"I am afraid Maggie feels it a good deal," said Lady Constance.

Satisfaction mingled with pity in her soul. The disabilities of other women's children are never wholly distressing to a tender mother's heart.

"You see, she's so anxious the girls should not marry the bishop's chaplains; and yet really they hardly see any other young men. I think it is a very difficult position, that of a bishop's wife."

Lord Fallowfeild smiled, settling himself back in the corner of the wide sofa and crossing his long legs. He had thought more deeply on a good many subjects than the majority of his acquaintance supposed; with the consequence that he occasionally surprised his fellow-peers by the acuteness of his observations in debate. Lord Fallowfeild, it may be added, took his recently acquired office of hereditary legislator with a commendable mixture of humour and seriousness.

"Their position is an anomalous one," he said; "and an anomalous position is inevitably a difficult one--ought to be SO; in my opinion. But that's not to the point. We were talking, not about the episcopal ladies, but about this little business of Kathleen's. So you believe Lady Sokeington has views and intentions?"

"I know that she has. But you see, Shotover," Lady Constance went on, returning to the name which that gentleman had rendered somewhat notorious in earlier years by a record in sport, in debts, in amours, and in irresistible sweetness of temper--"I want to be quite sure he is really good. Because the affair has not gone very far yet and it might be put a stop to--at least I hope and think it might--without making darling Kathleen too dreadfully unhappy. You do believe he really is good?"

Lord Fallowfeild leaned forward and rubbed a hardly perceptible atom of fluff off his left trouser leg just above the ankle.

"My dear Con," he answered, "you are very charming, but you are a trifle embarra.s.sing, too, you know. Haven't you learned, even at this time of day, that very few men in our world are good in a good woman's sense of the word?"

Lady Constance's smooth forehead puckered into fine little lines.

"Shotover, dear," she said, "you're not getting embittered, I hope?"

"Me? Bless you, no, never in life!" he returned, smiling very rea.s.suringly at her. "Don't worry yourself under that head. I quarrel with n.o.body and nothing, not even the consequences of my past iniquities.

It is a very just world, take it all round, and has been kinder to me than I deserve."

"Oh! but you do nothing, you--you are what--you won't think me rude, Shotover?--what the boys call 'very decent' now."

Lady Constance spoke hurriedly, her colour rising in the most engaging manner.

"As decent as I know how, you dear soul," he said, taking her hand in his. "But that makes no difference to one's knowledge of one's own ways, in the past, or of the ways of other men."

"But Alaric Barking?"

"Neither better nor worse than the rest."

Then Lord Fallowfeild shut his small and beautiful mouth very tight, as though he would be glad to avoid further cross-questioning. Lady Constance's forehead remained puckered.

"It's dreadfully difficult when one's girls grow up," she said plaintively. "One can be comfortable about them, poor darlings, and enjoy them when they are in the nursery--even in the schoolroom, though governesses are worrying. They know so much about quant.i.ties of subjects which seem to me not to matter. One never refers to them in ordinary conversation; and if one should be obliged to it is so easy to ask somebody to tell one. And yet they manage to make me feel dreadfully uncomfortable and ignorant because I know nothing about them. But when they grow up----"

"Who, the governesses?" Lord Fallowfeild inquired. "I never supposed they stood in need of that process--thought they started out of the egg all finished, as you might say, and ran about at once like chickens."

"No, no, the girls, poor darlings," Lady Constance replied. "One does get dreadfully anxious about them, Shotover, really one does--specially if one has escaped something very frightening oneself and has been very happy--lest they should fall in love with the wrong people, or lest they should be anything which one did not know beforehand and then everything should turn out dreadful. I should be so miserable. I don't think I could bear it. I know it is wrong to say that, because if one was really good, one would accept whatever G.o.d sent without murmuring. So I could for myself, I think. In any case I should earnestly try to. But for the children it is so much harder. If they were unhappy I should feel ashamed of having had them--as if I'd done something horribly selfish; because, you see, there can be nothing so delightful as having children."

She looked at Lord Fallowfeild in the most pathetic manner, the corners of her mouth a-shake. And he took her hand and held it again, touched by the sincerity of her confused utterance, and the great mother-love resident in her. Touched, perhaps, by the age-old problem of man and maid, also.

