by Ellen Wood
“Why did you speak of it to madame?” asked Dr. Knox. “We agreed to be silent for a short time.”
“I don’t see why she should not be told, Arnold. She is straightforward as the day — and Lettice Lane seems so, too. I tasted the beef-tea they gave her — took a cup of it, in fact — and I tasted the physic. Madame says it is impossible that anything in the shape of drugs is being given to her; and upon my word I think so too.”
“All the same, I wish you had not spoken.”
And a little time went on.
III.
The soirée to-night was at Rose Villa; and Mrs. Knox, attired in a striped gauze dress and the jangling ornaments she favoured, stood to receive her guests. Beads on her thin brown neck, beads on her sharp brown wrists, beads in her ears, and beads dropping from her waist. She looked all beads. They were drab beads to-night, each resting in a little cup of gold. Janet and Miss Cattledon went up in the brougham, the latter more stiffly ungracious than usual, for she still resented Mrs. Knox’s former behaviour to Janet. I walked.
“Where can the people from next door be?” wondered Mrs. Knox, as the time went on and Lady Jenkins did not appear.
For Lady Jenkins went abroad again. In a day or two after Mr. Tamlyn’s interview with her, Lefford had the pleasure of seeing her red-wheeled carriage whirling about the streets, herself and her companion within it. Old Tamlyn said she was getting strong. Dr. Knox said nothing; but he kept his eyes open.
“I hope she is not taken ill again? I hope she is not too drowsy to come!” reiterated Mrs. Knox. “Sometimes madame can’t rouse her up from these sleepy fits, do what she will.”
Lady Jenkins was the great card of the soirée, and Mrs. Knox grew cross. Captain Collinson had not come either. She drew me aside.
“Johnny Ludlow, I wish you would step into the next door and see whether anything has happened. Do you mind it? So strange that Madame St. Vincent does not send or come.”
I did not mind it at all. I rather liked the expedition, and passed out of the noisy and crowded room to the lovely, warm night-air. The sky was clear; the moon radiant.
I was no longer on ceremony at Jenkins House, having been up to it pretty often with Dan or Sam, and on my own score. Lady Jenkins had been pleased to take a fancy to me, had graciously invited me to some drives in her red-wheeled carriage, she dozing at my side pretty nearly all the time. I could not help being struck with the utter abnegation of will she displayed. It was next door to imbecility.
“Patty, Johnny Ludlow would like to go that way, I think, to-day may we?” she would say. “Must we turn back already, Patty? — it has been such a short drive.” Thus she deferred to Madame St. Vincent in all things, small and great: if she had a will or choice of her own, it seemed that she never thought of exercising it. Day after day she would say the drives were short: and very short indeed they were made, upon some plea or other, when I made a third in the carriage. “I am so afraid of fatigue for her,” madame whispered to me one day, when she seemed especially anxious.
“But you take a much longer drive, when she and you are alone,” I answered, that fact having struck me. “What difference does my being in the carriage make? — are you afraid of fatigue for the horses as well?” At which suggestion madame burst out laughing.
“When I am alone with her I take care not to talk,” she explained; “but when three of us are here there’s sure to be talking going on, and it cannot fail to weary her.”
Of course that was madame’s opinion: but my impression was that, let us talk as much as we would, in a high key or a low one, that poor nodding woman neither heard nor heeded it.
“Don’t you think you are fidgety about it, madame?”
“Well, perhaps I am,” she answered. “I assure you, Lady Jenkins is an anxious charge to me.”
Therefore, being quite at home now at Jenkins House (to return to the evening and the soirée I was telling of), I ran in the nearest way to do Mrs. Knox’s behest. That was through the two back gardens, by the intervening little gate. I knocked at the glass-doors of what was called the garden-room, in which shone a light behind the curtains, and went straight in. Sitting near each other, conversing with an eager look on their faces, and both got up for Mrs. Knox’s soirée, were Captain Collinson and Madame St. Vincent.
“Mr. Ludlow!” she exclaimed. “How you startled me!”
