Capricious Caroline Part 25

It seemed an incongruous thing for this woman, so exquisitely arrayed, to be doing little menial duties. But Camilla was very thoughtful in lots of things. She never permitted any one of the maids to sit up for her.

Late as it was, a bright fire was still burning in the grate, and her room was warm and cosy.

She sat down in the big easy-chair in front of the fire.

Her thoughts still hovered about Broxbourne. When she was tired, and there was no excitement, she was ripe for remorse, for self-recrimination. And now it seemed to her overstrained nerves that she was tainted with the very coa.r.s.eness, the vulgarity of the man she hated so much.

"If he will only go away," she said feverishly, "I shall feel free to breathe again: free of one horrible burden at all events! and he spoke very definitely of going to-night. Now I am sure," she said the next moment, "he can know nothing. If he had, he _must_ have let me realize this in some way or other. We have been so much together. I have wanted to be with him as much as I could, just on purpose to watch him! And if he does not know now, why should he ever know? If I could only set the matter right unknown to him!" She gave a long sigh, and shut her eyes for a moment. "What a lot of things there are to set right! What a fearful lot!"...

She sat with her eyes closed for a little while, and then she roused herself and began to draw off her long gloves slowly. As she did so a little sc.r.a.p of paper fell from the palm of one. She picked it up. It had scribbled on it the amount she had lost that night at bridge.

This swept her thoughts sharply into the old, the well-worn channel.

"Forty-seven pounds!" she said to herself. "Oh, Lord, what a fool I am!

Why can't I play like other people do? I shall have to settle this to-morrow. Ena will be round here with the milk to get her money. How I hate losing to women."

She got up with a jerk, and her letters were scattered on the ground.

As she stooped and picked them up she glanced at the writing on each.

One was from Agnes Brenton, the others looked like bills, with the exception of one that was addressed in a handwriting she knew and feared only too well.

It was a letter from Colonel Lancing, her husband's father.

Camilla bit her lip sharply and trembled. She flung off her beautiful theatre wrap, and stood deliberating with the letter unopened in her hand. Then with a sort of grim shadow on her face she took the plunge, and tore open the envelope.

The very look of the letter, with its straight, hard characters had an accusing tone about it. It started without any courteous beginning.

It was a horrible letter for Camilla Lancing to read. Clearly, coldly, uncompromisingly the writer put before her his knowledge of all those many facts that she had worked so hard to keep concealed from him.

Her life of debt and difficulty, her extravagances, her gambling, her friends, and her follies were denounced in hard, deliberate terms.

She was judged without mercy, without a chance of defence; and her sentence was written in the same hard, merciless way.

Colonel Lancing announced that the allowance he had made her since his son's death was taken from her; her independence was to cease at once.

"My son's children have been left too long in the miserable atmosphere of the life you affect; they are no longer infants, and I claim them.

They will come to my home, and be reared in the way they should be reared, and if you conform to my commands you may live with them. But let us understand one another clearly. Here there will be permitted no reckless folly, no sinful waste; none of those things that have brought you to where you are. You will be given a place with my daughters, because you are the children's mother, and for no other reason; your life will be ordered entirely by me, and in accordance with what I hold to be proper and fit for a woman in your position. Refuse this, and I wash my hands of you; you may sink to what depth you like. But the children shall not sink. I have been patient too long, hoped too long.

I now see that there is no good in you, and I mean to stand between these children and the harm you would do them."

Camilla stood like one transfixed.

The letter fluttered from her hand and lay on the floor.

The strong light of the electric light that was placed above her long mirror fell mercilessly upon her.

Her radiant charm seemed blotted out in this moment. She was like a woman blanched with some acute physical suffering.

This blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly. She had always known that she was an object of dislike, even of hatred, to her husband's people, that her claim upon them was recognized grudgingly; but she had quickly taught herself to think about them as little as possible. Her dependence only angered her when it had seemed to demand something of her. Even now it was not the hurt to herself that sent the blood running like ice in her veins; it was this stern revelation of authority, this demand for her children and the knowledge that, placed as she was, defiance to that authority was out of the question.

