return from them with a resentful, sombre look, as if his reflections
had not been pleasant company for him. In truth they were not pleasant
company. He was beset by thoughts he did not exactly care to be beset
by--thoughts which led him farther than he really cared to go, which did
not incline him to the close companionship of Lady Walderhurst. It was
these thoughts which led him on his long rides; it was one of them which
impelled him, one morning, as he was passing a heap of broken stone,
piled for the mending of the ways by the roadside, to touch Faustine
with heel and whip. The astonished young animal sprang aside curvetting.
She did not understand, and to horse-nature the uncomprehended is
alarming. She was more bewildered and also more fretted when, in passing
the next stone heap, she felt the same stinging touches. What did it
mean? Was she to avoid this thing, to leap at sight of it, to do what?
She tossed her delicate head and snorted in her trouble. The country
road was at some distance from Palstrey, and was little frequented. No
one was in sight. Osborn glanced about him to make sure of this fact. A
long stretch of road lay before him, with stone heaps piled at regular
intervals. He had taken a big whiskey and soda at the last wayside inn
he had passed, and drink did not make him drunk so much as mad. He
pushed the mare ahead, feeling in just the humour to try experiments
with her.
* * * * *
"Alec is very determined that you shall be safe on Faustine," Hester
said to Emily. "He takes her out every day."
"It is very good of him," answered Emily.
Hester thought she looked a trifle nervous, and wondered why. She did
not say anything about the riding lessons, and in fact had seemed of
late less eager and interested. In the first place, it had been Alec who
had postponed, now it was she. First one trifling thing and then another
seemed to interpose.
"The mare is as safe as a feather-bed," Osborn said to her one afternoon
when they were taking tea on the lawn at Palstrey. "You had better begin
now if you wish to accomplish anything before Lord Walderhurst comes
back. What do you hear from him as to his return?"
Emily had heard that he was likely to be detained longer than he had
expected. It seemed always to be the case that people were detained by
such business. He was annoyed, but it could not be helped. There was a
rather tired look in her eyes and she was paler than usual.
"I am going up to town to-morrow," she said. "The riding lessons might
begin after I come back."
"Are you anxious about anything?" Hester asked her as she was preparing
for the drive back to The Kennel Farm.
"No, no," Emily answered. "Only--"
"Only what?"
"I should be so glad if--if he were not away."
Hester gazed reflectively at her suddenly quivering face.
"I don't think I ever saw a woman so fond of a man," she said.
Emily stood still. She was quite silent. Her eyes slowly filled. She had
never been able to say much about what she felt for Walderhurst. Hers
was a large, dumb, primitive affection.
She sat at her open bedroom window a long time that evening. She rested
her chin upon her hand and looked up at the deeps of blue powdered with
the diamond dust of stars. It seemed to her that she had never looked up
and seen such myriads of stars before. She felt far away from earthly
things and tremulously uplifted. During the last two weeks she had lived
in a tumult of mind, of amazement, of awe, of hope and fear. No wonder
that she looked pale and that her face was full of anxious yearning.
There were such wonders in the world, and she, Emily Fox-Seton, no,
Emily Walderhurst, seemed to have become part of them.
She clasped her hands tight together and leaned forward into the night
with her face turned upwards. Very large drops began to roll fast down
her cheeks, one after the other. The argument of scientific observation
might have said she was hysterical, and whether with or without reason
is immaterial. She did not try to check her tears or wipe them away,
because she did not know that she was crying. She began to pray, and
heard herself saying the Lord's Prayer like a child.
"Our Father who art in Heaven--Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be
Thy name," she murmured imploringly.
She said the prayer to the end, and then began it over again. She said
it three or four times, and her appeal for daily bread and the
forgiveness of trespasses expressed what her inarticulate nature could
not have put into words. Beneath the entire vault of heaven's dark blue
that night there was nowhere lifted to the Unknown a prayer more humbly
passion-full and gratefully imploring than her final whisper.
"For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.
Amen, amen."
When she left her seat at the window and turned towards the room again,
Jane Cupp, who was preparing for the morrow's journey and was just
entering with a dress over her arm, found herself restraining a start at
sight of her.
"I hope you are quite well, my lady," she faltered.
"Yes," Lady Walderhurst answered. "I think I am very well--very well,
Jane. You will be quite ready for the early train to-morrow morning."
