When he reached his mother's house in Kensington, Rupert Haverford was
met with the information that Mrs. Baynhurst had left town the
preceding day.
The house was all shut up, and the servant who opened the door to him
wore no apron or cap.
He passed into the hall thoroughly vexed.
Of course by this time he ought to have been well prepared for any
startling move on the part of his mother, who never by any chance did
those things that were expected of her, or, indeed, anything that she
had announced she intended doing.
He put the parlourmaid through a cross-examination.
"I came up from the country on purpose," he said to her, naturally
irritated. "I understood from a letter that was sent on from my house
that my mother had had an accident, and that she was anything but well!"
"No more she is, sir," said the maid. "Dr. Mortlock, he was quite angry
when he come here this morning and found Mrs. Baynhurst gone; but there
was a letter come yesterday from Mr. Cuthbert, saying as he was ill in
Paris, and the mistress she fussed herself into a fever, and wouldn't
rest satisfied, so she left last night. She wasn't no more fit to
travel than this doormat, sir. You see, there was all but a smash up
with the brougham."
Rupert Haverford was frowning sharply.
"Who is with my mother?" he asked.
"She's took Stebbings, her maid that is, sir, but not Miss Graniger.
Most probable she'll have to join Mrs. Baynhurst in a day or two."
The maid rambled on loquaciously, and Rupert Haverford quickly gathered
that his mother must have had a nasty shock, as her carriage had
apparently just escaped collision with a runaway cab. She was not a
nervous or a timid woman, far from it; but of late she had been in
anything but good health, and this journey to Paris appeared to
Haverford not merely an altogether needless fatigue, but a very foolish
undertaking on her part.
In all probability his half-brother's serious illness would signify
nothing more than an ordinary cold.
It was so typical of Cuthbert Baynhurst to write in a sensational way
about himself; equally typical of their mother to take immediate alarm
when any such news reached her.
It relieved Rupert Haverford to be angry with his half-brother now. He
had made it a principle never to be angry with his mother. It was so
useless. She was a strange creature was Rupert's mother. In a sense
they were nothing more than acquaintances, for she had left his father
when he had been a baby of a few months.
Octavia Marling had married John Haverford in a hurry, and had
regretted the haste almost immediately.
Their life together had been unsupportable. It would, however, have
been a very unusual kind of man who would have found life possible with
a woman of her peculiar temperament and mental attributes, even in the
most easy-going circumstances, and when such a woman was boxed down
into the narrow limits of a struggling existence passed in a dull,
smoke-grimed, small provincial town, the result was inevitable.
Rupert's father had adored his wife, but he could not live with her.
She was a brilliant woman, a woman with the brains, the will, the
tenacious strength of a man, a woman who made rules for herself, and
quietly and firmly rebelled against the position which tradition and
nature had allotted to her sex.
When she had borne a child she had felt humiliated; motherhood was a
natural evil, she admitted so much, but there were women created
specially for the purpose, and she was assuredly not one of those
women. She put the baby away from her as she put other objectionable
things, and fell back on her work with new and deeper intentions.
She had been engaged, at the time when poor little Rupert came into the
world, on an historical work of some magnitude, a work which entailed a
considerable amount of research--indeed, which demanded that she should
move about from one country to another, untrammelled by ties of any
sort.
Perhaps the kindest letter she ever wrote to her husband was the one he
received after she had left him. She was so unutterably glad to be
free; to put the factory town, with its troops of working men and women
clattering on the rough stones past the window where she worked, far,
far behind her; to be liberated from the fretting duties and small
events in her husband's professional life; to feel that miles and miles
stretched between her and the clang of the factory bell and the
ever-whirring noise of the restless machinery....
She only saw Rupert at a few odd times during the years that stretched
between his birth and his father's death. And she was abroad when John
Haverford died.
By his father's will the boy was left to the joint care of his mother
and of a man called Matthew Woolgar.
No one knew where to find Mrs. Haverford, so the charge of the lad
passed into the hands of this Woolgar, who accepted the trust in a very
grudging spirit.
