Jane went to her room that night, but she did not undress. Two entirely
opposite lines of reasoning had ended in inducing one and the same
decision. On the one hand, it might be argued that Lady Heritage and Mr.
Ember, having passed the greater part of last night abroad upon their
mysterious business, would be most unlikely to spend a second sleepless
night so soon, and Jane might, therefore, count on finding the coast
clear for a little exploring on her own account. On the other hand, an
equally logical train of thought suggested that these midnight comings
and goings might be part of a routine, and that Jane, if on the watch,
might acquire some very valuable information.
She therefore locked her door and proceeded to consider the question of
what she should wear with as much attention as if she had been going to
a ball. Neither barefoot nor with only stockings would she go into any
passage which had left those unpleasant dark stains upon Lady Heritage’s
overall. A really heartfelt shudder passed over her at the very idea.
No, Renata possessed slippers of maroon felt. Misguided talent had
stenciled upon the toe of one a Dutch boy in full trousers, and upon the
toe of the other a Dutch girl in full petticoats. Jane had a fierce
loathing for the slippers, but they had cork soles and would at once
keep out the damp and be very silent. She therefore placed them in
readiness.
Prolonged hesitation between the claims of the crimson flannel
dressing-gown and an aged blue serge dress resulted in a final selection
of the latter. She decided that it would flap less, and that if it got
stained and damp the housemaids would be less likely to notice it.
“Of course, on the other hand,” said Jane to herself, “if I’m caught, it
absolutely does in any excuse about walking in my sleep, but I don’t
think that’s an earthly, anyhow. If I’m caught, they’ll jolly well know
what I was doing. The thing is not to be caught.”
At half-past eleven precisely she made her way down to the hall.
To-night there was no patch of moonlight to pass through, only a vague
greyness which showed that the moon had risen and that the clouds
outside were thin enough to let some of the light filter through.
Jane felt her way downstairs and across the hall to Sir William’s study.
The study door afforded the nearest point from which she could watch
what she called Willoughby Luttrell’s corner without exposing herself to
detection.
She made up her mind that she would wait until she heard twelve strike,
and then explore the corner. She had so thoroughly planned a period of
waiting that it was with a feeling of shocked surprise that she became
aware, even as she reached and crossed the threshold of the study, that
some one was coming down the stairs behind her.
If she had been one moment later, if she had stayed, as she very nearly
did stay, to look out of the window and see whether the night was fair,
they would have walked into one another at the top of the stairs. As it
was, she had escaped by the very narrowest margin.
The door opened inwards, and she had just time to get behind it and
close all but a crack, when through that crack she saw Raymond Heritage
pass, wrapped in the same black cloak which she had worn the night
before, only this time she wore beneath it, not her linen overall, but
the dress she had worn for dinner. She held an electric lamp in her left
hand.
As soon as she had passed the door, Jane opened it a little wider and
came forward a step.
Lady Heritage went straight to the corner of the hall. She put the torch
down upon a chair which stood immediately under Willoughby Luttrell’s
portrait. Then she went quite close to the wall and reached up, with her
arms stretched out widely. Her right hand touched the bottom left-hand
corner of the portrait and her left rested in the angle of the corner.
Jane heard the same click which she had heard the night before.
Lady Heritage stepped back, took up her light, and, going to the corner,
pushed hard against the wall.
Jane watched with all her eyes, and saw a section of the panelling turn
on some unseen pivot, leaving a narrow door through which Raymond
passed. For a moment she stared at the lighter oblong in the wall; then
there was a second click and the unbroken shadow once again.
Tingling with excitement, Jane stepped from her doorway and came to the
corner. She must, oh she must, find the spring, and find it in time to
follow. Raymond stood here and reached up, but she was tall, much taller
than Jane. She stood on her tiptoes and could not reach the lowest edge
of the portrait.
With the very greatest of care she moved the chair that was under the
picture a yard or two to the left. It weighed as though it were made of
lead instead of oak, and she was gasping as she set it down, but she had
made no noise. Renata’s cork soles slipped as she climbed on to the
polished seat, but she gripped the solid back and did not fall.
Raymond had pressed something in the wall with both hands at once. Jane
began to feel carefully along the lower edge of the portrait until she
came to the massively foliated corner with its fat gilt acanthus leaves.
A cross-piece of the panelling came just on the same level. She felt
along it with light, sensitive finger-tips. There was a knot in the
wood, but nothing else. “If there is another knot in the corner, I’ll
try pressing on them,” she thought to herself, and on the instant her
left hand found the second knot. She pressed with all her might, and for
the third time that evening she heard the little scarcely audible click.
This time it spelt victory.
In a curiously methodical manner Jane got down, put the chair carefully
back into its place, and pushed against the wall as she had seen Lady
Heritage do. The panelling yielded to her hand and swung inwards.
