Walderhurst, and made Mortimer Street a thing still more incredible.
When she dropped her hands, she laughed even a trifle hysterically.
"I _couldn't_ thank you," she said. "It is as I said. I never quite
believed there were people who were able to think of doing such things."
"There are such people," he said. "You are one of them."
"And--and--" She put it to him with a sudden recollection of the thing
her emotions had momentarily swept away. "Oh! I must not forget, because
I am so pleased. When it is furnished--"
"Oh! the Osborns? Well, we will let them have it for a few months, at
any rate."
"They will be so _thankful_," emotionally. "You will be doing them
_such_ a favour."
"I am doing it for you, not for them. I like to see you pleased."
She went to take off her hat with moisture in her eyes, being
overpowered by his munificence. When she reached her room she walked
about a little, because she was excited, and then sat down to think of
the relief her next letter would carry to Mrs. Osborn. Suddenly she got
up, and, going to her bedside, knelt down. She respectfully poured forth
devout thanks to the Deity she appealed to when she aided in the
intoning of the Litany on Sundays. Her conception of this Power was of
the simplest conventional nature. She would have been astonished and
frightened if she had been told that she regarded the Omnipotent Being
as possessing many of the attributes of the Marquis of Walderhurst. This
was, in fact, true without detracting from her reverence in either case.
Chapter Ten
The Osborns were breakfasting in their unpleasant sitting-room in Duke
Street when Lady Walderhurst's letter arrived. The toast was tough and
smoked, and the eggs were of the variety labelled "18 a shilling" in the
shops; the apartment was also redolent of kippered herring, and Captain
Osborn was scowling over the landlady's weekly bill when Hester opened
the envelope stamped with a coronet. (Each time Emily wrote a note and
found herself confronting the coronet on the paper, she blushed a little
and felt that she must presently awake from her dream.) Mrs. Osborn
herself was looking far from amiable. She was ill and nervous and
irritable, and had, in fact, just been crying and wishing that she was
dead, which had given rise to unpleasantness between herself and her
husband, who was not in the mood to feel patient with nerves.
"Here's one from the Marchioness," she remarked slightingly.
"I have had none from the Marquis," sneered Osborn. "He might have
condescended a reply--the cold-blooded beggar!"
Hester was reading her letter. As she turned the first page her
expression changed. As has previously been suggested, the epistolary
methods of Lady Walderhurst were neither brilliant nor literary, and yet
Mrs. Osborn seemed to be pleased by what she read. During the reading of
a line or so she wore an expression of slowly questioning wonder, which,
a little later on, settled into relief.
"I can only say I think it's very decent of them," she ejaculated at
last; "really decent!"
Alec Osborn looked up, still scowlingly.
"I don't see any cheque," he observed. "That would be the most decent
thing. It's the thing we want most, with this damned woman sending in
bills like this for the fourth-rate things we live on, and for her
confounded tenth-rate rooms."
"This is better than cheques. It means our having something we couldn't
hope for cheques enough to pay for. They are offering to lend us a
beautiful old place to live in for the rest of our stay."
"What!" Osborn exclaimed. "Where?"
"Near Palstrey Manor, where they are staying now."
"Near Palstrey! How near?" He had been slouching in his chair and now
sat up and leaned forward on the table. He was eager.
Hester referred to the letter again.
"She doesn't say. It is a sort of antiquity, I gather. It's called The
Kennel Farm. Have you ever been to Palstrey?"
"Not as a guest." He was generally somewhat sardonic when he spoke of
anything connected with Walderhurst. "But once I was in the nearest
county town by chance and rode over. By Jove!" starting a little, "I
wonder if it can be a rum old place I passed and reined in to have a
look at. I hope it is."
"Why?"
"It's near enough to the Manor to be convenient."
"Do you think," hesitating, "that we shall see much of them?"
"We shall if we manage things decently. She likes you, and she's the
kind of woman to be sympathising and make a fuss over another
woman--particularly one who is under the weather and can be
sentimentalised over."
Hester was pushing crumbs about on the tablecloth with her knife, and a
dull red showed itself on her cheek.
"I am not going to make capital of--circumstances," she said sullenly.
