Part 9 (1/2)
”Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with me,” were the only words she used.
And he had remained. Less than two years later, it was she who fixed the sum the other woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her. She was sufficiently in sympathy with her s.e.x to insist on the terms being liberal. ”I think she should have fifty thousand dollars,” she declared, and fifty thousand dollars the woman received.
So that, if Bradley had lost the first pa.s.sion of his love for her, he had gained vastly in respect. Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous, imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her curb and compress these qualities till they became a prodigious motor force. If she had not mastered herself, she had mastered the expression of herself till she was an instrument at her own command.
It was as an instrument at her own command that, on the Wednesday morning, before he went to town, she gave her husband as much information as she thought he ought to possess about his son.
”Would you mind sitting down for a minute, Bradley? I've something important to say.”
He had come up to her room, as she took her breakfast in bed, after he had had his own downstairs. Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a boudoir cap, she was propped up with pillows, a wicker tray with legs on the coverlet before her. In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old rich-grained walnut, raised six inches above the floor, she suggested an eighteenth-century French princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire, receiving a courtier at her _levee_.
Luxurious with a note of chast.i.ty was the rest of the chintzy room. The pictures on the walls were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters. A _prie-dieu_ in a corner supported a bible and a prayer-book in tooled bindings with a coat of arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept sacristy. Perfumed air came in through the open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the trees.
Reminding her that Tims, the chauffeur, would soon be at the door to take him to the bank, Collingham sank into the armchair nearest to the bed. His thoughts were on the amount in the proposed issue of Paraguayan bonds the house would be able to carry.
”It's about Bob,” she began, in a tone little more than casual. ”Did you know he was in a sc.r.a.pe?”
He started, firing off his brief questions rapidly:
”Who? Bob? What kind of sc.r.a.pe? With a girl?”
”Exactly. With a girl who may give us a good deal of trouble unless the thing is stopped.”
If Collingham's heart sank it was not wholly because of the sc.r.a.pe with the girl, but because he was afraid of chickens coming home to roost.
Though he had never broached the subject with the boy, he had often wondered as to how he met s.e.xual temptation; and now he was to learn.
”Is it anything very wrong?”
”Only in intention.” She sipped her coffee before letting him have the full force of it. ”He wants to marry her.”
He felt some slight relief.
”Oh, then it's not-”
”No; not as far as he's concerned. As to her-well I presume that she's the usual type.”
”Did he tell you himself?”
”He told me himself.”
”His job at the bank pays him only two thousand dollars a year. Did he say what else he expected to marry on?”
”We didn't discuss that; but I suppose it would be what he expects you to give him.”
”And if I don't give him anything?”
”That's what I wanted to know. If you didn't-”
”He'd call it off?”
”No; perhaps not. But she would.”