'It's a bad job, Mr. Mumford. My name is Cobb: I daresay you've heard of me. I came to see Miss Derrick, and I was clumsy enough to knock the lamp over.'

'Knock the lamp over! How could you do that? Were you drunk?'

'No, but you may well ask the question. I stumbled over something--a little chair, I think--and fell against the table with the lamp on it.'

'Where's Miss Derrick?'

'Upstairs. She got rather badly burnt, I'm afraid. We've sent for a doctor.'

'And here I am,' spoke a voice behind them. 'Sorry to see this, Mr.

Mumford.'

The two went upstairs together, and on the first landing encountered Emmeline, sobbing and wailing hysterically with the child in her arms. Her husband spoke soothingly.

'Don't, don't, Emmy. Here's Dr. Billings come to see Miss Derrick.

She's the only one that has been hurt. Go down, there's a good girl, and send somebody to help in Miss Derrick's room; you can't be any use yourself just now.'

'But how did it happen? Oh, _how_ did it happen?'

'I'll come and tell you all about it. Better put the boy to bed again, hadn't you?'

When she had recovered her senses Emmeline took this advice, and, leaving the nurse by the child's cot, went down to survey the ruin of her property. It was a sorry sight. Where she had left a reception-room such as any suburban lady in moderate circ.u.mstances might be proud of; she now beheld a mere ma.s.s of unrecognisable furniture, heaped on what had once been a carpet, amid dripping walls and under a grimed ceiling.

'Oh! Oh!' She all but sank before the horror of the spectacle. Then, in a voice of fierce conviction, 'She did it! _She_ did it! It was because I told her to leave. I _know_ she did it on purpose!'

Mumford closed the door of the room, shutting out Cobb and the cook and the housemaid. He repeated the story Cobb had told him, and quietly urged the improbability of his wife's explanation. Miss Derrick, he pointed out, was lying prostrate from severe burns; the fire must have been accidental, but the accident, to be sure, was extraordinary enough. Thereupon Mrs. Mumford's wrath turned against Cobb. What business had such a man--a low-cla.s.s savage--in _her_ drawing-room? He must have come knowing that she and her husband were away for the evening.

'You can question him, if you like,' said Mumford. 'He's out there.'

Emmeline opened the door, and at once heard a cry of pain from upstairs. Mumford, also hearing it, and seeing Cobb's misery-stricken face by the light of the hall lamp, whispered to his wife:

'Hadn't you better go up, dear? Dr. Billings may think it strange.'

It was much wiser to urge this consideration than to make a direct plea for mercy. Emmeline did not care to have it reported that selfish distress made her indifferent to the sufferings of a friend staying in her house. But she could not pa.s.s Cobb without addressing him severely.

'So _you_ are the cause of this!'

'I am, Mrs. Mumford, and I can only say that I'll do my best to make good the damage to your house.'

'Make good I fancy you have strange ideas of the value of the property destroyed.'

Insolence was no characteristic of Mrs. Mumford. But calamity had put her beside herself; she spoke, not in her own person, but as a woman whose carpets, curtains and bric-a-brac have ignominiously perished.

'I'll make it good,' Cobb repeated humbly, 'however long it takes me. And don't be angry with that poor girl, Mrs. Mumford. It wasn't her fault, not in any way. She didn't know I was coming; she hadn't asked me to come. I'm entirely to blame.'

'You mean to say you knocked over the table by accident?'

'I did indeed. And I wish I'd been burnt myself instead of her.'

He had suffered, by the way, no inconsiderable scorching, to which his hands would testify for many a week; but of this he was still hardly aware. Emmeline, with a glance of uttermost scorn, left him, and ascended to the room where the doctor was busy. Free to behave as he thought fit, Mumford beckoned Cobb to follow him into the front garden, where they conversed with masculine calm.

'I shall put up at Sutton for the night,' said Cobb, 'and perhaps you'll let me call the first thing in the morning to ask how she gets on.'

'Of course. We'll see the doctor when he comes down. But I wish I could understand how you managed to throw the lamp down.'

'The truth is,' Cobb replied, 'we were quarrelling. I'd heard something about her that made me wild, and I came and behaved like a fool. I feel just now as if I could go and cut my throat, that's the fact. If anything happens to her, I believe I shall. I might as well, in any case; she'll never look at me again.'

'Oh, don't take such a dark view of it.'

The doctor came out, on his way to fetch certain requirements, and the two men walked with him to his house in the next road. They learned that Louise was not dangerously injured; her recovery would be merely a matter of time and care. Cobb gave a description of the fire, and his hearers marvelled that the results were no worse.

'You must have some burns too?' said the doctor, whose curiosity was piqued by everything he saw and heard of the strange occurrence. 'I thought so; those hands must be attended to.'

