses for more frequent visits to Belchamber, where it was astonishing how often his presence and personal supervision seemed to be required.

In addition to the baby, there was now another person there, on whom he had the pleasure of knowing he had conferred a benefit; he had rescued his brother-in-law, Thomas Eccleston, from the hated thraldom of the broker’s office, and placed him with his agent, Mr. Danford, who was beginning to feel, as age stole upon him, the necessity for help in managing the huge property.

The good Tommy, his legs permanently gaitered, his honest pink face burnt to a healthy brickdust colour, and his hands hardened by much congenial outdoor labour, was as happy as a rabbit in a vegetable garden. To initiate this neophyte into his duties, and at the same time keep things smooth between Danford and the pupil in whom his jealousy could not but scent a possible successor, called for many visits from the master. Sainty made time for them gladly, half ashamed to admit even to himself how much the new tenant of his old nurseries had to do with his alacrity. It surprised him to find how eagerly his eyes would scan the walks and lawns for the distant gleam of white in the perambulator.

Week by week, and month by month, the little life was expanding and developing like an opening flower in the sunshine, and Sainty noted the changes, watching with reverent awe the miracle of the dawning intelligence. He brought wonderful toys, heads in fancy costume that could by a turn of the wrist be made to gyrate on a handle to a feeble lute-like accompaniment; wonderful parti-coloured acrobats in the attitude of St. Andrew on his cross, who shook their extended limbs with a great tinkling of bells; white furry animals that emitted strange squeaks when pressed in the abdominal regions.

It must be confessed that the toys left the baby rather cold; sometimes he looked at them with solemn and contemptuous eyes, sometimes with an indulgent smile; more often he swept them from him with a downward sabre-cut action of the right arm. Whatever he did seemed to Sainty an indication of unusual capacity. He thought with a pang of fierce hatred—was it envy? was it contempt?—of the men who begot such marvellous beings, and grudged an occasional moment from their low toils or pleasures to glance impatiently at them and order them from the room. Of a mother who could bring forth a child and leave it to take its chance of life or death in the care of hirelings, he dared not trust himself to think at all.

A hunger of paternity possessed him. How he could have adored a child of his own! His own! Was this child not his own? To whom did it rather belong? the father who disowned, the mother who neglected it, or to him who had tended and cared for it, and was learning to love it? And the crowning wonder of all was that the child was learning to love him. It was not a merry baby—‘a solemn wise-like thing,’ the nurse called it—looking out upon the world with grave mysterious eyes, and that peculiarly detached, far-off expression that belongs only to babies and cats; but at sight of Sainty the rare smile never failed to light up the little white face, the legs would jump and kick against the nurse, the arms be held out for his embrace.

A baby’s partiality has as little cause or meaning as its aversions, and it is as unreasonable to be flattered by the one as to be hurt by the other; but a man must be of a sterner temper than our poor Sainty to resist a certain mild elation when a little creature hurls itself into his arms with such confident self-surrender. To him, moreover, the novelty of the experience made it doubly dear. His mother had doubtless loved him in her own grim way, because he was her son; others, as his uncle, had pitied, or done their duty by him; others again might have paid him attention for what they hoped to obtain from him; but never in the course of his existence could he remember that any living thing had been simply attracted to him by the magnetism of his own personality; and no one can suspect a baby of any complexity of motive. So, when his coming was greeted with jubilant laughter and dancings and outstretched arms, a warmth crept about his heart, and he owned to himself with humble gratitude that out of what had seemed his greatest affliction had come the best happiness his life had ever known.

Of course he did not arrive at this height of devotion all at once; it was the growth of many months, and every time he came to Belchamber, the little tendrils wound themselves more closely round his heart. At the end of the session, he established himself there with a more joyful sense of homecoming than he had known for years.

To those who have experienced how rich in possibilities is the intimacy of a baby of six months, it were unnecessary to describe it; they who have not would hardly credit it, however cunningly set forth. There is something intangible about it that must necessarily evaporate in the mere attempt to put it on paper. Sainty fell into the habit of having the child almost constantly with him; often it slept on the sofa in his study, or in its perambulator under the great cedars while he read or wrote beside it, and the sense of its nearness at once soothed and stimulated him; even if it woke, it was so gentle and quiet that it hardly disturbed his work.

