All Lady Mitford's newly-sprung wisdom, all the acuteness she had gained by being sharpened on the grindstone of suffering, did not enable her to reach a complete comprehension of Mrs. Hammond's motives. She had not the key to the enigma; she knew nothing of Laura's former relations with Colonel Alsager. If she had ever heard the story, or any garbled version of it, at all, it was before she had any distinct knowledge of, or interest in, either of the parties concerned,--when she was confused and harassed with the crowd of new names and unfamiliar faces,--and she had forgotten it. Even that advantage was her enemy's. Mrs. Hammond had been peculiarly bewitching to Sir Charles, and preternaturally impertinent to Lady Mitford, at the breakfast-table, on the morning when Colonel Alsager's first letter had arrived; indeed, she had a little overdone her part, which was not altogether unnatural. Fierce passions, a violent temper, and a cold heart, form a powerful but occasionally troublesome combination, and imperatively demand a cool brain and steady judgment to control and utilize them. Laura Hammond had as cool a brain and as steady a judgment as even a very bad woman could reasonably be expected to possess; but they were not invariably dominant. The cold heart did not always aid them successfully in subduing the violent temper; and when it failed to do so, the combination was apt to be mischievous. On the occasion in question, Mrs. Hammond had been, to begin with, out of sorts, as the best-regulated natures, and the most intent on their purposes in their worst sense, will occasionally be. Sir Charles bored her, and she was on the point of letting him perceive the fact, and thus giving her temper its head, when the cool brain interposed and curbed it in time. She exerted herself then to bewitch and enslave the Baronet, even beyond his usual condition of enchantment and subjugation. Her success was complete; but its enjoyment was mitigated by her perception that it had failed to affect Lady Mitford. The husband whom she had undoubtedly loved, and of whom she had been undeniably jealous, slighted her more openly than ever, and offered to her rival before her face undisguised and passionate homage; and yet Lady Mitford maintained perfect composure; and though she was occasionally distraite, the expression of her face indicated anything but painful thoughts as the cause of her abstraction. Her serene beauty was particularly impressive, and there was an indefinable added attraction in the calm unconscious grace of her manner. The quick instinct of hate warned her enemy that she was losing ground, and she listened eagerly, while she never interrupted her conversation with Sir Charles, for an indication of the cause. It came quickly. Alsager's letter was mentioned, and Lady Mitford imparted its contents to Captain Bligh, who had dropped in late, and had not heard her communication to Sir Charles. She looked away from Mrs. Hammond while she spoke, and while she and Bligh discussed the letter, Sir Peregrine's state, Laurence's detention at Knockholt, and other topics connected with the subject. It was fortunate that she did not see Laura's face; the sight would have enlightened her probably, but at the cost of infinite perplexity and distress, deepening and darkening a coming sorrow, swooping now very near to her unconscious head. The look, which would have been a revelation, lasted only a moment. It did not deform the beauty of the face, which it lighted up with a lurid glare of baffled passion and raging jealousy; for that beauty owed nothing to expression--its charm, its power were entirely sensuous; but it changed it from the seductive loveliness of a wicked woman to the evil splendour of a remorseless devil. If Lady Mitford had seen it, the light which its lurid fury would have flashed upon her might have been vivid enough to show her that in the rage and torment whence it sprung, she was avenged; but Georgie was not the sort of woman to be comforted by that view of the subject.
Lady Mitford made her request of Sir Charles, and was refused more peremptorily than her letter to Laurence Alsager had implied. The increasing rudeness of Mitford to his wife was characteristic of the man. He had neither courage, tact, nor breeding; and when he went wrong, he did so doggedly, and without making any attempt to mitigate or disguise the ugliness of the aberration. His demeanour to his wife at this juncture exhibited a pleasing combination of viciousness and stupidity. He was maddened by the near inevitability of Laura's departure. The Hammonds must leave Redmoor, and there was no possibility of their going to town. Mr. Hammond's physician had prescribed Devonshire air, and in Devonshire he must be permitted to remain. Sir Charles heartily cursed the poor old gentleman for the ill-health by which he and Laura had so largely profited; but curses could do nothing,--the Hammonds must go. He must be separated from Laura for a time, unless indeed Hammond would be kind enough to die, or she would be devoted enough to elope with him. The latter alternative presented itself to Sir Charles only in the vaguest and remotest manner, and but for a moment. He had become very much of a brute, and he had always been somewhat of a fool; but he had not reached the point of folly at which he could have supposed that Laura Hammond would forfeit the wealth for which she had sold herself, and which in the course of nature must soon fall into her hands, for any inducement of sentiment or passion. He had been brooding over these grievances alone in the library, when Georgie, with whom he had not exchanged a dozen words for as many days, came in, and spoke to him, with a miserable affectation of unconsciousness, about a wish to visit her old home before their return to town for the season. He refused with curt incivility and obstinacy; and it is probable that the ensuing few minutes might have brought about a decided quarrel between the husband and wife, had not Captain Bligh entered the room abruptly, and called out, apparently without noticing Lady Mitford's presence:
"I say, Mitford, you're wanted. Hammond is ever so much worse. Gifford has been round to the stables to get a groom sent off for Dr. Wilkinson.--I beg your pardon, Lady Mitford,--I ought to have mentioned that Mrs. Hammond's maid is looking for you."
