CHAPTER XXIII.HEstopped at the door and said he must drive over to the Flagon House before dusk. Pamela went alone into the drawing-room and sat by the fire. The luxury and completeness of the room touched her with a sense of Jethro’s boundless generosity—all the more creditable because he was a frugal man. It was quite a modern room now—it had the thin, elegant touch which she preferred.Her tea came in. She threw aside her hat and coat, and toasted her knees while she read the newspaper. A queer hurry and unrest had taken possession of her. She kept worrying herself. Should she go to London to-morrow? Aunt Sophy had stirred her by the mere mention of London. Should she go? Should she stay at home?There was no harm in going. Shopping, tea with Barbara perhaps—nothing more. She would stop at Liddleshorn and ask Nancy or Egbert’s wife to go with her. There would surely be safety in that. Safety! The word made her blench and shrink. She instantly suspected herself. So there was really danger!She wasn’t sure of herself—not yet: wasn’t sure—would never be. Wasn’t it more than possible that, directly she was in London alone, unchecked, unwatched, she would go straight to Marquise Mansions,not meaning to enter? But, at the foot of the stairs, wasn’t it certain, miserably certain, that she would go up? If she saw him! Then—that she admitted, with a violent shame and misery—everything would depend on his attitude. The woman in brown! The woman—didn’t count.She wouldn’t think, wouldn’t speculate, wouldn’t decide just now. It would be premature to decide yet. There was no hurry.She picked up the paper, which had dropped to the floor. Then she remembered that it had been the paper which had tempted her to leave Jethro before. Suppose Edred’s name should be on the next sheet! That would settle everything—so she feared.Would it never end—this evil, incomprehensible witchery? Wasn’t she ever going to be safe? Was her life to be spent in veering between the happy lethargy of Folly Corner and the periodic joy and black misery of life with Edred? She despaired of herself. She hadn’t any shame, any self-respect, any modesty—any of those cold, praiseworthy qualities which romance has for centuries built up and labeled “feminine character.”She read on. One word, at last, became more than a dancing string of letters. It was the word Sutton. Here at last, after fifteen months of vigilant watching, was a sign. Here, beneath her eyes, was an indirect message from Marquise Mansions.Had he been knighted or sent to penal servitude? Either was equally likely—in their mode of life. She read. It was a highly respectable announcement:he was a member of the County Council—a prominent member—and he had been agitating about some strike—yes, the plasterers’ strike. Whatever sympathy had he with plasterers? She laughed softly, and put the paper down. He was evidently prosperous, this sleek minion of Edred’s. The paragraph was redolent of prosperity. He was spoken of deferentially as a promising man—a coming man. She knew his future. He’d go into Parliament, pick his way up the social ladder.There was no word of Edred. The omission was a knell on her brow.She must go to London to-morrow. It would be safe. She wasn’t quite so weak as she supposed. After all, there really would not be much danger in going to Marquise Mansions—just to inquire of the porter.The room grew dark as she sat, stooping forward, her chin in her hands. The wind rose, and lapped like rising waves about the lonely house. She put more coal on the fire, feeling the intense cold of the night even there, in the nest of carpets, thick curtains, and cushions.Suddenly she heard muffled feet on the red, newly-spread gravel outside. No wheels, but the steady, heavy tramping of feet! She heard voices, the rustic, slow voices of the farm men. There was a momentary silence: then Jethro spoke. She could not catch the words, but there was a sinister intonation in his voice.She ran to the window. When she hastily dragged the curtain back she saw that the glass wasspread with a fine cloth of silver. The casement was fast with frost; it took a determined movement of her wrist to throw it back.When she put her head stealthily out into the night, the cold dashed against her with the sting of a blow. There had not been so cold a night that winter. The snow fell in solid steady flakes.It was a typical winter’s night; it was quite theatrical in its completeness. She might have been looking at the drop-scene of a domestic drama. Snow, intense cold, slow-tongued, heavy-footed rustics—everything was ripe for a crisis; but there was to be no crisis in her life, no more drama. She was in harbor.Jethro saw her before she spoke.