CHAPTER XV. THE HANDSOME STRANGER.
Chris went upstairs feeling uncomfortable and unhappy. Instead of opening a way out of the awkward position in which, as she had truly said, she found herself now that the Graham-Shutes had come down, she had drawn upon herself a proposal which had served only to complicate the situation. She had settled nothing, moreover. Mr. Bradfield had treated her suggestion of going away in the lightest manner, and she could scarcely doubt that his persuasions would be successfully exercised upon her mother, who was already strongly averse from the idea of her daughter’s departure. She knew also that her mother would be disappointed to hear that she had not given more encouragement to Mr. Bradfield’s hopes of marrying her. These thoughts all troubled her, but there was one other which distressed her still more, the remembrance of the unhappy madman, whose treatment at the hands of Mr. Bradfield and of Stelfox was as perplexing to her as his own conduct.
Everything in connection with Mr. Richard was a puzzle. She had herself witnessed one of his fits of fury, culminating in savage violence, and yet Mr. Bradfield, whose regard for her she could not help knowing to be real, had left her alone with him in the barn. She remembered seeing Stelfox come breathless, panting and disordered out of the east wing after a struggle with his charge, and yet he had scoffed at the notion that Mr. Richard would do her any harm, and had even offered to let her meet him again.
Mr. Richard’s own conduct was more bewildering still. At one moment he would seem to understand everything she said, the next he would pay no attention whatever to her words. For a little while he would be silent and perfectly gentle, then he would begin to frighten her by curious moans and incoherent sounds. Neither of the explanations offered was a satisfactory one. Stelfox had said that the language he talked was a South African one, but at the idea of this Mr. Bradfield had burst into uncontrollable laughter. His own explanation that Mr. Richard had not enough intelligence to pick up even the rudiments of speech, was more incredible still. The girl’s experience of madness in any form was very slight, but she had never heard of any idiot or lunatic who was not able to talk at all, and whatever his mental deficiencies in certain directions might be, whatever mania he might be suffering from, it was clear to Chris he was far from being utterly devoid of intelligence.
Rather luckily, so Chris thought a little later, Mrs. Abercarne was not upstairs, for the girl thus had an opportunity of thinking the events of the afternoon over carefully before she saw her mother, and decided not to mention any of them. Poor Mrs. Abercarne had quite enough to worry her, not only in accommodating the housekeeping arrangements to Mrs. Graham-Shute’s erratic habits and projects, but in parrying that lady’s persistent attempts to cast slights upon her and her daughter. If now she were to hear, all in one breath, as it were, of her daughter’s encounter with the madman, of her quarrel with “that most objectionable young person,” Donald, and her refusal of the rich Mr. Bradfield’s attentions, Chris felt that her poor mother would spend a Christmas even less merry than she expected to do.
So the girl kept her little secrets to herself, which proved easy enough to do, as the preparations for the tableaux kept her fully employed, and away from her mother.
The following day was a long, confused nightmare to Chris. The din of Mrs. Graham-Shute’s voice was in her ears all the morning, and until the time when the hastily-summoned guests began to arrive.
They had been invited for four, with a promise of tea. This, not being within the jurisdiction of Mrs. Graham-Shute, duly came to hand. The tableaux did not. So the guests “stood about,” cold, bored, and critical, and waited. They had assembled in the drawing-room, whence Mrs. Graham-Shute, at the last moment, had had most of the chairs removed to the barn, with a sudden and unnecessary spasm of fear that there would not be seats enough for the audience.
Mr. Bradfield, in whose name the invitations had been issued, was “not at home,” in his study. Mrs. Abercarne, whom he desired to play the part of hostess, was completely overshadowed by Mrs. Graham-Shute, who not only occupied a good deal of space, and made her voice resound to the furthest extremities of the rooms, but who had a way of looking over the heads of the assembly as if she was counting her flock, which suggested to the meanest intelligence that she considered them all to be for the time being her property.