A Valiant Ignorance (Vol. 1-3). Victorian Romance
combat. Lady Bracondale, however, was not a judge of artificiality, and Mrs. Romayne’s manner, with its perfect assurance and careless assumption of a position and a footing in society, affected her in spite of herself. The stony stare relaxed perceptibly as she said, stiffly enough, but with condescending interest:
“You are expecting your son in town?”
“I am expecting him every day, I am delighted to say!” answered Mrs. Romayne, with a little conventional gush of superficial enthusiasm. “Really, you have no idea how forlorn I am without him! We are quite absurdly devoted to one another, as I often tell him, stupid fellow. But I always think—don’t you?—that a man is much better out of the way during the agonies of furnishing, so I insisted on his making a little tour while I plunged into the fray. He was very anxious to help, of course, dear fellow. But I told him frankly that he would be more hindrance than help, and packed him off—and made a great baby of myself when he was gone. Of course I have had to console myself by making our little place as perfect as possible, as a surprise for him! You know how these things grow! One little surprise after another comes into one’s head, and one excuses oneself for one’s extravagance when it’s for one’s boy.”
“Are you thinking of settling in London?” enquired Lady Bracondale.
She was unbending moment by moment in direct contradiction of her preconceived determination. Mrs. Romayne was so bright and so unconscious. She ran off her pretty maternal platitudes with such careless confidence, that iciness on Lady Bracondale’s part would have assumed a futile and even ridiculous appearance.
“Yes!” was the answer. “We are going to settle down a regular cosy couple. It has been our castle in the air all the time his education has been going on. He is to read for the bar, and I tell him that he will value a holiday more in another year or two, poor fellow. But I’m afraid I bore about him frightfully!” she added, with another laugh. “And it is rather hard on him, poor boy, for he really is not a bore! I think you will like him, Lady Bracondale. I remember young men always adored you!”
Lady Bracondale smiled, absolutely smiled, and said graciously—graciously for her, that is to say:
“You must bring him to see me! I should like to call upon you if you will give me your card.”
Mrs. Romayne was in the act of complying—complying with smiling indifference, which was the very perfection of society manner—when Mrs. Pomeroy, evidently moved solely by the impetus of the excited group of ladies of which she was the serenely smiling centre, bore cheerfully down upon them.
“Perhaps we ought to vote about the fancy dress before we separate this afternoon,” she suggested, “or shall we talk it over a little more at the next meeting? Perhaps that would be wiser. Mrs. Romayne——”
She looked invitingly at Mrs. Romayne as if for her opinion on the subject, and the invitation was responded to with that ever-ready little laugh.
“Oh, let us put it off until the next meeting,” she said. “I am ashamed to say that I really must run away now. But at the next meeting I promise faithfully to be here at the beginning and stay until the very end.”
Whereupon it became evident that the greater part of the committee was anxious to postpone the decision on the knotty point in question, and was conscious of more or less pressing engagements. A general exodus ensued, Mrs. Halse alone remaining to expound her views to Mrs. Pomeroy all by herself and in a higher and more conclusive tone than before.
A neat little coupé was waiting for Mrs. Romayne. She gave the coachman the order “home” at first, and then paused and told him to go to a famous cigar merchant’s. She got into the carriage with a smiling gesture of farewell to Lady Bracondale, whose brougham passed her at the moment; but as she leant back against the cushions the smile died from her lips with singular suddenness. It left her face very intent; the eyes very bright and hard, the lips set and a little compressed. The lines about them and about her eyes showed out faintly under this new aspect of her face in spite of the eager satisfaction which was its dominant expression. The battle had evidently been fought and won and the victor was ready and braced for the next.
She got out at the cigar merchant’s, and when she returned to her carriage there was that expression of elation about her which often attends the perpetration of a piece of extravagance. But as she was driven through the fading sunlight of the March afternoon towards Chelsea, her face settled once more into that intent reflection and satisfaction.
It was a narrow slip of a house at which her coupé eventually stopped, wedged in among much more imposing-looking mansions in the most fashionable part of Chelsea. But what it lacked in size it made up in brightness and general smartness. It had evidently been recently done up with all the latest improvements in paint, window-boxes, and fittings generally, and it presented a very attractive appearance indeed.
Mrs. Romayne let herself in with a latch-key, and went quickly across the prettily decorated hall into a room at the back of what was evidently the dining-room. She opened the door, and then stood still upon the threshold.
The light of the setting sun was stealing in at the window, the lower half of which was filled in with Indian blinds; and as it fell in long slanting rays across the silent room, it seemed to emphasize and, at the same time, to soften and beautify an impression of waiting and of expectancy that seemed to emanate from everything that room contained. It was furnished—it was not large—as a compromise between a smoking-room and a study, and its every item, from the bookcases and the writing-table to the bronzes on the mantelpiece, was in the most approved and latest style, and of the very best kind. Every conceivable detail had evidently been thought out and attended to; the room was obviously absolutely complete and perfect—only on the writing-table something seemed lacking, and some brown paper parcels lay there waiting to be unfastened—and it had as obviously never been lived in. It was like a body without a soul.
The lingering light stole along the wall, touching here and there those unused objects waiting, characterless, for that strange character which the personality of a man impresses always on the room in which he lives, and its last touch fell upon the face of the woman standing in the doorway. The artificiality of its expression was standing out in strong relief as if in half conscious, half instinctive struggle with something that lay behind, something which the aspect of that empty room had developed out of its previous intentness and excitement. With a little affected laugh, as though some one else had been present—or as though affectation were indeed second nature to her—Mrs. Romayne went up to the writing-table and began to undo the parcels lying there. They contained a very handsome set of fittings for a man’s writing-table, and she arranged them in their places, clearing away the paper with scrupulous care, and with another little laugh.
“What a ridiculous woman!” she said half aloud, with just the intonation she had used in speaking to Lady Bracondale of her “little surprises” for “her boy.” “And what a spoilt fellow!”
She turned away, went out of the room, with one backward glance as she closed the door, and upstairs to the drawing-room. She had just entered the room when a thought seemed to strike her.
“How utterly ridiculous!” she said to herself. “I quite forgot to notice whether there were any letters!”
She was just crossing the room to ring for a servant when the front-door bell rang vigorously and she stopped short. With an exclamation of surprise she went to the door and stood there listening, that she might prepare herself beforehand for the possible visitor, for whom she evidently had no desire. “How tiresome!” she said to herself. “Who is it, I wonder?” She heard the parlourmaid go down the hall and open the door.
“Mrs. Romayne at home?”
With a shock and convulsion, which only the wildest leap of the heart can produce, the listening face in the drawing-room doorway, with the conventional smile which might momently be called for just quivering on it, half in abeyance, half in evidence, was suddenly transformed. Every trace of artificiality fell away, blotted out utterly before the swift, involuntary flash of mother love and longing with which those hard blue eyes, those pretty, superficial little features were, in that instant,