When Doris reached home that evening,
the little Kensington house, with half its carpets
up and all but two of its rooms under dust-sheets,
looked particularly lonely and unattractive. Arthur’s
study was unrecognisable. No cheerful litter
anywhere. No smell of tobacco, no sign of a male
presence! Doris, walking restlessly from room
to room, had never felt so forsaken, so dismally certain
that the best of life was done. Moreover, she
had fully expected to find a letter from Arthur waiting
for her; and there was nothing.
It was positively comic that under
such circumstances anybody should expect her Doris
Meadows to trouble her head about Lady Dunstable’s
affairs. Of course she would feel it if her son
made a ridiculous and degrading marriage. But
why not? why shouldn’t he come to
grief like anybody else’s son? Why should
heaven and earth be moved in order to prevent it? especially
by the woman to whose possible jealousy and pain Lady
Dunstable had certainly never given the most passing
thought.
All the same, the distress shown by
that odd girl, Miss Wigram, and her appeal both to
the painter and his niece to intervene and save the
foolish youth, kept echoing in Doris’s memory,
although neither she nor Bentley had received it with
any cordiality. Doris had soon made out that
this girl, Alice Wigram, was indeed the clergyman’s
daughter whom Lady Dunstable had snubbed so unkindly
some twelve months before. She was evidently
a sweet-natured, susceptible creature, to whom Lord
Dunstable had taken a fancy, in his fatherly way, during
occasional visits to her father’s rectory, and
of whom he had spoken to his wife. That Lady
Dunstable should have unkindly slighted this motherless
girl, who had evidently plenty of natural capacity
under her shyness, was just like her, and Doris’s
feelings of antagonism to the tyrant were only sharpened
by her acquaintance with the victim. Why should
Miss Wigram worry her self? Lord Dunstable?
Well, but after all, capable men should keep such
wives in order. If Lord Dunstable had not been
scandalously weak, Lady Dunstable would not have become
a terror to her sex.
As for Uncle Charles, he had simply
declined all responsibility in the matter. He
had never seen the Dunstables, wouldn’t know
them from Adam, and had no concern whatever in what
happened to their son. The situation merely excited
in him one man’s natural amusement at the folly
of another. The boy was more than of age.
Really he and his mother must look after themselves.
To meddle with the young man’s love affairs,
simply because he happened to visit your studio in
the company of a lady, would be outrageous. So
the painter laughed, shook his head, and went back
to his picture. Then Miss Wigram, looking despondently
from the silent Doris to the artist at work, had said
with sudden energy, “I must find out about her!
I’m I’m sure she’s a horrid
woman! Can you tell me, sir” she
addressed Bentley “the name of the
gentleman who was painting her before she came here?”
Bentley had hummed and hawed a little,
twisting his red moustache, and finally had given
the name and address; whereupon Miss Wigram had gathered
up her papers, some of which had drifted to the floor
between her table and Doris’s easel, and had
taken an immediate departure, a couple of hours before
her usual time, throwing, as she left the studio,
a wistful and rather puzzled look at Mrs. Meadows.
Doris congratulated herself that she
had kept her own counsel on the subject of the Dunstables,
both with Uncle Charles and Miss Wigram. Neither
of them had guessed that she had any personal acquaintance
with them. She tried now to put the matter out
of her thoughts. Jane brought in a tray for her
mistress, and Doris supped meagrely in Arthur’s
deserted study, thinking, as the sunset light came
in across the dusty street, of that flame and splendour
which such weather must be kindling on the moors,
of the blue and purple distances, the glens of rocky
mountains hung in air, “the gleam, the shadow,
and the peace supreme”! She remembered
how on their September honeymoon they had wandered
in Ross-shire, how the whole land was dyed crimson
by the heather, and how impossible it was to persuade
Arthur to walk discreetly rather than, like any cockney
tripper, with his arm round his sweetheart. Scotland
had not been far behind the Garden of Eden under those
circumstances. But Arthur was now pursuing the
higher, the intellectual joys.
She finished her supper, and then
sat down to write to her husband. Was she going
to tell him anything about the incident of the afternoon?
Why should she? Why should she give him the chance
of becoming more than ever Lady Dunstable’s
friend pegging out an eternal claim upon
her gratitude?
