you. In her lady's maid's way she'd fight for your life."
"I think she is as faithful to me as Ameerah is to you," Emily answered.
"I feel sure Ameerah would fight for you."
Ameerah's devotion in these days took the form of a deep-seated hatred
of the woman whom she regarded as her mistress's enemy.
"It is an evil thing that she should take this place," she said. "She is
an old woman. What right hath she to think she may bear a son. Ill luck
will come of it. She deserves any ill fortune which may befall her."
"Sometimes," Lady Walderhurst once said to Osborn, "I feel as if Ameerah
disliked me. She looks at me in such a curious, stealthy way."
"She is admiring you," was his answer. "She thinks you are something a
little supernatural, because you are so tall and have such a fresh
colour."
There was in the park at Palstrey Manor a large ornamental pool of
water, deep and dark and beautiful because of the age and hugeness of
the trees which closed around it, and the water plants which encircled
and floated upon it. White and yellow flags and brown velvet rushes grew
thick about its edge, and water-lilies opened and shut upon its surface.
An avenue of wonderful limes led down to a flight of mossy steps, by
which in times gone by people had descended to the boat which rocked
idly in the soft green gloom. There was an island on it, on which roses
had been planted and left to run wild; early in the year daffodils and
other spring flowers burst up through the grass and waved scented heads.
Lady Walderhurst had discovered the place during her honeymoon, and had
loved it fondly ever since. The avenue leading to it was her favourite
walk; a certain seat under a tree on the island her favourite
resting-place.
"It is so still there," she had said to the Osborns. "No one ever goes
there but myself. When I have crossed the little old bridge and sit down
among the greenness with my book or work, I feel as if there was no
world at all. There is no sound but the rustle of the leaves and the
splash of the moor-hens who come to swim about. They don't seem to be
afraid of me, neither do the thrushes and robins. They know I shall only
sit still and watch them. Sometimes they come quite near."
She used, in fact, to take her letter-writing and sewing to the sweet,
secluded place and spend hours of pure, restful bliss. It seemed to her
that her life became more lovely day by day.
[Illustration: Hester Osborn]
Hester did not like the pool. She thought it too lonely and silent. She
preferred her beflowered boudoir or the sunny garden. Sometimes in these
days she feared to follow her own thoughts. She was being pushed--pushed
towards the edge of her precipice, and it was only the working of Nature
that she should lose her breath and snatch at strange things to stay
herself. Between herself and her husband a sort of silence had grown.
There were subjects of which they never spoke, and yet each knew that
the other's mind was given up to thought of them day and night. There
were black midnight hours when Hester, lying awake in her bed, knew that
Alec lay awake in his also. She had heard him many a time turn over with
a caught breath and a smothered curse. She did not ask herself what he
was thinking of. She knew. She knew because she was thinking of the same
things herself. Of big, fresh, kind Emily Walderhurst lost in her dreams
of exultant happiness which never ceased to be amazed and grateful to
prayerfulness; of the broad lands and great, comfortable houses; of all
it implied to be the Marquis of Walderhurst or his son; of the long,
sickening voyage back to India; of the hopeless muddle of life in an
ill-kept bungalow; of wretched native servants, at once servile and
stubborn and given to lies and thefts. More than once she was forced to
turn on her face that she might smother her frenzied sobs in her pillow.
It was on such a night--she had awakened from her sleep to notice such
stillness in Osborn's adjoining room, that she thought him profoundly
asleep--that she arose from her bed to go and sit at her open window.
She had not been seated there many minutes before she became singularly
conscious, she did not know how, of some presence near her among the
bushes in the garden below. It had indeed scarcely seemed to be sound or
movement which had attracted her attention, and yet it must have been
one or both, for she involuntarily turned to a particular spot.
Yes, something, someone, was standing in a corner, hidden by shrubbery.
It was the middle of the night, and people were meeting. She sat still
and almost breathless. She could hear nothing and saw nothing but,
between the leafage, a dim gleam of white. Only Ameerah wore white.
After a few seconds' waiting she began to think a strange thing, though
she presently realised that, taking all things into consideration, it
was not strange at all. She got up very noiselessly and stole into her
husband's room. He was not there; the bed was empty, though he had slept
there earlier in the night.
