"What a happy little family party!" laughed Charlotte Grey. "Mrs.
Darling, Mr. Andrews, and child. Maid, valet, and governess, I suppose."
"Oh, Nina"s governess herself," the d.u.c.h.ess disclosed. "She won"t trust the child to any one else."
"Didn"t I tell you she"d changed?" Bellingdown repeated. "She gives the kiddy the attention she used to lavish on that black beast, Tara."
Just then the butler appeared, and every one looked up, expecting to see Mrs. Darling and her _entourage_ following. But no one followed. Then they saw the blue envelope, and knew it was a wire.
Lady Bellingdown took it, and there wasn"t a sound. The entire group was enveloped in the silence of antic.i.p.ation.
"It"s from Nina," announced the recipient. "She isn"t coming, after all.
"Agnes seriously ill," she says. "Can"t bring her, and won"t come without her.""
"Didn"t I tell you?" asked Lord Waltheof. "She"s a slave to the kiddy."
"I like that in Nina," praised the duke. "She"s a fine woman--a devilishly fine woman! But Nibbetts was a martyr, just the same."
The next week the duke went up to town by himself and called at the flat in Mayfair.
"I came to see how the kiddy was," he announced, though he hardly needed to have asked a question, for Nina, he saw at a glance, was in high spirits.
"She"s better, the dear," she said; "ever so much better. The doctor feared pneumonia, but it was only a bad cold. It"s sweet of you to come"--at this point she kissed him--"and I"m going to let you see her as a reward."
The child was sitting up in a bed literally covered with dolls. On the head-rail was perched a pygmy parrot, which greeted the duke with: "_Bon jour! Bon jour! m"sieu"!_" provoking his grace to inordinate laughter, in which Miss Agnes heartily joined.
"Coco"s very polite," she said. "I teach him to be polite. Papa always said that good manners were half the battle."
The duke looked at Nina. "Papa?" he questioned.
"Nibbetts," she answered frankly. "I thought you knew. She"s Nibbetts"s little daughter."
"Ah!" murmured the duke. Then he looked at the little girl again, and was sure he saw a resemblance. Her hair was tawny, like his, but a shade lighter, and she had his gray eyes. She seemed tall for her age, so far as he could judge; but she was undoubtedly very frail.
Later Nina told him that Agnes"s mother was a young Scotch woman who had inherited a pulmonary weakness and died at the age of three and twenty.
"It makes me doubly anxious about the child," she said. "London is no climate for her."
But his grace wasn"t listening very attentively.
"Nibbetts"s," he kept saying--"Nibbetts"s! He wasn"t as much of a martyr as I thought."
Nina gave him some tea, and had one of the maids fetch some seed-cake from a very excellent bake-shop where a specialty was made of it. The duke liked it, and it put him in high good humor.
Moreover, it led him to a revelation. Nina was looking very lovely in her mourning, and he had always been very fond of her. He drew his chair close to hers and clasped her disengaged hand.
"I"m never going to Bellingdown again," he announced decisively. "They are all sharks at Bellingdown. They tear every one to pieces."
"I know they do," she returned, amused. "But what"s the difference? I thought you rather enjoyed the tearing."
"They never draw the line," he said. "Friend and foe, it is all the same. The other day they were tearing you, and I won"t stand for having you torn. I said as much then. But they"re sure to go on, nevertheless."
Nina smiled at her champion. "What were they tearing me about?"
"They said that they believed this child was yours, and implied that you"d been keeping her in hiding for fourteen years."
"I haven"t, of course. But what if she were and I had? Everybody knows now that I was married to Hal. As a matter of fact, our own little girl is buried on the island of Jersey. She died at her birth. If you"d care to go over and look at her grave I"ll do my best to direct you."
The Duke of Pemberwell gasped, and nearly choked on his seed-cake.
"Gad!" he exclaimed. "I never knew of that."
"Nor anybody else," said Nina. "I foolishly made a wreck of my life, but I did not think it worth while to show the whitened, worm-bored timbers to the world. Now that I"m past thirty, however, and the only real lover and husband I ever had is dead, I don"t care who knows it.
"It hasn"t been a pretty story, but if it was ever put into a book it would make an interesting one, and it might point a moral."
"Thirty isn"t old," his grace declared. "Why, you"re ten years off your prime yet. You"ve another life to live."
"I feel a hundred sometimes," she replied, "and I know my heart is quite that."
"You love the child--Nibbetts"s child?"
"Because he lives again in her. It"s a shadowy love, you see. I shall never love another man."
"They say you"ll marry this Andrews chap when the year is up."
"I suppose they do."
"But you won"t?"
"I may."
"I hope so. That will be the beginning of the new life. And you"ll love him, too."
"No," she insisted. "I sha"n"t love him--not as he deserves to be loved.
For he is very good--oh, worlds and worlds too good for this fate he craves--and deserves a younger woman--one that is not world-worn as I am! Agnes adores him. If he would only wait for her she"d--"
The duke spilled some crumbs of seed-cake on the floor.
"He"s a very sensible chap, Andrews is. He don"t want an infant. Donty Down says you"ve changed, and I believe him. You"re different. You"ve developed. You"re more desirable now than ever before. Marry Andrews.
That"s what I advise. You"ll make him very happy."
But Nina wouldn"t promise. "There"s one thing about Gerald," she added.
"He does rest me. I feel such a peace when he is about."
Then, in spite of his expressed decision, the duke went back to Bellingdown and told his Doody every word. And, of course, all the rest of the _incroyables_ knew it in no time.
That same evening Andrews came up again from Bath, where business had called him.
He found Nina sitting on the balcony outside one pf the French windows, screened by greenery and bathed in the silver sheen of a moon that was nearing its noon.