Meanwhile, Emmeline sat by the bedside and listened to the hysterical lamentation in which Louise gave her own--the true--account of the catastrophe. It was all her fault, and upon her let all the blame fall. She would humble herself to Mr. Higgins and get him to pay for the furniture destroyed. If Mrs. Mumford would but forgive her! And so on, as her poor body agonised, and the blood grew feverish in her veins.

CHAPTER IX

'Accept it? Certainly. Why should we bear the loss if he's able to make it good? He seems to be very well off for an unmarried man.'

'Yes,' replied Mumford, 'but he's just going to marry, and it seems--Well, after all, you know, he didn't really cause the damage. I should have felt much less scruple if Higgins had offered to pay--'

'He _did_ cause the damage,' a.s.severated Emmeline. 'It was his gross or violent behaviour. If we had been insured it wouldn't matter so much. And pray let this be a warning, and insure at once. However you look at it, he ought to pay.'

Emmeline's temper had suffered much since she made the acquaintance of Miss Derrick. Aforetime, she could discuss difference of opinion; now a hint of diversity drove her at once to the female weapon--angry and iterative a.s.sertion. Her native delicacy, also, seemed to have degenerated. Mumford could only hold his tongue and trust that this would be but a temporary obscurement of his wife's amiable virtues.

Cobb had written from Bristol, a week after the accident, formally requesting a statement of the pecuniary loss which the Mumfords had suffered; he was resolved to repay them, and would do so, if possible, as soon as he knew the sum. Mumford felt a trifle ashamed to make the necessary declaration; at the outside, even with expenses of painting and papering, their actual damage could not be estimated at more than fifty pounds, and even Emmeline did not wish to save appearances by making an excessive demand. The one costly object in the room--the piano--was practically uninjured, and sundry other pieces of furniture could easily be restored; for Cobb and his companion, as amateur firemen, had by no means gone recklessly to work. By candle-light, when the floor was still a swamp, things looked more desperate than they proved to be on subsequent investigation; and it is wonderful at how little outlay, in our glistening times, a villa drawing-room may be fashionably equipped.

So Mumford wrote to his correspondent that only a few 'articles' had absolutely perished; that it was not his wish to make any demand at all; but that, if Mr. Cobb insisted on offering rest.i.tution, why, a matter of fifty pounds, etc. etc. And in a few days this sum arrived, in the form of a draft upon respectable bankers.

Of course the house was in grievous disorder. Upholsterers' workmen would have been bad enough, but much worse was the establishment of Mrs. Higgins by her daughter's bedside, which naturally involved her presence as a guest at table, and the endurance of her conversation whenever she chose to come downstairs. Mumford urged his wife to take her summer holiday--to go away with the child until all was put right again--a phrase which included the removal of Miss Derrick to her own home; but of this Emmeline would not hear. How could she enjoy an hour of mental quietude when, for all she knew, Mrs.

Higgins and the patient might be throwing lamps at each other? And her jealousy was still active, though she did not allow it to betray itself in words. Clarence seemed to her quite needlessly anxious in his inquiries concerning Miss Derrick's condition. Until that young lady had disappeared from 'Runnymede' for ever, Emmeline would keep matronly watch and ward.

Mrs. Higgins declared at least a score of times every day that she could _not_ understand how this dreadful affair had come to pa.s.s.

The most complete explanation from her daughter availed nothing; she deemed the event an insoluble mystery, and, in familiar talk with Mrs. Mumford, breathed singular charges against Louise's lover.

'She's shielding him, my dear. I've no doubt of it. I never had a very good opinion of him, but now she shall never marry him with _my_ consent.' To this kind of remark Emmeline at length deigned no reply. She grew to detest Mrs. Higgins, and escaped her society by every possible manoeuvre.

'Oh, how pleasant it is,' she explained bitterly to her husband, 'to think that everybody in the road is talking about us with contempt!

Of course the servants have spread nice stories. And the Wilkinsons'--these were the people next door--'look upon us as hardly respectable. Even Mrs. Fentiman said yesterday that she really could not conceive how I came to take that girl into the house. I acknowledged that I must have been crazy.'

'Whilst we're thoroughly upset,' replied Mumford, with irritation at this purposeless talk, 'hadn't we better leave the house and go to live as far away as possible?'

'Indeed, I very much wish we could. I don't think I shall ever be happy again at Sutton.'

And Clarence went off muttering to himself about the absurdity and the selfishness of women.

For a week or ten days Louise lay very ill; then her vigorous const.i.tution began to a.s.sert itself. It helped her greatly towards convalescence when she found that the scorches on her face would not leave a permanent blemish. Mrs. Mumford came into the room once a day and sat for a few minutes, neither of them desiring longer communion, but they managed to exchange inquiries and remarks with a show of friendliness. When the fifty pounds came from Cobb, Emmeline made no friendliness. When the fifty pounds mention of it. The next day, however, Mrs. Higgins being absent when Emmeline looked in, Louise said with an air of satisfaction,