Over the country about Henley, that same day, the sun was shining
gloriously.
It was about five o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a clearness
about the light, a distinctness about the shadows, which, taken in
conjunction with the heavy bank of clouds into which the sun would
presently sink, argued coming rain. For the present, however, nature was
lovely to look at; and a garden-party which was going on in the large,
old-fashioned garden of a large, old-fashioned country house, about a
mile from the river, had the benefit of every advantage which atmosphere
and surroundings could give.
It was a large party, and the scene was very bright and animated. On the
larger of the two lawns, conspicuous among the well-dressed but by no
means striking-looking women about her, stood Mrs. Romayne, talking to a
local magnate.
She had arrived about half an hour before, and the politely concealed
satisfaction and surprise with which she had been received had testified
to the fact that her appearance at such a function was a phenomenon
in the neighbourhood. Invitations had showered in on her during her
residence at the “cottage,” but it had gradually become an established
fact that she was “going out very little.” This was in truth the first
party she had attended. It was fortunate that her hostess was not a
particularly observant person. There had been something about Mrs.
Romayne when she arrived which might have dashed that hostess’s personal
elation with a suspicion that her guest’s appearance had been dictated
by motives not wholly complimentary to the party; lines about the mouth
which suggested the enforced endurance of a burden from which she was
seeking temporary relief, however fictitious; a restlessness in the
eyes which suggested an attempt at the eluding of the too insistent
companionship of her own thoughts.
Her eyes were painfully bright, and there was a nervous tension about
her manner as she stood there on the lawn, talking and laughing. But
her companion of the moment--a worthy old gentleman, with not much
acquaintance among women of the world--thought her simply the most
astonishingly charming woman he had ever met; and seeking in his mind for
lines on which to make himself agreeable to her, he recollected to have
heard something about her son.
“You have a son here, I believe?” he said, with ponderous interest. “I
should greatly like to make his acquaintance.”
Mrs. Romayne laughed.
“I have a son,” she said, “but he is not here, I’m sorry to say. He is
hard at work just at present. Ah!” she broke off with an exclamation
of surprise. “I see a friend of mine over there! I must go and speak
to her.” And with a bow and a smile to her admirer, she broke off the
conversation which had, perhaps, seemed longer to one party than to the
other, and moved across the lawn to where Hilda Compton was standing
watching her with an uncertain but not particularly pleasant expression
on her pretty face.
“Are you staying in the neighbourhood?” said Mrs. Romayne prettily, when
they had shaken hands. She was apparently entirely oblivious of something
cold and disagreeable in the younger woman’s manner. “Is your husband
here?”
Hilda Compton glanced at her with a certain tentative triumph in her eyes.
“No!” she said. “He’s not here. I’m staying on a house-boat, but he is
kept in town over some troublesome business!”
She paused, and then, as Mrs. Romayne made a rather patronising gesture
of sympathy, that gleam of triumph strengthened into something distinctly
malicious. Hilda Compton had never forgotten or forgiven that moment in
the Norfolk garden twelve months ago. It had been no part of her policy
to resent it when such resentment must necessarily have rebounded to her
own disadvantage; she had accepted Mrs. Romayne’s society friendliness
during the past season with just such a manner as might sting but could
not, in very self-respect, be impugned by the elder woman; a manner
cleverly tinged with that deference which points the sense of superiority
with which a certain type of girl recognises the fact that the present
is to her, and not to the previous generation. But she had hoped always
that the day might come when she would find herself in a position to take
more active measures, and she felt, now, that even what she knew to be a
slight breach of conjugal faith would be venial, if it would straighten
what she would have called her “score” against Julian Romayne’s mother.
“Yes, it’s rather a bore!” she said. “City business, you know! Don’t you
think it’s very foolish of men to speculate, Mrs. Romayne? Of course I
haven’t a quarter of your experience, but I think so. They always seem
to get into trouble of some sort! But you know more than I do about this
affair, no doubt, since Mr. Romayne is mixed up in it, and he’s such a
devoted son. Husbands don’t tell one much, I find!”
Self-command is a wonderful thing, even when it originates in no higher
motive than the instinct of a woman of the world for the retention of her
society demeanour. Mrs. Romayne’s lips were ashen and her fingers were
clenched round the sunshade she held until her rings cut into them, but
she faced Hilda Compton steadily, and with a mechanical smile, her eyes,
a little dull and contracted, meeting the girl’s pretty, unfeeling ones.
Hilda Compton noticed the change of colour even behind the artificial
tinting, and rejoiced at the slip of the tongue by which her foolish
young husband had put such a weapon into her hand. If only she had
succeeded in making Howard tell her more, instead of making him lose his
temper! She reflected, however, that perhaps the truth was not so very
bad after all, and hints might possibly sound worse than the actual facts.
“Do tell Mr. Romayne, from me, that I hope he hasn’t done anything very
shocking!” she said, with a laugh. “I wanted Howard to tell me just what
it was, but he would not. Isn’t it funny how men seem to lose their heads
altogether when they get on to that silly Stock Exchange? The last men
one would expect, too! Who would have thought of Mr. Romayne’s getting
into trouble of that kind?”
