Not two minutes after this she returned to the charge again about the house in Chester Street. “Will you really not think of it again, Evelyn? It would be such a pleasure to have you near: and, my dear, I should never say a word about any Platonic diversion that amused you. On the contrary, I’d flirt with Mr. Rowland and keep him off the scent.—Oh, let me laugh: I must laugh after I have cried. Well, if you have decided, I don’t mind saying that you are quite as well out of Ned Saumarez’s way. Sending the girl to see you was a very serious step. And he is a man that will stick at nothing. Perhaps it is all the better that you are going away.”
“That is the strongest argument you could use,” said Evelyn, “to keep me here.”
“Perhaps that was what I intended,” said Lady Leighton; “but, dear, how late it is, I must go——” She had reached the door when she suddenly turned back. “What time did you fix for our visit to you, Evelyn? I must work it into our list. Without organisation one could never go anywhere at all. It must be between the end of October and the middle of December. Would the 10th November to the 20th suit you? or is that too long. One must be perfectly frank about these matters, or one never could go on at all.”
“It must be when you please, and for as long as you please, dear Madeline,” said Mrs. Rowland. She added, “I fear, you know, it will be rather dull I don’t know whether there is any society, and James——”
“I will put it down 10th to 15th,” said Lady Leighton, seriously noting this consideration. And then she gave her friend a hasty embrace, and hurried away.
How strange it all was! Evelyn felt as if she had peeped through some crevice behind the lively bustling stage, and suddenly seen what was going on behind the scenes. There had been little behind the scenes in her own life. It had been sad, but it had all been open as the day. And now, when she stood at the beginning of a new life, she had nothing to wound, nothing to make her reluctant that any word should leap to light, even that story of hers which had been so near tragedy, of which Edward Saumarez had been the hero. She almost blushed at the importance she had given that story, now that she had seen again the man who had been the hero of it. It seemed to lose all the dignity and tragic meaning which had been the chief thing in her life for so long.
While Evelyn was thinking this, a letter was put into her hand, in which her husband bade her do exactly as she pleased about the Chester Street house. “If you like to stay there for a little, my dear, and see your old friends, I shall like that best; and if you prefer to come home with me at once, and take possession of Rosmore, that is what I shall like best. It is for you to choose: and in the meantime I am coming back to town, to do whatever you like to-morrow night.”
To-morrow of the day on which the letter was written meant that very day upon which Evelyn received it. She had not pretended to be in love with her good middle-aged husband, she, a subdued middle-aged woman. But what a haven of quiet, and plain honest understanding, and simple truth and right she seemed to float into when she realised that he was coming back to her to-night.
CHAPTER IX.
James Rowland left his wife in London with a certain satisfaction which was very unlike the great affection he had for her, and the delight which day by day he had learned more and more to take in her society. He was a man full of intelligence and quickness of mind notwithstanding various roughnesses of manner; and he never had known before what it was to have such a companion; a woman who understood almost all he meant, and meant a good deal which he was delightfully learning to understand: bringing illustrations to their life which his imperfect education had kept from him, and making him aware of a hundred new sources of satisfaction and pleasure. But his very admiration for Evelyn had deepened in his mind the first stab of anxiety which her hand had involuntarily given. He had never got over the shock of finding out that his children, instead of being the little things he had invariably gone on thinking them to be, had reached the age of early manhood and womanhood, and that he knew nothing whatever about them. He had tried at first to laugh at this as a simple evidence of his own folly, but the little puncture of that first wound had gone on deepening and deepening. He felt it only in occasional thrills at first, when it had given him about as much annoyance as a stray pang of rheumatism; but as he travelled home, every day’s nearer approach made the ache a little keener. It was the only thing in his experience of which he had said nothing to Evelyn—although from the day of their arrival in London it had begun to gnaw him like the proverbial fox under his mantle. He grew restless, unable to settle to anything, continually wondering what they would be like, how they would receive him, if they would be a credit to him or the reverse, how Evelyn would receive them, and how they would take to Evelyn. Their stiff little letters about his marriage, which were almost the first letters of theirs which he had read with any attention, had been received at Suez on the way home. And they had redoubled his anxiety and his restlessness. He did not show them to Evelyn, which was very significant of their unsatisfactory character to himself. Had they been “nice” letters, he would have been too anxious to place them in her hands, to see her face light up with interest. But they were not, alas, nice letters. They were very stiff formal productions. They acknowledged that their father had a right to please himself, and that they had no claim to be taken into consideration. “What we expected was different, but it is you, as aunt Jane says, that are the master, and we hope that your lady will not look down upon us, or keep us away from you.” This was not the sort of thing which he could show to Evelyn, anxious as she was to do everything a mother could do for his children. And all this made him very restless: he wanted to escape from her, to go and inspect them before she saw them, to try even, if that were possible, to lick them into shape before they came under her eyes. He had not been afraid of the venture of his new marriage, nor of the perils by land and sea to which he was continually exposed; but he was very much afraid of the effect of the boy and girl whom he felt himself to have neglected, and who were now rising up as giants in his path. In these circumstances Rowland snatched anxiously at the pretext of going to see Rosmore and prepare it for his wife’s reception. What he really wanted was to see the children and decide what could be done to prepare them.