One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the
next day’s incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery
of her sense of security.
It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it
accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her
from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the
urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in
some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the previous
day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper
article,--as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return
upon the past,--had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting
moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband’s
affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him
instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith
had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and
suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and
unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the cross-examination
to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of
her lurking doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.
It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that surprised
her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her
daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging
herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet
face, where he bent, pipe in his mouth, above his papers, and now she
had her own morning’s task to perform. The task involved on such charmed
winter days almost as much delighted loitering about the different
quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and
borders. There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,
such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place,
without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter months
were all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her
recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar
zest to her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to
the kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated
patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about
the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something wrong about
the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from
Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of
the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses,
among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned
exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--she learned that the
great man had not arrived, and the day being too rare to waste in an
artificial atmosphere, she came out again and paced slowly along the
springy turf of the bowling-green to the gardens behind the house. At
their farther end rose a grass terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond
and the yew hedges, a view of the long house-front, with its twisted
chimney-stacks and the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in
the pale gold moisture of the air.
Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused,
mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and hospitably smoking
chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened
on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had so deep a sense
of her intimacy with it, such a conviction that its secrets were
all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, “for one’s good,” so
complete a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned’s into the
harmonious pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the
sun.
She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener,
accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one figure was
in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man, who, for reasons she
could not on the spot have specified, did not remotely resemble her
preconceived notion of an authority on hot-house boilers. The
new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a
gentleman--perhaps a traveler--desirous of having it immediately known
that his intrusion is involuntary. The local fame of Lyng occasionally
attracted the more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see
the stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing
it. But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she asked,
in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his attitude: “Is
there any one you wish to see?”
“I came to see Mr. Boyne,” he replied. His intonation, rather than his
accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar note, looked
at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his
face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted gaze a look of
seriousness, as of a person arriving “on business,” and civilly but
firmly aware of his rights.
Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but she
was jealous of her husband’s morning hours, and doubtful of his having
given any one the right to intrude on them.
“Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?” she asked.
He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.
“Not exactly an appointment,” he replied.
“Then I’m afraid, this being his working-time, that he can’t receive you
now. Will you give me a message, or come back later?”
The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would come
back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of the house. As
his figure receded down the walk between the yew hedges, Mary saw him
pause and look up an instant at the peaceful house-front bathed in faint
winter sunshine; and it struck her, with a tardy touch of compunction,
that it would have been more humane to ask if he had come from a
distance, and to offer, in that case, to inquire if her husband could
receive him. But as the thought occurred to her he passed out of
sight behind a pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was
distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the bearded
pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from Dorchester.
The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues that
they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his train, and
beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed
confabulation among the greenhouses. She was startled to find, when the
colloquy ended, that it was nearly luncheon-time, and she half expected,
as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to meet
her. But she found no one in the court but an under-gardener raking
the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she
guessed Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.
Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there,
at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay
to which the morning’s conference had committed her. The knowledge that
she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and
somehow, in contrast to the vague apprehensions of the previous days, it
now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as
Ned had said, things in general had never been “righter.”
She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously worded
inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their
jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a
state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an
absent-minded assent.
She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in rebuke
of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps sounded down the
passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall, and went
to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn,
disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed
his normal measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses,
the esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and
Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.
Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to
discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room;
but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her
that he was not in the library.
She turned back to the parlor-maid.
“Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.”
The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obeying
orders and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of
the injunction laid upon her. The struggle resulted in her saying
doubtfully, “If you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne’s not up-stairs.”
“Not in his room? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Madam.”
Mary consulted the clock. “Where is he, then?”
“He’s gone out,” Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has
respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have
first propounded.
Mary’s previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to
the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that
he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round
to the court. She crossed the hall to the glass portal opening directly
on the yew garden, but the parlor-maid, after another moment of inner
conflict, decided to bring out recklessly, “Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne
didn’t go that way.”
Mary turned back. “Where _did_ he go? And when?”
