This discovery was crushing. It seemed to threaten a hopeless state of affairs—a lifelong incubus! Yes, and an incubus who would take the precedence of Tito, and perhaps engage the somewhat flickering attentions of Tito’s cavaliers!—not because of what she was, but of what she would ultimately be—Baroness Marchlyde in her own right, and heiress of many thousands per annum. Apparently there was no mistake about the matter. A sworn information, a legal witness! Alas! there was no escape in that direction. If the girl had been brought up under her father’s roof it would have been a different affair; but twenty-one years in a dirty Irish mud cabin (impossible to dissociate the idea of mud and dirt from anything Irish)—it was too awful to contemplate. The abominable old foster-mother deserved to be hanged; but hanging and capital punishment she had cleverly evaded by death!
There was one small consolation: this new, uneducated person would be easily kept in the background; she resembled the horse and elephant, and was entirely ignorant of her own power, and ignorant she should remain. Lady Mulgrave was a woman who had acquired a special gift for repressing people. In the sweetest and most charming and smiling fashion she could administer the cruellest snubs; her rudeness of speech and manner at times bordered on brutality. To those whom she wished to “put down” or cast out from her circle, to any pushing nouveau riche, or dangerous rival, her affronts were as terrible and as ferocious, in their way, as if she were an East End virago, battering an enemy with a chair or a saucepan.
Lady Mulgrave sent off a charming, sympathetic letter to her husband, declaring that she was longing to welcome the dear child (lies are so easy on paper!), and that in a day or two she would move south and prepare to receive her at Westlands. She wrote the news to intimate friends as a dead secret, and would leave it to them to break it to all their acquaintance. “The old stock plot of a child changed at nurse has actually been flung as a bombshell into our quiet and everyday little family.” (This is how she began her epistle.) “Imagine poor dear Owen, most conventional and practical of men, having a strange grown-up daughter, Irish and uneducated, suddenly thrust into his arms! Of course he has recognised her, claimed her, and brings her to England very shortly; but please, dear, keep this to yourself. We don’t want any talk.” When her ladyship had despatched her correspondence and her lunch, she summoned Miss Tito to her presence. Tito came in with a dishevelled appearance and a flushed face. She had been disturbed in a game of tennis—a match but half decided.
“Well, mum,” she began, “are you better? What is it? Please don’t keep me; I’m having such a ripping game, and they are waiting—Lord Bobby, Mr. Beaufort, Julia Legge, two sets all.”
“I must detain you a few minutes to tell you a piece of family news”—and she took up her husband’s letter, two sheets closely written. “What do you say to a sister?”—and she looked over at Tito.
“A sister!” repeated the girl, with a laugh, “a sister-in-law you mean; I suppose she will be a necessary evil?”
“No, but ‘necessary evil’ is a capital name for the new addition to our family”—and in a few pungent and rapid sentences, Miss Dawson was made acquainted with the facts.
First she opened her eyes, and then her mouth, and stood staring dumbfounded, and totally unable to speak. Next she tore off her hat, flung it on a table, and cast herself into a chair.
“It’s not a joke, is it, mummy?”
“No indeed, but deadly earnest. Could anything be more unexpected, inconvenient and odious? Is not it too awful?”