The afternoon droppers-in had long become a weariness to Madame Provana, yet as her fashion had depended much upon her accessibility, she could not shut her door upon people who considered themselves obliging when they used her drawing-room as a rather superior club.
Claude Rutherford slipped out of the room imperceptibly, eluding the people who wanted to talk to him with the agility of a vanishing harlequin. He had another visit to pay before his evening engagements, an almost daily visit.
There was just one person in the world for whom he, who had left off caring for people or things, was known to care very much. In expatiating upon the blemishes in an agreeable young man's character, people often concluded with:
"But he is a model son. He adores that old woman in Palace Place."
It was to the old woman in Palace Place that Claude was going this November afternoon, and walking briskly through the clear, cold grey, he knew as well what the old woman was doing as if he had been gifted with second sight.
She was sitting in her large, low chair, with her table and exquisite little tea-service—his gift—at her elbow, and with her eyes fixed on the dial of the Sèvres clock on the mantelpiece, while her heart beat in time to the ticking of the seconds, and he knew that if he were but ten minutes later than usual those minutes were long enough for the maternal mind to visualise every form of accident that can happen to a young man about town.
Nobody talked of "poor Mrs. Rutherford," or pitied her widowed solitude, as they had pitied Lady Felicia. The fact that she had her own house in a fashionable quarter, and a handsome income, made all the difference.
The house was not spacious, but it was old—an Adams house—and one of the prettiest in London, for whatever had been done to it, after Adams, had been done with taste and discretion. Much of the furniture was of the same date as the house, and all that was more recent was precious after its kind, and had been bought when precious things were easier to buy than they are now. And Mrs. Rutherford was as perfect as her surroundings—a slim, pale woman, dressed in black, and wearing the same widow's cap which she had put on in sorrow and anguish fifteen years before—and which harmonised well with the long oval face and banded brown hair, lightly streaked with grey. She was a quiet person, and entertained few visitors except those of her own blood, or connections by marriage; but the name of those being legion, nobody called her inhospitable. Altogether she was a mother whom no well-bred son need be ashamed of loving.
Once, upon his friend saying something to this effect, Claude had turned upon the man fiercely: