Thérèse—that should be her room—the cheerful, blue-papered room with the south window. Julie felt a strange rush of feeling as she thought of it. How curious that these two—Léonie and little Thérèse—should be thus brought back into her life! For she had no doubt whatever that they would accept with eagerness what she had to offer. Her foster-sister had married a schoolmaster in one of the Communal schools of Bruges while Julie was still a girl at the convent. Léonie’s lame child had been much with her grandmother, old Madame Le Breton. To Julie she had been at first unwelcome and repugnant. Then some quality in the frail creature had unlocked the girl’s sealed and often sullen heart.
While she had been living with Lady Henry, these two, the mother and child, had been also in London; the mother, now a widow, earning her bread as an inferior kind of French governess, the child boarded out with various persons, and generally for long periods of the year in hospital or convalescent home. To visit her in her white hospital bed—to bring her toys and flowers, or merely kisses and chat—had been, during these years, the only work of charity on Julie’s part which had been wholly secret, disinterested, and constant.
XII
It was a somewhat depressed company that found its straggling way into the Duchess’s drawing-room that evening between tea and dinner.
Miss Le Breton did not appear at tea. The Duchess believed that, after her inspection of the house in Heribert Street, Julie had gone on to Bloomsbury to find Madame Bornier. Jacob Delafield was there, not much inclined to talk, even as Julie’s champion. And, one by one, Lady Henry’s oldest habitués, the “criminals” of the night before, dropped in.
Dr. Meredith arrived with a portfolio containing what seemed to be proof-sheets.
“Miss Le Breton not here?” he said, as he looked round him.
The Duchess explained that she might be in presently. The great man sat down, his portfolio carefully placed beside him, and drank his tea under what seemed a cloud of preoccupation.
Then appeared Lord Lackington and Sir Wilfrid Bury. Montresor had sent a note from the House to say that if the debate would let him he would dash up to Grosvenor Square for some dinner, but could only stay an hour.
“Well, here we are again—the worst of us!” said the Duchess, presently, with a sigh of bravado, as she handed Lord Lackington his cup of tea and sank back in her chair to enjoy her own.
“Speak for yourselves, please,” said Sir Wilfrid’s soft, smiling voice, as he daintily relieved his mustache of some of the Duchess’s cream.
“Oh, that’s all very well,” said the Duchess, throwing up a hand in mock annoyance; “but why weren’t you there?”
“I knew better.”
“The people who keep out of scrapes are not the people one loves,” was the Duchess’s peevish reply.
“Let him alone,” said Lord Lackington, coming for some more teacake. “He will get his deserts. Next Wednesday he will be tête-à-tête with Lady Henry.”
“Lady Henry is going to Torquay tomorrow,” said Sir Wilfrid, quietly.
“Ah!”
There was a general chorus of interrogation, amid which the Duchess made herself heard.
“Then you’ve seen her?”
“Today, for twenty minutes—all she was able to bear. She was ill yesterday. She is naturally worse today. As to her state of mind—”
The circle of faces drew eagerly nearer.
“Oh, it’s war,” said Sir Wilfrid, nodding—“undoubtedly war—upon the Cave—if there is a Cave.”
“Well, poor things, we must have something to shelter us!” cried the Duchess. “The Cave is being aired today.”
The interrogating faces turned her way. The Duchess explained the situation, and drew the house in Heribert Street—with its Cyclops-eye of a dormer window, and its Ionian columns—on the tea-cloth with her nail.
“Ah,” said Sir Wilfrid, crossing his knees reflectively. “Ah, that makes it serious.”
“Julie must have a place to live in,” said the Duchess, stiffly.
“I suppose Lady Henry would reply that there are still a few houses in London which do not belong to her kinsman, the Duke of Crowborough.”
“Not perhaps to be had for the lending, and ready to step into at a day’s notice,” said Lord Lackington, with his queer smile, like the play of sharp sunbeams through a mist. “That’s the worst of our class. The margin between us and calamity is too wide. We risk too little. Nobody goes to the workhouse.”
Sir Wilfrid looked at him curiously. “Do I catch your meaning?” he said, dropping his voice; “is it that if there had been no Duchess, and no Heribert Street, Miss Le Breton would have managed to put up with Lady Henry?”
Lord Lackington smiled again. “I think it probable. … As it is, however, we are all the gainers. We shall now see Miss Julie at her ease and ours.”
“You have been for some time acquainted with Miss Le Breton?”
“Oh, some time. I don’t exactly remember. Lady Henry, of course, is an old friend of mine, as she is of yours. Sometimes she is rude to me. Then I stay away. But I always go back. She and I can discuss things and people that nobody else recollects—no, as far as that’s concerned, you’re not in it, Bury. Only this winter, somehow, I have often gone round to see Lady Henry, and have found Miss Le Breton instead so attractive—”
“Precisely,” said Sir Wilfrid, laughing; “the whole case in a nutshell.”
“What puzzles me,” continued his companion, in a musing voice, “is how she can be so English as she is—with her foreign bringing up. She has a most extraordinary instinct for people—people in London—and their relations. I have never known her make a mistake. Yet