Doris wrote her letter. She described
the progress of the spring cleaning; she reported
that her sixth illustration was well forward, and
that Uncle Charles was wrestling with another historical
picture, a machine neither better nor worse
than all the others. She thought that after all
Jane would soon give warning; and she, Doris, had spent
three pounds in petty cash since he went away; how,
she could not remember, but it was all in her account
book.
And she concluded:
I understand then that we meet at Crewe
on Friday fortnight? I have heard of a lodging
near Capel Curig which sounds delightful. We
might do a week’s climbing and then go on
to the sea. I really shall want a
holiday. Has there not been ten minutes even since
you arrived to write a letter in? or
a postcard? Shall I send you a few addressed?
Having thus finished what seemed to
her the dullest letter she had ever written in her
life, she looked at it a while, irresolutely, then
put it in an envelope hastily, addressed, stamped
it, and rang the bell for Jane to run across the street
with it and post it. After which, she sat idle
a little while with flushed cheeks, while the twilight
gathered.
The gate of the trim front garden
swung on its hinges. Doris turned to look.
She saw, to her astonishment, that the girl-accountant
of the morning, Miss Wigram, was coming up the flagged
path to the house. What could she want?
“Oh, Mrs. Meadows I’m
so sorry to disturb you ” said the
visitor, in some agitation, as Doris, summoned by
Jane, entered the dust-sheeted drawing-room.
“But you dropped an envelope with an address
this afternoon. I picked it up with some of my
papers and never discovered it till I got home.”
She held out the envelope. Doris
took it, and flushed vividly. It was the envelope
with his Scotch address which Arthur had written out
for her before leaving home “care
of the Lord Dunstable, Franick Castle, Pitlochry,
Perthshire, N.B.” She had put it in her
portfolio, out of which it had no doubt slipped while
she was at work.
She and Miss Wigram eyed each other.
The girl was evidently agitated. But she seemed
not to know how to begin what she had to say.
Doris broke the silence.
“You were astonished to find that I know the
Dunstables?”
“Oh, no! I didn’t
think ” stammered her visitor “I
supposed some friend of yours might be staying there.”
“My husband is staying there,”
said Doris, quietly. Really it was too much trouble
to tell a falsehood. Her pride refused.
“Oh, I see!” cried Miss
Wigram, though in fact she was more bewildered than
before. Why should this extraordinary little lady
have behaved at the studio as if she had never heard
of the Dunstables, and be now confessing that her
husband was actually staying in their house?
Doris smiled with perfect self-possession.
“Please sit down. You think
it odd, of course, that I didn’t tell you I
knew the Dunstables, while we were talking about them.
The fact is I didn’t want to be mixed up with
the affair at all. We have only lately made acquaintance
with the Dunstables. Lady Dunstable is my husband’s
friend. I don’t like her very much.
But neither of us knows her well enough to go and
tell her tales about her son.”
Miss Wigram considered her
gentle, troubled eyes bent upon Doris. “Of
course I know how many people
dislike Lady Dunstable. She did a rather
cruel thing to me once. The thought of it humiliated
and discouraged me for a long time. It made me
almost glad to leave home. And of course she
hasn’t won Mr. Herbert’s confidence at
all. She has always snubbed and disapproved of
him. Oh, I knew him very little. I have
hardly ever spoken to him. You saw he didn’t
recognise me this afternoon. But my father used
to go over to Crosby Ledgers to coach him in the holidays,
and he often told me that as a boy he was terrified
of his mother. She either took no notice of him
at all, or she was always sneering at him, and scolding
him. As soon as ever he came of age and got a
little money of his own, he declared he wouldn’t
live at home. His father wanted him to go into
Parliament or the army, but he said he hated the army,
and if he was such a dolt as his mother thought him
it would be ridiculous to attempt politics. And
so he just drifted up to town and looked out for people
that would make much of him, and wouldn’t snub
him. And that, of course, was how he got into
the toils of a woman like that!”
The girl threw up her hands tragically.
Doris sat up, with energy.
“But what on earth,” she said, “does
it matter to you or to me?”
“Oh, can’t you see?”
said the other, flushing deeply, and with the tears
in her eyes. “My father had one of Lord
Dunstable’s livings. We lived on that estate
for years. Everybody loved Lord Dunstable.
