The Duke and Essie gazed at each other with awed intentness. There was
sheer amazement on his face, blank despair on hers. They were entirely
absorbed in each other. As I stood in the background I felt as if I were
a ghost, that no word of mine could reach their world.
At last he spoke, stammering a little.
"Madam, on the night of my coming of age I left the dancers, and came in
here, and behold! you were sitting on that divan, all in white."
"Yes," said Essie.
"We saw each other for the first time," he said, trembling exceedingly.
"Yes."
"And I knelt at your feet."
"Yes."
A suffocating compassion overcame me. It was unendurable to pry upon
them, oblivious as they were of my presence. I left the room.
"He will go out of her life in five minutes," I said to myself, "never
to return. Poor souls. Poor souls. Let them have their say."
I had never seen Romance before, much less such a fantastic romance as
this, in a faery land as forlorn as this. My heart ached for them.
Presently I heard Ted's voice in the distance shouting a last message to
the departing Rodwell, and I went back to the octagonal room.
He was kneeling at her feet, her pale hands held in his, and his face
bowed down upon them.
"You must go," she said faintly.
He shuddered.
"You must go," she repeated. "To me you can only be a picture. To you I
am only a dream."
"Yes, it is time to go," I said suddenly in a hoarse voice. I obliged
them to look at me, to listen to me.
Slowly he released her hands, and got upon his feet. He was like a man
in a trance.
"Go! Go!" I said sharply. Something urgent in my voice seemed to reach
his shrouded faculties.
He looked in bewildered despair at Essie.
"Go!" she repeated with agonised entreaty, paler than I had ever seen a
living creature.
Still like a man in a trance he walked slowly from the room, passing Ted
in the doorway without seeing him. In the silence that followed we heard
his motor start and whirl away.
"He's gone," said Essie, and she fainted.
We had considerable difficulty in bringing her round, and, angry as I
was with Ted, I could not help being sorry for him when for some long
moments it seemed as if Essie had closed her eyes on this world for
good.
But Ted, who always knew what to do in an emergency, tore her back by
sheer force from the refuge to which she had fled, and presently her
mournful eyes opened and recognised us once more. We took her back in
the motor to the village inn, and I put her to bed.
Rest, warmth, silence, nourishment, these were all I could give her.
Instinctively I felt that the presence of the remorseful distressed Ted
was unendurable to her, and I would not allow him to come into her room,
or to sit up with her as he was anxious to do.
I took his place in an armchair at her bedside, having administered to
her a sedative which I fortunately had with me, and was profoundly
thankful when her even breathing shewed me that she was asleep.
I have known--who has not?--interminable nights, and nights when I
dreaded the morning, but I think the worst of them was easier to bear
than the night I kept watch beside Essie.
She was stricken. I could see no happiness for her in her future life,
and I loved her. And I loved poor blundering Ted also. I grieved for
them both. And I was sorry for the Duke too.
When the dawn was creeping ghostlike into the room and the night-light
was tottering in its saucer, Essie stirred and woke. She lay a long time
looking at me, an unfathomable trouble in her eyes.
"Beatrice," she said at last, "I could not find the way back."
"Where, dearest?"
"To the house. I tried and tried, but it was no use. It is lost, lost,
lost. Everything is lost."
I did not answer. I tried to put my trust in Time, and in the thought
that she would presently see her children in its rooms and playing in
its gardens, and would realise that Kenstone was in a new sense her
home, though not in the old one.
I brought her breakfast to her in her room, and then, in spite of my
entreaties, she got up and dressed and came downstairs. But when a
chastened and humble Ted timidly approached her to ask whether she would
like to see the house once more before returning to London in a few
hours time, she shook her head and averted her eyes. It was evident to
me that she was determined never to set foot in it again.
He did not insist, and she was obviously relieved when he left the room.
He signed to me to follow him and then told me that he had just received
a letter from the Duke asking him to accept the Vandyck in the octagonal
room as a present, as on second thoughts he felt it belonged to the
house and ought to remain there. The Duke had not started after all, as
his ship had been delayed one day. He wrote from the house close at hand
where he had been staying till his departure.
"It's worth thousands," said Ted. "Thousands. These bigwigs are queer
customers. What an awful fool he is to part with it just out of
sentiment. But of course I shall never sell it. It shall be an heirloom.
I've told him so," and Ted thrust the letter into his pocket and hurried
away.
Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a
wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fashioned inn garden
still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming
autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak
round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained passive in
my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the
sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so.
Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to the dregs. She did not rebel
against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not
bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent
it in silence.
I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and
obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to snatch an hour's
rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk
down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a
squirrel's against the garish hotel cushion, her nerveless hands lying
half open, palm upwards on her knee.
A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded
leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her
breast and the others in the grass at her feet. She saw them not. She
heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed
together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her.
And so I looked for the last time on Essie.
* * * * *
Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen
shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted's surprise
at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he
had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety
and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London,
his uncomprehending fury when we reached London and--she was not there.
And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation.
I did what little I could to blunt the edge of his suffering when the
first fever fit of rage was past.
"Dear Ted, she did not like the house. She told me she could not live in
it."
"But she would have liked it when I had gutted it. I should have
transformed it entirely. Electric light, bathrooms, central heating,
radiators, dinner lift, luggage lift," Ted's voice broke down, and
struggled on in a strangled whisper. "Inglenooks, cosy corners, speaking
tubes, telephone, large French windows to the floor. She would not have
known it again."
He hid his face in his hands.