In the clear light of a July morning Royle’s thoughts took on a more sober colour. None the less, he made a cautious inquiry or two that day from the gardener, and from the shops in the village. The answer in each case was the same.
“The house had no history, no traditions. It had only been built ten years back. There was nothing but a field then where the house now stood. Even the trees had been planted at the time the house was built.”
Indeed, the assurance was hardly needed; for the house was new and bright as a hospital. There was hardly a dark corner anywhere, certainly nowhere a harbour for dark thoughts. Royle began to revert to his original fancy; and when that evening his wife returned, he asked her:
“Last night, just before midnight — what were you doing?”
They were together in a small library upon the first floor, a room with big windows opening upon the side of the house. The night was hot and the windows stood open, and close to one of them at a little table Ina was writing a letter. She looked up with a smile.
“Last night — just before midnight? I was asleep.”
“Are you sure?”
Some note of urgency in his voice made her smile waver. It disappeared altogether as she gazed at him.
“Of course,” she answered, slowly, “I am sure;” and then, after a little pause and with a slight but a noticeable hesitation, she added: “Why do you ask?”
Dorman Royle crossed over to her side and most unwisely told her:
“Because at midnight the gate into the paddock was opened and swung to without any hand to touch it. I had been thinking of you, Ina — wanting you — and I wondered.”
He spoke half in jest, but there was no jesting reply. For a little while, indeed, Ina did not answer him at all. He was standing just a step behind her as she sat at the table in the window, so that he could not see her face. But her body stiffened.
“It must have been a delusion,” she said, and he walked forward and sat down in a chair by the table facing her.
“If so, it was a delusion which the dog shared.”
She did not change her attitude; she did not stir. From head to foot she sat as though carved in stone. Nor did her face tell him anything. It became a mask; it seemed to him that she forced all expression out of it, by some miracle of self-command. But her eyes shone more than usually big, more than usually luminous; and they held their secret too, if they had a secret to hold. Then she leaned forward and touched his sleeve.
“Tell me!” she said, and she had trouble to find her voice; and, having found it, she could not keep it steady.
“I am sorry, Ina,” he said. “You are frightened. I should not have said a word.”
“But you have,” she replied. “Now I must know the rest.”
He told her all that there was to tell. Reduced to the simple terms of narrative, the story sounded, even to him, thin and unconvincing. There was so little of fact and event, so much of suggestion and vague emotion. But his recollection was still vivid, and something of the queer terror which he had felt as he had lain in the darkness was expressed in his aspect and in the vibrations of his voice. So, at all events, he judged. For he had almost expected her to laugh at the solemnity of his manner, and yet Ina did not so much as smile. She listened without even astonishment, paying close heed to every word, now and then nodding her head in assent, but never interrupting. He was vaguely reminded of clients listening to his advice in some grave crisis of their affairs. But when he had finished she made no comment. She just sat still and rigid, gazing at him with baffling and inscrutable eyes.
Dorman Royle rose. “So it wasn’t you, Ina, who returned last night?” he said.
“No,” she answered, in a voice which was low, but now quite clear and steady. “I slept soundly last night — much more soundly than I usually do.”
“That’s strange,” said Royle.
“I don’t think so,” Ina answered. “I think it follows. I was let alone. Yes, that’s all of a piece with your story, don’t you see?”
Dorman Royle sprang up, and at his abrupt movement his wife’s face flashed into life and fear.
“What are you saying?” he cried, and she shrank as if she realised now what a dangerous phrase she had allowed her lips to utter.
“Nothing, nothing!” she exclaimed, and she set herself obstinately to her letter.
Royle looked at the clock.
“It’s late,” he said. “I’ll take the dog out for a run.”
He went downstairs and out at the front of the house. To-night the air was mistier, and the moon sailed through a fleece of clouds. Royle walked to a gate on the edge of the hill. It may have been a quarter of an hour before he whistled to the dog and turned back to the house. From the gate to the house was perhaps a hundred yards, and as he walked back first one, then another, of the windows of the library upon the first floor came within his view. These windows stood wide open to the night, and showed him, as in a miniature, this and that corner of the room, the bookcases, the lamps upon the tables, and the top-rails of the chair-backs, small but very clear. The one window which he could not as yet see at all was that in which his wife sat. For it was at the far end of the room and almost over the front door. Royle came within view of it at last, and stopped dead. He gazed at the window with amazement. Ina was still sitting at the writing-table in the window, but she was no longer alone. Just where he himself had stood a few minutes before, a step behind her shoulder, another man was now standing — a man with a strong, rather square, dark face, under a mane of black hair. He wore a dinner-jacket and a black tie, and he was bending forward and talking to Ina very earnestly. Ina herself sat with her hands pressed upon her face and her body huddled in her chair, not answering, but beaten down by the earnestness of the stranger’s pleading. Thus they appeared within the frame of the window, both extraordinarily distinct to Royle watching outside there in the darkness. He could see the muscles working in the stranger’s face and the twitching of Ina’s hands, but he could hear nothing. The man was speaking in too low a voice.
