EPISODE OF THE INVISIBLE VISITOR
That was something like a summer, as the saying is, and for once they
could say it even on the bleak northern spurs of the Delverton Hills.
There were days upon days when that minor chain looked blue and noble as
the mountains of Alsace and hackneyed song, seen with an envious eye
from the grimy outskirts of Northborough, and when from the hills
themselves the only blot upon the fair English landscape was the pall of
smoke that always overhung the town. On such days Normanthorpe House
justified its existence in the north of England instead of in southern
Italy; the marble hall, so chill to the tread at the end of May, was the
one really cool spot in the district by the beginning of July; and
nowhere could a more delightful afternoon be spent by those who cared to
avail themselves of a general invitation.
The Steels had not as yet committed themselves to formal hospitality of
the somewhat showy character that obtained in the neighborhood, but they
kept open house for all who liked to come, and whom they themselves
liked well enough to ask in the first instance. And here (as in some
other matters) this curious pair discovered a reflex identity of taste,
rare enough in the happiest of conventional couples, but a gratuitous
irony in the makers of a merely nominal marriage. Their mutual feelings
towards each other were a quantity unknown to either; but about a third
person they were equally outspoken and unanimous. Thus they had fewer
disagreements than many a loving couple, and perhaps more points of
insignificant contact, while all the time there was not even the
pretence of love between them. Their lives made a chasm bridged by
threads.
This was not seen by more than two of their acquaintance. Morna Woodgate
had both the observation and the opportunities to see a little how the
land lay between them. Charles Langholm had the experience and the
imagination to guess a good deal. But it was little enough that Morna
saw, and Langholm's guesses were as wide of the mark as only the guesses
of an imaginative man can be. As for all the rest--honest Hugh Woodgate,
the Venables girls, and their friends the young men in the various
works, who saw the old-fashioned courtesy with which Steel always
treated his wife, and the grace and charm of her consideration for
him--they were every one receiving a liberal object lesson in matrimony,
as some of them even realized at the time.
"I wish I could learn to treat my wife as Steel does his," sighed the
good vicar, once when he had been inattentive at the table, and Morna
had rebuked him in fun. "That would be my ideal--if I wasn't too old to
learn!"
"Then thank goodness you are," rejoined his wife. "Let me catch you
dancing in front of me to open the doors, Hugh, and I shall keep my eye
on you as I've never kept it yet!"
But Rachel herself did not dislike these little graces, partly because
they were not put on to impress an audience, but were an incident of
their private life as well; and partly because they stimulated a study
to which she had only given herself since their return to England and
their establishment at Normanthorpe House. This was her study of the man
who was still calmly studying her; she was returning the compliment at
last.
And of his character she formed by degrees some remote conception; he
was Steel by name and steel by nature, as the least observant might
discern, and the least witty remark; a grim inscrutability was his
dominant note; he was darkly alert, mysteriously vigilant, a measurer
of words, a governor of glances; and yet, with all his self-mastery and
mastery of others, there were human traits that showed themselves from
time to time as the months wore on. Rachel did not recognize among these
that studious consideration which she could still appreciate; it seemed
rather part of a preconceived method of treating his wife, and the wary
eye gleamed through it all. But it has been mentioned that Rachel at one
time had a voice, of which high hopes had been formed by inexperienced
judges. It was only at Normanthorpe that her second husband became aware
of her possession, one afternoon when she fancied that she had the house
to herself. So two could play at the game of consistent concealment! He
could not complain; it was in the bond, and he never said a word. But he
stood outside the window till she was done, for Rachel saw him in a
mirror, and for many an afternoon to come he would hover outside the
same window at the same time.
Why had he married her? Did he care for her, or did he not? What could
be the object of that extraordinary step? Rachel was as far from hitting
upon a feasible solution of these mysteries as she was from penetrating
the deeper one of his own past life. Sometimes she put the like
questions to herself; but they were more easily answered. She had been
in desperate straits, in reckless despair; even if her second marriage
had turned out no better than her first, she could not have been worse
off than she was on the night of her acquittal; but she had been very
well off ever since. Then there had been the incentive of adventure, the
fascination of that very mystery which was a mystery still. And
then--yes!--there had been the compelling will of a nature infinitely
stronger than her own or any other that she had ever known.