There was a black gap in the corner. Jane passed through it without any
hesitation, and pulled the panelling to. She meant to leave it just
ajar, but her hand must have shaken, or else there was some controlling
spring, for as she stood in the black dark she heard the click again.
She drew a long breath and stood motionless for a moment, but only for a
moment. She had come there to follow Raymond Heritage, and follow her
she would.
She put out a cautious foot and it went down, so far down that for a
sickening instant she thought that she must overbalance and fall
headlong; then, just in time, it touched a step, the first of ten which
went down very steeply. At the bottom she felt her way round a corner,
and then with intensest thankfulness she saw, a good way ahead, a moving
figure with a light.
The passage that stretched before her was about six feet high and four
feet wide. The air felt very damp and heavy. At intervals there were
openings on the left-hand side where other passages seemed to branch
off. Jane began to have a growing horror of these other passages. If she
lost Lady Heritage, how would she ever find her way back, and—yet more
horrid thought—who, or what, might at any moment come out of one of
those dark tunnels behind her? It was at this point that she began to
run, only to check herself severely. “She’ll hear you, you fool. Jane, I
absolutely forbid you to be such a fool; and Renata’s slippers will come
off if you run, nasty sloppy things, and then you’ll tread in green
slime, and get it between all your toes. _It will squelch._” The horror
of the black passages was eclipsed; Jane stopped running obediently, but
she took longer steps and diminished the distance between herself and
her unconscious guide.
The passage had begun to run uphill. Jane wondered where they were
going. At any moment Lady Heritage might turn. If she did so, Jane must
infallibly be caught unless she were near enough to one of the side
tunnels. She went on with her heart in her mouth.
A line from one of Christina Rossetti’s poems came into her head:
“Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.”
“The sort of cheery thing one _would_ remember,” thought Jane to
herself; and she continued to climb the endless slope, her eyes fixed on
the dark, moving silhouette of Lady Heritage.
At last there was a pause. The light ceased to move. Jane crept closer,
but dared not come too near. Next moment she saw what looked like a slab
of stone in the passage wall swing round on a pivot as the panelling had
done. Lady Heritage passed out of sight through the opening, and at the
same moment a great breath of wind from the sea drove into the passage,
clear, fresh, exquisite.
Jane hurried to the opening and looked out. She saw first the dark,
curving walls of a small cave, and, immediately in front of her, the
black outline of a bench, beyond that a stretch of uneven ground, a
tangle of wire, and the black movement of the sea. The moon behind the
clouds made a vague, dusky twilight, and the wind blew. Lady Heritage
was standing just on the other side of the stone seat. It startled Jane
to find that she was so near. She stood quite still looking at the
shadowed water and the cloudy sky.
Then, without any warning, a tall, dark figure came into sight. To Jane
it seemed as if it rose out of the ground. Afterwards she thought that,
if any one had been sitting on the grass and then had risen, it would,
of course, have looked like that. At the time she leaned against the
rock for support and had much ado not to scream.
It was Lady Heritage who called out, with an inarticulate cry that
mingled with the wind and was carried away.
The dark figure stood still just where it had so suddenly appeared, and
in an instant Raymond had turned her light upon it. In the circle of
light Jane saw a man—a tall man, bareheaded. He had thrown up his arm as
if to screen his face, but it only hid the mouth and chin. Over it his
eyes looked straight at Raymond Heritage.
And Raymond gave a great cry of “Anthony!” The light dropped from her
hand, fell with a crash on the stones, rolled over, and went out.
Anthony Luttrell did not stir, but Raymond began to move towards him
after a strange rigid fashion, and as she moved, she kept saying his
name over and over:
“Tony—Tony—Tony—Tony.”
Her voice fell lower and lower. As she reached him it was nearly gone.
Jane turned from the stone wall where she was leaning, and stumbled back
along the dark passage with the tears running down her face.
At that last whisper of his name, Anthony spoke:
“I’m not a ghost, Raymond. Did you think I was?”
They were so close together that if she had stretched out those groping
hands another inch they would have touched him. Something in his tone
set a barrier between them and Raymond’s hands fell empty. The world was
whirling round her. Life and death, love and hate, their parting and
this meeting were merged in a confusion that robbed her of thought and
almost of consciousness. It seemed to her as if they had been standing
there for a long, long time, or, rather, as if time had nothing to do
with them, and they had been cast into a strange eternity. Out of the
turmoil of her thought arose the remembrance of the last time she and
Anthony had trysted in this place—a sky almost unbearably blue and the
sea brilliant under the noonday sun. Now there was no light anywhere.
Anthony was alive. That should have been joy unbelievable. All through
the years since she had read his name in the list of missing with what
an overwhelming surge of joy would her heart have lifted to the words,
“Anthony is alive.” Now she said them to herself and felt only a deeper,
more terrible sense of separation than any that had touched her yet.
