“Heaven forbid!” Vanderbank heartily concurred. “But none the less, as I’ve said, I’ll help you.”
Her attention was still fixed. “It will be him you’ll help. If you’re to make sacrifices to keep on good terms with him the first sacrifice will be of me.” Then on his leaving this remark so long unanswered that she had finally looked at him again: “I’m perfectly prepared for it.”
It was as if, jocosely enough, he had had time to make up his mind how to meet her. “What will you have—when he loved my mother?”
Nothing could have been droller than the gloom of her surprise. “Yours too?”
“I didn’t tell you the other day—out of delicacy.”
Mrs. Brookenham darkly thought. “HE didn’t tell me either.”
“The same consideration deterred him. But if I didn’t speak of it,” Vanderbank continued, “when I arranged with you, after meeting him here at dinner, that you should come to tea with him at my rooms—if I didn’t mention it then it wasn’t because I hadn’t learnt it early.”
Mrs. Brook more deeply sounded this affair, but she spoke with the exaggerated mildness that was the form mostly taken by her gaiety. “It was because of course it makes him out such a wretch! What becomes in that case of his loyalty?”
“To YOUR mother’s memory? Oh it’s all right—he has it quite straight. She came later. Mine, after my father’s death, had refused him. But you see he might have been my stepfather.”
Mrs. Brookenham took it in, but she had suddenly a brighter light. “He might have been my OWN father! Besides,” she went on, “if his line is to love the mothers why on earth doesn’t he love ME? I’m in all conscience enough of one.”