Chapter 11

"Look here, Roger!--suppose you stop talking this nonsense and come to business," said Marianne Winton, in pale exasperation. "I've sent Jones out with a note--but he'll be back directly. And I've got an appointment. What are you doing? Have you got any work to do?"

She took a seat not far from her brother, who perceived from her tone that he had perhaps gone as far as was prudent.

"Oh, dear, no, I've got no work to do," he said, smiling. "That's not a commodity that comes my way. But I must somehow manage to keep a roof over Anita and the child. So what can I do but count on your assistance, my dear? My father left you a great deal of money which in equity belonged to me--and I am bound to remind you of it."

"You know very well why he left you so little!" said Lady Winton. "We needn't go into that old story. I ask you again, what do you want?" She took out her watch. "I have just ten minutes."

"What do I want?" He looked at her with a slow, whimsical laugh. "Money, my dear, money! Money means everything that I must have--food, coals, clothes, doctor, chemist, buses--decent houseroom for Anita and myself--"

A shiver of revulsion ran through his sister.

"Have you married that woman?"

He laughed.

"As you seemed to think it desirable, Anita and I did take a trip to a Registry Office about a month ago. It's all lawful now--except for our abominable English law that doesn't legitimize the children. But"--he sprang to his feet with a movement which startled her--"whom do you think I've seen lately?"

His sister stared at him, amazed at the change in him--the animation, the rush of colour in the hollow, emaciated face.

"_Rachel_!--my wife--my former--precious--wife. I thought she was in Canada. No doubt she thought the same of me. But I've stumbled upon her quite by chance--living close to the place where I had taken lodgings for Anita and the babe, in September, in case there were more raids this winter. What do you think of that?"

"It doesn't interest me at all," said Lady Winton coldly.

"Then you have no dramatic sense, my dear. Just think! I stroll out, for want of anything better to do, with Anita, into the market-place of a beastly little country town, to see a silly sort of show--a mixture of a Harvest Festival and a Land Girls' beano--when without a moment's warning--standing up in a decorated wagon--I behold--_Rachel_!--handsomer than ever!--in a kind of khaki dress--tunic, breeches, and leggings--enormously becoming!--and, of course, the observed of all observers. More than that!--I perceive a young man, in an American uniform, dancing attendance upon her--taking her orders--walking her off to church--Oh, a perfectly clear case!--no doubt about it at all. And there I stood--within a few yards of her--and she never saw me!"

He broke off, staring at his sister--a wild, exultant look--which struck her uncomfortably. Her face showed her arrested, against her will.

"Are you sure she didn't see you?"

"Sure. I put the child on my shoulder, and hid behind her. Besides--my dear--even Rachel might find it difficult to recognize her discarded husband--in this individual!"

He tapped his chest lightly. Lady Winton could not withdraw her own eyes from him. Yes, it was quite true. The change in him was shocking--ghastly. He had brought it entirely on himself. But she could not help saying, in a somewhat milder tone,--

"Have you seen that doctor again?"

"To whom you so obligingly sent me? Yes, I saw him yesterday. One lung seems to have finally struck work--_caput_! as the Germans say. The other will last a bit longer yet."

A fit of coughing seized him. His sister instinctively moved farther away from him, looking at him with frightened and hostile eyes.

"Don't be alarmed," he said, as soon as he had found his voice again, "I'm drenched in disinfectant. I take all proper precautions--for the child's sake. Now then"--he rose with an effort to his feet--"what are you going to do for me?"

His aspect had altered, had assumed a sinister and passionate intensity. His sister was conscious of the menace in it, and hastily taking up a small hand-bag lying near her, she produced a purse from it.

"I have saved twenty pounds for you--out of my own money--with _great_ difficulty," she said, with indignant emphasis. "If I were to tell Richard, he would be furious. And I cannot--do--_anything_--more for you, beyond the allowance I give you. Everything you suffer from, you have brought upon, yourself. It is hopeless to try and help you."