“Go back!” he said peremptorily. “Go back to the fire!”Those were the words she had used to Gainah.“Go back!” he repeated.She couldn’t see his face; she could see nothing distinctly. The men were in a circle, as if they covered something. But she didn’t want to see. The strange ring in his voice was enough.She shut the window, caught a rug from the cozy corner, and went through the warm, well-lighted corridor out of doors.*****They were going very slowly, very cautiously, the group of farm men, headed by Jethro, toward the barn. She could see them—the bent shoulders, the rough clothes, the shambling, swinging steps and loose swing of the body. They were allfamiliar, these men. She knew them by name—knew how many shillings a week each had, and of how many children each was the father. At that moment she didn’t seem to know them at all. They were instinct with mystery—mystery flavored with dread.What were they carrying? She could see now, as she gained on them silently in her thin slippers, that they guardedly carried a thing—a long, shrouded bundle. It was shapeless; yet, somehow, it cried out of life beneath the roughly piled coverings. It was nothing agricultural that they were carrying toward the barn so carefully.She heard them speak, heard Daborn say in his cheery voice and deferential way:“’Course, sir, it aint asIthinks, it’s asyouthinks. ButIshould jus’ lay ’un in the barn.”Lay what in the barn? A formless fear quickened her feet. She was very close, none of them yet suspected her presence—the heavy snow now extinguished all sound of feet.They had covered the shrouded thing with sacks—wet sacks that were already stiffening with frost.She crept behind them in the shadow of the newly-planted shrubs. She followed to the barn—the great barn, full of cobwebs, scored by huge beams. Its new roof of corrugated iron, covering the heavy thatch, gleamed like a strange, new precious metal.They stopped to throw open the great door. How cold she was! And yet how her heart under thesofa-rug blazed and beat—she couldn’t have told why.They all went stolidly, carefully into the barn. She slipped like a wraith in after them.Jethro turned and saw her.“Go back!” he said wrathfully. “Go back!” repeating it, with no wrath at all, but with exquisite pleading and gentleness. “Go back! Dear love, go back to the fire.”She looked up at him meaningly, knowingly. She began to feel what it was that stretched under those wet sacks. Dear love! It was the first time since her return that he had used those words—his favorite pet expression during the brief, agitated period of their engagement.There were frozen flakes of snow scattered over the orange silk rug which wrapped her from her chin to the toe-caps of her slippers. Her white face, framed in disheveled, dust-colored hair, was shadowy. They stood together at the door of the barn. At the back of them, the men, each with his lantern, made a patch of light. An evil spirit seemed to stare out of each corner of the vast raftered place—to stare down at the thing under the sacks.“I will not go back,” she said firmly. “I want to see. What is there?”She pointed with a steady finger. They had improvised a bench. They were laying it out—straightening it, with rough, pitiful reverence, as she could very well see.“What is there?”Her voice rang out in the lofty barn amid the perfect, unnatural silence which suddenly fell over the rest. Jethro only repeated, touching her coaxingly on the wrist:“Go back. I’ll come in and tell you presently.”She shook her head.“I stay. I mean to see.”The group of men, with rare delicacy, without a word or a gesture of recognition, clumped out, with heads down and heavy feet, trying in vain to tread lightly.Jethro and Pamela were alone. She shot forward and touched the sacks.“You mustn’t touch. I insist on your going in, Pamela.”But her hand was already on the soiled, wet sacking, and she flipped it down with fearful eagerness.“I knew, I knew,” she called out almost exultingly. “I felt sure.”She looked at the dead face for a long time, and very steadily.“I was driving home from the Flagon House,” Jethro explained in a husky voice and averting his eyes from those dead ones which would not close. “Something went wrong with the harness just as I got to the pond. I jumped down. By the light of the lamps. I saw—his arm was thrust out.”She didn’t speak. Her eyes were steady and luminous on Edred’s rigid face. There was a ticking sound as the water dropped from his sodden clothes to the floor. Then a quick clatter of a horse’s hoofs fell on their ears.Jethro said simply:“That’s young Buckman gone to Liddleshorn for Egbert. I told him to saddle the black mare.”She only looked and looked. