Of the friends and neighbors who had associated with Herbert Linley, in bygone days, not more than two or three kept up their intimacy with him at the later time of his disgrace. Those few, it is needless to say, were men.
One of the faithful companions, who had not shrunk from him yet, had just left the London hotel at which Linley had taken rooms for Sydney Westerfield and himself—in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert. This old friend had been shocked by the change for the worse which he had perceived in the fugitive master of Mount Morven. Linley’s stout figure of former times had fallen away, as if he had suffered under long illness; his healthy color had faded; he made an effort to assume the hearty manner that had once been natural to him which was simply pitiable to see. “After sacrificing all that makes life truly decent and truly enjoyable for a woman, he has got nothing, not even false happiness, in return!” With that dreary conclusion the retiring visitor descended the hotel steps, and went his way along the street.
Linley returned to the newspaper which he had been reading when his friend was shown into the room.
Line by line he followed the progress of the law report, which informed its thousands of readers that his wife had divorced him, and had taken lawful possession of his child. Word by word, he dwelt with morbid attention on the terms of crushing severity in which the Lord President had spoken of Sydney Westerfield and of himself. Sentence by sentence he read the reproof inflicted on the unhappy woman whom he had vowed to love and cherish. And then—even then—urged by his own self-tormenting suspicion, he looked for more. On the opposite page there was a leading article, presenting comments on the trial, written in the tone of lofty and virtuous regret; taking the wife’s side against the judge, but declaring, at the same time, that no condemnation of the conduct of the husband and the governess could be too merciless, and no misery that might overtake them in the future more than they had deserved.
He threw the newspaper on the table at his side, and thought over what he had read.
If he had done nothing else, he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs. When he looked back, he saw nothing but the life that he had wasted. When his thoughts turned to the future, they confronted a prospect empty of all promise to a man still in the prime of life. Wife and child were as completely lost to him as if they had been dead—and it was the wife’s doing. Had he any right to complain? Not the shadow of a right. As the newspapers said, he had deserved it.
The clock roused him, striking the hour.
He rose hurriedly, and advanced toward the window. As he crossed the room, he passed by a mirror. His own sullen despair looked at him in the reflection of his face. “She will be back directly,” he remembered; “she mustn’t see me like this!” He went on to the window to divert his mind (and so to clear his face) by watching the stream of life flowing by in the busy street. Artificial cheerfulness, assumed love in Sydney’s presence—that was what his life had come to already.
If he had known that she had gone out, seeking a temporary separation, with his fear of self-betrayal—if he had suspected that she, too, had thoughts which must be concealed: sad forebodings of losing her hold on his heart, terrifying suspicions that he was already comparing her, to her own disadvantage, with the wife whom he had deserted—if he had made these discoveries, what would the end have been? But she had, thus far, escaped the danger of exciting his distrust. That she loved him, he knew. That she had begun to doubt his attachment to her he would not have believed, if his oldest friend had declared it on the best evidence. She had said to him, that morning, at breakfast: “There was a good woman who used to let lodgings here in London, and who was very kind to me when I was a child;” and she had asked leave to go to the house, and inquire if that friendly landlady was still living—with nothing visibly constrained in her smile, and with no faltering tone in her voice. It was not until she was out in the street that the tell-tale tears came into her eyes, and the bitter sigh broke from her, and mingled its little unheard misery with the grand rise and fall of the tumult of London life. While he was still at the window, he saw her crossing the street on her way back to him. She came into the room with her complexion heightened by exercise; she kissed him, and said with her pretty smile: “Have you been lonely without me?” Who would have supposed that the torment of distrust, and the dread of desertion, were busy at this woman’s heart?
He placed a chair for her, and seating himself by her side asked if she felt tired. Every attention that she could wish for from the man whom she loved, offered with every appearance of sincerity on the surface! She met him halfway, and answered as if her mind was quite at ease.
“No, dear, I’m not tired—but I’m glad to get back.”
“Did you find your old landlady still alive?”
“Yes. But oh, so altered, poor thing! The struggle for life must have been a hard one, since I last saw her.”
“She didn’t recognize you, of course?”
