The day's hunting was over.
Of the hundreds who had jostled each other in the first run, a
disreputable few survived, pulling up after that last gallop. They
grinned contentedly, drawing out their watches. Thirty-five minutes
from the wood; a straight fox and elbow-room. It had been worth
stopping out for, though now the dusk was thickening fast, and the
huntsman was calling off his hounds.
"Where's Rackham?" asked one man, peering into the hollow.
"Gone home. I saw his back as we came through Pickwell."
"That wasn't Rackham. That was Bond, hurrying home to tea."
"He's probably come to grief. His horse had had about enough when I
lost him."
Another man popped his head over the hedge that had worsted him. His
hat was stove in, and his tired animal was blowing on the farther side.
"_He's_ all right," he said. "The devil looks after his own. I turned
the most horrible somersault back yonder, through my horse catching his
leg in a binder; and before I could pick myself up, over shoots
Rackham, practically on the top of us. If he'd even given me time to
roll into the ditch!--Down he went to the water.... I wish I could
think he was swimming in it."
"He's not far, anyhow. Hark to him. I'd know that laugh of his a mile
off. There he goes--'Haw, haw, haw!'--all by himself, in the valley."
They turned their heads to listen, with a broadening and sympathetic
grin, as the dim outline of a horseman took shape in the
semi-obscurity, travelling upwards. It wasn't at all unlike Rackham to
turn up like that, though there hadn't been a sign of him till they
heard his laughter. The wonder would have been if he had let himself
be beaten altogether. What obstinacy had kept him going was explained
by the spur marks on his horse's sides as he brushed through a gap and
took stock of the diminished party, the handful that had, by a minute
or two, outstripped him.
"Only the tough 'uns in it," he said. "It wasn't bad. Has the fox
dipped into the sunset and left you staring? Where are we? We must
feel our way home, or let the horses smell it out."
"He's run into a drain. The usual end. What was the joke?" asked the
nearest man. Rackham pulled out his yellow silk handkerchief, and
twisted it round his throat. He was hot, and the air was clammy. With
that, and his wild eyes, and his sandy moustache, he looked like a
handsome bandit.
"It's turning cold," he said. "What? Didn't you hear the plaintive
toot of a motor lying in wait for the man who sells pills? I'm morally
certain the millionaire is feebly chasing his hunter round and round
that big field with the mole-hills in it, miles and miles behind. I
suppose the chauffeur had his orders; but it would be a charity to hint
that following hounds is the worst way to pick up his master."
"Didn't somebody catch his horse?"
"Oh, I did, and chucked him the reins; but I didn't see him get on to
him. I'll bet the idiot let him go."
"Do him good. He'll probably sit on a gate and pass the time inventing
another pill."
"Awful if he's benighted, and all the ghosts of all who swallowed the
other pills pop up screeching----!"
"Poor devil; he will have a time of it, with the mole-hills and the
thistles, and all those ghosts."
The picture called up was upsetting to the general gravity, and they
dispersed, chuckling in the increasing twilight. A division made for
the turnpike, with here and there an individual branching courageously
into a bridle road; and the larger half halted under a signpost that
stretched illegible arms east and west in the lane. It was pleasant to
linger a minute or two, lighting up, guessing at their direction. But
Rackham kept on.
"That's not your way, Rackham," one man called after him.
The match flickered at his cigar, and went out as he threw it in the
road. His horse was walking on with his head down, guided by the
rider's knees.
"Right," he shouted back. "It isn't. Is that you, Parsley? I nearly
jumped on you, didn't I?"
"You did," said one of the dawdling group. "He has been complaining."
"Well, if a fellow will sit down unexpectedly before you, like a hen
under a motor, how can you dodge him? Teach that lazy brute of yours
to lift up his hind legs, Parsley. Do you never hit him?"
"I say," called the first man. "Come back. Where are you going?" But
Rackham pursued his wrong road untroubled.
"He can make Melton that way, if he likes," said one of those who were
looking after him. "I daresay he means to call in on Lady Henrietta.
