CHAPTER XVIII
It was inevitable that such a scene as that which had passed in Madame Rocada’s showrooms, should become matter of common gossip within a few hours.
The story reached the clubs before the afternoon was over, and on every hand it was discussed, with variations of all sorts, until poor Audrey herself would hardly have recognised either her own portrait or the details of the miserable affair.
Sir Harry Archdale, who had walked away with Mr. Candover, and who found an opportunity of expressing his admiration for Miss Pamela, even while he regretted having met her in the society of Madame Rocada, detailed his version of the occurrence to the young Angmerings, and they, after hearing various other accounts of it, went back next morning to their father’s place in Hampshire, for the very purpose of enlightening both Lord Clanfield and their cousin concerning an event which touched the family honour nearly.
Both Edgar and his brother Geoffrey had shared the general suspicions of Madame Rocada’s good faith, and had alternately chuckled and waxed indignant over the story that she was their cousin’s wife, at one moment believing it and pitying Gerard, at another laughing at it as an invention, or growing angry at the notion.
Now, however, the aspect of affairs had changed. Sir Harry had told them of what Mr. Candover had said, that Madame Rocada, the artful keeper of a shady gambling-house, was the wife of a convict. And this statement, chiming in with Audrey’s own confession that she was their cousin’s wife, made them feel the necessity of communicating with their father, who would deal with the matter as he might think fit.
It was an awful scandal to have a cousin under their roof who, whether guilty or innocent, had undoubtedly been convicted of forgery; it was a worse thing for it to become known that this cousin’s wife was a woman in whose house men were fleeced of their money.
It was luncheon-time when they arrived at the old red-brick mansion, where they found their cousin Gerard, as usual, in the garden, looking ill indeed, but a little less thin, a little less lifeless, than he had been a week before.
The sight of his wife, brief as it had been, the receipt of a letter from her, vague as were its contents, had undoubtedly done wonders towards restoring the unlucky man to that interest in life which had for the time been crushed out of him.
His cheeks were still hollow and pale; his eyes were still unnaturally large and filled with a mournful wistfulness. But in spite of his anxiety as to his wife’s whereabouts, his irritation on account of his uncle’s replies to questions about her, he had now begun to find his energy and spirits slowly returning, and it is possible that the very uncertainty and suspense he was in about Audrey rather helped than hindered his recovery, by stimulating his curiosity and increasing his desire to be able to go in search of her, as he meant to do as soon as he was able.
Edgar was the first to speak. Half shyly, looking askance at his cousin as he came up with his hands in his pockets, he asked how he was getting on. Gerard at once detected something unusual in his tone, and looked at him curiously as he answered.
“Got rid of the nurse, at all events,” said Edgar.
“Oh, yes. I’m all right now.”
“You only want a winter at Nice or Cannes to set you up again,” suggested Geoffrey, who was close behind his brother.
Gerard was surprised at this solicitude, which was most unusual. Both his cousins, while not daring to be openly insolent to him in their father’s presence, had taken no pains to hide their disgust at having to put up with the residence under the paternal roof of a man who had been in penal servitude.
“No,” he answered, “I don’t want to go abroad. I prefer to stay in England. I’m tired of doing nothing.”
“Well, what can you do? You couldn’t go back to the bank, you know!” said Geoffrey, with cruel bluntness.
Gerard’s white face flushed, and he did not answer. The rather less boorish Edgar said quickly:—
“You couldn’t work yet awhile, if you wanted to, could you? You will have to get strong first.”
“Well, but I should get all right again faster if I had something to occupy myself with. I don’t care for the life you fellows lead, loafing and getting into mischief,” retorted Gerard.
“Well, you got into worse mischief than we,” replied Geoffrey.
Gerard shook his head.
“I think you both know that isn’t true,” he said quietly. “My uncle believes me, I’m almost sure.”
“But,” urged Geoffrey, not without reason, “if you didn’t do what they sent you to prison for, your story points a very bad moral. For, while you, who worked hard and did no harm got penal servitude as a reward, we, who’ve never done anything but enjoy ourselves and who never mean to do anything else, have managed to do it without interference from anybody!”
