Christina Part 9

"To arrange to meet a strange man isn't really a very womanly thing to do," she said, when she sat down to write her letter to the unknown Mr.

Mernside. "I shouldn't ever have answered the advertis.e.m.e.nt at all, if I had not been so dreadfully poor, and I shouldn't like to look Lady Cicely's cousin in the face again if I met this man."

The letter was not so difficult a one to write as the first had been, and its recipient both smiled and sighed, as he read the terse little sentences in the round, girlish handwriting.

"DEAR SIR,--

"Thank you for your kind letter, but I hope I now have a chance of getting some work, so that I need not trouble you any more.

"Yours faithfully, "C. MOORE."

"Well! that's a relief," Rupert e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, throwing the note into the fire; "what I could have done with the girl if she had agreed to meet me, heaven only knows. Margaret would have helped me--but Margaret----"

His meditations ended abruptly; he drew from his breast pocket a letter that had reached him a post or two before Christina's arrived, and for the fiftieth time read it from end to end. The sense of it had long since imprinted itself upon his brain, but it gave him a painful pleasure to let his eyes rest upon the well-formed letters of the handwriting, though a resentful indignation towards the writer stirred within him. She had not treated him well, and yet--she was the one woman in the world to him--this woman of the dark eyes and rare white beauty, who signed her letter with the one word, "Margaret." No address stood at the head of the letter, it was undated; and the postmark was that of the West Central district.

"Forgive me for having left London so abruptly, and without telling you of my intention," she wrote. "I was summoned away by telegram, and in my hurry and anxiety, I forgot to let you know. I cannot tell you my address just now, but Elizabeth is with me, and I am safe and well. I have often warned you, have I not, my dear, faithful friend, that much in my life must always seem to you strange and mysterious. I can give you no explanation now. But trust me still. MARGARET.

"Letters sent to me, c/o Mrs. Milton, 180, Gower Street, will be forwarded."

Mernside wrote four letters, each one of which in turn he tore up and flung into the fire as soon as it was written, finally writing a fifth, which appeared to satisfy him, for, having addressed and stamped it, he put it into his pocket when he went out.

"Drive sharply to 180, Gower Street," were his directions to the driver as he swung himself into a pa.s.sing hansom, and leant forward on the closed doors, watching the traffic with listless glances, which only saw a woman's dark eyes, set in a white face.

"No, sir, I couldn't tell you Mrs. Stanforth's address," was the uncompromising reply to his question, and Mrs. Milton's inflexible countenance, and flat, rigid form were as uncompromising as her speech; "she bid me say to anyone enquiring, that she was gone in the country for a time, and I can only answer the same to you, as I answers to the rest. Letters and people--they come on here from Barford Road, and I says the same to all of 'em."

Rupert's creed as a gentleman forbade his pressing for the address of a woman who wished to keep herself hidden, but with all the hatred of his s.e.x for mysteries, he moved impatiently away, speculating grimly on the eccentricities of women. Why, when she had a house of her own, did Margaret have her visitors and letters sent to Gower Street for information, or re-addressing respectively? What object was being served by all this mysterious behaviour? And why was she sometimes so apparently frank with him, at other times so strangely secret?

True, that her very uncertainty was part of her charm; but, without swerving in his unshakable loyalty to her, he felt himself occasionally wishing that Margaret had some of the transparent candour of his little cousin, Cicely Redesdale. Cicely was incapable of dark secrets, or hidden, mysterious actions; she and Baba were children together, and one was scarcely more innocent and crystal pure than the other--which reflections brought him by easy stages to his cousin's estates, and his own trusteeship; and the memory of a paper needing Cicely's signature, made him retrace his steps to his own chambers, and thence to Eaton Square, where he found Cicely and her small daughter enjoying the delights of tea together, in the bright nursery at the top of the house.

"Jane has got a sick mother," Cicely explained dolefully; "Jane was imperatively needed at home, at an hour's notice--and behold me, head nurse and nursery-maid rolled into one, and Baba in the seventh heaven of bliss. If you want any tea, Rupert, you must have it here--hot b.u.t.tered toast and all. Dawson won't approve, but I am tired of trying to live up to him." Dawson was the butler, a magnificent personage who had only condescended to anything more insignificant than a ducal mansion, in consideration of Mr. Redesdale's generosity in the matter of wages; and Dawson regarded any departure from the orthodox, with disapproving eyes.

"You will never succeed in reaching Dawson's criterion of correctness,"

Rupert laughed; "meanwhile, nursery tea is much jollier than the drawing-room meal. We can eat double as much, and we can spread our own jam."

"But you know, Rupert, I can't spend my whole life in the nursery,"

Cicely began, when the appet.i.tes of the baby and the big man had been partially satisfied. "Baba has chosen a new nurse for herself, but--I can't let her decide anything so important; I am afraid you will call me quixotic if I say I am half inclined to--

"Is it the young person--James's young person?" her cousin broke in.

"I knew that girl with the green eyes and shabby clothes was making indelible marks on your kind heart. But--you know nothing about her, dear, and, as you told me, you must have unimpeachable references."

"Rupert, to remind a woman of the things she has said in a remote past, is like driving a pig towards the north, when you want him to go there.

