§ 7
Once out of sight of the two standing in the lane, Rose rode home quickly. She felt she had a great deal to do, but she did not know what it was. Her head was hot with the turmoil of her thoughts. There was no order in them; the past was mixed with the present, the done with the undone: she was assailed by the awful conviction that right was prolific in producing wrong. If she had not preserved her own physical integrity, these two, who were almost like her children—yes, that was how she felt towards them—would not have been tempted to such folly. For it was folly: they did not love each other, and she remembered, with a sickening pang, the expression with which Francis had looked at her. She told herself he loved her still; he had never loved anybody else and she had only pity and protection and a deep-rooted fondness to give him in return. She cared more passionately for Henrietta, who was now the victim of the superficial chastity on which Rose had insisted.
If she had known that Henrietta was to suffer, she would have subdued her niceness, for if Francis had been in physical possession of her body, she would have had no difficulty in possessing his mind. Holding nothing back, she could also have held him securely. She did not want him, but Henrietta would have been saved. But then Rose had not known: how could she? And Henrietta might be saved yet, she must be saved. The obvious method was to lay siege to the facile heart of Francis, but there was no time for that. Rose was not deceived by Henrietta’s enigmatic words. They were tired of meeting stealthily, she had said. What did that mean? Her head grew hotter. She had to force herself into calm, and the old man at the toll-house on the bridge received her visual greeting as she passed, but, as she went slowly to the stables, there was added to her anxiety the thrilling knowledge that at last, and for the first time, she was going to take definite action. Her whole life had been a long and dull preparation for this day. She began to take a pleasure in her excitement: she had something to do; she was delivered from the monotony of thought.
On her way from the stables she met Charles Batty going home for his midday meal, and she stopped him. “Charles!” she said. She presented to his appreciative eyes a very elegant figure in the habit looped up to show her high slim boots, with her thick plait of hair under the hard hat, her complexion defying the whiteness of her stock; while to her he appeared with something of the aspect of an angel in a long top coat and a hat at the back of his head. “Charles,” she said again, tapping her boot with her whip, “I’m in trouble. Would you mind walking home by the hill? I want you to help me, but I can’t tell you how. Not yet.”
He walked beside her without speaking and they came to the place where he had stood with Henrietta and she had flouted him; whither she had wandered on her first day in Radstowe, that high point overlooking the gorge, the rocks, the trees, the river; that scene of which not Charles, nor Rose, nor Henrietta could ever tire.
“Not, yet,” she repeated. “Will you meet me this afternoon?”
“Look here,” he remonstrated, “if Henrietta found out—”
She had not time to smile. “It’s for her sake.”
“I’ll do anything,” he said.
“Then will you meet me this afternoon at five o’clock? Not here. I may not be able to get so far. Where can we meet?”
“Well, there’s the post-office. Can’t mistake that.”
“No, no, I may have something important, very important, Charles, to say to you. At five o’clock, will you be on The Green? There’s a seat by the old monument. It won’t take a minute to get there. Are you listening? On The Green at five o’clock. Come towards me as soon as you see me and at once we’ll walk together towards the avenue. Wait till six, and if I don’t come, will you still hold yourself in readiness at home? Don’t forget. Don’t be absent-minded and forget what you are there for, and even if there’s a barrel-organ playing dreadful tunes, you’ll wait there? For Henrietta.”
“I don’t understand this about Henrietta.”
“That doesn’t matter, not in the least. Now what are your instructions?”
He repeated them.
“Very well. I trust you.”
They separated and she went home, a little amused by her melodramatic conduct, but much comforted by the fact that Charles, though ignorant of his part, was with her in this conspiracy. She was met by reproaches from Sophia.
“Oh, Rose, riding on such a day! And Henrietta out, too! Suppose we’d wanted something from the chemist!”
“But you didn’t, did you? And there are four servants in the house. How is Caroline now?”
“Very quiet. Oh, Rose, she’s very ill. She lets me do anything I like. She hasn’t a fault to find with me.”
“Let Henrietta sit with her this afternoon while Nurse is out.”
“No, no, Rose, I must do what I can for her.”
“I should like Henrietta to feel she is needed.”
“I don’t think Caroline would be pleased. I’ll see what she says.”
Caroline was distressingly indifferent but, as Henrietta went to her room on her return and sent a message that she had a headache and did not want any food, she was left undisturbed. Sophia became still more agitated. What was the matter with the child? It would be terrible if she were ill, too. Would Rose go and take her temperature? No, Rose was sure Henrietta would not care for that. She had better be left to sleep. If only she could be put to sleep for a few days!
