Lady Rose's Daughter Part 37

"That's the hardest work I've done for many a long day," he said to himself, with a sigh of relief, as the hansom drove away. "I sha'n't turn nurse-maid when other trades fail. But they're nice little kids all the same.

"Now, then, c.o.x's--and the City"--he ran over the list of his engagements for the afternoon--"and by five o'clock shall I find my fair lady--at home--and established? Where on earth is Heribert Street?"

He solved the question, for a few minutes after five he was on Miss Le Breton's doorstep. A quaint little house--and a strange parlor-maid! For the door was opened to him by a large-eyed, sickly child, who looked at him with the bewilderment of one trying to follow out instructions still strange to her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE ENTERED UPON A MERRY SCENE"]

"Yes, sir, Miss Le Breton is in the drawing-room," she said, in a sweet, deliberate voice with a foreign accent, and she led the way through the hall.

Poor little soul--what a twisted back, and what a limp! She looked about fourteen, but was probably older. Where had Julie discovered her?

Warkworth looked round him at the little hall with its relics of country-house sports and amus.e.m.e.nts; his eye travelled through an open door to the little dining-room and the Russell pastels of Lady Mary's parents, as children, hanging on the wall. The _character_ of the little dwelling impressed itself at once. Smiling; he acknowledged its congruity with Julie. Here was a lady who fell on her feet!

The child, leading him, opened the door to the left.

"Please walk in, sir," she said, shyly, and stood aside.

As the door opened, Warkworth was conscious of a noise of tongues.

So Julie was not alone? He prepared his manner accordingly.

He entered upon a merry scene. Jacob Delafield was standing on a chair, hanging a picture, while Dr. Meredith and Julie, on either side, directed or criticised the operation. Meredith carried picture-cord and scissors; Julie the hammer and nails. Meredith was expressing the profoundest disbelief in Jacob's practical capacities; Jacob was defending himself hotly; and Julie laughed at both.

Towards the other end of the room stood the tea-table, between the fire and an open window. Lord Lackington sat beside it, smiling to himself, and stroking a Persian kitten. Through the open window the twinkling buds on the lilacs in the Cureton House garden shone in the still lingering sun. A recent shower had left behind it odors of earth and gra.s.s. Even in this London air they spoke of the spring--the spring which already in happier lands was drawing veils of peach and cherry blossom, over the red Sienese earth or the green terraces of Como. The fire crackled in the grate. The pretty, old-fas.h.i.+oned room was fragrant with hyacinth and narcissus; Julie's books lay on the tables; Julie's hand and taste were already to be felt everywhere. And Lord Lackington with the kitten, beside the fire, gave the last touch of home and domesticity.

"So I find you established?" said Warkworth, smiling, to the lady with the nails, while Delafield nodded to him from the top of the steps and Meredith ceased to chatter.

"I haven't a hand, I fear," said Julie. "Will you have some tea? Ah, Leonie, tu vas en faire de nouveau, n'est-ce pas, pour ce monsieur?"

A little woman in black, with a shawl over her shoulders, had just glided into the room. She had a small, wrinkled face, bright eyes, and a much-flattened nose.

"Tout de suite, monsieur," she said, quickly, and disappeared with the teapot. Warkworth guessed, of course, that she was Madame Bornier, the foster-sister--the "Propriety" of this _menage_.

"Can't I help?" he said to Julie, with a look at Delafield.

"It's just done," she said, coldly, handing a nail to Delafield. "_Just_ a trifle more to the right. Ecco! Perfection!"

"Oh, you spoil him," said Meredith, "And not one word of praise for me!"

"What have you done?" she said, laughing. "Tangled the cord--that's all!"

Warkworth turned away. His face, so radiant as he entered, had settled into sharp, sudden lines. What was the meaning of this voice, this manner? He remembered that to his three letters he had received no word of reply. But he had interpreted that to mean that she was in the throes of moving and could find no time to write.

