CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXII
"Is there anywhere that I can take you, Miss Bishop?" Mrs. Durlacher offered, as they stood by the side of the shivering taxi. "I'm going out to Sloane Street."
"Oh no, thank you; it's very good of you. I'm going to catch a train at Waterloo." She shook hands, then held out her hand quietly to Traill.
"Good-bye, Mr. Traill."
He took her hand and held it with meaning. "Good-bye."
She turned away and walked down Waterloo Place, her head erect, her steps firm, but the tears rolling from her eyes, and her breast lifting with every sob that she stifled in her throat.
Mrs. Durlacher looked after her; then her eyes swept up to her brother's face.
"Is she going to walk all the way to Waterloo Station?" she asked incredulously.
"Expect so."
Mrs. Durlacher looked above her in a perfect simulation of amazement. Then she stepped into the cab.
"Jack," she said, when she was seated.
"What?"
She prefaced her words with a little laugh. "I wouldn't be a little milliner at your mercy for all I could see."
Traill snorted contemptuously. "She's not a little milliner," he said, cutting each word clean with irony. "Neither in your sense, nor in reality. Fortune has cursed her with being a lady and withheld the necessary increment that would make such things obvious to you. Good night."
He stood away, and told the chauffeur the address in Sloane Street. They did not look at each other again, and the little vehicle pulled away from the kerbstone without the final nod of the head or shaking of the hand which usually terminated their meetings.
The last sight she had of him, was as he stood looking down Waterloo Place, his eyes picking out the people one by one, as the miner sifts the dross from the dust of gold. Then she leant back in the cab and a low, sententious laugh lazily parted her lips.
For a moment, Traill stood there; but Sally was out of sight. It crossed his mind to run down into Pall Mall—coatless, hatless, as he was—in the hope of finding her; but an inner consciousness convinced him that she would return, and he walked back into the house, upstairs to his room to wait for her.
When the mind had been made up to a critical sacrifice, it hates to be thwarted. The more difficult the sacrifice may be, the more the mind is revolted by the hampering of circumstances. Having brought herself through a thousand temptings to the determination that she must not keep the bangle which Traill had given her, Sally felt incensed with circumstances, incensed with everything, that she had been hindered in the carrying out of her design. All that Janet had said about her ultimate going back to him, she had wiped out with a rough and unrelenting hand during that hour when she had been in his sister's presence. But the sting of the other remained, while she firmly believed that her desire to see him once more, herself in the frail attitude of hope, had vanished—was dead, buried, almost forgotten.
The working of the mind is so like that of the body, that comparisons can be drawn at every point. When the body needs nourishment, or exercise, or rest, and is denied all of these things, it circumvents its own master and steals its needs with cunning. So is it precisely with the mind. When the mind craves a certain expression of itself, needs a certain relief, and is denied its craving, then it, too, circumvents its own master, and, by the crafty displacement of ideas, hoodwinking the very power that governs it, it attains its end.
Sally, yearning in her heart for one more sight of Traill, the putting to the touch of her last hope, and then crushing out the desire into an apparent oblivion, was trapped, deceived, outwitted by such subtle suggestions as that she had been thwarted in her determination of sacrifice.
At the bottom of Waterloo Place, she hesitated. He had said he would wait half an hour. She would be back almost immediately if she returned at once. Her steps took her onwards down Pall Mall, but they were slower and more measured than before. At the Carlton Restaurant, she stopped again. She wanted to give him back the bangle herself; to tell him herself how utterly she knew it was at an end. She could write, certainly; she could send the little box by post. She had said she would. But a romance, the only romance she had ever had in her life, to end through the tepid medium of the post—the letter dropped in through the black and gaping slit—just the one moment's thrill that now he must get it! Then, nothing; then, emptiness and the end. She wanted more than that. She would cry, perhaps, break down when she saw him put it aside where she could never touch it again. But what were tears? They were better than nothing; better than the hollowness of such an end as the writing of a letter would bring.
With half-formed decision, she turned up Haymarket instead of crossing towards Trafalgar Square and so, slowly, by indecisive steps, she found herself, some ten minutes later, once more knocking gently upon Traill's door.
The sound from within, as he jumped to his feet, set her heart beating through the blood, and though she steadied herself, her lips were trembling as he opened and made way for her to enter.
