Mrs. Dorriman Volume Iii Part 29

"Grace, that money must be given up."

"Yes," she said, and he thought he heard a little sob.

"How you can care to keep it!" he said, trying to subdue his feelings because she was evidently so unwell.

"I care to keep it! If you only knew how I hate myself for ever having cared! Paul, do you remember your being so violent--speaking so strongly about it. It took away my courage. I could not tell you, and it has been making me so wretched!"

"But why was I kept in the dark about it from the first?" he asked, always trying to control himself. "Why was it talked of as a legacy?"

"There was no reason you should not have known at first. I described it to your mother as a legacy (it was, in the first instance, left to Margaret); it saved explanations, and I did not care for her to know.

You never inquired how the money had come to me. If you had asked one direct question, I should have been forced to speak the truth to you."

"I see no difference," he said again.

He was most terribly annoyed; the whole thing was a shock to him, and he was all the more annoyed because he was conscious that the increase to his income had been pleasant, and that it had helped to smooth their path so much.

Without it how could he afford Grace's extravagant habits? He knew that the money coming from his own appointment was not enough, and out of that even he had given his mother something. If he now explained to her how could he explain without hurting his wife and showing that perfect confidence had not existed between them?

In spite of all these considerations he never for one moment thought of retaining the money. To him it was the price of Margaret's happiness, and he now turned over in his mind how he could say something to his mother without entering into details which would be so painful to him.

He turned away once more from his wife, and once again he said, as he had said before,

"The money must go back."

Grace was very miserable. She had learnt to love her husband and to find much to help her in his directness, and a certain strength she had not expected to find in his character. When she had married him she had thought that in all important things she would be the guiding star. He was slow in thought, and she valued her own quickness over-much; that position of being a sort of "Triton among minnows" at a second-cla.s.s school influenced her fatally still, and to fall, as she had fallen, was a bitter mortification to her. She sat down now to write to Margaret, and, as she wrote and repeated her husband's sentiments, she began herself to see things more as he did.

In the meantime poor Paul had a very difficult task before him. He had to make his mother understand, without explanations, that his promise of help, as far as a regular increase to her income went, could not be carried out.

Lady Lyons heard with dismay, in which a certain irritation against him for having raised false hopes was plainly visible.

"I have engaged a footman," she said, helplessly; "and now I must send him away. It will look so odd."

"I am very sorry."

"It would have been different, of course, if you had said nothing about it: then, you quite understand, Paul, that _then_ I could have had nothing to complain of."

Paul did quite understand. He went out as soon as he could, going to his club and entering it with that sense of leaving domestic and other troubles behind him which makes club-land enviable to those who know it not.

But the remembrance of his lessened resources came before him there. A friend asked him to give his subscription to help the family of a mutual friend. Paul was obliged to say, with great reluctance, that he found, on reconsideration, he could not do it. This was doubly hard, as, with the full consciousness of a good balance in the bank, he had himself originated the idea.

A clever man would simply have stated the fact of finding himself less well off than he expected, and the fact so stated would have been held sufficient excuse; but Paul Lyons was not clever, and he hesitated, muttered something about not being his own, and gave his friends directly an unfavourable impression.

Manner so often speaks more plainly than words.

Even this refuge seemed to have lost its charm now this unexpected annoyance had crept up.

He could himself do nothing to strip himself of this money since it was not his but belonged to his wife. He took a long walk by the Embankment, and, in the mood he was in, it was natural that the past, with all its follies and the many foolish and wrong things he had done when he was younger, came before him. What right had he to judge his wife so severely? His temptations and hers were different; was his standard so much higher than hers because he had not known the want of money as she had? He began to feel that he had behaved unkindly, and hurried back to that hotel in Brook Street where they were again staying. He would apologise, and, though he could not keep that money, and hoped she would give it up, still they had enough to get on with;--if their bread had no b.u.t.ter, still, there would be bread.

He arrived tired out, and was confronted by his mother, in a state of abject despair, her face blurred with tears, who announced that Grace had gone!

What had pa.s.sed? It was in vain that he tried to get Lady Lyons to tell him, in rational order, anything about his wife's departure.

Afraid of her son's anger, bewildered by Grace's sudden departure, the poor lady's ideas were entangled in a confusion from which she could not extricate herself; and her son, accustomed as he was to sift her statements, could make nothing of them now. Suddenly she quoted something said by Sir Albert Gerald.

"Was he here then?"

"Yes, he was here. I think, Paul, though I am not quite sure, and I do not want to a.s.sert anything not quite the case, that Grace sent for him."

Paul had a natural movement of anger;--Why should a third person be sent for by his wife? What business had any third person to come between them?

"Where has she gone?" he asked, his self-reproach of an hour ago still softening him towards Grace.

"I really do not know--but to Scotland I think. I heard her say to Sir Albert, 'You will escort me,' and he said he was going to Scotland, so I suppose she has gone there also."

"And left no message, or note, or anything for me?" said Paul, with rising anger, not yet fully understanding that Grace had really gone.

"Oh, my dear Paul! how stupid I am. Yes, she left a note for you, or a letter--let me see was it a letter?--no, I remember thinking it was oddly folded."

"Will you please give it to me?" asked Paul with the calmness of despair.

"My dear Paul, if you would only not hurry me and flurry me so," said his mother, as she sought in her pockets, one after another, and then looked under the china ornaments on the mantel-piece, and drove her son wild altogether.

At last she said as a brilliant idea crossed her mind, "I remember now.

I was so afraid of forgetting it that I put it inside one of your slippers, Paul, and I knew that you were quite sure to find it to-night, when you put your slippers on. I think it was rather clever of me, eh Paul?"

But Paul had left the room.

As he read his wife's note, consisting only of a few lines, he felt he loved her very dearly. She had gone to Richmond, she could not bear to see him so changed towards her.

"When you have forgiven me, if you can forgive me, then I will come back," she said.

Paul knew he had forgiven her, but he was still sore about that third person intervening. He was on his way to Richmond before many minutes were over.

Grace received him with intense satisfaction, she was ready to promise everything. Then came that question about Sir Albert Gerald.

"Is it possible you do not really understand all that story?" asked Grace, who, now, with that weight removed from her mind, and restored to her husband's affection, was in tremendous spirits.

"I understand nothing about him. What story do you mean?"

Then his wife enlightened him.

"I was to let him know about Margaret when I thought it would not hurt his cause--I was to send for him."

"Oh!" said Paul, "then you think he is in love with Margaret?"

"I do not think it, I know," she answered, laughing.

That evening dinner was ready at the Brook Street Hotel--three covers were laid.