“Well, yes,” he said quietly.
It was better, he thought, indeed it was only right, that she should know what she had done. But he did not look at her.
“Was it only that?” she asked again.
This time he weighed his answer. He thought her persistency odd. But again he assented.
“Yes,” he said gravely. “Only that, I think. But for that I should have remained in — with Lord Pilgrimstone of course. Perhaps things are better as they are, my dear.”
Lady Betty sprang from her seat with all her old vivacity. “Well!” she cried, “well, I am sure! Then why, I should like to know, did Mr. Atlay tell me that my letter to the Times had something to do with it!”
“Did not say so,” quoth Sir Horace. “Absurd!”
“Yes, he did,” cried Lady Betty, so fiercely that the rash speaker, who had returned to his boots, fairly shook in them. “You were not there! How do you know?”
“Don’t know,” Sir Horace admitted, meekly.
“But stay, stay a moment!” Mr. Stafford said, getting in a word with difficulty. It was strange if his wife could talk so calmly of her misdeeds, and before a third party too. “What letter to the Times did Atlay mean?”
“My letter about the Women’s League,” she explained earnestly. “You did not see it? No, I thought not. But Mr. Atlay would have it that you did, and that it had something to do with your going out. Horace told me at the time that I ought not to send it without consulting you. But I did, because you said you could not be bothered with it — I mean you said you were busy, Stafford. And so I thought I would ask if it had done any harm, and Mr. Atlay —— What is the matter?” she cried, breaking off sharply at sight of the change in her husband’s face. “Did it do harm?”
“No, no,” he answered. “Only I never heard of this letter before. What made you write it?”
Lady Betty coloured violently, and became on a sudden very shy — like most young authors. “Well,” she said, “I wanted to be in the — in the swim with you, don’t you know.”
Mr. Stafford murmured, “Oh!”
Thanks to his talk with Atlay he read the secret of that sudden shyness. And confusion poured over him more and more. It caused him to give way to impulse in a manner which a moment’s reflection would have led him to avoid.
“Then it was not you,” he exclaimed unwarily, “who sent Pilgrimstone’s terms to the Times?”
“I?” she exclaimed in an indescribable tone, and with eyes like saucers. “I?” she repeated.
“Gad!” cried Sir Horace; and he looked about for a way of escape.
“I?” she continued, struggling between wrath and wonder. “I betray you to the Times! And you thought so, Stafford?”
There was silence in the room for a long moment during which the cool statesman, the hard man of the world, did not know where to turn his eyes. “There were circumstances — several circumstances,” Mr. Stafford muttered at last, “which made — which forced me to think so.”
“And Mr. Atlay thought so?” she asked. He nodded. “Oh, that tame cat!” she cried, her eyes flashing.
Then she seemed to meditate, while her husband gazed at her, a prey to conflicting emotions, and Sir Horace made himself as small as possible. “I see,” she continued in a different tone. “Only — only if you thought that, why did you never say anything? Why did you not scold me, beat me, Stafford? I do not — I do not understand.”
“I thought,” he explained in despair — he had so mismanaged matters— “that perhaps I had left you — out of the swim, as you call it, Betty. That I had not treated you very well, and after all it might be my own fault.”
“And you said nothing! You intended to say nothing?” He nodded.
“Gad!” cried Sir Horace very softly.
But Lady Betty said nothing. She turned after a long look at her husband, and went out of the room, her eyes wet with tears. The two men heard her pause a moment on the landing, and then go upstairs and shut her door. But her foot, even to their gross ears, seemed to touch the stairs as if it loved them, and there was a happy lingering in the slamming of the door.
They looked, when she had left them, anywhere but at one another. Sir Horace sought inspiration in his boots, and presently found it. “Wonder who did it, then?” he burst out at last.
“Ah! I wonder,” replied the ex-minister, descending at a bound from the cloudland to which his thoughts had borne him. “I never pushed the inquiry; you know why now. But they should be able to enlighten us at the Times office. We could learn in whose handwriting the copy was, at any rate. It is not well to have spies about us.”
