After my father's offer of a reward there came various spiteful
paragraphs (inspired, as I thought, by Alma and written by the clumsier
hand of my husband) saying it was reported in Ellan that, if my
disappearance was to be accounted for on the basis of flight, the only
"shock" I could have experienced must be a shock of conscience, rumour
having for some time associated my name with that of a person who was
not unknown in connection with Antarctic exploration.
It was terrible.
Day by day the motive of my disappearance became the sole topic of
conversation in our boarding-house. I think the landlady must have
provided an evening as well as a morning paper, for at tea in the
drawing-room upstairs the most recent reports were always being
discussed.
After a while I realised that not only my house-mates but all London was
discussing my disappearance.
It was a rule of our boarding-house that during certain hours of the day
everybody should go out as if he had business to go to, and having
nothing else to do I used to walk up and down the streets. In doing so I
was compelled to pass certain newsvendors' stalls, and I saw for several
days that nearly every placard had something about "the missing
peeress."
When this occurred I would walk quickly along the thoroughfare with a
sense of being pursued and the feeling which a nervous woman has when
she is going down a dark corridor at night--that noiseless footsteps are
coming behind, and a hand may at any moment be laid on her shoulder.
But nobody troubled me in the streets and the only person in our
boarding-house who seemed to suspect me was our landlady. She said
nothing, but when my lip was quivering while the old colonel read that
cruel word about Martin I caught her little grey eyes looking aslant at
me.
One afternoon, her sister, the milliner, came to see me according to her
promise, and though she, too, said nothing, I saw that, while the old
colonel and the old clergyman were disputing on the hearthrug about
some disappearance which occurred thousands of years ago, she was
looking fixedly at the fingers with which, in my nervousness, I was
ruckling up the discoloured chintz of my chair.
Then in a moment--I don't know why--it flashed upon me that my
travelling companion was in correspondence with my father.
That idea became so insistent towards dinner-time that I made pretence
of being ill (which was not very difficult) to retire to my room, where
the cockney chambermaid wrung handkerchiefs out of vinegar and laid them
on my forehead to relieve my headache--though she increased it, poor
thing, by talking perpetually.
Next morning the landlady came up to say that if, as she assumed from my
name, I was Irish and a Catholic, I might like to receive a visit from a
Sister of Mercy who called at the house at intervals to attend to the
sick.
I thought I saw in a moment that this was a subterfuge, but feeling that
my identity was suspected I dared not give cause for further suspicion,
so I compelled myself to agree.
A few minutes later, having got up and dressed, I was standing with my
back to the window, feeling like one who would soon have to face an
attack, when a soft footstep came up my corridor and a gentle hand
knocked at my door.
"Come in," I cried, trembling like the last leaf at the end of a
swinging bough.
And then an astonishing thing happened.
A young woman stepped quietly into the room and closed the door behind
her. She was wearing the black and white habit of the Little Sisters of
the Poor, but I knew her long, pale, plain-featured face in an instant.
A flood of shame, and at the same time a flood of joy swept over me at
the sight of her.
It was Mildred Bankes.