'No matter. I will get some at home. Good-night!'
When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterwards in the drawing-room, where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on the chair.
The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with God. It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known—greater even than that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.
CHAPTER XLIII
Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westwards by the recurrent memory of that miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying face.
In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small number of people assembled. M. de Quérouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of 'a beastly set of tenants'; Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private secretary with a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a general air of superlativeness which demanded and secured attention; a famous journalist, whose smiling self-repressive look assured you that he carried with him the secrets of several empires; and one Sir John Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man with a limp—an ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted in London as an amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of society as he was popular with the other.
'Purely for talk, you see, not for show!' said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood waiting for the commencement of dinner.
'I shall hardly do my part,' he said with a little sigh. 'I have just come from a very different scene.'
She looked at him with inquiring eyes.