For five or six months more, life passed as usual at Peveril Court, or
at Harry Lewin's new town house in Curzon Street, Mayfair. The season
came and went pleasantly enough, with its round of dances, theatres, and
dinners; and in the autumn Edie Lewin found herself once more back for
the shooting in dear old Herefordshire. Harry was always by her side,
the most attentive and inseparable of husbands; he seemed somehow to
cling to her passionately, as if he could not bear to be out of her
sight for a single moment. Edie noticed it, and felt grateful for his
love. Evan Meredith noticed it too, and reproached himself bitterly more
than once that he should ever so unworthily have distrusted the man who
had been brought up in Paris and Vienna.
One day, however, Harry had ridden from Stoke to Hereford, for the
exercise alone, and Edie expected him back to dinner. But at half-past
seven, just as the gong in the hall was burrr-ing loudly, a telegram
arrived once more for Mrs. Lewin, which Edie tore open with trembling
fingers. It was almost exactly the same mystifying message over again,
only this time it was sent by Harry himself, not by an unknown
hotel-keeping deputy. "I have been suddenly detained here by unexpected
business. Do not expect me home before to-morrow. Shall return as early
as possible. God bless you!"
Those last words, so singular in a telegram, roused and accentuated all
Edie's womanly terrors. "God bless you!"--what on earth could Harry mean
by that solemn adjuration under such strange and mysterious
circumstances? There was something very serious the matter, Edie felt
sure; but what it could be she could not even picture to herself. Her
instinctive fears did not take that vulgarly mistrustful form that they
might have taken with many a woman of lower and more suspicious nature;
she knew and trusted Harry far too well for that; she was too absolutely
certain of his whole unshaken love and tenderness; but the very
vagueness and indefiniteness of the fears she felt made them all the
harder and more terrible to bear. When you don't know what it is you
dread, your fancy can dress up its terrors afresh every moment in some
still more painful and distressing disguise.
If Harry had let her know where he was stopping, she would have ordered
the carriage then and there, and driven over to Hereford, not to spy him
out, but to be with him in his trouble or difficulty. That, however, was
clearly impossible, for Harry had merely sent his telegram as from "H.
Lewin, Hereford;" and to go about from hotel to hotel through the county
town, inquiring whether her husband was staying there, would of course
have been open to the most ridiculous misinterpretation. Everybody would
have said she was indeed keeping a tight hand upon him! So with many
bitter tears brushed hastily away, Edie went down in solemn and solitary
state to dinner, hating herself for crying so foolishly, and burning hot
with the unpleasant consciousness that the butler and footman were
closely observing her face and demeanour. If she could have dined quite
alone in her own boudoir very furtively it wouldn't have been quite so
dreadful; but to keep up appearances with a sinking heart before those
two eminently respectable and officious men-servants--it was really
enough to choke one.
That night again Edie Lewin never slept for more than a few troubled
minutes together; and whenever she awoke, it was with a start and a
scream, and a vague consciousness of some impending evil.
When Harry came again next day he didn't laugh it off carelessly and
lightly; he didn't soothe her fears and uneasiness with ready kisses and
prompt excuses; he didn't get angry with her and tell her not to ask
him too many questions about his own business: he met her as gravely and
earnestly as before, with the same tender, loving, half self-reproachful
tone, and yet with the same evident desire and intention to love and
cherish her more fondly than ever. Edie was relieved, but she was by no
means satisfied. She knew Harry loved her tenderly, devotedly; but she
knew also there was some sort of shadow or secret looming ominously
between them.
Another wife, supposed dead? He would have trusted her and told her.
Another love? Oh, no: she could trust him; it was impossible.
And so the weeks wore away, and Edie wondered all to no purpose. At
last, by dint of constant wondering, she almost wore out the faculty of
wonder, and half ceased to think about it any longer.
But she noticed that from day to day the old bright, brilliant Irish
character was slowly fading out of Harry's nature, and that in its place
there was growing up a settled, noble, not unbecoming earnestness. He
seemed perhaps a trifle less striking and attractive than formerly, but
a great deal worthier of any true woman's enduring love and admiration.
Evan Meredith noticed the change as well. He and Harry had grown now
into real friends. Harry saw and recognized the genuine depth of Evan's
nature. Evan had made amends and apologies to Harry for a single passing
rudeness or two. Both liked the other better for the momentary rivalry
and for the way he had soon forgotten it. "He's a good fellow," Evan
said to his father often, "and Edie, with her quiet, simple English
nature, has made quite another man of him--given him the ballast and the
even steadiness he once wanted."