"It is the post, Aunt," said Aspasia; "and a letter from Runkle."
She stood at the door of the attic, looking in upon them with something unfriendly in the expression of her eyes. The tone in which she announced Lady Gerardine's correspondent was not without a shade of malicious triumph.
Rosamond and Major Bethune were sitting one at each end of the old writing-table that had been Harry English's. Between them lay a pile of papers. From the landing, Baby had heard Bethune's voice uplifted in unwonted animation, and then the ring of her aunt's laugh.
As she entered, the man rose. But Lady Gerardine merely turned her head towards the intruder with an involuntary contraction of the eyebrows.
"Dear child," she said, and Aspasia felt the impatience of interruption under the gentleness of the tone, "we are at work."
"At work! It had sounded like it," thought the girl, ironically.
"Runkle writes from Brindisi," she said, turning over in her hand the thin envelope with the foreign stamp. "We shall have him home directly."
If she had hoped to create a sensation with her news, here was a failure. Bethune stood impassive. Lady Gerardine had all the air of one to whom Sir Arthur's movements were the least of concerns. She turned with a little impatient gesture to Major Bethune!
"Do sit down again," she said, "and go on. You have not told me whether Harry won the race. Oh, he must have won. I never saw any one ride as he did."
Aspasia's pretty, defiant countenance changed. Of late she had occasionally known an undefined lurking anxiety about her aunt—it now sprang out of ambush and seized her again. She put one hand over Rosamond's clasped fingers, and with the other held the letter before the abstracted eyes.
"But you must read it," she said, half tenderly, half authoritatively.
"Presently," said Lady Gerardine. And then, as if irritated by the disturbing document, seized it and laid it on one side. "Here, Baby," said she, "come and take your favourite place on the floor, and Major Bethune will begin his story again. You will like to hear how Harry took the conceit out of these Lancers who thought that nobody could ride a horse but themselves."
Baby flung a swift look at Bethune, half appeal, half fright. He was gnawing the corner of his moustache and staring under his heavy brows at Rosamond's lace—beautiful, unconscious, eager. He seemed perplexed.
"But, my goodness," cried Aspasia, and for very little more she would have burst into tears, "you know what the Runkle is, both of you. Don't you see this is perfectly idiotic? Some one will have to read his letter and see what he's got to say."
"Read it you, then," retorted Lady Gerardine, with sudden heat. Her eyes flashed, the blood rushed into her cheeks. She was as angry as the sleeper who is shaken from some fair dream that he would fain hold fast. Thereupon Baby's temper flamed likewise. She shrugged her shoulders, snapped the letter from the table, tore it open. Lady Gerardine began to sort the papers before her, once more determinedly abstracted from the situation. The girl flung herself down on the window-seat below the dormer, and, with pouting lips and scornfully uplifted eyebrows, set to work to peruse the marital document.
"Poor Runkle hopes," she cried sarcastically, "that you have not been making yourself ill again with anxiety about him because he missed the last mail. (Fancy, if we'd only known dear Runkle missed the last mail!) You must forgive him, Aunt. Lady Aspasia insisted on being taken to Agra, to see the Taj.... Runkle will be in England almost as soon as this letter. (Oh, joy!) Lady Aspasia has insisted on his going to stay at Melbury Towers first. She is having all sorts of interesting people to meet him. (Aren't you jealous, Aunt?) When once she's got him, she doesn't mean to let him go—(Fancy, the Runkle!)—Oh——" She dropped her hands with the crinkling thin sheet and surveyed Lady Gerardine with some gravity: "He wants us to join him there!"
"Who—where?"
"Us—you and me, Aunt Rosamond, at Melbury. We're to meet him there, he says, immediately, and stay over Christmas. Lady Aspasia will write."
"I cannot go," said Rosamond, quietly, as if that decided the question.
Once again Aspasia hesitated in distress between the advisability of discussion with any one so unreasonable, and the danger of exciting a highly nervous patient. With a despairing shake of her fluffy head, she finally returned to the letter and read on in a voice from which all the angry zest had departed.
