CHAPTER XXVI
SHE walked rapidly along the corridor toward the tower. But in a moment or two she turned back and went in the direction of the library. It was Randolph’s habit to read there when the other guests were playing and romping. To-night’s frolic would certainly not have appealed to him. It was more than possible that he was there alone, or in his room; and to-morrow he must go with the others. It might be years before she would see him again, and it would be culpable not to make him a last appeal. If the Abbey was lost it should not be for want of effort on her part.
Randolph was in the library, and alone. He rose with a brilliant smile of pleasure, then stood and looked hard at her.
“Something has happened,” he said. “You look as if you had just come back from the next world.”
“You are not so far wrong. Lord Barnstaple has just killed himself. Things had come to his knowledge that I hope you may never hear. But he is dead, and to-morrow you will have gone.”
They were standing close together.
“You will not return to California with us.”
“I would never leave Cecil Maundrell for an hour again if I could help it.”
They exchanged a long look, and when it was over each understood the other. Lee looked down; then, in the unendurable silence, raised her eyes again. She averted them hastily. His were the eyes of men who look their last. It was the second time she had looked into a man’s soul to-night, and she felt cold and faint. What should she see in Cecil’s?
And how was she to speak of the Abbey in the face of a tragedy like this? She turned to go, but her feet clung to the floor. The Abbey was Cecil’s, and Cecil’s it must remain if its rescue were within the compass of her determined hands. But words were hard to find.
Then she remembered that she had very eloquent eyes, and that Randolph was versed in their speech. She raised them slowly and let them travel about the beautiful old room, then out to the cloisters under whose crumbling arches hooded shadows seemed passing to and fro; then raised them once more to his with an expression of yearning and appeal.
“Is it true that Lady Barnstaple is ruined?”
“She has not a penny.”
There was another silence, so intense that they heard the echo of a laugh, far out on the moor.
Randolph picked up a book from the table, and examined its title, then laid it down again, and turned it over.
“I have never yet broken my word,” he said.
Lee flashed him a glance full of tears and tribute. Then once more that night she shook hands with a man who was sick with the bitterness of life.
She left the library and went rapidly down the corridor. As she passed Lord Barnstaple’s door she noted with gratitude that there was no sign of discovery. If the blow could be softened it was by her alone.
She was traversing the last corridor but one when her eyes were arrested by the chapel and the churchyard on the hill. She paused a moment and regarded them intently. A week from to-night she and her husband would follow Lord Barnstaple up that hill to the vault beneath the chapel’s altar. She had hardly realised his death before, but that solitary hill, cold under the moonlight, cold in its bosom, coldly biding its Maundrells, generation after generation, century after century, made the tragedy of the earl’s death one of the several sharply-cut facts of her life. They were five; she counted them mechanically: the violent death of her father, her meeting with Cecil, the death of her mother, her union with her husband, the violent death of her husband’s father. There was certainly a singular coincidence between the first and the last.
As she continued to look out at the graveyard, dark even under the moon, and wondering if the next great fact in her life would be the birth of a child, to be borne up that hill supinely in his turn, following the father who had gone long since, she became aware that the word coincidence was swinging to and fro in her mind, although the other words of its company had gone to their dust-heap. She frowned and reproached herself for giving way to melancholy; then reflected that she would be less than mortal ifshe did not ... the reiteration of the word annoyed her, and in a moment she had fitted it into her conversation with Lord Barnstaple that afternoon.
Her stiffening eyes returned to the hill, and their vision stabbed through the mounds to the bones of the abbots, whose brothers had cursed the Abbey. It had been but a coincidence perhaps, but it had worked itself out with astonishing regularity.
Lee became conscious that she was as cold as ice. The Abbey was saved to the Maundrells. Was Cecil dead? Had he died before his father? Nothing could be more unlikely, for he was the healthiest of men, and there was no one to murder him.
She shook herself violently and took her nerves in hand. Two years ago she would have flung off the superstition as quickly, but to-day the old world and all its traditions had taken her imagination into its mould. Had Pix—or that silent, persistent, unfathomable woman, his sister——
She ran towards the tower, gripping her nerves; for if Cecil were there she would have need of all her faculties. It was no part of her programme to burst in upon him and scream and stammer her terrible bulletin. But she was a woman, frightened, horrified, overwrought with hours of nervous tension. When she reached the stair her knees were shaking, and she climbed the long spiral so slowly that she would have called her husband’s name could she have found her voice. She wished she had asked him to write in her boudoir, whose open door was as black as the entrance to a cave; but he was—should be—in his own little sitting-room above.
She climbed the next flight with something more of resolution; courage comes to all strong natures as they approach the formidable moments of their lives. At the last turning she saw a blade of light, but the door was too thick to pass a sound. When she reached it her fear and superstition, and the obsession they had induced, left her abruptly, and she opened the door at once. Cecil was writing quietly.
THE END.