Part 14 (1/2)

”I knew it.”

”You did, you wise woman. And you will keep house for me when I am gone?

You will take care of the dogs for me? You will oscillate between Hazels and town? You will keep the places ready against our return? You are never to leave us.”

Mrs. Morres's eyes overflowed.

”My dear,” she said, ”it would have broken my heart to have left you.

And Mary--what is to become of Mary?”

”I have a plan for Mary, unless she will stay here with you.”

”I must earn my bread,” said Mary.

”For all the bread you eat, I eat four times as much as you. Still, you have talents to be used for the many, as Sir Michael Auberon said. I have no right to keep you from them. You will talk to Robin Drummond about that. He is starting a bureau for purposes of organisation amongst the women. He has had his eye on you. I told him he could not have you.

Now, it will fill a gap, perhaps. I shall need you again.”

”The funny thing,” said Mrs. Morres, and the amus.e.m.e.nt had come back in her voice--”is that Colonel St. Leger won't like your marriage at all.

He has always wanted you to be married. But now--this African marriage--he will talk about it as though you were marrying a man of colour, Agatha, my dear. How his eyebrows will go out!”

”To think,” said Mary, with a little sigh, ”that the novel is unfinished, after all.”

”A novel is so much more interesting,” said Lady Agatha, ”when you live it, Mary. Besides, it has troubled me that if I published the novel I must come into compet.i.tion with the legitimate workers. They should form a Trades' Union against us, women of leisure and money, to keep us from poaching on their preserves. They really should. My dears, I have a presentiment that the novel never will be finished.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE HEART OF A FATHER

Oddly enough, seeing the General's feeling towards his sister-in-law, seeing, too, that he and Nelly had hardly ever had a thought or taste that was not in common, a certain affection grew up on Nelly's part for Lady Drummond. An acute observer would have said that the affection had something conscience-stricken about it. There were times when Nelly's eyes asked pardon of the Dowager for some offence committed against her, and this usually happened when the Dowager was making much of her, as of a daughter-in-law who would be dearly welcome when the time came.

Something of the love Lady Drummond had borne for her husband had pa.s.sed on to his niece. She was immensely proud, in her secret heart, of the deeds of the Drummonds. Despite her hectoring ways, she looked up to and admired the General, although he had been too simple to discern the fact and profit by it. Robin's divergence from his father's ways was, secretly, an acute disappointment to her. When she caressed Nelly with a warmth which none of her friends would have credited her with possessing, there was compunction with the tenderness. The child ought to have had the delight of marrying a soldier, a hero whom she could adore, as she herself had adored her Gerald. When she pressed the golden head to her angular bosom she was asking the girl's pardon for her son's shortcomings.

”I shall have heroic grandchildren,” she said to herself. ”Although Robin is a throwback to the Quaker, the grandsons of Gerald and Denis Drummond must be fighting men.”

She pondered long over those grandchildren, and derived a grim pleasure from the thought of them. She even spoke of them to the General, when Nelly was out of hearing.

”It was a disappointment to both of us that Robin is a man of peace,”

she said, acknowledging the fact for the first time. ”Not but that he is a good boy--a very good boy. The fighting strain will recur in the next generation. We shall have soldiers among our grandchildren.”

”Grandchildren!” growled the General, turning very crimson in the face.

”I call it indelicate to discuss such subjects. As for Nelly's marrying, why, she's only a child. I should feel very little obliged to the man who would want to take her from me at her age.”

”Nelly is nineteen,” the Dowager reminded him, ”and the marriage can't be delayed much longer. It ought to be a source of satisfaction to us that the young people are so pleased with the arrangement. I know that Robin has never thought of anyone but his cousin, and I am sure it is just the same with the dear child.”

The General grew red again--not this time with anger, but rather as though the Dowager's words had stirred some sense of guilt in his breast. He muttered something grumpily, and, discovering that his favourite pipe must have been left in his own den, he escaped from Lady Drummond for a while.

As a matter of fact, his mind had been plotting mischief. He did not care so much that it was against the Dowager, if it had not been that the memory of his dead brother came in to complicate things. And, after all, his plotting seemed to have come to naught. He had gone so far as to invite young Langrishe to dinner for a specific occasion, without result. The young man had written to say that he had effected his exchange into the --th Madras Light Infantry, and would be so very much occupied up to the time of his departure that he feared dining out was out of the question.