As the door opened Emily rose from a chair near the fire and came slowly towards her, with an awkward but lovely smile.

Lady Maria made a quick movement forward and caught hold of both her hands.

"My good Emily," she broke forth and kissed her. "My excellent Emily,"

and kissed her again. "I am completely turned upside down. I never heard such an insane story in my life. I have seen Dr. Warren. The creatures were mad."

"It is all over," said Emily. "I scarcely believe it was true now."

Lady Maria being led to a sofa settled herself upon it, still wearing her complex expression of crossness, agitation, and pleasure.

"I am going to stay here," she said, obstinately. "There shall be no more folly. But I will tell you that they have gone back to India. The child was a girl."

"It was a girl?"

"Yes, absurdly enough."

"Oh," sighed Emily, sorrowfully. "I'm _sure_ Hester was _afraid_ to write to me."

"Rubbish!" said Lady Maria. "At any rate, as I remarked before, I am going to stay here until Walderhurst comes back. The man will be quite mad with gratified vanity."

Chapter Twenty three

It was a damp and depressing day on which Lord Walderhurst arrived in London. As his carriage turned into Berkeley Square he sat in the corner of it rather huddled in his travelling-wraps and looking pale and thin.

He was wishing that London had chosen to show a more exhilarating countenance to him, but he himself was conscious of being possessed by something more nearly approaching a mood of eagerness than he remembered experiencing at any period of his previous existence. He had found the voyage home long, and had been restless. He wanted to see his wife. How agreeable it would be to meet, when he looked across the dinner-table, the smile in her happy eyes. She would grow pink with pleasure, like a girl, when he confessed that he had missed her. He was curious to see in her the changes he had felt in her letters. Having time and opportunities for development, she might become an absolutely delightful companion. She had looked very handsome on the day of her presentation at Court. Her height and carriage had made her even impressive. She was a woman, after all, to be counted on in one's plans.

But he was most conscious that his affection for her had warmed. A slight embarra.s.sment was commingled with the knowledge, but that was the natural result of his dislike to the sentimental. He had never felt a shadow of sentiment for Audrey, who had been an extremely light, dry, empty-headed person, and he had always felt she had been adroitly thrust upon him by their united families. He had not liked her, and she had not liked him. It had been very stupidly trying. And the child had not lived an hour. He had liked Emily from the first, and now--It was an absolute truth that he felt a slight movement in the cardiac region when the carriage turned into Berkeley Square. The house would look very pleasant when he entered it. Emily would in some subtle way have arranged that it should wear a festal, greeting air. She had a number of nice, little feminine emotions about bright fires and many flowers. He could picture her childlike grown-up face as it would look when he stepped into the room where they met.

Some one was ill in Berkeley Square, evidently very ill. Straw was laid thick all along one side of it, depressing damp, fresh straw, over which the carriage rolled with a dull drag of the wheels.

It lay before the door of his own house, he observed, as he stepped out.

It was very thickly scattered. The door swung open as the carriage stopped. Crossing the threshold, he glanced at the face of the footman nearest to him. The man looked like a mute at a funeral, and the expression was so little in accord with his mood that he stopped with a feeling of irritation. He had not time to speak, however, before a new sensation arrested his attention,--a faint odour which filled the place.

"The house smells like a hospital," he exclaimed, in great annoyance.

"What does it mean?"

The man he addressed did not answer. He turned a perturbed awkward face to his superior in rank, an older man, who was house steward.

In the house of mortal pain or death there is but one thing more full of suggestion than the faint smell of antiseptics,--the gruesome, cleanly, unpleasant odour,--that is, the unnatural sound of the whispering of hushed voices. Lord Walderhurst turned cold, and felt it necessary to stiffen his spine when he heard his servant's answer and the tone in which it was made.

"Her ladyship, my lord--her ladyship is very low. The doctors do not leave her."

"Her ladyship?"

The man stepped back deferentially. The door of the morning-room had been opened, and old Lady Maria Bayne stood on the threshold. Her worldly air of elderly gaiety had disappeared. She looked a hundred. She was almost dilapidated. She had allowed to relax themselves the springs which held her together and ordinarily supplied her with sprightly movement.

"Come here!" she said.

When he entered the room, aghast, she shut the door.

"I suppose I ought to break it to you gently," she said shakily, "but I shall do no such thing. It's too much to expect of any woman who has gone through what I have during these last three days. The creature is dying; she may be dead now."

She sank on the sofa and began to wipe away pouring tears. Her old cheeks were pale and her handkerchief showed touches of rose-pink on its dampness. She was aware of their presence, but was utterly indifferent.

Walderhurst stared at her haggard disorder and cleared his throat, finding himself unable to speak without doing so.

"Will you have the goodness to tell me," he said with weird stiffness, "what you are talking about?"

"About Emily Walderhurst," she answered. "The boy was born yesterday, and she has been sinking ever since. She cannot possibly last much longer."

"She!" he gasped, turning lead colour. "Cannot possibly last,--Emily?"

The wrench and shock were so unnatural that they reached that part of his being where human feeling was buried under selfishness and inhuman conventionality. He spoke, and actually thought, of Emily first.

Lady Maria continued to weep shamelessly.

"I am over seventy," she said, "and the last three days have punished me quite enough for anything I may have done since I was born. I have been in h.e.l.l, too, James. And, when she could think at all, she has only thought of you and your miserable child. I can't imagine what is the matter with a woman when she can care for a man to such an extent. Now she has what she wants,--she's dying for you."

"Why wasn't I told?" he asked, still with the weird and slow stiffness.

"Because she was a sentimental fool, and was afraid of disturbing you.

She ought to have ordered you home and kept you dancing attendance, and treated you to hysterics."

No one would have resented such a course of action more derisively than Lady Maria herself, but the last three days had reduced her to something like hysteria, and she had entirely lost her head.

"She has been writing cheerfully to me--"

"She would have written cheerfully to you if she had been seated in a cauldron of boiling oil, it is my impression," broke in her ladyship.

"She has been monstrously treated, people trying to murder her, and she afraid to accuse them for fear that you would disapprove. You know you have a nasty manner, James, when you think your dignity is interfered with."

Lord Walderhurst stood clenching and unclenching his hands as they hung by his sides. He did not like to believe that his fever had touched his brain, but he doubted his senses hideously.

"My good Maria," he said, "I do not understand a word you say, but I must go and see her."

"And kill her, if she has a breath left! You will not stir from here.

Thank Heaven! here is Dr. Warren."

The door had opened and Dr. Warren came in. He had just laid down upon the coverlet of a bed upstairs what seemed to be the hand of a dying woman, and no man like himself can do such a thing and enter a room without a singular look on his face.

People in a house of death inevitably whisper, whatsoever their remoteness from the sick-room. Lady Maria cried out in a whisper:

"Is she still alive?"

"Yes," was the response.

Walderhurst went to him.