She walked straight into the room, did not turn until she heard him close the door; even then, she refused to let her eyes meet his in a direct gaze. This was not easy for, having once shut the door, he stood with his back to it, looking intently at her as if, securing her at last, he would not willingly let her free.
"What made you come?" he asked, slowly—"and, having come—then, why on earth did you go away? In the last few minutes before you arrived, I almost began to think that you weren't coming back again."
She tried to hide her nervousness by taking off her gloves, but her fingers fumbled at the buttons, and in her awkwardness the seam of one of the fingers slit from top to bottom. She looked at it ruefully; was about to make use of the incident to lessen the tension of the moment when he came across to her. Standing in front of her, he looked down at the broken glove, and her white skin laid bare by the rent stitching.
"You'll let me get you a new pair," he said under his breath. In that instant he wanted to give her the world. The proffer of the gloves tried to express the sensation.
She looked up into his face with a very small smile—half refusal, half gratitude. When her eyes met his, she realized that her senses were swimming. She was standing on a giddy height, to throw herself from which, became an almost imperative inclination. She felt that she was losing her balance and in another moment would be pitching forward into his arms. She wanted to tell him to kiss her, and words of violent strength, which she had never dreamed of before, shouted suggestions through her—even to her lips. He seemed to be waiting for her to do all this, but made no move to accelerate it; then she swung backwards—turned blindly to the table, laying down her gloves and the little brown-paper parcel.
"You're going to take off your hat now," he said; "this room's too hot for accessories."
She showed hesitation, was about to refuse, when he made it plain to her that he would not have it otherwise.
"I've taken it off before, you know," he said with a smile. "I'm by no means a novice at the art. You can't call me an amateur."
"When—?" she began; "oh, of course, I remember."
She did not consider her refusal now; she obeyed. He took the hat from her and her feather boa. Then he insisted on the removal of the little short-waisted coat. She demurred again, and again was obedient. He laid them all down on the settle, then sat for a moment and watched her while she poked her fingers into her hair and pulled it lightly out where the hat had rested.
"Now you look as if you'd come to see me." he said.
"What did I look like before?"
"I don't know. As if you had been and were going away. But whatdidyou come for? What have you got to tell me? I assure you, when I opened that door and found you standing there—"
"Yes, I'm sure you must have been surprised," she joined in.
"I was—considerably. What do you think of Dolly?"
"Your sister?"
"Yes."
"I know she doesn't like me," she answered evasively.
"What makes you think that? I don't think you're correct. She hasn't got you right—that's all."
"No, she hasn't got me right. I know she thought I was quite a different person to what I really am."
"But how do you know that? She didn't tell you so when I'd gone out to get that taxi, did she? What did she say to you then?"
"Oh no, she didn't tell me what she thought. Under the circumstances, I'm sure she really treated me very well."
"I don't know about that," said Traill. "You must admit she was a bit icy at first. That's her social way—the way of the whole set when they meet strangers. One ought to bring a blast furnace when one goes calling at their houses, instead of a visiting card. My God, I've been to them myself, and I'd sooner undertake a job as look-out on a ship bound for the north pole. They'd freeze the very marrow in your bones."
Sally smiled—pleased—at his violent antipathy. "Don't you think you'll ever become one of them, then?" she asked. "I expect you will."
"No, not in fifty lifetimes. Did she say I would?"
"She said she expected it."
"Did she? Well, I wouldn't give a brass farthing for her expectations. Just like her to say that. I wonder what her game was. I wonder did she think you could persuade me to it."
He looked up at her; but Sally said nothing. She could have told him—told him to the letter what he wanted to know—but she said nothing. Then he asked her again why she had come that evening to see him.
"Is it anything to do with that parcel?" he asked suspiciously.
Her eyes turned to the little box in its wrapping of brown paper. She reached out her hand and took it from the table.
"Yes," she replied.
"Oh, the bracelet?"
"Yes."
Her fingers attacked the knots on the string with half-hearted enthusiasm.
"Doesn't it fit?" he questioned.
"Oh yes; it isn't that."
"Then what is it? You don't like it. Here—" he was growing impatient of her fingers' futile attempts; "cut the string. You'll never untie those knots. Here's a knife." He handed her one from his pocket. "You don't like it, eh?" he repeated.