He told me he had a message from her, asking him to come over, but he
wasn't going to miss a day's hunting to see what she was up to."
"I thought they were at daggers drawn."
"In a manner of speaking," said the first, dropping his voice a little;
"but outwardly they are civil. Of course, she hates him coming in for
poor Barnaby's property, and I know he was at the bottom of that row
that made Barnaby rush abroad."
"Ah, I remember, Rackham flirted furiously with Julia----"
They edged instinctively nearer to each other, snatching at an
enlivening bit of gossip as they jogged on together with the bats
swooping overhead.
"No mistake about that. And she let Barnaby see plainly that she was
ready to drop her bone for--his cousin. Of course, Rackham is a bigger
match. She's one of these women who can't perceive that titles are
getting vulgar."
"Rum chap, Rackham. I can't quite make him out. What did he do it
for?"
"He owed Barnaby one, perhaps. I don't think he was fond of Julia.
Anyhow, he didn't rise to her expectations; and so she relapsed, and
repented, and trails about now like a mourning bride. Poor old
Barnaby; he'll be missed.... And we'll never hear what wild things he
did out there."
"Desperate sort of cure, to disappear in the backwoods, and never call
on his bankers. Just like him though.--But he shouldn't have got
himself killed in a scuffle in some outlandish quarter, and spoilt the
yarn."
The man next him grunted.
"Who started the rumour that it wasn't an accident," he inquired; "but
that life without Julia wasn't worth tuppence to him, and so--and
so----?"
"Shut up, Parsley. Don't you circulate it," put in his neighbour
hastily. "Heaven send Lady Henrietta hasn't got hold of that."
"By George, if the tale came to her ears----!"
The last man mended his pace. He had hung back a little.
"Rackham's bearing to the right," he struck in. "You can hear the
horse trotting on the hill. He must be turning in to see Lady
Henrietta. I wonder what on earth she wants him for. It was a rather
portentous message."
They had reached a rougher bit of road and their voices grew
indistinct, drowned in a tired clatter of horses' hoofs, and died away
in the distance.
Rackham himself could not guess the reason for Lady Henrietta's
summons. Latterly there had been war between him and his aunt.
Something must have happened to mitigate the rigour of her ban, but he
rather fancied the circumstances must be uncommon that could accomplish
that. He was curious, and not the less so when, having left his horse
to a bucket of gruel, he walked stiffly across from the stables, and
letting himself in at the hall door, found himself face to face with
another visitor, who had just arrived and was slipping off her furs.
"Julia!" he said, taken aback at her presence in this house. She
acknowledged his amazement with a trickling laugh. Her voice had a
note of melancholy importance.
"Is it so unnatural," she said reproachfully, "that you should find me
here?"
The man bit his lip, looking at her. To him there was humour in her
romantic pose.
They had once been so well acquainted--though lately she had affected
short-sightedness when she saw him--that he imagined he understood her.
He rather admired an invincible vanity that had ignored disappointment
and defied scoffing tongues by making this bid for public sympathy. It
was a brilliant move, but he had never thought it would impose on Lady
Henrietta, that worldly woman with a hot corner in her heart for
anybody who could squeeze in, but an implacable spirit. She had held
out stubbornly up to now.
"Well--I don't know," he said, hesitating, swallowing his amusement.
Julia lifted her tragic eyes to his. Perhaps she was not sorry he
should witness her recognition in this house. The trailing black
garments that she was wearing for Barnaby lent a majestic sweep to her
full outlines, and there was a kind of bloom on her cheeks. She
reminded one of a big purple pansy.
The butler, an old family servant, one of those that know too much, had
closed the great door, shutting out the wind and the stormy sky,
already night-ridden; and was now waiting discreetly in the background.
Rackham nodding to him, remarked a curious twinkle on his face, but
when he looked again it was wooden.
"I knew she would send for me at last," crowed Julia. "People called
her selfish and cruel, but I told everybody I understood. I told them
to give her time. It must be so difficult for her to realise that
someone else was closer to poor Barnaby than even she. How could she
help feeling, at first, a little jealousy of my grief?"
