comes to you. There's things being plotted and planned that looks like
accidents. The bridge would look like an accident if part of it broke.
There's no bottom to the water. They were saying so yesterday, and _she_
sat listening. I found her here last night."
"She! Her!" Emily felt as if she was passing through another nightmare.
"Ameerah," wailed poor Jane. "White ones have no chance against black.
Oh, my lady!" her sense of the possibility that she might be making a
fool of herself after all was nearly killing her. "I believe she would
drive you to your death if she could do it, think what you will of me."
The little basket of needlework shook in Lady Walderhurst's hand. She
swallowed hard, and without warning sat down on the roots of a fallen
tree, her cheeks blanching slowly.
"Oh Jane!" she said in simple woe and bewilderment. "I don't understand
any of it. How could--how _could_ they want to hurt me!" Her innocence
was so fatuous that she thought that because she had been kind to them
they could not hate or wish to injure her.
But something for the first time made her begin to quail. She sat, and
tried to recover herself. She put out a shaking hand to the basket of
sewing. She could scarcely see it, because suddenly tears had filled her
eyes.
"Bring one of the men here," she said, after a few moments. "Tell him
that I am a little uncertain about the safety of the bridge."
She sat quite still while Jane was absent in search of the man. She held
her basket on her knee, her hand resting on it. Her kindly, slow-working
mind was wakening to strange thoughts. To her they seemed inhuman and
uncanny. Was it because good, faithful, ignorant Jane had been rather
nervous about Ameerah that she herself had of late got into a habit of
feeling as if the Ayah was watching and following her. She had been
startled more than once by finding her near when she had not been aware
of her presence. She had, of course, heard Hester say that native
servants often startled one by their silent, stealthy-seeming ways. But
the woman's eyes had frightened her. And she had heard the story about
the village girl.
She sat, and thought, and thought. Her eyes were fixed upon the
moss-covered ground, and her breath came quickly and irregularly several
times.
"I don't know what to do," she said. "I am sure--if it is true--I don't
know what to do."
The under-gardener's heavy step and Jane's lighter one roused her. She
lifted her eyes to watch the pair as they came. He was a big, young man
with a simple rustic face and big shoulders and hands.
"The bridge is so slight and old," she said to him, "that it has just
occurred to me that it might not be quite safe. Examine it carefully to
make sure."
The young man touched his forehead and began to look the supports over.
Jane watched him with bated breath when he rose to his feet.
"They're all right on this side, my lady," he said. "I shall have to get
in the boat to make sure of them that rest on the island."
He stamped upon the end nearest and it remained firm.
"Look at the railing well," said Lady Walderhurst. "I often stand and
lean on it and--and watch the sunset."
She faltered at this point, because she had suddenly remembered that
this was a habit of hers, and that she had often spoken of it to the
Osborns. There was a point on the bridge at which, through a gap in the
trees, a beautiful sunset was always particularly beautiful. It was the
right-hand rail facing these special trees she rested on when she
watched the evening sky.
The big, young gardener looked at the left-hand rail and shook it with
his strong hands.
"That's safe enough," he said to Jane.
"Try the other," said Jane.
He tried the other. Something had happened to it. It broke in his big
grasp. His sunburnt skin changed colour by at least three shades.
"Lord A'mighty!" Jane heard him gasp under his breath. He touched his
cap and looked blankly at Lady Walderhurst. Jane's heart seemed to
herself to roll over. She scarcely dared look at her mistress, but when
she took courage to do so, she found her so white that she hurried to
her side.
"Thank you, Jane," she said rather faintly. "The sky is so lovely this
afternoon that I meant to stop and look at it. I should have fallen into
the water, which they say has no bottom. No one would have seen or heard
me if you had not come."
She caught Jane's hand and held it hard. Her eyes wandered over the
avenue of big trees, which no one but herself came near at this hour. It
would have been so lonely, so lonely!
The gardener went away, still looking less ruddy than he had looked when
he arrived on the spot. Lady Walderhurst rose from her seat on the mossy
tree-trunk. She rose quite slowly.
"Don't speak to me yet, Jane," she said. And with Jane following her at
a respectful distance, she returned to the house and went to her room to
lie down.
There was nothing to prove that the whole thing was not mere chance,
mere chance. It was this which turned her cold. It was all impossible.
The little bridge had been entirely unused for so long a time, it had
been so slight a structure from the first; it was old, and she
remembered now that Walderhurst had once said that it must be examined
and strengthened if it was to be used. She had leaned upon the rail
often lately; one evening she had wondered if it seemed quite as steady
as usual. What could she say, whom could she accuse, because a piece of
rotten wood had given away.
She started on her pillow. It was a piece of rotten wood which had
fallen from the balustrade upon the stairs, to be seen and picked up by
Jane just before she would have passed down on her way to dinner. And
yet, what would she appear to her husband, to Lady Maria, to anyone in
the decorous world, if she told them that she believed that in a
dignified English household, an English gentleman, even a deposed heir
presumptive, was working out a subtle plot against her such as might
adorn a melodrama? She held her head in her hands as her mind depicted
to her Lord Walderhurst's countenance, Lady Maria's dubious, amused
smile.
"She would think I was hysterical," she cried, under her breath. "He
would think I was vulgar and stupid, that I was a fussy woman with
foolish ideas, which made him ridiculous. Captain Osborn is of his
family. I should be accusing him of being a criminal. And yet I might
have been in the bottomless pond, in the bottomless pond, and no one
would have known."
If it all had not seemed so incredible to her, if she could have felt
certain herself, she would not have been overwhelmed with this sense of
being baffled, bewildered, lost.
The Ayah who so loved Hester might hate her rival. A jealous native
woman might be capable of playing stealthy tricks, which, to her strange
mind, might seem to serve a proper end. Captain Osborn might not know.
She breathed again as this thought came to her. He could not know; it
would be too insane, too dangerous, too wicked.
And yet, if she had been flung headlong down the staircase, if the fall
had killed her, where would have been the danger for the man who would
only have deplored a fatal accident. If she had leaned upon the rail and
fallen into the black depths of water below, what could have been blamed
but a piece of rotten wood. She touched her forehead with her
handkerchief because it felt cold and damp. There was no way out. Her
teeth chattered.
"They may be as innocent as I am. And they may be murderers in their
hearts. I can prove nothing, I can prevent nothing. Oh! _do_ come home."
There was but one thought which remained clear in her mind. She must
keep herself safe--she must keep herself safe. In the anguish of her
trouble she confessed, by putting it into words, a thing which she had
not confessed before, and even as she spoke she did not realise that her
words contained confession.
"If I were to die now," she said with a touching gravity, "he would care
very much."
A few moments later she said, "It does not matter what happens to me,
how ridiculous or vulgar or foolish I seem, if I can keep myself
safe--until after. I will write to him now and ask him to try to come
back."
It was the letter she wrote after this decision which Osborn saw among
others awaiting postal, and which he stopped to examine.
Chapter Eighteen
Hester sat at the open window of her boudoir in the dark. She had
herself put out the wax candles, because she wanted to feel herself
surrounded by the soft blackness. She had sat through the dinner and
heard her husband's anxious inquiries about the rotten handrail, and had
watched his disturbed face and Emily's pale one. She herself had said
but little, and had been glad when the time came that she could decently
excuse herself and come away.
As she sat in the darkness and felt the night breath of the flowers in
the garden, she was thinking of all the murderers she had ever heard of.
She was reflecting that some of them had been quite respectable people,
and that all of them must have lived through a period in which they
gradually changed from respectable people to persons in whose brains a
thought had worked which once they would have believed impossible to
them, which they might have scouted the idea of their giving room to.
She was sure the change must come about slowly. At first it would seem
too mad and ridiculous, a sort of angry joke. Then the angry joke would
return again and again, until at last they let it stay and did not laugh
at it, but thought it over. Such things always happened because some one
wanted, or did not want, something very much, something it drove them
mad to think of being forced to live without, or with. Men who hated a
woman and could not rid themselves of her, who hated the sight of her
face, her eyes, her hair, the sound of her voice and step, and were
rendered insane by her nearness and the thought that they never could be
free from any of these things, had before now, commonplace or
comparatively agreeable men, by degrees reached the point where a knife
or a shot or a heavy blow seemed not only possible but inevitable.
