And I did. I gave her a couple of hours, before I returned whistling. The floor was white, the table laid for lunch, two eggs put in a cold saucepan by the grate, the fire piled up to smoulder, and a nosegay of red leaves and berries placed in a tumbler on the windowsill. The place looked neater and homelier than I had ever succeeded in making it, and Morgiana was gone. Of the eternal instinct are Eve’s daughters; and this one, it appeared, had no difficulty in “throwing back” from silks to homespun.
That night came a very strange experience to me.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
On entering the dining-room at Evercreech, I found company assembled. I had not been warned, and I was not introduced. I came in late, and took my seat at the table quietly, being placed between Mr Pugsley and a lady whom I did not know. I learned, however, in due course, that she was a Mrs Dalston, who, with her husband, also present, was a new-comer in the neighbourhood. The two had taken the Lone Farm, a decent but rather decayed property situated on the outskirts of Market Grazing, and foolishly reputed to be haunted. But it was inexpensive—perhaps because of its reputation—and fully adequate to the needs of a childless couple. The only other guest was, to my pleasure, Sir Maurice Carnac, who had earlier shown me friendship, and who was down somewhere in Hampshire for the shooting. But he looked little capable of shouldering a gun, and was altogether sadly altered from my memory of him, having but lately, as I learned, recovered from a paralytic stroke, whose passing had left him much debilitated. He lay sunk in his chair, like a heap of human ashes, and with all the old fire of roguery smouldering low in him. But he seemed to awaken suddenly on my entrance, and looking across at me as I sat down, treated me to a leer and wink.
“Hillo, Charlie, my boy!” he chuckled. “What sport with the girls, hey!”
Consternation sat on every face. My lord, looking much perturbed, bent to the old rascal, and enlightened him.
“Gaskett, Carnac; Gaskett!” he said. “You remember Richard Gaskett?”
“Hey!” The old man sat up. What link of memory had slipped in him, obliterating a whole score of years? “Richard, hey?” he said, immensely sly. “I know, I know. The lovely one’s pledge—earnest of widowed respectability. But mum, mum, my boy—I know. What days, hey!”
The soup engaged and silenced him—at least in everything but its absorption. It was some moments before the talk could find itself an embarrassed vent. But Sir Maurice brightened as he fed. Good fare was the natural aliment to that impoverished soil. He had only wandered and lost himself when hungry. In a little he had forgotten all about his balourdise, and was paying senile compliments along the table to his hostess.
In the moment of its delivery, however, the strange lady next me had turned quickly and looked me in the face. She appeared to me an utterly colourless person, fade, thin, dowdy, with hardly a sign of spirit or expression—a condemned ghost of womanhood. I wondered presently at the fond attentions with which her husband treated her, at his efforts to win a smile from her unresponsive face, and his patience when habitually baffled, since he himself was a fine bold figure of a man, white-teethed, black-whiskered, for all his forty-five or so years. And I wondered still when I came to learn how persistently she had disappointed his hopes of an heir, the few children she had born to him having died one by one on the very threshold of their existence. But perhaps all those fruitless pangs were accountable as much for his manly devotion as for her insensibility. She might have held him responsible for that seed of death which had stultified all the rich Woman in her. In any case, that he was more attached to her than she to him was obvious.