Dredlinton House, before which Wingate presented himself punctually at
eight o'clock that evening, had a sombre, almost a deserted appearance.
The great bell which he pealed seemed to ring through empty spaces. His
footsteps echoed strangely in the lofty white stone hall as he followed
the butler into a small anteroom, from which, however, he was rescued a
few minutes later by Josephine's maid.
"Her ladyship will be glad if you will come to the boudoir," she invited.
"Dinner is to be served there. If monsieur will follow me."
Wingate passed up the famous staircase, around which was a little
semicircle of closed doors, and was ushered into a small apartment on the
first floor, through the shielded windows of which he caught glimpses of
green trees. The room was like a little fairy chamber, decorated in white
and the faintest shade of mauve. In the center, a white and gold round
table was prepared for the service of dinner, some wonderful cut glass
and a little bunch of mauve sweet peas its only decoration.
"Her ladyship will be down in a moment," the maid announced, as she
lowered the blind a little more to keep out the last gleam of sunlight.
"If monsieur will be seated."
Wingate ignored the silent invitation of the voluptuous little settee
with its pile of cushions. He stood instead upon the hearth rug, gazing
around him. The room, in its way, was a revelation. Josephine, ever since
their first meeting at Étaples, had always seemed to him to carry with
her a faint suggestion of sadness, which everything in this little
apartment seemed to contradict. The silverpoint etchings upon the wall
were of the school of Hellieu, delicate but daring, exquisite in
workmanship and design, the last word in the expression of modern life
and love. A study of Psyche, in white marble, fascinated him with its
wonderful outline and sense of arrested motion. The atmosphere appeared
to him intensely feminine and yet strange. He realised suddenly that it
contained no knick-knacks,--nothing, in short, but books and flowers.
Perhaps his greatest surprise, however, came at the opening of the door.
It seemed at first that he was confronted by a stranger. The woman who
entered in a perfectly white gown of some clinging material, with a
single row of pearls around her neck, with ringless fingers and plainly
coiled hair, seemed like the ghost of her own girlhood. It was only when
she smiled, a smile which, curiously enough, seemed to bring back
something of that aging sadness into her face, that he found himself able
to readjust his tangled impressions. Then he realised that she was no
longer a girl, that she was indeed a woman, beautiful, graceful, serious,
with all the charm of her greater physical and spiritual maturity.
"Please don't think," she begged, as she sank into the settee by which he
was standing, "that I have inveigled you here under false pretences.
Henry took the trouble to ring me up from the City this morning to say
that he should be dining at home--such an unusual event that I took it
for granted it meant a tête-à-tête.--I don't quite know why I treat you
with such an extraordinary amount of confidence," she went on, "but I
feel that I must and it helps me so much. A tête-à-tête dinner with my
husband would have been insupportable. I should have had to telephone to
Sarah Baldwin if you had not been available. Sarah would probably have
been engaged, and then I should have had to have gone to bed with a
headache."
"You don't imagine," he asked, smiling, "that I am disappointed at your
husband's absence?"
"I hope not," she answered, raising her eyes to his for a moment.
"Let me imitate your adorable frankness," he begged. "I hope your
husband's absence this evening is not because he objects to meeting me?"
"Of course not," she replied wonderingly. "Why on earth should he object
to meeting you?"
"You probably don't know," Wingate replied, "that I am in a sort of way
the declared enemy of the British and Imperial Granaries--Phipps' latest
escapade--of which your husband is a director."
"I am sure that would not have made the slightest difference," she
replied. "As a matter of fact, he had no idea that you were coming this
evening--I had no opportunity of telling him. A servant rang up from the
club, half an hour ago, to say that he would not be home. Come, here is
dinner. Will you sit there?" she invited, indicating the chair which a
trim parlour maid was holding. "I hope you can eat quite simple things.
One scarcely knows what to order, this hot weather."
Wingate took his place, and the conversation merged into those indefinite
channels necessitated by the presence of servants. The dinner, simple
though it was, was perfect,--iced consomme, a lobster mayonnaise, cold
cutlets and asparagus. Presently the little movable sideboard, with its
dainty collection of cold dishes and salads, was wheeled outside by the
solitary maid who waited upon them, and nothing was left upon the table
but a delicately-shaped Venetian decanter of _Château Yquem_, liqueurs in
tiny bottles, the coffee served in a jug of beaten copper, and an ivory
box of cigarettes. With the closing of the door, a different atmosphere
seemed immediately created. They smiled into one another's eyes in mutual
appreciation.
"I was dying to send Laura away," she confessed. "Why do servants get on
one's nerves so when one wants to talk? I don't think I ever noticed it
before so much."
"Nor I," he admitted. "Now we are alone there is a sort of luxury in
thinking that one may open any one of those subjects I want so much to
discuss with you, and perhaps a greater luxury still is the lingering,
the feeling that unless one chooses one need say nothing and yet be
understood."
