XIX
The return to London seemed like a return to another life.
Even the weather changed suddenly.
No more waking to the sound of the hens clucking below the open window, to the sight of nodding ivy-leaves, and to the cheerful anticipation of such novelties as a school entertainment in the village, or an all-day cricket match, with luncheon provided for both teams at Quintmere, as well as the usual Saturday afternoon tea at the pavilion.
Fogs began very early, and seemed to pervade the boarding-house, together with the perpetual smell of cabbages cooking in the basement. Omnibuses lurched and rumbled through the wet streets, and the “Elephant and Castle,” that took Lydia daily to the corner of Lexham Gardens, seemed always full of shiny mackintoshes and dripping umbrellas.
There was a change in the atmosphere of the household there that Lydia could not altogether define.
For one thing, Sir Rupert’s taciturnity seemed to have given place to a spasmodic, unpleasant sort of garrulity, when he would ask his secretary abrupt and apparently disconnected questions, that certainly did not concern her work for him.
“You been in here all day, Miss Raymond?”
“Yes. It was too wet to take my little walk after lunch, I thought.”
“Do they bring your lunch properly in here?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You didn’t go to the dining-room to-day, then?”
“No, Sir Rupert.”
A pause, while Sir Rupert gave his habitual, choked-sounding snort, as though in a useless attempt to modify the ugly nasal intonation with which he always spoke.
“I suppose her Ladyship wasn’t in for lunch, was she?”
He always spoke of his wife as “her Ladyship,” and Lydia inwardly resented it.
“I don’t know.”
“She doesn’t tell you her plans, eh?”
“I haven’t seen Lady Honoret for the last day or two.”
“No, I don’t suppose you have. She’s more often out than in, by all accounts,” said Sir Rupert, with a disagreeable, meaningless laugh.
Another day, when he asked Lydia the same question, she was able to reply that Lady Honoret had invited her to luncheon in the dining-room.
“There were some people here, weren’t there?”
“Only one or two. There was an old lady whose name I didn’t hear, and Mrs. Cohen and Mr. Cassela.”
“H’m. And I suppose they stayed on all the afternoon?”
“I don’t know,” said Lydia. “I came back here at half-past two.”
Sir Rupert gave her a very sharp look, almost as though he were wondering whether or not she was speaking the truth, and Lydia felt vexed and uncomfortable, unable to imagine any reason for these interrogations.
Still more disconcerting did she find it when Sir Rupert took to making sudden appearances in the course of the day, always at hours when he had hitherto been in the City.
“Is her Ladyship in?”
“I don’t know, Sir Rupert.”
“Just ring the bell, will you?”
And Sir Rupert would sharply question the footman:
“What time did her Ladyship go out?”
“I couldn’t say, Sir Rupert. I’ll inquire, Sir Rupert.”
The footman was always obliged to disappear, in order to collect the information that her Ladyship had gone off in a hansom-cab at half-past two o’clock.
“Didn’t she order the carriage?”
“I believe not, Sir Rupert.”
“Why not? What do I keep a couple of fine horses for, eating their heads off, and fellows in livery and all? Anything wrong with the horses, eh?”
“Not as I’m aware of, Sir Rupert.”
“Send her Ladyship’s maid to me. No—don’t—that’ll do. You can go.”
“Very good, Sir Rupert.”
Then the little Jewish financier turned to Lydia, pretending to be absorbed at her writing-table in the corner.
“Why don’t her Ladyship use the carriage, instead of a low, dirty cab?”
“I don’t know at all. Perhaps Lady Honoret went out in a hurry.”
Sir Rupert snorted again.
Perhaps, after all, old Mr. Palmer’s warnings had not been without reason. Lydia began to feel that she did not much like the atmosphere of the Lexham Gardens house nowadays.
Her relations with Lady Honoret were changed, too. The excitement that the publication of her book had momentarily caused in these literary circles was now apparently forgotten, and although Lydia resolutely told herself that she had expected nothing less, she could not help noticing that instead of being introduced to visitors as the new discove’y, she was now either left unpresented, or referred to as “my husband’s secreta’y, who does sums so ve’y, ve’y marvellously. Poor little me can never add two and two together, you know....”
Sometimes Lady Honoret brought a request to Lydia that she would juggle various items of expenditure on dress or jewellery into an appearance of charitable generosity, but this she only did in her own drawing-room. She never, so far as Lydia was aware, entered Sir Rupert’s study, whether he were there or not.
