That’s simply gossip and lying, and they are bad manners. If you have good manners, you don’t.”
She chatted on in her pungent little worldly, good-humoured way through the making of a very excellent lunch. After which she settled her smart bonnet with clever touches, kissed Emily on both cheeks, and getting into her brougham rolled off smiling and nodding.
Emily stood at the drawing-room window and watched her equipage roll round the square and into Charles Street, and then turned away into the big, stately empty room, sighing without intending to do so while she smiled herself.
“She’s so witty and so amusing,” she said; “but one would no more think of telling her anything than one would think of catching a butterfly and holding it while one made it listen. She would be so bored if she was confided in.”
Which was most true. Never in her life had her ladyship allowed herself the indiscretion of appearing a person in whom confidences might be reposed. She had always had confidences enough of her own to take care of, without sharing those of other people.
“Good heavens!” she had exclaimed once, “I should as soon think of assuming another woman’s wrinkles.”
On the first visit Lady Walderhurst made to The Kennel Farm the morning after her return to Palstrey, when Alec Osborn helped her from her carriage, he was not elated by the fact that he had never seen her look so beautifully alive and blooming during his knowledge of her. There was a fine rose on her cheek, and her eyes were large and happily illumined.
“How well you look!” broke from him with an involuntariness he was alarmed to realise as almost spiteful. The words were an actual exclamation which he had not meant to utter, and Emily Walderhurst even started a trifle and looked at him with a moment’s question.
“But you look well, too,” she answered. “Palstrey agrees with both of us. You have such a colour.”
“I have been riding,” he replied. “I told you I meant to know Faustine thoroughly before I let you mount her. She is ready for you now. Can you take your first lesson tomorrow?”
“I—I don’t quite know,” she hesitated. “I will tell you a little later. Where is Hester?”
Hester was in the drawing-room. She was lying on a sofa before an open window and looking rather haggard and miserable. She had, in fact, just had a curious talk with Alec which had ended in something like a scene. As Hester’s health grew more frail, her temper became more fierce, and of late there had been times when a certain savagery, concealed with difficulty in her husband’s moods, affected her horribly.
This morning she felt a new character in Emily’s manner. She was timid and shy, and a little awkward. Her childlike openness of speech and humour seemed obscured. She had less to say than usual, and at the same time there was a suggestion of restless unease about her. Hester Osborn, after a few minutes, began to have an odd feeling that the woman’s eyes held a question or a desire in them.
She had brought some superb roses from the Manor gardens, and she moved about arranging them for Hester in vases.
“It is beautiful to come back to the country,” she said. “When I get into the carriage at the station and drive through the sweet air, I always feel as if I were beginning to live again, and as if in London I had not been quite alive. It seemed so heavenly in the rose garden at Palstrey to-day, to walk about among those thousands of blooming lovely things breathing scent and nodding their heavy, darling heads.”
“The roads are in a beautiful condition for riding,” Hester said, “and Alec says that Faustine is perfect. You ought to begin tomorrow morning. Shall you?”
She spoke the words somewhat slowly, and her face did not look happy. But, then, it never was a really happy face. The days of her youth had been too full of the ironies of disappointment.
There was a second’s silence, and then she said again:
“Shall you, if it continues fine?”
Emily’s hands were full of roses, both hands, and Hester saw both hands and roses tremble. She turned round slowly and came towards her. She looked nervous, awkward, abashed, and as if for that moment she was a big girl of sixteen appealing to her and overwhelmed with queer feelings, and yet the depths of her eyes held a kind of trembling, ecstatic light. She came and stood before her, holding the trembling roses as if she had been called up for confession.
“I—I mustn’t,” she half whispered. The corners of her lips drooped and quivered, and her voice was so low that Hester could scarcely hear it. But she started and half sat up.
“You mustn’t?” she gasped; yes, really it was gasped.
Emily’s hand trembled so that the roses began to fall one by one, scattering a rain of petals as they dropped.
“I mustn’t,” she repeated, low and shakily. “I had—reason.—I went to town to see—somebody. I saw Sir Samuel Brent, and he told me I must not. He is quite sure.”
She tried to calm herself and smile. But the smile quivered and ended in a pathetic contortion of her face. In the hope of gaining decent self-control, she bent down to pick up the dropped roses. Before she had picked up two, she let all the rest fall, and sank kneeling among them, her face in her hands.
“Oh, Hester, Hester!” she panted, with sweet, stupid unconciousness of the other woman’s heaving chest and glaring eyes. “It has come to me too, actually, after all.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Palstrey Manor carriage had just rolled away carrying Lady Walderhurst home. The big, low-ceilinged, oak-beamed farmhouse parlour was full of the deep golden sunlight of the late afternoon, the air was heavy with the scent of roses and sweet-peas and mignonette, the adorable fragrance of English country-house rooms. Captain Osborn inhaled it at each breath as he stood and looked out of the diamond-paned window, watching the landau out of sight. He felt the scent and the golden glow of the sunset light as intensely as he felt the dead silence which reigned between himself and Hester almost with the effect of a physical presence. Hester was lying upon the sofa again, and he knew she was staring at his back with that sardonic widening of her long eyes, a thing he hated, and which always foreboded things not pleasant to face.
He did not turn to face them until the footman’s cockade had disappeared finally behind the tall hedge, and the tramp of the horses’ feet was deadening itself in the lane. When he ceased watching and listening, he wheeled round suddenly.
“What does it all mean?” he demanded. “Hang her foolish airs and graces._ Why_ won’t she ride, for she evidently does not intend to.”
Hester laughed, a hard, short, savage little un-mirthful sound it was.
“No, she doesn’t intend to,” she answered, “for many a long day, at least, for many a month. She has Sir Samuel Brent’s orders to take the greatest care of herself.”
“Brent’s? Brent’s?”
Hester struck her lean little hands together and laughed this time with a hint at hysteric shrillness.
“I told you so, I told you so!” she cried. “I knew it would be so, I knew it! By the time she reaches her thirty-sixth birthday there will be a new Marquis of Walderhurst, and he won’t be either you or yours.” And as she finished, she rolled over on the sofa, and bit the cushions with her teeth as she lay face downwards on them. “He won’t be you, or belong to you,” she reiterated, and then she struck the cushions with her clenched fist.
He rushed over to her, and seizing her by the shoulders shook her to and fro.
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” he said; “you don’t know what you are saying.”
“I