She met this lucidity, Miss Cutter, with but an instant’s lapse. “You say I can’t twist their heads about. But I HAVE twisted them.”
It had been quietly produced, but it gave her companion a jerk. “They say ‘Yes’?”
She summed it up. “All but one. SHE says ‘No.’”
Mrs. Medwin thought; then jumped. “Lady Wantridge?”
Miss Cutter, as more delicate, only bowed admission. “I shall see her either this afternoon or late to-morrow. But she has written.”
Her visitor wondered again. “May I see her letter?”
“No.” She spoke with decision. “But I shall square her.”
“Then how?”
“Well”—and Miss Cutter, as if looking upward for inspiration, fixed her eyes a while on the ceiling—”well, it will come to me.”
Mrs. Medwin watched her—it was impressive. “And will they come to you—the others?” This question drew out the fact that they would- -so far at least as they consisted of Lady Edward, Lady Bellhouse and Mrs. Pouncer, who had engaged to muster, at the signal of tea, on the 14th—prepared, as it were, for the worst. There was of course always the chance that Lady Wantridge might take the field, in such force as to paralyse them, though that danger, at the same time, seemed inconsistent with her being squared. It didn’t perhaps all quite ideally hang together; but what it sufficiently came to was that if she was the one who could do most FOR a person in Mrs. Medwin’s position she was also the one who could do most against. It would therefore be distinctly what our friend familiarly spoke of as “collar-work.” The effect of these mixed considerations was at any rate that Mamie eventually acquiesced in the idea, handsomely thrown out by her client, that she should have an “advance” to go on with. Miss Cutter confessed that it seemed at times as if one scarce COULD go on; but the advance was, in spite of this delicacy, still more delicately made—made in the form of a banknote, several sovereigns, some loose silver, and two coppers, the whole contents of her purse, neatly disposed by Mrs. Medwin on one of the tiny tables. It seemed to clear the air for deeper intimacies, the fruit of which was that Mamie, lonely after all in her crowd and always more helpful than helped, eventually brought out that the way Scott had been going on was what seemed momentarily to overshadow her own power to do so.
“I’ve had a descent from him.” But she had to explain. “My half-brother—Scott Homer. A wretch.”
“What kind of a wretch?”
“Every kind. I lose sight of him at times—he disappears abroad. But he always turns up again, worse than ever.”
“Violent?”
“No.”
“Maudlin?”
“No.”
“Only unpleasant?”
“No. Rather pleasant. Awfully clever—awfully travelled and easy.”
“Then what’s the matter with him?”
Mamie mused, hesitated—seemed to see a wide past. “I don’t know.”
“Something in the background?” Then as her friend was silent, “Something queer about cards?” Mrs. Medwin threw off.
“I don’t know—and I don’t want to!”
“Ah well, I’m sure I don’t,” Mrs. Medwin returned with spirit. The note of sharpness was perhaps also a little in the observation she made as she gathered herself to go. “Do you mind my saying something?”
Mamie took her eyes quickly from the money on the little stand. “You may say what you like.”
“I only mean that anything awkward you may have to keep out of the way does seem to make more wonderful, doesn’t it, that you should have got just where you are? I allude, you know, to your position.”
“I see.” Miss Cutter somewhat coldly smiled. “To my power.”
“So awfully remarkable in an American.”
“Ah you like us so.”
Mrs. Medwin candidly considered. “But we don’t, dearest.”
Her companion’s smile brightened. “Then why do you come to me?”
“Oh I like YOU!” Mrs. Medwin made out.
“Then that’s it. There are no ‘Americans.’ It’s always ‘you.’”
“Me?” Mrs. Medwin looked lovely, but a little muddled.
“ME!” Mamie Cutter laughed. “But if you like me, you dear thing, you can judge if I like YOU.” She gave her a kiss to dismiss her. “I’ll see you again when I’ve seen her.”
“Lady Wantridge? I hope so, indeed. I’ll turn up late to-morrow, if you don’t catch me first. Has it come to you yet?” the visitor, now at the door, went on.
“No; but it will. There’s time.”
“Oh a little less every day!”
Miss Cutter had approached the table and glanced again at the gold and silver and the note, not indeed absolutely overlooking the two coppers. “The balance,” she put it, “the day after?”
“That very night if you like.”
“Then count on me.”
“Oh if I didn’t—!” But the door closed on the dark idea. Yearningly then, and only when it had done so, Miss Cutter took up the money.
She went out with it ten minutes later, and, the calls on her time being many, remained out so long that at half-past six she hadn’t come back. At that hour, on the other hand, Scott Homer knocked at her door, where her maid, who opened it with a weak pretence of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, as a lesson well learnt, that he hadn’t been expected till seven. No lesson, none the less, could prevail against his native art. He pleaded fatigue, her, the maid’s, dreadful depressing London, and the need to curl up somewhere. If she’d just leave him quiet half an hour that old sofa upstairs would do for it; of which he took quickly such effectual possession that when five minutes later she peeped, nervous for her broken vow, into the drawing-room, the faithless young woman found him extended at his length and peacefully asleep.
CHAPTER III
The situation before Miss Cutter’s return developed in other directions still, and when that event took place, at a few minutes past seven, these circumstances were, by the foot of the stair, between mistress and maid, the subject of some interrogative gasps and scared admissions. Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly after the interloper, and wishing, as she said, to wait, had gone straight up in spite of being told he was lying down.
“She distinctly understood he was there?”
“Oh yes ma’am; I thought it right to mention.”
“And what did you call him?”
“Well, ma’am, I thought it unfair to YOU to call him anything but a gentleman.”
Mamie took it all in, though there might well be more of it than one could quickly embrace. “But if she has had time,” she flashed, “to find out he isn’t one?”
“Oh ma’am, she had a quarter of an hour.”
“Then she isn’t with him still?”
“No ma’am; she came down again at last. She rang, and I saw her here, and she said she wouldn’t wait longer.”
Miss Cutter darkly mused. “Yet had already waited—?”
“Quite a quarter.”
“Mercy on us!” She began to mount. Before reaching the top however she had reflected that quite a quarter was long if Lady Wantridge had only been shocked. On the other hand it was short if she had only been pleased. But how COULD she have been pleased? The very essence of their actual crisis was just that there was no pleasing her. Mamie had but to open the drawing-room door indeed to perceive that this was not true at least of Scott Homer, who was horribly cheerful.
Miss Cutter expressed to her brother without reserve her sense of the constitutional, the brutal selfishness that had determined his mistimed return. It had taken place, in violation of their agreement, exactly at the moment when it was most cruel to her that he should be there, and if she must now completely wash her hands of him he had only himself to thank. She had come in flushed with resentment and for a moment had been voluble, but it would have been striking that, though the way he received her might have seemed but to aggravate, it presently justified him by causing their relation really to take a stride. He had the art of confounding those who would quarrel with him by reducing them to the humiliation of a stirred curiosity.