Chapter Twelve.
Two golden days! Summer sunshine, roses, lounging chairs set behind sheltering trees, grey eyes eloquent with unspoken vows; on every side beauty, and luxury, and sweet fostering care. Elma felt as if she had fallen asleep, and awakened in a fairyland more wonderful than her wildest dreams!
On the morning after the accident, Mrs Ramsden had duly chartered a fly, and driven to the Manor with intent to bring her daughter home without delay. During the night watches old dreads had revived; she shuddered at the thought of Elma left alone—poor, innocent darling!—with that terrible young man; pursed her lips at the recollection of Madame’s frivolities, and decided that nothing but grimmest necessity should induce her to prolong the danger. She entered the Manor, a Spartan matron prepared to fight to the death for the rescue of her child, but behold, instead of a battlefield, there stretched before her eye a scene of pastoral simplicity, in which the most Puritan of critics could not have discovered an objectionable detail.
A wide, velvet lawn, shaded by a belt of grand old beeches; a deck chair placed in the most sheltered nook, on which Elma reclined against a bank of cushions, while beside her—marvellous and confounding sight!—sat Madame herself, turning the heel of a common domestic stocking, a mushroom hat hiding the objectionable pompadour. So far as the eye could reach there was not a man in sight, not so much as a whiff of tobacco smoke in the air! As the round black figure waddled across the lawn, Madame rose in gracious welcome, while Elma—Elma’s heart began to beat with sickening rapidity, a mist swam before her eyes, and a lump swelled in her throat. She could not speak; her cheeks turned first red, and then white. She shook her head in response to her mother’s greeting, and gasped as for breath.
The good lady was distracted at beholding such symptoms of collapse in her quiet, well-disciplined daughter, and Madame reproached herself in the conviction that the child was really much worse than she had imagined. As a matter of fact, the disease from which Elma was suffering was nothing more nor less than pure, unadulterated fright! Fright lest her mother should insist upon taking her home; lest she should be compelled to leave the Manor before Geoffrey returned from an excursion carefully timed to end just as his mother drove out to keep an appointment in the town! She was literally paralysed with fear. It seemed as if life itself hung on the issue of the next few moments. She shut her eyes and listened, with palpitating breath, to the conversation between the two ladies.
“Don’t be alarmed! It is just seeing you that has upset her. A few minutes ago she was quite gay. Weren’t you gay, dear? We have had such a happy little morning together. So long as she is absolutely quiet she seems quite well. But as you see, any excitement—” Madame gesticulated eloquently behind Elma’s back. “Excitement prostrates you, doesn’t it, dear? We must keep you quite a prisoner for the next few days!”
Mrs Ramsden sat down heavily on a wicker chair, folded her hands on her sloping lap, and sighed resignedly. Hardly a moment had elapsed since her arrival, but already her cause was lost. To subject Elma to the fatigue of returning home would be madness, when even an ordinary meeting had so disastrous effect; to refuse hospitality so charmingly offered would be ungracious in the extreme. There was nothing for it but to submit with a good grace, and submit she did, arranging to send up a box of clothing later in the afternoon, and promising to drive up again in a few days’ time. “A few days!” She wanted to come every single morning, but Madame sweetly ignored her hints, and Elma, brightening into something wonderfully like her old self, declared that there was not the slightest cause for anxiety.
“I shall be quite well, mother dear!” she murmured affectionately as the poor lady stooped to kiss her before hurrying away, carefully mindful of the fare of the waiting fly. “Quite well, and—happy!” The pink flamed again at that last word, and Madame stroked the soft cheek caressingly.
“That child is a picture! I love to look at her,” she said gushingly, as the two ladies recrossed the lawn. “How cruel of you to have kept her to yourself all this time. Really, do you know, I hardly realised that you had a daughter. But we are going to alter all that, aren’t we? So sweet of you to trust her to me!”