"I was sent for, too," said Rackham bluntly. "She said she had
something to show me."
"Poor dear!" said Julia. "How touching that she should think of it.
You were his cousin, and she wants you to witness her do me justice."
The man smiled to himself at her manner of glancing backwards at their
fellowship in disgrace. Was it possible that his aunt had really made
up her mind to forget and forgive, and fall upon Julia's neck? He felt
a twinge of something like shame.
"We mustn't keep her waiting," said Julia. "Is she in the library,
Macdonald? That is where she used to sit...."
Already she was assuming her ancient intimacy with the ways of the
house, and the servant made way for her as she passed him, traversing
the hall with a mournful swagger.
Lady Henrietta was knitting hard.
She sat in a deep sofa by the fire, turned so that it faced the
hangings that screened off the outer hall. The library was so big that
it seemed to reach at either end into darkness, and the lamps made
little islands of brilliance here and there in the prevailing gloom.
Behind, with the books, there was another fireplace, a red and
glimmering hearth where two or three dogs lay, warm and sleepy,
dreaming of winter tramps and a man calling them to heel. One, a
terrier with a bitten ear, had started half-awake on a run down the
room, but she could not settle on the other rug, and came back
restlessly to her post on the shabbier tiger-skin.
Barnaby's mother had a thin, hard, eager face, with a flick of colour
high on her cheek-bones. Not an unkind woman, but one possessed by
some passion that had tempered a frivolous, careless nature to a mood
of iron. Her rings glittered as she knitted, and the wires clicked
faster and faster, as if it were impossible that her fingers could be
for a minute still. She was knitting a man's grey-green shooting
stocking.
Occasionally her eyes, with a strange spark in them, lit on a girl
sitting opposite, gazing into the fire. The girl was young and quiet;
her head shone dark in the ring of light; her cheek was pale, but her
short upper lip showed courage. Lady Henrietta watched her with a
fierce joy that was not yet liking.
"You're not at all what I expected," she said abruptly. "I was afraid
of what I would see, and I didn't dare to look at you when you arrived
last night;--but twenty times I turned the handle of your bedroom door.
At last, I poked my head in when you were asleep, just to know the
worst.--I nearly dropped the candle when I saw your little head on the
pillow."
"What did you expect?" the girl said faintly.
"A great, coarse, fine woman, snoring," said Lady Henrietta.
All at once she bent forward, putting her knitting into the girl's
hands. There was significance in the gesture.
"Pick up that stitch for me," she said. "He never liked ladders in his
stockings."
There was no shake in the hard jauntiness of her voice, but the girl,
searching with bent head for the dropped stitch, felt her fingers
tremble as they touched the rough worsted--felt something pluck at her
heart. Barnaby was dead, and she had never known him; but he was the
one real person walking through a dream in which she had lost herself.
She was not strong yet. She still had a trick of putting out her hand
to some steady object when she stood up alone. And at first she had
not understood--too ill to question, not wondering. It was as if she
had died one night and awakened to a consciousness of protection, a
mystery of care and kindness, of strangers who took charge of her,
treating her like a precious doll. When she at last knew the reason,
she had felt like one who, falling from a precipice, found herself
clinging, the dizzy horror stopped by a branch;--she could not let it
go.
So they had found her, and brought her over the sea, and put her to bed
in a great, comfortable room, in a house that was haunted. It was
Barnaby's house, and it was for Barnaby's sake that people were kind to
her. Somehow they were all shadows to her beside the thought of him.
His name had been invoked to shelter her; it had been enough to lift
her out of despair. She had begun to feel safe in a confused assurance
that she belonged to him.
She remembered last night. She remembered the door sliding softly, and
a rustle in the room, and how she had lain quite still, shutting her
eyes, holding her breath, startled out of sleep. Someone was smoothing
the bedclothes under her chin. She longed to cover her face, but could
not. It was not a ghost, for mortal fingers had touched her cheek.
Soon the rustle had withdrawn from her bedside, and she had heard a
little sound that might have been a sigh. Afterwards the door had
closed, and the room was empty.
