“Mr. Saumarez bade me say, ma’am, that as you knew he was unable to come to you, he hoped as you would overlook the liberty and come to him.” Rogers stood respectfully but firmly between Evelyn and the door. Not, of course, to prevent her going, which was an impossibility, but with a moral impulse that she felt incapable of resisting. “He has been in a deal of suffering, and it will cheer him up, ma’am,” the man said.
With a pang of disappointment she yielded to the delay. It could only be for a few minutes, after all. She was exceedingly unwilling not only to be delayed, but to encounter Eddy’s father under any circumstances, and above all in his own house. She followed the attendant with great suppressed impatience and reluctance. The sitting-room occupied by Saumarez was close to the door, with a window upon the street. It was the dining-room of the little London house, the back part, which was separated from the front by folding-doors, half-covered with curtains, being Saumarez’s bedroom. He was seated in his invalid chair between the fire and the window, and though the foggy morning had very little light in it, a blind of much the same colour as the fog, yellowish and grimy, was drawn down half over the window. Out of this obscurity, upon which the red light of the fire shed at one side an illumination which looked smoky in the atmosphere of the fog, the long thin countenance, peaked beard, and gleaming eyes of the invalid were visible with the most striking Rembrandt effect. He held out to Evelyn a very thin, very white hand.
“Thanks, dear lady,” he said, “for this gracious visit. I scarcely hoped for anything so good. In London, at this time of the year, a fair visitor of any kind is a rarity; but you!—I believed you to be dispensing hospitality in marble halls,” he added, with a little laugh of the veiled satire which implied to Evelyn all that scorn of her late marriage, and parvenu husband, and vulgar wealth, which he did not put into words.
“You wonder, perhaps, what I have done with Rosamond,” she said; “but she is perfectly well and perfectly safe. My own absence from home is one of three days only. I return to-night.”
“Ah, Rosamond,” he said; “poor child! To tell the truth I did not think of Rosamond. She is quite safe, I have no doubt. But you? What is my friend Rowland about that he allows his beautiful wife to come up to London, even in the dead season, on business, by herself?”
“The business,” she said, hurriedly, “was my own, and he could not have done it for me. I hope you are better, and that the waters——”
“The waters,” he said, with a smile, “are good to amuse people with an idea that something is being done for them. That is the best of medical science now-a-days. It does amuse one somehow, however vain one knows it to be, to think that something is being done. And so your business, my dear lady, concerned my son? Happy Eddy to be mixed up in the affairs of such a woman as you.”
“There was a question I had to ask him,” said Evelyn, faltering.
“Of so much importance that you have tried to find him vainly for two days. I say again, happy Eddy! I wish these were questions which his father could answer: but alas! all that is over with me.”
“The question did not personally concern either him or me,” said Evelyn, “but the well-being of a third person, for whom I am very closely concerned.”