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her lips were steady. She looked from the handsome dead face to the shabby, drenched clothes, which were splintered all over with little spear-shaped fragments of ice.They were the clothes of a tramp. His boots were burst, a dirty handkerchief was knotted round his long throat, and on his chin was an unkempt beard—a piebald beard, half black, half gray. He was handsome still, but it was the wreck of comeliness—the sodden face of a dissolute man of fifty.“He must have had ill luck lately,” Jethro said. “He was evidently coming back to us.”“If he had come back—alive,” she said thoughtfully, “I wonder——”Her steady gaze on the dead, aged, handsome face never wavered. If he had come back to Folly Corner alive—so—would he have possessed the old magic?His eyes were fathoming the raftered roof. In every corner, clothed in the swaying black cobwebs, was an imp—the evil spirits who had swayed his life.“We shall never know what brought him to this. Come away, dear,” urged Jethro.She shook Jethro’s big hand off with petulance. The water from the dead man’s clothes was freezing at her feet, beneath her slippers, and chilled her. That was the nearest approach to contact shereached with the dead. She made no attempt to touch him, to go a little nearer, to stoop and stare into the glazing, fearful surface of his wide dark eyes.What a mystery he had always been! What a mystery he was now! She had never been certain even of his name. She didn’t know and never would know the secret history of the last fifteen months. Two might tell her—Sutton or the woman in brown. But she did not wish to revive either of them. That was past. Everything was past. She was stripped at last of everything; the world was simply Folly Corner. She felt as a slave might feel when he heard the blows which loosened his shackles. She was free. She had always been free—in the letter; in the spirit she had been a wretched slave. A slave to first love—that indefinable, holding thing.She turned away suddenly, turned her back on the dead man—not with horror, grief, or repulsion, but apathetically—as if she had seen enough. She dismissed him. She put her head to Jethro’s coat, with the persuasive, rubbing air of a cat.“I can’t feel,” she said, holding one hand out toward the roughly improvised bier. “I thank God that I don’t feel any longer. I’m not touched in the least, not even by ordinary natural emotions. I’m not sorry; I’m not ashamed; I’m not even glad. I’m only free. Jethro!”“Dear love!” His great hand was on her hair.“I don’t feel—for him,” she went on with more passion, “the ordinary pity and sadness that onefeels for any dead thing. I can’t—for him. There’s no dignity, no pathos in Death when it touches him. You mustn’t think me hard; mustn’t put this down to vengeance because he injured me. I can still feel pity. I cried only this morning over a tomtit which the cat had mangled. But I don’t cry for this. I don’t feel. I’m stone where he is concerned. Until to-night I have been wax. I’m not sorry or shocked; not anything womanly, anything human that I ought to be. I can’t feel. I’m free. Take me away. We’ll get warm in the house.”They stepped out into the driving snow. The world was white and pitiless that night.The door thudded solemnly when Jethro pulled it to. He had his arm round Pamela, his coat held out to form a screen for her. Midway to the house she stopped, the blinding, desolate snow whirling above their heads. She looked up and he looked down. There was a strange fire in each pair of eyes. Suddenly he stooped and kissed her on the mouth—roughly, brutally.Her mouth smarted with the rudeness of that kiss, but a sweet, permanent content ran through her body. He loved her! She would be Cousin Pamela no more, save in the tender jest of matrimony. He had always loved her. His reserve, his brotherly attitude, had been forced. They were part of his prudent nature, part of his hereditary economy. He would never expend when there was small chance of any result.The house was warm—a gently filtering warmththat seemed to wrap them directly they shut the door.The discreet clink of china, the savory smell of soup, came from the kitchen. They were preparing dinner—the place was wholly regardless of that miserable dead man.They shut themselves in the drawing-room. Pamela abandoned herself to the luxury of the fire. Jethro paced about nervously, his ears alert for wheels.