"I found it," said Professor Endorwick, laying Numbo Jumbo on the
drawing-room table at Roederay, "as I was coming over the moor this
morning, in order, Lady Maud, to finish a delightful walking tour by a
still more delightful visit. Oddly enough, I found something similar
on the Grada Sands yesterday, but this, I fear, is genuine, and
therefore quite uninteresting. I have it in my knapsack if you will
allow me. There! from the fracture you will observe that it has formed
part of a handle, probably the paddle of a war canoe, as this
grotesque, which represents the savage conception of Aete or Fate, is
generally used for that purpose. It has drifted here, doubtless in the
Gulf Stream, is therefore, as I said before, uninteresting, since most
museums possess something of the sort. This, however, is very
different. It is, you will again observe, of very recent construction.
This, joined to the fact that I found it on a _harp_ or Viking's tomb
famous in local tradition, points, to my mind, conclusively towards
the survival amongst this primitive people of some, if not the
original, cult of Fate. I need scarcely say that nothing is more
difficult to track home than the faint footstep of a discredited
belief, simply because rash inquiry results in prompt denial. I must
therefore be careful, and I will ask you also, for the present at
least, to preserve a kindly silence on my discovery."
He looked round his company as if it were a full meeting of the
British Association after lunch. As a matter of fact, it consisted of
Lady Maud, her husband, and Eustace Gordon.
They had barely finished breakfast when the professor, ignorant of
their discomfort, walked in on them according to previous arrangement.
Mr. Wilson, a slight, pleasant-looking man with a short beard covering
his chin,--or want of chin,--had been moving restlessly from window to
fireplace and back again during this speech, now drumming with his
fingers on the sill, now transferring his attention to a fisherman's
barometer on the mantelpiece, again slipping his hands to his pockets
as if to force himself to quiet. Lady Maud, meanwhile, stood by the
table looking at Numbo Jumbo and the despised original.
"So you think the one with the eyes most interesting? and I don't."
She raised the flotsam jetsam in her slender hands, scanning it more
closely. "I wonder if you would give me this, professor," she said
suddenly. "I've taken a great fancy to it."
"My dear lady! I am only relieved to find you have not chosen the
other," he replied with a gallant bow. "In either case, however, your
desire is my law."
"I believe that beast of a thing is going down again," muttered Mr.
Wilson from the mantelpiece. "The _Clansman_ will never be able to
come in to-morrow. It's too bad of Hooper, upon my soul it is."
"My dear fellow," remonstrated Eustace, "anything will go down if it
is continually thumped. It's a lovely day, a bit blowy, but it always
blows on this coast. The warmth of the Gulf Stream."
"Ah, confound the Gulf Stream!"
Lady Maud turned to her husband in surprise.
"What is the matter to-day, Edward? I didn't know a valet was such a
hero to his master. Why, Josephine hasn't done a hand's turn since she
caught sight of the steamer at Oban, but I don't complain."
He muttered something about Hooper having been with him for years and
stood looking gloomily out of the window with his back turned to
everybody.
Eustace Gordon gave a half-contemptuous shrug of his shoulders and a
look at his cousin.
"Come out and see the ghillies, Wilson," he said. "By the way, I sent
to the inn for whiskey this morning; you see, professor, nothing can
be done without it in these parts, so I hope you are not a total
abstainer."
The professor coughed gently. "I believe I am on principle. But having
observed the fact you mention, I invariably carry a flask with me on
my walking tours, merely, of course, as a means of acquiring
information."
Mr. Wilson burst into sudden boisterous laughter. "A good joke that.
Come along! We all have a thirst for knowledge on us this morning."
Lady Maud, left alone with the two carven images, took up the sea-waif
and carried it off to her own sanctum, where she stuck it in the place
of honour on the mantelshelf. Then, walking to the window, she looked
out on pale green jostling waves and purple-green swaying heather.
"I wonder when Louisa will turn up," she thought irrelevantly. "After
all, she would have done better to come on with us and get it over,
instead of waiting in the yacht for calmer weather. Suppose it were
never to calm down?"