“Oh! no. She looked at me and my dress in great surprise and said her lodgings were hardly fit for a young lady like me. It was too sad. I said I had known her lodgings well, many years ago—and, with that to prepare her, I told her who I was. Ah, it was a melancholy meeting for both of us. She burst out crying when I kissed her; and I had to tell her that my mother was dead, and my brother lost to me in spite of every effort to find him. I asked to go into the kitchen, thinking the change would be a relief to both of us. The kitchen used to be a paradise to me in those old days; it was so warm to a half-starved child—and I always got something to eat when I was there. You have no idea, Herbert, how poor and how empty the place looked to me now. I was glad to get out of it, and go upstairs. There was a lumber-room at the top of the house; I used to play in it, all by myself. More changes met me the moment I opened the door.”
“Changes for the better?”
“My dear, it couldn’t have changed for the worse! My dirty old play-room was cleaned and repaired; the lumber taken away, and a nice little bed in one corner. Some clerk in the City had taken the room—I shouldn’t have known it again. But there was another surprise waiting for me; a happy surprise this time. In cleaning out the garret, what do you think the landlady found? Try to guess.”
Anything to please her! Anything to make her think that he was as fond of her as ever! “Was it something you had left behind you,” he said, “at the time when you lodged there.”
“Yes! you are right at the first guess—a little memorial of my father. Only some torn crumpled leaves from a book of children’s songs that he used to teach me to sing; and a small packet of his letters, which my mother may have thrown aside and forgotten. See! I have brought them back with me; I mean to look over the letters at once—but this doesn’t interest you?”
“Indeed it does.”
He made that considerate reply mechanically, as if thinking of something else. She was afraid to tell him plainly that she saw this; but she could venture to say that he was not looking well. “I have noticed it for some time past,” she confessed. “You have been accustomed to live in the country; I am afraid London doesn’t agree with you.”
He admitted that she might be right; still speaking absently, still thinking of the Divorce. She laid the packet of letters and the poor relics of the old song-book on the table, and bent over him. Tenderly, and a little timidly, she put her arm around his neck. “Let us try some purer air,” she suggested; “the seaside might do you good. Don’t you think so?”
“I daresay, my dear. Where shall we go?”
“Oh, I leave that to you.”
“No, Sydney. It was I who proposed coming to London. You shall decide this time.”
She submitted, and promised to think of it. Leaving him, with the first expression of trouble that had shown itself in her face, she took up the songs and put them into the pocket of her dress. On the point of removing the letters next, she noticed the newspaper on the table. “Anything interesting to-day?” she asked—and drew the newspaper toward her to look at it. He took it from her suddenly, almost roughly. The next moment he apologized for his rudeness. “There is nothing worth reading in the paper,” he said, after begging her pardon. “You don’t care about politics, do you?”
Instead of answering, she looked at him attentively.
The heightened color which told of recent exercise, healthily enjoyed, faded from her face. She was silent; she was pale. A little confused, he smiled uneasily. “Surely,” he resumed, trying to speak gayly, “I haven’t offended you?”
“There is something in the newspaper,” she said, “which you don’t want me to read.”
He denied it—but he still kept the newspaper in his own possession. Her voice sank low; her face turned paler still.
“Is it all over?” she asked. “And is it put in the newspaper?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the Divorce.”
He went back again to the window and looked out. It was the easiest excuse that he could devise for keeping his face turned away from her. She followed him.
“I don’t want to read it, Herbert. I only ask you to tell me if you are a free man again.”
Quiet as it was, her tone left him no alternative but to treat her brutally or to reply. Still looking out at the street, he said “Yes.”
“Free to marry, if you like?” she persisted.
He said “Yes” once more—and kept his face steadily turned away from her. She waited a while. He neither moved nor spoke.
Surviving the slow death little by little of all her other illusions, one last hope had lingered in her heart. It was killed by that cruel look, fixed on the view of the street.
“I’ll try to think of a place that we can go to at the seaside.” Having said those words she slowly moved away to the door, and turned back, remembering the packet of letters. She took it up, paused, and looked toward the window. The streets still interested him. She left the room.
She locked the door of her bedchamber, and threw off her walking-dress; light as it was, she felt as if it would stifle her. Even the ribbon round her neck was more than she could endure and breathe freely. Her overburdened heart found no relief in tears. In the solitude of her room she thought of the future. The dreary foreboding of what it might be, filled her with a superstitious dread from which she recoiled. One of the windows was open already; she threw up the other to get more air. In the cooler atmosphere her memory recovered itself; she recollected the newspaper, that Herbert had taken from her. Instantly she rang for the maid. “Ask the first waiter you see downstairs for today’s newspaper; any one will do, so long as I don’t wait for it.” The report of the Divorce—she was in a frenzy of impatience to read what he had read—the report of the Divorce.
