CHAPTER XVII
The two met next day during the morning, and half an hour's discussion was sufficient to enable Edgar to fill a half-sheet with notes of things he had to do, with regard to this little cruise in the Southern sea, and to leave him with the certainty that nothing had been omitted. The yacht, which was at Southampton, was to start for Marseilles as soon as it could get its coaling and provisioning done, and on receipt of a telegram that it had arrived there, he and Lucia would leave London and travel overland. They might, in fact, hope to start in ten days' time at the outside. But these ten days would be rather full: bimetallists and small-holders clamoured for his presence on committees; there was also an inside-of-a-week visit which should be paid, and it was necessary for him, at any rate, to go down to Brayton for a night or so, to collect the photographic apparatus and the guide-books without which visits to foreign lands were shorn of half their potential profit. Lucia had laughed at such an idea: what was simpler than to send to Brayton for all the guide-books and all the photographic apparatus? But Edgar had used a phrase that she knew well to be final—"One feels safer if one sees to things oneself." But this visit to Brayton was hard to work in with the other visit, and, in upshot, Lucia was to write an apologetic letter to Mouse, saying that she would come, but that Edgar would not. As a matter of fact, this adjustment seemed to her almost ideal, for, as she heard from other sources, Maud was laid up with a cold that resembled influenza, and Charlie was going there alone. She felt she would like to see Charlie before they left, for she would not see him again for some time. They were giving a couple of shooting-parties at Brayton, but he and Maud had been unable to come to them. And before Christmas the latter left for St. Moritz, where they would spend six weeks.
Lucia came out from her husband's room, when these arrangements had been talked over, and went slowly upstairs. It was her part to see to the movements of the servants, and though, in general, she was extremely rapid in domestic dealings, she sat on this occasion in long consideration. Yet they appeared simple enough. At Brayton, for instance, at the present time there was only the caretaker and his wife, who cooked in a plain manner, and her own child and the nurse and nurserymaid. She must therefore send down a marmiton, anyhow, to give Edgar eatable dinners, a housemaid and a footman; they, with his man, would make him comfortable. When they came back from their cruise they would go straight down to Brayton; the rest of the London household, therefore, could move down after they had gone, and be on board wages there. It all seemed simple.
But there was this also. On the day Edgar went to Brayton she herself was going to stay with Mouse, and would rejoin him in town the evening before they started to go abroad. That night, according to Edgar's invariable custom, when leaving London in the winter to go to the Continent by the morning train, they would spend at the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria, so as to run no risk of missing the train owing to a fog. Once, years ago, he had missed the eleven o'clock train from this cause: since then he chose to run no risks. She would, then, not require any servants except the caretaker in Prince's Gate from the day she left town to stay with Mouse. They might therefore just as well leave town then and go down to Brayton at once. Yes, that would be more convenient; Edgar would be better looked after also. It was all quite reasonable, quite natural.
But none of these excellent arrangements were accounted for in her own mind by the reasons that made them so accountable. Lucia, from several causes, had not slept well last night, in spite of the fact that she had told her husband she was so sleepy. Madge's conversation with her after dinner had merited and had received due consideration, and Lucia had made up her mind that Madge was right, that extreme caution—for a time—was necessary. But that was not all, nor nearly all. Edgar's manner in their subsequent talk had a little disquieted her at the time, and on thinking it over after she had gone to bed, it disquieted her very much indeed; it became of the quality of nightmare. She felt sure that something had lurked behind the suggestion, for instance, that they should take Charlie with them. It was certain also that, having made that suggestion, he observed her, watched the effect of it on her. Decidedly, it was very disquieting.
Then for a little while she would tell herself that she was disquieting herself in vain, and suspected that others were suspicious, merely because she privately knew that they had cause for it. But this failed to encourage her for long; she felt she was right to be nervous. It was this that was the real cause of her thinking over domestic arrangements so carefully. She wanted to be prudent, over-prudent if necessary, and it was over-prudence that made her arrange that the house in Prince's Gate should be shut up on the day she went to stay with Mouse. Inconceivable and monstrous as such a suspicion would be, she wanted to make it impossible for Edgar to suspect that she was not going to Mouse. Such an idea would be wild and utterly baseless, but Lucia had observed that people who are in a suspicious frame of mind do imagine wild and baseless things. What a terrible thing suspicion was; it poisoned everything!
There was another precaution that ought to be taken, but it was harder to make up her mind upon that. Edgar probably knew that Maud was laid up and would not be going; he might, in his present state of mind, think over the fact that Charlie would be there. In that case, Charlie must not go. He must stop with Maud in town. That again was quite natural: he did not like to leave Maud.
