CHAPTER XXII. LEFT OUT IN THE COLD.
Even Mrs. Abercarne, at the other end of the table, could see that something had gone wrong: Mr. Bradfield’s voice as he loudly assented, had not the right ring: Mr. Graham-Shute looked mischievous, his wife looked anxious, while Chris looked as if she had been frightened. The housekeeper gave the signal hastily to Mrs. Graham-Shute, even in the midst of the laughter and cracker-pulling which was going on among the young people. Lilith and Rose were surprised, but both Mrs. Graham-Shute and Chris jumped up in a hurry, quite eager to leave the scene of what looked like the beginning of a serious quarrel. For, although no angry words had passed between the gentlemen, Marrable’s effusive geniality in face of his host’s ever-increasing abruptness, looked ominous to those who knew the temper of the latter.
When the ladies were assembled in the drawing-room, and Chris had sat down to the piano to play some carols, Mrs. Graham-Shute, for want of a better, was forced to make a confidante of the obnoxious lady-housekeeper.
“Exceedingly unpleasant, was it not, to have to endure the presence of that extraordinary individual at dinner,” she said to Mrs. Abercarne in a confidential tone. “Of course, it is very good of my cousin to remember his old friends, but it’s a pity he cannot find some who would make themselves more agreeable to the rest of us. Such a pleasant party we should have been, too, if it hadn’t been for that!”
Now Mrs. Abercarne had been smarting for the past week under the snubs and slights which Mrs. Graham-Shute had administered to her daughter and herself, and she was by no means mollified by the Bayswater lady’s momentary condescension. She pricked up her ears, figuratively speaking, rejoicing in her opportunity.
“Yes,” she answered, frigidly, drawing herself up and surveying Mrs. Graham-Shute in a manner full of stately vindictiveness. “I quite agree with you. Mr. Bradfield is a great deal too good to his old friends; and they do make themselves excessively disagreeable; and the party would be much pleasanter without them.”
And poor Mrs. Graham-Shute, try as she would, could not look as if she did not perceive that this speech was a barbed one. She turned away abruptly, and, taking the place at the piano which Chris had just vacated, began hurriedly and very badly, and with vicious thumps upon the keys, a hymn about “peace on earth and goodwill towards men.”
Chris had stolen into the recess formed by the great bay window on the western side of the room. She heard a sound like the breaking of glass outside, and had left her place at the piano to look out. Raising the heavy curtain, and pulling back the blind, she saw dimly through the moisture on the window-pane, the forms of two men, one of whom was so close that he seemed to have been trying to look through the window. She could just see enough of them to know that the figures were those of Mr. Richard and his keeper Stelfox, and her heart leapt up, and her brain seemed suddenly to be on fire, as there rang in her ears the words used by Mr. Marrable about Gilbert Wryde.
Gilbert Wryde! Gilbert Wryde—Mr. Bradfield’s benefactor! She remembered the portrait bearing that name, and she remembered Mr. Bradfield’s change of expression at the sight of it. That expression, which she had taken for annoyance, must then have been caused by some more tender emotion, to which also the subsequent disappearance of the miniature must be traced. And then the likeness between the portrait of Gilbert Wryde and the solitary occupant of the east wing? Chris felt sick with excitement, bewilderment and fear. She would have given the world to be able to forget the problem which was beginning to trouble her peace of mind, to shut her mind to the questions she could not help asking.
In the meantime, a great impulse of pity for Mr. Richard, spending his Christmas alone except for his attendant, and peeping in through the windows at the warmth and light inside the room he was not allowed to enter, seized her, and caused her to find an opportunity of leaving the room unobserved. Putting on a hooded cloak, and wrapping it tightly round her, she went out into the garden.
Chris, who had run down the steps, paused at the bottom. The impulse upon which she had acted in coming out into the night was the kindly one of exchanging a Christmas greeting with the outcast from the east wing. But to this impulse had succeeded a fit of maidenly shyness. Twice since their last meeting in the barn, she had encountered Mr. Richard in the park in a manner which could scarcely have been the result of chance, and on each of these occasions the silent happiness he had shown in her society had touched her deeply; so deeply, indeed, that she could not help feeling a little self-consciousness about this meeting which she herself was bringing about. Whether she would have turned back, following the dictates of her impulse of shyness and maidenly modesty, it is impossible to say. For at that moment she heard a footstep on the path, and a great thrill of a feeling she did not understand passed through her as a voice she had never heard before said low in her ear:
“I wish you a merry Christmas.”
