“But, indeed——” I was beginning, when Dr. Knox stopped me.
“A moment, Johnny. I was about to add that a woman who is capable of one crime can sometimes be capable of another; and I should not be surprised if it is Lettice Lane who is tampering with Lady Jenkins.”
“But,” I repeated, “Lettice Lane did not take the jewels. She knew nothing about it. She was perfectly innocent.”
“You cannot answer for it, Johnny.”
“Yes, I can; and do. I know who did take them.”
“You know, Johnny Ludlow?” cried old Tamlyn, while Dr. Knox looked at me in silence.
“I helped Miss Deveen to find it out. At least, she had me with her during the progress of the discovery. It was a lady who took the jewels—as Miss Cattledon told you. She fainted away when it was brought home to her, and fell on my shoulder.”
I believe they hardly knew whether to give me credit or not. Of course it did sound strange that I, young Johnny Ludlow, should have been entrusted by Miss Deveen with a secret she would not disclose even to her many years’ companion and friend, Jemima Cattledon.
“Who was it, then, Johnny?” began Mr. Tamlyn.
“I should not like to tell, sir. I do not think it would be right to tell. For the young lady’s own sake, Miss Deveen hushed the matter up, hoping it would be a warning to her in future. And I dare say it has been.”
“Young, was she?”
“Yes. She has married since then. I could not, in honour, tell you her name.”
“Well, I suppose we must believe you, Johnny,” said Dr. Knox, making the admission unwillingly. “Lettice Lane did get fingering the jewels, it appears; you admit that.”
“But she did not take them. It was—another.” And, cautiously choosing my words, so as not to say anything that could direct suspicion to Sophie Chalk—whose name most likely they had never heard in their lives—I gave them an outline of the way in which Miss Deveen had traced the matter out. The blaze lighted up Mr. Tamlyn’s grey face as I told it.
“You perceive that it could not have been Lettice Lane, Dr. Knox,” I said, in conclusion. “I am sorry Miss Cattledon should have spoken against her.”
“Yes, I perceive Lettice could not have been guilty of stealing the jewels,” answered Dr. Knox. “Nevertheless, a somewhat unfavourable impression of the girl has been made upon me, and I shall look a little after her. Why does she want to emigrate to Australia?”
“Only because two of her brothers are there. I dare say it is all idle talk—that she will never go.”
They said no more to me. I took up my book and quitted the room, leaving them to talk it out between themselves.
II.
Mr. Tamlyn might be clever in medicine; he certainly was not in diplomacy. Dr. Knox had particularly impressed upon him the desirability of keeping their suspicion a secret for the present, even from Madame St. Vincent; yet the first use old Tamlyn made of his liberty was to disclose it to her.
Tossed about in the conflict of doubts and suspicions that kept arising in his mind, Mr. Tamlyn, from the night I have just told you of, was more uneasy than a fish out of water, his opinion constantly vacillating. “You must be mistaken, Arnold; I feel sure there’s nothing wrong going on,” he would say to his junior partner one minute; and, the next minute, decide that it was going on, and that its perpetrator must be Lettice Lane.
The uneasiness took him abroad earlier than he would otherwise have gone. A slight access of fever attacked him the day after the subject had been broached—which fever he had no doubt worried himself into. In the ordinary course of things he would have stayed at home for a week after that: but he now went out on the third day.
“I will walk,” he decided, looking up at the sunshine. “It will do me good. What lovely weather we are having.”
Betaking himself through the streets to the London Road, he reached Jenkins House. The door stood open; and the doctor, almost as much at home in the house as Lady Jenkins herself, walked in without knocking.
The dining-room, where they mostly sat in the morning, was empty; the drawing-room was empty; and Mr. Tamlyn went on to a third room, that opened to the garden at the back with glass-doors.
“Any one here? or is the house gone a-maying?” cried the surgeon as he entered and came suddenly upon a group of three people, all upon their knees before a pile of old music—Madame St. Vincent, Mina Knox, and Captain Collinson. Two of them got up, laughing. Mina remained where she was.
“We are searching for a manuscript song that is missing,” explained madame, as she gave her hand to the doctor. “Mina feels sure she left it here; but I do not remember to have seen it.”
“It was not mine,” added Mina, looking round at the doctor in her pretty, gentle way. “Caroline Parker lent it to me, and she has sent for it twice.”
“I hope you’ll find it, my dear.”
“I must have left it here,” continued Mina, as she rapidly turned over the sheets. “I was singing it yesterday afternoon, you remember,” she added, glancing up at the captain. “It was while you were upstairs with Lady Jenkins, Madame St. Vincent.”
She came to the end of the pile of music, but could not find the song. Putting it all on a side-table, Mina said a general good-bye, escaped by the glass-doors, and ran home by the little gate that divided the two gardens.
Captain Collinson left next. Perhaps he and Mina had both a sense of being de trop when the doctor was there. Waiting to exchange a few words with Mr. Tamlyn, and bidding Madame St. Vincent an adieu that had more of formality in it than friendship, the captain bowed himself out, taking his tasselled cane with him, madame ringing for one of the men-servants to attend him to the hall-door. Tasselled canes were the fashion then.
“They do not make a practice of meeting here, do they?” began old Tamlyn, when the captain was beyond hearing.
“Who? What?” asked Madame St. Vincent.
“The captain and little Mina Knox.”
For a minute or two it appeared that madame could not catch his meaning. She looked at him in perplexity.
“I fail to understand you, dear Mr. Tamlyn.”
“The captain is a very attractive man, no doubt; a good match, I dare say, and all that: but still we should not like poor little Mina to be whirled off to India by him. I asked if they often met here.”
“Whirled off to India?” repeated madame, in astonishment. “Little Mina? By him? In what capacity?”
“As his wife.”
“But—dear me!—what can have put such an idea into your head, my good sir? Mina is a mere child.”
“Old enough to take up foolish notions,” quoth the doctor, quaintly; “especially if they are put into it by a be-whiskered grenadier, such as he. I hope he is not doing it! I hope you do not give them opportunities of meeting here!”
Madame seemed quite taken aback at the implication. Her voice had a sound of tears in it.
“Do you suppose I could be capable of such a thing, sir? I did think you had a better opinion of me. Such a child as Mina! We were both on our knees, looking for the song, when Captain Collinson came in; and he must needs go down on his great stupid knees too. He but called to inquire after Lady Jenkins.”
“Very thoughtful of him, of course. He is often up here, I fancy; at the next house, if not at this.”
“Certainly not often at this. He calls on Lady Jenkins occasionally, and she likes it. I don’t encourage him. He may be a brave soldier, and a man of wealth and family, and everything else that’s desirable; but he is no especial favourite of mine.”
