All that afternoon and evening Mrs. Payne watched them. The rôle of
detective was unnatural to her, and once or twice she couldn't help
feeling that it was unworthy, and that she herself was an ogress, they
were so young and so unsuspicious. She had an impression not that they
were deliberately hiding anything from her, but that the understanding
between them somehow tacitly excluded her from their intimacy. She
felt out of it at Lapton, hovering impotently on the edge of the magic
circle that their passion had created. The strangest thing of all
about this amazing relation of theirs was its air of innocence. She
was so keenly aware of this, and felt herself so likely to fall a
victim to the idea's persuasions, that she had to make an unusual
effort, to remain awake and alive to her plain duty, and to the fact
that this simple and natural love affair was a crime against society, a
disaster that might wreck not only Considine's home, but all Arthur's
future.
She could not make up her mind what to do, and this unsettled her, for
in the ordinary way she was a woman of determination who acted first
and afterwards considered the propriety of her actions. Her first
impulse was to go straight to Considine and say, "I told you so." This
course presented her with the opportunity of an easy triumph, and was
in keeping with her downright traditions; but in this case she was not
in the least anxious to make a personal score. She saw that if she
told Considine she would be firing the train to an explosion that might
end in nothing but useless wreckage. Considine, for instance,
admittedly touchy on the subject of Gabrielle, might refuse to believe
her and show her the door. Arthur would be forced to leave Lapton; and
she thought too highly of Considine's influence on him to run the risk
of a relapse. On the other hand Considine might believe her, and put
the very worst construction on what she told him. She saw the
possibility of Arthur's being landed in the Divorce Court, which was
unthinkable. She abandoned the idea of approaching Considine at all.
The next course that suggested itself was that of tackling Arthur; but
the atmosphere of mistrust, if not of actual hostility, that at present
involved their relations made her think twice about this. She could
not dare to treat Arthur as a normal person, for she knew that his hold
on normality was recent and precarious, and feared that a violent or
passionate scene might undo in a moment all the developments that had
been accomplished in the last six months. Even if they escaped this
catastrophe it was possible that she might offend him so deeply as to
lose him.
There remained Gabrielle, and though she knew that she was old enough
to speak to Gabrielle with the authority of a mother, she felt that
this would be impossible at Lapton. It was a curious attitude that she
found difficult to explain, but it seemed to her that to tackle Mrs.
Considine in her husband's house was dangerous, that it would give to
Gabrielle an unreasonable but inevitable advantage. At Lapton Mrs.
Payne felt she was a stranger, insecure of her ground, and therefore in
an inferior position; and this struck her more forcibly when she
reflected that, though she was confident of the rightness of her
conclusions, the actual evidence that she possessed was extremely
small. She admitted to herself that it would be difficult to carry her
point on the strength of looks and blushes, and was thankful that she
had not been betrayed by her instincts into hasty action.
Lying sleepless on her bed that night with her eyes open in the dark
she evolved a new plan that would not only give her the advantage of
choosing the site of the coming struggle, but would eliminate the
uncertain element of Considine and probably provide her with evidence
to strengthen her charge. This change of plan involved a duplicity
against which her straightforward nature rebelled, but with Arthur's
future at stake she would have stopped at nothing. After breakfast on
the Monday morning she went to Considine in his study, thanked him for
his kind consideration, and confessed that she had been needlessly
alarmed. Considine gracefully accepted this confession and the implied
apology, assuring her once more that there was really nothing to worry
about. Then, very carefully she made another suggestion. It was usual
at Lapton for the pupils to go home for a long week-end at half term.
She wondered if Mrs. Considine would like to come back to Overton with
Arthur? The rest and change would do her good, and it would be
interesting for Gabrielle, who had seen so little of England, to visit
Cotswold. Mrs. Payne promised to take great care of her. She gave her
invitation in a way that suggested that it was an attempt to make
amends for her suspicions. It conveyed at the same time an implicit
confidence and an anxiety to please.
Considine tumbled headlong into her trap. He thanked her for her
invitation, saying that he had no objection, but that Gabrielle, of
course, must decide for herself. His tone made it clear that such a
visit must be regarded as a condescension. The Halbertons, he said,
had been begging Gabrielle for a long time to spend a week with them,
but she was devoted to Lapton.
"At any rate I may ask her?" said Mrs. Payne.
"Certainly, certainly--you'll find her in the garden."
Mrs. Payne was in some doubt as to what Gabrielle's answer would be.
She moved to the proposal obliquely, feeling like a conspirator, and
one so unused to conspiracy that her manner was bound to betray her.
They began by talking about the gardens at Overton, the beauty of
Cotswold stone, the essential difference of her country from that in
which Lapton lay.
"You can't know England," she said, "until you've seen the Vale of
Evesham."
