IV

It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they

had often called England so little--“such a confoundedly hard place to

get lost in.”

_A confoundedly hard place to get lost in!_ That had been her husband’s

phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation

sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing

straits; now, with Boyne’s name blazing from the walls of every town

and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the

country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact,

populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself

as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his

wife’s anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something

they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne’s disappearance there had been no word of

him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that

raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one

but the bewildered kitchen-maid had seen him leave the house, and no one

else had seen “the gentleman” who accompanied him. All inquiries in the

neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger’s presence that

day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either

alone or in company, in any of the neighboring villages, or on the road

across the downs, or at either of the local railway-stations. The sunny

English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into

Cimmerian night.

Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its

highest pressure, had ransacked her husband’s papers for any trace of

antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to

her, that might throw a faint ray into the darkness. But if any such

had existed in the background of Boyne’s life, they had disappeared as

completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his

name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except--if it were

indeed an exception--the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the

act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter,

read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded

little enough for conjecture to feed on.

“I have just heard of Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now

no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--” That was all. The “risk

of trouble” was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which had

apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his

associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information

conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote

it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he

had assured his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter

itself declared that the plaintiff was dead. It took several weeks

of exhaustive cabling to fix the identity of the “Parvis” to whom the

fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these inquiries

had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the

Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern

in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely as an

acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable

to divine with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight’s feverish

search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed.

Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she

had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of

time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck

from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as

the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal

gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No

doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew

less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded

out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually

bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of

velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture;

but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were moments

of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which

leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself

domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of

the fixed conditions of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a

phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of life

with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of

civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard

herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its

motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat,

an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and

tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of

the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of

“change.” Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by

the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which

he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary

state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of

anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was

sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight

as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold.

She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his

disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and her

own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these

alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was

gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would ever know.

But the house _knew_; the library in which she spent her long, lonely

evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted,

here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused

Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the

books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the

intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out

into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation

never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the

garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its

very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the

incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary

Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the

futility of seeking to break it by any human means.

V

“I don’t say it _wasn’t_ straight, yet don’t say it _was_ straight. It

was business.”

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at

the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with “Mr. Parvis” on it had been

brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been

a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of

Boyne’s unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a

small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it

sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person to

whom her husband’s last known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a man who

has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of his visit.

He had “run over” to England on business, and finding himself in the

neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying

his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if the occasion offered,

what she meant to do about Bob Elwell’s family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary’s bosom.

Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished

phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at

once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject.

Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?

“I know nothing--you must tell me,” she faltered out; and her visitor

thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused

perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the

whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money

in that brilliant speculation at the cost of “getting ahead” of some one

less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young

Robert Elwell, who had “put him on” to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary’s first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance

through his impartial glasses.

“Bob Elwell wasn’t smart enough, that’s all; if he had been, he might

have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It’s the kind of thing

that happens every day in business. I guess it’s what the scientists

call the survival of the fittest,” said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased

with the aptness of his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to

frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated

her.

“But then--you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?”

Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. “Oh, no, I don’t.

I don’t even say it wasn’t straight.” He glanced up and down the long

lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the

definition he sought. “I don’t say it _wasn’t_ straight, and yet I don’t

say it _was_ straight. It was business.” After all, no definition in his

category could be more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the

indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.

“But Mr. Elwell’s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I

suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice.”

“Oh, yes, they knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, technically. It was

when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You

see, he’d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he

was up a tree. That’s why he shot himself when they told him he had no

show.”

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.

“He shot himself? He killed himself because of _that?_”

“Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before

he died.” Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone

grinding out its “record.”

“You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?”

“Oh, he didn’t have to try again,” said Parvis, grimly.

They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glass

thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along

her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

“But if you knew all this,” she began at length, hardly able to force

her voice above a whisper, “how is it that when I wrote you at the

time of my husband’s disappearance you said you didn’t understand his

letter?”

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. “Why, I didn’t

understand it--strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk

about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was

withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find

your husband.”

Mary continued to scrutinize him. “Then why are you telling me now?”

Still Parvis did not hesitate. “Well, to begin with, I supposed you

knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s

death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been

raked up again. And I thought, if you didn’t know, you ought to.”

She remained silent, and he continued: “You see, it’s only come out

lately what a bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud

woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and

taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--something with the heart,

I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after, and the

children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help.

That attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a

subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most

of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people

began to wonder why--”

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. “Here,” he continued,

“here’s an account of the whole thing from the ‘Sentinel’--a little

sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.”

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering,

as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of

a clipping from the “Sentinel” had first shaken the depths of her

security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring

head-lines, “Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,” ran down

the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was

her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to

England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that

stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the

photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was

said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

“I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--” she heard

Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait.

It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with

features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where

had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart

hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a cry.

“This is the man--the man who came for my husband!”

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had

slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending

above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself, and

reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

“It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that

sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,

fog-muffled windings.

“Mrs. Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a

glass of water?”

“No, no, no!” She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically

clenching the newspaper. “I tell you, it’s the man! I _know_ him! He

spoke to me in the garden!”

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait.

“It can’t be, Mrs. Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.”

“Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space. “Then it

was Robert Elwell who came for him.”

“Came for Boyne? The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers

rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her

gently back into her seat. “Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?”

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was

saying.

“Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me--the one you found

on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s

death.” She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. “Surely

you remember that!” he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had

died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s

portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in

the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The

library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the

man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter.

Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom

of half-forgotten words--words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at

Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or

had imagined that they might one day live there.

“This was the man who spoke to me,” she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance

under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration;

but the edges of his lips were blue. “He thinks me mad; but I’m not

mad,” she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of

justifying her strange affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she

could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking

straight at Parvis: “Will you answer me one question, please? When was

it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?”

“When--when?” Parvis stammered.

“Yes; the date. Please try to remember.”

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. “I have a reason,”

she insisted gently.

“Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should

say.”

“I want the date,” she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. “We might see here,” he said, still

humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. “Here it is. Last

October--the--”

She caught the words from him. “The 20th, wasn’t it?” With a sharp look

at her, he verified. “Yes, the 20th. Then you _did_ know?”

“I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday, the

20th--that was the day he came first.”

Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came _here_ first?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him twice, then?”

“Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first

on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day

we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.” She felt a faint gasp

of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have

forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

“We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the lime-avenue

toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My

husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but

there was no one there. He had vanished.”

“Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.

“Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t

think what had happened. I see now. He _tried_ to come then; but he

wasn’t dead enough--he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months;

and then he came back again--and Ned went with him.”

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has

successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her

hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

“Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent him to

this room!” she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling

ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins,

crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his

touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard

but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at

Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long,

long afterward.”