Mr. Witt's Widow Part 20

PRESENTING AN HONEST WOMAN.

To fit square pegs into round holes is one of the favourite pastimes of Nature. She does it roughly, violently, and with wanton disregard of the feelings of the square pegs. When, in her relentless sport, she has at last driven the poor peg in and made it fit, by dint of knocking off and abrading all its corners, philosophers glorify her, calling the process evolution, and plain men wonder why she did not begin at the other end, and make the holes square to fit the pegs.

The square peg on which these trite reflections hang is poor Neaera Witt. Nature made her a careless, ease-loving, optimistic creature, only to drive her, of malice prepense, into an environment--that is to say, in unscientific phrase, a hole--where she had need of the equipment of a full-blooded conspirator.

She resisted the operation; she persistently trusted to chance to extricate her from the toils into which she, not being a philosopher, thought chance had thrown her. If she saw a weapon ready to her hand, she used it, as she had used the Bournemouth character, but for the most part she trusted to luck. George Neston would fail, or he would relent; or Gerald would be invincibly incredulous, or, she would add, smiling at her face in the gla.s.s, invincibly in love. Somehow or other matters would straighten themselves out; and, at the worst, ten days more would bring the marriage; and after the marriage---- But really, ten days ahead is as far as one can be expected to look, especially when the ten days include one's wedding.

Nevertheless, Sidmouth Vane had a knack of being correct in his information, and he was correct in stating that Neaera had gone to Liverpool on business. It was, of course, merely a guess that her errand might be connected with George's, but it happened to be a right guess.

Neaera knew well the weak spot in her armour. Hitherto she had been content to trust to her opponent not discovering it; but, as the decisive moment came nearer, a nervous restlessness so far overcame her natural _insouciance_ as to determine her to an effort to complete her defences, in antic.i.p.ation of any a.s.sault upon them. She was in happy ignorance of the chance that had directed George's forces against her vulnerable point, and imagined that she herself was, in all human probability, the only person in London to whom the name of Mrs. Bort would be more than an unmeaning uneuphonious syllable. To her the name was full of meaning; for, from her youth till the day of the happy intervention of that stout and elderly _deus ex machina_, the late Mr.

Witt, Mrs. Bort had been to Neaera the impersonation of virtue and morality, and the physical characteristics that had caught Lord Mapledurham's frivolous attention had been to her merely the frowning aspect under which justice and righteousness are apt to present themselves.

Neaera was a good-hearted girl, and Mrs. Bort now lived on a comfortable pension, but no love mingled with the sense of duty that inspired the gift. Mrs. Bort had interpreted her quasi-maternal authority with the widest lat.i.tude, and Neaera shuddered to remember how often Mrs. Bort's discipline had made her smart, in a way, against which apathy of conscience was no shield or buckler. Recorder Dawkins would have groaned to know how even judicial terrors paled in Neaera's recollection before the image of Mrs. Bort.

These childish fears are hard to shake off, and Neaera, as she sped luxuriously to Liverpool, acknowledged to herself that, in that dreadful presence, no advent.i.tious glories of present wealth or future rank would avail her. The governing fact in the situation, the fact that Neaera did not see her way to meet, was that Mrs. Bort was an honest woman. Neaera knew her, and knew that a bribe would be worse than useless, even if she dared to offer it.

"And I don't think," said Neaera, resting her pretty chin upon her pretty hand, "that I should dare." Then she laughed ruefully. "I'm not at all sure she wouldn't beat me; and if she did, what could I do?"

Probably Neaera exaggerated even the fearless rect.i.tude of Mrs. Bort, but she was so convinced of the nature of the reception which any proposal of the obvious kind would meet with that she made up her mind that her only course was to throw herself on Mrs. Bort's mercy, in case that lady proved deaf to a subtle little proposal which was Neaera's first weapon.

So far as Neaera knew, Peckton and Manchester were the only places in which George Neston was likely to seek for traces of her. Liverpool, though remote from Peckton, was uncomfortably near Manchester. Every day now had great value. If she could get Mrs. Bort away to some remote spot as soon as might be, she gained no small advantage in her race against time and George Neston.

"If she will only go to Glentarroch, he will never find her."

