“Our cousin, Ellinor Marvel!”
“How do you do,” said Ellinor composedly.
There was no attempt on either side at even a hand touch. Lady Lochore nodded.
“Ellinor is my good providence here,” continued Sir David. “I should not have ventured to receive you in this bachelor establishment had it not been for her presence. But now everything, I am confident, will be as it should be during the month that you honour this house with your presence.” He enunciated each word with determined deliberateness; it was like the pronouncing of a sentence. Once again Ellinor felt the implacable passion of the man under the set, controlled manner. “If you should desire anything, pray address yourself to cousin Ellinor,” he added.
Lady Lochore put down her eyeglasses and looked for a second with natural angry eyes from one to the other. She bit her lip and it seemed as if beneath the rouge her cheek turned ghastly.
She had come prepared to fight and prepared to hate. Yet this sudden rage springing up within her was not due to reason but to instinct. It was the ferocious antipathy of the fading woman for the fresh beauty; of the woman who has failed in love for her who seems born to command love as she goes. Lady Lochore could not look upon her cousin’s fairness without that inner revulsion of anger which not only works havoc with the mind but distils acrid poison into the blood.
The clatter of the second coach was heard without.
“Give me the child, give me the boy!” cried Lady Lochore. She made a rush, with fluttering silks, to the doors. “No one shall show my boy to his uncle but myself!”
“Mamma’s own!”
Could that be Lady Lochore’s voice? She came staggering back upon them, clasping a lusty, kicking child in her frail arms; the whole countenance of the woman was changed—“A heartless, callow creature,” so Madam Tutterville had called her, and so Ellinor had learned to regard her. But even the legendary monster has its vulnerable spot: there could be no mistaking Maud Lochore’s passionate maternity. Ellinor drew a step nearer, attracted in spite of herself; she could almost have wished to see David’s face unbend. But its previous severity only gave way to something like mockery, as he looked at mother and child.