She threw open the window with a reckless laugh. The fresh wind raced
in, bellying the curtains like sails, catching her slender figure with
such force that she was fain to cling to the sash as to a mast. So
standing, with that background of surging sea, and one hand keeping
her hair from her eyes, she looked as if she were adrift and searching
the horizon for some familiar landmark.
"Here's luck, and wissing you may all go back as you came, without any
mistakes whatever."
It was the spokesman ghillie from below, toasting the new tenant. She
looked down to meet Eustace Gordon's amused eyes raised to hers; she
smiled back at him, and, closing the window, returned to the
fireplace. There, under the eye of fate personified in the war paddle,
the phrase "go back as you came" struck her as a curious wish, perhaps
even a somewhat infelicitous one, considering the discomfort of their
arrival. Whereat she laughed, as she did at most things. Not all, for
Lady Maud, despite many attempts, had never been able to get the whip
hand of her conscience. She had to _menager_ it by driving round
anything at which she thought it likely to shy. Her marriage to Mr.
Wilson had been approached in this circuitous way until its manifest
advantages completely obscured the central fact that she really loved
her cousin Eustace. As yet repentance had not come to her; indeed, it
came hardly to one so full of common sense and worldly wisdom as she
was, but it came sometimes. Once as a child it had come suddenly in
the sunlit solitary room into which she had been set apart for
reflection, and she had knelt down to say naively, "Oh, God, I'm sorry
now; but please don't make me sorry again, for I don't like it."
That, briefly, was still her attitude towards the ideal. She did not
love her husband, but she thought him sufficiently gentlemanlike and
pleasing to save herself regret. She did, or rather she had, loved
Eustace, but the idea of either of them permitting that past folly to
interfere with the present they had deliberately chosen was absurd. To
begin with, they would see little of each other, and when they did
they would carefully avoid the renewal of any confidential relations;
that was the great safety in these cases; for Lady Maud viewed the
matter dispassionately, as a case.
She came down to dinner that evening in a pale plush teagown, with
long sleeves falling back from her bare arms, and smiled at
everything. At the fact that she got on perfectly without Josephine's
help; at the furtive way in which Kirsty set down the dinner, as if it
were a bomb, and she in a hurry to escape the explosion; at her
husband's continued anxiety about the weather; at the professor's
profuse apologies for having intruded on them so inopportunely.
"Not at all," she said gaily; "you will make a fourth at whist; Edward
loves a rubber."
"I can't play to-night," replied her husband. "I've a headache."
"You do look a little flushed; perhaps it is the wind."
"The wind!" he echoed petulantly; "of course it's the wind. Did you
ever hear anything like it, Endorwick? I swear I never slept a wink
last night, what with it and that confounded sea. It is enough to
drive a fellow distracted."
"You are as bad as Josephine," laughed his wife. "She has been in
hysterics all day until Miss Macdonald's cook gave her a whole tumbler
of hot whiskey and water. Since then she has been asleep."
"We have all been trying that remedy," put in Eustace. "What with the
men coming in, and the boats being engaged, we shall want more whiskey
to-morrow, Wilson."
"No, we shan't," retorted his host quickly; "I mean it's beastly
stuff, you know. I never take anything but claret myself."
"Awfully difficult to get decent claret nowadays," remarked Eustace
with the ease, to him so delightfully new, of the rich man who
quarrels with the supply and not the price. So the topic passed.
"I'll have a cigar and go to bed; I didn't sleep a bit last night,"
said Mr. Wilson shortly after they returned to the bare drawing-room,
guiltless of all decoration, where Lady Maud's Parisian teagown looked
so oddly out of place.
"Take some hot whiskey and water," laughed his wife. "Won't you all go
to the smoking-room? You must be tired, professor, after your long
walk."
