The next morning at breakfast Lord Dollamore announced regretfully that he must leave Redmoor for a few days, but hoped to return by the end of the week. He addressed this announcement to Sir Charles Mitford, who was gazing intently on Mrs. Hammond as she broke the seals of several notes, and tossed them down one after another, half read, with a most reassuring air of indifference. Lady Mitford was not present; breakfast was a free and unceremonious meal at Redmoor, to which everybody came when everybody liked, and nobody was surprised if anybody stayed away. Sir Charles expressed polite regret.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Hammond, "how very sorry Lady Mitford will be! Bereft of her two courtiers, she will be bereaved indeed. First Colonel Alsager, and now Lord Dollamore. She will be quite au déspoir.
"I wish I could hope to make so deep an impression by my absence, Mrs. Hammond," he answered in the careless tone in which one replies to a silly observation made by a petted child. "Mitford, can you come with me into the library a minute?" And he moved away, taking with him a parcel of letters.--"When you are spiteful, and show it, you grow vulgar, madam," he muttered under his breath--"after the manner of your kind--and a trifle coarse; but Mitford is not the man to see that, or to mind it if he did."
Half an hour later Lord Dollamore had left Redmoor; and as he leant back in the railway carriage which bore him towards town, he quietly reviewed all that had taken place during his visit, and arrived at a conclusion perfectly satisfactory to himself. Then he resolved to think no more of the matter till his return; and dismissed it with the reflection that "Mitford was a regular beast,--low, and all that;" but that she "was a devilish nice woman;--no fool, but not clever enough to bore one, and pretty enough for anything."
Matters continued pretty much in the same state at Redmoor during the week which followed Lord Dollamore's departure. Lady Mitford wrote to Colonel Alsager, and heard from him; but her letter--that which we have seen him receive at Knockholt--said as little as possible of the real state of affairs. The truth made a faint attempt to struggle out in the postscript; but pride, reserve, an instinct of propriety, the numberless obstacles to a woman in such a position as that of Lady Mitford telling it in its entirety to any man rendered the attempt abortive. Could he not come? she had asked him. Could he not come? she asked herself, in the weary days through which she was passing--days of which each one was wearier and more hopeless than its predecessor; for things were becoming desperate now. The other guests had taken their leave, but still the Hammonds remained at Redmoor. Not a woman of the party but had known Laura's hollowness and falsehood well--had known that the powers of fascination she had employed were mere tricks of cunning art; but they were all fascinated for all that. Laura had made the close of the time at Redmoor incomparably pleasant, whereas its opening had been undeniably dull; and there was another reason for their letting Mrs. Hammond down easily. They had remained as long as they could in the same house with her; and how were they to excuse or account for their having done so, if they disclosed their real opinion of her character and conduct? It was a keen privation, no doubt, not to be able to descant upon the "doings" at Redmoor, but they had to bear it; and the only alleviation within their reach was an occasional compassionate mention of Lady Mitford as "hardly up to the mark for her position and fortune, and sadly jealous, poor thing!"
It would have been impossible, in common decency, to have avoided all mention of the departure of the Hammonds; and accordingly Sir Charles Mitford told his wife, as curtly and sullenly as possible, that she might make her preparations for going to town, as he supposed they would be moving off in a few days. Georgie had suffered dreadfully, but the worst was over. The keen agony of outraged love had died out, and the sense of shame, humiliation, terrible apprehension, and uncertainty, was uppermost now. In her distress and perplexity she was quite alone; she had no female friend at all in any real sense of the word. It was not likely Sir Charles Mitford's wife should have any; and the only friend she could rely upon was away, and hopelessly detained. The only friend she could rely on--As she repeated the lamentation over and over again in the solitude of her room, and in the bitterness of her heart, did it ever occur to her that the only friend she could rely on might be a dangerous, though not a treacherous one;--that she was crying peace, peace, where there was no peace?
"When we know what the Hammonds are going to do, I shall write to Dollamore," said Sir Charles. He spoke to Georgie.