Seized by an unaccountable impulse, she had put her foot to the floor,
and crossed the wide carpet to the fireplace, where the visitor had
gone from her side. The fire had fallen in, flaring high in a
quivering blaze, and by its light she had seen that over the
chimney-piece hung the picture of a man. Instinct had told her who it
was, and she stared at him, fascinated.
The other woman had left her the wrong photograph in her hurry. This
was no weak boy with a foolish mouth, bundled over-seas by his people.
This was a man with a steady face that betrayed nothing of himself, and
eyes that held her startled gaze. Blue eyes, audacious and
understanding. Her heart beat strangely. For this must be Barnaby the
reckless, who had married a wife and got himself killed ... and she,
poor fool, was calling herself his widow.
She clung to the chimney-piece, shivering with excitement, a quaint,
slight figure in her white night-dress.
"I'll hurt nobody.... I'll hurt nobody!" she was explaining to him in
an imploring whisper; and it seemed to her that the man in the picture
smiled.
"--There, give it back to me," said Lady Henrietta jealously, and her
voice scattered mists of imagination. "You don't think I'm crazy, do
you? You know why it is I can't stop knitting his stockings.--We'll
not talk about him, Susan. You and I have each our own memories, and
we can't share them.--I don't want yours. But we'll fight for him
together; since he belongs to us."
Her manner took on a sudden fierceness.
"I've not told anybody about you yet," she said. "I've been hugging
the secret for purposes of my own. I am a wicked woman, Susan. Upon
my honour, if you hadn't existed, I'd have been obliged to invent you.
If you hadn't come to me, I'd have searched the world for an imitation,
from end to end. How he would laugh at me!--But we'll not talk about
him--we couldn't bear it. Only we'll fight for him, as I said. We'll
not let his enemies triumph and pretend that they broke his heart."
Her voice was quicker, charged with a passionate haste that hurried the
words out before she could close her lips.
"You little pale thing," she said. "I am not a kissing woman ... but
... oh, you don't know what you are to me. Wait. I'll make you
understand. There's a creature here who behaved shamefully to my boy
... to _him_. And now he is dead she goes about boasting, claiming him
as her victim, hinting to all who will listen that he killed himself
for love of her. It's not true.... You'll teach them it is not true!"
She stopped, controlling herself. In the hall outside there was the
slight bustle of an arrival, and voices, muffled by distance, came
faintly through. As suddenly as she had spoken, she checked her
outburst of confidence, and picked up her knitting with a terrible
little smile.
"I know who it is that's coming," she said grimly. "A woman, Susan--a
woman who dresses in black, and prates of a misunderstanding."
They came in together, the man blinking a little after his ride in the
twilight, approaching with a stiff gait and clinking spurs; the woman
swimming triumphantly up the room.
"Dear Lady Henrietta!" she murmured, a ready quiver in her emotional
Irish voice.
"How do you do, Julia?" said Lady Henrietta. She had recovered an
extraordinary calm. "Did you and Rackham meet on the doorstep? I am
pleased to see you both."
Her ominous quietness struck the man, more observant. His instinct had
not disappointed him, that was clear; he marked her attitude with an
inward chuckle. Something tremendous was toward.
"You are looking well, Aunt Henrietta," he said politely. "Do you mind
my smoking? We had a tiring day, and I missed my only sandwich."
"Macdonald will look after you," she said. "Make him get you anything
you want."
"Thanks," said Rackham. "I'll have something before I go. I meant to
ask him for a whisky and soda, but he shot us in here.--I thought the
old chap seemed a bit excited."
"Yes," said Lady Henrietta. "They were all so devoted to Barnaby.
Naturally they share my feelings--" She paused significantly, and he
could see that she was watching Julia. "My son has given me a
legacy.... He has left me his wife."
"How sweet of you to put it like that!" said Julia.
She had established herself on the sofa without an instant's delay,
taking figurative possession, too self-absorbed to appreciate any
by-play. Her head was full of the tardy capitulation of her
fellow-mourner, and she, in her own eyes, was the principal figure
here. But Rackham, looking on, all but shouted.