And though Lady Dunstable makes enemies, there’s
a great respect for the family. They’ve
been there since Queen Elizabeth’s time.
And it’s dreadful to think of a woman
like well, like that! reigning
at Crosby Ledgers. I think of the poor people.
Lady Dunstable’s good to them; though of course
you wouldn’t hear anything about it, unless you
lived there. She tries to do her duty to them she
really does in her own way. And, of
course, they respect her. No Dunstable
has ever done anything disgraceful! Isn’t
there something in ‘Noblesse oblige’?
Think of this woman at the head of that estate!”
“Well, upon my word,”
said Doris, after a pause, “you are feudal.
Don’t you feel yourself that you are old-fashioned?”
Mrs. Meadows’s half-sarcastic
look at first intimidated her visitor, and then spurred
her into further attempts to explain herself.
“I daresay it’s old-fashioned,”
she said slowly, “but I’m sure it’s
what father would have felt. Anyway, I went off
to try and find out what I could. I went first
to a little club I belong to for professional
women near the Strand, and I asked one or
two women I found there who know artists and
models and write for papers. And very
soon I found out a great deal. I didn’t
have to go to the man whose address Mr. Bentley gave
me. Madame Vavasour is a horrid woman!
This is not the first young man she’s fleeced by
a long way. There was a man younger
than Mr. Dunstable, a boy of nineteen three
years ago. She got him to promise to marry her;
and the parents came down, and paid her enormously
to let him go. Now she’s got through all
that money, and she boasts she’s going to marry
young Dunstable before his parents know anything about
it. She’s going to make sure of a peerage
this time. Oh, she’s odious! She’s
greedy, she’s vulgar, she’s false!
And of course” the girl’s eyes
grew wide and scared “there may be
other things much worse. How do we know?”
“How do we know indeed!”
said Doris, with a shrug. “Well!” she
turned her eyes full upon her guest “and
what are you going to do?”
An eager look met hers.
“Couldn’t you couldn’t
you write to Mr. Meadows, and ask him to warn Lady
Dunstable?”
Doris shook her head.
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
The girl flushed uncomfortably.
“You see, father quarrelled with her about that
unkind thing she did to me oh, it isn’t
worth telling! but he wrote her an angry
letter, and they never spoke afterwards. Lady
Dunstable never forgives that kind of thing. If
people find fault with her, she just drops them.
I don’t believe she’d read a letter from
me!”
“Les offenses, etc.,”
said Doris, meditating. “But what are the
facts? Has the boy actually promised to marry
her? She may have been telling lies to my uncle.”
“She tells everybody so.
I saw a girl who knows her quite well. They write
for the same paper it’s a fashion
paper. You saw that hat, by the way, she had
on? She gets them as perquisites from the smart
shops she writes about. She has a whole cupboard
of them at home, and when she wants money she sells
them for what she can get. Well, she told me that
Madame they all call her Madame, though
they all know quite well that she’s not married,
and that her name is Flink boasts perpetually
of her engagement. It seems that he was ill in
the winter in his lodgings. His mother
knew nothing about it he wouldn’t
tell her, and Madame nursed him, and made a fuss of
him. And Mr. Dunstable thought he owed her a
great deal and she made scenes and told
him she had compromised herself by coming to nurse
him and all that kind of nonsense.
And at last he promised to marry her in
writing. And now she’s so sure of him that
she just bullies him you saw how she ordered
him about to-day.”
“Well, why doesn’t he
marry her, if he’s such a fool why
hasn’t he married her long ago?” cried
Doris.
Miss Wigram looked distressed.
“I don’t know. My
friend thinks it’s his father. She believes,
at least, that he doesn’t want to get married
without telling Lord Dunstable; and that, of course,
means telling his mother. And he hates the thought
of the letters and the scenes. So he keeps it
hanging on; and lately Madame has been furious with
him, and is always teasing and sniffing at him.
He’s dreadfully weak, and my friend’s afraid
that before he’s made up his own mind what to
do that woman will have carried him off to a registry
office and got the horrid thing done for
good and all.”
There was silence a moment. After
which Doris said, with a cold decision:
“You can’t imagine how
absurd it seems to me that you should come and ask
me to help Lady Dunstable with her son. There
is nobody in the world less helpless than Lady Dunstable,
and nobody who would be less grateful for being helped.