"I won't."
She was not a woman easily managed, and Osborn had had reason on more
than one occasion to realise a certain wicked stubbornness in her. There
was a look in her eye now which frightened him. It was desperately
necessary that she should be kept in a tractable mood. As she was a girl
with affections, and he was a man without any, he knew what to do.
He got up and went to her side, putting his arm round her shoulders as
he sat in a chair near her. "Now, little woman," he said. "Now! For
God's sake don't take it that way. Don't think I don't understand how
you feel."
"I don't believe you know anything about the way I feel," she said,
setting her narrow white teeth and looking more like a native woman than
he had ever seen her. A thing which did not aid his affection for her,
such as it was, happened to be that in certain moods she suggested a
Hindoo beauty to him in a way which brought back to him memories of the
past he did not care to have awakened.
"Yes I do, yes I do," he protested, getting hold of her hand and trying
to make her look at him. "There are things such a woman as you can't
help feeling. It's because you feel them that you must be on your
mettle--Lord knows you've got pluck enough--and stand by a fellow now.
What shall I do, my God, if you don't?"
He was, in fact, in such straits that the ring of emotion in his voice
was not by any means assumed.
"My God!" he repeated, "what shall we all do if you won't?"
She lifted her eyes then to look at him. She was in a sufficiently
nervous condition to be conscious that tears were always near.
"Are there worse things than you have told me?" she faltered.
"Yes, worse things than it would be fair to bother you with. I don't
want you to be tormented. I was a deuced fool before I met you and began
to run straight. Things pile in now that would have lain quiet enough if
Walderhurst had not married. Hang it all! he ought to do the decent
thing by me. He owes something to the man who may stand in his shoes,
after all."
Hester lifted her slow eyes again.
"You've not much of a chance now," she said. "She's a fine healthy
woman."
Osborn sprang up and paced the floor, set upon by a sudden spasm of
impotent rage. He snapped his teeth rather like a dog.
"Oh! curse her!" he gave forth. "The great, fresh-coloured lumping
brute! What did she come into it for? Of all the devilish things that
can happen to a man, the worst is to be born to the thing I was born to.
To know through your whole life that you're just a stone's-throw from
rank and wealth and splendour, and to have to live and look on as an
outsider. Upon my word, I've felt more of an outsider just because of
it. There's a dream I've had every month or so for years. It's a dream
of opening a letter that tells me he's dead, or of a man coming into the
room or meeting me in the street and saying suddenly, 'Walderhurst died
last night, Walderhurst died last night!' They're always the same words,
'Walderhurst died last night!' And I wake up shaking and in a cold sweat
for joy at the gorgeous luck that's come at last."
Hester gave a low cry like a little howl, and dropped her head on her
arms on the table among the cups and saucers.
"She'll have a son! She'll have a son!" she cried. "And then it won't
matter whether _he_ dies or not."
"Ough!" was the sound wrenched from Osborn's fury. "And our son might
have been in it. Ours might have had it all! Damn--damn!"
"He won't,--he won't now, even if he lives to be born," she sobbed, and
clutched at the dingy tablecloth with her lean little hands.
It was hard on her. She had had a thousand feverish dreams he had never
heard of. She had lain awake hours at night and stared with wide-open
eyes at the darkness, picturing to her inner soul the dream of splendour
that she would be part of, the solace for past miseries, the high
revenges for past slights that would be hers after the hour in which she
heard the words Osborn had just quoted, "Walderhurst died last night!"
Oh! if luck had only helped them! if the spells her Ayah had taught her
in secret had only worked as they would have worked if she had been a
native woman and had really used them properly! There was a spell she
had wrought once which Ameerah had sworn to her was to be relied on. It
took ten weeks to accomplish its end. In secret she had known of a man
on whom it had been worked. She had found out about it partly from the
remote hints which had aided her half knowledge of strange things and by
keeping a close watch. The man had died--he had died. She herself, and
with her own eyes had seen him begin to ail, had heard of his fevers and
pains and final death. He had died. She knew that. And she had tried the
thing herself in dead secrecy. And at the fifth week, just as with the
native who had died, she heard that Walderhurst was ill. During the next
four weeks she was sick with the tension of combined horror and delight.
