“Yes, yes, I know,” Mildred answered, almost impatiently. “I know that you will be sorry for me, but you may not be able to do anything. It is a forlorn hope. In such a strait as mine one catches at any hope.”
Her aunt’s measured accents jarred upon her overstrung nerves. Her grief raged within her like a fever, and the grave placidity of the elder woman tortured her. There seemed no capacity for sympathy in this stately spinster who stood and scanned her with coldly inquisitive eyes.
“Can we be quite alone for a little while, aunt? Are you sure of no one interrupting us while I am telling you my troubles?”
“I will give an order. It is only half-past six, and we do not dine till eight. There is no reason we should be disturbed. Come and sit over here, Mildred, on this sofa. Your maid can take your hat and jacket to your room.”
Stray garments lying about in those orderly drawing-rooms would have been agony to Miss Fausset. She rang the bell, and told the servant to send Mrs. Greswold’s maid, and to take particular care that no visitor was admitted.
“I can see nobody this evening,” she said. “If any one calls you will say I have my niece with me, and cannot be disturbed.”
Franz, the Swiss butler, bowed with an air of understanding the finest shades of feeling in that honoured mistress. He brought out a tea-table, and placed it conveniently near the sofa on which Mildred was sitting, and he placed upon it the neatest of salvers, with tiny silver teapot and Worcester cup and saucer, and bread and butter such as Titania herself might have eaten with an “apricock” or a bunch of dewberries. Then he discreetly retired, and sent Louisa, who smelt of tea and toast already, though she could not have been more than ten minutes in the great stony basement, which would have accommodated a company of infantry just as easily as the spinster’s small establishment.
Louisa took the jacket and hat and her mistress’s keys, and withdrew to finish her tea and to discuss the motive and meaning of this extraordinary journey from Enderby to Brighton. The gossips over the housekeeper’s tea-table inclined to the idea that Mrs. Greswold had found a letter—a compromising letter—addressed to her husband by some lady with whom he had been carrying on an intrigue, in all probability Mrs. Hillersdon of Riverdale.
“We all know who she was before Mr. Hillersdon married her,” said Louisa; “and don’t tell me that a woman who has behaved liked that while she was young would ever be really prudent. Mrs. Hillersdon must be fifty if she’s a day; but she is a handsome woman still, and who knows?—she may have been an old flame of my master’s.”
“That’s it,” sighed Franz assentingly. “It’s generally an old flame that does the mischief. Wir sind armer Thieren.”