not then realise that the words which had just been spoken would for
ever spoil to her this fragrant, familiar corner of her garden. All she
felt now was a fierce, instinctive wish to get under shelter,--to hear
whatever shameful thing had to be heard within four walls,--and so she
put out her right hand and pushed her visitor before her into the
sitting-room.
Then, keeping her back to the window, she forced Miss Wellow to turn
round.
"Now tell me the truth," she commanded, "and Tiddy--above all, don't let
yourself be upset, and don't get hysterical! I know what it is--you and
David have had some silly quarrel. I saw from the first that you were
making yourself too cheap! He can't go back to Rosaleen; he divorced
her--and she's with another man. Besides, David is my brother! He
wouldn't dare do such a wicked thing! You have no right, Tiddy, to
accuse him of such shameful behaviour!" She spoke with quick, savage
decision.
But Miss Wellow faced her with a strange, untoward courage--"I won't
have you speak so of him--of David, I mean!" she exclaimed passionately,
"you're his sister and ought to take his part!"
Then her voice broke, and with a touch of her old feebleness she added,
"If you had heard him telling me about it, even you, Kate, who are so
hard, would maybe have understood and felt sorry for him. _I_ felt very
sorry for him----"
"_You!_"--said Mrs. Rigby, with what appeared to the other withering
contempt, "_you!_----"
"He put it very beautifully," continued Miss Wellow; her voice was now
almost inaudible, but Mrs. Rigby caught the word and repeated it with
terrible irony:
"Beautifully!" she said,--"beautifully!"
Matilda shrank back as though she feared the other was about to strike
her, but Mrs. Rigby did not see the gesture.
"And did he tell you when he proposes to bring----" she made a scarcely
perceptible pause and then shot out the words--"his bride home. If it's
to-morrow, I'll make Matt take me away to-night!"
"He's not going to bring her home," said Matilda, quietly. "He's never
coming back himself; they are going right away--out of England."
"A good thing too!" said Mrs. Rigby.
"He says that will be more respectful to me; he has considered my
feelings, Kate--he has indeed."
"Has he? Why----" she suddenly held up a warning finger, for there was a
sound of footsteps in the passage; the sound stopped outside the door,
and both women instinctively held their breath, united by a common fear
of servants' gossip.
There was a long pause, and then the handle of the door was slowly
turned, and Mr. Rigby came into the room, his ruddy colour gone, or
rather lying in curious streaks across his face, a nervous smile
hovering over his lips.
He shut the door behind him and looked, with a world of interrogation
and anxiety in his eyes, at his wife.
"You needn't smile," she said sharply; "this is no smiling matter!"
His eyes fell; instinctively he turned to the other, the weaker vessel.
But the reproof which Mrs. Rigby had just addressed to her husband
penetrated Miss Wellow's brain.
"I'm afraid I do look rather silly!" she said nervously, "wearing this
dress, I mean. But, you see, knowing that now I shall never wear it, I
thought I would put it on to-night."
The odd collocation of her words passed unnoticed; indeed, Mr. Rigby,
even had he wished to answer her, was not given time to do so, for his
wife had turned on him and was avenging in his person the heaped-up
wrongs of her sex.
"It's all your fault, Matt! You were always against David going to
London from the first, and you ought to have prevented his doing so!
But no--you stood aside and did nothing! I suppose you guessed he might
meet that--that----" her lips snapped together she would not soil them
by uttering the word which to her mind alone described Rosaleen.
As her husband did not answer, suspicion grew into certainty.
"Did you know that she was there? Did you think he would see her?" she
demanded.
Mr. Rigby looked mildly at his Kate. "I didn't know anything, but I did
just think it possible," he said.
But his triumph, if triumph it was, was short-lived.
"Why didn't you tell me then? A decent woman would never have thought of
such a thing, but men have such disgusting minds!" cried his wife
sharply. She added suspiciously, "But how did you learn what's happened?
Did David write to you?"
"He came into the office on his way back to the station," said Mr.
Rigby, briefly. "And, Kate--I've promised to see to things for him. Rosy
will join them"--he gave a little cough--"the day after to-morrow, and
they will all sail for South Africa as soon as matters can be settled
up. It's better so, my dear."
