Leonie of the Jungle Read online

  CHAPTER II

  "When your fear cometh as a desolation."--_The Bible_.

  Susan Hetth rose.

  She had always intensely disliked her brother-in-law's old friend,failing utterly to perceive the heart of gold studded with rare gemsthat was hidden under a bushel of intentional brusqueness.

  But as she was under an obligation to him she decided to make herselfas pleasant as possible, and to obey his orders, however irksome.

  Great brain specialist, great philanthropist, she had rung him up in apanic that morning after having vainly ransacked her memory for someother human being in whom she could with safety confide her fear, andfrom whom she could expect some meed of succour.

  She knew, as everybody knew, that years ago he had given up the hoursof consultation which had seen his Harley Street waiting-room filled tooverflowing; that little by little, bit by bit, indeed, he had givenhimself up entirely to research work, travelling in every quarter ofthe globe in his quest for the knowledge necessary to the alleviationof the mental troubles of his fellow-beings. And that when he found itor some part of it he had hurried home, and having brought it to asnear a state of perfection as possible, had flung it broad-cast to thesuffering; just as he flung the immense sums of money he made among thedestitute for whom he loved to work without thought of the morrow.

  A genuine case of trouble he had never been known to dismiss, and SusanHetth had heaved a sigh of relief into the receiver when he fixed animmediate appointment.

  The spook of fear is not the cheeriest companion of the early cup oftea, and Nannie's words, allied to Nannie's face when she enteredwithout knocking, had caused the silly, invertebrate woman to takeimmediate action for once in her life.

  Not for anything would she confess it, but she wished now she hadlistened to Nannie when, just a year ago, she had so fervently urged avisit to the doctor the first time she had discovered the baby girlwalking downstairs one step at a time in her sleep.

  She remembered the way the ever-changing house-parlourmaids hadfurtively looked at the child when she came in to dessert; how oneafter the other they had given notice, declaring that although theyreally loved the child their nerves would not stand the ever-recurringshock of finding her sitting in some corner in the dark; or thepattering of her little feet on the stairs when she occasionally evadedthe nurse and walked about the house in her sleep; and she rememberedhow other nurses who brought baby visitors to tea had watched thechild, surreptitiously touching their foreheads and wagging their headsat each other.

  But, as is the way of the supine, she had put it off and put it offuntil her negligence had culminated in the frightful scene of this samevery early morning, when Leonie, waking in the day nursery to find herkitten dead, had screamed and shrieked hour after hour until thehouse-parlourmaid had rushed in and given instant notice, with theunsolicited information that the servants thought, and the neighbourssaid, the child was mad and ought to be sent to a home.

  Then, indeed, had terror suddenly tweaked Susan Hetth's heart, thesocial one, the maternal one having long since atrophied through wantof use; for the shadow of lunacy is about the blackest of all theshadows that can fall across a butterfly's sunny, heedless path.

  Ten years ago she had lost her husband, in the year following most ofher capital had gone in a mad-cat speculation, and three years laterher gallant brother-in-law died, leaving her a yearly income sufficientfor expenses and education if she would undertake to mother his littledaughter. Since then she had led the usual abortive life of the womanwho lives on the past glamour of her husband's success and a limitedincome, upon which she tries ineffectually to dovetail herself into asociety to which she does not rightly belong. Having noticed anincreasing plenitude of silver among the ash-gold of her hair, adeepening of the lines of discord between her brows, and the threads ofdiscontent which were daily being hemstitched into her face by thesharp needles of make-believe, covetousness, and a precarious bankingaccount, she had recently decided to try and annex, or rather try andgraft herself on to a certain unsuspecting male being _en secondesnoces_.

  And that simply cannot be done if there is the slightest shadow uponone's appendages.

  So she sat down in the chair with as good a grace as she could muster,and arranged her big picture hat so that the spring sun should not drawSir Jonathan's attention to the methods she employed to combat therapidity with which what remained of her prettiness, prematurely fadedby the Indian sun, was vanishing.

  For a long and trying moment he sat silently staring at her, wonderingas he had always wondered what had induced his old friend to place hislittle girl in such inadequate, feeble hands.

  To break the tension Lady Hetth clanked a silver Indian bracelet boughtat Liberty's against an Egyptian chain sold by Swan & Edgar's, and theman frowned as he drew a series of cats on his blotting-paper.