“I can tell you in whose handwriting they say it was,” Sir Horace said bluntly.
“In whose?”
“In Atlay’s.”
Mr. Stafford did not look surprised. Instead of answering he thought. As a result of which he presently left the room in silence. When he came back he had a copy of the Times in his hand, and his face wore a look of perplexity. “I have read the riddle,” he said, “and yet it is a riddle to me still. I never found time to read the report of my speech at the Club. It occurred to me to look at it now. It is full of errors; so full that it is clear the printer had not the corrected proof Atlay prepared. Therefore I conclude that Atlay’s copy of the terms went to the Times instead of the speech. But how was the mistake made?”
“That is the question.”
It happened that the private secretary came into the room at this juncture. “Atlay,” Mr. Stafford said at once, “I want you. Carry your mind back a week — to this day week. Are you sure that you sent the report of my speech at the Club to the Times?”
“Am I sure?” the other replied confidently, nothing daunted by being so abruptly challenged. “I am quite sure I did, sir. I remember the circumstances. I found the report — it was type-written you remember — lying on the blotting-pad when I came down before dinner. I slipped it into an envelope, and put it in the box. I can see myself doing it now.”
“But how do you know that it was the report you put in the envelope?”
“You had indorsed it ‘Corrected speech. — W. Stafford,’” Atlay replied triumphantly.
“Ah!” Mr. Stafford said, dropping his hands and eyes and sitting down suddenly, “I remember! My wife came in, and — yes, my wife came in.”
THE SURGEON’S GUEST
CHAPTER I.
“To be content,” said the carrier, “that is half the battle. If I have said it to one, I have said it to a hundred. You be content,” says I, “and you will be all right.”
For the first time, though they had plodded on a mile together, the tall gentleman turned his eyes from the sombre moorland which stretched away on either side of the road, and looked at his companion. There had been something strange in the preoccupation of his thoughts hitherto; though the carrier, lapped in his own loquacity, had not felt it. And, to tell the truth, there had been something still more strange in the tall gentleman’s behaviour before their meeting. Now he had raced along the road and now he had loitered; sometimes he had stood still, letting his eyes stray over the dark groups of heather, which lay islanded in a sea of brown grass; and again he had sauntered onwards, his hat in his hand and his face turned up to the sky, which hung low over the waste, and had yet the breadth of a fen cloudscape. Whatever the eccentricity of his lonely movements, his tall hat and fluttering frock-coat had exaggerated it.
At length on the summit of one of the ridges over which the road ran he had made a longer halt, and had begun to look about him to right and left, seeking, it seemed, for a track across the moss. Then he had caught sight of the carrier plodding up the next ridge at the tail of his cart, and he had started after him. But having almost overtaken him, he had reduced his pace and loitered as if his desire for human company had faded away. He had even paused as though to return. But a glance at the desolate waste had determined him. He had walked on again, and had overtaken and fallen to talking with the carrier. The
latter on his part had been glad to have a companion, and had readily set down what was odd in the stranger’s bearing to the cause which accounted for his costume. The tall gentleman was a Londoner.
“‘You be content,’ says I,” quoth the old fellow again, his companion’s tardy attention encouraging him to repeat his statement, “‘and you will be all right.’ I have told that to hundreds in my time.”
“And you practise it yourself?” The tall gentleman’s voice was husky. His eyes, now that they had found their way to the other’s face, continued to dwell on it with a gleam in their depths which matched the pallor of his features. His forehead was high, his face long and thin, and lengthened by a dark brown beard which hid the working of his lips. A nervous man meeting his gaze might have had strange thoughts. But the carrier’s were country nerves, and proof against anything short of electricity.
“Oh yes, I am pretty well content,” Nickson answered sturdily. “I have twenty acres of land from the duke, and I turn a penny with the carrying, going into Sheffield twice a week, rain and shine. Then I have as good a wife as ever kissed her man, and neither chick nor child, and no more than three barren ewes this lambing.”
