CHAPTER XV.
For months Deborah Audaer suffered from the horrible effect which the incidents of the visit to Rees had left upon her mind. London seemed to her the pestilential centre of all evil, physical and moral. The inky atmosphere, the black, gloomy streets, Rees Pennant’s dingy room, the passage full of deserted, dirty houses, all contributed to form a ghastly background to the picture of evil in which Amos Goodhare, with his cynical stare, and Rees, with his bold, feverish eyes, formed the central figures.
That journey had shown her men and things from a new and hideous point of view. For a time all the sweetness and freshness of life seemed poisoned for her. She saw the ills in the world—poverty, sin, and sorrow, in a harder, colder light. Since Rees whom she loved, could be corrupt and base, what in the wide world could be pure? So she reasoned, womanlike, and suffered in silence for the rest of the year, seeing a new and uglier sadness in the autumn and winter changes of nature, and brooding over her poor lost ideal.
Deborah was much too brave and good a girl for this change in her thoughts and feelings to find outward expression in her actions. Whatever view she might take of life in the abstract, the round of daily duties, which were sufficiently heavy, were fulfilled just as well as ever, and if Mrs. Pennant was shrewd enough to detect a change in the girl, it was not by finding the thin places in the old drawing-room curtains less carefully darned or her early cup of tea forgotten. For Deborah, to save the expense of keeping more than one servant, was perfect mistress of every household duty. This extreme domestic devotion, as Godwin considered it, excited in him great annoyance, the more so that he was now enjoying a salary which enabled him to send home a very handsome allowance.
Soon after the eventful visit to London, Godwin paid his mother a Saturday to Monday visit, and took the opportunity of the old lady’s afternoon nap to make a formal remonstrance with Deborah.
She was sitting on the old-fashioned fender-stool by the drawing-room fire, stroking the head of his fox terrier, when he came very softly down the long, cold-looking room, and stood behind her. She was bending down over the dog, talking to him softly; but presently, lifting up her head and perceiving the blocking out of the light from the window behind her, she turned with a start.
“Oh, Godwin, you startled me! I didn’t hear you come in. I thought you’d gone over to Llancader.”
“I changed my mind; I wanted to have a talk with you.” Deborah moved impatiently. He went on quickly, noticing this movement, “Oh, not on the old subject; don’t be afraid. I see you are not in the mood for one of my matter-of-fact proposals. I’m not even going to ask you why you are so particularly brusque, not to say snappish, to me this time. But I want to know why you don’t keep another servant. You know very well that, with what I send to her, my mother can afford it.”
Deborah, who had got up from the fender-stool and seated herself firmly on a chair, spoke very coldly and decisively.
“Is there anything wrong about the house, then—dirty windows, unswept carpets, or bad cooking—that you are dissatisfied with our arrangement?”
Godwin bounced up from the chair he had taken, and, standing with his back to the fireplace, stared over her head defiantly.
“Well, of all the disagreeable, bad-tempered girls I ever met, you are the most impossible to do anything with,” he said, at last losing his temper. “What do you suppose I want you to keep another servant for, except to save you trouble? Considering that I don’t live at home, what would it matter to me if the washing were hung over the front garden wall, and the knives cleaned on the drawing-room table?”
“What are you grumbling for, then?”
“I was not grumbling at all. I merely thought that a second servant would allow you to have more time to yourself.”
“That was not your reason at all. You thought it more in accordance with the family dignity—that is, your dignity—that there should be two servants in your mother’s house.”
Godwin brought his eyes quickly down from the window, and looked at her with a keenness which made her uncomfortable.
“You are unhappy,” he said at last, shortly, and not at all tenderly. “You never used to fish among people’s motives for a mean one like that. You have had some annoyance or disappointment, and, like an unreasoning woman, you visit it on me, because you think you can hurt me. But you shan’t! you shan’t!”
And he put his hands in his pockets, and walked away up the room with a defiant air.
Deborah felt sorry and ashamed. He was quite right, and she knew it.
All women, when they have had their belief in man in the abstract destroyed by the perfidy of one particular individual, like to visit their disappointment and resentment upon some other individual whom they at the bottom of their hearts know that they can implicitly trust. If he had known it, therefore, Deborah’s snappishness, which she reserved for him alone, was only the natural expression of her indignation that he, the man she did not love, was sound to the core, while the man she did love had proved himself a contemptible wretch.
She was not going to own herself in the wrong, though. Oh, no! She bit her lips with a moment’s self-reproach, and then said, quite coldly:
“Whether I am happy or not is, you will admit, my own affair. Whether we keep one servant or twenty is, I admit, yours, since you pay them. But I tell you frankly that I feel much more comfortable with only one, because like that, by careful management and without any pinching, I am saving a large sum out of the money you send mamma, which she means to give you to furnish your house when you marry.”
Of course Deborah knew that she was hurting him, though she would not have owned it.
“How dare you talk of my marrying?” he burst out, almost dancing with rage. “You know I don’t mean to marry; you know you don’t want me to marry.”
