So, since Carnaby was to be a man of the right kind, his grandmother had come to look at him, not in love, as other women come to such bedsides, but in pride of heart. The boy, after his “white night” at Wittisham and the varied emotions of the succeeding day, lay on his side, in the deep, recuperative sleep of youth whence its energies are drawn and in which its vigors are renewed. His round cheek indented the pillow, his rumpled hair stirred in the breeze that blew in at the window, his arm and his open hand, relaxed, lay along the sheet. Another woman would have straightened the bed-clothes above him; another might have touched his hair or hand; another kissed his cheek. But not even because he was like her departed husband, like the man who five and fifty years before had courted a certain cold and proud, handsome and penniless Miss Augusta Gallup, would Mrs. de Tracy do these 322 things. She had had her sensation, such as it was, her secret moment of emotion, and was satisfied. She left the room as she had come, the candle casting exaggerated shadows of herself upon the walls where Carnaby’s bats and fishing rods and sporting prints hung.
It is sad to be old as Mrs. de Tracy was old, but her age was of her own making, a shrinkage of the heart, a drying up of the wells of feeling that need not have been.
“I should be better out of the way,” her bitterness said within her, and alas! it was true. Her great, gaunt room seemed very lonely, very full of shadows when she returned to it. Rupert, who always slept at her bedside, awaited her. Disturbed at this unwonted hour, he stirred in his basket, wheezed and gurgled, turned round and round and could not get comfortable, whined, and looked up in his mistress’s face. She stood watching him with a sort of grim pity, and, 323 strangely enough, bestowed upon him the caress she had not found for her grandson.
“Poor Rupert! You are getting too old, like your mistress! Your departure, like hers, will be a sorrow to no one!” Rupert seemed to wheeze an asthmatical consent, and presently he snuggled down in his basket and went to sleep.
XXV
THE BELLS OF STOKE REVEL
On Sunday morning Robinette and Lavendar were both ready for church, by some strange coincidence, half an hour too soon. He was standing at the door as she came down into the hall. Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon were nowhere to be seen; even Carnaby was invisible, but the shrill, infuriated yelping of the Prince Charles from the drawing room indicated his whereabouts only too plainly.
“We’re much too early,” said Robinette, glancing at the clock.