“Egbert can do nothing,” he said. “The poor chap was dead when I found him—dead and stiff. He must have been in the pond some time. If I hadn’t found him to-night the ice would have pinned him in by to-morrow. We should have been obliged to cut him out. I can’t think how he got in. It isn’t dark: he never drank—too much. His head was strong. He could stand a lot of whisky. We don’t know——”“We shall never know,” she said with the oddest lethargy.All the time he walked about the room, indulging as he did so in kind commonplace reflections concerning Edred, she was saying to herself—lilting the words to a queer dancing air that hummed in her head:“Free, free, free.”She tried herself, probed herself, insisted on proving. She recalled all sorts of things—her happiest, tenderest moments with the dead man. She felt nothing at all, except faint disgust for the woman—it could not have been herself—who had so madlyloved that creature who was lying in the barn searching the roof with his fixed, shallow eyes.“No,” she said, half to herself, half to Jethro, “I don’t feel.”She waited a moment, let that flow of recollections rush on. Nothing touched her. It had been another woman—a dogged, shameful, spiritless creature. She repeated devotionally, as if she had been kneeling in a great church, swept by religious frenzy:“I thank God. I don’t feel.”*****“Beaufort Street, May 24.“MYDEARESTPAMELA: Tim and I will be delighted to spend all June at Folly Corner, as you suggest: you’ll really see Tim at last!“We have let this house, and think of settling in the country. It will not be the real thing, as you have it. We shall go to one of those intellectual settlements with a good railway service to town; a theater train once a week. We shall live on a hill; there will be a splendid view from our windows. We shall have to pay for that view; we shall ask our friends down to look at it; we shall see it every morning—rave over it, become callous to it, abuse it—want to murder it. A true English home is in a hollow, like Folly Corner. I shall have to content myself with the hard monotony of a pine wood—after Sussex oak! We shall belong to a coterie—everybody will be an artistic something. Everybody will flatter and hate his neighbor.“I want to see the baby. Of course you’ll call him Jethro. I can understand your disquietude at Gainah’s fondness for him.“Your letter was too domestic altogether.Doremember that a ‘good manager’ degenerates into a shrew after thirty.“Of course your husband is trying—it is a way they have: a man is the most difficult of all domestic pets. Never mind his occasional morose moods; never mind his attempts at domestic economy. When a man decides on domestic economy he smokes a shilling cigar while he lectures his wife on the sinful extravagance of afternoon tea. A wise woman gives him his head on such occasions, and never varies her course.“You are very much to be envied; our life is a struggle to make both ends meet. Tim’s book of essays, which made such a splash last year, has been the ruin of him. He is a melancholy object lesson—a man ruined by press notices. Still, that is not a fate likely to befall you or Mr. Jayne. My poor Tim no longer has confidence in anything he does. I tell him—without making the least impression on him—that a thing doesn’t cease to be clever because you’ve found out the way to do it. He’s versatile—that is his stumbling-block. To succeed, you must be superlatively skillful at one thing, and a perfect fool at everything else.“So Nancy has won the literary prize in theLiddleshorn Heraldcompetition—and dear Mrs. Turle has justified her opinion.“As Chalcraft and his wife are dead, of coursethere will be a sale. Buy me the oak chair, if I am not present to buy it myself.“I remember Nettie; she didn’t look the kind of girl who would go off in a decline. But the rustics are dreadfully unhealthy. When I was at the Buttery buying things of the cottagers I had a fixed rule by which I ingratiated myself. If a woman was under fifty I inquired after the baby; over fifty, I inquired after the bad leg. It sounds horrid, but was invariably successful. If the victim was a man, I asked if his ground grew good onions, and said how sorry I was that I couldn’t keep a pig.“By the way, when you see Mrs. Silas Daborn, ask her to save me a kitten next time they occur. The cat we have won’t catch mice—lets them frisk with the tip of her tail. I cannot think what cats are coming to. Tim, who is not a Progressive, says it is all the fault of the School Board.“We shall come by the quick afternoon train on Wednesday, June 2. We arrive at five something; Mr. Jayne will please look it up in the time-table.“Affectionately yours, with a kiss for the baby,“BARBARACLUTTON.”THE END.