She looked straightly at him, eyes unmoved by the steady gaze in his.
"Do you really think that?" she asked. "That I'm bringing it back because I don't like it?"
"I don't know, I'm sure. But if not that, then why?"
There was irritation in his voice; he made little attempt to conceal it. It was his imagination that he had come to dealings with the type of feather-brained woman who knows least of all what she wants when she gets it. It may be seen from this that his knowledge of Sally was supremely slight. He had a broad judgment for all women, a pigeon-hole in his mind into which he threw them without discrimination. When, therefore, he came across the exception in Sally, he did not recognize her, flung her in with the rest, folded more carefully perhaps, tied even with a little distinguishing piece of ribbon. But into that same receptacle in his mind she went, nevertheless. Yet Traill was not without shrewdness in his wide judgment of the sex. He could read his sister as you read a book in which the pages only need cutting, and the glossary sometimes referred to.
On this evening, certainly, he had failed to see the point towards which she drove; but in her dealings with another of her sex, a woman is most inexplicable of all to a man. For this edition de luxe, he needs reference, dictionary, and magnifying glass, with a steady finger always to keep his place on the line should his eyes for one moment lift or wander from the print.
Sally, as yet, he had classified broadly. In the very next moment he was to learn more of her, to take her down from that indiscriminating file in his mind, and scrutinize her afresh.
She took the bangle out of its velvet case and clasped it—with pride even then—upon her wrist.
"You see it fits—perfectly," she said, looking up pathetically.
"Then—Good Lord! why do you bring it back?"
She unclasped it, letting it lie in the palm of her hand, half-stretched out towards him.
"Because I mustn't accept it—I can't. If, after the last time I was here, when you said good-bye, you'd said to me you were going to buy it, I should have told you that I would not take it."
He paid no attention to her outstretched hand. At her eyes he looked.
"Why not? Why particularly after I'd said good-bye?"
"Because you have no right to give it me, and I have less right to accept it."
He half-laughed. "Isn't that rather childish?"
"I don't think so."
"But do you like it? Isn't it a sort of thing you'd like?"
"A sort of thing? I think it's beautiful. I've never had a present like it in my life—never had anything that was so valuable."
"And you're going to refuse it?"
"I must."
He still made no offer to take it from her, but looked persistently at her eyes.
"If I asked you quite straight," he said, "would you tell me quite straight—why?"
Now it must be the truth or the lie. No silence, no half-measures could answer here. She knew that he was at the very door of her heart, when it must either be slammed, bolted, locked in his face with a lie or flung, with the truth, wide open for him to enter if he chose.
She hesitated, it is true; but it was not the hesitation of indecision. When, only a few moments before, her senses have been giddily balancing upon a precipice, saved from the hopeless downfall, only because the man put out no hand to pull her over, a woman is not likely to delay in doubt when at last he offers his hands, his eyes and his voice to drag her into the ultimate abyss of ecstasy.
Sally delayed, only with the natural instinct of reserve. Eventually, she knew she must tell him; if not in words, then by actions, looks—even by silence itself.
"I never thought you meant that bet," she began in timid procrastination.
"No—probably you didn't—but I did. And that's not the reason why you're returning it now. Supposing we sponge out the debt and I tell you to look upon it as a gift—would you keep it then?"
"No."
"Well—it's the wherefore of that I want to know. Why wouldn't you?"
"Because you have no right, no cause, to make me presents. You practically told me so yourself—you said good-bye."
"But don't you take all you can get?" he asked, almost with brutality. So the passion was stirring in him. All that came to his lips found utterance.
At any time, she would have resented that. Now she knew instinctively what the brutality in it expressed.
"No," she replied under her breath—"you might know I don't."
"And so you're returning this because I said good-bye—you're returning this because I said I was not the type of man who hugs the idea of matrimony. How could you take a gift from such a man—eh? I suppose to you it savours almost of an insult. Yet, have you any conception what your returning it seems to me?"
She shook her head.