When her wish had been gratified, when she had read it from beginning to end, one vivid impression only was left on her mind. She could think of nothing but what the judge had said, in speaking of Mrs. Linley.
A cruel reproof, and worse than cruel, a public reproof, administered to the generous friend, the true wife, the devoted mother—and for what? For having been too ready to forgive the wretch who had taken her husband from her, and had repaid a hundred acts of kindness by unpardonable ingratitude.
She fell on her knees; she tried wildly to pray for inspiration that should tell her what to do. “Oh, God, how can I give that woman back the happiness of which I have robbed her!”
The composing influence of prayer on a troubled mind was something that she had heard of. It was not something that she experienced now. An overpowering impatience to make the speediest and completest atonement possessed her. Must she wait till Herbert Linley no longer concealed that he was weary of her, and cast her off? No! It should be her own act that parted them, and that did it at once. She threw open the door, and hurried half-way down the stairs before she remembered the one terrible obstacle in her way—the Divorce.
Slowly and sadly she submitted, and went back to her room.
There was no disguising it; the two who had once been husband and wife were parted irrevocably—by the wife’s own act. Let him repent ever so sincerely, let him be ever so ready to return, would the woman whose faith Herbert Linley had betrayed take him back? The Divorce, the merciless Divorce, answered:—No!
She paused, thinking of the marriage that was now a marriage no more. The toilet-table was close to her; she looked absently at her haggard face in the glass. What a lost wretch she saw! The generous impulses which other women were free to feel were forbidden luxuries to her. She was ashamed of her wickedness; she was eager to sacrifice herself, for the good of the once-dear friend whom she had wronged. Useless longings! Too late! too late!
She regretted it bitterly. Why?
Comparing Mrs. Linley’s prospects with hers, was there anything to justify regret for the divorced wife? She had her sweet little child to make her happy; she had a fortune of her own to lift her above sordid cares; she was still handsome, still a woman to be admired. While she held her place in the world as high as ever, what was the prospect before Sydney Westerfield? The miserable sinner would end as she had deserved to end. Absolutely dependent on a man who was at that moment perhaps lamenting the wife whom he had deserted and lost, how long would it be before she found herself an outcast, without a friend to help her—with a reputation hopelessly lost—face to face with the temptation to drown herself or poison herself, as other women had drowned themselves or poisoned themselves, when the brightest future before them was rest in death?
If she had been a few years older, Herbert Linley might never again have seen her a living creature. But she was too young to follow any train of repellent thought persistently to its end. The man she had guiltily (and yet how naturally) loved was lord and master in her heart, doubt him as she might. Even in his absence he pleaded with her to have some faith in him still.
She reviewed his language and his conduct toward her, when she had returned that morning from her walk. He had been kind and considerate; he had listened to her little story of the relics of her father, found in the garret, as if her interests were his interests. There had been nothing to disappoint her, nothing to complain of, until she had rashly attempted to discover whether he was free to make her his wife. She had only herself to blame if he was cold and distant when she had alluded to that delicate subject, on the day when he first knew that the Divorce had been granted and his child had been taken from him. And yet, he might have found a kinder way of reproving a sensitive woman than looking into the street—as if he had forgotten her in the interest of watching the strangers passing by! Perhaps he was not thinking of the strangers; perhaps his mind was dwelling fondly and regretfully on his wife?
Instinctively, she felt that her thoughts were leading her back again to a state of doubt from which her youthful hopefulness recoiled. Was there nothing she could find to do which would offer some other subject to occupy her mind than herself and her future?
Looking absently round the room, she noticed the packet of her father’s letters placed on the table by her bedside.
The first three letters that she examined, after untying the packet, were briefly written, and were signed by names unknown to her. They all related to race-horses, and to cunningly devised bets which were certain to make the fortunes of the clever gamblers on the turf who laid them. Absolute indifference on the part of the winners to the ruin of the losers, who were not in the secret, was the one feeling in common, which her father’s correspondents presented. In mercy to his memory she threw the letters into the empty fireplace, and destroyed them by burning.
The next letter which she picked out from the little heap was of some length, and was written in a clear and steady hand. By comparison with the blotted scrawls which she had just burned, it looked like the letter of a gentleman. She turned to the signature. The strange surname struck her; it was “Bennydeck.”
Not a common name, and not a name which seemed to be altogether unknown to her. Had she heard her father mention it at home in the time of her early childhood? There were no associations with it that she could now call to mind.