Clement Damerel did not come to Lexham Gardens for some time after Lydia’s return there, and when at last he did so, it was by appointment, and Sir Rupert was waiting for him. Lydia was not at all sure what the etiquette of her position demanded, but Mr. Damerel appeared to have no such doubts.
He shook hands with her, although flushing a little, and told Sir Rupert that Miss Raymond had spent her holiday with his next-door neighbours in Devonshire.
Sir Rupert expressed no interest in the coincidence, and the two men began at once to discuss business.
Sir Rupert, however, did not seem quite so much interested in East End crèches and orphan asylums as he had been in the summer.
Very often the instructions that he gave Lydia were self-contradictory, as though he hardly knew altogether what he was saying.
It came as a relief to Lydia when one day he told her that an old friend of his was coming to stay.
“A man I knew abroad,” said Sir Rupert gruffly. “Quite a rough diamond, you understand, and I don’t want him to bother her Ladyship. He’ll make this room his headquarters.”
“I’m afraid I may be in his way?” ventured Lydia.
“No. He’s got plenty of writing to do. Over here on business.”
Lydia pictured a Colonial, but Sir Rupert’s friend proved to be a very quiet, unmistakably English, middle-aged man, who talked a good deal about big-game shooting in Africa, and was more prolix of reminiscences than was his host.
Sir Rupert, indeed, rather shocked Lydia by his absence of cordiality towards his old friend. He did not interrupt his daily excursions to the City on Mr. Codd’s account, and, in fact, appeared rather to discontinue his recently acquired habit of making unexpectedly early returns.
Mr. Codd was left to entertain himself all the morning, which he very often did by reading the newspapers in the study, or making entries in a black memorandum book that he kept in his pocket.
“As an old traveller, I may be writing my reminiscences one of these days,” he jokingly observed to Lydia. “I’ve always kept up the habit of noting my impressions as I go along. You’ll find that a very useful thing to do, Miss Raymond, as you write yourself.”
Lydia felt gratified.
“How do you know that I write?” she asked rather shyly.
“I’ve not yet had the pleasure of reading your novel, but Lady Honoret has told me all about it, and the success it enjoys.”
So Lady Honoret, at least, did take a little trouble to entertain the neglected guest!
Lydia felt quite relieved. Mr. Codd was very nice, and had quite good manners, but she had somehow imagined that he did not see very much of his hostess.
Certainly he must lunch in her company, but Lydia had a vague idea that he generally went out by himself in the afternoons. And she was obliged to admit, with a certain inward appreciation for her own discernment, that Mr. Codd, evidently a practical, matter-of-fact man, whose chief idea was sport, and whose life had been passed largely in the wilds, could hardly have very much in common with cultivated, expensive little Lady Honoret and her artistic circle of friends.
From these considerations it was easy to pass to a friendly feeling, almost amounting to a sense of responsibility, for Mr. Codd’s unoccupied morning hours.
Lydia was not very busy, and Mr. Codd was always ready to talk. For all his quietness of manner, he was a gregarious soul. Lydia had once entered the study, after a protracted absence, and found him in friendly intercourse with William, the footman.
Quite evidently, Mr. Codd was lonely.
Lydia asked him one or two questions about his travels and he gave her some very interesting information, in a manner that somehow reminded her a little of Uncle George, and then, in return as it were for her interest in his concerns, Mr. Codd asked Lydia about her own work.
Had she been long with his old friend Sir Rupert?
Lydia explained that she had not.
Mr. Codd said that Sir Rupert might be a little taciturn, perhaps, but that was only manner—a heart of gold. In fact, a rough diamond, Mr. Codd called him, oddly selecting the very expression by which Sir Rupert had described him, before his arrival.
“Our little friend, Lady Honoret, now,” said Mr. Codd, smiling, “is quite different—most warm-hearted and enthusiastic.”
Lydia assented, explaining that to Lady Honoret’s kindness she really owed her present position, and the success of her novel.
“Just like her!” Mr. Codd declared enthusiastically. “But still; we mustn’t forget that it gives her real pleasure to discover genuine new talent, and, besides, no doubt you’ve done many little things to help her—perhaps almost as a daughter might have done?”
Lydia could not help liking the expression, although she knew that it overstated the case. Almost as a daughter! Where were Miss Forster’s pretensions now?
“Oh, I’ve not had the chance of doing much,” she said modestly, “though of course I’d like to.”
