Chapter 15

He bent forward across the table, his mocking eyes fixed intently upon her. There was silence a moment--till she said:--

"And if I refuse?"

"Oh, well, then--" he lifted a paper-knife and balanced it on his hand as though considering--"I shall of course have to work up my case. What do you call this man?--John Dempsey? A great fool--but I dare say I shall get enough out of him. And then--well, then I propose to present the story to Captain Ellesborough--for his future protection."

"He won't believe a word of it."

But her lips had blanched--her voice had begun to waver--and with a cruel triumph he saw that he had won the day.

"I dare say not. That's for him to consider. But if I were you, I wouldn't put him to the test."

Silence again. He saw the fluttering of her breath. With a complete change of tone, he said, smiling, in a low voice:--

"Rachel!--when did you begin to prefer Dick Tanner to me? No doubt you had a jolly time with him. I suppose I can't undo the divorce--but you would never have got it, if I hadn't been such an innocent."

She sprang up, and he saw that he had gone too far.

"If you say any more such things to me, you will get nothing from me--and you may either _go_--" she pointed passionately to the door--"or you may sit there till my people come back--which you like."

He looked at her, under his eyebrows, smiling mechanically--weighing the relative advantages of prudence or violence. Prudence carried the day.

"You are just the same spitfire, I see, as you used to be! All right. I see you understand. Well, now, how am I to get my money--my damages?" She turned away, and went quickly to an old bureau that had been her uncle's. He watched her, exultant. It was all true, then. Dick Tanner had been her lover, and Ellesborough knew nothing. He did not know whether to be the more triumphant in her tacit avowal, or the more enraged by the testimony borne by her acquiescence to her love for Ellesborough. He hated her; yet he had never admired her so much, as his eyes followed her stooping over the drawers of the bureau, her beautiful head and neck in a warm glow of firelight.

Then, suddenly, he began to cough. She, hunting for her cheque-book, took no notice at first. But the paroxysm grew; it shook the very life out of him; till at last she stood arrested and staring-while he fell back in his chair like a dead man, his eyes shut, his handkerchief to his lips.

"Shall I--shall I get you some brandy?" she said, coldly. He nodded assent. She hurriedly looked for her keys, and went to a cupboard in the kitchen, where Janet kept a half bottle of brandy for medical use if needed.

He drank off what she brought--but it was some time before he recovered speech. When he did it was in a low tone that made the words a curse:---

"That's your doing!"

Her only answer was a gesture.

"It is," he insisted, speaking in gasps. "You never showed me any real love--any forbearance. You never cared for me--as you know I cared for you. You told me so once. You married me for a home--and then you deserted--and betrayed me."

There was a guilty answer in her consciousness which made her speak without anger.

"I know my own faults very well. And now you must go--we can't either of us stand this any more. Do you give me your solemn promise that you will trouble me no more---or the man I am going to marry--if I do this for you?"

"Give me a piece of paper--" he said, huskily.

He wrote the promise, signed it, and pushed it to her. Then he carefully examined the self cheque "to bearer" which she had written.

"Well, I dare say that will see me out--and bury me decently. I shall take my family down to the sea. You know I've got a little girl--about three? Oh, I never told any lies about Anita. I've married her now."

Rachel stood like a stone, without a word. Her one consuming anxiety was to see him gone, to be done with him.

He rose slowly--with difficulty. And the cough seized him again. Rachel in a fevered exasperation watched him clinging to the table for support. Would he die--or faint--then and there--and be found by Janet, who must now be on her way home? She pressed brandy on him again. But he pushed it away. "Let me be!" She could only wait.

When he could speak and move again, he put the cheque away in his pocket, and buttoned his coat over it.

"Well, good-night." Then straightening himself, he fixed her with a pair of burning eyes. "Good-night. Anita will be kind to me--when I die--Anita will be a woman to me. You were never kind--you never thought of any one but yourself. Good-bye. Good luck!"

