She shook a bottle as she spoke and poured out a cloudy mixture into a glass.
"Good-night, my pet! Do you remember when I taught you to read—'Ned had a gad—' and you wanted to know what a 'gad' was, and I forgot to find out. I'm afraid we shall never know now."
"I'll see you in the morning," murmured Fenella, as she kissed her. Miss Rigby was on the landing outside, dishevelled, round-eyed, and in a wrapper, asking news of her dear friend in a tragic whisper.
Perhaps it was because she cried herself to sleep that Nelly slept so late. The house was all topsy-turvy, and by the time they remembered to call her Lady Anne had been taken away. Her bedroom windows were wide open and Twyford was strewing tea-leaves on the carpet as Fenella passed the door. She had taken very little luggage—just a portmanteau full of linen and a dressing-case, and two days later she went a longer journey and took no luggage at all.
IX
THE MAN AT THE WHEEL
Just as we are used to hearing from time to time that the lives of certain great ones of the earth are insured for many thousands of pounds in quarters which their demise will unsettle but certainly not move to grief, so there are lives dismissed at their close with scant obituary notice, the shadow of whose eclipse reaches far beyond the covenanted few who wear mourning for their sakes.
The house in Suffolk Square never really recovered the shock of poor Lady Anne's taking off. Her rooms, stripped of their household gods, repapered and repainted, stood empty for weeks before Mrs. Barbour could even be prevailed upon to notify their vacancy, and when she did move, the paying guests whom they attracted were not of a sort to efface the hard-riding lady's wholesome memory or to make her the less keenly regretted. London is changing daily, and in nothing so much as in the accommodation it offers the stranger within its gates. Cheap hotels, the diseased craving for a veneered luxury, rapid transit from outskirts to centre—all combine to render what was always a precarious living well-nigh a hopeless one. In vain do old-fashioned people, unable or unwilling to read the signs of the times, advertise the family atmosphere to a public anxious to escape from it—quiet and seclusion to a generation that droops unless it feels its spirits uplifted by the wind and whirl of life. Between the tragic end of the old dispensation and the final dispersion there was a squalid interlude which Fenella never could recall in after years without a sinking of the heart as at the memory of a ravaged sanctuary. A dreadful Anglo-Indian ménage, which washed the dirty linen of ten stations with doors and windows open; a grumbling ayah whose gaudy rags clung to her, like wet cloths to a clay model, and whose depredations upon kitchen and larder on behalf of her screaming charges drove cook to revolt. A prim flaxen-tailed family who practised upon the piano all day by turns, and whose high-nosed parent did not think Miss Rigby "respectable." Was she, indeed, respectable? Mrs. Barbour had had her doubts from the first, and in spite of Lady Anne's breezy assurances, or perhaps on account of them, had long suspected a secret treaty of oblivion and protection between the two women. It had seemed, however, to include a tacit clause against direct communication, and with the new order the weaker woman appeared to see her way to break through this restriction upon her social aptitudes. She contracted a distressing habit of rapping at the doors of the first-floor rooms, to borrow, to return, to remonstrate, to apologize for remonstrating. Her friendship with little Mrs. Lovelace of Mian Meer, especially was, until its stormy close, over a disputed bargain at a "White Sale," of a suddenness and intensity calculated to revive a weakened faith in human affinities. Even the mother of the musical Miss Measons, after a glance at a skilfully disposed basket of calling-cards, called her "my dear" before she called her "that woman." In short, to express in one word a delayed and painful process, Jasmine Rigby deteriorated day by day, paid at long intervals, under pressure, and with cheques that were not her own, and finally, yielding no doubt to the instinct of flight from those whose good opinion we have forfeited, took a tearful and sentimental departure from the rooms which had been witness to fifteen futile years, and God alone knows what frenzied resolutions, what agonies of remorse and self-contempt as well. Financially, her loss was a serious matter, for she had rich and powerful connections, who might be trusted never to let her sink too deeply into debt nor beyond a certain standard of outward respectability: in other ways it would be idle to deny Mrs. Barbour felt it a relief. It afforded her an opportunity to reduce her establishment and to sell off some of the furniture. But the joy of turning our possessions into ready money and of ridding ourselves of old associates who have become encumbrances is a dearly bought one. It is likely that her health had been secretly unsatisfactory for years. It failed visibly from the day poor Druce, with the tears streaming down her honest wooden face, clasped her young mistress to her sparely covered chest in the hall and said "Good-bye." She had never been a good sleeper, but insomnia now became her nightly habit. Her cheeks grew flabby, her eyes dull; her comely face exchanged its pleasant pallor for a disquieting earthen tint.
Fenella would have been less than human if, amid all these anxieties, regrets, and annoyances, Lumsden's letters had come to her otherwise than as cheerful heralds from a happier world, bright assurances of a better time in store. He wrote oftener than many friends, though not as often as most lovers. He was generous enough or wise enough not to depart from the note he had struck during their conversation upon the day of winter sports at Freres Lulford. She was still his "investment," always "in training." And yet it was marvellous what a very wide field of inquiry, of advice and speculation, this position was held to justify. Her cheeks sometimes burned at Bryan's letters. Even when they were mere cheery chronicles of sport and pleasure, there was a little mocking undercurrent of sarcasm in them—sarcasm, as a rule, at the expense of society's hypocrisies—its standards of what might and what might not be permitted between two friends of opposite sexes, which she secretly resented—resented, that is to say, to the extent of never referring to it in her answers. Why should Bryan expect her to take the more cynical view, she wondered? Surely illusions were permissible to a girl of her age. What man who respected one, wished one well, would see her cheated of them? Clever letters are seldom written without ulterior motive. When heart speaks to heart it does so in language that admits of no double construction. It would save many a tangle were more sophisticated ones subjected to a merciless paraphrase.