But he did not die in the tenth week. They heard that he had gone to
Tangiers with a party of notable people, and that his "slight"
indisposition had passed, leaving him in admirable health and spirits.
Her husband had known nothing of her frenzy. She would not have dared to
tell him. There were many things she did not tell him. He used to laugh
at her native stories of occult powers, though she knew that he had seen
some strange things done, as most foreigners had. He always explained
such things contemptuously on grounds which presupposed in the
performers of the mysteries powers of agility, dexterity, and universal
knowledge quite as marvellous as anything occult could have been. He did
not like her to show belief in the "tricks of the natives," as he called
them. It made a woman look a fool, he said, to be so credulous.
During the last few months a new fever had tormented her. Feelings had
awakened in her which were new. She thought things she had never thought
before. She had never cared for children or suspected herself of being
the maternal woman. But Nature worked in her after her weird fashion.
She began to care less for some things and more for others. She cared
less for Osborn's moods and was better able to defy them. He began to be
afraid of her temper, and she began to like at times to defy his. There
had been some fierce scenes between them in which he had found her meet
with a flare of fury words she would once have been cowed by. He had
spoken one day with the coarse slightingness of a selfish, irritable
brute, of the domestic event which was before them. He did not speak
twice.
She sprang up before him and shook her clenched fist in his face, so
near that he started back.
"Don't say a word!" she cried. "Don't dare--don't dare. I tell you--look
out, if you don't want to be killed."
During the outpouring of her frenzy he saw her in an entirely new light
and made discoveries. She would fight for her young, as a tigress fights
for hers. She was nursing a passion of secret feeling of which he had
known nothing. He had not for a moment suspected her of it. She had not
seemed that kind of girl. She had been of the kind that cares for finery
and social importance and the world's favour, not for sentiments.
On this morning of the letter's arrival he watched her sobbing and
clutching the tablecloth, and reflected. He walked up and down and
pondered. There were a lot of things to be thought over.
"We may as well accept the invitation at once," he said. "Grovel as much
as you choose. The more the better. They'll like it."
Chapter Eleven
The Osborns arrived at The Kennel Farm on a lovely rainy morning. The
green of the fields and trees and hedges was sweetly drenched, and the
flowers held drops which sparkled when the fitful sun broke forth and
searched for the hidden light in them. A Palstrey carriage comfortably
met them and took them to their destination.
As they turned into the lane, Osborn looked out at the red gables and
chimneys showing themselves among the trees.
"It's the old place I looked at," he said, "and a jolly old place it
is."
Hester was drinking in the pure sweetness of the fresh air and filling
her soul with the beauty of such things as she had never seen before. In
London she had grown hopeless and sick of spirit. The lodgings in Duke
Street, the perpetual morning haddock and questionable eggs and unpaid
bills, had been evil things for her. She had reached a point at which
she had felt she could bear them no longer. Here, at all events, there
would be green trees and clear air, and no landlady. With no rent to
pay, there would be freedom from one torment at least.
She had not expected much more than this freedom, however. It had seemed
highly probable that there might be discomforts in an ancient farmhouse
of the kind likely to be lent to impecunious relatives.
But before they crossed the threshold it was plain to her that, for some
reason, they had been given more. The old garden had been put in
order--a picturesque and sweet disorderly order, which had allowed
creepers to luxuriate and toss, and flowers to spring out of crannies,
and clumps of things to mass themselves without restraint.
The girl's wretched heart lifted itself as they drove up to the
venerable brick porch which had somewhat the air of a little church
vestibule. Through the opened door she saw a quaint comfort she had not
dreamed of. She had not the knowledge of things which would have told
her what wonders Emily had done with the place, but she could see that
its quaint furnishings were oddly beautiful in their harmony. The heavy
chairs and benches and settles seemed to have been part of centuries of
farm-house life, and to belong to the place as much as the massive beams
and doors.
Hester stood in the middle of the hall and looked about her. Part of it
was oak panelled and part was whitewashed. There were deep, low windows
cut in the thick walls.
"I never saw anything the least like it," she said.