"It hurts. Do you think you'd feel inclined to believe that? You'd scarcely think I was capable of a wound to sentiment, would you? I am in this case. I gave you that, because I couldn't give you other things. That bangle was a sort of consolation to my thwarted wish to give. I'm quite aware that a woman gives most in a bargain; but a man likes to do a little bit of it as well. Half the jewellers' shops in London 'ud have to close if he didn't. Some of 'em 'ud keep open I know for the women who are bought and prefer the bargain to be settled in kind rather than in cash. And jewellery pretty nearly always realizes its own value. But this was a gift—a substitute for other things that I would rather have given you."
He paused and looked steadily at her, her head drooping, her fingers idly, nervously bending the woven gold.
"Have you any idea what those other things were?" he asked suddenly.
"No," she said—but she did not offer her eyes to convince him of her reply.
"They were the alteration of all your circumstances. The smashing of the chains that gave you to that damned treadmill of a typewriter—the unlocking of the door that keeps you mewed-up in that little lodging-house in Kew—rubbing shoulders with bank-clerks, being compelled to listen to their proposals of suburban marriage, with the prospect of feeding your husband as the stable-boy feeds the horse when it comes back to the manger. Those were the things I wanted to free you from, and in their place, give you everything you could ask, so far as my limited income permits. I only wanted to give you the things you ought to have—the things you should have by right—the things you were born to. Your father was a clergyman—a rector. Why, down at Apsley, the rector comes and dines—for the sake of God—and respectability—and brings his daughters, dressed in their Sunday best—with low-necked frocks that make no pretence to be puritanical. And you slave, day after day, because your father, through no fault of yours, happened to come down in the world, while they sit in a comfortable rectory accepting the invitations of the county. I wanted to give you things that 'ud make your life brighter—wantedto give them—would have found intense pleasure in seeing you take them from me."
Sally rose with a choking of breath to her feet. She could bear the strain no longer. It was like an incessant hammer beating upon her strength, shattering her resolve, until only the desire and the sense were left. She crossed with unsteady steps to the mantelpiece. He rose as well, and followed her.
"Oh—don't!" she moaned. But he took no notice. The impetus he had gained, carried him on. She could not stop him now.
"They were not much, certainly," he went on; "not much compared with what I wanted in return. What I wanted in return, was what no gentleman has the right to expect from any woman who is straight unless she willingly offers it—and you had called me a gentleman. Do you remember that? I don't suppose you really knew when you said it, how much you were saving yourself from me. I wouldn't suggest that credit were due to me for a moment—it isn't. It was just the same as telling a man to do a brave act, when only the doing of it could save his life. I did it because I had to. To be a gentleman is often one chance in a lifetime, and the man who doesn't take it is not fit for hanging. Birth has nothing to do with it. You offered me my chance—I took it—that's all. But now you want to deprive me of my one consolation. You want to refuse that bangle. I refuse to take it back."
Sally turned and faced him. Her lips were set—her eyes had strange lights in them. She looked—as she felt—upon the scaffold of indecision, with the noose of fate about her neck.
"Oh, it is so hard! Why is it so hard?" she whispered.
"Why is what so hard?"
"This—all this."
He laughed ironically. Either he would not see, or he could not see. Men may not be so dense as they appear. Sometimes it is a subconscious cunning that aids them in forcing half the initiative into the hands of the woman.
"Surely, it can't be so difficult a job to just snap the catch of that bracelet on your wrist, and forget all about whether I ought to have given it you or not."
"Oh, I don't mean that," she exclaimed, "you must know I don't mean that."
"Then what?" His whole manner changed. Now she had told him definitely. Now he knew without a shadow of doubt. She cared. It was even swaying in her mind whether she could bear to lose him, notwithstanding all he had said. It did not seem to him that he had worked her up to it. In that moment, he exonerated himself of all blame. He had danced gentleman to the clapping of her hands and the stamping of her foot; and if it came to this, that she cared for him more than convention, more than any principle, then it was not in his nature to force a part upon himself and play it, night after night, to an empty gallery. His hands caught her shoulders, the fingers gripping with passion to her flesh. "Then what?" he repeated. "Do you mean you care for me? Do you mean that it's so hard to go—hard to say good-bye because of that? Is that what you mean?"
She could not answer yet. Even then the rope was not drawn and she could still faintly feel the scaffold boards beneath her feet.