She read the letter. It addressed her father familiarly as “My dear Roderick,” and it proceeded in these words:—
“The delay in the sailing of your ship offers me an opportunity of writing to you again. My last letter told you of my father’s death. I was then quite unprepared for an event which has happened, since that affliction befell me. Prepare yourself to be surprised. Our old moated house at Sandyseal, in which we have spent so many happy holidays when we were schoolfellows, is sold.
“You will be almost as sorry as I was to hear this; and you will be quite as surprised as I was, when I tell you that Sandyseal Place has become a Priory of English Nuns, of the order of St. Benedict.
“I think I see you look up from my letter, with your big black eyes staring straight before you, and say and swear that this must be one of my mystifications. Unfortunately (for I am fond of the old house in which I was born) it is only too true. The instructions in my father’s will, under which Sandyseal has been sold, are peremptory. They are the result of a promise made, many years since, to his wife.
“You and I were both very young when my poor mother died; but I think you must remember that she, like the rest of her family, was a Roman Catholic.
“Having reminded you of this, I may next tell you that Sandyseal Place was my mother’s property. It formed part of her marriage portion, and it was settled on my father if she died before him, and if she left no female child to survive her. I am her only child. My father was therefore dealing with his own property when he ordered the house to be sold. His will leaves the purchase money to me. I would rather have kept the house.
“But why did my mother make him promise to sell the place at his death?
“A letter, attached to my father’s will, answers this question, and tells a very sad story. In deference to my mother’s wishes it was kept strictly a secret from me while my father lived.
“There was a younger sister of my mother’s who was the beauty of the family; loved and admired by everybody who was acquainted with her. It is needless to make this long letter longer by dwelling on the girl’s miserable story. You have heard it of other girls, over and over again. She loved and trusted; she was deceived and deserted. Alone and friendless in a foreign country; her fair fame blemished; her hope in the future utterly destroyed, she attempted to drown herself. This took place in France. The best of good women—a Sister of Charity—happened to be near enough to the river to rescue her. She was sheltered; she was pitied; she was encouraged to return to her family. The poor deserted creature absolutely refused; she could never forget that she had disgraced them. The good Sister of Charity won her confidence. A retreat which would hide her from the world, and devote her to religion for the rest of her days, was the one end to her wasted life that she longed for. That end was attained in a Priory of Benedictine Nuns, established in France. There she found protection and peace—there she passed the remaining years of her life among devoted Sister-friends—and there she died a quiet and even a happy death.
“You will now understand how my mother’s grateful remembrance associated her with the interests of more than one community of Nuns; and you will not need to be told what she had in mind when she obtained my father’s promise at the time of her last illness.
“He at once proposed to bequeath the house as a free gift to the Benedictines. My mother thanked him and refused. She was thinking of me. ‘If our son fails to inherit the house from his father,’ she said, ‘it is only right that he should have the value of the house in money. Let it be sold.’
“So here I am—rich already—with this additional sum of money in my banker’s care.
“My idea is to invest it in the Funds, and to let it thrive at interest, until I grow older, and retire perhaps from service in the Navy. The later years of my life may well be devoted to the founding of a charitable institution, which I myself can establish and direct. If I die first—oh, there is a chance of it! We may have a naval war, perhaps, or I may turn out one of those incorrigible madmen who risk their lives in Arctic exploration. In case of the worst, therefore, I shall leave the interests of my contemplated Home in your honest and capable hands. For the present good-by, and a prosperous voyage outward bound.”
So the letter ended.
Sydney dwelt with reluctant attention on the latter half of it. The story of the unhappy favorite of the family had its own melancholy and sinister interest for her. She felt the foreboding that it might, in some of its circumstances, be her story too—without the peaceful end. Into what community of merciful women could she be received, in her sorest need? What religious consolations would encourage her penitence? What prayers, what hopes, would reconcile her, on her death-bed, to the common doom?
She sighed as she folded up Captain Bennydeck’s letter and put it in her bosom, to be read again. “If my lot had fallen among good people,” she thought, “perhaps I might have belonged to the Church which took care of that poor girl.”
Her mind was still pursuing its own sad course of inquiry; she was wondering in what part of England Sandyseal might be; she was asking herself if the Nuns at the old moated house ever opened their doors to women, whose one claim on their common Christianity was the claim to be pitied—when she heard Linley’s footsteps approaching the door.
His tone was kind; his manner was gentle; his tender interest in her seemed to have revived. Her long absence had alarmed him; he feared she might be ill. “I was only thinking,” she said. He smiled, and sat down by her, and asked if she had been thinking of the place that they should go to when they left London.