Did she regret this second marriage, this second leap in the dark? No,
she could not honestly pretend that she did; yet it had its sufficiently
sinister side, its occasional admixture of sheer horror. But this was
only when the mysteries which encompassed her happened to prey upon
nerves unstrung by some outwardly exciting cause; it was then she would
have given back all that he had ever given her to pierce the veil of her
husband's past. Here, however, the impulse was more subtle; it was not
the mere consuming curiosity which one in Rachel's position was bound to
feel; it was rather a longing to be convinced that that veil hid nothing
which should make her shudder to live under the same roof with this man.
Of one thing she was quite confident; wherever her husband had spent or
misspent his life (if any part of so successful a whole could really
have been misspent), it was not in England. He was un-English in a
hundred superficial ways--in none that cut deep. With all his essential
cynicism, there was the breadth and tolerance of a travelled man.
Cosmopolitan on the other hand, he could not be called; he had proved
himself too poor a linguist in every country that they had visited. It
was only now, in their home life, that Rachel received hints of the
truth, and it filled her with vague alarms, for that seemed to her to be
the last thing he need have kept to himself.
One day she saw him ride a fractious horse, not because he was fond of
riding, but because nobody in the stables could cope with this animal.
Steel tamed it in ten minutes. But a groom remarked upon the shortness
of his stirrups, in Rachel's hearing, and on the word a flash of memory
lit up her brain. All at once she remembered the incident of the
gum-leaves, soon after their arrival; he had told Morna what they were,
yet to his wife he had pretended not to know. If he also was an
Australian, why on earth should that fact, of all facts, be concealed
from her? Nor had it merely been concealed; it was a point upon which
Rachel had been deliberately misled, and the only one she could recall.
She was still brooding over it when a fresh incident occurred, which
served not only to confirm her suspicions in this regard, but to deepen
and intensify the vague horror with which her husband's presence
sometimes inspired her.
Mr. Steel was an exceptionally early riser. It was his boast that he
never went to sleep a second time; and one of his nearest approaches to
a confidence was the remark that he owed something to that habit. Now
Rachel, who was a bad sleeper, kept quite a different set of hours, and
was seldom seen outside her own rooms before the forenoon. One
magnificent morning, however, she was tempted to dress and make the best
of the day which she had watched breaking shade by shade. The lawns were
gray with dew; the birds were singing as they never sing twice in one
summer's day. Rachel thought that for once she would like to be up and
out before the sun was overpowering. And she proceeded to fulfil her
wish.
All had been familiar from the window; all was unfamiliar on the landing
and the stairs. No one had been down; the blinds were all drawn; a clock
ticked like a sledge-hammer in the hall. Rachel ran downstairs like a
mouse, and almost into the arms of her husband, whom she met coming out
of the dining-room with a loaded tray. Another would have dropped it;
with Steel there was not so much as a rattle of the things, but his
color changed, and Rachel had not yet had such a look as he gave her
with his pursed mouth and his flashing eyes.
"What does this mean?" he demanded, in the tone of distant thunder, with
little less than lightning in his glance.
"I think that's for me to ask," laughed Rachel, standing up to him with
a nerve that surprised herself. "I didn't know that you began so early!"
A decanter and a glass were among the things upon the tray.
"And I didn't know it of you," he retorted. "Why are you up?"
Rachel told him the simple truth in simple fashion. His tone of voice
did not hurt her; there was no opposite extreme of tenderness to call to
mind for the contrast which inflicts the wound. On the other hand, there
was a certain satisfaction in having for once ruffled that smooth mien
and smoother tongue; it was one of her rare glimpses of the real man,
but as usual it was a glimpse and nothing more.
