Читать книгу Leonie of the Jungle - Joan Conquest - Страница 8

Table of Contents

"When your fear cometh as a desolation."—The Bible.

Susan Hetth rose.

She had always intensely disliked her brother-in-law's old friend, failing utterly to perceive the heart of gold studded with rare gems that was hidden under a bushel of intentional brusqueness.

But as she was under an obligation to him she decided to make herself as pleasant as possible, and to obey his orders, however irksome.

Great brain specialist, great philanthropist, she had rung him up in a panic that morning after having vainly ransacked her memory for some other human being in whom she could with safety confide her fear, and from whom she could expect some meed of succour.

She knew, as everybody knew, that years ago he had given up the hours of consultation which had seen his Harley Street waiting-room filled to overflowing; that little by little, bit by bit, indeed, he had given himself up entirely to research work, travelling in every quarter of the globe in his quest for the knowledge necessary to the alleviation of the mental troubles of his fellow-beings. And that when he found it or some part of it he had hurried home, and having brought it to as near a state of perfection as possible, had flung it broad-cast to the suffering; just as he flung the immense sums of money he made among the destitute for whom he loved to work without thought of the morrow.

A genuine case of trouble he had never been known to dismiss, and Susan Hetth had heaved a sigh of relief into the receiver when he fixed an immediate appointment.

The spook of fear is not the cheeriest companion of the early cup of tea, and Nannie's words, allied to Nannie's face when she entered without knocking, had caused the silly, invertebrate woman to take immediate action for once in her life.

Not for anything would she confess it, but she wished now she had listened to Nannie when, just a year ago, she had so fervently urged a visit to the doctor the first time she had discovered the baby girl walking downstairs one step at a time in her sleep.

She remembered the way the ever-changing house-parlourmaids had furtively looked at the child when she came in to dessert; how one after the other they had given notice, declaring that although they really loved the child their nerves would not stand the ever-recurring shock of finding her sitting in some corner in the dark; or the pattering of her little feet on the stairs when she occasionally evaded the nurse and walked about the house in her sleep; and she remembered how other nurses who brought baby visitors to tea had watched the child, surreptitiously touching their foreheads and wagging their heads at each other.

But, as is the way of the supine, she had put it off and put it off until her negligence had culminated in the frightful scene of this same very early morning, when Leonie, waking in the day nursery to find her kitten dead, had screamed and shrieked hour after hour until the house-parlourmaid had rushed in and given instant notice, with the unsolicited information that the servants thought, and the neighbours said, the child was mad and ought to be sent to a home.

Then, indeed, had terror suddenly tweaked Susan Hetth's heart, the social one, the maternal one having long since atrophied through want of use; for the shadow of lunacy is about the blackest of all the shadows that can fall across a butterfly's sunny, heedless path.

Ten years ago she had lost her husband, in the year following most of her capital had gone in a mad-cat speculation, and three years later her gallant brother-in-law died, leaving her a yearly income sufficient for expenses and education if she would undertake to mother his little daughter. Since then she had led the usual abortive life of the woman who lives on the past glamour of her husband's success and a limited income, upon which she tries ineffectually to dovetail herself into a society to which she does not rightly belong. Having noticed an increasing plenitude of silver among the ash-gold of her hair, a deepening of the lines of discord between her brows, and the threads of discontent which were daily being hemstitched into her face by the sharp needles of make-believe, covetousness, and a precarious banking account, she had recently decided to try and annex, or rather try and graft herself on to a certain unsuspecting male being en secondes noces.

And that simply cannot be done if there is the slightest shadow upon one's appendages.

So she sat down in the chair with as good a grace as she could muster, and arranged her big picture hat so that the spring sun should not draw Sir Jonathan's attention to the methods she employed to combat the rapidity with which what remained of her prettiness, prematurely faded by the Indian sun, was vanishing.

For a long and trying moment he sat silently staring at her, wondering as he had always wondered what had induced his old friend to place his little girl in such inadequate, feeble hands.

To break the tension Lady Hetth clanked a silver Indian bracelet bought at Liberty's against an Egyptian chain sold by Swan & Edgar's, and the man frowned as he drew a series of cats on his blotting-paper.