"If I've made a rotten mistake," he went on, content on the moment in her silence to misdoubt his own judgment. "If I've gone and jumped to this conclusion out of sheer conceit—misreading all I see in your eyes—translating all wrongly what I hear in your silence—you'll have to forgive me. I'm not trying to rush you into any expression of what you feel." He conscientiously thought he was not. "In fact, to tell you the honest truth, to me it seems that you—bringing back this bangle—holding from me your reason in doing so; you, stumbling over everything you say, and looking at me as you have done in the last few moments—that it's you who have dragged these things out of me. All my attitude has been in trying to avoid them, because of what I thought you expected me to be. And now I think differently. Am I right? Am I?" He turned her face to meet his eyes. "Am I?"
She raised her eyes once—let his take them—hold them—keep them. Then the boards of the scaffold slipped away from under her feet—one instant the sensation of dropping—dropping; then oblivion—the noose of Fate drawn tight—the account reckoned. She swayed into his arms and he held her—kissing her hair, kissing her shoulders, her cheeks, her eyes—then, gently putting his hand beneath her chin, he lifted her face upwards, and crushed her lips against her teeth with kisses.
END OF BOOK I
END OF BOOK I
BOOK II
THE DESERTER
THE DESERTER
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
Apsley Manor was one of those residences to be found scattered over the country, which are vaguely described as Tudor—memorials to the cultured taste in England, before the restoration with its sponge of Puritanical Piety wiped out the last traces of that refinement which Normandy had lent. Britain was destined to be great in commerce, and not even the inoculation of half the blood of France could ever make her people great in art as well.
It would be difficult to say the exact date when Apsley Manor was built. Certain it was that Elizabeth, in one of her progresses—the resort of a clever woman to fill a needy purse—had stayed there on her way to Oxford. The room, the bed even in which she was supposed to have slept, still remain there. Each owner, as he parted with the property, exacted a heavy premium upon that doubtful relic of history. None of them wished to remove it from the room where it had so many romantic associations; but they one and all had used it as a lever to raise the price of the property—if only a hundred pounds—beyond that which they had, in the first case, paid for it themselves. Once, in fact, the hangings had been taken down and the bed itself lifted from the ground before the very eyes of the intended purchaser; but that had been too much for him. He had given in. There is England's greatness! Can it be wondered—much as we pose to despise them—that we are the only nation in Europe which has given shelter to the tribes of Israel?
In spring-time, the Manor looked wonderful—the lawns cut for the first time since the winter, the hedges of blackthorn splashed thick with snow-blossom, and daffodils, as if sackfuls of new-minted gold were emptied underneath the trees and elves had scattered pieces here and there from out the mass. Birds were building in all the thickets, and the young leaves—virgin green—shyly hid their love-making. Everything alive was possessed with a new-found energy. The sparrows—most ostentatious of any bird there is—flew about, trailing long threads of hay, with an air as if they carried the Golden Fleece in their beaks each time they returned to the apple trees. But other creatures were as busy as they. Strange little brown birds—whitethroats and linnets perhaps, if the eye could only have followed them—flew in and out of the blackthorn hedges all day long. Thrushes and blackbirds hopped pompously about the lawns, and the starlings chattered like old women on the roofs of the red gables.
The house itself was modelled as are nearly all such residences of the Tudor period, the gables at either end making, with the hall, the formation of the letter E so characteristic of the architecture of that time. Only two additions had been made, oriel windows to enlarge the rooms at each end of the gables; but they had been executed, some seventy years before Sir William Hewitt Traill's occupation of the place, by a man who had respect for the days of King Harry and they had long since toned into the atmosphere. A great tree of wisteria lifted itself above one of the windows, and on the other a clematis clung with its wiry, brittle shoots.
The huge cedars, holding out their black-green fans of foliage like Eastern canopies—the high yew-trees, to whom only age could bring such lofty dimensions, all surrounded the old, red building and wrapped it in a velvet cloak of warm security. Tulips in long beds—brilliant mosaics in a floor of green marble—were let into the lawn that stretched down the drive. Away on the horizon, the rising ground about Wycombe showed blue through the soft spring atmosphere, and in the middle distance, the ploughed fields—freshly turned—glowed with the rich, red blood of the earth's fulness. So it presented itself to the eyes of Mrs. Durlacher, when, one morning late in April, she drove up in her motor to the old iron-barred oak-door which opened into the panelled hall of her country residence.