Somewhat to her disgust, Hilda Compton found as she proceeded that it
was impossible to give such significance to her words as she would
have wished. She realised that it would never do to allow herself to
be brought to book, and consequently conventionality demanded that she
should adopt a jesting tone, and trust to Mrs. Romayne’s possessing some
half knowledge which should give the words the barb she wished for them.
She had a pleasant conviction, as Mrs. Romayne answered her, that she
had done something, at least, towards wiping out that old score. The
elder woman’s words were preceded by a harsh little laugh, and there was
something indistinct about their utterance.
“Just so. Who would have thought----”
Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly, and a sharp, extraordinary spasm passed
across her face, leaving it fixed and old.
The girl by her side could not flatter herself that the effect was
produced by her words, for Mrs. Romayne was gazing to the other side of
the garden, and it was evidently something she had seen there which had
affected her so powerfully. Turning her own curious eyes in the same
direction, Hilda Compton saw nothing calculated to account for such an
effect. The crowd had drifted away to some extent to the other lawn, and
the tennis-courts, and there was a considerable space, sparsely sprinkled
with people, between where they stood and the last group on the lawn; a
group of ladies to whom the host was introducing a little alert, elderly
man with grey hair; a little man who looked to-day--though only one pair
of the two pair of women’s eyes fixed upon him across the lawn recognised
this--exactly as he had looked twenty years ago.
Hilda Compton did not know him, and she was wondering curiously whether
Mrs. Romayne did, when she heard their hostess’s voice and turned
quickly. Mrs. Romayne, roused apparently by finding herself addressed,
had turned also--very quickly it seemed to Hilda Compton, and rather as
though she did not wish her face to be seen by some one on the other side
of the garden--and was listening with a dazed, strained expression of
enforced attention.
“I want to introduce a connexion of mine, my dear Mrs. Romayne. Something
of a traveller, and something of an eccentricity; but, really, worth
talking to. There he is!” indicating the little alert, elderly man on the
other side of the lawn. “He is a Dr. Aston. May I fetch him?”
To Hilda Compton’s astonishment Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand
hurriedly in unmistakeable dissent, and it was shaking like a leaf.
“I’m afraid I must say ‘no,’” she said, in a hoarse, hurried tone which
sounded as though she could hardly control it. “I have a long drive, you
know, and I must run away.”
She took her leave so briefly and hurriedly that her hostess came to the
conclusion that illness must be the cause of the seclusion in which
she was living, and that she must have miscalculated her strength that
afternoon.
She might have thought so with even more reason if she had seen the
strange collapse of her whole figure with which Mrs. Romayne sank back
into the corner of her carriage as she was driven home along the country
roads. If her attendance at the garden-party had been indeed a desperate
attempt at finding some sort of temporary oblivion or distraction, that
attempt had obviously failed. Her face was drawn and set, and in her
eyes, as they stared unseeingly before her, there was a look as of a
woman who is quivering still under the influence of some horrible shock.
She had, as she had said, a long drive home, and as she neared her own
house that look in her eyes faded, displaced by a sick hunger of anxiety.
She got out of the carriage quickly, helping herself a good deal as she
rose, however, as if that shock had affected her physical strength.
“Has Mr. Julian come?” she said to the servant who opened the door; then
as the woman answered in the negative, she moved swiftly on to where her
letters lay waiting for her, and looked them rapidly over. There was none
from Julian, and she carried them listlessly upstairs as she went to
dress for her solitary dinner.
The rain, which was falling fast by this time in London, was just
beginning to patter slowly on the window when she came into the
dining-room; and the wind was rising and moving gustily round the house.
They were dreary sounds, both of them, and Mrs. Romayne shivered a
little as she sat down. Apparently the monotonous pattering, growing
quicker and quicker as dinner went on, or the low howling of the wind,
made her nervous. She ate nothing, and when at last, the form of dinner
having been gone through with, and the servant having left the room,
she rose and walked aimlessly to the fireplace, her lips were strangely
compressed, and she seemed to control the expression of her eyes with
a determined effort. It was as though she were controlling something
within of which the tendency frightened her. She stood there forgetting,
apparently, to go into the drawing-room, her face fixed and intent as
though she were reasoning or arguing with herself. At last she shivered
sharply and her lips twitched. Then rousing herself forcibly, as it
seemed, she rang the bell fiercely, and gave orders that a fire should be
lighted in the drawing-room. It was a wretched evening, she said to the
servant, as though the audible expression of a tangible reason for the
nervous discomfort which seemed to be upon her was some sort of relief to
her. The fire lighted, she drew a chair in front of it, and taking up a
novel, set herself to read with a desperate determination in every line
of her face.
Down one page, line by line, on through the next, still line by line,
her eyes travelled steadily, mechanically; and then, as mechanically,
her hand moved, turned the leaf, and her eyes moved on again. But unless
her face greatly belied her, the sense of the words she read so intently
never penetrated to her brain. By-and-by that movement of her eyes
ceased; she sat staring fixedly at the page before her; then she let the
hand that held the book sink gradually on her knee, and sat staring into
space as she had sat staring at the printed words. Her face was drawn,
and there was an intense, indefinite dread about it which was none the
less ghastly in that it would have been impossible to say in which of her
set features its shadow lurked.
