“Richard dear, I _would_ like to ask mummie and Sir Charles to
dinner--supper, I mean--one night. I’ve got a little cash in hand, so
I shouldn’t feel too extravagant. You know I got rather more than I
expected, for the sale of that old bracelet of mine.”
Richard did know, because Rita had told him this already, quite
gleefully, although admitting that the bracelet had been a legacy from
a specially beloved grandmother, and that it cost her a pang to let it
go.
“I loathe your selling your jewellery. It makes me feel such a cad
for having got you into this mess, though God knows I never foresaw
anything like this. Rita, _must_ you do these things?”
She looked at him with a face of piteous, childlike surprise. “Oh,
aren’t you _at all_ pleased that we’ve got an extra pound or two,
Richard? I’m sure you’ve no idea what a difference it makes.”
He groaned impatiently.
“Of course, if you think I’ve no right to suggest entertaining
_any_body, even on a tiny scale, now we’re so poor, I won’t do it. It
was silly of me, I daresay, but I haven’t really properly got used
not to having an occasional little party, I suppose. It’s all right,
Richard darling. Never mind.”
She smiled bravely.
“Rita, I shall go mad if I can’t find a job, and take you out of this
sort of thing,” said Richard, and he began to pace up and down the
little room.
When Lady Clyde and her husband did come to dinner, Rita told her
mother privately that poor darling Richard was becoming almost
hysterical sometimes. It did make things so much, much harder when one
was doing all one could to keep up under the strain, and be always
bright and ready to make the best of it.
“No one can say you’re not doing that, my dearest child,” said her
mother.
Tears of mingled admiration and compassion rose to her eyes when Rita
apologised gaily for the poverty of the fare, when she corrected
herself every time that she mentioned the word dinner instead of
supper, and when she laughingly excused herself for having to run away
and help with the washing-up, because the servant now was only a daily
one, and went home early.
“It seemed so funny at first, mummy, and I was always ringing the bell
and expecting it to be answered, like when I used to ring for Cooper or
Ellis or Mary, at home. I really can’t believe that I had a maid all
for myself, just to do my hair and keep my clothes tidy, not so very
long ago.”
“What a plucky little thing she is!” said her mother in a choked voice.
She glanced resentfully at Richard, who sat silent, moody and haggard,
without endorsing her tribute to his wife in any way.
He looked very ill, but Lady Clyde at the moment could only realise to
what straits he had brought Rita, and with what surly unresponsiveness
he seemed to confront her courageous acceptance of poverty.
Lady Clyde asked her husband that night if he could not, as man to man,
give Richard Lambourne a hint that his ungracious attitude to his wife,
whilst living on her money, was the final crown of the wrongs that he
had done her.
“I was going to suggest, personally, that you should give Rita a hint,”
said Sir Charles.
“Rita! Why, when I think of that poor child’s gallantry----”
“Exactly. My own impression is that a very little more of it will drive
Lambourne into a mad-house, or worse.”
Sir Charles spoke in his usual level accents, and Lady Clyde did not
attempt to attach any meaning to his words. Neither did they recur to
her when Richard Lambourne disproved her assertion that he had placed
the crown upon the wrongs done to his wife, by the final ignominy of
suicide.
* * * * *
“Coward, coward!” sobbed Lady Clyde. “Can you deny that he was a
coward, Charles?”
“No. Richard was a coward,” said Sir Charles gravely.
“After all that poor little Rita had done!”
“And said,” added Sir Charles, not flippantly, and half under his
breath.
The old magnate who had admired Rita at her wedding made use of almost
the same words as Lady Clyde.
“After all that his wife had done, and was doing, to quit like that,
and leave her to face the life he’d brought her to! What a _brute_!”
A little while afterwards he proposed to Rita, diffident, in spite of
his wealth, because of the great difference in their ages.
She accepted him, and this time it was Sir Charles, looking at the
bridegroom’s bald head and infirm gait beside the pretty bride at the
quiet wedding, who repeated to himself the old man’s catchword, with an
ironical emphasis of his own:
“A _very_ gallant little lady.”