But she added, lest Mr. Codd should suppose her inability to be of use to Lady Honoret greater than it really was:
“Of course, I’ve always been very fond of figures, and I can do accounts easily. Sometimes I’ve helped Lady Honoret that way.”
“Very rare to find a young lady who is really good at accounts,” said Mr. Codd respectfully, almost as Mr. Monteagle Almond might have spoken. “Quite a faculty apart. I suppose you’ve mastered accountancy pretty thoroughly?”
Lydia told him, while he listened with great interest and attention, of her experience at Madame Elena’s shop.
“Ah, yes! Of course, after that Lady Honoret’s straightforward little accounts must seem to you like child’s play!”
Lydia laughed a little, secretly amused at the singularly inappropriate adjective that he had selected for describing Lady Honoret’s system of dealing with her expenditure, but she did not say anything.
Mr. Codd twirled his grey moustache, and declared that it was a shame to waste her time by talking, but if he might say so, it was a surprising relief to find a young lady who had other ideas in her head than dressing up, or going to the play.
Lydia remembered Margoliouth, but, after all, she thought that she had changed a great deal since those days. In fact, she must have done so, since she could attract men like Mr. Clement Damerel, and even Mr. Codd himself.
The liking that he evinced for her conversation was so unmistakable that Lydia began to allow herself to place possible interpretations upon it.
She was not attracted by Mr. Codd as she was by Clement Damerel, the only man who had yet touched her imagination in any romantic sense. But Mr. Codd—some instinct that she could not doubt assured her of it—belonged, for all his polished manners, and his old friendship with Sir Rupert and his extensive travels, to the classification roughly described by Lydia as her own “sort,” although he might be, and probably was, a rich man. Clement Damerel, the young London parson, and certainly not rich at all, was different. He might be attracted by Lydia, but an indefinable gulf separated the worlds to which they respectively belonged.
It was entirely characteristic of Lydia’s eminently practical outlook upon life that she should attach an importance to Mr. Codd’s mild attentions which she had absolutely denied to her own perfectly-recognized inclination towards the good-looking, diffident young clergyman.
Mr. Codd’s visit continued for a whole fortnight, and appeared likely to extend even beyond it. He explained to Lydia that he had no relations in England now, and but few friends, and so Sir Rupert had kindly bidden him make the house at Lexham Gardens his headquarters.
Perhaps it was because he wished his old friend to feel himself at home that Sir Rupert took so little pains to entertain him, Lydia reflected, but she did not feel that such a consideration would in any way account for the extreme brusqueness of the Jewish financier’s manner from time to time.
“Stop that damned foolery!” Lydia overheard him growl, when Mr. Codd had made an innocent and friendly allusion to some adventure shared in the past upon the West Coast of Africa.
Mr. Codd remained smiling and unperturbed, but he said to Lydia soon afterwards that he was afraid the City was a strenuous place, and told upon the nerves of many.
“Our poor friend, now—I daresay you notice a little irritability. Of course, meaningless—he merely lets himself go with those who are quite certain not to misunderstand him—but there’s a certain tension about him that I don’t quite like. It looks to me very much like over-strained nerves—probably from overwork. I don’t like it,” said Mr. Codd emphatically.
Lydia did not like it either.
Sir Rupert’s nerves, Lady Honoret’s flightiness, even Mr. Codd’s bland, observant presence, all combined to create an atmosphere of which Lydia became, more and more, uneasily conscious.
She was oddly reminded of the uncomfortable weight hanging in the air, the general sense of electricity, experienced on the sea-shore at home just before the breaking of a heavy thunderstorm.
“Shamrock can smell the thunder about.”
Grandpapa had been wont to claim such prescience for his favourite.
Regardless of the inelegance of the simile, Lydia felt inwardly as though she, too, could smell the thunder about.
In a phrase much affected by Aunt Evelyn, she realized that “things were getting on her nerves.”
She had less work to do for Sir Rupert than ever before. If he chanced to return early he generally said to her:
“You can leave all that, Miss Raymond. I’ll look at the letters—just let me have the room for half an hour or so.”
This was Sir Rupert’s fashion of intimating that Lydia should leave the study. He himself remained there, fiercely picking at his teeth and emitting that harsh, downward snort.
Mr. Codd remained also, and once, as she left the room, Lydia heard him say very soothingly:
“Well, a few days more will see the end of it. We’ve got pretty nearly all we want.”
That was the very day, Lydia remembered afterwards, that emerging into the hall, she met Lady Honoret, coming in all alone from some expedition that had left her with a white face and glittering eyes behind the thick veil she was wearing.