“My God!” said the stranger.
The words seemed wrung from him by a twinge of mental pain, but whether the feeling was envy of the man’s innocent joys, or disgust at his simplicity, did not appear. Whatever the impulse, the tall gentleman showed an immediate consciousness that he had excited his companion’s astonishment. He began to talk rapidly, even gesticulating a little. “But is there no drawback?” he said— “no bitter in your life, man? This long journey — ten — eleven miles? — and the same journey home again? Do you never find it cold, hot, dreary, intolerable?”
“It is cold enough some days, and hot enough some days,” the carrier replied heartily. “But dreary? — never! And cold and heat are but skin deep, you know.”
The tall gentleman let his head fall on his breast, and for some distance walked on in silence. The carrier whistled to his horse, the cry of a peewit came shrilling across the moor, one wheel of the cart squeaked loudly for grease. The evening was grey and still, and rain impended.
“It is all downhill after this,” Nickson said presently, pointing to the sky-line, now less than a hundred yards ahead. “You see that stone there, sir?” he continued, and pointing with his whip to a stone lying a little off the road. “There was a man died in the snow there. Three years back it would be. I went by him myself for a month and more, and took him for a dead sheep. At last a keeper passing that way turned him over with his foot, and — well, he was a sad sight, poor chap, by that time.”
The carrier should have been pleased with the effect his story produced; for the stranger shuddered. His face even seemed a shade paler, but this might be the effect of the evening light. He did not make any comment, however, and the two stepped out until they gained the summit of the ridge. Here the moor fell away on every side — a dark sweep of waste bounded by uncouth round-backed hills, which rose shapeless and grey, with never a graceful outline or soaring peak to break the horizon.
“You will take a lift down the hill, sir?” the carrier asked, gathering up his reins and preparing to mount. “I am light to-day.”
“No, I think not — I thank you,” the stranger answered jerkily.
“You are welcome, if you will,” persisted the carrier.
“No, I think not. I think I will walk,” the tall gentleman answered. But he still stood, and watched the other’s preparations with strange intentness. Even when Nickson, having wished him good day, drove briskly off, he continued to gaze after the cart until a dip in the descent — not far below — swallowed it up. Then he heaved a sigh, and looked round at the grey sky and darkening heath. He took off his hat.
“Hold up! what is the matter with the mare?” the carrier cried, coming to a stop as soon, as it chanced, as the dip in the road hid him from the other’s eyes. “She has picked up a stone, drat it!”
He got down stiffly, and taking his knife from his pocket went to the mare’s head. Having removed the stone he dropped the hoof, and stood a second while he closed the knife. In this momentary pause there came to his ear a sharp report like that of a gun, but brisker and less loud. It was difficult to suppose it the sound of a snapping stick; or of one stone struck against another. It puzzled Master Nickson, who climbed hastily to his seat again and drove on until he was clear of the dip. Then, swearing at himself for an old fool, he looked anxiously back at the top of the ridge, which had come into view again. He was looking for the tall gentleman. But the latter was not to be seen, either standing against the sky-line or moving on the intervening road. “Lord’s sakes!” the carrier muttered uneasily, “what has become of him? He cannot have gone back!”
He continued to stare for some moments at the place where the stranger should have been. At last giving way to a sudden conviction, he got down from his cart, and, leaving it standing, hurried back through the dip, and so to the top of the ridge. The ascent was steep, and he was breathing heavily when he reached the summit and cast his eyes round him. No, the tall gentleman was not to be seen. The brown grass and heather stretched away on this side and that, broken by no human figure. Not even a rabbit was visible on the long white strip of road that in the far distance grew hazy with the fall of night.