The one hotel in Sandyseal was full, from the topmost story to the ground floor; and by far the larger half of the landlord’s guests were invalids sent to him by the doctors.
To persons of excitable temperament, in search of amusement, the place offered no attractions. Situated at the innermost end of a dull little bay, Sandyseal—so far as any view of the shipping in the Channel was concerned—might have been built on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Vessels of any importance kept well out of the way of treacherous shoals and currents lurking at the entrance of the bay. The anchorage ground was good; but the depth of water was suited to small vessels only—to shabby old fishing-smacks which seldom paid their expenses, and to dirty little coasters carrying coals and potatoes. At the back of the hotel, two slovenly rows of cottages took their crooked course inland. Sailing masters of yachts, off duty, sat and yawned at the windows; lazy fishermen looked wearily at the weather over their garden gates; and superfluous coastguards gathered together in a wooden observatory, and leveled useless telescopes at an empty sea. The flat open country, with its few dwarf trees and its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a little wooden pier, sadly in want of repair. On the other side, a walled inclosure accommodated yachts of light tonnage, stripped of their rigging, and sitting solitary on a bank of mud until their owners wanted them. In this neighborhood there was a small outlying colony of shops: one that sold fruit and fish; one that dealt in groceries and tobacco; one shut up, with a bill in the window inviting a tenant; and one, behind the Methodist Chapel, answering the double purpose of a post-office and a storehouse for ropes and coals. Beyond these objects there was nothing (and this was the great charm of the place) to distract the attention of invalids, following the doctor’s directions, and from morning to night taking care of their health.
The time was evening; the scene was one of the private sitting-rooms in the hotel; and the purpose in view was a little tea-party.
Rich Mrs. Romsey, connected with commerce as wife of the chief partner in the firm of Romsey & Renshaw, was staying at the hotel in the interests of her three children. They were of delicate constitution; their complete recovery, after severe illness which had passed from one to the other, was less speedy than had been anticipated; and the doctor had declared that the nervous system was, in each case, more or less in need of repair. To arrive at this conclusion, and to recommend a visit to Sandyseal, were events which followed each other (medically speaking) as a matter of course.
The health of the children had greatly improved; the famous air had agreed with them, and the discovery of new playfellows had agreed with them. They had made acquaintance with Lady Myrie’s well-bred boys, and with Mrs. Norman’s charming little Kitty. The most cordial good-feeling had established itself among the mothers. Owing a return for hospitalities received from Lady Myrie and Mrs. Norman, Mrs. Romsey had invited the two ladies to drink tea with her in honor of an interesting domestic event. Her husband, absent on the Continent for some time past, on business connected with his firm, had returned to England, and had that evening joined his wife and children at Sandyseal.
Lady Myrie had arrived, and Mr. Romsey had been presented to her. Mrs. Norman, expected to follow, was represented by a courteous note of apology. She was not well that evening, and she begged to be excused.
“This is a great disappointment,” Mrs. Romsey said to her husband. “You would have been charmed with Mrs. Norman—highly-bred, accomplished, a perfect lady. And she leaves us to-morrow. The departure will not be an early one; and I shall find an opportunity, my dear, of introducing you to my friend and her sweet little Kitty.”
Mr. Romsey looked interested for a moment, when he first heard Mrs. Norman’s name. After that, he slowly stirred his tea, and seemed to be thinking, instead of listening to his wife.
“Have you made the lady’s acquaintance here?” he inquired.
“Yes—and I hope I have made a friend for life,” Mrs. Romsey said with enthusiasm.
“And so do I,” Lady Myrie added.
Mr. Romsey went on with his inquiries.
“Is she a handsome woman?”
Both the ladies answered the question together. Lady Myrie described Mrs. Norman, in one dreadful word, as “Classical.” By comparison with this, Mrs. Romsey’s reply was intelligible. “Not even illness can spoil her beauty!”
“Including the headache she has got to-night?” Mr. Romsey suggested.
“Don’t be ill-natured, dear! Mrs. Norman is here by the advice of one of the first physicians in London; she has suffered under serious troubles, poor thing.”
Mr. Romsey persisted in being ill-natured. “Connected with her husband?” he asked.
Lady Myrie entered a protest. She was a widow; and it was notorious among her friends that the death of her husband had been the happiest event in her married life. But she understood her duty to herself as a respectable woman.
“I think, Mr. Romsey, you might have spared that cruel allusion,” she said with dignity.