She was alone. Her maid and another servant had come down by rail to High Wycombe and were being driven over in one of the house conveyances from the station, a distance of five miles. The chauffeur descended from the seat, opened the door of the car, and when she had passed into the house, beckoned a gardener who was at work on one of the tulip beds, to help him in with some of the luggage which Mrs. Durlacher had brought with her.
"She's coming to stay, then?" said the gardener.
"S'pose so," replied the chauffeur. "I'd understood yesterday as she was going to the openin' of a bazaar this afternoon—openin' by royalty; but I got my orders this morning to fill up the tank and come along at once, 'cos she was going out into the country. 'Ow's that ferret of mine going on?"
"First class," said the gardener.
"Well then, as soon as I get the car cleaned this afternoon, I'm going to have some rattin'. Here—put 'em in the 'all—here."
The gardener struggled obediently. The chauffeur did most of the looking on and practically all the talking.
From the mouths of babes and sucklings and from the lips of hired servants one gets wisdom in the one case and information in the other. All that the chauffeur had stated was quite true. Some five days before—and we have now three years behind us since that night when Sally Bishop tottered into Traill's arms—Mrs. Durlacher had received a letter from her brother, of whom she had seen nothing for almost six months, saying that he thought of going down to Apsley for the day. "But I make sure first," his letter concluded, "that the field is cleared. Down there, as you know, I prefer to be the only starter."
She had written in reply that she had only been down to Apsley once that year herself and, furthermore, on the day he mentioned, the place would be as deserted of human beings as London is in the heart of July—meaning thereby that any place is a wilderness which is empty of one's self and one's associates. That she had written by return of post; then, two days later, her mind had caught an impression—a wandering insect that the flimsy web of a spider clutches by chance. He had gone down to Apsley before this, many a time. She knew that he had a lingering fondness for the place which no amount of gluttony of Bohemianism could ever wipe out. But he had never taken these precautions before. He had chanced his luck; if he had found people there, then he had forced a retreat as soon as possible. But now he was going out of his way—writing a letter, an action foreign to the whole of his nature—to ensure that he should be alone.
The circumstance—for circumstance there must be, just as there is the puff of wind that drifts the wandering insect to the spider's web—that brought the impression to her mind, was the brief report of a cross-examination in the divorce courts, conducted by J.H. Traill. She knew that in the last two years he had, in a desultory way, been gleaning briefs from the great field where others reaped. That had stood for little in her mind; for though she had always realized that in temperament and intellect he would make an excellent barrister, she had never believed that he would throw aside the Bohemian side of his nature sufficiently to gain ambition. Now, in this stray report, she beheld between the lines the successful man. His cross-examination had won the case, for his side. Its ability was undoubted, even to her untutored mind, and from this, in that indirect method—taking no heed of the straight line—by which women come leaping to their admirable conclusions, she received the impression that when Traill came down to Apsley, he would not come alone.
It is scarcely possible to see how this is arrived at; yet, to the mind of a woman, it is simple enough. Her brother had, after all these years, breasted his way out of the slow-moving tide of mental indifference, into the rapid current of ambition. When a man does that, her intuition prompted her to know that it is more than likely that he brings a woman with him. It is always possible for a woman to recognize—apart from her own identity—that her sex is an encumbrance to most men which they cannot easily shake off. Witness the generous criticism of a woman upon any husband but her own. Combine with this intuitive knowledge the fact—hitherto unrecorded, even by Traill to Sally—that when he handed over Apsley Manor to his sister and took her ready money in exchange, Traill had made her sign a document granting him the right to repurchase possession with the same amount at any time that it might please him, and you have the apprehension of the woman who knows that possession constitutes but few points of the law when there is ink and parchment to nullify the whole transaction.
Jack, with a woman at his heels; a woman, moreover, whom he had probably brought with him out of that dark abyss of the past; might quite easily be a crushing blow to all her social power. Five thousand pounds perhaps would be a difficult sum for him to raise—certainly to raise immediately—but she had the proof before her that he was striding into eminence and, as has been mentioned before in this chapter, England is the only country in Europe which is a safe harbour for the Jews.
