My mother smiled gently. I somehow gathered from her way of smiling that she thought my congratulations premature.
“Surely,” I said, “you don’t think she’ll break out again. She made you a definite promise.”
“She’ll keep her promise to the letter,” said my mother, still smiling in the same way.
“If she does,” I said, “she can’t do anything very bad.”
It turned out—it always does—that my mother was right and I was wrong. The next morning at breakfast a note was handed to me by the footman. He said it had been brought over from Thormanby Park by a groom on horseback. It was marked “Urgent” in red ink.
Thormanby acts at times in a violent and impulsive manner. If I were his uncle, and so qualified by relationship to give him the advice he frequently gives me, I should recommend him to cultivate repose of manner and leisurely dignity of action. He is a peer of this realm, and has, besides, been selected by his fellow peers to represent them in the House of Lords. He ought not to send grooms scouring the country at breakfast time, carrying letters which look, on the outside, as if they announced the discovery of dangerous conspiracies. I said this and more to my mother before opening the envelope, and she seemed to agree with me that the political and social decay of our aristocracy is to some extent to be traced to their excitability and lack of self-control. By way of demonstrating my own calm, I laid the envelope down beside my plate and refrained from opening it until I had finished the kidney I was eating at the time. The letter, when I did read it, turned out to be quite as hysterical as the manner of its arrival. Thormanby summoned me to his presence—there is no other way of describing the style in which he wrote—and ordered me to start immediately.
“I can’t imagine what has gone wrong,” I said. “Do you think that Miss Battersby can have gone suddenly mad and assaulted one of the girls with a battle axe?”
“It is far more likely that Lalage has done something,” said my mother.
“After her promise to you what could she have done?”
“She might have kept it.”