But the learned man's social beliefs forbade cigars when a charming
woman was the alternative, so he elected to remain. Being in reality
much fatigued, however, he shortly afterwards gave way to the
seductions of semi-darkness and an arm-chair. Semi-darkness because
Kirsty's lamp smoking horribly, they preferred the light of the
blazing peat fire. Outside the wind crooned round the house,--a
lullaby to ears acquainted with its other notes, but to those
accustomed to the stillness of the south, a banshee wail of coming
trouble. With the firelight playing on the jet agraffes which held the
cunning draperies on her gleaming bust and arms, Lady Maud was a
picture few men could look on absolutely unmoved; but if Eustace
Gordon felt the charm of her beauty, he gave no sign of it as yet.
They sate there in the semi-darkness side by side, sometimes silent,
sometimes talking indifferently of indifferent subjects. Alone, as
utterly alone in the world as if they two were the only man and woman
in it; for the barrier which luxury raises between one human being and
another had given way. Supposing, for instance, the butler, instead of
bobbing up and down on the Minch in the _Clansman_, had been at his
post, would they have been sitting in semi-darkness uninterrupted by
inroads for coffee cups, peats, and candles? Again, would any really
high-class butler have permitted Professor Endorwick to snooze
undisturbed in his chair, for two hours on end? Not that he did any
harm by his slumbers; he might have awakened at any moment and joined
unhesitatingly in the desultory talk of those two. True enough; yet
when, at last, Eustace did rouse the learned man by lighting Lady
Maud's candle, they both felt that the tete-a-tete had not left them
quite as it found them; that in some of those half-indifferent
ordinary remarks a virtue had gone out of them.
She took the light from him, decidedly, with a refusal of his offer to
pilot her along the dark passages; angry with herself for the very
thought, she still felt that it would be wiser to say good-night here
under the professor's eye; and as she went up the dim staircase, she
paused to give a glance at the sea with a wonder as to when Louisa
would find calm or courage enough to attempt the voyage. In a vague
way, she recognized that things would go more comfortably if she were
there. But beyond a sense of motion in the deep grey plane stretching
away to a paler grey horizon, she could see nothing. The tide was
flowing one way or another; that much was certain.
She opened the door of her dressing-room softly, so as not to disturb
her husband should he have fallen asleep. A great fire burnt bravely
in her little sitting-room beyond, and something in the unusual
silence of it all enhanced its comfort in her eyes. If Josephine had
been awaiting her as usual, she could not have put off the task of
undressing in favour of sheer idleness by the fire. Her husband was
right; something in that rhythmical surge of the sea made one not
exactly restless, but on the alert; disinclined for action, yet
prepared for it. A foolish idea, since what could be going to happen
to the small household already, for the most part, asleep? The
professor would have taken the first opportunity of recommencing that
snooze legitimately in his bed, and even Eustace,--why would her
thoughts run on Eustace? Irritated at her own self-consciousness, she
took up a book impatiently. It interested her, and, by and by, she
turned for the second volume, to find that it must have been left in
the travelling bag which Kirsty's ignorance had put in the bedroom.
Shading the light carefully, she passed through the dressing-room, and
so into the room beyond, giving a tentative glance at the bed as she
entered, lest she should disturb the sleeper. It was empty. Her hand
fell from the light; she looked round the room in surprise, and the
next moment was on her knees beside a figure on the floor,--a figure
which even in her first alarm brought back a horrible memory.
"Edward! what is the matter? Are you ill?"
Once, as a slip of a girl out blackberrying, she had come upon a tipsy
tramp in a ditch; a beast of a man who had met her innocent
benevolence by stumbling to his feet, pursuing her as far as his feet
would carry him. This was her solitary personal experience of
drunkenness, and something in her husband's look and attitude revived
the dread which had remained with her ever since. Yet he might be
ill--very, very ill--
"Edward! what is it?"
