Part 59 (1/2)
Her eyes were inscrutable, and her lips were folded close.
”She was the wife of the Colonel commanding my old Regiment--Sir George Hawting. A grand old warrior, and something of a martinet. He married a third daughter of the Duke of Runcorn--Lady Lucy Briddwater.”
She said without the betraying flicker of an eyelash: ”I have seen the lady named....”
He said, with a p.r.i.c.k of self-reproach for having again turned the barb that festered in her bosom:
”Lady Lucy was a very lovely creature, and a very impulsive one. She lived not happily, and she died tragically.”
There was the ring of steel and the coldness of ice in the Mother's words:
”She met the fate she chose.”
He thought, looking at her:
”What a woman this is! How silent, how resourceful, how calm, how immeasurably deep! And why does she think of me as an opponent?” He went on, stung by that quiet marshalling of all her forces against him:
”Unhappily, the fate we choose for ourselves sometimes involves others.
The death of that unhappy woman and the father of her child left an innocent creature at the mercy of sordid, evil hands.”
”In evil hands, indeed, judging by--what you have told me.”
”I would give much to be able to trace her.” There was a heavy line between his eyebrows, and his eyes were stern and sad. ”It would be something to know what had become of her, even if she were dead, or worse than dead.”
A violent, sudden scarlet dyed her to the edge of the white starched coif.
Her mouth writhed as though words were bursting from her; but she nipped her lips together, and controlled her eyes. And still her silence angered and defied him. He went on:
”If I seem to you to harp painfully upon this subject, pardon me. You have my word that, without encouragement from you, I will not refer to it after to-day.” His close-clipped brown moustache was straightened by the tension of the muscles of his mouth. He pa.s.sed his palm over it, and continued speaking without moving a muscle of his face or taking his searching eyes from the Mother's.
”The name of the young lady who is so fortunate as to be your ward, and even more, the striking likeness I spoke of just now, have led me to hope that my dead friend's daughter was led by a Hand, in whose Divine guidance I humbly believe, to find the very shelter he would have chosen for her.
Pray answer, acquitting me in your own mind of persistence or inquisitiveness. Am I right or wrong?”
She might have been a statue of black marble, with wimple and face and hands of alabaster, she stood so breathlessly still. Her heart did not seem to beat; her blood was stagnant in her veins. She felt no faintness.
Her observation was unnaturally keen, her mind dazzlingly clear; her brain seemed to work with twice its ordinary power. She thought. He glanced at the shabby watch he wore upon the steel lip-strap, and waited. She was aware of the action, though she never turned her head. She was weighing the question, to tell or not to tell? Her soul hung poised like a seagull in the momentary shelter of a giant wave-crest. Another moment, and the battle with the raging gale and the driving halberds of the sleet would begin again.
She looked again towards Lynette, and in an instant her purpose crystallised, her line of action was made clear. She saw a little bunch of wax-belled white heath fall from the girl's scarlet belt in the act of rising. She saw Beauvayse s.n.a.t.c.h it greedily from the gra.s.s and read the glance that pa.s.sed between the golden-hazel and the green-grey eyes, and understood with a great pang of jealous mother-pain that she was no longer first in her beloved's heart. Then came a throb of unselfish joy at the knowledge that Richard's girl had come into her kingdom, that the divine right and heritage and crown of Womanhood were hers at last.
Were hers? Not yet, but might be hers, if every clue that led back to that tavern upon the veld could be broken or tangled in such wise that the keenest and most subtle seeker should be baffled and lost. It all lay clear before her now, the manipulation of events, the deft rearrangement of actual fact that might best be used to this end. As her clear brain planned, her bleeding heart trailed wings in the dust, seeking to lead the searcher away from the hidden nest, and now her motherhood and her pride and all the diplomacy acquired in her long years of rule rose up in arms to meet him.
They were not of equal height. Her great, changeful eyes, purple-grey now, dropped to encounter his. She regarded him quietly, and said:
”No one of your wide experience needs to be reminded that resemblances between persons who are not allied by blood exist, and are strangely misleading. But since you have conveyed to me in unmistakable terms your conviction that Miss Mildare is the daughter of--a mutual friend who bore that surname--is actually identified in your idea with that most unhappy child who was left orphaned some seventeen years ago--at--I think you said a veld hotel in the Orange Free State?”
He bowed a.s.sent, biting the short hairs of his moustache in vexation and embarra.s.sment.
”Hardly an hotel--a wretched shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the cattle-grazing country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein. And--it seems my fate to be continually bringing our conversation back to a--most unhappy and painful theme.”