I really cannot meddle with it.”
She rose as she spoke, and Miss Wigram rose too.
“Couldn’t you couldn’t
you ” said the girl pleadingly “just
ask Mr. Meadows to warn Lord Dunstable? I’m
thinking of the villagers, and the farmers, and the
schools all the people we used to love.
Father was there twenty years! To think of the
dear place given over some day to
that creature!”
Her charming eyes actually filled
with tears. Doris was touched, but at the same
time set on edge. This loyalty that people born
and bred in the country feel to our English country
system what an absurd and unreal frame
of mind! And when our country system produces
Lady Dunstables!
“They have such a pull!” she
thought angrily “such a hideously
unfair pull, over other people! The way everybody
rushes to help them when they get into a mess to
pick up the pieces and sweep it all up!
It’s irrational it’s sickening!
Let them look after themselves and pay for
their own misdeeds like the rest of us.”
“I can’t interfere I
really can’t!” she said, straightening
her slim shoulders. “It is not as though
we were old friends of Lord and Lady Dunstable.
Don’t you see how very awkward it would be?
Let me advise you just to watch the thing a little,
and then to apply to somebody in the Crosby Ledgers
neighbourhood. You must have some friends or
acquaintances there, who at any rate could do more
than we could. And perhaps after all it’s
a mare’s nest, and the young man doesn’t
mean to marry her at all!”
The girl’s anxious eyes scanned
Doris’s unyielding countenance; then with a
sigh she gave up her attempt, and said “Good-bye.”
Doris went with her to the door.
“We shall meet to-morrow, shan’t
we?” she said, feeling a vague compunction.
“And I suppose this woman will be there again.
You can keep an eye on her. Are you living alone or
are you with friends?”
“Oh, I’m in a boarding-house,”
said Miss Wigram, hastily. Then as though she
recognised the new softness in Doris’s look,
she added, “I’m quite comfortable there and
I’ve a great deal of work. Good night.”
“All alone! with
that gentle face and that terrible amount
of conscience hard lines!” thought
Doris, as she reflected on her visitor. “I
felt a black imp beside her!”
All the same, the letter which Mrs.
Meadows received by the following morning’s
post was not at all calculated to melt the “black
imp” further. Arthur wrote in a great hurry
to beg that she would not go on with their Welsh plans for
the moment.
Lady D has insisted
on my going on a short yachting cruise with her
and Miss Field, the week after next. She wants
to show me the West Coast, and they have a small
cottage in the Shetlands where we should stay
a night or two and watch the sea-birds. It may
keep me away another week or fortnight, but you
won’t mind, dear, will you? I am getting
famously rested, and really the house is very agreeable.
In these surroundings Lady Dunstable is less of the
bas-bleu, and more of the woman. You
must make up your mind to come another
year! You would soon get over your prejudice and
make friends with her. She looks after us
all she talks brilliantly and
I haven’t seen her rude to anybody since
I arrived. There are some very nice people
here, and altogether I am enjoying it. Don’t
you work too hard and don’t let
the servants harry you. Post just going.
Good night!
Another week or fortnight! five
weeks, or nearly, altogether. Doris was sorely
wounded. She went to look at herself in the mirror
over the chimney-piece. Was she not thin and
haggard for want of rest and holiday? Would not
the summer weather be all done by the time Arthur
graciously condescended to come back to her? Were
there not dark lines under her eyes, and was she not
feeling a limp and wretched creature, unfit for any
exertion? What was wrong with her? She hated
her drawing she hated everything.
And there was Arthur, proposing to go yachting with
Lady Dunstable! while she might toil and
moil all alone in this August
London! The tears rushed into her eyes. Her
pride only just saved her from a childish fit of crying.
But in the end resentment came to
her aid, together with an angry and redoubled curiosity
as to what might be happening to Lady Dunstable’s
precious son while Lady Dunstable was thus absorbed
in robbing other women of their husbands. Doris
hurried her small household affairs, that she might
get off early to the studio; and as she put on her
hat, her fancy drew vindictive pictures of the scene
which any day might realise the scene at
Franick Castle, when Lady Dunstable, unsuspecting,
should open the letter which announced to her the advent
of her daughter-in-law, Elena, nee Flink or
should gather the same unlovely fact from a casual
newspaper paragraph. As for interfering between
her and her rich deserts, Doris vowed to herself she
would not lift a finger. That incredibly forgiving
young woman, Miss Wigram, might do as she pleased.