"You wouldn't expect to see anything like it in India," her husband
answered. "And you won't find many places like it in England. I should
like a look at the stables."
He went out almost immediately and took the look in question, finding
the result unexpectedly satisfactory. Walderhurst had lent him a decent
horse to ride, and there was a respectable little cart for Hester.
Palstrey Manor had "done them" very well. This was a good deal more than
he had expected. He knew such hospitality would not have been shown him
if he had come to England unmarried. Consequently his good luck was
partly a result of Hester's existence in his life. At the same time
there awakened in him a consciousness that Hester would not have been
likely to produce such results unless in combination with another
element in the situation,--the element of another woman who was
sympathetic and had some power,--the new Lady Walderhurst, in fact.
"And yet, confound her--confound her!" he thought, as he walked into the
loose box to look the mare over and pat her sleekness.
The relations which established themselves between Palstrey and The
Kennel Farm were marked by two characteristic features. One of these was
that Lord Walderhurst did not develop any warmer interest in the
Osborns, and that Lady Walderhurst did. Having acceded to Emily's
wishes, and really behaved generously in the matter of providing for his
heir presumptive and his wife, Lord Walderhurst felt impelled to no
further demonstration of feeling.
"I don't like him any better than I did," he remarked to Emily. "And I
cannot say that Mrs. Osborn attracts me. Of course there is a reason why
a kind-hearted woman like yourself should be specially good to her just
now. Do anything you wish for them while they are in the neighbourhood.
But as for me, the fact that a man is one's heir presumptive is not
enough in itself alone to endear him to one, rather the contrary."
Between these two it is to be confessed there existed that rancour which
is not weakened by the fact that it remains unexpressed and lurks in the
deeps of the inward being. Walderhurst would not have been capable of
explaining to himself that the thing he chiefly disliked in this robust,
warm-blooded young man was that when he met him striding about with his
gun over his shoulder and a keeper behind him, the almost unconscious
realisation of the unpleasant truth that he was striding over what might
prove to be his own acres, and shooting birds which in the future he
would himself possess the right to preserve, to invite other people to
shoot, to keep less favoured persons from shooting, as lord of the
Manor. This was a truth sufficiently irritating to accentuate all his
faults of character and breeding.
Emily, whose understanding of his nature developed with every day of her
life, grew into a comprehension of this by degrees. Perhaps her greatest
leap forward was taken on the day when, as he was driving her in the
cart which had picked her up on the moor, they saw Osborn tramping
through a cover with his gun. He did not see them, and a shade of
irritation swept Walderhurst's face.
"He seems to feel very much at home," he commented.
Then he was silent for a space during which he did not look pleased.
"If he were my son," he said, "it would be a different matter. If
Audrey's child had lived--"
He stopped and gave the tall mare a light cut with his whip. He was
evidently annoyed with himself for having spoken.
A hot wave of colour submerged Emily. She felt it rush over her whole
body. She turned her face away, hoping Walderhurst would not observe
her. This was the first time she had heard him utter his dead wife's
name. She had never heard anyone speak it. Audrey had evidently not been
a much-beloved or regretted person. But she had had a son.
Her primitive soul had scarcely dared to approach, even with awe, the
thought of such a possibility for herself. As in the past she had not
had the temerity to dream of herself as a woman who possessed
attractions likely to lead to marriage, so she was mentally restrained
in these days. There was something spinster-like in the tenor of her
thoughts. But she would have laid down her life for this dull man's
happiness. And of late she had more than once blamed herself for
accepting so much, unthinkingly.
"I did not realise things properly," she had said to herself in humble
pain. "I ought to have been a girl, young and strong and beautiful. His
sacrifice was too great, it was immense."
It had been nothing of the sort. He had pleased himself and done what
was likely to tend, and had tended, altogether to his own ease and
comfort. In any case Emily Fox-Seton was a fine creature, and only
thirty-four, and with Alec Osborn at the other side of the globe the
question of leaving an heir had been less present and consequently had
dwindled in importance.
The nearness of the Osborns fretted him just now. If their child was a
son, he would be more fretted still. He was rather glad of a
possibility, just looming, of his being called away from England through
affairs of importance.
