Part 167

She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's.

"You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!"

Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric:

"Go on!"

"I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice that comes from Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. "He was very handsome and very brave; he was an officer of the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to marry him, and I--I believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.' ... That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On Thursday he was killed, and later--nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham--I found out the truth."

Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her rival has suffered equal wrong.

"You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's not my business. You say you found out?" She shows her admirably preserved teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt--"nearly a year after your marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling you the truth!"

Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly.

"He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"

"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model husband. Now, my poor----"

Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis:

"I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord Beauvayse!"

"He's dead--let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting. Yet in the same breath, with another of the mental pirouettes characteristic of her class and type, she adds: "Do you suppose I don't know my own husband? Take him one way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars, and never found the equal of Beau."

She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case with reviving briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons in the bright hot sun.

"Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose we're likely ever to come across you again. Good-bye! I forgive you for pitying me," she says frankly, holding out the plump, over-jewelled hand. "As for the other grudge.... What, are you going to kiss me?... Give Baby another before you go, dear ... and ... forgive him when you can!"

LXXI

Lynette sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the red umbrella had departed. While it was yet visible in the white-hot distance, hovering like some gaudy Brobdingnagian butterfly in advance of the white perambulator pushed by the white-clad nurse, the heads of two little shabbyish, youngish people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose over the edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild chamomile and blazing poppies. And the female, a small draggled young woman in a large hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called out excitedly:

"Oh, William, it's 'er--it's 'er!"

"By Cripps, so it is!" came from the male companion of the battered peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the unconvincing mask of diffidence assumed by an undersized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's doubtful-weather panoply of black waterproof jacket, breeches merging into knee-boots, the whole crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with absurd brass ventilators, and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of dust. His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly light eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that the absurd cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick in all the chinks and creases of his leading features, and a large black smudge of oily grime was upon his wide upper lip, impinging upon his nose. Nor was his companion much less dusty, though the checks of a travelling ulster of green and yellow plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have advertised the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they emanated, through the medium of a Fleet Street fog.

"Might we speak to you, ma'am?" The dusty young man respectfully touched the dusty peak of the cap with brass ventilators, and, with a shock of surprise, Lynette recognised Saxham's chauffeur.

"Keyse!... It is Keyse!" She looked at him in surprise.

"Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of Beanfeast for Two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South Wyles, of droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the 'Ow Do." He breathed hard, and rivulets of perspiration began to trickle down from under the preposterous cap, converting the dust that filled the haggard lines of his thin face into mud. "An' payin' our respects." His eye slewed appealingly at his companion, asking as plainly as an eye can, "What price that?" And the glance that shot back from the dusty shadow of the exhausted peonies answered, "Not bad by 'arf--for you!"

Lynette smiled at the little Cockney couple. The surprise that had checked the beating of her heart had passed. It was pleasant to see these faces from Harley Street. She answered:

"I understand. My husband has given you a holiday. Is he well?" She flushed, realising that it was pain to have to ask others for the news of him that he had denied her. "I mean because he has not written.... I have been feeling rather anxious. Was he quite well when you left?"

"'Was he----'? Yes, 'm!" W. Keyse shot out the affirmative with such explosive suddenness that the hand upon his arm must have nipped hard.

"I am so glad!" Lynette turned to the young woman in the ulster, whose face betrayed no guilty knowledge of the pinch. She was small, and pale, and gritty, and her blue eyes had red rims to them from the fatigue of the journey, or some other cause. But they were honest and clear, and not unpretty eyes, looking out from a forest of dusty yellowish fringe, deplorably out of curl. Yet a fringe that had associations for Lynette, reaching a long way from Harley Street, and back to the old days at Gueldersdorp before the Siege.

"Surely I know you? I must have known you at Gueldersdorp." She added as Mrs. Keyse's eyes said "Yes": "You used to be a housemaid at the Convent. How strange that I should not have remembered it until now! And your husband.... I do not remember ever having seen him before he came to us at Harley Street. But his name comes back to me in connection with a letter"--she knitted her brows, chasing the vague, fleeting memory--"a love-letter that was sent to Miss Du Taine inside a chocolate-box, just when school was breaking up. It was you who smuggled the box in!"

"To oblige, bein' begged to by Keyse as a fyvour. 'E didn't know 'is own mind--them d'ys!" explained Mrs. Keyse, sweeping her husband's scorching countenance with a glance of withering scorn.