HE stopped at the door and said he must drive over to the Flagon House
before dusk. Pamela went alone into the drawing-room and sat by the
fire. The luxury and completeness of the room touched her with a sense
of Jethro’s boundless generosity--all the more creditable because he
was a frugal man. It was quite a modern room now--it had the thin,
elegant touch which she preferred.
Her tea came in. She threw aside her hat and coat, and toasted her
knees while she read the newspaper. A queer hurry and unrest had taken
possession of her. She kept worrying herself. Should she go to London
to-morrow? Aunt Sophy had stirred her by the mere mention of London.
Should she go? Should she stay at home?
There was no harm in going. Shopping, tea with Barbara perhaps--nothing
more. She would stop at Liddleshorn and ask Nancy or Egbert’s wife to
go with her. There would surely be safety in that. Safety! The word
made her blench and shrink. She instantly suspected herself. So there
was really danger!
She wasn’t sure of herself--not yet: wasn’t sure--would never be.
Wasn’t it more than possible that, directly she was in London alone,
unchecked, unwatched, she would go straight to Marquise Mansions, not
meaning to enter? But, at the foot of the stairs, wasn’t it certain,
miserably certain, that she would go up? If she saw him! Then--that
she admitted, with a violent shame and misery--everything would depend
on his attitude. The woman in brown! The woman--didn’t count.
She wouldn’t think, wouldn’t speculate, wouldn’t decide just now. It
would be premature to decide yet. There was no hurry.
She picked up the paper, which had dropped to the floor. Then she
remembered that it had been the paper which had tempted her to leave
Jethro before. Suppose Edred’s name should be on the next sheet! That
would settle everything--so she feared.
Would it never end--this evil, incomprehensible witchery? Wasn’t she
ever going to be safe? Was her life to be spent in veering between the
happy lethargy of Folly Corner and the periodic joy and black misery of
life with Edred? She despaired of herself. She hadn’t any shame, any
self-respect, any modesty--any of those cold, praiseworthy qualities
which romance has for centuries built up and labeled “feminine
character.”
She read on. One word, at last, became more than a dancing string of
letters. It was the word Sutton. Here at last, after fifteen months of
vigilant watching, was a sign. Here, beneath her eyes, was an indirect
message from Marquise Mansions.
Had he been knighted or sent to penal servitude? Either was equally
likely--in their mode of life. She read. It was a highly respectable
announcement: he was a member of the County Council--a prominent
member--and he had been agitating about some strike--yes, the
plasterers’ strike. Whatever sympathy had he with plasterers? She
laughed softly, and put the paper down. He was evidently prosperous,
this sleek minion of Edred’s. The paragraph was redolent of prosperity.
He was spoken of deferentially as a promising man--a coming man. She
knew his future. He’d go into Parliament, pick his way up the social
ladder.
There was no word of Edred. The omission was a knell on her brow.
She must go to London to-morrow. It would be safe. She wasn’t quite so
weak as she supposed. After all, there really would not be much danger
in going to Marquise Mansions--just to inquire of the porter.
The room grew dark as she sat, stooping forward, her chin in her hands.
The wind rose, and lapped like rising waves about the lonely house. She
put more coal on the fire, feeling the intense cold of the night even
there, in the nest of carpets, thick curtains, and cushions.
Suddenly she heard muffled feet on the red, newly-spread gravel
outside. No wheels, but the steady, heavy tramping of feet! She heard
voices, the rustic, slow voices of the farm men. There was a momentary
silence: then Jethro spoke. She could not catch the words, but there
was a sinister intonation in his voice.
She ran to the window. When she hastily dragged the curtain back she
saw that the glass was spread with a fine cloth of silver. The
casement was fast with frost; it took a determined movement of her
wrist to throw it back.
When she put her head stealthily out into the night, the cold dashed
against her with the sting of a blow. There had not been so cold a
night that winter. The snow fell in solid steady flakes.
It was a typical winter’s night; it was quite theatrical in its
completeness. She might have been looking at the drop-scene of a
domestic drama. Snow, intense cold, slow-tongued, heavy-footed
rustics--everything was ripe for a crisis; but there was to be no
crisis in her life, no more drama. She was in harbor.
Jethro saw her before she spoke.
“Go back!” he said peremptorily. “Go back to the fire!”
Those were the words she had used to Gainah.
“Go back!” he repeated.
She couldn’t see his face; she could see nothing distinctly. The men
were in a circle, as if they covered something. But she didn’t want to
see. The strange ring in his voice was enough.
She shut the window, caught a rug from the cozy corner, and went
through the warm, well-lighted corridor out of doors.
