John Talbot spends a wretched night. He does not owe this to the fact of Betty's infantine gambols, her ogles and cats'-cradles with Freddy Ducane through the previous evening; nor yet to any physical ill. It is one ray of honest contempt from a country-bred girl's heaven-blue eye that kills his rest. It seems to shine in upon his whole life, as a beam of clear morning sunshine shines in upon some ugly over-night revel, bringing out into all their unlovely prominence the wine-stains, and the guttered candles, and the faded flowers. A desire, whose futility he recognises, but which is none the less real for the impossibility of its ever being gratified, to set himself right with this thrice-seen stranger, takes possession of him; a desire to tell her his story--to lay before her the reasons why she should be lenient with him. Would she think them very cogent? His memory, made acuter by the darkness, journeys back over the past five years, weighing, sifting, recalling--back to the beginning, that August when his chief's affairs kept him in London after everybody else had left; when, sick at heart from a recent grief, he had fallen sick in body too; and when Betty, also detained in London by some accident--Betty, whom he had hitherto met only as one meets in the world, hearing of his sad plight, had come out of pure kind-heartedness--yes, he is quite sure that at first it was only out of pure kind-heartedness--to sit beside his sofa; Betty, laden with sweet flowers; Betty, with compassionate eyes and a womanly smile; Betty, with less paint and a lower voice; with more clothes and fewer after-dinner stories; and last, fatalest of all, with that likeness, fancied or real, to the sister he had just lost. He remembers the day on which he first told her of that resemblance. In the dark night he recalls again many another little landmark in that first period of his passion, and grows half tender again as their dead faces rise before him. But what did that first idyllic stage lead to? To nothing, indeed, as criminal as the world, as Margaret probably gives them credit for, but to those unhandsome shifts and expedients which have made of his life since one long shuffle and evasion. The kotowing to people he disliked and despised for invitations to meet her; the risky rendezvous; the mad jealousies; the half-heartedness in his work; the entire disintegration of all his plans, liable to be upset at a moment's notice, in order to dovetail in with her convenience; the irrepressible senseless friendliness, which he dare not refuse, on the part of the stupid worthy Harborough; the genuine fondness of that Harborough's little children--he looks back upon them all with nausea. No! there is nothing to be said for him! She would say that there was nothing to be said for him! He has slidden down a precipice, it is true, whose first slope was easy and gentle; but there were many bushes at which he might have caught in his downward passage to save himself if he had wished; and he caught at none. And now he is at the bottom! The very passion which gave some slight tinge of a bastard nobility to his ignoble life is dead--dead as the roses that flushed its dawn, and he must still be tied to its lifeless body as fast as--nay, faster than--he was to its living charms. This is his conclusion; and it is one not much calculated to lull him into slumber.
To prove the difference between a bad conscience and a good one, Margaret sleeps calmly; but she wakes in the morning with the sense of something faintly disagreeable having happened. She shakes it off as she goes about her garden and her chicken-pens, the more easily as Prue is in bounding spirits, which is to be accounted for by the fact of Freddy having invited her to go out riding with him in the afternoon, and promised to mount her upon one of his own horses--a privilege often before accorded to her, but which never fails to lift her into Elysium. She is too excited to settle to anything more solid than jumping over the garden-beds and the tennis-net, to and fro with Mink. If you are in paradise, why trouble yourself with earth's sordid tasks? But Margaret, not being in paradise, is meditatively grubbing on hands and knees in the rather overgrown border, when a ring at the door-bell brings her somewhat quickly to her feet. A sudden thought sends the indignant blood to her cheek. Is it possible that it can be Talbot? After yesterday, is it conceivable that he can have the presumption again to force himself upon her? She moves hastily towards the house to forbid his admission, if it be he. But she is too late. The visitor has been already let in; and proves to be one to whom her door is never shut--only Freddy Ducane.
'Have you come to fix the time for your ride?' asks she cordially, beaming upon him. He, at least, has wrenched himself out of Circe's sty. 'Do you want Prue? She is in the garden.'
The young man looks a shade embarrassed.