He had spoken to Emily of this possibility, and she had understood that,
as his movements and the length of his stay would be uncertain, she
would not accompany him.
"There is one drawback to our marriage," he said.
"Is it--is it anything I can remove?" Emily asked.
"No, though you are responsible for it. People seldom can remove the
drawbacks they are responsible for. You have taught me to miss you."
"Have I--have I?" cried Emily. "Oh! I _am_ happy!"
She was so happy that she felt that she must pass on some of her good
fortune to those who had less. She was beautifully kind to Hester
Osborn. Few days passed without the stopping of a Walderhurst carriage
before the door of The Kennel Farm. Sometimes Emily came herself to take
Mrs. Osborn to drive, sometimes she sent for her to come to lunch and
spend the day or night at Palstrey. She felt an interest in the young
woman which became an affection. She would have felt interested in her
if there had not existed a special reason to call forth sympathy. Hester
had many curious and new subjects for conversation. Emily liked her
descriptions of Indian life and her weird little stories of the natives.
She was charmed with Ameerah, whose nose rings and native dress,
combining themselves with her dark mystic face, rare speech, and
gliding, silent movements, awakened awe in the rustics and mingled
distrust and respect in the servants' hall at Palstrey.
"She's most respectably behaved, my lady, though foreign and strange in
her manners," was Jane Cupp's comment. "But she has a way of looking at
a person--almost stealthy--that's upset me many a time when I've noticed
it suddenly. They say that she knows things, like fortune-telling and
spells and love potions. But she will only speak of them quite secret."
Emily gathered that Jane Cupp was afraid of the woman, and kept a
cautious eye upon her.
"She is a very faithful servant, Jane," she answered. "She is devoted to
Mrs. Osborn."
"I am sure she is, my lady. I've read in books about the faithfulness of
black people. They say they're more faithful than white ones."
"Not more faithful than _some_ white ones," said Lady Walderhurst with
her good smile. "Ameerah is not more faithful than you, I'm very sure."
"Oh, my lady!" ejaculated Jane, turning red with pleasure. "I do hope
not. I shouldn't like to think she could be."
In fact the tropic suggestion of the Ayah's personality had warmed the
imagination of the servants' hall, and there had been much talk of many
things, of the Osborns as well as of their servants, and thrilling
stories of East Indian life had been related by Walderhurst's man, who
was a travelled person. Captain Osborn had good sport on these days, and
sport was the thing he best loved. He was of the breed of man who can
fish, hunt, or shoot all day, eat robust meals and sleep heavily all
night; who can do this every day of a year, and in so doing reach his
highest point of desire in existence. He knew no other aspirations in
life than such as the fortunes of a man like Walderhurst could put him
in possession of. Nature herself had built him after the model of the
primeval type of English country land-owner. India with her blasting and
stifling hot seasons and her steaming rains gave him nothing that he
desired, and filled him with revolt against Fate every hour of his life.
His sanguine body loathed and grew restive under heat. At The Kennel
Farm, when he sprang out of his bed in the fresh sweetness of the
morning and plunged into his tub, he drew every breath with a physical
rapture. The air which swept in through the diamond-paned, ivy-hung
casements was a joy.
"Good Lord!" he would cry out to Hester through her half-opened door,
"what mornings! how a man _lives_ and feels the blood rushing through
his veins! Rain or shine, it's all the same to me. I can't stay indoors.
Just to tramp through wet or dry heather, or under dripping or shining
trees, is enough. How can one believe one has ever lain sweating with
one's tongue lolling out, and listened to the whining creak of the
punkah through nights too deadly hot to sleep in! It's like remembering
hell while one lives in Paradise."
"We shan't live in Paradise long," Hester said once with some
bitterness. "Hell is waiting for us."
"Damn it! don't remind a man. There are times when I don't believe it."
He almost snarled the answer. It was true that his habit was to enhance
the pleasure of his days by thrusting into the background all
recollections of the reality of any other existence than that of the
hour. As he tramped through fern and heather he would remember nothing
but that there was a chance--there was chance, good Lord! After a man
not over strong reached fifty-four or five, there were more chances than
there had been earlier.