Chapter XII: An Odd Recognition

I was so stunned, so amazed by this sudden and utterly unexpected turn of events, that, for a time, only a monstrous sense of indignation could make room for its consideration in my brain. That another should be found to have a title equal with mine, and a knowledge obviously greater, to claim those preserves of retribution which I had considered my exclusive property, was sufficiently disturbing; that I should be brought to realise how, to all the intents and purposes of this inquisition, I was suddenly confessed the confederate, the mean subordinate even, of a common blackmailer, was infinitely, sickeningly worse. For the first time I was awake to a healthy scorn of myself for ever having condescended to a habit of espionage. That it should have reduced me to something the level of this fellow!--no outright, hard-fisted burglar, as, to his better credit, I had assumed him to be, but just an obscene Jerry Sneak! It had been awful to me to see that cold exclusive beauty writhing in the grip of such a scoundrel. I felt fouled, humiliated, ashamed. There and then I swore an oath that I would let Lady Skene understand, on the first reasonable opportunity, the nature of my claim on her--not to bleed her pocket but her heart.

And, in the meanwhile, how to engineer my discovery? Should I use it to my more crushing indictment of a guilty woman--a bludgeon in my already loaded hand? A gentle son! a human merciful spirit! To admit myself one in purpose with this vulgar conspirator? Never, never! To convince her, rather, of her insensibility to the means for reprisal, for defence, at least, which lay ready to her hand. What was her sin to me, if only she would once expiate it in a word, a look of remorse?

I asked for no more. Yet, lacking it, she must lack a faithful Paladin. I had thought I hated her; and it had needed only this menace from another quarter to reawaken all my maddest cravings. She was my mother, and in direful peril. The pity and the sorrow of it quite blinded me for the moment to all subordinate issues.

Yet Luck again had served me well for these. I remembered, when the passing of my moody grief left room for other thoughts, how it had put into my hands the one and very clue I needed. I knew at length where to find the old creature--godmother, grandmother, what you will--who alone, it seemed to me, could be induced, or bought, to make the revelation which I desired. Well, even so, that secret were safer in my keeping than solely in a villain’s. Though shared by another, or others, its possession by me could hardly weaken my position as a threatened mother’s champion. For all my wild pity, I was inexorably resolved to take an early opportunity of putting that discovery to the test.

And so I fell upon harder reflections. Who was this plausible dog, with his soft voice, his sentimental gaze, his compelling personality? Who was this astute villain--yet none so clever, nevertheless, but that Luck, my Luck, had been able easily to hoodwink him? His hold on Lady Skene must be a substantial one--one so potential of profit, it would appear, that, after all this lapse of years, it was still worth his while to take a house--a gambling office, one might call it--in the neighbourhood, for the sole purpose of exploiting her. How and where had he acquired an incriminating knowledge of her so damning? Alas! had I not learned enough already of her “maiden meditations” to be sceptical of their singleness? She had been an actress--on the stage, at least--and presumably a true child of her traditions. I could not forget Sir Maurice Carnac’s roguish innuendoes--his allusions to my stepfather’s feet “netted” to matrimony in their intended frolic over a wilder course; his sly maudlin reference to me as a pledge of “widowed respectability.” Likely enough he too had known, or guessed, the truth. Likely enough Lord Skene himself had not been so blind to it as the pious throwers of dust in his eyes had once assumed. Nor did I feel convinced that the question of it would much have affected his lordship in those days of his relapse from virtue, so long as its pretensions appeared to justify, in the worldly view, his marriage with the beautiful creature who had ravished his heart. Grant all that, and it made no difference in the present situation--offered Lady Skene no less a bait to vile persecution. If her husband had not been blind, she had been blind to his shrewd seeing. If he knew, she did not know he knew, and her ignorance of that inference of his, did it actually exist, constituted her real accessibility by scoundrelism. She never thought, one must conclude, but that she possessed a secret which, if revealed, would spell her social and domestic ruin; and, so long as she could be kept in that belief, the bloodsuckers might have their way with her. Had she not the traditions of eighteen or so years of a spotless and dignified wifehood to vindicate? It was for the very reason that she had justified her exaltation so nobly, that she figured such a helpless victim to the beasts of prey. She was a woman of position--a fact of which her religious world took strict account; and she had come to pledge herself to that world, and to be quoted for its local light. It was there, I knew, and she knew probably, that her downfall would be criticised most ruinously. Her husband, it was conceivable, she might win over to her sin’s condonement; that narrow world never. There, in any question of her victimising by a blackguard, was confessed her main vulnerable point--or it had been. For, indeed, at the last there had come to expose itself one more infinitely sensitive. She had borne a son, heir to his mother’s fame or infamy.

I declare that my heart bled for her, as I reviewed her present position, or such as I presumed it to be. What was it to me that she had been a sinner--even a reckless sinner? Circumstance makes evil, as it makes virtue. Let the righteous plume themselves on circumstance. If I were a child of sin, I would be loyal to the maternity which suffered for me. Only I wanted time to think and plan.

I dreaded more than I can describe the ordeal of the dinner hour that night. Yet I was resolved to put in an appearance at the table. As likely as not Miss Christmas had spoken of my return; and what reflections would that induce in Lady Skene! and, if I kept away, how would she regard my absence--with what suspicion, what fearful apprehensions for her secret’s safety! For had she not believed me far removed from the scene of her recent humiliation? I must face the music, at once and boldly.