And walking uncertainly to the door, he opened it and was gone. She heard his slow steps in the farmyard, and the opening of the wicket gate. Then all sounds died away.

For a few minutes she crouched sobbing over the fire, weeping for sheer nervous exhaustion. Then the dread seized her of being caught in such a state by Janet, and she went upstairs, locked her door, and threw herself on her bed. The bruise of an intolerable humiliation seemed to spread through soul and body. She knew that for the first time she had confessed her wretched secret which she had thought so wholly her own--and confessed it--horrible and degrading thought!--to Roger Delane. Not in words indeed--but in act. No innocent woman would have paid the blackmail. The dark room in which she lay seemed to be haunted by Delane's exultant eyes.

And the silence was haunted too by his last words. There arose in her a reluctant and torturing pity for the wretched man who had been her husband; a pity, which passed on into a storm of moral anguish. Her whole past life looked incredibly black to her as she lay there in the dark--stained with unkindness, and selfishness, and sin.

Which saw her the more truly?--Roger, or Ellesborough?--the man who hated and cursed her, or the man who adored her?

She was struggling, manoeuvring, fighting, to keep the truth from George Ellesborough. It was quite uncertain whether she would succeed. Roger's word was a poor safeguard! But if she did, the truth itself would only the more certainly pursue and beat her down.

And again, the utter yearning for confession and an unburdened soul came upon her intolerably. The religious psychologist describes such a crisis as "conversion," or "conviction of sin," or the "working of grace." And he knows from long experience that it is the result in the human soul not so much of a sense of evil, as of a vision of good. Goodness had been brought near to Rachel in the personality--the tender self-forgetting trust--of George Ellesborough. It was goodness, not fear--goodness, unconscious of any threatened wrong--that had pierced her heart. Then a thought came to her. _Janet!_--Janet whose pure and loving life beside her made yet another element in the spiritual forces that were pressing upon her.

She sprang to her feet. She would tell Janet everything--put her poor secret--her all--in Janet's hands.

XIII

It was again a very still and misty night,--extraordinarily mild for the time of year. A singular brooding silence held all the woodlands above Great End Farm. There was not a breath of wind. Every dead branch that fell, every bird that moved, every mouse scratching among the fallen beech leaves, produced sounds disproportionately clear and startling, and for the moment there would be a rustle of disturbance, as though something or some one, in the forest heart, took alarm. Then the deep waters of quiet closed again, and everything--except that watching presence--slept.

The hut in Denman Wood, which had formerly played a hospitable part as the scene of many a Gargantuan luncheon to Colonel Shepherd's shooting parties, had long been an abandoned spot. All the Colonel's keepers under fifty had gone to fight; and there was left only an old head keeper, with one decrepit helper, who shot the scanty game which still survived on strict business principles, to eke out the household rations of the big house. The Ipscombe woods were rarely visited. They were a long way from the keeper's cottage, and the old man, depressed by the difference between war and pre-war conditions, found it quite enough to potter round the stubbles and turnips of the home farm when game had to be shot.

The paths leading through the underwood to the hut were now in these four years largely over-grown. A place more hidden and forgotten it would have been difficult to find. And for this reason, combined with its neighbourhood to Rachel Henderson's farm, Roger Delane had chosen to inhabit it.

It was the third night after his interview with his former wife. He reached the hut after dark, by various by-paths over the wide commons stretching between it and X--the station at which he now generally alighted. He carried in his pocket some evening newspapers, a new anthology, and a novel. Owing to an injection of morphia--a habit to which he had only lately taken--he felt unusually fit, and his brain was unusually alert. At the same time he had had a disagreeable interview with a doctor that morning who had been insisting on Sanatorium treatment if the remaining lung was to be preserved and his life prolonged. He did not want to prolong his life, but only to avoid the beastliness of pain. It seemed to him that morphia--good stuff!--was going to do that for him. Why hadn't he begun it before? But his brain was queer--he was conscious of that. He had asked the doctor about some curious mental symptoms. The reply was that phthisis was often accompanied by them.

