Though I hold that no man has the right to accept the hospitality
offered by one he does not like, in all points except one I admired
and liked Lady Rorke immensely and wished to get rid of that one. So
I gratefully accepted, and then hurried out on a dismal and overdue
visit to the dentist’s. In the waiting-room was a girl of about twelve,
with a hand nursing a rueful face, and from time to time she stifled
a sob of pain or apprehension. I was just wondering whether it would
be a breach of waiting-room etiquette to attempt to administer comfort
or supply diversion, when the door opened and in came Lady Rorke. She
laughed delightfully when she saw me. “Hurrah! You’re another occupant of the condemned cell,” she said, “and
very soon we shall both be sent for to the scaffold. I can’t describe
to you what a coward I am about it. Why haven’t we got beaks like
birds?----”

Her glance fell on the forlorn little figure by the window, with the
rueful face and the wet eyes. “Why, here’s another of us,” she said. “And have they sent you to the
dentist’s all alone, my dear?”

“Y--yes.”

“How horrid of them!” said Lady Rorke. “They’ve sent me alone, too,
and I think it’s most unfeeling. But you shan’t be alone, anyhow, I’ll
come in with you, and sit by you, if you like that, and box the man’s
ears for him if he hurts you. Or shall you and I set on him, as soon
as we’ve got him by himself, and take out all his teeth one after the
other? Just to teach him to be a dentist.”

A faint smile began the break through the clouds. “Oh, will you come in with me?” she asked. “I shan’t mind nearly so
much, then. It’s--it’s got to come out, you know, and I mayn’t have
gas.”

Just the same gleam of a smile as I had seen on Lady Rorke’s face once
before quivered there now, a light not of pity, surely. “Ah, but it won’t ache any more after that,” she said, “and after all,
it is so soon over. You’ll just open your mouth as if you were going to
put the largest of all strawberries into it, and you’ll hold tight on
to my hand, and the dentist takes up something which you needn’t look
at----”

There was a want of tact in the vividness of this picture, and the
child began to sob again. “Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried. Again the door opened, and she clung to Lady Rorke. “Oh, I know it’s for me!” she wailed. Lady Rorke bent over her, scanning her terrified face. “Come along, my dear,” she said, “and it will be over in no time. You’ll be back here again before this gentleman can count a hundred,
and he’ll have all his troubles in front of him still.”

Again this morning I tried to expunge from that picture, so trivial and
yet so vivid to me, the sinister something which seemed to connect it
with the incident about the thrush, and, leaving it, my mind strayed
on over other reminiscences of Lady Rorke. Before the season was over
I had got to know her well, and the better I knew her the more I
marvelled at that many-petalled vitality, which never ceased unfolding
itself. She entertained largely, and had that crowning gift of a good
hostess, namely, that she enjoyed her own parties quite enormously. She
was a very fine horsewoman, and after being up till dawn at some dance,
she would be in the Row by half-past eight on a peculiarly vicious mare
to whom she seemed to pay only the most cursory attention. She had a
good knowledge of music, she dressed amazingly, she was charming to her
meagre little husband, playing piquet with him by the hour (which was
the only thing, apart from herself, that he cared about), and if in
this modern democratic London there could be said to be a queen, there
is no doubt who that season would have worn the crown. Less publicly,
she was a great student of the psychical and occult, and I remembered
hearing that she was herself possessed of very remarkable mediumistic
gifts. But to me that was a matter of hearsay, for I never was present
at any séance of hers. Yet through the triumphant music of her pageant, there sounded, to
my ears at least, fragments of a very ugly tune. It was not only in
these two instances of its emergence that I heard it, it was chiefly
and most persistently audible in her treatment of Archie Rorke, her
husband’s cousin. Everyone knew, for none could help knowing, that
he was desperately in love with her, and it is impossible to imagine
that she alone was ignorant of it. It is, no doubt, the instinct
of many women to fan a passion which they do not share, and which
they have no intention of indulging, just as the male instinct is to
gratify a passion that he does not really feel, but there are limits
to mercilessness. She was not “cruel to be kind”; she was kind to be
demoniacally cruel. She had him always by her; she gave him those
little touches and comrade-like licences which meant nothing to her,
but crazed him with thirst; she held the glass close to his lips
and then tilted it up and showed it him empty. The more charitable
explanation was that she, perhaps, knew that her husband could not
live long, and that she intended to marry Archie, and such, so it
subsequently appeared, her intentions were. But when I saw her feeding
him with husks and putting an empty glass to his lips, nothing, to
my mind, could account for her treatment of him except a rapture of
cruelty at the sight of his aching. And somehow, awfully and aptly,
that seemed to fit in with the affair of the thrush, and the meeting
with the forlorn child in the dentist’s waiting-room. Yet ever, through
that gruesome twilight, there blazed forth her charm and her beauty and
the beam of her joyous vitality, and I would cudgel myself for my nasty
interpretations. It was early in the spring of next year that I was spending a week-end
with her and her husband at Lincote. She had suggested my coming down
on Saturday morning before the party assembled later in the day, and
at lunch I was alone with her husband and her. Sir Ernest was very
silent; he looked ill and haggard, and, in fact, hardly spoke a word
except when suddenly he turned to the butler and said, “Has anything
been heard of the child yet?” He was told that there was no news, and
subsided into silence again. I thought that some queer shadow as of
suspense or anxiety crossed Lady Rorke’s face at the question; but
on the answer, it cleared off again, and, as if to sweep the subject
wholly away, she asked me if I could tolerate a saunter with her
through the woods till her guests arrived. Out she came like some splendid Diana of the Forests, and like the
goddess’s was the swift, swinging pace of her saunter. Spring all round
was riotous in blossom and bird-song; it was just that ecstatic moment
of the year when the hounds of spring have run winter to death, and as
we gained the high ridge of down above the woods she stopped and threw
her arms wide. “Oh, the sense of spring!” she cried. “The daffodils, and the west
wind, and the shadows of the clouds. How I wish I could take the
whole lot into my arms and hug them.