THE AUSTRALIAN ROOM
It was that discomfort to man, that cruelty to beast, that outrage by
unnatural Nature upon all her children--a bitter summer's day. The wind
was in the east; great swollen clouds wallowed across the sky, now
without a drop, now breaking into capricious showers of stinging rain;
and a very occasional burst of sunlight served only to emphasize the
evil by reminding one of the season it really was, or should have been,
even if it did not entice one to the wetting which was the sure reward
of a walk abroad. The Delverton air was strong and bracing enough, but
the patron wind of the district bit to the bone through garments never
intended for winter wear.
On such a day there could be few more undesirable abodes than
Normanthorpe House, with its marble floors, its high ceilings, and its
general scheme of Italian coolness and discomfort. It was a Tuesday,
when Mr. Steel usually amused himself by going on 'Change in
Northborough and lunching there at the Delverton Club. Rachel was thus
not only physically chilled and depressed, but thrown upon her own
society at its worst; and she missed that of her husband more than she
was aware.
Once she had been a bright and energetic person with plenty of resources
within herself; now she had singularly few. She was distraught and
uneasy in her mind, could settle less and less to her singing or a book,
and was the victim of an increasing restlessness of mind and limb.
Others did not see it; she had self-control; but repression was no cure.
And for all this there were reasons enough; but the fear of
identification by the neighbors as the notorious Mrs. Minchin was no
longer one of them.
No; it was her own life, root and branch, that had grown into the
upas-tree which was poisoning existence for Rachel Steel. She was being
punished for her second marriage as she had been punished for her first,
only more deservedly, and with more subtle stripes. Each day brought a
dozen tokens of the anomalous position which she had accepted in the
madness of an hour of utter recklessness and desperation. Rachel was not
mistress in her own house, nor did she feel for a moment that it was her
own house at all. Everything was done for her; a skilled housekeeper
settled the smallest details; and that these were perfect alike in
arrangement and execution, that the said housekeeper was a woman of
irreproachable tact and capability, and that she herself had never an
excuse for concrete complaint, formed a growing though intangible
grievance in Rachel's mind. She had not felt it at first. She had
changed in these summer months. She wanted to be more like other wives.
There was Morna Woodgate, with the work cut out for every hour of her
full and happy days; but Morna had not made an anomalous marriage, Morna
had married for love.
And to-day there was not even Morna to come and see her, or for her to
go and see, for Tuesday afternoon was not one of the few upon which the
vicar's wife had no settled duty or occupation in the parish. Rachel so
envied her the way in which she helped her husband in his work; she had
tried to help also, in a desultory way; but it is one thing to do a
thing because it is a duty, and another thing to do it for something to
do, as Rachel soon found out. Besides, Hugh Woodgate was not her
husband. Rachel had the right feeling to abandon those half-hearted
attempts at personal recreation in the guise of good works, and the
courage to give Morna her reasons; but she almost regretted it this
afternoon.
She had explored for the twentieth time that strange treasury known as
the Chinese Room, a state apartment filled with loot brought home from
the Flowery Land by a naval scion of the house of Normanthorpe, and
somewhat cynically included in the sale. The idols only leered in
Rachel's face, and the cabinets of grotesque design were unprovided with
any key to their history of former uses. In sheer desperation Rachel
betook herself to her husband's study; it was the first time she had
crossed that threshold in his absence, but within were the books, and a
book she must have.
These also had been purchased with the house. With few exceptions, they
were ancient books in battered calf, which Steel had stigmatized as
"musty trash" once when Rachel had asked him if she might take one. She
had not made that request again; indeed, it was seldom enough that she
had set foot inside the spacious room which the old books lined, and in
which the master of the house disliked being disturbed. Yet it was
anything but trash which she now discovered upon the dusty shelves.
There was _Tom Jones_ in four volumes and the _Spectator_ in eight, _Gil
Blas_ and the works of Swift, all with the long "s," and backs like
polished oak; in the lower shelves were Hogarth and Gillray in rare
folios; at every level and on either hand were books worth taking out.
But this was almost all that Rachel did; she took them out and put them
in again, for that was her unsettled mood. She spent some minutes over
the Swifts, but not sufficiently attracted to march off with them. The
quaint, obsolete type of the various volumes attracted her more as a
curiosity than as readable print; the coarse satires of the early
masters of caricature and cartoon did not attract her at all. Rachel's
upbringing had deprived her of the traditions, the superstitions, and
the shibboleths which are at once a strength and a weakness of the
ordinary English education; if, however, she was too much inclined to
take a world's masterpiece exactly as she found it, her taste, such as
it was, at all events was her own.
