Lalage's Lovers Part 33

"Not to me," I said hurriedly. "I couldn't work through that list of Selby-Harrison's. Try my uncle. Try Lord Thormanby. He'll like it."

"There's one thing----" said Lalage.

"Leave it to the synod," said my mother.

"Or to Lord Thormanby," I said.

"Very well," said Lalage. "I will. But perhaps he won't care to go into it, and if he doesn't I shall have to act myself."

"He will," I said. "He has a perfectly tremendous sense of responsibility."

"And now," said my mother, "come along, all of you, to the drawing-room and have tea."

"Is it all right?" said Hilda anxiously to me as we left the room.

"Quite," I said; "there'll be no prosecution. My mother can do anything she likes with the Archdeacon, just as she does with Lalage. He'll not enforce a single penalty."

"She's wonderful," said Hilda.

I quite agreed. She is. Even Miss Pettigrew could not do as much. It was more by good luck than anything else that she succeeded in luring Lalage away from Ballygore.

CHAPTER XIX

I congratulated my mother that night on her success in dealing with Lalage.

"Your combination," I said, "of tact, firmness, sympathy, and reasonableness was most masterly."

My mother smiled gently. I somehow gathered from her way of smiling that she thought my congratulations premature.

"Surely," I said, "you don't think she'll break out again. She made you a definite promise."

"She'll keep her promise to the letter," said my mother, still smiling in the same way.

"If she does," I said, "she can't do anything very bad."

It turned out--it always does--that my mother was right and I was wrong.

The next morning at breakfast a note was handed to me by the footman.

He said it had been brought over from Thormanby Park by a groom on horseback. It was marked "Urgent" in red ink.

Thormanby acts at times in a violent and impulsive manner. If I were his uncle, and so qualified by relationship to give him the advice he frequently gives me, I should recommend him to cultivate repose of manner and leisurely dignity of action. He is a peer of this realm, and has, besides, been selected by his fellow peers to represent them in the House of Lords. He ought not to send grooms scouring the country at breakfast time, carrying letters which look, on the outside, as if they announced the discovery of dangerous conspiracies. I said this and more to my mother before opening the envelope, and she seemed to agree with me that the political and social decay of our aristocracy is to some extent to be traced to their excitability and lack of self-control. By way of demonstrating my own calm, I laid the envelope down beside my plate and refrained from opening it until I had finished the kidney I was eating at the time. The letter, when I did read it, turned out to be quite as hysterical as the manner of its arrival. Thormanby summoned me to his presence--there is no other way of describing the style in which he wrote--and ordered me to start immediately.

"I can't imagine what has gone wrong," I said. "Do you think that Miss Battersby can have gone suddenly mad and a.s.saulted one of the girls with a battle axe?"

"It is far more likely that Lalage has done something," said my mother.

"After her promise to you what could she have done?"

"She might have kept it."

I thought this over and got a grip on the meaning by degrees.

"You mean," I said, "that she has appealed to my uncle on some point about the Archdeacon's qualifications."

"Exactly."

"But that wouldn't upset him so much."

"It depends on what the point is."

"She's extraordinarily ingenious," I said. "Perhaps I'd better go over to Thormanby Park and see."

"Finish your breakfast," said my mother. "I'll order the trap for you."

I arrived at Thormanby Park shortly after ten o'clock. The door was opened to me by Miss Battersby. She confessed that she had been watching for me from the window of the morning room which looks out over the drive. She squeezed my hand when greeting me and held it so long that I was sure she was suffering from some acute anxiety. She also spoke breathlessly, in a sort of gasping whisper, as if she had been running hard. She had not, of course, run at all. The gasps were due to excitement and agony.

"I'm so glad you've come," she said. "I knew you would. Lord Thormanby is waiting for you in the library. I do hope you won't say anything to make it worse. You'll try not to, won't you?"

I gathered from this that it, whatever it was, must be very bad already.

"Lalage?" I said.

Miss Battersby nodded solemnly.

"My mother told me it must be that, before I started."

"If you could," said Miss Battersby persuasively, "and if you would----"

"I can and will," I said. "What is it?"

"I don't know. But I can't bear to think of poor little Lalage bearing all the blame."

"I can't well take the blame," I said, "although I'm perfectly willing to do so, unless I can find out what it is she's done."

"I don't know. I wish I did. There was a letter from her this morning to Lord Thormanby, but he didn't show it to me."

"If it's in her handwriting," I said, "there's no use my saying I wrote it. He wouldn't believe me. But if it's typewritten and not signed, I'll say it's mine."

"Oh, I wouldn't ask you to do so much as that. Besides, it wouldn't be true."

"It won't be true in any case," I said, "if I take even part of the blame."

"But you mustn't say what isn't true."

Miss Battersby is unreasonable, though she means well. It is clearly impossible for me to be strictly truthful and at the same time to claim, as my own, misdeeds of which I do not even know the nature. I walked across the hall in the direction of the library door. Miss Battersby followed me with her hand on my arm.

"Do your best for her," she whispered pleadingly.