"Yes, my lady, quite."
"I have been thinking," said Emily gently, almost in a tone of reverie,
"that if your uncle had not wanted your mother so much it would have
been nice to have her here with us. She is such an experienced person,
and so kind. I never forget how kind she was to me when I had the little
room in Mortimer Street."
"Oh! my lady, you was kind to _us_," cried Jane.
She recalled afterwards, with tears, how her ladyship moved nearer to
her and took her hand with what Jane called "her wonderful _good_ look,"
which always brought a lump to her throat.
"But I always count on you, Jane," she said. "I count on you so much."
"Oh! my lady," Jane cried again, "it's my comfort to believe it. I'd lay
down my life for your ladyship, I would indeed."
Emily sat down, and on her face there was a soft, uplifted smile.
"Yes," she said, and Jane Cupp saw that she was reflective again, and
the words were not addressed exactly, to herself, "one would be quite
ready to lay down one's life for the person one loved. It seems even a
little thing, doesn't it?"
Chapter Fourteen
Lady Walderhurst remained in town a week, and Jane Cupp remained with
her, in the house in Berkeley Square, which threw open its doors to
receive them on their arrival quite as if they had never left it. The
servants' hall brightened temporarily in its hope that livelier doings
might begin to stir the establishment, but Jane Cupp was able to inform
inquirers that the visit was only to be a brief one.
"We are going back to Palstrey next Monday," she explained. "My lady
prefers the country, and she is very fond of Palstrey; and no wonder. It
doesn't seem at all likely she'll come to stay in London until his
lordship gets back."
"We hear," said the head housemaid, "that her ladyship is very kind to
Captain Osborn and his wife, and that Mrs. Osborn's in a delicate state
of health."
"It would be a fine thing for us if it was in our family," remarked an
under housemaid who was pert.
Jane Cupp looked extremely reserved.
"Is it true," the pert housemaid persisted, "that the Osborns can't
abide her?"
"It's true," said Jane, severely, "that she's goodness itself to them,
and they ought to adore her."
"We hear they don't," put in the tallest footman. "And who wonders. If
she was an angel, there's just a chance that she may give Captain Osborn
a wipe in the eye, though she is in her thirties."
"It's not for _us_," said Jane, stiffly, "to discuss thirties or forties
or fifties either, which are no business of ours. There's one gentleman,
and him a marquis, as chose her over the heads of two beauties in their
teens, at least."
"Well, for the matter of that," admitted the tall footman, "I'd have
chose her myself, for she's a fine woman."
Lady Maria was just on the point of leaving South Audley Street to make
some visits in the North, but she came and lunched with Emily, and was
in great form.
She had her own opinion of a number of matters, some of which she
discussed, some of which she kept to herself. She lifted her gold
lorgnette and looked Emily well over.
"Upon my word, Emily," she said, "I am proud of you. You are one of my
successes. Your looks are actually improving. There's something rather
etherealised about your face to-day. I quite agree with Walderhurst in
all the sentimental things he says about you."
She said this last partly because she liked Emily and knew it would
please her to hear that her husband went to the length of dwelling on
her charms in his conversation with other people, partly because it
entertained her to see the large creature's eyelids flutter and a big
blush sweep her cheek.
"He really was in great luck when he discovered you," her ladyship went
on briskly. "As for that, I was in luck myself. Suppose you had been a
girl who could not have been left. As Walderhurst is short of female
relatives, it would have fallen to me to decently dry-nurse you. And
there would have been the complications arising from a girl being baby
enough to want to dance about to places, and married enough to feel
herself entitled to defy her chaperone; she couldn't have been trusted
to chaperone herself. As it is, Walderhurst, can go where duty calls,
etc., and I can make my visits and run about, and you, dear thing, are
quite happy at Palstrey playing Lady Bountiful and helping the little
half-breed woman to expect her baby. I daresay you sit and make dolly
shirts and christening robes hand in hand."
"We enjoy it all very much," Emily answered, adding imploringly, "please
don't call her a little half-breed woman. She's such a dear little
thing, Lady Maria."
Lady Maria indulged in the familiar chuckle and put up her lorgnette to
examine her again.
