On the night after the tragic card-party she went to her room and kneeled down in a new spirit. She knelt, but not to cover her face, she knelt with throat strained and her fierce young face thrown back and upward.
Her hands were clenched to fists and flung out and shaken at the ceiling. She said things so awful that her own blood shuddered as she uttered them. But she could not—in her mad helplessness—make them awful enough. She flung herself on the carpet at last, her arms outstretched like a creature crucified face downward on the cross.
“I believed in You!” she gasped. “The first moment you gave me a reason I believed. I did! I did! We both said our prayer to You every night, like children. And you've done this—this—this!” And she beat with her fists upon the floor.
Several years had passed since that night, and no living being knew what she carried in her soul. If she had a soul, she said to herself, it was black—black. But she had none. Neither had Jem had one; when the earth and stones had fallen upon him it had been the end, as it would have been if he had been a beetle.
This was the guest who was coming to the house where Miles Hugo smiled from his frame in the picture-gallery—the house which would to-day have been Jem's if T. Tembarom had not inherited it.
Tembarom returned some twenty-four hours after Miss Alicia had received his visitors for him. He had been “going into” absorbing things in London. His thoughts during his northward journey were puzzled and discouraged ones. He sat in the corner of the railway carriage and stared out of the window without seeing the springtime changes in the flying landscape.
The price he would have given for a talk with Ann would not have been easy to compute. Her head, her level little head, and her way of seeing into things and picking out facts without being rattled by what didn't really count, would have been worth anything. The day itself was a discouraging one, with heavy threatenings of rain which did not fall.
The low clouds were piles of dark-purple gray, and when the sun tried to send lances of ominous yellow light through them, strange and lurid effects were produced, and the heavy purple-gray masses rolled together again. He wondered why he did not hear low rumblings of thunder.
He went to his room at once when he reached home. He was late, and Pearson told him that the ladies were dressing for dinner. Pearson was in waiting with everything in readiness for the rapid performance of his duties. Tembarom had learned to allow himself to be waited upon. He had, in fact, done this for the satisfying of Pearson, whose respectful unhappiness would otherwise have been manifest despite his efforts to conceal it. He dressed quickly and asked some questions about Strangeways. Otherwise Pearson thought he seemed preoccupied. He only made one slight joke.
“You'd be a first-rate dresser for a quick-change artist, Pearson,” he remarked.