Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  I replied carelessly enough that the profession was very creditable to him, for in truth I had seen him behave towards her with so cruel an inconsistency of temper that I was disinclined to rate his protestations very high.

  “And so greatly, Mr. Clavering,” he went on— “so greatly do I love her, that” — and here he threw down his pencils and took a step or two until he reached the window— “that if aught happened amiss to her I do not think I should live long after it, If she deceived me, I do not think that I should care to live. I do not think I should even hold it worth while to exact a retribution from the man who helped in the deceit.”

  And I saw his wife in the open doorway. She must have caught every word. I saw a flush as of anger overspread her face, and the flush give place to pallor.

  “Mr. Ashlock, my steward, was with you last night, Mr. Herbert. Was it upon this subject that you talked?”

  Herbert flung round upon his heel

  “You take a tone I do not understand,” he said, after a pause. “You may have a right to pry into the conversations of your servants, Mr. Clavering, but I am not one of them” — and of a sudden he caught sight of his wife in the doorway. “You here?” he asked with a start.

  “It is only fair,” she answered, “that I should be present when you discuss my frailties with your patrons. But it seems,” and her voice hardened audibly, “you do me the kindness to discuss them with your patrons’ servants too.”

  She stood before him superb in pride; every line of her body seemed to demand an answer.

  “It is because I love you,” he answered feebly; and at that her quietude gave way.

  She flung up her arms above her head.

  “Because you love me!” she cried “Was ever woman so insulted, and on so mean a plea?” And she sank down at the table in a passion of tears.

  Herbert stepped over to her, and laid a hand upon her shoulder.

  She shook his hand off, and rising of a sudden, confronted me with a blazing face.

  “And you!” she cried bitterly— “you could listen to such talk — ay, like your servant!” And she swept out of the room before either her husband or myself could find a word to say.

  Indeed, though I had not thought of the matter in that light before, I considered her accusation of the justest, and the sound of her sobbing remained in my ears, tingling me to pity of the woman and a sore indignation against the husband. It was for myself I should have felt that indignation I knew well, but I am relating what occurred, and — well, maybe I paid for the offence heavily enough.

  “Mr. Herbert,” said I, rising, with as much calmness as I could command, “I will not trouble you to continue the work.”

  “But the portrait!” he exclaimed, almost in alarm. “It is my best work!” And he stood a little aloof gazing at it.

  “The portrait!” I cried, in a fury at his insensibility— “the portrait may go hang!”

  “On the walls of Blackladies?” he asked, with a quick sneer.

  “Oh,” said I slowly, “you gossiped to some purpose with my steward, it appears.”

  He stood confused and silent I went into the room where it was my habit to change my dress, and left him. But when I came out I found him standing in the passage with a lighted candle in his hand, though it was broad noonday. Doubtless I looked my surprise at him.

  “An ill-lighted staircase, Mr. Clavering, is the devil,” he remarked; and with a sardonic deference he preceded me to the street.

  “It will rain, I think,” he said, looking op at the sky.

  “The air is very heavy,” said I.

  He stretched out the candlestick to the full length of his arm, and the flame barely wavered.

  “Yes, no doubt it will rain,” he repeated.

  I noticed that one or two people who were passing up the street stopped, as well they might, and stared at us. I bent forward and blew out the candle.

  “You will pardon me,” I said.

  “It has served its purpose,” said he, and he kicked the door to behind me.

  I mounted, and walked my horse slowly homewards. About two miles from the town I dismounted, and tethering my horse to a tree, paced about the lake shores, resolved to unpick his sentences word by word until I had disentangled from amongst them some reference which would give me an inkling into the steward’s designs. He had told Herbert of that talk we had had together in the hall concerning the hanging of the picture. Of so much I was assured, and so much I still found myself abstractedly repeating an hour later. For alas! in spite of my resolve, my thoughts had flown along a very different path. I had a vision of the woman, and her alternations from pride to tears, ever fixed before my eyes. It was myself who had caused them. One moment I accused myself for not undertaking her defence, the next for that I had ever entered her lodging; and whatever outcry I made sprang from the single conviction that I was responsible to her for the distress which she had shown. Just for that moment there seemed but two people upon God’s earth — myself and a woman wronged by me.

