LEO SWINFORD had been during all these proceedings haunted with a sense of a visitor about the house, whose comings and goings were kept secret from him. Those who were concerned were much too clever to permit this to be known or suspected by the risks of absolute meeting, by sudden withdrawal into corners, whisking past of clandestine shadows in the dark. It was not that he ever met Mrs. Brown on the stairs or in the hall, or just missed meeting her, as is generally the case under such circumstances. She had, as has been said, an entrance kept for herself, which opened upon the back part of the house, where there was a thick shrubbery, and where it would have been as impossible to find a fugitive in the dark as to find the proverbial needle in a bottle of hay. And Artémise was far too deeply learned in all the lore of evasion to be caught within the house. Nevertheless, he was well aware that the place was haunted by a personality very, perhaps unjustly, disagreeable to him, and with which he associated all those vague suspicions and troubles which haunt the mind of a child brought up among family secrets and discoveries. He had been accustomed all his life to this uncomfortable sense of some one about who was not seen, who had presumably unacknowledged errands of mischief-making, and whose presence, whose very existence, was inimical to family peace. That Leo’s thoughts went a great deal too far, and that this curious secret agent and confidante exercised, in fact, no evil influence, but had in many cases held the side of honour and justice, was a fact that Leo was not only quite unaware of, but totally incapable of believing in. It had always been, indeed, a sort of consolation when there was anything equivocal in Mrs. Swinford’s proceedings, to be able to think that it was not his mother who was to blame, but that wretched Artémise. Leo’s father, so long as he lived, had laid that flattering unction to his soul, and during his lifetime the appearance of Artémise had always been the occasion of domestic trouble. It was natural that Leo in his youth should have had no such right or reason to object or interfere; and he had not even been of his father’s faction in the house until that father was dead, and a natural compunction towards a man not happy in his life nor lamented in his death, awoke his sense of reason, and of right and wrong in this matter. But he had always had an instinctive dislike to Artémise. She had teased and sneered at him as a child, which is a recollection seldom altogether forgotten, and she was his mother’s evil genius in life—or so it gave him a certain relief to believe.
The commission given him by Lady William to find this woman, so strange and incomprehensible a commission, and which was not explained in any way, roused all the indefinite feelings of disgust, and a kind of despair which had filled his mind from the moment of her reappearance (after a long interval, in which he had been of opinion that she was permanently shaken off) in the house. He had expressed to his mother so distinctly his objection to her presence, that it was difficult for him to reopen the subject, and still more difficult to suggest, as he was tempted to do, that since Mrs. Swinford could not live without her, it would be better on the whole that she should come to live in the house than haunt it clandestinely. Difficult, however, as these overtures were, he felt the necessity of making them, as soon as he understood that the finding of Artémise was necessary to his friend. What would not he have done to serve her, to please her? The laugh with which she had turned off his offer of service, the suggestion that such offers belonged to the regions of fairy tales, had scarcely been necessary to show Leo how futile, so far as she was concerned, was his devotion. But this conviction rarely puts an end to devotion, and it must be said that as there is fashion in all things, it was not disagreeable to Leo’s fashion of man to entertain a devotion of this kind, however hopeless, for an older woman, whom it was, in the nature of things, impossible that he could ever marry. In the nature of things as seen by her, that is to say, and which he clearly divined. His double breeding as Frenchman and Englishman did him service in this complication of fate. As an Englishman he was aware that such relationships as are possible to a Frenchman’s ideal, without apparently injuring it in his standard of honour, were here as impossible as that the sky should fall: while as Frenchman he was not so determined on that strong step of marriage which seems the foregone conclusion of love in an Englishman’s eyes. He was willing to be utterly devoted to this lady of dreams who was not for him, and to ask no more, seeing that more could not be—but that her wishes should be obeyed and her commissions executed at whatever cost, was the thing most certain to his mind.
‘Mother,’ he said, on the first occasion when he had the possibility of an interview, for Mrs. Swinford, after the little controversy over Lord Will, had exercised her usual caprice, appearing only when she pleased at the common table, and ‘was not well enough’ to receive even her own son in her boudoir, ‘you have, I think, a very frequent visitor.’
‘I—have very frequent visitors! Where do I find them? I should be glad if you would tell me, Leo.’
‘I have no desire to be disagreeable, mother—you have Artémise.’
‘Ah, Artémise! Yes, fate for once has been a little favourable to me. To keep me from dying of England, and your village, and all the exciting circumstances of my life. I have Artémise—that is occasionally. You know that I am not permitted to have her here.’
‘Mother!’ he said; then subduing himself, ‘You are very much attached to this woman, who has never done anything but harm, so far as I know.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Swinford, ‘and what then? Is it not permitted to me to love as well as to hate? Artémise is the nearest to me in blood of any one in the world.’
‘You forget your son, it appears.’
‘My son—ah, that is a different matter. Sons have a way of being in opposition to their mothers. Besides, isn’t there a high authority which says that a mother is no relation, so to speak—an accident? It is so in English law.’