He was an ignorant, churlish man who had worked his way up from the
gutter to the command of enormous wealth; a man whose very name was a
curse in the ears of the men who served him; a man who was both feared
and hated, and credited truly with being the hardest taskmaster in the
world. It was asserted by many that the foundation of Woolgar's fortune
lay in usury--money lent to his fellow-workers at an enormous rate of
interest--but whether this was true or not no one knew. All that was
certain was that he owned more than half the town and ruled with the
hand of a tyrant.
John Haverford had written down his wishes as to his boy's education
and profession, but Matthew Woolgar sneered these wishes into thin air.
A pauper had no right to the training of a prince.
Without waiting to consult Octavia Haverford, he took matters into his
own hands, and sent the boy into the factory.
Rupert Haverford wore the common clothes as the others did, he ate the
same common food, he lived and moved and slept among these people who
adored his father, and for whose children his father had lost his life.
There was nothing outwardly to tell the difference between Rupert
Haverford and any of the others, except when Matthew Woolgar paid one
of his surprise visitations (as he was fond of doing) to the works,
when he would be certain to single out "t' poor doctor's lad" for some
sharp reproof or snarling word.
Then the mother had flashed into existence again.
She wrote from America, announcing that she was married a second time,
and peremptorily commanding Rupert to join her.
Matthew Woolgar quietly and grimly refused to permit this.
In truth, Rupert himself had no desire to go. His mother was nothing to
him, hardly a name. The passion, the intense love, of his childhood and
boyhood had been given to his father; even to live in the place where
his father had lived and died signified a sort of happiness to Rupert.
It was because he felt he was doing what John Haverford had wished him
to do that he gave his strange guardian such unquestioning obedience,
and it was certainly the loved memory of his father that sustained him,
that made life possible. Every day he toiled eight to nine hours in the
factory; every night he sat for hours studying, teaching himself. He
had dreams of his own. He would get promotion, earn more, save money,
and even yet follow that career which his father had desired for him.
It was a task of incredible difficulty, but he was his mother's child,
and the will that spurred her on to such questionable lengths ran like
a steady fire in Rupert's veins. The very work that to some would have
seemed so paralyzing, so harmful, served to urge the boy on; it gave
him grit; it taught him more than books can teach.
And he got on.
Against all odds he advanced.
He was about eighteen, a tall, raw youth with a thin resolute face,
when his mother and he met.
Mrs. Baynhurst was a widow for the second time. This was apparently not
a matter of great sorrow to her, but she was a changed woman.
For a second time also she had become a mother, a second son had been
born to her--a little, delicate, neurotic child, whose birth was not,
as Rupert's had been, merely a physical and a detestable fact, but
whose frail little existence brought to her the knowledge of those
things which neither logic, nor erudition, nor philosophy had ever
vouchsafed to her.
With the coming of this second child (the offspring of a brief, a
miserable passion), the flood of those natural yearnings which make the
sum of most women's lives had broken its barriers at last. Rupert had
been an amazement and a humiliation; Cuthbert was a delight, a
happiness so illimitable, so wondrous, that the woman trembled even at
the realization of it.
The meeting between Rupert and his mother had led to nothing. They were
as far apart as the two poles.
Mrs. Baynhurst had misunderstood the boy's attitude; she supposed that
he resented her second marriage, and in her turn she resented his right
to do this.
But Rupert was quite indifferent to anything his mother had done. Had
she had any tangible existence for him in the beginning, things, of
course, would have been different, but he had never known a mother, he
had never missed a mother; whereas even then, when at times he went to
kneel at his father's grave, his heart would contract with that old
incredulous anguish which had lived with him for so many black days
after he knew he would never see that father again.... Nevertheless,
though they parted so coldly, quietly, and indifferently, something in
the boy's bearing, in his calm submission to his fate, had struck a
reproach in the woman's heart.
She never wrote to Rupert, but she wrote very frequently to Matthew
Woolgar, who never troubled to send her a word in reply.
She began to fidget and to fret.
It was monstrous, so she declared, that her son should be working in a
factory. Such a circumstance stung her pride.
Rupert must go to a tutor's. She knew that John Haverford had left a
small sum of money, and she declared that this money should be used for
Rupert's education.
Matthew Woolgar took absolutely no notice of her wishes, and after a
time she grew tired, and left Rupert to his fate.
The care, the anxious, engrossing care that her second boy demanded of
her filled her every thought.