People who had been ill-treated, people who had faced horrors through
want and desire, had reached the moment in which they took by force what
Fate would not grant them. Her brain so whirled that she wondered if she
was not a little delirious as she sat in the stillness thinking such
strange things.
For weeks she had been living under a strain so intense that her
feelings had seemed to cease to have any connection with what was
normal.
She had known too much; and yet she had been certain of nothing at all.
But she and Alec were like the people who began with a bad joke, and
then were driven and driven. It was impossible not to think of what
might come, and of what might be lost for ever. If the rail had not been
tried this afternoon, if big, foolish Emily Walderhurst had been lying
peacefully among the weeds to-night!
"The end comes to everyone," she said. "It would have been all over in a
few minutes. They say it isn't really painful."
Her lips quivered, and she pressed her hands tightly between her knees.
"That's a murderer's thought," she muttered querulously. "And yet I
wasn't a bad girl to begin with."
She began to see things. The chief thing was a sort of vision of how
Emily would have looked lying in the depths of the water among the
weeds. Her brown hair would have broken loose, and perhaps tangled
itself over her white face. Would her eyes be open and glazed, or half
shut? And her childish smile, the smile that looked so odd on the face
of a full-grown woman, would it have been fixed and seemed to confront
the world of life with a meek question as to what she had done to
people--why she had been drowned? Hester felt sure that was what her
helpless stillness would have expressed.
How happy the woman had been! To see her go about with her unconsciously
joyous eyes had sometimes been maddening. And yet, poor thing! why had
she not the right to be happy? She was always trying to please people
and help them. She was so good that she was almost silly. The day she
had brought the little things from London to The Kennel Farm, Hester
remembered that, despite her own morbid resentment, she had ended by
kissing her with repentant tears. She heard again, in the midst of her
delirious thoughts, the nice, prosaic emotion of her voice as she said:
"_Don't_ thank me--don't. Just let us _enjoy_ ourselves."
And she might have been lying among the long, thick weeds of the pond.
And it would not have been the accident it would have appeared to be. Of
that she felt sure. Brought face to face with this definiteness of
situation, she began to shudder.
She went out into the night feeling that she wanted air. She was not
strong enough to stand the realisation that she had become part of a web
into which she had not meant to be knitted. No; she had had her
passionate and desperate moments, but she had not meant things like
this. She had almost hoped that disaster might befall, she had almost
thought it possible that she would do nothing to prevent it--almost. But
some things were too bad.
She felt small and young and hopelessly evil as she walked in the dark
along a grass path to a seat under a tree. The very stillness of the
night was a horror to her, especially when once an owl called, and again
a dreaming bird cried in its nest.
She sat under the tree in the dark for at least an hour. The thick
shadow of the drooping branches hid her in actual blackness and
seclusion.
She said to herself later that some one of the occult powers she
believed in had made her go out and sit in this particular spot, because
there was a thing which was not to be, and she herself must come
between.
When she at last rose it was with panting breath. She stole back to her
room, and lighted with an unsteady hand a bedroom candle, whose flame
flickered upon a distorted, little dark face. For as she had sat under
the tree she had, after a while, heard whispering begin quite near her;
had caught, even in the darkness, a gleam of white, and had therefore
deliberately sat and listened.
* * * * *
There could be, to the purely normal geniality of Emily Walderhurst's
nature, no greater relief than the recognition that a cloud had passed
from the mood of another.
When Hester appeared the next morning at the breakfast-table, she had
emerged from her humour of the day before and was almost affectionate in
her amiability. The meal at an end, she walked with Emily in the garden.
She had never shown such interest in what pertained to her as she
revealed this morning. Something she had always before lacked Emily
recognised in her for the first time,--a desire to ask friendly
questions, to verge on the confidential. They talked long and without
reserve. And how pretty it was of the girl, Emily thought, to care so
much about her health and her spirits, to be so interested in the
details of her every-day life, even in the simple matter of the
preparation and serving of her food, as if the merest trifle was of
consequence. It had been unfair, too, to fancy that she felt no interest
in Walderhurst's absence and return. She had noticed everything closely,
and actually thought he ought to come back at once.
