Chapter 11

The next course that suggested itself was that of tackling Arthur; but the atmosphere of mistrust, if not of actual hostility, that at present involved their relations made her think twice about this. She could not dare to treat Arthur as a normal person, for she knew that his hold on normality was recent and precarious, and feared that a violent or passionate scene might undo in a moment all the developments that had been accomplished in the last six months. Even if they escaped this catastrophe it was possible that she might offend him so deeply as to lose him.

There remained Gabrielle, and though she knew that she was old enough to speak to Gabrielle with the authority of a mother, she felt that this would be impossible at Lapton. It was a curious attitude that she found difficult to explain, but it seemed to her that to tackle Mrs. Considine in her husband's house was dangerous, that it would give to Gabrielle an unreasonable but inevitable advantage. At Lapton Mrs. Payne felt she was a stranger, insecure of her ground, and therefore in an inferior position; and this struck her more forcibly when she reflected that, though she was confident of the rightness of her conclusions, the actual evidence that she possessed was extremely small. She admitted to herself that it would be difficult to carry her point on the strength of looks and blushes, and was thankful that she had not been betrayed by her instincts into hasty action.

Lying sleepless on her bed that night with her eyes open in the dark she evolved a new plan that would not only give her the advantage of choosing the site of the coming struggle, but would eliminate the uncertain element of Considine and probably provide her with evidence to strengthen her charge. This change of plan involved a duplicity against which her straightforward nature rebelled, but with Arthur's future at stake she would have stopped at nothing. After breakfast on the Monday morning she went to Considine in his study, thanked him for his kind consideration, and confessed that she had been needlessly alarmed. Considine gracefully accepted this confession and the implied apology, assuring her once more that there was really nothing to worry about. Then, very carefully she made another suggestion. It was usual at Lapton for the pupils to go home for a long week-end at half term. She wondered if Mrs. Considine would like to come back to Overton with Arthur? The rest and change would do her good, and it would be interesting for Gabrielle, who had seen so little of England, to visit Cotswold. Mrs. Payne promised to take great care of her. She gave her invitation in a way that suggested that it was an attempt to make amends for her suspicions. It conveyed at the same time an implicit confidence and an anxiety to please.

Considine tumbled headlong into her trap. He thanked her for her invitation, saying that he had no objection, but that Gabrielle, of course, must decide for herself. His tone made it clear that such a visit must be regarded as a condescension. The Halbertons, he said, had been begging Gabrielle for a long time to spend a week with them, but she was devoted to Lapton.

"At any rate I may ask her?" said Mrs. Payne.

"Certainly, certainly--you'll find her in the garden."

Mrs. Payne was in some doubt as to what Gabrielle's answer would be.

She moved to the proposal obliquely, feeling like a conspirator, and one so unused to conspiracy that her manner was bound to betray her. They began by talking about the gardens at Overton, the beauty of Cotswold stone, the essential difference of her country from that in which Lapton lay.

"You can't know England," she said, "until you've seen the Vale of Evesham."

She didn't care twopence ha'penny for the Vale of Evesham--she was just talking for time. Gabrielle listened to her very quietly, and Mrs. Payne took her silence for evidence that she was playing her hand badly. This flustered her. She became conscious of the fact that nature had built her too roughly for diplomacy. Not daring to hedge any longer she blurted out her invitation, and Gabrielle, instantly delighted, accepted, transforming herself, in Mrs. Payne's mind from a subtle designing creature into something very like a victim. So, for one moment she appeared; but in the next Mrs. Payne felt nothing but exultation at the successful beginning of her plan.

"Arthur has told me that there are nightingales at Overton," said Gabrielle dreamily. "I wonder if I shall hear one? There are no nightingales in Ireland or in this part of England." And although Mrs. Payne could hardly accept an interest in ornithology for explanation of her readiness to come to Overton, she was quick to promise that nightingales should be in full song at the next weekend.