Suddenly Miss Wellow bent down. Her hand fumbled blindly among the soft,
voluminous flounces of her skirt.
"I've got something here," she said in a muffled voice, "that I want you
to give Rosy, Matt. But though I know it's there, I can't find the
pocket; you know I had one put in because David once said that he didn't
like a woman without a pocket in her dress. I've found it--here it
is!"--she took a step forward, and standing close to her old friend,
thrust into his unresisting hand a small hard substance. He looked down
and saw it was the ruby ring. "You can give this to the child," she said
breathlessly, "I don't want to see her again--with love from Auntie
Tiddy."
But this was more than Mrs. Rigby could stand.
"Well, it's a good thing," she exclaimed to her husband, "that Tiddy
takes it like that! No man would ever have dared to treat me so! But as
long as she doesn't care--still, she needn't take David's part against
his own sister, who has the right----"
But what right David's sister had was never explained, for Miss Wellow
suddenly swayed forward; she would have fallen to the ground had not Mr.
Rigby caught her.
"Why, she's fainted!" he said pitifully; "she does care--more than you
think, Kate. But she will come round soon--too soon," he muttered to
himself.
* * * * *
It was the same night, or rather the next morning, for the dawn was
beginning to make its grey way into the bed-chamber of Mr. and Mrs.
Rigby; it threw into dim relief the large, almost square four-poster,
under the chintz-covered canopy of which the husband and wife lay, rigid
as if carved in stone.
"Kate," said Matt, "are you awake?"
He could just see her head lying on the other pillow beside him. Her
still abundant hair was loosened and gave her a look of youth. Tears had
made a furrow down her cheeks.
"Yes," said Mrs. Rigby, "I am awake, Matt. What is it you want?"
"I'm afraid, my dear, that you are very much upset." There were
understanding, sympathy, ay, and tenderness expressed in the way Mr.
Rigby uttered the homely word.
His wife, for the first time in their twenty-five years of married life,
felt a responsive thrill. For the first time she was unfaithful to Nat
Bower.
"It's of you I'm thinking," she whispered. "I've been trying all night
to forget David,--my poor little David,--but it's terrible to me to
think that you, Matt, married into a family that could be guilty of such
shameful behaviour!"
VI
THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE
James Tapster was eating his solitary, well-cooked dinner in his
comfortable and handsome house, a house situated in one of the half-moon
terraces which line and frame the more aristocratic side of Regent's
Park, and which may indeed be said to have private grounds of their own,
for each resident enjoys the use of a key to a portion of the Park
entitled locally "The Enclosure."
Very early in his life Mr. Tapster had made up his mind that he would
like to live in Cumberland Crescent and now he was living there; very
early in his life he had decided that no one could order a plain yet
palatable meal as well as he could himself, and now for some months past
Mr. Tapster had given his own orders, each morning, to the cook.
To-night Mr. Tapster had already eaten his fried sole, and he was about
to cut himself off a generous portion of the grilled under-cut before
him, when he heard the postman's steps hurrying round the Crescent. He
rose with a certain quick deliberateness, and going out into the hall,
opened the front door just in time to avoid the rat-tat-tat. Then, the
one letter he had expected duly in his hand, he waited till he had sat
down again in front of his still empty plate before he broke the seal
and glanced over the typewritten sheet of notepaper.
SHORTERS COURT, THROGMORTON ST.,
_November 4th, 190--_.
DEAR JAMES,
In reply to your letter of yesterday's date, I have been to Bedford
Row and seen Greenfield, and he thinks it probable that the decree
will be made absolute to-day; in that case you will have received a
wire before this letter reaches you.
Your affect. Brother,
WM. A. TAPSTER.
In the same handwriting as the signature were added two holograph lines:
"Glad you have the children home again. Maud will be round to see them
soon."
Mr. Tapster read over once again the body of the letter, and there came
upon him an instinctive feeling of intense relief; then, with a not less
instinctive feeling of impatience, his eyes travelled down again to the
postscript--"Maud will be round to see them soon."
Well, he would see about that! But he did not exclaim, even mentally,
as most men feeling as he then felt would have done, "I'll be damned if
she will!" knowing the while that Maud certainly would.
