Lady Rose's Daughter Part 30

"Dear friend--kind, persecuted friend!--I thought of you in the watches of the night--I think of you this morning. Let me soon have news of you."

Julie put the letter down upon her knee. Her face stiffened. Nothing that she had ever received from him yet had rung so false.

Grief? Complaint? No! Just a calm grasp of the game--a quick playing of the pieces--so long as the game was there to play. If he was appointed to this mission, in two or three weeks he would be gone--to the heart of Africa. If not--

Anyway, two or three weeks were hers. Her mind seemed to settle and steady itself.

She got up and went once more carefully through the house, giving her attention to it. Yes, the whole had character and a kind of charm. The little place would make, no doubt, an interesting and distinguished background for the life she meant to put into it. She would move in at once--in three days at most. Ways and means were for the moment not difficult. During her life with Lady Henry she had saved the whole of her own small _rentes_. Three hundred pounds lay ready to her hand in an investment easily realized. And she would begin to earn at once.

Therese--that should be her room--the cheerful, blue-papered room with the south window. Julie felt a strange rush of feeling as she thought of it. How curious that these two--Leonie and little Therese--should be thus brought back into her life! For she had no doubt whatever that they would accept with eagerness what she had to offer. Her foster-sister had married a school-master in one of the Communal schools of Bruges while Julie was still a girl at the convent. Leonie's lame child had been much with her grandmother, old Madame Le Breton. To Julie she had been at first unwelcome and repugnant. Then some quality in the frail creature had unlocked the girl's sealed and often sullen heart.

While she had been living with Lady Henry, these two, the mother and child, had been also in London; the mother, now a widow, earning her bread as an inferior kind of French governess, the child boarded out with various persons, and generally for long periods of the year in hospital or convalescent home. To visit her in her white hospital bed--to bring her toys and flowers, or merely kisses and chat--had been, during these years, the only work of charity on Julie's part which had been wholly secret, disinterested, and constant.

XII

It was a somewhat depressed company that found its straggling way into the d.u.c.h.ess's drawing-room that evening between tea and dinner.

Miss Le Breton did not appear at tea. The d.u.c.h.ess believed that, after her inspection of the house in Heribert Street, Julie had gone on to Bloomsbury to find Madame Bornier. Jacob Delafield was there, not much inclined to talk, even as Julie's champion. And, one by one, Lady Henry's oldest _habitues_, the "criminals" of the night before, dropped in.

Dr. Meredith arrived with a portfolio containing what seemed to be proof-sheets.

"Miss Le Breton not here?" he said, as he looked round him.

The d.u.c.h.ess explained that she might be in presently. The great man sat down, his portfolio carefully placed beside him, and drank his tea under what seemed a cloud of preoccupation.

Then appeared Lord Lackington and Sir Wilfrid Bury. Montresor had sent a note from the House to say that if the debate would let him he would dash up to Grosvenor Square for some dinner, but could only stay an hour.

"Well, here we are again--the worst of us!" said the d.u.c.h.ess, presently, with a sigh of bravado, as she handed Lord Lackington his cup of tea and sank back in her chair to enjoy her own.

"Speak for yourselves, please," said Sir Wilfrid's soft, smiling voice, as he daintily relieved his mustache of some of the d.u.c.h.ess's cream.

"Oh, that's all very well," said the d.u.c.h.ess, throwing up a hand in mock annoyance; "but why weren't you there?"

"I knew better."

"The people who keep out of sc.r.a.pes are not the people one loves," was the d.u.c.h.ess's peevish reply.

"Let him alone," said Lord Lackington, coming for some more tea-cake.

"He will get his deserts. Next Wednesday he will be _tete-a-tete_ with Lady Henry."

"Lady Henry is going to Torquay to-morrow," said Sir Wilfrid, quietly.

"Ah!"

There was a general chorus of interrogation, amid which the d.u.c.h.ess made herself heard.

"Then you've seen her?"

"To-day, for twenty minutes--all she was able to bear. She was ill yesterday. She is naturally worse to-day. As to her state of mind--"

The circle of faces drew eagerly nearer.

