Lord Crawleigh handed his wife a paper with fingers that trembled.
"Here are the dates and trains," he said. "You will go to the Abbey by the 4.10 from Waterloo. I shall join you at the end of the session." He turned to his daughter without trusting himself to face her dark, reproachful eyes. "I contemplate taking you to Raglan in August and House of Steynes in September, if your aunts see fit not to withdraw your invitation——"
"But how long is this going on?" Lady Barbara interrupted.
"I cannot permit any discussion," he answered in something that was half a whisper and half a sigh.
Lady Barbara looked at him reflectively and went to her room. When she came of age, in little more than a year's time, he would have no means of coercing her. Without waiting a year she could go to Harry Manders and demand to be given a part; he had offered her one in her own duologue. But the tension of the last three weeks and the dazing examination and attack at the inquest had left her uncertain of herself. A day or two at the Abbey, even though she were snatched away in the middle of the season, would give her time to find her bearings and discover what people really thought of her.
The more she pondered, the deeper grew her bewilderment. If all had gone well, the dash to Rickmansworth and back would have been regarded as a wholly innocent diversion in the course of a tiresome evening; on her return every one else would have regretted that he had not come too; even the borrowing of the car was venial, for the owner refused to accept any compensation, though the insurance company might well make difficulties; even he regarded the expedition as a joke, which had unhappily turned to tragedy, and was far sorrier that Lady Barbara should have been upset than that the chauffeur should have been killed.
If the facts, then, were innocent, she was being persecuted by the coroner and threatened with persecution by society at large for an accident to which she had contributed nothing. The chauffeur was sober enough to drive through dense traffic on the Harrow Road; Webster—she remembered his words—had looked at his watch and said through the speaking-tube, "You can let her out a bit now, I should think. We don't want to keep you out too long." The charge that any one of them was drunk would have been more insulting if it had been less grotesque. And for this the coroner had suggested that she should be ostracized. And her simple-minded father imagined that there were other simple-minded souls who would take such a Jack-in-office at his own pontifical valuation.
She almost hoped that they would, so that she might force them in triumph to acknowledge her innocence. To start as an outcast and win her way back was a dramatic dream which almost made her wish that she was guilty. To become an outcast might be as dramatic as to rise from obscurity to a pinnacle of fame.... Napoleon owed half his place in history to St. Helena.
An undistracted fortnight at the Abbey cooled Lady Barbara's resentment and checked the more romantic flights of her imagination. Her father's judgement was clearly at fault; to run away was to admit herself in the wrong. By the time that she had got herself into perspective, the season was so near its end that she did not think it worth while to make a demonstration and to occupy her room in Berkeley Square by force. But the late summer and autumn lay before her, and, when her father came to the Abbey for a week-end in July, she informed him that she had not yet cancelled any of her arrangements for staying with friends.
"You will remain here till we go to the Riviera in February," he answered.