Chapter V

On a certain morning in the last week in June, Lady Frances Hope rode into the courtyard of the Knightsbridge flats. Throwing her bridle to the man-servant who was attending her, she dismounted from her horse, gathered up her habit, and entered the doorway of the building.

Seating herself in the lift, she was borne upwards, and a few seconds later stepped out upon the second floor, and, going briskly forward, pressed the bell of Clodagh's hall door.

The summons was answered by the same maid who had admitted Clodagh on the day of her arrival; and seeing the visitor, she drew back instantly, throwing the door wide.

"Is Mrs. Milbanke up, Barkes?" Lady Frances asked. "I did not see her in the park this morning."

"Mrs. Milbanke didn't ride this morning, my lady. She is having breakfast in her own room. Shall I say your ladyship is here?"

Lady Frances replied by walking into the hall.

"No, thanks! I'll announce myself."

Stepping forward without ceremony she passed down the hall and opened the door of Clodagh's bedroom. But on the threshold she paused, interested by what she saw.

The two windows that looked upon the park were wide open, and through them the beautiful warm sunshine was pouring across the room, touching the old French furniture into a renewal of its glories. Drawn into the full radiance of this light, stood a small round table set with silver, china, and a bowl of flowers; and at the table sat Clodagh. She was wearing a simple dress of black muslin, and her hair--which gleamed almost bronze in the clear, strong sunshine--was twisted into one thick coil. But it was neither her dress nor appearance that attracted her visitor; it was something vaguely disturbing--something subtly suggestive--in her attitude, as she sat close to the table, an array of letters and papers spread before her, a gold pencil held thoughtfully against her lips.

Thinking it was a servant who had entered the room, she did not change her position with the opening of the door; and Lady Frances Hope had a full minute in which to observe her; then, having made her deductions, she allowed her presence to be known.

"Can you tolerate such an early visitor?" she asked.

Clodagh started almost guiltily, and drew the array of papers into a confused heap; then she rose hastily, laughing to cover her momentary confusion.

"How you frightened me!" she said. "I must be developing nerves. But come in! I am delighted!"

She went forward with apparent cordiality, and, taking her visitor's hand, kissed her.

"How nice and energetic you look! You make me feel very lazy. I wasn't in the mood for a ride this morning. Come in! Sit down!"

Lady Frances responded to the suggestion by moving across the room. Pausing by the breakfast-table, she bent forward and buried her face for a moment in the flowers, at the same time stealing a swift glance at the scattered letters beside Clodagh's plate. Then, straightening herself again with apparent nonchalance, she moved to the open window and stood looking down upon the park.

"Clodagh!" she said suddenly. "Are you busy? Can we talk?"

Clodagh turned sharply, and almost with a gesture of surprise. The whole round of her intercourse with Lady Frances Hope had been of so easy, of so superficial a nature--the whole tone of their friendship had been pitched in so unemotional a key--since the one night in the Paris hotel, when they had touched upon things vital to them both--that the suggestion of reality, or even gravity, brought a sudden uneasiness to her mind.

"Oh, of course!" she said uncertainly--"of course! Let us sit down."

She returned to her own seat and indicated another to her visitor with a slightly hurried movement.

But Lady Frances did not respond to the invitation. Instead, she wandered back to the table, and again bent over the bowl of flowers.

"Why are we always climbing--only to slip back again?" she asked irrelevantly.

Again a faint uneasiness touched Clodagh's face.

"I thought you enjoyed climbing."

"Not to-day. Clodagh, you'll think me a horrid nuisance, but it's about that money----"

She paused as she said the word, and involuntarily her quick glance passed once more over the papers on the table.

For a second Clodagh remained silent; then she spoke, a little slowly--a little haltingly.

"Oh yes--the money," she said.

Lady Frances looked at her shrewdly.

"Yes, you remember on Tuesday--when you borrowed that sixty pounds to pay old Lady Shrawle--I said I could wait for everything till August."

"Yes--oh yes!"

"Well, I've had a horrid drop since then--yesterday, in fact."

For a moment longer, Clodagh sat staring aimlessly at the papers in front of her; then she raised her head and looked at her companion. Her face was a little pale, but her eyes and lips looked almost scornfully unconcerned.

"Poor you!" she said easily. "What a bore! You must let me settle up our differences at once--to-day."

She rose and pushed back her chair.

A look of surprise crossed the older woman's face--this time it was surprise tempered with bewilderment.

"To-day! But can you? I know how many little expenses----" She waved her hand expressively towards the breakfast-table, with its many costly adjuncts.

