LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XLIII.MR. AND LADY LAURA CARLTON AT HOME.
Lady Laura Carlton stood in her drawing-room, dressed for dinner. Hastening home from that expedition of hers to Tupper’s cottage, of which you read in the last chapter, where she saw Mr. Carlton and spoke afterwards with the little child, she made some slight alteration in her attire and descended. In the few minutes her dressing occupied, her maid thought her petulant: but that was nothing new. As she entered the drawing-room she rang the bell violently.
“Where’s Mr. Carlton?”
“Not in, my lady.”
“Serve the dinner.”
Lady Laura Carlton was boiling over with indignation. In this little child at Tupper’s cottage, she had seen what she thought a likeness to her husband, a most extraordinary likeness, and she was suffering herself to draw inferences therefrom, more natural perhaps than agreeable. She recalled with unnecessary bitterness past suspicions of disloyalty on Mr. Carlton’s part, which, whether well-founded or not, she had believed in; she remembered their, what might be called, renewed interchange of good-feeling only on the previous night; Lady Laura now believed that he was even then deceiving her, and a miserable feeling of humiliation took possession of her spirit, and she stamped her foot in passion.
She lost sight of probabilities in her jealous indignation. An angry resentment against the woman at Tupper’s cottage seated itself in her heart, filling its every crevice. What though the woman was getting in years? though she was hard-featured, singularly unattractive? In Lady Laura’s jealous mood, she might have been as ugly as a kangaroo and it would have made no difference.
Earlier in the day, when she had first passed the cottage with Lady Jane, the likeness she detected to her husband, or fancied she detected, excited only a half doubt in her mind, a sort of disagreeable perplexity. But the doubt rankled there; and as the day went on, Lady Laura, than whom a worse or more irritable subject for this sort of suspicion could not exist, felt impelled to wind her steps thither again. She could not have gone at a worse moment: for what she saw changed all her doubts into certainties.
She sat down to the dinner table, scarcely able to suppress her emotion, to keep in bare subjection the indignation that was rending her heart and her temper. It was no very unusual thing for her to sit down alone, for Mr. Carlton’s professional engagements rendered him somewhat irregular. The servants in waiting saw that their lady was put out, but of course it was no business of theirs. Perhaps they thought it was occasioned by the absence of their master.
In point of fact, that gentleman was even then making his way home, speeding to it in haste from a second visit to Mrs. Knagg’s. Not that a second visit there was in the least required or expected of him, and Nurse Pepperfly opened her eyes in surprise when she saw him enter. “He had just called in in passing to see that all was going on well,” he observed to the nurse; and particularly kind and attentive that functionary thought it of him. Lingering a moment, he beckoned her from the room, put a professional question or two as to the case in hand, and then led the way easily and naturally to the case at Tupper’s cottage, the ailing knee of the boy.
“I suppose there is no lack of means?” he casually remarked. “The little fellow ought to have the best of nourishment.”
“And so he do,” was the response of Mrs. Pepperfly. “I never see a mother so fond of a child, though she’s a bit rough in her ways. If he could eat gold she’d give it him. As to money, sir, there ain’t no want o’ that; she seems to have got plenty of it.”
“Have you not any idea who she can be?”
“Well, sir, in course ideas comes to one promiscous, without fetching of ’em up ourselves,” answered Mrs. Pepperfly. "I should think she’s the person that took away the babby—though I can’t say that my memory serves me to recognise her.”
“Maybe,” carelessly remarked Mr. Carlton. “Remember that you keep a quiet tongue about this, Mrs. Pepperfly,” he concluded as he went out.
“Trust me for that, sir,” readily affirmed Mrs. Pepperfly. And Mr. Carlton, conscious that his dinner hour had struck, made haste home, and found his wife at table.
“Have you begun, Laura? Oh that’s all right. I have been detained.”
Lady Laura made no reply, and Mr. Carlton took his seat. She motioned to one of the