“She is not there now—she is in London,” said Bee, in a low tone.
“In London?” Again the long, gaunt limbs came to the ground with a thump. “Bee, if you could get me a hansom perhaps I could go.”
The nurse at this moment came in noiselessly, and Charlie shrank before her. She put him back on the sofa with a swift movement. “If you go on like this I’ll take the young lady away,” she said.
“I’ll not go on—I’ll be as meek as Moses; but, nurse, tell her she mustn’t contradict a man in my state. She must do what I say.”
Nurse turned her back upon the patient, and made the usual grimaces; “Humour him,” her lips and eyebrows said.
“Charlie, papa knows the address, and Betty—and I ought, oh, I ought to let them know at once that you are here.”
“Betty!” he said, with a grimace, “what does that little thing know?”
“She knows—better than you think I do; and papa—— Papa is never happy but when he is with that lady. He goes to see her every day; she writes to him and he writes to her; they go out together,” cried Bee, thinking of that invitation to Portman Square which had seemed the last insult which she could be called on to bear.
Charlie smiled—the same smile of ineffable self-complacence and confidence which had replaced in a moment the gloom of the previous night; and then he grew grave. He was not such a fool, he said to himself, as to be jealous of his own father; but still he grudged that anyone but himself should have her company. He remembered what it was to go to see her every day, to write to her, to have her letters, to be privileged to give her his arm now and then, to escort her here or there. If it had been another fellow! But a man’s father—the governor! He was not a rival. Charlie imagined to himself the conversations with him for their subject, and how, perhaps for the first time, the governor would learn to do him justice, seeing him through Laura’s eyes. It was true that she had rejected him, had almost laughed at him, had sent him away so completely broken down and miserable that he had not cared what became of him. But hope had sprung within him, all the more wildly from that downfall. It was like her to go to the old gentleman (it was thus he considered his father) to explain everything, to set him right. She would not have done so if her heart had not relented—her heart was so kind. She must have felt what it was to drive a man to despair—and now she was working for him, soothing down the governor, bringing everything back.
“Eh?” he said, vaguely, some time after; he had in the meantime heard Bee’s voice going on vaguely addressing somebody, in the air, “are you speaking to me?”