"'I shall spend a couple of days in Paris. Lady Aspasia has implored me to give her my opinion upon some old furniture. I propose, however, to send Muhammed Saif-u-din—my native secretary, you remember—straight to you at Saltwoods. He has some important work to finish for me, and Jani will know how to look after him. He will arrive about the evening of the tenth.' That's to-morrow," said the girl, breaking off. "Lord, I'm glad you're here, Major Bethune! Gracious! This old place is creepy enough without having a black man wandering about the passages and the orchards.... Fancy us, all alone in the middle of the downs! He might cut all our throats, and nobody know anything, till the baker came. I do think our Runkle might keep his own blackamoors to himself."
Rosamond looked indifferent. She drummed the table softly with her fingers, as if in protest against the waste of time. Bethune still stood without speaking. His attitude had not changed a fraction, neither had his brooding face. Aspasia thought that she could have flung the inkpot at him with much satisfaction.
"That's all," she concluded drily; "Runkle is his dear wife's devoted husband." She threw a hard emphasis on the words. Rosamond suddenly paled and set her lips close.
"Oh yes! there's a postscript; he wants an answer immediately to Claridge's—and who do you think was their fellow traveller? Dr. Chatelard—he's to be at Melbury, too. It's all fish that comes to Lady Aspasia's net—evidently. Well?"
Still there was silence.
It was a clear day. A shaft of wintry sunshine pierced in between the ivy sprays, and caught the girl as she sat; her crisp aureole of hair seemed palely afire; sparks of the same faint yellow flame enkindled her eyes, and even the ends of her long eyelashes. She sat stiff and stern, her face was somewhat pallid. Bethune glanced at her suddenly. The sky was blue through the little panes beyond: he thought she made a quaintly pretty picture.
"Well!" repeated Miss Cuningham, "you had better wire to Runkle, I think."
Lady Gerardine rose from her seat with so swift a movement that, startled, Baby jumped from her perch. The elder woman was passion white; her nostrils were dilated.
"Leave me, Aspasia," she said, pointing to the door with a gesture at once dignified and incensed. "You disturb me."
"Well, I never!" exclaimed the ill-used girl. She checked herself suddenly and made a rush for the passage; if she spoke another word the tears would certainly come, and that (she thought) would be the last straw.
Quick as she was, Bethune was before her. He opened the door for her to pass. His air of detachment, the banality of the courtesy, seemed to her an insult; she flung a look of scathing reproach at him as she flounced by.
With Sir Arthur's letter clutched in her hand she sought refuge in her own room; and there on the small white bed shed some of the bitterest and angriest tears she had ever known. The thought of the two in the attic room galled her beyond endurance.
"Hasn't she had two husbands already?" sobbed she to herself, catching at the crudest conclusions with all the inconsequence of her years, "and couldn't she leave just this one man alone? ... 'You disturb me'—oh!"
Yet Bethune had remained in the attic scarcely a minute after Aspasia herself had left it. When he had returned to the table, Lady Gerardine had gazed at him a span or two with vague eyes—then she had passed her hand over her forehead, sighed wearily, and fallen into her seat.
"I can do no more to-day!" she had said. "Take those papers. You see I have copied out all in sequence, even the most trivial detail, till the Sandhurst examination. Make what use of them you like. I—forgive me, it is very stupid—but I feel troubled. And please—do not talk to me about this any more until I ask you to."
So she had dismissed him. And, dismissed, he returned to the study, which had been allotted for his use, and placed her voluminous notes with his own typewritten manuscript, pending the task of collation. Then he fell into a long reverie, and his thoughts were neither of Harry English nor of Miss Aspasia Cuningham.
* * * * *
But even in anger Baby was loyal; some instinct, rather than any positive train of reasoning, told her that Sir Arthur's arrival at the present juncture would inevitably precipitate matters to a most undesirable climax. On the other hand: how keep him away if his wife persisted in her attitude of indifference and silence? ...
"Good gracious, we'll have Runkle turning up in a special train before the week's out!" How to prevent it?
With much labour she finally concocted and despatched a telegram of Machiavellian artfulness to await arrival at Claridge's, taking further upon herself to sign it in Lady Gerardine's name:
Just received letter. Overjoyed return, trust you can make arrangements to join me here at once; unfortunate presence of guest prevents my leaving. Otherwise would meet you London before Melbury.
"That will do it, I think," said the astute young lady. "If Runkle thinks that any one is trying to dictate to him or to interfere with his own sacred arrangements—the trick is done."