“Well, Sam Jenkins has an idea that he would like to get making love to Mina. Sam was laughing about it in the surgery last night with Johnny Ludlow, and I happened to overhear him. Sam thinks they meet here, as well as next door: and you heard Mina say just now that she was singing to him here yesterday afternoon. Stay, my dear lady, don’t be put out. I am sure you have thought it no harm, have been innocent of all suspicion of it. Mistaken, you tell me? Well, it may be I am. Mina is but a child, as you observe, and—and perhaps Sam was only jesting. How is our patient to-day?”
“Pretty well. Just a little drowsy.”
“In bed, or up?”
“Oh, up.”
“Will you tell her I am here?”
Madame St. Vincent, her plumage somewhat ruffled, betook herself to the floor above, Mr. Tamlyn following. Lady Jenkins, in a loose gown of blue quilted silk and a cap with yellow roses in it, sat at the window, nodding.
“Well,” said he, sitting down by her and taking her hand, “and how do you feel to-day?”
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. Better, she thought: oh yes, certainly better.
“You are sleepy.”
“Rather so. Getting up tired me.”
“Are you not going for a drive to-day? It would do you good.”
“I don’t know. Ask Patty. Patty, are we going out to-day?”
The utter helplessness of mind and body which appeared to be upon her as she thus appealed to another, Mr. Tamlyn had rarely seen equalled. Even while listening to Madame St. Vincent’s answer—that they would go if she felt strong enough—her heavy eyelids closed again. In a minute or two she was in a sound sleep. Tamlyn threw caution and Dr. Knox’s injunction to the winds, and spoke on the moment’s impulse to Madame St. Vincent.
“You see,” he observed, pointing to the sleeping face.
“She is only dozing off again.”
“Only! My dear, good lady, this perpetual, stupid, lethargic sleepiness is not natural. You are young, perhaps inexperienced, or you would know it to be not so.”
“I scarcely think it altogether unnatural,” softly dissented madame, with deprecation. “She has really been very poorly.”
“But not sufficiently so to induce this helplessness. It has been upon her for months, and is gaining ground.”
“She is seventy years of age, remember.”
“I know that. But people far older than that are not as she is without some cause: either of natural illness, or—or—something else. Step here a minute, my dear.”
Old Tamlyn walked rapidly to the other window, and stood there talking in low tones, his eyes fixed on Madame St. Vincent, his hand, in his eagerness, touching her shoulder.
“Knox thinks, and has imparted his opinion to me—ay, and his doubts also—that something is being given to her.”
“That something is being given to her!” echoed Madame St. Vincent, her face flushing with surprise. “Given to her in what way?”
“Or else that she is herself taking it. But I, who have known her longer than Knox has, feel certain that she is not one to do anything of the sort. Besides, you would have found it out long ago.”
“I protest I do not understand you,” spoke madame, earnestly. “What is it that she could take? She has taken the medicine that comes from your surgery. She has taken nothing else.”
“Knox thinks she is being drugged.”
“Drugged! Lady Jenkins drugged? How, drugged? What with? What for? Who would drug her?”
“There it is; who would do it?” said the old doctor, interrupting the torrent of words poured forth in surprise. “I confess I think the symptoms point to it. But I don’t see how it could be accomplished and you not detect it, considering that you are so much with her.”
“Why, I hardly ever leave her, day or night,” cried madame. “My bedroom, as you know, is next to hers, and I sleep with the intervening door open. There is no more chance, sir, that she could be drugged than that I could be.”
“When Knox first spoke of it to me I was pretty nearly startled out of my senses,” went on Tamlyn. “For I caught up a worse notion than he meant to convey—that she was being systematically poisoned.”
A dark, vivid, resentful crimson dyed madame’s face. The suggestion seemed to be a reproof on her vigilance.
“Poisoned!” she repeated in angry indignation. “How dare Dr. Knox suggest such a thing?”
“My dear, he did not suggest it against you. He and I both look upon you as her best safeguard. It is your being with her, that gives us some sort of security: and it is your watchfulness we shall have to look to for detection.”
“Poisoned!” reiterated madame, unable to get over the ugly word. “I think Dr. Knox ought to be made to answer for so wicked a suspicion.”
“Knox did not mean to go so far as that: it was my misapprehension. But he feels perfectly convinced that she is being tampered with. In short, drugged.”
“It is not possible,” reasoned madame. “It could not be done without my knowledge. Indeed, sir, you may dismiss all idea of the kind from your mind; you and Dr. Knox also. I assure you that such a thing would be simply impracticable.”
Mr. Tamlyn shook his head. “Any one who sets to work to commit a crime by degrees, usually possesses a large share of innate cunning—more than enough to deceive lookers-on,” he remarked. “I can understand how thoroughly repulsive this idea is to you, my good lady; that your mind shrinks from admitting it; but I wish you would, just for argument’s sake, allow its possibility.”
But madame was harder than adamant. Old Tamlyn saw what it was—that she took this accusation, and would take it, as a reflection on her care.
“Who is there, amidst us all, that would attempt to injure Lady Jenkins?” she asked. “The household consists only of myself and the servants. They would not seek to harm their mistress.”
“Not so sure; not so sure. It is amidst those servants that we must look for the culprit. Dr. Knox thinks so, and so do I.”
Madame’s face of astonishment was too genuine to be doubted. She feebly lifted her hands in disbelief. To suspect the servants seemed, to her, as ridiculous as the suspicion itself.
“Her maid, Lettice, and the housemaid, Sarah, are the only two servants who approach her when she is ill, sir: Sarah but very little. Both of them are kind-hearted young women.”
Mr. Tamlyn coughed. Whether he would have gone on to impart his doubt of Lettice cannot be known. During the slight silence Lettice herself entered the room with her mistress’s medicine. A quick, dark-eyed young woman, in a light print gown.
The stir aroused Lady Jenkins. Madame St. Vincent measured out the physic, and was handing it to the patient, when Mr. Tamlyn seized the wine-glass.
“It’s all right,” he observed, after smelling and tasting, speaking apparently to himself: and Lady Jenkins took it.
“That is the young woman you must especially watch,” whispered Mr. Tamlyn, as Lettice retired with her waiter.
“What! Lettice?” exclaimed madame, opening her eyes.
“Yes; I should advise you to do so. She is the only one who is much about her mistress,” he added, as if he would account for the advice. “Watch her.”
Leaving madame at the window to digest the mandate and to get over her astonishment, he sat down by Lady Jenkins again, and began talking of this and that: the fineness of the weather, the gossip passing in the town.
“What do you take?” he asked abruptly.
“Take?” she repeated. “What is it that I take, Patty?” appealing to her companion.
