“How d’you know?” asked Jack.
“Cos she prayed such a deal,” said his sister. “She flopped down on her knees and I think she cried.”
“There must be bills then,” said Jack seriously. “Or p’rhaps,” he added, “’twas only the church. Churches is always sorrowful.”
“I don’t mind ’em,” said Boo. “There’s a lot o’ fun in people’s bonnets. I drawed two or three bonnets in my Prayer Book.”
Their mother was, indeed, as Boo’s observant eyes had discovered, greatly disturbed and apprehensive. Throughout the service of the fashionable church she was absorbed in one thought: would Billy play her false? Would he, if he were true to her, be in time? Might not Beaumont be away from Paris for the Sunday, like so many Parisian tradesmen; he had a country house, she knew, at Compigne. What would happen to her if, when the men from Coutts’s came, and she had not the veritable diamonds to give?
Exposure, complete and inevitable, must follow; when the jewels should be brought to valuation Hurstmanceaux and the Ormes must at least know the truth, and that seemed to her worse than to be pilloried, as people were of old, and stoned by the multitude.
She thought she could trust “Billy”; she felt that a hard-headed man of business would not go over to Paris on so grave an errand and leave it undone; but she could not be sure, a thousand things might happen. Channel steamers never do get wrecked, but the one in which he crossed might do so; the train might come to grief; Paris might be in revolution; Paris made revolutions as rapidly as it made omeletts for breakfast; she was not naturally imaginative, but in this tension of terror her fancy conjured up innumerable horrors as she apparently kneeled in prayer.
When she came home she shut herself up in her bedroom, said she had a headache and took a little chloral. As she lay on her sofa, with a handkerchief over her eyes, she heard the children trundling down the staircase to go for their afternoon drive; they always were driven somewhere into the country on Sunday afternoons to avoid the crowds and noise of the parks. She heard Jack’s voice shouting a negro melody as he jumped down three stairs at a time. She got up despite her headache and her chloral, opened her door which led on to the stairs, and caught the little sinner as he passed her by his blouse.
“How can you let the duke disgrace himself so?” she said sternly to the governess. “The very boys in the street respect the seventh day.”
Then, still with her fair hand closed fast on the blouse she said to the wearer of it: “I am shocked at you, Jack! Go upstairs to your room and stay there. You do not go out to-day.”