He laughed.

"Well, then, I must try Rachel!" he said carelessly, as he looked for his hat.

"That I think would be the lowest depth!" said Lady Winton, breathing quick, "to beg money from the wife who divorced you!"

"I am ready to beg for money--requisition is the better word--from anybody in the world who has more of it than I. I am a Bolshevist. You needn't talk to me about property, or rights. I don't acknowledge them. I want something that you've got, and I haven't. I shall take it if I find the opportunity--civilly if I can, uncivilly, if I must."

Lady Winton made no reply. She stood, a statue of angry patience waiting for him to go. He slowly buttoned on his coat, and then stepped coolly across the room to look at an enlarged photograph of a young soldier standing on the piano.

"Handsome chap! You're in luck, Marianne. I suppose you managed to get him into a staff job of some sort, out of harm's way?"

He turned to her with a sneer on his lips. His sister was still silent.

The man moving about the room was perhaps the thing she feared and hated most in the world. Every scene of this kind--and he forced them on her, in spite of her futile resistance, at fairly frequent intervals--represented to her an hour of torture and humiliation. How to hide the scenes and the being who caused them, from her husband, her servants, her friends, was becoming almost her chief preoccupation. She was beginning to be afraid of her brother. For some time she had regarded him as incipiently insane, and as she watched him this evening he seemed to her more than ever charged with sinister possibilities. It appeared to be impossible to influence or frighten him; and she realized that as he seemed not to care a fig whether she caused a scandal or not, and she cared with every pulse of her being, she was really in his power, and it was no good struggling.

"Well, good-night, Edith," he said at last, taking up his hat. "This'll last for a bit--but not very long, I warn you--prices being what they are. Oh, by the way, my name just now is Wilson--make a note of it!"

"What's that for?" she said disdainfully.

"Some Canadian creditors of mine got wind of me--worse luck. I had to change my quarters, and drop the old name--for a bit. However--what's in a name?" He laughed, and held out his hand.

"Going to shake hands, Edie? You used to be awfully fond of me, when you were small."

She stood, apparently unmoved, her hands hanging. The pathetic note had been tried on her too often.

"Good-night, Roger. Nannie will show you out."

The door closed on him, and Lady Winton dropped on a sofa by the fire, her face showing white and middle-aged in the firelight. She was just an ordinary woman, only with a stronger will than most; and as an ordinary woman, amid all her anger and fear, she was not wholly proof against such a spectacle as that now presented by her once favourite brother. It was not his words that affected her--but a hundred little personal facts which every time she saw him burnt a little more deeply into her consciousness the irreparableness of his personal ruin--physical and moral. Idleness, drink, disease--the loss of shame, of self-respect, of manners--the sense of something vital gone for ever--all these fatal things stared out upon her, from his slippery emaciated face, his borrowed clothes, his bullying voice--the scent on him of the mews in which he lived!

She covered her face with her hands and cried a little. She could remember when he was the darling and pride of the family--especially of his father. How had it happened? He had said to her once, "There must have been a black drop somewhere in our forbears, Edie. It has reappeared in me. We are none of us responsible, my dear, for our precious selves. I may be a sinner and a loafer--but that benevolent Almighty of yours made me."

That was wicked stuff, of course; but there had been a twist in him from the beginning. Had _she_ done her best for him? There were times when her conscience pricked her.

The clock struck seven. The sound brought her to her feet. She must go and dress. Richard would be home directly, and they were dining out, to meet a distinguished General, in London for a few days' leave from the front. Dick must, of course, know nothing of Roger's visit; and she must hurriedly go and look up the distinguished General's career in case she had to sit next him. Vehemently she put the preceding hour out of her mind. The dinner-party to which she was going flattered her vanity. It turned her cold to think that Roger might some day do something which would damage that "position" which she had built up for herself and her husband, by ten years' careful piloting of their joint lives. She knew she was called a "climber." She knew also that she had "climbed" successfully, and that it was Roger's knowledge of the fact, combined with a horrid recklessness which seemed to be growing in him, that made the danger of the situation.

