"If you insist on being so scrupulous----"

Clodagh looked round from the bureau at which she had seated herself.

"How much?" she said laconically.

Lady Frances pretended to knit her brows.

"Well, there was the eight hundred pounds at Nice--and the forty pounds the night of your return to town--the night we played bridge with Val and Deerehurst----"

She looked very quickly at Clodagh.

But Clodagh gave no sign. "And the fifty pounds a fortnight ago--besides the sixty for Lady Shrawle," she interrupted.

"Yes--oh yes! Let me see, that makes----"

"Nine hundred and fifty pounds," Clodagh interjected in a very quiet voice; and picking up a pen, she wrote out the cheque, signing it with her usual bold signature. A moment later she rose, blotted it, and held it out.

As the flimsy slip of paper pa.s.sed from one to the other, the elder woman permitted a gleam of curiosity to show in her eyes.

"A thousand thanks!" she exclaimed. "And don't think me a wretch if I run away now that I've got it. You know how fidgety my bay mare is.

Well, good-bye! I shall see you at Ranelagh?"

But Clodagh was absently studying her cheque-book.

"I don't think so," she said. "Lord Deerehurst offered to take me down, but I shan't go. I--I have some business to attend to."

Lady Frances laughed; picked up her riding whip, which she had laid aside, and, coming forward, kissed Clodagh.

"Then I expect I shall see you. Deerehurst is much more insistent than any business." Once again her shrewd glance travelled over Clodagh's face. "Good-bye! In any case, you'll be at the Ord's for bridge to-night? We can arrange then about going down to Tuffnell."

"Yes"--Clodagh returned the pressure of her hand--"yes; I suppose I shall go to the Ord's. Yes; I shall--good-bye!"

She walked with her visitor to the door of the bedroom, and stood waiting on the threshold until the hall door had closed. Then, almost mechanically, she turned, walked back to the table, and with a sharp, nervous movement gathered up the heap of papers still lying beside her plate.

As she stood there, in the flood of June sunshine, beside the attractive disarray of the pretty breakfast-table, she was aware of a horrible sense of helplessness, of alarm and impotence. For the papers she held between her hands were bills--a sheaf of bills--all unpaid and all pressing.

As she stood there, a swift review of the past months sped before her mind, carrying something like dismay in its train.

In April she had entered upon the tenancy of her furnished flat, having already borrowed eight hundred pounds from her friend and counsellor, Lady Frances Hope; and under the auspices of this same counsellor, had began her career as a woman of fashion.

In social circles the period and the conditions of mourning become more slender every season. And nowadays, although a widow may not attend dances or large dinner-parties, there are a hundred smaller, more exclusive--and possibly more expensive--forms of entertainment at which she may appear in her own intimate set. Very quiet dinners--very small luncheon parties--even friendly bridge parties--are quite permissible, when it is a tacitly accepted fact that the mourner is, by a natural law, barely entering upon her life--that the one mourned has departed from it by an equally natural dispensation.

Under these conditions Clodagh had begun her London career; and for more than a month she had lived--in the most costly sense of the word.

Her mourning had been the most distinguished that a famous dressmaker could devise; her electric brougham had possessed all the newest improvements; the flowers that filled her room had been supplied by a fashionable florist at an exorbitant cost. In a word, she had behaved like a child who has been given a pocketful of bright new pennies--and believes them to be golden coins.

Once or twice in the course of those extravagant weeks, a pang of misgiving had crossed her soul; but it had only been a pang of the moment.

The phantom of tradesmen's bills is one so easily dismissed from the Irish mind that, unless it materialises very forcibly, it may almost be considered non-existent.

On July the first she was to receive her half-yearly allowance; and towards July the first she looked with an almost superst.i.tious confidence. A thousand pounds! It was sufficient to settle a planetful of debts; and if any remained as satellites to the planet, well--there was the first of January.

But now her confidence had been rudely shaken. In a sudden moment of pride--of bravado--she had signed away almost the whole of the antic.i.p.ated half-yearly income. She stood possessed of fifty pounds, with which to dress, to eat, to exist from July to January; and in her hands was the sheaf of unpaid bills!

There is no race of people that undertakes liabilities so lightly, and that is so overwhelmed when retribution falls upon it, as the Irish race. As Clodagh gradually faced her position, panic seized upon her.

For weeks she had lived upon the credit that the London tradesman gives to customers who come provided with good references; and now suddenly she had realised--first by the arrival of certain bills couched in a new and imperative strain; later by Lady Frances Hope's unexpected demand for her money--that English credit is not the lax, indefinite credit of such places as Muskeere and Carrigmore: that it is a credit demanding--insisting upon--timely payment.

And where was she to turn--where look--for the necessary funds?