"I must apologize," said Steel, with an artificiality which was seldom
so transparent; "my only excuse is that you startled me out of my temper
and my manners. And I was upset to begin with. I have a poor fellow in
rather a bad way in the boathouse."
"Not one of the gardeners, I hope?" queried Rachel; but her kind anxiety
subsided in a moment, for his dark eyes were measuring her, his dark
mind meditating a lie; and now she knew him well enough to read him thus
far in his turn.
"No," replied Steel, deciding visibly against the lie; "no, not one of
our men, or anybody else belonging to these parts; but some unlucky
tramp, whom I imagine some of our neighbors would have given into
custody forthwith. I found him asleep on the lawn; of course he had no
business upon the premises; but he's so far gone that I'm taking him
something to pull him together before I turn him off."
"I should have said," remarked Rachel, thoughtfully, "that tea or coffee
would have been better for him than spirits."
Steel smiled indulgently across the tray.
"Most ladies would say the same," he replied, "but very few men."
"And why didn't you bring him into the house," pursued Rachel, looking
her husband very candidly in the face, "instead of taking him all that
way to the lake, and giving yourself so much more trouble than was
necessary?"
The smile broadened upon Steel's thin lips, perhaps because it had
entirely vanished from his glittering eyes.
"That," said he, "is a question you would scarcely ask if you had seen
the poor creature for yourself. I don't intend you to see him; he is a
rather saddening spectacle, and one of a type for which one can do
absolutely nothing permanent. And now, if you are quite satisfied, I
shall proceed, with your permission, to get rid of him in my own way."
It was seldom indeed that Steel descended to a display of sarcasm at his
wife's expense, though few people who came much in contact with him
escaped an occasional flick from a tongue that could be as bitter as it
was habitually smooth. His last words were therefore as remarkable as
his first; both were exceptions to a rule; and though Rachel moved away
without replying, feeling that there was indeed no more to be said, she
could not but dwell upon the matter in her mind. Satisfied she certainly
was not; and yet there was so much mystery between them, so many
instinctive reservations upon either side, that very little circumstance
of the kind could not carry an ulterior significance, but many must be
due to mere force of habit.
Rachel hated the condition of mutual secretiveness upon which she had
married this man; it was antagonistic to her whole nature; she longed to
repudiate it, and to abolish all secrets between them. But there her
pride stepped in and closed her lips; and the intolerable thought that
she would value her husband's confidence more than he would value hers,
that she felt drawn to him despite every sinister attribute, would bring
humiliation and self-loathing in its train. It was the truth, however,
or, at all events, part of the truth.
Yet a more unfair arrangement Rachel had been unable to conceive, ever
since the fatally reckless moment in which she had acquiesced in this
one. The worst that could be known about her was known to her husband
before her marriage; she had nothing else to hide; all concealment of
the past, as between themselves, was upon his side. But matters were
coming to a crisis in this respect; and, when Rachel deemed it done
with, this incident of the tramp was only just begun.
It seemed that the servants knew of it, and that it was not Steel who
had originally discovered the sleeping intruder, but an under-gardener,
who, seeing his master also up and about, had prudently inquired what
was to be done with the man before meddling with him.
"And the master said, 'leave him to me,'" declared Rachel's maid, who
was her informant on the point, as she combed out her mistress's
beautiful brown hair, before the late breakfast which did away with
luncheon when there were no visitors at Normanthorpe.
"And did he do so?" inquired Rachel, looking with interest into her own
eyes in the glass. "Did he leave him to your master?"
"He did that!" replied her maid, a simple Yorkshire wench, whom Rachel
herself had chosen in preference to the smart town type. "Catch any on
'em not doin what master tells them!"
"Then did John see what happened?"
"No, m'm--because master sent him to see if the chap'd come in at t'
lodge gates, or where, and when he got back he was gone, blanket an'
all, an' master with him."
"Blanket and all!" repeated Rachel. "Do you mean to say he had the
impudence to bring a blanket with him?"