As he neared the tea-table, Lord Lackington looked up. He greeted the new-comer with the absent stateliness he generally put on when his mind was in a state of confusion as to a person's ident.i.ty.

"Well, so they're sending you to D----? There'll be a row there before long. Wish you joy of the missionaries!"

"No, not D----," said Warkworth, smiling. "Nothing so amusing. Mokembe's my destination."

"Oh, Mokembe!" said Lord Lackington, a little abashed. "That's where Cecil Ray, Lord R's second son, was killed last year--lion-hunting? No, it was of fever that he died. By-the-way, a vile climate!"

"In the plains, yes," said Warkworth, seating himself. "As to the uplands, I understand they are to be the Switzerland of Africa."

Lord Lackington did not appear to listen.

"Are you a h.o.m.oeopath?" he said, suddenly, rising to his full and immense stature and looking down with eagerness on Warkworth.

"No. Why?"

"Because it's your only chance, for those parts. If Cecil Ray had had their medicines with him he'd be alive now. Look here; when do you start?" The speaker took out his note-book.

"In rather less than a month I start for Denga."

"All right. I'll send you a medicine-case--from Epps. If you're ill, take 'em."

"You're very good."

"Not at all. It's my hobby--one of the last." A broad, boyish smile flashed over the handsome old face. "Look at me; I'm seventy-five, and I can tire out my own grandsons at riding and shooting. That comes of avoiding all allopathic messes like the devil. But the allopaths are such mean fellows they filch all our ideas."

The old man was off. Warkworth submitted to five minutes' tirade, stealing a glance sometimes at the group of Julie, Meredith, and Delafield in the farther window--at the happy ease and fun that seemed to prevail in it. He fiercely felt himself shut out and trampled on.

Suddenly, Lord Lackington pulled up, his instinct for declamation qualified by an equally instinctive dread of boring or being bored.

"What did you think of Montresor's statement?" he said, abruptly, referring to a batch of army reforms that Montresor the week before had endeavored to recommend to a sceptical House of Commons.

"All very well, as far as it goes," said Warkworth, with a shrug.

"Precisely! We English want an army and a navy; we don't like it when those fellows on the Continent swagger in our faces, and yet we won't pay either for the s.h.i.+ps or the men. However, now that they've done away with purchase--Gad! I could fight them in the streets for the way in which they've done it!--now that they've turned the army into an examination-shop, tempered with jobbery, whatever we do, we shall go to the deuce. So it don't matter."

"You were against the abolition?"

"I was, sir--with Wellington and Raglan and everybody else of any account. And as for the violence, the disgraceful violence with which it was carried--"

"Oh no, no," said Warkworth, laughing. "It was the Lords who behaved abominably, and it'll do a deal of good."

Lord Lackington's eyes flashed.

"I've had a long life," he said, pugnaciously. "I began as a middy in the American war of 1812, that n.o.body remembers now. Then I left the sea for the army. I knocked about the world. I commanded a brigade in the Crimea--"

"Who doesn't remember that?" said Warkworth, smiling.

The old man acknowledged the homage by a slight inclination of his handsome head.

"And you may take my word for it that this new system will not give you men worth _a tenth part_ of those fellows who bought and bribed their way in under the old. The philosophers may like it, or lump it, but so it is."

Warkworth dissented strongly. He was a good deal of a politician, himself a "new man," and on the side of "new men." Lord Lackington warmed to the fight, and Warkworth, with bitterness in his heart--because of that group opposite--was nothing loath to meet him.

But presently he found the talk taking a turn that astonished him. He had entered upon a drawing-room discussion of a subject which had, after all, been settled, if only by what the Tories were pleased to call the _coup d'etat_ of the Royal Warrant, and no longer excited the pa.s.sions of a few years back. What he had really drawn upon himself was a hand-to-hand wrestle with a man who had no sooner provoked contradiction than he resented it with all his force, and with a determination to crush the contradictor.