Delivered in the most natural manner imaginable, with the quiet confidence of which this man was full, and followed by a smile of conscious yet not unkindly triumph, this argument, like most that fell from his lips upon her ears, was invested with a value out of all proportion to its real worth; and Steel clinched it with one of those homely saws which are not disdained by makers of speeches the wide world over.
“Could you really think,” he added, with one of his rarest and most winning smiles, “that I should be such a fool as to invite you to step out of the frying-pan into the fire?”
Rachel felt for a moment that she would like to say it was exactly what she had done; but even in that moment she perceived that such a statement would have been very far from the truth. And her nature was large enough to refrain from the momentary gratification of a bitter repartee. But he was too clever for her; that she did feel, whatever else he might be; and her only chance was to return to the plain questions with which she had started, demanding answers as plain. Rachel led up to them, however, with one or two of which she already knew the answer, thus preparing for her spring in quite the Old Bailey manner, which she had mastered subconsciously at her trial, and which for once was to profit a prisoner at the bar.
“Yet you don’t any longer deny that you have been to Australia?”
“It is useless. I lived there for years.”
“And you admit that you knew Alexander quite well out there?”
“Most intimately, in the Riverina, some fifteen or twenty years ago; he was on my station as almost everything a gentleman could be, up to overseer; and by that time he was half a son to me, and half a younger brother.”
“But no relation, as a matter of fact?”
“None whatever, but my very familiar friend, as I have already told you.”
“Then why in the world,” Rachel almost thundered, “could you not tell me so in the beginning?”
“That is a question I have already answered.”
“Then I have another. Why so often and so systematically pretend that you never were in Australia at all?”
“That is a question which I implore you not to press!”
The two answers, so like each other in verbal form, were utterly dissimilar in the manner of their utterance. Suddenly, and for the first time in all her knowledge of him, his cynical aplomb had fallen from the man like a garment. One moment he was brazening past deceit with a smiling face; the next, he was in earnest, even he, and that mocking voice vibrated with deep feeling.
“I should have thought all the more of you for being an Australian,” continued Rachel, vaguely touched at the change in him, “I who am proud of being one myself. What harm could it have done, my knowing that?”
“You are not the only one from whom I have hidden it,” said Steel, still in a low and altered voice.
“Yet you brought home all those keepsakes of the bush?”
“But I thought better of them, and have never even unpacked them all, as you must have seen for yourself.”
“Yet your mysterious visitor of the other day—”
“Another Australian, of course; indeed, another man who worked upon my own run.”
“And he knows why you don’t want it known over here?”
“He does,” said Steel, with grim brevity.
Rachel moved forward and pressed his hand impulsively. To her surprise the pressure was returned. That instant their hands fell apart.
“I beg your pardon in my turn,” she said. “I can only promise you that I will never again reopen that wound — whatever it may be — and I won’t even try to guess. I undertook not to try to probe your past, and I will keep my undertaking in the main; but where it impinges upon my own past I simply cannot! You say you were my first husband’s close friend,” added Rachel, looking her second husband more squarely than ever in the eyes. “Was that what brought you to my trial for his murder?”
He returned her look.
“It was.”
“Was that what made you wish to marry me yourself?”
No answer, but his assurance coming back, as he stood looking at her under beetling eyebrows, over black arms folded across a snowy shirt. It was the wrong moment for the old Adam’s return, for Rachel had reached the point upon which she most passionately desired enlightenment.
“I want to know,” she cried, “and I insist on knowing, what first put it into your head or your heart to marry me — all but convicted—”
Steel held up his hand, glancing in apprehension towards the door.
“I have told you so often,” he said, “and your glass tells you whenever you look into it. I sat within a few feet of you for the inside of a week!”
“But that is not true,” she told him quietly; “trust a woman to know, if it were.”
In the white glare of the electric light he seemed for once to change color slightly.
“If you will not accept my word,” he answered, “there is no more to be said.”
And he switched off a bunch of the lights that had beaten too fiercely upon him; but it only looked as if he was about to end the interview.
“You have admitted so many untruths in the last half hour,” pursued Rachel, in a thrilling voice, “that you ought not to be hurt if I suspect you of another. Come! Can you look me in the face and tell me that you married me for love? No, you turn away — because you cannot! Then will you, in God’s name, tell me why you did marry me?”
And she followed him with clasped hands, her beautiful eyes filled with tears, her white throat quivering with sobs, until suddenly he turned upon her as though in self-defence.
“No, I will not!” he cried. “Since the answer I have given you, and the obvious answer, is not good enough for you, the best thing you can do is to find out for yourself.”
A truculent look came into Rachel’s eyes, as they rested upon the smooth face so unusually agitated beneath the smooth silvery hair.
“I will!” she answered through her teeth. “I shall take you at your word, and find out for myself I will!”
And she swept past him out of the room.
“I will!” she answered through her teeth — and she swept past him out of the room.