She went back to her own bed and got into it again. In ten minutes' time
Captain Osborn crept upstairs and returned to bed also. Hester made no
sign and did not ask any questions. She knew he would have told her
nothing, and also she did not wish to hear. She had seen him speaking to
Ameerah in the lane a few days before, and now that he was meeting her
in the night she knew that she need not ask herself what the subject of
their consultation might be. But she looked haggard in the morning.
Lady Walderhurst herself did not look well, For the last two or three
nights she had been starting from her sleep again with that eerie
feeling of being wakened by someone at her bedside, though she had found
no one when she had examined the room on getting up.
"I am sorry to say I am afraid I am getting a little nervous," she had
said to Jane Cupp. "I will begin to take valerian, though it is really
very nasty."
Jane herself had a somewhat harried expression of countenance. She did
not mention to her mistress that for some days she had been faithfully
following a line of conduct she had begun to mark out for herself. She
had obtained a pair of list slippers and had been learning to go about
softly. She had sat up late and risen from her bed early, though she had
not been rewarded by any particularly marked discoveries. She had
thought, however, that she observed that Ameerah did not look at her as
much as had been her habit, and she imagined she rather avoided her. All
she said to Lady Walderhurst was:
"Yes, my lady, mother thinks a great deal of valerian to quiet the
nerves. Will you have a light left in your room to-night, my lady?"
"I am afraid I could not sleep with a light," her mistress answered. "I
am not used to one."
She continued to sleep, disturbedly some nights, in the dark. She was
not aware that on some of the nights Jane Cupp either slept or laid
awake in the room nearest to her. Jane's own bedroom was in another part
of the house, but in her quiet goings about in the list shoes she now
and then saw things which made her nervously determined to be within
immediate call.
"I don't say it isn't nerves, mother," she said, "and that I ain't silly
to feel so suspicious of all sorts of little things, but there's nights
when I couldn't stand it not to be quite near her."
Chapter Sixteen
The Lime Avenue was a dim, if lovely, place at twilight. When the sun
was setting, broad lances of gold slanted through the branches and
glorified the green spaces with mellow depths of light. But later, when
the night was drawing in, the lines of grey tree-trunks, shadowed and
canopied by boughs, suggested to the mind the pillars of some ruined
cathedral, desolate and ghostly.
Jane Cupp, facing the gloom of it during her lady's dinner-hour, and
glancing furtively from side to side as she went, would have been awed
by the grey stillness, even if she had not been in a timorous mood to
begin with. In the first place, the Lime Avenue, which was her
ladyship's own special and favourite walk, was not the usual promenade
of serving-maids. Even the gardeners seldom set foot in it unless to
sweep away dead leaves and fallen wood. Jane herself had never been here
before. This evening she had gone absolutely because she was following
Ameerah.
She was following Ameerah because, during the afternoon tea-hour in the
servants' hall, she had caught a sentence or so in the midst of a
gossiping story, which had made her feel that she should be unhappy if
she did not go down the walk and to the water-side,--see the water, the
boat, the steps, everything.
"My word, mother!" she had said, "it's a queer business for a
respectable girl that's maid in a great place to be feeling as if she
had to watch black people, same as if she was in the police, and not
daring to say a word; for if I did say a word, Captain Osborn's clever
enough to have me sent away from here in a jiffy. And the worst of it
is," twisting her hands together, "there _mayn't_ be _anything_ going on
really. If they were as innocent as lambs they couldn't act any
different; and just the same, things _might_ have happened by accident."
"That's the worst of it," was Mrs. Cupp's fretted rejoinder. "Any old
piece of carving might have dropped out of a balustrade, and any lady
that wasn't well might have nightmare and be disturbed in her sleep."
"Yes," admitted Jane, anxiously, "that is the worst of it. Sometimes I
feel so foolish I'm all upset with myself."
The gossip in servants' halls embraces many topics. In country houses
there is naturally much to be said of village incidents, of the scandals
of cottages and the tragedies of farms. This afternoon, at one end of
the table the talk had been of a cottage scandal which had verged on
tragedy. A handsome, bouncing, flaunting village girl had got into that
"trouble" which had been anticipated for her by both friends and enemies
for some time. Being the girl she was, much venomous village social stir
had resulted. It had been predicted that she would "go up to London," or
that she would drown herself, having an impudent high spirit which
brought upon her much scornful and derisive flouting on her evil day.
