Leonie of the Jungle | Page 3

with safety confide her fear, and
from whom she could expect some meed of succour.
She knew, as everybody knew, that years ago he had given up the hours
of consultation which had seen his Harley Street waiting-room filled to
overflowing; that little by little, bit by bit, indeed, he had given himself
up entirely to research work, travelling in every quarter of the globe in
his quest for the knowledge necessary to the alleviation of the mental
troubles of his fellow-beings. And that when he found it or some part of
it he had hurried home, and having brought it to as near a state of
perfection as possible, had flung it broad-cast to the suffering; just as
he flung the immense sums of money he made among the destitute for
whom he loved to work without thought of the morrow.
A genuine case of trouble he had never been known to dismiss, and
Susan Hetth had heaved a sigh of relief into the receiver when he fixed
an immediate appointment.
The spook of fear is not the cheeriest companion of the early cup of tea,
and Nannie's words, allied to Nannie's face when she entered without
knocking, had caused the silly, invertebrate woman to take immediate
action for once in her life.
Not for anything would she confess it, but she wished now she had
listened to Nannie when, just a year ago, she had so fervently urged a
visit to the doctor the first time she had discovered the baby girl
walking downstairs one step at a time in her sleep.
She remembered the way the ever-changing house-parlourmaids had
furtively looked at the child when she came in to dessert; how one after
the other they had given notice, declaring that although they really
loved the child their nerves would not stand the ever-recurring shock of
finding her sitting in some corner in the dark; or the pattering of her
little feet on the stairs when she occasionally evaded the nurse and
walked about the house in her sleep; and she remembered how other
nurses who brought baby visitors to tea had watched the child,

surreptitiously touching their foreheads and wagging their heads at each
other.
But, as is the way of the supine, she had put it off and put it off until
her negligence had culminated in the frightful scene of this same very
early morning, when Leonie, waking in the day nursery to find her
kitten dead, had screamed and shrieked hour after hour until the
house-parlourmaid had rushed in and given instant notice, with the
unsolicited information that the servants thought, and the neighbours
said, the child was mad and ought to be sent to a home.
Then, indeed, had terror suddenly tweaked Susan Hetth's heart, the
social one, the maternal one having long since atrophied through want
of use; for the shadow of lunacy is about the blackest of all the shadows
that can fall across a butterfly's sunny, heedless path.
Ten years ago she had lost her husband, in the year following most of
her capital had gone in a mad-cat speculation, and three years later her
gallant brother-in-law died, leaving her a yearly income sufficient for
expenses and education if she would undertake to mother his little
daughter. Since then she had led the usual abortive life of the woman
who lives on the past glamour of her husband's success and a limited
income, upon which she tries ineffectually to dovetail herself into a
society to which she does not rightly belong. Having noticed an
increasing plenitude of silver among the ash-gold of her hair, a
deepening of the lines of discord between her brows, and the threads of
discontent which were daily being hemstitched into her face by the
sharp needles of make-believe, covetousness, and a precarious banking
account, she had recently decided to try and annex, or rather try and
graft herself on to a certain unsuspecting male being en secondes noces.
And that simply cannot be done if there is the slightest shadow upon
one's appendages.
So she sat down in the chair with as good a grace as she could muster,
and arranged her big picture hat so that the spring sun should not draw
Sir Jonathan's attention to the methods she employed to combat the
rapidity with which what remained of her prettiness, prematurely faded

by the Indian sun, was vanishing.
For a long and trying moment he sat silently staring at her, wondering
as he had always wondered what had induced his old friend to place his
little girl in such inadequate, feeble hands.
To break the tension Lady Hetth clanked a silver Indian bracelet bought
at Liberty's against an Egyptian chain sold by Swan & Edgar's, and the
man frowned as he drew a series