CHAPTER XV
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
There was now an open breach between the Steels, but no third person would have discerned any difference in their relations. It was a mere snapping of the threads across the chasm which had always separated Rachel from her second husband. The chasm had been plain enough to those who came much in contact with the pair, but the little threads of sympathy were invisible to the naked eye of ordinary observation. There was thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture. It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one. Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel’s offences in the now jaundiced eyes of his wife.
Rachel felt as bitter as one only does against those who have inspired some softer feeling; the poison of misplaced confidence rankled in her blood. Her husband had told her much, but it was not enough for Rachel, and the little he refused to tell eliminated all the rest from her mind. There was no merit even in such frankness as he had shown, since her own, accidental discoveries had forced some measure of honesty upon him. He had admitted nothing which Rachel could not have deduced from that which she had found out for herself. She felt as far as ever from any satisfactory clew to his mysterious reasons for ever wishing to marry her. There lay the kernel of the whole matter, there the problem that she meant to solve. If her first husband was at the bottom of it, no matter how indirectly, and if she had been married for the dead man’s sake, to give his widow a home, then Rachel felt that the last affront had been put upon her, and she would leave this man as she had been within an ace of leaving his friend. So ran the wild and unreasonable tenor of her thoughts. He had not married her for her own sake; it was not she herself who had appealed to
him, after all. Curiosity might consume her, and a sense of deepening mystery add terrors of its own, but the resentful feeling was stronger than either of these, and would have afforded as strange a revelation as any, had Rachel dared to look deeper into her own heart.
If, on the other hand, she had already some conception of the truth about herself, it would scarcely lessen her bitterness against one who inspired in her emotions at once so complex and so painful. Suffice it that this bitterness was extreme in the days immediately following the scene between Rachel and her husband in the drawing-room after dinner. It was also unconcealed, and must have been the cause of many another such scene but for the imperturable temper and the singularly ruly tongue of John Buchanan Steel. And then, in those same days, there fell the two social events to which the bidden guests had been looking forward for some two or three weeks, and of which the whole neighborhood was to talk for years.
On the tenth of August the Uniackes were giving a great garden party at Hornby Manor, while the eleventh was the date of the first real dinner-party for which the Steels had issued invitations to Normanthorpe House.
The tenth was an ideal August day: deep blue sky, trees still untarnished in the hardy northern air, and black shadows under the trees. Rachel made herself ready before lunch, to which she came down looking quite lovely, in blue as joyous as the sky’s, to find her husband as fully prepared, and not less becomingly attired, in a gray frock-coat without a ripple on its surface. They looked critically at each other for an instant, and then Steel said something pleasant, to which Rachel made practically no reply. They ate their lunch in a silence broken good-naturedly at intervals from one end of the table only. Then the Woodgates arrived, to drive with them to Hornby, which was some seven or eight miles away; and the Normanthorpe landau and pair started with, the quartette shortly after three o’clock.
Morning, noon, and afternoon of this same tenth of August, Charles Langholm, the minor novelist, never lifted his unkempt head from the old bureau at which he worked, beside an open window overlooking his cottage garden. A tumbler of his beloved roses stood in one corner of the writing space, up to the cuts in MSS., and roses still ungathered peeped above the window-sill and drooped from either side. But Langholm had a soul far below roses at the present moment; his neatly numbered sheets of ruled sermon-paper were nearing the five hundredth page; his hero and his heroine were in the full sweep of those emotional explanations which they had ingeniously avoided for the last three hundred at least; in a word, Charles Langholm’s new novel is being finished while you wait. It is not one of his best; yet a moment ago there was a tear in his eye, and now he is grinning like a child at play. And at play he is, though he be paid for playing, and though the game is only being won after weeks and months of uphill labor and downhill joy.
At last there is the final ticking of inverted commas, and Charles Langholm inscribes the autograph for which he is importuned once in a blue moon, and which the printer will certainly not set up at the foot of the last page; but the thing is done, and the doer must needs set his hand to it out of pure and unusual satisfaction with himself. And so, thank the Lord!
Langholm rose stiffly from the old bureau, where at his best he could lose all sense of time; for the moment he was bent double, and faint with fasting, because it was his mischievous rule to reach a given point before submitting to the physical and mental distraction of a meal. But to-day’s given point had been the end of his book, and for some happy minutes Langholm fed on his elation. It was done at last, yet another novel, and not such a bad one after all. Not his best by any means, but perhaps still further from being his worst; and, at all events, the thing was done. Langholm could scarcely grasp that fact, though there was the last page just dry upon the bureau, and most of the rest lying about the room in galley-proofs or in typewritten sheets. Moreover, the publishers were pleased; that was the joke. It was nothing less to Langholm when he reflected that the final stimulus to finish this book had been the prospect and determination of at last writing one to please himself. And this reflection brought him down from his rosy clouds.
It was the day of the Uniacke’s garden-party; they had actually asked the poor author, and the poor author had intended to go. Not that he either shone or revelled in society; but Mrs. Steel would be there, and he burned to tell her that he had finished his book, and was at last free to tackle hers; for hers at bottom it would be, the great novel by which the name of Langholm was to live, and which he was to found by Rachel Steel’s advice upon the case of her namesake Rachel Minchin.
