“Well, what? Pretend already to have forgotten them?”
“Why not, when you’ve done it in so many other cases?”
“There ARE no other cases so bad. One meets them at any rate as they come. Some you can manage, others you can’t. It’s no use, you must give them up. They’re past patching; there’s nothing to be done with them. There’s nothing accordingly to be done with Mrs. Medwin but to put her off.” And Lady Wantridge rose to her height.
“Well, you know, I DO do things,” Mamie quavered with a smile so strained that it partook of exaltation.
“You help people? Oh yes, I’ve known you to do wonders. But stick,” said Lady Wantridge with strong and cheerful emphasis, “to your Americans!”
Miss Cutter, gazing, got up. “You don’t do justice, Lady Wantridge, to your own compatriots. Some of them are really charming. Besides,” said Mamie, “working for mine often strikes me, so far as the interest—the inspiration and excitement, don’t you know?—go, as rather too easy. You all, as I constantly have occasion to say, like us so!”
Her companion frankly weighed it. “Yes; it takes that to account for your position. I’ve always thought of you nevertheless as keeping for their benefit a regular working agency. They come to you, and you place them. There remains, I confess,” her ladyship went on in the same free spirit, “the great wonder—”
“Of how I first placed my poor little self? Yes,” Mamie bravely conceded, “when I began there was no agency. I just worked my passage. I didn’t even come to YOU, did I? You never noticed me till, as Mrs. Short Stokes says, ‘I was ‘way, ‘way up!’ Mrs. Medwin,” she threw in, “can’t get over it.” Then, as her friend looked vague: “Over my social situation.”
“Well, it’s no great flattery to you to say,” Lady Wantridge good-humouredly returned, “that she certainly can’t hope for one resembling it.” Yet it really seemed to spread there before them. “You simply MADE Mrs. Short Stokes.”
“In spite of her name!” Mamie smiled.
“Oh your ‘names’—! In spite of everything.”
“Ah I’m something of an artist.” With which, and a relapse marked by her wistful eyes into the gravity of the matter, she supremely fixed her friend. She felt how little she minded betraying at last the extremity of her need, and it was out of this extremity that her appeal proceeded. “Have I really had your last word? It means so much to me.”
Lady Wantridge came straight to the point. “You mean you depend on it?”
“Awfully!”
“Is it all you have?”
“All. Now.”
“But Mrs. Short Stokes and the others—’rolling,’ aren’t they? Don’t they pay up?”
“Ah,” sighed Mamie, “if it wasn’t for THEM—!”
Lady Wantridge perceived. “You’ve had so much?”
“I couldn’t have gone on.”
“Then what do you do with it all?”
“Oh most of it goes back to them. There are all sorts, and it’s all help. Some of them have nothing.”
“Oh if you feed the hungry,” Lady Wantridge laughed, “you’re indeed in a great way of business. Is Mrs. Medwin”—her transition was immediate—”really rich?”
“Really. He left her everything.”
“So that if I do say ‘yes’—”
“It will quite set me up.”
“I see—and how much more responsible it makes one! But I’d rather myself give you the money.”
“Oh!” Mamie coldly murmured.
“You mean I mayn’t suspect your prices? Well, I daresay I don’t! But I’d rather give you ten pounds.”
“Oh!” Mamie repeated in a tone that sufficiently covered her prices. The question was in every way larger. “Do you never forgive?” she reproachfully inquired. The door opened however at the moment she spoke and Scott Homer presented himself.
CHAPTER IV
Scott Homer wore exactly, to his sister’s eyes, the aspect he had worn the day before, and it also formed to her sense the great feature of his impartial greeting.
“How d’ye do, Mamie? How d’ye do, Lady Wantridge?”
“How d’ye do again?” Lady Wantridge replied with an equanimity striking to her hostess. It was as if Scott’s own had been contagious; it was almost indeed as if she had seen him before. Had she ever so seen him—before the previous day? While Miss Cutter put to herself this question her visitor at all events met the one she had previously uttered. “Ever ‘forgive’?” this personage echoed in a tone that made as little account as possible of the interruption. “Dear yes! The people I HAVE forgiven!” She laughed—perhaps a little nervously; and she was now looking at Scott. The way she looked at him was precisely what had already had its effect for his sister. “The people I can!”
“Can you forgive me?” asked Scott Homer.
She took it so easily. “But—what?”
Mamie interposed; she turned directly to her brother. “Don’t try her. Leave it so.” She had had an inspiration, it was the most extraordinary thing in the world. “Don’t try HIM”—she had turned to their companion. She looked grave, sad, strange. “Leave it so.” Yes, it was a distinct inspiration, which she couldn’t have explained, but which had come, prompted by something she had caught—the extent of the recognition expressed—in Lady Wantridge’s face. It had come absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the opposition of the two figures before her—quite as if a concussion had struck a light. The light was helped by her quickened sense that her friend’s silence on the incident of the day before showed some sort of consciousness. She looked surprised. “Do you know my brother?”
“DO I know you?” Lady Wantridge asked of him.
“No, Lady Wantridge,” Scott pleasantly confessed, “not one little mite!”
“Well then if you MUST go—” and Mamie offered her a hand. “But I’ll go down with you. NOT YOU!” she launched at her brother, who immediately effaced himself. His way of doing so—and he had already done so, as for Lady Wantridge, in respect to their previous encounter—struck her even at the moment as an instinctive if slightly blind tribute to her possession of an idea; and as such, in its celerity, made her so admire him, and their common wit, that she on the spot more than forgave him his queerness. He was right. He could be as queer as he liked! The queerer the better! It was at the foot of the stairs, when she had got her guest down, that what she had assured Mrs. Medwin would come did indeed come. “DID you meet him here yesterday?”
“Dear yes. Isn’t he too funny?”
“Yes,” said Mamie gloomily. “He IS funny. But had you ever met him before?”
“Dear no!”
“Oh!”—and Mamie’s tone might have meant many things.
Lady Wantridge however, after all, easily overlooked it. “I only knew he was one of your odd Americans. That’s why, when I heard yesterday here that he was up there awaiting your return, I didn’t let that prevent me. I thought he might be. He certainly,” her ladyship laughed, “IS.”
“Yes, he’s very American,” Mamie went on in the same way.
“As you say, we ARE fond of you! Good-bye,” said Lady Wantridge.
But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt more and more—or she hoped at least—that she looked strange. She WAS, no doubt, if it came to that, strange. “Lady Wantridge,” she almost convulsively broke out, “I don’t know whether you’ll understand me, but I seem to feel that I must act with you—I don’t know what to call it!—responsibly. He IS my brother.”