Innocent : her fancy and his fact Part 41

"Not at all!" and she forced a laugh. "I am perfectly--perfectly well!--a little faint perhaps! The heat, I think! Yes--of course! Miss Armitage--the famous author! I am--I am very proud to meet you!"

"Most kind of you!" said Innocent, quietly.

And they still looked at each other, very strangely.

The men beside them were a little embarra.s.sed, the Duke twirled his short white moustache, and Lord Blythe glanced at his wife with some wonder and curiosity. Both imagined, with the usual short-sightedness of the male s.e.x, that the women had taken a sudden fantastic dislike to one another.

"By jove, she's jealous!" thought the Duke, fully aware that Lady Blythe was occasionally "moved that way."

"The girl seems frightened of her," was Lord Blythe's inward comment, knowing that his wife did not always create a sympathetic atmosphere.

But her ladys.h.i.+p was soon herself again and laughed quite merrily at her husband's anxious expression.

"I'm all right--really!" she said, with a quick, almost defiant turn of her head towards him, the emeralds in her dark hair flas.h.i.+ng with a sinister gleam like lightning on still water. "You must remember it's rather overwhelming to be introduced to a famous author and think of just the right thing to say at the right moment! Isn't it, Miss Armitage?"

"It is as you feel," replied Innocent, coldly.

Lady Blythe rattled on gaily.

"Do come and talk to me for a few moments!--it will be so good of you!

The garden's lovely!--shall we go there? Now, my dear Duke, don't look so cross, I'll bring her back to you directly!" and she nodded pleasantly. "You want her, of course!--everybody wants her!--such a celebrity!" then, turning again to Innocent, "Will you come?"

As one in a dream the girl obeyed her inviting gesture, and they pa.s.sed out of the room together through a large open French window to a terraced garden, dimly illumined in the distance by the glitter of fairy lamps, but for the most part left to the tempered brilliancy of a misty red moon. Once away from the crowd, Lady Blythe walked quickly and impatiently, scarcely looking at the youthful figure that accompanied her own, like a fair ghost gliding step for step beside her. At last she stopped; they were well away from the house in a quaint bit of garden shaded with formal fir-trees and clipped yews, where a fountain dashed up a slender spiral thread of white spray. A strange sense of fury in her broke loose; with pale face and cruel, glittering eyes she turned upon her daughter.

"How dare you!" she half whispered, through her set teeth--"How dare you!"

Innocent drew back a step, and looked at her steadfastly.

"I do not understand you," she said.

"You do understand!--you understand only too well!" and Lady Blythe put her hand to the pearls at her throat as though she felt them choking her. "Oh, I could strike you for your insolence! I wish I had never sought you out or told you how you were born! Is this your revenge for the manner of your birth, that you come to shame me among my own cla.s.s--my own people--"

Innocent's eyes flashed with a fire seldom seen in their soft depths.

"Shame you?" she echoed. "I? What shame have I brought you? What shame shall I bring? Had you owned me as your child I would have made you proud of me! I would have given you honour,--you abandoned me to strangers, and I have made honour for myself! Shame is YOURS and yours only!--it would be mine if I had to acknowledge YOU as my mother!--you who never had the courage to be true!" Her young voice thrilled with pa.s.sion.--"I have won my own way! I am something beyond and above you!--'your own cla.s.s--your own people,' as you call them, are at MY feet,--and you--you who played with my father's heart and spoilt his career--you have lived to know that I, his deserted child, have made his name famous!"

Lady Blythe stared at her like some enraged cat ready to spring.

"His name--his name!" she muttered, fiercely. "Yes, and how dare you take it? You have no right to it in law!"

"Wise law, just law!" said the girl, pa.s.sionately. "Would you rather I had taken yours? I might have done so had I known it--though I think not, as I should have been ashamed of any 'maiden' name you had dishonoured! When you came to Briar Farm to find me--to see me--so late, so late!--after long years of desertion--I told you it was possible to make a name;--one cannot go nameless through the world! I have made mine!--independently and honestly--in fact"--and she smiled, a sad cold smile--"it is an honour for you, my mother, to know me, your daughter!"

Lady Blythe's face grew ghastly pale in the uncertain light of the half-veiled moon. She moved a step and caught the girl's arm with some violence.