HEstopped at the door and said he must drive over to the Flagon House before dusk. Pamela went alone into the drawing-room and sat by the fire. The luxury and completeness of the room touched her with a sense of Jethro’s boundless generosity—all the more creditable because he was a frugal man. It was quite a modern room now—it had the thin, elegant touch which she preferred.
Her tea came in. She threw aside her hat and coat, and toasted her knees while she read the newspaper. A queer hurry and unrest had taken possession of her. She kept worrying herself. Should she go to London to-morrow? Aunt Sophy had stirred her by the mere mention of London. Should she go? Should she stay at home?
There was no harm in going. Shopping, tea with Barbara perhaps—nothing more. She would stop at Liddleshorn and ask Nancy or Egbert’s wife to go with her. There would surely be safety in that. Safety! The word made her blench and shrink. She instantly suspected herself. So there was really danger!
She wasn’t sure of herself—not yet: wasn’t sure—would never be. Wasn’t it more than possible that, directly she was in London alone, unchecked, unwatched, she would go straight to Marquise Mansions,not meaning to enter? But, at the foot of the stairs, wasn’t it certain, miserably certain, that she would go up? If she saw him! Then—that she admitted, with a violent shame and misery—everything would depend on his attitude. The woman in brown! The woman—didn’t count.
She wouldn’t think, wouldn’t speculate, wouldn’t decide just now. It would be premature to decide yet. There was no hurry.
She picked up the paper, which had dropped to the floor. Then she remembered that it had been the paper which had tempted her to leave Jethro before. Suppose Edred’s name should be on the next sheet! That would settle everything—so she feared.
Would it never end—this evil, incomprehensible witchery? Wasn’t she ever going to be safe? Was her life to be spent in veering between the happy lethargy of Folly Corner and the periodic joy and black misery of life with Edred? She despaired of herself. She hadn’t any shame, any self-respect, any modesty—any of those cold, praiseworthy qualities which romance has for centuries built up and labeled “feminine character.”
She read on. One word, at last, became more than a dancing string of letters. It was the word Sutton. Here at last, after fifteen months of vigilant watching, was a sign. Here, beneath her eyes, was an indirect message from Marquise Mansions.
Had he been knighted or sent to penal servitude? Either was equally likely—in their mode of life. She read. It was a highly respectable announcement:he was a member of the County Council—a prominent member—and he had been agitating about some strike—yes, the plasterers’ strike. Whatever sympathy had he with plasterers? She laughed softly, and put the paper down. He was evidently prosperous, this sleek minion of Edred’s. The paragraph was redolent of prosperity. He was spoken of deferentially as a promising man—a coming man. She knew his future. He’d go into Parliament, pick his way up the social ladder.
There was no word of Edred. The omission was a knell on her brow.
She must go to London to-morrow. It would be safe. She wasn’t quite so weak as she supposed. After all, there really would not be much danger in going to Marquise Mansions—just to inquire of the porter.
The room grew dark as she sat, stooping forward, her chin in her hands. The wind rose, and lapped like rising waves about the lonely house. She put more coal on the fire, feeling the intense cold of the night even there, in the nest of carpets, thick curtains, and cushions.
Suddenly she heard muffled feet on the red, newly-spread gravel outside. No wheels, but the steady, heavy tramping of feet! She heard voices, the rustic, slow voices of the farm men. There was a momentary silence: then Jethro spoke. She could not catch the words, but there was a sinister intonation in his voice.
She ran to the window. When she hastily dragged the curtain back she saw that the glass wasspread with a fine cloth of silver. The casement was fast with frost; it took a determined movement of her wrist to throw it back.
When she put her head stealthily out into the night, the cold dashed against her with the sting of a blow. There had not been so cold a night that winter. The snow fell in solid steady flakes.
It was a typical winter’s night; it was quite theatrical in its completeness. She might have been looking at the drop-scene of a domestic drama. Snow, intense cold, slow-tongued, heavy-footed rustics—everything was ripe for a crisis; but there was to be no crisis in her life, no more drama. She was in harbor.
Jethro saw her before she spoke.
“Go back!” he said peremptorily. “Go back to the fire!”
Those were the words she had used to Gainah.