And so a few years rolled on, marked only for Rupert by the knowledge
that he was slowly but surely moving upwards, and sweetened by the fact
that he was following those lines which his father had laid down for
him as far as he could.
Half his wages went in books and to pay for tuition. He had put himself
into the hands of one of the masters of a school situated just outside
the town, and with this man he had worked in every spare hour he had.
His craving for knowledge amounted to greediness.
Perhaps once in a while he met Woolgar, who had grown into a surly and
suffering man; there was nothing, however, in this old man's treatment
of him to indicate even in the faintest degree the wonderful future
which awaited him.
When he was twenty-six Rupert was in a post of authority at the
factory; when he was thirty he was master of all that Matthew Woolgar
possessed--a fortune so large that no one quite knew its limits; a
young man with the world before him, and a certain section of the world
at his feet.
It was he, then, who had sought his mother.
A year or so back, when he had arrived at manhood, and had inherited
the money his father had left (which in Woolgar's hands had accumulated
to a decent sum), Rupert had made it his business to inquire into his
mother's financial position, and finding, as he had imagined, that her
circumstances were very poor, he had without hesitation immediately
passed over to her his small inheritance.
And Octavia Baynhurst had taken the money.
"Not for myself," she had written to him, "but for Cuthbert. He is so
delicate; he needs so much care, and he is so gifted! If he is properly
trained he can attain to anything, but he _must_ be in the proper
environment."
Since that bygone day when his mother had sought him with that frail,
pathetically small baby in her arms, Rupert had not met his
half-brother till the day when he reached London, after he had followed
Matthew Woolgar to the grave.
There was not the faintest possibility of sympathy or even friendship
between Octavia Baynhurst's two sons.
A portrait of Cuthbert Baynhurst was hanging over the fireplace in the
hall, and Rupert glanced up at it now as he turned to leave his
mother's house and go out into the fog again, and as he glanced he
frowned unconsciously.
There were portraits of Cuthbert all over the house. Young Baynhurst
affected the society, and in a degree the calling, of artistic life,
and was a favourite subject with most of the artists he knew; but not
one of these portraits did justice in the mother's eyes to that
strange, almost womanish beauty which the young fellow possessed. She
was blind to any defect in Cuthbert either mentally or physically.
Love, when it had come to her, had come in a wild, a primitive kind of
way; she who had carped and analyzed and sought to find the cause and
origin of all things, fell at the feet of this one creature, who
claimed her heart and accepted her destiny unquestioningly.
The fact that Cuthbert was lazy, selfish, callous, never dawned in her
comprehension. She had fashioned him out of the purest, the best of
herself. She required nothing of him, and lived merely to pour out her
love on him.
Just as he was passing out of the door Haverford looked back.
"I shall be obliged if you will ask Miss Graniger to let me have my
mother's address as soon as she gets it," he said.
He got into the cab that was waiting, and his thoughts lingered about
Cuthbert.
"Paris," he said; "I thought he was going to stay in town and work all
this winter."
Then he shrugged his shoulders.
He made it his business not to inquire too closely into anything that
Cuthbert did, in which he showed himself to be unlike the majority of
those people who give to others; and assuredly he was generous enough
to his half-brother. For Cuthbert, of course, had the major portion of
anything their mother had, and Rupert's first action (when he had
realized that he had the command of so much money) had been to put his
mother out of the reach of difficulty.
He bought her the house in which she now lived, she had her own
carriage, and a very comfortable income. He gave her, in fact, exactly
the sum equivalent to that which he spent on himself.
Matthew Woolgar had left him the money unreservedly--everything save a
legacy to his sister, an old, crippled, and humble woman, had passed
"To the son of the best man I ever knew." But Rupert himself had
certain theories. He felt convinced that this money would never have
come to him if Woolgar had not seen in him the proper medium through
which this immense wealth could be handled judiciously, and it was his
one desire, his one anxiety, that he should prove worthy of the immense
trust which had been placed in his hands.
The schemes about which he had spoken to Agnes Brenton the night before
were no paltry things; they were planned on the most generous lines.
There was scarcely a public charity to which Haverford did not already
subscribe largely, and his private expenditure of this kind was almost
without limit, but he intended to do more, much more. And his keenest,
his most living sympathy was with those people among whom he worked so
long; it was on these toilers and out of them that this great wealth
had been gleaned in the first instance, and Rupert resolved to give
back to them in full measure. Nothing was too large or too important
that dealt with their welfare and the good of their rising generation.