“Oh, you startled me!” she said shrilly, at the sudden sight of Lydia. “Is Sir Rupert there?”
“He’s just come in. He’s in the study with Mr. Codd.”
“I don’t know what he wants with that awful man,” said Lady Honoret pettishly. “He’s never had anyone to stay before—though I’m only too, too thankful for anything that’ll put him in a good humour. But does this Codd c’eature mean to stay here for ever?”
With the recollection clearly in her mind of the words that she had just overheard, to which she had definitely attached the implication that Mr. Codd’s visit was drawing to a term, Lydia nevertheless obeyed some obscure instinct entirely unintelligible to herself, and only answered:
“I don’t know.”
Afterwards she could not understand why she had done so, and the discomfort, unusual to her, of finding complexities in her own conduct to which she held no clue, added to Lydia’s unease.
It was less than two days later that enlightenment came to her.
She arrived at Lexham Gardens as usual, to have the front door opened for her with an instantaneous alacrity that was in itself a hint of deviation from the normal.
Not only William, but two maids were in the hall, hovering about the foot of the stairs with white, excited-looking faces.
Lydia wanted to ask, “What is the matter?” but disliked the idea of questioning the gaping servants, and prepared to go silently upstairs to the study on the first floor.
“Better not go up just yet, miss, if I were you,” said William, the footman.
“Why not?” Lydia asked quickly.
“There’s her Ladyship in the study with Sir Rupert,” hesitated the man.
“Of course I’m going in,” said Lydia quietly. Her heart was beating violently with some apprehension that she could not define, but not for worlds would she have taken place amongst the hovering, whispering crew of waiting domestics.
As she reached the first landing the door of the study flew open, and Lady Honoret came out.
Her little dark face was distorted by violent weeping and by an emotion which Lydia, with an abrupt, physical pang, recognized as sheer terror.
She put out her hand involuntarily as Lady Honoret dashed past her, and then turned back with a stifled, hunted exclamation at the sight of the servants below.
“Milady!” gasped a frightened voice from above, and Lydia looked up and saw Lady Honoret’s own maid, a smart, ugly little Frenchwoman, halfway down the second flight of stairs.
Lady Honoret stumbled upstairs with a sort of rush, and the woman led her away.
Almost simultaneously Sir Rupert’s voice shouted from inside the study:
“Shut that door, will you?” and Lydia, finding herself shaking all over, and not knowing what else to do, went into the study and shut the door behind her.
Sir Rupert and Mr. Codd stood side by side on the hearth-rug, the little Jew with a face like parchment and hands tearing nervously at a silk handkerchief, and Mr. Codd suave and imperturbable.
At the sight of Lydia, however, he came forward and pulled a chair towards her.
“Sit down,” he said benevolently. “You saw...? It’s been a shock, of course.”
“But what is it?” Lydia wailed, feeling bewildered.
“What is it?” sneered Sir Rupert. “I suppose you haven’t been in my lady’s counsels all the time, helping her to deceive me with her accounts, and what-all, have you?”
The room reeled round Lydia, and she heard as from an immense distance the remonstrating voice of Mr. Codd:
“Sir Rupert! I have already assured you——”
Could all this be about the accounts, and the money Lady Honoret had spent? Lydia asked herself wildly.
“Be quiet, you fellow!” Sir Rupert was bellowing at Mr. Codd. “You’ve done your part. I don’t want to hear any more from you.”
“I make allowances, Sir Rupert,” said Mr. Codd with dignity, “for the shock you have sustained. But really—your manner to this young lady, to say nothing of myself——”
Sir Rupert drew a shaking hand across his face.
He said nothing, but his habitual, sudden snort seemed designed to express a return to calm.
Mr. Codd turned to Lydia.
“Sir Rupert will hardly require you to-day. This has come as a complete blow to you, I see.”
“But what is it?” Lydia asked again.
Mr. Codd glanced at the financier, as though the words served to corroborate some statement of his own.
“Miss Raymond, have you had no idea of what has been going on in this house?” Sir Rupert demanded suddenly.
“I don’t understand,” Lydia said blankly.
“Do you know why Mr. Codd is here?”
“You asked him to stay.”
“Asked him to stay! What do you suppose I asked him for?”
Mr. Codd interposed again.