Gerard smiled grimly.
“Well, I don’t envy your existence,” said he. “On the contrary, my sympathy is with my wife, who has evidently deeply offended my uncle by doing what I admire her for doing, and setting up in business instead of starving on a wretchedly inadequate income.”
As he uttered these words, Gerard could not help noticing that his cousins listened with a sort of demure grimness, and then that they exchanged furtive looks. Now he was himself suffering from an unsatisfied curiosity concerning his wife’s whereabouts, and this attitude of the two young men increased his uneasiness about her.
He looked from the one to the other, but did not ask any questions; indeed, they gave him little time, for on catching sight of their father in the distance, on his way from the Home Farm, where he usually spent his mornings, they both nodded hastily to their cousin and made off to meet him.
Gerard’s curiosity was roused by the unusual animation which both his cousins showed, as they caught their father before he reached the house, and both evidently began talking to him at once. Gerard was much too far off to know what they said, but it was clear that it was something of considerable importance, and after noting that they all cast more than one glance in his direction, he concluded that, since what they had to say could not concern himself, or they would have spoken openly to him, it must concern his wife.
At luncheon, a few minutes later, he noticed that a change had come over his uncle’s manner to him, which had become uneasily kind. So, when they left the room, Gerard stopped his uncle on his way to the study, and asked if he might speak to him. Lord Clanfield, instead of answering, looked round anxiously for his sons.
His nephew looked round too.
“Let them come too,” said Gerard shrewdly. “I know they have something to say which I ought to hear.”
“Oh, no. At least I think—you’d better wait a little,” said the viscount kindly. “What I have just heard from them is of such a nature that it would only give you needless pain to hear it. Wait——”
Gerard interrupted.
“Do you think I can wait,” he asked earnestly, “when I know that what they have to say concerns my wife?”
The startled silence which followed showed him how good a guess he had made, and father and sons accompanied him without more words into the study, where Lord Clanfield took up his position on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, Gerard was given an easy-chair, and the two other young men sat on the edge of the big writing-table, and waited for their father to speak first.
“Gerard,” said the viscount, “I’m afraid, my poor boy, that your misfortunes are not over yet.”
“Well, let me know the worst of them at once,” said the young man, who was sitting upright in his chair, with a flush in his cheeks and very bright eyes.
“Really, I scarcely like—I don’t think we had better enter upon this very painful subject until we have asked Dr. Graham’s opinion as to whether——”
“Dr. Graham be hanged!” burst out Gerard, with a momentary return of his old boyish impetuosity and spirit. “I beg your pardon, uncle, but consider that this suspense is worse than almost any knowledge could be. Tell me at once what the news was that they brought you this morning.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, it’s only the confirmation of fears which I myself entertained. For I must tell you, Gerard, that I have had grave doubts as to your wife’s prudence.”
“Well. Go on.”
“If I must speak, you must promise to listen quietly.”
“I will—without a word,” said Gerard hoarsely, clutching the sides of his chair, and keeping his head bent.
The viscount and his sons exchanged apprehensive looks; but they all felt that now there was nothing to be done but to go on with the story, and risk its effect upon the convalescent.
“Your wife, unfortunately, has got into the society of people who are undesirable in every way. She is passing under a name which is not her own. She calls herself Madame Rocada, a title which is, I regret to say, that formerly used by a well-known woman of foreign extraction, who used to keep a gaming-house in Paris.”
The viscount paused, but Gerard said nothing, and remained in the same position as before. His uncle went on:—
“It was under the name of Madame Rocada that she became known to me, in the first place, before I had the least idea she was your wife.”
Then Gerard looked up at last, eager, wondering.
“She was staying at a place at Epsom, a big place, called ‘The Briars,’ and receiving a great many visitors. In the evenings there was gambling carried on there—in fact it went on all night,” said Lord Clanfield. “I went there to see her, and she professed not to know all that occurred there.”
“She did know it though,” put in Geoffrey. “For when there was a row one night she knew all about it, knew exactly what had happened, and then cleared out for fear of being called upon to give awkward explanations.”
Gerard never said a word. He turned his head from the one speaker to the other, but forbore to interrupt by so much as an exclamation.