The manor servants knew a good deal of her, because she had been for a
while a servant at The Kennel Farm, and had had a great fancy for
Ameerah, whom it had pleased her to make friends with. When she fell
suddenly ill, and for days lay at the point of death, there was a
stealthy general opinion that Ameerah, with her love spells and potions,
could have said much which might have been enlightening, if she had
chosen. The girl had been in appalling danger. The village doctor, who
had been hastily called in, had at one moment declared that life had
left her body. It was, in fact, only Ameerah who had insisted that she
was not dead. After a period of prostration, during which she seemed a
corpse, she had slowly come back to earthly existence. The graphic
descriptions of the scenes by her bedside, of her apparent death, her
cold and bloodless body, her lagging and ghastly revival to
consciousness, aroused in the servants' hall a fevered interest. Ameerah
was asked questions, and gave such answers as satisfied herself if not
her interlocutors. She was perfectly aware of the opinions of her fellow
servitors. She knew all about them while they knew nothing whatsoever
about her. Her limited English could be used as a means of baffling
them. She smiled, and fell into Hindustani when she was pressed.
Jane Cupp heard both questions and answers. Ameerah professed to know
nothing but such things as the whole village knew. Towards the end of
the discussion, however, in a mixture of broken English and Hindustani,
she conveyed that she had believed that the girl would drown herself.
Asked why, she shook her head, then said that she had seen her by the
Mem Sahib's lake at the end of the trees. She had asked if the water was
deep enough, near the bridge, to drown. Ameerah had answered that she
did not know.
There was a general exclamation. They all knew it was deep there. The
women shuddered as they remembered how deep they had been told it was at
that particular spot. It was said that there was no bottom to it.
Everybody rather revelled in the gruesomeness of the idea of a
bottomless piece of water. Someone remembered that there was a story
about it. As much as ninety years ago two young labourers on the place
had quarrelled about a young woman. One day, in the heat of jealous rage
one had seized the other and literally thrown him into the pond. He had
never been found. No drags could reach his body. He had sunk into the
blackness for ever.
Ameerah sat at the table with downcast eyes. She had a habit of sitting
silent with dropped eyes, which Jane could not bear. As she drank her
tea she watched her in spite of herself.
After a few minutes had passed, her appetite for bread and butter
deserted her. She got up and left the hall, looking pale.
The mental phases through which she went during the afternoon ended in
her determination to go down the avenue and to the water's side this
evening. It could be done while her ladyship and her guests were at
dinner. This evening the Vicar and his wife and daughter were dining at
the Manor.
Jane took in emotionally all the mysterious silence and dimness of the
long tree-pillared aisle, and felt a tremor as she walked down it,
trying to hold herself in hand by practical reflections half whispered.
"I'm just going to have a look, to make sure," she said, "silly or not.
I've got upset through not being able to help watching that woman, and
the way to steady my nerves is to make sure I'm just giving in to
foolishness."
She walked as fast as she could towards the water. She could see its
gleam in the dim light, but she must pass a certain tree before she
could see the little bridge itself.
"My goodness! What's that?" she said suddenly. It was something white,
which rose up as if from the ground, as if from the rushes growing at
the water's edge.
Just a second Jane stood, and choked, and then suddenly darted forward,
running as fast as she could. The white figure merely moved slowly away
among the trees. It did not run or seem startled, and as Jane ran she
caught it by its white drapery, and found herself, as she had known she
would, dragging at the garments of Ameerah. But Ameerah only turned
round and greeted her with a welcoming smile, mild enough to damp any
excitement.
"What are you doing here?" Jane demanded. "Why do you come to this
place?"
Ameerah answered her with simple fluency in Hindustani, with her manner
of not realising that she was speaking to a foreigner who could not
understand her. What she explained was that, having heard that Jane's
Mem Sahib came here to meditate on account of the stillness, she herself
had formed the habit of coming to indulge in prayer and meditation when
the place was deserted for the day. She commended the place to Jane, and
to Jane's mother, whom she believed to be holy persons given to
devotional exercises. Jane shook her.