Obsession--fixed ideas--in the medical sense: half of him, psychologically, was quite conscious that the other half was under their influence. The sound self was observing the unsound self, but apparently with no power over it. Otherwise how was it that he was here again, hiding like a wild beast in a lair, less than a mile from Great End Farm, and Rachel Henderson?

He had found his way to London in the small hours of the day following his scene with Rachel, intending to keep his promise, and let his former wife alone. The cashing of Rachel's cheque had given him and Anita some agreeable moments; though Anita was growing disturbed that he would not tell her where the money came from. They had found fresh lodgings in a really respectable Bloomsbury street; they had both bought clothes, and little Netta had been rigged out. Delane had magnificently compounded with his most pressing creditors, and had taken Anita to a theatre. But he had been discontented with her appearance there. She had really lost all her good looks. If it hadn't been for the kid--

And now, after this interval, his obsession had swooped upon him again. It was an obsession of hate--which simply could not endure, when it came to the point, that Rachel Henderson should vanish unscathed into the future of a happy marriage, while he remained the doomed failure and outcast he knew himself to be. Rachel's implied confession rankled in him like a burn. _Tanner!_--that wretched weakling, with his miserable daubs that nobody wanted to buy. So Rachel had gone to him, as soon as she had driven her husband away, no doubt to complain of her ill-treatment, to air her woes. The fellow had philandered round her some time, and had shown an insolent and interfering temper once or twice towards himself. Yes!--he could imagine it all!--her flight, and Tanner's maudlin sympathy--tears--caresses--the natural sequel. And then her pose of complete innocence at the divorce proceedings--the Judge's remarks. Revolting hypocrisy! If Tanner had been still alive, he would somehow have exposed him--somehow have made him pay. Lucky for him he was drowned in that boat accident on Lake Nipissing! And no doubt Rachel thought that the accident had made everything safe for her.

Every incident now, every phase of his conversation with her was assuming a monstrous and distorted significance in his mind. How easily she had yielded on the subject of the money! He might have asked a great deal more--and he would have got it. Very likely Ellesborough was well off--Yankees generally were--and she knew that what she gave Delane as hush money would make very little difference to her. Ellesborough no doubt would not look very closely into her shekels, having sufficient of his own. Otherwise it might occur to him to wonder how she had got rid of that £500. Would it pinch her? Probably, if all she had for capital was the old chap's legacy. Well--serve her right--serve her, damned, doubly right! Ellesborough's kisses would make up.

These thoughts, after a momentary respite, held him in their grip as he walked London streets. Suspicion of the past--ugly and venomous--flapped its black wings about him. Had Rachel ever been faithful to him--even in the early days? She had made acquaintance with the Tanners very soon after their marriage. Looking back, a number of small incidents and scenes poked their heads out of the dead level of the past. Rachel and Tanner, discussing the Watts photograph when Rachel first acquired it--Tanner's eager denunciatory talk--he called himself an "impressionist"--the creature!--because he couldn't draw worth a cent--Rachel all smiles and deference. She had never given _him_ that sort of attention. Or Rachel at a housewarming in the next farm to his--Rachel in a pale green dress, the handsomest woman there, dancing with Tanner--Rachel quarrelling with him in the buggy on the way home, because he called Tanner a milksop--"He cares for beautiful things, and you don't!--but that's no reason why you should abuse him."

And what about those weeks not very long after that dance, when he had gone off to the land-sale at Edmonton (that was the journey, by the way, when he first saw Anita!), and Rachel had stayed at home, with a girl friend, a girl they knew in Winnipeg? But that girl hadn't stayed all the time. To do her justice, Rachel had made no secret of that. He remembered her attacking him when he came home for having left her for three or four days quite alone. Why had he been so long away? Probably a mere bluff--though he had been taken in by it at the time, and being still in love with her, had done his best to appease her. But what had she been doing all the time she was alone? In the light of what he knew now, she might have been doing anything. _Was the child his_?

