‘SO,’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘you have seen your dear aunt.’
Lord Will had arrived in the afternoon, and she had scarcely seen him until dinner. After that meal—in the moment always anxiously awaited when there is any subject to talk of, when the servants had left the room—she entered into conversation. It was not by her invitation that he had come to the Hall—neither, of course, were any of the circumstances of her arranging. Sometimes, strangely enough, when there is an evil deed to be done, Providence will seem to arrange all the circumstances for it with special care—to give the intending sinner a clearer light for the resistance of temptation, or to commit him to his evil choice and inevitable doom. Thus Mrs. Swinford’s whole soul was set upon the ruin of Lady William—if she could fathom it—and the chain of possibilities seemed woven for that end.
‘Yes,’ said Lord Will, though a little embarrassed by this description, ‘I have seen Lady William: and being a dear aunt whom I never saw before, and whom I did not expect to be proud of, she is the greatest piece of luck I ever came upon. You know her, I suppose?’
‘Know her!’ said Mrs. Swinford, with that little continuous laugh which was like the tingling of an electric bell. ‘Indeed, I know her—to my cost.’
‘Ah! there’s mischief in her, then?’
‘There are always old sores in a friendship of twenty years. Isn’t that true, mother? But whatever they are, they must be of very old date, and there can be no reason for bringing them forward now.’
Thus Leo, who was evidently very uneasy, and had showed symptoms of rising from the table though his mother had as yet given no sign.
‘Leo,’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘has fallen under the fascination which a woman of that age often exercises—too old to be dangerous, but old enough to know how to make herself very agreeable.’
‘Oh, she’s very agreeable,’ said Lord Will; ‘as for fascination, one doesn’t associate it somehow with the name of an aunt, don’t you know.’
‘That is true, but you see she is not everybody’s aunt. To some people she is——’
‘I should say to everybody a charming woman. Do you take your coffee downstairs to-night, mother?’
‘I know what you mean, Leo: but coffee or no coffee, you must understand that I have a great deal to say to Lord Will. It may be now, or it may be later—but I have a great deal to say——’
‘I need not tell you I am entirely at your disposition, Mrs. Swinford.’
‘You know,’ said Leo, almost angrily, ‘it is bad for your health to stay up late: and Will wants a glass of wine, or perhaps to knock about the balls a little——’
‘I hope I don’t look like a fellow to knock about balls—when I have so much better within reach——’
‘It’s always well,’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘to know how to turn a compliment. Will you now give me your arm upstairs like a Frenchman, or wait like a Britisher till you have had your glass of wine?’
‘Perish the glass of wine!’ said Lord Will with a laugh, ‘though I hear ladies say nowadays that they like the British fashion best.’
‘These are strong-minded ladies, who are, I believe, the fashion, too—whom the men don’t care for, and who, consequently, pretend not to care for the men.’
‘Well, that’s very flattering to us, at least,’ said Lord Will. He was perhaps a little too much in the movement of his time to accept it as the gospel it has always been supposed to be, and was even a little disposed to laugh in his sleeve at the antiquated charmer who held by that old doctrine. Mrs. Swinford’s air of the ancient seductrice and devourer of men was not a new thing to this experienced youth.
‘It comes to much the same thing,’ said Leo, ‘for the Frenchmen adjourn for their cigarette after they have reconducted the ladies. Come, mother, let him be English for to-night. I have something to say to him, too.’
‘My son,’ said Mrs. Swinford, with the blandest smile, ‘Lord Will shall choose between us. I am not going to exercise any pressure, or pull against you.’
The natural result, of course, was that in a minute or two more Mrs. Swinford was established in the great drawing-room in her favourite chair, just within reach of the influence of the blazing, cheerful fire, amid the banks of flowers and pleasant twinkling of the lights, with Lord Will before her, at her feet.
‘We need not detain you, Leo,’ she said, with a nod and a smile; ‘I know your liking for this hour by yourself.’
‘I have no choice of one hour more than another by myself,’ said Leo, ‘and I, too, prefer the company of my guest to my own.’
‘Go, dear boy,’ she said, kissing the tips of her fingers. ‘I prefer that you should not remain: I have a great deal to say, and it is grave. You can say your say afterwards. At present, I don’t want to be contradicted. It puts me out.’
Leo looked at her with an earnest remonstrance in his eyes, but she continued to nod and smile at him, waving him away with that action of her arm which had once been so graceful and playful. Leo had been brought up to think all his mother’s movements graceful, and herself the most distinguished of women. But there was a painful sense of unwilling ridicule in his mind as he looked back at her waving him away, placed in the most careful pose in the great chair, and with the young man, much perplexed between curiosity and embarrassment, and a sense of ridicule, too, in the low chair at her feet. He withdrew into the shade beyond the pillars, but he did not go away. His mother could still see him moving in the partial dark, standing staring at a half-seen picture, or taking up and throwing down again book after book.
‘We are not to be left quite alone,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders; ‘Leo acts sheep-dog. It is a new rôle for him. But whether it is in my interest or yours, Lord Will, I cannot tell.’
