His mother was agitated beyond expression; she was for the moment paralyzed and could think of nothing which she could do or say. She let her son pass out of the room without censure or inquiry or punishment. She threw herself down upon the cushions of a couch and wept.
Her sorrow was real for the moment. As far as she had ever really cared for anyone in a sense of tenderness, she had loved Harry. But it was not long before her grief gave way to violent indignation. How ungenerous, how ungentlemanlike, it had been of him to speak ill of her to her child!
She had no doubt that he had done so, for it never occurred to her that Jack’s active mind had unaided arrived at its just estimate of herself, and that the instincts of the boy had made him see in her the true assassin of his dear dead friend.
The bitterness of her anger dried the well springs of her grief. When she felt herself injured, she always thought that the whole world should rise up and do battle for her. For a man base enough to set her son against her there could be no occasion to mourn; especially when to mourn would compromise her before others. She had no anxiety about what correspondence Harry might have left behind him, for when he had gone to Africa he had sent her all her letters and other mementoes. She ordered her carriage and drove into the Park as usual; then she dined early at a club with some friends, and did a theatre, and went afterward with a merry party to supper at the Papillons Club.
That is how Helen mourns for Paris nowadays.
The obligation to laugh a little louder than usual for fear people should suppose you are sorry; a little shiver of regret when you are coming home alone in your brougham; a few drops more chloral than usual when you do get home—these are the only sacrifices that need to be made on the funeral pyre of the lover of to-day.
Jack did not sleep all night. He had sobbed himself into a heavy, agitated slumber as the day dawned, and his tutor had given orders that he should not be disturbed. When he had risen, had bathed, and been dressed, it was eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and he slipped out of sight of his servant, and instead of going to breakfast with Mr. Lane ran out of the house and came to seek his uncle Ronald, who happened to be in town on business; he was seldom in town for anything else. As Hurstmanceaux opened the hall door of his rooms to go down into the street, he saw with surprise the figure of a boy in sailor clothes standing on the head of the stairs.
“Is that you, Jack?” he said, recognizing his nephew. “You don’t look well. Is anything the matter?”
“May I speak to you?” said Jack, standing on the threshold with his sailor hat in his hand.
“Certainly—come in,” replied Hurstmanceaux, surprised to see the boy unaccompanied. “Are you alone?”