His brother's letter, though most satisfactory as regarded its main
point, put Mr. Tapster out of conceit with the rest of his dinner; so he
rang twice and had the table cleared, frowning at the parlour-maid as
she hurried through her duties, and yet not daring to rebuke her for
having neglected to answer the bell the first time he rang.
After a pause, he rose and turned towards the door--but, no, he could
not face the large, cheerless drawing-room upstairs; instead, he sat
down by the fire, and set himself to consider his future, and, in a more
hazy sense, that of his now motherless children.
But very soon, as generally happens to those who devote any time to that
least profitable of occupations, Mr. Tapster found that his thoughts
drifted aimlessly, not to the future where he would have them be, but to
the past--that past which he desired to forget, to obliterate from his
memory.
Till rather more than a year ago few men of his age--he had then been
sixty, he was now sixty-one--enjoyed a pleasanter and, from his own
point of view, a better-filled life than James Tapster. How he had
scorned the gambler, the spendthrift, the adulterer,--in a word, all
those whose actions bring about their own inevitable punishment! He had
always been self-respecting and conscientious,--not a prig, mind you,
but inclined rather to the serious than to the flippant side of life,
and so inclining he had found contentment and great material prosperity.
Not even in those days to which he was now looking back so regretfully
had Mr. Tapster always been perfectly content; but now the poor man
sitting alone by his dining-room fire, only remembered what had been
good and pleasant in his former state. He was aware that his brother
William--and William's wife, Maud--both thought that even now he had
much to be thankful for; his line of business was brisk, scarcely
touched by foreign competition, his income increasing at a steady rate
of progression, and his children were exceptionally healthy.
But, alas! now that, in place of a pretty little Mrs. Tapster on whom to
spend easily-earned money, his substance was being squandered by a crowd
of unmanageable and yet indispensable thieves,--for so Mr. Tapster
voicelessly described the five servants whose loud talk and laughter
were even now floating up from the basement below,--he did not feel his
financial stability so comfortable a thing as he had once done.
His very children, who should now be, as he told himself complainingly,
his greatest comfort, had degenerated from two sturdy, well-behaved
little boys and a charming baby girl, into three unruly, fretful imps,
setting him at defiance, and terrorising their two attendants, who,
though carefully chosen by their Aunt Maud, did not seem to manage them
as well as the old nurse who had been an ally of the ex-Mrs. Tapster.
Looking back at the whole horrible affair, for so in his own mind Mr.
Tapster justly designated the divorce case in which he had figured as
the successful petitioner, he wondered uneasily if he had done quite
wisely--wisely, that is, for his own repute and comfort.
He knew very well that had it not been for William--or rather for
Maud--he would never have found out the dreadful truth. Nay, more; he
was dimly aware that but for them, and for their insistence on it as the
only proper course open to him, he would never have taken action. All
would have been forgiven and forgotten had not William--and more
especially Maud--said he must divorce Flossy, if not for his own sake,
ah! what irony! then for that of his children.
Of course he felt grateful to his brother William and to his brother's
wife for all they had done for him since that sad time. Still, in the
depths of his heart, Mr. Tapster felt entitled to blame, and sometimes
almost to hate, his kind brother and sister. To them both--or rather to
Maud--he really owed the break-up of his life, for, when all was said
and done, it had to be admitted (though Maud did not like him to remind
her of it) that Flossy had met the villain while staying with the
William Tapsters at Boulogne. Respectable London people should have
known better than to take a furnished house at a disreputable French
watering-place--a place full of low English!
Sometimes it was only by a great exercise of self-control that he, James
Tapster, could refrain from telling Maud what he thought of her conduct
in this matter, the more so that she never seemed to understand how
greatly she--and William--had been to blame.
On one occasion Maud had even said how surprised she had been that James
had cared to go away to America, leaving his pretty young wife alone
for as long as three months. Why hadn't she said so at the time, then?
Of course, he had thought that he could leave Flossy to be looked after
and kept out of mischief by Maud--and William. But he had been--in more
than one sense, alas!--bitterly deceived.
Still, it's never any use crying over spilt milk, so Mr. Tapster got up
from his chair and walked round the room, looking absently, as he did
so, at the large Landseer engraving of which he was naturally proud. If
only he could forget--put out of his mind for ever--the whole affair!
