CHAPTER XII
Audrey came in trembling, and stood facing Lord Clanfield without a word. She had contrived to give the slip to the not over-vigilant Geoffrey, and had flown like the wind across the flower-garden, peering into the rooms on the ground-floor, in the hope of discovering either Gerard or his uncle.
Now that she had succeeded, her courage failed her, and she was mute and frightened, presenting as great a contrast as possible to any idea the viscount might have formed of a violent and loud-voiced woman forcing her way in with intent to make a disturbance.
“Madame Rocada,” he began.
But she stopped him with a rapid gesture.
“Do not call me that. I have already told you that it is not my name, it never was my name. I am your nephew’s wife.”
Anxious to be out of the way of a scene which promised to be a trying one, Edgar had sidled out of the room as he let the lady in, and the two, distressed woman and scandalised man, were left alone together.
“Am I to believe that?” he stammered after a short pause.
“Bring him face to face with me, and you will be no longer in doubt.”
He shook his head.
“I cannot do that. He has been given his liberty on account of the state of his health, which is considered hopeless. In fact, he has been let out to die.”
Although she did not utter a word, Lord Clanfield could not help seeing that the grief his words caused her was profound.
“His condition is such that the slightest shock might, I should think, be fatal, and I cannot venture to try experiments.”
“Is there no hope, no hope?” asked Audrey in a stifled voice.
“Well, I feared not when I first saw him a couple of days ago. But the fact that he is still alive gives me hopes. If I can get him away to a warmer climate before the winter comes, and rouse him out of his depression, I think we may pull him through.”
“What is the matter with him? Is it consumption?”
“That’s what we are afraid of. At present we don’t know that it is that. He suffers from extreme weakness after pneumonia and the general breakdown which preceded that,” went on Lord Clanfield, who could not help answering her questions, they were put so modestly and with such evident warmth of feeling. But he replied with his eyes turned away, reluctantly, as if by an effort. If she was really his nephew’s wife, she was certainly not a person to be received otherwise than in the most distant manner, and even then she must understand that such reception was accorded under protest.
“Poor boy, my poor boy! What he must have suffered! And don’t you think it would do him good, not harm, to see me, to know I am safe? Oh, I know very well it is on my account, because he doesn’t know what has become of me, that he is so miserable. And it’s his misery that prevents his getting well! Oh, Lord Clanfield, can’t you see that it is?”
The viscount moved nervously.
“I’ve no doubt,” said he stiffly, “that if, when the prison authorities thought of releasing him, they had been able to find his wife, and to give him back to her care, it would have been better for him, much better. But you had disappeared; you had hidden yourself under a fresh name. And—really I’m sorry to have to say it, as I see you are truly sorry for the situation you have brought about, I cannot but think that, if he were to learn the truth about you and about the life you’ve been leading while he was in prison, it would be the last straw. He would never hold up his head again.”
Audrey heard these words with the wildest despair. Well though she knew that Lord Clanfield exaggerated the case, that he looked upon her as a woman who had deliberately chosen to give up her name and her enforced widowhood for a life of pleasure and for companions of the most undesirable type, she knew too that even the truth was bad enough to shock poor Gerard and to wake all sorts of terrible suspicions in his breast.
She was sure that, if she could broach the matter at her own time and in her own way, when the joy of reunion should have soothed his anguish and softened the remembrance of his trials, the sudden and unsympathetic recital of the circumstances of her life, even without exaggeration, would be more than he could bear.
So that these cruel words of the viscount’s could not be resented with indignation, his assertions could not even be denied.
She could, however, make an effort to put him right about herself, and, as much for Gerard’s sake as her own, she set about doing so with the utmost earnestness.
“Lord Clanfield,” she said, in a low, pleading voice, “you do me the most terrible injustice. I’ve never done anything unworthy of Gerard’s wife, indeed. I’ve done something that neither he nor you would perhaps approve, in starting a millinery business under a high-sounding name, and in allowing myself to be persuaded into receiving all sorts of people in a house I have rented, in the hope of attracting customers for what I sell, and clients for the business. I was advised to do these things, and though it was distasteful, the advice sounded good from the monetary point of view. That’s the worst I have done, indeed, indeed it is. Oh, if you don’t believe me, I’m sure that Gerard would!”
Lord Clanfield was walking up and down his end of the room, much perturbed and distressed. At last he stopped short and turned to her.
“My dear lady,” he said, and the very words indicated a welcome change of temper towards her, she thought, “supposing what you say is true—and I am bound to say I can’t quite believe you—what then? Do you really think it is nothing to have brought upon yourself, so lightly as you have done, the suspicions which any reasonable person would naturally entertain of you? Do you think your conduct is such as to be a credit to my family—mine?”
