His wife frowned. "How can you be so absurd, dear; she must be quite old, for Paul wrote she was a perfect mother to him, and that is quite six years ago."

Lord George's eyes twinkled again. "My dear Blanche, you and Paul have exaggerated notions on the subject of a mother's----" He paused, at a rattle on the door-handle, and looked apprehensively at his wife. The next instant two charming little figures in frilled white nightgowns burst into the room, and flinging themselves into their mother's arms began to cover her with kisses. The daintiest little creatures, a boy and a girl, with angelic faces and shrill, excited, happy, little voices.

"Oh, you bad children!" cried Blanche, without a trace of vexation.

"So you wanted to see mother, did you? And now you have seen her, off to bed with you before Nannie comes after you, there's dear ones!

Quick! or she will be coming."

"Quick, Adam! Quick, Evie!" echoed the happy voices excitedly, in a rush to the open door, which ended in a sudden pull up, and a still more excited cry. "Oh, mammy! Oh, daddy! here's Blazes comin' down the stairs."

Lord George's face lost its apprehensiveness in resignation. Yet, as he settled himself back in his chair, his long upper lip betrayed a disposition to smile, for Blasius, his youngest son, was apt to amuse him. A very different child this, short, squat, and red-haired, who, after sundry thumpings and b.u.mpings outside, suggestive of falls, appeared, rubbing his eyes sleepily, at the door; then the broad, good-natured face expanded into a grin. "_Bickys'!_" he said, laconically, as he toddled across to the tray.

"Oh! what a welly greedy little boy, ain't he, Evie?" said Adam. "We come to see our darlin' mummie, didn't we, duck.u.ms?" He was at her side for a swift caress, and back again to stand expectantly beside his sister, whose little dancing feet were keeping time to her nodding golden head. As pretty a picture of light-hearted innocent enjoyment as heart could desire, even at eleven o'clock at night!

"Give him a biscuit, do, and let him go," said Lady George, hurriedly.

"It won't hurt him, they are quite plain. Dada will give you a biscuit, Blasius, and then you can go back to bed, like a dear, can't you?"

Blasius' large, round, blue eyes a.s.sumed a look of vacuity as the sentence proceeded; but as he stood st.u.r.dily on his little bare feet beside his father both little chubby hands went out at once, and a singularly full voice for so young a child gave out conglomerately:--

"Blathe's--'ll--take two, ta."

Lord George shot a glance at his wife and complied; while from the door came a little whisper, intended to be one of horror. "Oh, Addie!

ain't he a welly greedy little boy?"

"And now Blasius will go to bed like a good boy, with his good little brother and sister," remarked Lady George, with forced optimism. "Adam and----" Her voice failed before a soft thud as Blasius sat down solidly, and stuck his little bare feet beyond his little white nightgown.

"Mummie can go, Blazeth'll stay with dada--ta."

Those two at the door stood bolt upright, with sidelong looks of pious horror at each other--

"Oh, Evie! > Ain't he a weally naughty little boy?"

"Oh, Addle! /

"Blasius _must_ go to bed," began his mother, quite firmly, "or--or--mummie will be very much grieved. Her little boy wouldn't like to grieve his mummie, would he?"

Lord George, who had looked hopeful at the decision of tone, sank back in his chair and twiddled his thumbs.

"You had better ring for nurse at once, Blanche. It always comes to that in the end, and the child will get cold."

His wife frowned. Her theories had been so successful with Adam and Eve that the necessity for reverting to the _vi et armis_ with this baby was grievous. She sate down beside him on the floor, and began in mellifluous tones.

"Listen, Blasius. Mummie wants her little Blasius to do something to please her; she wants him to do something very much----" She got no further, being gagged by a little soft hand and a very hard biscuit together.

"Blazeth's not a deedy 'ickle boy. Blazeth'll give poor 'ickle mummie hith bicky, and be a dood 'ickle boy. Then daddy'll gif him anofer."

Little chortles of intense enjoyment came from those angelic faces at the door.

"Go to bed, children; off with you at once," said their father, quickly, whereupon an obedient patter of bare feet fled up the stairs with an accompanying cackle of high, eager voices, busy over the pros and cons of Blasius versus authority.

"Do you think she'll a.s.suade him, Evie? I don't." "I think he ought to be smacked, I do." "I'd let him cry, it don't hurt a child to cry.

Nanna's mother says it's good for the lungs." "And Blazes likes to cry, he does." "I say, Addie! how long will it be afore Duck.u.m's mummie has to ring the bell?"

The last wonder being faintly audible from the landing above, settled the business downstairs. Lord George rose and took the law into his own hands.

"Oh, George!" cried his wife, reproachfully, "how can you expect to train up children in the way they should go if you are so impatient?

If once I could have got Blasius to understand what was really required of him----"

Here the advent of a big, stalwart figure in a wrapper, bearing a white shawl, brought such sudden comprehension to the stalwart little one, that the room for one brief moment resounded with yells. The next found the door closed upon them, and Lady George looked disconsolately at her husband, as she listened to the retreating struggles of her youngest born.

"I cannot think what makes him so different from the others," she said, gloomily.

"My dear," replied her husband, consolingly, "Cain came after Adam and Eve; perhaps the next will be Abel. Besides, Blasius was a risky name.

I told you so at the time."

"Saint Blasius was a very worthy man," retorted his spouse, hotly, "and, considering that you and the boy were both born on his day, I must say I think it quite natural that I should call my child George Blasius--or, let me see, was it Blasius George?"

