He dined alone, and while he dined evoked Sylvia’s presence at the table, setting her, not at the far end, but at the side and close, so that a hand might now and then touch hers; calling up into her face her slow hesitating smile; seeing her still gray eyes grow tender; in a word watching the Madonna change into the woman. He went into the library where, since the night had grown chilly, a fire was lit. It was a place of comfort, with high bookshelves, deep-cushioned chairs, and dark curtains. But, no less than the dining-room it needed another presence, and lacking that lacked everything. It needed the girl with the tired and terror-haunted face. Here, surely the fear would die out of her soul, the eyes would lose their shadows, the feet regain the lightness of their step.
Chayne took down his favorite books, but they failed him. Between the pages and his eyes one face would shape itself. He looked into the fire and sought as of old to picture in the flames some mountain on which his hopes were set and to discover the right line for its ascent. But even that pastime brought no solace for his discontent. The house oppressed him. It was empty, it was silent. He drew aside the curtains and looking down into the valley through the clear night air watched the lights in cottage and farm with the envy born of his loneliness.
In spite of the brave words he had used, he wondered to-night whether the three-foot hedge was not after all to prove the unassailable wall. And it was important that he should know. For if it were so, why then he had not called at the War Office in vain. A proposal had been made to him — that he should join a commission for the delimitation of a distant frontier. A year’s work and an immediate departure — those were the conditions. Within two days he must make up his mind — within ten days he must leave England.
Chayne pondered over the decision which he must make. If he had lost Sylvia, here was the mission to accept. For it meant complete severance, a separation not to be measured by miles alone, but by the nature of the work, and the comrades, and even the character of the vegetation. He went to bed in doubt, thinking that the morning might bring him counsel. It brought him a letter from Sylvia instead.
The letter was long; it was written in haste, it was written in great distress, so that words which were rather unkind were written down. But the message of the letter was clear. Chayne was not to come again to the House of the Running Water; nor to the little house in London when she returned to it. They were not to meet again. She did not wish for it.
Chayne burnt the letter as soon as he had read it, taking no offence at the hasty words. “I seem to have worried her more than I thought,” he said to himself with a wistful smile. “I am sorry,” and again as the sparks died out from the black ashes of the letter he repeated: “Poor little girl. I am very sorry.”
So the house would always be silent and empty.
Sylvia had written the letter in haste on the very evening of Chayne’s visit, and had hurried out to post it in fear lest she might change her mind in the morning. But in the morning she was only aware of a great lightness of spirit. She could now devote herself to the work of her life; and for two long tiring days she kept Walter Hine at her side. But now he sought to avoid her. The little energy he had ever had was gone, he alternated between exhilaration and depression; he preferred, it seemed, to be alone. For two days, however, Sylvia persevered, and on the third her lightness of spirit unaccountably deserted her.
She drove with Walter Hine that morning, and something of his own irritability seemed to have passed into her; so that he turned to her and asked:
“What have I done? Aren’t you pleased with me? Why are you angry?”
“I am not angry,” she replied, turning her great gray eyes upon him. “But if you wish to know, I miss something.”
So much she owned. She missed something, and she knew very well what it was that she missed. Even as Chayne in his Sussex home had ached to know that the house lacked a particular presence, so it began to be with Sylvia in Dorsetshire.
“Yet he has been absent for a longer time,” she argued with herself, “and I have not missed him. Indeed, I have been glad of his absence.” And the answer came quickly from her thoughts.
“At any time you could have called him to your side, and you knew it. Now you have sent him away for always.”
During the week the sense of loss, the feeling that everything was unbearably incomplete, grew stronger and stronger within her. She had no heart for the losing battle in which she was engaged. A dangerous question began to force itself forward in her mind whenever her eyes rested upon Walter Hine. “Was he worth while?” she asked herself: though as yet she did not define all that the “while” connoted. The question was most prominent in her mind on the seventh day after the letter had been sent. She had persuaded Walter Hine to mount with her on to the down behind the house; they came to the great White Horse, and Hine, pleading fatigue, a plea which during these last days had been ever on his lips, flung himself down upon the grass. For a little time Sylvia sat idly watching the great battle ships at firing-practice in the Bay. It was an afternoon of August; a light haze hung in the still air softening the distant promontories; and on the waveless sparkling sea the great ships, coal-black to the eye, circled about the targets, with now and then a roar of thunder and a puff of smoke, like some monstrous engines of heat — heat stifling and oppressive. By sheer contrast, Sylvia began to dream of the cool glaciers; and the Chalet de Lognan suddenly stood visible before her eyes. She watched the sunlight die off the red rocks of the Chardonnet, the evening come with silent feet across the snow, and the starlit night follow close upon its heels; night fled as she dreamed. She saw the ice-slope on the Aiguille d’Argentière, she could almost hear the chip-chip of the axes as the steps were cut and the perpetual hiss as the ice-fragments streamed down the slope. Then she looked toward Walter Hine with the speculative inquiry which had come so often into her eyes of late. And as she looked, she saw him furtively take from a pocket a tabloid or capsule and slip it secretly into his mouth.