Well, perhaps with the Decree being made Absolute would come oblivion.
He sat down again before the fire. Staring at the hot embers, he
reminded himself that Flossy, wicked, ungrateful Flossy, had disappeared
out of his life. This being so, why think of her? The very children had
at last left off asking inconvenient questions about their mamma----
By the way, would Flossy still be their mamma after the Decree had been
made Absolute?--so Mr. Tapster now suddenly asked himself. He hesitated
perplexed.
But yes, the Decree being made Absolute would not undo, or even efface,
that fact. The more so, though surely here James Tapster showed himself
less logical than usual--the more so that Flossy, in spite of what Maud
had always said about her, had been a loving and, in her own
light-hearted way, a careful mother. But though Flossy would remain the
mother of his children--odd that the Law hadn't provided for that
contingency--she would soon be absolutely nothing, and less than
nothing, to him, the father of those children. Mr. Tapster was a great
believer in the infallibility of the Law, and he subscribed
whole-heartedly to the new reading, "What Law has put asunder, let not
man join together."
To-night Mr. Tapster could not help looking back with a certain
complacency to his one legal adventure. Nothing could have been better
done, or more admirably conducted, than the way the whole matter had
been carried through. His brother William, and William's solicitor, Mr.
Greenfield, had managed it all so very nicely. True, there had been a
few uncomfortable moments in the witness-box, but everyone, including
the Judge, had been most kind.
As for his Counsel, the leading man who makes a specialty of these sad
affairs, not even James Tapster himself could have put his own case in a
more delicate and moving fashion. "A gentleman possessed of considerable
fortune," so had he been justly described, and Counsel, without undue
insistence on irrelevant detail, had drawn a touching--and a
true--picture of Mr. Tapster's one romance, his marriage eight years
before to the twenty-year-old daughter of an undischarged bankrupt. Even
the Petitioner had scarcely seen Flossy's dreadful ingratitude in its
true colours till he had heard his Counsel's moderate comments on the
case.
This evening Mr. Tapster saw Flossy's dreadful ingratitude terribly
clearly, and he wondered, not for the first time, how his wife could
have had the heart to break up his happy home!
Why, but for him and his offer of marriage, Flossy Ball--that had been
his wife's maiden name--would have had to have earned her own living!
And as she had been very pretty, very "fetching," she would probably
have married some good-for-nothing young fellow of her own age lacking
the means to support a wife in decent comfort,--such a fellow, for
instance, as the wretched "Co." in the case. While with Mr.
Tapster--why, she had had everything the heart of woman could wish for,
a good home, beautiful clothes, and the being waited on hand and foot. A
strange choking feeling came into his throat as he thought of how good
he had been to Flossy, and how very bad had been her return for that
kindness.
But this--this was dreadful! He was actually thinking of her again, and
not, as he had meant to do, of himself and his poor, motherless
children. Time enough to think of Flossy when he had news of her again.
If her lover did not marry her--and from what Mr. Greenfield had
discovered about him, it was most improbable that he would ever be in a
position to do so--she would certainly reappear on the Tapster horizon;
Mr. Greenfield said "they" always did. In that case, it was arranged
that William should pay her a weekly allowance. Mr. Tapster, always, as
he now reminded himself sadly, ready to do the generous thing, had fixed
that allowance at three pounds a week--a sum which had astonished, in
fact quite staggered, Mr. Greenfield's head clerk, a very decent fellow,
by the way.
"Of course, it shall be as you wish, Mr. Tapster, but you should think
of the future and of your children. A hundred and fifty pounds a year
is a large sum; you may feel it a tax, sir, as years go on----"
"That is enough," Mr. Tapster had answered, kindly but firmly; "you have
done your duty in laying that side of the case before me. I have,
however, decided on the amount named; should I see reason to alter my
mind, our arrangement leaves it open to me at any time to lower the
allowance."
But though this conversation had taken place some months ago, and though
Mr. Tapster still held true to his generous resolve, as yet Flossy had
not reappeared.
