The doctor offered no remark. She resumed all her old tranquillity, wiping her eyes carefully with a fine, tiny handkerchief that Felix had given her. The bearers arrived a quarter of an hour later--discreet, furtive and sinister. The hotel slept in its vastness. All gaiety was asleep. But even if some devoted slave of dissipation had surprised them on their way back, he could not have guessed that it was a coffin they bore. The doctor, by using his professional prestige, kept Lilian in her own room till the bearers were nearly ready to depart with more than they had brought. She went into the mortuary. The coffin was disguised. Picking up the wreath, which had been forgotten or intentionally left, she placed it upon the coffin and beneath the disguise. It lay there alone in its expensive grandeur. The bearers withdrew with their burden, tiptoeing along the dim, silent corridor lest revellers should be disturbed from well-earned, refreshing sleep and open their doors to see what was afoot in the night. The cortège was lost to view round the corner at the end of the corridor. The doctor remained a little while, and he also prepared to go. The two nurses Lilian would never see again.
"You should go to bed now and try to sleep. I'll call for you in good time to-morrow for the funeral."
Lilian shook her head.
"No, I'm going to pack his things now." She stood at the door of his room, and watched the doctor also disappear from view round the corner at the end of the corridor.
PART IV
I
The Return
It was early in July, on one of those long summer evenings of which the melancholy twilight seems determined never to end, that Lilian, from Victoria Station, drove up to her late husband's house, now her own. The events leading to the arrival, and giving it a most poignant dramatic quality, had one after another as they occurred impressed everybody concerned as being very strange and sinister; but seen in perspective they took on a rather ordinary complexion.
At the very moment of leaving the Riviera Lilian had heard that Miss Grig, on her way to the South to see Felix, had been detained in Paris by serious ptomaine poisoning due to food eaten at home. Had Miss Grig been able to get a berth in the through Calais-Mediterranée express, she might well have died in the train; but she had not been able to get a berth, and had travelled by a service which necessitated crossing Paris by taxi. She never did cross Paris. Railway officials carried her to the Hôtel Terminus, and medical aid was obtained just in time. For several days she was lost, like a mislaid and helpless parcel in the international post. As soon as she could move again she returned home, for Felix was by then dead and buried.
Lilian, on her part, did travel towards London by the through Calais-Mediterranée express, alighting at Calais extremely exhausted after twenty-eight hours on the railway. A gale was raging in the Channel. The steamer failed to enter Dover, a colossal harbour constructed in defiance of common sense for the inconvenience of seafarers, and put in at Folkestone. This detail changed the course of Lilian's journey. She was lifted ashore suffering acutely from sickness and nervous shock caused by the storm. At Dover she would assuredly not have remained more than a day or two; but Folkestone is a health-resort, and, installed in a big hotel on the Leas, she was tempted to let week drift after week in languid and expectant meditation. Felix's solicitor came down several times from London to see her and take her instructions. From him she had news of Miss Grig and of the business; but she neither saw Miss Grig nor heard from her; the silence between the two mourners was absolute; and Lilian would not be the first to break it; moreover, there was no official need for letters to pass, each party being always well informed of the situation through the medium of the lawyer. At the close of the Riviera season Lilian had a flattering surprise. Dr. Samson the faithful came to see her in Folkestone. He was staying at another hotel. He desired nothing, hoped for nothing, except to exhibit his fidelity. She had in him someone upon whom she could exercise her instinct to please, and to whom she could talk about the unique qualities of Felix. But also she had grown capricious and uncertain in temper. Perceiving at once that her little outbursts charmed and delighted him, she did not check them, but rather bestowed them upon him as favours; and the gloomy, fretful, transformed girl in unbecoming black played with some spirit the rôle of spoiled virgin from whom a suppliant adorer anticipates one day complete surrender. It was touching and at the same time comical.