Meanwhile Delane stepped out into the fog, which, however, was lifting a little. He made his way down into Piccadilly, which was crowded with folk, men and women hurrying home from their offices, and besieging the omnibuses--with hundreds of soldiers too, most of them with a girl beside them, and smart young officers of every rank and service--while the whole scene breathed an animation and excitement, which meant a common consciousness, in the crowd, of great happenings. All along the street were men with newspapers, showing the headlines to passers-by. "President Wilson's answer to the German appeal expected to-morrow." "The British entry into Lille."

Delane bought an _Evening News_, glanced at the headlines, and threw it away. What did the war matter to him?--or the new world that fools supposed to be coming after it? Consumptives had a way, no doubt, of living longer than people expected--or hoped. Still, he believed that a couple of years or so would see him out. And that being so, he felt a kind of malignant indifference towards this pushing, chattering world, aimlessly going about its silly business, as though there were any real interest or importance in it.

Then, as he drifted with the crowd, he found himself caught in a specially dense bit of it, which had gathered round some fallen horses. A thin slip of a girl beside him, who was attempting to get through the crush, was roughly elbowed by a burly artilleryman determined to see the show. She protested angrily, and Delane suddenly felt angry, too. "You brute, you,--let the lady pass!" he called to the soldier, who turned with a grin, and was instantly out of reach and sight. "Take my arm," said Delane to the girl--"Where are you going?" The little thing looked up--hesitated--and took his arm. "I'm going to get a bus at the Circus." "All right. I'll see you there." She laughed and flushed, and they walked on together. Delane looked at her with curiosity. High cheek-bones--a red spot of colour on them--a sharp chin--small, emaciated features, and beautiful deep eyes. Phthisical!--like himself--poor little wretch! He found out that she was a waitress in a cheap eating-house, and had very long hours. "Jolly good pay, though, compared to what it used to be! Why, with tips, on a good day, I can make seven and eight shillings. That's good, ain't it? And now the war's goin' to stop. Do you think I want it to stop? I don't think! Me and my sister'll be starvin' again, I suppose?"

He found out she was an orphan, living with her sister, who was a typist, in Kentish town. But she refused to tell him her address, which he idly asked her. "What did you want with it?" she said, with a sudden frown. "I'm straight, I am. There's my bus! Night! night!--So long!" And with a half-sarcastic wave of her tiny hand, she left him, and was soon engulfed in the swirl round a north-bound bus.

He wandered on along Regent Street, and Waterloo Place, down the Duke of York's steps into the Mall, where some captured guns were already in position, with children swarming about them; and so through St. James's Park to the Abbey. The fog was now all but clear, and there were frosty stars overhead. The Abbey towers rose out of a purple haze, etherially pale and moon-touched. The House of Commons was sitting, but there was still no light on the Clock Tower, and no unmuffling of the lamps. London was waiting, as the world was waiting, for the next step in the vast drama which had three continents for its setting; and meanwhile, save for the added movements in the streets, and a new something in the faces of the crowds hurrying along the pavements, there was nothing to show that all was in fact over, and the war won.

Delane followed a stream of people entering the Abbey through the north transept. He was carried on by them, till a verger showed him into a seat near the choir, and he mechanically obeyed, and dropped on his knees.

When he rose from them, the choir was filing in, and the vergers with their pokers were escorting the officiating Canon to his seat. Delane had not been inside a church for two or three years, and it was a good deal more since he had stood last in Westminster Abbey. But as he watched the once familiar spectacle there flowed back upon him, with startling force, old impressions and traditions. He was in Cambridge again, a King's man, attending King's Chapel. He was thinking of his approaching Schools, and there rose in his mind a number of figures, moving or at rest, Cambridge men like himself, long since dismissed from recollection. Suddenly memory seemed to open out--to become full, and urgent, and emphatic. He appeared to be living at a great rate, to be thinking and feeling with peculiar force. Perhaps it was fever. His hands burnt.