“I beg your pardon for entering so abruptly. Mrs. Knox asked me to run in and see whether anything was the matter, and I came the shortest way. She has been expecting you for some time.”
“Nothing is the matter,” shortly replied madame, who seemed more put out than the occasion called for: she thought me rude, I suppose. “Lady Jenkins is not ready; that is all. She may be half-an-hour yet.”
“Half-an-hour! I won’t wait longer, then,” said Captain Collinson, catching up his crush hat. “I do trust she has not taken another chill. Au revoir, madame.”
With a nod to me, he made his exit by the way I had entered. The same peculiarity struck me now that I had observed before: whenever I went into a place, be it Jenkins House or Rose Villa, the gallant captain immediately quitted it.
“Do I frighten Captain Collinson away?” I said to madame on the spur of the moment.
“You frighten him! Why should you?”
“I don’t know why. If he happens to be here when I come in, he gets up and goes away. Did you never notice it? It is the same at Mrs. Knox’s. It was the same once at Mrs. Hampshire’s.”
Madame laughed. “Perhaps he is shy,” said she, jestingly.
“A man who has travelled to India and back must have rubbed his shyness off, one would think. I wish I knew where I had met him before! — if I have met him. Every now and again his face seems to strike on a chord of my memory.”
“It is a handsome face,” remarked madame.
“Pretty well. As much as can be seen of it. He has hair enough for a Russian bear or a wild Indian.”
“Have wild Indians a superabundance of hair?” asked she gravely.
I laughed. “Seriously speaking, though, Madame St. Vincent, I think I must have met him somewhere.”
“Seriously speaking, I don’t think that can be,” she answered; and her jesting tone had become serious. “I believe he has passed nearly all his life in India.”
“Just as you have passed yours in the South of France. And yet there is something in your face also familiar to me.”
“I should say you must be just a little fanciful on the subject of likenesses. Some people are.”
“I do not think so. If I am I did not know it. I — —”
The inner door opened and Lady Jenkins appeared, becloaked and beshawled, with a great green hood over her head, and leaning on Lettice Lane. Madame got up and threw a mantle on her own shoulders.
“Dear Lady Jenkins, I was just coming to see for you. Captain Collinson called in to give you his arm, but he did not wait. And here’s Mr. Johnny Ludlow, sent in by Mrs. Knox to ask whether we are all dead.”
“Ay,” said Lady Jenkins, nodding to me as she sat down on the sofa: “but I should like a cup of tea before we start.”
“A cup of tea?”
“Ay; I’m thirsty. Let me have it, Patty.”
She spoke the last words in an imploring tone, as if Patty were her mistress. Madame threw off her mantle again, untied the green hood of her lady, and sent Lettice to make some tea.
“You had better go back and tell Mrs. Knox we are coming, though I’m sure I don’t know when it will be,” she said aside to me.
I did as I was told; and had passed through the garden-gate, when my eye fell upon Master Richard Knox. He was standing on the grass in the moonlight, near the clump of laurels, silently contorting his small form into cranks and angles, after the gleeful manner of Punch in the show when he has been giving his wife a beating. Knowing that agreeable youth could not keep himself out of mischief if he tried, I made up to him.
“Hush — sh — sh!” breat
hed he, silencing the question on my lips.
“What’s the sport, Dicky?”
“She’s with him there, beyond the laurels; they are walking round,” he whispered. “Oh my! such fun! I have been peeping at ‘em. He has his arm round her waist.”
Sure enough, at that moment they came into view — Mina and Captain Collinson. Dicky drew back into the shade, as did I. And I, to my very great astonishment, trod upon somebody else’s feet, who made, so to say, one of the laurels.
“It’s only I,” breathed Sam Jenkins. “I’m on the watch as well as Dicky. It looks like a case of two loviers, does it not?”
The “loviers” were parting. Captain Collinson held her hand between both his to give her his final whisper. Then Mina tripped lightly over the grass and stole in at the glass-doors of the garden-room, while the captain stalked round to the front-entrance and boldly rang, making believe he had only then arrived.
