Sir Hilton's Sin Part 46

"Yes, yes, yes, I know; but pray think. I grant that racing is gambling, but I really believe my dear old friend Hilton Lisle will for the future yield to your wishes and fight shy--I beg your pardon-- religiously abstain from attending Turf meetings."

"Oh, oh, oh, doctor!" sobbed the patient, who was at her weakest in the weakest hour of the twenty-four. "You do not know all. I could have forgiven that; but when I discovered the base disloyalty of the man in whom I had always the most perfect faith--"

"Dear me! Ahem!" coughed the doctor. "I--" and he glanced at Lady Tilborough.

"Oh, hang it, no!" cried the latter, firing up. "Surely, madam, you don't think that! Oh, absurd! Poor old Hilton! Oh, nonsense, nonsense! Why, the woman is jealous of me!"

"No, no, no!" cried Lady Lisle, excitedly. "I did not think--Oh, no, Lady Tilborough, I do not think that."

"Ha! That's some comfort," sighed the lady addressed; but she frowned angrily, and the look she darted at the doctor was by no means like the last, though his was of the most abject, imploring kind.

"I can't explain--I can't explain," sobbed Lady Lisle in her handkerchief. "I would sooner die, for it is all over now."

The others exchanged looks and a whisper or two, as they drew aside from the weeping woman.

"Oh, I don't believe it of poor old Hilt," said Lady Tilborough.

"Neither do I," cried the doctor.

"There is no one," said Lady Tilborough. "Unless--" she added, as a sudden thought struck her. "No, no, no; he's too loyal to go running after a pretty little commonplace doll like that, Jack."

"I hope so," said the doctor, shaking his head. "Well, here he is to answer for himself," he added quickly, for the farther door was opened, and, clad in slippers and dressing-gown, and carrying a flat candlestick, whose light was not wanted, and looking quite himself mentally, but ghastly pale, Sir Hilton briskly entered the room.

"What's the meaning of this?" he cried, stopping short, and looking from one to the other.

"Oh-h-h-h!" exclaimed Lady Lisle, in a long-drawn utterance expressive of her anger and disgust.

"Why, Hilt, old fellow," cried Granton, "I thought you were ill in bed?"

"What brings you here, sir?" cried Sir Hilton. "But stop; I'll talk to you afterwards," he added fiercely. "Now, madam, will you have the goodness to explain what this means?"

"Oh-h-h-h!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Lady Lisle again, in tones more long-drawn and suggestive of the rage boiling up within, her darting and flashing eyes telling their own tale of the storm about to burst.

"Oh, indeed, madam!" cried Sir Hilton, mockingly. "Really, I am very sorry to have to make a display of the soiled laundry of our establishment before our visitors, but I must demand an explanation.

Here am I, called suddenly away upon very important business respecting monetary matters, and I return home late, to find that you have taken advantage of my absence to--to--to--to--there, I will not give utterance to my thoughts, but ask you, madam, to explain why I find you away, even at midnight, and not putting in an appearance till nearly four in the morning--four in the morning, and in a state that--Good heavens, madam!

have you looked at yourself in the gla.s.s?"

Lady Lisle had not looked at herself in the gla.s.s, and her husband's words came so aptly, rousing such a feeling of wonder in her that she involuntarily turned sharply to glance in one of the long mirrors and see a reflection in the crossed light of the artificial and the real coming from candle and break of day, that she felt horrified, and once more e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed "Oh!"

"Yes. Oh, indeed!" cried Sir Hilton, grasping at his advantage. "Pray, madam, will you be good enough to explain."

Lady Tilborough, who had drawn back behind the couch to give the princ.i.p.als in this domestic scene room to develop their quarrel, exchanged mirthful glances with the doctor.

"Taking the bull by the horns," whispered Granton.

"Cow!" whispered back Lady Tilborough, correctively, and she laid her hands upon the piled-up Polar bear skin to support herself, but s.n.a.t.c.hed them away with a look of alarm at the doctor, one which changed to a glance full of inquiry, his answer from a yard or so away being a gesture with the hands which, being interpreted, meant, Haven't the least idea. But he moved a little nearer, touched the skin, and then whispered the one word: "Dog!"

Lady Tilborough felt comforted, nodded her head and turned her eyes from the doctor to watch the domestic scene, and then felt uncomfortable, for she found that Lady Lisle's attention had been drawn to what was going on between her and the doctor concerning the strangely piled-up hill of white fur, and her dark eyes were now fixed upon her uninvited visitor with a furious look of suspiciously jealous rage.

Lady Lisle saw in all this a means of making a counter attack upon her husband's desperate a.s.sault, and she seized upon the weapon proffered by fate at once.

"Don't add insult to injury before these friends of yours, sir," she cried, fully equipped now for the counter attack; "and pray do not imagine that you have blinded me by this contemptible dust you are trying to throw in my eyes."

"Dust, madam?" cried Sir Hilton, some what staggered by the reaction that had taken place.

"Yes, sir--dust. You forget that I was a witness to your appearance in that den of infamy."

"Den of infamy, madam?"

"Yes, sir; den of infamy--disgracefully inebriated."

"Oh, poor old Hilton!" whispered Granton. "I must--"

"Silence!" cried Lady Lisle, turning upon the speaker, in the tones and with the air of a tragedy queen, her eyes flashing again as she saw a peculiar movement beneath the Polar bear skin, from the bottom of which there was the sudden protrusion of a very prettily-booted little foot.

"Yes, Sir Hilton," continued Lady Lisle, pressing her hands upon her heaving bosom to keep down the seething pa.s.sion. "I repeat, disgracefully inebriated, dressed in the low, flaunting guise of a jockey."

"Oh, dear," groaned Sir Hilton, completely taken aback.

"And forgetting the wife who rescued you from ruin--home--position--even yourself, as a man bearing an honoured t.i.tle in the country, stooping to toy and play with that--abandoned creature."

"What!"

"Whom you have had the audacity to bring with you into this--my house."

"My dear madam!" cried Lady Tilborough, indignantly.

"Silence, woman!" shouted the furious wife. "Do you think me blind?

Did I not see you and your confederate plotting together just now to try and hide his shame?"

"No," cried Granton; "nothing of the kind."

"Laura!" roared Sir Hilton. "You must be mad!"

"Mad? Ha, ha!" cried Lady Lisle, hysterically, and covering three yards in a gliding rush that would have been a triumph upon the stage she seized the Polar bear skin with both hands, whisked it off, and displayed the sleeping figure of poor little Molly, flushed, dishevelled, not to say touzled, by the heavy covering from which she had been freed, and just aroused sufficiently to open a pair of pretty red lips and say drowsily--

"Kiss me, dear."

"Ha!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Lady Lisle, with her eyes darting daggers, and her fingers playing instinctively the part of a savage barbarian-woman face to face with the rival who has supplanted her with the man she loved-- they crooked themselves into claws.

"Well, I am blowed!" exclaimed Sir Hilton, with a puzzled look of horror and despair so wildly comical, aided as it was by his making a drag with both hands at his already too thin hair.

"Now, sir," cried Lady Lisle, "what have you to say to that?"

_Crash_!