On a certain morning in the last week in June, Lady Frances Hope rode
into the courtyard of the Knightsbridge flats. Throwing her bridle to
the man-servant who was attending her, she dismounted from her horse,
gathered up her habit, and entered the doorway of the building.
Seating herself in the lift, she was borne upwards, and a few seconds
later stepped out upon the second floor, and, going briskly forward,
pressed the bell of Clodagh's hall door.
The summons was answered by the same maid who had admitted Clodagh on
the day of her arrival; and seeing the visitor, she drew back
instantly, throwing the door wide.
"Is Mrs. Milbanke up, Barkes?" Lady Frances asked. "I did not see her
in the park this morning."
"Mrs. Milbanke didn't ride this morning, my lady. She is having
breakfast in her own room. Shall I say your ladyship is here?"
Lady Frances replied by walking into the hall.
"No, thanks! I'll announce myself."
Stepping forward without ceremony she passed down the hall and opened
the door of Clodagh's bedroom. But on the threshold she paused,
interested by what she saw.
The two windows that looked upon the park were wide open, and through
them the beautiful warm sunshine was pouring across the room, touching
the old French furniture into a renewal of its glories. Drawn into the
full radiance of this light, stood a small round table set with silver,
china, and a bowl of flowers; and at the table sat Clodagh. She was
wearing a simple dress of black muslin, and her hair--which gleamed
almost bronze in the clear, strong sunshine--was twisted into one thick
coil. But it was neither her dress nor appearance that attracted her
visitor; it was something vaguely disturbing--something subtly
suggestive--in her attitude, as she sat close to the table, an array of
letters and papers spread before her, a gold pencil held thoughtfully
against her lips.
Thinking it was a servant who had entered the room, she did not change
her position with the opening of the door; and Lady Frances Hope had a
full minute in which to observe her; then, having made her deductions,
she allowed her presence to be known.
"Can you tolerate such an early visitor?" she asked.
Clodagh started almost guiltily, and drew the array of papers into a
confused heap; then she rose hastily, laughing to cover her momentary
confusion.
"How you frightened me!" she said. "I must be developing nerves. But
come in! I am delighted!"
She went forward with apparent cordiality, and, taking her visitor's
hand, kissed her.
"How nice and energetic you look! You make me feel very lazy. I wasn't
in the mood for a ride this morning. Come in! Sit down!"
Lady Frances responded to the suggestion by moving across the room.
Pausing by the breakfast-table, she bent forward and buried her face
for a moment in the flowers, at the same time stealing a swift glance
at the scattered letters beside Clodagh's plate. Then, straightening
herself again with apparent nonchalance, she moved to the open window
and stood looking down upon the park.
"Clodagh!" she said suddenly. "Are you busy? Can we talk?"
Clodagh turned sharply, and almost with a gesture of surprise. The
whole round of her intercourse with Lady Frances Hope had been of so
easy, of so superficial a nature--the whole tone of their friendship
had been pitched in so unemotional a key--since the one night in the
Paris hotel, when they had touched upon things vital to them both--that
the suggestion of reality, or even gravity, brought a sudden uneasiness
to her mind.
"Oh, of course!" she said uncertainly--"of course! Let us sit down."
She returned to her own seat and indicated another to her visitor with
a slightly hurried movement.
But Lady Frances did not respond to the invitation. Instead, she
wandered back to the table, and again bent over the bowl of flowers.
"Why are we always climbing--only to slip back again?" she asked
irrelevantly.
Again a faint uneasiness touched Clodagh's face.
"I thought you enjoyed climbing."
"Not to-day. Clodagh, you'll think me a horrid nuisance, but it's about
that money----"
She paused as she said the word, and involuntarily her quick glance
passed once more over the papers on the table.
For a second Clodagh remained silent; then she spoke, a little
slowly--a little haltingly.
"Oh yes--the money," she said.
Lady Frances looked at her shrewdly.
"Yes, you remember on Tuesday--when you borrowed that sixty pounds to
pay old Lady Shrawle--I said I could wait for everything till August."
"Yes--oh yes!"
"Well, I've had a horrid drop since then--yesterday, in fact."
For a moment longer, Clodagh sat staring aimlessly at the papers in
front of her; then she raised her head and looked at her companion. Her
face was a little pale, but her eyes and lips looked almost scornfully
unconcerned.
"Poor you!" she said easily. "What a bore! You must let me settle up
our differences at once--to-day."
She rose and pushed back her chair.
A look of surprise crossed the older woman's face--this time it was
surprise tempered with bewilderment.
"To-day! But can you? I know how many little expenses----" She waved
her hand expressively towards the breakfast-table, with its many costly
adjuncts.