They stood together, and between them there was a gulf unpassable—and no
light anywhere.
Raymond moved very slowly back along the way that she had come. She came
to the stone seat, caught at the back of it with a hand that suddenly
began to shake, and sat down. A few slow moments passed. Then she bent
and began to grope for the torch which she had dropped.
Anthony came towards her.
“What is it?” he said, and she answered him in a low, fluttering voice:
“My light—I dropped—it’s so dark—I want the light.”
The strong, capable hand groping without aim stirred something in
Anthony. He said, almost roughly:
“I’ll find it.”
Then a moment later he had picked it up, found it intact save for a
crack in the glass, and, switching it on, put it down on the seat beside
her.
He was not prepared for her immediately flashing the light on to his
face. An exclamation broke from him, and to cover it he said:
“I am changed out of knowledge.”
“Changed—yes—Tony, that scar.”
Her voice trembled away into silence. Her hand fell. The dusk was
between them.
“Ugly, isn’t it? But I haven’t the monopoly of change, have I? You, I
think, have changed also.”
“Yes.”
With an impulse she hardly understood, she raised the light and turned
it until her face and her bare throat were brilliantly illuminated. The
dark cloak fell away a little. The dark eyes looked at him with defiance
and appeal. Her beauty, seen like that, had something that startled; it
was so devoid of life and colour, and yet so great! After a long,
breathless minute Anthony said in his slow voice:
“You have changed more than I have, Lady Heritage, for you have changed
your name.”
He saw the last vestige of colour leave her face. She put the lamp down,
and her silence startled him.
“No one would have known me,” he said after a pause that was all strain.
“I knew you,” said Raymond very low.
“Only because the lower part of my face was hidden. You’d have passed me
in daylight. You have passed me.”
She winced at that, turned the light full on to him again, and said:
“You are working in the laboratory—that’s—that’s why....” She broke off
for a minute and went on with a sort of violence, “You say that I didn’t
know you, but I did—I did. All this week I’ve been tormented with your
presence. All this week I’ve felt you just at hand, just out of reach. I
kept saying to myself, ‘Tony’s dead,’ and expecting to meet you round
every corner. It was driving me mad.”
“It sounds most uncomfortable,” said Anthony dryly.
Raymond saw a mocking look pass over his face. She turned the light away
and set it down. If she had not felt physically incapable of rising to
her feet, she would have left him then. This was not Anthony at all,
only the anger, the bitterness, the cold resentment which she had hated
in him. These, not Anthony, had come back from the grave.
He was speaking again:
“Perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but ... are you expecting to meet any one
here? Am I in the way?”
She answered him with a sort of heartbroken simplicity quite beyond
pride:
“I don’t know what I expected. You were haunting me so. I came here
because ... oh, Tony, don’t you remember at all?”
“I remember something that you appear to have forgotten, Raymond. When
like a fool, and a dishonourable fool at that, I gave you the secret of
these passages, I remember very well the rather enthusiastic terms in
which you asserted your conviction that the secret was a sacred trust,
and one that you would keep absolutely inviolate. As, however, I broke
my own trust in giving you the secret, I can, I suppose, hardly complain
because you have imitated my lack of discretion.”
Raymond did rise then.
“Tony, what do you mean?” she cried.
“My dear Raymond, you know very well what I mean.”
“I do not.” Her voice had risen; this was more the Raymond of their old
quarrels, a creature quick to passionate anger, vehement and reckless.
“I say you know very well.”
“And I say that I do not. That I haven’t the shadow of an idea—and that
you must explain, Tony; explain.”
“Oh, I’ll explain all right!”
The last word was almost lost in a battering gust of wind. He waited for
it to die away, and then:
“How soon did you give away the secret to Ember?” he said, and heard her
gasp.
“To Jeffrey—you think I told Jeffrey?”
Anthony laughed. It needed only her use of Ember’s name.
“I know that you told Ember,” he said in a voice like ice.
Raymond put her hands to her head. She pressed her throbbing temples and
stared at this shadow of Anthony. It was beyond any nightmare that they
should meet like this. She made a very great effort, and came up to him,
touching his wrist, trying to take his hand.
“Tony, I don’t know what you’re thinking of. I don’t know how you can
speak to me like this. I don’t know what you mean—I don’t indeed. Since
you went I have only been into the passages twice, last night and
to-night. I went there because—oh, why do people go and weep upon a
grave? I had no grave to go to, but I thought that, if I came here where
we used to meet, perhaps the you that was haunting me would take shape
so that I could see it, or else leave me. I felt driven, and I didn’t
know what was driving me.”
In the breathless silence that followed she heard him say:
“I _know_ that you told Ember”—and quite suddenly all the strength went
out of her.