"What do you mean to do?" she asked, in an angry whisper, "I must know!

What are your plans of vengeance?--your campaign of notoriety?--your scheme of self-advertis.e.m.e.nt? What claim will you make?"

"None!" and Innocent looked at her fully, with calm and fearless dignity. "I have no claim upon you, thank G.o.d! I am less to you than a dropped lamb, lost in a thicket of thorns, is to the sheep that bore it! That's a rough country simile,--I was brought up on a farm, you know!--but it will serve your case. Think nothing of me, as I think nothing of you! What I am, or what I may be to the world, is my own affair!"

There was a pause. Presently Lady Blythe gave a kind of shrill hysterical laugh.

"Then, when we meet in society, as we have met to-night, it will be as comparative strangers?"

"Why, of course!--we have always been strangers," the girl replied, quietly. "No strangers were ever more strange to each other than we!"

"You mean to keep MY secret?--and your own?"

"Certainly. Do you suppose I would give my father's name to slander?"

"Your father!--you talk of your father as if HE was worth consideration!--he was chiefly to blame for your position--"

"Was he? I am not quite sure of that," said Innocent, slowly--"I do not know all the circ.u.mstances. But I have heard that he was a great artist; and that some woman he loved ruined his life. And I believe you are that woman!"

Lady Blythe laughed--a hard mirthless laugh.

"Believe what you like!" she said--"You are an imaginative little fool!

When you know more of the world you will find out that men ruin women's lives as casually as cracking nuts, but they take jolly good care of their own skins! Pierce Armitage was too selfish a man to sacrifice his own pleasure and comfort for anyone--he was glad to get rid of me--and of YOU! And now--now!" She threw up her hands with an expressive, half-tragic gesture. "Now you are famous!--actually famous! Good heavens!--why, I thought you would stay in that old farmhouse all your life, scrubbing the floors and looking after the poultry, and perhaps marrying some good-natured country yokel! Famous!--you!--with social London dancing attendance on you! What a ghastly comedy!" She laughed again. "Come!--we must go back to the house."

They walked side by side--the dark full-figured woman and the fair slight girl--the one a mere ephemeral unit in an exclusively aristocratic and fas.h.i.+onable "set,"--the other, the possessor of a sudden brilliant fame which was spreading a new light across the two hemispheres. Not another word was exchanged between them, and as they re-entered the ducal reception-rooms, now more crowded than ever, Lord Blythe met them.

"I was just going to look for you," he said to his wife--"There are dozens of people waiting to be presented to Miss Armitage; the d.u.c.h.ess has asked for her several times."

Lady Blythe turned to Innocent with a dazzling smile.

"How guilty I feel!" she exclaimed. "Everybody wanting to see you, and I selfishly detaining you in the garden! It was so good of you to give me a few minutes!--you, the guest of the evening too! Good-night!--in case I don't find you again in this crowd!"

She moved away then, leaving Innocent fairly bewildered by her entire coolness and self-possession. She herself, poor child, moved to the very soul by the interview she had just gone through, was trembling with extreme nervousness, and could hardly conceal her agitation.

"I'm afraid you've caught cold!" said Lord Blythe, kindly--"That will never do! I promised I would take you to the d.u.c.h.ess as soon as I found you--she has some friends with her who wish to meet you. Will you come?"

She smiled a.s.sent, looking up at him gratefully and thinking what a handsome old man he was, with his tall, well-formed figure and fine intellectual face on which the constant progress of good thoughts had marked many a pleasant line. Her mother's husband!--and she wondered how it happened that such a woman had been chosen for a wife by such a man!

"They're going to dance in the ball-room directly," he continued, as he guided her through the pressing throng of people. "You will not be without partners! Are you fond of dancing?"

Her face lighted up with the lovely youthful look that gave her such fascination and sweetness of expression.

"Yes, I like it very much, though before I came to London I only knew country dances such as they dance at harvest-homes; but of course here, you all dance so differently!--it is only just going round and round!

But it's quite pleasant and rather amusing."

"You were brought up in the country then?" he said.

"Yes, entirely. I came to London about two years ago."

"But--I hope you don't think me too inquisitive!--where did you study literature?"

She laughed a little.

"I don't think I studied it at all," she answered, "I just loved it!