* * * * *
They were going very slowly, very cautiously, the group of farm men,
headed by Jethro, toward the barn. She could see them--the bent
shoulders, the rough clothes, the shambling, swinging steps and loose
swing of the body. They were all familiar, these men. She knew them
by name--knew how many shillings a week each had, and of how many
children each was the father. At that moment she didn’t seem to know
them at all. They were instinct with mystery--mystery flavored with
dread.
What were they carrying? She could see now, as she gained on them
silently in her thin slippers, that they guardedly carried a thing--a
long, shrouded bundle. It was shapeless; yet, somehow, it cried out of
life beneath the roughly piled coverings. It was nothing agricultural
that they were carrying toward the barn so carefully.
She heard them speak, heard Daborn say in his cheery voice and
deferential way:
“’Course, sir, it aint as _I_ thinks, it’s as _you_ thinks. But _I_
should jus’ lay ’un in the barn.”
Lay what in the barn? A formless fear quickened her feet. She was very
close, none of them yet suspected her presence--the heavy snow now
extinguished all sound of feet.
They had covered the shrouded thing with sacks--wet sacks that were
already stiffening with frost.
She crept behind them in the shadow of the newly-planted shrubs. She
followed to the barn--the great barn, full of cobwebs, scored by huge
beams. Its new roof of corrugated iron, covering the heavy thatch,
gleamed like a strange, new precious metal.
They stopped to throw open the great door. How cold she was! And yet
how her heart under the sofa-rug blazed and beat--she couldn’t have
told why.
They all went stolidly, carefully into the barn. She slipped like a
wraith in after them.
Jethro turned and saw her.
“Go back!” he said wrathfully. “Go back!” repeating it, with no wrath
at all, but with exquisite pleading and gentleness. “Go back! Dear
love, go back to the fire.”
She looked up at him meaningly, knowingly. She began to feel what it
was that stretched under those wet sacks. Dear love! It was the first
time since her return that he had used those words--his favorite pet
expression during the brief, agitated period of their engagement.
There were frozen flakes of snow scattered over the orange silk rug
which wrapped her from her chin to the toe-caps of her slippers. Her
white face, framed in disheveled, dust-colored hair, was shadowy. They
stood together at the door of the barn. At the back of them, the men,
each with his lantern, made a patch of light. An evil spirit seemed to
stare out of each corner of the vast raftered place--to stare down at
the thing under the sacks.
“I will not go back,” she said firmly. “I want to see. What is there?”
She pointed with a steady finger. They had improvised a bench. They
were laying it out--straightening it, with rough, pitiful reverence, as
she could very well see.
“What is there?”
Her voice rang out in the lofty barn amid the perfect, unnatural
silence which suddenly fell over the rest. Jethro only repeated,
touching her coaxingly on the wrist:
“Go back. I’ll come in and tell you presently.”
She shook her head.
“I stay. I mean to see.”
The group of men, with rare delicacy, without a word or a gesture of
recognition, clumped out, with heads down and heavy feet, trying in
vain to tread lightly.
Jethro and Pamela were alone. She shot forward and touched the sacks.
“You mustn’t touch. I insist on your going in, Pamela.”
But her hand was already on the soiled, wet sacking, and she flipped it
down with fearful eagerness.
“I knew, I knew,” she called out almost exultingly. “I felt sure.”
She looked at the dead face for a long time, and very steadily.
“I was driving home from the Flagon House,” Jethro explained in a husky
voice and averting his eyes from those dead ones which would not close.
“Something went wrong with the harness just as I got to the pond. I
jumped down. By the light of the lamps. I saw--his arm was thrust out.”
She didn’t speak. Her eyes were steady and luminous on Edred’s rigid
face. There was a ticking sound as the water dropped from his sodden
clothes to the floor. Then a quick clatter of a horse’s hoofs fell on
their ears.
Jethro said simply:
“That’s young Buckman gone to Liddleshorn for Egbert. I told him to
saddle the black mare.”
She only looked and looked. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her lips
were steady. She looked from the handsome dead face to the shabby,
drenched clothes, which were splintered all over with little
spear-shaped fragments of ice.
They were the clothes of a tramp. His boots were burst, a dirty
handkerchief was knotted round his long throat, and on his chin was an
unkempt beard--a piebald beard, half black, half gray. He was handsome
still, but it was the wreck of comeliness--the sodden face of a
dissolute man of fifty.
“He must have had ill luck lately,” Jethro said. “He was evidently
coming back to us.”
“If he had come back--alive,” she said thoughtfully, “I wonder----”
Her steady gaze on the dead, aged, handsome face never wavered. If he
had come back to Folly Corner alive--so--would he have possessed the
old magic?
His eyes were fathoming the raftered roof. In every corner, clothed in
the swaying black cobwebs, was an imp--the evil spirits who had swayed
his life.
“We shall never know what brought him to this. Come away, dear,” urged
Jethro.