"Sympathetic person!" she sighed. "Tell me, by the by, did you notice an
air of desertion in the lower part of the house?"
"There seemed to be echoes," he admitted. "I noticed it more this
afternoon."
"The whole of the rooms downstairs were fitted up as a small hospital
during the last year of the war," she explained. "It was after I had a
slight breakdown and was sent back from Étaples. Some of our patients
stayed on for months afterwards, and we have never had the place put to
rights yet. One or two rooms are quite sufficient for us in these days."
"It seems to be a wing by itself that remains empty," Wingate ruminated.
"The house might have been built for the purpose we put it to," she said.
"The rooms we turned into a hospital are quite cut off from the rest of
the place. If ever you murder Peter Phipps and want a hiding place, I
shall be able to provide you with one!"
He was looking unusually thoughtful. It was evident that he was pursuing
some train of reflection suggested by her words. At the mention of
Phipps' name, however, he came back to earth.
"I think I should rather like to murder Phipps," he confessed. "The worst
of it is the laws are so ridiculously undiscriminating. One would have
to pay the same penalty for murdering him as for getting rid of an
ordinary human being."
"Queer how I share your hatred of that person," she murmured.
"Was he trying to make love to you this afternoon?" Wingate asked
bluntly.
"He was just too clever," she replied, "to put it into plain words. His
instinct told him what the result would be, so he decided to wait a
little longer, although just towards the end he nearly gave himself
away. As a matter of fact," she went on, "he was rather tediously
melodramatic. My husband, it seems, is in disgrace with the company--has
overdrawn, or helped himself to money, or something of the sort. I rather
fancy that I am cast for the role of self-sacrificing wife, who saves her
husband from prison by little acts of kindness to his wronged partner.
Somehow or other, I don't think the role suits me. I am a very
hard-hearted woman, I suppose, but I don't believe I should lift up my
little finger to save Henry from prison. Besides, I hate the British and
Imperial Granaries."
"Why?" he asked.
"I hate the principle of gambling in commodities that are necessary for
the poor," she answered. "I don't pretend to be a philanthropist, or
charitable, or anything of that sort. I am wrapped up in my own life and
its unhappiness. At the same time, I would never receive as a friend any
one who indulged in that sort of speculation."
He looked at her thoughtfully, for once without that absorbing personal
interest which had sprung up like a flame in his life. He felt that
underneath her words lay real earnestness, real purpose.
"Tell me," he asked, a little abruptly, "if I started a crusade
against the British and Imperial, outside the Stock Exchange
altogether, if I embarked in a crude and illegal scheme to break them
up, would you help me?"
"To the fullest extent of my power," she answered eagerly. "Tell me about
it at once, please?"
"Not for a few days," he replied. "I have to think out many details, to
get my tools together, and then to decide whether I should have a
reasonable chance of success."
"Promise me that I shall help?" she insisted.
"I promise that you shall have the opportunity."
She rose from her chair and settled down in a corner of the settee.
With a little half-conscious gesture she invited him to take the place
by her side.
"Do you know," she said, "that you are making life much more
endurable for me?"
"You should never believe it unendurable," he told her firmly.
"Whatever one has suffered, and however dreary the present, there is
always the future."
"I wonder," she murmured. "In this life or the next?"
"In this one," he answered.
"Are you, by the by, a believer in anything beyond?" she went on.
"A struggling one," he replied. "I have wanted so much to believe that I
think I have at times almost succeeded."
"I believe," she said reflectively, "but I cannot analyse my belief. I am
most content when I keep my brain shut off from it and consider it as an
instinct. I try to tell myself that the power which is responsible for
the sorrows of this world must provide compensation. Even history can
show us that this has always been the case. Yesterday," she continued, "I
went to a spiritual séance. I found nothing. I shall go to the next thing
of the sort which any one suggests. I am like the hypochondriac with his
list of patent medicines. I try them all, but my heart still aches."
"I think," he admitted, "that _au fond_ I have, like most men, a strong
leaven of materialism in me. I have had my disappointments in life. I
want my compensations here, in the same world where I have suffered."
"Why should we not try to believe, like La Fontaine," she questioned,
"that sorrow and unhappiness are akin to disease, a mental instead of a
physical scourge--that it must pass just as inevitably?"
"It is a comfortable philosophy," he confessed. "Could you adopt it?"
"In my blackest moments I should have scoffed at the idea," she replied.
"One thing I know quite well, though, is unchanging," she continued, her
face losing all the gentle softness which a moment before he had found so
fascinating, so reminiscent of those sad, sleepy-eyed women immortalised
by the masters of the Renaissance. "That is my hatred of everything and
everybody connected with my present life."
"Everybody?" he murmured.
She stretched out her hand impulsively. He held it in his with a tender,
caressing clasp. There seemed to be no need of words. The moment was in
its way so wonderful that neither of them heard the opening of the door.
It was only the surprised exclamation of the man who had entered which
brought them back to a very sordid present.