She didn't care twopence ha'penny for the Vale of Evesham--she was just
talking for time. Gabrielle listened to her very quietly, and Mrs.
Payne took her silence for evidence that she was playing her hand
badly. This flustered her. She became conscious of the fact that
nature had built her too roughly for diplomacy. Not daring to hedge
any longer she blurted out her invitation, and Gabrielle, instantly
delighted, accepted, transforming herself, in Mrs. Payne's mind from a
subtle designing creature into something very like a victim. So, for
one moment she appeared; but in the next Mrs. Payne felt nothing but
exultation at the successful beginning of her plan.
"Arthur has told me that there are nightingales at Overton," said
Gabrielle dreamily. "I wonder if I shall hear one? There are no
nightingales in Ireland or in this part of England." And although Mrs.
Payne could hardly accept an interest in ornithology for explanation of
her readiness to come to Overton, she was quick to promise that
nightingales should be in full song at the next weekend.
Thus having laid her plans, she resisted, though with difficulty, all
her impulses to continue her search for evidence. It was hard to do
so, for all through the evening Gabrielle and Arthur were together in
her presence, and she found it impossible not to watch them out of the
corner of her eye or strain her ears to catch what they were saying;
but she realised that the least slip at this stage might ruin her
chances of success, and devoted her attention or as much of it as she
could muster, to Considine. Next morning, with a sense of successful
strategy, she returned to Overton by an early train.
The rest of the week was for her a period of acute suspense. For
Gabrielle and Arthur it was one of delightful anticipation. On Friday
at midday Considine drove them to Totnes station, the scene of their
last parting, and set them on their journey. They watched him standing
serious on the platform as the train went out, and when they lost sight
of his tall figure at a curve in the line, it seemed to them as though
the last possible shadow had been lifted from them. In the first part
of their journey a soft rain hid the shapes of the country through
which they passed, so soft that they could keep the windows open, and
yet so dense as to give them a feeling of delicious loneliness, for
they could see nothing but the grassed embankments starred with
primroses. All through the Devon valleys and over the turf moors of
Somerset this weather held. It was not until they had changed at
Bristol and crept under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds that the
air cleared.
At a junction below the southern end of Bredon they emerged in an air
that this vast sheeting of fine moisture had washed into a state of
brilliant clarity. The evening through which they drove to Overton was
full of birdsong and sweet with the smell of young and tender green.
There was not a breath of wind, but the sky was cool, and into it the
old trees lifted their branches with an air of youth and vernal
strength. When the road climbed, scattered woodlands stretched beneath
them in clear and comely contours. A hovering kestrel hung poised like
a spider swinging from a thread. She swooped, and her chestnut back
was lit into flame. The great elms that gird the village of Overton
received them. Arthur touched up the horse as they swung past the
church and a row of cottages with long trim gardens.
Mrs. Payne, who was working on the herbaceous border in front of the
house, heard the grating of the carriage wheels on the gravel of the
drive. She took off her gardening gloves and came to meet them.
Arthur jumped down from the carriage and kissed his mother. Gabrielle,
also approaching her, put up her face to be kissed, and Mrs. Payne, who
could not very well refuse her, felt that the kiss was a kind of
betrayal. She wished, in her instinctive honesty, that it could have
been avoided.
It was a bad beginning, and gave her a hint of the kind of emotional
conflict that she had let herself in for when she assumed the rôle of
detective. What made it a hundred times worse was the fact that she
really liked kissing Gabrielle, for her kindly heart warmed to the girl
again as it had warmed when first they met. "I'm sentimental," she
thought, "for heaven's sake let us get it over!"
Gabrielle, however, was quite unconscious of the struggle that divided
Mrs. Payne's breast. She was a child launched on a holiday with the
friend of her choice in the most delightful season of the year. She
didn't scent any hostility in the atmosphere of Overton; and this was
strange in a person who moved through life by the aid of intuitions
rather than reasons. She felt contented at Overton, just as she had
felt contented at Roscarna. She was more at home there than she could
ever have been at Lapton or Clonderriff; her mind was as sensitive to
sky changes as the surface of a lonely lake. Mrs. Payne had given her
an airy bedroom facing west, and while the maid unpacked her things
Gabrielle stood at the window looking out over meadows, golden in the
low sun. Beneath her lay the lawns, smooth and kempt and of a rich, an
almost Irish green, on which the black shadows of cedar branches were
spread. A tall hedge of privet divided the lawns from the vegetable
garden in which a man was working methodically. She saw the pattern of
paths and hedges from above as though they were lines in a picture. In
the middle of the lawn stood a square of clipped yew trees, making a
hollow chamber of the kind that formal gardeners call a yew-parlour,
with a stone sundial in the middle of it. "What a jolly place for
children to play in," she thought. A blackbird broke into a whistle in
the privet hedge and brought her heart to her mouth. Could any
nightingale sing sweeter?