“Nay, but I want you to tell me yourself,” hastily interposed the doctor. “Don’t trouble madame.”
“But I don’t know that I can recollect.”
“Oh yes, you can. The effort to do so will do you good—wake you out of this stupid sleepiness. Take yesterday: what did you have for breakfast?”
“Yesterday? Well, I think they brought me a poached egg.”
“And a very good thing, too. What did you drink with it?”
“Tea. I always take tea.”
“Who makes it?”
“I do,” said madame, turning her head to Mr. Tamlyn with a meaning smile. “I take my own tea from the same tea-pot.”
“Good. What did you take after that, Lady Jenkins?”
“I dare say I had some beef-tea at eleven. Did I, Patty? I generally do have it.”
“Yes, dear Lady Jenkins; and delicious beef-tea it is, and it does you good. I should like Mr. Tamlyn to take a cup of it.”
“I don’t mind if I do.”
Perhaps the answer was unexpected: but Madame St. Vincent rang the bell and ordered up a cup of the beef-tea. The beef-tea proved to be “all right,” as he had observed of the medicine. Meanwhile he had continued his questions to his patient.
She had eaten some chicken for dinner, and a little sweetbread for supper. There had been interludes of refreshment: an egg beaten up with milk, a cup of tea and bread-and-butter, and so on.
“You don’t starve her,” laughed Mr. Tamlyn.
“No, indeed,” warmly replied madame. “I do what I can to nourish her.”
“What do you take to drink?” continued the doctor.
“Nothing to speak of,” interposed madame. “A drop of cold brandy-and-water with her dinner.”
“Patty thinks it is better for me than wine,” put in Lady Jenkins.
“I don’t know but it is. You don’t take too much of it?”
Lady Jenkins paused. “Patty knows. Do I take too much, Patty?”
Patty was smiling, amused at the very idea. “I measure one table-spoonful of brandy into a tumbler and put three or four table-spoonfuls of water to it. If you think that is too much brandy, Mr. Tamlyn, I will put less.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said old Tamlyn. “It’s hardly enough.”
“She has the same with her supper,” concluded madame.
Well, old Tamlyn could make nothing of his suspicions. And he came home from Jenkins House and told Knox he thought they must be both mistaken.
“Why did you speak of it to madame?” asked Dr. Knox. “We agreed to be silent for a short time.”
“I don’t see why she should not be told, Arnold. She is straightforward as the day—and Lettice Lane seems so, too. I tasted the beef-tea they gave her—took a cup of it, in fact—and I tasted the physic. Madame says it is impossible that anything in the shape of drugs is being given to her; and upon my word I think so too.”
“All the same, I wish you had not spoken.”
And a little time went on.
III.
The soirée to-night was at Rose Villa; and Mrs. Knox, attired in a striped gauze dress and the jangling ornaments she favoured, stood to receive her guests. Beads on her thin brown neck, beads on her sharp brown wrists, beads in her ears, and beads dropping from her waist. She looked all beads. They were drab beads to-night, each resting in a little cup of gold. Janet and Miss Cattledon went up in the brougham, the latter more stiffly ungracious than usual, for she still resented Mrs. Knox’s former behaviour to Janet. I walked.
“Where can the people from next door be?” wondered Mrs. Knox, as the time went on and Lady Jenkins did not appear.
For Lady Jenkins went abroad again. In a day or two after Mr. Tamlyn’s interview with her, Lefford had the pleasure of seeing her red-wheeled carriage whirling about the streets, herself and her companion within it. Old Tamlyn said she was getting strong. Dr. Knox said nothing; but he kept his eyes open.
“I hope she is not taken ill again? I hope she is not too drowsy to come!” reiterated Mrs. Knox. “Sometimes madame can’t rouse her up from these sleepy fits, do what she will.”
Lady Jenkins was the great card of the soirée, and Mrs. Knox grew cross. Captain Collinson had not come either. She drew me aside.
“Johnny Ludlow, I wish you would step into the next door and see whether anything has happened. Do you mind it? So strange that Madame St. Vincent does not send or come.”
I did not mind it at all. I rather liked the expedition, and passed out of the noisy and crowded room to the lovely, warm night-air. The sky was clear; the moon radiant.
I was no longer on ceremony at Jenkins House, having been up to it pretty often with Dan or Sam, and on my own score. Lady Jenkins had been pleased to take a fancy to me, had graciously invited me to some drives in her red-wheeled carriage, she dozing at my side pretty nearly all the time. I could not help being struck with the utter abnegation of will she displayed. It was next door to imbecility.
“Patty, Johnny Ludlow would like to go that way, I think, to-day may we?” she would say. “Must we turn back already, Patty?—it has been such a short drive.” Thus she deferred to Madame St. Vincent in all things, small and great: if she had a will or choice of her own, it seemed that she never thought of exercising it. Day after day she would say the drives were short: and very short indeed they were made, upon some plea or other, when I made a third in the carriage. “I am so afraid of fatigue for her,” madame whispered to me one day, when she seemed especially anxious.
“But you take a much longer drive, when she and you are alone,” I answered, that fact having struck me. “What difference does my being in the carriage make?—are you afraid of fatigue for the horses as well?” At which suggestion madame burst out laughing.
“When I am alone with her I take care not to talk,” she explained; “but when three of us are here there’s sure to be talking going on, and it cannot fail to weary her.”
Of course that was madame’s opinion: but my impression was that, let us talk as much as we would, in a high key or a low one, that poor nodding woman neither heard nor heeded it.
“Don’t you think you are fidgety about it, madame?”
“Well, perhaps I am,” she answered. “I assure you, Lady Jenkins is an anxious charge to me.”
Therefore, being quite at home now at Jenkins House (to return to the evening and the soirée I was telling of), I ran in the nearest way to do Mrs. Knox’s behest. That was through the two back gardens, by the intervening little gate. I knocked at the glass-doors of what was called the garden-room, in which shone a light behind the curtains, and went straight in. Sitting near each other, conversing with an eager look on their faces, and both got up for Mrs. Knox’s soirée, were Captain Collinson and Madame St. Vincent.
“Mr. Ludlow!” she exclaimed. “How you startled me!”
“I beg your pardon for entering so abruptly. Mrs. Knox asked me to run in and see whether anything was the matter, and I came the shortest way. She has been expecting you for some time.”
“Nothing is the matter,” shortly replied madame, who seemed more put out than the occasion called for: she thought me rude, I suppose. “Lady Jenkins is not ready; that is all. She may be half-an-hour yet.”
“Half-an-hour! I won’t wait longer, then,” said Captain Collinson, catching up his crush hat. “I do trust she has not taken another chill. Au revoir, madame.”
