Alice had come up to them in her easy grace of youth. She heard, if not the words, yet the tone in which they were said; and her father got up hastily and got behind the stranger to whom he was speaking so seriously, but who smiled upon the girl from her great chair.
“Come and talk to me, my pretty,” Mrs. Lenny said. “Your father and I have been reminding each other of things we had both forgotten, and they’re not such pleasant things as you. Come and cheer us up, my bonnie dear.”
Lady Markham was very well content to see the close conversation that was going on between her husband and this new guest. It took a great burden off her mind. This time she had made no mistake—the claim of the old friendship was real. No suspicion of any kind entered her thoughts. She leaned back in her chair with a grateful sense of relief, and felt glad that she had sent orders by Brown that Mrs. Lenny was to be put into one of the best rooms, thus promoting the colonel too. There remained only one little difficulty: Mrs. Lenny’s pink bonnet was a very fine article indeed, but she could not come to dinner in it. Where was she to find a toilette for the evening, since all her luggage, Lady Markham knew, consisted of a bag which she had left with the lodge-keeper? Lady Markham herself was somewhat particular about dress. She wondered privately what it would be best to do, as she leant back in her chair and listened to the colonel talking of Roland and Harry. She must put on, she concluded, the plainest article in her wardrobe, that Mrs. Lenny might not feel uncomfortable, and she must give Alice a hint to do the same. Thus the alarming sensations aroused by this meeting subsided, to all appearance.
“Yes, you did quite right; they are old friends, very old friends,” Sir William said from his dressing-room, in answer to his wife’s question. “Did I never tell you I spent two years in Barbadoes? Indeed I suppose I had almost forgotten myself. My uncle had left some property there, and not being of much consequence then I was sent out to look after it. It came to nothing, like most West Indian property. The Gavestons were a family of handsome girls. I—saw a good deal of them; most of the young Englishmen who were there frequented their house. Lenny among the rest. I scarcely recollected his name; but Katey Gaveston of course I was bound to know.”
“She implied, I think, that there once had been some—flirtation between you,” said Lady Markham, with a smile.
“Ah!” said Sir William—his voice sounded harsher than usual, though he was painfully civil and ready to explain—“perhaps there might have been—something. It is nearly forty years ago—it is not of much consequence to any one now.”
“No—you don’t think I mind,” she said, this time with a soft laugh. But he did not respond. He had not finished dressing, and he was very particular in his attire. His wife had taken a slight liberty, she felt, in disturbing him. Did she not know that he liked perfect tranquillity in that moment of preparation for dinner? It would not have occurred to him to put on a black neck-tie, or change the usual solemn dignity of his appearance on account of any visitor. Lady Markham was glad that her own very simple dress escaped notice, at least.
The other pair meanwhile were comparing notes in their rooms, where Mrs. Lenny’s preparations for dinner were by no means so simple as Lady Markham had supposed. The bag, on being opened, had proved to contain what she called “an evening body,” much trimmed with lace and ribbons. She regarded this article with great complacency as she pinned the ribbons across her bosom.
“I hope you don’t feel that you’ve any call to be ashamed of your wife, Lenny,” she said. “I hope I’m fit to sit down with my lady, or the Queen herself if she were to think of asking us. There’s the good of a real, excellent black silk, it does for anything; in the morning it’s one dress, in the evening it’s another. My Lady Markham will think I have trunks full when she sees me. She’s a sweet woman; I thought so before, but I think so more than ever now, to see the handsome room she’s put us in. That proves her sense. She can see I’m not one of the common sort. She doesn’t know anything about the connection, and she sha’n’t know it through me, to vex her, the pretty dear. She doesn’t even know he was ever in the island. After all, it’s a long time ago. She shall never hear a word of it through me.”