“The devil!” the carrier said, shuddering, and feeling more lonely than he had ever felt in his life. “Then he has gone, and — —”
He stopped. His eyes were on a dark bundle of clothes that lay a little aside from the road between two clumps of heather. Just a bundle of clothes it seemed, but Master Nickson drew in his breath at sight of it. The peewits and curlews had gone to rest. There was not a sound to be heard on the wide moor, save the beating of his heart.
He would have given pounds to drive on with a clear conscience, yet he forced himself to go up to the huddled form, and to turn it over until the face was exposed. There was a pistol near the right hand, and behind the ear there was a small, a very small hole, from which the blood welled sluggishly. Round this the skin was singed and blackened. The eyes were closed, and the pale face, thoughtful and placid, was scarcely disfigured.
Suddenly Master Nickson fell on his knees. “Dang me, if I don’t think he is alive!” he whispered. “For sure, he breathes!”
Convinced of it, the carrier sprang to his feet a different man. He lost not a moment in bringing his cart to the spot and lifting the insensible form into it. Then he led the horse to the road, and started gingerly down the hill. “It is a mercy it happened right at the doctor’s door,” he muttered, as he turned off the road into a track which seemed to lead through the heather to nowhere in particular. “If he lives five minutes longer he will be in good hands.”
A stranger would have wondered where the doctor lived; for there was no signs of a house to be seen. But when the wheels had rolled noiselessly over the sward a hundred yards a faint curl of smoke became visible, rising from the ground in front. A few more paces brought the tops of trees to view, and nestling among them the gables of an old stone house, standing below the level of the moor in a gully or ravine, that here began to run down from the watershed towards Bradfield and the Loxley. The track Nickson was following led to a white gate, which formed the entrance to this lonely demesne.
The carrier found assistance sooner than he had expected. Leaning against the inner side of the gate, with her back to him, was a tall girl. She was bending over a fiddle, drawing from it wailing sounds that went well with the waste behind her and the fading light. Her head swayed in time, her elbow moved slowly. She did not hear the wheels, and he had to call, “Whisht! Miss Pleasance, whisht!” before she heard and turned.
He could see little of her face, for in the hollow the light was almost gone, but her voice as she cried, “Is that you, Nickson? Have you something for us?” rang out so cheerily that it strung his nerves anew.
“Yes, miss,” he answered. “But it is your
father I want. I have got a man here who has been hurt — —”
“What? In the cart?” she cried. She stepped forward and would have looked in. But he was before her.
“No, miss, you fetch your father!” he said sharply. “It is just a matter of minutes, maybe. You fetch him here, please.”
She understood now, and turned and sped through the shrubbery, and across the little rivulet and the lawn. In five minutes the grey house, which had stood gaunt and lifeless in the glooming, was aroused. Lights flitted from window to window, and servants called to one another. The surgeon, a tall, florid, elderly man, with drooping white moustaches, came out, after snatching up one or two necessary things. The groom hastened behind him with a candle. Only Pleasance, the messenger of ill, whom her father had bidden stay in the house, had nothing to do in the confusion. She laid down her violin and bow, and stood in the darkness of the outer room — it was half hall, half parlour — listening and wondering.
The sound of heavy footsteps crunching the gravel presently warned her that the man was to be brought into the house. She heard her father direct the other bearers to make for his room, which was on the left of the hall, and her face grew a shade paler as the men stumbled with their burden through the doorway. There is something monstrous to the unaccustomed in limbs which fall lifeless, or stick out stiff and stark in ghastly prominence. She averted her face as the group passed her, and yet managed to touch the groom’s sleeve. “What is it, Daniel?” she whispered.
“He has been shot, miss,” the servant answered. He was enjoying himself hugely, if the truth be told.
She had no time to ask more. The door was shut upon her, and she was left alone with her curiosity. She wondered how it had happened, for this was not the shooting season, and Nickson had spoken of the man as a stranger. She pondered over the problem until the maids, who were too much upset to stay in their own quarters, came into the room with lights. Then she stepped outside, and stood on the gravel listening to the murmur of the brook, and looking at the old sundial which gleamed white on the lawn.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 816