Lucia scribbled a hasty note to him:
"Charlie,
"Edgar is not going to stay with Mouse, and as Maud is laid up it will be wiser for you not to go either. Come to lunch here to-day, and tell Edgar this, and leave again directly after lunch. I will arrange to see you somehow before I go abroad—we are going for a short cruise, E. and I, in about ten days—and tell you all about it. I am rather frightened.
Lucia had this sent at once, and sat down again to consider whether it was in her power to do anything more to add further security. She felt that somehow suspicion had come into his mind, and that it had there grown and waxed fat, and it was necessary firmly and instantly to starve it to death. That cruise on the yacht was surely of the nature of starvation; so, too, would now be the days that must elapse before they set off. On the day he went to Brayton she would now necessarily be with Mouse, since the Prince's Gate house would be servantless, and Charlie, he would know, would not be there. Prudence and discretion could go no further.
She went down to Edgar's room again in the course of the morning, and told him casually, so she believed, that she had arranged for the household to leave London as soon as she went to stay with Mouse, and that the town house would be shut up. But to a man who is suspicious there is no such thing as casual information. He believes all information to be significant, though perhaps at the time he cannot guess its significance, and what this information conveyed to him was not so much that the house in Prince's Gate would be shut up when he went to Brayton, but that Lucia wished him to think that it would be. What that meant, he had no idea; he merely believed it to mean something. But above all tilings, he did not want Lucia to see his suspicions, and he was casual too. And his casualness, likewise, Lucia read by the light of her own uneasiness. Each played a secret part in the ghastly, bitter little farce.
Her plans met with his approval.
"You think of everything, my dear Lucia," he said. "It is far better to leave the servants in the country, and, as you say, they have nothing more to do when we leave the house on Monday. You and your maid will join me, then, on Friday at the Grosvenor Hotel, and we start on Saturday morning."
Lucia continued the prudent course.
"Yes; I wish you were coming to Ashdown, though. Mouse will be sorry not to see you. Can't you manage to come for one day?"
"I fear it is impossible. I see that my time will be very fully occupied as it is. But I shall be able to get up on Friday night."
Lucia put in what she thought was a fine piece of work.
"If you don't," she said, "I shall quite refuse to wait. I shall telegraph to Charlie and make him come instead. He is going to be at Ashdown."
"So you told me. Well, I must go out now."
"You will be in to lunch?"
"Yes. You have not got a party, have you?"
"No; as far as I know we shall be quite alone. Not that I expect it; somebody always drops in."
Edgar knew well when first he began to watch his wife and Charlie, and, to do him justice, knew how stern and loyal a struggle he went through with himself before he definitely admitted suspicions into his mind. Suspicion was an ugly thing, and he knew it, but as often as he thought he had got the better of what he had first told himself was quite unfounded, some little fresh incident occurred, some fragment more of what was now a complete pattern. Sometimes it would be a few inaudible words, sometimes a look that passed between them; sometimes it was the feeling that inwardly Lucia winced at his own touch, at his very proximity. It seldom happened that she showed this, for she was on her guard, but now and then the truth of it was forced upon him, and what made the truth more patent to him was that whenever she had betrayed this, however slightly, she immediately afterwards was demonstratively affectionate to him. But he was by no means a fool, also he was still in love with her, and he could distinguish very well between a tenderness that was diplomatic and a tenderness that was spontaneous. Then by degrees with a growing bitterness and hardness he thought over all the history of their marriage, and asked himself whether she had ever loved him, or whether she had even from the first only tolerated him. And that question, and the answer which he feared to give to it, stung him into an anger and resentment that made his heart iron to her. How far she had seen this he did not know; but it was with an added sense of humiliation that he saw her relief at the growing rareness of his caresses, and at their ultimate cessation. He was naturally proud, and the position was intolerable, while his very pride prevented him from speaking to Lucia on the subject. Slowly through these weeks his suspicion had deepened into certainty, and now he was watching her, not with a sense of the unworthiness of doing so, but with a sense that it was his duty. It was no wonder then that Lucia's expressed desire to go yachting with him alone, to the exclusion of Charlie, failed to disarm his suspicions. What that meant he did not know for certain, but it seemed probable at least that she had become aware of them, and was attempting, with what now seemed to him transparent futility, to convince him of their groundlessness.
But, as has been seen, he fell in with her suggestion that they should cruise alone; for, since he had loved her, and in love there is something immortal, so that the utmost wounding cannot quite do it to death, he still had hold on the desperate hope that he had been wrong throughout. If he considered that with his reason, it seemed a possibility not to be dreamed of; but since he had loved her, his past love still dreamed of it. Away, alone with her, in the solitude of another honeymoon, he would be able to test that. But in the interval suspicion blackened and embittered him. Everything fed it: the fact of the empty house fed it; the fact that Charlie would be at Ashdown fed it. It is always feeding-time for suspicion, and suspicion is omnivorous, and knows no quenching of its appetite.
