The room swam in Letitia’s eyes; a mist seemed to rise over the
sparkling dining-table--over all the faces of the guests. The voices,
too, rang in a kind of hubbub, one confused, big noise through which she
seemed able to be sure of nothing except the words of Ralph and the
laughter, in which all round were so ridiculously, so horribly ready to
join. What revelations he might make! How certainly he would prove to
the others that he was no elegant prodigal from the fashionable deserts
where so many great persons went after big game, but a mere Australian
stockman sent there because nobody knew what to do with him at home! She
was vaguely aware of talking a great deal herself to stop his talking,
if possible, with the dreadful result of merely increasing his
outpourings, and of having to subside at last in sheer prostration of
faculty, into an alarmed and horrified silence. Ralph, it was evident,
amused her guests though he did not amuse Letitia. And that dreadful
Mrs. Kington, how she devoted herself to him; how she played upon him
and drew him out! When the moment came for the ladies’ withdrawal,
Letitia rose with mingled relief and terror. She said to herself that no
man could be so dangerous by Ralph’s side as that clever, spiteful
woman; and yet at the same time the dreadful consciousness that among
men when they were alone revelations still more appalling might be made,
and that John knew nothing of this prodigal brother, gave her a new
cause of alarm. Even in such dreadful circumstances, however, a woman
has to endure and say nothing. She gave Ralph a glance as she passed him
which might have annihilated him, but which conveyed no idea to the
obtuse mind of the bushman: while he elevated his eyebrows at her, and
made a noise with his tongue against his palate. “You are in all your
glory, Tisch!” he said, as she passed. But furious and terrified as she
was, she had to go like a martyr to the stake and leave him--to do
further harm--who could tell? Mary Hill was in the drawing-room when the
ladies filed in, wearing a dyed dress which Letitia had given her, with
nervous hands clasped tightly together, and anxiety and panic in her
eyes. Mrs. Parke gave her an angry grip as she passed, and said in a
fierce whisper, “How could you let him come?” to which Mary answered
with a confused murmur of anxious explanation. And then the ordeal began
once more.
“How amusing your brother is, Mrs. Parke. I don’t know when I have
laughed so much. It is so delightful to meet a man like that out of the
wilds--and so genuine--and so funny!”
“You had all the fun at your end of the table,” said another lady. “We
heard you all in shrieks of laughter, and wanted to know what it was
about.”
“It was about everything,” said Mrs. Kington, laughing at the
recollection. “He is so delightfully wild, and such a democrat, and so
unconventional.”
“Too much so, a great deal, for the comfort of his family,” said
Letitia, with a gasp. She was clever enough to seize upon the chance
thus afforded her. “It is not so amusing when the person belongs to you,
and when you know how he has thrown away all his chances,” she said,
panting.
“Ah!” said Lady Witheringham, with sympathy, “young men are so silly;
but none of us can throw a stone in that respect.”
This, though Letitia did not know it, was as good as a bombshell to Mrs.
Kington, who knew a great deal about prodigals.
“To be silly is one thing and to be amusing is another,” said that lady,
“every man is not such fun who sows wild oats abroad. You must make him
tell you about the black fellows. I nearly died of laughing. There is
one story I must tell you----”
“For my part I would rather not die of laughing,” said the great lady.
She took Letitia by the arm and drew her in the direction of the
conservatory. “Let me see your flowers,” she said, “and never mind what
they say. I know what it is,” she added, shaking her head, “to have a
boy in the family that you can make nothing of. I sympathize with your
parents, Mrs. Parke.”
The emergency lent a cleverness which she did not possess to Letitia.
She said with a half sob, “He had no mother.” This was not a loss which
she had ever been specially moved by before; but necessity develops the
faculties. Lady Witheringham clasped her arm still more closely. “Ah,
poor boy!” she said; “tell me if it does not pain you, dear Mrs. Parke.”
Dear Mrs. Parke! the words inspired Letitia. Was it possible, she asked
herself piously, that good was to come out of evil? and she did tell
Ralph’s history, with many details unknown to that gentleman himself, to
her sympathetic listener. They walked about softly in front of the
subdued lights in the conservatory, the old great lady leaning tenderly
upon the arm of John Parke’s wife, whom his other guests were describing
to each other as a nobody. “He’s not a gentleman at all, and I daresay
she was a milliner,” Mrs. Kington said, feeling it very piquant to
communicate these conjectures all but within hearing of the person most
concerned. And Letitia divined but now did not care, for had she not got
Lady Witheringham on her side?
