‘Que cherchez-vous, Bébé? Allez-vous en!’
‘Maman, je viens vous souhaiter la bonne nuit!
‘Allez, allez,’ she replied impatiently, ‘je viendrai vous baiser quand vous serez couché.’
With a wondering look at the stranger the child ran from the room.
The interruption seemed to have calmed them both. There was a brief silence, during which Bradley gazed drearily at the door through which the child had vanished, and his companion seemed lost in thought.
The time has perhaps come to explain that, if this worldly and sin-stained woman had one redeeming virtue, it was love for her little boy. True, she showed it strangely, being subject to curious aberrations of mood. The child was secretly afraid of her. Sometimes she would turn upon him, for some trivial fault, with violent passion; the next moment she would cover him with kisses and load him with toys. In her heart she adored him; indeed, he was the only thing in the world that she felt to be her own. She knew how terribly his birth, when he grew up, would tell against his chances in life, and she had so managed matters that Lord Ombermere had settled a large sum of money unconditionally upon the child; which money was already invested for him, in his mother’s name, in substantial Government securities. Her own relation with Ombermere, I may remark in passing, was a curious one. Whenever he was in London, his lordship dropped in every afternoon at about four, as ‘Mr. Montmorency’; he took a cup of tea in company with mother and child; at a quarter to six precisely he looked at his watch and rose to go; and at seven he was dining in Bentinck Square, surrounded by his legal children, and faced by his lady. Personally, he was a mild, pale man, without intelligence or conversational powers of any kind, and ‘Mrs. Montmorency’ found his company exceedingly tedious and tame.
‘You see my position,’ said Mrs. Montmorency at last. ‘If you have no consideration for me, perhaps you will have some for my boy.’
The clergyman sighed, and looked at her as if dazed.
‘I must think it over,’ he said. ‘All this has come as a terrible shock upon me.’
‘Shall I see you again?’