“Go back!” he repeated.
She couldn’t see his face; she could see nothing distinctly. The men were in a circle, as if they covered something. But she didn’t want to see. The strange ring in his voice was enough.
She shut the window, caught a rug from the cozy corner, and went through the warm, well-lighted corridor out of doors.
*****
They were going very slowly, very cautiously, the group of farm men, headed by Jethro, toward the barn. She could see them—the bent shoulders, the rough clothes, the shambling, swinging steps and loose swing of the body. They were allfamiliar, these men. She knew them by name—knew how many shillings a week each had, and of how many children each was the father. At that moment she didn’t seem to know them at all. They were instinct with mystery—mystery flavored with dread.
What were they carrying? She could see now, as she gained on them silently in her thin slippers, that they guardedly carried a thing—a long, shrouded bundle. It was shapeless; yet, somehow, it cried out of life beneath the roughly piled coverings. It was nothing agricultural that they were carrying toward the barn so carefully.
She heard them speak, heard Daborn say in his cheery voice and deferential way:
“’Course, sir, it aint asIthinks, it’s asyouthinks. ButIshould jus’ lay ’un in the barn.”
Lay what in the barn? A formless fear quickened her feet. She was very close, none of them yet suspected her presence—the heavy snow now extinguished all sound of feet.
They had covered the shrouded thing with sacks—wet sacks that were already stiffening with frost.
She crept behind them in the shadow of the newly-planted shrubs. She followed to the barn—the great barn, full of cobwebs, scored by huge beams. Its new roof of corrugated iron, covering the heavy thatch, gleamed like a strange, new precious metal.
They stopped to throw open the great door. How cold she was! And yet how her heart under thesofa-rug blazed and beat—she couldn’t have told why.
They all went stolidly, carefully into the barn. She slipped like a wraith in after them.
Jethro turned and saw her.
“Go back!” he said wrathfully. “Go back!” repeating it, with no wrath at all, but with exquisite pleading and gentleness. “Go back! Dear love, go back to the fire.”
She looked up at him meaningly, knowingly. She began to feel what it was that stretched under those wet sacks. Dear love! It was the first time since her return that he had used those words—his favorite pet expression during the brief, agitated period of their engagement.
There were frozen flakes of snow scattered over the orange silk rug which wrapped her from her chin to the toe-caps of her slippers. Her white face, framed in disheveled, dust-colored hair, was shadowy. They stood together at the door of the barn. At the back of them, the men, each with his lantern, made a patch of light. An evil spirit seemed to stare out of each corner of the vast raftered place—to stare down at the thing under the sacks.
“I will not go back,” she said firmly. “I want to see. What is there?”
She pointed with a steady finger. They had improvised a bench. They were laying it out—straightening it, with rough, pitiful reverence, as she could very well see.
“What is there?”
Her voice rang out in the lofty barn amid the perfect, unnatural silence which suddenly fell over the rest. Jethro only repeated, touching her coaxingly on the wrist:
“Go back. I’ll come in and tell you presently.”
She shook her head.
“I stay. I mean to see.”
The group of men, with rare delicacy, without a word or a gesture of recognition, clumped out, with heads down and heavy feet, trying in vain to tread lightly.
Jethro and Pamela were alone. She shot forward and touched the sacks.
“You mustn’t touch. I insist on your going in, Pamela.”
But her hand was already on the soiled, wet sacking, and she flipped it down with fearful eagerness.
“I knew, I knew,” she called out almost exultingly. “I felt sure.”
She looked at the dead face for a long time, and very steadily.
“I was driving home from the Flagon House,” Jethro explained in a husky voice and averting his eyes from those dead ones which would not close. “Something went wrong with the harness just as I got to the pond. I jumped down. By the light of the lamps. I saw—his arm was thrust out.”
She didn’t speak. Her eyes were steady and luminous on Edred’s rigid face. There was a ticking sound as the water dropped from his sodden clothes to the floor. Then a quick clatter of a horse’s hoofs fell on their ears.
Jethro said simply:
“That’s young Buckman gone to Liddleshorn for Egbert. I told him to saddle the black mare.”