"And slept in it!" cried her excited little maid. "John says he found
him tucked up in a corner of the lawn, out of the wind, behind some o'
them shrubs, sound asleep, and lapped round and round in his blue
banket from head to heel."
Rachel saw her own face change in the glass; but she only asked one more
question, and that with a smile.
"Did John say it was a blue blanket, Harris, or did your own imagination
supply the color?"
"He said it, m'm; faded blue."
"And pray when did you see John to hear all this?" demanded Rachel,
suddenly remembering her responsibility as mistress of this young
daughter of the soil.
"Deary me, m'm," responded the ingenuous Harris, "I didn't see him, not
more than any of the others; he just comed to t' window of t' servants'
hall, as we were having our breakfasts, and he told us all at once. He
was that full of it, was John!"
Rachel asked no more questions; but she was not altogether sorry that
the matter had already become one of common gossip throughout the house.
Meanwhile she made no allusion to it at breakfast, but her observation
had been quickened by the events of the morning, and thus it was that
she noticed and recognized the narrow blue book which was too long for
her husband's breast-pocket, and would show itself as he stooped over
his coffee. It was his check-book, and Rachel had not seen it since
their travels.
That afternoon a not infrequent visitor arrived on his bicycle, to which
was tied a bouquet of glorious roses instead of a lamp; this was Charles
Langholm, the novelist, who had come to live in Delverton, over two
hundred miles from his life-long haunts and the literary market-place,
chiefly because upon a happy-go-lucky tour through the district he had
chanced upon what he never tired of calling "the ideal rose-covered
cottage of my dreams," though also for other reasons unknown in
Yorkshire. His flat was abandoned before quarter-day, his effects
transplanted at considerable cost, and ever since Langholm had been a
bigoted countryman, who could not spend a couple of days in town without
making himself offensive on the subject at his club, where he was
nevertheless discreetly vague as to the exact locality of his rural
paradise. Even at the club, however, it was admitted that his work had
improved almost as much as his appearance; and he put it all down to the
roses in which he lived embowered for so many months of the year. Such
was their profusion that you could have filled a clothes-basket without
missing one, and Langholm never visited rich or poor without a little
offering out of his abundance.
"They may be coals to Newcastle," he would say to the Woodgates or the
Steels, "but none of your Tyneside collieries are a patch on mine."
Like most victims of the artistic temperament, the literary Langholm was
a creature of moods; but the very fact of a voluntary visit from him was
sufficient guarantee of the humor in which he came, and this afternoon
he was at his best. He had indeed been writing all day, and for many
days past, and was filled with the curious exhilaration which
accompanies an output too rapid and too continuous to permit a running
sense of the defects. He was a ship with a fair wind, which he valued
the more for the belts of calms and the adverse weather through which he
had passed and must inevitably pass again; for the moment he was a happy
man, though one with no illusion as to the present product of his
teeming pen.
"It is nonsense," he said to Rachel, in answer to a question from that
new and sympathetic friend, "but it is not such nonsense as to seem
nothing else when one's in the act of perpetrating it, and what more can
one want? It had to be done by the tenth of August, and by Jove it will
be! A few weeks ago I didn't think it possible; but the summer has
thawed my ink."
"Are you sure it isn't Mrs. Steel?" asked one of the Venables girls,
who had also ridden over on their bicycles. "I heard you had a
tremendously literary conversation when you dined with us."
"We had, indeed!" said Langholm, with enthusiasm. "And Mrs. Steel gave
me one of the best ideas I ever had in my life; that's another reason
why I'm racing through this rubbish--to take it in hand."
It was Sybil to whom he was speaking, but at this point Rachel plunged
into the conversation with the sister, Vera, which required an effort,
since the elder Miss Venables was a young lady who had cultivated
languor as a sign of breeding and sophistication. Rachel, however, made
the effort with such a will that the talk became general in a moment.
"I don't know how anybody writes books," was the elder young lady's
solitary contribution; her tone added that she did not want to know.