He abandoned his little cart in favour of a larger open carriage in which the nurse and baby could accompany him on his drives. Not infrequently they would start by way of the dower-house, where Lady Charmington would be a willing addition to the party. Sainty and his mother were brought very close together by their common worship of the child; at no previous time, and on no other subject, had her son been in such constant need of the good lady’s advice. Exactly what the baby had suffered at the hands of the ‘treasure’ remained in doubt, but certainly its internal economy was none of the strongest, and many changes of diet had to be tried, which its two guardians discussed by the hour. Then it began to cut its teeth exceptionally early, with all the usual accompaniments of heaviness, loss of appetite, and restless nights. Without his mother’s rocklike commonsense to lean upon, Sainty would have worked himself into a fever of anxiety; her experience of the frailty of his own early days was of inestimable comfort to him.

‘I tell you, this child is a tower of strength to what you were,’ Lady Charmington would say. ‘I’ve been up night after night with you when you were teething.’

‘But was I as hot and restless as baby?’

‘Hot and restless? I should think you were! twice as bad, and croupy into the bargain, which this child, thank God! hasn’t a symptom of.’

So Sainty took heart, and when, after a time, he was made to feel with his finger two tiny white points in the red gum, this also seemed to him an almost supernatural achievement on the part of one so young.

He had come to regard the precious infant as so entirely his charge, that he did not bestow much thought upon its recreant mother. Cissy had started on a round of visits at the end of the Season, hardly going through the form of inquiring if Sainty thought of accompanying her. It was a shock to him to find how completely she had gone out of his existence, when she presently announced that she was coming to Belchamber; she had spent a day or two there, before going North, to get some country clothes and give her maid a chance to repack, but had not seen the baby more than two or three times, nor appeared to take any particular interest in what was being done for it. It never occurred to Sainty as likely that she would in any way occupy herself with the child or its relation to him; it was therefore no small surprise to him to discover, before she had been many days in the house, that it was a distinct irritation to her to see them together.

The first time she found it under the cedars with him, she inquired, with a perceptible shade of annoyance in her voice, where the nurse was, and why she hadn’t taken it out.

‘Baby generally spends most of the morning with me here if it’s fine,’ Sainty said. ‘The doctor likes him to be in the open air as much as possible, and it gives nurse a chance to do various little things for him.’

‘Nonsense! it’s her place to be with him; she’ll get utterly spoilt if you do her work for her; she has got a girl in the nursery. If she can’t manage, she had better have another. There’s no earthly reason for you to do nursery-maid.’

‘I like having baby with me, and this woman doesn’t neglect her duties; at least she doesn’t leave the child alone, when he’s not with me, like the one your mother got for him.’

‘You were always unjust about that poor woman. Ah! here you are, nurse. You had better take baby and walk him about. You shouldn’t leave him here to worry his lordship.’

‘Begging your ladyship’s pardon, my lord partick’larly wished for the child to be left with him,’ retorted the nurse, as she wheeled the perambulator viciously away, quivering with suppressed indignation.

‘You see the results of your spoiling that woman,’ Cissy remarked. ‘If she’s going to be insolent to me she’ll have to go.’

‘No—by heaven! I’m hanged if she shall,’ Sainty burst out ‘She’s devoted to the child, and takes very good care of him, and he isn’t very strong. It would be monstrous, after never giving him a thought from the time of his birth till now, if you undertook to sack the people who do look after him, because you considered they didn’t sufficiently kowtow to you.’

‘It’s precisely what you did to her predecessor.’

‘On the contrary, I sent her away because she neglected him, which was, no doubt, what gave you a fellow-feeling for her.’

‘Oh! well, don’t let me interfere between you and your protégée. I don’t even pretend to inquire what terms you are on with her; but I must confess I can’t see what particular pleasure you derive from the constant presence of another man’s child.’

‘Hush!’ Sainty said, casting a swift, frightened glance around to see if any one was within earshot. ‘Be careful what you say. Remember the child is mine. He has got to be mine. Your remark was in your usual excellent taste, but on that particular subject you will have to forego the pleasure of wounding me. If you are so fond of reminding me that I am not his father, you will say something one of these days before others that you will regret.’

It gave him a horrible sense of complicity to be obliged to entreat her discretion a feeling that, bound by their guilty secret, let them hate each other as they would, they dare not quarrel. Probably Cissy was not less aware of this necessity than her husband, for though her object remained the same, she altered her tactics. She would try to keep the child from him by little underhand manœuvres, sending it out when she thought him likely to want it, and even going so far as to take it with her when she drove; but she did not risk another face attack.