‘English law has little to do with you and me, or any law. Mother, if you prefer this Artémise to every one, why have her pay you visits clandestinely like——’
‘Like a lover!’ she said, with her tinkling laugh. ‘Well, say she is my lover and I like it; have it so.’
‘Such a simile is insulting,’ he said. ‘I resent for you that you should even yourself say it.’
‘Ah, but I do not resent; I like the simile. The thing itself might not be so impossible. But you are a Puritan, Leo, like your father. I have tried to prevent it, but one cannot stop the course of nature. Fortunately, my own constitution is not so.’
He rose in impatience, as was generally the result of these conversations, and paced the long dining-room from end to end. Then he returned to where she sat with her back to the fire, which she still insisted on, though it was now May. He stood half behind her, leaning on the mantelpiece. It was better, perhaps, than being face to face.
‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is, that if your comfort so depends upon this woman—whom I don’t pretend to like, as you know; but that does not matter: if your comfort depends upon her, mother, or if she is some pleasure to you, it would certainly be better to have her here, living with you, than skulking to and fro like a——’
‘Lover!’ she said again, with a laugh to madden him. Then she turned round upon him, as he stood with his head bent regarding the glow of the fire. ‘I don’t say that you’ve made your offer an insult, Leo, which would be the truth—but what is the cause of such a change? You have a motive. Ah! I think I see it!’
He looked up with a more profoundly clouded brow than had ever been seen in Leo before.
‘What do you see?’ he said.
She laughed again. Any one who has ever listened to the dreadful endless tinkling of an electric bell at a foreign railway station will understand how Mrs. Swinford laughed, and how it affected the nerves of those who listened.
‘Ah! I think I see!’ she repeated.
Perhaps it was because he was used to these agaceries that he bore it so well. What tempests of impatience were in his heart! He did not move. He remained as still as if he had been made in bronze, leaning against the mantelpiece till the laugh ceased. Then he said coldly:
‘I have expressed myself willing to give up what may be my own prejudice on your account, mother. I think it would be more dignified, more fit and becoming for you that your visitor did not come by stealth. What motive you credit me with I can’t tell. If you do not think fit to adopt my suggestion, so be it; but at least let her come openly, not by stealth.’
The tinkling began again with that supreme power of exasperation, and she said amid her laughing, every word coming tinkling out:
‘That you may have her at hand and within reach when she is wanted, eh? I divine you, my Leo. What is becoming for the mother who is so little capable of understanding that for herself, is a beautiful pretext—what is convenient for some one else——’
‘Who is the person,’ he said, suddenly lifting his eyes, ‘to whom it will be so convenient to know where this woman is?’ He did not shrink or show any consciousness as he thus carried the war into the enemy’s country. Leo, after all, was a man of the world, and his mother’s son.
‘Ah!’ she cried, stopping in her laugh, which was always a gain. ‘I congratulate you, my son, upon your aplomb. But don’t you know you take away all grace from your offer, if there were any in it, when you say this woman? How dare you speak of your mother’s dear friend and relation as this woman? It is an affront I will not bear.’
‘Mother, this is a subterfuge,’ said Leo indignantly.
‘And is not your proposal a subterfuge? Understand that I will manage things in my own way, Leo. Artémise shall come to me how she and I please. She shall stay with me if I wish it, and she consents to it, as would have been the case whatever you had felt on the subject. I am not here, you understand, as your housekeeper,’ she laughed scornfully, ‘or your dependent; I am, while I am here, the mistress of the house: and shall invite whom I please. If you think your order to shut her out affected me, any more than your order to admit her does now—I think we have said enough on this subject. You can give me your arm upstairs.’
She held out her arm, imperiously rising from the table, and Leo obeyed. They presented a group full of natural grace, as he led her carefully upstairs, subduing his steps to hers. She, wonderful in all her laces and draperies, a marquise, a lady of the old régime, exacting every sign of devotion; he, not made of velvet or brocade, as her cavalier ought to have been, but in the spare and reserved costume of modern days, with a manner very grave, very self-controlled, full of care, and attention, and duty. There was nothing in it of that pretty gallantry, so charming from a son to a mother, of which Leo for years of his life had been an example, but a serious care of guidance and protection, which was as different as night from day. They went upstairs thus, she leaning all her weight upon him, he careful above measure to keep her foot from stumbling even upon her own too ample skirts. When he had placed her in her favourite chair, and seen that she had everything she liked near her, he stood gravely by her side.
‘Is this your last word, mother?’ he said.
‘It is quite my last word. Should Artémise come here, I shall expect you to be civil to her. Should she not come, you will be careful to let her alone.’
‘I must act in that matter according to my own judgment,’ he said.