"I think that is all, madam," said the maid demurely. Gabrielle smiled
at her and thanked her, and the girl smiled back. Like everything else
in Mrs. Payne's admirably managed house she was fresh and clean,
homelier than the frigid servants at Halberton House, happier--that was
the only word--than Gabrielle's own servants at Lapton. Yes,
happier----
When she came downstairs Arthur was waiting for her.
"I thought you were never coming," he said. Their time was short and
he was anxious to show her all the altars of his childhood. They met
Mrs. Payne in the hall. She smiled at them with encouragement, for it
was part of her settled plan to let them have their own way and so
tempt them into a naturalness that might betray them. She, too, had
the feeling that she was fighting against time.
Arthur was full of enthusiasms. They went together to the stables,
where he introduced her to Hollis, the coachman standing in his
shirtsleeves in a saddle-room that smelt of harness-polish. He stood
in front of a cracked mirror brushing his hair, hissing softly, as
though he were grooming a horse, and round his waist was a red-striped
belt of the webbing out of which a horse's belly-band is made.
"Well, Mr. Arthur, you're looking up finely, sir," he said, touching
his forelock. Even the stables exhaled the same atmosphere of pleasant
leisure as the house.
"I want you to get a side-saddle ready for Brunette to-morrow, Hollis,"
said Arthur. "Mrs. Considine and I are going for a ride over the hill."
At the end of the stables they encountered a pair of golden retrievers.
For a moment they stared at Arthur, and then, suddenly recognising him,
made for him together, jumping up with their paws on his shoulders and
licking him with their pale tongues.
"What beauties," Gabrielle cried.
"Yes, they come from Banbury," he said. "I'll get you a pup next term
if you'd like one."
Their evening was crowded with such small wonders. "I can't show you
half the things I want to," he said. "It's ridiculous that you should
only be here for three days." He would have gone on for ever, and she
had to warn him when the clock in the stables struck seven that they
had only just time to dress for dinner. On the way upstairs he showed
her his new study, with the bookshelves that he had bought in the last
holidays.
"I do all my writing here," he said, and then suddenly but shyly
emboldened: "it was here that I wrote to you when I sent you the
cowslips."
He had never dared to mention the incident before.
"You didn't answer me," he went on. "Why didn't you answer me? I wish
you'd tell me."
"Arthur--I couldn't--you know that I couldn't."
A panic seized her and she went blushing to her room.
She was still flushed with excitement or pleasure when she came down to
dinner. Mrs. Payne, in a matronly dress of black, sat at the head of
the table with Arthur and Gabrielle on either side of her facing each
other. The arrangement struck her as a triumph of strategy. From this
central position she could see them both and intercept any such glances
as had passed between them in the church at Lapton. In this she was
disappointed, for there was nothing to be seen in the behaviour of
either but a transparent happiness. "They only want encouragement,"
she thought, and settled down deliberately to put them at their ease, a
proceeding that was quite unnecessary for the last feeling that could
have entered either of their minds was that of guilt.
So the evening passed, in the utmost propriety. No look, no sign, no
symptom of unusual tenderness appeared. It even seemed that Gabrielle
was particularly anxious to make the conversation general. "Oh, you're
artful!" thought Mrs. Payne, "but I'll have you yet." They talked of
Lapton, of Considine and of the Traceys. Only once did Mrs. Payne
surprise a single suspicious circumstance.
"I showed Mrs. Considine the dogs, mother," he said. "She's fallen in
love with Boris."
"Yes, his eyes are like amber," said Gabrielle.
"So I thought I'd like to write to Banbury to-morrow and get her a
puppy."
"Certainly, dear," said Mrs. Payne suavely. Bedtime came. Gabrielle
and Arthur shook hands in the most ordinary fashion. Mrs. Payne,
seeing Gabrielle to her door and submitting, once again, to an
uncomfortable kiss, felt that her triumphant plan had already shown
itself to be a failure. She went along the passage to her own room
with a sense of bewilderment and defeat. She could not sleep for
thinking. She wondered, desperately, if when all other methods had
failed, as she now expected they would, she could possibly approach
their secret from another angle, laying aside her watchful inactivity
and becoming in defiance of all her principles an "agent provocateuse."
If it came to the worst she might be forced to do this, for very little
time was left to her. If she remained static she would be powerless.
Next day, she reflected, they had planned a ride over the flat top of
Bredon Hill. She could not go with them; she could not even watch
them; yet who knew what shames might be perpetrated in that secrecy as
they rode through the green lanes of the larch plantations? Never was
a better solitude made for lovers. Her imaginings left her tantalised
and thwarted, for she was sure now, more than ever, that there was a
secret to be surprised.
She lay there sleepless in the dark till the stable clock slowly struck
twelve. Then she sighed to herself and decided that she must try to
sleep.