Lady Lucy said nothing. She, too, had grown white.
The butler appeared. Marsham asked for the Sunday trains, ordered some packing, went down-stairs to speak to the Beechcote messenger, and returned.
Ferrier retired into the farthest window, and Marsham approached his mother.
"Good-bye, mother. I will write to you from Beechcote, where I shall stay at the little inn in the village. Have you no kind word that I may carry with me?"
Lady Lucy looked at him steadily.
"I shall write myself to Miss Mallory, Oliver."
His pallor gave place to a flush of indignation.
"Is it necessary to do anything so cruel, mother?"
"I shall not write cruelly."
He shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
"Considering what you have made up your mind to do, I should have thought least said, soonest mended. However, if you must, you must. I can only prepare Diana for your letter and soften it when it comes."
"In your new love, Oliver, have you quite forgotten the old?" Lady Lucy"s voice shook for the first time.
"I shall be only too glad to remember it, when you give me the opportunity," he said, sombrely.
"I have not been a bad mother to you, Oliver. I have claims upon you."
He did not reply, and his silence wounded Lady Lucy to the quick. Was it her fault if her husband, out of an eccentric distrust of the character of his son, and moved by a kind of old-fashioned and Spartan belief that a man must endure hardness before he is fit for luxury, had made her and not Oliver the arbiter and legatee of his wealth? But Oliver had never wanted for anything. He had only to ask. What right had she to thwart her husband"s decision?
"Good-bye, mother," said Marsham again. "If you are writing to Isabel you will, I suppose, discuss the matter with her. She is not unlikely to side with you--not for your reason, however--but because of some silly nonsense about politics. If she does, I beg she will not write to me. It could only embitter matters."
"I will give her your message. Good-bye, Oliver." He left the room, with a gesture of farewell to Ferrier.
Ferrier came back toward the fire. As he did so he was struck--painfully struck--by a change in Lady Lucy. She was not pale, and her eyes were singularly bright. Yet age was, for the first time, written in a face from which Time had so far taken but his lightest toll. It moved him strangely; though, as to the matter in hand, his sympathies were all with Oliver. But through thirty years Lady Lucy had been the only woman for him. Since first, as a youth of twenty, he had seen her in her father"s house, he had never wavered. She was his senior by five years, and their first acquaintance had been one of boy-adoration on his side and a charming elder-sisterliness on hers. Then he had declared himself, and she had refused him in order to marry Henry Marsham and Henry Marsham"s fortune. It seemed to him then that he would soon forget her--soon find a warmer and more generous heart. But that was mere ignorance of himself. After awhile he became the intimate friend of her husband, herself, and her child. Something, indeed, had happened to his affection for her. He felt himself in no danger beside her, so far as pa.s.sion was concerned; and he knew very well that she would have banished him forever at a moment"s notice rather than give her husband an hour"s uneasiness. But to be near her, to be in her world, consulted, trusted, and flattered by her, to slip daily into his accustomed chair, to feel year by year the strands of friendship and of intimacy woven more closely between him and her--between him and hers--these things gradually filled all the s.p.a.ce in his life left by politics or by thought. They deprived him of any other home, and this home became a necessity.
Then Henry Marsham died. Once more Ferrier asked Lady Lucy to marry him, and again she refused. He acquiesced; their old friendship was resumed; but, once more, with a difference. In a sense he had no longer any illusions about her. He saw that while she believed herself to be acting under the influence of religion and other high matters, she was, in truth, a narrow and rather cold-hearted woman, with a strong element of worldliness, disguised in much placid moralizing. At the bottom of his soul he resented her treatment of him, and despised himself for submitting to it. But the old habit had become a tyranny not to be broken. Where else could he go for talk, for intimacy, for rest? And for all his disillusion there were still at her command occasional felicities of manner and strains of feeling--ethereally delicate and spiritual, like a stanza from the _Christian Year_--that moved him and pleased his taste as nothing else had power to move and please; steeped, as they were, in a far-off magic of youth and memory.
So he stayed by her, and she knew very well that he would stay by her to the end.
He sat down beside her and took her hand.
"You are tired."
"It has been a miserable day."
"Shall I read to you? It would be wise, I think, to put it out of your mind for a while, and come back to it fresh."
"It will be difficult to attend." Her smile was faint and sad. "But I will do my best."
He took up a volume of Dean Church"s sermons, and began to read.
