“How do you know?” said her father.
She smiled.
“How should I know!”
“But not Clifford’s child, of course?”
“No! Another man’s.”
She rather enjoyed tormenting him.
“Do I know the man?” asked Sir Malcolm.
“No! You’ve never seen him.”
There was a long pause.
“And what are your plans?”
“I don’t know. That’s the point.”
“No patching it up with Clifford?”
“I suppose Clifford would take it,” said Connie. “He told me, after last time you talked to him, he wouldn’t mind if I had a child: so long as I went about it discreetly.”
“Only sensible thing he could say, under the circumstances. Then I suppose it’ll be all right.”
“In what way?” said Connie, looking into her father’s eyes. They were big blue eyes rather like her own, but with a certain uneasiness in them, a look sometimes of an uneasy little boy, sometimes a look of sullen selfishness, usually good-humoured and wary.
“You can present Clifford with an heir to all the Chatterleys, and put another baronet in Wragby.”
Sir Malcolm’s face smiled with a half-sensual smile.
“But I don’t think I want to,” she said.
“Why not? Feeling entangled with the other man? Well! If you want the truth from me, my child, it’s this. The world goes on. Wragby stands and will go on standing. The world is more or less a fixed thing, and externally, we have to adapt ourselves to it. Privately, in my private opinion, we can please ourselves. Emotions change. You may like one man this year and another next. But Wragby still stands. Stick by Wragby as far as Wragby sticks by you. Then please yourself. But you’ll get very little out of making a break. You can make a break if you wish. You have an independent income, the only thing that never lets you down. But you won’t get much out of it. Put a little baronet in Wragby. It’s an amusing thing to do.”
And Sir Malcolm sat back and smiled again. Connie did not answer.
“I hope you had a real man at last,” he said to her after a while, sensually alert.
“I did. That’s the trouble. There aren’t many of them about,” she said.
“No, by God!” he mused. “There aren’t! Well my dear, to look at you, he was a lucky man. Surely he wouldn’t make trouble for you?”
“Oh, no! He leaves me my own mistress entirely.”
“Quite! Quite! A genuine man would.”
Sir Malcolm was pleased. Connie was his favourite daughter, he had always liked the female in her. Not so much of her mother in her as in Hilda. And he had always disliked Clifford. So he was pleased, and very tender with his daughter, as if the unborn child were his child.
He drove with her to Hartland’s hotel, and saw her installed: then went round to his club. She had refused his company for the evening.
She found a letter from Mellors. “I won’t come round to your hotel, but I’ll wait for you outside the Golden Cock in Adam Street at seven.”
There he stood, tall and slender, and so different, in a formal suit of thin dark cloth. He had a natural distinction, but he had not the cut-to-pattern look of her class. Yet, she saw at once, he could go anywhere. He had a native breeding which was really much nicer than the cut-to-pattern class thing.
“Ah, there you are! How well you look!”
“Yes! But not you.”
She looked in his face anxiously. It was thin, and the cheekbones showed. But his eyes smiled at her, and she felt at home with him. There it was: suddenly, the tension of keeping up her appearances fell from her. Something flowed out of him physically, that made her feel inwardly at ease and happy, at home. With a woman’s now alert instinct for happiness, she registered it at once. “I’m happy when he’s there!” Not all the sunshine of Venice had given her this inward expansion and warmth.
“Was it horrid for you?” she asked, as she sat opposite him at table. He was too thin; she saw it now. His hand lay as she knew it, with that curious loose forgottenness of a sleeping animal. She wanted so much to take it and kiss it. But she did not quite dare.
“People are always horrid,” he said.
“And did you mind very much?”
“I minded, as I always shall mind. And I knew I was a fool to mind.”
“Did you feel like a dog with a tin can tied to its tail? Clifford said you felt like that.”
He looked at her. It was cruel of her at that moment: for his pride had suffered bitterly.
“I suppose I did,” he said.
She never knew the fierce bitterness with which he resented insult.
There was a long pause.
“And did you miss me?” she asked.
“I was glad you were out of it.”
Again there was a pause.
“But did people believe about you and me?” she asked.
“No! I don’t think so for a moment.”
“Did Clifford?”
“I should say not. He put it off without thinking about it. But naturally it made him want to see the last of me.”
“I’m going to have a child.”
The expression died utterly out of his face, out of his whole body. He looked at her with darkened eyes, whose look she could not understand at all: like some dark-flamed spirit looking at her.
“Say you’re glad!” she pleaded, groping for his hand. And she saw a certain exultance spring up in him. But it was netted down by things she could not understand.
“It’s the future,” he said.
“But aren’t you glad?” she persisted.
“I have such a terrible mistrust of the future.”
“But you needn’t be troubled by any responsibility. Clifford would have it as his own, he’d be glad.”
She saw him go pale, and recoil under this. He did not answer.
“Shall I go back to Clifford, and put a little baronet into Wragby?” she asked.
He looked at her, pale and very remote. The ugly little grin flickered on his face.
“You wouldn’t have to tell him who the father was.”
“Oh!” she said;