This time he raised an unsteady arm against the candle she held to his
face, and she shrank back, shaking all over. Her first impulse was
that of civilization,--to ring for help, at least for company. But
what good would that do in an empty house? Josephine, until other
women came to share her fears, had elected to sleep in a great
chamber on the upper storey. Besides, what good would she be? Kirsty
slept outside with the other farm servants. Eustace! no, no! not
Eustace,--not now at any rate,--not till she was certain. There was
the cook, of course; people in that rank of life were accustomed--oh,
no! no! it was not possible. What a wretch she was to harbour such
suspicions, when he might be ill--perhaps dying. With this protest in
her mind, her rich draperies caught over her arm, the candle flaring,
guttering, almost out in the swift search, she made her way to the
unknown regions beyond the swing door, which separated work from
leisure. Here? No! that must be the pantry. There? No! that was the
gun-room. So, peering in at each room, she went along the stone
passages till suddenly a door right in front of her opened, and
Eustace Gordon came out, with a candle in his hand. He had been
sitting up over the smoking-room fire, impelled, as she had been, to
wakefulness by something, he knew not what.
"Maud! Maud, my darling! What is it? What is the matter?"
She forgot everything in the comfort of companionship as, still
shaking with fear, she went swiftly to his side.
"Edward. I think he is ill. Oh, Eustace, I am so frightened!"
And he in his turn, taken utterly by surprise, seemed to forget
everything save that the woman he loved passionately was there beside
him. His thoughts had been so full of her, nothing but her, and now--
"Oh, come! please come; he is ill. I know he is ill."
"Yes! I am coming," he said with an effort at self-control. "Where is
he--in your room?"
Then, with his arm round her, they went back through the silent house
together. Those two alone. Yet not, it seemed to her, so much alone as
when they stood at last with that drunken figure lying on the floor
between them. She knew the truth at once in his quick exclamation, and
then everything under sun and stars seemed to slip away and leave them
face to face. "Eustace and she." "Eustace and me." The low rush of the
waves caught the refrain and repeated it ceaselessly.
"Don't be alarmed; you had better go away."
She heard the words as in a dream, scarcely recognizing the voice in
its harsh passion. "Stay, he shall not remain here; not here in your
room." Then she felt his hands grip hers, and the voice rang with
fierce resentment.
"Maud! Maud! that this should have come to you--to you of all people.
By heaven, it is too much. I will not bear it."
She laughed suddenly and broke from him. "You mean that he has
taken too much whiskey. Well! plenty of men do that, and you others
think--think none--none the worse." Then she broke down, flinging her
arms across the bed by which she had been standing. "Oh, my God! what
shall I do? what shall I do?"
Her outburst calmed him.
"Go into the other room, dear; I will call some one."
She turned on him as she knelt like a wild animal at bay.
"No! not the servants! no one shall know. I will not have it. Let me
help. I am quite strong."
"Do you think I'd let you touch him?" he burst out. "Go! I'll manage."
She crept away, cowed by his vehemence, overcome by the desire to obey
which subdues most women when the command is from one they love. Back
to the fire she had left so short a time ago. It was dull now, but a
touch sent the responsive flames leaping up the chimney. Would any
amount of care restore that confidence in herself which but an hour
ago had defied fate? Eustace and she--Eustace and me. What evil chance
was this?
She started from a maze of confused fear at his knock at her door.
"A light, please. You have no bed here, and none of the other rooms
are fit for you to-night; so I have brought this. I had to leave
him--there."
"Why should you trouble?" she asked drearily, with lack-lustre eyes on
his burden of blankets and pillows. "I can so easily sit up; it must
be near morning now."
He gave her a look so full of passionate adoration that her eyes fell
before it.
"Do you think I am going to let you suffer one little bit--one atom of
discomfort because of _him?_ No, that shall not be; you shall never
suffer."
"How can you help it?"
"How can you ask? We may have made a mistake, Maud; perhaps we
_hav'n't_ God knows. But if we have, why then--" He came over to where
she was standing and took her hands in his. So they stood, those two
alone, with nothing between them save a conscience which could be
turned aside; every barrier raised by the world broken down by a
strange fate, by a mere turn of the tide.
"Good-night, dear," he said, stooping to kiss her.
She made no reply, no protest; perhaps in her heart of hearts she knew
that he said the truth. That if it was a mistake, why then--
The waves caught up that refrain also, as she lay with wide, sleepless
eyes on the little camp-bed with which his care had provided her. "It
is a mistake--you shall not suffer--it is a mistake--you shall not
suffer."