Presently, as always, his subtler self became conscious of the irony of the situation. He was endeavoring to soothe her trouble by applying to it some of the n.o.blest religious thought of our day, expressed in the n.o.blest language. Such an attempt implied some moral correspondence between the message and the listener. Yet all the time he was conscious himself of cowardice and hypocrisy. What part of the Christian message really applied to Lady Lucy this afternoon but the searching words: "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love G.o.d whom he hath not seen?"
Yet he read on. The delicate ascetic face of his companion grew calmer; he himself felt a certain refreshment and rest. There was no one else in the world with whom he could sit like this, to whom he could speak or read of the inner life. Lucy Marsham had made him what he was, a childless bachelor, with certain memories in his past life of which he was ashamed--representing the revenge of a strong man"s temperament and physical nature. But in the old age she had all but reached, and he was approaching, she was still the one dear and indispensable friend. If she must needs be harsh and tyrannical--well, he must try and mitigate the effects, for herself and others. But his utmost effort must restrain itself within certain limits. He was not at all sure that if offended in some mortal point, she might not do without him. But so long as they both lived, he could not do without her.
Early the following morning Alicia Drake appeared in Eaton Square, and by two o"clock Mrs. Fotheringham was also there. She had rushed up from Leeds by the first possible train, summoned by Alicia"s letter. Lady Lucy and her daughter held conference, and Miss Drake was admitted to their counsels.
"Of course, mamma," said Isabel Fotheringham, "I don"t at all agree with you in the matter. n.o.body is responsible for their mothers and fathers.
We make ourselves. But I shall not be sorry if the discovery frees Oliver from a marriage which would have been a rope round his neck. She is a foolish, arrogant, sentimental girl, brought up on the most wrong-headed principles, and she could _never_ have made a decent wife for him. She will, I hope, have the sense to see it--and he will be well out of it."
"Oliver, at present, is very determined," said Lady Lucy, in a tone of depression.
"Oh, well, of course, having just proposed to her, he must, of course, behave like a gentleman--and not like a cad. But she can"t possibly hold him to it. You will write to her, mamma--and so shall I."
"We shall make him, I fear, very angry."
"Oliver? Well, there are moments in every family when it is no use shirking. We have to think of Oliver"s career, and what he may do for his party, and for reform. You think he proposed to her in that walk on the hill?" said Mrs. Fotheringham, turning to her cousin Alicia.
Alicia woke up from a brown-study of her own. She was dressed with her usual perfection in a gray cloth, just suggesting the change of season.
Her felt hat with its plume of feathers lay on her lap, and her hair, slightly loosened by the journey, captured the eye by its abundance and beauty. The violets on her breast perfumed the room, and the rings upon her hands flashed just as much as is permitted to an unmarried girl, and no more. As Mrs. Fotheringham looked at her, she said to herself: "Another Redfern! Really Alicia is too extravagant!"
On that head no one could have reproached herself. A cheap coat and skirt, much worn, a hat of no particular color or shape, frayed gloves and disreputable boots, proclaimed both the parsimony of her father"s will and the independence of her opinions.
"Oh, of course he proposed on the hill," replied Alicia, thoughtfully.
"And you say, Aunt Lucy, that _he_ guessed--and she knew nothing?
Yes!--I was certain he guessed."
"But she knows now," said Lady Lucy; "and, of course, we must all be very sorry for her."
"Oh, of course!" said Isabel. "But she will soon get over it. You won"t find it will do her any harm. People will make her a heroine."
"I should advise her not to go about with that cousin," said Alicia, softly.
"The girl who told you?"
"She was an outsider! She told me, evidently, to spite her cousin, who seemed not to have paid her enough attention, and then wanted me to swear secrecy."
"Well, if her mother was a sister of Juliet Sparling, you can"t expect much, can you? What a mercy it has all come out so soon! The mess would have been infinitely greater if the engagement had gone on a few weeks."
"My dear," said her mother, gravely, "we must not reckon upon Oliver"s yielding to our persuasions."
Isabel smiled and shrugged her shoulders. Oliver condemn himself to the simple life!--to the forfeiture of half a million of money--for the sake of the _beaux yeux_ of Diana Mallory! Oliver, who had never faced any hardship or gone without any luxury in his life!
Alicia said nothing; but the alertness of her brilliant eyes showed the activity of the brain behind them. While Mrs. Fotheringham went off to committees, Miss Drake spent the rest of the day in ministering to Lady Lucy, who found her company, her gossip about Beechcote, her sympathetic yet restrained att.i.tude toward the whole matter, quite invaluable. But, in spite of these aids, the hours of waiting and suspense pa.s.sed heavily, and Alicia said to herself that Cousin Lucy was beginning to look frail.