“They are mine,” she said, “you have given them to me. Now look, here is my private picture-gallery, Mrs. Arthur; my son, whom you thought you had met, do you remember? You will be able to make sure by looking at his portrait; and Lucy—you know Lucy? I have been very extravagant about my children, here they are at all ages. Here is the first of my boy—and there is the last,” said Lady Curtis, pointing to a framed photograph on the table. She wondered that the visitor did not move to look at it. Nancy was holding the child’s miniature in her trembling hands. She could not have spoken or risen up to save her life. Look at him—she who belonged to him, to whom he belonged more than to his mother—she could not do it! There was something almost more than she could bear even in the child’s face.
“The connoisseurs of the present day will have nothing to say to my pretty room,” said Lady Curtis; “but perhaps you are of that way of thinking, and like darkness and neutral tints. No? I am glad of that. This is where I have spent almost all my life,” she said, dropping into that tempting strain of gentle reminiscence which seems to come natural to us all, when we grow old among the young, as just the other day we were young among the old, and liked to draw that soft babble of memory from elder lips. Nancy felt the charm of it, which soothed her even in her excitement, and looked up listening with eyes that grew bigger and bigger, like the listening eyes of a child.
“I furnished it at my own pleasure, after I was married, when I came first to Oakley;” she said. “Sir John does not care for these sort of things, he was always pleased when I was always pleased; and all our little talks we did here; and then the children—all that they had to say to mamma, this was the place. When Arthur was a boy at school, he always came rushing in here the moment he arrived; and here they made all their plans, he and his school friend, Lewis, who is a very dear friend still. I think I can see their little faces with the firelight upon them,” said Lady Curtis. “My Arthur! Ah, if he had always been as open with me as he was then!”
Nancy was choking with her tears. It was all that she could do not to cry out—it was my fault, it was my fault! all she could to keep herself from creeping to Lady Curtis’s feet, and kissing them, and crying her heart out. She sat still and kept silent, she could not tell how.
“But I must not talk of that, and make myself cry,” said my lady, “that would be poor entertainment for you. All these things are presents, they have been brought me one time or another. Sir John gave me my clock; it is a genuine seventeenth century one, and we picked it up by the merest chance. Arthur brought me that Sèvres the first time he went abroad. Come, I have upset you with my absurd talk. I can see you know what it is to be in trouble about those you love.”
My lady was behind Nancy at the moment, and suddenly put her arms round her, and gave her a little half-embrace. It was gratitude for her supposed feeling. Nancy stumbled up to her feet with a great cry, “Oh, my lady—my lady! if you knew! if you only knew!”
Lady Curtis looked at her fixedly, her cheek flushed a little. After all she knew nothing of this strange young woman whom she had received so rashly. What if she should turn out to be—something not fit for the company of good women? She looked at her with a momentary suspicion.
“If there was any serious reason why you should not come into my house, I think you would not have come,” she said, with meaning. Nancy did not reply—her thoughts were occupied by a wholly different preventing cause from that which was in Lady Curtis’s thoughts; but neither did she quail from the look, which she did not understand. The impulse was strong upon her to tell everything, to go no further, to disclose the whole story now.
“After to-day,” she said, with her lips quivering, “I meant, if you would listen, to tell you everything about me. But perhaps, I thought to myself, you would not like me then—perhaps you would be angry; and I thought I might give myself first this one day.”
“Poor child!” said Lady Curtis, half smiling. “It cannot be very great wickedness, at which you think I would be angry, which you tell with such an innocent face. Hush, hush!” she added, “no more of this, here is Lucy. You shall have your day, and tell me after. Before her not a word.”