Now that she was in the house and locked into her room, Rose was alarmed. She was afraid she had done wrong in making that confession; she had played what seemed to be her strongest card but she had played it in the wrong way, at the wrong moment. She had surely roused the girl’s antagonism and rivalry, and there came to Rose’s memory many little scenes in which Reginald Mallett, crossed in his desires, or irritated by reproaches, had suddenly stopped his storming, set his stubborn mouth and left the house, only to return when need drove him home.
But if Henrietta went, and Rose had no doubt of her intention, she would not come back. She had the unbending pride of her mother’s class, and Rose’s fear was changed into a sense of approaching desolation. The house would be unbearable without Henrietta. Rose stood on the landing listening to the small sounds from Caroline’s room and the unbroken silence from Henrietta’s. If that room became empty, the house would be empty too. There would be no swift footsteps up and down the stairs, no bursts of singing, no laughter: she must not go; she could not be spared. For a moment Rose forgot Francis Sales’s share in the adventure: she could only think of her own impending loneliness.
She went quickly down the stairs and sat in the drawing-room, leaving the door open, and after an hour or so she heard stealthy sounds from the room above; drawers were opened carefully and Henrietta, in slipperless feet, padded across the floor. Rose looked at her watch and rang the bell.
“Please take a tray to Miss Henrietta’s room,” she told Susan, “with tea, and sandwiches and, yes, an egg. She had no luncheon. A good, substantial tea, please, Susan.” If the child were anticipating a journey, she must be fed.
A little later she heard Susan knock at Henrietta’s door. It was not opened, but the tray was deposited outside with a slight rattle of china, and Susan’s voice, mildly reproachful, exhorted Miss Henrietta to eat and drink.
At half-past four the tray was still lying there untouched. This meant that Henrietta was in no hurry, or that she was too indignant to eat: but it might also mean that she had no time. Only half-past four and Charles Batty was not due till five! He might be there already; in his place, she would have been there, but men were painfully exact, and five was the hour she had named. But again, Charles Batty was not an ordinary man. Trusting to that fact, she went to her room and provided herself with money, and, having listened without a qualm at Henrietta’s door, she ran out of the house.
The church facing The Green sounded the three-quarters and there, on the seat by the old stone, sat Charles, his hands in his pockets, his hat pulled over his eyes in a manner likely to rouse suspicions in the mildest of policemen.
He rose. “Where’s your hat?”
“No time,” she said.
He repeated his lesson. “We were to walk towards the avenue.”
“Yes, but I daren’t. I want to keep in sight of the house. Come with me. Here’s money. Don’t lose it.”
He held it loosely. “Some one’s been playing ‘The Merry Peasant’ for half an hour,” he said. “I’ll never sit here again.”
“Charles, take care of the money. You may need it. There’s ten pounds—all I had—but perhaps it will be enough. I want you to watch our gate, and if Henrietta goes out, please follow her, but don’t let her see you.”
“Oh, I say!” he murmured.
“I know. It’s hateful, it’s abominable, but you must do it.”
“She won’t be pleased.”
“You must do it,” Rose repeated.
“She’s sure to see me. Eyes like needles.”
“She mustn’t. She’ll probably go by train. If she goes to London, to this address—I’ve written it down for you—you may leave her there for the night and let me know at once. If she goes anywhere else, you must go with her. Take care of her. I can’t tell you exactly what to do because I don’t know what’s going to happen. She may meet somebody, and then, Charles, you must go with them both. But bring her home if you can. Don’t go to sleep. Don’t compose music in your head. Oh, Charles, this is your chance!”
“Is it? I shall miss it. I always do the wrong thing.”
“Not to-night.” She smiled at him eagerly, imperiously, trying to endue him with her own spirit. “Stay here in the shadow. I don’t think you will have long to wait, and if you get your chance, if you have to talk to her, don’t scold.”
“Scold! It’s she that scolds. She bullies me.”
“Ah, not to-night!” she repeated gaily.
He peered down at her. “Yes, you are rather like her in the face, specially when you laugh. Better looking, though,” he added mournfully.
“Don’t tell her that.”
“Mustn’t I? Well, I don’t suppose I shall think of it again.”
“Remember that for you she is the best and most beautiful woman in the world. You can tell her that.”