Already there had sprung up in that smoke-grimed factory town a
monument dedicated to the memory of the man who had enriched him and
the man who had given birth to him. It took the form of a large
institution designated for the practical education and the physical and
moral uplifting of his old comrades.
Life in the factory served to stunt the growth and stultify the
intellect of those who did not possess, like himself, that piercing,
that vitalizing determination to keep looking upwards. It was to such
as these that Haverford determined the major part of Matthew Woolgar's
money should go.
After leaving Kensington he went back to the city, where he had an
office, and it was late in the afternoon before he reached the house
that was perhaps the sole reason why he had elected to make London his
head-quarters.
Matthew Woolgar had raised up to himself a veritable palace. Money had
been lavished on this house like water. The art experts of the various
great Continental centres had been busy for months and months finding
treasures with which to garnish this lordly dwelling-place.
But Rupert Haverford's benefactor had never lived in the house. His
real home had been the shabby worker's cottage, where he had dwelt in
those far-off years before his wife and son had died, and when
greatness had not even dawned on the horizon of his future.
When first Rupert Haverford had passed through room after room of that
magnificent house which Matthew Woolgar had raised up for himself, his
feeling had been one of oppression and, in a sense, pain. Everything
was so beautiful, everything was so cold. That element of desolation,
of heart loneliness, which must have driven the wealth-burdened man to
sit and smoke in his old wooden armchair by the broken down fireplace
in that humble north-country cottage made itself felt to Rupert almost
too sharply.
That had been more than two years ago, and his influence and the
crowded, and to him wonderful, circumstances in those two years had
made a change in everything--in himself and in all that surrounded him.
Still, though the world had fluttered in and out of these rooms very
often, this wonderful house remained only a house; it was never a home.
That element of solitude, that deadness, as it were, that clings about
the atmosphere of museums and other treasure storehouses, continued to
oppress Rupert.
It was too big for one person.
And to-day, coming freshly from the cheery, sociable influence of
Yelverton, Rupert was sensibly affected by this sense of solitude, this
mockery of empty grandeur.
Happily, a vast amount of correspondence awaited him, and he set
himself at the task at once.
Letters bombarded him wherever he went--the world seemed peopled with
beggars.
It was a matter requiring great tact and discrimination, this giving to
those who asked. Naturally there were other letters. Invitations poured
in upon Rupert Haverford. There was scarcely a great house which had
not thrown open its doors to him.
Already his small dinners had taken to themselves a _cachet_. If he
had responded to all the invitations that were poured upon him he would
scarcely have had a moment to himself. As it was, he felt that he was
drifting more swiftly into the stream of society than he had any desire
or intention of doing.
Not once, but a dozen times he had told himself of late that he must
change this.
Life for him had a serious meaning. It was full of serious projects.
Sometimes when he was a guest at the table of some illustrious
personage, or sometimes when he would be standing in a ballroom
watching the dancers and listening to the strains of softest music, he
would lose himself, as it were; he would go back in his imagination to
those days when he had stood working with the humblest of the factory
hands, working and dreaming for the time when he should be free.
Working, not for this bubbling gaiety, but for those big, those noble
ambitions which his father had set before him as his ideals when he had
been a child of only a few years.
He threw aside the letters now, and leaned back in his chair.
It was perhaps the first time he had let himself challenge himself.
With one of those curious tricks that imagination plays us at times he
was suddenly wafted from the cosy warmth of his room to that cold, damp
mist of the day before. He was walking through the white fog with
Camilla Lancing nestling close to him.
If he were to turn his back on London, on society, on that life which
had been circling about him of late, he must turn his back on this
woman, for she, and she alone, was the magnet that held him so
tenaciously.
He caught his breath suddenly, like one who fights for a cold, keen
wind, and got up. It had grown to be the dominant influence of his
present life, this struggle with himself on the subject of Camilla
Lancing. How would it end?
His man came into his room at that moment, bringing a note.
It was written in pencil, and came from Camilla.
"I am waiting outside," she had scribbled. "I wonder if you would see
me? I want to see you _very_ much. I have a great favour to ask you.
Could you spare me ten minutes?"