She only looked and looked. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her lips were steady. She looked from the handsome dead face to the shabby, drenched clothes, which were splintered all over with little spear-shaped fragments of ice.
They were the clothes of a tramp. His boots were burst, a dirty handkerchief was knotted round his long throat, and on his chin was an unkempt beard—a piebald beard, half black, half gray. He was handsome still, but it was the wreck of comeliness—the sodden face of a dissolute man of fifty.
“He must have had ill luck lately,” Jethro said. “He was evidently coming back to us.”
“If he had come back—alive,” she said thoughtfully, “I wonder——”
Her steady gaze on the dead, aged, handsome face never wavered. If he had come back to Folly Corner alive—so—would he have possessed the old magic?
His eyes were fathoming the raftered roof. In every corner, clothed in the swaying black cobwebs, was an imp—the evil spirits who had swayed his life.
“We shall never know what brought him to this. Come away, dear,” urged Jethro.
She shook Jethro’s big hand off with petulance. The water from the dead man’s clothes was freezing at her feet, beneath her slippers, and chilled her. That was the nearest approach to contact shereached with the dead. She made no attempt to touch him, to go a little nearer, to stoop and stare into the glazing, fearful surface of his wide dark eyes.
What a mystery he had always been! What a mystery he was now! She had never been certain even of his name. She didn’t know and never would know the secret history of the last fifteen months. Two might tell her—Sutton or the woman in brown. But she did not wish to revive either of them. That was past. Everything was past. She was stripped at last of everything; the world was simply Folly Corner. She felt as a slave might feel when he heard the blows which loosened his shackles. She was free. She had always been free—in the letter; in the spirit she had been a wretched slave. A slave to first love—that indefinable, holding thing.
She turned away suddenly, turned her back on the dead man—not with horror, grief, or repulsion, but apathetically—as if she had seen enough. She dismissed him. She put her head to Jethro’s coat, with the persuasive, rubbing air of a cat.
“I can’t feel,” she said, holding one hand out toward the roughly improvised bier. “I thank God that I don’t feel any longer. I’m not touched in the least, not even by ordinary natural emotions. I’m not sorry; I’m not ashamed; I’m not even glad. I’m only free. Jethro!”
“Dear love!” His great hand was on her hair.
“I don’t feel—for him,” she went on with more passion, “the ordinary pity and sadness that onefeels for any dead thing. I can’t—for him. There’s no dignity, no pathos in Death when it touches him. You mustn’t think me hard; mustn’t put this down to vengeance because he injured me. I can still feel pity. I cried only this morning over a tomtit which the cat had mangled. But I don’t cry for this. I don’t feel. I’m stone where he is concerned. Until to-night I have been wax. I’m not sorry or shocked; not anything womanly, anything human that I ought to be. I can’t feel. I’m free. Take me away. We’ll get warm in the house.”
They stepped out into the driving snow. The world was white and pitiless that night.
The door thudded solemnly when Jethro pulled it to. He had his arm round Pamela, his coat held out to form a screen for her. Midway to the house she stopped, the blinding, desolate snow whirling above their heads. She looked up and he looked down. There was a strange fire in each pair of eyes. Suddenly he stooped and kissed her on the mouth—roughly, brutally.
Her mouth smarted with the rudeness of that kiss, but a sweet, permanent content ran through her body. He loved her! She would be Cousin Pamela no more, save in the tender jest of matrimony. He had always loved her. His reserve, his brotherly attitude, had been forced. They were part of his prudent nature, part of his hereditary economy. He would never expend when there was small chance of any result.
The house was warm—a gently filtering warmththat seemed to wrap them directly they shut the door.
The discreet clink of china, the savory smell of soup, came from the kitchen. They were preparing dinner—the place was wholly regardless of that miserable dead man.
They shut themselves in the drawing-room. Pamela abandoned herself to the luxury of the fire. Jethro paced about nervously, his ears alert for wheels.