"Send for him," she said quite suddenly; "send for him now."
There was an eagerness expressed in the dark thinness of her face which
moved Emily.
"It is dear of you to care so much, Hester," she said. "I didn't know
you thought it mattered."
"He must come," said Hester. "That's all. Send for him."
"I wrote a letter yesterday," was Lady Walderhurst's meek rejoinder. "I
got nervous."
"So did I get nervous," said Hester; "so did I."
That she was disturbed Emily could see. The little laugh she ended her
words with had an excited ring in it.
During the Osborns' stay at Palstrey the two women had naturally seen a
good deal of each other, but for the next two days they were scarcely
separated at all. Emily, feeling merely cheered and supported by the
fact that Hester made herself so excellent a companion, was not aware of
two or three things. One was that Mrs. Osborn did not lose sight of her
unless at such times as she was in the hands of Jane Cupp.
"I may as well make a clean breast of it," the young woman said. "I have
a sense of responsibility about you that I haven't liked to speak of
before. It's half hysterical, I suppose, but it has got the better of
me."
"You feel responsible for _me_!" exclaimed Emily, with wondering eyes.
"Yes, I do," she almost snapped. "You represent so much. Walderhurst
ought to be here. I'm not fit to take care of you."
"I ought to be taking care of you," said Emily, with gentle gravity. "I
am the older and stronger. You are not nearly so well as I am."
Hester startled her by bursting into tears.
"Then do as I tell you," she said. "Don't go anywhere alone. Take Jane
Cupp with you. You have nearly had two accidents. Make Jane sleep in
your dressing-room."
Emily felt a dreary chill creep over her. That which she had felt in the
air when she had slowly turned an amazed face upon Jane in the Lime
Avenue, that sense of the strangeness of things again closed her in.
"I will do as you wish," she answered.
But before the next day closed all was made plain to her, all the
awfulness, all the cruel, inhuman truth of things which seemed to lose
their possibility in the exaggeration of proportion which made their
incongruousness almost grotesque.
The very prettiness of the flowered boudoir, the very softness of the
peace in the velvet spread of garden before the windows, made it even
more unreal.
That day, the second one, Emily had begun to note the new thing. Hester
was watching her, Hester was keeping guard. And as she realised this,
the sense of the abnormalness of things grew, and fear grew with it. She
began to feel as if a wall were rising around her, built by unseen
hands.
The afternoon, an afternoon of deeply golden sun, they had spent
together. They had read and talked. Hester had said most. She had told
stories of India,--curious, vivid, interesting stories, which seemed to
excite her.
At the time when the sunlight took its deepest gold the tea-tray was
brought in. Hester had left the room a short time before the footman
appeared with it, carrying it with the air of disproportionate solemnity
with which certain male domestics are able to surround the smallest
service. The tea had been frequently served in Hester's boudoir of late.
During the last week, however, Lady Walderhurst's share of the meal had
been a glass of milk. She had chosen to take it because Mrs. Cupp had
suggested that tea was "nervous." Emily sat down at the table and filled
a cup for Hester. She knew she would return in a few moments, so set the
cup before Mrs. Osborn's place and waited. She heard the young woman's
footsteps outside, and as the door opened she lifted the glass of milk
to her lips.
She was afterwards absolutely unable to describe to herself clearly what
happened the next moment. In fact, it was the next moment that she saw
Hester spring towards her, and the glass of milk had been knocked from
her hand and rolled, emptying itself, upon the floor. Mrs. Osborn stood
before her, clenching and unclenching her hands.
"Have you drunk any of it?" she demanded.
"No," Emily answered. "I have not."
Hester Osborn dropped into a chair and leaned forward, covering her face
with her hands. She looked like a woman on the verge of an outbreak of
hysteria, only to be held in check by a frenzied effort.
Lady Walderhurst, quite slowly, turned the colour of the milk itself.
But she did nothing but sit still and gaze at Hester.
"Wait a minute." The girl was trying to recover her breath. "Wait till I
can hold myself still. I am going to tell you now. I am going to tell
you."