Confusion reigned at Redmoor all that day, which seemed likely, during many hours, to have been the last of Mr. Hammond's life. Sir Charles felt that his morning meditation had had something prophetic in it; here was the other alternative almost within his grasp. At all events, whether he died a little sooner or lingered a little longer, Mr. Hammond must remain at Redmoor. The evil day was postponed. Lady Mitford simply devoted herself to the invalid, and behaved towards Mrs. Hammond with magnanimous kindness and consideration, which might have disarmed even Laura, had her inveterate coquetry and love of intrigue been the only animating motives of her conduct. She might have sacrificed the lesser passions to an impulse of the kind, but the greater--no. So she accepted all the delicate kindness which poor Georgie did her, she accepted the rôle of devoted and afflicted wife assigned to her before the household, and she hardened her heart against every appeal of her feebly-speaking conscience. With the following day the aspect of things changed a little. Mr. Hammond rallied; the doctors considered him likely to get over the attack; and Lord Dollamore arrived at Redmoor.
"I didn't hear anything from anybody, Mitford, and so I came on according to previous arrangement," said his lordship, as he greeted his host and looked about for Lady Mitford.
Lord Dollamore had strictly adhered to his programme. He never burdened his mind with the pursuit of two objects at the same time. He had completely disposed of the business which had called him away, and with which the present narrative has no concern; and he had come back to Redmoor as a kind of divertissement before the serious business of the season should commence. He entertained no doubt that he could resume his relation with Lady Mitford precisely at the point which it had attained when he left Redmoor. Georgie was not a fickle woman in anything; rather methodical, he had observed, in trifles. The impression he had made was likely to have been aided rather than lessened by the intermediate course of events at Redmoor. On the whole he felt tolerably confident; besides, he did not very much care. Lord Dollamore's was a happy temperament--a fortunate constitution, in fact--always supposing that life on this planet was tout potage, and nothing to follow. He could be pleasantly excited by the ardour of pursuit, and moderately elated by success; but failure had no terrors for him; he never fell into the weakness of caring sufficiently about anything to furnish fate with the gratification of disappointing him, in the heart-sickening or enraging sense of that elastic expression.
The Hammonds and Lord Dollamore were the only people now at Redmoor who could be strictly called guests. Captain Bligh was rather more at home than Sir Charles; and one or two stragglers, who had remained after the general break-up, addicted themselves to the versatile and good-humoured vaurien, and were generally to be found in his company. Accordingly, and as he anticipated, Lord Dollamore found Lady Mitford alone in, the drawing-room when he quitted the delectable society of the gentlemen. Mrs. Hammond had left the dinner-table, proclaiming her intention of at once resuming her place by her husband's side--a declaration by which she secured two purposes: one, the avoidance of a tête-à-tête with Lady Mitford; the other, the prevention of a visit by her hostess to the sickroom, on any supposition that Mr. Hammond might require extra attention. During dinner she had been quiet and subdued; her manner, in short, had been perfectly comme-il-faut, and she was dressed for her part to perfection. She had kept alive Lady Mitford's gentler feelings towards her; she had forged a fresh chain for Sir Charles, who, like "Joey B.," had great admiration for proceedings which he considered "devilish sly;" and she had afforded Dollamore much amusement of the kind which he peculiarly appreciated--quiet, ill-natured, and philosophical.
It does not much signify whether Laura went to her husband's sickroom at all, or how long she remained there; but there was some significance in the fact, which Lord Dollamore found eminently convenient and agreeable, that Sir Charles sent a footman to tell my lady that he had business to attend to in the library, and requested she would send his coffee thither; and there was a fortunate coincidence in the adjournment of Captain Bligh and his companions to the smoking-room, without any embarrassing drawing-room parade at all.
As Lord Dollamore entered the room, Lady Mitford was bidding goodnight to Mr. Hammond's little daughter, to whom she had been uniformly kind since the mysterious departure of Miss Gillespie. Lord Dollamore had, hardly ever seen the child, whom her stepmother wholly neglected, leaving her to the care of her maid, if the foreign damsel who officiated in that enviable capacity chose to take care of her,--and to chance, if she did not. Laura Hammond hardly knew that Lady Mitford had taken the child under her kindly protection, and had kept her with her during many of the hours of each day which she was not obliged to devote to her social duties; but the child's father knew the fact, and felt grateful to the one woman, after his senile fashion, without daring to express or even to feel any condemnation of the other. As the child left the room, Lord Dollamore looked after her for a moment before he closed the door; then he went up to Lady Mitford's sofa by the fireplace, and said quietly:
"Mrs. Hammond is as admirable as a stepmother as in all the other relations of life, I fancy."