She felt an eager longing to see her old home, and to breathe a purer moral atmosphere than that of Redmoor. "I can only suffer and be perplexed here," she thought. "Let me get away, and I can think freely, and make up my mind to some line of action. Out of her sight, I should be easier, even in town; and how much easier at home!--once more in the old place, and among the old people, where I used to be before I knew there were such women as this one in the world." So she thought she would do a courageous thing, and ask Sir Charles to take her home for a little, as soon as the Hammonds should have left Redmoor.
She came to this resolution one morning before she went down to breakfast,--before she had to encounter Mrs. Hammond, who brought a fresh supply of ammunition to the attack on each such occasion; whose beauty was never brighter or more alluring than when she arrayed it in the elaborate simplicity of Parisian morning-dress; who was not sufficiently sensitive to be journalière, and who might always cherish a well-founded confidence in her own good looks, and the perfect efficiency of her weapons. Not that Georgie was fighting her any longer on the old terrain; she had retreated from that, and had no other object now than to shield herself from the perpetual sharp fire of Laura's polished impertinence, her epigrammatic sarcasms, her contemptuous pity. Lady Mitford, whose good sense was apt to do its proper office in spite of the tumult of feeling constantly striving to overpower it, wondered sometimes why Laura took so much trouble to wound her. "She has made sure of Sir Charles," the pure simple lady would say to herself, when some sharp arrow had been shot at her, and she felt the smart, not quite so keenly as the archer thought perhaps, but keenly still. "She does not need to turn me into ridicule before him, to expose my defects and gaucheries; she does not need to test his devotion to her by the strength and impenetrability of his indifference to me,--at least not now. She is clever enough to know that wit and humour, sarcasm and finesse, are all thrown away upon him, if she is showing them off for her own sake." Of a surety Lady Mitford was rapidly learning to estimate Sir Charles aright. "Her beauty and her unscrupulousness have fascinated him, and all the rest is more likely to bore him than otherwise. If she were in love with him she might not understand this; but she is not in love with him--not even after her fashion and his own; and I am sure she does understand it perfectly. What does she throw so much vigilance away for, then?--for she never loses a chance. Why does she waste so much energy on me? Of course, I know she hates me; and if she be as good a hater as such a woman should be, she would not be satisfied with the one grand injury she has done me; hatred might be pacified by so large a sop, but spite would crave for more. Yes, that must be the explanation--she is feeding spite."
If the old clergyman who had cried over Georgie Stanfield on her wedding-day, and uttered that futile blessing on the marriage which was so unblessed, could have heard her speak thus to her own heart, how utterly confounded and astonished that good but not "knowledgable" individual would have been! A few months in the great world to have turned Georgie into this woman, who seeks for motives, who reads character, who has all the dreary cunning in interpretation of the human heart which his life-long experience had failed to impart to him, though he had passed half a century in professional proclamation that "the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." But it was not her short experience of the great world in any general sense which had so far forwarded her education in the science of life as to enable her thus to analyze conduct and motives,--she had had a surer, subtler teacher; she had loved, and been betrayed; she had hoped, and been deceived. She had dreamed a young girl's dream, and one by no means so exaggerated and exalted as most young girls indulge in; and the awakening had come, not only with such rudeness and bitterness as seldom accompany the inevitable disillusionment, but with such startling rapidity, that the lasting of her vision had borne no more proportion to the usual duration of "love's young dream," than the forty winks of an after-dinner nap bear to the dimensions of "a good night's rest." Experience had not tapped at the sleeper's door, and lingered softly near the couch, and insinuated a gently-remonstrative remark that really it was time to risk--tenderly letting in the garish light by tempered degrees the while--cheerfully impressing, without hurry or severity, the truth that a work-day world--busy, stirring, dutiful, and real--lay beyond the glorified realms of slumber, and awaited the passing of the foot going forth to the appointed task over the enchanted threshold. The summary process of awakening by which the sleeper has a basinful of cold water flung on his face, and is pulled out of bed by his feet, bears a stricter metaphorical analogy to that by which Lady Mitford had been roused from her delusion; and though she had reeled and staggered under it at first, the shock had effectually done its work. Georgie Mitford was a wiser woman than Georgie Stanfield could ever have been made by any more considerate process.