  “Mr. Clavering.”

  The name was uttered behind me with an involuntary cry, and I knew the voice. I turned me about, and there was Mrs. Herbert standing in a gap of the trees.

  She was dressed as I had seen her an hour ago, with the addition of a hood thrown loosely over her head.

  “What can I do?” I cried. “I can think of nothing. It is my fault, all this. God knows I am sensible of the remorse; I feel it at the very core of my heart; but that does not help me to the remedy. What can I do?”

  “It is not your fault,” she replied gently. “This would have happened sooner or later. Jealousy is never at a loss to invent an opportunity. No, it is not your fault.”

  “But it is,” I cried. “You know it; you know that the excuse you make for me is no more than a kindly sophistry. It is my fault. What can I do?”

  She gave me no answer; indeed, it almost seemed as though there was something of impatience in her attitude.

  I moved a few steps away and sat down upon a boulder by the water’s edge, with my head between my hands.

  “There is but one thing that I can do,” I said, and I heard her move a step or two nearer. “But it is so small, so poor a thing;” and at that I think she stopped. “I shall not go back again to Mr. Herbert’s lodging.”

  “Neither shall I.”

  The words dulled and stupefied me like a blow. I sat staring out across the lake, and I noticed a ripple that broke and broke in a tiny wave, ever at the same spot, some thirty yards from the shore. I fell to counting the waves, I remember, and lost my reckoning and began afresh; and in a while I commenced to laugh, though it did not sound like laughter.

  “Neither shall I,” she repeated, and struck the laugh dead. I started from my seat. She stood patiently before me with folded hands, and to argue against that patience seemed the merest waste of words. Before, however, I could make the effort, her spirit changed. Passion leapt out of her like a flame. “I hate him,” she cried, beating her hands one upon the other. “Oh, to be made a common talk for his acquaintances! The humiliation of it! Servants too, he will debate of me with them, for them to mock at.”

  “No!” I answered vehemently. “You do not know that. It was I that spoke of my steward and I knew nothing. I did but guess idly, heedlessly. It was not he, it was I who spoke of Ashlock.” But there was no sign of assent in her demeanour. “It was I spoke of him,” I repeated, “and before you. Ah, God, it is my doing this, from the beginning to the end!”

  “Think!” she went on, taking no more notice of my interruption. “They are making merry over me in your servants’ hall. Think, Lancelot!”

  She tried to check the name, but it was carried beyond her lips on the stream of her passion. A great silence fell upon us both; I saw the colour come and go fitfully upon her face, and her bosom rise and fall with her fitful breath. Then she covered her face with her hands and sank down upon the boulder.

  Yes, I thought, it was my fault. They
had quarrelled before, but never for such a reason; and that reason I had provided. I had gone there of my own free will to serve my own objects. But, somehow, as I looked at her seated by my side, the thought of the slatternly room she had been compelled to live in shot into my mind. I remembered how unfitted to her I had thought it on my first going thither. Of a sudden, while I was thus watching her, she lifted her eyes to mine. What babbling incoherencies I spoke, I do not know; I do not think she caught more than their drift. If they are known at all, it is because they stand ranged against my name in the Judgment Book. I became like one drunk, his senses reeling, his words the froth of his vilest passions. I think that I cried.

  “Be it so, then! Since the harm is done, let the name be Lancelot;” but I know that she rode before me on my horse to the gates of Blackladies, that we dismounted there and walked up to the house; and that I found the hall-door open, and the house to all seeming deserted.

  Now, this day was the 23rd of August.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  THE AFTERNOON OF THE 23RD OF AUGUST.