She put out her hand and steadied herself by the toilette-table; but she trembled and swayed as she stood, and once her eyes turned to the door in a hunted way, as though she could fas.h.i.+on out of the shadows on the landing the figure of the stern old man, who denounced her in words she dared not repeat to herself, who claimed from her the dearest possession life held for her.

The silent emptiness of the room came upon her all at once as the clock on the mantelpiece chimed three. Four hours of solitude stretched before her. Four hours before she could expect Dennis to knock at her door! Four hours of heart degradation and anguish, and deadly sickening fear! She put up one cold hand and pushed her hair back from her brow.

It seemed to her as if already she were alone; already she had been robbed of those little lives that made everything sweet, even the darkest hour.

"I am frightened," she said to herself, "I am frightened!

frightened!... What shall I do?"

She began to pace the room, averting her eyes from the letter that lay on the floor. Once she said with her pale lips--

"Violet has done this!"

Another time she almost cried aloud as if with a sudden pain. Then all at once she stood still. Her expression changed. Her face flamed with colour, and she commenced with cold, feeble fingers to get out of her beautiful gown.

A feverish intention born of that sudden thought began to run like wildfire in her veins. She tore at the hooks, she had no thought for the delicacy of the lace, or the fragility of the material. She almost spurned the gown with her foot as it slipped from her, and she veritably threw aside the jewelry she had worn.

On her way to the door she only paused to fold herself in her warm dressing-gown and to shed her high-heeled satin shoes. Then softly, and with that same curious fever urging her on, she mounted the stairs cautiously till she stood outside the room where her children slept.

Caroline was a light sleeper. She started up in bed nervously as she heard the door open and some one move softly into the room.

"Who is it?" she asked. "Who is there? Is it you, Dennis? Has anything happened?"

Camilla came to the foot of the bed. She could not speak; she was breathing hardly, with difficulty. At first the girl could not distinguish her clearly, the light was so dim; but almost immediately she recognized that it was not Dennis who had come, and, slipping in haste from the bed, she went at once to the bowed figure that sat rocking itself to and fro, breathing in that painful fas.h.i.+on, as if struggling with some great suffering.

"You are ill; what can I do for you? Tell me. Oh, please tell me!"

Caroline said, her nerves all ajar.

Camilla caught at her two hands.

"I ... I have had a shock," she said, when she could speak, "and I am frightened ... very frightened. I cannot stay alone. I want to be near the children. I _must_ have the children with me.... I have come to take them downstairs."

To her suffering, distorted, mental vision in this moment Caroline looked like some spirit, tall and straight in her long, white nightgown, with her dark hair falling in two heavy plaits from her small, smooth head.

The girl was more than a little frightened herself, but she calmed herself with an effort.

It was, of course, impossible for her even to guess at what had happened; nor did she wish to, she only wanted to help, to comfort, if possible, for she realized that she had to minister to one who was pa.s.sing through no ordinary ordeal.

Putting her finger on her lip as a gesture of silence, she drew Camilla to her feet.

"I will go down with you," she whispered, and they pa.s.sed together out of the room, but Camilla's mind dwelt on the children.

"Don't separate me from them," she said; her voice was so changed, so dull, so hoa.r.s.e. "Don't stand between me and the children," she said almost pa.s.sionately.

"If you will go downstairs," said Caroline, quietly and gently, "I will bring the children down. I don't think they will wake. Make the bed ready and turn the lights low. I think we will put them into the blankets, they will not feel the cold that way."

At first she had been on the point of suggesting that Camilla should stay in the nursery and take her bed, but she quickly felt that it would be a wise thing to occupy the other woman a little, for even to her untutored eye there were unmistakable signs of acute and dangerous mental tension about Camilla at this moment.

"If you will go and make everything ready and come up again, you might carry Baby down," she whispered.