Thus having laid her plans, she resisted, though with difficulty, all her impulses to continue her search for evidence. It was hard to do so, for all through the evening Gabrielle and Arthur were together in her presence, and she found it impossible not to watch them out of the corner of her eye or strain her ears to catch what they were saying; but she realised that the least slip at this stage might ruin her chances of success, and devoted her attention or as much of it as she could muster, to Considine. Next morning, with a sense of successful strategy, she returned to Overton by an early train.

The rest of the week was for her a period of acute suspense. For Gabrielle and Arthur it was one of delightful anticipation. On Friday at midday Considine drove them to Totnes station, the scene of their last parting, and set them on their journey. They watched him standing serious on the platform as the train went out, and when they lost sight of his tall figure at a curve in the line, it seemed to them as though the last possible shadow had been lifted from them. In the first part of their journey a soft rain hid the shapes of the country through which they passed, so soft that they could keep the windows open, and yet so dense as to give them a feeling of delicious loneliness, for they could see nothing but the grassed embankments starred with primroses. All through the Devon valleys and over the turf moors of Somerset this weather held. It was not until they had changed at Bristol and crept under the escarpment of the lower Cotswolds that the air cleared.

At a junction below the southern end of Bredon they emerged in an air that this vast sheeting of fine moisture had washed into a state of brilliant clarity. The evening through which they drove to Overton was full of birdsong and sweet with the smell of young and tender green. There was not a breath of wind, but the sky was cool, and into it the old trees lifted their branches with an air of youth and vernal strength. When the road climbed, scattered woodlands stretched beneath them in clear and comely contours. A hovering kestrel hung poised like a spider swinging from a thread. She swooped, and her chestnut back was lit into flame. The great elms that gird the village of Overton received them. Arthur touched up the horse as they swung past the church and a row of cottages with long trim gardens.

Mrs. Payne, who was working on the herbaceous border in front of the house, heard the grating of the carriage wheels on the gravel of the drive. She took off her gardening gloves and came to meet them. Arthur jumped down from the carriage and kissed his mother. Gabrielle, also approaching her, put up her face to be kissed, and Mrs. Payne, who could not very well refuse her, felt that the kiss was a kind of betrayal. She wished, in her instinctive honesty, that it could have been avoided.

It was a bad beginning, and gave her a hint of the kind of emotional conflict that she had let herself in for when she assumed the rôle of detective. What made it a hundred times worse was the fact that she really liked kissing Gabrielle, for her kindly heart warmed to the girl again as it had warmed when first they met. "I'm sentimental," she thought, "for heaven's sake let us get it over!"

Gabrielle, however, was quite unconscious of the struggle that divided Mrs. Payne's breast. She was a child launched on a holiday with the friend of her choice in the most delightful season of the year. She didn't scent any hostility in the atmosphere of Overton; and this was strange in a person who moved through life by the aid of intuitions rather than reasons. She felt contented at Overton, just as she had felt contented at Roscarna. She was more at home there than she could ever have been at Lapton or Clonderriff; her mind was as sensitive to sky changes as the surface of a lonely lake. Mrs. Payne had given her an airy bedroom facing west, and while the maid unpacked her things Gabrielle stood at the window looking out over meadows, golden in the low sun. Beneath her lay the lawns, smooth and kempt and of a rich, an almost Irish green, on which the black shadows of cedar branches were spread. A tall hedge of privet divided the lawns from the vegetable garden in which a man was working methodically. She saw the pattern of paths and hedges from above as though they were lines in a picture. In the middle of the lawn stood a square of clipped yew trees, making a hollow chamber of the kind that formal gardeners call a yew-parlour, with a stone sundial in the middle of it. "What a jolly place for children to play in," she thought. A blackbird broke into a whistle in the privet hedge and brought her heart to her mouth. Could any nightingale sing sweeter?