"What?" he said. "Poor old Barnaby! Married? Good Lord! how did it
come about?"
Julia turned round and stared at him.
"Lord Rackham!" she said. "Are you mad?"
Lady Henrietta made a motion with her hand towards the girl sitting in
the background. She could not trust herself to speak to the woman
whose outrageous complacency had survived her blow.
"My dear," she said, "this is your husband's cousin. He gets
everything when I die--things are so wickedly entailed in this
family--except a pittance I mean to scrape up for you. You know I
don't chatter, Rackham. You can understand I didn't care to set the
neighbourhood talking until I had Susan here."
There was no mistaking the triumphant note in her proclamation.
The girl coloured faintly. They were all looking at her now; the
strange woman with a startled face, the man curiously. Some likeness
in him to the picture that hung upstairs troubled her. So Barnaby
might have looked, his dare-devil glance falling on her with a
quizzical compassion.
Rackham's wits were not slow. He crossed over to her side, and took up
his station on the hearthrug, so close to her that his splashed scarlet
coat almost brushed her black sleeve. Barnaby had been dressed like
him in the picture, gallant in hunting clothes. Would Barnaby have
stood by her? For she understood the significance of his action. This
man wanted to be her friend. She trembled a little, wondering why.
Lady Henrietta took no more notice of him than if he had been a vexing
shadow put in his place. His strategic movement was lost on her.
Barnaby's mother, in her thirst to punish, her eagerness in striking
for the sake of her son, had not time to consider that the sword in her
hand was his wife. Her eyes were shining with the fire that had burnt
up her tears, and they were fixed on the enchantress who had wrecked
Barnaby's life, and was trading on his old infatuation, making a bid
for public sympathy by flaunting her forfeited hold on him.
"I can't understand," said Julia, with a gasp. "Barnaby was not
married...."
But she was shaken. Her blank amazement was turning visibly to dismay.
This stroke was so sharp, so inconceivable, that she lost her head,
refusing to believe in the humbling revelation.
"It's a plot!" she cried all at once. "A plot against me. What have I
done to be treated like this? Why should I be insulted?--Everybody
knows that Barnaby and I----"
"Don't be an idiot, Julia," said Rackham softly, but it was not his
interruption that stopped her passionate surrender to the Irish-woman's
instinct to have it out with the world.
Perhaps the actress was uppermost in Susan, or perhaps an odd impulse
of loyalty to the dead man whose ring she wore carried her out of
herself. Her heart was hot against the woman who had played fast and
loose with him, and it taught her how one who belonged to Barnaby would
have faced this moment. His wife would not be a coward, would not sit,
a piteous listener, in the background; she had his memory to uphold.
And so she found herself standing up, confronting the stranger in a
proud silence that was more eloquent than reproach. Slowly, without a
word, she moved onwards to leave the room.
"Gad!" said Rackham, under his breath. He liked that.
Something like awe had smitten Julia. She remained a moment
transfixed, staring after her, all exclamation hushed on her reckless
lips. Then, all at once, she followed.
"Tell me who you are," she panted hysterically. "It's all nonsense,
isn't it?--It's a sham?"
Lady Henrietta was watching the scene from her sofa, and so was
Rackham, standing with his back to the fire. They were both far off.
It was a swift and dramatic minute.
"His mother hates me," said Julia, half to herself; her hold tightened
on the girl's arm. "She's capable of anything. She--What colour were
his eyes?"
The question was flung at her without warning. But a man's face stood
out distinct in the girl's imagination, haunting her with a clearness
none of these other faces had; smiling whimsically down from his
picture all this while she was letting people proclaim her his....
Somehow she was defending him, covering his hurt.
Without thinking, without a pause--
"Blue," she said.
The other woman's hand dropped. She let her go.
Susan let the velvet hangings fall heavily behind her as she came
through. A kind of wonder at herself possessed her, and her knees
trembled. Mechanically she traversed the hall, and began to climb the
wide staircase, leaning a little as she went, on the solid oak
balustrade.
