Lady Rose's Daughter Part 28

"That's right--that's right. Now, Evelyn, I leave you to make the arrangements. The keys shall be here this afternoon. Miss Le Breton, of course, stays here till things are settled. As for me, I must really be off to my meeting. One thing, Miss Le Breton--"

"Yes."

"I think," he said, gravely, "you ought to reveal yourself to Lord Lackington."

She shrank.

"You'll let me take my own time for that?" was her appealing reply.

"Very well--very well. We'll speak of it again."

And he hurried away. As he descended his own stairs astonishment at what he had done rushed upon him and overwhelmed him.

"How on earth am I ever to explain the thing to Lady Henry?"

And as he went citywards in his cab, he felt much more guilty than his wife had ever done. What _could_ have made him behave in this extraordinary, this preposterous way? A touch of foolish romance--immoral romance--of which he was already ashamed? Or the one bare fact that this woman had refused Jacob Delafield?

XI

"Here it is," said the d.u.c.h.ess, as the carriage stopped. "Isn't it an odd little place?"

And as she and Julie paused on the pavement, Julie looked listlessly at her new home. It was a two-storied brick house, built about 1780. The front door boasted a pair of Ionian columns and a cla.s.sical canopy or pediment. The windows had still the original small panes; the _mansarde_ roof, with its one dormer, was untouched. The little house had rather deep eaves; three windows above; two, and the front door, below. It wore a prim, old-fashioned air, a good deal softened and battered, however, by age, and it stood at the corner of two streets, both dingily quiet, and destined, no doubt, to be rebuilt before long in the general rejuvenation of Mayfair.

As the d.u.c.h.ess had said, it occupied the site of what had once--about 1740--been the westerly end of a mews belonging to houses in Cureton Street, long since pulled down. The s.p.a.ce filled by these houses was now occupied by one great mansion and its gardens. The rest of the mews had been converted into three-story houses of a fair size, looking south, with a back road between them and the gardens of Cureton House. But at the southwesterly corner of what was now Heribert Street, fronting west and quite out of line and keeping with the rest, was this curious little place, built probably at a different date and for some special family reason. The big planes in the Cureton House gardens came close to it and overshadowed it; one side wall of the house, in fact, formed part of the wall of the garden.

The d.u.c.h.ess, full of nervousness, ran up the steps, put in the key herself, and threw open the door. An elderly Scotchwoman, the caretaker, appeared from the back and stood waiting to show them over.

"Oh, Julie, perhaps it's _too_ queer and musty!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess, looking round her in some dismay. "I thought, you know, it would be a little out-of-the-way and quaint--unlike other people--just what you ought to have. But--"

"I think it's delightful," said Julie, standing absently before a case of stuffed birds, somewhat moth-eaten, which took up a good deal of s.p.a.ce in the little hall. "I love stuffed birds."

The d.u.c.h.ess glanced at her uneasily. "What is she thinking about?" she wondered. But Julie roused herself.

"Why, it looks as though everything here had gone to sleep for a hundred years," she said, gazing in astonishment at the little hall, with its old clock, its two or three stiff hunting-pictures, its drab-painted walls, its poker-work chest.

And the drawing-room! The caretaker had opened the windows. It was a mild March day, and there were misty sun-gleams stealing along the lawns of Cureton House. None entered the room itself, for its two semi-circular windows looked north over the gardens. Yet it was not uncheerful. Its faded curtains of blue rep, its buff walls, on which the pictures and miniatures in their tarnished gilt frames were arranged at intervals in stiff patterns and groups; the Italian gla.s.s, painted with dilapidated Cupids, over the mantel-piece; the two or three Sheraton arm-chairs and settees, covered with threadbare needle-work from the days of "Evelina"; a carpet of old and well-preserved Brussels--blue arabesques on a white ground; one or two pieces of old satin-wood furniture, very fine and perfect; a heavy centre-table, its cloth garnished with some early Victorian wool-work, and a pair of pink gla.s.s vases; on another small table close by, of a most dainty and spindle-legged correctness, a set of Indian chessmen under a gla.s.s shade; and on another a collection of tiny animals, stags and dogs for the most part, deftly "pinched" out of soft paper, also under gla.s.s, and as perfect as when their slender limbs were first fashioned by Cousin Mary Leicester's mother, somewhere about the year that Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold. These various elements, ugly and beautiful, combined to make a general effect--clean, fastidious, frugal, and refined--that was, in truth, full of a sort of acid charm.

"Oh, I like it! I like it so much!" cried Julie, throwing herself down into one of the straight-backed arm-chairs and looking first round the walls and then through the windows to the gardens outside.

"My dear," said the d.u.c.h.ess, flitting from one thing to another, frowning and a little fussed, "those curtains won't do at all. I must send some from home."

"No, no, Evelyn. Not a thing shall be changed. You shall lend it me just as it is or not at all. What a character it has! I _taste_ the person who lived here."

"Cousin Mary Leicester?" said the d.u.c.h.ess. "Well, she was rather an oddity. She was Low Church, like my mother-in-law; but, oh, so much nicer! Once I let her come to Grosvenor Square and speak to the servants about going to church. The groom of the chambers said she was 'a dear old lady, and if she were _his_ cousin he wouldn't mind her being a bit touched,' My maid said she had no idea poke-bonnets could be so _sweet_.