He could hear the tinkle of the laugh as he went away. That laugh!—it had been compared to silver bells dans les temps. It was not that now, but an electric jar or vibration that got on the nerves. Mrs. Swinford’s son did not think of this, or feel any pity for the woman who had descended thus from the poetic state of compliment and adulation. Sons, perhaps, rarely consider that downfall with any sympathy. And Leo was too angry to make any sentiment possible for the moment. He was all the more angry because of his own undisclosed motive, which his mother had been so quick to discover. Had he been quite single-minded, desiring only his mother’s comfort and honour, things might perhaps have gone better; but he was not single-minded. And now the question was, not how to justify his mother, but to discover for Lady William the woman she wanted—to secure her, wherever she was, and whatever might be the motive for which she was sought. He did not very clearly know what that was, nor was he sure as to the previous connection of Artémise with Lady William’s history. But his mother’s revelations to Lord Will had helped the vague recollections in his own mind, and he divined something of her possible importance—importance most probably (he thought) more fancied than real, for it would be in the nature of a woman to give weight to a personal witness of the marriage, above all papers and records. Importance or not, however, real or fancied as might be the need of her, it was enough that Lady William wanted her to make Leo’s action certain. She must be found, he said to himself, as he went downstairs.
He questioned Morris that evening carelessly: ‘Do you remember a lady, Morris, who came here one evening in the dusk? A lady—who insisted on disturbing Mrs. Swinford. Don’t you remember? And by dint of insisting was allowed to go in?’
‘Remember ‘er, sir!’ said Morris, with much emphasis. ‘I should just think I did—as well as I remember my own name.’
‘She has never,’ said Leo, carelessly aiming at a ball on the billiard table, ‘been here again?’
He spoke in so artificially careless a tone to convey no suspicion of any special meaning in the question, that Morris would not have been a man and a butler had he not been put upon the alert.
‘Oh, ‘asn’t she, sir!’ said Morris. ‘I should say, sir, as she’s here most days, is that lady; as if the house was her own——’
‘I have never seen her,’ said Leo, with as natural an expression of surprise as he could put on.
‘No more haven’t I,’ said Morris. ‘Never; and how she gets in and goes out is more nor I can say; but she’s favoured, sir, of course, in the ‘igher suckles; that we know.’
‘Morris, my man,’ said Leo briskly, ‘you forget yourself, I think. I asked you if a lady, who is a friend of my mother’s, had been here again: and you take it upon you to talk of how she comes into the house without attracting your intelligent attention, which was not the question at all.’
‘I ‘umbly beg your pardon, sir,’ said Morris; and here the conversation stayed. Leo felt that he had done as much as in the meantime it was possible to do. His own faculties alone must arrange the rest. Those faculties, thoroughly awakened and put to the sharpest usage that was in them, were, however, of but little use to Leo for a day or two. There could be no doubt, he felt sure, that Artémise was continually in the house. But it was impossible for him to storm his mother’s apartments in search of her, and equally impossible to show himself to a keen-eyed houseful of servants as in waiting to trap her near his mother’s door. The situation was one of the utmost difficulty, and demanded extreme caution, and the only result he attained after twenty-four hours’ sustained observation was that it was possible from Mrs. Swinford’s rooms to reach, without going near the formal entrance, a servants’ door, apparently little used, and which opened at an unfrequented angle of the house, quite apart from the noisy and populous kitchen entrance. He had made up his mind to post himself in the shrubbery close to this door at the hour of dinner, when his mother would imagine him to be occupied with his meal. She had sent down word that she herself was not coming to dinner, and the opportunity seemed propitious. Leo was pondering upon this resolution, and how to carry it out, as he returned from the village, where Lady William had told him that the need for finding Artémise was greater than ever. It was a hazy, rainy evening, not dark, but growing towards dusk, as he walked home soberly under his umbrella, full of this intention. And he had just passed the glimmer of the lake, all dimpled with the circlets of the falling rain, when a movement in the shrubbery behind caught his eye. The bushes were thick there, a heavy bosquet of all the flowering shrubs that make spring delicious, a thicket of lilac and syringa, which extended along the further side of the pretty piece of water. Leo scarcely paused to think, but, putting down his umbrella, and pulling himself together, started at full speed for the house to intercept the visitor who, on whatsoever errand, was making her way towards the back entrance: probably only a servant using the legitimate way. He was not near enough, nor was there light enough to make out absolutely who it was, or, indeed, more than that the figure was that of a woman, covered from head to foot with one of the shapeless garments, ulster or waterproof, which are the habitual wear of a humble class of the community. He managed so well that he reached the neighbourhood of the house sooner than this gliding figure, who was more a movement than a being, and whom, in a less excited state of his nerves, he would probably not have noticed at all. He made for the little entrance which he had discovered and arrived there before her. Would he be convicted of spying by the astonished eyes of some innocent maidservant? Or would he——? What was that? Certainly the movement had been there for a moment in the bushes, and there had been a pause—a pause was it of consternation to see him on the watch? A moment after, he perceived that the almost imperceptible quiver of the pale lilac, washed almost white with the rain, had gone further off; the visitor had retreated. He hurried along in the track, his heart beating. Certainly it was retreating. Down again along the edge of the little lake he followed, cautious, tracking the faint swaying in the branches. If the evening had not been perfectly still, he could not have noted any progress at all, the path of the fugitive was so judiciously chosen. Then he gave almost a shout of satisfaction; skirting among the bushes became no longer practicable, and, trusting to the dark and the rain, an indistinct form suddenly appeared in the open, moving like a shadow, but with great speed, over the grass. He uttered a cry, almost without knowing it, and launched himself forth in pursuit.