Mary Hill sat alone, not noticed by anyone. She occupied the place which
a governess of retiring manners does in such a party. All governesses
are not persons of retiring manners, and consequently the rule does not
always hold. And Miss Hill was not the governess. She was not a salaried
dependent, but a friend who in reality conferred instead of receiving
benefits: but it was as a dependent that everybody regarded her. She sat
very quiet with a sense of guilt towards Letitia, which was entirely
gratuitous, and a confusing feeling that she was somehow to blame. That
she would be blamed she was very well aware, and her powers of
vindicating and asserting herself were small. Beyond this there was
great trouble and confusion in Mary’s mind. The sight of this big,
flushed, disorderly, half-savage man had been a revelation to her even
more distressing than his sudden appearance had been to her friend.
Letitia’s pride was assailed, but in Mary the wound went a great deal
deeper. When Ralph had been sent to Australia ten years before, he was
young, and his offences, though terrible to a girl’s sensitive innocence
and ignorance, had been things to weep and pray over rather than to
denounce. Poor Ralph! he had been her sweetheart when they were
children, he had supposed himself in love with her years ago, and Mary
had carried all these years a softened image of him in her heart. She
had sighed to herself over it in many a lonely hour. Poor Ralph! if her
expectations of his return had never been clear, it was still always a
possibility pleasant to think of. And now he had come, and her faintly
visioned idol had fallen prone to the ground, like Dagon in his temple.
He had never attained the importance of a demi-god, to whom sacred
litanies might be said. But there had been a vague niche for him in the
background of the temple. And in a moment he had fallen, with the first
sound of his rough voice and sight of his deteriorated countenance. Mary
was still under the influence of this shock, and it was complicated by
the conviction that she was to blame, that Letitia would think she was
to blame, that she would be accused and would not know how to defend
herself. She sat alone, trembling over the evening paper which she was
pretending to read. She heard the _chuchotement_ of the soft yet
venomous voices near, which were tearing Letitia’s pretensions to
pieces, and assuring each other that they had always known her to be a
nobody, and the other less audible strain of Letitia’s narrative to Lady
Witheringham. What romance was she telling about poor Ralph to interest
the old lady so--poor Ralph, who never had any story but vulgar
dissipation and the sharp remedy of being turned out of his father’s
house to do as he pleased!
The gentlemen as they came in made the usual diversion, arrested the
talk of the ladies, and made an alteration in the groups. But Ralph kept
his place among the younger men, standing in a group of them telling his
bush stories, keeping up noisy peals of laughter. Somehow the carriages
of Lady Witheringham and of Mrs. Kington lingered long that night--or
rather, which was a sign that the evening had not been a failure so far
as they were concerned, these ladies lingered and showed no inclination
to go away. When the great lady got up at last she bestowed a kiss upon
her palpitating hostess. “I am so much touched by your confidence in me,
my dear,” she said, and actually held out her hand to Ralph with a
condescending good-night. “I hope you will find your native country the
best now that you have returned to it, Mr. Ravelstone,” she said. Ralph
was so dumbfounded that fortunately he could only reply by a bow. But
Letitia’s troubles were not over even when her outdoor guests were gone.
There were still the visitors in the house, and the familiarity of the
smoking-room, in which she was sure her brother would fully unveil
himself. She made an attempt to draw him with her when the moment came
for the candlesticks. “Come with me to my boudoir, Ralph,” she said in
her kindest note. But the monster was not to be cajoled. “Oh, I think I
see myself in a bou-duar as you call it when there’s a lot of jolly
fellows waiting me.” Letitia caught him by the hand sharply, though
without putting her nails into it as she would have liked to do--“Mary’s
coming with me,” she said with the most winning notes she could bring
forth. Ralph roared over her head, opening a wide cavern of a mouth in
the middle of his big head. “Mary--’s an old maid,” he said. As for John
Parke, he had a troubled air, and cast curious glances of mingled
reproach and interrogation at his wife; but he could not leave his
guests in the lurch.
By the time she had escaped from the surveillance of the stranger’s
looks and had got half way up the stair, Letitia had come to have one
clear purpose in her mind if no more--and that was vengeance. She said
to herself that all the miseries of the evening were Mary’s fault; its
alleviations, Lady Witheringham’s kindness, and her kiss of sympathy
Mrs. Parke felt she had achieved for herself--but for Ralph’s
appearance, unannounced, and indeed for his presence at all untimely, it
was Mary that was to blame. She paused on the stairs where the passage
led off to the nursery apartments where Miss Hill, when her room was
appropriated as now, found a refuge, and turning sharp round gripped
Mary’s hand, who was so fluttered and frightened that she made a step
backward and nearly lost her balance. Letitia held her up with that grip
furious and tight upon her arm--“You come with me,” she said fiercely,
“I’ve got something to say to you----”
“I’d rather--hear it to-morrow,” said poor Mary.