Clodagh made a lofty gesture of denial; and, walking across the room, paused beside her bureau.

For a minute there was no sound in the room save the abrupt opening and shutting of one or two small drawers; then Clodagh turned round again, a cheque-book in her hand.

"Now tell me what I owe you," she said. "I'll write you a cheque and post-date it to July the first. Will that do? I draw my money then, you know."

"Perfectly. But, my dear Clodagh----"

But again Clodagh made a gesture that seemed to relegate the matter to a region of obscure--if not of absolutely contemptible--things.

"Don't trouble!" she said. "Money is never worth an argument. What do I owe?"

During her words, her companion had sat silent--speculative and suspicious. To her worldly mind, Clodagh's grand manner--Clodagh's extraordinary behaviour--indicated but one possibility. She had found means of augmenting her income!

Any knowledge of the false pride, the empty magnificence that will, metaphorically speaking, fling its last coin to a beggar, while passing on to penury, had never come within her experience. It needs the environments of such places as Orristown to bring them to maturity. She looked now at her companion, and her eyes narrowed in a sudden, triumphant satisfaction. Something that she had anticipated had come to pass! At the imagined discovery, she gave a quick laugh.

"If you insist on being so scrupulous----"

Clodagh looked round from the bureau at which she had seated herself.

"How much?" she said laconically.

Lady Frances pretended to knit her brows.

"Well, there was the eight hundred pounds at Nice--and the forty pounds the night of your return to town--the night we played bridge with Val and Deerehurst----"

She looked very quickly at Clodagh.

But Clodagh gave no sign. "And the fifty pounds a fortnight ago--besides the sixty for Lady Shrawle," she interrupted.

"Yes--oh yes! Let me see, that makes----"

"Nine hundred and fifty pounds," Clodagh interjected in a very quiet voice; and picking up a pen, she wrote out the cheque, signing it with her usual bold signature. A moment later she rose, blotted it, and held it out.

As the flimsy slip of paper passed from one to the other, the elder woman permitted a gleam of curiosity to show in her eyes.

"A thousand thanks!" she exclaimed. "And don't think me a wretch if I run away now that I've got it. You know how fidgety my bay mare is. Well, good-bye! I shall see you at Ranelagh?"

But Clodagh was absently studying her cheque-book.

"I don't think so," she said. "Lord Deerehurst offered to take me down, but I shan't go. I--I have some business to attend to."

Lady Frances laughed; picked up her riding whip, which she had laid aside, and, coming forward, kissed Clodagh.

"Then I expect I shall see you. Deerehurst is much more insistent than any business." Once again her shrewd glance travelled over Clodagh's face. "Good-bye! In any case, you'll be at the Ord's for bridge to-night? We can arrange then about going down to Tuffnell."

"Yes"--Clodagh returned the pressure of her hand--"yes; I suppose I shall go to the Ord's. Yes; I shall--good-bye!"

She walked with her visitor to the door of the bedroom, and stood waiting on the threshold until the hall door had closed. Then, almost mechanically, she turned, walked back to the table, and with a sharp, nervous movement gathered up the heap of papers still lying beside her plate.

As she stood there, in the flood of June sunshine, beside the attractive disarray of the pretty breakfast-table, she was aware of a horrible sense of helplessness, of alarm and impotence. For the papers she held between her hands were bills--a sheaf of bills--all unpaid and all pressing.

As she stood there, a swift review of the past months sped before her mind, carrying something like dismay in its train.

In April she had entered upon the tenancy of her furnished flat, having already borrowed eight hundred pounds from her friend and counsellor, Lady Frances Hope; and under the auspices of this same counsellor, had began her career as a woman of fashion.

In social circles the period and the conditions of mourning become more slender every season. And nowadays, although a widow may not attend dances or large dinner-parties, there are a hundred smaller, more exclusive--and possibly more expensive--forms of entertainment at which she may appear in her own intimate set. Very quiet dinners--very small luncheon parties--even friendly bridge parties--are quite permissible, when it is a tacitly accepted fact that the mourner is, by a natural law, barely entering upon her life--that the one mourned has departed from it by an equally natural dispensation.

Under these conditions Clodagh had begun her London career; and for more than a month she had lived--in the most costly sense of the word. Her mourning had been the most distinguished that a famous dressmaker could devise; her electric brougham had possessed all the newest improvements; the flowers that filled her room had been supplied by a fashionable florist at an exorbitant cost. In a word, she had behaved like a child who has been given a pocketful of bright new pennies--and believes them to be golden coins.