With a nod to me, he made his exit by the way I had entered. The same peculiarity struck me now that I had observed before: whenever I went into a place, be it Jenkins House or Rose Villa, the gallant captain immediately quitted it.
“Do I frighten Captain Collinson away?” I said to madame on the spur of the moment.
“You frighten him! Why should you?”
“I don’t know why. If he happens to be here when I come in, he gets up and goes away. Did you never notice it? It is the same at Mrs. Knox’s. It was the same once at Mrs. Hampshire’s.”
Madame laughed. “Perhaps he is shy,” said she, jestingly.
“A man who has travelled to India and back must have rubbed his shyness off, one would think. I wish I knew where I had met him before!—if I have met him. Every now and again his face seems to strike on a chord of my memory.”
“It is a handsome face,” remarked madame.
“Pretty well. As much as can be seen of it. He has hair enough for a Russian bear or a wild Indian.”
“Have wild Indians a superabundance of hair?” asked she gravely.
I laughed. “Seriously speaking, though, Madame St. Vincent, I think I must have met him somewhere.”
“Seriously speaking, I don’t think that can be,” she answered; and her jesting tone had become serious. “I believe he has passed nearly all his life in India.”
“Just as you have passed yours in the South of France. And yet there is something in your face also familiar to me.”
“I should say you must be just a little fanciful on the subject of likenesses. Some people are.”
“I do not think so. If I am I did not know it. I——”
The inner door opened and Lady Jenkins appeared, becloaked and beshawled, with a great green hood over her head, and leaning on Lettice Lane. Madame got up and threw a mantle on her own shoulders.
“Dear Lady Jenkins, I was just coming to see for you. Captain Collinson called in to give you his arm, but he did not wait. And here’s Mr. Johnny Ludlow, sent in by Mrs. Knox to ask whether we are all dead.”
“Ay,” said Lady Jenkins, nodding to me as she sat down on the sofa: “but I should like a cup of tea before we start.”
“A cup of tea?”
“Ay; I’m thirsty. Let me have it, Patty.”
She spoke the last words in an imploring tone, as if Patty were her mistress. Madame threw off her mantle again, untied the green hood of her lady, and sent Lettice to make some tea.
“You had better go back and tell Mrs. Knox we are coming, though I’m sure I don’t know when it will be,” she said aside to me.
I did as I was told; and had passed through the garden-gate, when my eye fell upon Master Richard Knox. He was standing on the grass in the moonlight, near the clump of laurels, silently contorting his small form into cranks and angles, after the gleeful manner of Punch in the show when he has been giving his wife a beating. Knowing that agreeable youth could not keep himself out of mischief if he tried, I made up to him.
“Hush—sh—sh!” breathed he, silencing the question on my lips.
“What’s the sport, Dicky?”
“She’s with him there, beyond the laurels; they are walking round,” he whispered. “Oh my! such fun! I have been peeping at ’em. He has his arm round her waist.”
Sure enough, at that moment they came into view—Mina and Captain Collinson. Dicky drew back into the shade, as did I. And I, to my very great astonishment, trod upon somebody else’s feet, who made, so to say, one of the laurels.
“It’s only I,” breathed Sam Jenkins. “I’m on the watch as well as Dicky. It looks like a case of two loviers, does it not?”
The “loviers” were parting. Captain Collinson held her hand between both his to give her his final whisper. Then Mina tripped lightly over the grass and stole in at the glass-doors of the garden-room, while the captain stalked round to the front-entrance and boldly rang, making believe he had only then arrived.
“Oh my, my!” repeated the enraptured Dicky, “won’t I have the pull of her now! She’d better tell tales of me again!”
“Is it a case, think you?” asked Sam of me, as we slowly followed in the wake of Mina.
“It looks like it,” I answered.
Janet was singing one of her charming songs, as we stole in at the glass-doors: “Blow, blow, thou wintry wind:” just as she used to sing it in that house in the years gone by. Her voice had not lost its sweetness. Mina stood near the piano now, a thoughtful look upon her flushed face.
“Where did you and Dicky go just now, Sam?”
Sam turned short round at the query. Charlotte Knox, as she put it, carried suspicion in her low tone.
“Where did I and Dicky go?” repeated Sam, rather taken aback. “I—I only stepped out for a stroll in the moonlight. I don’t know anything about Dicky.”
“I saw Dicky run out to the garden first, and you went next,” persisted Charlotte, who was just as keen as steel. “Dick, what was there to see? I will give you two helpings of trifle at supper if you tell me.”
For two helpings of trifle Dick would have sold his birthright. “Such fun!” he cried, beginning to jump. “She was out there with the captain, Lotty: he came to the window here and beckoned to her: I saw him. I dodged them round and round the laurels, and I am pretty nearly sure he kissed her.”
“Who was?—who did?” But the indignant glow on Lotty’s face proved that she scarcely needed to put the question.
“That nasty Mina. She took and told that it was me who eat up the big bowl of raspberry cream in the larder to-day; and mother went and believed her!”
Charlotte Knox, her brow knit, her head held erect, walked away after giving us all a searching look apiece. “I, like Dicky, saw Collinson call her out, and I thought I might as well see what he wanted to be after,” Sam whispered to me. “I did not see Dicky at all, though, until he came into the laurels with you.”
“He is talking to her now,” I said, directing Sam’s attention to the captain.
“I wonder whether I ought to tell Dr. Knox?” resumed Sam. “What do you think, Johnny Ludlow? She is so young, and somehow I don’t trust him. Dan doesn’t, either.”
“Dan told me he did not.”
“Dan fancies he is after her money. It would be a temptation to some people,—seven thousand pounds. Yet he seems to have plenty of his own.”
“If he did marry her he could not touch the money for three or four years to come.”
“Oh, couldn’t he, though,” answered Sam, taking me up. “He could touch it next day.”
“I thought she did not come into it till she was of age, and that Dr. Knox was trustee.”
“That’s only in case she does not marry. If she marries it goes to her at once. Here comes Aunt Jenkins!”
The old lady, as spruce as you please, in a satin gown, was shaking hands with Mrs. Knox. But she looked half silly: and, may I never be believed again, if she did not begin to nod directly she sat down.
“Do you hail from India? as the Americans phrase it,” I suddenly ask of Captain Collinson, when chance pinned us together in a corner of the supper-room, and he could not extricate himself.
“Hail from India!” he repeated. “Was I born there, I conclude you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Not exactly. I went there, a child, with my father and mother. And, except for a few years during my teens, when I was home for education, I have been in India ever since. Why do you ask?”
“For no particular reason. I was telling Madame St. Vincent this evening that it seemed to me I had seen you before; but I suppose it could not be. Shall you be going back soon?”