‘There can be only one of us who is in any danger,’ said the young man.
‘I might say that was enigmatical still: but I will receive it as I am sure it is meant, and I congratulate you upon a very pretty turn of speech. Few young Englishmen deserve that. My Leo I used to think—but he is getting heavy in England, as most young men do.’
To this Lord Will, who was much intent upon the revelations to be made to him, was prepared with no reply; and serious as this old woman’s meaning was, and fatal in intent, she was nevertheless half disappointed that he did not continue a little the badinage with which she would have been pleased to preface what she had to say. She had an eye to serious interest even in desiring to prolong this moment. For no man likes to see his old mother imitating the coquette, and it might have resulted in sending Leo away.
‘I think I heard you say—and you must pardon me for interfering with your family affairs—that there was a question of money involved in your coming here to see after these unknown relations?’
‘Yes,’ said Lord Will, straightening himself up with relief; ‘there is money. My uncle John died the other day, rich, and without a will. There were only two other brothers, my father and my Uncle William. In that case, Uncle William’s heirs would come in for half the estate.’ He stopped with a little embarrassment. ‘And my father was of opinion—my mother thought—— It seemed a little hard perhaps that people we know nothing of—and then, for his rank, and with all he has to keep up, my father is a poor man.’
‘So you came to see——?’
Whatever her own motives might be, Mrs. Swinford had no thought of letting off a culprit of another kind. The young man grew red under her searching eye. ‘You thought it a pity,’ she went on, ‘that the money you could spend so much better should be wasted upon a couple of insignificant women—who perhaps had never heard, never knew that they had any claim to it, so would have been none the worse?’
‘You take me up too sharply,’ answered Lord Will. ‘I don’t think I meant anything like that. I meant that it was best to see something of them—to know something. My father has given Lady William an allowance all along. I don’t know that he was compelled to do it. He has not abandoned his brother’s widow. We thought that perhaps——’
‘I will not ask what you find so much difficulty in putting into words. What would your father say to any one who gave him a chance of proving—that Emily Plowden was not William Pakenham’s widow at all?’
She had lowered her voice, but yet spoke with such a keenness of meaning that she was heard further than she intended. Leo came striding out of the dark where he was, calling out in a voice of indignation, ‘Mother!’ She turned to him and waved her hand quickly, threateningly, without any of the former consciousness of a gracious pose.
‘Go away!’ she cried, ‘go away, go away! What I am saying is not for you. Go away, Leo Swinford, or you may hear something you will like still less—go away, go away!’
‘Swinford,’ said Lord Will, standing up, ‘this you see is too serious to be suppressed. Whether it’s fact or not, don’t you see I must hear out what your mother has got to say?’
Leo did not make any reply. He retired again to the darker part of the room, but instead of lounging about drew forward a chair almost ostentatiously, and placed himself therein.
‘I see,’ said Mrs. Swinford, with a laugh, ‘the Devil’s Advocate—on the part of his client. That will not make any difference. Would you like me to tell you how these two came together? I can do so in every detail.’
‘The question for me is,’ said Lord Will, after a pause: for to tell the truth, being a young man with a clear view of his own interests, but no wickedness in him, nor desire to harm his neighbours—at least no more than was essential to benefit himself—he was a little frightened by the gleam of devilry in Mrs. Swinford’s eyes; and he was well enough aware—as people in society are aware of everything of the kind—that there was something about Mrs. Swinford herself which had kept her out of England for so long. ‘The question for me is simply about the marriage. If there is scandal there is no use in raking up old scandals; besides, whatever happened before, if she is his wife and the girl his child, nothing else matters to us. I am sure it would be all very interesting—but you see——’
‘I am not going to rake up old scandals,’ Mrs. Swinford said, ‘but as it all happened within my knowledge—— She was here—a pretty little country girl, nothing more. She has immensely improved—quite, quite a different creature. A girl I had taken a fancy to. I am not sure that she did not teach Leo a little. That was her standing, the daughter of the parish clergyman.’
‘That I am sure she did not,’ said Leo from behind; ‘you forget that I had a governess, mother.’
‘Oh, you are there still, old Truepenny! You seem practising for the ghost in Hamlet, Leo. No, decidedly I cannot go on while he is there. It shall be for another time. To-morrow you will come to me in my boudoir before you go away.’
Lord Will looked round to his friend with an appealing air. Then going up to him, ‘Swinford,’ he said, ‘like a good fellow, let me hear it all now. I must know it.’
‘In order, if you can, to keep what is theirs from two helpless women?’
‘I want to keep nothing that is theirs from any one,’ said the young man, with an angry flush.
‘And yet it appears this is what you came here for. But forewarned is forearmed. Yes, you shall hear it all now; I will not interfere.’