With a start she turned, and put her hand into that of Mr. Richard, who kissed it with the fervour of a lover.
“I am afraid your Christmas is not a very merry one,” she said gently.
They were standing in the full moonlight, and Mr. Richard was gazing with his usual melancholy into her face.
“No, it has not been happy,” he answered very slowly, and with an apparent effort, “until now.”
Then he stood for a short time in silence, and Chris, utterly thrown off her balance by new and strange feelings, did not notice, or did not mind, that he held her hand in his own with a warm pressure which said more than his words had done.
Chris roused herself by an effort from the trance of pleasant feeling into which the first words she had ever heard him utter had thrown her.
“You are here by yourself!” she exclaimed. “I thought Stelfox was with you!”
Mr. Richard seemed to find it even more painful than she had done to break by speech the spell which the happiness of the meeting had cast upon him. His first answer was a heavy sigh. Then he said, gently, with the same strange appearance of speaking with difficulty, as if the exercise of speech were an unaccustomed thing which made him shy and nervous:
“He is not far off. He did not want me to come out here to-night. But I begged that the day might not pass for me without one sight of you.”
He uttered these words in such a low voice, and so indistinctly, that Chris had some difficulty in understanding him. Perceiving this he became so painfully nervous, that in repeating the words he was more indistinct than ever. He had scarcely finished saying them for the second time when Stelfox came with his usual noiseless footsteps round the angle of the house.
He started on seeing the young lady, and, without uttering a word, made a sign to his charge which Chris understood to be an imperious command to return to the east wing. Mr. Richard was as submissive as a lamb. Taking the young lady’s hand for one moment in his, he pressed it for a moment in his own, and whispering in a very low voice, “Good-bye,” disappeared rapidly towards his rooms, returning by the north side of the house.
As soon as he was out of sight, his attendant shook his head gravely.
“It’s a great risk we’re all of us running, through my letting the young gentleman out, as I’ve done the last few days,” he said, in a warning voice; “but he’s begged so hard and he’s behaved so well that I’ve done it to keep him quiet for one thing, for fear he’d get out without my leave, instead of with it.”
Here was her opportunity. In a voice which was one of earnest entreaty, Chris said:
“Why should he not be let out? He is not mad, you know he is not mad, Stelfox. You would never dare to let a man who was really insane go about as he has done the last few days. Why should you ever have been afraid to let him out? And why have you changed your mind now?”
Stelfox looked rather alarmed by the young lady’s vehemence. He gave a glance round and made a gesture of warning, as if afraid they might be overheard; but Chris went on in a reckless tone:
“I can’t understand you. Either this unhappy man is mad, in which case he certainly ought not to come out at all, now more than at any other time, or he is not mad, in which case it is very wicked of Mr. Bradfield to shut him up, and very wicked of you to be quiet about it, and very silly of Mr. Richard himself not to get away when he can.”
“Hush, ma’am, pray don’t speak so loud; you wouldn’t if you knew the harm you might be doing the poor gentleman by it. Mr. Richard’s mad, and he’s not mad, and that’s the truth. You can see for yourself there’s something wrong with him,” he went on, looking into the young lady’s face, with an expression of some doubt and curiosity. “He’s reasonable enough in many ways, as I told you before. He’s as mad as a hatter in his likes and dislikes. It’s by his liking for you, ma’am, that I’m keeping him in order. But he hates Mr. Bradfield so much that if I were to allow him to meet my master alone, I wouldn’t give sixpence for Mr. Bradfield’s chances of getting away from him alive.”
The night air was clear and still, and keen with frost. The great evergreen oaks above them were lightly powdered with snow, which there was not even a breath of wind to shake off. For a moment after Stelfox had uttered these words there was a dead, silent calm, which increased the dread roused by the man’s words in poor Chris.
Then, from the north side of the house, there came suddenly, piercing their ears, a ringing cry of “Help—help!”
Then there came a crash, the sound of a heavy fall, and then again perfect stillness.