Once or twice in the course of those extravagant weeks, a pang of misgiving had crossed her soul; but it had only been a pang of the moment.

The phantom of tradesmen's bills is one so easily dismissed from the Irish mind that, unless it materialises very forcibly, it may almost be considered non-existent.

On July the first she was to receive her half-yearly allowance; and towards July the first she looked with an almost superstitious confidence. A thousand pounds! It was sufficient to settle a planetful of debts; and if any remained as satellites to the planet, well--there was the first of January.

But now her confidence had been rudely shaken. In a sudden moment of pride--of bravado--she had signed away almost the whole of the anticipated half-yearly income. She stood possessed of fifty pounds, with which to dress, to eat, to exist from July to January; and in her hands was the sheaf of unpaid bills!

There is no race of people that undertakes liabilities so lightly, and that is so overwhelmed when retribution falls upon it, as the Irish race. As Clodagh gradually faced her position, panic seized upon her. For weeks she had lived upon the credit that the London tradesman gives to customers who come provided with good references; and now suddenly she had realised--first by the arrival of certain bills couched in a new and imperative strain; later by Lady Frances Hope's unexpected demand for her money--that English credit is not the lax, indefinite credit of such places as Muskeere and Carrigmore: that it is a credit demanding--insisting upon--timely payment.

And where was she to turn--where look--for the necessary funds?

In a dazed way she thought of David Barnard, who had returned a month previously from a holiday in Spain; but her pride made her shrink sensitively from the thought of the suave indulgence with which he would listen to her confession of folly. Once the thought of recalling Lady Frances Hope, and explaining the position to her, sped through her mind; but she dismissed it as swiftly as it came. In restless perturbation she turned and walked across the room, pausing once more beside the bureau, which stood in a recess between the windows.

Where could she turn, where look, for the money that would tide over her difficulties? In her mental distraction, she laid aside the bills she was still holding, and aimlessly picked up a half-dozen opened letters that lay awaiting answers. A couple of invitations to lunch; an invitation to play bridge; the offer of a box at the opera; Laurence Asshlin's monthly report from Orristown; Nance's last letter from America.

With a vague preoccupation she raised the last of these and looked at it.

How free and unhampered Nance seemed in her inexperience of life! She looked unseeingly at the closely written lines, her mind in a harassed way contrasting her own and her sister's fate. Then quite suddenly she dropped the letter and lifted her head.

A thought had struck her. As a flash of lightning might rend a night sky, an inspiration had illuminated the darkness of her mind. The thousand pounds which was to be Nance's property when she came of age, or upon her engagement, still lay to her own credit--in her own name--in the bank with which Milbanke had done business.

It is extraordinary how rapidly a thought can mature in a receptive mind. In one moment, as Clodagh stood beside the bureau, all the possibilities comprised in that thousand pounds broke upon her understanding.

How if she withdrew it as a loan? No one--not even Nance herself--need know; and she could refund it within six months, or within a year--long before the thought of marriage could enter the child's mind.

Then suddenly she paused in her mental calculations; and a new expression passed over her face. Was it right, was it honourable, to make use of this money left in her safe-keeping?

Uneasy and distressed, she turned to the open window, as though a study of the life beyond her own might help her in her dilemma. The scene she looked upon was interesting and even beautiful. The grass of the park still retained something of its first greenness; in the distance the clustering bower of chestnuts and copper beeches suggested something far removed from the traffic and toil of the great town; while below the window, under a canopy of leaves, the morning procession of horses and carriages passed incessantly to and fro.

What a curious world it was! How conventional and obvious, and yet in reality how inscrutable! What would it say of her, did it know her true position? What comfort--what aid--would it offer? Involuntarily, almost curiously, she laid her finger-tips upon the window-sill and bent slightly forward. Then, very suddenly, she drew back into the room, her face flushing.

Lord Deerehurst, mounted upon a high black horse, had passed the window at the moment that she had looked out; and raising his head, had seen and bowed to her.

The incident was slight; but at certain moments the Celtic nature is extraordinarily--even mysteriously--open to suggestion. Clodagh could not have defined her thought; but the thought was there, a vague, half-fearful, wholly instinctive thought that suddenly prompted her to shield herself, to ward off the nearer approach to this world that she had leant from her window to study impersonally; and from which she had received so peculiarly personal a response.

She continued to stand for a moment longer in an attitude of doubt; then, swiftly, almost abruptly, she turned round to the bureau and, kneeling down before it, reopened her cheque-book with tremulous hands and wrote out a cheque for one thousand pounds, payable to herself.