“Do you think I am going to fly from my wife?” Waring said. He rose up very tremulous, yet with a certain dignity. “In that case, I should not have come here.”
“But, Edward, you are not prepared. O Edward, be guided by me. If you once get into that woman’s hands——”
“Hush!” he said; “her daughter is here.” Then, with a smile: “When a lady comes to see me, I hope I can receive her still as a gentleman should, whoever she may be.”
The door opened, and Lady Markham came in. She was very pale, yet flushed from moment to moment. She, who had usually such perfect self-command, betrayed her agitation by little movements, by the clasping and unclasping of her hands, by a hurried, slightly audible breathing. She stood for a moment without advancing, the door closing behind her, facing the agitated group. Frances, following an instinctive impulse, went hastily towards her mother as a maid of honour in an emergency might hurry to take her place behind the Queen. Mrs Clarendon on her side, with a similar impulse, drew nearer to her brother—the way was cleared between the two, once lovers, now antagonists. The pause was but for a moment. Lady Markham, after that hesitation, came forward. She said: “Edward, I should be wanting in my duty if I did not come to welcome you home.”
“Home!” he said, with a curious smile. Then he, too, came forward a little. “I accept your advances in the same spirit, Frances.” She was holding out her hands to him with a little appeal, looking at him with eyes that sank and rose again—an emotion that was restrained by her age, by her matronly person, by the dignity of the woman, which could not be quenched by any flood of feeling. He took her hands in his with a strange timidity, hesitating, as if there might be something more, then let them drop, and they stood once again apart.
“I have to thank you, too,” she said, “for bringing Constance back to me safe and well; and what is more, Edward, for this child.” She put out her hand to Frances, and drew her close, so that the girl could feel the agitation in her mother’s whole person, and knew that, weak as she was, she was a support to the other, who was so much stronger. “I owe you more thanks still for her—that she never had been taught to think any harm of her mother, that she came back to me as innocent and true as she went away.”
“If you found her so, Frances, it was to her own praise, rather than mine.”
“Nay,” she said with a tremulous smile, “I have not to learn now that the father of my children was fit to be trusted with a girl’s mind—more, perhaps, than their mother—and the world together.” She shook off this subject, which was too germane to the whole matter, with a little tremulous movement of her head and hands. “We must not enter on that,” she said. “Though I am only a woman of the world, it might be too much for me. Discussion must be for another time. But we may be friends.”
“So far as I am concerned.”
“And I too, Edward. There are things even we might consult about—without prejudice, as the lawyers say—for the children’s good.”