Notwithstanding Part 15

"That was the man at the registry office?"

"Yes."

"And"--the voice laboured heavily and was barely audible--"did Nurse write her name nicely too?"

"Yes, and her brother and the man. We all wrote them, and then we all had tea at Frobisher's,--only it wasn't tea,--and Nurse's brother ordered a bottle of champagne. Nurse didn't want him to, but he said people didn't get married every day. And he drank our health, and I drank a little tiny sip, and it made me sneeze."

Lady Louisa lay quite motionless, the sweat upon her forehead, looking at her son, who smiled seraphically back at her.

And so Nurse had actually thought she could outwit _her_--had pitted herself against _her_? She would shortly learn a thing or two on that head.

A great cold was invading her. And as she looked at Harry, it was as if some key, some master key, were suddenly and noiselessly turned in the lock. Without moving her eyes, she saw beyond him the door, expecting to see the handle turn, and Nurse or Janey to come in. But the door remained motionless. Nevertheless, a key somewhere had turned.

Everything was locked tight--the room, the walls, the bed, herself in it--as in a vice.

"Go back to your lessons," she said to Harry, "and send Janey to me."

She felt a sudden imperative need of Janey.

But Harry, so docile, so schooled to obedience, made no motion to obey her. He only looked vacantly, expectantly at her.

She spoke again, but he paid no heed. She spoke yet again with anger, but this time he was fidgeting with the watch on her table and did not even look up. She saw him as if through a gla.s.s screen.

A wave of anger shook her.

"Leave the room this moment, and do as I tell you," she said, with her whole strength. Had he suddenly became deaf? Or had she----? Was she----? A great fear took her. He put back the watch on its stand, and touched the silver box in which the chocolates were kept.

"May I have another--just one other?" he said, opening it, his voice barely audible through the gla.s.s screen.

And then, glancing at her for permission, he was seized with helpless laughter.

"Oh, mamma! You do look so funny, with your mouth all on one side--funnier than the dog in the hat."

His words and his laughter reached her, faint yet distinct, and she understood what had befallen her. Two large tears gathered in her anguished eyes and then slowly ran down her distorted face. Everything else remained fixed, as in a vice, save Harry, rocking himself to and fro, and snapping his fingers with delight.

CHAPTER XVI

"After all, I think there are only two kinds of people in the world, lovers and egotists. I fear that lovers must smile when they see me making myself comfortable, collecting refined luxuries and a pleasant society round myself, protecting myself from an uneasy conscience by measured ornamental acts of kindness and duty; mounting guard over my health and my seclusion and my liberty. Yes!

I have seen them smile."--M. N.

The violet dusk was deepening and the dew was falling as Annette crossed the garden under the apple trees on her return from the choir practice.

There was a light in Aunt Maria's window, which showed that she was evidently grappling with the smoking embroglio which was racking two young hearts. Even a footfall in the pa.s.sage was apt to scare that shy bird Aunt Maria's genius, so Annette stole on tiptoe to the parlour.

Aunt Harriet, extended on a sofa near a shaded lamp, looked up from her cushions with a bright smile of welcome, and held out both her hands.

Aunt Harriet was the youngest of three sisters, but she had not realized that that fact may in time cease to mean much. It was obvious that she had not yet kissed the rod of middle age. She had been moderately good-looking twenty years ago, and still possessed a willowy figure and a slender hand, and a fair amount of ash-coloured hair which she wore in imitation of the then Princess of Wales tilted forward in a dome of innumerable little curls over a longish pinkish face, leaving the thin flat back of her head unmitigated by a coil. Aunt Harriet gave the impression of being a bas-relief, especially on the few occasions on which she stood up, when it seemed as if part of her had become momentarily unglued from the sofa, leaving her spinal column and the back of her head behind.

She had had an unhappy and misunderstood--I mean too accurately understood--existence, during the early years when her elder sister Maria ruthlessly exhorted her to exert herself, and continually frustrated her mild inveterate determination to have everything done for her. But a temporary ailment long since cured and a sympathetic doctor had enabled her to circ.u.mvent Maria, and to establish herself for good on her sofa, with the soft-hearted Catherine in attendance. Her unlined face showed that she had found her niche in this uneasy world, and was no longer as in all her earlier years a drifter through life, terrified by the possibility of fatiguing herself. Greatly to her credit, and possibly owing to Catherine's mediation, Aunt Maria accepted the situation, and never sought to undermine the castle, not in Spain but on a sofa, which her sister had erected, and in which she had found the somewhat colourless happiness of her life.

"Come in, my love, come in," said Aunt Harriet, with playful gaiety.

"Come in and sit by me."

Her love came in and sat down obediently on the low stool by her aunt's couch, that stool to which she was so frequently beckoned, on which it was her lot to hear so much advice on the subject of the housekeeping and the management of the servants.

"I think, Annette, you ought to speak to Hodgkins about the Albert biscuits. I know I left six in the tin yesterday, and there were only four to-day. I went directly I was down to count them. It is not good for _her_ to take the dining-room Alberts and then to deny it, as she did the other day. So I think it will be best if I don't move in the matter, and if you mention it as if you had noticed it yourself." Or, "There was a cobweb on my gla.s.s yesterday. I think, dearest, you must not overlook that. Servants become very slack unless they are kept up to their work." Aunt Harriet was an enemy of all slackness, idleness, want of energy, shirking in all its branches. She had taken to reading Emerson of late, and often quoted his words that "the only way of escape in all the worlds of G.o.d was performance."

Annette would never have kept a servant if she had listened to her aunt's endless promptings. But she did not listen to them. Her placid, rather happy-go-lucky temperament made her forget them at once.

"Have you had supper, dear child?"

"Not yet. I will go now."

"And did you remember to take a lozenge as you left the church?"

"I am afraid I forgot."

"Ah! my dear, it's a good thing you have some one to look after you and mother you. It's not too late to take one now."

"I should like to go and have supper now. I am very hungry."

"I rejoice to hear it. It is wonderful to me how you can do without a regular meal on choir nights. If it had been me, I should have fainted.

But sit down again for one moment. I have something to tell you. You will never guess whom we have had here."

"I am sure I never shall."

"You know how much Maria thinks of literary people?"

"Yes."

"I don't care for them quite so much as she does. I am more drawn to those who have suffered, whose lives have been shattered like gla.s.s as my own life has been, and who gather up the fragments that remain and weave a beautiful embroidery out of them."

Annette knew that her aunt wanted her to say, "As you do yourself."

She considered a moment and then said, "You are thinking of Aunt Catherine."

Aunt Harriet was entirely nonplussed. She felt unable to own that she had no such thought. She sighed deeply, and said after a pause, "I don't want it repeated, Annette,--I learned long ago that it is my first duty to keep my troubles to myself, to consume my own smoke,--but my circulation has never been normal since the day Aunt Cathie died."

Then after a moment she added, with sudden brightness, as one who relumes the torch on which a whole household depends--

"But you have not guessed who our visitor was, and what a droll adventure it all turned out. How I did laugh when it was all over and he was safely out of hearing! Maria said there was nothing to laugh at, but then she never sees the comic side of things as I do."

"I begin to think it must have been Canon Wetherby, the clergyman who told you that story about the parrot who said 'd.a.m.n' at prayers, and made Aunt Maria promise not to put it in one of her books."

"She will, all the same. It is too good to be lost. No, it was not Canon Wetherby. But you will never guess. I've never known you guess anything, Annette. You are totally devoid of imagination, and ah! how much happier your life will be in consequence. I shall have to tell you. It was Mr.

Reginald Stirling."