For months Deborah Audaer suffered from the horrible effect which
the incidents of the visit to Rees had left upon her mind. London
seemed to her the pestilential centre of all evil, physical and moral.
The inky atmosphere, the black, gloomy streets, Rees Pennant’s dingy
room, the passage full of deserted, dirty houses, all contributed to
form a ghastly background to the picture of evil in which Amos
Goodhare, with his cynical stare, and Rees, with his bold, feverish
eyes, formed the central figures.
That journey had shown her men and things from a new and hideous point
of view. For a time all the sweetness and freshness of life seemed
poisoned for her. She saw the ills in the world--poverty, sin, and
sorrow, in a harder, colder light. Since Rees whom she loved, could be
corrupt and base, what in the wide world could be pure? So she
reasoned, womanlike, and suffered in silence for the rest of the year,
seeing a new and uglier sadness in the autumn and winter changes of
nature, and brooding over her poor lost ideal.
Deborah was much too brave and good a girl for this change in her
thoughts and feelings to find outward expression in her actions.
Whatever view she might take of life in the abstract, the round of
daily duties, which were sufficiently heavy, were fulfilled just as
well as ever, and if Mrs. Pennant was shrewd enough to detect a change
in the girl, it was not by finding the thin places in the old
drawing-room curtains less carefully darned or her early cup of tea
forgotten. For Deborah, to save the expense of keeping more than one
servant, was perfect mistress of every household duty. This extreme
domestic devotion, as Godwin considered it, excited in him great
annoyance, the more so that he was now enjoying a salary which enabled
him to send home a very handsome allowance.
Soon after the eventful visit to London, Godwin paid his mother a
Saturday to Monday visit, and took the opportunity of the old lady’s
afternoon nap to make a formal remonstrance with Deborah.
She was sitting on the old-fashioned fender-stool by the drawing-room
fire, stroking the head of his fox terrier, when he came very softly
down the long, cold-looking room, and stood behind her. She was
bending down over the dog, talking to him softly; but presently,
lifting up her head and perceiving the blocking out of the light from
the window behind her, she turned with a start.
“Oh, Godwin, you startled me! I didn’t hear you come in. I thought
you’d gone over to Llancader.”
“I changed my mind; I wanted to have a talk with you.” Deborah moved
impatiently. He went on quickly, noticing this movement, “Oh, not on
the old subject; don’t be afraid. I see you are not in the mood for
one of my matter-of-fact proposals. I’m not even going to ask you why
you are so particularly brusque, not to say snappish, to me this time.
But I want to know why you don’t keep another servant. You know very
well that, with what I send to her, my mother can afford it.”
Deborah, who had got up from the fender-stool and seated herself
firmly on a chair, spoke very coldly and decisively.
“Is there anything wrong about the house, then--dirty windows, unswept
carpets, or bad cooking--that you are dissatisfied with our
arrangement?”
Godwin bounced up from the chair he had taken, and, standing with his
back to the fireplace, stared over her head defiantly.
“Well, of all the disagreeable, bad-tempered girls I ever met, you are
the most impossible to do anything with,” he said, at last losing his
temper. “What do you suppose I want you to keep another servant for,
except to save you trouble? Considering that I don’t live at home,
what would it matter to me if the washing were hung over the front
garden wall, and the knives cleaned on the drawing-room table?”
“What are you grumbling for, then?”
“I was not grumbling at all. I merely thought that a second servant
would allow you to have more time to yourself.”
“That was not your reason at all. You thought it more in accordance
with the family dignity--that is, your dignity--that there should be
two servants in your mother’s house.”
Godwin brought his eyes quickly down from the window, and looked at
her with a keenness which made her uncomfortable.
“You are unhappy,” he said at last, shortly, and not at all tenderly.
“You never used to fish among people’s motives for a mean one like
that. You have had some annoyance or disappointment, and, like an
unreasoning woman, you visit it on me, because you think you can hurt
me. But you shan’t! you shan’t!”
And he put his hands in his pockets, and walked away up the room with
a defiant air.
Deborah felt sorry and ashamed. He was quite right, and she knew it.
All women, when they have had their belief in man in the abstract
destroyed by the perfidy of one particular individual, like to visit
their disappointment and resentment upon some other individual whom
they at the bottom of their hearts know that they can implicitly
trust. If he had known it, therefore, Deborah’s snappishness, which
she reserved for him alone, was only the natural expression of her
indignation that he, the man she did not love, was sound to the core,
while the man she did love had proved himself a contemptible wretch.
She was not going to own herself in the wrong, though. Oh, no! She bit
her lips with a moment’s self-reproach, and then said, quite coldly:
“Whether I am happy or not is, you will admit, my own affair. Whether
we keep one servant or twenty is, I admit, yours, since you pay them.
But I tell you frankly that I feel much more comfortable with only
one, because like that, by careful management and without any
pinching, I am saving a large sum out of the money you send mamma,
which she means to give you to furnish your house when you marry.”
Of course Deborah knew that she was hurting him, though she would not
have owned it.
“How dare you talk of my marrying?” he burst out, almost dancing with
rage. “You know I don’t mean to marry; you know you don’t want me to
marry.”