So, piece by piece, with no auditor but his own brain, shut in upon himself by the isolation which his own life had forged for him, he built up a hideous indictment against the woman he had once loved. He wished he had put off his interview with her till he had had time to think things out more. As he came to realize how she had tricked and bested him, her offence became incredibly viler than it seemed at first. He had let her off far too cheaply that night at the farm. Scenes of past violence returned upon him, and the memory of them seemed to satisfy a rising thirst. Especially the recollection of the divorce proceedings maddened him. His morbid brain took hold on them with a grip that his will could not loosen. Her evidence--he had read it in the Winnipeg newspapers--the remarks of the prating old judge--and of her cad of a lawyer--good God! And all the time it was _she_ who ought to have been in the dock, and he the accuser, if he had known--if he hadn't been a trusting idiot, a bleating fool.

A brooding intensity of rage, as this inward process went on, gradually drowned in him every other feeling and desire. The relief and amusement of the money and its spending were soon over. He thought no more of it. Anita, and his child even--the child for whom he really cared--passed out of his mind. As he sat drinking whisky in the dull respectable lodging, at night after Anita had gone to bed, he felt the sinister call of those dark woods above Rachel's farm, and tasted the sweetness of his new power to hurt her, now that she had paid him this blackmail, and damned herself thereby--past help. She had threatened him. But what could she do--or the Yankee fellow either? She had given the show away. As for his promise, when he had no right to make it,--no right to allow such a woman to get off scot-free, with plenty of money and a new lover.

So on the Thursday evening he took train for X. It was still the Armistice week. The London streets were crowded with soldiers and young women of every sort and kind. He bought a newspaper and read it in the train. It gave him a queer satisfaction--for one half of him was still always watching the other--to discover that he could feel patriotic emotion like anybody else and could be thrilled by the elation of Britain's victory--_his_ victory. He read the telegrams, the positions on the Rhine assigned to the Second Army, and the Fourth,--General Plumer General Rawlinson--General F.--Gad! he used to know the son of that last old fellow at King's.

Then he fell to his old furtive watching of the people on the platform, the men getting in and out of the train. At any moment he might fall in with one of his old Cambridge acquaintances, in one of these smart officers, with their decorations and their red tabs. But in the first place they wouldn't travel in this third class where he was sitting--not till the war was over. And in the next, he was so changed--had taken indeed such pains to be--that it was long odds against his being recognized. Eleven years, was it, since he left Cambridge? About.

At X. he got out. The ticket collector noticed him for that faint touch of a past magnificence that still lingered in his carriage and gait; but there were so many strangers about that he was soon forgotten.

He passed under a railway arch and climbed a hill, the hill on which he had met Dempsey. At the top of the hill he left the high-road for a grass track across the common. There was just enough light from a declining moon to show him where he was. The common was full of dark shapes--old twisted thorns, and junipers, and masses of tall grass--shapes which often seemed to him to be strargely alive, the silent but conscious witnesses of his passage.

The wood was very dark. He groped his way through it with difficulty and found the hut. Once inside it, he fastened the door with a wooden bar he had himself made, and turned on his electric torch. Bit by bit in the course of his night visits he had accumulated a few necessary stores--some firewood, a few groceries hidden in a corner, a couple of brown blankets, and a small box of tools. A heap of dried bracken in a corner, raised on a substratum of old sacks, had often served him for a bed; and when he had kindled a wood fire in the rough grate of loose bricks where Colonel Shepherd's keepers had been accustomed to warm the hot meat stews sent up for the shooting luncheons, and had set out his supper on the upturned fragment of an old box which had once held meal for pheasants, he had provided at least what was necessary for his night sojourn. This food he had brought with him; a thermos bottle full of hot coffee, with slices of ham, cheese, and bread; and he ate it with appetite, sitting on a log beside the fire, and pleasantly conscious as he looked round him, like the Greek poet of long ago, of that "cuteness" of men which conjures up housing, food, and fire in earth's loneliest places. Outside that small firelit space lay the sheer silence of the wood, broken once or twice by the call and flight of an owl past the one carefully darkened window of the hut, or by the mysterious sighing and shuddering which, from time to time, would run through the crowded stems and leafless branches.

