A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
There was now an open breach between the Steels, but no third person
would have discerned any difference in their relations. It was a mere
snapping of the threads across the chasm which had always separated
Rachel from her second husband. The chasm had been plain enough to those
who came much in contact with the pair, but the little threads of
sympathy were invisible to the naked eye of ordinary observation. There
was thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture.
It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one.
Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no
caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel's
offences in the now jaundiced eyes of his wife.
Rachel felt as bitter as one only does against those who have inspired
some softer feeling; the poison of misplaced confidence rankled in her
blood. Her husband had told her much, but it was not enough for Rachel,
and the little he refused to tell eliminated all the rest from her
mind. There was no merit even in such frankness as he had shown, since
her own, accidental discoveries had forced some measure of honesty upon
him. He had admitted nothing which Rachel could not have deduced from
that which she had found out for herself. She felt as far as ever from
any satisfactory clew to his mysterious reasons for ever wishing to
marry her. There lay the kernel of the whole matter, there the problem
that she meant to solve. If her first husband was at the bottom of it,
no matter how indirectly, and if she had been married for the dead man's
sake, to give his widow a home, then Rachel felt that the last affront
had been put upon her, and she would leave this man as she had been
within an ace of leaving his friend. So ran the wild and unreasonable
tenor of her thoughts. He had not married her for her own sake; it was
not she herself who had appealed to him, after all. Curiosity might
consume her, and a sense of deepening mystery add terrors of its own,
but the resentful feeling was stronger than either of these, and would
have afforded as strange a revelation as any, had Rachel dared to look
deeper into her own heart.
If, on the other hand, she had already some conception of the truth
about herself, it would scarcely lessen her bitterness against one who
inspired in her emotions at once so complex and so painful. Suffice it
that this bitterness was extreme in the days immediately following the
scene between Rachel and her husband in the drawing-room after dinner.
It was also unconcealed, and must have been the cause of many another
such scene but for the imperturable temper and the singularly ruly
tongue of John Buchanan Steel. And then, in those same days, there fell
the two social events to which the bidden guests had been looking
forward for some two or three weeks, and of which the whole neighborhood
was to talk for years.
On the tenth of August the Uniackes were giving a great garden party at
Hornby Manor, while the eleventh was the date of the first real
dinner-party for which the Steels had issued invitations to Normanthorpe
House.
The tenth was an ideal August day: deep blue sky, trees still
untarnished in the hardy northern air, and black shadows under the
trees. Rachel made herself ready before lunch, to which she came down
looking quite lovely, in blue as joyous as the sky's, to find her
husband as fully prepared, and not less becomingly attired, in a gray
frock-coat without a ripple on its surface. They looked critically at
each other for an instant, and then Steel said something pleasant, to
which Rachel made practically no reply. They ate their lunch in a
silence broken good-naturedly at intervals from one end of the table
only. Then the Woodgates arrived, to drive with them to Hornby, which
was some seven or eight miles away; and the Normanthorpe landau and pair
started with, the quartette shortly after three o'clock.
Morning, noon, and afternoon of this same tenth of August, Charles
Langholm, the minor novelist, never lifted his unkempt head from the old
bureau at which he worked, beside an open window overlooking his cottage
garden. A tumbler of his beloved roses stood in one corner of the
writing space, up to the cuts in MSS., and roses still ungathered peeped
above the window-sill and drooped from either side. But Langholm had a
soul far below roses at the present moment; his neatly numbered sheets
of ruled sermon-paper were nearing the five hundredth page; his hero and
his heroine were in the full sweep of those emotional explanations which
they had ingeniously avoided for the last three hundred at least; in a
word, Charles Langholm's new novel is being finished while you wait. It
is not one of his best; yet a moment ago there was a tear in his eye,
and now he is grinning like a child at play. And at play he is, though
he be paid for playing, and though the game is only being won after
weeks and months of uphill labor and downhill joy.
At last there is the final ticking of inverted commas, and Charles
Langholm inscribes the autograph for which he is importuned once in a
blue moon, and which the printer will certainly not set up at the foot
of the last page; but the thing is done, and the doer must needs set his
hand to it out of pure and unusual satisfaction with himself. And so,
thank the Lord!
Langholm rose stiffly from the old bureau, where at his best he could
lose all sense of time; for the moment he was bent double, and faint
with fasting, because it was his mischievous rule to reach a given point
before submitting to the physical and mental distraction of a meal. But
to-day's given point had been the end of his book, and for some happy
minutes Langholm fed on his elation. It was done at last, yet another
novel, and not such a bad one after all. Not his best by any means, but
perhaps still further from being his worst; and, at all events, the
thing was done. Langholm could scarcely grasp that fact, though there
was the last page just dry upon the bureau, and most of the rest lying
about the room in galley-proofs or in typewritten sheets. Moreover, the
publishers were pleased; that was the joke. It was nothing less to
Langholm when he reflected that the final stimulus to finish this book
had been the prospect and determination of at last writing one to please
himself. And this reflection brought him down from his rosy clouds.
It was the day of the Uniacke's garden-party; they had actually asked
the poor author, and the poor author had intended to go. Not that he
either shone or revelled in society; but Mrs. Steel would be there, and
he burned to tell her that he had finished his book, and was at last
free to tackle hers; for hers at bottom it would be, the great novel by
which the name of Langholm was to live, and which he was to found by
Rachel Steel's advice upon the case of her namesake Rachel Minchin.
The coincidence of the Christian names had naturally struck the
novelist, but no suspicion of the truth had crossed a mind too skilled
in the construction of dramatic situations to dream of stumbling into
one ready-made. It was thus with a heart as light as any feather that
Langholm made a rapid and unwholesome meal, followed by a deliberate and
painstaking toilet, after which he proceeded at a prudent pace upon his
bicycle to Hornby Manor.
