Rachel turned in the other direction and walked slowly back to the
pavilion. What had happened? What had she been hearing? The slightest
mental exertion still made her head ache, but she was conscious that if
she once let herself go and made the effort it would be possible for her
to understand. But that moment had not come yet.
She had not been many minutes in her quiet shady garden when the little
gate at the bottom of it was thrown open, and her husband came quickly
in, looking round him with an anxious, hurried glance as though not
knowing what he might find. What had he expected? He could hardly have
told. But as he drew nearer and nearer he had been gradually nerving
himself for the worst. He had been dreading to find he knew not what.
Wentworth might be sitting with Rachel, the faces of both telling that
Wentworth's would-be explanations had been of no avail; or Rachel
herself might have been absent--she might have strolled out into the
crowd and there unawares heard rumours of what he felt convinced must by
this time be in every one's mind, on every one's lips. It was therefore
for the moment an unmeasured relief to find that all seemed as usual,
that Rachel was sitting there quiet and cool before her little
tea-table.
"Ah!" he almost gasped, with a long sigh, as he sank into a chair and
leant his head against the back of it with a weary, hunted look.
"Frank!" said Rachel anxiously, "what is the matter? What has happened?"
"What do you mean?" he said, sitting up, with again the startled,
haggard expression on his face. "What should have happened?"
"I don't know," Rachel said, startled too at his look and manner. "You
look so tired, so ill."
"Oh, I'm all right," he said, taking up and drinking eagerly the cup of
tea that almost mechanically she had poured out and pushed towards him,
and as he did so he realised that he had had no food since the morning.
He ate and drank and then again lay back in his chair and was silent. As
Rachel looked at him the absolute conviction swept over her--she knew
not why--that he had been concerned in the terrible catastrophe of which
she had heard the broken accounts. It began to dawn upon her that in
some inconceivable way the thing had happened to him; that it was of him
those women were speaking. She still heard Lady Adela saying: "Did you
ever see any one look so awful?" And yet what could it be? What horrible
misunderstanding was it? What horrible mistake could have been made?
She sat and waited. Not the least of her charms was that she knew, what
many women do not know, how to sit absolutely quiet. She knew when to
refrain from questioning, how to sit by her companion in so peaceful, so
final a manner, as it were, that he did not feel that she was simply
waiting for what he would do next.
The band blared out again with renewed vigour. Rendel leant his elbows
on his knees, his face between his hands.
"Oh! that miserable noise!" he said. "Will it never leave off? The
hideousness of it all!--those people, that band! Oh! to get away from it
all!" he muttered half to himself.
"Frank," said Rachel entreatingly, touching his arm, "if you don't like
it why shouldn't we go away from it? I think it is horrible, too. I went
out of the garden to-day to where the people were walking."
Rendel looked up quickly.
"Did you? Did you see any one you knew?"
"Yes," said Rachel; "I saw Mr. Pateley."
"Pateley!" said her husband. "Did you have any talk with him? What did
he say?"
"Hardly anything," said Rachel. "He was surprised to see me, and asked
how long we had been here, and if he might come and see us. That was
all."
"That was all," echoed Rendel, again with an inward shiver. "Coming to
see us, is he?"
That encounter for the moment he must at any cost avoid.
"Frank, I wonder if we must go on staying here?" Rachel said.
"Of course we must," Rendel replied, trying to pull himself together
again. "Dr. Morgan said that this was the very best place for you to
come to, and that the waters would do you all the good in the world."
"I wonder if we need," said Rachel. "I am sure it is the kind of thing
you hate."
"It is not for very long, after all," said Rendel, trying to smile.
He was gradually regaining possession of himself, but was still afraid
to trust himself to utter any but the most commonplace and ordinary
sentences.
"The moment I have done the cure," said Rachel, "we'll go back to
London, won't we? And you can begin your work again, and do all the
things you like. And then," she went on with an attempt at lightness of
tone, "you can go back to your beloved politics, and think of nothing
else all day." And she went on talking of their house, of their arrival,
of what they would do, in a forlorn little attempt to show him that she
meant to try to shoulder life valiantly, although it had been so
altered. "You will stand for somewhere. You will go into the House."
Rendel thought of what the life might have been that she was sketching,
and what it was going to be now. What he had gone through that day was
an earnest probably of what awaited him many a time if he should try to
lead his life as he used to lead it, among the people who were congenial
to him.
"No," he said, "I'm not going to stand. I'm not going into the House. I
shan't have anything to do with politics."
"What?" said Rachel, looking at him startled.
"All that, is at an end," he said firmly. Then with the relief of
speaking, came the irresistible desire to go on, to tell her something
at least of what his fate was, although he might not tell the thing that
mattered most.
"Do you remember," he said, "something that I told you had happened----"
he broke off, then began again. "Tell me," he said, impelled to ask,
"how much you remember, if you remember anything, of those days when
your father was so ill, at the end, just before he died, or is it still
a blank to you?"
Rachel shuddered.
"No, I can't remember," she said. "The last thing I remember clearly is
one afternoon when he was beginning to be worse and had to go upstairs
again; and I remember nothing more after that till," and her voice
trembled, "till--a day that I woke up in bed and wanted to go to him,
and you told me that--that he was dead. The rest of that time is a
blank."
"How extraordinary it is!" muttered Rendel to himself.
"I did not even know," said Rachel, "that I had fallen on the stairs,
until the doctor told me days afterwards that I had caught my foot as I
was running downstairs. He told me then it was no use trying to
remember the time just before," she went on in a low, anxious voice,
something stirring uneasily within her: "that it might not come back at
all. It seems it doesn't sometimes to people who have that sort of
accident."