A queer "hotel" this, for mid-November! He might, if he had chosen, have been amusing himself, _tant bien que mal_, in one or other of those shabby haunts,--bars, night-clubs, dancing-rooms, to which his poverty and his _moeurs_ condemned him, while his old comrades, the lads he had been brought up with at school and college, guardsmen, Hussars, and the rest, were holding high revel for the Peace at the Ritz or the Carlton; he might even, as far as money was concerned, now that he had bagged his great haul from Rachel, have been supping himself at the Ritz, if he had only had time to exchange his brother-in-law's old dress suit, which Marianne had passed on to him, for a new one, and if he could have made up his mind to the possible recognitions and rebuffs such a step would have entailed. As it was, he preferred his warm hiding-place in the heart of the woods, coupled with this exultant sense of an unseen and mysterious power which was running, like alcohol, through his nerves.

Real alcohol, however, was not wanting to his solitary meal. He drenched his coffee in the cognac he always carried about with him, and then, cigarette in hand, he fell back on the heap of bracken to read a while. The novel he sampled and threw away; the anthology soon bored him; and he spent the greater part of two hours lying on his back, smoking and thinking--till it was safe to assume that the coast was clear round Great End Farm. About ten o'clock, he slipped noiselessly out of the hut, after covering up the fire to wait for his return, and hiding as far as he could the other traces of his occupation. The damp mist outside held all the wood stifled, and the darkness was profound. Stepping as lightly as possible, and using his torch with the utmost precaution, he gradually made his way to the edge of the wood, and the lip of the basin beyond it. On the bare down was enough faint moonlight to see by, and he extinguished his little lantern before leaving the wood. Below him were the dim outlines of the farm, a shadowy line of road beyond, and, as it were, a thicker fold of darkness, to mark the woods on the horizon. There was not a light anywhere; the village was invisible, and he listened for a long time without hearing anything but the rush of a distant train.

Ah!--Yes, there was a sound down there in the hollow--footsteps, reverberating in the silence. He bent his head listening intently. The footsteps seemed to approach the farm, then the sounds ceased, till suddenly, on the down slope below him, he saw something moving. He threw back his head with a quiet laugh.

The Ipscombe policeman, no doubt, on his round. Would he come up the hill? Hardly, on such a misty night. If not, his retreating steps on the farm lane would soon tell his departure.

In a few minutes, indeed, the click of an opening gate could be clearly heard through the mist, and afterwards, steps. They grew fainter and fainter. All clear!

Choosing a circuitous route, Delane crept down the hill, and reached a spot on the down-side rather higher than the farm enclosure, from which the windows of the farm-house could be seen. There was a faint light in one of the upper two--in which he had some reason to think was that of Rachel's bedroom. It seemed to him the window was open; he perceived something like the swaying of a blind inside it. The night was marvellously mild for mid-November; and he remembered Rachel's old craving for air, winter and summer.

The light moved, there was a shadow behind the blind, and suddenly the window was thrown up widely, and a pale figure--a woman's figure--stood in the opening. Rachel, no doubt! Delane slipped behind a thorn growing on the bare hill-side. His heart thumped. Instinctively his hand groped for something in his pocket. If she had guessed that he was there--within twenty yards of her!

Then, as he watched the faint apparition in the mist, it roused in him a fresh gust of rage. Rachel, the sentimental Rachel, unable to sleep--Rachel, happy and serene, thinking of her lover--the lies of her divorce all forgotten--and the abominable Roger cut finally out of her life!--