BUT the nurse went out for her walk and came in again and nothing
happened, and Charlie had his invalid dinner, which in his excitement he
could not eat, and Bee was called downstairs to luncheon, and yet nobody
came. The luncheon was a terrible ordeal for Bee. She attempted to eat,
with an eye on the window, to watch for the arrival of the visitors, and
an ear upon the subdued sounds of the house, through which she seemed to
hear the distant step, the distant voice of someone whose presence was
not acknowledged. She repeated with eagerness her little speech of the
night before. “Something must have detained papa,” she said, “I cannot
understand it, but he is sure to come, and he will take me away.”
“I don’t want you to be taken away, my dear,” said Mrs. Leigh. “I should
not let you go if I could help it.”
“Oh, but I must, I must,” said Bee, trembling and agitated. She could
not eat anything, any more than Charlie, and when the nurse came
downstairs, indignantly carrying the tray from which scarcely anything
had been taken, Bee could make no reply to her remonstrances. “The young
lady had better not come upstairs again,” said nurse; “she has done him
more harm than good, he will have a relapse if we don’t mind. It is as
much as my character is worth.” She talked like other people when there
was no patient present, and she was genuinely afraid.
“What are we to do?” said Mrs. Leigh. “If this lady comes he ought not
to see her! But perhaps she will not come.”
“That is what I have hoped,” said Bee, “but if she doesn’t come he will
go out, he will get to her somehow; he will kill himself with
struggling----”
At the suggestion of going out the nurse gave a shriek and thrust her
tray into the servant’s hands who was waiting. “He will have to kill me
first,” she said, rushing away.
And immediately upon this scene came Betty, fresh and shining in her
white frock, with a smile like a little sunbeam, who announced at once
that Miss Lance was coming.
“How is Charlie?” said Betty. “Oh, Mrs. Leigh, how good you have been!
Papa is coming himself to thank you. What a trouble it must have been to
have him ill here all the time. Mrs. Lyon, whom I am staying with,
thinks it so wonderful of you--so kind, so kind! And Bee, _she_ is
coming, though it is rather a hard thing for her to do. She says you
will not like to see her, Mrs. Leigh, and that it will be an intrusion
upon you; but I said when you had been so good to poor Charlie all
along, you would not be angry that she should come who is such a
friend.”
“Any friend, of course, of Colonel Kingsward’s----” Mrs. Leigh said
stiffly, while little Betty stared. She thought they all looked very
strange; the old lady so stiff, and Bee turning red and turning white,
and a general air as if something had gone wrong.
“Is Charlie worse?” she said, with an anxious look.
And then Bee was suddenly called upstairs. “Can’t manage him any
longer,” the nurse said on the landing. “I wash my hands of it. Your
fault if he has a relapse.”
“Who is that?” said Charlie, from within, “Who is it? I will see her!
Nobody shall interfere, no one--doctor, or nurse, or--the devil himself.
Bee!”
“It is only Betty,” said Bee, upon which Charlie ceased his raging and
flung himself again on his sofa.
“You want to torment me; you want to wear me out; you want to kill me,”
he said, with tears of keen disappointment in his eyes.
“Charlie,” said Bee, “she is coming. Betty is here to say so; she is
coming in about an hour or so. If you will eat your dinner and lie quite
quiet and compose yourself you will be allowed to see her, and nurse
will not object.”
“Oh, Miss Kingsward, don’t answer for me. It is as much as his life is
worth.”
“But not unless you eat your dinner and keep perfectly quiet.”
“Give us that old dinner,” said Charlie, with a loud, unsteady laugh,
and the tray was brought back and he performed his duty upon the
half-cold dishes with an expedition and exuberance that gave nurse new
apprehensions.
“He’ll have indigestion,” she said, “if he gobbles like that,” speaking
once more inaudibly over Charlie’s shoulder. But afterwards all was
quiet till the fated moment came.
I do not think if these girls had known the feelings that were within
Miss Lance’s breast that they would have been able to retain their
respective feelings towards her--Betty of adoration or Bee of hostility.
