Evan was considerably taken aback.
“Deary,” said she, “I’ll explain—”
Just then she caught sight of Leonard, who had come into the hall, urged by sheer curiosity. He wished to hear the preposterous tale this woman would surely tell. It was almost pathetic, to think of her coming before him, the cynic, the merciless detector of human weakness, with her ridiculous yarn.
“You’re the one to remember!” she said. “Your eyes—so kind o’ piercing looking, and all! You remember your Auntie Jean, I bet!”
“No,” said Leonard, “I can’t say that I do.”
Indeed, he felt that if he had ever set eyes on her before, he would have remembered. She was not one easy to forget. Stout and tall, she carried herself with majesty. In her face, powdered white as a clown’s, her lips were a vivid scarlet. Sticky dark lashes surrounded her eyes, and crowning all was a bushy halo of blond hair, dry and unreal as a doll’s wig. No, Leonard did not remember her.
Nevertheless, looking at her, a queer sympathy stirred in him. There was something honest in her. Even the paint and powder and dyed hair were honest. They showed no intention to deceive, but merely an artless desire to make the best of what nature had provided.
“Deary,” she said, “I’m your Uncle Lambert’s second.”
There really had been an Uncle Lambert, a black sheep brother of their father’s, and Leonard thought he could remember some talk about a dreadful marriage. He was almost ready to believe that this lady might be a relation—by marriage; but that did not exclude the possibility of her being also a swindler.
“I remember,” said she, “as plain as plain. Your mother was the only one in the family that ever had a kind word for me—a sweet, lovely woman, she was. Well do I remember her saying to me: ‘Jean,’ she said, and those were her words—‘Jean,’ she said, ‘come and see the children.’ Then she took me up through that rich, elegant house, and the taste there was in those lace curtains I shall remember to my dying day, and the carpet on the stairs as thick as fur, and there you were in the nursery, the two of you, in little black velvet pants and white silk shirts, as sweet and clean as two little lambs.” She sobbed. “Two little lambs!” she insisted. “And Evan, he sat on my lap and played with my locket, and well I remember he broke it off the chain and tried to swallow it, and you stood in a corner, saying, ‘Go ‘way! Go ‘way!’ Two l-little l-lambs!”