Rupert Haverford read the note two or three times; he wanted to calm
himself and steady his voice.
"Please ask Mrs. Lancing if she will come in, Harper," he said.
She came in almost directly.
Yesterday she had been a brown fairy; to-day she seemed to be a living
violet. He never knew in detail what she wore; he was only conscious of
the exquisite effect she always made. Her near approach was heralded by
the sweetest, faintest whisper of the flowers she personified.
She had thrown back her veil. He noticed that though she was smiling
she looked pale and tired.
"How good of you to see me!" she said.
"How good of you to come!" he answered in his usual grave way--the way
she called "stodgy."
He pushed forward a chair for her near the fire, but she chose to sit
away from it in the shadows.
"Thanks. No, I won't have tea. I have had some already--two cups, and I
must not stay more than two minutes. I have some news for you," she
announced. "Agnes has come up with me; I simply refused to leave
Yelverton without her. And she only wanted an excuse to come." Camilla
laughed as she sank into a chair. "You have not an idea what a scene of
excitement there was at my house when we arrived! My children simply
adore Agnes, and she adores them. And oh, Mr. Haverford, I am charged
with all sorts of messages to you! Betty and Baby are enchanted with
your lockets and intend wearing them always, but, please, you must give
them a picture of yourself to put inside; that is what they say."
There was a little pause.
Camilla let her sables slip from her shoulders on to her arms. She had
come there with a distinct purpose, a purpose that was bound about with
the iron of most pressing fear and necessity.
True to her nature, she was not going to speak frankly.
"I can't," she said to herself; "I absolutely can't!"
Haverford was standing by the fire.
The scent of her violets, the bewildering entrancement of her presence,
made him dreamy.
How changed the room was!
The house was full of treasures--pictures, tapestries, bronzes,
inanimate things which had cost thousands--but everything was as
nothing compared with this living, breathing, beautiful woman.
How far more beautiful than all the rest she was!
"I shall be photographed on purpose," he roused himself to say; and
then he pulled himself together with a great effort. "You want me?" he
queried. "I am only too delighted to do any little thing for you, Mrs.
Lancing. Pray let me know what I can do!"
Camilla got up and moved about a little aimlessly.
"It ... it's rather a big favour, really quite an enormous one," she
said. "I ... I feel nervous...." Indeed, her voice broke a little.
"Don't be afraid," said Haverford.
She caught her breath, and then she steadied her voice.
"Well, I have come to you because a dear friend of mine is in great
trouble, Mr. Haverford," she said. "When I got home this afternoon I
found a letter waiting for me. You would not know if I were to tell you
her name. She lives in the country, and oh! she has had such a hard
life. We ... we are old, old friends, and I suppose that is why she has
turned to me now and asked me to help her.... I only wish I could..."
she broke off with a sharp sigh; "it is so hateful to feel one cannot
do things of this sort for people who really need help..." she said
half impatiently, half wearily.
He stood quietly by the fireplace looking at her; he was barely
conscious of what she was saying. The fragrance that floated about
her--her clear voice with its pretty enunciation--the realization that
she was so close, made a curious effect upon him: he felt stupid,
dazed, burningly hot one instant, strangely cold the next.
Camilla hurried on nervously.
"When I read that letter, Mr. Haverford, I thought immediately of you.
I know I have no earthly right to bother you with things that belong to
a stranger ... indeed"--she laughed faintly--"I am _quite_ prepared to
hear you say that you are surprised; that you did not think that I
should do anything of this sort I--I have come even expecting you to
refuse."
He left the fireplace and went nearer to her.
The dream dropped away from him.
"Some friend of yours is in trouble?" he asked. He smiled at her. "You
were quite right to come to me. I am only too glad to do anything for
any one in trouble, but more especially I am glad to do anything for
any one who is dear to you."
Camilla bit her lip, and moved a little away from him, approaching the
fire in her turn.
"How good you are!" she said. The words were wrung from her
involuntarily, and there were tears in her eyes and tears in her voice.
Indeed, he moved her sharply at this moment.
There was such an element of simplicity about him and yet no weakness.
He accepted her story without question. The flimsy fabrication she had
just given him was merely the truth to him, essentially so because it
was she who spoke. No other man she knew would have been deceived by
this story of a friend in the country, but Rupert was not like all
these other men. He was very far removed from being a fool, but he was
a long, long way from grasping the meaning of life as it was lived by
most of the men and women who circled about him now.
