Then, quite suddenly, all her self-control gave way. She dropped her face in the sofa cushions and sobbed as if her heart would break. Lord Hayes was by no means a fool, and he saw very plainly what the reason for this sudden outburst was, and obviously it was not very complimentary to him, however complimentary it might be to another.
He closed the door quietly, and sat down in a chair a little way from her. He had no notion of being tender, and he lit a cigarette till she was herself again. The sobs grew quieter after a while, and in a few minutes Eva sat up again. Lord Hayes chucked the end of his cigarette into the fireplace.
"My dear Eva," he said very calmly and quietly, "I know quite well, of course, what this all means. You are in love with that young fellow, and that quite accounts for your very—your very extraordinary behaviour. But I don't mind that at all, I assure you. You may be in love with him as much as ever you like. The only thing I should mind would be any scandal on the subject, and I feel quite sure that nothing of the sort will happen. You have been very candid to me—very candid indeed, and I will follow your lead. I know perfectly well that your position and title and wealth are much too dear to you to let you risk any possibility of losing them. You would lose everything by a scandal, and I do not believe you would gain anything. This young man is engaged to another girl, as you say, and he is obviously a very good young man, and will do nothing he should not. In any case, you would have to live at Boulogne or Dieppe, or some of those hideous little French towns, among a set of second-rate people. That is absurd on the face of it. No, I am sure this 'tedious journey called life,' to quote your own words again, would be much more tedious there. For the rest, I fail to see how I am to prevent our quarrelling. It never has been a wish of mine that we should. So once more, good-night!"
Eva was sitting up looking at her husband, with an intensity that was not pleasant to contemplate. He felt it perhaps, for once, when he met her eyes, he looked away again immediately and he faltered in his speech. The utter, entire absence of generosity, of anything like manly feeling in what he said, seemed to Eva to be a new revelation of meanness, the like of which she had never encountered. He turned and left the room at these last words, and Eva was left sitting there.
[CHAPTER VII.]
Mrs. Davenport had spent the evening alone. Her husband was away for the night, and Reggie, as we have seen, had gone to the opera.
Whatever Reggie was he was not secretive, and his obvious pleasure that afternoon at Lady Hayes's invitation did not savour of the sweetness of consciously forbidden fruit. But his very frankness, which, as has been mentioned before, was capable of dealing unpleasant back-hand blows, had also a dazzling power about it, which, like the rays from a noon-day sun, renders it impossible to tell what lies behind, though it would be very false to describe it as partaking of the nature of dissimulation. It seemed to say, "I am not responsible for the weakness of your eyesight; I show my mystery or my want of mystery to you with all my heart, and you are at fault if you cannot form any conclusion which it is." To continue the metaphor, Mrs. Davenport would have felt not ungrateful to some abatement in its brilliance partaking of the nature of an eclipsed frankness, a shadow cast on the disc by some external object, or, at any rate, she would have been glad to take the opinion of someone who was possessed of smoked glasses, or a natural tendency to observe correctly. Had she known it, Lord Hayes would have been exactly the individual required, but it was no discredit to her acuteness that the idea never entered her head, quite apart from the impracticability of putting it into execution.
She had just dined and was glancing through the pages of a novel from Mudie's, when the drawing-room door opened, and Reggie appeared. He paused a moment when he saw his mother, and then advanced into the room. His attempt to look unconcerned and contented was singularly unsuccessful.
Mrs. Davenport laid down her book, frightened.