To this Leo made no reply. He thought he knew a great deal better. He thought it was because of a cruel plot with his mother that Artémise had disappeared. But he would not destroy Lady William’s confidence, nor did he dare betray how much more he knew about the matter, and the cause of her anxiety to see Artémise than had ever been confided to him. But he walked on by her side repeating what he would do. He would go to London and take the boxes with him. He would wait at the station she had indicated till she came. But she might not come. She might send a stranger.
‘Bien!’ said Leo. ‘I will be there. I will follow, whoever it may be. I will not lose sight of her property, her boxes, till I have found her or some clue to her. Dear lady, the boxes—that is the best of guides: for what is a woman without her “things”? Is it not so?’
‘You are always safe to have a theory about women to fall back upon,’ said Lady William, beguiled into a laugh; and then they reached the door of the cottage, and Leo, who was not invited to cross the threshold, had nothing for it but to go away.
The ladies, however, had another attendant, who was more pertinacious, who waited for no invitation, but stalked in after them as he had stalked along by Mab’s side, with a much-troubled countenance but few words, all the way. Jim found himself in the midst of this imbroglio, which he did not in the least understand, not as a spectator only, but as a potential agent with something to say if he could but secure the means of saying it. What the message with which he was charged meant he knew as little as he could comprehend what possible or impossible link there could be between Mrs. Brown and Lady William, the one the symbol of dignity and modest greatness to Jim, the other—— He thought no evil of Mrs. Brown: he thought she was ‘queer’ though kind: that a woman so old and so clever should be on the terms of a bon camarade with himself was astounding to him, but agreeable. There was no harm in anything she had either said or done in his knowledge. But he had known that the ladies of the parish, at whom she laughed so much, would have very little approval of Mrs. Brown had they known more of her—and Lady William was ‘a cut above’ the ladies of the parish: that she should be so much distressed by Mrs. Brown’s sudden departure as to faint, or almost faint, when she discovered it, was incredible to him. But things being so, Mrs. Brown’s message, which he had thought at the time to be a kind of insanity, began to have meaning in it—meaning still dark to him, but which, perhaps, Lady William would understand. He went into the cottage after them, accordingly, indifferent to Mab’s looks, who frowned him back: but Jim was not to be kept back by Mab. When he appeared in the drawing-room, Lady William had thrown herself into a chair, and was leaning back with an air of anxiety and trouble, yet relief to be at rest and unobserved for the moment. Jim’s entrance made her start, with a little exclamation of annoyance.
‘Jim,’ said Mab, ‘oh, do go away, there’s a good fellow; don’t you see that mother’s overdone?’
‘Yes, I see,’ said Jim, ‘but I’ve got something to say to Aunt Emily.’
‘Oh, what can you have to say? Something about going up to town. There’s a hundred people ready to go up to town—if that would do any good. Please, Jim, please, go away!’
‘I have something to say to Aunt Emily,’ said Jim, standing first on one foot and then on the other in his embarrassment, but with a dogged look of determination that had never been seen upon his face before.
‘Get me a glass of water, Mab,’ said Lady William, ‘and let Jim alone. It is very kind of him to be so ready to help.’
It did not occur to her, indeed, that Jim could have very much real help to give; but she saw the anxiety in the young man’s face, and even (as she was always a person who could be amused at the most unlikely moments) the attitude of her little Mab, determined to sweep this big and obstinate encumbrance out of the way, stirred her with that sense of the humorous which gives so much solace to life. When Mab had most unwillingly gone out of the room, Jim came up, red and eager, and much flustered, to Lady William’s chair.