Royle did not move.
“But I know the man,” he was saying to himself. “I have seen him, at all events. Where? Where?” And suddenly he remembered. It was at the time of a General Election. He had arrived at King’s Cross Station from Scotland late one night, and, walking along the Marylebone Road, he had been attracted by a throng of people standing about a lamp-post, and above the throng the head and shoulders of a man addressing it had been thrown into a clear light. He had stopped for a moment to listen; He had asked a question of his neighbour. Yes, the speaker was one of the candidates, and he was the man who now stood by Ina’s side.
Royle tried to remember the name, but he could not. Then he began to wonder whence the stranger had come. It was a good two miles to the village. How, too, had he managed to get into the house? The servants had gone to bed an hour before Royle had come out. The hall-door stood open now. He had left it open. The man must have been waiting some such opportunity — as he had done no doubt last night. Such a passion of anger and jealousy flamed up in Royle as he had never known. He ran into the hall and shot the bolts. He hurried up the stairs and flung open the door. Ina was still sitting at the table, but she had withdrawn her hands from her face, and, but for her, the room was empty.
“Ina!” he cried, and she turned to him. Her face was quiet, her eyes steady; there was a smile upon her lips.
“Yes?”
She sat just as he had left her. Looking at her in his bewilderment, he almost came to believe that his eyes had tricked him, that thus she had sat all this while. Almost! For the violence of his cry had been unmistakable, and she did not ask for the reason of it. He was out of breath, too, his face no doubt disordered; yet she put no question; she sat and smiled — tenderly. Yes, that was the word. Dorman Royle stood in front of her. It seemed to him that his happiness was crumbling down in ruins about him.
“Ina!” he repeated, and the dog barked for admission underneath th
e window. The current of his thoughts was altered by the sound. His passion fell away from him. It seemed to him that he dived under ice.
“Ina!”
He sat quietly down in the chair on the other side of that table.
“You have had that dog some time?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“How did you get it?”
The answer came quite steadily but slowly, and after a long silence.
“A friend gave it to me.”
“Who?”
There was no longer any smile upon the girl’s face. Nor, on the other hand, was there any fear. Her eyes never for a second wavered from his.
“Why do you ask?”
“I am curious,” replied Royle. “Who?”
“Raymond Byatt.”
The name conveyed nothing to Royle. He did not even recollect it. But he spoke as if it were quite familiar to him.
“Raymond Byatt? Didn’t he stand for Parliament once in Marylebone?”
“Yes. He was defeated.”
Royle rose from his chair.
“Well, I had better go down and let the dog in,” he said, and he went to the door, where he turned to her again.
“But if he’s a friend of yours, you should ask him down,” he remarked. Ina drew herself up in her chair, her hands clinging to the arms of it.
“He killed himself a fortnight ago.”
The answer turned Royle into a figure of stone. The two people stared at one another across the room in a dreadful silence; and it seemed as if, having once spoken, Ina was forced by some terrible burden of anguish to speak yet more.
“Yes,” she continued in a whisper, “a week before we married.”
“Did you care for him?”
Ina shook her head.
“Never.”
There were words upon the tip of Royle’s tongue — words of bitterness:
“It was he who came back last night. He came back for you. He was with you to-night — the moment after I left you. I saw him.” But he knew they would be irrevocable words, and with an effort he held his tongue. He went downstairs and let the dog in. When he returned to the library Ina was standing up.
“I’ll go to bed,” she said, and her voice pleaded for silence. “I am tired. I have had a long journey;” and he let her go without a word.
He sat late himself, wondering what in the morning he should do. The house had become horrible to him. And unless Ina told him all there was to tell, how could they go on side by side anywhere? When he went upstairs Ina was in bed and asleep. He left the door wide open between her room and his and turned in himself. But he slept lightly, and at some time that night, whilst it was still dark, he was roused to wakefulness. A light was burning in his wife’s room, and through the doorway he could see her. She had in her hand the glass of water which usually stood on a little table beside her bed, and she was measuring out into it from a bottle some crystals. He knew that they were chloral crystals, for, since she slept badly, she always kept them by her. He watched her shaking out the dose, and as he watched such a fear clutched at his heart as made all the other terrors of that night pale and of no account. Ina was measuring out deliberately enough chloral into that tumbler of water to kill a company. Very cautiously he drew himself up in his bed. He heard the girl stifle a sob, and as she waited for the crystals to dissolve her face took on a look of grief and despair which he had never in his life seen before. He sprang out of bed, and in an instant was at her side. With a cry Ina raised the glass to her lips, but his hand was already upon her wrist.