Flags were drooping from their poles, a band clashing fitfully through
the sleepy August air, and carriages still sweeping into the long drive,
when Langholm also made his humble advent. He was a little uneasy and
self-conscious, and annoyed at his own anxiety to impart his tidings to
Mrs. Steel, but for whom he would probably have stayed at home. His eye
sought her eagerly as he set foot upon the lawn, having left his bicycle
at the stables, and carefully removed the clips from his trousers; but
before his vigilance could be rewarded he was despatched by his hostess
to the tea-tent, in charge of a very young lady, detached for the nonce
from the wing of a gaunt old gentleman with side whiskers and lantern
jaws.
Fresh from his fagging task, Langholm did not know what on earth to say
to the pretty schoolgirl, whose own shyness reacted on herself; but he
was doing his best, and atoning in attentiveness for his shortcomings as
a companion, when in the tent he had to apologize to a lady in blue, who
turned out to be Rachel herself, with Hugh Woodgate at her side.
"Oh, no, we live in London," the young girl was saying; "only I go to
the same school as Ida Uniacke, and I am staying here on a visit."
"I've finished it," whispered Langholm to Rachel, "this very afternoon;
and now I'm ready for yours! I see," he added, dropping back into the
attitude of respectful interest in the young girl; "only on a visit; and
who was the old gentleman from whom I tore you away?"
The child laughed merrily.
"That was my father," she said; "but he is only here on his way to
Leeds."
"You mustn't call it my book," remonstrated Rachel, while Woodgate
waited upon both ladies.
"But it was you who gave me the idea of writing a novel round Mrs.
Minchin."
"I don't think I did. I am quite sure it was your own idea. But one book
at a time. Surely you will take a rest?"
"I shall correct this thing. It will depress me to the verge of suicide.
Then I shall fall to upon my _magnum opus_."
"You really think it will be that?"
"It should be mine. It isn't saying much; but I never had such a plot as
you have given me!"
Rachel shook her head in a last disclaimer as she moved away with the
Vicar of Marley.
"Oh, Mr. Langholm, do you write books?" asked the schoolgirl, with round
blue eyes.
"For my sins," he confessed. "But do you prefer an ice, or more
strawberries and cream?"
"Neither, thank you. I've been here before," the young girl said with a
jolly smile. "But I didn't know I should come back with an author!"
"Then we'll go out into the open air," the author said; and they
followed Rachel at but a few yards' distance.
It was a picturesque if an aimless pageant, the smart frocks sweeping
the smooth sward, the pretty parasols with the prettier faces
underneath, the well-set-up and well-dressed men, with the old gray
manor rising upon an eminence in the background, and a dazzling splash
of scarlet and of brass somewhere under the trees. The band was playing
selections from _The Geisha_ as Langholm emerged from the tea-tent in
Rachel's wake. Mrs. Venables was manoeuvring her two highly marriageable
girls in opposite quarters of the field, and had only her own
indefatigable generalship to thank for what it lost her upon this
occasion. Mr. Steel and Mrs. Woodgate apparently missed the same thing
through wandering idly in the direction of the band; but the tableau
might have been arranged for the express benefit of Charles Langholm and
the very young lady upon whom he was dancing laborious attendance.
Mrs. Uniacke had stepped apart from the tall old gentleman with the side
whiskers, to whom she had been talking for some time, and had
intercepted Rachel as she was passing on with Hugh Woodgate.
"Wait while I introduce you to my most distinguished guest, or rawther
him to you," whispered Mrs. Uniacke, with the Irish brogue which
rendered her slightest observation a delight to the appreciative. "Sir
Baldwin Gibson--Mrs. Steel."
Langholm and the little Miss Gibson were standing close behind, and the
trained eye of the habitual observer took in every detail of a scene
which he never forgot. Handsome Mrs. Uniacke was clinching the
introduction with a smile, which ended in a swift expression of
surprise. Sir Baldwin had made an extraordinary pause, his hand half way
to his hat, his lantern jaws fallen suddenly apart. Mrs. Steel, though
slower at her part of the obvious recognition, was only a second slower,
and thereupon stood abashed and ashamed in the eyes of all who saw; but
only for another second at the most; then Sir Baldwin Gibson not only
raised his hat, but held out his hand in a fatherly way, and as she took
it Rachel's color changed from livid white to ruby red.
Yet even Rachel was mistress of herself so quickly that the one or two
eye-witnesses of this scene, such as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm,
who saw that it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that
meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had seen as much as
they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once into amiable and fluent conversation,
and before many moments Rachel's replies were infected with an
approximate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to his juvenile
companion, and put a question in the form of a fib.
"So that is your father," said he. "I seem, do you know, to know his
face?"
Little Miss Gibson fell an easy prey.
"You probably do; he is the judge, you know!"
"The judge, is he?"
"Yes; and I wanted to ask you something just now in the tent. Did you
mean the Mrs. Minchin who was tried for murder, when you were talking
about your plot?"
Langholm experienced an unforeseen shock from head to heel; he could
only nod.
"He was the judge who tried her!" the schoolgirl said with pardonable
pride.
A lady joined them as they spoke.
"Do you really mean that that is Mr. Justice Gibson, who tried Mrs.
Minchin at the Old Bailey last November?"
"Yes--my father," said the proud young girl.
"What a very singular thing! How do you do, Mr. Langholm? I didn't see
it was you."
And Langholm found himself shaking hands with the aquiline lady to whom
he had talked so little at the Upthorpe dinner-party; she took her
revenge by giving him only the tips of her fingers now, and by looking
deliberately past him at Rachel and her judge.