"I think that is all, madam," said the maid demurely. Gabrielle smiled at her and thanked her, and the girl smiled back. Like everything else in Mrs. Payne's admirably managed house she was fresh and clean, homelier than the frigid servants at Halberton House, happier--that was the only word--than Gabrielle's own servants at Lapton. Yes, happier----

When she came downstairs Arthur was waiting for her.

"I thought you were never coming," he said. Their time was short and he was anxious to show her all the altars of his childhood. They met Mrs. Payne in the hall. She smiled at them with encouragement, for it was part of her settled plan to let them have their own way and so tempt them into a naturalness that might betray them. She, too, had the feeling that she was fighting against time.

Arthur was full of enthusiasms. They went together to the stables, where he introduced her to Hollis, the coachman standing in his shirtsleeves in a saddle-room that smelt of harness-polish. He stood in front of a cracked mirror brushing his hair, hissing softly, as though he were grooming a horse, and round his waist was a red-striped belt of the webbing out of which a horse's belly-band is made.

"Well, Mr. Arthur, you're looking up finely, sir," he said, touching his forelock. Even the stables exhaled the same atmosphere of pleasant leisure as the house.

"I want you to get a side-saddle ready for Brunette to-morrow, Hollis," said Arthur. "Mrs. Considine and I are going for a ride over the hill."

At the end of the stables they encountered a pair of golden retrievers. For a moment they stared at Arthur, and then, suddenly recognising him, made for him together, jumping up with their paws on his shoulders and licking him with their pale tongues.

"What beauties," Gabrielle cried.

"Yes, they come from Banbury," he said. "I'll get you a pup next term if you'd like one."

Their evening was crowded with such small wonders. "I can't show you half the things I want to," he said. "It's ridiculous that you should only be here for three days." He would have gone on for ever, and she had to warn him when the clock in the stables struck seven that they had only just time to dress for dinner. On the way upstairs he showed her his new study, with the bookshelves that he had bought in the last holidays.

"I do all my writing here," he said, and then suddenly but shyly emboldened: "it was here that I wrote to you when I sent you the cowslips."

He had never dared to mention the incident before.

"You didn't answer me," he went on. "Why didn't you answer me? I wish you'd tell me."

"Arthur--I couldn't--you know that I couldn't."

A panic seized her and she went blushing to her room.

She was still flushed with excitement or pleasure when she came down to dinner. Mrs. Payne, in a matronly dress of black, sat at the head of the table with Arthur and Gabrielle on either side of her facing each other. The arrangement struck her as a triumph of strategy. From this central position she could see them both and intercept any such glances as had passed between them in the church at Lapton. In this she was disappointed, for there was nothing to be seen in the behaviour of either but a transparent happiness. "They only want encouragement," she thought, and settled down deliberately to put them at their ease, a proceeding that was quite unnecessary for the last feeling that could have entered either of their minds was that of guilt.

So the evening passed, in the utmost propriety. No look, no sign, no symptom of unusual tenderness appeared. It even seemed that Gabrielle was particularly anxious to make the conversation general. "Oh, you're artful!" thought Mrs. Payne, "but I'll have you yet." They talked of Lapton, of Considine and of the Traceys. Only once did Mrs. Payne surprise a single suspicious circumstance.

"I showed Mrs. Considine the dogs, mother," he said. "She's fallen in love with Boris."

"Yes, his eyes are like amber," said Gabrielle.

"So I thought I'd like to write to Banbury to-morrow and get her a puppy."