'Yes,' he says; 'I do. No; I do not--at least, I have something to say to her, but I think'--insinuatingly--'that I had rather say it to you. You know, Peggy, how fond I am of saying things to you! There is no one to whom I can say things as comfortably as I can to you.'
At this preface her heart sinks a little.
'What is it?' she asks curtly.
'Oh, only my luck!' throwing himself into a chair. 'By Jove'--looking round the room--'how cool you feel! and how good you smell!'
'I do not suppose that you came here to say that,' rejoins she, still standing over him in expectant anxiety.
His answer is to try and get possession of her hand.
'Peggy,' he says plaintively, 'that is not a nice way to speak to me; that is not the way I like to be spoken to. The reason why I came here--it is very inhospitable of you to insist upon my giving a reason--was to say'--sighing profoundly--'that I fear dear little Prue and I shall have to give up our ride this afternoon.'
Her foreboding was a true one then!
'Why?'
'Oh, because--because--just my luck!'
'I understand,' replies she caustically. 'You are in the case of the man who telegraphed to the house where he did not wish to stay, "So sorry. Cannot come. No lie ready."'
Freddy colours.
'Peggy, if I were not so really fond of you,' he says, in an injured voice, 'I should not allow you to speak to me like that. There are days when you rasp one like a file. Prue never rasps one.'
'Is that the reason why you think yourself justified in always letting her go to the wall?' asks Margaret, with a bitterness that seems out of proportion to the occasion; but in her mind's eye she sees the poor little figure that has been frolicking among the geraniums with dog and cat--sees, too, the metamorphosis that will be worked in it.
Freddy rolls his curly head uneasily to and fro on the chair-back.
'You talk as if I were not quite as disappointed as she,' he says, in a lamentable tone. 'But what is one to do? When one has guests, one must entertain them. Somebody must entertain her.'
'Must entertain whom?'
'Oh, you know as well as I do! You are only asking out of ill-nature. Betty, of course!'
'Betty, of course!' repeats she after him, with an indefinable accent.
'Well, Peggy, I appeal to you. What could I do, when she asked me point-blank? You know that I never can refuse to do anything that anybody asks me point-blank.'
'Then suppose that I ask you point-blank to throw her over?' suggests Margaret, looking full at him with her straightforward blue eyes.
'But you would not,' returns he hastily. 'You dear thing, it would not be the least like you; and it would only make her hate Prue for life. Ah, you do not know Betty!'
'And, meanwhile, where is her ame damnee, pray?' asks Margaret with a curling nose.
'"Where is John Talbot? Where is valiant John?"'
Freddy shrugs his shoulders.
'Valiant John is a little slack of late; he wants poking up a bit. But'--with a coaxing change of tone--'it will be just the same to Prue to go another day, will not it? and you will tell her, will not you? I--I really am in a great hurry this morning; and I--I--think I had rather you told her.'
'I will do nothing of the kind,' replies Peggy severely. 'You may do your own errands.'
Nor do any of his blandishments, any of his numerous assertions of the reverential attachment he has always felt for herself, any of his asseverations of the agonising grief it causes him to give the slightest pain to Prue, avail to make her budge one inch from her original resolution. She watches him as, with a somewhat hang-dog air, he walks across the grass-plot to meet her sister, who comes treading on air to meet him. And then Margaret looks away. She cannot bear to witness the extinction of that poor short radiance. She does not again meet young Ducane; nor does Prue reappear until luncheon-time, when she comes down from her bedroom with red eyes, but an air of determined cheerfulness.
'It would have been much too hot for riding to-day,' she says, fanning herself; 'unbearable, indeed! We are going a far longer ride in a day or two. He says he does not think that they will stay long. He was so bitterly disappointed. I do not think that I ever saw any one so disappointed--did you?' casting a wistful glance at her elder.
'He said he was,' replies Peggy sadly.
The incident has made her own heart heavy; and it is with an unelastic step that she sets off in the afternoon to the Manor, summoned thither by one of Lady Roupell's almost daily cocked-hat notes, to hold sweet converse upon the arrangements of an imminent village concert. A casual sentence to the effect that everybody but the old lady herself will be out has decided Margaret to obey the summons, which, did it expose her to a meeting with Lady Betty and John Talbot, she would have certainly disregarded.
