An hour later there was a knock at Rosamond’s door in the stillness of the early withdrawal which last night’s dissipation had made general throughout the house. Rosamond was sitting in her dressing-gown before her fire—thinking of many things, and particularly of her father’s last letter, which lay open upon the little table beside her.
“Stay as long as you can,” Mr. Saumarez said. “It’s the best chance you can have at present to see a little society, and keep Eddy on the straight.”
Rosamond was not happy, she could not have told why. It was not that Archie was of any importance to her, but there is something in the atmosphere of a disturbed and unhappy house, which reflects itself in the consciousness of the most indifferent guest. She could not think what he could have done. The offence of which his father had convicted him the other day in the hall, of having refused money to a friend, was of all reproaches in the world the most extraordinary to Rosamond. She thought with a laugh that was irrestrainable, of what her own father’s remark would have been, and the high tone of indignation he would have assumed at the folly, nay the criminality, of throwing money away. “Where do you expect to get more?” he would have asked with righteous wrath, had his son been suspected of such a miserable weakness. But, to do him justice, Eddy had no guilty inclinations that way. Curiously enough, while Rosamond laughed with the surprised contempt, yet respect, of the poor for Rowland’s liberality, which had, in spite of herself, the aspect of “swagger” in the girl’s eyes—she felt, at the same time, something of the same astonishment, mingled with disappointment, that Archie should have laid himself open to such a reproach. “I should have thought he would have given away—everything he had,” Rosamond said to herself—not as praise, but as a characteristic feature of Archie’s nature, as she conceived it—and she was disappointed that he had not carried out her idea of him, notwithstanding that she believed such a procedure to be folly of the deepest dye.
She was considerably startled by the knock at the door, and still more by seeing Eddy in the silk smoking-suit, which was too thin for this locality. It was perhaps that flimsy dress which made him look so pinched and cold, and he came in with eager demonstration of his delight at the sight of her fire.
“Mine’s gone out an hour ago,” he said, “let’s get a good warm before we go to bed.”
“You have come from the smoking-room,” she said; “you will fill my room with the smell of your cigarettes. I hate the smell of the paper worse than the tobacco.”
“Oh, you’re always hating something,” said Eddy vaguely. And then he added, standing with his back to the fire, looking down upon her in her low chair—“It won’t matter how it smells, for to-morrow we ought to go.”
“To go!” she cried in astonishment. “What new light have you got on the subject? for I have heard nothing of this before.”
“Never mind what you’ve heard,” said Eddy. “Circumstances have arisen—altogether beyond my control,” he added with a laugh at the familiar words. “In short, if you must know it, Rose, I can’t stay here any longer, and that is all there is about it,” he said.
“Do you mean now that Archie has got into disgrace? How has he got into disgrace? I can’t think what he can have done.”