‘You mean the chickens: and I should not dream of putting the fifty thousand pounds in my own pocket. Why, man alive, it’s not for me! I shan’t get twenty thousand farthings of it, nor anything like that.’
‘Ah, then you are hopeless, for you will feel yourself disinterested,’ said Leo, so busy with the balls that once more he missed seeing Lord Will’s hand stretched out.
‘I say, Swinford, there’s no ill-feeling, I hope.’
‘Why should there be any ill-feeling?’ said Leo, raising his eyes for a moment with a benign but too radiant smile. He turned to the balls again the next moment as he said lightly with a wave of his cue, ‘Good night.’
It is confusing, it must be allowed, to a plain intelligence, to have one member of a family force information of the most serious kind upon you, while another avoids shaking hands with you because you believe it. Such things happen, no doubt, in the world, but they are rare, and Lord Will went upstairs to his room in a very uncomfortable state of mind, not knowing which he should depend on of those two conflicting powers. Leo remained for some time after, still knocking about the balls. Morris, with whom his master in the dearth of other companions had sometimes played an occasional game, hung about in prospect of a call. But Morris was disappointed, though it was perhaps an hour later before Mr. Swinford left that uninviting occupation. He went on with the gravest face in the world, but very devious strokes, evidently as indifferent to what he was doing as he was overwhelmingly serious in doing it. The click of the balls and of his steps round the table gave a curious sound in the midst of the silence of the great house. Such sounds say more of solitude than the most complete stillness, and Leo’s countenance was as grave as if he had been playing, like a man in an old legend, with some unseen being for his own soul.
XXX
It is not to be supposed that during this period the visits of Mrs. Brown, the schoolmistress, to her friend at the Hall, who was so like yet so unlike her—so unlike in personal importance—so superior in position, and yet so strangely resembling—should have ceased. There were no other two persons in all the precincts of Watcham so evidently belonging to the same world and species, and yet there were no two more separate in all those externals that distinguish life. Mrs. Brown’s visits were almost all paid in the evening, sometimes very late, sometimes at that hour before dinner when Mrs. Swinford was known to receive no one. But there was no bar at any time against the entrance of this privileged visitor. On the evening which Lord Will spent at the Hall Mrs. Brown came late, while dinner was going on. She had an entrance of her own by which she preferred to come in, a door which gave admittance to the servants’ quarters, but which was always open, and spared the schoolmistress the intervention of Morris, whom she did not dislike to see now and then, and metaphorically put her foot upon with the pride of a superior knowledge which he could not understand. But this malicious gratification, though she enjoyed it occasionally, was not enough to make up for the disadvantage of having her movements known and chronicled, and it suited her character and habits better to have a mode of access absolutely free and beyond control. She was so swift and subtle in her movements, and so fortunate, as the clandestine often are, in finding her passage free, that on many occasions she had glided through the great house, mounted the great stairs, and appeared noiseless in the ante-room occupied by Julie, the maid, without an individual in the house being aware that she was there. It had so happened on this particular night when even Julie was out of the way. Mrs. Brown came in noiseless, slightly breathless, having hurried upstairs, and just escaped meeting a strange young man, whose wide shirt-front indicated him in the partial darkness of the corridor as if he had carried a light, but whom to her surprise she did not know. A woman with her wits so much about her, knew by sight by this time everybody in the neighbourhood who was likely to dine with Leo. She avoided him by a rapid step aside, and consequently she was a little out of breath when she arrived in Julie’s room, where there was no one, a dereliction of duty that might have cost Julie her place had it been known. Mrs. Brown looked round her with a nod of satisfaction as she put off the heavy veil in which she was accustomed to wrap herself on these visits. She went into the inner room, and looked round with an even more vivid look of satisfaction. Mrs. Swinford’s luxurious room was as she had left it in the perfection of silent repose and comfort—soft light, soft warmth, everything that the most refined suggestion of luxury and ease could command. Mrs. Brown gave a sigh, and then a laugh. She said to herself, ‘How little a difference would have made me like this!’ and then she said, ‘What a bore it would have been!’ The laugh suited her better than the sigh. It called forth a twinkle of mischief and lurking vagabondism in her eyes. She then lay down on Mrs. Swinford’s sofa, put back her head upon the cushions, took up first one book, then another, and read a page or two. Then she threw them down one after another, and looked round the room again. How pretty it was! Her eyes lingered for a moment here and there on the pictures, the little graceful bronzes, the prevailing ornament, the lights, carefully planned to the advantage of the decorations. And then a strange shadow came over her face. Good heavens, to lie here, and remember! she said. Perhaps in her energy of feeling, these words were said aloud. At least, they brought in Julie, who had in the meantime returned to her room, not suspecting the presence of this visitor, and who peeped in suspicious, half-terrified, with her hand on her breast. ‘C’est vous, Madame?’ she said, with a look of mingled terror and relief.
‘Who else should it be, unless a thief?’ said Mrs Brown. ‘But as it might have been a thief and not me, you know, you ought not to be absent, ma chère.’
Julie clasped her hands and entreated that Madame would not say anything. ‘This is not the house for thiefs,’ she said.
‘On the contrary, it is just the house. Don’t you know all the robberies of jewels are done when the family are at dinner?’ Mrs. Brown rose from the sofa and took a low chair beside the fire, where she continued to sit when she had dismissed Julie much alarmed by the admonition. Many thoughts went through her mind while she waited, and she had a long time to wait. She compared her own vagabond lot, now up, now down, which she had led after her own wild fancy—the life rather of a man than of a woman—with this beauty and luxury, with a shudder of pity going over her. The pity was not for herself, but for the other woman shut in, in this gilded cage to—— remember! The pictures on the walls, the carefully arranged lights, the unchangeable surroundings, all luxury and brightness, affected her like a spell. Good heavens! to sit there day after day, evening after evening, and remember! Mrs. Brown thought of her own little rooms which it had given her pleasure to arrange and decorate in a manner which she felt to be fictitious and out of character, but which amused her all the same, and which she laughed at, having done it, with a full consciousness that it was trumpery, and that the trumpery was out of place, as a woman who knew better could not fail to see. ‘Ah, well!’ she said to herself, ‘I’d rather have my trumpery that I can throw away any day, and probably shall some day, and that I can run away from when I like, when it gets too absurd.’ And then there were the books: French novels, going over and over with fantastic variations the one story—the story of (so-called) love—that is, the complicated ways by which two people, generally old enough to know better, are brought into the relations of intrigue or passion with each other—which ends badly, either in the death of one or the disgust of both: and so da capo, always beginning over again. ‘Good heavens!’ said Mrs. Brown to herself again, ‘how can she go on day after day, day after day, reading that—and remembering!’ The schoolmistress had no objection to a French novel of this class herself now and then; and reading only now and then—being within reach of such indulgences only now and then—naturally she got only the best, the ones that had wit and genius in them. But the unhappy woman who lived upon that food for ever! What garbage, what insipidity of nastiness must go through her hands! The poor Bohemian whose life was a continual scuffle (chiefly of her own choosing) looked upon this unvarying luxury, ease, and wealth, with a horror and wonder which it would be difficult to describe. ‘Good heavens!’ she repeated to herself; ‘why doesn’t she take a little chloral and be done?’