‘I want to keep nothing that is theirs from any one,’ said the young man, with an angry flush.
‘And yet it appears this is what you came here for. But forewarned is forearmed. Yes, you shall hear it all now; I will not interfere.’
‘Is he gone?’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘really gone? Leo is the most scrupulous and delicate of men. He hates your talk of the clubs, gossip and scandal, as he calls it. If I had brought him up in England would it have been so? Shut the door, and draw the curtain, Lord Will. I have the temperature kept up as well as I can, but there are always cold winds about.’ She shivered a little and drew round her a film of a white shawl that had been hanging over her chair. ‘Now come back and put yourself there. Now I may speak my mind.’
‘You must know,’ she went on after all had been done as she ordered, ‘that your uncle William was a great deal here in this house—a very great deal—it was a kind of home to him. I cannot say that I myself remarked that he had been attracted by Emily Plowden, but I have told you that she had a certain bread-and-butter-prettiness. I do not say beauté de diable, for it was neither beauté, nor had she enough in her for the devil to have anything to do with it. Youth alone sometimes attracts a man. Enfin, I never saw anything of it: but one evening, nay, it was pretty late—he came to me’—she paused a little and drew a long breath—‘to tell me—it was a confused story—something about having committed himself. Mr. Swinford, Leo’s father, was a little like Leo, but more English, more rigid. He burst in while this was being explained to me, took up a false idea, got what you call the wrong end of the stick——’ She spoke not with her usual ease, but with strange breaks of breathlessness. ‘Enough, he got it all wrong, completely wrong from beginning to end, and stormed and made a scene. And when he understood that it was Emily who was concerned—Emily had always been a great favourite,’ with the electrical tinkle running through her words, ‘he insisted that a marriage should take place at once. She left our house late that night, escorted by your uncle: and what happened I cannot tell. I never met her again except in Paris, where she was called Lady William, but saw no society, except the sort of men among whom your poor uncle, by that time heartbroken and misunderstood——’
‘But why heartbroken—if he had been in love with her?’
‘You are an innocent young man,’ said Mrs. Swinford, tapping him on the shoulder with her fan. ‘Oh, a very innocent dear boy! You don’t think what a man like that would feel with a creature like her—a country girl tied to him, and no doubt leading him a life! She kept him—from saying a word to me, watching over him like a cat over a mouse. He was burning to tell me—something; I know not what. My husband also was much prejudiced, and would not let us meet. So that I never heard his secret, if there was a secret, as I suppose there must have been. I have never seen her again till I saw her last month, shining as Lady William, and believed in by all the country folk—taking precedence,’ Mrs. Swinford cried with her little laugh, throwing up her fine hands, with all her rings flashing, ‘upon next to nothing a year.’
‘But she was acknowledged by my uncle as his wife.’
‘She was called Lady William among the sort of demi-monde they lived in. But what happened between the time she left my house and the time I saw her there——’
‘Do you mean to say that my uncle eloped with this young lady, Mrs. Swinford?’
My dear Lord Will, you are young, but you know the world. They left the house together, late at night. I tell you, quite late, after midnight. He, a man who was known to be—well, not the safest for women: and she a country girl of nineteen—oh, very well able to take care of herself, but as silly and ignorant as they usually are: and—I know no more.’