Evelyn left the little sitting-room and went downstairs with a quickly
beating heart. She did not quite see the meaning of what she was bidden
to do. It was like the formula of a doctor’s prescription, obscure yet
authoritative, and to be obeyed without doubt or delay. Her heart was
beating high, and her brain throbbing in sympathy. She had no thought
but to get as quickly as possible to the nearest telegraph office; the
only thing that restrained her was the thought that she was not quite
sure where her husband was. It had been settled that he should return
home that day, on which she had determined to return too so as to meet
him. That part of her intention she evidently could not carry out, but
in her absorption she did not reflect that, if he had arrived, it would
be to the disappointment and surprise of finding her gone, without any
explanation; that he would probably be annoyed and displeased, and not
in a mood to receive her laconic and unexplained question graciously.
This did not enter into Evelyn’s mind at all. She was given up to one
thought. That Rowland should be harsh to her or misunderstand her did
not occur to her as possible.
She hurried downstairs to fulfil her mission, bidding Eddy remain and
take his breakfast. “You look as if you wanted it, my poor boy,” she
said, patting him on the shoulder.
“Oh, I want it--and something stronger!” he said, with a laugh.
“No, my dear; oh, no, my dear,” she said anxiously. She even came back
from the door, hurried and eager as she was, to deliver, like a true
woman, a few very broken words on this subject. “Be content with the
tea, dear Eddy,” she said. A great tenderness for the boy had risen in
her breast. He had never known his mother; how much there was to be
excused in him! And he might have been her own son! though she thanked
God that it was not so, and reflected with horror what her life would
have been, had her youthful hopes been fulfilled, with such a man as
Edward Saumarez had turned out to be, and with such a son: yet the very
thought that she might have been the boy’s mother always softened
Evelyn. He was such a boy, too, still! though he had run the course of
so many unknown ills--young enough to be taken into his mother’s arms,
if he had one, and coaxed and persuaded back to innocence. Eddy had no
such feeling in the roused and excited state of his mind; he would not
laugh as she left him so as she could hear, but waited till, as he
thought, she had left the house before he allowed that unsteady peal to
burst forth. “Be content with the tea! Oh, the natural preacher, the
all-advising woman!” but with the sound of that “dear Eddy!” in his ears
the young man laughed till he cried--only because it was so good a joke,
he said to himself: but in this there was a certain self-deception too.
Evelyn was hurrying out, waiting for no one to open the door for her,
when she was suddenly stopped by Rogers, the servant who, she now
recollected suddenly, was the personal attendant of Saumarez himself.
She had not attempted to account for his presence, nor indeed thought of
him in the hurry of her thoughts. But it now flashed upon her, with
sudden surprise and vexation, in the enlightenment of his words--“My
master, ma’am,” he said, “would like to see you before you go.”
“Your master!” It was with a gasp of alarm that Evelyn replied. “I did
not know,” she said, “that Mr. Saumarez was here.”
“We came home--sudden,” said the man, “yesterday. My master will often
take a fancy like that. And he hopes, ma’am, that you will not go out of
the house without giving him the pleasure of seeing you.”
“I am in great haste,” Mrs. Rowland said. “I came to Mr. Edward entirely
on business. I am very sorry Mr. Saumarez was told that I was here: for
indeed I have no time----”
“Mr. Saumarez bade me say, ma’am, that as you knew he was unable to come
to you, he hoped as you would overlook the liberty and come to him.”
Rogers stood respectfully but firmly between Evelyn and the door. Not,
of course, to prevent her going, which was an impossibility, but with a
moral impulse that she felt incapable of resisting. “He has been in a
deal of suffering, and it will cheer him up, ma’am,” the man said.
With a pang of disappointment she yielded to the delay. It could only be
for a few minutes, after all. She was exceedingly unwilling not only to
be delayed, but to encounter Eddy’s father under any circumstances, and
above all in his own house. She followed the attendant with great
suppressed impatience and reluctance. The sitting-room occupied by
Saumarez was close to the door, with a window upon the street. It was
the dining-room of the little London house, the back part, which was
separated from the front by folding-doors, half-covered with curtains,
being Saumarez’s bedroom. He was seated in his invalid chair between the
fire and the window, and though the foggy morning had very little light
in it, a blind of much the same colour as the fog, yellowish and grimy,
was drawn down half over the window. Out of this obscurity, upon which
the red light of the fire shed at one side an illumination which looked
smoky in the atmosphere of the fog, the long thin countenance, peaked
beard, and gleaming eyes of the invalid were visible with the most
striking Rembrandt effect. He held out to Evelyn a very thin, very white
hand.