So then she leapt to the conclusion. He was bringing a woman with him to see the place. She pictured the creature vividly in her mind—a woman with a large hat, red lips, a woman with a bold figure who knew how to dress it brazenly, with eyes that danced to the whip of his remarks; a woman who as mistress of Apsley, would make it impossible for her ever to go near the place again. There was only one way to meet the situation—a situation it had definitely become in the sudden workings of her mind—and that was face to face, at Apsley, in possession, with the servants at her command and the most gracious of speeches on her lips. Tramping through the house alone, that woman would be assigning rooms to their different owners, as if she were already in possession; but with Mrs. Durlacher, the perfect artist, as Jack had called her—she laughed unfeelingly when that phrase came back to her mind—with herself at the woman's heels, telling her what they did with this room and how in the hunting season they used that, there would be little scope for exhibition of the proprietary sentiment and, whoever the person might be, Mrs. Durlacher guaranteed she should not shine on that occasion before her brother.
For that day, then, she had cancelled all her engagements. The opening of the bazaar, a function at which she had felt it her duty to be present, she crossed out of her book. From the dinner, to which she and her husband had been asked on the evening previous to Traill's visit to Apsley, she wrote and excused herself, saying she had been called out of Town; and on the next morning she had ordered the car to be round at the house in Sloane Street punctually at a quarter to ten.
"Can't see why you have to give up the dinner and drive me out of it as well because you have to go down to Apsley to-morrow," her husband had said when she had written to her hostess excusing their presence at dinner.
"The reason's obvious," she replied equably. "I haven't had a good night's rest for a week—I can't sleep after eight o'clock in the morning like you do, and I've got a woman to deal with to-morrow. You don't want to lose the shooting and the hunting down at Apsley, do you?"
"No—rather not—of course I don't."
"Then let me get a good night's rest."
One admires the woman who sees her plan of action and takes it like a sword in the hand. Certainly, there was a possibility that she might be wrong. There well might be no woman. But in her mind, she was confident, and this was the only method of defence. She did not hesitate to accept it, difficult though it were. The woman might be any one—a creature whose touch would be contamination. She placed no trust in her brother where women were concerned. He would not actually disgrace her; she could be certain of that. A calculation on the presence of Mrs. Butterick, the housekeeper, who was always left in charge of the Manor, would be bound to act as a certain restraint. But what he expected to present a quotient of respectability to Mrs. Butterick and the gardener if he happened to be about the grounds, might well represent sordid vulgarity to her. He had certainly taken every precaution to be alone. Yet having drawn all these facts into consideration, she was undaunted. The whole way down to Apsley, sitting comfortably in the corner of the car, her eyes unseeingly fixed upon the back of the chauffeur's neck, she rehearsed one scene after another with a precision of imagination that was worthy of a greater cause. Yet what cause could be greater to her? With the loss of Apsley, she fell irremediably in social power. Five thousand pounds would purchase another residence in the country. But what sort of a residence? She shuddered and, in a moment of relaxation, became aware that the chauffeur was in need of a clean collar.
The moment she arrived, she sent for Mrs. Butterick and went upstairs to her bedroom. The good, fat, little woman—her face a full harvest moon, to which the features adhered with regularity but no expression—soon followed her. She stood at the door of the long, lofty room with its three big, latticed windows and beamed upon her mistress. She loved the quality—the quality, she always called them. When the season of week-ends came round each year, she was the proudest of women in the country-side. At that very moment, she was wearing a silk petticoat, worth its weight in gold, five guineas at the utmost for it seemed like froth in the hand—which a French lady's maid had given her in exchange for silence over a little incident that scarcely calls for mention. The first return of her mistress to Apsley, then, was a sign of the nearing season—the lonely swallow that is seen scudding through the first break in the year by some enthusiastic ornithologist and recorded in the next morning's edition of theTimes. She kept a diary, in fact, did Mrs. Butterick, and in about the middle of April of every year, might be noticed the comment, "Madame arrived—first time this year—" and then, more than probably the addition, "House-party on the ——" and thereafter the date, whatever it may have been.
Now, on this occasion, as she always did, she beamed in silence and waited.
"Good morning, Mrs. Butterick. You got my letter?"
"Yes, madam."
"These sheets are aired?"
"Dry as a bone, madam. I felt 'em myself."
"I shall only be staying the night," Mrs. Durlacher continued; "I go back to Town to-morrow morning."