Mr. Romsey apologized. He had his reasons for wishing to know something more about Mrs. Norman; he proposed to withdraw his last remark, and to put his inquiries under another form. Might he ask his wife if anybody had seen Mr. Norman?
“No.”
“Or heard of him?”
Mrs. Romsey answered in the negative once more, and added a question on her own account. What did all this mean?
“It means,” Lady Myrie interposed, “what we poor women are all exposed to—scandal.” She had not yet forgiven Mr. Romsey’s allusion, and she looked at him pointedly as she spoke. There are some impenetrable men on whom looks produce no impression. Mr. Romsey was one of them. He turned to his wife, and said, quietly: “What I mean is, that I know more of Mrs. Norman than you do. I have heard of her—never mind how or where. She is a lady who has been celebrated in the newspapers. Don’t be alarmed. She is no less a person than the divorced Mrs. Linley.”
The two ladies looked at each other in blank dismay. Restrained by a sense of conjugal duty, Mrs. Romsey only indulged in an exclamation. Lady Myrie, independent of restraint, expressed her opinion, and said: “Quite impossible!”
“The Mrs. Norman whom I mean,” Mr. Romsey went on, “has, as I have been told, a mother living. The old lady has been twice married. Her name is Mrs. Presty.”
This settled the question. Mrs. Presty was established, in her own proper person, with her daughter and grandchild at the hotel. Lady Myrie yielded to the force of evidence; she lifted her hands in horror: “This is too dreadful!”
Mrs. Romsey took a more compassionate view of the disclosure. “Surely the poor lady is to be pitied?” she gently suggested.
Lady Myrie looked at her friend in astonishment. “My dear, you must have forgotten what the judge said about her. Surely you read the report of the case in the newspapers?”
“No; I heard of the trial, and that’s all. What did the judge say?”
“Say?” Lady Myrie repeated. “What did he not say! His lordship declared that he had a great mind not to grant the Divorce at all. He spoke of this dreadful woman who has deceived us in the severest terms; he said she had behaved in a most improper manner. She had encouraged the abominable governess; and if her husband had yielded to temptation, it was her fault. And more besides, that I don’t remember.”
Mr. Romsey’s wife appealed to him in despair. “What am I to do?” she asked, helplessly.
“Do nothing,” was the wise reply. “Didn’t you say she was going away to-morrow?”
“That’s the worst of it!” Mrs. Romsey declared. “Her little girl Kitty gives a farewell dinner to-morrow to our children; and I’ve promised to take them to say good-by.”
Lady Myrie pronounced sentence without hesitation. “Of course your girls mustn’t go. Daughters! Think of their reputations when they grow up!”
“Are you in the same scrape with my wife?” Mr. Romsey asked.
Lady Myrie corrected his language. “I have been deceived in the same way,” she said. “Though my children are boys (which perhaps makes a difference) I feel it is my duty as a mother not to let them get into bad company. I do nothing myself in an underhand way. No excuses! I shall send a note and tell Mrs. Norman why she doesn’t see my boys to-morrow.”
“Isn’t that a little hard on her?” said merciful Mrs. Romsey.
Mr. Romsey agreed with his wife, on grounds of expediency. “Never make a row if you can help it,” was the peaceable principle to which this gentleman committed himself. “Send word that the children have caught colds, and get over it in that way.”
Mrs. Romsey looked gratefully at her admirable husband. “Just the thing!” she said, with an air of relief.
Lady Myrie’s sense of duty expressed itself, with the strictest adherence to the laws of courtesy. She rose, smiled resignedly, and said, “Good-night.”
Almost at the same moment, innocent little Kitty astonished her mother and her grandmother by appearing before them in her night-gown, after she had been put to bed nearly two hours since.
“What will this child do next?” Mrs. Presty exclaimed.
Kitty told the truth. “I can’t go to sleep, grandmamma.”
“Why not, my darling?” her mother asked.
“I’m so excited, mamma.”
“About what, Kitty?”
“About my dinner-party to-morrow. Oh,” said the child, clasping her hands earnestly as she thought of her playfellows, “I do so hope it will go off well!”
Belonging to the generation which has lived to see the Age of Hurry, and has no sympathy with it, Mrs. Presty entered the sitting-room at the hotel, two hours before the time that had been fixed for leaving Sandyseal, with her mind at ease on the subject of her luggage. “My boxes are locked, strapped and labeled; I hate being hurried. What’s that you’re reading?” she asked, discovering a book on her daughter’s lap, and a hasty action on her daughter’s part, which looked like trying to hide it.