"I don't understand a word you say," she cried. "You know I don't. Speak
in English."
Ameerah shook her head slowly, and smiled again with patience. She
endeavoured to explain in English which Jane was sure was worse than she
had ever heard her use before. Was it forbidden that a servant should
come to the water?
She was far too much for Jane, who was so unnerved that she burst into
tears.
"You are up to some wickedness," she sobbed; "I know you are. You're
past bearing. I'm going to write to people that's got the right to do
what I daren't. I'm going back to that bridge."
Ameerah looked at her with a puzzled amiability for a few seconds. She
entered into further apologies and explanations in Hindustani. In the
midst of them her narrow eyes faintly gleamed, and she raised a hand.
"They come to us. It is your Mem Sahib and her people. Hear them."
She spoke truly. Jane had miscalculated as to her hour, or the time
spent at the dinner-table had been shorter than usual. In fact, Lady
Walderhurst had brought her guests to see the young moon peer through
the lime-trees, as she sometimes did when the evening was warm.
Jane Cupp fled precipitately. Ameerah disappeared also, but without
precipitation or any sign of embarrassment.
* * * * *
"You look as if you had not slept well, Jane," Lady Walderhurst remarked
in the morning as her hair was being brushed. She had glanced into the
glass and saw that it reflected a pale face above her own, and that the
pale face had red rims to its eyes.
"I have been a bit troubled by a headache, my lady," Jane answered.
"I have something like a headache myself." Lady Walderhurst's voice had
not its usual cheerful ring. Her own eyes looked heavy. "I did not rest
well. I have not rested well for a week. That habit of starting from my
sleep feeling that some sound has disturbed me is growing on me. Last
night I dreamed again that someone touched my side. I think I shall be
obliged to send for Sir Samuel Brent."
"My lady," exclaimed Jane feverishly, "if you would--if you would."
Lady Walderhurst's look at her was nervous and disturbed.
"Do you--does your mother think I am not as well as I should be, Jane?"
she said.
Jane's hands were actually trembling.
"Oh no, my lady. Oh no! But if Sir Samuel could be sent for, or Lady
Maria Bayne, or--or his lordship--"
The disturbed expression of Lady Walderhurst's face changed to something
verging on alarm. It was true that she began to be horribly frightened.
She turned upon Jane, pallor creeping over her skin.
"Oh!" she cried, a sound of almost child-like fear and entreaty in her
voice. "I am sure you think I am ill, I am sure you do. What--what is
it?"
She leaned forward suddenly and rested her forehead on her hands, her
elbows supported by the dressing-table. She was overcome by a shock of
dread.
"Oh! if anything should go wrong!" in a faint half wail; "if anything
_could_ happen!" She could not bear the mere thought. It would break her
heart. She had been so happy. God had been so good.
Jane was inwardly convulsed with contrition commingled with anger at her
own blundering folly. Now it was she herself who had "upset" her
ladyship, given her a fright that made her pale and trembling. What did
she not deserve for being such a thoughtless fool. She might have known.
She poured forth respectfully affectionate protestations.
"Indeed, I beg your pardon, my lady. Indeed, it's only my silliness!
Mother was saying yesterday that she had never seen a lady so well and
in as good spirits. I have no right to be here if I make such mistakes.
Please, my lady--oh! might mother be allowed to step in a minute to
speak to you?"
Emily's colour came, back gradually. When Jane went to her mother, Mrs.
Cupp almost boxed her ears.
"That's just the way with girls," she said. "No more sense than a pack
of cats. If you can't keep quiet you'd better just give up. Of course
she'd think you meant they was to be sent for because we was certain she
was a dying woman. Oh my! Jane Cupp, get away!"
She enjoyed her little interview with Lady Walderhurst greatly. A woman
whose opinion was of value at such a time had the soundest reasons for
enjoying herself. When she returned to her room, she sat and fanned
herself with a pocket handkerchief and dealt judicially with Jane.