In a dazed way she thought of David Barnard, who had returned a month previously from a holiday in Spain; but her pride made her shrink sensitively from the thought of the suave indulgence with which he would listen to her confession of folly. Once the thought of recalling Lady Frances Hope, and explaining the position to her, sped through her mind; but she dismissed it as swiftly as it came. In restless perturbation she turned and walked across the room, pausing once more beside the bureau, which stood in a recess between the windows.

Where could she turn, where look, for the money that would tide over her difficulties? In her mental distraction, she laid aside the bills she was still holding, and aimlessly picked up a half-dozen opened letters that lay awaiting answers. A couple of invitations to lunch; an invitation to play bridge; the offer of a box at the opera; Laurence a.s.shlin's monthly report from Orristown; Nance's last letter from America.

With a vague preoccupation she raised the last of these and looked at it.

How free and unhampered Nance seemed in her inexperience of life! She looked unseeingly at the closely written lines, her mind in a hara.s.sed way contrasting her own and her sister's fate. Then quite suddenly she dropped the letter and lifted her head.

A thought had struck her. As a flash of lightning might rend a night sky, an inspiration had illuminated the darkness of her mind. The thousand pounds which was to be Nance's property when she came of age, or upon her engagement, still lay to her own credit--in her own name--in the bank with which Milbanke had done business.

It is extraordinary how rapidly a thought can mature in a receptive mind. In one moment, as Clodagh stood beside the bureau, all the possibilities comprised in that thousand pounds broke upon her understanding.

How if she withdrew it as a loan? No one--not even Nance herself--need know; and she could refund it within six months, or within a year--long before the thought of marriage could enter the child's mind.

Then suddenly she paused in her mental calculations; and a new expression pa.s.sed over her face. Was it right, was it honourable, to make use of this money left in her safe-keeping?

Uneasy and distressed, she turned to the open window, as though a study of the life beyond her own might help her in her dilemma. The scene she looked upon was interesting and even beautiful. The gra.s.s of the park still retained something of its first greenness; in the distance the cl.u.s.tering bower of chestnuts and copper beeches suggested something far removed from the traffic and toil of the great town; while below the window, under a canopy of leaves, the morning procession of horses and carriages pa.s.sed incessantly to and fro.

What a curious world it was! How conventional and obvious, and yet in reality how inscrutable! What would it say of her, did it know her true position? What comfort--what aid--would it offer? Involuntarily, almost curiously, she laid her finger-tips upon the window-sill and bent slightly forward. Then, very suddenly, she drew back into the room, her face flushing.

Lord Deerehurst, mounted upon a high black horse, had pa.s.sed the window at the moment that she had looked out; and raising his head, had seen and bowed to her.

The incident was slight; but at certain moments the Celtic nature is extraordinarily--even mysteriously--open to suggestion. Clodagh could not have defined her thought; but the thought was there, a vague, half-fearful, wholly instinctive thought that suddenly prompted her to shield herself, to ward off the nearer approach to this world that she had leant from her window to study impersonally; and from which she had received so peculiarly personal a response.

She continued to stand for a moment longer in an att.i.tude of doubt; then, swiftly, almost abruptly, she turned round to the bureau and, kneeling down before it, reopened her cheque-book with tremulous hands and wrote out a cheque for one thousand pounds, payable to herself.

CHAPTER VI

The habit of self-deception had become as a cloak in which Clodagh wrapped herself. She desired happiness: therefore she told herself that she was happy; she instinctively wished to live honourably: therefore, through her own persuasion, she believed her actions to be honourable.

And under this insidiously sheltering garment, her appropriation of her sister's money was securely hidden away. To her own thinking--once the first misgiving had been buried--there was no real wrong, no real dishonour, in the taking of the thousand pounds. She needed it temporarily, and would, in due time, repay it with interest. The fact that she did not think it necessary to inform Nance of what she had done, certainly weakens the case for her defence; but had she come to be judged from some impersonal source, it is quite possible she would have made as subtle and specious a justification of her conduct as that which she offered to herself. In this light, the act stood recorded in her own conscience. She needed the money; she took the money; and having taken it, she set about banishing the recollection of it from her mind.

For three days after she had signed the cheque, she retired into semi-privacy. She was at home to no one; and although she continued to ride each morning and drive each afternoon in the park, she did so with so cold a demeanour that none of her friends had dared to accost her!

For three nights she stayed indoors alone; but on the fourth, the insurmountable restlessness that settles so frequently upon the high-spirited woman devoid of home ties, seized on her remorselessly.

The thought of further solitude became unendurable--the idea of another lonely evening something not to be borne. At eight o'clock she rose from her solitary dinner, tingling in every nerve for some companionship; and telephoning to Curzon Street, ascertained that Lady Frances Hope was at home and willing to see her. And a quarter of an hour later she stepped from her brougham at the door of the familiar house.

She was informed that Lady Frances was in her own room, preparing to go out, but would be glad to see her if she would come upstairs. She acquiesced quickly; and before the servant could conduct her down the hall, had brushed past him and begun to run up the stairs.