"Thank you, my dear. How are you, Rachel? You're not looking very well. Richard, who came in to see me this morning, told me that you were ill at dinner last night. He seemed quite anxious."
"It was nothing, thank you, grandmamma. That thunder always upsets me. I was sorry to interfere with Lady Carloes' dinner-party."
"Not much of a party from what Richard told me. And she had in a harpist afterwards. Why a harpist? Poor Aggie Carloes! Always done the wrong thing ever since she was a child. Yes, her little drawing-room's so stuffy, they tell me—must have been intolerable last night."
It was for all three of them a quite unbearable situation. Roddy had never, even when he was a boy of sixteen, been afraid of her; now at last he understood what the power was that had kept her family at her feet for so many years, indeed, he seemed now to perceive in all of them—in Breton, in Rachel, as well as in the Duchess—a strain of some almost hysterical passion, that, held in check though it was, for the moment, promised to flare into the frankest melodrama at the slightest pretext.
Anything better than this pause; he plunged.
"You won't forgive me, Duchess," he said abruptly. "I believe I've done a pretty rotten thing. I didn't intend it that way. I only meant just to clear everything up and make it all straight for everybody, but if I've been unpardonable just say so and give it me hot."
He paused and cleared his throat. "I wonder if you'd mind, Rachel," said the Duchess, "passing me that little stool that I see over there—that little brown stool. Just put it under my feet, will you? Thank you."
Roddy desperately proceeded.
"It's only this. You said the last time you came that you had heard—that you knew—that you were afraid that Rachel and your grandson, Mr. Breton, were—had been—seein' too much of one another. You just put it to me, you know—Well," he went on, trying to make his voice cheerful and ordinary and failing completely, "lyin' on one's back one gets thinkin' and broodin', specially a feller who hasn't been used to it, like me. I got worried—not because I didn't trust Rachel—and Mr. Breton, of course, all the way, because I do; but simply that, you know, it's rotten for a feller to be lyin' helpless on his back, thinkin' that people are talkin' about his wife—you know how malicious people are, Duchess—and I thought it jolly well must be stopped, don't you know, and I wanted it stopped quick and straight and clean, and I didn't see how it was goin' to be stopped unless I'd got us all friendly together here and just squashed it, all of us. And so—well, to speak—well, here we are.... And," he concluded, trying to smile upon everyone present, "I do hope it's all right. It didn't seem then a poor sort of thing to do, but somehow gettin' you all here as a surprise...." He broke off, made noises in his throat, and felt that the room was of a burning heat.
He remembered, vaguely, that he had designed this meeting as a punishment to the old lady; he had only succeeded, however, in revealing his own cowardice; the first glimpse of her had made a poor creature of him. Oh! how he wished himself now well out of it! And yet, behind that thought was the knowledge of the little speech that he was soon to make and the way that, with it, he would win Rachel and hold her for ever! After all, it came to that, absolutely: Rachel was the only thing in all the world that mattered.