  I LED HER into the little parlour which gives on to the terraces at the south end of the house. The wall upon one side was broken by a great open fireplace faced with bricks, and all too big for the room, into which a man could walk and wherein he could sit too, were he so disposed, upon a chilly night, and smoke his pipe with a crony over against him; for there were cushioned seats on either side of the hearth and a curtain hung to keep your head from the bricks.

  The room seemed very silent as we entered it, and the silence deepened. She crossed over to this fireplace and stood with a foot raised towards the hearth, though there was no fire to warm it by. I tossed my hat and whip on to the table with more noise than was necessary and made a step as if to join her. She drew back instinctively. I stopped as though the step had been a liberty; and neither of us had a word to say. Once she untied the ribands of her hood, for she must be doing something; but the moment she was aware of what it was she did, she tied them again with hasty uncertain fingers, and then reddened and paled, of a sudden becoming, it seemed to me, sensible of the hastiness of her action. I sent my eyes wandering to every corner of the room, so that they should not rest upon her face; but none the less, after a little our glances crossed, and with one movement we averted our heads. After that one of us had to speak.

  “You will be hungry,” I said lamely. “You have eaten nothing since the morning;” and I walked to a little sideboard on which a bell was standing.

  “No, no!” she cried, but I had struck the bell or ever the words were past her lips. “Oh, what have you done?” she said with a shiver; “one of your servants will come;” and then she checked herself and added, with her fingers plucking at her gown in a pitiful helpless way, “Well, what does it matter? They had the story before it happened. This will but confirm and seal it.”

  I went out into the hall to stop whosoever should be answering the summons. But no one came to answer it I crossed the hall and opened the door which led to the kitchens. As a rule, the noise of women’s voices was incessant in that quarter of the house, but to-day not a sound, not so much as the clatter of a dish-cover! I went back to the hall and listened. The house was as still as on that night when I crept down the stairs and discovered the marks of a picture-frame upon the wall.

  Was the house empty? I wondered, and shouted to solve the doubt. My voice went echoing and diminishing along corridor and gallery, but that was all. I moved down the passage to the office, half thinking that I might find Aron there, but remembered that he would be away, and so returned reluctantly. Thereupon I mounted the stairs and walked from room to room, and maybe lingered over-long in each. I was not, indeed, concerned with their silence and vacancy so much as with the knowledge that each step brought me actually a step nearer to the parlour-door. But I came to the end of my search, and there was nothing for it but to descend again. The hall-door, however, stood open, and I saw my horse at the bottom of the steps tethered by the rein to a knob of the stone balustrade. I walked down the steps, loosed it, and led it round to the stables. There was a boy or two in the stable-yard, and I remember putting to them a number of aimless questions which I was at great pains to think of, but did not listen to the answers; until their fidgeting made me sensible of the cowardice of my delay and drove me back to the house. Then I remembered why I had left the parlour, and going to the pantry, I got together some food upon a tray and brought it with a decanter of Burgundy into the parlour. Mrs. Herbert was standing where I had last seen her. I set out the table saying, “My servants seem all to have taken holiday;” and more for something to do, you may be sure, than from any sense of hunger, she sat herself at the table and began to play with the food. I had brought but one plate and set a chair for but one person; and neither of us noticed that. The truth is, there was a shadow in the room; the shadow cast by sin, and we watched it as children in a fitful firelight will watch a strange shadow on the wall — neither drawing near to it nor fleeing from it, but crouched watching it. Once she said, “I have brought nothing with me;” and after a little, some thought seemed to strike her. For she lifted her head suddenly and said:

  “There is no one in the house but you and I?”

  “No one,” I said.

  “That is strange,” she said absently.