She had naturally an open mind, but it was not open now; it was full and
running over with the mysteries and the perplexities of her own
environment. Books would not take her out of herself; in them she could
not hope to find a key to any one of the problems within problems which
beset and tortured her. So she ran her hand along the dusty books,
little dreaming that the key was there all the time; so in the end, and
quite by chance, but for the fact that she was dipping into so many, she
took out the right book, and started backward with it in her hand.
The book was _The Faerie Queene_, and Rachel had extracted it in a
Gothic spirit, because she had once heard that very few living persons
had read it from end to end; since she could not become interested in
anything, she might as well be thoroughly bored. But she never opened
the volume, for in the dark slit which it left something shone like a
little new moon. Rachel put in her hand, and felt a small brass handle;
to turn and pull it was the work of her hand without a guiding thought;
but when tiers of books swung towards her with the opening door which
they hid, it was not in human nature to shut that door again without so
much as peeping in.
Rachel first peeped, then stepped, into a secret chamber as
disappointing at the first glance as such a place could possibly be. It
was deep in dust, and filled with packing-cases not half unpacked, a
lumber-room and nothing more. The door swung to with a click behind her
as Rachel stood in the midst of this uninteresting litter, and
instinctively she turned round. That instant she stood rooted to the
ground, her eyes staring, her chin fallen, a dreadful fear in every
feature of her face.
It was not that her second husband had followed and discovered her; it
was the face of her first husband that looked upon Rachel Steel, his
bold eyes staring into hers, through the broken glass of a fly-blown
picture-frame behind the door.
The portrait was not hanging from the wall, but resting against it on
the floor. It was a photographic enlargement in colors, and the tinted
eyes looked up at Rachel with all the bold assurance that she remembered
so keenly in the perished flesh. She had not an instant's doubt about
those eyes; they spoke in a way that made her shiver; and yet the
photograph was that of a much younger man than she had married. It was
Alexander Minchin with mutton-chop whiskers, his hair parted in the
middle, and the kind of pin in the kind of tie which had been
practically obsolete for years; it was none the less indubitably and
indisputably Alexander Minchin.
And indeed that fact alone was enough to shake Rachel's nerves; her
discovery had all the shock of an unwelcome encounter with the living.
But it was the gradual appreciation of the true significance of her
discovery that redoubled Rachel's qualms even as she was beginning to
get the better of them. So they had been friends, her first husband and
her second! Rachel stooped and looked hard at the enlargement, and there
sure enough was the photographer's imprint. Yes, they had been friends
in Australia, that country which John Buchanan Steel elaborately and
repeatedly pretended never to have visited in all his travels!
Rachel could have smiled as she drew herself up with this point settled
in her mind for ever; why, the room reeked of Australia! These cases had
never been properly unpacked, they were overflowing with memorials of
the life which she herself knew so well. Here a sheaf of boomerangs were
peeping out; there was an old gray wide-awake, with a blue-silk fly-veil
coiled above the brim; that was an Australian saddle; and those glass
cases contained samples of merino wool. So it was in Australia as a
squatter that Steel had made his fortune! But why suppress a fact so
free from all discredit? These were just the relics of a bush life which
a departing colonist might care to bring home with him to the old
country. Then why cast them into a secret lumber-room whose very
existence was unknown to the old Australian's Australian wife?
Rachel felt her brain reeling; and yet she was thankful for the light
which had been vouchsafed to her at last. It was but a lantern flash
through the darkness, which seemed the more opaque for that one thin
beam of light; but it was something, a beginning, a clew. For the rest
she was going straight to the man who had kept her so long in such
unnecessary ignorance.
Why had he not told her about Australia, at all events? What conceivable
harm could that have done? It would have been the strongest possible
bond between them. But Rachel went further as she thought more. Why not
have told her frankly that he had known Alexander Minchin years before
she did herself? It could have made no difference after Alexander
Minchin's death; then why had he kept the fact so jealously to himself?
And the dead man's painted eyes answered "Why?" with the bold and
mocking stare his wife could not forget, a stare which at that moment
assumed a new and sinister significance in her sight.
Rachel looked upward through the window, which was barred, and almost
totally eclipsed by shrubs; but a clout of sky was just visible under
the architrave. It was a very gray sky; gray also was Rachel's face in
the sudden grip of horror and surmise. Then a ragged edge of cloud
caught golden fire, a glimmer found its way into the dust and dirt of
the secret chamber, and Rachel relaxed with a slight smile but an
exceedingly decided shake of the head. Thereafter she escaped
incontinently, but successfully, as she had entered; closed the hidden
door behind her, and restored _The Faerie Queene_ very carefully to its
place. Rachel no longer proposed to join the select band of those who
have read that epic through.