“Let me go!” she cried, and she struggled to free herself. But he took the glass from her, and suddenly all her self-command gave way in a passion of tears. She became a frightened child. Her hands sought him, she hid her face from him, and she would not let him go.
“Ina,” he whispered, “what were you doing?”
“I was following,” she said. “I had to. He stands by me, always, commanding me.” And she shook like one in a fever.
“Good God!” he cried.
“Oh, I have fought,” she sobbed, “but he’s winning. Yes, that’s the truth. Sooner or later I shall have to follow.”
“Tell me everything,” said Royle.
“No.”
But he held her close within the comfort of his arms and wrestled for her and for himself. Gradually the story was told to him in broken sentences and with long silences between them, during which she lay in his clasp and shivered.
“He wanted me to marry him. But I wouldn’t. He had a sort of power over me — the power of a bully who cares very much,” she said; and a little later she gave the strangest glimpse of the man. He would hardly have believed it; but he had seen the man, and the story fitted him.
“I was in Paris for a few days — alone with my maid. I went to see a play which was to be translated for me. He was in the same hotel, quite alone as I was. It was after I had kept on refusing him. He seemed horribly lonely — that was part of his power. I never saw anyone who lived so completely in loneliness. He was shut away in it as if in some prison of glass through which you could see but not hear. It made him tragic — pitiful. I went up to him in the lounge and asked if we couldn’t be just friends, since we were both there alone. You’ll never imagine what he did. He stared at me without answering at all. He just walked away and went to the hotel manager. He asked him how it was that he allowed women in his hotel who came up and spoke to strangers.”
“Ina — he didn’t!” cried Royle.
“He did. Luckily the manager knew me. And that night, though he wouldn’t speak to me in the lounge, he wrote me a terrible letter. Then, when you and I were engaged, he killed himself — just a week before we married. He tried to do it twice. He went down to an hotel at Aylesbury and sat up all night, trying to do it. But the morning came and he had failed. The servant who called him found him sitting in his bedroom at the writing-table at which he had left him the night before; and all night he had written not one word. Next day he went to another hotel on the South Coast, and all that night he waited. But in the morning — after he had been called — quite suddenly he found the courage — yes — —” and Ina’s voice trailed away into silence. In a little while she began again.
“Ever since he has been at my side, saying ‘I did it because of you. You must follow.’ There was the chloral always ready. I found myself night after night, when you were asleep, reaching out my hand obediently towards it — towards it — —”
“Except last night,” Royle interrupted, suddenly finding at last the explanation of some words of hers which had puzzled him, “when he came here, and you were away.”
“And I slept soundly in consequence,” she agreed. “Yes. But to-night — if you hadn’t been here — I should have obeyed altogether.”
“But I am here,” said Royle, gently; and, looking up, he saw that the morning had come. He rose and pulled aside the curtains so that the clear light flooded the room.
“Ina, do something for me,” he pleaded, and she understood. She took the bottle of crystals, poured them into the basin, and set the tap running.
“Stay with me,” she said. “Now that I have told you, I believe that I shall sleep, and sleep without fear. When you came into the room before I was only pretending.”
She nestled down, and this time she did sleep. It seemed to Royle that the victory was won.
Some months later, however, a client talking over his affairs with Royle in his private office mentioned Raymond Byatt’s name. Royle leaned forward with a start.
“You knew that man?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied the client with a laugh. “He forged my name for a thousand pounds — and not mine alone. He was clever with his pen. But he came to the end of his tether at last. He saved himself from penal servitude by blowing his brains out.”
Royle jumped out of his chair.
“Is that true?”
“Absolutely.”
And Royle sat down suddenly.
“What do you think, Ina, I discovered to-day?” he blurted out. “You’ll be as glad to hear as I was. Raymond Byatt didn’t kill himself for you, after all. He did it to save himself from a prosecution for forgery.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Ina replied:
“Indeed!” and that was all. But Dorman Royle, to his perplexity, detected a certain unexpected iciness in her voice. Somehow that new insight which Groome had discovered in him had on this evening failed him altogether.
THE CRYSTAL TRENCH
I
It was late in the season, and for the best part of a week the weather had been disheartening. Even to-day, though there had been no rain since last night, the mists swirled in masses over a sunless valley green as spring, and the hill-sides ran with water. It pleased Dennis Challoner, however, to believe that better times were coming. He stood at a window of the Riffelalp Hotel, and imagined breaches in the dark canopy of cloud.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 789