"I suppose," said Clara, rather hesitatingly, "that the reason why Captain Cheffington has not announced his marriage to his relations is that he thinks they would object to receive an opera-singer."
"Possibly," answered May. (In her heart she thought, "The reason is that he cares nothing for any of us.")
"It must be that," proceeded Clara. "For as far as I can make out there seems to be no concealment about it in Brussels."
Then they arrived at Mrs. Dormer-Smith's house, and May alighted and bade her friend farewell.
"Thank you, Clara," she said, "for telling me the truth. I loathe mysteries and concealments. When one thinks of it, they are despicable."
"Unless when one conceals something to shield others," suggested Clara gently.
She had told her friend what she believed to be the truth so far as the fact of her father's marriage was concerned. But she had not given her all the details and comments which Signor Valli had imparted to her on the subject. His view of the matter was not flattering to Captain Cheffington. Valli declared, with cynical plainness of speech, that Captain Cheffington had married La Bianca merely to have the right to confiscate her professional earnings. Latterly these had become very scanty. La Bianca did not grow younger, and her voice was rapidly failing her. A good deal of gambling had gone on in her house at one time. But it had been put a stop to—or, at least, shorn of its former proportions by the ugly incident of which Miss Polly Piper had brought back a version to Oldchester. Since that, things had not gone well with the Cheffington ménage. Captain Cheffington had become insupportable, irritable, impossible! He was, moreover, a malade imaginaire; a querulous, selfish, tyrannous fellow; always bewailing his hard fate, and the sacrifice he had made in so far derogating from his rank as to marry an opera-singer. La Bianca was a slave to his caprices. To be sure she was not precisely a lamb. There were occasions when she flamed up, and made quarrels and scenes.
"But," said Signor Valli, "he is an enormous egoist, and, with a woman, the bigger egoist you are, the surer to subjugate her. La Bianca would have stabbed a man who loved her devotedly, for half the ill-treatment she endures from that cold, stiff ramrod of an Englishman."
Such was Vincenzo Valli's version of the case; and Clara Bertram, in listening to him, believed that, in the main, it was a true one. Valli had recently been in Brussels, where he had seen the Cheffingtons; and one or two other foreign musicians whom she knew had come upon them from time to time, and had given substantially the same account of them. As to persons in the rank of life to which Captain Cheffington still claimed to belong, they were no more likely to come across him now than if he were living on the top of the Andes.
May went into the house wearily. In the hall she met her uncle Frederick, who had just come in, and had seen the cab drive away.