“He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam.” It was a matter of
principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.
“Up the drive? At this hour?” Mary went to the door herself, and
glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare limes. But
its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering the
house.
“Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?” she asked.
Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces
of chaos.
“No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman.”
“The gentleman? What gentleman?” Mary wheeled about, as if to front this
new factor.
“The gentleman who called, Madam,” said Trimmle, resignedly.
“When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!”
Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult
her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so
unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached
enough to note in Trimmle’s eye the dawning defiance of the respectful
subordinate who has been pressed too hard.
“I couldn’t exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn’t let the
gentleman in,” she replied, with the air of magnanimously ignoring the
irregularity of her mistress’s course.
“You didn’t let him in?”
“No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--”
“Go and ask Agnes, then,” Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her
look of patient magnanimity. “Agnes would not know, Madam, for she had
unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of the new lamp from
town--” Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new
lamp--“and so Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.”
Mary looked again at the clock. “It’s after two! Go and ask the
kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word.”
She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought
her there the kitchen-maid’s statement that the gentleman had called
about one o’clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with him without leaving
any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller’s name, for
he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to
her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.
Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over,
and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had
deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne
to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the
difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had apparently
obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne’s
experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and
compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic
acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne’s withdrawal from business he
had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the
dispersed and agitated years, with their “stand-up” lunches and dinners
rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he cultivated the last
refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife’s fancy
for the unexpected; and declaring that to a delicate taste there were
infinite gradations of pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.
Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen,
it was evident that all Boyne’s precautions would sooner or later prove
unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit
by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him
for part of the way.
This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she went
out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she
walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she
turned toward home, the early twilight was setting in.
She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile,
had probably returned from the station by the highroad, there was little
likelihood of their meeting on the way. She felt sure, however, of his
having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it
herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly
for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted
precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the papers on
her husband’s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in
to call him to luncheon.
Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had
closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the
long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound,
to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her
short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual
presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from
that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope
and gave it a desperate pull.
The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a
lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the
usual.
“You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in,” she said, to justify her ring.
“Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in,” said Trimmle, putting down
the lamp.
“Not in? You mean he’s come back and gone out again?”
“No, Madam. He’s never been back.”
The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.
“Not since he went out with--the gentleman?”
“Not since he went out with the gentleman.”
“But who _was_ the gentleman?” Mary gasped out, with the sharp note of
some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless noises.
“That I couldn’t say, Madam.” Trimmle, standing there by the lamp,
seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the
same creeping shade of apprehension.
“But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn’t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?”
“She doesn’t know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded
paper.”
Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating
the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional
formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of
custom. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the
folded paper.
“But he must have a name! Where is the paper?”
She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered documents
that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an unfinished letter
in her husband’s hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped
there at a sudden summons.
“My dear Parvis,”--who was Parvis?--“I have just received your letter
announcing Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther
risk of trouble, it might be safer--”
She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded
paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript which
had been swept together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a hurried or a
startled gesture.
“But the kitchen-maid _saw_ him. Send her here,” she commanded,
wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a
solution.
Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out
of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling,
Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her questions pat.
The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood. But what had he
said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was
easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so
little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling something on a
bit of paper, had requested that it should at once be carried in to him.
“Then you don’t know what he wrote? You’re not sure it _was_ his name?”
The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written
it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.
“And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?”
The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but she
could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was
opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her
into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen
together.
“But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they
went out of the house?”
This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness,
from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious
circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the
hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her, and had
seen them go out of the front door together.
“Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what
he looked like.”
But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became
clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid’s endurance had been reached.
The obligation of going to the front door to “show in” a visitor was
in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had
thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer
out, after various panting efforts at evocation, “His hat, mum, was
different-like, as you might say--”
“Different? How different?” Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in
the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, but
temporarily lost under layers of subsequent impressions.
“His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a youngish
face?” Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation.
But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge,
it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own
convictions. The stranger--the stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not
thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he
who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he,
and why had Boyne obeyed his call?