But when a mother pursues her own selfish ends so as
to make her only son dislike and shun her, let her
take what comes. It was in the mood of an Erinnys
that Doris made her way northwards to Campden Hill,
and nobody perceiving the slight erect figure in the
corner of the omnibus could possibly have guessed
at the storm within.
The August day was hot and lifeless.
Heat mist lay over the park, and over the gardens
on the slopes of Campden Hill. Doris could hardly
drag her weary feet along, as she walked from where
the omnibus had set her down to her uncle’s
studio. But it was soon evident that within the
studio itself there was animation enough. From
the long passage approaching it Doris heard someone
shouting declaiming what appeared
to be verse. Madame, of course, reciting her own
poems poor Uncle Charles! Doris stopped
outside the door, which was slightly open, to listen,
and heard these astonishing lines delivered
very slowly and pompously, in a thick, strained voice:
“My heart is adamant!
The tear-drops drip and drip
Force their slow path,
and tear their desperate way.
The vulture Pain sits
close, to snip and snip and snip
My sad, sweet life to
ruin well-a-day!
I am deceived a
bleating lamb bereft! who goes
Baa-baaing to the moon
o’er lonely lands.
Through all my shivering
veins a tender fervour flows;
I cry to Love ’Reach
out, my Lord, thy hands!
And save me from these
ugly beasts who ramp and rage
Around me all day long beasts
fell and sore
Envy, and Hate, and
Calumny! do thou assuage
Their impious mouths,
O splendid Love, and floor
Their hideous tactics,
and their noisome spleen,
Withering to dust the
awful “Might-Have-Been!"’”
“Goodness! ‘Howls
the Sublime’ indeed!” thought Doris, gurgling
with laughter in the passage. As soon as she
had steadied her face she opened the studio door,
and perceived Lady Dunstable’s prospective daughter-in-law
standing in the middle of the studio, head thrown back
and hands outstretched, invoking the Cyprian.
The shriek of the first lines had died away in a stage
whisper; the reciter was glaring fiercely into vacancy.
Doris’s merry eyes devoured
the scene. On the chair from which the model
had risen she had deposited yet another hat, so large,
so audacious and beplumed that it seemed to have a
positive personality, a positive swagger of its own,
and to be winking roguishly at the audience.
Meanwhile Madame’s muslin dress of the day before
had been exchanged for something more appropriate
to the warmth of her poetry a tawdry flame-coloured
satin, in which her “too, too solid” frame
was tightly sheathed. Her coal-black hair, tragically
wild, looked as though no comb had been near it for
a month, and the gloves drawn half-way up the bare
arms hardly remembered they had ever been white.
A slovenly, dishevelled, vulgar woman,
reciting bombastic nonsense! And yet! a
touch of Southern magnificence, even of Southern grace,
amid the cockney squalor and finery. Doris coolly
recognised it, as she stood, herself invisible, behind
her uncle’s large easel. Thence she perceived
also the other persons in the studio: Bentley
sitting in front of the poetess, hiding his eyes with
one hand, and nervously tapping the arm of his chair
with the other; to the right of him seen
sideways the lanky form, flushed face,
and open mouth of young Dunstable; and in the far
distance, Miss Wigram.
Then a surprising thing!
The awkward pause following the recitation was suddenly
broken by a loud and uncontrollable laugh. Doris,
startled, turned to look at young Dunstable.
For it was he who had laughed. Madame also shook
off her stage trance to look a thunderous
frown upon her handsome face. The young man laughed
on laughed hysterically burying
his face in his hands. Madame Vavasour all
attitudes thrown aside ran up to him in
a fury.
“Why are you laughing?
You insult me! you have done it before.
And now before strangers it is too much!
I insist that you explain!”
She stood over him, her eyes blazing.
The youth, still convulsed, did his best to quiet
the paroxysm which had seized him, and at last said,
gasping:
“I was I was thinking of
your reciting that at Crosby Ledgers to
my mother and and what she would
say.”
Even under her rouge it could be seen
that the poetess turned a grey white.
“And pray what would she say?”
