Capricious Caroline Part 50

"You're going to stay with me a day or two?" said Camilla, entreatingly. "It will be sweet to have you." Then with a flash of her old merriment, "remember we are cousins now."

Caroline shook her head.

"I am afraid I must go back this evening; but the children will be all right with Dennis."

And Camilla bit her lip.

"Of course, if you must go, you must go." Then she added, restlessly, "I hope we shall not stay here more than a few days ourselves. It was horrible coming at all. And then I am so afraid this illness will upset Cuthbert. He is so sensitive. I have entreated him not to stay longer than a few minutes in his mother's room. I wish he need not go in at all. Cancer is such an awful thing."

Then she shuddered.

Caroline said nothing. She had no reason to care one way or another about Mrs. Baynhurst, but it was impossible for her to withhold her pity in such an hour as this; because she knew, none better, the hopelessness of the mother's pa.s.sionate love for her second child, and because it had been a creed with Octavia Baynhurst to sneer at womanly weakness, and suffering; to deny almost scornfully the terrors of death.

And now death had come upon her--and what a death!

There was a tragedy to Caroline in the thought of that fine intellect, that strong nature, surrendering itself to the ravages of the most appalling disease the human frame can know.

As the children danced off to another room to find Dennis, and they were alone, Camilla turned and stretched out both her hands to the girl.

"Have I lost you, Caroline?" she said; "you look at me so strangely, your eyes hurt me. I have always clung to the hope that you would never change, that you would always love me."

Caroline paused a moment, and then took the hands for an instant.

"Are you happy?" she asked in a low voice.

The look that flashed into the other woman's face was a revelation to her.

"So happy," she said. "Oh, Caroline, it is all the beginning over again, only better, truer, and, please G.o.d, more lasting! Caroline, I love him. He is so young, so beautiful, so full of poetry, he makes life quite different! Oh, I love him, and I never thought I should love any one again after Ned."

Caroline turned away; her lips quivered.

"Then we who care for you must be content," she said. There was a bitter and yet a sad note in her voice.

Cuthbert Baynhurst's wife stood and looked at her.

"Of course," she said a little hardly, "I know you think I did a dreadful thing, and I will tell you one thing, Caroline, that I wish from the bottom of my heart that I could have come by this happiness in a different way. I don't want to excuse myself, for I have no excuse, but equally I don't want you or anybody else to make up things that don't exist. Don't for instance, run away with the idea that Rupert is breaking his heart about me. He is much too prosaic, too stolid, too commonplace. You saw for yourself how calmly he took the whole thing.

If he had been another sort of man, well!" she laughed, "there might have been four inches of steel for Cuthbert, and perhaps a bullet through my brain."

Caroline turned and looked at her coldly.

"How can you speak so foolishly. What do you know of his heart? You have never understood him; even when you had the life of his life in your hands you sneered at him as poor and paltry. Make a mockery of him to others if you will, but not to those who know what sort of man he is. It is pitiful; it makes your wrong so much, much worse."

Camilla looked almost frightened. Her lip quivered, and tears gathered in her eyes.

"Oh, don't speak to me like that," she said brokenly. "Do you think I don't know how good he is--how more than good; his generosity won't bear talking about; but you don't know all, Caroline. If you did, perhaps you would judge me more mercifully."

There was a little pause.

Caroline made no answer; she turned aside sharply, and walked to one of the long windows. Though she had spoken so quietly, so coldly, a wild sort of pa.s.sion swirled about her; her heart beat so violently she felt almost suffocated.

Camilla moved across to her.

"Caroline, darling," she said pleadingly. She put her hand on Caroline's shoulder, and as the girl still said nothing she gave a quick sigh.

"Well," she said, letting her hand slip down, "whatever any one else may think, Rupert himself ought not to reproach me. For I was absolutely honest with him. I always told him I was not half good enough for him. There was no deception, my dear Caroline, and he chose to do what he did with his eyes open. I don't mind betting you anything you like that he is ever so much happier now that I am off his hands,"

Camilla declared. "Our marriage would have been the most awful failure of modern times."

She came back to the girl by the window, and gave her a little shake.

"You know you love me, and you shan't be angry with me, Caroline."

There was a mist in Caroline's eyes. She turned, and would have spoken, but at that moment Dennis looked in at the door and called to her mistress.

"If you please, ma'am, I think you'd better come to Mr. Baynhurst. He's in the other room. I'm afraid something bad has happened."

Camilla stumbled in her haste to get out of the room, and almost immediately she was back again.

"I'm sorry," she said indistinctly, nervously; "but I think the children had better not stop. Cuthbert's mother is dead. She died an hour ago. Try not to let them be disappointed, Caroline. Tell them they shall see me very soon, perhaps to-morrow. It seems awfully unkind to send them away, poor little souls, but he is in a terrible state. I must be with him. It would be so miserable for the children here."

Indeed the children seemed glad to go. They kissed their mother, who held them to her in a pa.s.sionate, nervous kind of way, and then let Dennis put on their hats, and went away with Caroline, dancing as they went.

Outside in the hot suns.h.i.+ne they clamoured for food.

"I can smell beef," said Betty, wrinkling up her pretty nose. "I thought we was going to have a lovely dinner, and we didn't have none.

Oh, Caroline, I am so hungry."

And Baby chimed in with the same remark.

Caroline hoisted them both into a cab, and they drove to the station.

There she regaled them with lunch, and by the middle of the afternoon they were back at Yelverton.

CHAPTER XVII

It was of course impossible for Haverford to leave London immediately after his mother's funeral. He had to charge himself with the arrangements of her affairs, a matter in which his half-brother should have taken his share. But Cuthbert Baynhurst had hastened away as quickly as he could go.

He seemed to be haunted by the dread of infection if he set foot again in the house where his mother had suffered and died. More than this, he had put into his mind the morbid fear that he had in him already the seeds of this complaint which his mother had endured in silence for so long. He was not even present at the funeral.

At the time the coffin was being lowered into the ground Camilla and he were travelling in hot haste away from London, from England, from the mere possibility of breathing the air the poor dead woman had breathed.

"This will be the beginning of the end," Caroline said to herself. "Her eyes may be blinded for a little while, and he may attempt to tyrannize through this power he has over her now, but Camilla is not his mother.

She will tire so soon, and his selfishness has no limits."

She was sitting out in the garden alone. There was a moon, and the world was wrapped about in the hush of the summer night.