"Yes," Emily answered faintly.
It seemed to her that she waited twenty minutes before another word was
spoken, that she sat quite that long looking at the thin hands which
seemed to clutch the hidden face. This was a mistake arising from the
intensity of the strain upon her nerves. It was scarcely five minutes
before Mrs. Osborn lowered her hands and laid them, pressed tightly palm
to palm, between her knees.
She spoke in a low voice, such a voice as a listener outside could not
have heard.
"Do you know," she demanded, "what you represent to us--to me and to my
husband--as you sit there?"
Emily shook her head. The movement of disclaimer was easier than speech.
She felt a sort of exhaustion.
"I don't believe you do," said Hester. "You don't seem to realise
anything. Perhaps it's because you are so innocent, perhaps it's because
you are so foolish. You represent the thing that we have the right to
_hate_ most on earth."
"Do _you_ hate me?" asked Emily, trying to adjust herself mentally to
the mad extraordinariness of the situation, and at the same time
scarcely understanding why she asked her question.
"Sometimes I do. When I do not I wonder at myself." The girl paused a
second, looked down, as if questioningly, at the carpet, and then,
lifting her eyes again, went on in a dragging, half bewildered voice:
"When I do _not_, I actually believe it is because we are both--women
together. Before, it was different."
The look which Walderhurst had compared to "that of some nice animal in
the Zoo" came into Emily's eyes as two honest drops fell from them.
"Would _you_ hurt me?" she faltered. "Could _you_ let other people hurt
me?"
Hester leaned further forward in her chair, widening upon her such
hysterically insistent, terrible young eyes as made her shudder.
"Don't you _see_?" she cried. "_Can't_ you see? But for _you_ my son
would be what Walderhurst is--my son, not yours."
"I understand," said Emily. "I understand."
"Listen!" Mrs. Osborn went on through her teeth. "Even for that, there
are things I haven't the nerve to stand. I have thought I could stand
them. But I can't. It does not matter why. I am going to tell you the
truth. You represent too much. You have been too great a temptation.
Nobody meant anything or planned anything at first. It all came by
degrees. To see you smiling and enjoying everything and adoring that
stilted prig of a Walderhurst put ideas into people's heads, and they
grew because every chance fed them. If Walderhurst would come home--"
Lady Walderhurst put out her hand to a letter which lay on the table.
"I heard from him this morning," she said. "And he has been sent to the
Hills because he has a little fever. He must be quiet. So you see he
_cannot_ come yet."
She was shivering, though she was determined to keep still.
"What was in the milk?" she asked.
"In the milk there was the Indian root Ameerah gave the village girl.
Last night as I sat under a tree in the dark I heard it talked over.
Only a few native women know it."
There was a singular gravity in the words poor Lady Walderhurst spoke in
reply.
"That," she said, "would have been the cruelest thing of all."
Mrs. Osborn got up and came close to her.
"If you had gone out on Faustine," she said, "you would have met with
_an accident_. It might or might not have killed you. But it would have
been an accident. If you had gone downstairs before Jane Cupp saw the
bit of broken balustrade you might have been killed--by accident again.
If you had leaned upon the rail of the bridge you would have been
drowned, and no human being could have been accused or blamed."
Emily gasped for breath, and lifted her head as if to raise it above the
wall which was being slowly built round her.
"Nothing will be done which can be proved," said Hester Osborn. "I have
lived among native people, and know. If Ameerah hated me and I could not
get rid of her I should die, and it would all seem quite natural."
She bent down and picked up the empty glass from the carpet.
"It is a good thing it did not break," she said, as she put it on the
tray. "Ameerah will think you drank the milk and that nothing will hurt
you. You escape them always. She will be frightened."
As she said it she began to cry a little, like a child.
"Nothing will save _me_," she said. "I shall have to go back, I shall
have to go back!"
"No, no!" cried Emily.
The girl swept away her tears with the back of a clenched hand.
"At first, when I hated you," she was even petulant and plaintively
resentful, "I thought I could let it go on. I watched, and watched, and
bore it. But the strain was too great. I broke down. I think I broke
down one night, when something began to beat like a pulse against my
side."