"There's a certain kind of early Victorian saintliness about you, Emily
Walderhurst, which makes my joy," she said. "You remind me of Lady
Castlewood, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Sedley, with the spitefulness
and priggishness and catty ways left out. You are as nice as Thackeray
_thought_ they were, poor mistaken man. I am not going to suffuse you
with blushes by explaining to you that there is what my nephew would
call a jolly good reason why, if you were not an early Victorian and
improved Thackerayian saint, you would not be best pleased at finding
yourself called upon to assist at this interesting occasion. Another
kind of woman would probably feel like a cat towards the little Osborn.
But even the mere reason itself, as a reason, has not once risen in your
benign and pellucid mind. You have a pellucid mind, Emily; I should be
rather proud of the word if I had invented it myself to describe you.
But I didn't. It was Walderhurst. You have actually wakened up the man's
intellects, such as they are."
She evidently had a number of opinions of the Osborns. She liked neither
of them, but it was Captain Osborn she especially _dis_liked.
"He is really an underbred person," she explained, "and he hasn't the
sharpness to know that is the reason Walderhurst detests him. He had
vulgar, cheap sort of affairs, and nearly got into the kind of trouble
people don't forgive. What a fool a creature in his position is to
offend the taste of the man he may inherit from, and who, if he were not
antagonistic to him, would regard him as a sort of duty. It wasn't his
immorality particularly. Nobody is either moral or immoral in these
days, but penniless persons must be decent. It's all a matter of taste
and manners. I haven't any morals myself, my dear, but I have beautiful
manners. A woman can have the kind of manners which keep her from
breaking the Commandments. As to the Commandments, they are awfully easy
things _not_ to break. Who wants to break them, good Lord! Thou shall do
no murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit, etc. Thou shalt
not bear false witness. That's simply gossip and lying, and they are bad
manners. If you have good manners, you _don't_."
She chatted on in her pungent little worldly, good-humoured way through
the making of a very excellent lunch. After which she settled her smart
bonnet with clever touches, kissed Emily on both cheeks, and getting
into her brougham rolled off smiling and nodding.
Emily stood at the drawing-room window and watched her equipage roll
round the square and into Charles Street, and then turned away into the
big, stately empty room, sighing without intending to do so while she
smiled herself.
"She's so witty and so amusing," she said; "but one would no more think
of _telling_ her anything than one would think of catching a butterfly
and holding it while one made it listen. She would be so _bored_ if she
was confided in."
Which was most true. Never in her life had her ladyship allowed herself
the indiscretion of appearing a person in whom confidences might be
reposed. She had always had confidences enough of her own to take care
of, without sharing those of other people.
"Good heavens!" she had exclaimed once, "I should as soon think of
assuming another woman's wrinkles."
On the first visit Lady Walderhurst made to The Kennel Farm the morning
after her return to Palstrey, when Alec Osborn helped her from her
carriage, he was not elated by the fact that he had never seen her look
so beautifully alive and blooming during his knowledge of her. There was
a fine rose on her cheek, and her eyes were large and happily illumined.
"How well you look!" broke from him with an involuntariness he was
alarmed to realise as almost spiteful. The words were an actual
exclamation which he had not meant to utter, and Emily Walderhurst even
started a trifle and looked at him with a moment's question.
"But you look well, too," she answered. "Palstrey agrees with both of
us. You have such a colour."
"I have been riding," he replied. "I told you I meant to know Faustine
thoroughly before I let you mount her. She is ready for you now. Can you
take your first lesson to-morrow?"
"I--I don't quite know," she hesitated. "I will tell you a little later.
Where is Hester?"
Hester was in the drawing-room. She was lying on a sofa before an open
window and looking rather haggard and miserable. She had, in fact, just
had a curious talk with Alec which had ended in something like a scene.
As Hester's health grew more frail, her temper became more fierce, and
of late there had been times when a certain savagery, concealed with
difficulty in her husband's moods, affected her horribly.
This morning she felt a new character in Emily's manner. She was timid
and shy, and a little awkward. Her child-like openness of speech and
humour seemed obscured. She had less to say than usual, and at the same
time there was a suggestion of restless unease about her. Hester Osborn,
after a few minutes, began to have an odd feeling that the woman's eyes
held a question or a desire in them.
She had brought some superb roses from the Manor gardens, and she moved
about arranging them for Hester in vases.