“Both Geoff and I got rooked there,” put in Edgar. “The first time it was by a fellow named Diggs——”
Then for the first time Gerard spoke.
“Diggs!” exclaimed he, speaking in a hoarse, low voice. “What Diggs?”
“Fellow named Durley Diggs. A Yankee and secretary to Reginald Candover, the great connoisseur.”
Gerard only nodded, and the viscount went on:—
“Now it appears she has run away to some showrooms she has near Bond Street, where there was a scene, a most unpleasant scene, as recently as yesterday afternoon. It appears she was followed there by a number of the men who had been robbed at her house at Epsom, and there was an explanation asked for. Your wife, still passing as Madame Rocada, a name one would have thought she would have dropped on hearing the associations connected with it, turned round upon them all, told them that they had only themselves to thank if they were cheated, and said that one-half of them were swindlers, and professed only to have discovered the fact a day or two ago.”
“And may not that have been true?” asked Gerard, in the same low, hoarse voice.
Edgar answered for his father:—
“No. Impossible. I had it from Archdale, one of the best fellows going, that there was no one present but men of the highest standing—Sir Barnaby Joyce, Reginald Candover——”
Again Gerard looked up. But this time, though he frowned slightly, he said nothing.
Edgar went on: “And half a dozen other men equally well known. It seems your wife behaved like a fury, so that at last—to calm her, Candover was obliged to—to——”
“To do what?”
“To remind her that she herself was——”
“The wife of—of a convict, I suppose?” said Gerard steadily.
Lord Clanfield drew himself up indignantly.
“He had no right to say that!” he cried angrily.
“No. I don’t say he had. But think of the provocation! She called them a gang of swindlers!”
“And didn’t you say some of you had been swindled?”
“Yes. But she was talking to the victims.”
Gerard bent his head again, and said nothing. He was taking the whole story with uncanny calmness, almost, thought the others, as if his brain had lost some of its reasoning power. Not a sign did he give of the burst of tempestuous indignation they had all expected. He merely let his head hang forward again, and listened, with clasped hands, while Geoffrey went on:—
“Of course, there’s no end of a row and a scandal, and some take her part and think there’s someone behind her, who does the work and makes her the figure-head. Sir Barnaby’s one of those. You know what an eye he has for a pretty face.”
Gerard moved uneasily, but said nothing.
“Well, he and one or two more are round again at her place to-day, and everybody’s awaiting interesting developments. Nobody thinks she will come to any harm. In fact, the general opinion is that she’s confoundedly artful, and that she got up this scene to attract attention, and—to nail Sir Barnaby.”
Not even this insinuation had the effect of rousing Gerard to any open expression of indignation. He just sat as before, huddled up in his chair, staring at the fire, while the others offered different, more or less guarded, comments on the unpleasant news.
At last Edgar and Geoffrey went out and then Gerard seemed to wake up as if out of a dream, and to realise that he was alone with his uncle, who evidently wanted to get rid of him, for he fidgeted, and looked at his watch, not liking to leave the presumably disconsolate young husband by himself, yet anxious to take up the occupation upon which he was engaged.
Gerard rose quickly, stammered an incoherent apology, not with any appearance of dismay or despair, but quietly and conventionally, and then went out of the room.
The viscount was puzzled by his behaviour, but was, on the whole, thankful that these painful disclosures had passed off so quietly.
When the family reassembled at dinner, however, Gerard was absent, and inquiries elicited the fact that he had left the house almost immediately after coming out of the study.
Lord Clanfield looked uneasily at his sons.
Geoffrey nodded astutely.
“Gone to have it out with her, you bet!” he muttered to his brother.
Lord Clanfield caught the whisper.
“It’s very unfortunate. We ought to have foreseen——” he muttered uneasily.
But Geoffrey shrugged his shoulders, and said in a low voice:—
“Better that he should know all, and have done with her, sir! After all, it had to come. And it’s less disgrace to the family to break with her than for the present condition of things to become known and talked about.”
“Perhaps, but it’s confoundedly unpleasant!” said Lord Clanfield, with a frown.