The question was delivered with apparent
calm. But Madame’s eyes were dangerous.
Doris stepped forward. Her uncle stayed her with
a gesture. He himself rose, but Madame fiercely
waved him aside. Miss Wigram, in the distance,
had also moved forward and paused.
“What would she say?”
demanded Madame, again at the sword’s
point.
“I I don’t
know ” said young Dunstable, helplessly,
still shaking. “I I think she’d
laugh.”
And he went off again, hysterically,
trying in vain to stop the fit. Madame bit her
lip. Then came a torrent of Italian evidently
a torrent of abuse; and then she lifted a gloved hand
and struck the young man violently on the cheek.
“Take that! you insolent you you
barbarian! You are my fiance, my
promised husband and you mock at me; you
will encourage your stuck-up mother to mock at me I
know you will! But I tell you ”
The speaker, however, had stopped
abruptly, and instead of saying anything more she
fell back panting, her eyes on the young man.
For Herbert Dunstable had risen. At the blow,
an amazing change had passed over his weak countenance
and weedy frame. He put his hand to his forehead
a moment, as though trying to collect his thoughts,
and then he turned quietly to
look for his hat and stick.
“Where are you going, Herbert?”
stammered Madame. “I I was carried
away I forgot myself!”
“I think not,” said the
young man, who was extremely pale. “This
is not the first time. I bid you good morning,
Madame and good-bye!”
He stood looking at the now frightened
woman, with a strange, surprised look, like one just
emerging from a semi-conscious state; and in that
moment, as Doris seemed to perceive, the traditions
of his birth and breeding had returned upon him; something
instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the
gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris
remembered, when matters were serious “always
got his way,” was there strangely
there in the degenerate son.
“Where are you going?”
repeated Madame, eyeing him. “You promised
to give me lunch.”
“I regret I have
an engagement. Mr. Bentley when the
sitting is over will you kindly see Miss
Flink into a taxi? I thank you very
much for allowing me to come and watch your work.
I trust the picture will be a success. Good-bye!”
He held out his hand to Bentley, and
bowed to Doris. Madame made a rush at him.
But Bentley held her back. He seized her arms,
indeed, quietly but irresistibly, while the young
man made his retreat. Then, with a shriek, Madame
fell back on her chair, pretending to faint, and Bentley,
in no hurry, went to her assistance, while Doris slipped
out after young Dunstable. She overtook him on
the door-step.
“Mr. Dunstable, may I speak to you?”
He turned in astonishment, showing a grim pallor which
touched her pity.
“I know your mother and father,”
said Doris hurriedly; “at least my husband and
I were staying at Crosby Ledges some weeks ago, and
my husband is now in Scotland with your people.
His name is Arthur Meadows. I am Mrs. Meadows.
I I don’t know whether I could help
you. You seem” her smile flashed
out “to be in a horrid mess!”
The young man looked in perplexity
at the small, trim lady before him, as though realising
her existence for the first time. Her honest eyes
were bent upon him with the same expression she had
often worn when Arthur had come to her with some confession
of folly the expression which belongs to
the maternal side of women, and is at once mocking
and sweet. It said “Of course
you are a great fool! most men are.
But that’s the raison d’etre of
women! Suppose we go into the business!”
“You’re very kind ”
he groaned “awfully kind. I’m
ashamed you should have seen such a thing.
Nobody can help me thank you very much.
I am engaged to that lady I’ve promised
to marry her. Oh, she’s got any amount
of evidence. I’ve been an ass and
worse. But I can’t get out of it.
I don’t mean to try to get out of it. I
promised of my own free will. Only I’ve
found out now I can never live with her. Her temper
is fiendish. It degrades her and me.
But you saw! She has made my life a burden to
me lately, because I wouldn’t name a day for
us to be married. I wanted to see my father quietly
first without my mother knowing and
I have been thinking how to manage it and
funking it of course I always do funk things.
But what she did just now has settled it it
has been blowing up for a long time. I shall
marry her at a registry office as
soon as possible. Then I shall separate from her,
and I hope never see her again.
The lawyers will arrange that and money!
Thank you it’s awfully good of you
to want to help me but you can’t nobody
can.”
Doris had drawn her companion into
her uncle’s small dining-room and closed the
door. She listened to his burst of confidence
with a puzzled concern.