Why, he was in many things a child compared to herself!...
Haverford had set down to his writing-table.
"In any matter of this kind," he said, "I beg you will use me in every
way that may seem good to you, Mrs. Lancing. I gather that your friend
needs immediate help; pray do not let her be troubled an hour longer
than is possible."
He signed a blank cheque, and slipped it into an envelope.
As he turned and held this out to her, Camilla Lancing gave a little
shiver. She looked at him without taking the envelope.
"Oh!" she murmured, "I ... am half afraid to take this! I came ... on
... on the impulse of the moment, not because you have so much ... but
because I ... felt ... I feel you are so glad to--to help any one
but...."
"Why should there be any 'but'?" he asked, not very steadily; "by this
time I hope you know that I hold it one of my greatest pleasures, as it
is certainly an honour, to serve you whenever you will permit me to do
so. Will you remember this always?..."
Camilla bit her lip again, and then put out her hand.
Haverford bent over it and kissed it. Her hand was kissed at least once
or twice a day on the average but Rupert Haverford had never before
permitted himself this old-fashioned and gracious sign of homage. It
was with him an expression of something far, far deeper than mere
courtesy to a very delightful and very pretty woman. She divined this
instantly, and her heart began to beat nervously. As he released her
hand she pulled her sables about her and prepared to go. She wanted to
be away from him. The expression of his face troubled her. She had
chafed almost angrily at his silence, his self-repression, yet now that
she knew he would speak she dreaded to hear his words.
A thousand jarring feelings thrilled her.
Though there had been many moments recently when he had appealed to her
physically, when, indeed, she had frankly admired him, in this moment
she felt almost as though she hated him.
It was a sensation which she could not define which she would have
found practically impossible to explain to another person, but it was
very real, very oppressive.
She crushed the envelope he had given her in her hand, and hid it in
her big muff; then she began speaking gaily.
"What are you doing to-night?" she asked. "You are engaged? Oh, I am so
sorry! I thought that perhaps you would have taken Agnes and me to
dinner somewhere. We have no engagement; but never mind, we can do that
another night."
"Will you dine with me to-morrow?" he asked. He, too, was nervous. He
had not her gift of slipping into a seeming indifference. Her easy,
everyday manner separated them once again, brought back with a rush the
old uncertainty, the old unrest.
She laughed.
"Oh! delightful! And let us dine here, do, please. I simply adore this
house, and I want Agnes to see it. You know, you have always happened
to be away when she has been up in town. How enchanting everything is!
No matter where one looks one sees something that is perfect of its
kind ... and that is not what one can say of every magnificent house,
you know!" said Camilla. She had moved to the door, and he opened it.
They passed out into the wide corridor. "The fact is a man's taste is
always so much better than a woman's," she chattered on restlessly, "it
is really a most absurd idea to suppose that a house must have a woman
in it.... For the best of us will persist in filling our rooms with
rubbish. Do you know, to this day I have the greatest difficulty in
denying myself the joys of Japanese fans on the walls, and art muslin
draperies and curtains? Oh!" she said suddenly, "I quite forgot to ask
you; how is your mother? I hope she is better."
"I hope she is," said Rupert, "but I have not seen her. She has gone to
Paris. My half-brother is ill."
He went with her to the entrance door, and himself put her into the cab
that was waiting.
She stretched out her hand just before starting.
"I must _try_ and say thank you," she said nervously, "but it is not
easy to say. I shall send ... this ... on to my friend at once. You
will have the consciousness of knowing you have made one person very
happy to-night, Mr. Haverford! _A demain!_ May we dine late?... I have
such a full day to-morrow.... Good night...."
He held her hand very, very closely, and let it go reluctantly.
The light of the cab-lamp was shining on him fully. He looked very
handsome as he stood there against the dark, foggy background, a man to
make gladness to the eyes and heart of any woman. But as she rolled
away swiftly, Camilla Lancing leaned back and flung up her veil,
sighing rapidly and impatiently.