He had gone a little too near the truth. Naturally enough, Deborah would not have liked to see her own devoted admirer enslaved by another woman, however indifferent to him she herself might be. She gave him one look of speechless indignation, and without heeding the grovelling apologies which he hurriedly began to make, sailed out of the room with the dignity of an empress.
She would not speak to him for the remainder of his short visit, except such few words as were absolutely necessary; and these she uttered in a loftily distant tone. Poor Mrs. Pennant saw that something was wrong, and make several discreet, but ineffectual, efforts to put it right. Deborah even took care to be out of the way when, on the following morning, Godwin went away again.
Mrs. Pennant heard very little from her other absent son, her darling Rees, although she wrote to him regularly. Indeed, as winter drew on, her letters became more frequent than ever, for the London papers published alarming accounts of a gang of skilful and desperate thieves, who, taking advantage of the foggy season, which was now at its height, waylaid well-dressed men even in much-frequented thoroughfares, and robbed them of everything of value they had about them, often with considerable violence. Rees’s answers to his mother’s letters were always very short; but he re-assured her as to his personal safety and also as to his prospects. He had got another situation, he said, better than the last, and was saving money. However, he sent home no proof of his altered fortune until Christmas, when Mrs. Pennant received from him a parcel containing a handsome fur collar and muff for herself and a beautiful chased silver clasp for Deborah.
The girl took her gifts in silence, and interrupted by no comment Mrs. Pennant’s ecstasies. It was Christmas Eve, and Godwin, who was expected home, had already sent his presents.
“Why, Deborah, Deborah, this clasp is the very thing for the mantle Godwin has given you!”
“Yes, mamma,” answered the girl, quietly.
But on the following morning, when she put on her new cloak to go to church with Mrs. Pennant and her sons, the clasp was not on it. The old lady remarked on this with some displeasure, thinking her eldest son’s gift despised. Deborah, however, steadily excused herself from wearing it, and there was a slight coolness in consequence between the ladies, which resulted in Mrs. Pennant walking with Hervey instead of with her adopted daughter, and leaving the latter to follow with Godwin.
“Why won’t you wear Rees’s present, Deb?” ventured Godwin, diffidently, as they walked along. “No such luck as that you have give up thinking about him, I suppose?”
“No,” answered the girl in a tremulous voice; “but don’t let us talk about Rees; I can’t tell you why, but I can’t bear it.”
He walked on by her side, obediently changing the subject. Only just before they passed under the heavy porch of the old Norman church, he asked:
“May I walk home too with you, Deb? I won’t talk about anything to—to worry you.”
“Of course,” answered she, with a gentle and grateful smile.
But when the service was over and the congregation poured out of the church, Deborah was seized and surrounded by the Llancader ladies, who had come to Monmouthshire to pass Christmas. Only Lady Marion was absent. Deborah inquired after her of Lady Kate.
“Oh, don’t you know. Of course, it’s a secret, but still it’s one that everyone seems to know—except papa and mamma,” babbled out Lady Kate, in a confidential tone. “Marion is so dreadfully, idiotically fond of that Rees of yours that she has gone to stay with Aunt Lucilla, in Eaton Square, so that she may stay in the same town with him. She is making a perfect fool of herself about him. I must say so, Mr. Pennant, though I know he is your brother.”
“Oh, I’m not at all offended, Lady Kate. You can’t expect two geniuses in one family. But I think its a pity Lord St. Austell isn’t told of their pranks.”
“Nobody dares tell papa anything since last Friday,” answered Kate in a lower voice.
“He was knocked down and robbed as he was walking at night with one of his friends. He had been out to dinner, and it was so foggy that he dared not drive home. And—of course we are not supposed to talk about it—but he believes he recognised one of the men who attacked him.”
“Who was it?” asked Godwin, interested.
“Why—you won’t say anything about it, will you?—but he thinks the man who knocked him down was the man who used to be librarian here—Amos Goodhare!”
“By Jove!” cried Godwin. “You don’t mean it?”
“Yes, I do. This man struck papa down quite savagely, and held him down, and was going to kick him as he lay on the ground if one of the men with him—there were three altogether—had not interfered.”
A sharply uttered exclamation burst from Deborah’s lips. Godwin and Lady Kate turned quickly, and saw that the color had left her cheeks and that her face wore a terror-struck expression.
“What is the matter, dear?” asked plump little Lady Kate, in much concern.
“Nothing, nothing. I—I was only thinking—of—of what a narrow escape your father might have had with those—ruffians, and how glad I am that one of them had the humanity to save him from being hurt.”
“Yes, indeed, we were surprised ourselves at that. It is quite like Claude Duval and the days of chivalry, isn’t it? But I mustn’t laugh about it for really poor papa has a dreadful bruise at the back of his head, and he might have been killed, of course.”
“Yes, I—I am very thankful,” said Deborah.
Godwin saw that something was the matter, and he managed to cut short Lady Kate’s chatter, so that he could take Deborah home. But not all his artfully made suggestions and inquiries could drag from her the secret of the fear which made her creep about with startled eyes and a terror-struck white face all through that Christmas Day.