It made her understand what the Queen looked like when she was young.

And none of them have ever been to church since that I can make out.

There was one very curious thing about Cousin Mary Leicester," added the d.u.c.h.ess, slowly--"she had second sight. She _saw_ her old mother, in this room, once or twice, after she had been dead for years. And she saw Freddie once, when he was away on a long voyage--"

"Ghosts, too!" said Julie, crossing her hands before her with a little shiver--"that completes it."

"Sixty years," said the d.u.c.h.ess, musing. "It was a long time--wasn't it?--to live in this little house, and scarcely ever leave it. Oh, she had quite a circle of her own. For many years her funny little sister lived here, too. And there was a time, Freddie says, when there was almost a rivalry between them and two other famous old ladies who lived in Bruton Street--what _was_ their name? Oh, the Miss Berrys! Horace Walpole's Miss Berrys. All sorts of famous people, I believe, have sat in these chairs. But the Miss Berrys won."

"Not in years? Cousin Mary outlived them."

"Ah, but she was dead long before she died," said the d.u.c.h.ess as she came to perch on the arm of Julie's chair, and threw her arm round her friend's neck. "After her little sister departed this life she became a very silent, shrivelled thing--except for her religion--and very few people saw her. She took a fancy to me--which was odd, wasn't it, when I'm such a worldling?--and she let me come in and out. Every morning she read the Psalms and Lessons, with her old maid, who was just her own age--in this very chair. And two or three times a month Freddie would slip round and read them with her--you know Freddie's very religious.

And then she'd work at flannel petticoats for the poor, or something of that kind, till lunch. Afterwards she'd go and read the Bible to people in the workhouse or in hospital. When she came home, the butler brought her the _Times_; and sometimes you'd find her by the fire, straining her old eyes over 'a little Dante.' And she always dressed for dinner--everything was quite smart--and her old butler served her.

Afterwards her maid played dominoes or spillikins with her--all her life she never touched a card--and they read a chapter, and Cousin Mary played a hymn on that funny little old piano there in the corner, and at ten they all went to bed. Then, one morning, the maid went in to wake her, and she saw her dear sharp nose and chin against the light, and her hands like that, in front of her--and--well, I suppose, she'd gone to play hymns in heaven--dear Cousin Mary! Julie, isn't it strange the kind of lives so many of us have to lead? Julie"--the little d.u.c.h.ess laid her cheek against her friend's--"do you believe in another life?"

"You forget I'm a Catholic," said Julie, smiling rather doubtfully.

"_Are_ you, Julie? I'd forgotten."

"The good nuns at Bruges took care of that."

"Do you ever go to ma.s.s?"

"Sometimes."

"Then you're not a good Catholic, Julie?"

"No," said Julie, after a pause, "not at all. But it sometimes catches hold of me."

The old clock in the hall struck. The d.u.c.h.ess sprang up.

"Oh, Julie, I have got to be at Clarisse's by four. I _promised_ her I'd go and settle about my Drawing-room dress to-day. Let's see the rest of the house."

And they went rapidly through it. All of it was stamped with the same character, representing, as it were, the meeting-point between an inherited luxury and a personal asceticism. Beautiful chairs, or cabinets transported sixty years before from one of the old Crowborough houses in the country to this little abode, side by side with things the cheapest and the commonest--all that Cousin Mary Leicester could ever persuade herself to buy with her own money. For all the latter part of her life she had been half a mystic and half a great lady, secretly hating the luxury from which she had not the strength to free herself, dressing ceremoniously, as the d.u.c.h.ess had said, for a solitary dinner, and all the while going in sore remembrance of a Master who "had not where to lay his head."

At any rate, there was an ample supply of household stuff for a single woman and her maids. In the china cupboard there were still the old-fashioned Crown Derby services, the costly cut gla.s.s, the Leeds and Wedgewood dessert dishes that Cousin Mary Leicester had used for half a century. The caretaker produced the keys of the iron-lined plate cupboard, and showed its old-world contents, clean and in order.

"Why, Julie! If we'd only ordered the dinner I might have come to dine with you to-night!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess, enjoying and peering into everything like a child with its doll's house. "And the linen--gracious!" as the doors of another cupboard were opened to her.

"But now I remember, Freddie said nothing was to be touched till he made up his mind what to do with the little place. Why, there's everything!"

And they both looked in astonishment at the white, fragrant rows, at the worn monogram in the corners of the sheets, at the little bags of lavender and pot-pourri ranged along the shelves.

Suddenly Julie turned away and sat down by an open window, carrying her eyes far from the house and its stores.

"It is too much, Evelyn," she said, sombrely. "It oppresses me. I don't think I can live up to it."

"Julie!" and again the little d.u.c.h.ess came to stand caressingly beside her. "Why, you must have sheets--and knives and forks! Why should you get ugly new ones, when you can use Cousin Mary's? She would have loved you to have them."

"She would have hated me with all her strength," said Miss Le Breton, probably with much truth.

The two were silent a little. Through Julie's stormy heart there swept longings and bitternesses inexpressible. What did she care for the little house and all its luxuries! She was sorry that she had fettered herself with it.... Nearly four o'clock in the afternoon, and no letter--not a word!

"Julie," said the d.u.c.h.ess, softly, in her ear, "you know you can't live here alone. I'm afraid Freddie would make a fuss."