"It is beautiful to come back to the country," she said. "When I get
into the carriage at the station and drive through the sweet air, I
always feel as if I were beginning to live again, and as if in London I
had not been quite alive. It seemed so _heavenly_ in the rose garden at
Palstrey to-day, to walk about among those thousands of blooming lovely
things breathing scent and nodding their heavy, darling heads."
"The roads are in a beautiful condition for riding," Hester said, "and
Alec says that Faustine is perfect. You ought to begin to-morrow
morning. Shall you?"
She spoke the words somewhat slowly, and her face did not look happy.
But, then, it never was a really happy face. The days of her youth had
been too full of the ironies of disappointment.
There was a second's silence, and then she said again:
"Shall you, if it continues fine?"
Emily's hands were full of roses, both hands, and Hester saw both hands
and roses tremble. She turned round slowly and came towards her. She
looked nervous, awkward, abashed, and as if for that moment she was a
big girl of sixteen appealing to her and overwhelmed with queer
feelings, and yet the depths of her eyes held a kind of trembling,
ecstatic light. She came and stood before her, holding the trembling
roses as if she had been called up for confession.
"I--I mustn't," she half whispered. The corners of her lips drooped and
quivered, and her voice was so low that Hester could scarcely hear it.
But she started and half sat up.
"You _mustn't_?" she gasped; yes, really it was gasped.
Emily's hand trembled so that the roses began to fall one by one,
scattering a rain of petals as they dropped.
"I mustn't," she repeated, low and shakily. "I had--reason.--I went to
town to see--somebody. I saw Sir Samuel Brent, and he told me I must
not. He is quite sure."
She tried to calm herself and smile. But the smile quivered and ended in
a pathetic contortion of her face. In the hope of gaining decent
self-control, she bent down to pick up the dropped roses. Before she had
picked up two, she let all the rest fall, and sank kneeling among them,
her face in her hands.
"Oh, Hester, Hester!" she panted, with sweet, stupid unconciousness of
the other woman's heaving chest and glaring eyes. "It has come to me
too, actually, after all."
Chapter Fifteen
The Palstrey Manor carriage had just rolled away carrying Lady
Walderhurst home. The big, low-ceilinged, oak-beamed farm-house parlour
was full of the deep golden sunlight of the late afternoon, the air was
heavy with the scent of roses and sweet-peas and mignonette, the
adorable fragrance of English country-house rooms. Captain Osborn
inhaled it at each breath as he stood and looked out of the
diamond-paned window, watching the landau out of sight. He felt the
scent and the golden glow of the sunset light as intensely as he felt
the dead silence which reigned between himself and Hester almost with
the effect of a physical presence. Hester was lying upon the sofa again,
and he knew she was staring at his back with that sardonic widening of
her long eyes, a thing he hated, and which always foreboded things not
pleasant to face.
He did not turn to face them until the footman's cockade had disappeared
finally behind the tall hedge, and the tramp of the horses' feet was
deadening itself in the lane. When he ceased watching and listening, he
wheeled round suddenly.
"What does it all mean?" he demanded. "Hang her foolish airs and
graces._ Why_ won't she ride, for she evidently does not intend to."
Hester laughed, a hard, short, savage little un-mirthful sound it was.
"No, she doesn't intend to," she answered, "for many a long day, at
least, for many a month. She has Sir Samuel Brent's orders to take the
greatest care of herself."
"Brent's? Brent's?"
Hester struck her lean little hands together and laughed this time with
a hint at hysteric shrillness.
"I told you so, I told you so!" she cried. "I knew it would be so, I
knew it! By the time she reaches her thirty-sixth birthday there will be
a new Marquis of Walderhurst, and he won't be either you or yours." And
as she finished, she rolled over on the sofa, and bit the cushions with
her teeth as she lay face downwards on them. "He won't be you, or belong
to you," she reiterated, and then she struck the cushions with her
clenched fist.
He rushed over to her, and seizing her by the shoulders shook her to and
fro.
"You don't know what you are talking about," he said; "you don't know
what you are saying."
"I do! I do! I do!" she screamed under her breath, and beat the cushions
at every word. "It's true, it's true. She's drivelling about it,
drivelling!"
Alec Osborn threw back his head, drawing in a hard breath which was
almost a snort of fury.
"By God!" he cried, "if she went out on Faustine now, she would not come
back!"
