Lady William looked up quickly with a half-defiant glance.
‘Above all’ said the Rector impressively, ‘while there is any sort of doubt, any sort of cloud, and when every step you take will be remarked—— Don’t make me enter into explanations, but, for all our sakes, don’t have Mr. Swinford always here.’
XXXVIII
It is almost needless to say that the Rector left his sister in a state of mind in which exasperation healthily and beneficially contended with despair. She might have been crushed altogether by his discovery; but he had managed to mingle with that so many other sentiments that Lady William felt herself no broken-down and miserable woman, but a creature all full of fight and resistance—tingling, indeed, with pain, and scorched with a fire of injury, feeling insulted and outraged to the depths of her being, but all the same full of angry strength and force, determined that nothing as yet was lost, and that sooner than yield herself to the tolerance of her sister-in-law and indulgent interpretations of her friends, who would pity and assure each other that whatever dreadful thing had really happened, poor Emily, a mere child at the time, was innocent—there was nothing she was not capable of doing. To change from Lady William—in a sort, the head of the little community—to poor Emily, was a thought which fired her blood. For that, as well as for her child, the small motive thrusting in in the immediate present into the foreground—there was nothing she would not do. To find Artémise was a trifle to her roused and indignant soul. If she went out herself on foot with a lanthorn, she said to herself with a vehemence which soon turned into an angry laugh, she would find her. The lanthorn and the search on foot turned it all into stormy ridicule, as the Rector’s suggestion that the little, dingy, dark private chapel had been burned and the books destroyed as a natural consequence of her folly in being married there, had done. Lady William felt the laughter burst out in the middle of the bitter pain. For the pain was bitter enough down in the breast from which that stormy humour burst, so sharp that she could not sit still, but went raging about like—as she said to herself—a wild beast, pushing the crowded furniture aside, holding her hands together as if to keep down the anguish by physical torture. A thumbscrew or a deadly boot to crush her flesh would have been something of a relief to her in the active anguish of her soul. Mab to hear that her mother was—— Oh no; never that her mother was—— but only that there was a doubt, a horrible peradventure, a failure of proof.
Lady William paused in her movement to and fro and tried to look at it for a moment through Mab’s eyes. That is often a very good thing to do, but a difficult. We forget nature when the question is one so all-important as this, what a child will think of its mother. Often we believe in an opinion too favourable, without inquiry, forgetting what a formidable criticism is that which our children make of us from their cradles, learning our habitual ways so much better than we know them ourselves. But there are some ways in which the natural judgment of candid and clear-sighted youth may give any who is unjustly accused comfort. In the light of Mab’s eyes (though they were neither bright nor beautiful) Lady William felt for a moment that her trouble melted away. Mab might not see the fun—that she should see fun at such a crisis of her life!—of James’s suggestion of the connection between the burning of the church and the folly of the marriage: but she would be utterly stolid like a block of stone to any idea of shame. No one could cast suspicion upon her mother’s honour to Mab. Lady William thought she could see the girl’s look of utter disdain on any one who could suggest such a suspicion even by a glance. There was once a lady known to fame who, moved by a hot fit of jealous pain and misery, left the house in which she was being entertained, and walked home alone at night up the long length of Piccadilly. A man who met her, moved, I suppose, by her solitude and the unusual sight, followed, and at last addressed her. When her attention was attracted she turned round upon him, looked at him, and uttering the one word ‘Idiot!’ walked on, as secure as if she had been surrounded by a bodyguard of chivalry. Somehow that incident floated into Lady William’s memory. That was what Mab would do. She would think, if she did not say ‘Idiot!’ and pass by, too contemptuous almost to be angry, feeling it unnecessary to answer a word to the depth of imbecility which was capable of such a thought.
Yes; it made her quieter, it calmed her down, it delivered her from that worst and deepest horror, to look at it through Mab’s sensible, quiet eyes. But when Lady William remembered that James would tolerate her, and be kind, and that everybody else would say, ‘Poor Emily!’ the intolerableness of the catastrophe caught her once more—and the advantage which even her brother even James, who loved her in his way, who would spare no trouble for her, had taken of it already. While there was a shade, while there was a shadow of a doubt upon her, she must not admit Leo Swinford ‘for all our sakes.’ Women do not habitually swear, or I think Lady William would have used bad words, had she known any, when this intolerable recollection came into her mind, just as, if she had not been bound by the inevitable bonds of education and natural self-control, she might have broken the china or the furniture to relieve herself. A gentlewoman cannot do either of these things, fortunately, or unfortunately, for her, and they are outlets which must sometimes be of use. But the quick movement with which she dashed her hands together when that last thought came into her mind, upset a little table upon which was a plant, one of Mab’s especial nurslings just shaping for flower, as well as various other nicknacks of less importance. The sense of guilt and shame with which she saw what she had done, the compunction with which she stooped over the broken flower-pot, and gathered up the fortunately uninjured plant, and the specially prepared soil in which it had been placed, and which was but dirt to Patty, who came dashing in at the sound of the crash to set matters right—did Lady William as much good as smashing a window or two might have done to a poor woman out of Society. She was very penitent and much ashamed of herself, and horribly amused all the same. To express her rage, her injured feelings, her pride and desperation, by breaking a flower-pot, was again where bathos and ridicule came in.
‘I’ll sweep it all up, my lady,’ cried Patty, ‘and there won’t be no harm.’
‘Miss Mab’s leaf-mould? No, you shan’t do anything of the kind. Find me another flower-pot, and let us gather it all up carefully, and put it back.’
‘Miss Mab’s full of fads,’ said Patty, under her breath.
But Lady William did not allow herself such freedom of criticism, and she had scarcely gathered up the mould and built it securely round the plant in the new pot before Mab came in. ‘Oh, are you filling it up with fresh mould, mother?. My poor auricula! It will never produce a prize bloom now, and I had such hopes.’