“No, to-night,” said Letitia between her pale lips. She led her way to
the boudoir, which indeed was a room sacred not to sulkiness but to many
a conflict. It was where she received her housekeeper, her nurse, her
husband when he was in the way, the homely dressmaker who helped Mrs.
Parke’s maid with her simple dresses, and Miss Hill; these were the
privileged persons who knew and had to listen to the eloquent discourses
of Letitia--and they had all a sacred horror of the boudoir. She swept
into it this evening with Mary following and flung herself into a chair.
Her eyes, not generally bright, had little flames in them. She was pale,
and panted for breath. After all her long repression it was an
unspeakable relief to get to this sanctuary to give vent to herself, to
heap wrath upon everybody who was to blame--
“Well, Mary Hill!” she cried with a snort of passion, turning upon her
friend. The diamonds on her neck gave forth little quick gleams as they
moved with the panting of her wrath as if they simulated the passion
which burned in their mistress’ eyes.
“Well, Letitia,” said the mild Mary, “I see you are very angry----”
“Have I not reason to be angry? Why on earth didn’t you let me know?
What motive could you have to keep it a secret? Why, for goodness sake
didn’t you tell me? I never will fathom you, Mary Hill! And to think
that you should have brought this upon me without a word, without making
a sign----”
“I implored you to let me speak to you, Letitia. I waited on the stairs
for you.”
“Implored me! Waited for me: why you should have forced me to hear. Do
you think if it had been as important as that I should have been content
to wait on the stairs? I’d have let any one know that minded as much as
you know I’d mind. If they’d killed me I’d have let them know--and to
think I’ve tried to be so kind to--oh, oh Mary Hill. To think you should
have stood by and seen it all and never lifted a hand!”
“What could I do?” said poor Mary, “I wasn’t even there----”
“And why weren’t you there? There are no risks in such a case as that;
you should have dressed and come to dinner and made him take you in and
kept him quiet. That’s what you would have done if you had been a true
friend.”
“I couldn’t have taken--such a liberty; when you had settled it all.”
“What did it matter about my settling it all. Did I know what was going
to happen? And to take the advantage just then of coming when I was out
of the way! But I tell you what, Mary Hill. I blame you for more than
that. You never should have let him come in at all--you never would had
you been a true friend.”
“Oh, Letitia, what could I do? Your own brother.”
“My own brother--such a pleasant visitor, don’t you think?--such a
credit to us all--without even an evening coat--like a clown, like a
blackguard, like a navvy---- Oh, my patience!” cried Letitia, whose eyes
were starting from her head and who had no patience at all. “But I know
why you did it,” she added after an angry pause to get breath. “Oh, I
remember well enough. It’s not for nothing you’re an old maid, Mary
Hill! Don’t I know that you’ve had him in your mind all the while.”
Mary, though she was so mild, was being driven beyond the power of
self-restraint. She was all the more easily shaken perhaps that there
was a certain truth in it. It was true that Ralph Ravelstone had never
been forgotten--and that his shadow had come between her and the only
marriage she had ever had it in her power to make--but not, oh, not as
he appeared now.
“I think,” she said with some gentle dignity, “that it is very improper
of you to say anything of the kind. If I am an old maid it’s at least by
my own will, and not because I could not help it.” Mary was very mild,
and yet she felt that standing upon the platform of that proposal which
was the one instance past in her life of the last years, it was hard to
be assailed as an old maid by one who knew her so well.
Letitia stood for a moment surprised--scarcely believing her ears. That
Mary should have turned upon her! It was like the proverbial worm that
sometimes at unexpected moments will turn when nobody is thinking of it.
“I know as well as you do that you refused a good offer. What was it
made you do it. Oh, I can see through you, though you don’t think so. I
always suspected it, and now I know it. But what did you expect to gain
by bringing him here. Why should he be brought here? If you had ever
told me, if I had known! a man who has been ten years in the bush, a man
with a hand like that, and not an evening coat! Oh Mary, you that I have
always been so kind to, how could I ever have expected such a thing of
you.”
Tears of rage came to the relief of Letitia’s overburdened soul. But she
suddenly regained command of herself in a moment, dried her eyes and
turned to the door. It was now her own part to stand on the defensive,
to prepare, to give explanations and excuses. There was no mistaking the
step which was approaching, the heavy step of the outraged husband, he
who had never even heard of Ralph’s existence. John Parke was not a man
before whom his wife was accustomed to tremble. But she did not know
what John might be about to pour forth upon her now.