Doris shrank a little from these indiscretions. But she could not keep her curiosity out of her eyes, and Miss Field smilingly answered it.
"She's absorbed him so! You see he watches her all the time. She's like an endless play to him. He really doesn't care for anything else—he doesn't want anything else. Of course they're very rich. But he might have done something in politics, if she hadn't been so much more important than he. And then, naturally, she's made enemies—powerful enemies. Her friends come here of course—her old cronies—the people who can put up with her. They're devoted to her. And the young people—the very modern ones—who think nice manners 'early Victorian,' and like her rudeness for the sake of her cleverness. But the rest!—What do you think she did at one of these parties last year?"
Doris could not help wishing to know.
"She took a fancy to ask a girl near here—the daughter of a clergyman, a great friend of Lord Dunstable's, to come over for the Sunday. Lord Dunstable had talked of the girl, and Rachel's always on the look-out for cleverness; she hunts it like a hound! She met the young woman too somewhere, and got the impression—I can't say how—that she would 'go.' So on the Saturday morning she went over in her pony-carriage—broke in on the little Rectory like a hurricane—of course you know the people about here regard her as something semi-divine!—and told the girl she had come to take her back to Crosby Ledgers for the Sunday. So the poor child packed up, all in a flutter, and they set off together in the pony-carriage—six miles. And by the time they had gone four Rachel had discovered she had made a mistake—that the girl wasn't clever, and would add nothing to the party. So she quietly told her that she was afraid, after all, the party wouldn't suit her. And then she turned the pony's head, and drove her straight home again!"
"Oh!" cried Doris, her cheeks red, her eyes aflame.
"Brutal, wasn't it?" said the other. "All the same, there are fine things in Rachel. And in one point she's the most vulnerable of women!"
"Her son?" Doris ventured.
Miss Field shrugged her shoulders.
"He doesn't drink—he doesn't gamble—he doesn't spend money—he doesn't run away with other people's wives. He's just nothing!—just incurably empty and idle. He comes here very little. His mother terrifies him. And since he was twenty-one he has a little money of his own. He hangs about in studios and theatres. His mother doesn't know any of his friends. What she suffers—poor Rachel! She'd have given everything in the world for a brilliant son. But you can't wonder. She's like some strong plant that takes all the nourishment out of the ground, so that the plants near it starve. She can't help it. She doesn't mean to be a vampire!"
Doris hardly knew what to say. Somehow she wished the vampire were not walking with Arthur! That, however, was not a sentiment easily communicable; and she was just turning it into something else when Miss Field said—abruptly, like someone coming to the real point—