It did not come for an extraordinary moment and only then in the form of a tangent. Feo turned slowly round to the girl who was in the habit of dressing her and putting her to bed. With raised eyebrows and an air of amused amazement, she ran her eyes over every inch of her, as though trying very hard to find something to palliate the insufferable cheek that she was apparently expected to swallow.
“My good Lola,” she said finally, “what the devil has this got to do with you?”
“Madame de Brézé is the dea ex machina,” said Lytham, evenly.
It didn’t seem to him to be necessary to lead up to this announcement like a cat on hot bricks, considering that Lady Feo had openly flouted his chief from the first. She had no feelings to respect.
“What did you say?”
He repeated his remark, a little surprised at the gaping astonishment which was caused by it.
“Madame de Brézé—Lola—the woman for whom I am to be asked to step aside?—Is this a joke?”
“No,” he said. “Far from a joke.”
“Ye Gods!” said Feo. And she sat for a moment, holding her breath, with her large intelligent mouth open, her dark Italian eyes fixed on Lytham’s face, and one of her long thin capable hands suspended in mid-air. She might have been struck by lightning, or turned into salt like Lot’s inquisitive wife.
It was plain enough to Lola that her mistress was reviewing in her mind all the small points of their connection,—the engagement in the housekeeper’s room, the knowledge of her parentage, the generous presents of those clothes for her beautification, the half-jealous, half-sympathetic interest that had been shown in her love affair with Chalfont, as she had allowed Lady Feo to imagine. She had come to Dover Street, not to take this woman’s husband away, but to give him back, to beg that he should be retained by all the hollow ties of Church and law; bound, held, controlled, rendered completely unable to break away,—not for Feo’s sake, and not for his, but for his country’s. And so, having committed no theft because Fallaray was morally free, and being unashamed of her scheme which had been merely to give a lonely man the rustle of silk, she hung upon an answer to her question.