“Oh my, my!” repeated the enraptured Dicky, “won’t I have the pull of her now! She’d better tell tales of me again!”
“Is it a case, think you?” asked Sam of me, as we slowly followed in the wake of Mina.
“It looks like it,” I answered.
Janet was singing one of her charming songs, as we stole in at the glass-doors: “Blow, blow, thou wintry wind:” just as she used to sing it in that house in the years gone by. Her voice had not lost its sweetness. Mina stood near the piano now, a thoughtful look upon her flushed face.
“Where did you and Dicky go just now, Sam?”
Sam turned short round at the query. Charlotte Knox, as she put it, carried suspicion in her low tone.
“Where did I and Dicky go?” repeated Sam, rather taken aback. “I — I only stepped out for a stroll in the moonlight. I don’t know anything about Dicky.”
“I saw Dicky run out to the garden first, and you went next,” persisted Charlotte, who was just as keen as steel. “Dick, what was there to see? I will give you two helpings of trifle at supper if you tell me.”
For two helpings of trifle Dick would have sold his birthright. “Such fun!” he cried, beginning to jump. “She was out there with the captain, Lotty: he came to the window here and beckoned to her: I saw him. I dodged them round and round the laurels, and I am pretty nearly sure he kissed her.”
“Who was? — who did?” But the indignant glow on Lotty’s face proved that she scarcely needed to put the question.
“That nasty Mina. She took and told that it was me who eat up the big bowl of raspberry cream in the larder to-day; and mother went and believed her!”
Charlotte Knox, her brow knit, her head held erect, walked away after giving us all a searching look apiece. “I, like Dicky, saw Collinson call her out, and I thought I might as well see what he wanted to be after,” Sam whispered to me. “I did not see Dicky at all, though, until he came into the laurels with you.”
“He is talking to her now,” I said, directing Sam’s attention to the captain.
“I wonder whether I ought to tell Dr. Knox?” resumed Sam. “What do you think, Johnny Ludlow? She is so young, and somehow I don’t trust him. Dan doesn’t, either.”
“Dan told me he did not.”
“Dan fancies he is after her money. It would be a temptation to some people, — seven thousand pounds. Yet he seems to have plenty of his own.”
“If he did marry her he could not touch the money for three or four years to come.”
“Oh, couldn’t he, though,” answered Sam, taking me up. “He could touch it next day.”
“I thought she did not come into it till she was of age, and that Dr. Knox was trustee.”
“That’s only in case she does not marry. If she marries it goes to her at once. Here comes Aunt Jenkins!”
The old lady, as spruce as you please, in a satin gown, was shaking hands with Mrs. Knox. But she looked half silly: and, may I never be believed again, if she did not begin to nod directly she sat down.
“Do you hail from India? as the Americans phrase it,” I suddenly ask of Captain Collinson, when chance pinned us together in a corner of the supper-room, and he could not extricate himself.
“Hail from India!” he repeated. “Was I born there, I conclude you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Not exactly. I went there, a child, with my father and mother. And, except for a few years during my teens, when I was home for education, I have been in India ever since. Why do you ask?”
“For no particular reason. I was telling Madame St. Vincent this evening that it seemed to me I had seen you before; but I suppose it could not be. Shall you be going back soon?”
“I am not sure. Possibly in the autumn, when my leave will expire: not till next year if I can get my leave extended. I shall soon be quitting Lefford.”
“Shall you?”
“Must do it. I have to make my bow at a levée; and I must be in town for other things as well. I should like to enjoy a little of the season there: it may be years before the opportunity falls to my lot again. Then I have some money to invest: I think of buying an estate. Oh, I have all sorts of business to attend to, once I am in London.”
“Where’s the use of buying an estate if you are to live in India?”
“I don’t intend to live in India always,” he answered, with a laugh. “I shall quit the service as soon as ever I can, and settle down comfortably in the old country. A home of my own will be of use to me then.”
Now it was that very laugh of Captain Collinson’s that seemed more familiar to me than all the rest of him. That I had heard it before, ay, and heard it often, I felt sure. At least, I should have felt sure but for its seeming impossibility.