"It is a matter of no importance, my dear," replied her husband, drily. He did not remind his wife, nor did she choose to remember that at the time she had been playing the ultra ritualistic role. To tell the truth, she did not care to be brought face to face with her past impersonations, unless the fancy seized her to revert to them; when, at a moment's notice, she could resume the character as if she had never ceased to play it.

So, the next day, with a view to making a suitable impression on Paul's widow, as she chose to call Mrs. Vane, she put on her most dowdy garments, and actually went in an omnibus down the King's-road.

Thus far her environment suited her foregone conclusions, but, as she stood in the wide stretch down by the river, the brilliant sunshine streaming upon a very bright knocker and a very white door, a certain feeling of distrust crept over her. Nor was the darkened room into which she was ushered rea.s.suring. The parquet floors were almost bare, the windows beneath the striped Venetian awnings were set wide open to a balcony wreathed with blossoming creepers, and hung with cages of singing birds. A scent of flowers was in the air, a coolness, an emptiness, and yet the first impression was one of ease and comfort.

Not the room, this, of an old frump. And this was not an old frump rising from a cushioned lounge and coming forward like a white shadow in the half light.

"How good of you to come!"

Lady George, dazzled as she was by the change from the sunlight outside to the darkness within, yet saw enough to make her gasp. Lo!

this little bit of a woman with syren written all over her from the tip of her dainty Parisian shoe to the crown of her fair, curly head, was Paul's widow. His mother, forsooth! A pretty mother, indeed!

Having got so far as this, Blanche, being, amongst other things, somewhat of an artist, felt bound to admit that Violet Vane was very pretty indeed; so pretty that it was a pleasure to watch the piquant face, full of a quaint sort of humour and freshness, grow clear of the shadows. In this half light she looked younger, no doubt, than she really was; still, even in the garish day, Lady George felt instinctively that her charm would remain. In fact, she was not at all, no! not in the least, a suitable companion for Paul, when so much depended on his being reasonable.

"I haven't seen your brother for years," came the sweet but rather thin voice. "It is so good of him to remember me. So more than good of him to ask me down to Gleneira that I mean to go, if only to ensure the kindness being credited to him. I wonder if he is much changed?"

There was a certain challenge in the speech which Lady George was quick enough to recognise, and, as she recognised it, wondered if her own astonishment had been too palpable, as that in itself would be a mistake, so she replied deftly:

"He is not changed in one thing--his grat.i.tude to you. And I am grateful also, for Paul is very dear to me. The dearest fellow in the world, is he not?"

It was a statement to which, in the language of poker, Mrs. Vane could hardly go one better, and therefore it left her, as it were, to an under-study of devotion.

"He used to be very nice when I knew him; but, then, sick people are always nice; they are so much at one's mercy," said the little lady, airily. They were, in their way, admirable types of their kind, these two women; both artificial, yet with an artificiality which sprang from the head in the one case, from the heart in the other; for Mrs.

Vane saw through herself, and Lady George did not.

"So that is Paul's sister," said the former to herself as, on the way back to her lounge, after escorting her visitor in friendliest fashion to the stairs, she paused to take up a photograph case lying on the table. It contained Paul's portrait as he had been before the time when she had watched his fair head tossing restlessly on the pillow in that hot Indian room which nothing would cool. The memory of those dreary days and nights came back to her in a rush, making her, paradoxically, look years older, worn, haggard, and anxious. She seemed to be back in them; to hear the gathering cry of the jackals prowling past the open door, to see the flicker of the oil night-light gleam on the splintered ice, turning it for a brief second to diamonds, as she prepared it for the burning forehead above those bright, yet glazed eyes; and, more than all, she seemed to feel the old pa.s.sionate protest against the possibility of his pa.s.sing for ever out of her life joined to the fierce determination to save him to the uttermost. From what? from herself, perhaps. For Mrs. Vane had performed the most unselfish act of her life when she had laughed and scoffed at the devotion and grat.i.tude of her patient. She had had many, she said, and they had always felt like that during some period of their convalescence. There was nothing for these sequelae of jungle fever like three months' leave to the bears in Kashmir; and, if he liked, he might bring her home one of those little silk carpets for her sitting-room as a fee; she would prefer a carpet to anything else.

And so Paul had come back with his unromantic offering, cured, as she had prophesied, of his feverishness, but not of his friendliness. That had lasted, despite a separation of years. And something else had lasted also, to judge by the look on Mrs. Vane's face as she stood with Paul's photograph in her hand.

Lady George Temple took a cab home, and tried to regain a sense of lost importance by having the children down to tea. Paul had kept this thing secret from her; he had allowed her for years to speak kindly, effusively of the woman who had saved his life as if she were an old frump, when she was really--Blanche, being a person of sense, felt forced to acknowledge the truth--one of the most charming little creatures imaginable, with just that half-sympathetic, half-bantering manner which was so taking. And Paul, having done this, her own role of devoted sisterhood suffered thereby; so she fell back upon her motherhood.

Thus, when her husband returned, he found the room littered with Kindergarten toys, while Adam was threading beads by the multiplication table, and Eve was busily engaged in marking the course of the River Congo in red back-st.i.tching on a remarkably black continent of Africa, which was afterwards to do duty as a kettleholder. Blasius, meanwhile, having been so far beguiled into the Zeit-Geist as to consent to build a puff-puff out of some real terra-cotta bricks and columns which were intended for an architectural object lesson.

"Oh, George!" began his wife, pausing with a lump of sugar in the tongs over his cup, "Paul's widow is dreadful; I don't know what I shall do with her."