Laid up in Lavender. Weyman Stanley John
has never appeared aware of it," she persisted. "Are you sure that he saw it?"
He wondered at her innocence, or her audacity. That such a baby should do so much mischief. The thought irritated him. "It was impossible that he should not see it, Lady Betty," he said, with a touch of asperity. "Quite impossible!"
"Ah," she replied, with a faint sigh. "Well, he has never spoken to me about it. And you think it had really something to do with his resignation, Mr. Atlay?"
"Most certainly," he said. He was no longer inclined to spare her.
She nodded thoughtfully, and then with a quiet "Thank you" she went out.
"Well," muttered the secretary to himself when the door was fairly shut behind her, "she is-upon my word, she is a fool! And he" – appealing to the inkstand-"he has never said a word to her about it. He is a new Don Quixote! a modern Job! a second Sir Isaac Newton! I do not know what to call him!"
It was Sir Horace, however, who precipitated the catastrophe. He happened to come in about teatime that afternoon, before, in fact, my lady had had an opportunity of seeing her husband. He found her alone and in a brown study, a thing most unusual with her and portending something. He watched her for a time in silence: seemed to draw courage from a still longer inspection of his boots, and then said, "So the cart is clean over, Betty?"
She nodded.
"Driver much hurt?"
"Do you mean, does Stafford mind?" she replied impatiently.
He nodded.
"Well, I do not know. It is hard to say."
"Think so?" he persisted.
"Good gracious, Horry!" my lady retorted, losing patience, "I say I do not know, and you say, 'Think so!' If you want to learn so particularly, ask him yourself. Here he is!"
Mr. Stafford had just entered the room. Perhaps she really wished to satisfy herself as to the state of his feelings. Perhaps she only desired in her irritation to put her cousin in a corner. At any rate she turned to her husband and said, "Here is Horace wishing to know if you mind being turned out?"
Mr. Stafford's face flushed a little at the home-thrust which no one else would have dared to deal. But he showed no displeasure. "Well, not so much as I should have thought," he answered, pausing to weigh a lump of sugar, and, as it seemed, his feelings. "There are compensations, you know."
"Pity all the same-those terms came out," Sir Horace grunted.
"It was."
"Stafford!" Lady Betty asked on a sudden, speaking fast and eagerly, "is it true, I want to ask you, is it true that that led you to resign?"
Naturally he was startled, and he showed that he was. She was the last person who should have put that question to him, but his long training in self-control stood him in good stead.
"Well, yes," he said quietly.
It was better, he thought, indeed it was only right, that she should know what she had done. But he did not look at her.
"Was it only that?" she asked again.
This time he weighed his answer. He thought her persistency odd. But again he assented.
"Yes," he said gravely. "Only that, I think. But for that I should have remained in-with Lord Pilgrimstone of course. Perhaps things are better as they are, my dear."
Lady Betty sprang from her seat with all her old vivacity. "Well!" she cried, "well, I am sure! Then why, I should like to know, did Mr. Atlay tell me that my letter to the Times had something to do with it!"
"Did not say so," quoth Sir Horace. "Absurd!"
"Yes, he did," cried Lady Betty, so fiercely that the rash speaker, who had returned to his boots, fairly shook in them. "You were not there! How do you know?"
"Don't know," Sir Horace admitted, meekly.
"But stay, stay a moment!" Mr. Stafford said, getting in a word with difficulty. It was strange if his wife could talk so calmly of her misdeeds, and before a third party too. "What letter to the Times did Atlay mean?"
"My letter about the Women's League," she explained earnestly. "You did not see it? No, I thought not. But Mr. Atlay would have it that you did, and that it had something to do with your going out. Horace told me at the time that I ought not to send it without consulting you. But I did, because you said you could not be bothered with it-I mean you said you were busy, Stafford. And so I thought I would ask if it had done any harm, and Mr. Atlay- What is the matter?" she cried, breaking off sharply at sight of the change in her husband's face. "Did it do harm?"
"No, no," he answered. "Only I never heard of this letter before. What made you write it?"
Lady Betty coloured violently, and became on a sudden very shy-like most young authors. "Well," she said, "I wanted to be in the-in the swim with you, don't you know."
Mr. Stafford murmured, "Oh!"
Thanks to his talk with Atlay he read the secret of that sudden shyness. And confusion poured over him more and more. It caused him to give way to impulse in a manner which a moment's reflection would have led him to avoid.
"Then it was not you," he exclaimed unwarily, "who sent Pilgrimstone's terms to the Times?"
"I?" she exclaimed in an indescribable tone, and with eyes like saucers. "I?" she repeated.
"Gad!" cried Sir Horace; and he looked about for a way of escape.
"I?" she continued, struggling between wrath and wonder. "I betray you to the Times! And you thought so, Stafford?"
There was silence in the room for a long moment during which the cool statesman, the hard man of the world, did not know where to turn his eyes. "There were circumstances-several circumstances," Mr. Stafford muttered at last, "which made-which forced me to think so."
"And Mr. Atlay thought so?" she asked. He nodded. "Oh, that tame cat!" she cried, her eyes flashing.
Then she seemed to meditate, while her husband gazed at her, a prey to conflicting emotions, and Sir Horace made himself as small as possible. "I see," she continued in a different tone. "Only-only if you thought that, why did you never say anything? Why did you not scold me, beat me, Stafford? I do not-I do not understand."
"I thought," he explained in despair-he had so mismanaged matters-"that perhaps I had left you-out of the swim, as you call it, Betty. That I had not treated you very well, and after all it might be my own fault."
"And you said nothing! You intended to say nothing?" He nodded.
"Gad!" cried Sir Horace very softly.
But Lady Betty said nothing. She turned after a long look at her husband, and went out of the room, her eyes wet with tears. The two men heard her pause a moment on the landing, and then go upstairs and shut her door. But her foot, even to their gross ears, seemed to touch the stairs as if it loved them, and there was a happy lingering in the slamming of the door.
They looked, when she had left them, anywhere but at one another. Sir Horace sought inspiration in his boots, and presently found it. "Wonder who did it, then?" he burst out at last.
"Ah! I wonder," replied the ex-minister, descending at a bound from the cloudland to which his thoughts had borne him. "I never pushed the inquiry; you know why now. But they should be able to enlighten us at the Times office. We could learn in whose handwriting the copy was, at any rate. It is not well to have spies about us."
"I can tell you in whose handwriting they say it was," Sir Horace said bluntly.
"In whose?"
"In Atlay's."
Mr. Stafford did not look surprised. Instead of answering he thought. As a result of which he presently left the room in silence. When he came back he had a copy of the Times in his hand, and his face wore a look of perplexity. "I have read the riddle," he said, "and yet it is a riddle to me still. I never found time to read the report of my speech at the Club. It occurred to me to look at it now. It is full of errors; so full that it is clear the printer had not the corrected proof Atlay prepared.