CHAPTER X
Now this affair, unpleasant as it was, had been very promptly and satisfactorily settled, and Audrey felt that she ought to feel more contented than she did about it. Mr. Candover had behaved with quite admirable consideration for her, and his dismissal of the secretary whom he had employed and trusted for so long might have been supposed to set Audrey’s mind completely at ease.
But suspicions and doubts, once roused, are hard to set at rest, and she had carefully refrained from showing him any effusive gratitude for his action.
After all, how could he have done less without showing himself on the side of the wrongdoer?
For though he might indeed have insisted upon tracing the accusation to its source, there must have followed such an unpleasant exposure, such a scandal, such gossip, that the result might have been to draw disagreeable remarks down upon his own head.
But Audrey was not to be allowed any rest from her troubles. On the following day another difficulty cropped up; for, on returning from her afternoon drive, she heard, with dismay, that one of the Miss Candovers had come and Sir Harry Archdale.
Audrey was bewildered.
“When did they come? How long have they been here?” she asked.
“Miss Candover came soon after you started, Madame, and Sir Harry about ten minutes later. They both said they’d wait till you came back, and they’re in the drawing-room.”
What would Mr. Candover say to this? Audrey hurried towards the drawing-room, and before she reached it she heard peals of merry laughter, which proved conclusively that the visitors had broken the ice.
On entering the room she found the two young people at the window, playing with her little dogs. Pamela ran towards her, her face beaming, her step as light and her movements as graceful as those of a gazelle.
“Oh, Madame Rocada, don’t scold. I see you want to scold. But, indeed, I had to come!”
“What will Mr. Candover say?”
The girl’s face grew troubled.
“I—I don’t know,” she said. “But when you know why I’ve come, you will understand.”
Audrey now held out her hand to Sir Harry, who was looking as happy as a schoolboy home for the holidays, and who could scarcely take his eyes off pretty Pamela. He, however, had to explain this second visit.
“I’ve come,” said he in a low voice, “to tell you not to worry yourself about what I said to you the other day. I met Candover last night, and he told me he had dismissed his secretary. Is that your doing?”
“I daresay it is,” said Audrey. “But I took care not to mention any names when I spoke to Mr. Candover. I took it upon my own shoulders to say what I thought of Mr. Diggs and his doings.”
“That was very good of you, and very effectual,” said Sir Harry. “But it’s only what one would have expected. No decent man would care to employ a fellow so very shady, if he knew of it.”
“Of course not.”
“Least of all a man like Mr. Candover.”
And Sir Harry cast at Pamela a glance which showed how bright a halo he threw round everything and every one belonging to her.
Pamela, meanwhile, had grown serious and anxious to be able to speak to her hostess. Sir Harry noted this, and said: “Miss Candover wants to speak to you, Madame. Now I hope you won’t send me away; I’ve been manœuvring to get asked to tea. Shall I go out into the garden and feed the rabbits—if there are any rabbits—while she pours out her heart to you?”
Pamela turned to him gratefully. “Would you—would you really?” she said, with pretty gratitude. “I do want to speak to Madame, but I don’t want to drive you away.”
Audrey, whose spirits rose in the presence of these two bright, good-looking, sympathetic young people, nodded a smiling dismissal to Sir Harry, who promptly took himself off into the garden, and made elaborate pretences of plucking handfuls of grass to feed imaginary animals while the ladies talked.
Pamela seized Audrey by the arm, and made her sit beside her on a couch while she poured into her ear a rather disquieting tale.
“There’s been a woman,” she said, “a wild-looking, uncanny woman, not quite in her right mind, I think, calling at Miss Willett’s, and asking to see us. She says she’s our mother, but we know that our mother is dead. We don’t quite like to write to my father about it, because he doesn’t like to be told annoying things. So I thought I’d run over and see you, and ask you what we’d better do.”
Audrey was troubled. There were these vague clouds of distress and mystery in every direction, she thought. How was it? “What does Miss Willett think?” she asked.