“I am not sure. Possibly in the autumn, when my leave will expire: not till next year if I can get my leave extended. I shall soon be quitting Lefford.”
“Shall you?”
“Must do it. I have to make my bow at a levée; and I must be in town for other things as well. I should like to enjoy a little of the season there: it may be years before the opportunity falls to my lot again. Then I have some money to invest: I think of buying an estate. Oh, I have all sorts of business to attend to, once I am in London.”
“Where’s the use of buying an estate if you are to live in India?”
“I don’t intend to live in India always,” he answered, with a laugh. “I shall quit the service as soon as ever I can, and settle down comfortably in the old country. A home of my own will be of use to me then.”
Now it was that very laugh of Captain Collinson’s that seemed more familiar to me than all the rest of him. That I had heard it before, ay, and heard it often, I felt sure. At least, I should have felt sure but for its seeming impossibility.
“You are from Gloucestershire, I think I have heard,” he observed to me.
“No; from Worcestershire.”
“Worcestershire? That’s a nice county, I believe. Are not the Malvern Hills situated in it?”
“Yes. They are eight miles from Worcester.”
“I should like to see them. I must see them before I go back. And Worcester is famous for—what is it?—china?—yes, china. And for its cathedral, I believe. I shall get a day or two there if I can. I can do Malvern at the same time.”
“Captain Collinson, would you mind giving Lady Jenkins your arm?” cried Mrs. Knox at this juncture. “She is going home.”
“There is no necessity for Captain Collinson to disturb himself: I can take good care of Lady Jenkins,” hastily spoke Madame St. Vincent, in a tart tone, which the room could not mistake. Evidently she did not favour Captain Collinson.
But the captain had already pushed himself through the throng of people and taken the old lady in tow. The next minute I found myself close to Charlotte Knox, who was standing at the supper-table, with a plate of cold salmon before her.
“Are you a wild bear, Johnny Ludlow?” she asked me privately, under cover of the surrounding clatter.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Madame St. Vincent takes you for one.”
I laughed. “Has she told you so?”
“She has not told me: I guess it is some secret,” returned Charlotte, beginning upon the sandwiches. “I learnt it in a curious way.”
A vein of seriousness ran through her half-mocking tone; seriousness lay in her keen and candid eyes, lifted to mine.
“Yes, it was rather curious, the way it came to me: and perhaps on my part not altogether honourable. Early this morning, Johnny, before ten o’clock had struck, mamma made me go in and ask how Lady Jenkins was, and whether she would be able to come to-night. I ran in the nearest way, by the glass-doors, boisterously of course—mamma is always going on at me for that—and the breeze the doors made as I threw them open blew a piece of paper off the table. I stooped to pick it up, and saw it was a letter just begun in madame’s handwriting.”
“Well?”
“Well, my eyes fell on the few words written; but I declare that I read them heedlessly, not with any dishonourable intention; such a thought never entered my mind. ‘Dear Sissy,’ the letter began, ‘You must not come yet, for Johnny Ludlow is here, of all people in the world; it would not do for you and him to meet.’ That was all.”
“I suppose madame had been called away,” continued Charlotte, after a pause. “I put the paper on the table, and was going on into the passage, when I found the room-door locked: so I just came out again, ran round to the front-door and went in that way. Now if you are not a bear, Johnny, why should you frighten people?”
I did not answer. She had set me thinking.
“Madame St. Vincent had invited a sister from France to come and stay with her: she does just as she likes here, you know. It must be she who is not allowed to meet you. What is the mystery?”
“Who is talking about mystery?” exclaimed Caroline Parker; who, standing near, must have caught the word. “What is the mystery, Lotty?”
And Lotty, giving her some evasive reply, put down her fork and turned away.
LADY JENKINS.
MADAME.
I.
“If Aunt Jenkins were the shrewd woman she used to be, I’d lay the whole case before her, and have it out; but she is not,” contended Dan Jenkins, tilting the tongs in his hand, as we sat round the dying embers of the surgery fire.
His brother Sam and I had walked home together from Mrs. Knox’s soirée, and we overtook Dan in the town. Another soirée had been held in Lefford that night, which Dan had promised himself to before knowing Mrs. Knox would have one. We all three turned into the surgery. Dr. Knox was out with a patient, and Sam had to wait up for him. Sam had been telling his brother what we witnessed up at Rose Villa—the promenade round the laurels that Captain Collinson and Mina had stolen in the moonlight. As for me, though I heard what Sam said, and put in a confirming word here and there, I was thinking my own thoughts. In a small way, nothing had ever puzzled me much more than the letter Charlotte Knox had seen. Who was Madame St. Vincent? and who was her sister, that I, Johnny Ludlow, might not meet her?
“You see,” continued Dan, “one reason why I can’t help suspecting the fellow, is this—he does not address Mina openly. If he were honest and above board, he would go in for her before all the world. He wouldn’t do it in secret.”
“What do you suspect him of?” cried Sam.
“I don’t know. I do suspect him—that he is somehow not on the square. It’s not altogether about Mina; but I have no confidence in the man.”
Sam laughed. “Of course you have not, Dan. You want to keep Mina for yourself.”
Dan pitched his soft hat at Sam’s head, and let fall the tongs with a clatter.
“Collinson seems to be all right,” I put in. “He is going up to London to a levée, and he is going to buy an estate. At least, he told me so to-night in the supper-room.”
“Oh, in one sense of the word the fellow is all right,” acknowledged Dan. “He is what he pretends to be; he is in the army list; and, for all I know to the contrary, he may have enough gold to float an argosy of ships. What I ask is, why he should go sneaking after Mina when he does not care for her.”
“That may be just a fallacy of ours, Dan,” said his brother.
“No, it’s not. Collinson is in love with Madame St. Vincent; not with Mina.”
“Then why does he spoon after Mina?”
“That’s just it—why?”
“Any way, I don’t think madame is in love with him, Dan. It was proposed that he should take aunt home to-night, and madame was as tart as you please over it, letting all the room know that she did not want him.”
“Put it down so,” agreed Dan, stooping to pick up the tongs. “Say that he is not fond of madame, but of Mina, and would like to make her his wife: why does he not go about it in a proper manner; court her openly, speak to her mother; instead of pursuing her covertly like a sneak?”
“It may be his way of courting.”
“May it! It is anything but a right way. He is for ever seeking to meet her on the sly. I know it. He got her out in the garden to-night to a meeting, you say: you and Johnny Ludlow saw it.”
“Dicky saw it too, and Charlotte got the truth out of him. There may be something in what you say, Dan.”