Sainty, on his side, did nothing to provoke an encounter. He saw the child not less, but as it were by stealth, and this introduction of a slightly clandestine element into their intercourse only heightened his love for it. Not that it required any great exercise of tact or ingenuity to evade Cissy’s notice. Lord Charmington would have fared ill had he been dependent on the fitful attentions of his mamma for care and comfort. Even the amiable desire to deprive her husband of his one pleasure could not make a domestic character of Lady Belchamber. She was much away, and when at home constantly surrounded by guests who absorbed her attention. It was only at rare intervals that she found any leisure to bestow on the separation of her husband and her child.

She had a trick of arriving when least expected, swooping suddenly into visible space like a comet, and, like a comet, followed by her train; though to speak of her appearances as comet-like gives a false impression of something periodical and calculably recurrent, whereas no one could foretell when Cissy might take it into her head to entertain a party, which seemed to be her only idea of the uses of a home.

Once, when he thought she was safely launched on a round of country-houses, Sainty had asked his old friend Gerald Newby, for whom she entertained no great regard, to pay him a visit. They were at tea on the lawn, when, preceded at a short interval by a heralding telegram, her ladyship descended on them with a few friends, and the announcement of a further contingent for the morrow.

Lady Charmington had come over from the dower-house, and Tommy had dropped in for tea and to play with his nephew, about whom he was almost as weak as Sainty.

No one looking at the group under the cedars would have guessed that he was witness of anything but the most delightful scene of domestic felicity. The stately ancestral home, the superb trees, the great stretches of smoothly mown turf, the young married couple with their baby between them, surrounded by all that wealth and great possession could give, the adoring grandmother, the loving uncle, the admiring friends, the glow of flowers, the cheerful, intimate little meal, all combined to make the picture complete. It appealed strongly to Newby, who beamed indulgently on the party.

‘Our dear Sainty appears in a new and most amiable light,’ he said; ‘I am not accustomed to see him as Kourotrophos. It is the epithet applied to Hermes in his character of the child-tender,’ he added explanatorily to Cissy, who looked rather blank.

‘I can’t think why nurse doesn’t fetch baby,’ that lady remarked; ‘or, for that matter, why she brought him down at all. I’ve always told her not to when any one was here. Whatever one may think of one’s own children, one has no right to bore other people with them.’

‘I asked to see the child,’ said Lady Charmington, the light of battle waking in her eye.

‘Mother had settled to come over before I knew you were coming,’ Sainty said quietly. ‘When I got your telegram it was too late to stop her, and as she had come on purpose to see baby, I couldn’t refuse to send for him. No one need bother about him; he will be quite good with me.’

‘Dear little man!’ said one of the ladies who had come with the fond mother. ‘I’m so glad you didn’t stop him, Lord Belchamber. I love babies. I’ve been trying to think who he reminds me of. He’s not a bit like you or Cissy.’

‘We think him like my grandmother—’ Sainty began.

‘I never could see that he was so like the duchess,’ Lady Charmington cut in.

‘To me he’s the image of Claude Morland,’ remarked the luckless Tommy.

There was a sudden hush that may have lasted some five seconds ere it was broken by Newby inquiring, ‘What has become of your charming cousin? I liked him so much, and hoped I might meet him here.’

‘We see very little of Claude now,’ Lady Charmington responded. ‘He never seems to come here. I suppose he finds other places more amusing. He was glad enough to come in old days.’

‘I fancy,’ said Sainty, ‘as the duke gets older that he is more dependent on him. He very seldom gets away.’

He had, in fact, for some time been conscious that Claude came much less to the house than formerly, and was acutely aware of a like consciousness in Cissy, though each was careful to say nothing about it to the other.

‘By the way, that reminds me,’ said Lady Charmington to Sainty. ‘I had almost forgotten. Alice de Lissac writes she is coming to her father for a little, and she is very anxious to see baby. May I bring her over some day?’

‘Why should Claude remind you of Mrs. de Lissac?’ Cissy asked, with a little laugh, her desire to score off her mother-in-law getting the better of her prudence. ‘I never knew they had much in common.’

‘Only because Alice says in her letter they have seen a good deal of him lately. He seems to have been several times to Roehampton; and mother mentioned his coming in to see her one day with one of the girls.’