“From what Aunt Bertha said, you and she have made great friends?”
“Yes, we have now.” He paused a moment. “She was a bit difficult at first. You see, there were things in the past——Oh, well, never mind that—it’s all over.”
There were things in the past; there were: that group of three on the top of the cliffs; the girl sobbing wildly, furiously, shamefully; the man holding the other girl’s arm in his as in a vise of iron. Meeting Nina again may well have been a bit difficult at first! It was also a bit difficult to adjust one’s vision to Baroness Dundrannan and Madame Chose’s needlewoman, to re-focus them. How would they feel about one another now? Lucinda had found some pity for the sobbing girl; would Lady Dundrannan find the like for the needlewoman?
Or would Waldo himself? In spite of the new gentleness that there was in his manner, taken as a whole, there had been an acidity, a certain sharpness of contempt, in his reference to Lucinda. “That girl”—“like to like”—“she and Monkey Valdez.” It was natural, perhaps, but—the question would not be suppressed—was it quite the tone of that “great gentleman” whom Lucinda herself still held in her memory?
I was content to drop the subject. “Your father’s looking splendid,” I remarked, “but Aunt Bertha seems to me rather fagged.”
“Aunt Bertha’s been fretting a dashed sight too much over me—that’s the fact.” He smiled as he went on. “Well, I’m out of it for good and all, they tell me—if I need telling—and I suppose I ought to be sorry for it. But really I’m so deuced tired, that——! Well, I just want to lie here and be looked after.”
“Oh, you’ll get that!” I assured him confidently. There was Aunt Bertha to do it; Aunt Bertha, at all events. Possibly there was somebody else who would do it even more efficiently.
“YES,” said my uncle, as he warmed himself before the library fire, “a young man of very considerable ability, I think. One might trust old Jonathan Frost to make no mistake about that. He might be led by family feeling—but not led astray! Hard-headed, and ambitious—for himself, I mean, apart from his business, the boy is. He’s different from the old man in that; the old man thought of nothing but his undertakings, he was just the most important part of their machinery. This boy’s got his eye on politics, he tells me. I’ve no doubt he’ll get on in them. Then, with a suitable wife——”