“Oh, she’s an old maid, and she is simply horror-struck, and can do nothing but hold up her hands and say ‘Dear, dear, how dreadful!’ and refuse admittance to the woman. But we girls can’t be satisfied like that, and so I thought of you. What would you suggest?”
Audrey considered a moment.
“Supposing I were to see her?” she said.
“Oh, would you? That would be sweet of you! We don’t dare to see her ourselves, and yet we don’t like to take it for granted that—that——”
“Next time she comes—if she does come—give her—let her be given, my address, and refer her to me. Hush, here comes the tea. And we must call our rabbit-lover in.”
They went to the window, and made signs to the ostentatiously distant Sir Harry that he might come in, and they had such a merry hour together that it was with difficulty they could make up their minds to break up the party. At last, however, Audrey put Pamela into the pony-carriage and drove her over to Staines, where she could take the train direct to within a short distance of her school, and Sir Harry, very reluctantly, bade them good-bye, with many hints that he should like to come again.
Audrey was quite cheered by the merry young people, who were, after all, of her own generation, though circumstances had combined to make her feel many years older.
But her pleasure was short-lived. There was a card-playing evening in store for her, at which Diggs was, of course, not present. But two days later she received another indignant letter from Lord Clanfield, complaining of her lack of good faith, in that his two sons had been playing cards at her house the whole of the night through.
Audrey was intensely indignant at this letter, and was convinced, since the young Angmerings had certainly not been among the guests on the night he mentioned, that they had themselves deceived their father, and given her address to hide their real whereabouts.
She began a letter to him, at least as indignant as his own, but could not satisfy herself with the wording of it. She tried again and again, and finally made up her mind to give up the attempt and to descend upon the angry father in person, and force him to retract his accusation and to apologise for it.
She was extremely angry about this annoyance, after the strong measures she had taken to insure the exclusion of the young men.
Now Lord Clanfield’s place was in Hampshire, and although the actual distance as the crow flies was not so very great between “The Briars” and Angmering Court, the journey was a tedious one, with many changes of train and awkward waits at country stations.
It was not, therefore, until somewhat late in the afternoon that Audrey got out at the nearest station to the viscount’s place, and having ascertained that it was only a couple of miles away, went on foot across the fields, according to the direction given her, and reached the gates of the park at about five o’clock.
There was no lodge at the gate, which she opened and passed through, admiring the prospect of hillock and tree, winding road and grassy glade, with an occasional peep at the house, which was a low-built Georgian structure, homely and cosy-looking rather than stately or imposing.
The day had been a glorious one and the sun was still warm and bright. Audrey, who had had little inclination to dwell on the beauty of the place or the delights of the balmy air, was seized with nervousness on finding herself so near the great man of her husband’s family, and wondered at her own daring in coming at all.
Along the winding road she went, coming rather suddenly upon a charming flower-garden, divided from the park-land only by a wire fence, and offering to the eye a view of dahlias and gladioli, rich-tinted begonias, feathery pampas grass, and late roses that strewed their sweet petals on the grass.
On the lawn among the flowers there was an umbrella-tent, and under it a wicker lounge-chair. Beside the chair stood a nurse in uniform, and lying full length upon it was a young man, so white, so thin, so haggard of cheek and sunken of eye that he looked more like a dead man than a live one.
Audrey, who was not in the direct line of sight of the nurse and her patient, by reason of a clump of shrubs behind which she had instinctively stopped, clenched her hands, held her breath, and stared with incredulous eyes at the invalid.
Surely, surely she must be dreaming! Surely, surely her misery and her troubles must have turned her brain! And yet she knew, even while she hung forward, gazing in agony at the hollow cheeks and the glassy eye, that she was awake, that she was sane—and that the invalid with the pallid, waxen face, who seemed to have not more than an hour’s life left in his wasted, shrunken frame, was Gerard, her husband.