“There’s a great deal in what I say,” contended Dan, his honest face full of earnestness. “Look here. Here’s an officer and a gentleman; a rich man, as we are given to believe, and we’ve no reason to doubt it. He seems to spend enough—Carter saw him lose five pounds last night, betting at billiards. If he is in love with a young lady, there’s nothing to hinder a man like that from going in for her openly——”
“Except her age,” struck in Sam. “He may think they’ll refuse Mina to him on that score.”
“Stuff! I wish you wouldn’t interrupt me, Sam. Every day will help to remedy that—and he might undertake to wait a year or two. But I feel sure and certain he does not really care for Mina; I feel sure that, if he is seeking in this underhand way to get her to promise to marry him, he has some ulterior motive in view. My own belief is he would like to kidnap her.”
Sam laughed. “You mean, kidnap her money?”
“Well, I don’t see what else it can be. The fellow may have outrun the constable, and need some ready money to put him straight. Rely upon this much, Sam—that his habits are as fast as they can well be. I have been learning a little about him lately.”
Sam made no answer. He began to look grave.
“Not at all the sort of man who ought to marry Mina, or any other tender young girl. He’d break her heart in a twelvemonth.”
Sam spoke up. “I said to Johnny Ludlow, just now, that it might be better to tell Dr. Knox. Perhaps——”
“What about?” interrupted the doctor himself, pouncing in upon us, and catching the words as he opened the door. “What have you to tell Dr. Knox about, Sam? And why are all you young men sitting up here? You’d be better in bed.”
The last straw, you know, breaks the camel’s back. Whether Sam would really have disclosed the matter to Dr. Knox, I can’t say; the doctor’s presence and the doctor’s question decided it.
Sam spoke in a low tone, standing behind the drug-counter with the doctor, who had gone round to look at some entry in what they called the day-book, and had lighted a gas-burner to do it by. Dr. Knox made no remark of any kind while he listened, his eyes fixed on the book: one might have thought he did not hear, but his lips were compressed.
“If she were not so young, sir—a child, as may be said—I should not have presumed to speak,” concluded Sam. “I don’t know whether I have done wrong or right.”
“Right,” emphatically pronounced the doctor.
But the word had hardly left his lips when there occurred a startling interruption. The outer door of the surgery, the one he had come in by, was violently drummed at, and then thrown open. Charlotte Knox, Miss Mack the governess, and Sally the maid—the same Sally who had been at Rose Villa when the trouble occurred about Janet Carey, and the same Miss Mack who had replaced Janet—came flocking in.
“Dicky’s lost, Arnold,” exclaimed Charlotte.
“Dicky lost!” repeated Dr. Knox. “How can he be lost at this time of night?”
“He is lost. And we had nearly gone to bed without finding it out. The people had all left, and the doors were locked, when some one—Gerty, I think—began to complain of Dicky——”
“It was I who spoke,” interposed the governess; and though she was fat enough for two people she had the meekest little voice in the world, and allowed herself to be made a perfect tool of at Rose Villa. “Dicky did behave very ill at supper, eating rudely of everything, and——”
“Yes, yes,” broke in Charlotte, “I remember now, Macky. You said Dicky ought to be restrained, and you wondered he was not ill; and then mamma called out, ‘But where is Dicky?’ ‘Gone to bed to sleep off his supper,’ we all told her: and she sent Sally up to see that he had put his candle out.”
“And of course,” interrupted Sally, thinking it was her turn to begin, “when I found the room empty, and saw by the moonlight that Master Dicky had not come to bed at all, I ran down to say so. And his mamma got angry, accusing us servants of having carelessly locked him out-of-doors. And he can’t be found, sir—as Miss Lotty says.”
“No, he cannot be found anywhere,” added Lotty. “We have searched the house and the gardens, and been in to inquire at Lady Jenkins’s; and he is gone. And mamma is frantic, and said we were to come to you, Arnold.”
“Master Dicky’s playing truant: he has gone off with some of the guests,” observed Dr. Knox.
“Well, mamma is putting herself into a frightful fever over him, Arnold. That old well in the field at the back was opened the day before yesterday; she says Dicky may have strayed there and fallen in.”
“Dicky’s after more mischief than that,” said the doctor, sagely. “A well in a solitary field would have no charms for Dicky. I tell you, Lotty, he must have marched home with some one or other. Had you any lads up there to-night?”
“No, not any. You know mamma never will have them. Lads, and Dicky, would be too much.”
“If Master Dicky have really gone off, as the doctor thinks, I’d lay my next quarter’s wages that it’s with Captain Collinson,” cried Sally. “He is always wanting to be after the captain.”
Lotty lifted her face, a gleam of intelligence flashing across it. “Perhaps that’s it,” she said; “I should not wonder if it is. He has strayed off after, or with, Captain Collinson. What is to be done, Arnold?”
“Not strayed with him, I should think,” observed the doctor. “Captain Collinson, if he possesses any sense or consideration, would order Dicky back at once.”
“Won’t you come with us to the captain’s lodgings, Arnold, and see?” cried Charlotte. “It would not do, would it, for us to go there alone at this time of night? The captain may be in bed.”
Arnold Knox looked at his sister; looked at the three of them, as if he thought they were enough without him. He was nearly done up with his long day’s work.
“I suppose I had better go with you, Lotty,” he said. “Though I don’t think Captain Collinson would kidnap any one of you if you went alone.”
“Oh dear, no; it is Mina he wants to kidnap, not us,” answered Lotty, freely. And Arnold glanced at her keenly as he heard the words.
Did you ever know a fellow in the hey-dey of his health and restlessness who was not ready for any night expedition—especially if it were to search after something lost? Dr. Knox took up his hat to accompany the visitors, and we three took up ours.
We proceeded in a body through the moonlit streets to Collinson’s lodgings; the few stragglers we met no doubt taking us all for benighted wayfarers, trudging home from some one or other of the noted Lefford soirées. Collinson had the rooms at the hairdresser’s—good rooms, famed as the best lodgings in the town. The gas was alight in his sitting-room over the shop; a pretty fair proof that the captain was yet up.
“Stay, Lotty,” said Dr. Knox, arresting her impatient hand, that was lifted to pull the bell. “No need to arouse the house: I dare say Pink and his family are in bed. I will go up to Collinson.”
It was easy to say so, but difficult to do it. Dr. Knox turned the handle of the door to enter, and found it fastened. He had to ring, after all.
Nobody answered it. Another ring and another shared the same fate. Dr. Knox then searched for some small loose stones, and flung them up at the window. It brought forth no more than the bell had.
“Dicky can’t be there, or that gravel would have brought him to the window,” decided Lotty. “I should say Captain Collinson is not there, either.”
