The word rose from him in a male scream.
"Who is being murdered?" remarked the deep voice of the Duchess, who at this instant became visible threading her way through the shrubs with Chloe at her side.
MR. HARRISON'S NIGHT-WATCH.
From this terrible moment despair began to grip Mr. Rodney, and the worst of it was, that besides being in despair, he was in confusion. He now fully recognised that Mrs. Verulam was suffering under a "possession," as he called it to himself. What he could not decide was, which of those two demons, Huskinson Van Adam and James Bush, it was who possessed her with demoniacal influence. Lady Sage was about to cut Mrs. Verulam because of Mr. Van Adam. Society would certainly follow Lady Sage's lead on the same account. But Mr. Rodney's penetration had almost convinced him that the man from Bungay was, in truth, the Svengali to this Trilby. It was surely his enormous shadow in which Mrs. Verulam now walked. It was his fatal rusticity which she envied, his sheep-washing, bee-swarming, cabbage-digging, pea-podding existence she aimed at. This was so. But then, why should she compromise herself with this divorced Huskinson? Why should she lead him about whithersoever she went? Poor Mr. Rodney began "turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound." He yearned for the informing letter from Lord Bernard Roche which tarried so long upon the way. Nevertheless, when it came, this letter only increased the darkness in which events moved—at the first.
In fact, all things tended towards complication in and about the palace at this time. And although Mr. Rodney, in the usual manner of men, flattered himself that he alone of all the universe was truly troubled in spirit, he was entirely mistaken. Mrs. Verulam was secretly exercised at the apparent success which was about to crown her endeavours to leave the milieu in which Heaven had placed her. The Lady Pearl was, or imagined herself to be, swept by the mysterious tremors of a budding affection. The Duchess was in a simmering state of fury against her hostess, and of match-making anxiety on her daughter's behalf. And before the week was out Chloe was struck by a thunder-bolt—metaphorically. At the moment, however, Mr. Rodney was to some extent correct in considering himself the most unhappy person within the precincts of the palace. On this Tuesday night he probably was, as he sat down to dinner, pale, seedy, and bemuddled.
Her Grace was in a certain mental confusion. That afternoon in the shrubbery she had been "sounding" Chloe, as she called it. That is to say, she had been asking Chloe a very large number of extremely leading questions in a very determined bass voice. Chloe had been obliged to hear herself characterised as a very rascally woman, and to receive to herself the flood of pity intended for her ex-husband. She had also been informed that the victim of one unfortunate marriage should instantly seek for happiness in another and more judicious union. And she had learned the catalogue of the Lady Pearl's perfections. According to her mother, the Lady Pearl's only fault was a slight tendency to hereditary gout, and that, as her Grace very justly observed, was glorified in a manner by the fact that it was distinctly filial.
"The Duke has always been a victim to it, Mr. Van Adam," she exclaimed with undoubted force, "and Pearl has been accustomed from a child to look up to her father as to a being almost sacred."
The apparent deduction to be drawn from this sound reasoning was, that if from childhood you look up to a sacred being—who has the gout—you will be rewarded by receiving the sacred being's complaint; a somewhat unsatisfactory state of things, which, however, has this advantage, that it places you in the excellent position of being an undoubted martyr. Chloe had done her best not to give any encouragement to the determined hopes of the Duchess, but her gay delight in titles made it so difficult for her to resist the seductions of one so venerable as the title of Southborough, that she left upon her Grace an impression that there was nothing in the Verulam business on her side. This made the Duchess highly generous to Chloe, but hardly blunted her anger against Mrs. Verulam, who was, no doubt, deliberately trying to snatch the American away from the Lady Pearl. The Duchess's spirit was up in arms against such paltry kleptomania. She was resolved to protect the supposed orange-grower from such wicked designs; and on Tuesday night her bosom swelled with mingled determination and enmity as she solaced her spirit with mayonnaise and '84 champagne.