Later in the day he was sitting in his room with a report he had to master, but with a mind that persistently wandered from it. Several people had come to lunch, and among them Charlie, who brought not too good an account of Maud. She was still a good deal pulled down by her attack, and though she was up, she was depressed and weak. It would be so nice of Lucia, he said, to go and see her and convince her that he was right in having telegraphed to Mouse to say that he must throw up his visit, and stop with his wife. Maud did not want him to do so; she said it was quite absurd, and wished him to go. Lucia had broken in at this.
"Oh, Charlie, I am sorry," she said, "but I entirely agree with Maud. I know exactly what influenza depression is, and it is really much better to leave a person alone. She doesn't want you. Poor Maud! I will go and see her this afternoon if I can squeeze it in."
Charlie caught Lucia's eye.
"Oh well, then, don't go and see her, if you mean to say that," he said. "I want you to back me up, and not her. I'm not going to Mouse; that is quite settled."
Lucia had seen Madge again that morning, who had condemned her rejection of Charlie as yacht-companion. Lucia had seen the point when it was shown her, and here was a heaven-sent opportunity to repair the error. To urge Charlie to come to Ashdown would be the correction of any inference Edgar might have drawn last night.
"But it's too disappointing," she said. "I was reckoning on your being there. Edgar and I are going off at the end of the week, and you will have gone to St. Moritz before we get back, and we shan't meet for two thousand years. Oh, do come!"
But Charlie had remained firm. He had also left the house immediately after lunch.
It was this that got between Edgar and his book. This morning it had been the fact that Charlie was going to be at Ashdown that had been food for suspicion. Now he was not going to be there, and still suspicion fed and fattened. He did not know what it meant, but soon it would fit into its place, if he thought about it. And then quite suddenly and quite securely it fitted into the poisoned map that his mind made. Next to it came the empty house. How it fitted he did not quite know, but he felt the edge to be flush and firm.
And then for a moment he cast the map aside, telling himself, as was indeed true, that he was doing Lucia a hideous injustice. This, at any rate, was causeless—absolutely causeless. Whatever she did he turned into edible form for his poisonous brood: last night it was the fact that she did not want Charlie's companionship that was capable to him of only one explanation; to-day the fact that she did appeared equally suggestive. Again, that he should go down to Ashdown when Lucia was there fevered him; now, that he should not go to Ashdown had the same effect. Frankly he acknowledged to himself the unreasonableness and the meanness of his thoughts. But he could not expel them; they came back and back, swarming like brown evil flies over carrion.
Three days later Lucia was sitting over her fire in her bedroom before it was time to dress for dinner. There was a huge party in the house, a party that should have been very amusing—at any rate, the same party, more or less, had amused her immensely on other occasions. All the right people were there, and, what made more difference, there were none of the wrong ones. But Lucia, in the twenty-four hours that had elapsed since she arrived, had not been in the least degree amused. Yet she had not been bored; her thoughts had been desperately busy.
It was Tuesday. On Friday night she was to go up to town, join Edgar at the Grosvenor Hotel, and go off with him next day. They would cruise in the Mediterranean; then they would be busy with their shooting-parties, and before they were over Maud and her husband would have started for St. Moritz. It would be weeks—months—before she saw Charlie again, and there were things she must tell him—he must know the reason for her guardedness, else he might think she wanted to break with him. It was that thought which was intolerable, which obsessed her, which prevented her enjoyment of this thoroughly congenial society. And it never left her; her laugh would wither in mid-air, dropping dead. She would be in the middle of a sentence, and the sentence would go lopped and maimed. And people, she felt sure, were beginning to notice these things. She was not herself; anybody could see that, and what lay between her and herself was this difficulty: she could not conceive how, with the prudence she was determined to exercise, she could see him again before she left England on this deadly and necessary trip.
All that was honest enough; it was all there, but much more was there which she refused to acknowledge. It was the pith of the whole which she disowned—namely, her overwhelming desire to see him. Intolerable as was the thought that he might imagine she had wished to bring an end to their intimacy, it was more intolerable that she should be unable to see him just once again and tell him that it was not so. She had decided that he should not come to Ashdown while she was there, since Edgar was not with her nor Maud with him. That had been a hateful necessity, but necessary. More imperative now was the necessity of seeing him. But how? How?
