[ CHAPTER XXVI]
Lady Jim boarded a special train to Firmingham in a royal rage, the more riotous for necessary suppression. After the shock of the unexpected had passed, she gave a flitting thought of pity to her drowned relatives, and reverted hastily to selfish considerations. Solitude permitting the play of temper, she punished the fetish, by flinging its outward and visible sign of a peacock's feather from the compartment which witnessed the unmasking. That her Baal should have played her such a trick was intolerable, and still more intolerable the thought that circumstances muzzled her. For the first time in her victorious life Leah Kaimes dealt with a fixed decree, against which there was no appeal.
What could she do? Nothing! To make chaos of a continent would not have relieved her feelings, and there was nothing to wreck in the limited space of the carriage. Unable to sit still, she threw herself from seat to seat, feeling like a caged tiger, with the added savagery of a trained intellect. Unlike the beast, she had the use of speech to vent her wrath, but this she did not utilise from a conviction that no words would do justice to the situation. A Texan mule-driver's vocabulary would have fallen short of her requirements. Her impotent anger was like that of a dog leaping and slavering against an offending but unreachable moon.
And the facts--the hard ironic facts, which she could not do away with, scheme as she might! Those inflexible actualities buzzed in her brain, until repetition took the rhythm of the droning wheels underfoot. Pentland was dead, along with his son and heir; Hilda, a widow with two girl babies, who did not count in the succession; Jim was wiped out of social existence, and by her own act. Remained Lionel, the curate, the prig, her one honest man--the Duke of Pentland. Leah could have screamed in the face of this crushing truth.
A title at the best, fifty thousand a year, three country seats, a town house, spacious and crammed with beautiful things, and a Scotch moor with an adorable shooting-box. This was the heritage of the new peer! "Of a milk-and-water parson," raged Lady Jim, unjustly, "who will waste everything in charity, and turn the houses into pigsties for the unclean. Oh, Lord, to think that such a clerical ass should get the inside runnings!" This latter phrase she had picked up from Miss Mulrady, and at the moment it seemed expressive.
The position would not bear thinking about; yet she had to think, appealing betweenwhiles to the gods-of-things-as-they-are for reasons to justify such shabby treatment. What had she done, that they should be so disagreeable? It was enough to make a truly virtuous woman, as she assuredly could call herself, dance a can-can in Piccadilly. Then she desisted for a few moments from calling the Unseen bad names to lament over her own short-sightedness. To think that she should have sold Jim's birthright for thirty thousand pounds! It was not even one year's income of the Pentland estates. She would have been a Duchess, too; not that she personally cared for rank, but with a higher position she could have trampled the more easily on her enemies. A thought of these flashing into her mind made her clench her fists and grit her teeth. How they would rejoice, the beasts, to think what she had missed, and by how short a period she had missed it! If they had only one neck, as Caligula desired for his enemies, how she would have enjoyed a chop at it!
"Oh!" cried Leah, banging the cushions and choking in the dust thus raised--"if I could only bring Jim back!"
It was a kindly wish, as she desired him to enjoy the good things that had fallen into his sham grave. But there did not seem much chance of achieving the impossible. Jim was dead and buried, and the interment had been legally sanctified by her tears. If he came to life it would be difficult to explain how a corpse in his name came to occupy a niche in the Kaimes vault. Also, inquiry might lead to the production of a Siberian exile. If Demetrius told the truth--which he assuredly would do in the face of a betrayal he must guess was her work--there would be no place for her in Society, and she would starve, a social Peri at the gates of a forbidden Paradise. No! Think as she would--and think she did till her brain ached--things had to remain as she had foolishly arranged them. It was a galling thought to think that none but she who suffered was responsible. She could not even lay the blame on the stars; but she could and did on the fetish. It was something of a relief to have thrown its peacock manifestation out of the window.
Two hours in the railway carriage tamed her unruly nerves into some sort of submission, and partially schooled her into accepting the inevitable. To make the best of it, to rob the new Duke shamelessly of money and the Curzon Street house, on the plea of disinheritance, were the results at which she arrived. By the time Firmingham appeared through the carriage windows she had ceased to kick against the pricks. The mask was on her face when the train stopped, and it was a quiet and demure lady who alighted at the station. Even the sister-in-law who entered the great house to console the Marchioness was as sympathetic as the most exacting could have required.
She suppressed a groan when she passed through the doors of the lordly mansion that was really and truly her own, but managed by a steady exercise of her strong will to greet Colley with great calmness. The butler intimated that Lady Frith wept incessantly in her boudoir, and that the Duke----