He had gone a little too near the truth. Naturally enough, Deborah
would not have liked to see her own devoted admirer enslaved by
another woman, however indifferent to him she herself might be. She
gave him one look of speechless indignation, and without heeding the
grovelling apologies which he hurriedly began to make, sailed out of
the room with the dignity of an empress.
She would not speak to him for the remainder of his short visit,
except such few words as were absolutely necessary; and these she
uttered in a loftily distant tone. Poor Mrs. Pennant saw that
something was wrong, and make several discreet, but ineffectual,
efforts to put it right. Deborah even took care to be out of the way
when, on the following morning, Godwin went away again.
Mrs. Pennant heard very little from her other absent son, her darling
Rees, although she wrote to him regularly. Indeed, as winter drew on,
her letters became more frequent than ever, for the London papers
published alarming accounts of a gang of skilful and desperate
thieves, who, taking advantage of the foggy season, which was now at
its height, waylaid well-dressed men even in much-frequented
thoroughfares, and robbed them of everything of value they had about
them, often with considerable violence. Rees’s answers to his mother’s
letters were always very short; but he re-assured her as to his
personal safety and also as to his prospects. He had got another
situation, he said, better than the last, and was saving money.
However, he sent home no proof of his altered fortune until Christmas,
when Mrs. Pennant received from him a parcel containing a handsome fur
collar and muff for herself and a beautiful chased silver clasp for
Deborah.
The girl took her gifts in silence, and interrupted by no comment Mrs.
Pennant’s ecstasies. It was Christmas Eve, and Godwin, who was
expected home, had already sent his presents.
“Why, Deborah, Deborah, this clasp is the very thing for the mantle
Godwin has given you!”
“Yes, mamma,” answered the girl, quietly.
But on the following morning, when she put on her new cloak to go to
church with Mrs. Pennant and her sons, the clasp was not on it. The
old lady remarked on this with some displeasure, thinking her eldest
son’s gift despised. Deborah, however, steadily excused herself from
wearing it, and there was a slight coolness in consequence between the
ladies, which resulted in Mrs. Pennant walking with Hervey instead of
with her adopted daughter, and leaving the latter to follow with
Godwin.
“Why won’t you wear Rees’s present, Deb?” ventured Godwin,
diffidently, as they walked along. “No such luck as that you have give
up thinking about him, I suppose?”
“No,” answered the girl in a tremulous voice; “but don’t let us talk
about Rees; I can’t tell you why, but I can’t bear it.”
He walked on by her side, obediently changing the subject. Only just
before they passed under the heavy porch of the old Norman church, he
asked:
“May I walk home too with you, Deb? I won’t talk about anything to--to
worry you.”
“Of course,” answered she, with a gentle and grateful smile.
But when the service was over and the congregation poured out of the
church, Deborah was seized and surrounded by the Llancader ladies, who
had come to Monmouthshire to pass Christmas. Only Lady Marion was
absent. Deborah inquired after her of Lady Kate.
“Oh, don’t you know. Of course, it’s a secret, but still it’s one that
everyone seems to know--except papa and mamma,” babbled out Lady Kate,
in a confidential tone. “Marion is so dreadfully, idiotically fond of
that Rees of yours that she has gone to stay with Aunt Lucilla, in
Eaton Square, so that she may stay in the same town with him. She is
making a perfect fool of herself about him. I must say so, Mr.
Pennant, though I know he is your brother.”
“Oh, I’m not at all offended, Lady Kate. You can’t expect two geniuses
in one family. But I think its a pity Lord St. Austell isn’t told of
their pranks.”
“Nobody dares tell papa anything since last Friday,” answered Kate in
a lower voice.
“He was knocked down and robbed as he was walking at night with one of
his friends. He had been out to dinner, and it was so foggy that he
dared not drive home. And--of course we are not supposed to talk about
it--but he believes he recognised one of the men who attacked him.”
“Who was it?” asked Godwin, interested.
“Why--you won’t say anything about it, will you?--but he thinks the
man who knocked him down was the man who used to be librarian
here--Amos Goodhare!”
“By Jove!” cried Godwin. “You don’t mean it?”
“Yes, I do. This man struck papa down quite savagely, and held him
down, and was going to kick him as he lay on the ground if one of the
men with him--there were three altogether--had not interfered.”
A sharply uttered exclamation burst from Deborah’s lips. Godwin and
Lady Kate turned quickly, and saw that the color had left her cheeks
and that her face wore a terror-struck expression.
“What is the matter, dear?” asked plump little Lady Kate, in much
concern.
“Nothing, nothing. I--I was only thinking--of--of what a narrow escape
your father might have had with those--ruffians, and how glad I am
that one of them had the humanity to save him from being hurt.”
“Yes, indeed, we were surprised ourselves at that. It is quite like
Claude Duval and the days of chivalry, isn’t it? But I mustn’t laugh
about it for really poor papa has a dreadful bruise at the back of his
head, and he might have been killed, of course.”
“Yes, I--I am very thankful,” said Deborah.
Godwin saw that something was the matter, and he managed to cut short
Lady Kate’s chatter, so that he could take Deborah home. But not all
his artfully made suggestions and inquiries could drag from her the
secret of the fear which made her creep about with startled eyes and a
terror-struck white face all through that Christmas Day.