Mrs. Norman made the most common, and—where the object is to baffle curiosity—the most useless of prevaricating replies. When her mother asked her what she was reading she answered: “Nothing.”
“Nothing!” Mrs. Presty repeated with an ironical assumption of interest. “The work of all others, Catherine, that I most want to read.” She snatched up the book; opened it at the first page, and discovered an inscription in faded ink which roused her indignation. “To dear Catherine, from Herbert, on the anniversary of our marriage.” What unintended mockery in those words, read by the later light of the Divorce! “Well, this is mean,” said Mrs. Presty. “Keeping that wretch’s present, after the public exposure which he has forced on you. Oh, Catherine!”
Catherine was not quite so patient with her mother as usual. “Keeping my best remembrance of the happy time of my life,” she answered.
“Misplaced sentiment,” Mrs. Presty declared; “I shall put the book out of the way. Your brain is softening, my dear, under the influence of this stupefying place.”
Catherine asserted her own opinion against her mother’s opinion, for the second time. “I have recovered my health at Sandyseal,” she said. “I like the place, and I am sorry to leave it.”
“Give me the shop windows, the streets, the life, the racket, and the smoke of London,” cried Mrs. Presty. “Thank Heaven, these rooms are let over our heads, and out we must go, whether we like it or not.”
This expression of gratitude was followed by a knock at the door, and by a voice outside asking leave to come in, which was, beyond all doubt, the voice of Randal Linley. With Catherine’s book still in her possession, Mrs. Presty opened the table-drawer, threw it in, and closed the drawer with a bang. Discovering the two ladies, Randal stopped in the doorway, and stared at them in astonishment.
“Didn’t you expect to see us?” Mrs. Presty inquired.
“I heard you were here, from our friend Sarrazin,” Randal said; “but I expected to see Captain Bennydeck. Have I mistaken the number? Surely these are his rooms?”
Catherine attempted to explain. “They were Captain Bennydeck’s rooms,” she began; “but he was so kind, although we are perfect strangers to him—”
Mrs. Presty interposed. “My dear Catherine, you have not had my advantages; you have not been taught to make a complicated statement in few words. Permit me to seize the points (in the late Mr. Presty’s style) and to put them in the strongest light. This place, Randal, is always full; and we didn’t write long enough beforehand to secure rooms. Captain Bennydeck happened to be downstairs when he heard that we were obliged to go away, and that one of us was a lady in delicate health. This sweetest of men sent us word that we were welcome to take his rooms, and that he would sleep on board his yacht. Conduct worthy of Sir Charles Grandison himself. When I went downstairs to thank him, he was gone—and here we have been for nearly three weeks; sometimes seeing the Captain’s yacht, but, to our great surprise, never seeing the Captain himself.”
“There’s nothing to be surprised at, Mrs. Presty. Captain Bennydeck likes doing kind things, and hates being thanked for it. I expected him to meet me here to-day.”
Catherine went to the window. “He is coming to meet you,” she said. “There is his yacht in the bay.”
“And in a dead calm,” Randal added, joining her. “The vessel will not get here, before I am obliged to go away again.”
Catherine looked at him timidly. “Do I drive you away?” she asked, in tones that faltered a little.
Randal wondered what she could possibly be thinking of and acknowledged it in so many words.
“She is thinking of the Divorce,” Mrs. Presty explained. “You have heard of it, of course; and perhaps you take your brother’s part?”
“I do nothing of the sort, ma’am. My brother has been in the wrong from first to last.” He turned to Catherine. “I will stay with you as long as I can, with the greatest pleasure,” he said earnestly and kindly. “The truth is, I am on my way to visit some friends; and if Captain Bennydeck had got here in time to see me, I must have gone away to the junction to catch the next train westward, just as I am going now. I had only two words to say to the Captain about a person in whom he is interested—and I can say them in this way.” He wrote in pencil on one of his visiting cards, and laid it on the table. “I shall be back in London, in a week,” he resumed, “and you will tell me at what address I can find you. In the meanwhile, I miss Kitty. Where is she?”
Kitty was sent for. She entered the room looking unusually quiet and subdued—but, discovering Randal, became herself again in a moment, and jumped on his knee.
“Oh, Uncle Randal, I’m so glad to see you!” She checked herself, and looked at her mother. “May I call him Uncle Randal?” she asked. “Or has he changed his name, too?”