Rendel, his eyes fixed on the ground, had been listening; he took in the
meaning of her words and tried to realise their bearing on himself, but
he was too far gone on the slope to stop. It was clear that she would
not know what had happened, unless she were told by himself... and yet,
who could tell how the awakening would come? it might even be in a worse
form when she was able once more to mix with her kind.
"Rachel," he said. "I want to tell you something that happened the day
before your father became worse, the day before you had that accident,
the last day, in fact, that you remember." She looked at him with
anxious eagerness. "Something tremendously important happened. Lord
Stamfordham brought me some private notes of his own to decipher and
copy."
"Of course," said Rachel, "that I remember. In your study downstairs."
"You remember?" said Rendel eagerly. Then instantly conscious, alas,
that the evidence could do him no kind of good, "that I gave some papers
to Thacker to take to Stamfordham?"
"Stop a minute," said Rachel. "Yes, I remember that too. My father
wanted to play chess afterwards, but he was too tired."
"In those papers," said Rendel, "there was a very important secret,
though it didn't remain a secret," he added, with a bitter little laugh,
"for twenty-four hours. Those papers contained the notes of a
conversation at the German Embassy at which that agreement was decided
upon by which Germany and England divided Africa between them. It was
_I_ copied those papers from Stamfordham's notes. I copied the map of
Africa with a line down the middle of it. The next morning, no one knew
how or why, that map appeared in the _Arbiter_."
Rachel looked at him, still not understanding all that was implied.
"Do you see what that means for me?" Rendel said. "It was not
Stamfordham published it, he did not mean to do so until the moment
should come, and since I was the person who had had the original notes,
he thought that I had published it; that I had let it out, somehow."
"You!" said Rachel, with wide-open eyes.
"Yes," said Rendel shortly. "That I had betrayed the great secret
entrusted to me."
"Frank!" she cried. "But of course you didn't!"
"Of course I didn't," Rendel said quietly.
"And--then----?" said Rachel breathlessly.
"Then," Rendel said, shrinking at the very recollection, "Stamfordham
told me he believed I had done it. Then of course,"--and the words came
with an effort--"there was an end of everything, and I knew that there
was nothing left for me to do but to go under, to throw everything up. I
knew that people would turn their backs upon me, and I didn't see
Stamfordham again until--until to-day. And to-day Wentworth and I went
up to that place in the woods to lunch, and by chance, by the most
horrible, evil fortune, we came upon a luncheon party at which
Stamfordham was, and--and," he said trying to speak calmly, "when he saw
me he refused to sit down at the same table with me." And as he spoke
Rachel felt that things were becoming clear to her and that she was
beginning to understand. The comments of the people who had stood by her
and discussed the scene they had witnessed still rang in her ears, and
she realised what the horror of that scene must have been.
"Frank!" she cried, with her tears falling. And she went to him and took
his hand, then drew his head against her bosom as though to give him
sanctuary. "Imagine believing that you, _you_ of all people..." and the
broken words of comfort and faith in him, of love and belief again gave
him a moment of feeling that rehabilitation might be possible.
"Frank!" Rachel went on, "tell me this. Did my father know?"
"Know what?" Rendel said, starting up, the iron reality again facing
him.
"That you were accused? That they could believe that you had done such a
shameful thing?"
"Yes," said Rendel slowly. "At least he knew what had
happened--and--and--he guessed that the suspicion would fall upon me."
"Oh!" cried Rachel, hiding her face in her hands and trying to steady
her voice. "I am sorry he knew just at the end. I wonder if he
realised?"
Rendel said nothing. Even now was Sir William Gore to stand between
them?
"Perhaps he didn't," Rachel said, almost entreatingly, "as he was so
ill. Because think what it would have been to him! Of course he would
have known it was not true, but he was so fastidious, so terribly
sensitive, the mere thought that you could have been suspected of such a
thing even would have preyed upon him so terribly."
"Well," said Rendel, in a low voice--the last possibility of clearing
himself was put behind him, and the darkness fell again--"he is beyond
reach of it. It is I who must suffer now."
Rachel had walked to the other side of the garden, pressing her
handkerchief to her eyes and trying to control herself. Now she came
swiftly back, a sudden determination in her heart.
"Frank," she cried, "why must you suffer? We must find out who really
did it."
"I can't," said Rendel.
"But have you tried?"
"Yes," he said. "As much as was possible."
"But it must be possible," she cried. And she came to him, her eyes and
face glowing with resolve. "If the whole world came to me and said that
you had done this I should not believe it. I remember so well my mother
saying, the day that I came back from Maidenhead," and their eyes met in
the recollection of that happy, cloudless time, "'what a man needs is
some one to believe in him,' and I thought to myself that when--if--I
married I would believe in my husband as she believed in my father."
At this moment one of the Swiss waiters came quickly through the
pavilion into the garden.
"Monsieur Pateley," he said, "wishes to know if Madame is at home."
Rachel and her husband looked at each other in consternation.
"I can't see him at this moment," Rendel said, going to the gate.
"Can't we send him away?" said Rachel, anxiously.
"Where is he?" addressing the waiter. But it was too late. The question
answered itself, as Pateley's large form appeared behind that of the
waiter, distinctly seen on every side of it. Rachel, trying to control
her face into a smile of welcome, went forward to meet him as Rendel
disappeared amongst the trees, from whence he could get round into the
house another way.