And in the midst of the mother’s anxieties there burst upon her the sudden, incredible tale that Warkworth—to whom she herself was writing regularly, and to whom Aileen, from her bed, was sending little pencilled notes, sweetly meant to comfort a sighing lover—had been entangling himself in London with another, a Miss Le Breton, positively a nobody, as far as birth and position were concerned, the paid companion of Lady Henry Delafield, and yet, as it appeared, a handsome, intriguing, unscrupulous hussy, just the kind of hawk to snatch a morsel from a dove’s mouth—a woman, in fact, with whom a little bread-and-butter girl like Aileen might very well have no chance.
Emily Lawrence’s letter, in the tone of the candid friend, written after her evening at Crowborough House, had roused a mingled anguish and fury in the mother’s breast. She lifted her eyes from it to look at Aileen, propped up in bed, her head thrown back against the pillow, and her little hands closed happily over Warkworth’s letters; and she went straight from that vision to write to the traitor.
The traitor defended and excused himself by return of post. He implored her to pay no attention to the calumnious distortion of a friendship which had already served Aileen’s interests no less than his own. It was largely to Miss Le Breton’s influence that he owed the appointment which was to advance him so materially in his career. At the same time he thought it would be wise if Lady Blanche kept not only the silly gossip that was going about, but even this true and innocent fact, from Aileen’s knowledge. One never knew how a girl would take such things, and he would rather explain it himself at his own time.
Lady Blanche had to be content. And meanwhile the glory of the Mokembe appointment was a strong factor in Aileen’s recovery. She exulted over it by day and night, and she wrote the letters of an angel.
The mother watched her writing them with mixed feelings. As to Warkworth’s replies, which she was sometimes allowed to see, Lady Blanche, who had been a susceptible girl, and the heroine of several “affairs,” was secretly and strongly of opinion that men’s love-letters, at any rate, were poor things nowadays, compared with what they had been.
But Aileen was more than satisfied with them. How busy he must be, and with such important business! Poor, harassed darling, how good of him to write her a word—to give her a thought!
And now Lady Blanche beheld her child crushed and broken, a nervous wreck, before her life had truly begun. The agonies which the mother endured were very real, and should have been touching. But she was not a touching person. All her personal traits—her red-rimmed eyes, her straggling hair, the slight, disagreeable twist in her nose and mouth—combined, with her signal lack of dignity and reticence, to stir the impatience rather than the sympathy of the bystander.
“And mamma was so fond of her,” Julie would say to herself sometimes, in wonder, proudly contrasting the wild grace and originality of her disgraced mother with the awkward, slipshod ways of the sister who had remained a great lady.
Meanwhile, Lady Blanche was, indeed, perpetually conscious of her strange niece, perpetually thinking of the story her brothers had told her, perpetually trying to recall the sister she had lost so young, and then turning from all such things to brood angrily over the Lawrence letter, and the various other rumors which had reached her of Warkworth’s relations to Miss Le Breton.
What was in the woman’s mind now? She looked pale and tragic enough. But what right had she to grieve—or, if she did grieve, to be pitied?
Jacob Delafield had been fool enough to marry her, and fate would make her a duchess. So true it is that they who have no business to flourish do flourish, like green bay-trees.
As to poor Rose—sometimes there would rise on Lady Blanche’s mind the sudden picture of herself and the lost, dark-eyed sister, scampering on their ponies through the country lanes of their childhood; of her lessons with Rose, her worship of Rose; and then of that black curtain of mystery and reprobation which for the younger child of sixteen had suddenly descended upon Rose and all that concerned her.
But Rose’s daughter! All one could say was that she had turned out as the child of such proceedings might be expected to turn out—a minx. The aunt’s conviction as to that stood firm. And while Rose’s face and fate had sunk into the shadows of the past, even for her sister, Aileen was here, struggling for her delicate, threatened life, her hand always in the hand of this woman who had tried to steal her lover from her, her soft, hopeless eyes, so tragically unconscious, bent upon the bold intriguer.
What possessed the child? Warkworth’s letters, Julie’s company—those seemed to be all she desired.
And at last, in the June beauty and brilliance, when a triumphant summer had banished the pitiful spring, when the meadows were all perfume and color, and the clear mountains, in a clear sky, upheld the ever-new and never-ending pomp of dawn and noon and night, the little, wasted creature looked up into Julie’s face, and, without tears, gasped out her story.
“These are his letters. Some day I’ll—I’ll read you some of them; and this—is his picture. I