“Thanks, dear lady,” he said, “for this gracious visit. I scarcely hoped
for anything so good. In London, at this time of the year, a fair
visitor of any kind is a rarity; but you!--I believed you to be
dispensing hospitality in marble halls,” he added, with a little laugh
of the veiled satire which implied to Evelyn all that scorn of her late
marriage, and parvenu husband, and vulgar wealth, which he did not put
into words.
“You wonder, perhaps, what I have done with Rosamond,” she said; “but
she is perfectly well and perfectly safe. My own absence from home is
one of three days only. I return to-night.”
“Ah, Rosamond,” he said; “poor child! To tell the truth I did not think
of Rosamond. She is quite safe, I have no doubt. But you? What is my
friend Rowland about that he allows his beautiful wife to come up to
London, even in the dead season, on business, by herself?”
“The business,” she said, hurriedly, “was my own, and he could not have
done it for me. I hope you are better, and that the waters----”
“The waters,” he said, with a smile, “are good to amuse people with an
idea that something is being done for them. That is the best of medical
science now-a-days. It does amuse one somehow, however vain one knows it
to be, to think that something is being done. And so your business, my
dear lady, concerned my son? Happy Eddy to be mixed up in the affairs of
such a woman as you.”
“There was a question I had to ask him,” said Evelyn, faltering.
“Of so much importance that you have tried to find him vainly for two
days. I say again, happy Eddy! I wish these were questions which his
father could answer: but alas! all that is over with me.”
“The question did not personally concern either him or me,” said Evelyn,
“but the well-being of a third person, for whom I am very closely
concerned.”
“Happy third person!” said the invalid, with a gleam of those wolfish,
eager eyes out of the partial gloom. “I would I were one of those third
persons. And Rowland, my good friend, does he know all about it, and of
a necessity so strong that a lovely lady had almost forced her way into
Eddy’s room?”
“Mr. Saumarez,” said Evelyn, feeling her cheeks burn. “My husband knows,
or will know, exactly in every particular what I have done, and will
approve of it. You know what a boy of Eddy’s age, and lately a visitor
in my own house, the companion of my husband’s son, must be to me.”
“Age is very deceitful,” said Saumarez with a laugh, “especially in
Eddy’s case, if you will permit me to say it. He is not a boy, as you
will call him, to be judged by mere numerals. Eddy is one of the sons
occasionally to be met with in highly civilized life, who are older than
their fathers. Even a husband’s son, dear lady, has been known to be not
over-safe,” he added with again that mocking laugh.
“There is no question of safety,” said Evelyn. She felt the blaze of
shame to be so addressed, enveloping her from head to foot like a fire.
“You must pardon me if I say that this is a kind of conversation very
unpleasing to me,” she said with spirit, “and most uncalled for.” His
laugh sounded like the laugh of a devil in her ears.
“Nay,” he said, “you must not let my precious balms break your head. I
speak as a friend, and in your best interests, Evelyn.”
“My name is Mrs. Rowland, Mr. Saumarez.”
“Oh! if I could ever forget the time when you were not Mrs. Rowland, but
my Evelyn! But that, of course, is not to the purpose,” he added with a
sigh, at which he presently laughed. “We get sentimental. Dear lady, if
you will let me say it, your age is precisely the one which is most
dangerous, and in which a taste for youth has been often shown, in
various conspicuous examples.”
Evelyn rose to her feet with a start of offence and shame. She had not
known it was in her to be so wildly, almost fiercely angry. “Not another
word!” she said. “You abuse your privileges as a sick man. I will not
hear another word.”
“And what,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand to detain
her, “if I--or Rogers--were to let my good friend Rowland know that he
had difficulty in preventing the trusted and honoured wife from making a
forcible entrance into a young man’s room?”
If Evelyn had been a weak or unreasoning woman, had she been without
trust in her husband or herself, had she been apt to concealment, or to
believe, as so many do, that an evil motive is always the most readily
believed in--it is possible that she might at this odious moment, a
moment she could never bear to think of after--have been lost one way or
other, bound as a miserable thrall under this man’s power, whose
malignant mouth could have done her such vile and frightful injury. But
fortunately she was none of these things. It had not even once occurred
to her that her determination to see Eddy, wherever she might find him,
would have been made the subject of any remark. And if she now perceived
that it was a foolish and imprudent thing, the discovery was made in a
moment of such extreme excitement that it had no effect upon her. She
stood by him for a second, towering over him in a wrath which possessed
and inspired her. “Do so,” she said, “at once: or rather let Rogers do
so, Mr. Saumarez. It will not be so degrading to him, a man without
instruction, possibly knowing no better, as it would be to you. And
besides, he could speak from personal knowledge. His letter will find my
husband at Rosmore. Good-bye.”
“And do you think you are to silence the world in this way?” said
Saumarez. “Myself, or Rogers perhaps, and your husband if he is such a
fool--but----”
“Good-bye,” she said once more.