The coincidence of the Christian names had naturally struck the novelist, but no suspicion of the truth had crossed a mind too skilled in the construction of dramatic situations to dream of stumbling into one ready-made. It was thus with a heart as light as any feather that Langholm made a rapid and unwholesome meal, followed by a deliberate and painstaking toilet, after which he proceeded at a prudent pace upon his bicycle to Hornby Manor.
Flags were drooping from their poles, a band clashing fitfully through the sleepy August air, and carriages still sweeping into the long drive, when Langholm also made his humble advent. He was a little uneasy and self-conscious, and annoyed at his own anxiety to impart his tidings to Mrs. Steel, but for whom he would probably have stayed at home. His eye sought her eagerly as he set foot upon the lawn, having left his bicycle at the stables, and carefully removed the clips from his trousers; but before his vigilance could be rewarded he was despatched by his hostess to the tea-tent, in charge of a very young lady, detached for the nonce from the wing of a gaunt old gentleman with side whiskers and lantern jaws.
Fresh from his fagging task, Langholm did not know what on earth to say to the pretty schoolgirl, whose own shyness reacted on herself; but he was doing his best, and atoning in attentiveness for his shortcomings as a companion, when in the tent he had to apologize to a lady in blue, who turned out to be Rachel herself, with Hugh Woodgate at her side.
“Oh, no, we live in London,” the young girl was saying; “only I go to the same school as Ida Uniacke, and I am staying here on a visit.”
“I’ve finished it,” whispered Langholm to Rachel, “this very afternoon; and now I’m ready for yours! I see,” he added, dropping back into the attitude of respectful interest in the young girl; “only on a visit; and who was the old gentleman from whom I tore you away?”
The child laughed merrily.
“That was my father,” she said; “but he is only here on his way to Leeds.”
“You mustn’t call it my book,” remonstrated Rachel, while Woodgate waited upon both ladies.
“But it was you who gave me the idea of writing a novel round Mrs. Minchin.”
“I don’t think I did. I am quite sure it was your own idea. But one book at a time. Surely you will take a rest?”
“I shall correct this thing. It will depress me to the verge of suicide. Then I shall fall to upon my magnum opus.”
“You really think it will be that?”
“It should be mine. It isn’t saying much; but I never had such a plot as you have given me!”
Rachel shook her head in a last disclaimer as she moved away with the Vicar of Marley.
“Oh, Mr. Langholm, do you write books?” asked the schoolgirl, with round blue eyes.
“For my sins,” he confessed. “But do you prefer an ice, or more strawberries and cream?”
“Neither, thank you. I’ve been here before,” the young girl said with a jolly smile. “But I didn’t know I should come back with an author!”
“Then we’ll go out into the open air,” the author said; and they followed Rachel at but a few yards’ distance.
It was a picturesque if an aimless pageant, the smart frocks sweeping the smooth sward, the pretty parasols with the prettier faces underneath, the well-set-up and well-dressed men, with the old gray manor rising upon an eminence in the background, and a dazzling splash of scarlet and of brass somewhere under the trees. The band was playing selections fr
om The Geisha as Langholm emerged from the tea-tent in Rachel’s wake. Mrs. Venables was manoeuvring her two highly marriageable girls in opposite quarters of the field, and had only her own indefatigable generalship to thank for what it lost her upon this occasion. Mr. Steel and Mrs. Woodgate apparently missed the same thing through wandering idly in the direction of the band; but the tableau might have been arranged for the express benefit of Charles Langholm and the very young lady upon whom he was dancing laborious attendance.
Mrs. Uniacke had stepped apart from the tall old gentleman with the side whiskers, to whom she had been talking for some time, and had intercepted Rachel as she was passing on with Hugh Woodgate.
“Wait while I introduce you to my most distinguished guest, or rawther him to you,” whispered Mrs. Uniacke, with the Irish brogue which rendered her slightest observation a delight to the appreciative. “Sir Baldwin Gibson — Mrs. Steel.”
Langholm and the little Miss Gibson were standing close behind, and the trained eye of the habitual observer took in every detail of a scene which he never forgot. Handsome Mrs. Uniacke was clinching the introduction with a smile, which ended in a swift expression of surprise. Sir Baldwin had made an extraordinary pause, his hand half way to his hat, his lantern jaws fallen suddenly apart. Mrs. Steel, though slower at her part of the obvious recognition, was only a second slower, and thereupon stood abashed and ashamed in the eyes of all who saw; but only for another second at the most; then Sir Baldwin Gibson not only raised his hat, but held out his hand in a fatherly way, and as she took it Rachel’s color changed from livid white to ruby red.
Yet even Rachel was mistress of herself so quickly that the one or two eye-witnesses of this scene, such as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm, who saw that it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had seen as much as they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once into amiable and fluent conversation, and before many moments Rachel’s replies were infected with an approximate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to his juvenile companion, and put a question in the form of a fib.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 251