Sir George stood rather stiff, and the placidly obstinate look came to his mouth. 'Mr. Raymond?' he echoed in his turn. 'Why on earth should Mr. Raymond know anything about it--unless you have been speaking to him?'
She had realised her slip before the suggestion came, a suggestion whose truth she was too proud to deny, even though her husband's displeasure at the thought was unmistakable. 'I have spoken to him,' she replied steadily. 'I told him your opinion as to the danger should the hints in the native press prove to have any foundation; and he quite agreed.'
'I feel flattered,' remarked Sir George coldly, as he sat down again. 'Perhaps, my dear, when you are ready to go, you will ring the bell. Mr. Raymond may be in a hurry.'
Grace Arbuthnot's heart sank within her. A woman--especially a sensible woman--can hardly live for ten years in close and affectionate companionship with a man without having seen him at his best and his worst; and that the latter was the case with Sir George now his wife recognised instantly; albeit with a clear comprehension of the cause, which made her feel a pathetic regret that she should thus handicap a man, as a rule so just, so unbiassed. And that, too, at a moment when much might depend on his being free from personal feeling; since Jack Raymond, she knew, would not have come lightly. Some woman might have fought against facts. Grace was too wise for that. She simply rang the bell, and passed into her own sitting-room with that pathetic regret. It seemed so pitiful after these long years to find antagonism in these two men; and yet what right had she to feel scornful? Was it not bitterly true that she herself could not forget?--not quite!
Seated at her writing-table, her head on her hand, she tried to argue the matter out with herself, and failed. Only this seemed clear. That once you admitted certain emotions to be inevitable, it was very hard to set limits to them. Surely, therefore, there must be a firmer basis than the conventional one; but what was it?
She roused herself, after a time, to the consideration that no matter how the state of tension between herself, her husband, and Jack Raymond came about--and that such a tension did exist, she was again too proud to deny--it must not be allowed to interfere with matters more important; and that it might do so was only too palpable; all the more so because those two, especially her husband, would be loth to admit the very existence of such a possibility.
Therefore, she herself must see and talk to Mr. Raymond. Nay, more! she must get him to do what her husband would not do: make inquiries concerning this threat of publishing some documents if payment for it was not made, which was contained in the letter which--half unconsciously--she had brought away with her in her hand from the office.
She passed out into the anteroom, told the attendant orderly that Raymond sahib, on leaving Sir George, was not to be shown out as usual by the office entry, but through the suite of reception-rooms, and then went thither herself to await and waylay him.
Being seldom used in the morning, these rooms leading the one from the other into a hall beyond, and so to the grand portico, were dim and silent, the jalousies closed, the great jardinières, full of flowers, mysteriously sweet in the shadowy corners. And Grace herself, ready for church save for the bunch of flowers and lace that go to make up the headgear of a grande toilette, looked mysteriously sweet also in the curves of a cushioned chair. She suited the vista of rooms, so empty of trivial nicknacks, so restful in its perfect blending of comfort and beauty. Comfort, not luxury; beauty, not decoration. Cold in its marble floors, warm in its oriental embroideries, and, above all things, charming in both its scented chilliness and scented warmth.
Perhaps she knew that she suited it, and that it suited her, since the hope of this decides the disposition of furniture in most drawing-rooms. Perhaps, in a way, she calculated on this, also on the effect of memory, in reducing Jack Raymond to obedience, since it was in these very rooms, scarcely different even in detail, that the most part of those two happy years had been spent. Such unconscious calculations are quite inevitable when women hold, as they are taught to hold as sacred, the dogma that true womanhood should never permit manhood to forget that it is woman.