"After all, he does mean to speak ... and soon," she said to herself,
"and when he does I _must_ agree; I must say 'Yes'! How can I possibly
refuse? It would be madness. He would do everything so well there would
be no more anxiety about the children, and I should have everything I
want, no more horrible bills, no more difficulties, and an end to the
hideous dependence on Ned's father...." She pulled aside the sable
almost roughly from about her throat. The night was bitterly cold, but
she felt as if she were stifling.
"But what a life!... I don't believe I shall be able to stand it for
even a month.... I shall feel like a caged animal. My very thoughts will
not be my own.... I wanted him to love me, but not like this. He loves
me too much. He will exact too much. I shall have to give up everything
I like. No more bridge, no more freedom, no more fun. Oh, my God!" said
Camilla with fierceness, though she was crying, "I _know_ I shall never
be able to do it! I don't want that sort of man," she said, "I don't
want to stagnate and grow old, and good.... I want to live ... to
live!... And I did live before Ned left me!... How can I marry a man
like this after I have been Ned's wife? Oh, Ned, Ned, if only you had
not died!... If only I could feel you were somewhere in the world, even
though there were twenty women between us ... it ... it would be all so
different!..."
She cried unceasingly for a few moments as the cab swayed and jerked
over the greasy pavement, and then she pulled herself together.
"Oh! what an ass I am! If Agnes sees red eyes, she will want to know
all there is to know. I can imagine her expression if I were to explain
I had been crying about Ned!... that blackguard Ned!" She laughed in an
impatient stifled way. "We must go somewhere to-night," she said a
moment later; "I shall die boxed up at home. Why shouldn't we dine
somewhere and then go on to a music-hall!"
As she got out of the cab she dropped the envelope Haverford had given
her. She picked it up hurriedly, and her train of thought was changed
swiftly; a sudden sense of delicious independence thrilled her. The man
whom she feared, and the man who had shown her such chivalrous
generosity, and the man she had married and lost, passed from her
thoughts. She felt as if she were in sunshine. The cheque was blank!
She had not expected that; there were no limits to her intentions.
"I shall give Veronique something on account; that will stop the writ,"
she said as she passed into the house. "And the children shall have new
coats, dear souls; they have been looking _so_ shabby lately. Then I
shall get out my pearls and some of my rings and things first thing
to-morrow...."
In the hall there were some cards, a splendid basket of flowers, and a
square, white-coated packet. Camilla loved to find white packages and
letters and flowers waiting for her.
She shivered as she remembered the cold perfection of the hall she had
just left.
Sir Samuel's card was attached to the basket and the box of bonbons,
and he had left a note. Camilla read this and ran upstairs quickly.
"Agnes," she called gaily, putting her head in at the door of the
drawing-room, "Sammy wants us to dine with him and go afterwards to the
play. We shall just have time to change. What a bother you have to go
out to dress! Why not let me send for your things?"
Mrs. Brenton shook her head.
"Oh no. I will trot round to my rooms. As a matter of fact, I was just
going. Will you call for me, Camilla? The children are just asleep.
They tried to keep awake till you came, but they were too tired...."
Camilla threw off her furs and cloak in her room, and then stole
upstairs softly till she reached the nursery. All was still. The two
small bodies in the two small cots never stirred as she approached.
Mrs. Lancing bent over each child and lightly laid a hand as in
benediction on each little head. Then she paused a moment before
Betty's small altar. The child had arranged it carefully before going
to bed, there were white flowers in the tiny brass vases, and the red
light burning before the statue of the Virgin was the only light in the
room.
Camilla shut her eyes. She never remembered any prayers; but Betty had
just knelt there, and the child's prayers had hallowed the place; they
seemed to carry the mother's soul with them--just a little way.
As the nurse came into the room, Mrs. Lancing turned and, with her
finger on her lip, went noiselessly from the room.
She dressed for dinner in a happy mood.
Haverford's cheque was locked up in her dressing case. She had not
settled yet what sum she would inscribe on it. Certainly a small sum
would be useless. So she mused as she ordered her maid to bring her the
flowers Sir Samuel had sent, and she chose a few to wear as a
breast-knot.
"What is a thousand to him, or, for the matter of that, two?" she
queried. "And even two will not go very far. Well, that is for
to-morrow."
She pinned the flowers in her bodice and smiled at her reflection.
It was delightful not to spend a dull evening at home, and really she
was just in the mood for a good dinner!