Mrs. Presty shook a warning forefinger at her granddaughter, and reminded Kitty that she had been told not to talk about names. Randal saw the child’s look of bewilderment, and felt for her. “She may talk as she pleases to me,” he said “but not to strangers. She understands that, I am sure.”
Kitty laid her cheek fondly against her uncle’s cheek. “Everything is changed,” she whispered. “We travel about; papa has left us, and Syd has left us, and we have got a new name. We are Norman now. I wish I was grown up, and old enough to understand it.”
Randal tried to reconcile her to her own happy ignorance. “You have got your dear good mother,” he said, “and you have got me, and you have got your toys—”
“And some nice boys and girls to play with,” cried Kitty, eagerly following the new suggestion. “They are all coming here directly to dine with me. You will stay and have dinner too, won’t you?”
Randal promised to dine with Kitty when they met in London. Before he left the room he pointed to his card on the table. “Let my friend see that message,” he said, as he went out.
The moment the door had closed on him, Mrs. Presty startled her daughter by taking up the card and looking at what Randal had written on it. “It isn’t a letter, Catherine; and you know how superior I am to common prejudices.” With that defense of her proceeding, she coolly read the message:
“I am sorry to say that I can tell you nothing more of your old friend’s daughter as yet. I can only repeat that she neither needs nor deserves the help that you kindly offer to her.”
Mrs. Presty laid the card down again and owned that she wished Randal had been a little more explicit. “Who can it be?” she wondered. “Another young hussy gone wrong?”
Kitty turned to her mother with a look of alarm. “What’s a hussy?” she asked. “Does grandmamma mean me?” The great hotel clock in the hall struck two, and the child’s anxieties took a new direction. “Isn’t it time my little friends came to see me?” she said.
It was half an hour past the time. Catherine proposed to send to Lady Myrie and Mrs. Romsey, and inquire if anything had happened to cause the delay. As she told Kitty to ring the bell, the waiter came in with two letters, addressed to Mrs. Norman.
Mrs. Presty had her own ideas, and drew her own conclusions. She watched Catherine attentively. Even Kitty observed that her mother’s face grew paler and paler as she read the letters. “You look as if you were frightened, mamma.” There was no reply. Kitty began to feel so uneasy on the subject of her dinner and her guests, that she actually ventured on putting a question to her grandmother.
“Will they be long, do you think, before they come?” she asked.
The old lady’s worldly wisdom had passed, by this time from a state of suspicion to a state of certainty. “My child,” she answered, “they won’t come at all.”
Kitty ran to her mother, eager to inquire if what Mrs. Presty had told her could possibly be true. Before a word had passed her lips, she shrank back, too frightened to speak.
Never, in her little experience, had she been startled by such a look in her mother’s face as the look that confronted her now. For the first time Catherine saw her child trembling at the sight of her. Before that discovery, the emotions that shook her under the insult which she had received lost their hold. She caught Kitty up in her arms. “My darling, my angel, it isn’t you I am thinking of. I love you!—I love you! In the whole world there isn’t such a good child, such a sweet, lovable, pretty child as you are. Oh, how disappointed she looks—she’s crying. Don’t break my heart!—don’t cry!” Kitty held up her head, and cleared her eyes with a dash of her hand. “I won’t cry, mamma.” And child as she was, she was as good as her word. Her mother looked at her and burst into tears.
Perversely reluctant, the better nature that was in Mrs. Presty rose to the surface, forced to show itself. “Cry, Catherine,” she said kindly; “it will do you good. Leave the child to me.”
With a gentleness that astonished Kitty, she led her little granddaughter to the window, and pointed to the public walk in front of the house. “I know what will comfort you,” the wise old woman began; “look out of the window.” Kitty obeyed.
“I don’t see my little friends coming,” she said. Mrs. Presty still pointed to some object on the public walk. “That’s better than nothing, isn’t it?” she persisted. “Come with me to the maid; she shall go with you, and take care of you.” Kitty whispered, “May I give mamma a kiss first?” Sensible Mrs. Presty delayed the kiss for a while. “Wait till you come back, and then you can tell your mamma what a treat you have had.” Arrived at the door on their way out, Kitty whispered again: “I want to say something"—"Well, what is it?"—"Will you tell the donkey-boy to make him gallop?"—"I’ll tell the boy he shall have sixpence if you are satisfied; and you will see what he does then.” Kitty looked up earnestly in her grandmother’s face. “What a pity it is you are not always like what you are now!” she said. Mrs. Presty actually blushed.