IN OUTER DARKNESS.
And yet it was not such a phantom after all! Inside were women in satin
gowns, sitting at their ease among lights and flowers and frivolous
talk. Outside in the damp chill of the autumn rain stood another woman,
raising herself uncomfortably to the level of that unblinded window.
Cold to the bone, sick with envy and despair she saw the lighted room
as the stage at a theater, where she should have been among the actors,
but had been cast out into the pit.
Oh, the night, and the rain! What a fool she had been to come out in
her house dress without a mackintosh; she would be wet to the skin.
Suddenly, fiercely, she knew she did not care; and she raised herself
on tiptoe on the stone terrace, clinging with one trembling hand to
the sharp stonework round the window. It was senseless, useless, yet
she must see. And, perhaps, if luck were in her way, if she came night
after night, might see something that, if it did not turn Levallion to
her again, might at least turn him from some one else.
There was Levallion with his back to her. She had tried the other
side of the room first and left it hurriedly for fear of his eyes.
And over his shoulder, opposite him, she could see the girl who had
supplanted her; whom she--Hester Murray--had helped to do it. A sheer
physical pang made her move back from the window. Lady Levallion in her
ivory and orange, her exquisite young throat and arms bare, her face
immaculately fresh and young, was not a sight the woman who shivered
in the rain could bear to look on. Ten years ago she had been within
an ace of sitting in her place; a year ago would have been hand in
glove with all that well-dressed company who surrounded her. To-night
she knew quite well that not one of them but would have cut her in
the park. For things had come out! Her not being asked to Levallion’s
wedding had set a match to the train, and poor, kindly, drunken Bob
Murray had made a scene one night before a lot of people, and said
things that made even Hester’s gods of money and smartness look at her
askance. He had named no names, it was true; but he had said quite
enough. And then he had departed from her house, from her and her boy
forever; saying they were no concern of his. And though Levallion did
not believe her, for excellent reasons, when she told him she had no
money, it was quite true. Her debts--that she had made sure would be
paid for her--had swallowed up all she possessed. It took all she
could scrape to keep her boy at school, and her tenancy of the raw new
bungalow in Levallion’s own village was her last throw, her forlorn
hope. When he was tired of his new toy, perhaps he might come back to
her; at all events she would give him the chance and trust to luck to
pay her rent!
But she was not thinking of those things now. Only that her downfall
had been all her own fault. A little carelessness, an unskilful lie
found out, and her life had toppled about her ears. And even this
marriage of Levallion’s was partly her work. She could still see
Ravenel Annesley’s face as it looked in the glass the day she had told
that mad lie about Adrian Gordon.
“The girl cared then,” she thought, pressing her hand to her burning
eyes. “And he’s here still. If she cares now Levallion will get rid
of her. I know him. Oh, I hope she’ll care! I wonder what there was
between them, and if Sylvia told the truth about their meaning to get
married.” Once more she raised herself to peer through the barren
window, and saw Adrian Gordon plainly enough to catch with a fierce
leap of her heart how very ill he looked. “He may die yet! But it would
be better if he lived, perhaps, and made love to his old flame,” with
the coarse thought of a woman who habitually speaks daintily. “If he
does Levallion shall see it, shall----” She had been so occupied with
Adrian as not to notice that two faces, Lady Levallion’s and Lord
Chayter’s, were turned curiously in her direction, but she felt their
eyes with sudden intuition and moved swiftly away into the dark. It was
no part of her schemes to be seen looking at Levallion’s dinner-party
like a dismissed servant.
“All that for her,” she thought bitterly, “and nothing for me and the
boy! I would have done better to have stuck to Bob. He never drank till
I ran away from him; he would have been kind to me. Oh, Levallion’s a
devil! a devil!” It was all she could do not to cry it aloud. “If I
can’t get anything out of him, I’ll be even with him. I’ll find some
way to make him feel. If I know anything of faces that pink-and-white
girl won’t be able to keep away from her old lover. And then we’ll
see. Levallion in a rage would do anything, anything! Oh! I’m not done
yet, I’m not despairing yet. Not with Adrian Gordon in the house and
Levallion in love with his wife. Oh, my God!” and this time she spoke
in a dreadful croaking whisper. “What a fool I was ever to imagine for
one instant that he was in love with me!”