"_My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour!_"

As the chant rose, and he recognized the words, he felt extraordinarily exalted, released, purified. Why not think away the past? It has no existence, except in thought.

"I am what I conceive myself to be--who can prove me to be anything else? What am I then! An educated man, with a mind--an intelligence. I have damaged it, but there it is--still mine."

His eyes wandered, during the Lesson, to the line of sculptured Statesmen in the north transept. He had taken History honours, and his thoughts began to play with matter still stored in them: an essay on Dizzy and Cobden he had written for a Cambridge club--or Gladstone's funeral, which he had seen as a boy of seventeen. He had sat almost in this very place, with his mother, who had taken pains to bring him to see it as an historic spectacle which he might wish to remember. A quiet, dull woman, his mother--taciturn, and something of a bookworm. She had never understood him, nor he her. But she had occasionally shown moments of expansion and emotion, when the soul within glowed a little through its coverings; and he remembered the look in her eyes as the coffin disappeared into the earth, amid the black-coated throng of Lords and Commons. She had been for years a great though silent worshipper of Mr. Gladstone, to the constant amusement of her Tory husband and sons.

Then, suddenly, a face, a woman's pretty face, in the benches of the north transept, caught his eye, and with a leap, as of something unchained, the beast within him awoke. It had reminded him of Rachel; and therewith the decent memories of the distant past disappeared, engulfed by the seething, ugly, mud-stained present. He was again crouching on the hill-side, in the shelter of the holly, watching the scene within: Rachel in that man's arms! Had the American seen him? He remembered his own backward start of alarm, as Ellesborough suddenly turned and walked towards the window. He had allowed himself, in his eagerness to see, to press too near. He had exposed himself? He did not really believe that he had been discovered--unless the American was an uncommonly cool hand! Any way, his retreat to the wooded cover of the hill had been prompt. Once arrived in the thick plantation on the crest, he had thrown himself down exhausted. But as he sat panting there, on the fringe of the wood, he had fancied voices and the flash of a light in the hollow beneath him. These slight signs of movement, however, had quickly disappeared. Darkness and silence resumed possession of the farm, and he had had no difficulty in finding his way unmolested through the trees to the main road, and to the little town, five miles nearer to London than Millsborough, at which he had taken a room, under his present name of Wilson.

The wooded common, indeed, with its high, withered bracken, together with the hills encircling the farm, had been the cover from which he had carried out his prying campaign upon his former wife. As he sat or knelt, mechanically, under the high and shadowy spaces of the Abbey, his mind filled with excited recollections of that other evening when, after tearing his hand badly on some barbed wire surrounding one of Colonel Shepherd's game preserves, so that it bled profusely, and he had nothing to bandage it with, he had suddenly become aware of voices behind him, and of a large party of men in khaki--Canadian foresters, by the look of them, from the Ralstone timber camp, advancing, at some distance, in a long extended line through the trees; so that they were bound to come upon him if he remained in the wood. He turned back at once, faced the barbed wire again, with renewed damage both to clothes and hands, and ran, crouching, down the green road leading to the farm, his wound bleeding as he ran. Then he had perceived an old labourer making for him with shouts. But under the shelter of the cart-shed, he had first succeeded in tying his handkerchief so tightly round his wrist, with his teeth and one hand, as to check the bleeding, which was beginning to make him feel faint. Then, creeping round the back of the farm, he saw that the upper half of the stable door was open, and leaping over it, he had hidden among the horses, just as Halsey came past in pursuit. The old man--confound him!--had made the circuit of the farm, and had then gone up the grass road to the hill. Delane, looking out from the dark stable, had been able to watch him through the dusk, keeping an eye the while to the opposite door opening on the farm-yard. But the labourer disappeared, and in the dark roomy stable, with its beamed roof, nothing could be heard but the champing and slow tramping movements of the splendid cart-horses. Rachel's horses! Delane passed his free hand over two of them, and they turned their stately heads and nosed him in a quiet way. Then he vaulted again over the half door, and hurried up the hill, in the gathering darkness.