“I’ve—I’ve done nothing really wrong,” pleaded Audrey humbly.
“Indeed! You are at the head of what is, whatever you may choose to call it, a gaming-house.” She uttered an exclamation of dismay, but he went on in spite of her. “You are at the head of another establishment for selling—h’m—bonnets. Now it is perfectly legitimate to sell—h’m—bonnets. But it is not an employment which I can approve of in my nephew’s wife.”
And the viscount drew himself up with dignity.
“Why didn’t you find me out and see what I was doing?” burst out Audrey with sudden spirit. “If you had given it a thought, you would have known that I must do something to live, and it’s your fault, after all, that I had to take the advice of such friends as I had, whether it was bad or good.”
Lord Clanfield was much displeased by this attack, which was, he considered, unjust and uncalled for. His irritation against her increased.
“Permit me to be the best judge of my own actions,” he said icily; “I repeat that I cannot countenance your proceedings, either in regard to my sons or my nephew.”
“I was coming to tell you about your sons. If they’ve told you they come to my house still, they have said what is not true. They do not come. I have forbidden my servants to let them in.”
To her annoyance, these words of hers incensed him more than anything else that she had said. She saw plainly that he did not believe her.
“I really think,” he said drily, “that there is no need for us to prolong this interview. As for my sons, if they do not desist from courses of which I disapprove, I may—I should regret it, but I may—have to call in the assistance of the police.” Audrey uttered a cry, but he went on without taking any notice of her. “As for my nephew, if you force your way into his presence, I cannot answer for the consequences, and I regret that I should in that case feel it my duty to let him know some things which, in his present state, he had better not hear.”
“He would not believe you,” cried Audrey passionately.
“Possibly not. But in that case, and if he insisted upon taking your part, which would be perfectly natural, I should have to give him up to you entirely, as I decline to receive you here.”
Audrey was shaking like a leaf.
“You don’t mean that! You couldn’t be so cruel! If it were best for him to see me?” pleaded she.
“I deny that it would be best. In any case, I cannot go back from that position. If you leave him here, and suffer him to think, as he now thinks, that you are dead, lost to him, he may get over that shock, in the comfort and relief of finding himself free and tenderly cared for once more. In the meantime, as I cannot but think I have been unjust to him in taking it for granted he was guilty, I will strain every nerve to probe the mystery attending his conviction. But if you insist on taking him away with you—and I daresay he would go, for you are a beautiful and attractive woman and he loves you—then I cast him off, I can do no less, and you must sink or swim together.”
“Oh, no, no, I can’t think you would be so hard, so cruel, so wicked!” cried poor Audrey, alarmed to see the look of stubborn determination in the viscount’s eyes.
But she was wrong. Used all his life to having his own way, except in the matter of the behaviour of his headstrong and not very worthy sons, Lord Clanfield could make up his mind inflexibly, and carry out his plans with the dogged steadfastness of a not unjust or unkindly, but narrow mind.
He believed that he might have been unjust to Gerard, that there was a possibility that the young man’s reiterated asseverations of his innocence might have something in them, after all.
But the more inclined he was to believe this, the less likely was he to believe in the complete innocence and guilelessness of Gerard’s wife. It even occurred to him as possible that this beautiful woman, who had shown herself so frivolous if not worse, might have connived in some diabolical plot to get her husband out of the way.
“I hope I am not wicked,” he said coldly. “And, indeed, I did not expect to hear that word applied to me. I have done my best, I am still doing my best, for my nephew, and I shall continue to do it if I am suffered to do it in the way I think right. However, the matter is in your hands, madam, and it is for you to decide what course we are both to pursue.”
Audrey, who had refused all Lord Clanfield’s perfunctory invitations to be seated, was standing, just as she had been ever since her entrance, forlorn and desolate, in the middle of the floor. Her hands were tightly clenched, her eyes showed the terrible conflict which was going on within her.
Must she give him up? Could she? Ought she? Would it really be best for him, as Lord Clanfield said?
On the one hand were the care, the luxury, the atmosphere of a beautiful English home, the protection, the very powerful protection of an eminent name, the energetic endeavours of his relations to have the taint removed from his name.
On the other hand, there was nothing but her own love, and such efforts as she, poor, weak, helpless woman that she was, could make on his behalf.
And, while it was true that she felt certain he must be suffering deeply from her disappearance, and the suspense he must be in as to what had become of her, yet she did not disguise from herself the fact that the knowledge of the position in which she had so strangely got placed might give him even more pain and more anxiety than the suspense from which he was now suffering on her account.