I faced it; and with what immediate result? As I entered the dining-room, she was standing by her chair before taking her seat, and, as I passed her by, going to my own, withdrew her skirts from my contact. It was the instinctive act of a moment, and regretted, I think, as soon as done; but it hurt me so cruelly, that my devil, for an instant, returned uppermost. “Very well,” I thought, “if you _will_ have me your Nemesis!”

Lord Skene greeted me kindly but abstractedly. He made no comment on my late absence, except to ask me where I had been gone these three or four days.

“To Clapham, sir,” I said, perfectly self-possessed. “It occurred to me to explore the field of Mr Pugsley’s early ministrations. I am thinking of writing his life.”

He grinned first; then looked a little startled, glancing across uneasily at his wife. She had suddenly put down her spoon, I observed, leaving her soup unfinished.

“What!” said his lordship. “Are you thinking of turning author?”

“No, sir,” I answered. “Only of studying truth and godliness at first hand.”

“Well,” he said, “you might occupy yourself worse.”

He was fairly puzzled, I could see, and, to protect himself, turned the talk in other directions, leaving me to my own cogitations. Miss Christmas, sitting opposite me, seized the opportunity to engage him to herself--no great task, for the old man was genuinely attached to her.

“What do you think of my frock, dear?” she said. “I want your opinion, because you are a judge, you know.”

But he accepted her banter seriously. He was in an oddly sober mood.

“I think,” he said, “that, like charity, it covers a multitude of sins.”

“O!” she cried, “how terribly severe! I am only a whited sepulchre after all. In the midst of life we are in death.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” I said. “It sounds like one of Mr Pugsley’s original reflections. But of course we are. Don’t you feel it, my lady?”

I don’t know what demon was urging me. Lord Skene suddenly exclaimed: “Georgina! is anything the matter?”

She was leaning back in her chair, looking white and faint; but she rallied immediately.

“Nothing whatever,” she said. “What makes you think so? Go on with your dinner--please do.”

He obeyed uneasily. I saw Miss Christmas steal her hand under the cloth, and “poor” her hostess’s with a little lovely look of sympathy. It meant nothing, of course, but sex. What could she know of the other’s real indisposition? But a sudden unaccountable pang of jealousy shot through me witnessing the act.

I had put the girl utterly out of my mind. She had become nothing, and less than nothing, in the tragic sequence of events. Now, all in a moment, I was moved to reconsider her--wonderingly, even. I thought her face was pale--white, with a sort of pathetic sickness which follows after much crying; and I was sorry for her, sorry, with a sudden strange turmoil of the heart, which spoke most, I think, of sorrow for myself. What was she to me? Nothing. I had taken brutal pains, indeed, to convince her of the fact; and she must surely feel convinced at last, and hold herself acquitted of any further obligations to me. Yet, is it not human nature to view with jealousy another’s fond appreciation of the thing we have held too cheap for our own use? The value of it, it may be, has never struck us until we have lost it. I don’t mean to say that I had arrived, already and at once, at that extravagant pitch of regret; but I was certainly awake, and suddenly, to points of attraction about the girl which had never appealed to me before. Her hair grew very prettily on her forehead, dividing from it in wings of the softest fawn. There was an unspoiled frankness in her face, for all its temptation to chartered coquetry, and her eyes had grown honest. She had developed into a little being quite remote from my early conception of her. Her complexion was of an unsoiled purity, just the natural maturing of pink-skinned babydom, when its cheeks have ripened to a contour and moulded themselves to a meaning. Her lips were always as red as if a Cupid had just left kissing them, and there was an attractive robin note in her voice, whether it spoke or laughed.

Now, noting all this, a quick sharp feeling as of loss, as of an utter loneliness never until this moment fully realised, smote into me. What possible sympathy, in all this turmoil of my hates and loves and grievances, had I willingly foregone! But it was of no use: I _had_ rejected it, and I must take the consequences. She was even at this moment ostentatiously ignoring me, and I saw that my hold on her was gone.

What did I care? Why should I? Yet, I confess, to see these gentle feminine spirits leagued together in revolt against my brutality wounded me smartly. I had thought myself their master, and I was master of nothing but their fear. Bill Sikes could better me there. Something gained from that consciousness--call it what you will--was promising to educate me finely.

Not once during the dinner did either of the ladies speak to me. I chose bitterly to put their neglect down to the presumption of a “by-blow” in assuming a claim on their notice. I was glad, though with an impotent rage of jealousy, when they rose and left me alone with my stepfather.

There was a gravity that night about Lord Skene which was new in him. The sudden death of his old comrade, taken with the glass of joy at his lips, as it were, would seem to have had a curiously sobering effect on him. No doubt the mood was fleeting; but it had all the force of a reformation while it lasted. He questioned me more seriously than he had ever done yet as to my prospects and intentions; dwelling, even, upon the necessity of prayer as a medium for exhorting from the Deity the truth as to one’s vocation. Once or twice, as I noticed, he put out his hand to the decanter, and withdrew it empty. And presently he fell into a fit of musing, in which I did not venture to disturb him. Then suddenly he looked up.

“I haven’t seen you since that night, Gaskett,” he said. “What a shocking experience! And to risk damnation with a joke on his lips! But that was Maurice all over. Do you remember how he greeted you, my boy? It ought to have warned us, perhaps, and----”

I was smiling at him, as I leaned, playing with a knife, on the table. He broke off quickly, rose, not altogether steadily, to his feet, and stood staring at me.

“By the Lord, Gaskett!” he said, “what was in your mother’s mind when she pupped you?”

I was so taken aback that I could not utter a word in reply. And the next instant he had recovered himself, and was forcing an embarrassed laugh.

“I think since that night my brain’s full of ghosts,” he said. “Come along now to the drawing-room.”