She had lived a life of adventure, and she had come already on various
occasions to the very eve of such a settled condition of life as would
have made further adventure unnecessary and impossible--but something
had always come in the way. Something so often comes in the way of such
a career. The stolid people who are incapable of any skilful
combinations go on and prosper, while those who have wasted so much
cleverness or much wit, so much trouble--and disturbed the lives of
others and risked their own--fail just at the moment of success. I am
sometimes very sorry for the poor adventurers. Miss Lance went to Curzon
Street with all her wits painfully about her, knowing that she was about
to stand for her life. It seemed the most extraordinary spite of fate
that this should have happened in the house of Aubrey Leigh. She would
have had in any case a disagreeable moment enough between Charlie
Kingsward and his father, but it was too much to have the other brought
in. The man whom she had so wronged, the family (for she knew that his
mother was there also) who knew all about her, who could tell
everything, and stop her on the very threshold of the new life--that new
life in which there would be no equivocal circumstances, nothing that
she could be reproached with, only duty and kindness. So often she
seemed to have been just within sight of that halcyon spot where she
would need to scheme no more, where duty and every virtuous thing would
be natural and easy. Was the failure to come all over again?
She was little more than an adventuress, this troubled woman, and yet it
was not without something of the exalted feeling of one who is about to
stand for his life, for emancipation and freedom to do well and all that
is best in existence, that she walked through the streets towards her
fate. Truth alone was possible with the Leighs, who knew everything
about her past, and could not be persuaded or turned from their
certainty by any explanations. But poor Charlie! Bare truth was not
possible with him, whom she had sacrificed lightly to the amusement of
the moment, whom she could never have married or made the instrument of
building up her fortune except in the way which, to do her justice she
had not foreseen, through the access he had given her to his father. How
was she to satisfy that foolish, hot-headed boy?--and how to stop the
mouths of the others in the background?--and how to persuade Colonel
Kingsward that circumstances alone were against her--that she herself
was not to blame? She did not conceal from herself any of these
difficulties, but she was too brave a woman to fly before them. She
preferred to walk, and to walk alone, to this trial which awaited her,
in order to subdue her nerves and get the aid of the fresh air and
solitude to steady her being. She was going to stand for her life.
It seemed a good augury that she was allowed to enter the house without
any interruption from the sitting-room below, where she had the
conviction that her worst opponents were lying in wait. She thought even
that she had been able to distinguish the white cap and shawl of Mrs.
Leigh through the window, but it was Betty who met her in the hall--met
her with a kiss and expression of delight.
“Oh, I am so glad you have come,” said Betty, “he is so eager to see
you.” The people in ambush in the ground floor rooms must have heard the
exclamation, but they made no sign. At the door upstairs they were met
by the nurse, excited and laconic, speaking without any sound.
“No worry--don’t contradict. Much as life is worth,” she said, with
emphatic, silent lips. Miss Lance, so composed, so perfect in her
manner, so wound up to everything, laughed a little--she was so
natural!--and nodded her head. And then she went in.
Charlie on the sofa was of course the chief figure. But he had jumped
up, flinging his wrappings about, and stood in his gaunt and tremulous
length, with his big hollow eyes and his ragged little beard, and his
hands stretched out. “At last!” he said, “at last---- Laura!” stumbling
in his weakness as he advanced to her. Bee was standing up straight
against the window in the furthest corner of the room, not making a
movement. How real, how natural, how completely herself and ready for
any emergency this visitor was! She took Charlie’s hands in hers,
supporting him with that firm hold, and put him back upon his couch.
“Now,” she said, “the conditions of my visit are these: perfect quiet
and obedience, and no excitement. If you rebel in any way I shall go. I
know what nursing is, and I know what common-sense is--and I came here
to help you, not to harm you. Move a toe or finger more than you ought,
and I shall go!”
“I will not move, not an eyelid if you tell me not. I want to do nothing
but look at you. Laura! oh, Laura! I have been dead, and now I am alive
again,” Charlie said.
“Ill or well,” said Miss Lance, arranging his cushions with great skill,
“you are a foolish, absurd boy. Partly it belongs to your age and partly
to your temperament. I should not have considered you like your father
at the first glance, but you are like him. Now, perfect quiet. Consider
that your grandmother has come to see you, and that it does not suit the
old lady to have her mind disturbed.”
He had seized her hand and was kissing it over and over again. Miss
Lance took those caresses very quietly, but after a minute she withdrew
her hand. “Now, tell me all about it,” she said; “you went off in such a
commotion--so angry with me--”
“Never angry,” he said, “but miserable, oh, more miserable--too
miserable for words. I thought that you had cut me off for ever.”