In the silence which followed the viscount’s words, a dead silence in which the slightest sound was audible to them both, there came a halting step outside the door of the room, and then a knock.
Recognising the step, or guessing whose it was, Audrey raised her head, and uttered, in a hoarse whisper, the one word: “Gerard!”
Lord Clanfield looked angrily, uneasily at the door, the window and at Audrey. Then, crossing the floor quickly towards the French window, he pushed it wide open, inviting her by a gesture to go out.
She threw at him one imploring look, saw that he was unyielding, and summoning all her self-control, made one tottering step towards the open window.
But her docility came too late. Before she had reached the window the door opened, and Gerard, leaning on a stick, appeared in the doorway.
“Uncle, may I come in?”
But the words had scarcely passed his lips when he saw who it was that was cowering between him and the viscount, and throwing down his stick, he crossed the intervening space at one bound, and flinging himself into his wife’s arms, clung to her, his face, his voice full of a passionate joy.
“Audrey! Audrey! And I thought you were dead! Oh, thank God, thank God!”
For a few moments there was not a word more spoken. Audrey did indeed try to articulate, but the words stuck in her throat; she could utter nothing more coherent than low moans indicative of emotions which indeed were deeper and more painful than she could well express.
In the meantime Lord Clanfield stood motionless beside the open French window, and the first thing that Audrey said was to him.
“Lord Clanfield,” she cried, when she had suddenly caught a glimpse of his face, and read that there was no softening there, “I—I want to speak to you. I want you to hear what I have to tell Gerard. You know that it’s true, and he wouldn’t believe me if you were not here to support what I’m going to say.”
Gerard, whose flushed face looked human once more, the death-like pallor and dull eyes having become transformed, looked at his wife with amazement mingled with his joy.
“What is this wonderful thing that I’m to hear and not to believe?” he asked, looking with a joyous smile from his wife to his uncle, and now dimly conscious that something was not quite right between these two.
Audrey had withdrawn herself from his embrace, and was supporting him on her strong young arm, facing the viscount the while.
“I have to tell you, Gerard, something you won’t like to hear. While you were away, I made up my mind to try to make some money, and I’ve gone—into well, business, trade. I’ve had, of course, to sink my own name, and that is why you could not find me. Now Lord Clanfield very naturally disapproves of any connection of his family being engaged in this way, and I am conscious that he is within his rights in objecting. I think you might perhaps object too.”
“Well, it is rather astonishing!” gasped Gerard, to whom the constrained tone in which the information was conveyed was rather disturbing. “But, of course, you can give it up, can’t you?”
She threw one imploring look at Lord Clanfield, to ascertain whether he would accept that as sufficient propitiation. But one glance was enough to show her that he would not.
“Unfortunately,” she answered, with a trembling voice, “I can’t—and I won’t—at present. Unless Lord Clanfield wishes it.”
“My wishes have nothing to do with it,” said Lord Clanfield coldly.
Then she understood that the decision lay with her still.
“I won’t give it up,” she said quietly, “and I won’t let you, Gerard, have anything to do with it. You are ill; you need care, more care than I could give you. And I am strong and eager to make money. Will you, Lord Clanfield, take care of him, so that I can go quietly on with my work without any one’s knowing who I am, or what my name is?”
Lord Clanfield, although this was the very decision at which he had wished her to arrive, was taken aback when it was reached.
“Do—do you mean it? Will you consent to leave him with me?” he said incredulously.
“And am I to have nothing to say in the matter?” asked Gerard, with not unnatural irritation.
Audrey, having made up her mind what she ought to do, turned to him with a laugh which indeed was forced, but which she carried through cleverly and well.
“Nothing whatever,” she said. “At present, at any rate. Stay here where you are well cared for, and rest assured I am well off too, working hard, and making money. Oh, lots of money! And don’t look so worried. You ought to be as happy in knowing that I am well, as I am in knowing that you are free and—and in good hands. Good-bye, my dear, dear boy. Thank God for letting me see you, know that——”
A catch in her voice stopped her, and she threw her arms round him and pressed her lips to his, while Lord Clanfield, stiff, upright, and unbending, stood at the window with his back towards them.
Gerard stared into her face with haggard, disappointed eyes.
“Do you mean you’re going? That I’m to lose you already? What does it mean, Audrey, what does it mean?”
“It means,” answered she readily, “that we’re doing the best for us both. For us both.”
“When will you come again?”
“I’ll—I’ll let you know.”
She tore herself away from him and fled through the window with one swift glance at Lord Clanfield, and the whispered words:—
“I’ve done my part. Do yours!”