Mary Gray Part 27

"He was well when he wrote, but the letter was written some time ago.

Where he is, it is not easy to get letters carried in safety. One never knows what may be happening. It is, of course, a terrible anxiety."

The tears came into her eyes. There had been a little shadow over her brightness even while she had watched Bunny. Nelly had been aware of it dimly. What did she mean?

"Anxiety!" Nelly repeated falteringly. "Why should you be anxious? He is not ill, is he?"

Her heart had sunk, heavy as lead. Her soul cried out in fear.

"You know he is with the punitive expedition against the Wazees for the murder of Major Sayers and his companions? You never can tell what dreadful thing may be happening to him. It isn't possible you didn't know? And I had been thinking you hardhearted! Ah!"

Her arms went round Nelly.

"It isn't possible you didn't know? _Don't_ look like that! Do you care so much as all that, Nelly? Why, then, why, in the name of Heaven, did you let him go? Why are you marrying your cousin? My poor G.o.dfrey!"

She was conscious of a strident voice shouting the evening papers in the street outside. Indeed, even while she spoke to Nelly, half her brain was listening in a strained way to that voice as it came nearer. What was it the creature was shouting? Before she could hear distinctly the voice died away again in the distance.

"Why did I let him go?" Nelly repeated after her. "Because, because, he would not stay. He knew that I loved him, but he would not stay. He never seemed to think of staying. When he had broken my heart it seemed that I might as well make others happy. My father, Lady Drummond, my cousin; they have been so good to me always."

"But you were engaged to your cousin, weren't you, when G.o.dfrey left?"

Little Mrs. Rooke's dark eyes looked black in her frightened face.

"You were engaged to your cousin, were you not, just as you are to-day?"

"I never accepted my cousin till--till Captain Langrishe had gone. It was understood that when we grew up we should marry to please our parents if we saw nothing against it. No one would have wanted to bind me if I did not wish to be bound."

Mrs. Rooke flung up her hands with a dramatic gesture.

"Heaven forgive me, my poor Nelly, for it was I who sent G.o.dfrey from you! I told him you were engaged to your cousin. I had been told so explicitly by Lady Drummond herself. How could I doubt that it was true?"

Nelly turned a white face towards her. Oddly enough, in spite of its pallor the face had a certain illumination.

"So he went away because of that. Only that stood between us. Do you think I am going to let that--a lie, a mistake--stand between us? I am going to break off my engagement, even at the eleventh hour."

The daughter of the Drummonds had found the courage of her race. She stared uncomprehendingly at the alarm in Mrs. Rooke's expression.

"Don't do anything rash," the little woman said, in a frightened voice.

"Supposing G.o.dfrey did not come back. Supposing----"

Again there sounded in the distance the voices of the vendors of evening papers. The voices came nearer, one, two, half a dozen of them. They were all shouting together.

"There must be some news," Mrs. Rooke said under her breath.

"I shall come and see you to-morrow," Nelly said. "To-morrow I shall be free to come and go where I like. Do you know that I was bidding this room and you and Bunny a long good-bye five minutes ago? And if he never comes back--well, he will know I waited for him."

So preoccupied was she with her intention that she never noticed the newspaper boys and men fluttering their Stop Press editions like the wings of some birds of evil omen. As she sat in the hansom she drew the engagement ring off her finger and dropped it into her purse. Then she sighed, as though an immense burden had fallen from her.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE NEWS IN THE _WESTMINSTER_

As Nelly's hansom drew up at her own door another hansom was just turning away from it. She wondered with an impatient wonder who could have come. At the moment she could not have endured any hindrance between her and her project of telling her father that the engagement with Robin was to come to an end. She was not in the least afraid of what she had to do. The spirit of the Drummonds was thoroughly awake now.

Beyond her announcement to her father lay something vaguely painful which at the moment she did not consider. She would have to tell Lady Drummond and Robin, of course, and it would hurt them: they would be angry with her. She was going to make a scandal, a nine days' wonder.

Her father would be grieved--angry, too, perhaps; but that could not be helped either.

And then--some resentment stirred in her heart against him for the first time during all the years in which they had been together. He had kept her in ignorance of her lover's peril. She was not a child that she should have been kept in ignorance. For the moment she had no tender excuses for him. If he had been candid with her, then all this trouble about Robin might have been spared, for she could never have promised herself as wife to another man while the one she loved was in daily and hourly danger.

She went into the house with a look of stern accusation on her young face. The dogs came shrieking down the stairs in vociferous welcome as usual, but she took no notice of them. Being old dogs and wise, they recognised a forbidding mood in her, and retired with deprecating wrigglings of their bodies.

She asked Pat if there were a visitor in the drawing-room.

"No, then, Miss, only the master. I can't make out what came over him at all to be comin' home in a hansom."

He was minded to tell her that the General was not looking himself, to give her an affectionate, intimate warning; but she pa.s.sed him by. He stood watching her, holding the door open in his hand till she took the bend of the staircase that hid her from his sight.

"Bedad, the Dowager couldn't have done it better," he said, "shweepin'

by me without a 'By your l'ave, Pat'; and the master, callin' me 'Murphy' to my face, what he's never done since he left the rig'ment. I wonder what's the matter with Pat. 'Twill be 'Corporal' next."

Nelly looked into the drawing-room. Her father was not there. She turned the handle of another door, the door of the General's own particular den, and going in she found him.

She never thought of asking herself how he came to be there at this hour of the day, he who lived by rule, the click of whose latch-key had sounded in the hall-door every evening at a quarter to seven as long as she could remember. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to ten minutes to five.

The General was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace as though he had dropped into it on his entering the room. He was doing absolutely nothing, and that was an alarming thing enough, if but she had noticed it. A green evening paper was crumpled on his knee. If she had eyes to see it there was calamity in his att.i.tude and his looks. But she had no eyes. She was too much absorbed in the thing she had to do.

"What, Nell!" he said, getting up as she entered. "We must have come home almost together. Where have you been, child?"

To his own ear his voice rang false, but she did not notice it. She did not meet his kiss. She did not see that he was looking at her with a fearful apprehension.

"What is the matter, Nell?" he stammered, noticing the alteration in her looks.

She came and stood beside him, seeming to tower above him.

"Father," she said, "I am not going to marry Robin. I want him to know at once."

"Not marry Robin!" This was something the General was unprepared for.

"Not marry Robin! G.o.d bless my soul, Nell! It's very late for you to say such a thing--within three weeks of your wedding! And all the arrangements made! What will people say? What will the Dowager say? You can't play fast and loose with a man like that, Nell. Why, it will be the talk of the town."

He tried to work himself up to the old fretting and fuming, but there was no heartiness in it. Under the projecting eyebrows his old frostily-blue eyes had a scared look. But if he had been in such a pa.s.sion as he had shown on a certain historic occasion when the regiment had nearly scattered before the approach of screaming Dervishes--a pa.s.sion which had rallied the men and won Sir Denis his V.C.--it would have been all the same to Nelly.

"All that is perfectly immaterial," she said. "I am sorry for Robin and for Aunt Matilda. But all that will pa.s.s. I was mad to consent to the marriage. I am only glad that I came to my senses in time."

Was this Nelly?--this young, sure, inflexible creature! He stared at her in utter amazement.