"What we've got to do," she said, "is to think, and think we will. Tell
her things outright we must not, until we've got something sure and
proved. Then we can call on them that's got the power in their hands. We
can't call on them till we can show them a thing no one can't deny. As
to that bridge, it's old enough to be easy managed, and look accidental
if it broke. You say she ain't going there to-day. Well, this very
night, as soon as it's dark enough, you and me will go down and have a
look at it. And what's more, we'll take a man with us. Judd could be
trusted. Worst comes to worst, we're only taking the liberty of making
sure it's safe, because we know it _is_ old and we're over careful."
As Jane had gathered from her, by careful and apparently incidental
inquiry, Emily had had no intention of visiting her retreat. In the
morning she had, in fact, not felt quite well enough. Her nightmare had
shaken her far more on its second occurring. The stealthy hand had
seemed not merely to touch, but to grip at her side, and she had been
physically unable to rise for some minutes after her awakening. This
experience had its physical and mental effects on her.
She did not see Hester until luncheon, and after luncheon she found her
to be in one of her strange humours. She was often in these strange
humours at this time. She wore a nervous and strained look, and
frequently seemed to have been crying. She had new lines on her forehead
between the eyebrows. Emily had tried in vain to rouse and cheer her
with sympathetic feminine talk. There were days when she felt that for
some reason Hester did not care to see her.
She felt it this afternoon, and not being herself at the high-water mark
of cheerfulness, she was conscious of a certain degree of
discouragement. She had liked her so much, she had wanted to be friends
with her and to make her life an easier thing, and yet she appeared
somehow to have failed. It was because she was so far from being a
clever woman. Perhaps she might fail in other things because she was not
clever. Perhaps she was never able to give to people what they wanted,
what they needed. A brilliant woman had such power to gain and hold
love.
After an hour or so spent in trying to raise the mental temperature of
Mrs. Osborn's beflowered boudoir, she rose and picked up her little
work-basket.
"Perhaps you would take a nap if I left you," she said. "I think I will
stroll down to the lake."
She quietly stole away, leaving Hester on her cushions.
Chapter Seventeen
A few minutes later a knock at the door being replied to by Hester's
curt "Come in!" produced the modest entry of Jane Cupp, who had come to
make a necessary inquiry of her mistress. "Her ladyship is not here; she
has gone out." Jane made an altogether involuntary step forward. Her
face became the colour of her clean white apron.
"Out!" she gasped.
Hester turned sharply round.
"To the lake," she said. "What do you mean by staring in that way?"
Jane did not tell her what she meant. She incontinently ran from the
room without any shadow of a pretence at a lady's maid's decorum.
She fled through the rooms, to make a short cut to the door opening on
to the gardens. Through that she darted, and flew across paths and
flowerbeds towards the avenue of limes.
"She shan't get to the bridge before me," she panted. "She shan't, she
shan't. I won't let her. Oh, if my breath will only hold out!"
She did not reflect that gardeners would naturally think she had gone
mad. She thought of nothing whatever but the look in Ameerah's downcast
eyes when the servants had talked of the bottomless water,--the eerie,
satisfied, sly look. Of that, and of the rising of the white figure from
the ground last night she thought, and she clutched her neat side as she
ran.
The Lime Avenue seemed a mile long, and yet when she was running down it
she saw Lady Walderhurst walking slowly under the trees carrying her
touching little basket of sewing in her hand. She was close to the
bridge.
"My lady! my lady!" she gasped out as soon as she dared. She could not
run screaming all the way. "Oh, my lady! if you please!"
Emily heard her and turned round. Never had she been much more amazed in
her life. Her maid, her well-bred Jane Cupp, who had not drawn an
indecorous breath since assuming her duties, was running after her
calling out to her, waving her hands, her face distorted, her voice
hysteric.
Emily had been just on the point of stepping on to the bridge, her hand
had been outstretched towards the rail. She drew back a step in alarm
and stood staring. How strange everything seemed to-day. She began to
feel choked and trembling.
A few seconds and Jane was upon her, clutching at her dress. She had so
lost her breath that she was almost speechless.
"My lady," she panted. "Don't set foot on it; don't--don't, till we're
sure."
"On--on what?"
Then Jane realised how mad she looked, how insane the whole scene was,
and she gave way to her emotions. Partly through physical exhaustion and
breathlessness, and partly through helpless terror, she fell on her
knees.