It was a dead faint indeed. Having laid her down and unfastened the neck of her dress, Rata dashed to the bell.
Then as she returned to the invalid she said, “I think you had better go—you have done your worst.”
“I have done my best for my brother,” answered Lady Foxrock fiercely. “I am sorry your patroness has fainted—she would have kept the secret always, to her very last hour; what I have stated is true—and can be proved.”
“Mother—mother,” murmured the girl, as she rubbed the cold hands. Then to a servant, “Run for the nearest doctor, and send some brandy. Mrs. Loftus is very ill; and let someone show this lady out.”
Lady Foxrock’s words were prophetic, for Mrs. Loftus had kept her secret to her dying hour. When the doctor and the brandy arrived, she was past all human aid.
It appeared that she had a most dangerous form of heart disease, and it was a marvel she had survived for so long.
Rata was stunned—she had sustained two violent shocks within the same hour: the announcement of her parentage, and the loss of her mother.
Her grief was at first as wild and uncontrollable as that of one of her savage ancestors; then she became as a creature of stone, and shut herself up from all eyes, like some wounded animal, who would suffer alone. Lady Nesfield and Lumley were all sympathy and affection—they did not yet know the truth. Lord Nesfield undertook the funeral arrangements and Lady Nesfield—who could not prevail on Rata to leave the house—offered to take up her quarters in Lowndes Square; but this Rata declined. She and her sorrow, her anguish, and her fears were sufficient company for one another. The day after the funeral, a paragraph to this effect appeared among the fashionable intelligence:
“Owing to the sudden death of Mrs. Loftus, the marriage of Miss Loftus and Captain the Hon. Lumley Grantham, fixed for the 13th inst., is unavoidably postponed.”
When affairs were returning to their normal course, Lady Foxrock made her parents and her brother acquainted with the result of her investigations into the past of their future relation. At first their amazement transcended expression. The intelligence fell like a moral avalanche; they were all three stunned by the information.