"Dear little Con, dear little Con," he said, "I'm awfully sorry you should be worried, but I'm afraid we've got to look facts in the face.

And it's no kindness for me to lie to you about these matters. I don't pretend to say what's right or what's wrong; I only say what it is. We can't make society, and the ways of it, all over again even to save Kathleen a heartache. I don't want to seem a brute, but she must just take her chance along with the rest of you. Marriage always has been a confounded uncertain business, and will always remain so, I suppose. The sort of remedies excited persons suggest to mitigate the dangers of it are a good deal worse than the disease, in my opinion. Every woman has to take her chance. Every man has to take his, too, you know--and the chance strikes some of us as such an uncommonly poor one, that, upon my honour, it seems safest to wash one's hands of it altogether."

"But you're not unhappy, Shotover, dear? You're not lonely?" Lady Constance inquired anxiously.

"Abominably so sometimes, Con. But I manage, oh! I manage. I have my consolations"--he smiled at her, perhaps a trifle shamefacedly. "But now about Kathleen," he went on, "as I say, she must take her chance along with the rest of you, poor little dear. After all, you took your chance when you married Decies, and it has not turned out so badly, you know."

Lady Constance became radiant once more, as some mild-shining summer moon emerging from behind temporarily obscuring clouds.

"Oh! but then," she said, "of course that was so entirely different."

Lord Fallowfeild patted her hand, his head bent, looking at her somewhat merrily.

"Was it, my dear, was it?--I wonder," he said.

She withdrew her head with a certain dignity. Notwithstanding her softness and tenderness, there were occasions--even with those she loved best--when Lady Constance could delicately mark her displeasure.

"I think you are a little embittered, Shotover," she a.s.serted.

He leaned back, still smiling, and shaking his head at her.

"Old and wise--unpleasantly old, and not quite such a fool as I used to be, that's all," he answered.

For a time there was silence, both brother and sister thinking their own thoughts. Then the latter spoke. Like many gentle persons, she was persistent. She always had been so.

"I should be so grateful if you would tell me, because I think I ought to know, and then I should try to turn the course of darling Kathleen's affections before it all becomes too p.r.o.nounced. Is there any entanglement, anything amounting to what one calls an impediment, in-- well--you understand--against Alaric Barking?"

Lord Fallowfeild got up, took a turn across the room, came back, and stood in front of her.

"I wish you wouldn't, Con," he said. "Upon my soul, I wish you wouldn't.

It's a nasty thing for an old man, who has gone the pace in his day pretty thoroughly, to give away a lad who may have made a slip just at the start, and who is doing his best to get his feet again and run straight. Alaric Barking's a good fellow. I like him. I never have been and never shall be partial to that family. Your sister Louisa cried up their virtues and their confounded solvency, in the old days, till she made them a positive nuisance. She's not a happy way of inculcating a moral economic lesson, hasn't Louisa. But I own I'm fond of this boy.

He's far the best of the whole lot--gentlemanlike, and a sportsman, and good-looking--unusually so for one of that family--and, my dear, he's downright honestly in love with Kathleen. I've watched him--did so when he was down at Ranelagh one day last month with her and Victoria Sokeington--and I know the real thing when I see it."

"But--but, I am afraid, Shotover, you mean me to understand there is some impediment?" Lady Constance repeated.

"Oh! well, hang it all, I'm awfully sorry, but if you are determined to have it, Connie, perhaps there is. Only for heaven's sake don't be in too much of a hurry. Between ourselves, I happen to know the boy's doing his best to shake himself free in an honourable manner. So don't rush the business. Like the dear tender-hearted creature you are, have a little mercy on the poor beggar. Let the whole affair drift a little. It may straighten out."

Lady Constance meditated for a minute or so.

"It's very dreadful that there should be any impediment," she said.

"I'll back Alaric to agree with you there," Lord Fallowfeild answered.

"You'll do what you can, Shotover, won't you, to help Kathleen? I never forget how you helped me once!"

Lord Fallowfeild's handsome face expressed rather broad amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I'm afraid the two cases are hardly parallel, my dear," he said.

CHAPTER X

"The play's on the other side, the crowd's on the other side, all the fun's on the other side, and I am on this side with nothing more lively than you, you little shivering idiot, for company."

Poppy St. John drew the spaniel's long silky ears through her fingers slowly.