Lady Roses Daughter | Page 9

the old bonne-housekeeper, which was necessary before serviettes could be produced.
And afterwards the library, with its deal shelves from floor to ceiling put up by Dalrymple himself, its bare, polished floor, Dalrymple's table and chair on one side of the open hearth, Lady Rose's on the other; on his table the sheets of verse translation from ?schylus and Euripides, which represented his favorite hobby; on hers the socialist and economical books they both studied and the English or French poets they both loved. The walls, hung with the faded damask of a past generation, were decorated with a strange crop of pictures pinned carelessly into the silk--photographs or newspaper portraits of modern men and women representing all possible revolt against authority, political, religious, even scientific, the Everlasting No of an untiring and ubiquitous dissent.
Finally, in the centre of the polished floor, the strange child, whom Lady Rose had gone to fetch after lunch, with its high crest of black hair, its large, jealous eyes, its elfin hands, and the sudden smile with which, after half an hour of silence and apparent scorn, it had rewarded Sir Wilfrid's advances. He saw himself sitting bewitched beside it.
Poor Lady Rose! He remembered her as he and she parted at the gate of the neglected garden, the anguish in her eyes as they turned to look after the bent and shrunken figure of Dalrymple carrying the child back to the house.
"If you meet any of his old friends, don't--don't say anything! We've just saved enough money to go to Sicily for the winter--that'll set him right."
And then, barely a year later, the line in a London newspaper which had reached him at Madrid, chronicling the death of Marriott Dalrymple, as of a man once on the threshold of fame, but long since exiled from the thoughts of practical men. Lady Rose, too, was dead--many years since; so much he knew. But how, and where? And the child?
She was now "Mademoiselle Le Breton "?--the centre and apparently the chief attraction of Lady Henry's once famous salon?
"And, by Jove! several of her kinsfolk there, relations of the mother or the father, if what I suppose is true!" thought Sir Wilfrid, remembering one or two of the guests. "Were they--was she--aware of it?"
* * * * *
The old man strode on, full of a growing eagerness, and was soon on Lady Henry's doorstep.
"Her ladyship is in the dining-room," said the butler, and Sir Wilfrid was ushered there straight.
"Good-morning, Wilfrid," said the old lady, raising herself on her silver--headed sticks as he entered. "I prefer to come down-stairs by myself. The more infirm I am, the less I like it--and to be helped enrages me. Sit down. Lunch is ready, and I give you leave to eat some."
"And you?" said Sir Wilfrid, as they seated themselves almost side by side at the large, round table in the large, dingy room.
The old lady shook her head.
"All the world eats too much. I was brought up with people who lunched on a biscuit and a glass of sherry."
"Lord Russell?--Lord Palmerston?" suggested Sir Wilfrid, attacking his own lunch meanwhile with unabashed vigor.
"That sort. I wish we had their like now."
"Their successors don't please you?"
Lady Henry shook her head.
"The Tories have gone to the deuce, and there are no longer enough Whigs even to do that. I wouldn't read the newspapers at all if I could help it. But I do."
"So I understand," said Sir Wilfrid; "you let Montresor know it last night."
"Montresor!" said Lady Henry, with a contemptuous movement. "What a poseur! He lets the army go to ruin, I understand, while he joins Dante societies."
Sir Wilfrid raised his eyebrows.
"I think, if I were you, I should have some lunch," he said, gently pushing the admirable salmi which the butler had left in front of him towards his old friend.
Lady Henry laughed.
"Oh, my temper will be better presently, when those men are gone"--she nodded towards the butler and footman in the distance--"and I can have my say."
Sir Wilfrid hurried his meal as much as Lady Henry--who, as it turned out, was not at all minded to starve him--would allow. She meanwhile talked politics and gossip to him, with her old, caustic force, nibbling a dry biscuit at intervals and sipping a cup of coffee. She was a wilful, characteristic figure as she sat there, beneath her own portrait as a bride, which hung on the wall behind her. The portrait represented a very young woman, with plentiful brown hair gathered into a knot on the top of her head, a high waist, a blue waist-ribbon, and inflated sleeves. Handsome, imperious, the corners of the mouth well down, the look straight and daring--the Lady Henry of the picture, a bride of nineteen, was already formidable. And the old woman sitting beneath it,