  Strange! The word was an arrow of light piercing through the mist of my senses. Strange! It was indeed strange! Aron had warned me not to ride to Keswick; that was strange too. For the first time I set this desertion of my servants together in my mind with my suspicions of Ashlock’s treachery. I started to my feet, invaded by a sudden fear; but I saw Mrs. Herbert at the table running her fingers along the hem of my fine tablecloth and her throat working as though she was swallowing her tears. I knew by some instinct of what she was thinking. She was thinking of her poor furniture in her lodging at Keswick. It was hers, you see, won by her husband’s toil, and maybe she had a passing thought, too, of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s estate at Witton — earned, too, by a painter’s art. And such a pity for her, such a loathing of myself, flooded my mind as drove out all thought of Mr. Ashlock’s machinations. I recalled how I had deemed that slatternly apartment unfit for her. It needed that we two should be here with the shadow about us, for me to realize how contemptible was the thought.

  Again she said:

  “No one is in the house except yourself and me,” and in the same thoughtful tone. Then she rose from her chair with the air of one that has come upon an outlet when all outlets seemed barred. “It was kind of you,” she said, “to show me your house, I would gladly have seen the gardens too, but the day is clouding, and it will rain, I think, ere long.”

  She dropped me a formal curtsey as she spoke. I did not want the urgent appeal of her eyes to take her meaning. My heart rose to it with a spring.

  “I will have a carriage made ready for you,” I replied; and I turned me to the window. “Yes, I am afraid that it will rain.”

  “Thank you!” she said.

  And I, like the blundering fool I was, must needs, in my great joy, add:

  “It is no long journey into Keswick, after all”

  “Keswick!” says she with a start, and drops her eyes. “I had not thought of that. I had not thought where I should go to.”

  I stood before her dumb. I knew — yes, I knew that the only place for her was that little apartment in Keswick. Grant her but the sight of it, and the sight of her husband in it — for he loved her — and, well, it needed no magician to forecast the result. But there was one person in the world who could not use that argument — myself. However, she helped me out.

  “I cannot go back,” she said, “without he knows. It would not be just No! it is not possible;” and at that the tears came at last. The sound of her weeping pierced me like a sword.

  “He shall know, then,” I cried. “He shall know. I myself will ride to Keswick and tell him.”

  “You will?” she asked, suddenly lifting her head.

&nb
sp; “Maybe, too, I may find means to bring him back.”

  “If that might be!” she whispered in a fervour of hope, her whole face lightening and a timorous smile dawning through her tears. “But no!” and the hope died out of her face. “Payment will have to be made for this. You’ll see, payment will be made.”

  She spoke in a low tone of such perfect certainty, that it seemed to me it was not so much the woman who spoke, but that Providence chose her voice that moment for its mouthpiece.

  “Heaven send the payment fall to me,” I said.

  She glanced at me quickly.

  “Oh,” she said, in a complete change of voice, “what will you tell him?”

  “Why, the truth,” I answered. “That I found you by the lake, and brought you here.”

  “No!” she exclaimed, “I will not have you say that. It must be the truth — that I came to you.”

  She drew a note from her pocket as she spoke, and tossed it on to the table. I picked it up, wondering what she meant. It was a line scribbled in a hand which was familiar to me, and there was a word curiously misspelled— “wateing” for “waiting.” Somewhere I had seen that word misspelled precisely in that way before, and surely in this handwriting too. Then the truth flashed upon me. It was in the inn at Commercy, and the handwriting was Jervas Rookley’s. The line was this:

  “I shall be wateing for you by the lake, on the road to Blackladies.”

  But Jervas Rookley knew that I was journeying to Grasmere, that I was not returning to Blackladies until night The letter was a snare, then, to draw Mrs. Herbert from the house.

  If so, all the more need for haste.

  I opened the door and stepped into the hall. But the hall was no longer empty. The hall-door was still open; I had left it open, and a man stood in the centre of the hall. It was Anthony Herbert. His back was towards me, and from his manner I gathered that he was considering which of the passages giving upon the hall he should choose. It was for no more than a second that he stood thus, but that second gave me time enough to do the stupidest thing that ever a man out of his wits conceived; and yet in a way it was natural. For I slammed the door to behind my back, and stood barring it, with my hand upon the knob. Mr. Herbert twisted round upon his heel.