She drew away into the scant shelter of an evergreen, and pushed her
wet, uncurled hair out of her eyes. She had no motive for staying here
shivering and drenched, but the air and the rain even were better than
sitting alone by her solitary fireside, when no one of all the people
she had ever asked to dinner would dream of coming to see her. Once
start the truth about a woman who lives by her wits, and a hundred
things true and untrue come up to confirm it. Hester Murray’s pitcher
had gone once too often to the well; it was broken for good and all
now. And Levallion, who had once been her slave, had forbidden her to
come within his gates.
“Well, he can do it,” she thought defiantly, “but he can’t make me
obey him! I’ll try one more window and then I’ll go. I don’t want to
kill myself.” And the sharp shiver that went through her made her move
hastily through the darkness. It was odd, but the drip of the rain from
the house made her think of earth falling into a grave. It was ghostly,
terrifying to lurk outside in the dark, while women no better than she
sat at their ease on the other side of a window-pane.
Stumbling, for all her slim grace; weary, for all the passion that
burned in her, she made her way round the house in the pitchy darkness
that had somehow got on her nerves. There was a little alcove in the
drawing-room, whose modern French window reached the floor--it was odd
how well Mrs. Murray knew the house--it would do no harm to glance
in there, if the blind was up. They would be coming out from dinner
soon; and she might as well see all she could before going back to that
lonely house where no one ever came. And once more that pang at her
heart sickened her. All this might have been hers once, and had been
thrown away.
There was no standing on tiptoe to reach this second window. Before she
neared it she saw the square of light it flung on the grass, saw the
convenient rose-bush which would shield her from any one inside. And if
there had been any one to see the fierce white face, so changed from
that of the Hester Murray who had been all smiles and softness, they
might have shrunk away as if they saw an evil spirit.
“Ah!” she drew in her breath sharply, for she had builded better than
she knew.
Dinner was over; the men were coming into the drawing-room; one, with
his arm in a sling, coming straight to this alcove, unconscious, though
Hester did not know it, that it already held his hostess looking for
a book for which the duchess had asked her. He had sat down wearily
before he saw the gleam of orange and ivory the watcher outside had
seen long ago, as she saw Lady Levallion drop the just-found book and
turn to him quickly, breathlessly.
Yet her words might have been shouted on the housetops; there was no
need for Mrs. Murray to strain her ears to catch those compromising
utterances through the glass.
“Won’t you go to bed? You look so tired!”
He nodded. He could hardly bear to look at her whom once he had never
wanted out of his sight.
“I’ll go directly. I meant to go away to-morrow, but the doctor won’t
let me travel till the end of the week.” His eyes on her wistfully,
saying what his lips dared not--that it was not his fault that he was
making things so hard for her.
“He’s quite right,” she answered, for the benefit of any one who might
be outside the curtained recess. “We are very glad to have you,” but
the hard-held look of her face told Gordon what he knew--that the words
were a mockery.
Mrs. Murray remembered suddenly that she had not seen Levallion come
into the room. An unreasoning and instinctive terror caught her heart,
and sent her noiselessly, invisibly in her dark dress, yards away from
the lighted window. And just in time.
Levallion, sauntering with apparent aimlessness, an Inverness cape
thrown over his shoulder, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, came round
the corner of the house, Lord Chaytor’s recital of the half-seen face
at the window having set him wondering if it were real or not. But he
had seen no one, and in front of the window he stopped and lit his
cigarette, deciding Chaytor had looked upon more champagne than was
good for him.
His unseen neighbor slipped behind him, paused for one second to look
under his upraised arm before she took to her heels. And both of
them saw the same sight. A girl turning from a man with a curious,
pitiful gesture, stopped half-way; and the man, left alone, covering
his haggard eyes with his hand. Levallion turned like a flash and had
Hester Murray by the elbow.