There were many possible ways, all faced by some grand impossibility. Mouse, for instance, would be charmed if he telegraphed Maud's improvement, and suggested he should come here for a night or two. But grand impossibility faced that; if she had been right—and she felt sure she had been—in prohibiting his visit at all, she would be terribly wrong in getting him to come now. Things got into the papers; two lines to say that Mr. Lindsay had joined the Duchess of Wiltshire's party at Ashdown was a sufficient match for the powder-magazine of Edgar's mind. That clearly would not do. Slight though the risk was, it was still a risk, and Lucia, that hunted soul, wanted no risks.
Or again, she might go back to town on Thursday, stay at an hotel, and get him to dine with her. At the Carlton, for instance, under the blare of the band, she could tell him of the danger. She could also see him again, which was a more instant need. Yet that would not do; a chance paragraph might again wreck all. It was possible that Edgar might take up a paper which recorded that she had dined at the Carlton one night when she was supposed to be staying at Ashdown. It might even say, in case Charlie was recognized, who dined with her. Explanation, of course, would be simple: she had shopping to do in town, and since the house in Prince's Gate was shut up, she dined and slept at the Carlton. Certainly Charlie had dined with her: why not? Maud would have, but was still laid up. She had asked them both, but Maud had not come. What did anybody mean?
Then in a flash Lucia saw that which had been a subject of suspicion, though meaningless, to her husband, a few days before. The publicity of a hotel was impossible: it was impossible that she should get Charlie to come to Ashdown. But there was an empty house in London, which was hers, and no one except the caretaker and his wife would know she had been in town. What if she made a perfectly reasonable excuse to Mouse on the ground of shopping, and went to town on Thursday? Chops were possible even in dismantled houses; she could dine there, if chops were dinner, see Charlie there, and speak to him very strongly on the subject of discretion. It was so important; he must be brought to see that. It was impossible to explain things by letters, and letters in themselves were so dangerous. Also letters were so hard, so wooden. But with him beside her she could make him feel how she loathed and rebelled against this forced, this necessary surrender to what prudence dictated. It was only temporary.
The consistent falsity of her life came to-night to its logical conclusion. For years she had deceived others—those who most trusted and loved her—whenever she could suck but a small advantage therefrom, but she had not deceived herself. But now, in a matter so supreme as this, she achieved this crowning result, and when she told herself that it was in order to explain the policy of discretion to her lover that she was going to meet him, she believed it. She reined her imagination in; she would not let it spring forward to forecast the details of their meeting, its setting in the shrouded house, his arrival, the picnic dinner they would have together, the long talk which would burn up the hours of the evening like fire. All that she hid even from herself. The moment that her plan flashed into her mind she executed the things that were necessary for its realization, and wrote at once to the caretaker, saying that she would be coming up for Thursday night, would want the plainest of dinners for herself and a friend, and—that she would not bring her maid. It was better so; she should come up with the big luggage on Friday, and go straight to the Grosvenor Hotel. A couple of lines to Charlie completed the arrangements.
Only one thing remained for consideration, and that was what excuse exactly she should give Mouse. Shopping was a poor reason; everybody said shopping when she meant something else; it was not solid enough, not convincing enough. Then, the evening post having just been brought to her, she thought of something much better, and went to seek her hostess. But to-night she felt there would be no more withering of her laugh in mid-air, no lopped and maimed sentences. The joy of life had come back to her, the rage for love and living.
"Dear Mouse," she said, when she found her in her bedroom, "Edgar is too tiresome and worrying for words. Having carefully settled to start on Saturday, he now proposes to start on Friday. What am I to do?"
Mouse drew another chair up to the fire; it was a frosty evening, and the exhilaration of the cold had entered into the blaze. Exhilaration too, so she thought, had entered into Lucia, in spite of this tiresome proposal.
"Do?" she said. "Don't." It is a woman's prerogative to change her plans at the last moment, not a man's. It seems to me that men are invading our provinces. They have headaches and drink tea. Don't go, Lucia. Be calm and firm."
"But I'm not; I'm furious. He really must think he is Providence, upsetting things in this way.'
"Shall I telegraph to him?" asked Mouse. "I will, with pleasure, just saying that if necessary you shall be kept here by force."
Lucia laughed.
"I wish you could," she said, "but Edgar wouldn't see that you Were serious. He would think it was a joke. How annoying he is! But you must remember that I have to spend a fortnight all alone with him on the yacht. If I simply refused to go a day earlier he would be so very polite and dignified, which I can't stand. I abhor dignity."
"Well, it all depends, then, on what you abhor most," said Mouse, "dignity or having your arrangements upset."
Lucia poked the fire viciously.