On the first landing a window faced the stair, and right and left ran
corridors, interminable, and equally mysterious to the stranger, who
was, in a manner, lost in this unknown house. She sank down on the
window-seat, set deep in the thickness of the wall.
Outside, the sky was dark with a strange red, as of furnaces under the
horizon, glimmering in the west. She could just distinguish the
jutting corner of the more antique part of the house, built as it was
in different centuries, bit by bit. That side was strangely ornamented
with mediaeval figures--the images of ancient warriors, all battered and
weather-stained. And the land they had won was quiet, lying half
asleep; only the trees still restless as night came on.
She turned her face. In front of her gleamed the shallow stair,
running straight into the hall below, and all the way down hung
pictures, men and women who had lived in this house, and trod the
stairs, hurrying, lagging, or perhaps clinging, as she had in her
weakness clung to the balustrade. Some were ill-painted, some stared
wickedly; but all of them were watching. There was history in their
eyes.
The girl felt a queer fellowship with the still procession; she, whose
only title among them was make-believe. Perhaps, in forgotten times,
her own people had fought and loved and ridden side by side with these,
and their descendant had come back to a friend's house. How good it
would be to let the world go on, to walk in a dream always, and not
struggle any more.
She thought, with a remote disdain, of the scene downstairs. Her heart
was still beating quickly; but that gripping sense of the theatre had
left her. And she knew she had conquered. Barnaby's memory was safe
from the woman his mother hated. One could imagine her claim
collapsing, one could hear her voluble excuse, pleading bewilderment,
accepting the situation--with perhaps a plaintive expression of her
relief in knowing she was, after all, not as guilty as gossip said--had
Lady Henrietta heard the dreadful rumours? And Barnaby's mother would
smile at the thrust with victory in her soul, while the man, his
cousin, would look on, smothering his chuckle, with his head on one
side like a magpie, and a splash of mud that had dried on his cheek.
It was his step she heard first as they came out into the hall. He and
Julia were leaving together, she talking fast. Her voice, charged with
subdued excitement, rose and fell on a singing note. What she was
saying did not reach up the stairs; only its contralto music. The
sound of it awakened Susan in her mood of overwrought exaltation.
Reality came back to her with a shock. She remembered another voice as
warm, as emotional, with the same theatrical tune of tears; and she
remembered the dangerous charity that had mocked her opposition.
Stripped of its fantastic mist of adventure, she looked at her own
story, and was ashamed. Her very scorn of the woman against whom she
had been pitted turned on herself and scorched her, ranking her as low.
She and Julia--no, she could not bear to be judged with Julia. The
romantic sophistry that had comforted her was gone, and nothing could
stay her desperate longing to be honest.
They passed underneath. Rackham was helping Julia into her furs, was
hunting for her muff, with his face to the stair. The girl above held
her breath. His nearness affected her with a kind of panic.
She had an intuition that he was the kind of man who would--guess. She
thought of his quick movement to her side, his presumptuous readiness
to stand by her, unspoken but unmistakable, with an unexplained alarm.
Would they never go? Why did he loiter, looking upwards with that
inexplicable smile?
As the great door shut, at last, on a silence, she sprang up and went
downstairs. It was a pity she was not stronger. One should not go to
be judged with a tottering step. And she would want all her courage.
Knowing the spirit in which Barnaby's mother had dealt with Julia, she
did not look for mercy.
But Lady Henrietta was not sitting upright and watchful, with that look
of ruthlessness stamped on her thin, hard, pretty face. She had thrown
herself across the sofa, her fast-knitting fingers idle, the
half-finished stocking that would never be worn fallen from her hand to
the floor. She lay like a broken reed; deprived of the motive that had
sustained her--and she was crying.
That sight stirred all the heart in Susan. She ran to her blindly,
only conscious of a great compassion that shamed her selfish terror of
the weight of a lie. She could not tell her ... now.
And Barnaby's mother looked up at her approach. Something of the old
defiant jauntiness came back to her for a minute. She tried to laugh.
"Come here and kiss me," she called. There was a fierce tenderness in
her cry--"you darling--!"