“You were right so far as your foolish ideas of that moment went, but I
hope you have learnt better since, and now tell me what did you do? I
hoped you had gone home, and then that you had gone to Scotland, and
then--. What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” said Charlie, “I can’t tell you. I suppose I must have
been ill then. I came up to town, but I don’t know what I did. And I was
brought here, and I’ve been ill ever since, and couldn’t seem to get
better until I heard you had been speaking for me. You speaking for me,
Laura! Thinking of me a little, trying to bring me back to life. I’ll
come back to life, dear, for you--anything, Laura, for you!”
“My dear boy, it is a pity you should not have a better reason,” she
said. The two girls had not gone away. Betty had retired to the corner
where Bee was, and they stood close together holding each other, ashamed
and scornful beyond expression of Charlie’s abandonment. Even Betty, who
was almost as much in love with Miss Lance as Charlie was, was ashamed
to hear him “going on” in this ridiculous way. What Miss Lance felt to
have these words of devotion addressed to her in the presence of two
such listeners I will not say. She was acutely sensible of their
presence, and of what they were thinking, but she did not shrink from
the ordeal. “And you must not call me Laura,” she said, “unless you can
make it Aunt Laura, or Grandmother Laura, which are titles I shouldn’t
object to. Anything else would be ridiculous between you and me.”
“Laura!” the young man said, raising himself quickly.
“Say Aunt Laura, my dear, and if you move another inch I will go away!”
“You are crushing me,” he cried, “you are driving me to despair!”
“Dear Charlie,” said Miss Lance, “all this, you know, is very great
nonsense--between you and me; I have told you so all along. Now things
have really become too serious to go on. I want to be kind to you, to
help you to get well, and to see as much of you as possible; for you are
a dear boy and I am fond of you. But this can’t be unless you will see
things in their true light and acknowledge the real state of affairs. I
am most willing and ready to be your friend, to be a mother to you. But
anything else is ridiculous. Do you hear me, Charlie?--ridiculous! You
don’t want to be laughed at, and you don’t want me to be laughed at, I
suppose?” She took his hands with which he had covered his face and held
them in hers. “Now, no nonsense, Charlie. Be a man! Will you have me for
your friend, always ready to do anything for you, or will you have
nothing to do with me? Come! I might be your mother, I have always told
you so. And look here,” she said, with a tone of genuine passion in her
voice and a half turn of her flexible figure towards the two girls, “I’m
worth having for a mother; whatever you may think in your cruel youth, I
am, I am!” Surely this was to them and not to him. The movement, the
accent, was momentary. Her voice changed again into the softness of a
caress. “Charlie, my dear boy, don’t make me ridiculous, don’t make
people laugh at me. They call me an old witch, trying to entrap a young
man. Will you let people--nay, will you _make_ people call me so?”
“_I_ make anyone call you--anything but what you are!” he cried.
“Nobody would dare,” said the unfortunate fellow, “to do anything but
revere you and admire you so long as I was there.”
“And then break out laughing the moment your back was turned,” she said.
“‘What a hold the old hag has got upon him!’ is what they would say. And
it would be quite true. Not that I am an old hag. No, I don’t think I am
that, I am worse. I’m a very well preserved woman of my years. I’ve
taken great care of myself to keep up what are called my personal
advantages. I have never wished--I don’t wish now--to be thought older
than I am, or ugly. I am just old enough--to be your mother, Charlie, if
I had married young, as your mother did----”
He drew his hands out of her cool and firm grasp, and once more covered
his face with them. “Don’t torture me,” he cried.
“No, my dear boy, I don’t want to torture you, but you must not make me,
nor yourself--whom I am proud of--ridiculous. I am going probably--for
nothing is certain till it happens,” she said, with a mournful tone in
her voice, slightly shaking her head, “and you may perhaps help to balk
me--I am probably going to make a match with a reasonable person suited
to my age.”
Poor Charlie started up, his hands fell from his face, his large
miserable eyes were fixed upon hers. “And you come--you come--to tell me
this!” he cried.
“It will be partly for you--to show how impossible your folly is--but
most for myself, to secure my own happiness.” She said these words very
slowly, one by one--“To secure my own happiness. Have I not the right to
do that, because a young man, who should have been my son, has taken it
into his foolish head to form other ideas of me? You would rather make
me ridiculous and wretched than consider my dignity, my welfare, my
happiness--and this is what you call love!” she said.
The girls listened to this conversation with feelings impossible to put
into words, not knowing what to think. One of them loved the woman and
the other hated her; they were equally overwhelmed in their young and
simple ideas. She seemed to be speaking a language new to them, and to
have risen into a region which they had never known.