Prue accompanies her to their gate, still with that strained look of factitious content on her childish face; and, as she parts from her sister, whispers feverishly:
'Find out how soon they are going!'
Dispirited as she was on leaving her own home, Miss Lambton's cheerfulness undergoes still further diminution before she reaches her goal; as, in passing through the park, has not she, in a retired and bosky dell, caught a glimpse of a white gown, and of a supine male figure, with a curly head and a poetry book, stretched beside it? She starts at the sight.
Freddy had certainly implied that he was going out riding with Lady Betty. On searching her memory, she found that he had not actually said so; but he had knowingly conveyed that idea to her mind. It is not the first time by many that Freddy Ducane has succeeded in conveying impressions that do not absolutely tally with the fact; but each fresh discovery of his disingenuousness gives her a new shock. Lady Roupell's boudoir is upstairs; and, following her usual custom, Margaret repairs thither unannounced. In doing so she passes the day nursery's open door; and, through it, sees Miss Harborough sitting on the floor, buttoning her boots. Peggy stops a moment to throw the child a greeting; but is instantly checked by the nurse.
'Oh, please, ma'am, do not speak to her! I am sure that she does not deserve it! she has been a real naughty girl!'
On inquiry, it appears that the enemy of man having again entered into Miss Lily, she has cut the string of her necklace, strewed the beads all over the floor, and then told a barefaced lie, and entirely denied it.
During this recital of her iniquities she continues her buttoning quite calmly; and merely says, with a dispassionate tone of indifference and acquiescence:
'Yes, I am bad.'
It is two hours later--so long does the discussion over the penny reading last--before Margaret again passes the nursery door. The interval has been filled by a discussion as to which of the local talent must be invited to contribute, and which may be, without giving too much offence, left out; but the larger part has been spent in a confederate consultation as to how best to prevent Mrs. Evans from singing 'Love, the Pilgrim.'
The matter is arranged at last; and Peggy puts on her hat and gloves again to depart. As she repasses the nursery door she finds that an entire change of decoration has taken place. Instead of the young cynic defiantly buttoning her boots in the teeth of the law, she sees a little pious figure in a white nightgown, kneeling by its nurse's side. The instant, however, that the saintly little form catches sight of her it is up on its bare legs, and rushing towards her.
'Oh, Miss Lambton, do let me say my prayers to you! it would be so pleasant!--No, Franky,' with a disposition to hustle her little brother, who is putting in a like claim; 'you are too little; you can say yours to Nanny!'
As she speaks she pulls Peggy by the gown into the room; and, placing her in a chair, kneels down at once--so that there may be no chance of her escaping--beside her, with hands devoutly folded, but a somewhat roving eye.
'Which shall I say?' asks she, with a wriggle of the back and an air of indifference: '"Our Father" or "Gentle Jesus"?'
'Say whichever you please,' replies Margaret gently; 'only attend and make up your mind which.'
'Oh, then,' with another wriggle, 'I will say "Gentle Jesus."'
After a pause:
'Do you think that there would be any harm in my praying for John Talbot?'
Margaret gives a little jump. It is, then, an hereditary passion! But she answers drily:
'Not the least.'
Another pause. The wriggling has ceased.
'Only,' pursues Peggy, quite determined not to supply the form of petition for Talbot's welfare, 'only you must say it out of your own head. I am not going to tell you what to say.'
'Oh, then,' with an air of resolution, 'I had better say, "God bless John Talbot; and I am glad he is here."'
She has pronounced this last somewhat eccentrically-worded supplication rather loud, and at the end of it her wandering eye takes in an object which makes her spring from her knees as hastily as she had done before.
'Oh! there is John Talbot!' cries she, tearing out barefoot into the passage, and flinging herself into his arms.
'I have been praying for you!' cries she, hugging him. 'Miss Lambton said that I might.'
At this unexpected colouring given to her reluctant permission Peggy reddens.
'I said that there was no harm in it,' explains Peggy hurriedly; 'there is no harm in praying for any one.'
'And the more they need it the greater charity it is,' replies he, looking at her with so sad and deprecating a humility that her anger against him melts.
