Notwithstanding Part 14

"Her ladyship's tired, and it's past ten o'clock. You must tell her about the dogs to-morrow."

"Yes, to-morrow," echoed Harry, and he kissed his mother, and shuffled towards the door. Janey slipped out with him.

Lady Louisa did not speak again while the nurse made the arrangements for the night. She was incensed with her. She had been too peremptory with Harry. It was not for her to order him about in that way. Lady Louisa was beginning to distrust this capable, indefatigable woman, on whom she had become absolutely dependent; and when the nurse had left her for the night, and was asleep in the next room with the door open between, she began to turn over in her mind, not for the first time, the idea of parting with her, and letting Janey nurse her entirely once more, as she had done at first. Janey with Anne the housemaid to help her could manage perfectly well, whatever the doctor might say. It was not as if she wanted anything doing for her, lying still as she did day after day. She should never have had a trained nurse if her own wishes had been consulted. But when were they ever consulted? The doctor, who understood nothing about her illness, had insisted, and Janey had not resisted the idea as she ought to have done. But the whole household could not be run to suit Janey's convenience. She had told her so already more than once. She should tell her so again. Even worms will turn. There were others to be considered besides Janey, who only considered herself.

Lady Louisa's mind left her daughter and went back, as if it had received some subtle warning, to the subject of the nurse. She was convinced by the woman's manner of intervening when she had been questioning Harry, that something had been concealed from her about the expedition to Ipswich. She constantly suspected that there was a cabal against her. She was determined to find out what it was, which she could easily do from Harry. And if Nurse had really disobeyed her, and had taken him on the water, which always excited him, or to a theatre, which was strictly forbidden, then she would make use of that act of disobedience as a pretext for dismissing her, and she would certainly not consent to have anyone else in her place. Having settled this point, she closed her eyes and tried to settle herself to sleep.

But sleep would not come. The diligent little clock, with its face turned to the strip of light shed by the shaded nightlight, recorded in a soft chime half-hour after half-hour. With forlorn anger, she reflected that every creature in the house was sleeping--she could hear Nurse's even breathing close at hand--every one except herself, who needed sleep more than anyone to enable her to get through the coming day. It did not strike her that possibly Janey also might be lying open-eyed through the long hours.

Lady Louisa's mind wandered like a sullen, miserable tramp over her past life. She told herself that all had gone wrong with her, all had cheated her from first to last. It seems to be the doom of the egoist to crave for things for which he has no real value, on which when acquired he can only trample. Lady Louisa had acquired a good deal and had trampled heavily on her acquisitions, especially on her kindly, easy-tempered husband who had loved her. And how throughout her whole life she had longed to be loved!

To thirst voraciously to be loved, to have sufficient ac.u.men to perceive love to be the only real bulwark, as it is, against the blows of fate; the only real refuge, as it is, from grief; the one sure consolation, as it is, in the recurring anguished ache of existence,--to perceive that life is not life without it, and _then_ to find that love when appropriated and torn out of its shrine is no talisman, but only a wearisome, prosaic clog quickly defaced by being dragged in the dust up the th.o.r.n.y path of our egotism! Is there any disappointment so bitter, so devastating as that? Lady Louisa, poor soul, had endured it. She glanced for a moment at the photograph of her husband on the mantelpiece, with his hair brushed forward over his ears. Even death had not a.s.suaged her long-standing grievance against him. Why had he always secretly preferred his nephew Roger to his own sons? Why did he die just after their eldest son d.i.c.k came of age? And why had not he left her Hulver for her life, instead of taking for granted that she would prefer to go back to her own house, Noyes Court, a few miles off? She had told him so, but he might have known she had never meant it. She had not wanted to go back to it. She had not gone back, though all her friends and Janey had especially wished it. She had hastily let it to Mr.

Stirling the novelist, to show that she should do exactly as she liked, and had made one of those temporary arrangements that with the old are always for life. She had moved into the Dower House for a year, and had been in it seven years.

Her heart swelled with anger as she thought of the conduct of her eldest son after his father's death: and yet could anyone have been a brighter, more delightful child than d.i.c.ky? But d.i.c.ky had been a source of constant anxiety to her, from the day when he was nearly drowned in the mill-race at Riff to the present hour, when he was lying dying by inches of spinal paralysis at his aunt's house in Paris as the result of a racing accident. What a heartbreaking record his life had been, of one folly, one insane extravagance after another! And shame had not been wanting. He had not even made a foolish marriage, and left a son whom she and Janey could have taken from its mother and educated; but there was an illegitimate child--a girl--whom Roger had told her about, by a village schoolmistress, an honest woman whom d.i.c.k had seduced under promise of marriage.

Perhaps, after all, Lady Louisa had some grounds for feeling that everything had gone against her. d.i.c.k was dying, and her second son Harry--what of him? She was doggedly convinced that Harry was not "wanting": that "he could help it if he liked." In that case, all that could be said was that he did not like. She stuck to it that his was a case of arrested development, in strenuous opposition to her husband, who had held that Harry's brain was not normal from the awful day when as a baby they first noticed that he always stared at the ceiling. Lady Louisa had fiercely convinced herself, but no one else, that it was the glitter of the old cut-gla.s.s chandelier which attracted him. But after a time even she had to own to herself, though never to others, that he had a trick of staring upwards where no chandelier was. Even now, at two-and-twenty, Harry furtively gazed upon the sky, and perhaps vaguely wondered why he could only do so by stealth--why that was one of the innumerable forbidden things among which he had to pick his way, and for which he was sharply reprimanded by that dread personage his mother.