“Egbert can do nothing,” he said. “The poor chap was dead when I found him—dead and stiff. He must have been in the pond some time. If I hadn’t found him to-night the ice would have pinned him in by to-morrow. We should have been obliged to cut him out. I can’t think how he got in. It isn’t dark: he never drank—too much. His head was strong. He could stand a lot of whisky. We don’t know——”
“We shall never know,” she said with the oddest lethargy.
All the time he walked about the room, indulging as he did so in kind commonplace reflections concerning Edred, she was saying to herself—lilting the words to a queer dancing air that hummed in her head:
“Free, free, free.”
She tried herself, probed herself, insisted on proving. She recalled all sorts of things—her happiest, tenderest moments with the dead man. She felt nothing at all, except faint disgust for the woman—it could not have been herself—who had so madlyloved that creature who was lying in the barn searching the roof with his fixed, shallow eyes.
“No,” she said, half to herself, half to Jethro, “I don’t feel.”
She waited a moment, let that flow of recollections rush on. Nothing touched her. It had been another woman—a dogged, shameful, spiritless creature. She repeated devotionally, as if she had been kneeling in a great church, swept by religious frenzy:
“I thank God. I don’t feel.”
*****
“Beaufort Street, May 24.
“MYDEARESTPAMELA: Tim and I will be delighted to spend all June at Folly Corner, as you suggest: you’ll really see Tim at last!
“We have let this house, and think of settling in the country. It will not be the real thing, as you have it. We shall go to one of those intellectual settlements with a good railway service to town; a theater train once a week. We shall live on a hill; there will be a splendid view from our windows. We shall have to pay for that view; we shall ask our friends down to look at it; we shall see it every morning—rave over it, become callous to it, abuse it—want to murder it. A true English home is in a hollow, like Folly Corner. I shall have to content myself with the hard monotony of a pine wood—after Sussex oak! We shall belong to a coterie—everybody will be an artistic something. Everybody will flatter and hate his neighbor.
“I want to see the baby. Of course you’ll call him Jethro. I can understand your disquietude at Gainah’s fondness for him.
“Your letter was too domestic altogether.Doremember that a ‘good manager’ degenerates into a shrew after thirty.
“Of course your husband is trying—it is a way they have: a man is the most difficult of all domestic pets. Never mind his occasional morose moods; never mind his attempts at domestic economy. When a man decides on domestic economy he smokes a shilling cigar while he lectures his wife on the sinful extravagance of afternoon tea. A wise woman gives him his head on such occasions, and never varies her course.
“You are very much to be envied; our life is a struggle to make both ends meet. Tim’s book of essays, which made such a splash last year, has been the ruin of him. He is a melancholy object lesson—a man ruined by press notices. Still, that is not a fate likely to befall you or Mr. Jayne. My poor Tim no longer has confidence in anything he does. I tell him—without making the least impression on him—that a thing doesn’t cease to be clever because you’ve found out the way to do it. He’s versatile—that is his stumbling-block. To succeed, you must be superlatively skillful at one thing, and a perfect fool at everything else.
“So Nancy has won the literary prize in theLiddleshorn Heraldcompetition—and dear Mrs. Turle has justified her opinion.
“As Chalcraft and his wife are dead, of coursethere will be a sale. Buy me the oak chair, if I am not present to buy it myself.
“I remember Nettie; she didn’t look the kind of girl who would go off in a decline. But the rustics are dreadfully unhealthy. When I was at the Buttery buying things of the cottagers I had a fixed rule by which I ingratiated myself. If a woman was under fifty I inquired after the baby; over fifty, I inquired after the bad leg. It sounds horrid, but was invariably successful. If the victim was a man, I asked if his ground grew good onions, and said how sorry I was that I couldn’t keep a pig.
“By the way, when you see Mrs. Silas Daborn, ask her to save me a kitten next time they occur. The cat we have won’t catch mice—lets them frisk with the tip of her tail. I cannot think what cats are coming to. Tim, who is not a Progressive, says it is all the fault of the School Board.
“We shall come by the quick afternoon train on Wednesday, June 2. We arrive at five something; Mr. Jayne will please look it up in the time-table.
“Affectionately yours, with a kiss for the baby,
“BARBARACLUTTON.”
THE END.