Upon this announcement Neigh looked at poor Chickerel as if he saw through him into the wall. Mrs. Doncastle uttered a faint exclamation and leant back in her chair: the bare possibility of the truth of Chickerel's claims to such paternity shook her to pieces when she viewed her intimacies with Ethelberta during the past season--the court she had paid her, the arrangements she had entered into to please her; above all, the dinner-party which she had contrived and carried out solely to gratify Lord Mountclere and bring him into personal communication with the general favourite;thus making herself probably the chief though unconscious instrument in promoting a match by which her butler was to become father-in-law to a peer she delighted to honour. The crowd of perceptions almost took away her life; she closed her eyes in a white shiver.
'Do you mean to say that the lady who sat here at dinner at the same time that Lord Mountclere was present, is your daughter?' asked Doncastle.
'Yes, sir,' said Chickerel respectfully.
'How did she come to be your daughter?'
'I-- Well, she is my daughter, sir.'
'Did you educate her?'
'Not altogether, sir. She was a very clever child. Lady Petherwin took a deal of trouble about her education. They were both left widows about the same time: the son died, then the father. My daughter was only seventeen then. But though she's older now, her marriage with Lord Mountclere means misery. He ought to marry another woman.'
'It is very extraordinary,' Mr. Doncastle murmured. 'If you are ill you had better go and rest yourself, Chickerel. Send in Thomas.'
Chickerel, who seemed to be much disturbed, then very gladly left the room, and dinner proceeded. But such was the peculiarity of the case, that, though there was in it neither murder, robbery, illness, accident, fire, or any other of the tragic and legitimate shakers of human nerves, two of the three who were gathered there sat through the meal without the least consciousness of what viands had composed it. Impressiveness depends as much upon propinquity as upon magnitude; and to have honoured unawares the daughter of the vilest Antipodean miscreant and murderer would have been less discomfiting to Mrs. Doncastle than it was to make the same blunder with the daughter of a respectable servant who happened to live in her own house. To Neigh the announcement was as the catastrophe of a story already begun, rather than as an isolated wonder. Ethelberta's words had prepared him for something, though the nature of that thing was unknown.
'Chickerel ought not to have kept us in ignorance of this--of course he ought not!' said Mrs. Doncastle, as soon as they were left alone.
'I don't see why not,' replied Mr. Doncastle, who took the matter very coolly, as was his custom.
'Then she herself should have let it be known.'
'Nor does that follow. You didn't tell Mrs. Petherwin that your grandfather narrowly escaped hanging for shooting his rival in a duel.'
'Of course not. There was no reason why I should give extraneous information.'
'Nor was there any reason why she should. As for Chickerel, he doubtless felt how unbecoming it would be to make personal remarks upon one of your guests--Ha-ha-ha! Well, well--Ha-ha-ha-ha!'
'I know this,' said Mrs. Doncastle, in great anger, 'that if my father had been in the room, I should not have let the fact pass unnoticed, and treated him like a stranger!'
'Would you have had her introduce Chickerel to us all round? My dear Margaret, it was a complicated position for a woman.'
'Then she ought not to have come!'
'There may be something in that, though she was dining out at other houses as good as ours. Well, I should have done just as she did, for the joke of the thing. Ha-ha-ha!--it is very good--very. It was a case in which the appetite for a jest would overpower the sting of conscience in any well-constituted being--that, my dear, Imust maintain.'
'I say she should not have come!' answered Mrs. Doncastle firmly.
'Of course I shall dismiss Chickerel.'