Glentarroch was the name of a little retreat in remote Scotland, whither Mr. Witt had been wont to betake himself for rest and recreation. It was Neaera's now. It was a beautiful place, which was immaterial, and a particularly inaccessible one, which was most material. Would not Mrs.

Bort's despotic instincts lead her to accept an invitation to rule over Glentarroch? Neaera could not afford to pity the hapless wights over whom Mrs. Bort would rule.

Mrs. Bort received Neaera in a way most unbecoming to a pensioner.

"Well, Nery," she said, "what brings you here? No good, I'll be bound.

Where's your mourning?"

Neaera said that she thought resignation to Heaven's will not a subject of reproach, and that she came to ask a favour of Mrs. Bort.

"Ay, you come to me when you want something. That's the old story."

Neaera remembered that Mrs. Bort had often taken her own view of what the supplicant wanted, and given something quite other than what was asked; but, in spite of this unpromising opening, she persevered, and laid before Mrs. Bort a dazzling picture of the grandeur waiting her at Glentarroch.

"And I shall be so much obliged. Really, I don't know what the servants--the girls, especially--may be doing."

"Carryings-on, I'll be bound," said Mrs. Bort. "Why don't you go yourself, Nery?"

"Oh, I can't, indeed. I--I must stay in London."

"Nasty, cold, dull little place it sounds," said Mrs. Bort.

"Oh, of course I shall consider all that----"

"He--he!" Mrs. Bort sn.i.g.g.e.red unpleasantly. "So it ain't sech a sweet spot, as ye call it, after all?"

Neaera recovered herself without dignity, and stated that she thought of forty pounds a year and all found.

"Ah, if I knowed what you was at, Nery!"

Neaera intimated that it was simply a matter of mutual accommodation.

"And there's really no time to be lost," she said, plaintively. "I'm being robbed every day."

"Widows has hard times," said Mrs. Bort. And Neaera did not think it necessary to say how soon her hard times were coming to an end.

"Come agin to-morrer afternoon, and I'll tell ye," was Mrs. Bort's ultimatum. "And mind you don't get into mischief."

"Why afternoon?" asked Neaera.

"'Cause I'm washing," said Mrs. Bort, snappishly. "That's why."

Neaera in vain implored an immediate answer. Mrs. Bort said a day could not matter, and that, if Neaera pressed her farther, she should consider it an indication that something was "up," and refuse to go at all.

Neaera was silenced, and sadly returned to her hotel.

"How I hate that good, good woman!" she cried. "I'll never see her again as long as I live, after to-morrow. Oh, I should like to hit her!"

The propulsions of cause upon cause are, as Bacon has said, infinite.

If Mrs. Bort had not washed--in the technical sense, of course--on that particular Friday, Neaera would have come and gone--perhaps even Mrs.

Bort might have gone too--before the train brought George Neston to Liverpool, and his eager inquiries landed him at Mrs. Bort's abode. As it was, Mrs. Bort's little servant bade him wait in the parlour, as her mistress was talking to a female in the kitchen. The little servant thought "female" the politest possible way of describing any person who was not a man, and accorded the t.i.tle to Neaera on account of her rustling robes and gold-tipped parasol.

George did not question his informant, thereby showing that he, in the _role_ of detective, was a square peg in a round hole. He heard proceeding from the kitchen a murmur of two subdued voices, one of which, however, dominated the other.

"That must be Mrs. Bort," thought he. "I wish I could hear the female."

Then his attention wandered, for he made sure the unknown could not be Neaera, as she had had a day's start of him. He did not allow for Mrs.

Bort's washing. Suddenly the dominant voice was raised to the pitch of distinctness.

"Have ye told him," it said, "or have ye lied to him, as you lied to me yesterday?"

"I didn't--I didn't," was the answer. "You never asked me if I was going to be married."

"Oh, go along! You know how I'd have answered that when ye lived with me."

"How's that?" asked George, with a slight smile.

"Have ye told him?"

"Told him what?" asked Neaera; for it was clearly Neaera.

"Told him you're a thief."

"This woman's a brute," thought George.

"Have ye?"

"No, not exactly. How dare you question me?"