THE NEWS IN THE _WESTMINSTER_
As Nelly's hansom drew up at her own door another hansom was just
turning away from it. She wondered with an impatient wonder who could
have come. At the moment she could not have endured any hindrance
between her and her project of telling her father that the engagement
with Robin was to come to an end. She was not in the least afraid of
what she had to do. The spirit of the Drummonds was thoroughly awake
now.
Beyond her announcement to her father lay something vaguely painful
which at the moment she did not consider. She would have to tell Lady
Drummond and Robin, of course, and it would hurt them: they would be
angry with her. She was going to make a scandal, a nine days' wonder.
Her father would be grieved--angry, too, perhaps; but that could not be
helped either.
And then--some resentment stirred in her heart against him for the first
time during all the years in which they had been together. He had kept
her in ignorance of her lover's peril. She was not a child that she
should have been kept in ignorance. For the moment she had no tender
excuses for him. If he had been candid with her, then all this trouble
about Robin might have been spared, for she could never have promised
herself as wife to another man while the one she loved was in daily and
hourly danger.
She went into the house with a look of stern accusation on her young
face. The dogs came shrieking down the stairs in vociferous welcome as
usual, but she took no notice of them. Being old dogs and wise, they
recognised a forbidding mood in her, and retired with deprecating
wrigglings of their bodies.
She asked Pat if there were a visitor in the drawing-room.
"No, then, Miss, only the master. I can't make out what came over him at
all to be comin' home in a hansom."
He was minded to tell her that the General was not looking himself, to
give her an affectionate, intimate warning; but she passed him by. He
stood watching her, holding the door open in his hand till she took the
bend of the staircase that hid her from his sight.
"Bedad, the Dowager couldn't have done it better," he said, "shweepin'
by me without a 'By your l'ave, Pat'; and the master, callin' me
'Murphy' to my face, what he's never done since he left the rig'ment. I
wonder what's the matter with Pat. 'Twill be 'Corporal' next."
Nelly looked into the drawing-room. Her father was not there. She turned
the handle of another door, the door of the General's own particular
den, and going in she found him.
She never thought of asking herself how he came to be there at this hour
of the day, he who lived by rule, the click of whose latch-key had
sounded in the hall-door every evening at a quarter to seven as long as
she could remember. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to ten minutes
to five.
The General was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace as though he had
dropped into it on his entering the room. He was doing absolutely
nothing, and that was an alarming thing enough, if but she had noticed
it. A green evening paper was crumpled on his knee. If she had eyes to
see it there was calamity in his attitude and his looks. But she had no
eyes. She was too much absorbed in the thing she had to do.
"What, Nell!" he said, getting up as she entered. "We must have come
home almost together. Where have you been, child?"
To his own ear his voice rang false, but she did not notice it. She did
not meet his kiss. She did not see that he was looking at her with a
fearful apprehension.
"What is the matter, Nell?" he stammered, noticing the alteration in her
looks.
She came and stood beside him, seeming to tower above him.
"Father," she said, "I am not going to marry Robin. I want him to know
at once."
"Not marry Robin!" This was something the General was unprepared for.
"Not marry Robin! God bless my soul, Nell! It's very late for you to say
such a thing--within three weeks of your wedding! And all the
arrangements made! What will people say? What will the Dowager say? You
can't play fast and loose with a man like that, Nell. Why, it will be
the talk of the town."
He tried to work himself up to the old fretting and fuming, but there
was no heartiness in it. Under the projecting eyebrows his old
frostily-blue eyes had a scared look. But if he had been in such a
passion as he had shown on a certain historic occasion when the regiment
had nearly scattered before the approach of screaming Dervishes--a
passion which had rallied the men and won Sir Denis his V.C.--it would
have been all the same to Nelly.
"All that is perfectly immaterial," she said. "I am sorry for Robin and
for Aunt Matilda. But all that will pass. I was mad to consent to the
marriage. I am only glad that I came to my senses in time."
Was this Nelly?--this young, sure, inflexible creature! He stared at her
in utter amazement.
"Supposing I were to say that you must go on now since you have gone so
far, Nell?" he said, and felt at the same time the futility of the
saying. "I never thought my girl would play so shabby a trick on
Gerald's son. You know that people will laugh at Robin?"
"They won't. Robin is not the sort of person to be laughed at--at least,
not for long. Besides, if it is any consolation to you, father, I may
tell you that it will not hurt Robin much: Robin is not and never has
been in love with me."
"What!" The General now was genuinely indignant. He had forgotten for
the moment his other perturbation, whatever it might be. "What do you
mean, Nell? Your cousin not in love with you! After all the years during
which you have been meant for each other! Impossible, Nell! Robin _must_
be in love with you."
"He is not; he never has been. That is my consolation, so far as he is
concerned. Father, why did you keep from me the fact that Captain
Langrishe was fighting the Wazees? Why did you?"
The General's colour deserted his cheeks once again.
"Poor Langrishe! What was the good of letting you know, Nell? You used
to be--interested in the poor fellow."
"You shouldn't have kept it from me. I didn't read the newspapers, or I
should have known. Do you know why I didn't read them? Because if I had
I must have turned to the army news. I was fighting that as a
temptation. I was trying to drive him from my mind. I kept away from his
sister, although she had been kind to me; I went nowhere where I might
hear his name. Then to-day I met her by accident. I went home with her.
