It was all right then, so far as Lionel was concerned, seeing that he gave her the title which Mr. Hall withheld. He at least believed in the wonderful story of Strange. With Lionel on her side things would be bound to come out all right. Still, although the trees were thinning, she was not yet out of the wood. The green light of safety had not yet been substituted for the red danger signal.
"I am aching all over," said Leah, addressing her reflection in the mirror; "there's a twist of nerves between my eyes, and I could scream the house down. But I shan't!" She flung away from the glass, gripping her courage with both hands. "I'll be calm, and easy in my mind, till Jim comes back. When the worst is over, I shall collapse--I know I shall. Till then--till then--Oh, God"--the weakness she declined to recognise broke forth in prayer--"give me grit and pluck to fight through to the end."
So she prayed, but not to the fetish. In this uplifted moment Leah felt that Lionel's Deity was not a myth, but a terrible reality.
[ CHAPTER XXIX]
Then did "Rumour, painted full of tongues," enter into Lady Jim's strictly private life and depart with half-truths for the bewildering of gossips. In some marvellous way the news leaked out, as news will, despite careful caulking of the human vessels containing it. Lord James Kaimes, ran the babble, had been kidnapped by his medical attendant, who, substituting an illegal corpse for that of the husband he wished to supplant, had plotted to secure the wife. This was the tune, correct enough; then came its variations. The hurdy-gurdy of society ground out wonderful twiddles and twists of false notes, distorting the original theme into a melody Leah herself would not have recognised. Not that she heard any of the fiortura. Prudence counselled a retreat to Firmingham pending the home-coming of Jim, and thither, very wisely, she went. At this crisis of her fortunes Lady Jim felt that she required the countenance of all truly respectable people, however dull, and therefore sheltered like a maltreated chick under Hilda Frith's wing. To console the widowed and orphaned was her obvious excuse,--so obvious, indeed, that she declined to make it. Thus did she escape questions about the one engrossing topic of drawing-room, club, and public-house bar.
Every one, from the lowest to the highest, talked exhaustively, and the newspapers, cheap and costly, printed scandal with alluring recklessness. Out of London E.C. issued halfpenny journals with lurid headings over incomplete histories of the plot, invented on unsound premises. These transparent fictions began with the Russian's snake-in-the-grass intrusion into the happy home of an attached couple, and ended with a political cry for the exclusion of such immoral aliens from the Island of the Blest, which is England. The more expensive small-beer chronicles refused to believe that so fantastic an occurrence could have happened in these enlightened days of police-courts and publicity; but, nevertheless, supplied middle-class breakfast-tables with equally doubtful data, out of which to weave romances of the minor peerage. "The triangle of Dumas the younger," cried one scribe, with a fine disregard for meaning and metaphor, "must never be sounded in our dear Motherland!" A sufficient sample this of the stuff supplied. But, since the silly season prevailed when reporters, one and all, were credited with March-hare madness, such incongruities were pardoned, and the public gaped to swallow full-sized camels.
The clubs buzzed like hives at swarming time, for their members wondered at Jim's adventure; wondered, also, how "so knowing a Johnny"--so they put it--"could allow himself to be diddled by a measly little foreign beast." All were agog for the hero's appearance, and curious friends thirsted for a first-hand account of the enforced Odyssey. Many speculated as to the probability of Jim being sobered by untoward experience into becoming a truly respectable Duke, and a few made original observations anent a much-quoted leopard and his unchangeable spots. In this way was the statement that men are not born gossips contradicted, for the Eveless Edens of St. James's Street, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly resembled a village sewing-class in mid-career.
The drawing-rooms, as was natural, interested themselves chiefly in Leah, and chafed that she should become an unexpected Duchess. Hitherto Lady Jim's skilful man[oe]uvring had saved her reputation, but, as animals fall upon the wounded of their kind, so did the pack of hounds she had never hunted with fling itself forward, full-voiced and open-mouthed. Rejoicing women cried her sins on the housetop with surprising details. She must have encouraged Dr. Demetrius shamefully, else he never would have gone to such lengths, though why he should do so for such a woman it was impossible to understand. They had never admired her, said the pure-minded, and had always suspected her of being no better than she should be. Poor Mr. Askew, too: had she not put an end to a family matrimonial arrangement by her arts; had she not inveigled him to Paris in the hope that he would marry her in haste to repent at leisure? Certainly, aware of her character before it was too late, he had sailed to the South Pole or the North Pole, or to somewhere she could not follow, as she was certainly dying to do. Her vanity was insatiable. She had flirted quite indecently with Sir Billy Richardson, though he was but an infant lately breeched. Julia Hengist had only snatched her lord from the claws of this harpy by the merest, the very merest, chance. And the money she wasted! Oh! Why, the bailiffs had twice and thrice been in the Curzon Street house. Also, she was so lucky at bridge that she assuredly must cheat, and it showed what a blackleg she was, that no one had ever caught her cheating. Then her dresses were ridiculous for a woman with her poor husband's income. She had ruined him completely--that was why he ran away, in a dying condition. And the money had not gone to discharge lawful debts; she never paid anything, therefore she must have spent the cash on some secret vice, which she certainly must have, since she always posed as being so very correct. She ought to be cut; she ought to be in gaol; whipping was too good for her; put her in a pillory and throw stones at her. And let such a creature be anathema maranatha for ever and ever and ever, Amen.
But for all this throwing of stones by ladies who were without sin, Leah had her supporters in some, who must have been wicked, since they declined to condemn her wholesale on hearsay evidence. These pointed out that she had behaved admirably, when Jim's supposed death had been reported. The late Marquis of Frith was himself deceived by the likeness of the corpse to his brother, though of course there were family reasons for such a likeness. Also, the old Duke had paid the Curzon Street debts, which so good a man would not have done had they been of a questionable character. And the very respectable Hengists, kind things, spoke highly of Lady Jim's patience under trying domestic difficulties caused by an unfaithful husband. Besides, Leah--poor, dear, persecuted woman--was now the Duchess of Pentland, and could do no wrong. She was a misunderstood angel. Hilda Frith doted on her, and every one knew how very, very particular Hilda Frith was. To decry a woman who had suffered so much, and who had so nobly borne suffering, was a crime--worse, was a blunder, seeing that the latest Duchess would assuredly sway society, to bless or damn at her good pleasure. The peerage--the immaculate peerage of Great Britain and Ireland--would stand or fall by Leah Pentland, as a perfect example of what a titled woman should be.
In this way raged the war of tongues, while Lionel, in Mr. Hall's company, and with the assistance of Scotland Yard officials, sought for the missing prodigal. Strange, playing the game with characteristic stubbornness, refused to indicate the whereabouts of his victim's floating prison, and, as the Stormy Petrel under a new coat of paint, with readjusted rigging and bearing a prettier but unknown name, could not be found in any shipping list, there appeared little prospect of finding the kidnapped. The telegraph wires sizzled in the air and under the sea, with messages to home and foreign ports; bills with Jim's portrait and a most flattering description were scattered broadcast; a reward large enough to tempt Mammon himself was offered in every journal, and in many languages; and the journals themselves denounced the police authorities--who were merely mortal, poor scapegoats--for not producing a mislaid nobleman in five minutes. It was an enjoyable time for armchair critics, who, on insufficient evidence, knew exactly what should be done, and blamed the police, confronted with hard facts, for not doing it.