The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death

II

It must not be supposed that Mrs. Rand had not, at first, been unsettled by scruples.

The fact that Breton was, in the eyes of the Beaminster family, a ne'er-do-well who had brought disgrace upon the family name had, for a time, distressed her, but the romantic hope of being herself the agent of his restoration to his grandmother, and the delightful manners of the scoundrel when he appeared, killed her alarm. Mrs. Rand's mind was a dark misty place except when the candles of romance were lit; when they flamed, blown by the wind though they might be, there was, around the candlesticks at any rate, a real and even splendid blaze.

One afternoon, towards the end of July, Mrs. Rand meeting Breton on their doorstep was moved to ask him whether he would come in and spend the evening with them, if he had nothing better to do. They had only a simple little meal, and would he please not bother to dress? Breton said that he would be delighted.

Mrs. Rand had been, that afternoon, to a romantic comedy in which ladies and gentlemen with French accents had made love and escaped together and been caught together and been married together. Mrs. Rand had gone quite alone into the pit and had returned with tears in her eyes and affection for all the world.

So she had asked Mr. Breton to dinner.

After a while, however, she was a little uncertain. Daisy was away in the country with friends. How would Lizzie then like this unexpected visitor? Mrs. Rand was, quite frankly, frightened of Lizzie and complained of her a good many times a week to Daisy. Lizzie was for ever interfering with innocent pleasures; Lizzie was mean and unromantic and unimaginative; Lizzie was thoroughly tiresome.

The fact that Lizzie worked incessantly for her mother and her sister never occurred to Mrs. Rand at all.

Lizzie objected to all innocent amusement and she would, in all likelihood, object now.

However, when Mrs. Rand with a fearful mind said, "Oh, Lizzie dear, I've had such a delightful afternoon. I went to Love and the King and it was too charming—you ought to go, really—and Mr. Breton's coming to dinner to-night," Lizzie only smiled a little and asked whether there was food enough. Lizzie was so strange....

Alone in her bedroom Lizzie wondered at her excitement. She looked at her trim, neat figure in the glass, with the hair so gravely brushed, with her collar and her cuffs, with her compact businesslike air: what had she to do with excitement because a young man was coming to dinner? "It must be because I'm tired—this heat," she said to the mirror. And the mirror replied, "You know that you are glad because your sister Daisy is away."

And to that she had no answer.

When he arrived he was grave and seemed sad and tired, she thought. Dinner was a serious affair and Mrs. Rand, who disliked people when they refused to respond to her moods, wished, at first, that she had not asked him, and felt sure that there was much truth in what people said about his wickedness.

Then, when dinner was nearly over, he brightened up and told stories and was entertaining. Mrs. Rand noticed that he drank much claret, but this was, after all, a compliment to her housekeeping. By the end of dinner Mrs. Rand almost loved him and wished that Daisy had been here to entertain him.

Of course it must be dull for a man with only a plain cut-and-dried girl like Lizzie for company.

Lizzie, meanwhile, knew that he was waiting for an opportunity of speech. She had read an appeal in his eyes when he had first entered the room, and now she sat there, curiously, ironically amused at her own agitation. "Lizzie Rand," she said to herself, "you're only, after all, the kind of fool that you despise other people for being. What are you after in this galère?"

Nevertheless even now, in retrospect, how arid and sterile seemed all those other active useful days. One moment's little grain of sentiment and a life's hard work goes for nothing in comparison.

After dinner, when the lamp burnt brightly and the furniture seemed to be less anxious to fill every possible space and the windows were opened into the square with its stars and grey shadows, the room seemed, of a sudden, comfortable, and Mrs. Rand, sitting in an arm-chair, with a novel on her lap and spectacles on her nose, was almost cosy. She had left, before going to her matinee, Just a Heroine at one of its most thrilling crises, and Lizzie knew that the talk with Breton depended for its very existence on the relative strength of the play and the novel. If Love and the King were the more powerful, then would Mrs. Rand make a discursive third. But no, for a moment there was a pause, then, indecisively, Mrs. Rand took up her book. For a while she talked to Breton over its pages, then the light of excitement stole into her eyes, her soul was netted by the snarer, Breton was forgotten as though he had never been.

Their chairs were by the open window and a very little breeze came and played around them. In the square there was that sense of some imminent occurrence, a breathless suggestion of suspense, that a hot evening sometimes carries with it. The stars blazed in a purple sky and a moon was full rounded, a plate of gold; beneath such splendour the square was cool and dim.

"You mustn't think mother rude," Lizzie said with a little smile. "If she once gets deep into a book nothing can tear her from it."

He said something, but she could see that he was not thinking of Mrs. Rand. It was always in the evening, she thought, when uncertain colours and shadows filled the air, that he looked his best. He touched, now, as he had touched on that day of their first meeting, a note of something fine and strange—someone, very young and perhaps very foolish and impetuous, but someone armoured in courage and set apart for some great purpose.

He sat back in his chair, flinging, every now and again, little restless glances beyond the window, pulling sometimes at his beard, answering her absent-mindedly. Then suddenly he began, fiercely, looking away from her—

"Miss Rand, I've got an apology to make to you–"

His voice was so low that she could only catch the words by leaning forward—"To me?"

"Yes—I've been wanting to speak all these weeks. It seemed right enough before, but since I've known you I've felt ashamed of it—as though I'd done something wrong."

"What is it, Mr. Breton?" Her clear grave eyes encouraged him.

"Why—I came to this house, took my rooms, simply because I knew that you were here–"

"That I was here?"

"Yes. I was looking about in this part of the world for rooms. I wanted to be—near Portland Place, you know. I came here and old Mrs. Tweed talked a lot and then, after a time, I said something—about my grandmother. And then she told me that someone who lived here did secretarial work for my aunt–"

He stopped abruptly.

"Well?" said Lizzie, laughing. "All this is not very terrible."

"Then, you see, I determined to stay. I was full of absurd ideas just at the time, thought that I was going to take some great revenge—I was quite melodramatic. And so I thought that I'd use you, get to know you and then, through you—do something or another."

Lizzie eyed him with merriment. "Upon my word, what were you going to make me do? Carry bombs into your aunt's bedroom or set fire to the Portland Place house? Tell me, I should like to know–"

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