“The best and most beautiful—yes,” he said. “All right. But you’ll see—I’ll lose her. Bound to,” he muttered.
She put her hand on his arm. “You’ll bring her home,” she said firmly, and she left him standing monumentally, with his hat awry.
Charles stood obediently in the place assigned to him, where the shelter of the Malletts’ garden wall made his own bulk less conspicuous and whence he could see the gate. The night was mild, but a little wind had risen, gently rocking the branches of the trees which, in the neighbourhood of the street lamps, cast their shadows monstrously on the pavements. Their movements gradually resolved themselves into melody in Charles Batty’s mind: the beauty of the reflected and exaggerated twigs and branches was not consciously realized by his eyes, but the swaying, the sudden ceasing, and the resumption of that delicate agitation became music in his ears. He, too, swayed slightly on his big feet and forgot his business, to remember it with a jerk and a fear that Henrietta had escaped him. Rose had told him he must not make music in his head. How had she known he would want to do that? She must have some faculty denied to him, the same faculty which warned her that Henrietta was going to do something strange to-night.
He felt in his pocket to assure himself of the money’s safety. He rearranged his hat and determined to concentrate on watching. The pain which, varying in degrees, always lived in his bosom, the pain of misunderstanding and being misunderstood, of doing the wrong thing, of meaning well and acting ill, became acute. He was bound to make a mistake; he would lose Henrietta or incense her, though now he was more earnest to do wisely than he had ever been. He had told her he was going to make an art of love, but he knew that art was far from perfected, and she was incapable of appreciating mere endeavour. He was afraid of her, but to-night he was more afraid of failing.
The music tripped in his head but he would not listen to it. He strained his ears for the opening of the Malletts’ door, and just as the sound of the clock striking two steady notes for half-past five was fading, as though it were being carried on the light wings of the wind over the big trees, over the green, across the gorge, across the woods to the essential country, he heard a faint thud, a patter of feet and the turning of the handle of the gate. He stepped back lest she should be going to pass him, but she turned the other way, walking quickly, with a small bag in her hand.
“She’s going away,” Charles said to himself with perspicacity, and now for the first time he knew what her absence would mean to him. She did not love him, she mocked and despised him, but the Malletts’ house had held her, and several times a day he had been able to pass and tell himself she was there. Now, with the sad little bag in her hand, she was not only in personal danger, she threatened his whole life.
He followed, not too close. Her haste did not destroy the beauty of her carriage, her body did not hang over her feet, teaching them the way to go; it was straight, like a young tree. He had never really looked at her before, he had never had a mind empty of everything except the consideration of her, and now he was puzzled by some difference. In his desire to discover what it was, he drew indiscreetly close to her, and though a quick turn of her head reminded him of his duty to see and not to be seen, he had made his discovery. Her clothes were different: they were shabby and, searching for an explanation, he found the right one. She was wearing the clothes in which she had arrived at Nelson Lodge. He remembered. In books it was what fugitives always did: they discarded their rich clothes and they left a note on the pin-cushion. It was her way of shaking the dust from her feet and, with a rush of feeling in which he forgot himself, he experienced a new, protective tenderness for her. He realized that she, too, might be unhappy, and it seemed that it was he who ought to comfort her, he who could do it.
He had to put a drag on his steps as they tried to hurry after her, through the main street of Upper Radstowe, through another darker one where there were fewer people and he had to exercise more care, and so past the big square where tall old houses looked at each other across an enclosure of trees, down to a broad street where tramcars rushed and rattled. She boarded one of these and went inside. Pulling his hat farther over his face in the erroneous belief that he would be the less noticeable, he ascended to the top, to crane his head over the side at every stopping-place lest Henrietta should get off; but there was no sign of her until they reached that strange place in the middle of the city where the harbour ran into the streets and the funnels and masts of ships mingled with the roofs of houses. This was the spot where, round a big triangle of paving, tramcars came and went in every direction, and here everybody must alight.
The streets were brilliant with electricity; electric signs popped magically with many-coloured lights on the front of a music hall where an audience was already gathering for the first performance, on public-houses, on the big red warehouses on the quay. The lighted tramcars with passengers inside looked like magic-lantern slides, and amid all the people using the triangle as a promenade or hurrying here and there on business, the newsboys shouting and the general bustle, Charles did not know whether to be more afraid of losing Henrietta or colliding with her. But now his faculties were alert and he used more discretion than was necessary, for Henrietta, under the influence of that instinct which persuades that not seeing is a precaution against being seen, was scrupulous in avoiding the encounter of any eye.
