[CHAPTER IX.]
Lady Crowborough, as has been incidentally mentioned, was in the habit of hermetically sealing herself up in a small dark house in Half Moon Street for the winter months. This year as recounted, she had substituted a process of whole-hearted unsealedness in Egypt for a couple of months, but on her return had been more rigorously immured than ever, to counteract, it must be supposed, the possibly deleterious effects of so persistent an exposure to the air, and to fortify her for her coming visits to Charles' studio. In the evening, it is true, she often went out to dine, in a small brougham with the windows up, but except for her call yesterday on Charles' mother, the daylight of Piccadilly had scarcely beheld her since her return. Windows in the house were always kept tightly shut, except owing to the carelessness or approaching asphyxia of servants, rooms were ventilated by having their doors set ajar, so that the air of the passage came into them, and dry stalks of lavender were continually burned all over the house, so that it was impregnated with their fresh fragrance. She was a standing protest against those modern fads, so she labelled them, of sitting in a draught, and calling it hygiene, and certainly her procedure led to excellent results in her own case, for her health, always good, became exuberant when she had spent a week or two indoors, her natural vitality seemed accentuated, and she ate largely and injudiciously without the smallest ill-effects. Between meals, she worked at fine embroidery without spectacles, sitting very upright in a small straight-backed cane chair.
The house was tiny, and crammed from top to bottom with what she called "my rubbish," for, without collecting, she had an amazing knack of amassing things. Oil paintings, water-colour sketches, daguerrotypes, photographs, finely-shaded pencil drawings, samplers, trophies of arms, hung on the walls, and on chimney-pieces and tables and in cupboards and cabinets were legions of little interesting objects, Dresden figures, carved ivory chessmen, shells, silver boxes, commemorative mugs, pincushions, Indian filigree-work, bits of enamel, coins, coral, ebony elephants, all those innumerable trifles that in most houses get inexplicably lost. She had just cleared a shelf in a glass case by the fireplace in her minute drawing room, and was busy arranging the beads and doubtful scarabs of "me Egyptian campaign" in it when Charles entered. Upon which she dismissed from her shrewd and kindly old mind all concerns but his.
"Sit down, my dear," she said. "And light your cigarette. I saw your mother yesterday, as she may have told you. I'm coming to sit for you next week, and so please have the room well warmed, and not at all what these doctors call aired. Lord bless me, I had enough air in Egypt to last me for twenty years to come."
She indulged in these cheerful generalities until she saw that Charles was established. Then she broke them off completely.
"Now I sent for you because I wished to see you most particularly, Mr. Lathom," she said. "No, there's nobody here but me: I sent Joyce back to her father this morning, so if you think you're going to see her, you'll be disappointed. Now it's no use beating about the bush: there's something I've got to tell you, and here it comes. That Craddock—I call him that Craddock—told my son Philip that you were a disreputable young fellow, that's about what it comes to. I had it from Craddock's own lips that he did. Joyce knew from her father that somebody had done so, and guessed it was that Craddock. So I was as cool as a cucumber, and just said 'I'm sorry you had so bad a report to give my son of Mr. Lathom.' I said it so naturally that he never guessed I didn't know it was he. And there he was caught like a wasp in the marmalade. I wish he had been one. I'd have had the spoon over him in no time."
Charles sat quite still for a moment, and in that moment every feeling but one was expunged from his mind. There was left nothing but a still white anger that spread evenly and smoothly over his heart and his brain. He had no longer any regret that Craddock had done this, the consciousness that he had sufficed to choke all other emotions. More superficially the ordinary mechanism of thought went on.
"I never believed a word of it, my dear," went on Lady Crowborough, "nor did Joyce. But it was my duty, for reasons which you can guess, to find out if it was true or not. Well, I got your mother's account of you yesterday, as she may have told you, and your friend Mr. Armstrong's account, as he also may have told you, and there were several others. So either all these people are liars or else that Craddock is. And there ain't a sane person in the land who could doubt which it was. And Joyce has gone back home to tell her father."