“He may be in his room at the back,” observed Dr. Knox. And he rang again.
Presently, after a spell of at least ten minutes’ waiting, and no end of ringing, an upper window was opened and a head appeared—that of the hairdresser.
“Whatever’s the matter?” called out he, seeing us all below. “It’s not fire, is it?”
“I am sorry to disturb you, Pink,” called back Dr. Knox. “It is Captain Collinson I want. Is he in, do you know?”
“Yes, sir; he came in about twenty minutes ago, and somebody with him, for I heard him talking,” answered Pink. “He must be in his sitting-room, if he is not gone to bed.”
“There is a light in the room, but I don’t think he can be in. I have thrown up some gravel, and he does not answer.”
“I’ll come down and see, sir.”
Pink, the most obliging little man in the world, descended to the captain’s room and thence to us at the door. Captain Collinson was not in. He had gone out again, and left his gas alight.
“You say some one came in with him, Pink. Was it a young lad?”
“I can’t tell, sir. I heard the captain’s latch-key, and I heard him come on upstairs, talking to somebody; but I was just dropping off to sleep, so did not take much notice.”
That the somebody was young Dick, and that Captain Collinson had gone out to march Dick home again, seemed only probable. There was nothing for it but to go on to Rose Villa and ascertain; and we started for it, after a short consultation.
“I shall not have the remotest idea where to look for Dick if he is not there,” remarked Dr. Knox.
“And in that case, I do believe mamma will have a fit,” added Charlotte. “A real fit, I mean, Arnold. I wish something could be done with Dicky! The house is always in a commotion.”
Captain Collinson was at Rose Villa, whether Dicky was or not. At the garden-gate, talking to Mina in the moonlight, stood he, apparently saying good-night to her.
“Dicky? oh dear, yes; I have just brought Dicky back,” laughed the captain, before Dr. Knox had well spoken his young half-brother’s name, while Mina ran indoors like a frightened hare. “Upon getting home to my rooms just now I found some small mortal stealing in after me, and it proved to be Dicky. He followed me home to get a top I had promised him, and which I forgot to bring up here when I came to-night.”
“I hope you did not give it him,” said Dr. Knox.
“Yes, I did. I should never have got him back without,” added the captain. “Good-night.”
He laughed again as he went away. Dicky’s vagaries seemed to be rare fun for him.
Dicky was spinning the top on the kitchen table when we went in—for that’s where they had all gathered: Mrs. Knox, Gerty, Kate, and the cook. A big humming-top, nearly as large and as noisy as Dick. Dr. Knox caught up the top and caught Dicky by the hand, and took both into the parlour.
“Now then, sir!” he sternly asked. “What did you mean by this night’s escapade?”
“Oh, Arnold, don’t scold him,” implored Mrs. Knox, following them in with her hands held up. “It was naughty of him, of course, and it gave me a dreadful fright; but it was perhaps excusable, and he is safe at home again. The captain was to bring the top, and did not, and poor Dicky ran after him to get it.”
“You be quiet, Arnold; I am not to be scolded,” put in cunning Dicky. “You just give me my top.”
“As to scolding you, I don’t know that it would be of any further use: the time seems to have gone by for it, and I must take other measures,” spoke Dr. Knox. “Come up to bed now, sir. I shall see you in it before I leave.”
“But I want my top.”
“Which you will not have,” said the doctor: and he marched off Dicky.
“How cross you are with him, Arnold!” spoke his step-mother when the doctor came down again, leaving Dicky howling on his pillow for the top.
“It needs some one to be cross with him,” observed Dr. Knox.
“He is only a little boy, remember.”
“He is big enough and old enough to be checked and corrected—if it ever is to be done at all. I will see you to-morrow: I wish to have some conversation with you.”
“About Dicky?” she hastily asked.
“About him and other things. Mina,” he added in a low tone, as he passed her on his way out, but I, being next to him, caught the words, “I did not like to see you at the gate with Captain Collinson at this hour. Do not let it occur again. Young maidens cannot be too modest.”
And, at the reproof, Miss Mina coloured to the very roots of her hair.
II.
They sat in the small garden-room, its glass-doors open to the warm spring air. Mrs. Knox wore an untidy cotton gown, of a flaming crimson-and-white pattern, and her dark face looked hot and angry. Dr. Knox, sitting behind the table, was being annoyed as much as he could be annoyed—and no one ever annoyed him but his step-mother—as the lines in his patient brow betrayed.
“It is for his own good that I suggest this; his welfare,” urged Dr. Knox. “Left to his own will much longer, he must not be. Therefore I say that he must be placed at school.”
“You only propose it to thwart me,” cried Mrs. Knox. “A fine expense it will be!”
“It will not be your expense. I pay his schooling now, and I shall pay it then. My father left me, young though I was, Dicky’s guardian, and I must do this. I wonder you do not see that it will be the very best thing for Dicky. Every one but yourself sees that, as things are, the boy is being ruined.”
Mrs. Knox looked sullenly through the open doors near which she sat; she tapped her foot impatiently upon the worn mat, lying on the threshold.
“I know you won’t rest until you have carried your point and separated us, Arnold; it has been in your mind to do it this long while. And my boy is the only thing I care for in life.”
“It is for Dicky’s own best interest,” reiterated Dr. Knox. “Of course he is dear to you; it would be unnatural if he were not; but you surely must wish to see him grow up a good and self-reliant man: not an idle and self-indulgent one.”
“Why don’t you say outright that your resolve is taken and nothing can alter it; that you are going to banish him to school to-morrow?”
“Not to-morrow, but he shall go at the half-quarter. The child will be ten times happier for it; believe that.”
“Do you really mean it?” she questioned, her black eyes flashing fury at Arnold. “Will nothing deter you?”
“Nothing,” he replied, in a low, firm tone. “I—bear with me a moment, mother—I cannot let Dicky run riot any longer. He is growing up the very incarnation of selfishness; he thinks the world was made for him alone; you and his sisters are only regarded by him as so many ministers to his pleasure. See how he treats you all. See how he treats the servants. Were I to allow this state of things to continue, how should I be fulfilling my obligation to my dead father?—my father and Dicky’s.”
“I will hear no more,” spoke Mrs. Knox, possibly thinking the argument was getting too strong for her. “I have wanted to speak to you, Arnold, and I may as well do it now. Things must be put on a different footing up here.”
“What things?”
“Money matters. I cannot continue to do upon my small income.”
Arnold Knox passed his hand across his troubled brow, almost in despair. Oh, what a weary subject this was! Not for long together did she ever give him rest from it.
“Your income is sufficient, mother; I am tired of saying it. It is between three and four hundred a-year; and you are free from house-rent.”