“Why must you marry her?”
she said abruptly, when he paused. “Break
it off! It would be far best.”
“No. I promised. I ”
he stammered a little “I seem to have
done her harm her reputation, I mean.
There is only one thing could let me off. She
swore to me that well! that she
was a good woman that there was nothing
in her past you understand ”
“And you know of nothing?” said Doris,
gravely.
“Nothing. And you don’t
think I’m going to try and ferret out things
against her!” cried the youth, flushing.
“No I must just bear it.”
“It’s your parents that will have to bear
it!”
His face hardened.
“My mother might have prevented
it,” he said bitterly. “However, I
won’t go into that. My father will see
I couldn’t do anything else. I’d better
get it over. I’m going to my lawyers now.
They’ll take a few days over what I want.”
“You’ll tell your father?”
“I I don’t
know,” he said, irresolutely. She noticed
that he did not try to pledge her not to give him
away. And she, on her side, did not threaten
to do so. She argued with him a little more, trying
to get at his real thoughts, and to straighten them
out for him. But it was evident he had made up
such mind as he had, and that his sudden resolution even
the ugly scene which had made him take it had
been a relief. He knew at last where he stood.
So presently Doris let him go.
They parted, liking each other decidedly. He
thanked her warmly though drearily for
taking an interest in him, and he said to her on the
threshold:
“Some day, I hope, you’ll
come to Crosby Ledgers again, Mrs. Meadows and
I’ll be there for once! Then
I’ll tell you if you care more
about it. Thanks awfully! Good-bye.”
Later on, when “Miss Flink,”
in a state of sulky collapse, had been sent home in
her taxi, Doris, Bentley, and Miss Wigram held a conference.
But it came to little. Bentley, the hater of
“rows,” simply could not be moved to take
the thing up. “I kept her from scalping
him! ” he laughed “and
I’m not due for any more!” Doris said little.
A whirl of arguments and projects were in her mind.
But she kept her own counsel about them. As to
the possibility of inducing the man to break it off,
she repeated the only condition on which it could be
done; at which Uncle Charles laughed, and Alice Wigram
fell into a long and thoughtful silence.
Doris arrived at home rather early.
What with the emotions of the day, the heat, and her
work, she was strangely tired and over-done. After
tea she strolled out into Kensington Gardens, and
sat under the shade of trees already autumnal, watching
the multitude of children children of the
people enjoying the nation’s park
all to themselves, in the complete absence of their
social betters. What ducks they were, some of
them the little, grimy, round-faced things rolling
on the grass, or toddling after their sisters and
brothers. They turned large, inquisitive eyes
upon her, which seemed to tease her heart-strings.
And suddenly, it was in
Kensington Gardens that out of the heart of a long
and vague reverie there came a flash an
illumination which wholly changed the life
and future of Doris Meadows. After the thought
in which it took shape had seized upon her, she sat
for some time motionless; then rising to her feet,
tottering a little, like one in bewilderment, she
turned northwards, and made her way hurriedly towards
Lancaster Gate. In a house there, lived a lady,
a widowed lady, who was Doris’s godmother, and
to whom Doris who had lost her own mother
in her childhood had turned for counsel
before now. How long it was since she had seen
“Cousin Julia"! nearly two months.
And here she was, hastening to her, and not able to
bear the thought that in all human probability Cousin
Julia was not in town.
But, by good luck, Doris found her
godmother, perching in London between a Devonshire
visit and a Scotch one. They talked long, and
Doris walked slowly home across the park. A glory
of spreading sun lay over the grassy glades; the Serpentine
held reflections of a sky barred with rose; London,
transfigured, seemed a city of pearl and fire.
And in Doris’s heart there was a glory like
that of the evening, and, like the burning
sky, bearing with it a promise of fair days to come.
The glory and the promise stole through all her thoughts,
softening and transmuting everything.
“When he grows up if
he were to marry such a woman and I didn’t
know if all his life and
mine were spoilt and nobody said
a word!”
Her eyes filled with tears. She
seemed to be walking with Arthur through a world of
beauty, hand in hand.
How many hours to Pitlochry?
She ran into the Kensington house, asking for railway
guides, and peremptorily telling Jane to get down the
small suitcase from the box-room at once.