She told me--do you know what she told me?"
"What, Nell?"
"That her brother went away under the impression that I was engaged to
Robin Drummond. Aunt Matilda had told her so and she had told him. So
that is why he left me."
"I see," the General groaned. "A nice lot of trouble has come out of
that scheme of your Aunt Matilda's for marrying you and Robin. I never
would agree to it; I used to say: 'Let it be till the children are old
enough to choose for themselves.' I wish I had taken a stronger stand. I
only wished for your happiness, Nell. I always liked poor Langrishe, and
felt I could trust him with even what I held dearest on earth. I did my
best for you, Nell. If I kept his danger from you, it was only that I
hoped to keep you from suffering like those other poor women."
She did not notice the haggardness of his face, nor the repetition of
"Poor Langrishe." She was too much absorbed in getting to the root of
things. She was determined to know everything.
"What happened when you went to Tilbury?"
Was this young inquisitor his Nell?
"I didn't see him. The boat had gone."
"And I thought you had offered me to him, and that he had rejected me!
Oh, I know you would have done it in the most delicate way. There need
not have been a word spoken. But it would have been the same thing in
the end. I thought his love was not great enough to conquer his pride."
"My train broke down, Nell; I came ten minutes too late. I thought the
hand of God was in it."
"It was a mere accident. God had nothing to do with it. I am only
grateful that it has not ended worse. If I had married Robin and then
discovered these things----"
"Don't say that you couldn't have forgiven me, Nell." The General took
out a big white silk handkerchief and wiped his forehead with it. "Don't
say that you couldn't have forgiven me! I meant it all for the best. My
little Nell couldn't be hard with her old father."
She stooped suddenly and caught his hand to her lips. She noticed with a
tender contraction of her heart that it was an old hand--knotted, with
purple stains.
"I should be a brute if I could be angry with you," she said; and the
tenseness of her face relaxed to its old softness.
"Ah, that's right, Nell--that's right. We couldn't do without each
other. You've always your old father, you know--haven't you, dearie?--no
matter what happens. I'll stand by you, Nell. I'll take you away. No one
shall be angry with my Nell."
"You are too good to me," she said. "And I've been angry with you! What
a wretch I was to be angry with you! On my way here I telegraphed to
Robin to come this evening. I must get it over. You shall take me away
if you will afterwards. I would stay and face it if it would do any
good, but it wouldn't. After all, there is no great harm done. Robin's
heart will not be broken."
"And afterwards, Nell?"
"Afterwards? Oh, you and I shall be together."
"Yes; we did very well when we were together. Listen, Nell." He put his
arm about her. "I want you to be strong and brave. I came home to tell
you, lest you should hear by accident. His poor sister did not know----"
The General's den looked out on the Square gardens. It was quite a long
way across them to the road; yet through the quietness of the golden
afternoon there came the shouting of the newsboys. It all flashed on
Nelly with a blinding suddenness. To be sure, they had been calling the
same thing while she stood with his sister and learned why he had left
her, only she had not known.
"He is dead," she said, with an immense quietness. It was as though she
had known it always.
"No; not dead, Nell--terribly wounded, but not dead. He is in English
hands."
He stopped, shuddering. If he had been in those black devils' hands to
be tortured to death! He had been only saved by a sudden rush of his
men. Even his wounds would not have saved him from torture if God had
not delivered him out of their hands.
"Show it to me."
All of a sudden she saw the newspaper which had been lying crumpled on
his knee. That had contained the news all the time while they had been
talking about things that mattered so much less.
He did not try to keep it from her. He turned over the paper and found
the page of it which had the latest news. There it was, with its staring
headlines. She seemed to have seen it just so, in another life.
She read it through to the end. It had been an ambush. The small
detachment of troops had been led by the guide into the midst of a large
body of the enemy--it had been surrounded. Captain Langrishe had fallen,
as had a young lieutenant. The men had stood shoulder to shoulder,
fighting desperately. By the most desperate courage they had rescued the
bodies of their officers, which were being carried by the tribesmen into
one of their towers among the hills. They had fought their way back with
the bodies strapped to their horses. Lieutenant Foley proved to be dead.
He had been hacked and hewed with knives. Captain Langrishe had been
more fortunate; the life was still in him when the last intelligence had
been sent down. There was very little hope of his recovery.
Nelly neither cried out nor fainted. When she had finished the reading
she laid down the paper quietly. Her father watched her in mingled
terror and relief. She was seeing it all--the rocky gorge with the
inaccessible hills on either side, filled in with scrub and low trees;
at the little neck of the gorge the dreadful tower; the small body of
Britishers fighting their way step by step backward; the dazzling blue
sky over all. Was Heaven empty that such things happened? She remembered
in a kind of daze that she had been at a garden-party that very
afternoon. She had worn for the first time her white silk frock with the
roses on it and she had seen in many eyes how well it became her. That
had happened in another world. A great gulf stretched between even the
events of the afternoon and this time--this time, in which she knew that
Godfrey Langrishe was dead or dying.
"I wish he might have known," she said quietly, "that after all I was
not engaged to Robin."