"Oh, dignity is the worst," she said. "I shall do as he wishes. It's so unfair, though, for unless I do it with the best grace in the world, it will be as bad as not doing it at all. Yes, I shall do it, and pretend it suits me perfectly. No one can say that I don't do my duty. What an angel was born into this malicious world twenty-five years ago! Sometimes I am so good that I am almost afraid I shall die in the night."
"Oh, be very careful," said Mouse. "But, really, you are too amiable. You will have to leave us on Thursday, then? Edgar's Grosvenor Hotel plans are quite too funny for anything. I wonder he doesn't get leave to sleep in the carriage that will form part of the train next day."
"For Heaven's sake don't suggest it to him!" said Lucia. "He would certainly do it, and wonder he hadn't thought of it before. Dear, dear! how nicely we should all get on if it wasn't for our husbands!"
"That is a profound observation," said Mouse. "But, then, on the whole, it is possible to get on fairly well with them."
Edgar found plenty to occupy him at Brayton, but it was that which he brought with him that occupied him most of all. Day and night there sat in its dark corner of his mind that grey form of his distrust and suspicion. Sometimes, even now, though it had become so solid and real, he could make it, so to speak, close its eyes and doze, but it was only by the strongest effort on his part that he could thus lull it to rest, and even then it did not quit its corner; it still sat there, though for the time it might be quiescent. It was chiefly when he was with his child and Lucia's that these moments of its quiescence came; with that chuckling, crowing atom which was bone of her bone, and contained life also that was in him, he could, though by an effort, make himself believe that he had made a gross and wellnigh unforgiveable mistake, that it was her due that he should ask her pardon abjectly, imploringly, humbly for these weeks of poisoned thought that had so incessantly and causelessly wronged her. And at such moments it seemed to him that a wraith of himself stood by him and reproached him, that wraith of his true self which had loved her, and was, indeed, save that it inhabited his flesh and bones, an entity which no longer had anything in common with that which made up his present consciousness. Then, even while the spell of their child's presence was with him, the wraith of his true self would vanish again, and he would ask himself what this child who was so much to him had been, or was, to its mother, whether she had ever shown sign that she knew how this living link was that which made her unity with him.
But there had no such sign been shown. Neither to him, since the birth of their child, nor to it had she given that spontaneous abandonment of herself that is what wifehood and motherhood mean. And the eyes of the grey form that sat in the dusk were open again and fixed on him. It seemed to have moved a little nearer, too, and the darkness that enshrouded it had lifted a little.
Step by step he went back over the road which they had walked together since their marriage, once so strewn with roses. Stately and splendid it had been as he trod it with her; they had walked it to the sound of flutes, and the beauty of all that was lovely in the world of art had been brought to adorn it. But looking back to-day it seemed that all he had thought lovely was blackened and grimed, and the hoofs of satyrs, leering and diabolical, had trodden the roses into the filth over which they had been laid. From the beginning there had been nothing true or real about it all; he had worshipped a monstrous thing, and its monstrosity had infected all that had come near it.
And then for a moment he would look on that sunbeam of a child again, and he would tell himself that there was nothing monstrous except his own stupendous disloyalty to Lucia.
These nightmares of thought came like repeated attacks of some nameless fever. But each weakened him; after each it was more difficult to rally, and he felt that he would go off his head altogether unless he could arrive at some certainty. Yet how was that to be done? Whatever Lucia had done, whether the truth was that he by his suspicions had so sinned against her, or whether it was she who had sinned against him, there was nothing that would satisfy him in the wounded and incredulous anger that must be her answer to any direct question of his. Since he entertained those vile suspicions of her, he necessarily would not be convinced—the evil part of him that suspected her, that is to say—by any indignant and fiery denial of hers. It could not be through her that his distrust must be set at rest; he must convince himself independently of her. He must frame to himself a definite suspicion, and—test it. Yet how mean! how abhorrent! What would be his own feelings if he found that Lucia had ever spied on him?
But the idea recurred and recurred again. He often put it away, but as often it came back. And he found by degrees that he was not putting it so far away as he did when first it presented itself.
He was busying himself the morning after his arrival at Brayton with that which had formed part of the cause of his coming, and was overhauling his photographic apparatus. He was more than a mere amateur at photography, and his equipment was singularly complete. There was a big full-plate camera, which he used chiefly for time exposures in interiors; he had made some extraordinarily fine photographs of the bronzes in the Museum of the Acropolis with this, and as he was considering whether on the Riviera there would conceivably be a use for it, there came into his mind a day he and Lucia had spent on the Acropolis on their first tour. It was with the vividness of a thing actually seen with his eyes now and here that he recalled a particular moment when she had come into the room when he was photographing.