The room was absolutely still. Outside the rain fell and the wind moaned.
Inside the intense quiet seemed to be taking a weirdly tangible form, and
to be creeping closer and closer round her motionless figure with every
breath she drew.
With a sudden, sharp movement, as though, in taking a too sharply
piercing point, her thoughts had roused her to a desperate resistance of
them, she rose, and began to walk restlessly up and down the room.
Her brows were drawn to a concentration which made her whole face look
thin and very old. There was an expression of deliberate, self-conscious
self-contempt about her mouth, but in her eyes there lurked the battling
horror against which all her force seemed to be fiercely arrayed. Up
and down she walked, no muscle of her set face relaxing; until, quite
suddenly, there swept across it, breaking up all its rigid lines, a very
agony of yearning. It was as though some sudden and most inopportune
realisation, in no wise to be resisted, had shaken her through and
through.
“If only I had dared to ask him! If only, if only I dared to speak!”
The words had broken from her half aloud, a sharp, low cry, and as she
uttered them she stopped in her walk, gripping and clinging to a chair as
if for physical support in a moment of terrible mental conflict. She was
evidently fighting desperately inch by inch for the self-control which
was slipping from her; the self-control which she dreaded to lose as she
dreaded nothing else in life; the self-control to which she clung with
the tenacity of instinctive self-preservation.
She lifted her face at last, still and hard as resolution could make it.
She crossed the room with quick, resolute steps, looking neither to the
right nor the left, and went rapidly upstairs to her own room. A desk
containing a quantity of papers stood on the chest of drawers. They were
old bills and receipts that needed sorting and destroying, and she had
brought them into the country saying that she never had time for such
work in town. She went up to this desk now, lifted it in her two hands,
and placing it on the table, sat down before it and unlocked it. All
her movements were the quick, concentrated movements of a woman to whom
employment, close, tedious employment, has become an absolute necessity.
A telegram ten days old was not among the papers to be sorted, but Mrs.
Romayne held one in her hand as she sat there at her writing-table. She
had drawn it from the front of her dress and she read and re-read it,
oblivious of the task she had set herself, with an intensity in her eyes
which seemed as though it would wring a hidden meaning from the words.
It was the telegram Julian had sent her ten days before. She folded it
at last with a quick defiant gesture and drew towards her a packet of
receipts.
She untied the string that fastened the papers, and out from among them
there fell a folded letter, yellow with age, and crumpled. It had
evidently worked its way into that packet by accident, as papers will
when many are kept together, for it was obviously a letter and not a
bill. Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand mechanically and picked it up
and opened it. Her eyes were met by the words, written in a childish,
scrawling, much blotted handwriting: “My dear mamma.”
It was the letter which she had received from Julian twenty years ago at
Nice.
In an instant, even as her eyes fell on those faded baby characters,
so suddenly and so utterly that she never realised her loss, the
self-control to which she had clung so fiercely melted away from Mrs.
Romayne. Before the flash and quiver of recognition had subsided on her
face she had seized the bell-rope and was ringing furiously for her maid.
The woman, appearing breathless and alarmed a moment later, found her
mistress searching feverishly for bonnet and cloak.
“I am going to London, Dawson. Order the carriage at once.”
The voice was harsh, rapid, and peremptory; but the bewildered woman
hesitated.
“Now, ma’am?”
Mrs. Romayne turned on her with such a face as her maid had never seen
before.
“At once, I said. At once!”
The last train was just steaming into the station when Mrs. Romayne’s
carriage dashed up, the horse smoking and covered with foam.
She had thrust that yellow little letter half-unconsciously into her
pocket, and all through the journey she sat motionless, clasping it
tightly in her hand, her eyes wild, her features forced into a quiescence
which sat upon them like a mask.
That mask seemed to get thin, to break away now and again, as she drove
through the London streets at last, as though the wild emotion which
it hid was growing too strong for it. Her breath was coming faster and
faster, until her white, parted lips took an involuntary line of physical
pain.
There were no lights in the house in Chelsea as her cab drew up. It was
twelve o’clock. She rang violently, and waited, her rapid breathing
almost suffocating her. No one came. She rang again, pausing this time
with her hand on the bell; again and again, furiously, as a wild,
unreasoning horror seemed to seize upon her and tear at her heart. At
last there was a sound as of the tentative undoing of bolts and turning
of keys. The door was opened an inch or two, and a frightened woman’s
voice said:
“Who is it?”
A moment later there was no possibility of doubt on that score. The door
was hurriedly thrown open, and Mrs. Romayne moved swiftly into the hall,
turning fiercely to confront the astonished, partially-dressed servant,
whose bedroom candle seemed to be the only light in the house.
“Has Mr. Julian gone to bed?” she demanded, and the woman hardly
recognised her mistress’s voice.
“Mr. Julian is not here, ma’am!” she answered. “He has not been here
since the day before yesterday.”