"Look long, look long in the water Melisande,
Is there never a face but your own?
There is never a soul you shall know Melisande,
Your soul must stand alone.
All alone in the world Melisande,
Alone, alone."
ETHEL CLIFFORD.
The long evening was before Janey. Since her stroke, her mother "retired
for the night," as the nurse called it, at nine instead of ten. And at
nine, Janey came down to the drawing-room and established herself with
her work beside the lamp. Harry, whom nothing could keep awake after his
game of dominoes, went to bed at nine also.
But to-night, as she took up her work, her spirit quailed at the long
array of threadbare thoughts that were lying in wait for her. She dared
not think any more. She laid down her work, and took up the paper. But
she had no interest in politics. There seemed to be nothing in it. She
got up, and taking the lamp in her hand crossed the room and looked at
the books in the Chippendale bookcase, the few books which her mother
had brought with her from Hulver. They were well chosen, no doubt, but
somehow Janey did not want them. Shakespeare? No. Longfellow? No. She
was tired of him, tired even of her favourite lines, "Life is real, life
is earnest." Tennyson? No. Pepys' Diary? She had heard people speak of
it. No. Bulwer's novels, Jane Austen's, Maria Edgeworth's, Sir Walter
Scott's? No. _Crooks and Coronets_? She had only read it once. She might
look at it again. She liked Miss Nevill's books. She had read most of
them, not intentionally, but because while she was binding them in brown
paper for the village library, she had found herself turning the leaves.
She especially liked the last but one, about simple fisher-folk. She
often wondered how Miss Nevill knew so much about them. If she had
herself been acquainted with fishermen, she would have realized how
little the dignified authoress did know. Somehow, she did not care to
read even one of Miss Nevill's books to-night.
_The Magnet_, by Reginald Stirling. She hesitated, put out her hand, and
took the first of the three volumes from the shelf. She had skimmed it
when it came out five years ago, because the Bishop, when he stayed with
them for a confirmation, had praised it. Janey had been surprised that
he had recommended it when she came to read it, for parts of it were
decidedly unpleasant. She might look at it again. She had no
recollection of it, except that she had not liked it. Her conversation
with Mr. Stirling had agitated her, but it had also stirred her. Though
she did not know it, it was the first time she had come into real
contact with an educated and sensitive mind, and one bent for the moment
on understanding hers. No one as a rule tried to understand Janey. It
was not necessary. No one was interested in her. You might easily love
Janey, but you could not easily be interested in her.
The book was dusty. It was obvious that _The Magnet_ had not proved a
magnet to anyone in the Dower House.
She got out an old silk handkerchief from a drawer and dusted it
carefully. Then she sat down by the lamp once more and opened it.
Ninetieth thousand. Was that many or few to have sold? It seemed to her
a good many, but perhaps all books sold as many as that. She glanced at
the first page.
"TO A BLESSED MEMORY."
That, no doubt, was the memory of the woman of whom he had spoken. She
realized suddenly that it had cost him something to speak of that. Why
had he done it? To help Annette? Every one wanted to help and protect
Annette, and ward off trouble from her. No one wanted to help or guard
her--Janey.
"No one?" asked Conscience.
Janey saw suddenly the yellow leaves on the flags. She had not noticed
them at the time. She saw the two baby-swallows sitting on their
breasts on the sun-warmed stone. She had not noticed them at the time.
She saw suddenly, as in a glass, the nobility, the humility, and the
benevolence of the man sitting beside her, and his intense desire to
save her from what he believed to be a cruel action. She had noticed
nothing at the time. She had been full of herself and her own
devastating problem. She saw that he had pleaded with her in a great
compassion as much on her own account as on Annette's. He had stretched
out a hand to help her, had tried to guard her, to ward off trouble from
her. This required thought. Janey and Roger could both think, though
they did not do so if they could help it, and he did his aloud to Janey
by preference whenever it really had to be done. Janey's mind got slowly
and reluctantly to its feet. It had been accustomed from early days to
walk alone.
A step crunched the gravel, came along the terrace, a well-known step.
Roger's face, very red and round-eyed behind a glowing cigarette end,
appeared at the open window.
"I saw by the lamp you had not gone to bed yet. May I come in?" Coming
in. "My! It is like an oven in here."
"I will come out," said Janey.
They sat down on the terrace on two wicker chairs. It was the first time
she had been alone with him since she had met Geoff Lestrange. And as
Roger puffed at his cigarette in silence she became aware that he had
something on his mind, and had come to unburden himself to her. The moon
was not yet risen, and the church tower and the twisted pines stood as
if cut out of black velvet against the dim pearl of the eastern sky.
"I came round this afternoon," said Roger in an aggrieved tone, "but you
were out."
It seems to be a fixed idea, tap-rooted into the very depths of the
masculine mind, that it is the bounden duty of women to be in when they
call, even if they have not thought fit to mention their flattering
intentions. But some of us are ruefully aware that we might remain
indoors twenty years without having our leisure interrupted. Janey had
on many occasions waited indoors for Roger, but not since he had seen
Annette home after the choir practice.
"You never seem to be about nowadays," he said.
"I was in the Hulver gardens."
"Yes, so I thought I would come round now."
Roger could extract more creaking out of one wicker garden chair than
any other man in Lowshire, and more crackling out of a newspaper,
especially if music was going on: that is, unless Annette was singing.
He was as still as a stone on those occasions.