"Certainly, dear," said Mrs. Payne suavely. Bedtime came. Gabrielle and Arthur shook hands in the most ordinary fashion. Mrs. Payne, seeing Gabrielle to her door and submitting, once again, to an uncomfortable kiss, felt that her triumphant plan had already shown itself to be a failure. She went along the passage to her own room with a sense of bewilderment and defeat. She could not sleep for thinking. She wondered, desperately, if when all other methods had failed, as she now expected they would, she could possibly approach their secret from another angle, laying aside her watchful inactivity and becoming in defiance of all her principles an "agent provocateuse." If it came to the worst she might be forced to do this, for very little time was left to her. If she remained static she would be powerless. Next day, she reflected, they had planned a ride over the flat top of Bredon Hill. She could not go with them; she could not even watch them; yet who knew what shames might be perpetrated in that secrecy as they rode through the green lanes of the larch plantations? Never was a better solitude made for lovers. Her imaginings left her tantalised and thwarted, for she was sure now, more than ever, that there was a secret to be surprised.

She lay there sleepless in the dark till the stable clock slowly struck twelve. Then she sighed to herself and decided that she must try to sleep.

XVIII

Lying thus, upon the verge of slumber, Mrs. Payne became aware of a sound of light steps in the corridor outside her room. She opened her eyes and lay with tense muscles listening. The sound was unmistakable, and the steps came from the direction of Arthur's room, the only one on that side of hers that was occupied. The steps came nearer. Passing her bedroom door they became tiptoe and cautious, as though the walker, whoever he might be, was anxious not to arouse her attention. The sound passed and grew fainter down the length of the corridor, and she knew then that the very worst had happened, for Gabrielle's room lay at the end of the passage. Many things she had dreaded, but not this last enormity.

She crept out of bed, neglecting in her anxiety to put on a dressing-gown, and went softly to the door. She wondered how she could open it without making a noise, and if, when she had opened it, she could hear at such a distance.

Very carefully with her hot hand she turned the door handle and opened a small chink that fortunately allowed her to look along the passage towards Gabrielle's room. Through a window halfway down the corridor moonlight cut across it, throwing on the floor the distorted shadow of an Etruscan vase. She remembered that Arthur's father had bought it in Italy on their honeymoon, yet, while this thought went through her mind, her ears were strained to listen. She could do no more, for the further end of the passage was plunged by this insulating flood of moonlight into inscrutable darkness.

It was so quiet that she felt that she had missed him; he had already entered her room; but while she considered the awful indignity of surprising him there, the sound of a light tapping on the door's panel relieved her. She thanked God that she was still in time.

The knock was repeated and evidently answered, for now she heard him speak in a whisper. He called her Mrs. Considine--it was ridiculous! "Are you awake?" she heard. "The nightingale--yes, the nightingale. We could go down into the garden under the trees. If you're game. How splendid of you! ... Yes, I'll wait below .... Outside, under your window."

Before Mrs. Payne could pull herself together she heard his steps returning. She closed the door fearfully. He came along the passage and stopped for a moment just outside her room. There was nothing between them but an oak door, so thin, she felt, that he must surely hear her anxious breath. She dared not breathe, but in a moment he passed by.

Why had he stopped outside her door? What curious filial instinct had made him think of her at that moment? Had he thought kindly, or only perhaps suspiciously, wondering if she were safely asleep? She couldn't tell. Her mind was too full of disturbing emotions to allow her to think. One thing emerged foremost from her confusion, a feeling of devout thankfulness that her first fears had not been justified, and as the dread of definite and paralysing defeat lifted from her mind, she realised with a sudden exultation that chance had given her the very opportunity for which she had been waiting and scheming. If she went carefully she might see them together, alone and unsuspecting, and know for certain by their behaviour how far matters had gone.

She dared not switch on the light or strike a match for fear that her windows might become conspicuous. Very gently she released one of the blinds, admitting the light of the luminous sky. She dressed hurriedly, catching sight of her figure in the long pier glass as she pulled on her stockings. For the moment it struck her as faintly ludicrous to see this middle-aged woman in a long white nightdress behaving like a creature in a detective story. It was extravagant. People of her age and figure and general sobriety didn't do this sort of thing in real life. But the seriousness of her mission recalled her, and while she had been considering the picturesque aspects of the case she found that she had actually, unconsciously dressed ... and only just in time, for now she heard the lighter step of Gabrielle in the passage.

