THE SIEGE OF LONDON (continued 3)

Dear Mr. Littlemore—It will interest you to know that I’m engaged to be married to Sir Arthur Demesne and that our marriage is to take place as soon as their stupid old Parliament rises. But it’s not to come out for some days, and I’m sure I can trust meanwhile to your complete discretion.

Yours very sincerely, Nancy H.

P.S.—He made me a terrible scene for what I did yesterday, but he came back in the evening and we fixed it all right. That’s how the thing comes to be settled. He won’t tell me what passed between you—he requested me never to allude to the subject. I don’t care—I was bound you should speak!

Littlemore thrust this epistle into his pocket and marched away with it. He had come out on various errands, but he forgot his business for the time and before he knew it had walked into Hyde Park. He left the carriages and riders to one side and followed the Serpentine into Kensington Gardens, of which he made the complete circuit. He felt annoyed, and more disappointed than he understood—than he would have understood if he had tried. Now that Nancy Beck had succeeded her success was an irritation, and he was almost sorry he hadn’t said to Sir Arthur: “Oh well, she was pretty bad, you know.” However, now they were at one they would perhaps leave him alone. He walked the irritation off and before he went about his original purposes had ceased to think of Mrs. Headway. He went home at six o’clock, and the servant who admitted him informed him in doing so that Mrs. Dolphin had requested he should be told on his return that she wished to see him in the drawing-room. “It’s another trap!” he said to himself instinctively; but in spite of this reflexion he went upstairs. On entering his sister’s presence he found she had a visitor. This visitor, to all appearance on the point of departing, was a tall elderly woman, and the two ladies stood together in the middle of the room.

“I’m so glad you’ve come back,” said Mrs. Dolphin without meeting her brother’s eye. “I want so much to introduce you to Lady Demesne that I hoped you’d come in. Must you really go—won’t you stay a little?” she added, turning to her companion; and without waiting for an answer went on hastily: “I must leave you a moment—excuse me. I’ll come back!” Before he knew it Littlemore found himself alone with her ladyship and understood that since he hadn’t been willing to go and see her she had taken upon herself to make an advance. It had the queerest effect, all the same, to see his sister playing the same tricks as Nancy Beck!

“Ah, she must be in a fidget!” he said to himself as he stood before Lady Demesne. She looked modest and aloof, even timid, as far as a tall serene woman who carried her head very well could look so; and she was such a different type from Mrs. Headway that his present vision of Nancy’s triumph gave her by contrast something of the dignity of the vanquished. It made him feel as sorry for her as he had felt for her son. She lost no time; she went straight to the point. She evidently felt that in the situation in which she had placed herself her only advantage could consist in being simple and business-like.

“I’m so fortunate as to catch you. I wish so much to ask you if you can give me any information about a person you know and about whom I have been in correspondence with Mrs. Dolphin. I mean Mrs. Headway.”

“Won’t you sit down?” asked Littlemore.

“No, thank you. I’ve only a moment.”

“May I ask you why you make this inquiry?”

“Of course I must give you my reason. I’m afraid my son will marry her.”

Littlemore was puzzled—then saw she wasn’t yet aware of the fact imparted to him in Mrs. Headway’s note. “You don’t like her?” he asked, exaggerating, in spite of himself, the interrogative inflexion.

“Not at all,” said Lady Demesne, smiling and looking at him. Her smile was gentle, without rancour; he thought it almost beautiful.

“What would you like me to say?” he asked.

“Whether you think her respectable.”

“What good will that do you? How can it possibly affect the event?”

“It will do me no good, of course, if your opinion’s favourable. But if you tell me it’s not I shall be able to say to my son that the one person in London who has known her more than six months thinks so and so of her.”

This speech, on Lady Demesne’s clear lips, evoked no protest from her listener. He had suddenly become conscious of the need to utter the simple truth with which he had answered Rupert Waterville’s first question at the Théâtre Français. He brought it out. “I don’t think Mrs. Headway respectable.”

“I was sure you would say that.” She seemed to pant a little.

“I can say nothing more—not a word. That’s my opinion. I don’t think it will help you.”

“I think it will. I wanted to have it from your own lips. That makes all the difference,” said Lady Demesne. “I’m exceedingly obliged to you.” And she offered him her hand; after which he accompanied her in silence to the door.

He felt no discomfort, no remorse, at what he had said; he only felt relief—presumably because he believed it would make no difference. It made a difference only in what was at the bottom of all things—his own sense of fitness. He only wished he had driven it home that Mrs. Headway would probably be for her son a capital wife. But that at least would make no difference. He requested his sister, who had wondered greatly at the brevity of his interview with her friend, to spare him all questions on the subject; and Mrs. Dolphin went about for some days in the happy faith that there were to be no dreadful Americans in English society compromising her native land.

Her faith, however, was short-lived. Nothing had made any difference; it was perhaps too late. The London world heard in the first days of July, not that Sir Arthur Demesne was to marry Mrs. Headway, but that the pair had been privately and, it was to be hoped as regards Mrs. Headway on this occasion, indissolubly united. His mother gave neither sign nor sound; she only retired to the country.

“I think you might have done differently,” said Mrs. Dolphin, very pale, to her brother. “But of course everything will come out now.”

“Yes, and make her more the fashion than ever!” Littlemore answered with cynical laughter. After his little interview with the elder Lady Demesne he didn’t feel at liberty to call again on the younger; and he never learned—he never even wished to know—whether in the pride of her success she forgave him.

Waterville—it was very strange—was positively scandalised at this success. He held that Mrs. Headway ought never to have been allowed to marry a confiding gentleman, and he used in speaking to Littlemore the same words as Mrs. Dolphin. He thought Littlemore might have done differently. But he spoke with such vehemence that Littlemore looked at him hard—hard enough to make him blush. “Did you want to marry her yourself?” his friend inquired. “My dear fellow, you’re in love with her! That’s what’s the matter with you.”

This, however, blushing still more, Waterville indignantly denied. A little later he heard from New York that people were beginning to ask who in the world Lady Demesne “had been.”