The friendliness of the two faithful Cupps and the humble Turkey-red comforts of the bed-sitting-room had meant home to Emily Fox-Seton. When she had turned her face and her tired feet away from discouraging errands and small humiliations and discomforts, she had turned them toward the bed-sitting-room, the hot little fire, the small, fat black kettle singing on the hob, and the two-and-eleven-penny tea-set. Not being given to crossing bridges before she reached them, she had never contemplated the dreary possibility that her refuge might be taken away from her. She had not dwelt upon the fact that she had no other real refuge on earth.
As she walked among the sun-heated heather and the luxuriously droning bees, she dwelt upon it now with a suddenly realising sense. As it came home to her soul, her eyes filled with big tears, which brimmed over and rolled down her cheeks. They dropped upon the breast of her linen blouse and left marks.
“I shall have to find a new bed-sitting-room somewhere,” she said, the breast of the linen blouse lifting itself sharply. “It will be so different to be in a house with strangers. Mrs. Cupp and Jane—” She was obliged to take out her handkerchief at that moment. “I am afraid I can’t get anything respectable for ten shillings a week. It Was very cheap—and they were so nice!”
All her fatigue of the early morning had returned. Her feet began to burn and ache, and the sun felt almost unbearably hot. The mist in her eyes prevented her seeing the path before her. Once or twice she stumbled over something.
“It seems as if it must be farther than four miles,” she said. “And then there is the walk back. I am tired. But I must get on, really.”
Chapter Six
The drive to the ruins had been a great success. It was a drive of just sufficient length to put people in spirits without fatiguing them. The party came back to lunch with delightful appetities. Lady Agatha and Miss Cora Brooke had pink cheeks. The Marquis of Walderhurst had behaved charmingly to both of them. He had helped each of them to climb about among the ruins, and had taken them both up the steep, dark stairway of one of the towers, and stood with them looking over the turrets into the courtyard and the moat. He knew the history of the castle and could point out the banquet-hall and the chapel and the serving-places, and knew legends about the dungeons.
“He gives us all a turn, mother,” said Miss Cora Brooke. “He even gave a turn yesterday to poor Emily Fox-Seton. He’s rather nice.”
There was a great deal of laughter at lunch after their return. Miss Cora Brooke was quite brilliant in her gay little sallies. But though she was more talkative than Lady Agatha, she did not look more brilliant.
The letter from Curzon Street had not made the beauty shed tears. Her face had fallen when it had been handed to her on her return, and she had taken it upstairs to her room with rather a flagging step. But when she came down to lunch she walked with the movement of a nymph. Her lovely little face wore a sort of tremulous radiance. She laughed like a child at every amusing thing that was said. She might have been ten years old instead of twenty-two, her colour, her eyes, her spirits seemed of a freshness so infantine.
She was leaning back in her chair laughing enchantingly at one of Miss Brooke’s sparkling remarks when Lord Walderhurst, who sat next to her, said suddenly, glancing round the table:
“But where is Miss Fox-Seton?”
It was perhaps a significant fact that up to this moment nobody had observed her absence. It was Lady Maria who replied.
“I am almost ashamed to answer,” she said. “As I have said before, Emily Fox-Seton has become the lodestar of my existence. I cannot live without her. She has walked over to Maundell to make sure that we do not have a dinner-party without fish tonight.”
“She has walked over to Maundell,” said Lord Walderhurst—“after yesterday?”
“There was not a pair of wheels left in the stable,” answered Lady Maria. “It is disgraceful, of course, but she is a splendid walker, and she said she was not too tired to do it. It is the kind of thing she ought to be given the Victoria Cross for—saving one from a dinner-party without fish.”
The Marquis of Walderhurst took up the cord of his monocle and fixed the glass rigidly in his eye.
“It is not only four miles to Maundell,” he remarked, staring at the tablecloth, not at Lady Maria, “but it is four miles back.”
“By a singular coincidence,” said Lady Maria.
The talk and laughter went on, and the lunch also, but Lord Walderhurst, for some reason best known to himself, did not finish his. For a few seconds he stared at the tablecloth, then he pushed aside his nearly disposed-of cutlet, then he got up from his chair quietly.
“Excuse me, Maria,” he said, and without further ado went out of the room, and walked toward the stables.
There was excellent fish at Maundell; Batch produced it at once, fresh, sound, and desirable. Had she been in her normal spirits, Emily would have rejoiced at the sight of it, and have retraced her four miles to Mallowe in absolute jubilation. She would have shortened and beguiled her return journey by depicting to herself Lady Maria’s pleasure and relief.
But the letter from Mrs. Cupp lay like a weight of lead in her pocket. It had given her such things to think of as she walked that she had been oblivious to heather and bees and fleece-bedecked summer-blue sky, and had felt more tired than in any tramp through London streets that she could call to mind. Each step she took seemed to be carrying her farther away from the few square yards of home the bed-sitting-room had represented under the dominion of the Cupps. Every moment she recalled more strongly that it had been home—home. Of course it had not been the third-floor back room so much as it had been the Cupps who made it so, who had regarded her as a sort of possession, who had liked to serve her, and had done it with actual affection.
“I shall have to find a new place,” she kept saying. “I shall have to go among quite strange people.”
She had suddenly a new sense of being without resource. That was one of the proofs of the curious heaviness of the blow the simple occurrence was to her. She felt temporarily almost as if there were no other lodging-houses in London, though she knew that really there were tens of thousands. The fact was that though there might be other Cupps, or their counterparts, she could not make herself believe such a good thing possible. She had been physically worn out before she had read the letter, and its effect had been proportionate to her fatigue and lack of power to rebound. She was vaguely surprised to feel that the tears kept filling her eyes and falling on her cheeks in big heavy drops. She was obliged to use her handkerchief frequently, as if she was suddenly developing a cold in her head.
“I must take care,” she said once, quite prosaically, but with more pathos in her voice than she was aware of, “or I shall make my nose quite red.”
[Illustration: The Marquis of Walderhurst]
Though Batch was able to supply fish, he was unfortunately not able to send it to Mallowe. His cart had gone out on a round just before Miss Fox-Seton’s arrival, and there was no knowing when it would return.
“Then I must carry the fish myself,” said Emily. “You can put it in a neat basket.”
“I’m very sorry, miss; I am, indeed, miss,” said Batch, looking hot and pained.
“It will not be heavy,” returned Emily; “and