“We were sure she was a wrong 'un from the first,” he explained in a thick, jerky voice to his listless auditors. “And now it turns out that she was in thick with poor Billy Withers, you know, and when Billy broke his neck—that was through another blessed woman—I'll tell you all about her by'm bye—when Billy broke his neck, his confounded valet got hold of Mrs. Jack's letters, and how she paid for 'em's the cream of the story—”
“We need not have that now, Benjamin,” said Mrs. Hardacre, with a warning indication that reverence was due to the young.
“Well, of course that's the end of it,” replied Mr. Hardacre, in some confusion.
But Norma rose with a laugh of hard mockery.
“The valet entered the service of Lord Wyniard, and now there's a pretty little divorce case in the air, with Jack Dugdale as petitioner and Lord Wyniard as corespondent. Are n't you sorry, mother, I did n't marry Wyniard and reform him, and save society this terrible scandal?”
Turning from her disconcerted parents, Norma pulled back the thick curtains from the French window and opened one of the doors.
“What are you doing that for?” cried Mrs. Hardacre irritably, as the cold air of a wet May night swept through the room.
“I'm going to try to ventilate my soul,” said Norma, stepping on to the balcony.
Chapter II—THE FOOL'S WISDOM
LIKE the inexplicable run on a particular number at the roulette-table, there often seems to be a run on some particular phenomenon thrown up by the wheel of daily life. Such a recurrent incident was the meeting of Norma and Jimmie Padgate during the next few weeks. She met him at Mrs. Deering's, she ran across him in the streets. Going to spend a weekend out of town, she found him on the platform of Paddington Station. The series of sheer coincidences established between them a certain familiarity. When next they met, it was in the crush of an emptying theatre. They found themselves blocked side by side, and they laughed as their eyes met.
“This seems to have got out of the domain of vulgar chance and become Destiny,” she said lightly.
“I am indeed favoured by the gods,” he replied.
“You don't deserve their good will because you have never come to see me.”
Jimmie replied that he was an old bear who loved to growl selfishly in his den. Norma retorted with a reference to Constance Deering. In her house he could growl altruistically.
“She pampers me with honey,” he explained.
“I am afraid you'll get nothing so Arcadian with us,” she replied, “but I can provide you with some excellent glucose.”
They were moved a few feet forward by the crowd, and then came to a halt again.
“This is my ward, Miss Aline Marden,” he said, presenting a pretty slip of a girl of seventeen, who had hung back shyly during the short dialogue, and looked with open-eyed admiration at Jimmie's new friend. “That is how she would be described in a court of law, but I don't mind telling you that really she is my nurse and foster-mother.”
The girl blushed at the introduction, and gave him an imperceptible twitch of the arm. Norma smiled at her graciously and asked her how she had liked the play.
“It was heavenly,” she said with a little sigh. “Did n't you think so?”
Norma, who had characterised the piece as the most dismal performance outside a little Bethel, was preparing a mendacious answer, when a sudden thinning in the crush brought to her side Mrs. Hardacre, from whom she had been separated. Mrs. Hardacre inquired querulously for Morland King, who had gone in search of the carriage. Norma reassured her as to his ability to find it, and introduced Jimmie and Aline. Mr. Padgate was Mr. King's oldest friend. Mrs. Hardacre bowed disapprovingly, took in with a hard glance the details of Aline's cheap, homemade evening frock, and the ready-made cape over her shoulders, and turned her head away with a sniff. She had been put out of temper the whole evening by Norma's glacial treatment of King, and was not disposed to smile at the nobodies whom it happened to please Norma to patronise.
At last King beckoned to them from the door, and they crushed through the still waiting crowd to join him. By the time Jimmie Padgate and his ward had reached the pavement they had driven off.
“Wonder if we can get a cab,” said Jimmie.
“Cab!” cried the girl, taking his arm affectionately. “One would think you were a millionaire. You can go in a cab if you like, but I'm going home in a 'bus. Come along. We'll get one at Piccadilly Circus.”
She hurried him on girlishly, talking of the play they had just seen. It was heavenly, she repeated. She had never been in the stalls before. She wished kind-hearted managers would send them seats every night. Then suddenly:
“Why did n't you tell me how beautiful she was?”
“Who, dear?”
“Why, Miss Hardacre. I think she is the loveliest thing I have ever seen. I could sit and look at her all day long. Why don't you paint her portrait—in that wonderful ivory-satin dress she was wearing to-night? And the diamond star in her hair that made her look like a queen—did you notice it? Why, Jimmie, you are not paying the slightest attention!”
“My dear, I could repeat verbatim every word you have said,” he replied soberly. “She is indeed one of the most beautiful of God's creatures.”
“Then you'll paint her portrait?”
“Perhaps, deary,” said Jimmie, “perhaps.”
Meanwhile in the brougham King was giving Norma an account of Jimmie's guardianship. She had asked him partly out of curiosity, partly to provide him with a subject of conversation, and partly to annoy her mother, whose disapproving sniff she had noted with some resentment. And this in brief is the tale that King told.
Some ten years ago, John Marden, a brother artist of Jimmie Padgate's, died penniless, leaving his little girl of seven with the alternative of fighting her way alone through an unsympathetic world, or of depending on the charity of his only sister, a drunken shrew of a woman, the wife of a small apothecary, and the casual mother of a vague and unwashed family. Common decency made the first alternative impossible. On their return to the house after the funeral, the aunt announced her intention of caring for the orphan as her own flesh and blood. Jimmie, who had taken upon himself the functions of the intestate's temporary executor, acquiesced dubiously. The lady, by no means sober, shed copious tears and a rich perfume of whisky. She called Aline to her motherly bosom. The child, who had held Jimmie's hand throughout the mournful proceedings, for he had been her slave and playfellow for the whole of her little life, advanced shyly. Her aunt took her in her arms. But the child, with instinctive repugnance to the smell of spirits, shrank from her kisses. The shrew arose in the woman; she shook her vindictively, and gave her three or four resounding slaps on face and shoulders. Jimmie leaped from his chair, tore the scared little girl from the vixen's clutches, and taking her bodily in his arms, strode with her out of the house, leaving the apothecary and his wife to settle matters between them. It was only when he had walked down the street and hailed a cab that he began to consider the situation.
“What on earth am I to do with you?” he asked whimsically.
The small arms tightened round his neck. “Take me to live with you,” sobbed the child.
“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings we learn wisdom. So be it,” said Jimmie, and he drove home with his charge.
As neither aunt nor uncle nor any human being in the wide world claimed the child, she became mistress of Jimmie's home from that hour. Her father's