LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Fourteen

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      Lady Walderhurst remained in town a week, and Jane Cupp remained with her, in the house in Berkeley Square, which threw open its doors to receive them on their arrival quite as if they had never left it. The servants’ hall brightened temporarily in its hope that livelier doings might begin to stir the establishment, but Jane Cupp was able to inform inquirers that the visit was only to be a brief one.

      “We are going back to Palstrey next Monday,” she explained. “My lady prefers the country, and she is very fond of Palstrey; and no wonder. It doesn’t seem at all likely she’ll come to stay in London until his lordship gets back.”

      “We hear,” said the head housemaid, “that her ladyship is very kind to Captain Osborn and his wife, and that Mrs. Osborn’s in a delicate state of health.”

      “It would be a fine thing for us if it was in our family,” remarked an under housemaid who was pert.

      Jane Cupp looked extremely reserved.

      “Is it true,” the pert housemaid persisted, “that the Osborns can’t abide her?”

      “It’s true,” said Jane, severely, “that she’s goodness itself to them, and they ought to adore her.”

      “We hear they don’t,” put in the tallest footman. “And who wonders. If she was an angel, there’s just a chance that she may give Captain Osborn a wipe in the eye, though she is in her thirties.”

      “It’s not for us,” said Jane, stiffly, “to discuss thirties or forties or fifties either, which are no business of ours. There’s one gentleman, and him a marquis, as chose her over the heads of two beauties in their teens, at least.”

      “Well, for the matter of that,” admitted the tall footman, “I’d have chose her myself, for she’s a fine woman.”

      Lady Maria was just on the point of leaving South Audley Street to make some visits in the North, but she came and lunched with Emily, and was in great form.

      She had her own opinion of a number of matters, some of which she discussed, some of which she kept to herself. She lifted her gold lorgnette and looked Emily well over.

      “Upon my word, Emily,” she said, “I am proud of you. You are one of my successes. Your looks are actually improving. There’s something rather etherealised about your face to-day. I quite agree with Walderhurst in all the sentimental things he says about you.”

      She said this last partly because she liked Emily and knew it would please her to hear that her husband went to the length of dwelling on her charms in his conversation with other people, partly because it entertained her to see the large creature’s eyelids flutter and a big blush sweep her cheek.

      “He really was in great luck when he discovered you,” her ladyship went on briskly. “As for that, I was in luck myself. Suppose you had been a girl who could not have been left. As Walderhurst is short of female relatives, it would have fallen to me to decently dry-nurse you. And there would have been the complications arising from a girl being baby enough to want to dance about to places, and married enough to feel herself entitled to defy her chaperone; she couldn’t have been trusted to chaperone herself. As it is, Walderhurst, can go where duty calls, etc., and I can make my visits and run about, and you, dear thing, are quite happy at Palstrey playing Lady Bountiful and helping the little half-breed woman to expect her baby. I daresay you sit and make dolly shirts and christening robes hand in hand.”

      “We enjoy it all very much,” Emily answered, adding imploringly, “please don’t call her a little half-breed woman. She’s such a dear little thing, Lady Maria.”

      Lady Maria indulged in the familiar chuckle and put up her lorgnette to examine her again.

      “There’s a certain kind of early Victorian saintliness about you, Emily Walderhurst, which makes my joy,” she said. “You remind me of Lady Castlewood, Helen Pendennis, and Amelia Sedley, with the spitefulness and priggishness and catty ways left out. You are as nice as Thackeray thought they were, poor mistaken man. I am not going to suffuse you with blushes by explaining to you that there is what my nephew would call a jolly good reason why, if you were not an early Victorian and improved Thackerayian saint, you would not be best pleased at finding yourself called upon to assist at this interesting occasion. Another kind of woman would probably feel like a cat towards the little Osborn. But even the mere reason itself, as a reason, has not once risen in your benign and pellucid mind. You have a pellucid mind, Emily; I should be rather proud of the word if I had invented it myself to describe you. But I didn’t. It was Walderhurst. You have actually wakened up the man’s intellects, such as they are.”

      She evidently had a number of opinions of the Osborns. She liked neither of them, but it was Captain Osborn she especially disliked.

      “He is really an underbred person,” she explained, “and he hasn’t the sharpness to know that is the reason Walderhurst detests him. He had vulgar, cheap sort of affairs, and nearly got into the kind of trouble people don’t forgive. What a fool a creature in his position is to offend the taste of the man he may inherit from, and who, if he were not antagonistic to him, would regard him as a sort of duty. It wasn’t his immorality particularly. Nobody is either moral or immoral in these days, but penniless persons must be decent. It’s all a matter of taste and manners. I haven’t any morals myself, my dear, but I have beautiful manners. A woman can have the kind of manners which keep her from breaking the Commandments. As to the Commandments,

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