He was aware of the ghost-story. He had heard it and the story of the murder from a man cutting bracken on the common; and he had already formed some vague notions of making use of it for the blackmailing of Rachel. It amused him to think that perhaps his sudden disappearance would lead to a new chapter of the old tale.

Then at the recollection of Rachel's prosperity and peace, of her sleek horses and cows, her huge hay and corn stacks, her comfortable home, and her new lover, a fresh shudder of rage and hatred gripped him. She had once been his thing--his chattel; he seemed to see her white neck and breast, her unbound hair on the pillow beside him--and she had escaped him, and danced on him.

Of course she had betrayed him--of course she had had a lover! What other explanation was there of her turning against him?--of her flight from his house? But she had been clever enough to hide all the traces of it. He recalled his own lame and baffled attempts to get hold of some evidence against her, with gnashing of teeth....

* * * * *

"_For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal!_"

He caught the words staring at him from the page of the open prayer book beside him, and automatically the Greek equivalent suggested itself. He had always done well in "divinners"! Then he became aware that the blessing had been given, that the organ was playing, and the congregation was breaking up.

* * * * *

Twenty-four hours later, Delane found himself on a road leading up from the town where he was lodging to the summit of the wide stretch of common land on the western side of which lay Great End Farm. Half way up a long hill, he came upon a young man in uniform, disconsolately kneeling beside a bicycle which he seemed to be vainly trying to mend. As Delane came up with him, he looked up and asked for a light. Delane produced a match, and the young man, by the help of it, inspected his broken machine.

"No go!" he said with a shrug, "I shall have to walk."

He rose from the ground, put up the tool he had been using, and buttoned up his coat. Then he asked Delane where he was going. Delane named a little village on the farther edge of the common.

"Oh, well, that's straight ahead. I turn off to the right," said the young soldier, "at the cross road."

They walked on together, Delane rather unwillingly submitting to the companionship thus sprung upon him. He saw from the badge on the man's shoulder that he belonged to one of the Canadian Forestry Corps in the district, and was at once on his guard. They started in silence, till Delane, pulling his mind back with a jerk, asked his companion if he was going to Ipscombe.

"No--only to Great End Farm."

Darkness hid the sudden change in Delane's countenance.

"You know some one there?"

"No, but I want to see one of the ladies about something. There's two of them running the farm. But Miss Henderson's the boss."

Cautiously, with assumed indifference, Delane began to ask questions.

He discovered that his companion's name was Dempsey; and before many minutes had passed the murderer's grandson was in the full swing of his story. Delane, despising the young man for a chattering fool, listened, nevertheless, with absorbed attention to every item of his tale. Presently Dempsey said with a laugh,--

"There's been people in Ipscombe all these years as always would have it old Watson walked. I know the names of three people at least as have sworn to seein' 'im. And there's an old fellow in Ipscombe now that declares he's seen him, only t'ther day."

Delane lit his pipe, and nonchalantly inquired particulars.

Dempsey gave a mocking account of Halsey's story.

"He's an old fool! Did you ever hear of a ghost bleedin' before!" The speaker threw back his head and laughed. "That's all rot! Besides, I don't believe in ghosts--never did. But as Miss Henderson's farmin' the very land where old Watson was done in, I thought she'd like to have the true story and first hand. And there's no one but me knows it--not first hand. So I wrote to her, and said as I would call at six o'clock this evening."

"You know her?"

"No--o," said the young man, hesitating. "But I somehow fancy as I may have seen her before."

"Where?"

"Why, in Canada. I was living on a farm, not far from Winnipeg"--he named the place. Delane suddenly dropped his pipe, and stooped to pick it up.

"All right," he said, "go on."