He followed her to another tramcar which would take her to the station; he followed her when she alighted once more and, seeing her change that bag from one hand to another, as though she found it heavy, he let out a groan so loud and heartfelt that it aroused the pity of a passer-by, but he was really luxuriating in his sorrow for her. It was an immense relief after much sorrowing for himself and it induced a forgetfulness of everything but his determination to help her.
It was easy to keep her in sight while she went up the broad approach to the dull, crowded, badly lighted and dirty station: it was harder to get near enough to hear what ticket she demanded. He did not hear, but again he followed the little, shabby, yet somehow elegant figure, and he took a place in the compartment next to the one she chose. It was the London train, and he found himself hoping she was not going so far; he felt that to see her disappearing into that house of which he had the address in his pocket would be like seeing her disappear for ever. He would lose his chance of helping her, or rather, she would lose her chance of being helped, a slightly different aspect of the affair and the one on which he had set his mind.
He had taken a ticket for the first stop, and when the train slowed down for the station of that neighbouring city, he had his head out of the window. An old gentleman with a noisy cold protested. Could he not wait until the train actually stopped? Charles was afraid he could not be so obliging. He assured the old gentleman that the night was mild. “And I’m keeping a good deal of the draught out,” he said pleasantly.
He saw a small hand on the door of the next compartment, then the sleeve of a black coat as Henrietta stretched for the handle, and he said to himself, “She was in mourning for her mother.” He was proud of remembering that; he had a sense of nearness and a slow suspicion that hitherto he had not sufficiently considered her. In their past intercourse he had been trying to stamp his own thoughts on her mind, but now it seemed that something of her, more real than her physical beauty, was being impressed on him. He wanted to know what she was feeling, not in regard to him, but in regard, for instance, to that dead mother, and why she ran away like this, in her old clothes and with the little bag.
She was out of the train: she had descended the steps to the roadway and there she looked about her, hesitating. Cabmen hailed her but, ignoring them and crossing the tramlines, she began to walk slowly up a dull street where cards in the house windows told of lodgings to be let. If she knocked at one of these doors, what was he to do? But she did not look at the houses: her head was drooping a little, her feet moved reluctantly, she was no longer eager and her bag was heavy again, she had changed it from the right to the left hand, and then, unexpectedly, she quickened her pace. The naturally unobservant Charles divined a cause and, looking for it, he saw with a shock of surprise and horror the tall figure of a man at the end of the street. She was hastening towards him.
Charles stood stock-still. A man! He had not thought of that, he had positively never thought of it! Nor had he guessed at his capacity for jealousy and anger. Then this was why Rose Mallett had sent him on this mission: it was a man’s work, and in the confusion of his feelings he still had time to wish he had spent more of his youth in the exercise of his muscles. He braced himself for an encounter, but already Henrietta had swerved aside. This was not the man she was to meet; her expectation had misled her; but the acute Charles surmised that the man she looked for would also be tall and slim.
Tall and slim; he repeated the words so that he should make no mistake, but subconsciously they had roused memories and instead of that little black figure hurrying on in front of him, he saw a young woman clothed in yellow, entering from the frosty night, with brilliant half veiled eyes, and by the side of her was Francis Sales.
Again he stood still, as much in amazement at his own folly as in any other feeling. Francis Sales, the fellow who could dance, who murdered music and little birds! And he had a wife! Charles was not shocked. If Henrietta had wished to elope with a great musician, wived though he might be, Charles could have let her go, subduing his own pangs, not for her own sake but for that of a man more important than himself, but he would not yield the claims of his devotion to Francis Sales. He should not have her.
He walked on quickly, taking no precautions. He had lost sight of Henrietta and he could not even hear the sound of her steps, yet he had no doubt but he would find her, and she was not far to seek. A turn of the road brought him under the shadow of the cathedral and, in the paved square surrounded by old houses in which it stood, he saw her. Apparently at that moment she also saw him, for with an incredibly swift movement and a furtiveness which wrung his heart, she slipped into the porch and disappeared. He followed. The door was unlocked and she had passed through it, but he lingered there, fancying he could smell the faint sweetness of her presence. Within, the organ was booming softly and in that sound he forgot, for a moment, the necessity for action. The music seemed to be wonderfully complicated with the waft of Henrietta’s passage, with his love for her, with all he imagined her to be, but the forgetfulness was only for that moment, and he pushed open the door.