His rage had made him so far beside himself that he had said more than
he intended, far more than he would have felt safe. But the girl was as
far beside herself as he was, and she took him up.
"Serve her right," she cried. "I shouldn't care. I hate her! I hate her!
I told you once I couldn't, but I do. She's the biggest fool that ever
lived. She knew _nothing_ of what I felt. I believe she thought I would
rejoice with her. I didn't know whether I should shriek in her face or
scream out laughing. Her eyes were as big as saucers, and she looked at
me as if she felt like the Virgin Mary after the Annunciation. Oh! the
stupid, _inhuman_ fool!"
Her words rushed forth faster and faster, she caught her breath with
gasps, and her voice grew more shrill at every sentence. Osborn shook
her again.
"Keep quiet," he ordered her. "You are going into hysterics, and it
won't do. Get hold of yourself."
"Go for Ameerah," she gasped, "or I'm afraid I can't. She knows what to
do."
He went for Ameerah, and the silently gliding creature came bringing her
remedies with her. She looked at her mistress with stealthily
questioning but affectionate eyes, and sat down on the floor rubbing her
hands and feet in a sort of soothing massage. Osborn went out of the
room, and the two women were left together. Ameerah knew many ways of
calming her mistress's nerves, and perhaps one of the chief ones was to
lead her by subtle powers to talk out her rages and anxieties. Hester
never knew that she was revealing herself and her moods until after her
interviews with the Ayah were over. Sometimes an hour or so had passed
before she began to realise that she had let out things which she had
meant to keep secret. It was never Ameerah who talked, and Hester was
never conscious that she talked very much herself. But afterwards she
saw that the few sentences she had uttered were such as would satisfy
curiosity if the Ayah felt it. Also she was not, on the whole, at all
sure that the woman felt it. She showed no outward sign of any interest
other than the interest of a deep affection. She loved her young
mistress to-day as passionately as she had loved her as a child when she
had held her in her bosom as if she had been her own. By the time Emily
Walderhurst had reached Palstrey, Ameerah knew many things. She
understood that her mistress was as one who, standing upon the brink of
a precipice, was being slowly but surely pushed over its edge--pushed,
pushed by Fate. This was the thing imaged in her mind when she shut
herself up in her room and stood alone in the midst of the chamber
clenching her dark hands high above her white veiled head, and uttering
curses which were spells, and spells which were curses.
Emily was glad that she had elected to be alone as much as possible, and
had not invited people to come and stay with her. She had not invited
people, in honest truth, because she felt shy of the responsibility of
entertainment while Walderhurst was not with her. It would have been
proper to invite his friends, and his friends were all people she was
too much in awe of, and too desirous to please to be able to enjoy
frankly as society. She had told herself that when she had been married
a few years she would be braver.
And now her gladness was so devout that it was pure rejoicing. How could
she have been calm, how could she have been conversational, while
through her whole being there surged but one thought. She was sure that
while she talked to people she would have been guilty of looking as if
she was thinking of something not in the least connected with
themselves.
If she had been less romantically sentimental in her desire to avoid all
semblance of burdening her husband she would have ordered him home at
once, and demanded as a right the protection of his dignity and
presence. If she had been less humble she would have felt the importance
of her position and the gravity of the claims it gave her to his
consideration, instead of being lost in prayerful gratitude to heaven.
She had been rather stupidly mistaken in not making a confidante of Lady
Maria Bayne, but she had been, in her big girl shyness, entirely like
herself. In some remote part of her nature she had shrunk from a certain
look of delighted amusement which she had known would have betrayed
itself, despite her ladyship's good intentions, in the eyes assisted by
the smart gold lorgnette. She knew she was inclined to be
hyper-emotional on this subject, and she felt that if she had seen the
humour trying to conceal itself behind the eye-glasses, she might have
been hysterical enough to cry even while she tried to laugh, and pass
her feeling off lightly. Oh, no! Oh, no! Somehow she _knew_ that at such
a moment, for some fantastic, if subtle, reason, Lady Maria would only
see her as Emily Fox-Seton, that she would have actually figured before
her for an instant as poor Emily Fox-Seton making an odd confession. She
could not have endured it without doing something foolish, she felt that
she would not, indeed.
So Lady Maria went gaily away to make her round of visits and be the
amusing old life and soul of house-party after house-party, suspecting
nothing of a possibility which would actually have sobered her for a
moment.