III
“Richard dear, I would like to ask mummie and Sir Charles to dinner—supper, I mean—one night. I’ve got a little cash in hand, so I shouldn’t feel too extravagant. You know I got rather more than I expected, for the sale of that old bracelet of mine.”
Richard did know, because Rita had told him this already, quite gleefully, although admitting that the bracelet had been a legacy from a specially beloved grandmother, and that it cost her a pang to let it go.
“I loathe your selling your jewellery. It makes me feel such a cad for having got you into this mess, though God knows I never foresaw anything like this. Rita, must you do these things?”
She looked at him with a face of piteous, childlike surprise. “Oh, aren’t you at all pleased that we’ve got an extra pound or two, Richard? I’m sure you’ve no idea what a difference it makes.”
He groaned impatiently.
“Of course, if you think I’ve no right to suggest entertaining anybody, even on a tiny scale, now we’re so poor, I won’t do it. It was silly of me, I daresay, but I haven’t really properly got used not to having an occasional little party, I suppose. It’s all right, Richard darling. Never mind.”
She smiled bravely.
“Rita, I shall go mad if I can’t find a job, and take you out of this sort of thing,” said Richard, and he began to pace up and down the little room.
When Lady Clyde and her husband did come to dinner, Rita told her mother privately that poor darling Richard was becoming almost hysterical sometimes. It did make things so much, much harder when one was doing all one could to keep up under the strain, and be always bright and ready to make the best of it.
“No one can say you’re not doing that, my dearest child,” said her mother.
Tears of mingled admiration and compassion rose to her eyes when Rita apologised gaily for the poverty of the fare, when she corrected herself every time that she mentioned the word dinner instead of supper, and when she laughingly excused herself for having to run away and help with the washing-up, because the servant now was only a daily one, and went home early.
“It seemed so funny at first, mummy, and I was always ringing the bell and expecting it to be answered, like when I used to ring for Cooper or Ellis or Mary, at home. I really can’t believe that I had a maid all for myself, just to do my hair and keep my clothes tidy, not so very long ago.”
“What a plucky little thing she is!” said her mother in a choked voice.
She glanced resentfully at Richard, who sat silent, moody and haggard, without endorsing her tribute to his wife in any way.
He looked very ill, but Lady Clyde at the moment could only realise to what straits he had brought Rita, and with what surly unresponsiveness he seemed to confront her courageous acceptance of poverty.
Lady Clyde asked her husband that night if he could not, as man to man, give Richard Lambourne a hint that his ungracious attitude to his wife, whilst living on her money, was the final crown of the wrongs that he had done her.
“I was going to suggest, personally, that you should give Rita a hint,” said Sir Charles.
“Rita! Why, when I think of that poor child’s gallantry——”
“Exactly. My own impression is that a very little more of it will drive Lambourne into a mad-house, or worse.”
Sir Charles spoke in his usual level accents, and Lady Clyde did not attempt to attach any meaning to his words. Neither did they recur to her when Richard Lambourne disproved her assertion that he had placed the crown upon the wrongs done to his wife, by the final ignominy of suicide.
“Coward, coward!” sobbed Lady Clyde. “Can you deny that he was a coward, Charles?”
“No. Richard was a coward,” said Sir Charles gravely.
“After all that poor little Rita had done!”
“And said,” added Sir Charles, not flippantly, and half under his breath.
The old magnate who had admired Rita at her wedding made use of almost the same words as Lady Clyde.
“After all that his wife had done, and was doing, to quit like that, and leave her to face the life he’d brought her to! What a brute!”
A little while afterwards he proposed to Rita, diffident, in spite of his wealth, because of the great difference in their ages.
She accepted him, and this time it was Sir Charles, looking at the bridegroom’s bald head and infirm gait beside the pretty bride at the quiet wedding, who repeated to himself the old man’s catchword, with an ironical emphasis of his own:
“A very gallant little lady.”
THE HOTEL CHILD