The Keepers of the People

CHAPTER XI

THE LOSS OF ALTHEA

754Lady Hammersmith was firm in the matter of preventing Althea from being often with Lord and Lady Lisdor; and her efforts were for the most part successful. Lady Lisdor was fretted by a restlessness of which she could not find the cause, which robbed her of her enjoyment of the pleasures of the season, at whiles drove her to a petulance foreign to her serene temper, or left her listless, indifferent to life. At the end of a week she resolved to return to Quivern Court, thinking that her unquiet spirit would be easier in that peaceful land. Before going she asked Lady Hammersmith to allow Althea to go with her, pointing out to her that the child’s health and spirits suffered in London.

755But Lady Hammersmith was stiff-necked, and would not be persuaded. “No,” she said: “No: I cannot allow it. What, after all, is Althea’s body to her soul? You yourself are deficient in the higher womanhood; you lack the loftier aspirations; you display a sordid acquiescence in the facts of human nature. As for George, his mind is a soil in which no moral fervour will grow: he is the born scoffer, insensible to the ethereal. The soul of a child is a fragile and delicate plant, and in such an atmosphere it must wither. My duty as her mother forbids me to let her go with you.”

756A warm self-satisfaction glowed in Lady Hammersmith’s face as she expressed these firm maternal sentiments; and Lady Lisdor only said, “It’s a pity you neglect her so.”

757She would fain have stayed in London to see at least a little of the child, to be some relief in her life; but her unrest was wearing her, and she came back to Quivern Court with Lord Lisdor; while Althea, deprived of her books, and of the companionship of Ralph Falcon, fell into a greater loneliness than ever. Her friend the poet was her only relief from it, and the hours spent with him in the early morning the only pleasant part of her day. He was seldom the first to talk: indeed, he said but little at any time, only breaking from the dream in which he perpetually wandered, to murmur, very quickly, “Beautiful child! Beautiful child! Beautiful child!” She talked therefore to him. She never told him of the restraints from which she was suffering; but would often deliver herself of a dissertation on the peculiar morality of her mother; and his comments on it were not of a kind to foster in her the growth of those vague lofty ideals to which her mother wished her to aspire. But the emptiness and loneliness of most of her day were beyond her endurance; all the dull month her purpose to be done with this life was growing stronger; and at the end of it she wrote to Ralph Falcon — “I will come; thank you. — Althea.”