“Why don’t you remind me that the house is yours, and have done with it!” she cried, her voice harsh and croaking as a raven’s.
“Well, it is mine,” he said good-humouredly.
“Yes; and instead of settling it upon me when you married, you must needs settle it on your wife! Don’t you talk of selfishness, Arnold.”
“My wife does not derive any benefit from it. It has made no difference to you.”
“She would derive it, though, if you died. Where should I be then?”
“I am not going to die, I hope. Oh, mother, if you only knew how these discussions vex me!”
“Then you should show yourself generous.”
“Generous!” he exclaimed, in a pained tone. And, goaded to it by his remembrance of what he had done for her in the present and in the past, he went on to speak more plainly than he had ever spoken yet. “Do you forget that a great portion of what you enjoy should, by right, be mine? Is mine!”
“Yours!” she scornfully said.
“Yes: mine. Not by legal right, but by moral. When my father died he left the whole of his property to you. Considerably more than the half of that property had been brought to him by my mother: some people might have thought that much should have descended to her son.”
“He did not leave me the whole. You had a share of it.”
“Not of the income. I had a sum of five hundred pounds left me, for a specific purpose—to complete my medical education. Mother, I have never grumbled at this; never. It was my father’s will and pleasure that the whole should be yours, and that it should go to your children after you; and I am content to think that he did for the best; the house was obliged to come to me; it had been so settled at my mother’s marriage; but you have continued to live in it, and I have not said you nay.”
“It is like you to remind me of all this!”
“I could remind you of more,” he rejoined, chafing at her unjust words, her resentful manner. “That for years I impoverished myself to help you to augment this income. Three parts of what I earned, before my partnership with Mr. Tamlyn, I gave to you.”
“Well, I needed it. Do, for goodness’ sake, let the past alone, if you can: where’s the use of recalling it? Would you have us starve? Would you see me taken off to prison? And that’s what it will come to, unless I can get some money to pay up with. That table-drawer that you’ve got your elbow on, is full of bills. I’ve not paid one for these six months.”
“I cannot think what it is you do with your money!”
“Do with my money! Why, it goes in a hundred ways. How very ignorant you are, Arnold. Look at what dress costs, for myself and four girls! Look at what the soirées cost! We have to give all sorts of dishes now; lobster salads and raspberry creams, and all kinds of expensive things. Madame St. Vincent introduced that.”
“You must put down the soirées and the dress—if you cannot keep them within the bounds of your income.”
“Thank you. Just as I had to put down the pony-carriage and James. How cruel you are, Arnold!”
“I hope I am not. I do not wish to be so.”
“It will take two hundred pounds to set me straight; and I must have it from you, or from somebody else,” avowed Mrs. Knox.
“You certainly cannot have it, or any portion of it, from me. My expenses are heavy now, and I have my own children coming on.”
His tone was unmistakably decisive, and Mrs. Knox saw that it was so. For many years she had been in the habit of regarding Arnold as something like a bucket in a well, which brings up water every time it is let down. Just so had he brought up money for her from his pocket every time she worried for it. But that was over now: and he had to bear these reproaches periodically.
“You know that you can let me have it, Arnold. You can lend it me from Mina’s money.”
His face flushed slightly, he pushed his fair hair back with a gesture of annoyance.
“The last time you spoke of that I begged you never to mention it again,” he said in a low tone. “Why, what do you take me for, mother?”
“Take you for?”
“You must know that I could not touch Mina’s money without becoming a false trustee. Men have been brought to the criminal bar to answer for a less crime than that would be.”
“If Mina married, you would have to hand over the whole of it.”
“Of course I should. First of all taking care that it was settled upon her.”
“I don’t see the necessity of that. Mina could let me have what she pleased of it.”
“Talking of Mina,” resumed Dr. Knox, passing by her remark, “I think you must look a little closely after her. She is more intimate, I fancy, with Captain Collinson than is desirable, and——”
“Suppose Captain Collinson wants to marry her?” interrupted Mrs. Knox.
“Has he told you that he wants to do so?”
“No; not in so many words. But he evidently likes her. What a good match it would be!”
“Mina is too young to be married yet. And Captain Collinson cannot, I should suppose, have any intention of the sort. If he had, he would speak out: when it would be time enough to consider and discuss his proposal. Unless he does speak, I must beg of you not to allow Mina to be alone with him.”
“She never is alone with him.”
“I think she is, at odd moments. Only last night I saw her with him at the gate. Before that, while your soirée was going on, Dicky—I believe he could tell you so, if you asked him—saw them walking together in the garden, the captain’s arm round her waist.”
“Girls are so fond of flirting! And young men think no harm of a little passing familiarity.”
“Just so. But for remembering this, I should speak to Captain Collinson. The thought that there may be nothing serious in it prevents me. At any rate, I beg of you to take care of Mina.”
“And the money I want?” she asked, as he took up his hat to go.
But Dr. Knox, shortly repeating that he had no money to give her, made his escape. He had been ruffled enough already. One thing was certain: that if some beneficent sprite from fairyland increased Mrs. Knox’s annual income cent. per cent. she would still, and ever, be in embarrassment. Arnold knew this.
Mrs. Knox sat on, revolving difficulties. How many similar interviews she had held with her step-son, and how often he had been brought round to pay her bills, she could but remember. Would he do it now? A most unpleasant doubt, that he would not, lay upon her.
Presently the entrance was darkened by some tall form interposing itself between herself and the sunlight. She glanced up and saw Captain Collinson. He stood there smiling, his tasselled cane jauntily swayed in his left hand.
“My dear madam, you looked troubled. Is anything wrong?”
“Troubled! the world’s full of trouble, I think,” spoke Mrs. Knox, in a pettish kind of way. “Dr. Knox has been here to vex me.”
Captain Collinson stepped airily in, and sat down near Mrs. Knox, his eyes expressing proper concern: indignation blended with sympathy.
“Very inconsiderate of Dr. Knox: very wrong! Can I help you in any way, my dear lady?”
“Arnold is always inconsiderate. First, he begins upon me about Dicky, threatening to put him altogether away at school, poor ill-used child! Next, he——”
“Sweet little angel?” interlarded the captain.
“Next, he refuses to lend me a trifling sum of money—and he knows how badly I want it!”
“Paltry!” ejaculated the captain. “When he must be making so much of it!”
“Rolling in it, so to say,” confirmed Mrs. Knox. “Look at the practice he has! But if he did not give me any of his, he might advance me a trifle of Mina’s.”
“Of course he might,” warmly acquiesced Captain Collinson.
What with the warmth and the sympathy, Mrs. Knox rather lost her head. Many of us are betrayed on occasion into doing the same. That is, she said more than she should have said.