She shook Jethro’s big hand off with petulance. The water from the dead
man’s clothes was freezing at her feet, beneath her slippers, and
chilled her. That was the nearest approach to contact she reached with
the dead. She made no attempt to touch him, to go a little nearer, to
stoop and stare into the glazing, fearful surface of his wide dark eyes.
What a mystery he had always been! What a mystery he was now! She had
never been certain even of his name. She didn’t know and never would
know the secret history of the last fifteen months. Two might tell
her--Sutton or the woman in brown. But she did not wish to revive
either of them. That was past. Everything was past. She was stripped at
last of everything; the world was simply Folly Corner. She felt as a
slave might feel when he heard the blows which loosened his shackles.
She was free. She had always been free--in the letter; in the spirit
she had been a wretched slave. A slave to first love--that indefinable,
holding thing.
She turned away suddenly, turned her back on the dead man--not with
horror, grief, or repulsion, but apathetically--as if she had seen
enough. She dismissed him. She put her head to Jethro’s coat, with the
persuasive, rubbing air of a cat.
“I can’t feel,” she said, holding one hand out toward the roughly
improvised bier. “I thank God that I don’t feel any longer. I’m not
touched in the least, not even by ordinary natural emotions. I’m not
sorry; I’m not ashamed; I’m not even glad. I’m only free. Jethro!”
“Dear love!” His great hand was on her hair.
“I don’t feel--for him,” she went on with more passion, “the ordinary
pity and sadness that one feels for any dead thing. I can’t--for him.
There’s no dignity, no pathos in Death when it touches him. You mustn’t
think me hard; mustn’t put this down to vengeance because he injured
me. I can still feel pity. I cried only this morning over a tomtit
which the cat had mangled. But I don’t cry for this. I don’t feel. I’m
stone where he is concerned. Until to-night I have been wax. I’m not
sorry or shocked; not anything womanly, anything human that I ought to
be. I can’t feel. I’m free. Take me away. We’ll get warm in the house.”
They stepped out into the driving snow. The world was white and
pitiless that night.
The door thudded solemnly when Jethro pulled it to. He had his arm
round Pamela, his coat held out to form a screen for her. Midway to the
house she stopped, the blinding, desolate snow whirling above their
heads. She looked up and he looked down. There was a strange fire in
each pair of eyes. Suddenly he stooped and kissed her on the
mouth--roughly, brutally.
Her mouth smarted with the rudeness of that kiss, but a sweet,
permanent content ran through her body. He loved her! She would be
Cousin Pamela no more, save in the tender jest of matrimony. He had
always loved her. His reserve, his brotherly attitude, had been forced.
They were part of his prudent nature, part of his hereditary economy.
He would never expend when there was small chance of any result.
The house was warm--a gently filtering warmth that seemed to wrap them
directly they shut the door.
The discreet clink of china, the savory smell of soup, came from the
kitchen. They were preparing dinner--the place was wholly regardless of
that miserable dead man.
They shut themselves in the drawing-room. Pamela abandoned herself to
the luxury of the fire. Jethro paced about nervously, his ears alert
for wheels.
“Egbert can do nothing,” he said. “The poor chap was dead when I found
him--dead and stiff. He must have been in the pond some time. If I
hadn’t found him to-night the ice would have pinned him in by
to-morrow. We should have been obliged to cut him out. I can’t think
how he got in. It isn’t dark: he never drank--too much. His head was
strong. He could stand a lot of whisky. We don’t know----”
“We shall never know,” she said with the oddest lethargy.
All the time he walked about the room, indulging as he did so in kind
commonplace reflections concerning Edred, she was saying to
herself--lilting the words to a queer dancing air that hummed in her
head:
“Free, free, free.”
She tried herself, probed herself, insisted on proving. She recalled
all sorts of things--her happiest, tenderest moments with the dead man.
She felt nothing at all, except faint disgust for the woman--it could
not have been herself--who had so madly loved that creature who was
lying in the barn searching the roof with his fixed, shallow eyes.
“No,” she said, half to herself, half to Jethro, “I don’t feel.”
She waited a moment, let that flow of recollections rush on. Nothing
touched her. It had been another woman--a dogged, shameful, spiritless
creature. She repeated devotionally, as if she had been kneeling in a
great church, swept by religious frenzy:
“I thank God. I don’t feel.”
* * * * *
“Beaufort Street, May 24.
“MY DEAREST PAMELA: Tim and I will be delighted to spend all June at
Folly Corner, as you suggest: you’ll really see Tim at last!