When you have a wife, you will understand the inwardness of my remark."

"I shall never have a wife," was the quick retort, "and am I to infer from your remark that you are intending to engage a nurse who cannot produce the necessary references?"

"I don't know what she can produce yet, but I have written to ask your green-eyed friend of the shabby hat, to come and see me, and--then I thought we could talk things over."

"Then 'things' are a foregone conclusion," said Rupert, with a laugh.

"I know you, Cicely. The girl seemed to have a way with children; she looked and spoke like a lady, and----"

"And Baba loved her"; Cicely lowered her voice, but the child, absorbed in putting a consignment of dolls to bed, gave no heed to her elders; "and ever since the girl came here, Baba has gone on saying: 'Baba would like that pretty lady to live with her; can't the pretty lady come?' And sometimes children and dogs have wonderful instincts about people, don't they? Baba's instinct may be just the right one."

"It may. Let us hope it will. There was something very straightforward about that girl's eyes, and her voice was particularly pleasant. It reminded me of somebody, but who the somebody is I can't for the life of me remember."

"By the way, didn't you tell me the other day you knew of a nursery governess who wanted work? Can she come and see me as well? Perhaps you have found out more about her by now?"

"She has just succeeded in hearing of work," Rupert answered, and Cicely noticed that, as before, he spoke with a trace of embarra.s.sment.

"I have found out nothing more about her, but I hear she is, or hopes to be, 'suited,' as the servants say."

"I am very strongly inclined to try the girl who brought Baba in from the fog. Something about her appealed to me, and she must be able to produce some kind of reference. She can't just have 'growed,' like Topsy, into her present position. Oh! Dawson, who and what is it?"

she broke off to say, as the butler's stately form and impa.s.sive face appeared in the doorway.

"Sir Arthur Congreve wishes to see your ladyship very particularly,"

was the reply.

"I will be down in one moment," she answered; and, when the door had closed noiselessly after the butler, she turned to Rupert, and made a small grimace.

"Now, what has brought that tiresome old person here to-day," she demanded of the world in general; "you don't know him, do you? He is a cousin of John's; and the most intolerable bore ever created to worry his long-suffering relations."

"I know him by name, naturally; but I never had the pleasure----"

"Come and have it now." Cicely sprang to her feet, and rang the bell.

"I must get a housemaid to take care of Baba; and you come and be introduced to my pet bugbear. He and his wife hardly ever come to town. They look upon it as modern Babylon, sunk in iniquity. He is hugely rich, and their jewels are amazing, but very few people ever see them. He lives in a very remote corner of the country, somewhere on the Welsh border, about ten miles from every reasonable sort of place, and my private opinion is that he is more mad than sane."

"Why?"

"Oh! a woman's reason. I think him so, because I think him so. No; but without joking, all sorts of queer things have happened in that family--dark mysteries, and I fancy even crimes; but John never told me details. Sir Arthur is a most unspeakably conventional person, but I believe some of his relations were quite the reverse. Come and help me entertain him," she added, when a housemaid had entered the nursery; "he will probably disapprove of you, and tell me later on that your presence in the house is damaging to my reputation," she added as they went down the stairs together.

The elderly gentleman who stood on the drawing-room hearthrug, surveying the room with an air of disapproval, was, Rupert thought, one of the handsomest men he had ever seen. White-haired, with a heavy white moustache, his complexion was clear and healthy as a girl's, and his refined, well-cut features were almost cameo-like in their perfect chiselling His eyes were dark, and very bright, and they fixed themselves at once upon Rupert with a glance of suspicion.

"My dear Cicely," he said, shaking her stiffly by the hand, "urgent business, tiresome family business, brought me to this city of dreadful night for a few hours, and I thought I must call and enquire after your health, and the health of Veronica."

"Thank you, Cousin Arthur; do sit down; I am very flourishing, and Baba is in rude health. We don't call her Veronica yet, you know; she is really only quite a baby still."

"I strongly deprecate the calling of children by fancy names," Sir Arthur answered pompously. "Veronica is a name in our family; a name about which, alas! cling many sad a.s.sociations. But still, I am convinced that if her poor father had lived, your poor daughter----"

"I haven't introduced you to my cousin," Cicely cut in unceremoniously, feeling that any comments upon her husband's possible conduct would be unendurable from Sir Arthur's lips. "I believe you have never met him.

Mr. Mernside, Sir Arthur Congreve."

Sir Arthur bowed stiffly. Rupert's greeting was pleasant and friendly; the older man's rigid att.i.tude merely amused him.

"No; I have certainly never met Mr. Mernside," Sir Arthur said coldly; "as you know, my dear Cicely, I never come to this terrible Babylon, unless absolutely driven to do so by irresistible circ.u.mstances. And in your husband's lifetime, I do not ever remember to have seen your cousin," he added, with a severe glance at Mernside.

"If you had been much in town in John's lifetime you would often have met Rupert," Cicely answered quickly. "Rupert was one of John's greatest friends, and is Baba's trustee and guardian. But you," she tried to speak more lightly, "you and Cousin Ellen bury yourselves so completely in your country fastness, that you know nothing of the troublesome world in which we live."