CHAPTER IV
There was no merry dinner that night in the verandah of the hotel under the clinging wreaths of green. Mrs. Kingsward went up to her room still with her heavy shawl about her shoulders which she had forgotten, though it added something to her discomfort – followed by Bee, pale and rigid, offering no help, following her mother like an angry shadow. Charlie and Betty met them on the stairs and stood aside in consternation, unable to conceive what had happened. Mrs. Kingsward gave them a sort of troubled smile and said: “Get your dinner, dears; don’t wait for us. I am too tired to come down to-night.”
“But, mamma – ” they both began in remonstrance.
“Go down and get your dinner,” said Mrs. Kingsward, peremptorily.
As for Bee, she did not look at them at all. Her eyes were fierce with some sentiment which Betty could not divine, and angry, blazing, as if they might have set light to the hotel.
Little Betty pressed against Charlie’s side as they went down, startled and alarmed. “Bee has had a quarrel with mamma,” she whispered, in tones of awe.
“That’s impossible,” said Charlie.
“Oh, no, it’s not impossible. There was once – ”
It comforted them both a little in the awful circumstances that such a thing had perhaps happened before. They went very silently and much cast down to that table in the verandah, whither obsequious waiters beckoned them, and contemplated with dismay all the plates laid, all the glitter of the lamps and the glasses.
“I suppose we must not wait for them as they said so,” said Charlie, sitting down in his place at the bottom of the table. “Tell Mr. Leigh – that is the other gentleman – that we are ready.”
“The other gentleman, sir,” said the waiter, who was the pride of the establishment for his English, “has gone out.”
“Gone out!” said Charlie. He could only stare at Betty and she at him, not knowing what to think.
“He has had his letters, too, sir,” said the waiter in a significant tone.
His letters! What could that have to do with it? Charlie also had had his letters, one of them a bill which he did not view with any satisfaction; but even at twenty-one a man already learns to disguise his feelings, and sits down to dinner cheerfully though he has received a bill by the post. Charlie’s mind at first could not perceive any connection between Bee’s withdrawal upstairs and Aubrey’s disappearance. It was Betty who suggested, sitting down very close to him, that it looked as if Aubrey and Bee had quarrelled too.
“Perhaps that is what it is,” she said, as if she had found out a satisfactory reason. “Lovers always quarrel; and mamma will have taken Aubrey’s part, and Bee will be so angry, and feel as if she could never forgive him. There, that is what it must be.”
“A man may quarrel with his sweetheart,” said Charlie, severely, “but he needn’t spoil other people’s dinner for that;” however, they comforted themselves that this was the most likely explanation, and that all would come right in the morning. And they were very young and hungry, having eaten nothing since the veal at one o’clock. And these two made on the whole a very satisfactory meal.
The scene upstairs was very different. Mrs. Kingsward sent Moulsey away on pretence of getting her some tea, and then turned to her daughter who stood by the dressing-table and stared blankly, without seeing anything, into those mysterious depths of the glass which are so suggestive to people in trouble. She said, faintly, “Bee, I would so much rather you would not ask me any more questions to-night.”
“That is,” said Bee, “you would like to send me away to be miserable by myself without even knowing what it is, while you will take your sleeping draught and forget it. How can you be so selfish, mamma? And you have made my Aubrey join in the conspiracy against me – my Aubrey who belongs to me as papa does to you. If you are against us it is all very well, though I can’t imagine why you should be against us – but at least you need not interfere between Aubrey and me.”
“Oh, my dear child, my poor darling!” said Mrs. Kingsward, wringing her hands.
“It is all very well to call me your poor child, when it is you that are making me poor,” said Bee.
She kept moving a little, first on one foot then on the other, but always gazing into the glass which presented the image of an excited girl, very pale, but lit up with a sort of blaze of indignation, and unable to keep still. It was not that girl’s face, however, that Bee was gazing at, but at the dim world of space beyond in which there were faint far-away reflections of the light and the world. “And if you think you will get rid of me like this, and hang me up till to-morrow without knowing what it is, you are mistaken, mamma. I will not leave you until you have told me. What is it? What has papa got in his head? What does he say in that horrid – horrid letter? I wish I had known when I gave it to you I should have thrown it into the river instead of ever letting it come into your hands.”
“Bee, you must know that this passion is very wrong and very improper. You ought not to face me like that, and demand an answer. I am your mother,” said Mrs. Kingsward, but with a falter which was all unlike that assumption of authority, “and I have no need to tell you anything more than I think is for your good.”
“Ah! I know where that comes from,” cried Bee; “that’s papa’s thunder! that’s what he has told you to say! You don’t believe, yourself, that you have a right to hang up a poor girl over some dreadful, dreadful abyss, when she was so happy and never suspected anything.” Here Bee’s voice faltered for a moment, but she quickly recovered herself. “And to drag her away from the one person that could support her, and to cut the ground from under her feet, and never to tell her what it means!”
It was at this point that Moulsey, with a little discreet cough to herald her approach, came into the room, bearing a tray with tea, and a little cover from which came a faint but agreeable odour. Mrs. Kingsward was in great trouble about her child, but she was much exhausted and in want of physical support, and it did seem to her hard that she might not be permitted to eat the smallest of cutlets before embarking on a scene such as she knew this would be. Oh, why didn’t papa come and say it himself, when there was so much that was dreadful to say?
“Shall I fetch something for Miss Bee, too?” said Moulsey. “It ain’t a good thing for a young creature to go without her dinner. If she’s not going down, ma’am, as would be much the best, I’ll just run and fetch a little something for Miss Bee too.”
“Indeed, indeed, Bee, Moulsey is right. Think how miserable the others will feel all alone, and thinking something has happened. Do go down, darling, and strengthen yourself with a little food, and take a glass of wine just for once to please me. And after that you shall be told everything – all that I know.”
Bee grew paler and paler, standing there before the glass, and her eyes blazed more and more. “It is as bad as that, then!” she said under her breath to herself, and then went away from where she was standing to the further end of the room. “I shall wait here, mamma, till you have had your tea. I know you want it. Oh, go away Moulsey! Let me alone! No, you shall not bring me anything! or, if you do, I will throw it out of the window,” she said, stamping her foot. The dark end of the room seemed suddenly lighted up by a sort of aurora borealis, with the fire of poor Bee’s burning eyes and the flashes here and there of her white frock – oh, poor white frock! put on in the sunshine of life and happiness to please her love, and now turned into a sort of sacrificial robe.
“Take it away, Moulsey; I can’t eat anything – I can’t, indeed – no more than Miss Bee – ”
“But you must, ma’am,” said Moulsey. “Miss Bee’s young; she’s had nothing to drain away her strength. But it’s far different with you, after all your family and so weak