"Oh, no. He said his name, of course. It was Palliser ... that was right, wasn't it?"
"Oh dear, no; it was Graythorpe. Palliser indeed!"
"It was true about the tiger though, because Major Roper says he's got the skin himself now."
"Only it wasn't my father that shot it. That's quite clear." Sally was feeling greatly relieved, and showed it in the way she added: "Now, doesn't that just show what a parcel of nonsense the whole story is?"
Sally had never told her friend about her mother's name before she took that of Nightingale. Very slight hints had sufficed to make her reticent about Graythorpe. Colonel Lund had once said to her: "Of course, your mother was Mrs. Graythorpe when she came to England; that was before she changed her name to Nightingale, you know?" She knew that her mother's money had come to her from a "grandfather Nightingale," whose name had somehow accompanied it, and had been (very properly, as it seemed to her) bestowed on herself as well as her mother. They were part and parcel of each other obviously. In fact, she had never more than just known of the existence of the name Graythorpe in her family at all, and it had been imputed by her to this unpopular father of hers, and put aside, as it were, on a shelf with him. Even if her mother had not suggested a desire that the name should lapse, she herself would have accepted its extinction on her own account.
But now this name came out of the past as a consolation. Palliser indeed! How could mamma have been Mrs. Graythorpe if her husband's name had been Palliser? Sally was not wise enough in worldly matters to know that divorced ladies commonly fall back on their maiden names. And she had been kept, or left, so much in the dark that she had taken for granted that her mother's had been Nightingale—that, in fact, she had retaken her maiden name at her father's wish, possibly as a censure on the misbehaviour of a husband who drank or gambled or was otherwise reprobate. Her young mind had been manipulated all
one way—had been in contact only with its manipulators. Had she had a sister or brother, they would have canvassed the subject, speculated, run conclusions to earth, and demanded enlightenment. She had none but her mother to go to, unless it were Colonel Lund; and the painful but inevitable task of both was to keep her in the dark about her parentage at all hazards. "If ever," said the former to the latter, "my darling girl has a child of her own, I may be able to tell her her mother's story." Till then, it would be impossible.
Sally had had a narrow escape of knowing more about this story when the veteran Sub-Dean qualified himself for an obituary in the "Times," which she chanced upon and read before her mother had time to detect and suppress it. Luckily, a reasonable economy of type had restricted the names and designations of all the wives he had driven tandem, and no more was said of his third than that she was Rosalind, the widow of Paul Nightingale. So, as soon as Sally's mother had read the text herself, she was able to say to the Major, quite undisturbedly, that the old Sub-Dean had gone at last, leaving thirteen children. The name Graythorpe had not crept in.
But we left Sally with a question unanswered. Didn't that show what nonsense old Major Roper's story was? Lætitia was rather glad to assent, and get the story quashed, or at least prorogued sine die.
"It did seem rather nonsense, Sally dear. Major Roper was a stupid old man, and evidently took more than was good for him." Intoxicants are often of great service in conversation.