“How long have you been taking cocaine?” she asked, suddenly.
Walter Hine flushed scarlet and turned to her with a shrinking look.
“I don’t,” he stammered.
“Yet you left a bottle of the drug where I found it.”
“That was not mine,” said he, still more confused. “That was Archie Parminter’s. He left it behind.”
“Yes,” said Sylvia, finding here a suspicion confirmed. “But he left it for you?”
“And if I did take it,” said Hine, turning irritably to her, “what can it matter to you? I believe that what your father says is true.”
“What does he say?”
“That you care for Captain Chayne, and that it’s no use for any one else to think of you.”
Sylvia started.
“Oh, he says that!”
She understood now one of the methods of the new intrigue. Sylvia was in love with Chayne; therefore Walter Hine may console himself with cocaine. It was not Garratt Skinner who suggested it. Oh, no! But Archie Parminter is invited for the night, takes the drug himself, or pretends to take it, praises it, describes how the use of it has grown in the West End and amongst the clubs, and then conveniently leaves the drug behind, and no doubt supplies it as it is required.
Sylvia began to dilate upon its ill-effects, and suddenly broke off. A great disgust was within her and stopped her speech. She got to her feet. “Let us go home,” she said, and she went very quickly down the hill. When she came to the house she ran up-stairs to her room, locked the door and flung herself upon her bed. Walter Hine, her father, their plots and intrigues, were swept clean from her mind as of no account. Her struggle for the mastery became unimportant in her thoughts — a folly, a waste. For what her father had said was true; she cared for Chayne. And what she herself had said to Chayne when first he came to the House of the Running Water was no less true. “If I loved, I think nothing else would count at all except that I loved.”
She had judged herself aright. She knew tha
t, as she lay prone upon her bed, plunged in misery, while the birds called upon the boughs in the garden and the mill stream filled the room with its leaping music. In a few minutes a servant knocked upon the door and told her that tea was ready in the library; but she returned no answer. And in a few minutes more — or so it seemed, but meanwhile the dusk had come — there came another knock and she was told that dinner had been served. But to that message again she returned no answer. The noises of the busy day ceased in the fields, the birds were hushed upon the branches, quiet and darkness took and refreshed the world. Only the throbbing music of the stream beat upon the ears, and beat with a louder significance, since all else was still. Sylvia lay staring wide-eyed into the darkness. To the murmur of this music, in perhaps this very room, she had been born. “Why,” she asked piteously, “why?” Of what use was it that she must suffer?
Of all the bad hours of her life, these were the worst. For the yearning for happiness and love throbbed and cried at her heart, louder and louder, just as the music of the stream swelled to importance with the coming of the night. And she learned that she had had both love and happiness within her grasp and that she had thrown them away for a shadow. She thought of the letter which she had written, recalling its phrases with a sinking heart.
“No man could forgive them. I must have been mad,” she said, and she huddled herself upon her bed and wept aloud.
She ran over in her mind the conversations which she and Hilary Chayne had exchanged, and each recollection accused her of impatience and paid a tribute to his gentleness. On the very first day he had asked her to go with him and her heart cried out now:
“Why didn’t I go?”
He had been faithful and loyal ever since, and she had called his faithfulness importunity and his loyalty a humiliation. She struck a match and looked at her watch and by habit wound it up. And she drearily wondered on how many, many nights she would have to wind it up and speculate in ignorance what he, her lover, was doing and in what corner of the world, before the end of her days was reached. What would become of her? she asked. And she raised the corner of a curtain and glanced at the bright picture of what might have been. And glancing at it, the demand for happiness raised her in revolt.
She lit her candle and wrote another letter, of the shortest. It contained but these few words:
“Oh, please forgive me! Come back and forgive. Oh, you must! — SYLVIA.”
And having written them, Sylvia stole quietly down-stairs, let herself out at the door and posted them.
Two nights afterward she leaned out of her window at midnight, wondering whether by the morrow’s post she would receive an answer to her message. And while she wondered she understood that the answer would not come that way. For suddenly in the moonlit road beneath her, she saw standing the one who was to send it. Chayne had brought his answer himself. For a moment she distrusted her own eyes, believing that her thoughts had raised this phantom to delude her. But the figure in the road moved beneath her window and she heard his voice call to her:
“Sylvia! Sylvia!”
CHAPTER XIX
THE SHADOW IN THE ROOM
SYLVIA RAISED HER hand suddenly, enjoining silence, and turned back into the room. She had heard a door slam violently within the house; and now from the hall voices rose. Her father and Walter Hine were coming up early to-night from the library, and it seemed in anger. At all events Walter Hine was angry. His voice rang up the stairway shrill and violent.
“Why do you keep it from me? I will have it, I tell you. I am not a child,” and an oath or two garnished the sentences.
Sylvia heard her father reply with the patronage which never failed to sting the vanity of his companion, which was the surest means to provoke a quarrel, if a quarrel he desired.
“Go to bed, Wallie! Leave such things to Archie Parminter! You are too young.”