Mrs. Butterick made no reply, If her features could have fallen into an expression of disappointment, they would willingly have done so; but nature had taken no trouble with them. They were an afterthought. It seemed as if they had been placed there at the last moment of birth, with no inner mechanism to answer to sensation. She just said nothing.
"To-morrow morning," Mrs. Durlacher repeated.
"Yes, madam."
"And now you can take the chintz covers off everything in this room and the drawing-room as well. There's rather a snap in the air; I think perhaps you might have the fire lighted in the dining-room. And tell one of the gardeners to pick me plenty of daffodils—not common ones—not those ordinary double ones, but the best he's got. White petals with the yellow trumpets—you know the ones I mean. Also some narcissi and a few tulips—pink ones for the drawing-room. They must all be on the dining-room table when I come downstairs. I'll arrange them myself. And get my trunks sent up to me at once—I want to change my dress. Taylor and Mason are coming down by train; they'll be here any minute now. The trap went for them—didn't it?"
"Yes, madam—at half-past ten."
"Well, then, that's all, Mrs. Butterick. What time is it?"
The housekeeper extracted a silver watch with its flowery, ornamental dial from the recesses of an ample bosom. She drew it out by the chain and, once free, it swung violently to and fro till she caught it.
"A quarter past eleven, madam."
"Very well, there's not too much time. I expect my brother and probably a lady down here to-day. Oh yes, and by the way—when they come—well—I'll tell that to Taylor. You go and see about the flowers and the chintz covers at once—and my trunks—immediately. You'd better come up yourself and unpack for me until Mason arrives."
When once she heard the crunching wheels of the trap upon the drive, she rang her bell. Mason entered almost immediately.
"Tell Taylor I want her here at once," said Mrs. Durlacher, "and come and help me dress before you change your things."
The moment she had closed the door, her mistress called her back.
"And send Mrs. Butterick as well."
"Yes, madam."
Mason went downstairs with the report that something was in the air. She had a feeling, she said.
The interview with Taylor was shorter—more to the point.
"I'm expecting my brother—Mr. Traill, and probably a lady," she said. She laid no stress on the last word, much as the temptation assailed her. "It's quite likely they may be down to lunch. When they come, there is no need to say that I am here, unless, of course, Mr. Traill asks you. You'd better go and change your dress at once."
Then she turned to Mrs. Butterick.
"You've taken off the chintz covers?" she said.
"Yes, madam."
"Ordered the flowers?"
"Yes, madam."
"Well, now, what have you got in for lunch?"
"There's some lamb, madam."
"Well—that's no good—I'd better tell you what I want. A heavy lunch like that is impossible. I want all dainty little dishes—something out of the common, I leave it entirely to you. Four courses will be enough. And Sauterne and Burgundy. Tell Taylor we'll have coffee in the dining-room. Now my hair, Mason."
So she marshalled forces, occupied positions and concentrated artillery in preparation for the siege. The generalship of a woman is never so keen, so instinct with strategy, as when she gives battle against another of her sex. Her campaign against men, when once she takes up arms, is mimic warfare—a sham fight—compared to this. Against a man, she needs but a company of fascinations, and in one attack his squares—the stern veterans of determination—are driven to flight. But with a woman, whole regiments of cunning, whole battalions of craft, with all the well-trained scouts of intuition and all the dashing cavalries of charm, are needed to rout her absolutely from the field.
Within an hour Mrs. Durlacher descended to the dining-room. The gown she wore would not have pleased a man to infatuation; but a woman would have realized its beauty, known its value. With deft fingers, she arranged the flowers. In a chair by the fire, hiding herself from view to any one outside the window, she sat and watched the table being laid, giving orders how the vases were to be placed on the old oak table.
"Lay two places—that's all," she said.
Taylor looked up. "I thought you said there would be a lady with Mr. Traill, madam."
"I said—probably. You can lay another place if she comes." A vision crossed her mind of making so small a point as that, a moment of embarrassment for her unwelcome guest.
Then a sound reached her ears. Her eyes were arrested, fixed unseeingly to a point before her as she listened.
"Is that a motor, Taylor?"
Taylor looked out of the window. "It's a taxi-cab, madam."
"Can you see who's inside?"
"I suppose it's Mr. Traill, madam. Yes—it is."
"Any one with him?"
"Yes, madam—a lady."