"Oh, Edgar," she said, "it is spring, and outside 'blossom by blossom the spring begins.' Do let us go out on to Pentilicus this afternoon, instead of spending it photographing. If you must photograph, you may photograph me. I will pose on a bed of asphodel and moly."
And suddenly his breath caught in his throat.
No; there would be no need for taking this big time-exposure camera. Whatever photography he did would be in the open air. Yet Lucia had asked him once to photograph her "dear cabin" on the yacht, and, not having a plate to spare, he had not done so. Very likely she would ask him again; it was worth taking the camera, then. It had a wider lens than the other; nothing else at such close quarters could take more than a section of the cabin. By using the widest stop, he could take the whole side of it with this. There was her bed along one side; a table which she called "Utility," because she wrote at it; another which she called "Flora-dora," because she had nothing but flowers on it. No; it was he who had suggested those names; hers had been the delighted acceptance of them.
He took hold of his mind again, and shook it up. These thoughts would lead on to other thoughts, and his present business was with cameras. There was a focal-plane camera which was supposed to work at a fifteen-hundredth part of a second. But when he used it last it struck him that the shutter did not move quite as quickly as it ought. It would be well to test this, for in the bright glare of the Riviera its fastest pace was not at all too quick. If it was still working sluggishly, it must be looked to before he went South.
Edgar had the films handy, and put a roll in; then, with it in his hand, he went to the window. Outside the brilliance of the morning rivalled the southern sun, and he only wanted some quickly-moving object on which to test the shutter. It happened to be focussed, he saw, for six yards, and even at the moment there came the crunch of gravel outside, and round the corner in the perambulator came his son. The child knew him, and opened his mouth in an ecstatic "Daddy," which for him comprised the English language ("Mammy" he had never learned), and Edgar pressed the air-bulb which worked the shutter. If the camera was in good order, the child's mouth ought to be quite sharp. He said a word or two to the nurse, said also that Daddy was busy, and went back to develop the photograph. The shutter was beyond doubt very badly out of order. It must certainly be seen to. That ought to be done at its maker's in town; one could not trust these provincial people. But he would only arrive in London on Friday evening, and they were to start on Saturday morning. It was a pity to send those things by post; they often got jarred. Perhaps he could manage to get up to town a little earlier. He might manage to get up on Friday morning; there were sure to be other little jobs to be done. Or even earlier than that; a whole day in London before one went abroad always meant a full day. But the Prince's Gate house was shut up; the servants had all come down, according to Lucia's admirable arrangement. He would have to stay somewhere else; there was nothing so cheerless as a solitary night in a disbanded house.
And then, suddenly as the lightning-flash, other pieces and ends of thought rushed together and joined themselves to this. There had been in his mind causeless suspicion of that empty house; that came side by side with the question of the defective camera, and was joined to it. There had been the necessity for finding out, in some way other than that of asking direct questions, the truth or falsity of all that poisoned him; that was there in the same flash. He had found himself a specious excuse for doing what was mean and abhorrent. A call at Prince's Gate was more than reasonable; indeed, he had left an aquascutum there, which he really wanted to take abroad with him. No doubt his valet might fetch it, but it was better to see to things oneself.
This lightning-flash of connection between things hitherto unconnected was brief enough, and it had passed almost as soon as it occurred. But in the mysterious alchemy of the human mind, it is ordained that a thought once entertained has easier access when it calls for the second time than it has had when first it presented itself. It has written its microscopic little wrinkle or dot on the brain; when next it passes that way, that wrinkle will nod and beckon to it.
Edgar had things to be seen to in Brayton that afternoon. It was true that his presence there or personal interviews were not necessary, but in this hell of fears and suspicion and suspense he wanted and longed for employment. There were so few days to be got through; could he but hold himself in hand till he and Lucia were safely off from Victoria, speeding South, alone and together, he felt that some certainty would come. He tried by business and employment to root out from his mind the crooked course that had already indicated itself, that had done more than that, and had insisted on its being the only satisfactory course. And it was his very best self—the best self, too, of which any man is capable—that tried to scare away the bat-like shapes that hovered round him by refusing to allow his mind to recognize their existence. He wanted to do anything rather than be at leisure to perceive them. Whatever else was foul or fair, they were foul. Foul he had been in entertaining them, in being at leisure to receive them all these weeks, and now that they suggested a practical plan, he could at least refuse to give it consideration. Only a few hours ago he had longed for certainty at whatever cost; now, when the definite idea of testing his suspicion of the empty house occurred to him as practically and reasonably possible, he tried to put it away. Already he had strayed far; how much better to have gone with Lucia to Ashdown, and left the damned photographic apparatus to be in order or not, just as it pleased. Yet for a while his suspicions had been at rest when Charlie himself announced as a new plan that he would not go to Ashdown, but stop in town with Maud. Or had suspicion ever been wholly at rest? Had he not instantly connected Charlie's presence in town with the empty house?