His voice was friendly, but a little louder than he generally used, so that Sylvia clearly distinguished every word; so clearly indeed, that had he wished her to hear, thus he would have spoken. She heard the two men mount the stairs, Hine still protesting with the violence which had grown on him of late; Garratt Skinner seeking apparently to calm him, and apparently oblivious that every word he spoke inflamed Walter Hine the more. She had a fear there would be blows — blows struck, of course, by Hine. She knew the reason of the quarrel. Her father was depriving Hine of his drug. They passed up-stairs, however, and on the landing above she heard their doors close. Then coming back to the window she made a sign to Chayne, slipped a cloak about her shoulders and stole quietly down the dark stairs to the door. She unlocked the door gently and went out to her lover. Upon the threshold she hesitated, chilled by a fear as to how he would greet her. But he turned to her and in the moonlight she saw his face and read it. There was no anger there. She ran toward him.
“Oh, my dear,” she cried, in a low, trembling voice, and his arms enclosed her. As she felt them hold her to him, and knew indeed that it was he, her lover, whose lips bent down to hers, there broke from her a long sigh of such relief and such great uplifting happiness as comes but seldom, perhaps no more than once, in the life of any man or woman. Her voice sank to a whisper, and yet was very clear and, to the man who heard it, sweet as never music was.
“Oh, my dear, my dear! You have come then?” and she stroked his face, and her hands clung about his neck to make very sure.
“Were you afraid that I wouldn’t come, Sylvia?” he asked, with a low, quiet laugh.
She lifted her face into the moonlight, so that he saw at once the tears bright in her eyes and the smile trembling upon her lips.
“No,” she said, “I rather thought that you would come,” and she laughed as she spoke. Or did she sob? He could hardly tell, so near she was to both. “Oh, but I could not be sure! I wrote with so much unkindness,” and her eyes dropped from his in shame.
“Hush!” he said, and he held her close.
“Have you forgiven me? Oh, please forgive me!”
“Long since,” said he.
But Sylvia was not reassured.
“Ah, but you won’t forget,” she said, ruefully. “One can forgive, but one can’t forget what one forgives,” and then since, even in her remorse, hope was uppermost with her that night, she cried, “Oh, Hilary, do you think you ever will forget what I wrote to you?”
And again Chayne laughed quietly at her fears.
“What does it matter what you wrote a week ago, since to-night we are here, you and I — together, in the moonlight, for all the world to see that we are lovers.”
She drew him quickly aside into the shadow of the wall.
“Are you afraid we should be seen?” he asked.
“No, but afraid we may be interrupted,” she replied, with a clear trill of laughter which showed to her lover that her fears had passed.
“The whole village is asleep, Sylvia,” he said in a whisper; and as he spoke a blind was lifted in an upper story of the house, a window was flung wide, and the light streamed out from it into the moonlit air and spread over their heads like a great, yellow fan. Walter Hine leaned his elbows on the sill and looked out.
Sylvia moved deeper into the shadow.
“He cannot see us,” said Chayne, with a smile, and he set his arm about her waist; and so they stood very quietly.
The house was built a few yards back from the road, and on each side of it the high wall of the garden curved in toward it, making thus an open graveled space in front of its windows. Sylvia and her lover stood at one of the corners where the wall curved in; the shadow reached out beyond their feet and lay upon the white road in a black triangle; they could hardly be seen from any window of the house, and certainly they could not be recognized. But on the other hand they could see. From behind Walter Hine the light streamed out clear. The ceiling of the room was visible and the shadow of the lamp upon it, and even the top part of the door in the far corner.
“We will wait until he turns back into the room,” Sy
lvia whispered; and for a little while they stood and watched. Then she felt Chayne’s arm tighten about her and hold her still.
“Do you see?” he cried, in a low, quick voice. “Sylvia, do you see?”
“What?”
“The door. Look! Behind him! The door!” And Sylvia, looking as he bade her, started, and barely stifled the cry which rose to her lips. For behind Walter Hine, the door in the far corner of the room was opening — very slowly, very stealthily, as though the hand which opened it feared to be detected. So noiselessly had the latch been loosed that Walter Hine did not so much as turn his head. Nor did he turn it now. He heard nothing. He leaned from the window with his elbows on the sill, and behind him the gap between the door and the wall grew wider and wider. The door opened into the room and toward the window, so that the two people in the shadow below could see nothing of the intruder. But the secrecy of his coming had something sinister and most alarming. Sylvia joined her hands above her lover’s arm, holding her breath.
“Shout to him!” she whispered. “Cry out that there’s danger.”
“Not yet!” said Chayne, with his eyes fixed upon the lighted room; and then, in spite of herself, a low and startled cry broke from Sylvia’s lips. A great shadow had been suddenly flung upon the ceiling of the room, the shadow of a man, bloated and made monstrous by the light. The intruder had entered the room; and with so much stealth that his presence was only noticed by the two who watched in the road below. But even they could not see who the intruder was, they only saw the shadow on the ceiling.
Walter Hine, however, heard Sylvia’s cry, faint though it was. He leaned forward from the window and peered down.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 440