Clodagh made a lofty gesture of denial; and, walking across the room,
paused beside her bureau.
For a minute there was no sound in the room save the abrupt opening and
shutting of one or two small drawers; then Clodagh turned round again,
a cheque-book in her hand.
"Now tell me what I owe you," she said. "I'll write you a cheque and
post-date it to July the first. Will that do? I draw my money then, you
know."
"Perfectly. But, my dear Clodagh----"
But again Clodagh made a gesture that seemed to relegate the matter to
a region of obscure--if not of absolutely contemptible--things.
"Don't trouble!" she said. "Money is never worth an argument. What do I
owe?"
During her words, her companion had sat silent--speculative and
suspicious. To her worldly mind, Clodagh's grand manner--Clodagh's
extraordinary behaviour--indicated but one possibility. She had found
means of augmenting her income!
Any knowledge of the false pride, the empty magnificence that will,
metaphorically speaking, fling its last coin to a beggar, while passing
on to penury, had never come within her experience. It needs the
environments of such places as Orristown to bring them to maturity. She
looked now at her companion, and her eyes narrowed in a sudden,
triumphant satisfaction. Something that she had anticipated had come to
pass! At the imagined discovery, she gave a quick laugh.
"If you insist on being so scrupulous----"
Clodagh looked round from the bureau at which she had seated herself.
"How much?" she said laconically.
Lady Frances pretended to knit her brows.
"Well, there was the eight hundred pounds at Nice--and the forty pounds
the night of your return to town--the night we played bridge with Val
and Deerehurst----"
She looked very quickly at Clodagh.
But Clodagh gave no sign. "And the fifty pounds a fortnight
ago--besides the sixty for Lady Shrawle," she interrupted.
"Yes--oh yes! Let me see, that makes----"
"Nine hundred and fifty pounds," Clodagh interjected in a very quiet
voice; and picking up a pen, she wrote out the cheque, signing it with
her usual bold signature. A moment later she rose, blotted it, and held
it out.
As the flimsy slip of paper passed from one to the other, the elder
woman permitted a gleam of curiosity to show in her eyes.
"A thousand thanks!" she exclaimed. "And don't think me a wretch if I
run away now that I've got it. You know how fidgety my bay mare is.
Well, good-bye! I shall see you at Ranelagh?"
But Clodagh was absently studying her cheque-book.
"I don't think so," she said. "Lord Deerehurst offered to take me down,
but I shan't go. I--I have some business to attend to."
Lady Frances laughed; picked up her riding whip, which she had laid
aside, and, coming forward, kissed Clodagh.
"Then I expect I shall see you. Deerehurst is much more insistent than
any business." Once again her shrewd glance travelled over Clodagh's
face. "Good-bye! In any case, you'll be at the Ord's for bridge
to-night? We can arrange then about going down to Tuffnell."
"Yes"--Clodagh returned the pressure of her hand--"yes; I suppose I
shall go to the Ord's. Yes; I shall--good-bye!"
She walked with her visitor to the door of the bedroom, and stood
waiting on the threshold until the hall door had closed. Then, almost
mechanically, she turned, walked back to the table, and with a sharp,
nervous movement gathered up the heap of papers still lying beside her
plate.
As she stood there, in the flood of June sunshine, beside the
attractive disarray of the pretty breakfast-table, she was aware of a
horrible sense of helplessness, of alarm and impotence. For the papers
she held between her hands were bills--a sheaf of bills--all unpaid and
all pressing.
As she stood there, a swift review of the past months sped before her
mind, carrying something like dismay in its train.
In April she had entered upon the tenancy of her furnished flat, having
already borrowed eight hundred pounds from her friend and counsellor,
Lady Frances Hope; and under the auspices of this same counsellor, had
began her career as a woman of fashion.
In social circles the period and the conditions of mourning become more
slender every season. And nowadays, although a widow may not attend
dances or large dinner-parties, there are a hundred smaller, more
exclusive--and possibly more expensive--forms of entertainment at which
she may appear in her own intimate set. Very quiet dinners--very small
luncheon parties--even friendly bridge parties--are quite permissible,
when it is a tacitly accepted fact that the mourner is, by a natural
law, barely entering upon her life--that the one mourned has departed
from it by an equally natural dispensation.
Under these conditions Clodagh had begun her London career; and for
more than a month she had lived--in the most costly sense of the word.
Her mourning had been the most distinguished that a famous dressmaker
could devise; her electric brougham had possessed all the newest
improvements; the flowers that filled her room had been supplied by a
fashionable florist at an exorbitant cost. In a word, she had behaved
like a child who has been given a pocketful of bright new pennies--and
believes them to be golden coins.
