"You will be hungry," I said lamely. "You have eaten nothing since the morning;" and I walked to a little sideboard on which a bell was standing.
"No, no!" she cried, but I had struck the bell or ever the words were past her lips. "Oh, what have you done?" she said with a shiver; "one of your servants will come;" and then she checked herself and added, with her fingers plucking at her gown in a pitiful helpless way, "Well, what does it matter? They had the story before it happened. This will but confirm and seal it."
I went out into the hall to stop whosoever should be answering the summons. But no one came to answer it I crossed the hall and opened the door which led to the kitchens. As a rule, the noise of women's voices was incessant in that quarter of the house, but to-day not a sound, not so much as the clatter of a dish-cover! I went back to the hall and listened. The house was as still as on that night when I crept down the stairs and discovered the marks of a picture-frame upon the wall.
Was the house empty? I wondered, and shouted to solve the doubt. My voice went echoing and diminishing along corridor and gallery, but that was all. I moved down the passage to the office, half thinking that I might find Aron there, but remembered that he would be away, and so returned reluctantly. Thereupon I mounted the stairs and walked from room to room, and maybe lingered over-long in each. I was not, indeed, concerned with their silence and vacancy so much as with the knowledge that each step brought me actually a step nearer to the parlour-door. But I came to the end of my search, and there was nothing for it but to descend again. The hall-door, however, stood open, and I saw my horse at the bottom of the steps tethered by the rein to a knob of the stone balustrade. I walked down the steps, loosed it, and led it round to the stables. There was a boy or two in the stable-yard, and I remember putting to them a number of aimless questions which I was at great pains to think of, but did not listen to the answers; until their fidgeting made me sensible of the cowardice of my delay and drove me back to the house. Then I remembered why I had left the parlour, and going to the pantry, I got together some food upon a tray and brought it with a decanter of Burgundy into the parlour. Mrs. Herbert was standing where I had last seen her. I set out the table saying, "My servants seem all to have taken holiday;" and more for something to do, you may be sure, than from any sense of hunger, she sat herself at the table and began to play with the food. I had brought but one plate and set a chair for but one person; and neither of us noticed that. The truth is, there was a shadow in the room; the shadow cast by sin, and we watched it as children in a fitful firelight will watch a strange shadow on the wall—neither drawing near to it nor fleeing from it, but crouched watching it. Once she said, "I have brought nothing with me;" and after a little, some thought seemed to strike her. For she lifted her head suddenly and said:
"There is no one in the house but you and I?"
"No one," I said.
"That is strange," she said absently.
Strange! The word was an arrow of light piercing through the mist of my senses. Strange! It was indeed strange! Aron had warned me not to ride to Keswick; that was strange too. For the first time I set this desertion of my servants together in my mind with my suspicions of Ashlock's treachery. I started to my feet, invaded by a sudden fear; but I saw Mrs. Herbert at the table running her fingers along the hem of my fine tablecloth and her throat working as though she was swallowing her tears. I knew by some instinct of what she was thinking. She was thinking of her poor furniture in her lodging at Keswick. It was hers, you see, won by her husband's toil, and maybe she had a passing thought, too, of Sir Godfrey Kneller's estate at Witton—earned, too, by a painter's art. And such a pity for her, such a loathing of myself, flooded my mind as drove out all thought of Mr. Ashlock's machinations. I recalled how I had deemed that slatternly apartment unfit for her. It needed that we two should be here with the shadow about us, for me to realize how contemptible was the thought.
Again she said:
"No one is in the house except yourself and me," and in the same thoughtful tone. Then she rose from her chair with the air of one that has come upon an outlet when all outlets seemed barred. "It was kind of you," she said, "to show me your house, I would gladly have seen the gardens too, but the day is clouding, and it will rain, I think, ere long."