"Thank G.o.d you pa.s.sed!" she cried. "You were wonderful!"
"I"d have shot myself if I hadn"t been. I had an awful day yesterday with the governor; it was late at night before it was over. I leave England next week. He brought me down here for it to look well--so that the children shan"t know."
"HE"S wonderful too!" Adela murmured.
"Wonderful too!" G.o.dfrey echoed.
"Did SHE tell him?" the girl went on.
"She came straight to Seymour Street from here. She saw him alone first; then he called me in. THAT luxury lasted about an hour."
"Poor, poor father!" Adela moaned at this; on which her brother remained silent. Then after he had alluded to it as the scene he had lived in terror of all through his cramming, and she had sighed forth again her pity and admiration for such a mixture of anxieties and such a triumph of talent, she pursued: "Have you told him?"
"Told him what?"
"What you said you would--what _I_ did."
G.o.dfrey turned away as if at present he had very little interest in that inferior tribulation. "I was angry with you, but I cooled off.
I held my tongue."
She clasped her hands. "You thought of mamma!"
"Oh don"t speak of mamma!" he cried as in rueful tenderness.
It was indeed not a happy moment, and she murmured: "No; if you HAD thought of her--!"
This made G.o.dfrey face her again with a small flare in his eyes. "Oh THEN it didn"t prevent. I thought that woman really good. I believed in her."
"Is she VERY bad?"
"I shall never mention her to you again," he returned with dignity.
"You may believe _I_ won"t speak of her! So father doesn"t know?"
the girl added.
"Doesn"t know what?"
"That I said what I did to Mrs. Churchley."
He had a momentary pause. "I don"t think so, but you must find out for yourself."
"I shall find out," said Adela. "But what had Mrs. Churchley to do with it?"
"With MY misery? I told her. I had to tell some one."
"Why didn"t you tell me?"
He appeared--though but after an instant--to know exactly why. "Oh you take things so beastly hard--you make such rows." Adela covered her face with her hands and he went on: "What I wanted was comfort-- not to be lashed up. I thought I should go mad. I wanted Mrs.
Churchley to break it to father, to intercede for me and help him to meet it. She was awfully kind to me, she listened and she understood; she could fancy how it had happened. Without her I shouldn"t have pulled through. She liked me, you know," he further explained, and as if it were quite worth mentioning--all the more that it was pleasant to him. "She said she"d do what she could for me. She was full of sympathy and resource. I really leaned on her.
But when YOU cut in of course it spoiled everything. That"s why I was so furious with you. She couldn"t do anything then."
Adela dropped her hands, staring; she felt she had walked in darkness. "So that he had to meet it alone?"
"Dame!" said G.o.dfrey, who had got up his French tremendously.
Muriel came to the door to say papa wished the two others to join them, and the next day G.o.dfrey returned to town. His father remained at Brinton, without an intermission, the rest of the summer and the whole of the autumn, and Adela had a chance to find out, as she had said, whether he knew she had interfered. But in spite of her chance she never found out. He knew Mrs. Churchley had thrown him over and he knew his daughter rejoiced in it, but he appeared not to have divined the relation between the two facts. It was strange that one of the matters he was clearest about--Adela"s secret triumph--should have been just the thing which from this time on justified less and less such a confidence. She was too sorry for him to be consistently glad. She watched his attempts to wind himself up on the subject of shorthorns and drainage, and she favoured to the utmost of her ability his intermittent disposition to make a figure in orchids.
She wondered whether they mightn"t have a few people at Brinton; but when she mentioned the idea he asked what in the world there would be to attract them. It was a confoundedly stupid house, he remarked-- with all respect to HER cleverness. Beatrice and Muriel were mystified; the prospect of going out immensely had faded so utterly away. They were apparently not to go out at all. Colonel Chart was aimless and bored; he paced up and down and went back to smoking, which was bad for him, and looked drearily out of windows as if on the bare chance that something might arrive. Did he expect Mrs.
Churchley to arrive, did he expect her to relent on finding she couldn"t live without him? It was Adela"s belief that she gave no sign. But the girl thought it really remarkable of her not to have betrayed her ingenious young visitor. Adela"s judgement of human nature was perhaps harsh, but she believed that most women, given the various facts, wouldn"t have been so forbearing. This lady"s conception of the point of honour placed her there in a finer and purer light than had at all originally promised to shine about her.
She meanwhile herself could well judge how heavy her father found the burden of G.o.dfrey"s folly and how he was incommoded at having to pay the horrible woman six hundred a year. Doubtless he was having dreadful letters from her; doubtless she threatened them all with hideous exposure. If the matter should be bruited G.o.dfrey"s prospects would collapse on the spot. He thought Madrid very charming and curious, but Mrs. G.o.dfrey was in England, so that his father had to face the music. Adela took a dolorous comfort in her mother"s being out of that--it would have killed her; but this didn"t blind her to the fact that the comfort for her father would perhaps have been greater if he had had some one to talk to about his trouble. He never dreamed of doing so to her, and she felt she couldn"t ask him. In the family life he wanted utter silence about it. Early in the winter he went abroad for ten weeks, leaving her with her sisters in the country, where it was not to be denied that at this time existence had very little savour. She half expected her sister-in-law would again descend on her; but the fear wasn"t justified, and the quietude of the awful creature seemed really to vibrate with the ring of gold-pieces. There were sure to be extras.
Adela winced at the extras. Colonel Chart went to Paris and to Monte Carlo and then to Madrid to see his boy. His daughter had the vision of his perhaps meeting Mrs. Churchley somewhere, since, if she had gone for a year, she would still be on the Continent. If he should meet her perhaps the affair would come on again: she caught herself musing over this. But he brought back no such appearance, and, seeing him after an interval, she was struck afresh with his jilted and wasted air. She didn"t like it--she resented it. A little more and she would have said that that was no way to treat so faithful a man.
They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first days of April she saw Mrs. Churchley in the Park. She herself remained apparently invisible to that lady--she herself and Beatrice and Muriel, who sat with her in their mother"s old bottle-green landau.
Mrs. Churchley, perched higher than ever, rode by without a recognition; but this didn"t prevent Adela"s going to her before the month was over. As on her great previous occasion she went in the morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted. This time, however, her visit was shorter, and a week after making it--the week was a desolation--she addressed to her brother at Madrid a letter containing these words: "I could endure it no longer--I confessed and retracted; I explained to her as well as I could the falsity of what I said to her ten months ago and the benighted purity of my motives for saying it. I besought her to regard it as unsaid, to forgive me, not to despise me too much, to take pity on poor PERFECT papa and come back to him. She was more good-natured than you might have expected--indeed she laughed extravagantly. She had never believed me--it was too absurd; she had only, at the time, disliked me. She found me utterly false--she was very frank with me about this--and she told papa she really thought me horrid. She said she could never live with such a girl, and as I would certainly never marry I must be sent away--in short she quite loathed me. Papa defended me, he refused to sacrifice me, and this led practically to their rupture. Papa gave her up, as it were, for ME. Fancy the angel, and fancy what I must try to be to him for the rest of his life! Mrs. Churchley can never come back--she"s going to marry Lord Dovedale."