Mr. Tapster sometimes told himself that if he only knew where she was,
what she was doing,--whether she was still with that young fellow, for
instance,--he would think much less about her than he did now. Only last
night, when going for a moment into the night nursery,--poor Mr. Tapster
now only enjoyed his children's company when he was quite sure that they
were asleep,--he had had an extraordinary, almost a physical, impression
of Flossy's presence; he certainly had felt a faint whiff of her
favourite perfume. Flossy had been fond of scent, and though Maud always
said that the use of scent was most unladylike, he, James, did not
dislike it.
With sudden soreness Mr. Tapster now recalled the one letter Flossy had
written to him just before the actual hearing of the divorce suit.
It had been a wild, oddly-worded appeal to him to take her back, not--as
Maud had at once perceived on reading the letter--because she was sorry
for the terrible thing she had done, but simply because she was
beginning to hanker after her children. Maud had described the letter as
shameless and unwomanly in the extreme; and even William, who had never
judged his pretty young sister-in-law as severely as his wife had always
done, had observed sadly that Flossy seemed quite unaware of the
magnitude of her offence against God and man.
* * * * *
Mr. Tapster, who prided himself on his sharp ears, suddenly heard a
curious little sound--he knew it for that of the front door being first
opened and then shut again, extremely quietly. He half rose from his
chair by the fire, then sat down again, heavily.
By Maud's advice he always locked the area gate himself, when he came
home each evening. But how foolish of Maud--such a sensible woman
too,--to think that servants and their evil ways could be circumvented
so easily! Of course, the maids went in and out by the front door in the
evening, and the policeman--a most respectable officer standing at point
duty a few yards lower down the road--must be well aware of these
disgraceful "goings on."
For the first two or three months of his widowerhood (how else could he
term his present peculiar wifeless condition?) there had been a constant
coming and going of servants, first chosen, and then dismissed, by Maud.
At last she had suggested that her brother-in-law should engage a lady
housekeeper, and the luckless James Tapster had even interviewed several
applicants for the post after they had been chosen--sifted out, as it
were--by Maud. Unfortunately they had all been each more or less of his
own age; and plain--very plain; while he, naturally enough, would have
preferred to see something young and pretty about him again.
It was over this housekeeper question that he had at last escaped from
Maud's domestic thraldom, for his sister-in-law, offended by his
rejection of each of her candidates, had declared that she would take no
more trouble about his household affairs! Nay, more; she had reminded
him with a smile which she had honestly tried to make pleasant, that
there is, after all, no fool like an old fool--about women! This
insinuation had made Mr. Tapster very angry, and straightway he had
engaged a respectable cook-housekeeper, and, although he had soon become
aware that the woman was feathering her own nest,--James Tapster, as you
will have divined ere now, was fond of good workaday phrases,--yet she
had a pleasant, respectful manner, and kept rough order among the
younger servants.
Mr. Tapster's sister-in-law only now interfered where his children were
concerned. Never having been herself a mother, she had, of course, been
able to form a clear and unprejudiced judgment as to how children, and
especially as to how little boys, should be physically and mentally
trained.
As yet, however, Maud had not been very successful with her two nephews
and infant niece, but this was doubtless owing to the fact that there
had been something gravely amiss with each of the five nurses who had
been successively engaged by her during the last year.
The elder of Mr. Tapster's sons was six and the second four; the
youngest child, a little girl named unfortunately Flora after her
mother, was three years old. There had been a fourth, Flossy's second
baby, also a girl, who had only lived one day. All this being so, was it
not strange that a young matron who had led, for some four years out of
the eight years her married life had lasted, so wholly womanly and
domestic an existence as had fallen to the lot of Flossy, should have
been led astray by the meretricious allurements of unlawful
love?--Maud's striking thought and phrase this.
And yet Flossy, in spite of her frivolity, had somehow managed the
children far better than Maud was now able to do. At the present time,
so Mr. Tapster admitted to himself with something very like an inward
groan, his two sons possessed every vice of which masculine infancy is
capable. They had become--so he was told by their indignant nurses--the
terror of the well-behaved children who shared with them the pleasures
of the Park Enclosure, where they took their daily exercise; and Baby,
once so sweet and good, was now very fretful and peevish.
* * * * *
Again the train of Mr. Tapster's mournful thoughts was disturbed by a
curious little sound--that of someone creeping softly down the staircase
leading from the upper floors.