"How is Aunt Louisa?"
"Just the same."
"Doctor been?"
"No."
"I was over at Noyes this morning about the bridge. Stirling gave me
luncheon. I don't know where I'm going to get the money for it, with
Aunt Louisa in this state. It's her business to repair the bridge. It's
going to cost hundreds."
Janey had heard all this before many times. She was aware that Roger was
only marking time.
"When I was over there," continued Roger, "I saw Bartlet, and he told me
Mary Deane--you know who I mean?"
"Perfectly."
"I heard the child, the little girl, had died suddenly last week. Croup
or something. They ought to have let me know. The funeral was
yesterday."
"Poor woman!"
"She and the old servant between them carried the little coffin
themselves along the dyke and across the ford. Wouldn't let anyone else
touch it. I heard about it from Bartlet. He ought to have let me know. I
told him so. He said he thought I _did_ know. That's Bartlet all over.
And he said he went up to see her next day, and--and she was gone."
"Gone?"
"Yes, gone. Cleared out; and the servant too. Cowell said a man from
Welysham had called for their boxes. They never went back to the house
after the funeral. I ought to have been told. And to-day I get this,"
Roger pulled a letter out of his pocket and held it out to her. He lit a
match, and by its wavering light she read the few lines, in an educated
hand:--
"_I only took the allowance from you when Dick became too ill to
send it, on account of Molly. Now Molly is dead, I do not need it,
or the house, or anything of Dick's any more. The key is with
Cornell.--M._"
"Poor woman!" said Janey again.
"It's a bad business," said Roger. "She was--there was something nice
about her. She wasn't exactly a lady, but there really _was_ something
nice about her. And the little girl was Dick over again. You couldn't
help liking Molly."
"I suppose she has gone back to her own people?"
Roger shook his head.
"She hasn't any people--never knew who her parents were. She was--the
same as her child. She loved Dick, but I don't think she ever forgave
him for letting Molly be born out of wedlock. She knew what it meant. It
embittered her. It was not only her own pride which had been wounded,
and she was a proud woman. But Molly! She resented Molly being
illegitimate."
"Oh, Roger, what will become of her?"
"Goodness knows."
"Dick oughtn't to have done it," said Roger slowly, as if he were
enunciating some new and startling hypothesis. "But to do him justice I
do believe he might have married her if he'd lived. I think if he cared
for anybody it was for her. Dick meant well, but he was touched in his
head. She ought not to have trusted him. Not quite like other people; no
memory: and never in the same mind two days running."
There was a short silence. But Roger had got under way at last. Very
soothing at times is a monologue to the weary masculine mind.
"I used to think," he went on, "that Dick was the greatest liar and
swindler under the sun. He went back on his word, his written word, and
he wasn't straight. I'm certain he ran a ramp at Leopardstown. That was
the last time he rode in Ireland. You couldn't trust him. But I begin to
think that from the first he had a bee in his bonnet, poor chap. I
remember Uncle John leathering him within an inch of his life when he
was a boy because he said he had not set the big barn alight. And he
_had_. He'd been seen to do it by others as well as by me. I saw him,
but I never said. But I believe now he wasn't himself, sort of
sleep-walking, and he really had clean forgotten he'd done it. And do
you remember about the Eaton Square house?"
Of course Janey remembered, but she said, "What about that?"
"Why, he wrote to me to tell me he had decided to sell it only last
August, a month before his accident, as he wanted cash. He had clean
forgotten he had sold it two years ago and had had the money. Twenty
thousand it was."
Puff! Puff!
"Jones, his valet, you know!"
"Yes."
"Jones told me privately when I was in Paris a month ago that Dick
couldn't last much longer. Gangrene in both feet. The wonder is he has
lived so long. Aunt Louisa will get her wish after all. You'll see he
will die intestate, and everything will go to Harry. Pity you weren't a
boy, Janey. Dick can't make a will now, that's certain, though I don't
believe if he could and wanted to, Lady Jane would let him. But whatever
happens, the family ought to remember Jones when Dick's gone, and settle
something handsome on him for life. Jones has played the game by Dick."
Janey thought it was just like Roger to be anxious about the valet, when
his own rightful inheritance was slipping away from him. For Roger came
next in the male line after Dick, if you did not count Harry.
There was a long silence.
"When Dick does go," said Roger meditatively,--"moon looks jolly,
doesn't it, peeping out behind the tower?--I wonder whether we shall
have trouble with the other woman, the one who was with him when he was
taken ill."
"At Fontainebleau?"
"Yes. I hear she was not at all a common person either, and as handsome
as paint."
At the back of his mind Roger had a rueful, half-envious feeling that
really the luck had been with Dick: one pretty woman after another,
while he, Roger, plodded along as good as gold and as dull as ditch
water, and only had to provide for the babes of these illicit unions. It
did not seem fair.
"Perhaps there is another child there," he said.
"Oh no, no!" said Janey, wincing.
"It's no use saying, 'Oh no, no!' my good girl. It may be, 'Oh yes,
yes!' The possibility has to be faced." Roger spoke as a man of the
world. "There may be a whole brood of them for aught we know."
"Do you think he may possibly have married this--second one?" said Janey
tentatively.
"No, I don't. If he had, she wouldn't have bolted. Besides, if Dick had
married anyone, I do believe it would have been Mary Deane. Well, she's
off our hands, poor thing. She won't trouble us again, but I don't
expect we shall get off as easy with number two."