The rows of well-ordered villas streamed by him. There was Holywell and Holyrood, and Laburnums and Cedars, all with their inhabitants, all with their possibilities of tragedy or rapture, all so much smaller than himself as regards that which the world recognizes as the possibilities of life, but all quite as large as he, to say the least, as regards the possibilities of those things which make life a thing that is raised just a little higher than existence. He had meant—Lucia had ardently backed his desire—to turn some sort of cultured sun on to these suburbanly provincial residences, to speak to them of fireworks and Botticelli, and God knows what. But what if, after all, the majority of these decayed and effete old ladies and gentlemen possessed that which he now found he prized above all else and had missed? What if in the Laburnums an old General and his rheumatic spouse dwelt together in quiet content, and were yearly cheered by the visit of that darling naval officer in the King's service, their son? What if the last Mayor but two, a man without an "h," found in the Cedars a tranquillity and happiness that was lacking to those who looked at Corots, and saw slightly doubtful plays acted beneath that superb vault of the theatre he had built at Brayton? And then—
Next the Cedars was Fair View. The car had passed it before it could slow down to the pace that was necessary to enter the narrow gate and take the ellipse of the "carriage sweep," but with a little hooting and grunting it backed its way into the gate labelled "Out," which Aunt Cathie had caused to be repainted. There were no other chariots in the carriage-sweep; the possible difficulty of compelling them to back into the road was non-existent.
Edgar got out and rang the bell. It was not so far off that the twitched wire caused the jangle, and standing there on the doorstep, it was no longer "here and now" with him, but here and on a day that seemed so long past that it had, till the bell scolded in the basement, no existence at all. But that sound conjured the past up again out of the well of the relentless years; it was almost with expectation that he was silent for the whistle from above that should recall Schubert's "Unfinished" to him; it was almost with conviction that he looked at the sill of the drawing-room window, thinking to see there the broad-brimmed rush-hat with the scarlet bow. Yet, simultaneously, sickness and ache of heart was his; whether it was she, the same she who had come downstairs to greet him who now was staying at Ashdown, he dared not think. He but knew that somebody else, not the he who had heard that jangling bell before on a day of brilliant sunshine, stood here now waiting for the bell to be answered. Another being usurped his envelope; somebody not looking eagerly forward, but looking hopelessly back; somebody sick at heart, tired, tired with a struggle that made him momently weaker, who found the present intolerable instead of finding the future bright.
There was an irony in external things. He remembered that flies buzzed on the wall; in this sheltered November sunshine they buzzed there now; flowers had been bright below the windows, and to-day the scarlet salvia still showed traces of its bravery, and chrysanthemums blazed and smouldered. But the quality of the sun was changed. It had been June then.
He had stopped the car, told the chauffeur to back into the narrow gate instinctively; but as he waited, while still the bell had not ceased to jangle, his instinct translated itself into purpose that could be stated and reasoned over. Not much reasoning was necessary; simply he wanted to get back into the atmosphere that had once been radiant. Some brightness might linger here, when he saw the little dingy hall, the confined little sitting-room, and perhaps the tiny veranda that looked out over the lawn and the railway embankment. His heart ached for the Lucia of those days, whether she was real or false then; he wanted the belief that she was real. That might help him now; she might be on his side, phantom though she should prove to be, to fight the deadlier phantom that sat at home with him underneath the Corots.
There succeeded to the clangour of the bell a long silence. Then from upstairs came the sound of descending feet, and the door was opened. It was not Arbuthnot who opened it, nor the godly Mrs. Inglis, who performed such functions when Arbuthnot had her afternoons out; it was Aunt Cathie. She saw him, and threw the door wide.
"Why, if I ever!" she said. "Dear Edgar, if you had only told me! And I'm not fit to be seen. Lucia is not with you?"
"No, Aunt Cathie; she is away. I am at Brayton for a day or two before we go abroad, looking out photographic things."
Aunt Cathie was still in crackling black of the nature of bombazine, though it was over a year since Elizabeth died. But the crackling black was worn and brownish; the magisterial precision which had been so characteristic of Aunt Cathie was lacking in her now, both as regards dress and address. She seemed softened, faded.
"But how nice of you to come and see me," she said, "though the most dreadful thing has happened. There is nobody in; I am quite alone in the house. My servants"—her voice stumbled and faltered a moment—"are all out. It was such a fine afternoon. But I will give you some tea."