“Evelyn!” he cried.
“Good-bye.” Mrs. Rowland went out of the house like an arrow from a bow,
drawing the door behind her, with a sound that rang through the sleepy
street. She came so quickly that she almost discovered a watcher on the
other side, intent upon all her movements; that is, she gave him the
shock of a possible discovery: for, as for Evelyn, she saw nothing. Her
eyes were dim and misty with the heat of indignation that seemed to rise
up from her flushed cheeks and panting breath to blind her. She walked
away with the impulse of that wrath, at a pace that would have been
impossible under other circumstances, walking far and fast, incapable of
thinking even where it was that she wanted to go.
The pure air, however, and the rapid movement, soon brought Mrs. Rowland
to herself, and she turned back upon her rapid course so suddenly that
again--But she did not observe any one, or anything in the road, which,
even in this dead season, was sufficiently full to confuse an
unaccustomed visitor. She went at once to the telegraph office and sent
off the message, as a matter of precaution, sending it to Rosmore, and
in duplicate to the house of Sir John Marchbanks, where it was possible
Rowland might still be. She added a word of explanation to the message
dictated by Eddy. “Don’t be surprised to hear from me, from London,” she
wrote, without any recollection of the concise style necessary to a
telegram, “all explanations when we meet, and I know you will approve.”
When she had sent this off, Evelyn was solaced and more or less restored
to herself. She walked back more calmly to the hotel, beginning to feel
a little the effect of the morning’s exertions and excitement. But when
she reached the shelter of her room, and felt herself alone, and under
no restraint from other people’s looks, she was incapable of keeping up
any longer. A long fit of crying gave vent to the pent up trouble in her
breast. She bent down her head upon her hands and wept like a child,
helplessly. When one has been outraged, insulted, hurt in every fibre,
and with no power to vindicate or avenge, which are momentary modes of
relief--the mingled pain and shame and rage, quite justifiable, yet
making up a passion which hurts almost as much as the cause which
produced it, lay all one’s defences low. Men even are wrought to tears
by such means, how much more a woman, to whom that expression of
suffering is always so painfully and inconveniently near.
When Evelyn had overcome this weakness and recovered her confusion, I
cannot assert that her mind was easy or her thoughts comfortable. Was
she so sure that her husband would approve? Had she not been imprudent
and unguarded in what she had done? The thought had not entered her mind
before, but the light of a vile suggestion is one that makes the whitest
innocence pause and shudder. Could any one else for a moment think----.
She said to herself, No, no! with a high head and expanded nostril. But
it made her unhappy in spite of herself. It was as if something filthy
and festering had been thrown into her mind. She could not forget it,
could not throw it forth again, felt its unutterable foulness like a
burn or a wound. Rogers, perhaps the servants, might have thought--for
servants have dreadful ways of thinking, dreadful back-stair ways, the
ideas of minds which peep and watch, and hope to detect. He might have
thought--and in that mysterious way in which such whispers fly, it might
be communicated to some other privileged attendant, and so go forth upon
the air, an evil breath. Was it possible! was it possible! Evelyn seemed
to feel already the confusion, the bewilderment, the restless horror of
a whispered scandal, an accusation that never could be met, because
never openly made, one of those vile breathings which go through
society. It is so strange to think that one may one’s self be subject to
such an insinuated wrong. Herself! the last person, the most unlikely,
the most impossible! It was already a wrong to her that the vile idea
should be put within the furthest range of things thought of. And thus
Mrs. Rowland spent a very restless and miserable afternoon. She could
neither eat nor rest. She put up her “things,” the few necessaries she
had brought with her, to be ready for the night train, and tried to
still herself, to keep quiet, to read, but without effect. There is
nothing so difficult to get through as a day spent in waiting, and it
was scarcely past twelve o’clock, when, after all she had gone through,
she returned to the solitary empty hotel room, with its big stone
balustrade against the window, and the crowd sweeping along below. She
went out upon the balcony and watched for the coming of the telegraph
boy with an answer to her message. There were dozens of telegraph boys
coming and going, and at intervals she could see one below, mounting the
very steps of the hotel. But hour after hour passed, and nothing came
for her. On two or three occasions she ran to the door of her room, as
if that could quicken the steps of the tardy messenger; but among the
many people who passed up and down the stairs and looked at her
curiously, there was no one bringing the reply upon which all the
success of this painful mission hung.
And then it was five o’clock: but not soon, not till months of weary
waiting seemed to have passed; and then ensued, to Evelyn perhaps the
worst of all, a half-hour of excitement and expectation almost beyond
bearing. Would Eddy come? Would he stand by his bargain, though she was
not able to do so with hers. It was nothing that he did not appear at
the hour. He had never been punctual. He was one of those who do not
know the value of time, nor what it is to others to keep to an hour.