The sound gave her a sudden flush of anger. She wanted, there and then, to open her door and ask Gabrielle where she was going. It was tantalising to let the thing go on and hold her hand. She clutched on to the foot of the bed to save herself from doing anything so rash. Gabrielle's steps passed, and the house was quiet again. The most difficult moment had come. "I hope to goodness none of the servants are awake," she thought...

Reaching the top of the staircase she heard them whispering in the hall. It seemed that they were going out brazenly by the front door, and since it seemed to her that to follow them closely would be dangerous she herself hastened round to the back staircase and let herself out of the house by a side door set in an angle of the building that sheltered her.

An eastward drift of cloud came over, hiding the moon, and she was glad of this, for the crude moonlight had put her to shame by its brilliance. She wondered to see the clouds moving so fast, for in the garden not a tree stirred but one aspen that made a sound as of gentle rain. She heard the grating of their feet on the drive, and then, by the sudden cessation of this sound, guessed that they had stepped on to the lawn. Arthur's low voice came to her clearly. "He's stopped singing, but I think he'll sing again," and from Gabrielle a whispered "Yes."

Mrs. Payne could scarcely be certain of the words she heard: she knew that she ought in some way to get nearer to them, but the expanse of dewy turf by which they were surrounded made it impossible for her to approach without being seen. Very cautiously she cut across to the left and into the shelter of the privet hedge, along which she stole until she reached their level.

They stood together in the middle of the lawn without speaking. At last Gabrielle shivered. Arthur noticed it quickly. "I hope you're not cold," he said.

"No, I'm not cold--only--only we're so exposed out here. If we could get a little more into the shadow I should feel more comfortable----"

"That's easily managed," he said laughing. "We can go over by the sundial. It's called a yew-parlour, I think. It might have been made for us."

So they passed into its shade. Mrs. Payne noticed eagerly that his hand was not on her arm. The yew hedge that now sheltered them concealed her also from their sight, and, greatly relieved, she crept along her cover of privet into the shadow of a mulberry tree where, by stooping a little, she could watch them unperceived.

"What a wonderful night," Gabrielle whispered.

"I never knew such a night," he said. "It feels a bit like that evening when we stood leaning over the bridge by the lake."

"Don't," she said. "I want to forget it. Can you smell the dew?"

"Yes, and the scent of may coming over from the meadows."

"We call it whitethorn in Ireland."

There was a long pause, then he spoke again.

"I think you look sad to-night," he said. "Are you sorry that you came?"

"No, no--of course not. It's the moonlight that makes me paler than usual. But I'm always pale. You shouldn't look at me so closely, Arthur."

"I love to look at you. It isn't always that I get the chance. I just wanted to be certain that you weren't anxious. You don't think that we oughtn't to have come here?"

"No, why shouldn't we?" she said, turning her face away.

Then suddenly, in the edge of the copse beyond the nearest field, the nightingale began. The song was so beautiful in the stillness of the night that even Mrs. Payne, who had other things to think of, felt its influence. It was a strange, unearthly moment.

"You hear it?" Arthur whispered; but Gabrielle did not answer; she laid her hand on his sleeve and Arthur trembled at her touch. So they stood listening, close together, while Arthur took the hand that held him. She smiled and turned her eyes towards him but they could not look at each other for long. She surrendered herself to his arms and they kissed.

Mrs. Payne saw their faces close together in the dusk and their shadowy bodies entwined. She could bear it no longer, but turned and groped her way back along the privet hedge to the door from which she had first come. She did not know where she was going or how she went until she found that she had reached her own bedroom again. There, in her dressing-gown, she threw herself on the bed and fell into a fit of violent sobbing. She lay there shaken by sobs like a disconsolate child. Over in the coppice the nightingale sang exultantly as if he knew of the wonder that his song had revealed to the lovers who listened to him with their lips together.

XIX