The ghosts of past days were on the wing now, fluttering, dancing, laughing, calling to him out of the time when it was dawn with love. He could not but remember that it was thus that Lucia had received him at Littlestone; the servants had been out, and they had had tea in the kitchen with an infinity of tender mirth. With the true history of that day he never been made acquainted, for the effect of its narration on Maud was not such as would encourage Lucia to make further confidences about it. But to-day, when the situation, so infinitesimal in itself, was so strangely repeated, it was not witl mirth that Aunt Cathie announced it. She was evidently agitated and preoccupied.
"But let us have it in the kitchen," he said, "just as Lucia and I did at Littlestone. It will remind me of that day, and I want to be reminded."
They had passed into the drawing-room, and Edgar, still beckoned to by the ghosts of past days, looked round for the things that were so familiar. But the piano, where the "Unfinished" had stood, was no longer there, and bookcases gaped with empty shelves.
"But the piano," he said, "and the books?"
Aunt Cathie drew herself up with a quiet dignity.
"I was cluttered up with things," she said. "It was more convenient to part with some of them. There is no inconvenience in not having a piano, especially when you can't play it. And as for books, what is the use of dusting what you don't read? And now, dear Edgar, the kettle is boiling, and the tray is outside. Might I trouble you to bring it in, while I run down to the kitchen and see if they have sent in the cake I ordered? If not, you must be content with some bread and butter."
It required no unusual perspicacity to put these things together and while Aunt Cathie was downstairs, he went with purpose and looked out of the glass door into the garden. It was even as he suspected: the grass of the lawn was tall and matted and rank; the bed that had been the famous "blaze of colour" was but jungle of neglected herbage. It was clear beyond doubt that Aunt Cathie had had some pecuniary loss, and it was infinitely foolish and brave of her to have kept it to herself, and told neither Lucia nor him. But at that another suspicion came into his mind, which he felt he must have satisfied at once. He knew very well that no word of all this had reached him. But he had to be told that no word of it had reached Lucia.
Aunt Cathie came upstairs again. The cake had not come it was tiresome of the tradespeople.
Edgar shut the door after her and came and sat down beside her on the sofa with its decoration of head-rests.
"Now, dear Aunt Cathie," he said, "you know I am not impertinent or inquisitive, I hope. But I cannot help seeing what all this means, your parting with the piano, the servants being out, the neglect in the garden. But why, why didn't you tell Lucia or me? I don't think it was kind of you."
There came a sudden jerking in the muscles of Aunt Cathie's throat. But she overcame it bravely.
"Lucia, I am sure, was very busy," she said, "and it was no wonder she forgot. I did write to her, but I felt I couldn't write again. And I have a servant. Surely one old woman can be looked after by one servant. Many people have none at all."
And then very gently, though with a sickness of heart at what she had told him, he got from her the story of what had happened. Elizabeth had urged her to put the bulk of their money into some Russian oil property that yielded a higher percentage than did their present investment, and three months ago, when the half-yearly dividend was due, it had not been paid. She had received the report of the meeting, and it was quite clear that this embarrassment would only be temporary, and that the payment of dividends would soon be resumed. But in the meantime it was better to sell the piano, and do without a gardener.
Aunt Cathie could not go on at once.
"I don't mind about that," she said, "and it is very wicked of one to mind about anything else. But when I think of Lucia forgetting all about it, sometimes I do feel hurt. I don't mean to, I don't want to. I know she loves me, and we all forget things at times. I never had a good memory myself."
Then suddenly she recovered her ancient spirit, blew her nose violently, and became astonishingly brusque.
"Hope you're hungry," she said, "because if I am good for anything, it's cutting bread and butter. And the kettle's boiling. Now tell me what you and Lucia are going to do with yourselves. When are you coming to Brayton? Been in London, haven't you?"
Edgar did not stop long after this, but before going he extracted the extent of her losses from Aunt Cathie, and her promise that Fair View should be instantly reinstalled with a new piano and its usual complement of servants. A visit to her bank was necessary, but after that he had not the heart to do the rest of the business for which he had come, and went back to Brayton.
So Lucia had known all about Aunt Cathie's troubles, and had done nothing. It was only reasonable to suppose that the letter had reached her when she was very busy, and that she had forgotten all about it. The point was that she had been able to forget about it. Aunt Cathie, with a generosity of which he was incapable, had said that she knew Lucia loved her. But was that so? Did Lucia love anybody?
And at that question all the flood of suspicion overwhelmed him again. Somehow he must arrive at certainty. It would not be arrived at by asking Lucia.