“You are from Gloucestershire, I think I have heard,” he observed to me.
“No; from Worcestershire.”
“Worcestershire? That’s a nice county, I believe. Are not the Malvern Hills situated in it?”
“Yes. They are eight miles from Worcester.”
“I should like to see them. I must see them before I go back. And Worcester is famous for — what is it? — china? — yes, china. And for its cathedral, I believe. I shall get a day or two there if I can. I can do Malvern at the same time.”
“Captain Collinson, would you mind giving Lady Jenkins your arm?” cried Mrs. Knox at this juncture. “She is going home.”
“There is no necessity for Captain Collinson to disturb himself: I can take good care of Lady Jenkins,” hastily spoke Madame St. Vincent, in a tart tone, which the room could not mistake. Evidently she did not favour Captain Collinson.
But the captain had already pushed himself through the throng of people and taken the old lady in tow. The next minute I found myself close to Charlotte Knox, who was standing at the supper-table, with a plate of cold salmon before her.
“Are you a wild bear, Johnny Ludlow?” she asked me privately, under cover of the surrounding clatter.
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Madame St. Vincent takes you for one.”
I laughed. “Has she told you so?”
“She has not told me: I guess it is some secret,” returned Charlotte, beginning upon the sandwiches. “I learnt it in a curious way.”
A vein of seriousness ran through her half-mocking tone; seriousness lay in her keen and candid eyes, lifted to mine.
“Yes, it was rather curious, the way it came to me: and perhaps on my part not altogether honourable. Early this morning, Johnny, before ten o’clock had struck, mamma made me go in and ask how Lady Jenkins was, and whether she would be able to come to-night. I ran in the nearest way, by the glass-doors, boisterously of course — mamma is always going on at me for that — and the breeze the doors made as I threw them open blew a piece of paper off the table. I stooped to pick it up, and saw it was a letter just begun in madame’s handwriting.”
“Well?”
“Well, my eyes fell on the few words written; but I declare that I read them heedlessly, not with any dishonourable intention; such a thought
never entered my mind. ‘Dear Sissy,’ the letter began, ‘You must not come yet, for Johnny Ludlow is here, of all people in the world; it would not do for you and him to meet.’ That was all.”
“I suppose madame had been called away,” continued Charlotte, after a pause. “I put the paper on the table, and was going on into the passage, when I found the room-door locked: so I just came out again, ran round to the front-door and went in that way. Now if you are not a bear, Johnny, why should you frighten people?”
I did not answer. She had set me thinking.
“Madame St. Vincent had invited a sister from France to come and stay with her: she does just as she likes here, you know. It must be she who is not allowed to meet you. What is the mystery?”
“Who is talking about mystery?” exclaimed Caroline Parker; who, standing near, must have caught the word. “What is the mystery, Lotty?”
And Lotty, giving her some evasive reply, put down her fork and turned away.
LADY JENKINS. MADAME.
I.
“If Aunt Jenkins were the shrewd woman she used to be, I’d lay the whole case before her, and have it out; but she is not,” contended Dan Jenkins, tilting the tongs in his hand, as we sat round the dying embers of the surgery fire.
His brother Sam and I had walked home together from Mrs. Knox’s soirée, and we overtook Dan in the town. Another soirée had been held in Lefford that night, which Dan had promised himself to before knowing Mrs. Knox would have one. We all three turned into the surgery. Dr. Knox was out with a patient, and Sam had to wait up for him. Sam had been telling his brother what we witnessed up at Rose Villa — the promenade round the laurels that Captain Collinson and Mina had stolen in the moonlight. As for me, though I heard what Sam said, and put in a confirming word here and there, I was thinking my own thoughts. In a small way, nothing had ever puzzled me much more than the letter Charlotte Knox had seen. Who was Madame St. Vincent? and who was her sister, that I, Johnny Ludlow, might not meet her?
“You see,” continued Dan, “one reason why I can’t help suspecting the fellow, is this — he does not address Mina openly. If he were honest and above board, he would go in for her before all the world. He wouldn’t do it in secret.”