“I assure you, Sir Rupert, that no one in this house has had the faintest idea of the purpose for which I have been here—yourself excepted. Secrecy was essential to our scheme, and this young lady was completely duped. It would be strange indeed,” said Mr. Codd, with a slight, superior laugh, “if a private inquiry agent of my experience were to betray himself like a mere tyro.”
A private inquiry agent....
Lydia had seen in the papers the advertisements of firms offering to supply the services of such....
Mr. Codd, Sir Rupert’s old friend, who had hunted big game with him in West Africa, a private inquiry agent—— But, of course, the West African reminiscences were only part of a necessary pose—he wasn’t a friend at all, but a paid spy. Then who...?
Wave after wave of sick enlightenment broke over Lydia.
“Has Lady Honoret——” she began, hardly knowing what she said.
“You scarcely understand, even yet,” said Mr. Codd compassionately, and yet with an underlying streak of satisfaction in his voice, as though at the entire success of his disguise. “It’s like this, Miss Raymond. Sir Rupert here had to find out—to put the matter in a nutshell—whether he had adequate grounds on which to file a petition for a divorce. He very wisely put the matter into the hands of a most eminent firm, which I have the honour to represent.”
Lydia, like many another girl of her age and standing, seldom read a newspaper. She had been taught that “divorce” was a shocking word, not mentioned among decent people. The occasional gossip at the boarding-house, arising from paragraphs in so-called “society papers,” constituted the nearest view that she had ever had of the ugly phenomenon.
Shaking all over, she burst into tears that were an actual physical relief.
“Do you mean to tell me that you had no idea at all of her ladyship’s little games?” said Sir Rupert, almost threateningly. “I thought you were as thick as thieves.”
“No!” cried Lydia, wildly repudiating she knew not what.
“You’ve seen that dam’ fellow Cassela hanging about?”
Lydia nodded her head, barely understanding the implication.
“I told you so, Sir Rupert,” Mr. Codd said. “I was certain that Miss Raymond could know nothing. But we shall have plenty of witnesses without her.”
The word “witnesses,” associated in a vague, muddled way in Lydia’s mind with the barely-apprehended horrors of the police court, filled her with panic.
“I don’t know anything about it,” she gasped, and rose to her feet. “Let me go.”
“Not so fast,” said Sir Rupert with sudden, renewed suspicion. “How am I to know that you aren’t concealing valuable evidence? I tell you, I’m going to see this thing through if I have to drag the lot of you through the Courts to do it.”
Mr. Codd shook his head, and put a fearless hand on the Jew’s trembling shoulder.
“Now, now, Sir Rupert. This is most natural, but you’re frightening the young lady. When the proper time comes, she will conceal nothing that is necessary for the pursuit of justice—but I assure you that last night’s testimony will—will do the trick, in vulgar parlance. We have more than enough evidence to institute proceedings at once, as I have told you already.”
Lydia wrenched at the door handle and found herself, she scarcely knew how, out of the room, with its echo of horrible words.
Shaking from head to foot, she went downstairs.
What had happened was no longer incomprehensible to her, but her ignorance inspired her with terrible fears as to the results to herself of the cataclysm.
Could they put her into a witness-box—perhaps try her for having falsified Lady Honoret’s accounts?
The innate provincialism in Lydia rose up and turned her almost sick with the thought of a publicity that must shame her so unutterably in the eyes of her relations—Aunt Beryl, the Senthovens, Uncle George, Mr. Monteagle Almond—all of them. Their names rushed to her mind in a chaotic bewilderment of horror.
With a new, sudden pang in the midst of so much that stabbed, Lydia remembered old Mr. Palmer, and his kindly, hesitating inquiries as to the “tone” of the household where Lydia had chosen to work.
After all, then, he had known best!
It seemed to her shaken perceptions almost a natural continuation of the thought that she should hear a voice speaking to her in the hall, connected with all the infinitely distant and regretted peace of her Devonshire visit.
“Something has happened—can I do anything?”
She saw Clement Damerel, and realized with distraught, passionate gratitude that the solicitude in his kind, anxious face was for herself.
Crying and sobbing in an abandonment such as she had never known, even in the days of her already self-controlled childhood, Lydia pushed him into the empty drawing-room, out of the way of the prying servants.
“It’s frightful—frightful!” she sobbed. “There’s been a detective and I never knew, and Sir Rupert is going to divorce Lady Honoret, and he thinks I know about it and can be a witness. Don’t let me—take me away—help me, somehow!”
“Oh, you poor child!” said Clement Damerel, and he put Lydia into an arm-chair, and knelt down on one knee beside her.