“We have let this house, and think of settling in the country. It will
not be the real thing, as you have it. We shall go to one of those
intellectual settlements with a good railway service to town; a theater
train once a week. We shall live on a hill; there will be a splendid
view from our windows. We shall have to pay for that view; we shall ask
our friends down to look at it; we shall see it every morning--rave
over it, become callous to it, abuse it--want to murder it. A true
English home is in a hollow, like Folly Corner. I shall have to content
myself with the hard monotony of a pine wood--after Sussex oak! We
shall belong to a coterie--everybody will be an artistic something.
Everybody will flatter and hate his neighbor.
“I want to see the baby. Of course you’ll call him Jethro. I can
understand your disquietude at Gainah’s fondness for him.
“Your letter was too domestic altogether. _Do_ remember that a ‘good
manager’ degenerates into a shrew after thirty.
“Of course your husband is trying--it is a way they have: a man is the
most difficult of all domestic pets. Never mind his occasional morose
moods; never mind his attempts at domestic economy. When a man decides
on domestic economy he smokes a shilling cigar while he lectures his
wife on the sinful extravagance of afternoon tea. A wise woman gives
him his head on such occasions, and never varies her course.
“You are very much to be envied; our life is a struggle to make both
ends meet. Tim’s book of essays, which made such a splash last year,
has been the ruin of him. He is a melancholy object lesson--a man
ruined by press notices. Still, that is not a fate likely to befall you
or Mr. Jayne. My poor Tim no longer has confidence in anything he does.
I tell him--without making the least impression on him--that a thing
doesn’t cease to be clever because you’ve found out the way to do it.
He’s versatile--that is his stumbling-block. To succeed, you must be
superlatively skillful at one thing, and a perfect fool at everything
else.
“So Nancy has won the literary prize in the _Liddleshorn Herald_
competition--and dear Mrs. Turle has justified her opinion.
“As Chalcraft and his wife are dead, of course there will be a sale.
Buy me the oak chair, if I am not present to buy it myself.
“I remember Nettie; she didn’t look the kind of girl who would go off
in a decline. But the rustics are dreadfully unhealthy. When I was at
the Buttery buying things of the cottagers I had a fixed rule by which
I ingratiated myself. If a woman was under fifty I inquired after the
baby; over fifty, I inquired after the bad leg. It sounds horrid, but
was invariably successful. If the victim was a man, I asked if his
ground grew good onions, and said how sorry I was that I couldn’t keep
a pig.
“By the way, when you see Mrs. Silas Daborn, ask her to save me a
kitten next time they occur. The cat we have won’t catch mice--lets
them frisk with the tip of her tail. I cannot think what cats are
coming to. Tim, who is not a Progressive, says it is all the fault of
the School Board.
“We shall come by the quick afternoon train on Wednesday, June 2. We
arrive at five something; Mr. Jayne will please look it up in the
time-table.
“Affectionately yours, with a kiss for the baby,
“BARBARA CLUTTON.”
THE END.
Transcriber’s Note
This transcription is based on images made available by the University
of Wisconsin and Google:
books.google.com/books?id=KSXQAAAAMAAJ
These scans are also available through the Hathi Trust Digital Library:
hdl.handle.net/2027/wu.89011718319
The following changes were made to the printed text:
• Added a table of contents.
• p. 7: She knew the effect of foxgolve on the human heart--Changed
“foxgolve” to “foxglove”.
• p. 12: “No glass,” said Palema in astonishment.--Changed “Palema” to
“Pamela”.
• p. 26: he rolled down the covering and showed his bandaged
limb.--Changed “he” to “He”.
• p. 33: The farmhouse was so overgrown with fruit-trees and ivy that
the mellow bricks were shouded.--Changed “shouded” to “shrouded”.
• p. 63: “It’s the Shakepere class, mamma.”--Changed “Shakepere” to
“Shakspere” for consistency.
• p. 65: She was introduced to all of then--Changed “then” to “them”.
• p. 71: And you never how these queer people from London may turn
out.--Inserted “know” after “never”.
• p. 127: Don’t say anthing dreadful.--Changed “anthing” to “anything”.
• p. 204: His tips have puts hundreds into my pocket.--Changed “puts” to
“put”.
• p. 213: They gave her flowers, one or twice a jewel.--Changed “one” to
“once”.
• p. 242: It was sombeody else--one of the blessed bungles--Changed
“sombeody” to “somebody”.
• p. 255: it’s frill tickling her cheeks.--Changed “it’s” to “its”.
• pp. 256–57: it was part of the compact that that she was not to go
beyond--Deleted the second “that”.
• pp. 303–04: “Put her in here. Then go down and send Nettie up. “We’ll
undress her,”--Deleted the opening double quotation mark before
“We’ll”.
In the plain text version of this ebook, italics have been denoted by
underscores, and small capitals have been changed to all capitals.
Except where noted otherwise, inconsistencies of spelling and
hyphenation have been preserved.