Barclay nodded. "Yes, I shall always live in London. Somewhere not too far from—here."
[CHAPTER XXVII]
It was one o'clock when Mrs. Walbridge at last found herself alone. She was very tired, but so happy and excited that she did not want to go to bed, and after walking restlessly about the girls' room, and the drawing-room, living over again the happenings of the last few crowded hours, she went softly up two flights of stairs and opened the door of her little study.
It was many weeks since she had sat there at the old table, and the moonlight revealed a thick layer of dust over the inky blotting-paper and the cheap, china ink-stand. Noiselessly she opened the window and stood looking out at the night. She had always loved the quiet, dark hours and the mystery and purity of night had all her life made a strong appeal to her imagination. The millions of people who lay helpless and innocent in sleep; the rest from scheming and struggle; the renewal of strength; and the ebbing towards dawn of enfeebled life. The very fact that some of the great thoroughfares of London were being washed—laved she mentally called it—and purified from their accumulation of ugly unhygienic filth; all these things made night a time of beauty and romance to this writer of sentimental rubbish. It seemed, she had always thought, to make the sin-defiled old world young and innocent again for a few hours, and this night was to be an unforgettable one to her.
Guy had come back finer, and with greater promises of nobility than ever before. Grisel had finally come—been dragged—to her senses, and would worthily fulfil her womanhood with Oliver, whom Mrs. Walbridge told herself she loved nearly as much as she loved her own sons. In reality she loved the young journalist far more than even Guy, but this she did not, and never was, to know.
She went on counting her blessings. Maud's baby was lovely, and strong, and patients were really beginning, if not exactly to flock at least, to come in decent numbers to Moreton Twiss. Hermione was enjoying what to her mother seemed an almost unparalleled social success, among people innocently believed by Mrs. Walbridge to be of very high society indeed; little Jenny Wick seemed to like Paul, and if she married him he seemed to stand a very good chance of improving in every way, of becoming kinder and less selfish.
Thus, standing in the moonlight, Mrs. Walbridge thankfully reviewed the many good things in her life.
"To be sure," she thought, her face clouding, "it was very sad about Ferdie, it was a dreadful, almost tragic thing that their old life, however trying and disappointing it had been to her, should have been broken in this way. Like many other women she felt that, though her husband was a bad one he was, because he had been the lover of her youth and was the father of her children, a thing of odd pathos and even value to her. He was like," she thought, "a bit of china—a bowl or a jug—bought by her in her youth, and though she had been deceived in thinking it genuine and though it was cracked all over, she yet preferred to keep it than to lose it."