"Nor I," echoed Sybil, "especially in a place like this, where nothing
ever happens. If I wanted to write a novel, I should go to Spain--or
Siberia--or the Rocky Mountains--where things do happen, according to
all accounts."
"Young lady," returned the novelist, a twinkle in his eye, "I had
exactly the same notion when I first began, and I remember what a much
older hand said to me when I told him I was going down to Cornwall for
romantic background. 'Young man,' said he, 'have you placed a romance in
your mother's backyard yet?' I had not, but I did so at once instead of
going to Cornwall, and sounder advice I never had in my life. Material,
like charity, begins at home; nor need you suppose that nothing ever
happens down here. That is the universal idea of the native about his or
her own heath, but I can assure you it isn't the case at all. Only just
now, on my way here, I saw a scene and a character that might have been
lifted bodily out of Bret Harte."
Sybil Venables clamored for particulars, while her sister resigned
herself to further weariness of the flesh. Rachel put down her cup and
leant forward with curiously expectant eyes. They were sitting in the
cool, square hall, with doors shut or open upon every hand, and the
gilded gallery overhead. Statuettes and ferns, all reflected in the
highly polished marble floor, added a theatrical touch which was not out
of keeping with a somewhat ornate interior.
"It was the character," continued Langholm, "who was making the scene;
and a stranger creature I have never seen on English earth. He wore what
I believe they call a Crimean shirt, and a hat like a stage cowboy; and
he informed all passers that he was knocking down his check!"
"What?" cried Rachel and Sybil in one breath, but in curiously different
tones.
"Knocking down his check," repeated Langholm. "It's what they do in the
far west or the bush or somewhere--but I rather fancy it's the
bush--when they get arrears of wages in a lump in one check."
"And where did you see all this?" inquired Rachel, whose voice was very
quiet, but her hazel eyes alight with a deeper interest than the story
warranted.
"At the Packhorse on the York Road. I came that way round for the sake
of the surface and the exercise."
"And did you see the check?"
"No, I only stopped for a moment, to find out what the excitement was
about; but the fellow I can see now. You never set eyes on such a
pirate--gloriously drunk and bearded to the belt. I didn't stop, because
he was lacing into everybody with a cushion, and the local loafers
seemed to like it."
"What a joke!" cried Sybil Venables.
"There is no accounting for taste," remarked her sapient sister.
"And he was belaboring them with a cushion, did you say?" added Rachel,
with the slightest emphasis upon the noun.
"Well, it looked like one to me," replied Langholm, "but, on second
thoughts, it was more like a bolster in shape; and now I know what it
was! It has just dawned on me. It looked like a bolster done up in a
blanket; but it was the swag that the tramps carry in Australia, with
all their earthly goods rolled up in their bedding; and the fellow was
an Australian swagsman, that's what he was!"
"Swagman," corrected Rachel, instinctively. "And pray what color was the
blanket?" she made haste to add.
"Faded blue."
And, again from sheer force of instinct, Rachel gave a nod.
"Were you ever out there, Mrs. Steel?" inquired Langholm, carelessly. "I
never was, but the sort of thing has been done to death in books, and I
only wonder I didn't recognize it at once. Well, it was the last type
one thought to meet with in broad daylight on an English country road!"
Had Langholm realized that he had put a question which he had no
business to put? Had he convicted himself of a direct though
unpremeditated attempt to probe the mystery of his hostess's
antecedents, and were his subsequent observations designed to unsay
that question in effect? If so, there was no such delicacy in the elder
Miss Venables, who became quite animated at the sudden change in
Rachel's face, and at her own perception of the cause.
"Have you been to Australia, Mrs. Steel?" repeated Vera, looking Rachel
full in the eyes; and she added slyly, "I believe you have!"
There was a moment's pause, and then a crisp step rang upon the marble,
as Mr. Steel emerged from his study.
"Australia, my dear Miss Venables," said he, "is the one country that
neither my wife nor I have ever visited in our lives, and the last one
that either of us has the least curiosity to see."
And he took his seat among them with a smile.