Once or twice in the course of those extravagant weeks, a pang of
misgiving had crossed her soul; but it had only been a pang of the
moment.
The phantom of tradesmen's bills is one so easily dismissed from the
Irish mind that, unless it materialises very forcibly, it may almost be
considered non-existent.
On July the first she was to receive her half-yearly allowance; and
towards July the first she looked with an almost superstitious
confidence. A thousand pounds! It was sufficient to settle a planetful
of debts; and if any remained as satellites to the planet, well--there
was the first of January.
But now her confidence had been rudely shaken. In a sudden moment of
pride--of bravado--she had signed away almost the whole of the
anticipated half-yearly income. She stood possessed of fifty pounds,
with which to dress, to eat, to exist from July to January; and in her
hands was the sheaf of unpaid bills!
There is no race of people that undertakes liabilities so lightly, and
that is so overwhelmed when retribution falls upon it, as the Irish
race. As Clodagh gradually faced her position, panic seized upon her.
For weeks she had lived upon the credit that the London tradesman gives
to customers who come provided with good references; and now suddenly
she had realised--first by the arrival of certain bills couched in a
new and imperative strain; later by Lady Frances Hope's unexpected
demand for her money--that English credit is not the lax, indefinite
credit of such places as Muskeere and Carrigmore: that it is a credit
demanding--insisting upon--timely payment.
And where was she to turn--where look--for the necessary funds?
In a dazed way she thought of David Barnard, who had returned a month
previously from a holiday in Spain; but her pride made her shrink
sensitively from the thought of the suave indulgence with which he
would listen to her confession of folly. Once the thought of recalling
Lady Frances Hope, and explaining the position to her, sped through her
mind; but she dismissed it as swiftly as it came. In restless
perturbation she turned and walked across the room, pausing once more
beside the bureau, which stood in a recess between the windows.
Where could she turn, where look, for the money that would tide over
her difficulties? In her mental distraction, she laid aside the bills
she was still holding, and aimlessly picked up a half-dozen opened
letters that lay awaiting answers. A couple of invitations to lunch; an
invitation to play bridge; the offer of a box at the opera; Laurence
Asshlin's monthly report from Orristown; Nance's last letter from
America.
With a vague preoccupation she raised the last of these and looked at
it.
How free and unhampered Nance seemed in her inexperience of life! She
looked unseeingly at the closely written lines, her mind in a harassed
way contrasting her own and her sister's fate. Then quite suddenly she
dropped the letter and lifted her head.
A thought had struck her. As a flash of lightning might rend a night
sky, an inspiration had illuminated the darkness of her mind. The
thousand pounds which was to be Nance's property when she came of age,
or upon her engagement, still lay to her own credit--in her own
name--in the bank with which Milbanke had done business.
It is extraordinary how rapidly a thought can mature in a receptive
mind. In one moment, as Clodagh stood beside the bureau, all the
possibilities comprised in that thousand pounds broke upon her
understanding.
How if she withdrew it as a loan? No one--not even Nance herself--need
know; and she could refund it within six months, or within a year--long
before the thought of marriage could enter the child's mind.
Then suddenly she paused in her mental calculations; and a new
expression passed over her face. Was it right, was it honourable, to
make use of this money left in her safe-keeping?
Uneasy and distressed, she turned to the open window, as though a study
of the life beyond her own might help her in her dilemma. The scene she
looked upon was interesting and even beautiful. The grass of the park
still retained something of its first greenness; in the distance the
clustering bower of chestnuts and copper beeches suggested something
far removed from the traffic and toil of the great town; while below
the window, under a canopy of leaves, the morning procession of horses
and carriages passed incessantly to and fro.
What a curious world it was! How conventional and obvious, and yet in
reality how inscrutable! What would it say of her, did it know her true
position? What comfort--what aid--would it offer? Involuntarily, almost
curiously, she laid her finger-tips upon the window-sill and bent
slightly forward. Then, very suddenly, she drew back into the room, her
face flushing.
Lord Deerehurst, mounted upon a high black horse, had passed the window
at the moment that she had looked out; and raising his head, had seen
and bowed to her.
The incident was slight; but at certain moments the Celtic nature is
extraordinarily--even mysteriously--open to suggestion. Clodagh could
not have defined her thought; but the thought was there, a vague,
half-fearful, wholly instinctive thought that suddenly prompted her to
shield herself, to ward off the nearer approach to this world that she
had leant from her window to study impersonally; and from which she had
received so peculiarly personal a response.
She continued to stand for a moment longer in an attitude of doubt;
then, swiftly, almost abruptly, she turned round to the bureau and,
kneeling down before it, reopened her cheque-book with tremulous hands
and wrote out a cheque for one thousand pounds, payable to herself.