Nothing would ever convince Eddy that the rest of the world were not as
easy in respect to time, as little bound by occupation as himself. He
had no understanding of those who do a certain thing at a certain time
every day of their lives. The waiter appeared bringing lights, uncalled
for, for Evelyn, sitting in the partial dark, looking out upon the lamps
outside, felt her heart beating too quick and fast to give her leisure
to think of what was required or the hour demanded. He brought lights,
he brought tea; he made an attempt, which she prevented to draw the
curtains, and shut out the gleaming world outside, the lights and sounds
which still seemed to link her with the distance, and made it possible
that some intelligence might still come, some answer to her prayer. And
then suddenly, all at once, in the hush after the waiter had gone from
the room, Eddy opened the door. Mrs. Rowland sprang from her seat as if
she had not expected him at all, and his coming was the greatest
surprise in the world.
“Eddy! you!”
“Did you not expect me?” he said, astonished.
She drew a chair near her, and made him sit down. “I feel as if I had
brought you here on false pretences. I have got no answer to the
telegram.”
Eddy had taken a small pocket-book out of his breast pocket, and held it
in his hand. He stopped suddenly, and looked at it, then at Mrs.
Rowland. He was excited and pale, but yet his usual humorous look broke
over his face. “No answer?” he said.
“Did I tell you my husband was from home? he ought to have returned
to-day; but perhaps he has not done so. I ought also to have returned
to-day. It means nothing but that he has not got home.”
“There is no answer,” Eddy said, as if explaining matters to himself,
“and I will be giving myself away and no security acquired. Well, in for
a penny, in for a pound,” he said. “I have got it all here, Mrs.
Rowland; but you ought to give me your word that I shall not be the
worse for it.”
She sat gazing at him with such uncomprehension, that he laughed aloud.
“She doesn’t understand me,” he said, “not a bit: it is not in her to
understand; she has not an idea how serious it is.”
Eddy’s hands were unsteady, his little grey eyes were sparkling with a
feverish fire. From his foot, which he kept shaking in nervous
commotion, as he sat on the table with one leg suspended, to the mobile
eyebrows, which quivered and twisted over his forehead, there was
nothing still about him. He took a piece of paper on which something was
written out of his pocket-book, and looked at it, holding it in his
hand.
“Here it is,” he said, and his voice shook a little, though its tone was
light enough. “The guilty witness. When you put this into your husband’s
hands, Mrs. Rowland, he will know who forged his name. Have you a safe
place to put it in, a purse or something? For, remember, I am placing
my life in your hands.”
“Eddy, Eddy, you frighten me! I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“No, I know you can’t; perhaps not even when you see it will you know.
But give him that, Mrs. Rowland, and he will understand.”
He held the paper a moment more, and then gave it to her. There was not
a particle of colour in his sallow, small face. He sat on the corner of
the table, swinging one leg, at first not looking at her, a smile on his
face, which grew every moment more grey.
Evelyn took the paper almost with alarm. She gazed at it with a look at
first of intense surprise and disappointment. What did it mean? her
husband’s signature written two or three times on a piece of paper, as
if he had been trying a pen. James--James, twice or thrice repeated;
then “Rowland.” Then in full, “James Rowland,” with a characteristic
flourish at the end. She looked at the paper and then at Eddy, and
then----
It was his look that forced conviction on her mind, not the guilty
witness in her hand. She gave a great cry, “Eddy!” and put her hand over
her eyes, as if to shut out some unwelcome sight.
“Yes,” he said, swinging his foot, his head sunk upon his breast; “that
is just about what it is: and I am a--a--everything that is bad. But not
such a cad as to let another man be ruined instead of me,” he cried.
Evelyn got up to her feet, stumbling, not seeing where she went, her
eyes blinded with tears. “Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy!” she cried,
putting her arms round him, drawing him to her.
“Is that how you take it?” he said, with a sob. “I did not expect you to
take it like that.”
“Oh, Eddy!” she said, not able to find other words; “oh, my poor boy!”
He drew himself away from her a little, dashing off the tears that were
in his eyes. “You know what that means, Mrs. Rowland,” he said, “though
you may be sorry for me, and he may forgive me for your sake; but it is
separation for ever. I mustn’t presume to let you be kind to me.” He
took her back to her chair and placed her in it, and kissed her hand.
And then he took up his hat. “It could mean nothing else, and I should
be too thankful that he takes no step. Of course, I shall never see any
of you again.” Then he suddenly laughed out, the colour coming back to
his face. “And I was fond of that little Marion,” he said; “I was,
though you might not think it, and she did not deserve it any more than
I do. I was--but all that’s at an end now.”