“What is the dreadful truth?” I asked. “I give you my word that I am utterly in the dark.”
Now Lady Rollinson was a dear old woman, and I had had a warm affection for her. On her side she had treated me from the beginning of our acquaintance almost as if I had been her son; and hitherto there had been nothing but the most friendly and affectionate sentiment between us. But I began to get angry, and I dare say I spoke in a tone to which she had been little accustomed. She cast an indignant glance at me, and fanned herself at a great rate for a full minute before she answered.
“Come,” I repeated more than once; “what is this dreadful truth? Surely I have a right to know it.”
“You shall know it, Captain Fyffe,” she answered, in a voice of weeping menace such as women use when they are both wounded and angry; “you shall have it in a word.” She dropped her fan upon her knees, and asked me, with a lugubrious air of triumph and reproach, “Did you ever hear of Constance Pleyel?”
I was standing before her, and as she leaned forward suddenly to offer this surprising question I stepped back a little. A chair caught me at the back of the knees, and I dropped into it as if I had been shot. I have laughed in memory many a time over that ludicrous accident, but it was no laughing matter at the moment, for it sent a conviction to the old lady's mind which I do not think was altogether banished from it to her dying day. Of course the question in such a connection came upon me as a surprise. In all my searchings for the cause of her ladyship's distemper I had not lighted on the thought of Constance Pleyel. I was not so much amazed at it that the name alone could have bowled me over in that way; but Lady Rollinson's idea was that it had gone home instantly to a guilty conscience.
“That is enough,” she said, “and more than enough.” With these words she arose and walked towards the door, but I intercepted her.
“I beg your pardon, it is not enough, or nearly enough.”
“You know the name,” she answered. “You have shown me enough to tell me that.”
“I know the name, certainly,” I replied. “I have known the name and the person that owns the name for many years. But that fact affords a very partial explanation of your conduct. I must trouble you to sit down, Lady Rollinson, and listen to what I have to say.”
The stupid, good old woman had taken her side already, and if anything had been needed to confirm her own mistaken judgment of the case that ludicrous accident would have supplied it. She fanned herself in an emotion made up of wrath and grief and dignity, glancing at me from time to time, and looking away again with an expression of disdain, which was hard for an innocent man to bear.