‘Is he gone?’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘really gone? Leo is the most scrupulous and delicate of men. He hates your talk of the clubs, gossip and scandal, as he calls it. If I had brought him up in England would it have been so? Shut the door, and draw the curtain, Lord Will. I have the temperature kept up as well as I can, but there are always cold winds about.’ She shivered a little and drew round her a film of a white shawl that had been hanging over her chair. ‘Now come back and put yourself there. Now I may speak my mind.’
‘You must know,’ she went on after all had been done as she ordered, ‘that your uncle William was a great deal here in this house—a very great deal—it was a kind of home to him. I cannot say that I myself remarked that he had been attracted by Emily Plowden, but I have told you that she had a certain bread-and-butter-prettiness. I do not say beauté de diable, for it was neither beauté, nor had she enough in her for the devil to have anything to do with it. Youth alone sometimes attracts a man. Enfin, I never saw anything of it: but one evening, nay, it was pretty late—he came to me’—she paused a little and drew a long breath—‘to tell me—it was a confused story—something about having committed himself. Mr. Swinford, Leo’s father, was a little like Leo, but more English, more rigid. He burst in while this was being explained to me, took up a false idea, got what you call the wrong end of the stick——’ She spoke not with her usual ease, but with strange breaks of breathlessness. ‘Enough, he got it all wrong, completely wrong from beginning to end, and stormed and made a scene. And when he understood that it was Emily who was concerned—Emily had always been a great favourite,’ with the electrical tinkle running through her words, ‘he insisted that a marriage should take place at once. She left our house late that night, escorted by your uncle: and what happened I cannot tell. I never met her again except in Paris, where she was called Lady William, but saw no society, except the sort of men among whom your poor uncle, by that time heartbroken and misunderstood——’
‘But why heartbroken—if he had been in love with her?’
‘You are an innocent young man,’ said Mrs. Swinford, tapping him on the shoulder with her fan. ‘Oh, a very innocent dear boy! You don’t think what a man like that would feel with a creature like her—a country girl tied to him, and no doubt leading him a life! She kept him—from saying a word to me, watching over him like a cat over a mouse. He was burning to tell me—something; I know not what. My husband also was much prejudiced, and would not let us meet. So that I never heard his secret, if there was a secret, as I suppose there must have been. I have never seen her again till I saw her last month, shining as Lady William, and believed in by all the country folk—taking precedence,’ Mrs. Swinford cried with her little laugh, throwing up her fine hands, with all her rings flashing, ‘upon next to nothing a year.’
‘But she was acknowledged by my uncle as his wife.’
‘She was called Lady William among the sort of demi-monde they lived in. But what happened between the time she left my house and the time I saw her there——’
‘Do you mean to say that my uncle eloped with this young lady, Mrs. Swinford?’
My dear Lord Will, you are young, but you know the world. They left the house together, late at night. I tell you, quite late, after midnight. He, a man who was known to be—well, not the safest for women: and she a country girl of nineteen—oh, very well able to take care of herself, but as silly and ignorant as they usually are: and—I know no more.’
Mrs. Swinford threw up her hands again, with the dazzling rings. There was a thrill and tremble in her whole frame with the excitement of the story, which was so elaborately false yet so nearly true. The young man had not seated himself a second time. He stood leaning upon the mantelpiece, his head bent, looking down upon the blazing fire.
‘And you?’ he said, ‘you allowed a girl to go out of your house like that—a girl, unprotected?’
‘What could I do?’ said Mrs. Swinford. ‘I was not her keeper, neither was I in command of affairs. I tell you that my husband insisted——’
‘For the marriage, you said, for a marriage—that was very different.’
‘Ah, you are difficile! And she, a hot-headed girl full of her own attractions, do you think she would be restrained——’
‘From leaving home with her lover in the dead of night?’
‘Her lover!’ cried Mrs. Swinford, with the tingling laugh; ‘her lover!’
‘Was he not her lover? For heaven’s sake say what you mean.’
There was a little pause again, through which her laugh ran on, as if she could not stop it when once it had begun. Lord Will was the first to speak. He said: ‘All this is very curious and dramatic and strange; but the one question of my uncle’s marriage is, after all, the chief thing. I don’t think my father ever entertained any doubt. It is in the peerage——’
‘That is no proof,’ said Mrs. Swinford sharply.
‘I know; but still—my father was sent for at his death. There was no suspicion. I have heard that it was a mésalliance, but that is all I have ever heard.’
‘Your father arrived when he was dying, had no communication with him, nor had any of his true friends. She kept them away. Lord Will, perhaps we have talked on this question long enough; it is no matter to me, it is only you who are affected. If there is money involved it is of the more consequence. You will require proof of the marriage before you do anything further. That is all you have to do. Ask her to send in her certificates, child’s birth, and all that. Women of that class are very wary; they generally see after their papers. I have thought it over; I thought it all over before I made up my mind to speak to you. I felt that I could not allow what might be a great wrong to be done to the family of one who was once a dear friend——’
Mrs. Swinford put her handkerchief lightly to her eyes; it was scarcely substantial enough to have imbibed one tear. And there were perhaps other reasons why tears would have been out of place; but, had they existed at all, they would have been not dew, but fire.