Lady Marabout bent down and kissed her, with a fervent gratitude that not a little bewildered the recipient.
"My dear child! thank God! little as I thought to say so. Flora, tell me, you love some one else?"
"Lady Marabout, you have no right——"
"Yea, I have a right—the strongest right! Is not that other my son?"
Flora Montolieu looked up, then dropped her head and burst into tears—tears that Lady Marabout soothed then, tears that Carruthers soothed, yet more effectually still, five minutes afterwards.
"That I should have sued that little Montolieu, and sued to her for Philip!" mused Lady Marabout. "It is very odd. Perhaps I get used to being crossed and disappointed and trampled on in every way and by everybody; but certainly, though it is most contrary to my wishes, though a child like that is the last person I should ever have chosen or dreamt of as Philip's wife, though it is a great pain to me, and Anne Hautton of course will be delighted to rake up everything she can about the Montolieus, and it is heart-breaking when one thinks how a Carruthers might marry, how the Carruthers always have married, rarely any but ladies in their own right for countless generations, still it is very odd, but I certainly feel happier than ever I did in my life, annoyed as I am and grieved as I am. It is heart-breaking (that horrid John Montolieu! I wonder what relation one stands in legally to the father of one's son's wife; I will ask Sir Fitzroy Kelley; not that the Montolieus are likely to come to England)—it is very sad when one thinks whom Philip might have married; and yet she certainly is infinitely charming, and she really appreciates and understands him. If it were not for what Anne Hautton will always say, I could really be pleased! To think what an anxious hope, what a dreaded ideal, Philip's wife has always been to me; and now, just as I had got reconciled to his determined bachelor preferences, and had grown to argue with him that it was best he shouldn't marry, he goes and falls in love with this child! Everything is at cross-purposes in life, I think! There is only one thing I am resolved upon—I will NEVER chaperone anybody again."
And she kept her vow. None can christen her Lady Tattersall any longer with point, for there are no yearling sales in that house in Lowndes Square, whatever there be in the other domiciles of that fashionable quarter. Lady Marabout has shaken that burden off her shoulders, and moves in blissful solitude and tripled serenity through Belgravia, relieved of responsibility, and wearing her years as lightly, losing the odd trick at her whist as sunnily, and beaming on the world in general as radiantly as any dowager in the English Peerage.
That she was fully reconciled to Carruthers's change of resolve was shown in the fact that when Anne Hautton turned to her, on the evening of his marriage-day, after the dinner to which Lady Marabout had bidden all her friends, and a good many of her foes, with an amiable murmur:
"I am so grieved for you, dearest Helena—I know what your disappointment must be!—what should I feel if Hautton——Your belle-fille is charming, certainly, very lovely; but then—such a connection! You have my deepest sympathies! I always told you how wrong you were when you fancied Goodwood admired little Montolieu—I beg her pardon, I mean Lady Carruthers—but you will give your imagination such reins!"