Mr. Manvers on his death-bed had said to d.i.c.k in Lady Louisa's presence, "Remember, if you don't have a son, Roger ought to have Hulver. Harry is not fit."

She had never forgiven her husband for trying to denude Harry of his birthright. And to-night she felt a faint gleam of consolation in the surrounding dreariness in the thought that he had not been successful.

When d.i.c.k died, Harry would certainly come in. On her last visit to Paris she had ransacked d.i.c.k's rooms at his training-stable. She had gone through all his papers. She had visited his lawyers. She had satisfied herself that he had not made a will. It was all the more important, as Harry would be very rich, that Janey should take entire and personal charge of him, lest he should fall into the hands of some designing woman. That pretty French adventuress, Miss Georges, who had come to live at Riff and whom Janey had made such friends with, was just the kind of person who might entangle him into marrying her. And then if Roger and Janey should eventually marry, Harry could perfectly well live with them. He must be guarded at all costs. Lady Louisa sighed. That seemed on the whole the best plan. She had looked at it all round. But Janey was frustrating it by refusing to do her part. She must fall into line. To-morrow she would send for her lawyer and alter her will once more, leaving Noyes to Harry, instead of Janey, as she had done by a promise to her husband. Janey had no one but herself to thank for such a decision. She had forced it on her mother by her obstinacy and her colossal selfishness. What had she done that she of all women should have such selfish children? Then Janey would have nothing of her own at all, and then she would be so dependent on Harry that she would have no alternative but to do her duty by him.

Lady Louisa sighed again. Her mind was made up. Janey must give way, and the nurse must be got rid of. Those were the two next things to be achieved. Then perhaps she would be suffered to rest in peace.

CHAPTER XV

"And Death stopped knitting at the m.u.f.fling band.

'The shroud is done,' he muttered, 'toe to chin.'

He snapped the ends, and tucked his needles in."

JOHN MASEFIELD.

After a sleepless night, and after the protracted toilet of the old and feeble, Lady Louisa tackled her task with unabated determination. She dictated a telegram to her lawyer, sent out the nurse for a walk, and desired Janey to bring Harry to her.

Harry, who was toiling over his arithmetic under the cedar, with the help of a tutor from Riebenbridge and a box of counters, obeyed with alacrity. He looked a very beaming creature, with "fresh morning face,"

as he came into his mother's room.

"Good morning, mamma."

"Good morning, my son."

The terrible ruler looked benign. She nodded and smiled at him. He did not feel as cowed as usual.

"You can go away, Janey, and you needn't come back till I ring."

"And now tell me all about the performing dogs," said the terrible ruler in the bed, when Janey had left the room.

Harry saw that she was really interested, and he gave her an exact account, interrupted by the bubbling up of his own laughter, of a dog which had been dressed up as a man in a red coat, with a c.o.c.ked hat and a gun. He could hardly tell her for laughing. The dread personage laughed too, and said, "Capital! Capital!" And he showed her one of the tricks, which consisted of sitting up on your hind legs with a pipe in your mouth. He imitated exactly how the dog had sat, which in a man was perhaps not quite so mirth-provoking as in a dog. Nevertheless, the dread personage laughed again.

It promised to be an agreeable morning. He hoped it would be a long time before she remembered his arithmetic and sent him back to it, that hopeless guess-work which he sometimes bribed Tommy the gardener's boy to do for him in the tool-shed.

"And then you got your gloves!" said the dread personage suddenly. "How many pairs was it?" Harry was bewildered, and stared blankly at her.

"You must remember how many pairs it was." Harry knit his poor brow, rallied his faculties, and said it was two pairs.

"And now," said Lady Louisa, "you may have a chocolate out of my silver box, and let me hear all about--you know what," and she nodded confidentially at him.

But he only gaped at her, half frightened. She smiled rea.s.suringly at him.

"Nurse told me all about it," she said encouragingly. "That was why you weren't to tell me. She wanted it to be a great surprise to me."

"I wasn't to say a word," said Harry doubtfully,--"not a word--about _that_."

"No. That was just what Nurse said to me. You weren't to say a single word last night, until she had told me. But now I know all about it, so we can talk. Was it great fun?"

"I don't know."

"It was great fun when I did it. How I laughed!"

"I didn't laugh. She told me not to."

"Well, no. Not at first. She was quite right. And what did her brother say? Nurse said he went with you."

"Yes. We called for him, and he went with us, with a flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole--a rose it was. He gave me one too."

Harry looked at his b.u.t.ton-hole, as if expecting to see the rose still in it. But that sign of merry-making was absent.

Lady Louisa had on a previous occasion severely reprimanded Nurse for taking Harry to tea at her brother's house, a solicitor's clerk in Ipswich. Her spirits rose. She had detected her in an act of flagrant disobedience. And as likely as not they had all gone to a play together.

"Capital!" she said suavely. "He was just the right person to go with.

That was what I said to Nurse. And what did _he_ talk about?"

"He said, 'Mum's the word. Keep it all quiet till the old cat dies,' and he slapped me on the back and said, 'Mind that, brother-in-law.' He was very nice indeed."

A purple mark like a bruise came to Lady Louisa's clay-coloured cheeks.

There was a long pause before she spoke again.

"And did you write your name nicely, like Janey taught you?" She spoke with long-drawn gasps, each word articulated with difficulty.

"Yes," said Harry anxiously, awed by the fixity of her eyes upon him. "I did indeed, mamma. I was very particular."

"Your full name?"

"Yes, the man said my full name--Henry de la Pole Manvers."