"Oh, it's war," said Sir Wilfrid, nodding--"undoubtedly war--upon the Cave--if there is a Cave."

"Well, poor things, we must have something to shelter us!" cried the d.u.c.h.ess. "The Cave is being aired to-day."

The interrogating faces turned her way. The d.u.c.h.ess explained the situation, and drew the house in Heribert Street--with its Cyclops-eye of a dormer window, and its Ionian columns--on the tea-cloth with her nail.

"Ah," said Sir Wilfrid, crossing his knees reflectively. "Ah, that makes it serious."

"Julie must have a place to live in," said the d.u.c.h.ess, stiffly.

"I suppose Lady Henry would reply that there are still a few houses in London which do not belong to her kinsman, the Duke of Crowborough."

"Not perhaps to be had for the lending, and ready to step into at a day's notice," said Lord Lackington, with his queer smile, like the play of sharp sunbeams through a mist. "That's the worst of our cla.s.s. The margin between us and calamity is too wide. We risk too little. n.o.body goes to the workhouse."

Sir Wilfrid looked at him curiously. "Do I catch your meaning?" he said, dropping his voice; "is it that if there had been no d.u.c.h.ess, and no Heribert Street, Miss Le Breton would have managed to put up with Lady Henry?"

Lord Lackington smiled again. "I think it probable.... As it is, however, we are all the gainers. We shall now see Miss Julie at her ease and ours."

"You have been for some time acquainted with Miss Le Breton?"

"Oh, some time. I don't exactly remember. Lady Henry, of course, is an old friend of mine, as she is of yours. Sometimes she is rude to me.

Then I stay away. But I always go back. She and I can discuss things and people that n.o.body else recollects--no, as far as that's concerned, you're not in it, Bury. Only this winter, somehow, I have often gone round to see Lady Henry, and have found Miss Le Breton instead so attractive--"

"Precisely," said Sir Wilfrid, laughing; "the whole case in a nutsh.e.l.l."

"What puzzles me," continued his companion, in a musing voice, "is how she can be so English as she is--with her foreign bringing up. She has a most extraordinary instinct for people--people in London--and their relations. I have never known her make a mistake. Yet it is only five years since she began to come to England at all; and she has lived but three with Lady Henry. It was clear, I thought, that neither she nor Lady Henry wished to be questioned. But, do you, for instance--I have no doubt Lady Henry tells you more than she tells me--do you know anything of Mademoiselle Julie's antecedents?"

Sir Wilfrid started. Through his mind ran the same reflection as that to which the Duke had given expression in the morning--"_she ought to reveal herself!_" Julie Le Breton had no right to leave this old man in his ignorance, while those surrounding him were in the secret. Thereby she made a spectacle of her mother's father--made herself and him the sport of curious eyes. For who could help watching them--every movement, every word? There was a kind of indelicacy in it.

His reply was rather hesitating. "Yes, I happen to know something. But I feel sure Miss Le Breton would prefer to tell you herself. Ask her.

While she was with Lady Henry there were reasons for silence--"

"But, of course, I'll ask her," said his companion, eagerly, "if you suppose that I may. A more hungry curiosity was never raised in a human breast than in mine with regard to this dear lady. So charming, handsome, and well bred--and so forlorn! That's the paradox of it. The personality presupposes a _milieu_--else how produce it? And there is no _milieu_, save this little circle she has made for herself through Lady Henry.... Ah, and you think I may ask her? I will--that's flat--I will!"

And the old man gleefully rubbed his hands, face and form full of the vivacity of his imperishable youth.

"Choose your time and place," said Sir Wilfrid, hastily. "There are very sad and tragic circ.u.mstances--"

Lord Lackington looked at him and nodded gayly, as much as to say, "You distrust me with the s.e.x? Me, who have had the whip-hand of them since my cradle!"

Suddenly the d.u.c.h.ess interrupted. "Sir Wilfrid, you have seen Lady Henry; which did she mind most--the coming-in or the coffee?"

Bury returned, smiling, to the tea-table.

"The coming-in would have been nothing if it had led quickly to the going-out. It was the coffee that ruined you."